Owner: Flada Blog URL:http://blog.flada.com Join Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:13:29 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: For the purposes of this blog, an acronym was coined from the word Flada: Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy Argumentation. It is the author's intent to write articles primarily of a political nature. Most of these will be from the viewpoint of a libertarian Site statistics:Click here
30 Dead Thanks to Gun Control 2007-04-16 22:16:05 The Commonwealth of Virginia is one of a small number of states that allows open carry. They also have concealed carry laws that allow permit holders to carry a hidden weapon. It’s funny to use the word allow when talking about an inalienable right, but that’s the insane world we live in. As pointed out here in a great article by Steve Olson, we have become a nation of frightened wimps. Because of this fear, there are still more than a few public places where firearms are banned–even in Virginia. Universities and other schools are among those places.
Because of the ban, there’s really nothing to stop a madman from walking into a dormitory or classroom and blowing 30 people away. If even a few people in the crowd were armed, there would be far fewer dead. First, the madman would be less likely to attempt his rampage in the first place, knowing that some of his intended victims would be more than happy to put a stop to his plans. Second, the armed public w Read more:Thanks
, Control
Flada.com Has Moved to Pensacola 2007-04-26 17:24:20 The military move is complete. It has been quite hectic moving about 8000 lbs of stuff pretty much by myself since my wife is 7 months pregnant. Actually, she has been a huge help with packing and unpacking.
There’s still a lot of unpacking left, though.
We were lucky because we were able to move into a three bedroom duplex the day we arrived. Anyone who has experience with military housing will know that this is practically unheard of. Also, the place is very nice. It’s actually among the nicer homes I’ve ever lived in.
On an aside, if you need to rent a moving truck, I strongly recommend Penske. I had a reservation with U-Haul before my old landlord told me that I should check with Penske. I did, and I was able to get a truck that was 2 feet longer for about $200 less. Also, Penske has unlimited mileage so we were able to use the truck to pick up a new washer and dryer that we bought when we arrived.
The washer and dryer are another story. They are Whirlpoo
Dreaming while Awake 2007-05-04 21:27:31 I just finished watching the movie The Final Cut starring Robin Williams as a cutter. In this somewhat futuristic movie, cutters are people who edit the details of a dead person’s life (audio and video) which are recovered from an implant that the person received while they were still in utero. I had seen the movie previously, for that matter we have the DVD. Although I found the film to be full of plot holes, even mediocre movies can be thought provoking.
My particular thoughts about this film focus on a brief sequence where the protagonist is showing his love interest some footage from “defective” implants that couldn’t differentiate between actual events and those that took place only in the mind. One girl is on a swing at the park and her video morphs from her swinging to her soaring through the sky.
This got me thinking about youth and how children actually seem to have imaginations that are powerful enough to allow them to dream while they are awake. Read more:Dreaming
The Things I Learned in Public School 2007-05-17 01:15:17 My 20 year reunion is coming up this year. I’ve never been to a reunion and probably won’t go this year. There are actually two high schools where I could legitimately go to their reunion if I were so inclined. That’s because I went to school in a town in northern Minnesota from third grade until about halfway through tenth grade. Then I moved to another town and went to school there for a couple years.
The funny thing is that if I were to go to one of these reunions, I would feel far more welcome at the one with people who were my classmates for only 2 years. At the northern Minnesota school, my siblings and I (with the possible exception of my older brother) were treated like lepers. We were from Indiana originally so we had accents. Also, we lived in a trailer in the woods for a few years without power or running water which made us too different. By the time I moved away, I’d changed the minds of most of my classmates, but the emotional scars that the Read more:Learned
, Public
, School
, Public School
Photo Entry: Conrad Playing With The Sprinkler 2007-05-23 15:08:07 These are some photos that I wanted to share with my family and other readers. My son has discovered how to turn the valve on and off for the lawn sprinkler so I grabbed the camera and snapped a few shots. Enjoy!
Click on any of the thumbnails to open images in a larger view. If anyone knows of good plugins for Wordpress that make a photo entry look better, please tell me about them in the comments. Thank you.
And one of Conrad
after climbing in a kitchen cabinet:
And for the cat lovers (no stupid captions on this like “I is not a-mew-sed”):
Read more:Photo
, Entry
, Sprinkler
I’m Throwing Down a Libertarian Gauntlet. 2007-05-23 10:48:27 My brother has told me several times that, as a libertarian, I should be far more sympathetic to the ideas of liberalism than to those of conservatism. I believe his rationale is that libertarians generally agree with liberals about more issues than they do with conservatives. Of course, I’ve never debated that point because I agree with it. It’s just that some of the conservative issues always seemed to rank higher on my “personal issues” list than those of liberals. After almost 7 years of a so-called neocon in the Executive and 12 years of conservatives controlling Congress, my opinions have changed.
It’s not that I don’t still find conservative issues regarding liberty more important, it’s just that I don’t find very many real conservatives holding office. The whole feigned outrage with the most conservative member of Congress after the last debate drives this home. It brings the lying hypocrisy of the neocons right out into the Read more:Libertarian
Our Last Chance for a Bloodless Coup 2007-06-06 10:16:46
After three debates, I think it’s safe to say that most everyone paying attention knows Dr. Ron Paul’s (correct) view on military action and foreign policy.
Unfortunately, in Republican primaries this is probably not a winning issue despite the fact that Dr. Paul is on the right side of the issue. Although his foreign policy ideas gain him broad support from libertarians and liberals alike, they won’t help him win the Republican nomination. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt that I am. I’m not suggesting that he should downplay his anti-preemption, anti-nation-building stance because he’s correct. It’s just that in the best case he’ll end up not winning the nomination and be nominated by the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party (which both have already endorsed him).
Under that scenario, he could end up with a lot of support from people who are disenfranchised by both major parties, and might even be the top third-party vote-earner
Migrating Entries from Opendiary 2007-06-04 19:32:52 Over the next few days, I intend to migrate old entries from my journal at Opendiary under the name De Redyns. This will greatly increase my content on this blog and help to make posts while I am going through a transition that has been making it difficult to post regularly.
In light of this, I am creating a new sub-category under “Ed’s Articles” that is named “OpenDiary Posts“. Since these entries will have their timestamps modified to match their original posting date on OpenDiary, they won’t show up at the top of my posts on my main page. To access these entries you can click on the “OpenDiary Posts” link on the sidebar.
A few of these entries may not be quite up to the high standards you have come to expect from the Flada Blog, but all of them will be at least a small adventure into the workings of my mind. Ultimately, I will migrate older posts from my previous OpenDiary journal under the name Parthian Tactic, but I’ve de Read more:Migrating
New Addition at the Flada Blog 2007-06-19 23:31:56 Every time I decide I’m going to knuckle down and start writing more, something changes my plans. Last week, on June 13, my wife gave birth to our second son. After being in labor for about 12 hours and actively pushing for about 2, Charles Patrick drew his first breath.I was very impressed with the doctor who performed the delivery (although in actuality, Alena and one nurse did most of the real work) because I’ve never actually seen so many bodily fluids explode all over someone before–including his face, eyes, and probably even mouth.
Charles weighed in at 9 lbs, 2.6 ounces. He and Alena spent 2 days in the hospital and were released where she now looks forward to her 42 paid days of convalescent leave. One of the few good things about the Navy.
Conrad had most of the hospital staff eating from the palm of his hand. Every time I had to leave for whatever reason, he would say “Bye-bye, see ya,” to his mom on the way out of the room. Then he would r Read more:Addition
(Relatively) Easy Homemade Bookends 2007-06-24 19:50:11 (Relatively
) Easy Homemade Bookends
This won’t exactly be a tutorial since I didn’t think to take pictures during the building process, but my sister sounded interested when I told her about the bookends I’d made, so here they are for everyone. I plan to make quite a few more of these for personal use as well as a selection of them to sell, so maybe I’ll be able to make an actual tutorial then.
Anyway, I recently built a large freestanding bookshelf from pretty cheap pine boards and 2×2’s. The bookshelf turned out really nice since I did quite a bit of prep work on the wood–proving that even cheap wood can make nice furniture with enough elbow grease. Most of the elbow grease came in the form of sanding, but there was also staining and finishing involved.
The bookends that I have made are composed of cedar, although any other wood would work just as well. I just happened to have some cedar boards lying around, so that’s what I used.
Comment Blacklist 2007-07-09 15:48:37 After returning from a vacation with my family and my older sister’s, I found my comments full of spam. I’ve updated my comment spam blacklist with a few new items and offending IP addresses. I am posting the list here. Feel free to copy it to your blacklist. Also, I’d appreciate any additional suggestions left in my comments. I’ll update the list below as I receive comments so that anyone in need can find a comprehensive list here. If you feel that there is an IP address on the list that doesn’t belong, I’ll be happy to consider your argument.
I’ve set up my blacklist so that anything it marks as spam is still available for me to read and override, so don’t worry if you happen to accidentally use one of the offending words.
My blacklist:
-online
4u
12.172.250.252
12.219.64.154
24.91.149.151
24.232.51.173
59.93.131.206
68.107.13.23
68.116.187.183
70.51.175.35
71.59.130.37
71.110.11.98
71.239.6.57
72.20.2.58
72.36.199.18
72.55.133.2 Read more:Comment
, Blacklist
Rebuttal to “5 Reasons Why You Should Homeschool” 2007-07-16 11:54:45
[Editor’s Note: This entry was originally left as a series of comments on my discussion board as a response to my post &ldquo
;5 Reasons
Why You Should Homeschool
.&rdquo
; With the contributor’s permission, I have copied it, unedited, to the blog side of my site so that it can receive the attention it deserves. I intend to answer these points in a future entry. When I do I will add links from here and back to here. For now, I’ll just say that my original entry was intended primarily for readers in the States since my personal knowledge of the education systems in other countries is lacking. I would also like to comment, that “5 Reasons Why You Should Homeschool” has been my most popular post by a wide margin. It averages over 50 hits per day which, for my humble little blog, is quite a few.]
Hi Ed, I am writing to request that you ammend the homeschooling article, because I believe it is misleading, both about teachers and about teaching.
I understa
Overcoming Obstacles 2007-07-27 18:41:23 I just StumbledUpon a blog entry that I had to share with my readers.
How to Walk Through Steel-Reinforced Walls and Achieve other Similarly Impossible Feats is one of the my favorite entries I’ve ever accidentally found through StumbleUpon. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of other great blog entries that I’ve enjoyed and would call my favorites (like almost all of Steve Olson’s or Wendy Piersall’s entries), it’s just that I didn’t Stumbleupon them.
In the linked entry, Dan writes about a conversation with a child who was trying to walk through a wall ala Harry Potter. He gives several points of advice to child. Walking through walls is, of course, a metaphor for accomplishing any difficult task. Or is it? Sure, currently we don’t have the technology to walk through walls, but I couldn’t help but think of the car that drove through walls thanks to its Oscillation Overthruster in the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banza
DoFollow Plugin Installed 2007-07-30 23:21:46 I have installed the DoFollow plugin from Semiologic. I really wasn’t aware that there was a nofollow automatically placed on notes or I would have done this sooner. Thank you to everyone who has noted in the past despite this oversight. You will now get the links you deserve. Read more:Plugin
Public School Socialism 2007-07-30 14:37:34 One of the initial goals that I had when I started this blog was to spur debate within the notes or the discussion board. Although there hasn’t been much participation in the discussion board, my article 5 Reasons Why You Should Homeschool, has led to considerable discussion and emails. Almost all of these responses have been encouraging with people agreeing with at least some of my points. One notable point of dissent from contributor Obsteve was left on the discussion board and later copied unedited to the blog here. Some of obsteve’s arguments have been answered by other noters, but I still owe him responses as promised. I intend to get to those soon, but this entry is actually about a different reason to homeshool that wasn’t included in my original article.
The forgotten reason is actually the primary reason why I make this choice: as a libertarian individualist, I find socialism in any form to be undesirable and even immoral. Although I’m aware o Read more:Public
, School
, Socialism
, Public School
A Word on “Surrender” 2007-08-09 12:02:24
From the Wikipedia entry on surrender:
Surrender
is when soldiers, nations or other combatants stop fighting and become prisoners of war, either as individuals or when ordered to by their officers. A white flag is often used to surrender, as is the gesture of raising one’s hands empty and open above one’s head.
Surrender may be conditional, if the surrendering party promises to submit only if after the victor makes certain promises. Otherwise it is unconditional surrender; the victor makes no promises of treatment other than those provided by international law. Normally a belligerent will only agree to surrender unconditionally if completely incapable of continuing hostilities.
…
Entire nations can also surrender in an attempt to end a war or military conflict. This is done through the signing of an armistice or peace treaty.
This article is in reply to all of the neo-conservatives who attempt to castigate Rep. Ron Paul for his stance on the Iraq conflict. As most Read more:ldquo
, rdquo
More about My Reasons to Homeschool 2007-08-19 14:35:41 My friend Obsteve has been encouraging me for more than a few weeks to elaborate on my previous post, 5 Reasons
Why You Should Homeschool
:
Hi Ed, I still believe that this article is misleading, both about teachers and about teaching.Essentially, I feel that 5 different reasons to homeschool could and should be proffered; I do not believe your following reasons stand up to much scrutiny-“children in public schools don’t learn to socialize at least not in a real-world sense”;
“many of the things that are taught in public schools that are simply wrong”;
“This brings me to one of the reasons I want to homeschool which is that frankly I am smarter than 99% of public school teachers”;
“Your child will never be molested, murdered, assaulted at homeschool”;
“We want to instill our values… If we send him away, whose values will he be receiving? Who knows?”
In an otherwise persuasive blog entry these comments, ranging from the misguided to the scaremongering, need to be
Is your husband or wife an idiot? 2007-08-25 16:13:53 My father was a great man. Actually, he still is as far as I know. I learned a lot of invaluable lessons from him and from my mother.
To this day, a full 20 years after moving out of his home, I am certain that I could survive pretty well in almost any environment because of the practical knowledge that I gained from my dad. He is a man who could hunt or trap game for food, fell and chop a tree for fuel, construct a shelter out of poplar saplings to keep his family out of the elements, build a radio out of spare electronics components, adjust the carburetor on an old ‘62 Country Squire, and just about anything else you can think of.
Even a man as great as my dad had one major flaw, though. He was quite adept at bad-mouthing my mom. This is one area where I lost respect for the man.
My mother was very similar to my dad in that she would try many new things. She wasn’t always as successful at new endeavors as he usually was, but her successes were not infrequent either
DoFollow bug 2007-08-30 10:32:28 For some reason, the DoFollow plugin wasn’t working for me. I discovered yesterday that despite installing and enabling the plugin, nofollow tags were still being added to comment links.
I had to hack a root file on my server and manually remove the <rel=nofollow> occurences from the code of the file comment-template.php. After a quick check, it appears to work the way I wanted.
Flada Faves Volume 1 2007-09-16 20:07:42 I am going to start a new feature where I write about some of my favorite sites that I have found during the week. These may not necessarily be new posts or pages, but they are new to me. This is volume one.
There have been ongoing discussions on my blog notes about several of my posts regarding home schooling. One reason I listed is regarding textbooks and the inaccuracies. The Textbook League has a great page including text from a letter written by noted physicist Richard Feynman. Dr. Feynman’s findings about the selection process of school textbooks parallels a lot of the problems I have found in textbooks. For those not familiar with Richard Feynman, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices Read more:Volume
You Can Update Your Dreams 2007-08-31 12:25:17 My Dreams
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? For me, it was a doctor. Actually for a brief time, I wanted to be a worm doctor, whatever that is, but mostly I wanted to be a medical doctor. Then again, to a 5 year old, medical doctors are the only kind of doctor. At one point during high school (during one of the brief moments I stopped to consider it at all) I decided I wanted to be a medical technologist. My rationality was that I could use my natural abilities to fix things and still be in the medical community.
Then I got a girl pregnant and decided the only way to pay for the child was to join the military. The Navy convinced me that I would be a great aviation electronics technician–so that’s what I did. And guess what, I was a great technician. After leaving the service, I went on to be an even greater and more diverse technician. There’s only a little bragging involved when I claim that I can fix the electronics and mechan Read more:Update
Exchanging Values: The right way to do business. 2007-10-13 21:00:27 In 2003, I left one of my favorite jobs that I’d ever had in Illinois to move with my new wife to Virginia. She had joined the Navy, so she didn’t have much choice about where she was going to be. To save our relationship and build our future, leaving that company was the only possible decision.
There were almost immediate financial problems, however, because my pay had been considerably more than a new sailor’s. After a few months with no luck finding work in my field, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. So for about 4 months, I worked as a “Sales Consultant” for a Hummer dealership.
I managed to gross an average of about $1600 each of the 4 months I was selling, which is quite bad considering the number of hours that a car salesman puts in. But it was a lot better than nothing.
Very early in my time there, I realized that I wasn’t working for the right dealership because their sales philosophy and my business philosophy were at odds. T Read more:Values
Living on a Navy Base, Some Photos, a Halloween photo 2007-11-01 18:58:11 There aren’t a lot of good things to be said about living in base housing on a Navy base. But there are a few nice things. I guess it’s like a gated community in that there are armed guards controlling who can access the community. On the down side, you sure don’t want to forget your ID at home when you leave the base.
Last night I discovered the best thing about living here–the greatest trick-or-treating that a kid could imagine. Many housed decorated with very friendly people giving out candy are the norm on this base. One of the houses we stopped at had a sheet over their garage door with a fog machine in the garage and more than a few ghosts, ghouls, and other nasties. I’ve paid to go to haunted houses that weren’t nearly as nicely done as that garage.
My wife walked with our older son while I pushed the stroller with the baby. It was a fabulous night which makes me wish that we could go knocking on people’s doors every night. Conra Read more:Living
, Halloween
Some Good (But Fake) Reasons Not To Vote For Ron Paul 2007-12-05 18:47:25 I’ve been a Dr. Ron Paul
fan for many years. I first heard of Congressman Paul in 2000(ish) in a Yahoo Politics Chat room. One of the other conservative libertarians in the room asked me what I thought of Ron Paul and I had to confess that I’d never heard of him. So my chat buddy pointed me to a few links and I read up on the Congressman and was very impressed with what I read.
At the time, most of the self-professed conservatives in the chatrooms liked what they heard about Dr. Paul as well. Such statements as, “If you hear that there were 434 votes in Congress for a bill and only 1 vote against, you can be pretty sure that the one vote was cast by Ron Paul and that it was an unconstitutional bill.” were often read.
Another frequent comment was, “Wow, there’s actually someone in Congress who does more than just talk about smaller government.”
What a difference 7 years make. I was a member at Freerepublic from sometime in 1997 until about Read more:Reasons
, Reasons Not
Time is Running Out 2007-12-24 09:54:50 If you have been reading about Ron Paul and like what you’ve read, the only way you will be able to vote for him in the General Elections in November is if he wins the Republican nomination during the Primaries. His website has put together a table of the Primary and Caucus information for all of the States and Commonwealths. The chart also lists the date that you have to be registered by in order to vote in that State’s primary.
Many Ron Paul supporters have never voted before, and many others are registered in other parties. If you live in a State that has a closed Primary, then you won’t have any input into the Republican nominee unless you are registered Republican. Time is running out to change your party affiliation in order to vote for Ron Paul. A lot of you are off work for the next week, this would be a good time to go to your DMV, or other voter registration center and update your registration. If you’re unsure where to go, Googling “voter r
On Heath Ledger and Extremist Christian Terrorists 2008-01-26 14:57:43 You hear the words “extremist Islamic terrorists” thrown around a lot these days. The people who use this terminology will be quick to point out that they don’t believe all Muslims are extremists or terrorists, but implied in their original statement is the idea that all terrorists and all extremists are Islamic. To [...] Read more:Heath
, Extremist
, Christian
, Terrorists
It’s Just a Monitor 2008-03-15 17:11:04 We’ve had a 17″ HP computer monitor sitting in a box in the garage since we moved to Pensacola almost a year ago. Prior to that, the monitor was sitting in storage in Norfolk for almost a year. Today, while cleaning out the garage I finally decided that we aren’t ever going to [...] Read more:Monitor
Recommend Site To A Friend
