Tasty Tidbits 10/1/11

1. Sunset at the North Pole
2. On Rich People “Giving Back.”
3. For sale: eyes, ears, wallet: contact Google for details.
4. Where everyone knows your name.
5. Jesus flunks the religious test; Good Samaritan, too.
6. God bless the 5th Amendment.

1

Sunset at the North Pole. This is one of the rarest pictures that you will ever  see in your life when the moon was closest to the earth. The date the picture was taken Thursday, the 13th. of March 2011.

This is the sunset at the North Pole with the moon at its closest point last week.

a scene you will probably never get to see in person, so take a moment and enjoy God at work at the North Pole.

And, you also see the sun below the moon, an amazing photo and not one easily duplicated ….

(HT Octavian Gabor)

2

I commented yesterday on how Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren had Right bloggers and commentators scrambling to pick up a provocative gauntlet she threw down. The new highwater mark for such efforts, in my opinion, is in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, where Andy Kessler explains How Wilson Greatbatch “Gave Back.”

Wilson Greatbatch, 92, died this week a wealthy man. Investing $2,000 of his own money way back in 1958 and tending a garden to feed his family, Greatbatch invented the pacemaker. He licensed it to Medtronic, a company now valued at $36 billion that sells and continues to improve pacemakers and defibrillators. Greatbatch did his part to improve society, create wealth and increase, quite literally, our standard of living.

You’ll note (if you read the whole column) that Kessler throws this in the teeth not of Warren but of President Obama, but Obama was echoing Warren (or vice-versa).

I think there may be a fallacy in Kessler’s piece. Is the eventuality of his logic that that successful inventors need pay no tax, because they already “gave at the office”? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s my feeble effort to advance the discussion of a pretty important question.

3

Google wants to know your reading habits, taste in music, and where you are right now. You are not Google’s customer. You are its product.

(Arts & Letters Daily teaser for a book review)

That certainly sounds ominous, and Google has certainly taken it to new heights. I can’t believe how many pages on various websites had kettlebell ads on them weeks after I searched that term; I’d provide a link to kettlebells, but Google it yourself and see what I mean – especially if you Google it and then follow a link to Amazon.

But remember: you also are the “product” being sold by commercial TV and Radio. And those glossy magazines are as cheap as they are partly because Calvin Klein is paying them for that brief “rise in your Levis” at the sight of fetching young things in skimpy undies. Maybe there’s a point where quantitative change passes over into qualitative as we descend the slippery slope, but, gosh, as Andy Kessler says:

Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin have saved all of us hundreds of billions of hours of research and driving around, far more value than their $20 billion each in wealth.

Well, I guess that settles it. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

4

The sitcom Cheers had a theme song about “a place where everyone knows your name.” They may have been onto something.

5

The “religious employer exemption” is “so extremely narrow that it protects almost no one,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo. “Jesus himself, or the Good Samaritan of his famous parable, would not qualify as ‘religious enough’ for the exemption, since they insisted on helping people who did not share their view of God.”

Okay, that’s a provocative way of putting it, perhaps (which I why I like it), but John Garvey, President of Catholic University of America, spells out the problem in greater detail in a Washington Post opinion piece today, noting subtly that it is clear who is imposing their moral views on others now:

I understand, as do the leaders of other Catholic organizations, that not all citizens share the views that the Catholic Church holds about contraception and sterilization. It is particularly sad that not all Americans share our conviction that abortion is gravely wrong, even in the earliest stages of pregnancy. But in objecting to these regulations, our university does not seek to impose its moral views on others. All we ask is respect for the religious beliefs we try to impart to our students.

(Emphasis added)

6

Professor James Duane, who has the great personal misfortune of being less than 6 degrees separated from Pat Robertson, entertainingly explains why you should never talk to the police:

That’s “you” as in:

• guilty you
• innocent you
• pure as the driven snow you
• sophisticated powerful you
• etc.

* * * * *

Bon appetit!

(To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.)