Prayer Request (Updated)

Hilary (with the flowers), a nineteen year old relative of mine is suffering from a fever and may have contracted the swine flu.  Please keep her in your prayers.  Update: It’s just mono.

Interesting, Funny, Disturbing

Obama’s Smoke and Mirrors

From Jacob Sallum of The Patriot Post:

“The real reason Obama insists upon making the young and healthy buy insurance they don’t want is not the relatively minor free-rider problem, but the potentially ruinous adverse selection problem: The most expensive patients are the ones who are most likely to sign up for coverage. To keep the official 10-year price tag of his plan below that magical $1 trillion threshold, he needs to balance sick people who rack up big bills with healthy people who pay for insurance but don’t use it. Instead of acknowledging this reality, Obama portrays the healthy uninsured as irresponsible leeches. Even if Obama could make a plausible moral argument for the unprecedented step of demanding that all Americans buy insurance — not in exchange for a particular privilege, such as driving on public roads, but simply by virtue of being alive — he would be hard pressed to cite the constitutional authority for such a mandate. … Obama might be on firmer ground if he portrayed the levy imposed on people who decline to buy insurance as an exercise of the congressional tax power. But he does not want to admit he is forsaking his campaign promise to refrain from raising taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year. That’s why … he insisted that the ‘excise tax’ imposed on the uninsured by the Senate health care bill he supports is not really a tax. How so? After Obama signed a bill raising the federal cigarette tax, his press secretary explained that the tax pledge was still intact because ‘people make a decision to smoke.’ Likewise, Obama might argue, people make a decision not to buy health insurance. The lesson is clear: If you don’t want to pay higher taxes, don’t make any decisions.”  See full article.

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Video: Miles Burnyeat and Bryan Magee on Plato

This presentation is in five parts (complete running time less than 60 minutes)

What Is Social Democracy?

Socialistic communism, or simply socialism, advocates the transformation of all capital, or means of production, into the common property of society, or of the state, and the administration of the produce and the distribution of the proceeds by the state.  Since modern socialists, and chiefly the followers of Karl Marx, intend to realize this scheme entirely upon a democratic basis, they call themselves social democrats, and their system social democracy.  Social democracy may be defined as that system of political economy which advocates the inalienable ownership on the part of the state of all capital, or materials of labor, as also the public administration of all economic goods and the distribution of all produce by the democratic state.~Socialism: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Application, by Victor Cathrein, S.J.

We call socialism a a system of political economy, not as if it did not also lead to many political and social changes, but because the gist of socialism consists in the nationalization of property and in the public administration and distribution of all goods.   Socialism, at least as it is conceived by its modern defenders, is in the first instance an economical system, and only secondarily and subordinately a political system affecting society, the state, the family, ect.

The Death Of Socrates, By Romano Guardini

This work by the famed Catholic philosopher is an interpretation of the dialogues Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, and  Phædo.  Published in 1948 it is still under copyright, but is available for reading online.

The Total Plato

All the works by (or attributed to) Plato.   I wonder how long it will take to read 3, 490 pages?

View this document on Scribd

Currently Reading: The Federalist Papers

From the back cover~“The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, brilliantly defend what was in their day a revolutionary charter-the Constitution of the United States.  The Federalist Papers explain the complexities of a constitutional government-its political structure and principles based on the inherent rights of man.  Scholars have long regarded this work as a milestone in political science and a classic of American political theory.”

I suspect this is going to be a bit difficult, fortunately, The Cranky Conservative has just started a series of posts on the Papers.  What perfect timing!

Other Online Resources:

Federalist Papers Online.

Wikipedia Article.

The Federalist Papers Study Guide.

SparkNotes.  Note the table of contents on the left hand side of page.

The Liberal Meida’s Short Attention Span

Sunday Comedy News Roundup

Apparently, the President is undergoing a mini race riot within himself.  “National Democratic Party leaders have asked Gov. David Paterson to consider withdrawing from the 2010 governor’s race, according to two senior New York Democratic advisers…The New York Times, which originally reported the request on its Web site, said that it was President Barack Obama who asked Paterson to withdraw.”

Paterson is African-American so, no doubt, this request comes from the racist whiteness Obama inherited from his white, racist granny.   Damned whitey!  Always trying to keep the black man down!  Will the black Obama take a cue from white, open-minded liberals and declare himself half a racist for going after Paterson? or will the white Obama do what all conservatives (who by definition are racists) do, and contend (read “lie”) it has nothing to do with Paterson’s race but, rather, with the fact that he is a political failure?

The First Lady has her carbon footprints all over a farmer’s market.  (Carbon is sometimes black; I hope this doesn’t get me denounced as racist).  “The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.”

Note to the First Lady on how to avoid the wrath of Al Gore: Hire some nameless, faceless, college-age intern with a Yugo to go shopping for the twenty dollar a pound, organically grown Tuscan kale.

Chris Wallace of Fox News is a racist.  “I think that Fox News Sunday is truly a fair and balanced show…it’s like they (Obama administration) refuse to take ‘yes’ for an answer.  There’s a kind of childishness or pettiness about it…(With) these guys everything is personal.  They are the biggest bunch of cry babies I’ve dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Being an opponent of the President’s policies I of course didn’t hear the words “cry babies”; no, what I heard was this, and for that I am truly sorry.  Free at last!  Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank Dowd Almighty!  I’m finally free at last!  (Props too to the rest of the liberal Trinity: Jimmy Carter and Bill Maher).