Ned Danison, unedited

While it may be true that some colleges depend on donations from alumni to keep up their operating budget, I will probably never give the three colleges I’ve attended any more money than I already have. I already paid my tuition and fees. Now they call me on the phone thinking that, with the education [...]

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I’ve been reading online local papers from around the US recently, looking specifically at the comment sections. I’m playing with an idea about public discourse as it appears in these comments, which I find are often populated by a small core of opinionated commenters who “debate” each other in pissing, belching, chest-thumping, or cuteness/snottiness contests. [...]

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First, everyone agrees there’s a public good we should pay for collectively, like education or health care. Then, government funds it with tax money and local management allows it to run efficiently. Yippee, everything’s hunky dory for a while. But then interest groups want things done a certain way (i.e., they know what’s best for [...]

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Why blog? I remember when I was 10 and fantasized about playing the violin. I’d look at it, hold it, and move around pretending something marvelous was coming out of me, coursing through the violin, and amazing everyone. There’s only so much time you can delude yourself before the thing you dream will give you [...]

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Words serve mouths, and not the other way around. Words survive only because they feed the mouths they serve. Where they survive to the detriment of people usually means that some people derive benefits from them at the costs of others. What I mean is, I think people are creatures of logic, defined as algorithms [...]

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Like a tree that tosses off thousands of seeds, only a few of which have the slightest chance of growing into trees, humans toss off ideas, most of which have little or no value in terms of human survival, but a few of which may cause more or less massive changes in the way humans [...]

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One of these days I am going to tackle the so-called health care issue, in response to this article, or these or these arguments. Makes me tired just thinking about it. In trying to write out my take on it, I’d only end up repeating Thomas Sowell, so here he is on the subject: Words [...]

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The subject line is a Captain Beefheart song title. It’s an instrumental, so that line is as close as you’ll get to knowing what the heck he means. Anyway, I had the realization today that my wife is the only person I really feel like talking to anymore. In short, she’s the only person I [...]

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I’ve tried Facebook a couple of times. First time, the novelty of it was fun. I got in touch with a bunch of people from way back that I hadn’t even thought of for a long time. Whoopie! We were “friends”. I had a bit of catching up correspondence with some folks. Then the excitement [...]

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Here is a quote from Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman: “We all hope to see firefighters in the house if the kitchen catches fire. Few of us would want them to move in after the flames are out.” Chapman uses this in the context of emergency government programs designed to “jumpstart” the economy. It’s a [...]

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