December 16, 2009

PAGING HEALTH CZAR STARNES

(Via Bookworm Room)  Zombie has a good post up about why universal health care is bad for us...morally and socially.  His gist: "it turns each of us into a little fascist. A nagging nanny who tells other people what to do and how to live."

The fictionalized version of his post is the tale of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, of course.

And someday, someone in our new American health care system is gonna smash in Millie Bush's teeth too...

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December 13, 2009

SYNOVA IS DEAD ON

Althouse has a post about how CNN seems to have a broken English-to-English translator.  In the comments was this gem from Synova.  (I am copying the whole perfect comment because I can never get Althouse's permalinks to jump down to the right comment.)

In Iraq they did not *accidentally* wait until American soldiers were surrounded by Muslim children to attack them. And then, without irony, they *themselves* say that those children would not have died if the Americans were not there.

Then someone like Wright explains that the violence would not have happened if the Americans were not there.

Here's a clue.

The enemy knows what they are doing.

They are not simple or child-like brown people who don't know better or who are being tossed, to and fro, by events that are beyond them.

They may or may not believe their own propaganda, but they do understand psychological warfare and engineer the massacre of children with the explicit knowledge and understanding of just *how* they can jerk *our* chains.

So... "We are sorry that there are dead Muslims, that we shot into a crowd of them, that we planted IED's, that we blew up that Mosque, that we were forced to go through your village and dispense justice and left the bodies in the street to be found."

And the thing is... America and the West has NOTHING to combat this with because we simply refuse to do so. We have no one who's job it is to broadcast our side of the story, to put the information out there over and over that by far the most Muslims killed are not killed by us but are killed by those we are fighting. And it's the truth! It's the truth, so why doesn't our media push it voluntarily? Why don't they make certain that every person knows the atrocities committed by Muslims on other Muslims. Why don't they?

When we have found and documented rooms with shackles and blood on the walls...

The response to a dead and *gutted* woman in Iraq who had spent her life working to help people there was an insipid "oh, dear" followed by... "but they made a prisoner at Gitmo look at pornography."

The response to butchered and defiled Americans was "screw them". The response to defiled, dismembered and tortured to *death* American soldiers was "OMGAWD we poured water on someone's FACE!"

Someone is enabling this sort of thing, abetting, and participating.

And AQ is *sorry* that Muslims asked for it, oh well... lets blow up more Muslim kids and blame it on America.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:11 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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December 02, 2009

TERRORISM THAT'S PERSONAL

When I was 21, a boy asked me to marry him.  He wasn't the right person for me, and I had to politely decline the surprising offer.  I'm sure it hurt his feelings, but that was the extent of it.

And that's what I thought of when I saw Terrorism That's Personal.  (Warning: graphic content that will make you cry.)  No one threw acid on me or tried to kill me.

I was allowed to not marry him.

Many women in this world are not allowed to make that choice.  Or when they do make that choice, they must live with the consequences of wanting some control over their own lives.  Blindness, disfigurement, even death.

My heart is sick for these women.

(via Cass)

Posted by: Sarah at 07:50 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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December 01, 2009

GLOBAL WARMING FLOW CHARTS

There's a good post at The Devil's Kitchen (via The Corner) with flow charts explaining how we ought to make decisions on global warming vs how we do. I have debated this with real-world friends and have always tried to steer it towards the Ought flow chart, but it always ends up skipping right ahead to the "We're all going to die" box. Laymen, especially quasi-treehuggers, don't want to talk about cost-benefit analysis; I've been told that we need to err on the side of caution and try to prevent climate change from happening no matter the cost because it's For The Childrenâ„¢.  And even when I try to play Bjorn Lomborg, as I've said I always try to do to concede some ground in the debate, and say that there are things we can do to save The Children right now instead of in 100 years, it never seems to have much effect.

If anything, Climategate can at least give me another talking point to get us off the bozo flow chart and back onto the Ought one.  The science is most certainly not settled, so any decisions you make For The Children based on the "consensus" are flawed.

But what do I know, I don't even recycle.

UPDATE:

Slightly related, I enjoyed this comment on Althouse's post (via Boxenhorn).

He easily could've made an argument that Republicans are sceptical of anything which tries to paint Capitalism in as bad a light as possible, or that we are not idealistic so much as pragmatic, and realise that academia (who fired the first AGW volleys) are mostly left-wingers intent on hounding corporations for their multiple "crimes".

But no, he goes for the "Republicans are dumb and don't like science [read, because they are religious and therefore are all creationists]".

We're even better at making their arguments for them!

And here's a great summary of Climategate itself.  (I just discovered that the link doesn't go directly to the comment, so I am reposting it here.)

The reason why people say it has warmed at all in the last 100 years is because the CRU told them so. How did CRU come to that conclusion? Well, NASA gave the raw temperature readings for however many years such things existed. CRU then proceeded to "adjust" those readings. Clearly, some adjustment and almalgamation was needed to get the proper global temperature measurements. But were CRU's adjustments done correctly?

Understand, this is a really hard question. We don't know what the actual global temperature is. We are supposed to figure that out by looking at the temperature data and adjusting it accordingly. But if you don't know the final answer how do you know the adjustments are correct? That is a hard question.

But we will never know if the adjustments were done properly because the CRU destroyed the raw temperature readings. They only have their adjusted or "value added" readings. But there is no way to tell now if those readings are correct.

The whole proposition that the world warmed over the last 100 years is now in question. For all we know, the world could be cooler now than it was in 1900. We have only CRU's word and adjustments to go on. And CRU has been revealed to be a complete fraud. Basically, climate science has to start over from square one.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:08 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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