By-pass Japan - save time!

If you are planning to visit Japan after November 20 be prepared for a long wait at the airport or seaport. The country will begin finger-printing and photographing all visitors from that date. This is somehow supposed to increase security in that country. Sounds to me like a real pain in the a**, especially if you have a visa you obtained from one of their embassies or consulates outside the country.

Champions, Again

Jonathan Papelbon jumped for joy after striking out the last batter in the last inning of the fourth and last game of the 2007 World Series. The Red Sox closer got the final five outs in the game played Sunday night in Denver and won by the Red Sox 4-3 for their second World Series championship in four years after waiting 86 years. The flag on the Green Monster honors the 2004 Championship team. Another flag is in order and will likely be unveiled soon.

Why Al Won't run

Al Gore is unlikely to run again (for the Presidency). His ideas are catching on, but people still don't want to pay for them.
"Besides Mr Gore, however, no plausible candidate of either party favours a carbon tax, the most efficient way to tackle emissions. (Chris Dodd, a Democrat, does, but he surely won't win.) Voters prefer solutions that are either cheap or that they think will be paid for by someone else. A poll for the New Scientist magazine in June tried to quantify this, with sobering results. Only half of Americans would favour rules to force power companies to emit less if that raised their monthly electricity bill from $85 (the average in 2005) to $155 (an estimate of the hike needed to lower American emissions by 5% by 2020). And only 37% could stomach a tax that raised petrol (gasoline) prices to $4 a gallon. That would be an unprecedented hardship for Americans but barely half what the stuff now costs in Britain.
"This is why Mr Gore talks more bluntly now than he ever did on the campaign trail, and why no serious presidential contender echoes him. You cannot win the White House by telling Americans that they must pay more to drive, or by telling Midwestern coalminers that their industry must clean up or die. But if candidates do not prepare America for the cost of tackling climate change, the next president will have no mandate to impose it. Now that's an inconvenient truth."
(The foregoing, excerpted from The Economist, October 20, 2007, pg. 48, sums up, in my opinion, why Al Gore won't run again.)

Sign says it all

Unbelievable

So help me Jesus, this is from The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2007: "The Portland (Maine) school board on Wednesday approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control medications without notifying parents." About five of the school's 500 students reported themselves as being sexually active. What are we coming to?

South Carolina's Congressional Scrooges

One need not travel to Washington to learn how their congress person votes on critical issues. The results are announced immediately over the airwaves (and usually on the following Sunday The Post & Courier runs a graph reflecting the votes.) On Thursday next there will be one of these important votes when the House of Representatives considers President Bush's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The President says the current version of the bill is too expensive to continue. He doesn't remind us of his (and other Republican scrooges) philosophical opposition to all government-run health care. (Look up who voted against Medicare forty years ago.) SCHIP only happens to be their latest victim. When he was Governor of Texas, Mr. Bush unsuccessfully sought to limit access to the original SCHIP. In other words he has a track record against helping needy families with insurance coverage for children. By-the-by, during the period 2003-2005, Texas had the highest rate of uninsured children among the states. These numbers started growing long before 2003.

I will bet you right now, however, that the four Republican congressmen from South Carolina on Thursday will again buy into the President's nonsense and vote against needy children and families. They did so when the bill was originally passed in the House, and they voted 'Nay'. They will give a Scrooge-like kick in the pants to needy children, and hope for a photo-op at the next White House barbecue standing next to the 'compassionate conservative.'

It is difficult as hell to understand how Republicans claim they are for less spending and smaller government and yet have spent more money in the six years they were in charge of the White House and congress (2001-2006) than the Democrats did in any corresponding six years when they had control of the White House and the Congress. The Party of reduced spending and limited government has turned out to be afflicted with the same spending-like-a-drunken sailor mentality as any other political party. I believe this has to do with the idea that when you are in power your supporters (e.g. insurance companies, doctors, banks, etc. ) expect to be rewarded. Too bad needy children can't vote.

Waste not, want not

This morning when I sat down with my coffee and newspapers I decided to also have some toast and jam to enhance the start of a new day. A loaf of fresh raisin bread was waiting to be opened. I bought it yesterday with the anticipation of how good it would taste this morning. Right beside it, however, was a wrapper holding only the two crusts from a loaf of whole wheat bread that I have been eating on this past week. This loaf of bread had passed its sell-by date on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (October 2). What to do? Give in to my hedonistic nature, or remember the words of my late mother: "Waste not, want not. Clean your plate. Children are starving in Ethiopia and China."

In conversations with friends and strangers over the past twenty years since I turned 50 I have been amazed to hear played back to me some of the same admonitions and bromides that were pounded into my head by my mother. (My father took French leave when I was a small child.) I wonder if my grandparents pounded these things into my mother's head? Worst, did me and my wife do the same thing to our children? The burden of it all. Some of these things hack at you more than the Ten Commandments. Everyone breaks one or two of those occasionally but you can tell God you're sorry, do a little penance and get back in His good graces. But the starving children in Ethiopia are always with us. When I was a youngster I could not understand how children could be starving in Ethiopia, a country that whipped Mussolini when he was at the height of his power. But here this morning in the early days of the 21st Century those starving children haunt me still. As a child I wouldn't dare tell my mother (unless I was already on a plane and it was airborne) "send them this food." But I'll be damned if today I wasn't still in the clutches of those anonymous starving urchins.