Give Me Back My Rights! the Dangers of Mandatory Arbitration Clauses

Give Me Back My Rights! the Dangers of Mandatory Arbitration Clauses

Warning for Longmont Roman Catholics

I debated with myself for a while as to whether I should bring this up or not. I've decided to bring it up as a warning. Someone calling themselves Fr. Scott Jenkins is starting a new mass at the Longmont Senior Center. They claim to be catholic with and

"an independent Catholic faith community that seeks to make the richness of Catholic spirituality and tradition available and accessible to the many people who, for some reason, have felt excluded from the Roman Catholic Church"

I googled the Pastor, Fr. Scott Jenkins, and came up with this:

"Early in 1996, a former Lutheran pastor, Fr. Scott Jenkins, and his wife, Kris, joined our church. Bishop Peter ordained Scott a deacon on Pentecost Sunday of 1996. Deacon Scott served at Saint Matthew until August of 1997 when he moved to Colorado to work with Christ the King American Catholic Church. Deacon Scott was ordained a priest shortly thereafter. He became the founding pastor of a new independent Catholic faith community in Colorado called Church of the Holy Family."

at some place called Saint Matthew Church.

So the bottom line is that this new so called catholic church in Longmont is not a Roman Catholic Church. They are either "Ecumenical Catholic Communion" or a "Christ the King American Catholic Church" but certainly not a Roman Catholic Church in Communion with the Holy See. If you are Roman Catholic then I advise you to stay away, far way.

U.S. Mint Gears Up To Issue Commemorative County Pennies

You know, sometimes The Onion is down right rude, offensive, and obscene but every once in a while they generate a news article that I think is absolutely hillarious. Imagine that, County Pennies instead of State Quarters. At 5 a year they estimate a run of 639 years for 3,143 counties. This is multi-generational collecting at it's finest. Something else I hadn't thought about:

"But after the lesson of the New Hampshire quarter, I'm not too comfortable putting a natural rock formation on our penny. Luckily, we have another 438 years to decide on a symbol that accurately conveys the spirit of Richland County."

I hadn't thought about what the collapse of the "Old Man of the Mountain" would mean to the New Hampshire quarters. Funny, I thought that would last forever. My parents talk of seeing it on their honeymoon. It was kind of an icon for us even though I don't remember seeing it personally.

I'm Worried About Our Great Republic

I'm worried about our great Republic for a couple of reasons. Let me go over them with you.

First, it seems that most of our citizens don't even realize that we have a Republic and not a Democracy. A democracy leads to "tyranny by the majority" while a republic is a "rule by law". In our Republic we have (or is that had?) the protection of the law and the courts. Lately courts seem to be willing to create laws but that's another topic. Our President is intent on creating democracies around the globe and we ourselves are eroding into a democracy. It's scary how easily so many people go from being uncomfortable about something to crying out for a new law to prohibit it creating a Nanny State. Seat belt laws come to mind. Colorado is poised to join the masses with a primary stop seat belt law. That is, the law will allow police to stop and ticket you for not wearing a seat belt. Currently, they have to have another reason to stop you and then can write up the lack seat belt usage as a secondary offense.

Second, I'm watching the Senate with Bush's judgicial nominees, the filibuster, and the "nuclear option". The Republicans are upset over the Democrats filibuster. Let me state my personal opinion - if the judge is qualified the Senate should aprove them. Right now, that would work in my favor and when Clinton was in office it would have been judges that I don't like but so be it. They are either qualified or they are not and that should be the only thing to determine their fitness for judgeship. There should not be a litmus test for judges.
So the Democrats should not be filibustering judges and the Republicans are going to fix that by changing the filibuster rules. You know that'll come back to haunt us. They should put the original rules back and force the folks in favor of the filibuster to keep talking and bring Senate business to a halt. This "we'll pretend someone's talking when they aren't so that we can continue with other business" is just wrong. It makes the filibuster too convenient. If the filibuster is not more important than other business then it should end of it's own accord.
The Republicans are going to change the rules so that a simple majority vote can end the filibuster. Seems to me like they've neutered the filibuster. If a simple majority can end a filibuster and then a simple majority pass legislation then what's the point of the filibuster?
Someday, the Democrats will have the majority again and the Republicans will not be happy that they can't filibuster either. The rules should not be changed.

Thirdly (and lastly), our own personal and national tolerance... Think back to the last Presidential election. I don't care if you voted Democrat, Republican, or other. What was your opinion of the other candidate. And, even more importantly, what was your opinion of people who voted for the other candidate? There was a large number of people that voted for Kerry because it was "anyone but W" and there were people that voted for Bush because Kerry was an idiot. But both sides were spewing vile hate towards each other.
Strong opinions are to be expected. Even as our Republic was being founded there were strong opinions. The Federalist Papers comes to mind. But I think that both side respected each other and allowed folks that they disagreed with the benefit that everyone was trying to do the best thing for our country. These days the opposition are "ignorant idiots". So much for tolerance, eh? Some so called prolifers murder abortionists and some so called environmentalists are willing to disregard property laws because they are personally offended. We won't last much longer if we keep this up.

What do you think?

Dykotomy Apollyon

So I have a favor to ask. Back on the 19th of April I put up an entry talking about Dykotomy's CD. The CD is available for sale here and they are participating in an on-line battle of the bands. Please vote for Dykotomy here. You can listen to the tracks on the CD at the for sale site. I put up a page for the band at http://www.wossil.com/dykotomy - http://www.dykotomyapollyon.com should also get you there. If you can spare the cash please consider buying a copy of the CD. Some of the tracks remind me of Black Sabbath and over all IMHO it's a well done local band CD. Take a listen, buy a copy, and vote for it. You'll make Tim's day.

Uh, Oh - Random webbing alert

So I started doing some random webbing 'cause I didn't feel like doing anything constructive. Found some interesting productivity stuff. Follow along as I recreate the journey...

First I was at Excite and found an article called, "'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data", where it says,

"Noah Brier regularly looks for bookmarks tagged "lifehacks" - for everyday productivity tips - and recently ran across an article on better ways to shave."

So off to Google to do a search on "lifehacks" where I find a page called "Technorati: Tag: lifehacks" and if you read the earlier article would seem very interesting so I followed the link. And right there towards the top of the list is "GTD with Gmail (Conclusion)". So, being a Gmail user I am going further down the rabbit hole and realize that this is the last article and just what is GTD? So I start clicking the link to the previous article to get back to the beginning of the Gmail articles. The link to the prior article is called "Shaving...the Old Way", curious, I click. And amazingly enough it's the article on shaving mentioned in the link I followed from Excite. And I wasn't even looking for it.

So back to the Gmail articles. They keep talking about GTD as if I should know what it is. Fortunately, the first Gmail article has a GTD link. This GTD stuff looks really cool. I may have to buy a copy of the book but for now I'm going to go off and read the Gmail articles. I hope you found some of this interesting.

Changing Blog Habits

Happy May Everyone!

Read several interesting things in the paper today - not that I read the paper often. Saw this article and I've decided that I need to change my blog habits. Not that it's really a big deal. I only write things here that I don't mind other folks reading. (Duh!)

Quoting from the article though:

"employees could be blogging on company time or computers, making the company potentially liable for what they say"

I didn't know that. I don't blog about company stuff and I respect my employee agreement with my employer. I guess I'll blog from home now on.