Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Which do you prefer?
I prefer burgers when I’m hungry.
But when I’m trying to keep stuff together, ties are hard to beat.
Yet these two men seem to have a cut-and-dried preference:
Bush, Sarkozy promote ties over burgers
Maybe they decided to remove their ties and drape them over burgers.
Perhaps I should read the story.
Oh well.
Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look
| Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.
“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” “And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June. President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a “major policy shift” and Bush has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s necessary. |
I wonder how soon till he has to back down from those statements.
Taxes trigger big drop in U.S. smoking
| Higher state taxes on smoking are producing sharp declines in tobacco consumption in the United States, just as Congress considers a huge federal cigarette tax hike, USA Today reported in its Friday editions.
The newspaper, conducting its own analysis of taxation and consumption figures, said the degree of decline in smoking appears to be tied directly to the size of the tax increase. |
We know taxing smokes isn’t about legislating morality. So taxing abortion wouldn’t be either.
We know that consistency demands that “pro-choicers” should oppose someone deciding to smoke just as much as they should oppose someone deciding to have an abortion.
And what would be done with the money generated by state and federal taxes on abortions?
Well, I take you back to the story for my answer:
| The Senate last week approved a $35 billion tobacco tax increase as a way to pay for expanded government health care for children. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has proposed its own plan to provide health care to children through higher tobacco taxes |
Abortion taxes for the children!
Makes sense to me.
I’ve never heard of this before:
| Turns out, even beheaded rattlesnakes can be dangerous.
That’s what 53-year-old Danny Anderson learned as he was feeding his horses this week when a 5-foot rattler slithered onto his central Washington property, about 50 miles southeast of Yakima. Anderson and his 27-year-old son, Benjamin, pinned the snake with an irrigation pipe and cut off its head with a shovel. A few more strikes to the head left it sitting under a pickup truck. “When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger,” Anderson said. “I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose.” |
From the Boston Globe, The shock of the old:
Joe Mackall’s new book, “Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish,” explores the role of religion in modern society by looking closely at the life of a small devout religious community in Ohio: the Swartzentruber Amish. The struggle of the Amish people to live with “the English” (the non-Amish), and of the English “outsider” (Mackall) to understand the Amish, is a unique story of culture crossing in rural white America.
The complexity of the bridge that Mackall attempts to build between the Amish and English cultures is mirrored in the Latin root of the word “religion” — religare, to bind together again. This is the problem/promise that Mackall confronts: Religion can both liberate and indoctrinate, both create a community through the bonds of tradition and doctrine, and enslave a community through the binding of minds and control of behavior. The book points to a difficult truth: A religious community is bound to be freed.
If you need more than the first two paragraphs of the review, click the link above.
If you want the book, click the book graphic. 😉
| A massive manhunt and rescue operation ended in joy around midnight between Thursday and Friday, after a missing child was found alive, floating in the Dead Sea. The high salt and mineral content of the water, while extremely dangerous to ingest, kept the child afloat.
Eight-year-old Schneur Zalman Friedman disappeared within minutes on Thursday after he entered the water at 5:00 p.m. with his father and brother. It is known that high winds often blow through the Dead Sea area towards evening, cooling off the heat of the day, but in this case, they caused the tide to carry him away. |
