Minor Thoughts from me to you

Panel Votes to Allow Regulation of Cigarettes - New York Times

A Senate committee approved legislation that would allow federal regulation of cigarettes for the first time.

Bravo for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. There's just one little problem. Regardless of how long I pore over Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, I can't find anything granting Congress the power to regulate cigarettes. Nor do I found -- anywhere in the Constitution -- anything granting Congress the authority to grant itself more authority.

Quite the contrary. The Constitution grants Congress a very limited, specific, and well-defined list of powers.

If Congress does ultimately start regulating cigarettes, who's disobeying the law? Those that ignore the new regulations or the Congress that illegally passed the regulations in the first place?

Maverick Leads Charge for Charter Schools - New York Times

Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what often seems like a guerrilla war for control of this city's chronically failing high schools.

In just seven years, Mr. Barr's Green Dot Public Schools organization has founded 10 charter high schools and has won approval to open 10 more. Now, in his most aggressive challenge to the public school system, he is fighting to seize control of Locke Senior High, a gang-ridden school in Watts known as one of the city's worst. A 15-year-old girl was killed by gunfire there in 2005.

In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a wedge through the city's teachers union by welcoming organized labor "” in contrast to other charter operators "” and signing a contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.

Three years ago, Mr. Barr negotiated with district officials about overhauling Jefferson High School, a dropout factory in downtown Los Angeles. When the talks bogged down, Mr. Barr concluded he needed clout.

Green Dot organized a parents union, and its members, buttonholing neighbors in supermarkets and churches, collected 10,000 signatures endorsing Jefferson's division into several smaller charter schools.

Mr. Barr marched from Jefferson High with nearly 1,000 parents to deliver the petition to district headquarters. The authorities refused to relinquish Jefferson, but the school board approved five new charters, which Green Dot inaugurated last fall, all near Jefferson and drawing students from it.

Kudos to Steve Barr for waging this war. I wish him nothing but success as he fights the entrenched education bureaucracy. I just wish it wasn't necessary to fight these battles in order for parents to have control of their children's education.

Fight Song at Ozarks: Work Hard and Avoid Debt - New York Times

The Times has a nice write-up of College of the Ozarks.

Like many undergraduates, students at the College of the Ozarks here work their way through school, though they often do such unconventional campus jobs as milking cows at dawn in the college's barns and baking fruit breads for sale to donors.

But what is truly different about Hard Work U. "” as the college styles itself "” is that all 1,345 students must work 15 hours per week to pay off the entire cost of tuition "” $15,900 per year. If they work summers, as one-third are doing this summer, they pay off their $4,400 room and board as well. Work study is not an option as it is at most campuses; it is the college's raison d'être.

This is a college that is philosophically opposed to students starting careers with an Ozark mountain of debt "” 95 percent graduate debt free "” and it believes that students who put sweat equity into their education value it more.

Unfortunately, they can't quite lose the New York snobbery.

Colleges like Columbia pay high salaries to attract top scholars and offer students a smorgasbord of electives as well as amenities like Olympic-scale gyms. College of the Ozarks is run on a lean staff -- it has only four deans -- and pays full professors under $70,000 a year for teaching more hours per semester, 12. English majors can avail themselves of a bare-bones survey course like 20th-century British literature but not of a course just in James Joyce.

Horrors -- students are deprived of the opportunity to study James Joyce for an entire semester. Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I don't imagine many people outside of New York City would find that troublesome.

Certain Degrees Now Cost More at Public Universities - New York Times

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.

This makes sense to me. Some degrees offer a higher return on investment than others -- in the form of higher starting salaries, more opportunities, or more networking. Why shouldn't students pay more to access more valuable opportunities? Surprisingly, not everyone agrees with me.

"There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low," he said. "That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That's no longer the perception."

I have just one response: College of the Ozarks. Treating the "education of an individual" as a public good is a decent idea. But why not run public universities more like College of the Ozarks? Why try to make them taxpayer subsidized versions of the elite private universities? Providing education as a public good does not automatically require a state to provide full weight rooms, olympic size swimming pools, palatial dorms, and all of the other amenities to which students are starting to become addicted.

Growing up, I always heard that I should have an "attitude of gratitude". That phrase sounded annoyingly pat back then and still does now. That doesn't make it any less true. Here are two examples of people with a great attitude of gratitude.

First, Chef Mojo from Daily Pundit wrote about experiencing life with new hearing aids. Daily Pundit » The Hum and Roar of the World.

At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different from the other kids. Namely, I couldn't hear the things they heard.

This was somewhat expected, my mother being hearing impaired. I stepped into this life with the genetic code that dialed me down a notch or so when it came to sound. A childhood of constant ear infections only increased the damage.

...

The audiologist took the results of my test and input them into a program on her Dell laptop and dialed up the brands and models of aids that would apply to me. ... The thing was an inch long and little over a quarter inch thick, with a very thin tube encasing a wire that attached to a transmitter in the form of flexible silicone earbud. No more ear molds.

... The Lady gave me a little look and said, Hey sweetie. And she started reading from a poster in the office.

I almost started crying.

I'd never heard her before. Not like this. Not this way. Not to the point of being almost normal. Her voice was pure sparkling clarity and oh so sweet.

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

How often are you thankful for just the simple ability to hear, and to hear well?

Secondly, how about waking up from a coma after 19 years, to find that your entire world has changed? BBC NEWS | Europe | Pole wakes up from 19-year coma.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. ... Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. ... When Mr Grzebski had his accident Poland was still ruled by its last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski. ... The following year's elections ushered in eastern Europe's first post-communist government. Poland joined the Nato alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

"Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television. "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Mr Grzebski said. "What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning," said Mr Grzebski. "I've got nothing to complain about."

Every so often, I try to stop and remember what life used to be like. I try to talk to people who remember what life was like in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's. Really, we don't have it so bad today.

So, as you go through your day, try to have an attitude of gratitude -- no matter what happens.

Do you feel safe about taking a flight? Do you think that another 9/11 style attack couldn't possibly succeed? Do the TSA regulations and onerous security procedures make you feel safer? If they do, they shouldn't. We're just as much at risk as we were six years ago.

Hot Air > Blog Archive > A Pilot on Airline Security

At this moment, there are roughly 5000 commercial airliners in the skies above you. There will be 28,000 flights today, and 840,000 in the next month -- every month. The U.S. fleet consists of some 6000 aircraft -- almost all of which will be parked unattended tonight at a public airport. We will carry almost 7 billion passengers this year, the number increasing to 10 billion by 2010, barring an exogenous event like another 9/11.

There is simply no deployable technology that has a prayer of keeping a motivated, prepared terrorist out of the system every time -- even most times. TSA misses more than 90% of detectable weapons at passenger checkpoints in their own tests, and it is not their fault, because of the limitations of technology and the number of inspections they must conduct. This doesn't count several classes of completely undetectable weapons like composite knives and liquid explosives.

What is TSA's fault is their abject failure to embrace more robust approaches than high visibility inspections, and their accommodations to the Air Transport Association's revenue interests at the expense of true security, while largely ignoring the recommendations of the front-line airline crews and air marshals who have no direct revenue agenda and are much more familiar with airline operations than are the bureaucrats (remember government ignoring the front-line FBI agents who tried to warn them about 9/11?). Deplorable amounts of money have been wasted on incomprehensible security strategies, while KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid] methods proven to work have been ignored.

...

Almost six years after 9/11, it is inexcusable that -- in an environment where TSA misses more than 90% of weapons, RON aircraft are not secured, and ground employees are not screened -- fewer than 2% of our airliners have a team of armed pilots aboard, fewer than 5% have air marshals, and the flight attendants have no mandatory tactical or behavioral assessment training. $24 billion dollars later, we are not materially safer, except in the areas of intelligence that prevent an attack from getting to an airport. Once at the airport, there is little reason to believe the attack won't succeed.

...

I know I've gotten pretty far afield of your topic, but I want to give you the sense that RON aircraft are just one small piece of a multilayered security system wherein every layer leaks like a sieve. The problem is much, much bigger than any single element.

In the end, we should be starting with defending the smallest spaces -- the cockpits and cargo compartments, and working outward to the limits of our resources; instead of starting with the airport perimeter and working inward, ignoring the actual defense of those spaces that are actually the terrorist targets. And we should be using the resources already in place to the greatest extent possible, instead of trying to bring new, untried methods into play, then waiting to find out they don't work nearly as well in reality as they do on paper.

Given that Congress regulates air travel and air security, you can blame them for that. Just one more reason Congress has earned its 14% approval rating.

If you want to demand change, the issues raised in this article would be a great place to start.

The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our "now" was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I'm afraid.

Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Others missed the mark by a mile:

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

At the time, adding new states was a fairly common occurence. Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii hadn't yet become states in 1900. So, of course, they thought it reasonable that eventually most of Latin and South America would decide to join the Union.

Check it out. Not only was it fun reading, but it's a warning against getting too smug about our own understanding of the future.

Vitamin C doesn't do much to fight colds, lycopene probably doesn't prevent cancer, and eating a quarter of a grapefruit a day could kill you.

Kinda shakes up your world, doesn't it?

America is so rich that it's possible to make a living off of our trash. (You say wasteful, I say rich. It boils down to the same thing.) Madison's Capital Times published an article about the burgeoning art of dumpster diving.

So much is discarded, in fact, that it is possible to live almost entirely off of trash, or as New York dumpstering organizer and founding member of the Web site freegan.info Adam Weissman puts it, the excesses of capitalism. Weissman sustains himself almost exclusively by dumpstering, or as he refers to it, "urban foraging." Though he also trades items and gardens, the bulk of his sustenance is from garbage, he says in a phone interview.

He quotes Marx and talks about "opt[ing] out of the capitalist economic system." So, he's a bit of a nut. 'Cause, really, he'd be homeless and starving if it wasn't for the capitalist economic system that he' opting out of. Still, there is a lot of waste in a rich society. Some are using that waste to help others.

"The first time I saw it I was amazed and taken aback. There was more food than you've ever seen, just there. ... Sometimes it still hits you -- all this food is still good," says Spike Appel, frequent dumpster diver and chief organizer of the local chapter of Food Not Bombs, an "anarchist community project" that provides free vegetarian meals to the public.

Much of the food donated to Food Not Bombs is one step from the dumpster. This is not to say the produce, dips and baked goods are in any way spoiled. Ripe, organic produce is a hallmark of the meals provided by Food Not Bombs, as is the fact that they do not serve meat.

While the Food Not Bombs Web site advocates dumpstering as a way of obtaining food, the Madison chapter works with local businesses for donations. Food Not Bombs has an international following, and each chapter varies according to the resources in their community.

Interesting, no? Dumpstering is illegal. Many of the business that dump food, rather than donating it, do so out of fear of lawsuits and food safety regulations. The vast majority of that food is still perfectly safe. Why shouldn't we relax the regulations and remove the fear of lawsuits? Why not let that food be legally donated to the hungry rather than forcibly wasted?

The Weekly Standard: Fact or Fiction

The New Republic runs a piece in this week's issue titled "Shock Troops" (sub. req.) and authored by Scott Thomas -- described by the magazine as a "pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Baghdad." "Thomas" is the author of two previous dispatches from Iraq for the New Republic, both of which recount deeply disturbing anecdotes (in one, an Iraqi boy who calls himself James Bond has his tongue cut out for talking to Americans; in the other, dogs feast on a corpse in the street). His latest piece is even more disturbing.

But is it true? The milbloggers at Mudville Gazette call it a pile of a horse manure by the second sentence.

Again, this doesn't prove Scott Thomas is a liar, only that if he is who New Republic claims he is, his ignorance exceeds that of any soldier of any rank I've ever met.

Read the whole takedown. Thomas's piece reads like enemy propaganda -- American soldiers are despicable and evil. Is Thomas really a soldier? Or he is a terrorist posing as a soldier? What proof does he have about these claims? Does TNR even know?

If true, these stories should be reported up the chain of command and the sick soldiers involved should be prosecuted. If they're not true -- and they certainly don't seem to be true -- why is TNR reporting them? Who, exactly, are they trying to help?

Do you wonder why gas has been so expensive this summer? Wonder no more. Gas Prices Rise on Refineries' Record Failures - New York Times

Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer's records.

These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an "invisible hurricane," have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country's 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analysts.

There have been blazes at refineries in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and California, some of them caused by lightning strikes. Plants have suffered power losses that disrupted operations; a midsize refinery in Kansas was flooded by torrential rains last month.

American refiners are running roughly 5 percent below their normal levels at this time of the year.

Many factors have led to the rise in gas prices, including disruptions in oil supplies from places like Nigeria and Norway. But analysts say the refining bottleneck in North America has been one of the main drivers of higher energy prices this year.

The refining crunch has pushed wholesale gasoline prices up 35 percent this year and has contributed to a 23 percent gain for crude oil prices. Oil futures in New York closed at $75.57 a barrel on Friday.

The solution: build more refineries. Increase capacity. The problem: Congress.

Meanwhile, refiners have been scrambling to meet a raft of environmental regulations, phase out toxic additives, add ethanol to the fuel mix and introduce new ultralow sulfur standards for gasoline and diesel. Industry insiders attribute much of the fragility of refining operations to the difficulty of making these cleaner fuels.

No refineries have been built in the United States in over three decades, because refiners say they are too costly. Instead, they have been expanding their existing refineries.

But with a third summer of high gasoline prices, lawmakers are debating legislation they claim would punish oil companies for exploiting the tight supply situation and engaging in "price gouging." At the same time, they are pressing refiners to produce more fuel.

New refineries are super expensive. Companies would need to amass a large stockpile of cash -- earned from large profits -- before they would be willing to build a new refinery. But Congress keeps threatening to impose a windfall profits tax on the industry. Whose going to invest in a new refinery when your income could disappear at any time, courtesy of the U.S. Congress?

Note also, the mandates for new fuel mixes. It's hard to keep a refinery running when Congress and state governments mandate ever more exotic fuel mixtures. Each new gasoline blend makes the entire refining process a little more fragile. That leads to breakdowns and higher prices.

Once again, blame Congress for high gas prices. Don't let them trick you into blaming the oil companies.

Back in the day, America had a federal government. That meant that the national government was responsible for national defense, foreign policy, and not much else. That meant that states were free to govern themselves as they saw fit. That meant that states were free to act in the best interests of their citizens.

Sadly, that's all changed. Now Washington D.C. exercises more and more control over what states can -- and cannot -- do. Case in point: North Dakota.

Sober North Dakotans Hope to Legalize Hemp - New York Times

But no place has challenged the government as fiercely as North Dakota. Its legislature has passed a bill allowing farmers to grow industrial hemp and created an official licensing process to fingerprint such farmers and a global positioning system to track their fields. This year, Mr. Monson and another North Dakota farmer, with the support of the state's agriculture commissioner, applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration for permission to plant fields of hemp immediately.

This battle is decidedly, and Midwesternly, pragmatic. In 1993, scab, a fungus also known as Fusarium head blight, tore through this region, wiping out thousands of acres of wheat, a prized crop in North Dakota, where agriculture remains the largest element of the economy. Hard rains left water pooling in fields, giving scab an opening. The fungus has turned up in varying degrees ever since, even as farmers searched for a cure.

But hemp, Mr. Monson argued, offered an alternative for North Dakota's crop rotation. Its tall stalks survive similarly cool and wet conditions in Canada, just 25 miles north of here, where it is legal. And it suits the rocky soil left behind here by glaciers, soil that threatens to tear up farm equipment for anyone who dares to plant crops like beets or potatoes beneath ground.

Years and studies and hearings later, few here have much to say against hemp "” a reflection, it seems, of the state's urgent wish to improve its economy. Recent hemp votes have passed the legislature with ease, though some questions linger. How big a market would there really be for hemp? What about the worries of drug enforcement officials, who say someone might sneak into a farmer's field of harmless hemp and plant a batch of (similar-looking) marijuana?

Roger Johnson, the state's agriculture commissioner, said hemp fields would be the worst places to hide marijuana. Under state rules, Mr. Johnson said, such fields must be accessible for unannounced searches, day or night, and crops would be tested by the state. Also, he said, a field of hemp and marijuana would cross-pollinate, leaving the drug less potent.

"We're not wide-eyed liberals,"" Mr. Johnson said. "The D.E.A., they're the crazy ones on this. This sort of illogical, indefensible position is not going to prevail forever."

Summary: North Dakota desparately needs a new cash crop. Hemp is safe and usable in thousands of different products -- much like the venerable peanut. The D.E.A. gets the willies about marijuana -- a drug that's safer than nicotine and alcohol. Result: North Dakota can go pound sand, the central government reigns supreme.

That's tragically infuriating. It's time for states to take back the authority that they've been quietly ceding to Washington.

Now here's a bit of rather uppity salesmanship:

English newspaper The Guardian is currently running an electronic ad (as I write this, you'll find it here) in which it chastises President George W. Bush... for not buying its daily editions.

"US Presidents have always come to us for an overview of world affairs," the advertisement declares solemnly as framed pictures of former presidents of our U.S. of A. scroll by. "...Except one."

The scrolling image comes to rest on an empty frame, marked, of course, with the name of our current president.

"Try our four-week subscription," ends the ad. "(Go on George, it is free!)"

Maybe President Bush gets his daily dose of egomania-flavored yellow journalism from The Times.

UW eye doctor gives world better vision

"In the past 25 years, the cases of avoidable blindness have doubled to 35 million presently. At this rate, by 2020 the number will double again to 70 million," he explains. But in the face of those statistics, he finds great hope: Aided by recent improvements in lens manufacturing and surgical techniques, 90 percent are curable with simple cataract surgery that costs $20 and takes 20 minutes of surgery.

There have been roadblocks along the way, however. Cataract surgery removes the clouded eye lens and replaces it with a synthetic intraocular lens. When CBF started the eye camps, these lenses cost about $300, making them "unaffordable" for the program.

...

In 1992, CBF and its partners helped create Aurolab, an intraocluar lens and suture factory in Madurai, India. The factory produces high quality lenses and sutures at a low cost, making the surgery available to poor people throughout the world. At $2.50 per lens and $1.00 per suture, Aurolab distributes the supplies to not-for-profit organizations in 120 countries.

Now that's the kind of charity -- and innovation -- I can get behind. Way to go Dr. Suresh Chandra!

Congratulations, you paid off your mortgage. Do you really think that you own your home now? Actually, you don't. Sorry. The government can still find ways to take it away from you.

That's what Kermit and Dolores Atwood discovered .

A band and its 'forced march'

Starting in mid-June, members of the Oregon Marching Band and the Sound of Sun Prairie begin what they call "everydays": 12-hour practices, sometimes six days a week, often in sweltering conditions.

"I would say I probably put in 16 hours a day a good six days a week until the season's over," said Rachel Lisius, 16, Oregon's drum major.

And we need child labor laws, why? These 96 students are voluntarily "working" 72-96 hours a week. Of course, they're doing it for fun and hoping for a future career. State labor law says that these teenagers can only work a maximum of 50 hours a week. They're allowed to sweat, march, and practice for as many hours as they want, playing in a band. But try to work at McDonald's or a construction site for that many hours and the State will get you.

How does that make sense?

Lately I've seen health food on the news more and more. It seems like every week another restaurant decides to drop trans fats from the menu. Mayor Bloomberg is forcing fast food joints in New York City to post nutritional information next to the menus. It's getting harder and harder to find food that can give your heart a run for it's life.

Fortunately, we're still allowed to cook dangerous food at home. Enjoy it while you can. To help you enjoy it, I bring you this recipe. Squirrel Squad Squeeks: Fried Chicken Pizza

Papa and I have pretty much decided that if it's not fried chicken pizza, then it ought to be. Of course, we also had to plan meals to feed the Squad this week, so we just had to develop the Official Squirrel Squad Fried Chicken Pizza. And here it is in all it's glory.

Sure to be a hit for any Friday night dinner. Gentleman -- start your fryers!

The Declaration of Independence is still one of my favorite political documents. In fact, I have a copy of it hanging in my dining room. The Declaration was signed on the 4th of July, so what better topic to write about on America's birthday? I was planning on writing just such a post yesterday to celebrate the Declaration. Unfortunately, I need to do a lot of preparation before writing the post. That didn't happen. Instead, I'll start the prep now and you can read it next year.

Until then, this excerpt from P. J. O'Rourke is what I would have written if I had the time and I was a lot funnier than I am. Enjoy.

If you really want an iPhone, but you don't want a two-year AT&T; contract, there's good news. You can use it with AT&T;'s prepaid plans.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has instructions on how to activate the phone with a prepaid plan. They also have screenshots of the monthly plans that are available.

Assuming that $20 of the plan covers the unlimited data usage (web browsing, e-mail, etc), you'll be paying about $0.15 a minute for your talk time. That's with the cheapest plan. For the most expensive plan, you'll be paying about $0.10 a minute for your talk time. The most expensive plan also includes unlimited nights and weekends for and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls.

In comparison to the $0.19 a minute I'm paying for our current Sprint contract, that's not a bad deal. Maybe there's an iPhone in my future after all!

UPDATE: It's apparently possible to use the iPhone without an AT&T; contract, as long as you activate it first, then cancel the contract within three days. Yeah, it's a pain. But better than nothing. I'm still hoping Apple releases an iPod like the iPhone before Christmas.

Babies not as innocent as they pretend | Science | Earth | Telegraph

Dr Reddy said: "Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.

I'm pretty sure I've already caught Esther doing this. She's only 19 weeks, but she's smart. Devious too, apparently. Now I have proof that it wasn't just my imagination.

I'll have to keep an eye on this one...

How much do you need to spend on groceries? It depends. If you're talking about whether or not we give out enough food stamps, then $21 a week is far too little. If you're talking about the value of a good, wholesome Cuban diet, then $17 a week is just about right. So say America's liberals. (And, yes, they were talking about buying food in America for both amounts.)

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. Don Surber » Blog Archive » Name that party: Alms for the poor edition.

Pastor Tim Keller describes sin and idolatry.

Sin isn't only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry.

...

I do it this way, I take a page from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity -- your self-worth and happiness -- on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them that they are sinning because they are looking to their careers and romances to save them, to give them everything that they should be looking for in God. This idolatry leads to drivenness, addictions, severe anxiety, obsessiveness, envy of others, and resentment.

Making an idol out of something means giving it the love you should be giving your Creator and Sustainer. To depict sin as not only a violation of law but also of love is more compelling. Of course a complete description of sin and grace includes recognition of our rebellion against God's authority. But I've found that if people become convicted about their sin as idolatry and misdirected love, it is easier to show them that one of the effects of sin is to put them into denial about their hostility to God. In some ways, idolatry is like addiction writ large. We are ensnared by our spiritual idols just like people are ensnared by drink and drugs. We live in denial of how much we are rebelling against God's rule just like addicts live in denial of how much they are trampling on their families and loved ones.

Please do read the whole thing. I found it both thought provoking and convicting.