Category: culture
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Depths of Public Discourse
The current voucher mess illustrates a sad low point in public discourse. The course of events reads like the script of a soap opera. Our legislature passed two laws to implement a voucher system with the expressed intent of giving citizens a choice in educating our children. One of the two bills is now up…
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Information Processing
Thanks to Joshua for pointing to this quote from Douglas Adams (author of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust…
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Right Thinking
Townhall is not a place I have linked to before because much of what I see there is more partisan than I would care to pass along. Surprisingly today there are two articles there that give me hope that there are still active Republicans who stand for something besides being not Democrats (there are also…
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Commercial Zones
I was pleased to see my view on city planning represented in yesterdays Transportation Watch. That view being the need to make space for commercial areas in order to lessen the need for commuting – that is the number one way to reduce traffic in the long term. That article also mentioned a good example…
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Looking to Europe
I do not look favorably on many of the traits common among many European countries (higher taxes to fund broader social programs, shorter workweeks, that kind of thing). However a brief mention of Europe in Transportation Watch reminded me that there is one area where we could learn from Europe. They have learned to make…
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Heroes and Idols
Laura and I were having a fascinating conversation with good friends which rolled around to the topic of teaching children about their future roles as adults. We got to talking about the types of role models that children have and the messages that they are being fed from our society about those adult roles. Out…
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Mob Intelligence
I love reading Terry Pratchett, for the humor, but I just discovered an extremely useful mathematical equation in Maskerade to calculate the intelligence of any mob. “The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.” Now if only we had an accurate definition of what…
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Non-Binding Resolutions
While listening to NPR today I heard a senator talking about many agreements we have made with the Iraqi government where the Iraqi’s failed to do what they promised. He attributed that failure to the fact that "the agreements [had] no teeth." That got me thinking. We don’t have to look outside our country to…
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Massive Do-Over
I have been thinking and reading about political issues like congressional seats for Utah and Washington DC, where America currently stands on abortion, and the complexity and complaints about unfairness in our tax system. I’d love to write a post about almost all of these topics, but then I got to thinking – what if…
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Uncivil War
Today is the anniversary of the official surrender at Appomatox that ended the Civil War in 1865. That random tidbit struck home to me as I was reading The Passing of the Armies by Joshua Chamberlain (who officially received the arms and flags of the Confederate army in surrender). I had not realized until I…