I do worry that as I get older, as my IRA gets bigger, as I have kids who need schooling, when I own a home and don’t have close daily contact with poor people that I’ll lose some sympathy for those less fortunate than me. I worry that I’ll get so focused on my own best interests that I’ll forget about what’s good for my country as a whole. Maybe certain ideas about how this country should be run won’t seem so objectionable to me anymore. Yes, I worry that one day it might make perfect sense to me to vote Republican.

Well, if George Soros can resist, so can I.

Check out this article from NYT showing that Stanford students receive 7x the federal funds that CSU-Fresno students do.

• Stanford undergrad+grad students: 18,591
• Stanford tuition instate: $27,204
• Stanford tuition out-of-state: $27,204
• CSU-Fresno undergrad+grad students: 20007
• CSU-Fresno tuition instate: $1,796
• CSU-Fresno tuition out-of-state: $10,256

( stats from Students Review )

It may be grousing and throwing around numbers that mean very little, but it’s worth ruminating about. Stanford has higher base costs and a higher grad school mix, but shouldn’t “State” colleges get more funding? (Stanford’s not a traditional “Land Grant” institution, are they?)

Maybe they meant draught?

The Defense Department recently (and quietly) removed the website it had erected, Defend America, asking for volunteers to join local draft boards.

Why watch bad TV myself when so many bloggers are out there to say for me the clever things I would have said anyway. In her blog today, Lindsay Robertson has this to say about “Average Joe” — the show where a hot chick is surprised to find that what she thought would be “The Bachelor Rip-off” is filled with average looking men:

Just now, 21-year-old A.I./philosophy PhD candidate Tareq stared deeply into Melana’s cleavage and blurted these words: “It’s the simplicity of your complexity that is the catalyst of my infatuation.”
Okay, so I know the premise of the show is that these guys are smarter than usual, but it’s precisely said-with-a-straight-face sentences like that that really make a girl long to hear “You have a hot ass, and stuff.”

LOL! “You are pretty.” is always you’re safest bet for any situation with a female.

p.s. Pet Peeve – The link above will quickly become obsolete because Lindsay recreates her page by hand in Dreamweaver every time she makes an entry. I am all for DIY web, but when you’re using DW it’s no longer DIY — get a real tool, tool.

I believe Jessica Lynch went through a horrible traumatic event. War is not easy on anyone who is involved, and those injured in battle deserve great respect. Especially on this day I have to question what kind of respect the media machine (and a complicit White House?) is showing by “spinning” the story of Jessica Lynch.

The wonderful student daily here at OU has their own little NYT“ish” scandal going on.

Worst part is he took his material from a writer at Harvard by the Highway’s daily rag.

In the wee hours of today, I thought I had discovered a new simple truth. After more rumination, I recognize it as an old familar truth taken from a new angle. Salon’s weekly world press round-up features an article in the Arab News (from Saudi Arabia) with these impactful insights:

… some blamed those who spread religious intolerance in Saudi society. “Society will bear responsibility for this,” said Hussein Nasser, a 28-year-old bank employee. “We put the men of religion above fault, and made them unaccountable. We gave them special privilege — and this is the result.” …

Catholocism put the men of the cloth as seperate and greater than the common man. In so doing, they fueled an incestuous power grab of the Western world’s sociteal views leading to The Crusades. The parallels continue in the war of extremist Muslims to kill anyone who doesn’t follow their strict code.

Hopefully the religious power grab of the U.S.‘s political seats won’t return us to a cycle of literaly (or even figuratively) killing opposing religious views.