08.31.05

Hurricane Katrina Flood Aid

Posted in Miscellany at 4:49 pm by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

Please help as you can and give as you can for Hurricane Katrina Flood Aid - I’m recommending donations be given to Operation Blessing. Check out the many other worthy organizations here and here.

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Time for the Tough Questions?

Posted in Essays, Life, Liberty, Property, Miscellany at 12:11 pm by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

I have to begin this post by saying that my heart goes out to all who have lost family, life, limb, liberty and property in the horrific catastropy that was Katrina. This storm is having and will continue to have far-reaching effects that most of us haven’t even begun to consider.

One of the bulletin boards that I read has brought up a couple of considerations - one thing we need to remember is that EVERY RESCUER who subjects him/herself to the stagnant contaminated water in these areas may themselves turn out to be victim to hurricane Katrina as well.

The tough question, as I see it,is SHOULD New Orleans, as it was, be rebuilt? I never had the opportunity to visit the fair city - have only read of it and seen pictures. New Orleans, sitting 8 feet below sea level is the only coastal city whose elevation is in the negative numbers. In the 19th century, New Orleans was firmly established as a major shipping port - this during a time when trade via steamboats was the easiest and most convenient method of transporting goods. By the 20th century, however, steamboats were unable to compete with the railroads.

While New Orleans has been graced with a rich and fascinating history, seemingly at least, a portion of New Orleans has in the last few years degenerated into a celebration of some of the baser elements of a “civil” society. The current situation of widespread looting, taking advantage of a bad situation to make it worse, seems to validate this point as this type of situation was not seen to this degree even after 9/11 in New York City. For an interesting read, check out The Compact of Civil Societies from the RightWing NutHouse, H/T to Below the Beltway.

The damage, at the point of writing appears to cover in excess of 80% of the city of New Orleans. Should the billions of dollars for relief and aid be put into rebuilding the city and it’s levees? As recently as December, 2004, an article came out in USA Today which recognized research by the Army Corps of Engineers. The research showed that some levees in the Louisiana/Missippi Coastal area had sunk as much as a foot in the past 20 years. While they did not at that point have a $$$ amount for the necessary improvements, they did state that the cost for the 125-miles of Lake Ponchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project would be about $100 million. A bit of research shows that as of March, 2005 the costs for this project were estimated at $1.5 billion, and funds were not available for 2005 for the project, so estimated completion was not scheduled until 2013-2015.

Are there other options? Would it be feasible to attempt to “fill up” the bowl? With all the debris about now, if there ever could be a time to do so, it would seem that now would be the time.

Given the information on simply reinforcing the levees quoted above, and the fact that major roadways and highways will have to be resonstructed as well, wouldn’t it be better for folks to be encouraged to begin their lives anew in a new home, in a city less flood prone?

I’m sure I’ll be taken to task for this, as I’m just a civilian who doesn’t know whereof she speaks - but I *think* I know how I’d feel if I were to lose everything - and I don’t think I’d want to put my life on hold indefinitely to get back to life as I *knew* it. It just seems to me, that folks need to do some deep soul-searching to determine if rebuilding the dream is really worth the cost.

Update: I truly believed I would be among the minority voices on this subject, but after reading Ogre’s View and the accompanying comments, it looks like more folks are thinking about this subject . . .

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08.29.05

Hurricane Katrina . . .

Posted in Unusual, Miscellany at 6:51 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

Whoa. I’m heartsick. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t an issue for us (central Florida) at all - and my sister in S. Florida lost a Papaya tree and had a Royal Palm snap in half, but that was the extent of their damage.

But watching and waiting and empathizing with our neighbors over in Louisiana is keeping my heart in my throat. Kinda puts politics into a different perspective when some of our countrymen are in a life and death struggle that could at best wipe out their homes and at worst absolutely decimate their city and take many lives.

I’ll be staying tuned to Hurricane City.

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08.25.05

Please Stand By . . .

Posted in Miscellany at 11:43 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

I know, I know, I’ve not contributed anything in the last week or so - but with two kiddos not feeling too hot, a two day headache myself - I’ve just not been able to muster up the righteous indignation to comment on anything or even care much about the “outside” world, hehehe. The fact that another hurricane is about to descend on our state just hit me yesterday afternoon - and even that doesn’t seem like a big deal at this point. Mu Nu was down? Hmmm. Missed that. Oh well - this too shall pass, and I’ll crawl out of the doldrums to be my normal opinionated self before long. ‘Til then, check out the folks at the Life Liberty Property Community and Cox and Forkum.

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08.22.05

Checking out the Fair Tax

Posted in Miscellany at 3:05 pm by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

I’m spending a little time today checking out the Fair Tax - haven’t picked up the book yet, but from everything I hear, I’m all for it! Here are a number of places to read about it, and some interesting commentary . . .

Americans for Fair Taxation Read about it

Americans for Fair Taxation Volunteer Website Get involved

The ‘Fair’ Tax - Matt Towery

Fair Tax Blog

And congrats to Neal Boortz & Congressman John Linder for their #1 slot on the New York Times best seller list for the second week in a row!

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08.19.05

Great Children’s Literature with a Libertarian Edge

Posted in Essays, Life, Liberty, Property, Miscellany at 8:22 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

My girls and I have been thoroughly enjoying a series of books by ~believe it or not~ a British author, Brian Jacques. The series is “Redwall” and we’ve read through the first 6 or so and are avidly collecting the rest.

We first met the Redwall series when the girls were only about 5 and 2 - and our local PBS station picked up the series for afternoon TV broadcasts. The girls got ‘hooked’ quickly on the animated stories, only to have them pulled abruptly from the time slot in the afternoon and placed instead on a Sunday morning (whilst we were in church) so they were not able to watch them. I contacted the station to find out why they were pulled and was told “we had some complaints from parents that they were too violent”. Well, that’s our PC world for you. So, our station pulled the series from the afternoon slot, moved it to Sunday morning and then ditched it as quickly as they could, apparently.

At any rate, once the series was pulled, I did some research online and found a set of Redwall audio tapes - the complete and unabridged book entitled Redwall. My girls loved it - and I can assure you that just about any boys would!

Once the girls got a little older, I began collecting the series and I now read them aloud as a family reading - we do a lot of reading when we go out for drives. I have a sense for the dramatic, and Jacques uses a number of different British dialects for the voices of his characters - which are fun for me to read.

I liked the series immediately because it was equivalent historically to a kind of age of chivalry - only the characters, rather than being human, are critters. There are good and evil - with few gray areas in Jacques writings - the good being mice, squirrels, badgers, otters, shrews, moles, hedgehogs among others. Bad are the rats, stoats, weasels, foxes - and the fights between good and evil are accomplished with swords, pikes, bows, etc. The stories have marvellous plots with themes of liberty over oppression being carried out in very realistic ways. While most of the stories center around Redwall Abbey, and the characters who live in the abbey give thanks for their food and behave themselves in a moral way, Jacques does not make the mistake of assigning them a religion. The characters are so well developed, though, that you’ll recognize friends and family in their personalities.

I’ve always enjoyed reading - love the fantasy of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, etc. But fantasy has never been an overriding love - and it has to make sense to me. The Redwall series of books are IMHO, written just as well as Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia”. When I fall in love with characters, and actually shed tears over their demise, well, that’s good writing in my book - and most modern fiction just doesn’t touch my heart and mind that way.

So, if you’re looking for some good modern literature for your kiddos that isn’t full of PC crap, but spins a good yarn and upholds the truths that you value, check ‘em out!

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08.18.05

Aren’t Cindy’s 15 Minutes up yet?

Posted in Miscellany, Strictly Opinion at 7:10 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

If you haven’t gotten it before, folks, you’ve gotta get it now! This woman is more than a willing tool! She knows just which buttons to push to get the MSM to carry out her own brand of terrorism. Evidence that this is JUST a media ploy is that her blog runs on the website “Sacramento for Democracy” which I refuse to link here, but suffice to say, it is connected with Moveon.org, Michael Moore, and the Democratic Underground - to name but a few. And if you’ve never looked into the rash of mental trash on the DU, well you’re saving your mind from contamination. Cartoon courtesy of the folks at Cox and Forkum.

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08.15.05

Personality Check . . .

Posted in Silly Stuff at 8:28 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

Have you ever taken the Jung-Myers-Briggs Personality Profile? It’s really an interesting profile. Not everyone who takes it will agree with the results, but in my case I’ve taken it a number of different times over the years and it always comes out the same. I am an INTJ which stands for “Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging”. According to my “scores” I am a “mastermind rational”.

It is in their abilities that Masterminds differ from the other Rationals, while in most of their attitudes they are just like the others. However there is one attitude that sets them apart from other Rationals: they tend to be much more self-confident than the rest, having, for obscure reasons, developed a very strong will. They are rather rare, comprising no more than, say, one percent of the population.

Other famous “Mastermind Rationals” are listed as being Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ayn Rand.

Just a fun thing to check out for a Monday morning!

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08.13.05

Freedom OF Thought, or Freedom FROM Thought?

Posted in Essays, Life, Liberty, Property, Strictly Opinion at 9:44 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

A comment on a previous entry led me to think a bit about how we let what we read, hear, and see affect our opinions and thoughts. Freedom of thought (not freedom from it) is vitally important to our survival in the future as people who love Life, Liberty & Property. As the old saying goes, those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and there are many things going on in the world today that bear some careful thought and consideration.

In our day to day world, there are many occasions when we make judgement calls about things in which we have valid, useful, first-hand information. These are situations where we can be relatively certain that our judgement is accurate. We’ve looked at all the angles, and using the knowledge we’ve gained, we’ve determined the correct way to proceed.

How many times, though, do we see, hear, or read about situations in which we make a snap judgement based only on what we’ve watched on TV, heard on the radio, or read in the newspapers or online? Have you ever changed your mind after that snap judgement? Do you ever go seeking to find out if what you saw/heard/read was accurate? You see, it a world filled with so much media, we must really be sure that we’re exercising our freedom OF thought - not our freedom FROM thought. Freedom of thought allows us to step back and say, “Wow, that really sounds interesting - I wonder if it’s accurate?” Freedom from thought says “well, it must be so or they couldn’t produce/publish it.”

Freedom of thought will lead us to search every avenue available on a subject of interest rather than jumping on the nearest bandwagon. And, if you exercise your freedom of thought, you might just come to some really interesting conclusions - conclusions that may turn your original thoughts or established beliefs completely upside down. This kind of thinking, be forewarned, is not popular - and may cause you a great deal of grief, because bucking the establishment in any form will cause you to be ridiculed or held up as an imbecile to others. Yet it can be richly rewarding to self - if you can get past the need for accolades from others - to know, within your own heart and mind, that you’re not just blindly following the crowd.

My dad, whom I mentioned in a previous post, is a Minister. He always taught us at home, and his church flocks as well, that they should never take his word for anything - but should always study their bibles to be sure that “these things are so”. Dad taught us well - by example - that we should never pass anything along to others without doing our homework to try to insure that we were not passing along gossip or garbage. Incidentally, LOL, friends can tell you that I have never passed along chain emails and spam - and that more than one of them has received a link back to Snopes!

Recently, dad and I were talking about the word “Knowledge”. Dad laid it out to me in a way that I’d never thought about. Breaking the word into its separate syllables, it becomes “Know Ledge”. When we think about acquiring knowledge, we think of it as a climb up a ladder. When we’ve learned something concrete, we’ve reached a “know ledge”. We can stand on it. It’s firm. It’s a ledge on which we can place our trust, and from it we can rest and “chew the fat” about what we’ve learned until we’re ready to climb to the next level of “know ledge”.

Now, getting back to the ideas of freedom of thought and freedom from thought, whenever we gain knowledge from our research, we must sometimes use all our senses to discern truth. As the saying goes “the truth is out there”. While there are things that we can’t ever know for certain, if we at least take the time to search, using the knowledge that we can stand on (be it understanding of human nature, concrete science, or first hand information) we can at least be sure of using our freedom of thought to do the best humanly possible to grasp the realities of any situation. And wouldn’t that be better, always, than letting our brains atrophy in the mire of freedom FROM thought?

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Check out “Fearless Philosopy for Free Minds”

Posted in Life, Liberty, Property, Miscellany at 9:40 am by LBF (Left-Brain Female)

Wow! Fantastic post, carrying a pullout to appease terrorism to it’s logical conclusion! You’ve got to check out Stephen Littau’s latest here.

And in that same vein, equally good is this one from Ogre’s Politics and Views.

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