Over at Iowahawk you can find some great bumper stickers to show your support for the environment. He also gives a good solution to solving the global warming problem.

In this story, to escape a kidnapper, a kid uses a safety pin to cut through the duct tape binding his hands together. At one point during the kidnapping he conceals the pin by foolishly placing it in his mouth. This strikes me as very dangerous because he could have died by accidentaly swallowing the safety pin.

Just like a gun, the safety pin posed certain dangers, and just like a gun the safety pin was used to stop a crime in progress. Some have argued that the danger of guns is greater than their benefit of stopping crime. I for one embrace this argument. Its also why I fully support the banning of safety pins. Their potential for harm far outweigh their benefits.

Besides, we have law enforcement whose job is to stop crimes. This kid should never of taken that risk with a safety pin and instead waited for the police to show up. If you ask me its better to keep your life in the hand of experts rather than take matters into your hands.

Yet one more awesome example of the excellence bureaucrats achieve when managing an economy.

The Cato-at-liberty blog talks about how senators are adjusting to the new laws preventing earmarks by putting direct pressure on the departments heads of government to use their budget on the senator’s earmarks.

Members have been speed-dialing executive branch officials and asking them to fund their specific earmark requests out of agency budgets even though they were purged from the larger budget bill. This Congressional lobbying can be hard for the average federal bureaucrat to refuse, since he doesn’t want to offend those on Capitol Hill who control his budget. …

Some might think of this as wrong, but pressuring department heads to use their allocated funding for political earmarks should be viewed as appropriate given the fact that the we did vote those politicians into office. That is simply to say we can control how those senator use coercion to repay those voter who voted for them.

Of teaching my father how to use the computer.

How do you likes enableate’s look for this month. Personally, I think it might be my best.

The article details the change in attitude one of the founders of Greenpeaece had towards nuclear energy. The quote is reference to a current Greenpeace representative.

Mr. Townsley of Greenpeace disputes that. “We spend a lot of time looking at the science,” he says. “We’re pro-science. But you have good and bad science. Science has the ability to be our savior or our downfall.”

Weather in Durham is miserable today. About forty degrees with rain. This is some of the worst weather ever.

This article details the appaling one sideness of the media’s coverage of the war and attempts to give some background history as to the media current strong antiwar disposition. While the whole article is worthy of a read, the part I found most interesting is:

Sociologist James D. Wright directly measured the impact of press coverage by comparing the support for the war among white people of various social classes who read newspapers and news magazines with the support found among those who did not look at these periodicals very much. By 1968, when most newsmagazines and newspapers had changed from supporting the war to opposing it, backing for the war collapsed among upper-middle-class readers of news stories, from about two-thirds who supported it in 1964 to about one-third who supported it in 1968. Strikingly, opinion did not shift much among working-class voters, no matter whether they read these press accounts or not. Affluent people who read the press apparently have more changeable opinions than ordinary folks. Public opinion may not have changed much, but elite opinion changed greatly.

It turns out that the group of people most sensitive to media themes is the affluent well educated. The extent of support they give for a war is determined primarily by whether media sources cover the war favorably or unfavorably.

The easy explanation is to argue that educated people are more open to ‘new evidence’ presented in updated news reports. This openness leads to a willingness to adopt a more realistic position in light of improved evidence. There is only one problem with this explanation, as the article argues, the ‘new evidence’ was at best biased towards an antiwar group and at worst completely made up, as was the case with Tet offensive. Furthermore, the current coverage in Iraq lacks practically any verisimilitude to the events on the ground. Thus one is forced into the argument that educated affluent people are more amenable to biased or fabricated evidence than common folk. While attending college I have thought on many occasions college seems to filter out all but the most credulous given how much crap they jam down your throat without justification, but I think it’s unfair to say that the educated affluent are less likely to challenge the status quo then the common folk.

But I don’t want to give the impression that those less amenable to the press are somehow more independent in their thinking. I simply believe they take their authoritative information from a different source. The most immediate source that I can think of is religion. If this analogy holds, then it’s fair to say that the on some level the educated elite believe the ‘evidence’ of the MSM in the same way that the religious faithful believe the teachings of their respective faith.

The development of an independent thinker eager to apply his hammer to all authoritative sources is disliked equally by all groups. His kind is not disproportionally represented in either the educated elite or the religious faithful because both groups requires a degree of credulousness that the independent thinker is unable to countenance for an extended period of time. Eventually his hammer must come out and in the wake of smashed conventions and fractured axioms he will be banished.