Sunday, January 25, 2009

Kaeli's Daisy Pledge and Birthday Party!

After a few months of preparation, Kaeli finally became a Daisy, which is the forerunner to a Girl Scout. She loves Daisy's, which didn't surprise me. She is a very social person......I have a remark by her teacher on her report card to prove it. What is weird, though, is that when all eyes are on her in a public setting she goes into super-shy mode. I was perplexed. She dances in front of hundreds of people and doesn't miss a beat, why is she shy in front of a crowd under twenty people? I asked her, but got no real answer. Anyway, here is a snippet from the ceremony:










Last week we had Kaeli's birthday party at a local gymnastics studio and she invited all her friends. What a great way for kids to burn off excess energy! The days of just having cake at home are now over, I guess. Everything has to be a big production. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I mind, but I am just trying to figure out exactly when this changed. I hear stories now where Sweet 16 parties are costing thousands of dollars (I heard one tell how they spent $12,000). Does this seem insane to anyone else?
















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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Wonders of Wii

One of the girls Christmas presents was a Nintendo Wii. I bought this spur of the moment and wondered if the girls would like it. Wonder no more! They don't like the Wii................THEY LOVE IT!


I laughed all Christmas morning as Cattie and Kaeli boxed each other, played tennis, bowled their way to good scores, and commenced zaniness with Raving Rabbids TV Party (a great game).



One of the best parts of Wii is that players can make themselves into Miis (avatar creations). So, now we have a Wii family including Uncle Rob, Aunt Kaili, Jaia, Kenny and Joey, Victoria, and PopPop. They eventualy want to add all family members to fill their baseball teams and help them out in tennis.











What is great about Christmas is that they get all sorts of goodies from their "Canadian family".

However, this inevitably reminds us how far away everyone is. Maybe one day we can share Christmas together.




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This Is My Soapbox.....So Shut Up and Listen!

Chaos Out of Order

Chaos. No rational person desires to exist in such a state, nor can one tolerate any sign of societal decline leading to this stage of hopelessness. This is one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected; people perceived the free market operating chaotically due to a supposed lack of federal regulations and oversight. Houses were being foreclosed, the markets were tanking, pensions were being wiped out, investments and credit were drying up and vital industries were suddenly on the verge of insolvency. Chaos, it appeared, loomed on the horizon.Obama campaigned on ‘hope and change’. While an emotive and reformatory slogan, it lacked specifics. This should have signaled to any potential supporter, an ideology absent fundamental guiding principles. The demagoguery of a populist and its’ effects on a populace with a grand sense of entitlement is a topic for another time, what I wish to do is examine one aspect of Friedrich Hayek’s observations of collectivism (i.e. Leftism, socialism) as it relates to combating perceived politico-economic chaos.The attempt to restore order or avert a descent into chaos requires planning and implementation. Conservatives have long espoused the theory that individuals, unfettered by the restraints of unnecessary governmental intrusion, will make the best decisions for themselves and their family, which in turn will benefit society as a whole. Leftists have adhered to the misconception that the growing complexity of society REQUIRES increased central planning, on behalf of the government, in order to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities. For hundreds of years, Leftist intellectuals have dismissed the individualist approach (i.e. conservative) as leaving too much to chance and being susceptible to greed. Central planning, these intellectuals insisted, allowed the State the power to ensure that the resources of the nation were being allocated to the common good. This line of thinking became crystallized thanks to Karl Marx’s collectivist cry of “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.The housing market meltdown of last year that precipitated the financial chaos which has now gripped the world, was used as the latest example of ‘excessive capitalist greed’ undermining the social good. Obama was ushered into office to bring order to this anarchy, but how many people truly realize that Leftist ideologies address chaos with more chaos until tyranny results? And why is this? Consider the words of Hayek: “The planning authority cannot confine itself to providing opportunities for unknown people to make whatever use of them they like. It cannot tie itself down in advance to general and formal rules which prevent arbitrariness. It must provide for the actual needs of the people as they arise and then choose deliberately between them.” The key word in this quote was arbitrariness. Under the guise of regulating and providing oversight, which makes the average American feel like ‘something is being done’, the government is in effect opening up a Pandora’s box of arbitrarily-applied, constituent-based, policies, which will increase the uncertainty many citizens will eventually have with the direction of their economy and the application of their laws. Americans should have first been alerted to this when Obama moved to avoid contractual law during the uproar over executive bonuses, but the myth created about evil CEOs had at this point become too pervasive. The die was cast.This growing uncertainty begins us down the ‘road to serfdom’. As Hayek observed: “Yet agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of democratic assemblies to produce a plan, will evoke stronger and stronger demands that the government or some single individual should be given powers to act on their responsibility……The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning.”Our nation has elected a President to address a financial disaster that arbitrary governmental policies created (affordable housing GSEs). This President, a disciple of socialism, has embarked on a plan that has injected more chaos into the system, leaving many future Americans susceptible to the appeal of an economic and political tyranny. If we do not change course, the worst is yet in store.