Lots of people are saying we must do something, anything to fix the economy.  “Anything is better than nothing”.
Eric Munger, an economist, made an analogy recently :

Imagine you had a six-year-old daughter, and that she has a high fever. It’s 1820, and we don’t understand germs or fevers very well. You call the doctor, and the doctor comes to the house. “Please, do something. DO SOMETHING, and help my daughter,” you say.

The doctor takes out a lancet, and makes a small incision in your daughter’s wrist. The theory was that the fever was in the blood itself, and “bleeding” was the only treatment that people in 1820 knew.

It doesn’t work. Your daughter’s fever is still very high. So, you tell the doctor, “DO SOMETHING! You are the doctor.”

The doctor bleeds her some more. And she dies.

And the next day you blame the doctor for not bleeding her MORE and SOONER. But bleeding was the wrong thing to do.

This stimulus is the wrong thing to do. The fact that the first round didn’t work leads me to think we need to stop! But all the desperate economic parents out there say, DO IT MORE! DO IT LONGER! DO IT FAST!

I don’t blame the President. I blame voters, who have the naïve idea that government is responsible for the economy.

Full article at The John William Pope Center webpage

I seemed to have stopped enjoying new music about the time I got married. My favorite bands / albums are definitely from the late 80’s to mid 90’s. I don’t normally listen to music radio anymore, I can’t receive KROQ where
I live. I just laugh at myself because there is a number of internet radio stations
that I could be listening to, but instead I just put in a They
Might Be Giants CD. I really like Mink
Car (Max’s favorite track is Man
It’s So Loud In Here (click to listen)), but my all time favorite remains Flood from
1987. Birdhouse
In Your Soul (click to listen) just finished playing. Other bands that have
been ripped for my pleasure, in no particular order:

• U2
• 10,000
  Maniacs
• The
  Smiths / Morrisey
• REM
• The Cure

The newest music to enter my life has been from Tim
Neinhuis. He has a number of full length songs available
for download from his website.

I found a great word the other day. I came across it in a way that is wonderfully indicative of the communal nature of blogging. I was reading my
cousin’s blog and perused his list of frequently read blogs. I clicked on the
link to the 21st
Century Reformation blog and skimmed through the entries there. That blog has
a huge amounts of links. These links are grouped by topic and one topic is ‘aggregators’.
(For those who don’t know, an aggregator is a website or a computer program that subscribes
to various blogs and brings all those blogs’ posts into one central location. I highly
recommend the use of an aggregator for reading blogs, you can make your own at Bloglines.)
Listed as the first aggregator is League
of Reformed Bloggers. One of their entries on that day was titled with the previously
unknown word. I had never heard of this word and so clicked down to the
article at the Parableman
blog. Below is a teaser, I encourage you to read
the whole post.

I’ve been struggling with the idea that we have no
shorthand for the view that homosexuality is abnormal and morally aberrant. Most who
hate such a view call it homophobia, but there’s a clear distinction between those
who have this view and those who truly don’t like people who are gay, are uncomfortable
with gay people being involved in their life in any way, etc. Well, now I’ve seen
a term that sounds to me as if it’s just simply descriptive of the view in question. Someone
who considers heterosexuality normal and/or normative is heteronormative (emphasis
mine).

Heteronormative also got a write up
by Michael Medved in yesterday’s
commentary on Beyond
The News.

A couple of weeks ago, I responded to a letter to the editor (LTE) in our local paper, the Coastal
View News. My expanded commentary can be found here.
In the first issue following my letter, David
Chamlee wrote a response to Bud Fink’s ‘Slippery Slope’ memo (“Bigoted, racist
and offensive”, the last LTE on the page). In
this week’s Coastal View, Bud Fink responds (“Dont play the racist card with me”) and James E. Finch also comments (“God bless freedom of speech”).

Although I won’t be sending a letter to the editor on this topic to respond to the responses, I want to state that I stand by my initial response. I fail to see any valid comparison between the ‘faults’ that Bud Fink ascribes to our Gov. (using the phrase ‘Girle Men’, increasing state debt, being a successful fund raiser, failing to commute the death sentence of a lawfully convicted murderer), and the ruthlessness with which Adolf Hitler set about to exterminate an entire ethnic group and other groups with which he disagreed. I also was amused at the back tracking that Bud Fink did with his first point. In the original LTE, Bud Fink originally stated that the Gov. ‘wants to disband the legislature …’ But in his response, Bud Fink tones down his rhetoric and instead makes the more accurate claim that the Gov. ‘Pronounce[d] the legislature unnecessary or at best part time’. A part time legislature sounds like a great idea to me, no matter which party controls it.

The public debate has sunk to name calling, so I am bowing out.

Amazing content so far, but one line that I have to record, even before the speech is over.

‘…even
the unwanted have worth.’

Maybe this line stood out to me so forcefully
because of today’s Beyond
The News commentary entitled The Generational Impact of Roe,
authored by Janet Parshall. Read
it, better yet, subscribe to this short, daily emailed newsletter for insight, analysis and clarity on the current issue of today. The signup box is at the bottom of the page.