stupid is as stupid does – Page 117

March 2, 2006March 2, 2006

Rights or Privileges?

Anyone who’s read this blog for long, either here or in its former incarnation as a blogspot blog, knows I don’t usually quote articles from elsewhere at great length… unless there’s little way to extract the meat from the nut in shorter excerpts.

Walter Williams has a recent article that is far richer than the lengthy quote below, and I urge you to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, here’s a good mouthful of a highly “nutritious” article:

The way our Constitution’s framers used the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech, or freedom to travel, is something we all simultaneously possess. My right to free speech or freedom to travel imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. In other words, my exercising my right to speech or travel requires absolutely nothing from you and in no way diminishes any of your rights.

Contrast that vision of a right to so-called rights to medical care, food or decent housing, independent of whether a person can pay. Those are not rights in the sense that free speech and freedom of travel are rights. If it is said that a person has rights to medical care, food and housing, and has no means of paying, how does he enjoy them? There’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy who provides them. You say, “The Congress provides for those rights.” Not quite. Congress does not have any resources of its very own. The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings. In other words, when Congress gives one American a right to something he didn’t earn, it takes away the right of another American to something he did earn.

I hope that whetted your appetite for more. Please do go read the whole thing.

Served up at CustomerServant and Blue Star Chronicles.

March 2, 2006

Why I use Opera Browser

Every few months I’ve posted briefly about my browser preference. I don’t do so in order to rub Internet Exploder users’ faces in the mess IE makes of their everyday browsing (whether they know it’s doing so or not) or in any expectation of “converting” users to a more sane browser than Internet Exploder or the much better, though still kludgy, Firefox. No, I do it because something someone said in comments or email spurs me to simply let folks know that there is a better way.

Yesterday, I sent someone an swf file as an email attachment. They couldn’t play it with their default image/media file viewer and tried viewing it in Firefox.

No go there, either.

Strange. Opened just fine in Opera. I haven’t looked into it any further than to try to replicate the problem in Firefox. Yup. And when it fails to play the file, it doesn’t even suggest downloading and installing an “extension” to do so. Bad form, that.

So that got me thinking again about why I appreciate Opera browser. Here are my top three reasons, based on what I do every day on the internet.

It just works as a browser. CLeanly, efficiently, quickly. tabbed browsing is much easier than with Firefox, and mouse gestures and zooming work better and don’t need extensions to just work right.
It’s a great email client. That’s right. I don’t have to have a separate email client loaded to handle all my email needs. I can open and close my email window with a keystroke or mouse click/gesture. Right inside my browser. Check all my email accounts with a keyboard combo–without leaving the window I’m browsing. Built into the browser.
Opera is also my full text RSS reader. Just CLICK on the lil RSS button in the addressbar of a site I wanna subscribe to, accept the subscription and I’m done. Unlike the limited ability of Firefox, Opera’s RSS reader really works–easily, and displays the full text of the feeds by default (I could limit it to headline displays, but why?).

Media files, graphics, whatever. It Just Works. Without a lotta hoohaw.

For Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, heck, for your phone. Opera’s just a better browser.

Experiencing the internet in the fast lane and thumbing my nose at the slow drivers while driving by TMH’s Bacon Bits (sorry about that, TMH… sorta :-)).

March 1, 2006March 1, 2009

Saint David’s Day

[A slightly edited version of a Saint David’s Day post from 2005]

Dydd Gwyl Ddewi (St David’s Day), in honor of the “other” Celtic patron saint.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why Patrick is so honored (though mostly in the breech, as it were) and David so seemingly forgotten–at least outside of Wales. Ah, maybe that’s it: the Irish, so unsuccessful in their own land in the past, have huge swarms of folk in this, the most media-stricken land on the globe, and so Patrick just gets much more press.

Saint David, or Dewi Sant, as he is known in the Welsh language, is the patron saint of Wales. He was a Celtic monk, abbot and bishop, who lived in the sixth century. During his life, he was the archbishop of Wales, and he was one of many early saints who helped to spread Christianity among the pagan Celtic tribes of western Britain. –from Saint David and Saint David’s Day

If I can find it (again), I’ll also post a short hymn I wrote considering the likes of Sts David and Patrick, tune name: DEWI SANT. Ahhh, here it is…

So, wear a daffodil or a leek today and celebrate Saint David’s Day with what has become the Welsh motto (taken from his last sermon, according to tradition):

Gwnewch y pethau bychain

or,

“Do the little things.”

“Leeking” all over the place at Conservative Cat and TMH’s Bacon Bits

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