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Archived Posts February 2007 | Acton PowerBlog
In a follow up to The Goracle’s energy bill imbroglio, Bill Hobbs has this stunner today:
As the controversy over global warming hypemaster Al Gore’s voracious energy-eater mansion rolls on, there’s an angle I think merits deeper investigation than it is currently getting. In its original story, The Tennessean reported that Gore buys "carbon offsets" to compensate for his home’s use of energy from carbon-based fuels. As Wikipedia explains, a carbon offset "is a service that tries to reduce the net carbon emissions of individuals or organizations indirectly, through proxies who reduce their emissions and/or increase their absorption of greenhouse gases." (snip)
Have you heard about Logos Bible Software? Here’s a bit about the founding of the company from the February NewsWire update (and on their blog here): “A couple of young Microsoft programmers with their entire careers of high-pay and lucrative Microsoft stock options ahead of them, dropped everything to join a partner and risk it all on pursuing their dream.”
As a follow-up to the rather wide-eyed optimism I expressed in a post almost a year ago, the city of Grand Rapids has rejected the sole bid application received for development of property on the Grand River.
This piece from the Scientific American examines the difficulty that human beings have achieving happiness even in a world characterized by material prosperity.
“Once average annual income is above $20,000 a head, higher pay brings no greater happiness,” writes Michael Shermer, in the context of Richard Layrd’s observation that “we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950.”
Bjorn Lomborg has a better Powerpoint presentation than Al Gore. He’s also a more captivating speaker, and uses decent logic in his presentations. Is there any way we can get him an Oscar for the following 17 minute tour-de-force?
Rarely have I seen a movie that moved me the way Amazing Grace did last evening. The new film, which opened across America on Friday, is the story of the life-long struggle of William Wilberforce to end slavery and reform British society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The movie should compel Christians to understand how culture can be truly altered by incrementalism, deep faith, sheer perseverance, and quite often with great personal sacrifice.
U.S. high school students are taking harder classes, receiving better grades, and from every indication in recent data, leaning much less than their counterparts fifteen years ago. Go figure. All the talk about spending more money and about improving testing and teacher standards and the end result is that two decades of educational reform may not have improved things overall.
Anthony Esolen, from the March issue of Touchstone:
The most bountiful alms that the rich can give the poor, apart from the personal donation of their time and means, are lives of virtue to emulate. It is their duty. But when they use their means to buy off the effects of vice, or, worse, to celebrate it, that is an offense against those whom Jesus called ‘little ones,’ and no amount of almsgiving can lighten the millstone.
Read the whole thing (HT: the evangelical outpost).
From the NYTimes: “Zimbabwe’s economy is so dire that bread vanished from store shelves across the country on Wednesday after bakeries shut down, saying government price controls were requiring them to sell loaves at a loss. The price controls are supposed to shield consumers from the nation’s rampant inflation, which now averages nearly 1,600 percent annually.”
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