My buddy Ron says he wants to get a radio controlled model plane.

To which I say, have a little more ambition:


Or a bigger sense of humor:

Universal Health Care

Why should we be skeptical of "Universal Health Care," also known as socialized medicine? Because this is how well it works in Canada:

Mark Degasperis was furious his mother spent five days on a stretcher at Toronto Western Hospital waiting for a room with 25 patients ahead of her [...]

"I'm angry we pay such high taxes and the more money we throw at the health care system the worse it gets. People shouldn't be lined up on stretchers in the emergency department. If you are sick you should get a room."

Now that's a great health care system!

From Barack Obama:

We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

That's not leadership. That's not going to happen.

Which begs the question, "What is going to happen?" Will Barack take away my car, take control of my thermostat, and institute food rationing nationwide? Hmm? And how, pray tell, is that leadership? It sounds more like totalitarianism to me.

Now it's Nitrogen

Might as well be ahead of the curve and start worrying about your nitrogen footprint:

Various forms of nitrogen contribute to greenhouse warming, smog, haze, acid rain dead zones with little or no life along the coasts, and depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the researchers concluded.

Why don't we all just pack it in now and make everybody happy

Dogs!

The other day it occured to me that I had been too busy to pay much attention to Laurel's dogs. So I sat down on the kitchen floor to pay them some attention.


That's Maggie the Great Dane and Violet the Doberman/Rottweiler mix.



Eventually, Maggie decided to check out the camera, and leaned her 135 pounds onto my head. Great Danes love to lean on people, which is fine when you are standing up, but more problematic when you end up with your head in the oven!

I am not even sure what to say about this:

Planned Parenthood, a major abortion provider, is soliciting Mother's Day gifts for itself.

In a May 3 e-mail blast, Planned Parenthood Federation of America's president, Cecile Richards, asked recipients to "Make a Mother's Day Gift" by donating to the organization - a solicitation that some critics say is ironic given that many Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions.

Do they not see the contradiction in such a plea? I understand both sides of the abortion issue, and feel like I could make a convincing argument for either. But I the pro-abortion side always seems to end up in an intellectually indefensible corner, from defending partial birth procedures, to arguing against ultrasound procedures that might change a "choice" to an "educated choice." This is the same sort of myopia.

Architectural Record recently published it's awards for residential housing, which generated this letter to the editor:

I notice most of the houses in your 2008 Record Houses issue make some claim to sustainability. I think this does a disservice to the profession, ruins our credibility, and strains the public’s credulity. Single-family homes are inherently unsustainable and even antisustainable. Sustainable single-family housing is an oxymoron, like hybrid SUVs. Even Dwell has begun to admit they probably aren’t an optimum approach. When will McGraw-Hill catch on?

There you have the definition of a self-absorbed nanny state environmentalist. If you have the gall to live in (or, one presumes, even design) a single family dwelling, you are committing the unpardonable sin of "antisustainability." I am sure there are a myriad of other unsustainable activities this ass would be happy to lecture us about as well.