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| Courtesy of Dean Skelos |
Quote of the Day
No one forgives with more grace and love than a child.
Real Live Preacher
Andrew Napolitano / Reason, This Memorial Day, Freedom Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes: Thumbs UP!
A few days back Rand Paul sponsored an amendment which would bar warrantless FDA raids and guns on farms; only 15 senators voted for the amendment, none of those Democrats. (Before going further, I would like to see much broader amendments that this--more specifically, I don't want to see warrantless anything.) I believe that this probably has to do with farms in Pennsylvania and California dealing with raw milk products.
What I want readers to focus on is the fact that raw milk has been used by humans for thousands of years. The government is heavily promoting pasteurized milk products. A number of states allow selling raw milk products but there have been crackdowns on "smuggling" raw milk across state borders. I have a brother-in-law whose family produces grass-fed beef--but there are archaic inspection schemes in order to ship meat products across state lines and apparently for smaller producers, getting the inspections done is a nontrivial problem.
The original intent of the Constitution was to promote a free market across states with interstate commerce guided by the federal government. But you can point at one thing after another (e.g., banking, insurance, etc.) where it was difficult to operate across states, such as pooling a critical mass of policyholders.
Of course, I've been alluding to one of the worst SCOTUS decisions in American history: Carolene Products and the infamous Footnote 4. This basically opened the door for all sorts of federal and/or state intervention in the marketplace provided not any of a politically correct, limited set of rights are involved and the law seems be at least reasonable on its face.
Government has become Big Nanny--don't worry about retirement: we have social security and Medicare. Don't worry about job loss: we have unemployment compensation. We have welfare and other redistributionist schemes.
Somewhere along the way, as I recently quoted Bastiat, this has undermined the dignity of the person: we no longer have to think for ourselves: elected officials and bureaucrats will do it for us. As F.A. Hayek would say, we're on the road to serfdom: we no longer have consent of the governed: we have consent of the government.
Is this what people have fought and died for--for megalomaniac politicians and bureaucrats to micromanage our everyday life? To meddle in the affairs of other nations because of some all-encompassing vision of national security?
Judge Napolitano has raised some troubling questions. we got involved in the internal affairs of two countries (Iraq and Afghanistan), neither of which posed a direct, credible military threat against the US. Although I find it unlikely that we would set up a trigger mechanism to rationalize intervention, we must never give a blank check on fundamental rights of life, liberty and property.
Our biggest tribute to those who have died in the service of this nation would be to restore traditional liberties, to ensure as few as possible others ever risk their health and lives to defend their country and to elect leaders whom consider war only as a last resort in the direct defense of America.
My Vote for a British Princess
The British primary school student four-year-old Marcella Marino asked her father, professional hairstylist Marcello Marino, to make her look like a princess for her upcoming class photo. Marino fashioned a tilted hair bow, popularized by pop music entertainer Lady Gaga 3 years back. The little sweetheart had her heart broken when the school banned her from the class photograph because her hairstyle violated the school's strict dress code. (For a clearer picture of the hairstyle and a glum-looking Marcella, see the Daily Mail article.)
Okay, I'm the last guy in the world to talk about hairstyles; I'm not exactly John Edwards (although I understand he's lately used SuperCuts which I tried in the past). I'm been going to barbershops for years (I love the one I've been going to in Howard County where the walls are plastered with military photographs, caps, etc. I was born/cursed with naturally curly hair (I explained in an earlier post a teacher gave the nickname of Einstein, which stuck, in my freshman year of high school for both my academics and natural hairstyle)). I do sometimes comment on people's hairstyles if I think they are distracting, e.g., when my oldest niece used an unnatural hair color. (I think the next time I saw her, she was wearing three different unnatural hair colors, so I figured that it was time to shut up.)
Can we all agree that this is one of the cutest 4-year-old girls we've ever seen? She is beyond cute and adorable in the twitter photo. I think the bow is beautiful--it's better than the one I cited above of Lady Gaga. I really don't think we should break the spirit of youngsters over arcane policies, and I certainly would not be picking a fight with a professional stylist over how he styled his little daughter's hair. I personally like this style, and I tend to be conservative in my tastes. It breaks my heart to hear how inflexible the school was. I remember when I was in kindergarten (technically I had just turned 5), and big kids had stolen my Valentine's Day cards on the bus ride home. These kinds of things are traumatic to little kids. She'll never have that first class picture everybody else has. It's a shame--she ranks a 10 out of 10 on the cutie pie meter.
I haven't studied the school dress code, but I personally love seeing ladies wear flowers in their hair (hence the video below). Not that it makes any difference. I'm surprised when anything I say registers on personal appearance. I once had a very tall girlfriend in Houston; I remember at Sunday mass that she had worn this elegant white dress. So a couple of weeks later I was talked to her and I mentioned how I liked how she looked in that white dress; the next time I saw her, she was wearing the white dress in question. I naturally thought it had something to do with the comment I made, and I thought, "This is so cool... It's like having your own giant Barbie doll!" (The last time I saw her, she hated me with the intensity of 1000 suns--even more than my ex-students, if that's possible! I remember once coming home from an Astros game and found like 20 messages from her demanding to know where I was. After mass the next day she immediately came up to and demanded to know where I was. I said I had been at a baseball game. She demanded to know why I didn't ask her; I said I didn't know she liked baseball. She snapped back to me, no, she didn't like baseball, but that wasn't the point: I should have asked her anyway. And you think calculus and differential equations are tough to figure out... I figured she's the one whom called up and left the entire song of "Music Box Dancer" on my answering machine. Incidentally, I made answering machines an art form; I probably bought over a dozen over the years. I used to change my answering machine greetings regularly; a lot of times I would do voices and other novelty things, and I soon discovered that I had friends calling me just to check out my answering machine greeting. When I answered one live, my friend impatiently told me to hang up and not pick up next time, so he could catch my message. Wow--that's when I knew my answering machine gimmick went too far...)
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| (Courtesy of Marcello Marino/Twitter) |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Rolling Stones, "Harlem Shuffle"
