Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Bad Precedent

Here’s the headline blazed across the front page of The Grand Rapids Press. “What are limits to dad’s duty? Daughter’s child-support claim reaches back two decades." The short version.  Man, now 41, rolls in hay with college sweetie in 1982.  Sweetie moves to Florida and has child, unbeknownest to man.  In 1998, roll in hay child’s guardian-grandparents, who have had custody since the love child was five years old, sue the man and a blood test confirms parentage.  The man pays child support for 3 1/2 years, when love child graduates from highschool.  Love child turns 18 and sues Dad, she doesn’t even know, for support back to the day of her birth.  Michigan courts rule for love child to the tune of approximately $100K.

I think this is a crock and a total abrogation of support laws.  This isn’t about support, it’s about greedy revenge.  Read the article and decide for yourselves.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 01:04 PM
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What About the Evolutionary Angle?

Dennis Prager has a column posted at Townhall.com titled “Why young women are exposing themselves: Part one." Within the the column, Prager lists five reasons he thinks are the answers to the question posed in the title.  “Equality,” “death of femininity,” “gender role reversal (i.e. stay at home dads working moms),” and “lack of sexual reticence.” Prager also throws a nod to peer pressure, or what I call the lemming defense, and the women purchase what the stores are selling copout.

I’m wondering if evolutionary factors come into play, or, display?

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 11:58 AM
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Less Government Please

According to this Rasmussen poll, sixty-four percent of American voters would ”...prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes." A heartening percentage with a sampling error of plus or minus three percent.  The poll also arrived at the conclusion that fourteen percent just don’t know and twenty-two percent are actually clamoring for more government, which must be the socialist factor kicking in.  I looked at Rasmussen’s “Methodology” link, but unfortunately it did not provide the questions asked for this particular survey.

Via David T. Beito at the Liberty & Power: Group Blog.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 09:27 AM
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Planes That Never Got Off the Drawing Board or Out of the Comic Book

Fantasy Planes.

My personal favorite, a coal fired ramjet aircraft. Though for aesthetic beauty I personally like the Messerschmitt Me 264.

Via Dean’s World.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 06:14 AM
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Expensive Water

An article in the NYT, penned by James Dao, alerts us to a water issue in Zanesville, OH.  Specifically, a “hollow” on Coal Run Road.  It seems the 17 residents of the hollow just received hookups to city water at the cost of $730,000.00.  That’s $42,914.17 per residence.  In Dao’s article, we are led to believe that the main reason these folks living on Coal Run Road did not have city water is because they are, black.

For what it is worth, I could have saved Zanesville some serious money.  They should’ve drilled wells.  Granted, the article does mention that “a few residents” on Coal Run Road did drill wells but the water tables that were tapped provided bad water. The wells should then have been drilled deeper.  You ask, well, how then would drilling wells have saved money, especially if the wells needed to be drilled deeper?

I have a 300 foot deep well on my property in northern Michigan.  The cost of this well was $5,000.00.  Calculating from this cost, let’s assume that the wells that could have been drilled for the residences along Coal Run Road may have needed to be drilled to a depth of 700 feet to tap good water.  At a cost of $16.66 per drilling foot, based on my well cost, each individual well for the 17 residences would have cost $11,662.00.  Let’s add another $2,000.00 per well for unexpected drilling challenges, which would bring the cost of each well to $13,662.00.  And, because we’re looking at this as if this is a service the state should provide, let’s round the cost of each well to $15,000.00 for a total expense of $255,000.00.  If Zanesville would have drilled wells for the residences, they could have saved taxpayers $475,000.00.

This water issue has nothing to do with race.  It is simply a manifestation of individuals feeling that the state should provide them sustenance, or in this case, water.

Dao’s article is titled “Ohio Town’s Water at Last Runs Past a Color Line."

Via Atrios.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 05:33 AM
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First There Were Brown Shirts

Nazi.  Now there’s a four letter word, right?  Negative connotations abound when this epithet is pasted upon an individual.  What should these guys be called?  The head cases?  The black shirts?  The Islamfascists/nazis/commies?  The totally deluded?

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 05:02 AM
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Remember When

The English language is as malleable as they come.  This fact is both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing in regards to words like “cyberspace” and a curse in regards to words like “metrosexual.” Colloquialisms also abound in the English language and acronyms, too, roll off Americans’ tonques.  Well here are a word and an acronym I may never use the same again in the future.

The word - snort.  Snort can mean “to force air violently through the nose,” or “to express scorn,” amongest other similar definitions.  It isn’t till one reads further into a dictionary’s definition of the word that one comes upon snort defined as “a drink of usu. straight liquor taken in one draft.” That’s the snort I know, the drink snort, but now it seems this definition of snort is being refined one step further.  A company has invented a device which allows a user to snort alcohol, up their nose, they specifically mention absinthe and vodka, in order to bypass the stomach and the liver and head straight to the brain.  Lovely.

Anyway, the device which faciliates the “snort” brings us to the acronym.  The device is called a Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) vaporiser.  AWOL, to many individuals, means “absent without leave,” and, I would wager it could apply to over zealous use of the vaporiser, but only time will tell.

Here’s the link to the article from the Scotsman which informs us of the device.  The article is appropriately titled “Experts Condemn New Craze for ‘Snorting’ Alcohol."

Via Greg Swann at Presence of Mind.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/17 at 04:07 AM
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