Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'Theodore Roosevelt 1907Every American citizen needs to read this!
2010-08-16
Immigration vs. National Identity
2010-08-09
Home at Last
So Bryana came home last week all excited about the marvelous time she had at Girl Scout camp and ready to do it all over again. Other than a few bug bites, she came home intact - no bear bites or claw marks anywhere. A bear was known to live on the other side of the lake, but it had waaaay too much sense to wander near a bunch of 7 and 8 year old girls - I should have realized that bears would have the sense to be terrified of a camp full of young girls and stay far, far away. Bryana was very excited to see us and couldn't stop talking for the next hour. I wish I had an audio recording of it because she kept interrupting her own stories in order to relate another story or sing a song or tell us about about the meals, the swimming, the skit, what Tara did, what Try-its she earned, etc, etc, etc. So all my worry was for naught. Bryana was not lunch for a bear, she was not particularly homesick and she had a fantastic time.
2010-08-07
Fiscal Conservatism vs. History
So now we know…"CHANGE" =MORE DebtMORE TaxesMORE WelfareMORE RegulationMORE GovernmentMORE Wasteful spendingMORE CORRUPTIONThanks Mr. President
So now we know…"CHANGE" =MORE Debt
MORE Taxes
MORE Welfare
MORE Regulation
MORE Government
MORE Wasteful spending
MORE CORRUPTION
2010-07-29
A Mother's Guilt
In the meantime, I will comment on my excitement for tomorrow. We get to go pick up Bryana from her first overnight-away-from-mom-and-dad-camp and I can't wait. I've been worrying about her since we dropped her off. I almost changed my mind that she could go. It was my "What was I thinking? She's just a baby. I'm a terrible mother, sending her off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears!" moment.I recovered, sort of, but I will be very glad to go pick her up tomorrow and find out that her unbearable homesickness was all in my imagination, that she didn't miss us at all and is ready to go to college, thank you very much!
On the other hand, we think that we have found the cure for Allison's temper fits. Only-childhood. Yup. It has been two days since we dropped Bryana off at camp and we haven't had a single melt down or temper fit since. Allison has become the epitome of a reasonable, sweet, temper-free child. We figure this is either related to not having to compete for attention or fear of us dropping HER off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears. Either way, we figure we only have 18 hours or so left before a relapse - as soon as we pick Bryana up tomorrow. :)
So I have one daughter who away at camp, homesick, crying for her parents in between being snacked on by a bear and the other perfectly happy now that she has experienced the life of an only-child. A mother's guilt never ends....
2010-05-30
Percy Jackson annoyances
Overall, I really like the movie. Obviously, when you have a story that takes place in modern times, but has all the greek mythological characters in it, it is quite likely that you'll have to change small bits of the story line. There were two that annoyed me to some degree, however.
The first was Medusa. She was killed in the myths, which means that it seems somewhat unlikely that she would be alive in modern times to be killed again. Not a big deal, I suppose, since she's a well known monster that they could put in there. However, I think they could have simply made the character another of her species. I guess that would lose the Hollywood name dropping of the villain. While it's fun to complain, I won't dwell on it.
The one that annoyed me more was the depiction of Hades. In most of the mythology I've read, Hades is described as the underworld, sure, but it is *not* Hell. Hell is specifically a modern, monotheistic notion. The idea of fire and brimstone, torture and pain is modern and doesn't show up in the old myths. (To be clear, there are some that are tortured, but only a handful of - mostly demigods - who have annoyed the gods.)
Hades is simply an afterworld. It is Heaven and Hell put together. It is where you go when you die, but not necessarily a bad place to be. In many depictions, it isn't played up to be a particularly fun place, either, but the movie implies it sucks for everyone.
This seems unnecessary to me. Most of the rest of the references weren't too far off, why was this one? Were the producers so steeped in Western mythology that they couldn't let go of the "underworld-as-hell" idea? Did they have a low expectation of viewers? Either was, I felt it was kind of a downer.
2010-05-08
Origins of Life - Double Standard
When looking at the creation/evolution debate (well, intelligent design these days is what they like to call it instead of creationism) one of the arguments that frequently comes up is what the origin of life was. To summarize: the anti-evolutionist argues that either evolution can't explain the origin of life or that even the most basic forms of life are so complex that they could not have arisen purely by chance.
At this point there are a couple of directions I could take this essay. I could mention that any time someone starts talking about "chance" they probably don't know what they are talking about with respect to evolution. That alone is a subject ripe for discussion, of course, since it amazes me how someone could be so far off base that they can't even summarize the opposing position reliably. Instead i want to talk about hippocracy... But first, the other side of the coin.
A common argument from the scientist about why an intelligent design explanation of the origin of life isn't workable is that it only explains the first step... There is always the question of who designed the designer. Of course, there is a lot more to this argument if you flesh it out. One of the major assumptions is that science won't tolerate a supernatural explanation. (I won't go into that assumption much here, but suffice to say that if something out there is allowed to break the rues, then it makes researching what the rules are somewhat difficult... Well, impossible, really.) The only reason this comes up is that many of the people in the ID movement insist that it isn't about religion and that the designer doesn't have to be god. (Ironically, in the Expelled movie, Richard Dawkins was trying to concede this exact point, which Ben Stein mocked.)
However, we're told by the ID crew that we're not allowed to ask who designed the designer. They say that this is outside the scope of intelligent design. We're told that the techniques of "design detection" can only tell us if design was employed, but cannot reveal anything of the designer. Convenient, when yiu need to hide a religious motive in a secular argument.
The hippocracy, then (and the simple complaint at the end of this lengthy steep) is: Why can't they understand that Origin of Life research is outside the scope of evolution? Attacking evolution because we're not sure how the first genes came about is tantamount to asking an ID supporter questions about the designer. Of course, in e grand scheme of human learning, we went to know how life originated... But it wasn't related to evolution, it was the precursor to it.
I think it would be fair that scientists ignore the question until all the ID suppoeters fess up to their religious motivation.
Eric
2010-03-26
PowerShell isn't perfect
Linux: du -s *
PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, sum }
Would you like to have more readable output (ie: in MBs)?
Linux: du -sh *
PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, @{n="MB";e="{0:N2}" -f ($_.sum/1MB)} }