God bless the NCV folks for wanting to reach out to a new generation. But I just get this feeling that something is lost.
All posts by Ken Martin
Anything Goes by Cole Porter
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
Now heaven knows, anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four-letter words writing prose,
Anything goes.
The world has gone mad today,
And good’s bad today, and black’s white today,
And day’s night today,
When most guys today that women prize today
Are just silly gigolos.
So though I’m not a great romancer,
I know that you’re bound to answer
When I propose, anything goes.
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
Now heaven knows, anything goes.
And good authors too who once knew
Better words, now only use four-letter words
Writing prose, cause anything goes.
The world has gone mad today,
And good’s bad today, and black’s white today,
And day’s night today,
When most guys today that women prize today
Are just silly gigolos.
So though I’m not a great romancer,
I know that you’re bound to answer
When I propose, anything goes.
May I say before this record spins to a close,
I want you to know anything goes.
Ken Martin recommends you do NOT Vote Yes for the “Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment”
That’s a weird title for a post on my own blog. Well, here’s the story: there’s another Ken Martin. Actually, there’s a bunch of us, but there’s one in particular who is the campaign manager for the “Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment”. So folks are searching the web for him and seem to stumble in here.
Well, OK, but I’m not that Ken Martin, and though I’m sure he’s a perfectly fine fellow, I don’t agree with him that there should be a constitutional amendment like the one his group is supporting. In fact, I think it’s a dreadful idea. Please, vote no for the “Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment”.
I’m tempted to rant… sorely tempted. But I promised myself I’d keep this short. OK, I’ll try the constraint of bullet points:
- Let’s keep our “how government spends money” questions out of the constitution and in the legislature. That’s where government is faced with all the needs and must draw up a budget. Doing this constitutionally feels like an end run around representative government.
- “Yeah, well they did it!” Yes, others have pulled exactly this shenanigan, but I don’t accept that excuse from my kids, and none of us should accept it as a basis for creating public policy.
- I don’t trust a movement that talks all about “clean water” and then has 19.75% of the funds going to “the arts and cultural heritage fund”. You want to clean the water? Go clean the water. This is the hackneyed old political shell game… and a little for my friends to get this passed.
- Only 33% of the funds actually go exclusively to clean water.
- It’s a 25 year tax hike. Hello? A tax hike. I don’t really want to increase the “Minnesota Taxes” portion of my family’s budget. Certainly not in times like these.
- It’s a constitutional amendment. Hello? OK, that’s basically the same as my first bullet, but does anyone get this? If you’re unhappy with this choice – if it turns out to be a mistake – what will you do about it? Replace your legislator? Tough cookies… won’t work. Nothing will work! That’s why you shouldn’t make it a constitutional amendment.
Look, it’s a good idea to have clean resources. A very good idea. But there are a lot of very good ideas. It’s a good idea to help disadvantaged folks. It’s a good idea to make sure folks are educated. It’s good idea to have excellent law enforcement. It’s a good idea to replace the carpet in the capitol once in a while. So what we do is we get all the good ideas together and prioritize and find out which ones we can afford. We hire and pay for legislators for this very purpose.
My guess is folks behind this initiative have tried that, and have constantly missed the “cut”. And they’re just trying to find a way to get this thing – what they think is a good idea – done.
Don’t vote for this. If you care about this, you make your legislator pay attention to them and support them, but don’t support this practically irreversible end run around how we as a people prioritize our resources.
Ken looks like a nice guy (all of us Ken Martins are), and he’s done a nice job on the web site (I look at such things). But I just disagree with what he’s doing. This particular Ken Martin in Minnesota urges you to vote “No” for the “Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment“ on Tuesday.
28 minutes. I’m OK with that.
UPDATE: Here’s 10 reasons to vote “no”.
UPDATE: One more link with nice, balanced pro and con information.
Crunch!
The van got whacked. The story here. No one’s hurt, and it was plainly the uninsured motorist’s fault.
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States
Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.
She won!
She won! Yay!
Kenny has been busy…
…with a lot of blog updates. Good stuff! He’s been scanning pictures and uploading video. He’s getting pretty good at this stuff.
Government by the people?
Maybe it’s just me with my stochastic interest in history and our country’s founding, but I found this article by Steven Hayward (Reagan’s biographer) concerning Sarah Palin very interesting. What do we really think about “government of the people, by the people, for the people”?
So we went on vacation – part two
Last episode, we left our heroes (my family) slumbering away their mediocre McDonalds in Louisville, KY. The next morning we raided the hotel’s free breakfast cereal counter – a legendary delight the kids remembered from last road trip; three kinds of cereal! As much as we want!
Back into the van and away we went. 700 miles yesterday, and about 500 miles today. We should be at grandad’s in the late afternoon. Maybe we can even go swimming when we get there. We grabbed a Starbuck’s in downtown Louisville and we were on our way.
This leg didn’t quite go as swimmingly. The six bladders-on-board were nowhere near as resilient or synchronized as the day before. So more stops. And this was the mountain leg of the driving, which always takes longer.
And we had another last-minute waypoint in the works. Helen was hoping to meet up with a friend who lives in North Carolina. A few emails and phone calls were exchanged as the morning went on on we had a plan. So we typed the new destination into the borrowed Garmin nüvi and it led us on our way. Though the distance was little different than just going straight to my dad’s, it was slower going because of the smaller, winding roads and 30 mph zones as we moved through the small towns. But, man… it was lovely. We ended up going through a bit of Virginia, which I’d never seen before. Wow.
Well, we were making our way – slower than I wanted, but it was OK. But there was a flaw. I tend to be a bit of a ruthless packer: I don’t want to haul extraneous things around. Well, I misunderstood something about the borrowed nüvi. I left the auto adapter at home because I already had a USB auto adapter. Mistake. While it can be charged via USB, it will not operate while plugged in to USB. So I had to charge it, then use it, the see “OK, I have 50 miles before the next turn” and charge it for a while. Monkey business. And part way through Virginia, it ran out of power. I’m in Virginia for the first time and the GPS that took me there is dead. Ken gets grumpy.
I had a paper map and finally figured out where we were. Helen called her friend and figured out where we should be going (enough time had passed that plans had to change). We finally made our way to wide, fast, and welcome I-77.
As a side note: I really like paper. I mean, I love my gadgets – computer, iPhone, GPS, etc. – but paper is so much nicer and more convenient and “information dense” than a screen. (For the geeks visiting, yes, that’s a very Tufte-esque observation.) A paper map shows so much more in such a small space… layers and layers of information. I love paper maps.
Anyway, the evening approached and we accomplished our rendezvous with Helen’s friend a bit north of Charlotte. They hugged and and spun (see photo on bottom) and gabbed, while I enjoyed the entertainment inside the Outback:
Friendly waiter, but not very satisfying food. I’m 0-2 on culinary satisfaction so far on this trip.
Back on our way. We approached Charlotte. On a number of levels, I always love seeing “Billy Graham Parkway” on a street sign. I know my way by heart from here, and we rolled in to grandad’s place sometime around 9:30. Get the stuff in and the kids to bed. Day two done.
Driving totals:
Ken: 1,200 miles
Helen: 0 miles
I feel fine…
…even though today was billed as possibly being the “End of the World”.
The Large Hadron Collider is intended to collide a bunch of particles at about ~99.99997% of the speed of light, thus reproducing conditions quite close to the moment of the Big Bang. Some folks are concerned that doing so will unleash tiny black holes which will interact with Earth’s gravity and grow in size until we are annihilated. Which would be a drag. More on that here.
I thought this was funny, though… one paper is cheering “Success!” because the machine got switched on and we’re still here. But the experiment that could make the little black holes won’t actually be run until October, and actually maybe not even for a year, as they slowly ramp up to full power.
Although the big switch-on took place today, the first high-energy collisions are not due until October 21.
This is nice, but not really “success” in the “see, we didn’t destroy the world” sense.
I thought this was pretty good…
The CERN team insist the project is safe.
Well, if they insist it’s safe, then they must be right, right? But aren’t they running the experiment because there are things they don’t know but want to? Ah, nevermind. Anyway, as long as it’s all worth it…
They say it could even help to bring massive benefits, such as a cure for cancer and solutions to nuclear waste and global warming.
Haaa ha ha… doesn’t that sound like a line from the Simpson’s or something? The only things missing are world peace and ED.
They added that if it does actually turn out to destroy the Earth, they will issue a formal apology and form an inquiry to examine what went wrong.
OK, I made that up.
No, I’m not really worried. I’m just impressed by the vapidity of the ‘pat-pat it’s OK, dear… now run along’ infomercial-style reporting. (Reminds me of Mark’s writing in That Hideous Strength)
Thought for the day: This machine and its experiments are costing somewhere around eight billion dollars. Eight thousand stacks of one million dollars. I know “governments” funded this, but they get their money through taxing people and their companies. Best possible “public good”?