Injuries and Usurpations

I’m not the biggest Palin fan out there. I don’t think she is as dumb as the democrats would have your believe. There are many things I sympathize with her on, and some I don’t. I’m not running out on any orlando vacations to attend her book signing or anything like that, but as far as the Republican party goes, she is closer to my personal ideal that McCain ever was. Let me repeat- As far as the Republicans go.

The Newsweek cover this week was just another example of how the world just can’t believe that a woman can be attractive and intelligent. The cover wasn’t a cover showing an attractive powerful woman, it was saying, “what is this chick in short shorts doing talking about politics?”

Is it sexist? I don’t think it is just sexist, it is more than that.

Sexism as asking how Palin could be a public figure while having little kids while Obama was allowed to have two little kids without question.

I have personally never seen another political figure pictured this way. Bush was regularly seen biking and Clinton was seen jogging. There were certainly pictures in different magazines of them working out, but was that EVER used as the cover art for a story about their political place? Absolutely not. If Newsweek wanted to talk about Nancy Pelosi’s place in government, would they choose a picture of her in a jogging suit? She’s a fairly thin woman- I mean, she must work out right?

It isn’t just sexism here, but it is further proof that America can’t equate attractiveness and intelligence. Palin hasn’t been the best speaker in the world, but neither am I. I can write my way out of any situation, but I can’t publicly speak. The lack of public speaking etiquette doesn’t make someone dumb. Look at any nerdy kid in a high school with a 4.0 who can’t communicate properly with their peers and you’ll see what I mean.

The lesson we learn continually from the media is that you can’t be smart, beautiful, and good. You can be smart, beautiful, and evil. You can be beautiful, good and dumb, or good, smart and ugly, but that’s about as far as you are allowed to stretch as a woman.

Eyes look at me with question when I saw that I kind of like Glenn Beck.

Yes, he can be totally nutty sometimes and he can certainly be over-the-top, but I have to say that often times his message is on-point with my own opinions.

I first listened to Glenn when he had a morning radio show out of Philadelphia a few years back. When I used to listen to his radio show, I loved that he had a sense of humor along with making some good sense to me. At the time, I listened to Hannity and even Rush, but there was something more identifiable about Beck to me. He never claimed to be a reporter or a newsman. He always said his show was a strange breed, and said it was much more of a commentary than anything. He was like me. He heard something that pissed him off or intrigued him and he wanted to tell us all about it.

When he got a TV show, I was excited to see what he would do. He was a bit more restrained back in the CNN days, but went a little over the edge once Fox gave him room to do what he pleased. I’m not a conspiracy theorist in that I do believe the government would monitor our every more if they could, but I don’t think the hand dryers in the farmer’s market are watching me already. I have a hard time eating all of what Glenn serves.

Sure, he is super emotional, has some wild ideas about how a program should run, and he doesn’t always have his facts straight, but there is something about the guy that I like.

If there is one thing that Beck and I agree on, it is that things are going to wrong way and that liberty is the way to fix it. He is a strong supporter or personal freedom and free markets. He was one of the few people on a major network who gave Bob Barr and Ron Paul a voice during the last campaign.  He may be wrong on his war stance, and he may be wrong in fear mongering, but there are plenty of things he is right on.

We should be frightened for the direction things have gone and not just sit by and say “That’ll never happen. This is America.” (An actual quote from some people I’ve talked with). Do I think we are going to be socialist tomorrow? No. Do I think we should reverse decisions that are pushing us that way? Absolutely. Will I keep listening to Glenn with a smidgen of skepticism? Yes.

The kicker to starting a nonprofit in order to be unrestricted in our fundraising activities, is that we won’t have those restrictions removed right away.

To get a small games of chance license to raffles, we have to be in existence for a full year. To get a Bingo license, we have to be around for two years.

Our playground campaign specifically is only set with a two-year plan. Basically, we won’t event be able to use the full benefits of being a nonprofit until we are nearly done with this phase of town revitalization.

The advantage is that when we are ready to start a new project in two years, we will have this new group set in stone and ready to go.

Could they make it any more complicated to try to do good things for the community? I swear it would be easier to get medical travel insurance in Timbuktu than to try to raise a few dollars for a playground.

There is some basic legwork involved with starting a nonprofit group, but those little things are just fine with me to make it all legal and well planned.

What gets me are the fees to do this thing. Every state has some fees associated with non-profit incorporation. In PA, we have to pay $125 to file Articles of Incorporation with the State, and then $300 to the IRS for tax exempt status.This $300 would go up to $700 if we planned on raising more than $10,000 a year.

These things are absolutely mandatory. If we want to eventually be able to have a Bingo game or run raffles to benefit our playground, we have to be a nonprofit organization.

So we have to take $450 of the dollars earned so far towards a playground and put it into becoming a nonprofit organization so we can legally use some of the best fundraising tools out there to be more successful.

The system is so full of crap that I wish I could buy glucomannan for it.

I’ve been involved heavily with fund raising in my town. We are raising money to build a new playground and it is a long and difficult struggle. I wanted to outline a few of the ways that government makes it more difficult for people to raise money.

Today’s topic: gambling laws.

In my home state of PA, there a gambling laws that restrict anyone from running even a raffle without a small games of chance license. You have to be a nonprofit organization to get the license, and it costs up to $100 for a daily bingo license.

There was talk about taxing the profits of these activities when the PA budget was discussed, but these were squelched. Instead, they are raising the cost of the license and upping the daily limits on prizes. Of course, this really only helps organizations who have huge prizes like cars, diamonds, and thousand dollar cash prizes. If you have little working budget up front, and limited resources and prizes in the $50-100 range, you are paying more for a license than you used to with no benefit for you.

Government entities are not allowed to have a small games of chance license. This means that my Parks and Rec department can’t legally have a raffle, 50/50, or bingo of any kind (not even basket bingo). This severely limits the types of things we are allowed to do to raise money for our cause. In order to do some of these activities, we are forced to start a nonprofit group. See Part 2.

Obama released his big old jobs report and I’m confused.

Unemployment hit a 26-year high of 9.8 percent in September, and the October report due next week could show it topping 10 percent.

The government reported this week that the economy grew 3.5 percent from July through September, the first signs of growth in a year and unofficial confirmation that the economic slide that began in December 2007 is over. Separately, the White House said Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan — a mix of spending and tax cuts — had saved or created more than 1 million jobs.

That news, “while not cause for celebration, is certainly reason to believe that we are moving in the right direction,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

“It is easy to forget that it was only several months ago that the economy was shrinking rapidly and many economists feared another Great Depression,” the president said.

How is it possible that the economy is growing and unemployment is rising? Think about this for a moment. Money is being spent, things are being purchased, and cash (aka credit) is starting to flow again. But people are still losing their jobs.

I’m no economist, but logically, it seems that the wrong people are getting the money. The poorer are more in number and the economy is improving, so that means that the rich have more money to spend. Or, it means all that government money is creating as a false positive.

Lets look at a “successful” program for a moment. The Cash for Clunkers gave a huge influx of sales to car industry for a brief moment in time. Following its end, the industry fell in the clunker again. Reports show that this “successful” program cost the taxpayers an average of $24,000 per car. The problem was that the majority of the people who purchased a car said that they would have purchased a car before the end of this fiscal season anyway, so the program just prompted them to do it sooner. So it didn’t actually help the car industry in the long run at all, it just crammed all their sales into one month.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but if it starts using your best eye creams and wearing your diamond jewelry, you better put it back in the pen.

Obviously I believe that a healthy amount of mistrust of government is a good thing, particularly the bigger it gets.

What I think is insane is when you turn that mistrust into stupid conspiracy theories that have no backing in history, economics, or even science.

We’ve seen many of these ridiculous attacks lately. People should be focusing on the policy and making logical arguments against the president’s ideas, but instead they call him a Nazi. It doesn’t make sense.

I had the pleasure of attending an astronomy conference last week. Imagine 150 science guys and girls camping under the stars with tents and heated mattress pads, watching the sky with telescopes all night, and lectures all day. We had NASA ambassadors give us a run down of the current missions to the moon to look for water on the polar caps. I came home to look up some of the pictures that they mentioned and found an alarming amount of comments by people who are convinced that NASA is a weapons manufacturing plant and that the LCROSS mission is just a laser missile test.

Seriously people?

These are probably the same kooks who believe that the moon landing was faked. You can counter every single argument that they make with real science and they still will believe what they will. I watched a documentary on the “hoax” once and saw the explanations for every counter-moon-landing argument out there. Much of that information is covered on this article.

It is a great insult to the scientists of NASA and just pure idiocy.

Lets just ignore science for a moment and talk about common sense.

#1. Why would NASA need to be a weapons plant? The military is so large and sweeping in power and scope that they can certainly handle weapons manufacturing on their own.

#2. Why would they announce things? They would have to announce a fake mission and plant pictures and fake evidence. This one mission would have had millions of dollars in faked equipment and pictures. The LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) camera took pictures that show the walking path from past missions on the moon. That alone would have been one heck of a photoshop job. If they wanted to test a laser missile, they could do it unannounced and no one would notice. The few who may see something strange in their telescopes could be easily squelched.

#3. Everyone is lying? So in order to believe this, we have to believe that every single member of NASA, from the grounds crew to the top scientists are faking it. They ALL have to lie about what is actually going on.

#4. We see it. I’m an amateur astronomer. We watched when the shuttle docked with the Space Station. You can actually make out the space station through a high powered consumer telescope. If we can see the rings of Saturn and the Great Red Spot through our telescope, we can certainly see some of the “local” events.

I start to think after a while that these conspiracy theorists who talk about the Van Allen belt have never picked up a telescope or taken an astronomy course in their lives. (To read more about the Van Allen belt, see this article).

Common sense and logic tells you that NASA is a legitimate scientific organization. Just because it is a government agency doesn’t mean that every scientist who studied their entire life to  work there is a crooked SOB. I challenge anyone who believes this bunk to come to any astronomy conference and try to tell a group of pocket protector wearing book reading telescope owning science nerds that we are all wrong and you are right.

I love the “odd news” section. I found a little clip today I thought was interesting, coming out of Spencer Mountain, NC.

Apparently the little town is in the news because no one is on their ballot for their local election coming up in two weeks.  That isn’t unheard of, and  write-in votes are actually pretty much the norm for small towns.

What I found unusual about this town is the fact that they only have a population of 56 with a voting base of 29.

This brings me to a point about small towns. I’m sure there are many out there who would say that a town this small should just be consolidated into a larger one on the outskirts. I’m sure there are even some libertarians out there who, for the sake of less government, would say that governments should be consolidated.

I disagree heartily. It is the small town that allows people to have a voice. You come to a town meeting and say “the parking here is all wrong, you should make it no parking at spot a,b,c, for these reasons” and the council will listen to you. You can come in and say “we want trash pickup two times a week” and the council can advise you why it is or is not possible. In many small towns, you can literally walk in the door and give your opinions about tax increases and people will listen. You can give suggestions for improvement and they will do their best to remedy it instead of attending to the thousands of other things on their list.

In a truly libertarian society, the government wouldn’t own the roads, streetlights, water departments, or any other infrastructure services. Unfortunately, these things are not possible due to legislation from above the local level. Given that these things are mandated to be controlled by local government, isn’t it better to keep you local government small and in charge of small areas?

Remember too, that most of your officials in small towns are not paid. These elected officials run your town for no reason other than a sense of duty to community. In large cities and townships, elected officials are paid. Put money and campaign contributions into the mix and you can be guaranteed that someone in your local government is going to feel obligated to someone else in the private sector. Not all of your officials, but certainly someone up there is going to be voting with monetary loyalty.

I would argue that many small governments are better than one large one. The bigger you are, the more power you have, the more convoluted every issue becomes, the more red tape involved, and the less attention you can give to the people you are supposed to serve. You can’t tell me that Jane Smith, a full time working single mom living in temporary Jacksonville apartments is going to get the same attention that the owner of a department store in the city. In a small town, the shop owner and the average Joe and Jane have more of an opportunity for the same voice. The way I see it, you are more likely to get your constitutionally equal voice heard when the arena is a little smaller.

I would love to hear some other opinions on this topic, so give it whirl and let me know what you think about our disappearing small town America.

The FCC voted to continue formalizing the net neutrality laws.

This term “net neutrality” has been floating along for a few years, but many people still don’t know exactly what it means. It sounds so innocuous. Neutrality is a good thing right?

Net neutrality laws would prevent a network provider from giving priority to particular websites. Right now, a company like Comcast could choose to prioritize some websites over others. Say you want to reach this blog, which has low numbers of visitors compared to a website like google. If Comcast wanted to, they could make google a priority so that it downloads much faster than my website. My site would be slower because it is much lower on the priority list. Really, if they wanted to, they could block you from being able to see my website at all.

Comcast themselves has been involved in a bit of network management, which means they are choosing to drop certain uploads, particularly those from BitTorrent,  to decrease network traffic. If you need a good in depth explanation of this, turn to The Heritage Foundation’s discussion on this topic.

At first glance, it appears to be a good thing to make everyone equal on the internet. On the other hand, you have to look at it from a market perspective. There are so many options for internet service that the majority of people no longer need to feel locked in to one provider. Even in my tiny little town, we have both Comcast and Fios.

Comcast says it is blocking P2P uploads from BitTorrent in order to keep the overall network moving more smoothly. I don’t generally make those kinds of uploads, and I’m generally happy with the  speed and effectiveness of my provider. If someone does use those uploads and is unhappy with Comcast for blocking them, they can choose Fios instead.

I like to think of the internet in the same terms as regular shopping. If Wal-Mart puts Clearasil on sale for $2 a pack and marks up the rest of their acne treatments to $10, will you purchase Clearasil? Now, what if you think it is a good deal, but you really prefer Biore. Down the street, Target has all of their brands of acne treatment for $5. Would you be more likely to buy the $2 one from Wal-Mart and sacrifice choice, or would you rather get your choice of any at Target for $5?

That is essentially what net neutrality is. Do you want to go with a provider who will limit your choices, or will you choose one that specializes in the things that are important to you.

If we allow the market to speak for itself,  large companies will be forced to bow to the needs and desires of their clients. If Comcast decided to block all websites except the major ones, how many people do you think that would draw in? Those turtles in their commercials that like DSL may just switch to Comcast if that were the case.

Shocking isn’t it? Remember all those promises of TARP repayment with interest? How it was going to actually help us out in the long run because they were going to give us back what we lost plus some so we could pay down some debt with it? Yeah.

And yet, the president wants to hand out more money to more banks.

From this article:

Just as the Obama administration prepares to announce a new TARP-like program for small community banks, Inspector General Neil Barofsky said he believes that “it’s unrealistic to think we’re going to get all of that money back.”

The Treasury Department has spent more than $454 billion through TARP programs. Forty-seven recipients have paid back nearly $73 billion. That means more than $317 billion remains outstanding with the program set to expire Dec. 31.

Later Wednesday, President Barack Obama is expected to announce the community bank assistance effort. The American Bankers’ Association has asked for $5 billion in rescue-fund money to help small banks extend more loans.

That’ll fix it right? It didn’t really work the first time, so lets just try it again and see. Sure, maybe the economy recovered a little bit thanks to all this money poured into it, but all that money will eventually get us. If it doesn’t come back to us in taxes, it’ll come back to us in inflation.

It’s like exercising 3 hours a day and eating nothing but lard. Sure, you may have some muscle tone and be able to run without panting, but you’re most likely going to have a heart attack one day from all the fat clogging your veins. The US needs to curb its appetite for control.

Now to find the best weight loss pill for an hyper-inflated economy…