Penitent Sentiment

The busyness of my life was halted by the most heart-wrenching news tonight, and I nearly ignored the story because it boasts the names of Hollywood stars, including Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey, Jr., Jeremy Renner, and others.

Normally, I pay no attention to Hollywood chatter, but I am so moved by the astonishing display of humanity that I am bubbling at my cyber megaphone this very moment. It has been two years since I last wrote publicly, but here is an unprecedented story:

A faculty member at my alma mater's Oxford campus and Catholic author Stratford Caldecott is in his last days battling prostate cancer. Caldecott's daughter Sophie writes the bleak outlook on her blog—

The doctors now say that dad is into the final stages of the disease, the part where your bones fracture under the slightest impact, and swelling around vital organs starts to happen for no apparent reason. They say that we only have around 12 weeks left. We have to make these 12 weeks count, and I have an idea about how we can do that.

Knowing well her bedridden father's affinity for superhero comics, Sophie found a way to screen Marvel's latest film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, at the Caldecott home in England. With 12 weeks left to live, the August DVD release won't arrive in time, but Sophie managed to reach out to Marvel Comics and the multiple actors featured in Avengers.

The following day Sophie received this message on her blog:

...and then the actors responded with their own Twitter hashtag #CapForStrat (Captain America for Stratford):

(Photo courtesy of Michael J. Lichens)

The Drudge Report has been in the tank for Mitt Romney for at least the past two presidential election cycles and tonight's top headline facetiously and arrogantly insults Romney's main opponent and one of the most qualified presidential front-runners in decades: Rick Santorum.

I empathize with the Santorum campaign; I really do. 

On the campaign trail back in September 2007, I setup a lunch hour forum on the topic of Social Security at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire for then-Senator Sam Brownback's (R-KS) presidential bid. I brought in CATO's Bill Shipman (perhaps the world's foremost authority on the issue) to provide expert analysis of Brownback's plan.

With various people coming in and out of the auditorium during the course of the event, the room had about 75 people seated at any one time. Well, wouldn't you know? The AP Photographer waited until the end of Q&A--after most students had left for their next class--and began snapping photos of the nearly empty room. I committed the mea culpa of not moving the discussion to a more intimate setting given the amount of people remaining, but I also naively thought the media cared about Truth.

Some twenty minutes passed before one of the photos appeared as the top story on Drudge with the headline "What Happens When A Politician Goes To New Hampshire: And No One Shows Up..." Hannity mentioned the photo on his radio show that day.

Our PR team sent an email to media outlets calling the photo "highly disingenuous," providing eyewitness accounts to the contrary, coupled with the fact that my volunteers had collected pages and pages of email addresses at the entrance. But Drudge's media bias worked: Brownback bowed out of the race less than a month later.

Salinas Valley, CA - Researchers at the University of Arizona in May 2011 demonstrated a new robotic weed-killer and pruner they developed using Arizona Dept. of Agriculture funding that could replace migrant workers who help produce 80% of America's lettuce.

The robot differentiates good leaves from bad ones by using a color scanner, killing-off the bad leaves with a surgical dose of fertilizer/pesticide. Monterey County Weekly has the story:

Salinas Valley lettuce growers spend as much as $30 million a year – about 3 percent of the cost of production – sending crews with hoes through lettuce fields to thin and weed the rows. Running the tech-assisted tractor through a field would save about $75 per acre, according to estimates by Mark Siemens, a mechanization specialist at the Yuma Agricultural Center and developer of the weeding technology.

While modern technology is primarily responsible for spawning the immigration rush of the last few decades, now a border state is perhaps unwittingly doing its part with technology to perhaps stem the tide.

Peculiarly, the immigration population in the 50's doubled in the 60's, right after the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service began sending skilled American farmers and technology south of the border to modernize the primitive state of agriculture in Central America. Such well-intended programs have worked so well, that they drastically reduced the need for labor. Unskilled laborers then moved to cities to find work, overrunning resources and services in the process, drove up crime, and inspired a northward migration, with no signs of letting up until recently.

Drudge Report is aggregating a number of stories regarding taxation this morning (here's a screenshot), such as "Obama's tax rate on dividends to soar to 44.8%" and "Tax revenue plunges in UK after 50% rate implemented." Fifty percent. Seriously, how hard will you work when you know half of what you earn goes straight to the government?

While the necessary evil of taxation itself is clearly justified by The Constitution,

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises (Article I. Sec. 8),

why not take a gander at Art Laffer's napkin-scribbled parabola graph for determining the optimum tax rate?

Right now, the graph would unpredictably undulate a little more than we'd like, given the panoply of existing variables and tax brackets.

But if the tax rate were set at a given percentage of income, let's say 10% (Good enough for God, right?), this graph would simplify taxation to the point of eliminating all the fuss and waste that makes a mountain out of a mole hill, not to mention the 72,536 pages of US federal tax code. That page count rivals Understanding Women written by Man Kind.

Born from the salt of the earth--a failed saline abortion--Melissa Ohden stood there at a simple wooden podium at the 2011 AZ Right to Life Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.

She briefly waited for everyone to notice her beautiful, there's-no-way-she's-an-abortion-survivor face before she spoke. The off-kilter giraffe pattern on her business suit made sense once her story unfolded, towering over anyone who argues she ought to be dead.

Ohden's mother aborted her at 6 months via saline-infused abortion, a surgical procedure where an abortionist replaces amniotic fluid with a salt solution to burn the baby from the outside in. The two-pound preemie astonished the nurses when she was born alive and was transferred to a hospital. She was adopted soon after and led a normal life until, Ohden tearfully revealed, her sister let the secret slip during a vicious fight one day when she was 14:

"At least I was wanted!" she shrieked.

Her sister's face went pale the moment she said it, and shamefully told Melissa to "Go ask Mom" the details.

Dubbed the "Voice for the voiceless" at age 34, Melissa now travels the world speaking out against abortion at every stage, for any reason.

A night so still it turns the cold warm

Coat or shirt?

Velcro Blackberry scabbard scrapes an echo

Muted l’s, o’s, v’s, and even ease reminding

Nigh anachronism here where

O.W. Gray undertakes, harnesses, and wagons

And a stone’s throw was invented

If they don’t know Yoknapatawpha

Since 2006 I've designed adaptive Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) campaigns for several political candidates. The 72 Hours before any election are the most critical time for candidates, the sort of time the Greeks called "Kairos" (καιρός)--critical time or opportunity.

A Phoenix-based org asked me just days ago to help their major event run smoothly this weekend, with an additional goal of increasing the size of the crowd. Instead of votes, they are looking for attendees. Still, the GOTV principle is the same and this method could be used for any other type of traffic-generating contest.

I searched Google for about an hour to check if some savvy app creator has already done it so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, but as far as I can tell, no one has. There has to be an easier way to pull this off, but here's how I did it without needing serious web developer skills or an unavailable Google Analytics account:

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and I in the lunch line at St. Anselm College in Manchester after his tandem lecture on Social Security with CATO's William Shipman.  June 6th, 2007