Considerettes

He was a rabid environmentalist.  He considered babies "parasitic human infants", and wanted all "pro-birth" programs to push "stopping human birth".  He was extremely anti-war, and equated having more humans with more war.  He considered civilization "filth", and its religious roots "disgusting".

And ThinkProgress, an extremely popular liberal blog, calls out the Right over this guy, James Jay Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel, because one of his eleven points refers to immigration. 

Really?  Is this what passes for intellectual honesty on the Left these days?  A guy who said Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" woke him up is a product of the Right?

None other than President of the United States Bill Clinton blamed conservative talk radio for Timothy McVeigh, and recently brought that back up in light of the Tea Party.  Conservatives against the "Ground Zero Mosque" were blamed for the stabbing of a Muslim cabbie (until it was found that it was a GZM supporter who stabbed the cabbie who was against the Mosque).  And Caleb Howe reminds us:

Lee acted irrationally. His environmental extremism was likely a function of his derangement, rather than the source of it. He latched on. He took it to the extreme, to say the least. Lee was not, by any measure that I would choose, a sane man. The story told by his brother-in-law - one of temper, erratic behavior, and irrational views - recalls Jerry Kane.

Jerry Kane, and his son Joe, killed two police officers and were killed themselves, in a shoot-out precipitated by a simple traffic stop. Jerry Kane, too, was an unstable man. His hometown mayor said of him that “You were always looking over your shoulder to make sure he wasn’t there. You never knew what he was going to do. I always thought he was an unstable individual.” Like Lee, the aftermath anecdotes painted a picture of paranoia and fear. But that didn’t stop liberal sites like Crooks and Liars from laying him at the feet of the conservative movement. Or Joseph Stack. Or Richard Poplawski. Or Byron Williams. It didn’t stop them from suggesting that Erick [Erickson] was responsible for a census worker slaying.

In fact, every time someone is shot in a lone gunman scenario, the right, and the tea parties and talk radio in particular, are virtually instantaneously blamed by the left at large for “violent” rhetoric and instigation.

Stop me, again, if you’ve heard THAT one before.

We never stop hearing from the MSNBC left how the Fox News right is stirring up violence. But when someone clearly basing his murderous intent on the idea that humans are going to destroy the world, and soon, acts on the dire prophecies of Al Gore … well suddenly you can’t blame rhetoric for crazy people.

Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz will simply not take responsibility for this guy.  I don’t think they should, but they should then not require the Right to take responsibility for the acts of other nuts.

But they will, as will Bill Clinton.  This is what passes for intellectual honesty on the Left.

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Steven Hawking is one of the most brilliant scientists of our time, and we’re lucky to have him.  In earlier days, his disability might have relegated him to being homebound, and he probably wouldn’t have lived nearly this long, robbing humanity of his intelligence.

However, he’s apparently branching out into a new area that he is not as well versed in; religion.

In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

In A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking’s most famous work, he did not dismiss the possibility that God had a hand in the creation of the world.

He wrote in the 1988 book: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”

In his new book he rejects Sir Isaac Newton’s theory that the Universe did not spontaneously begin to form but was set in motion by God.

Scientists have a conniption when theologians delve into the scientific realm.  But apparently, that doesn’t work both ways in Prof. Hawking’s estimation.

Frankly, I think there can be spill over to each other.  The God of creation made us to be curious and made the order of the universe understandable to us.  I just would like scientists, who frown when a religious person appears to infringe on territory they claim exclusive rights to, would judge themselves by their own standards when moving the other direction. 

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The Oval Office got a makeover.

While President Obama was on vacation, his West Wing office got a bit of a face lift, complete with a new rug, fresh wallpaper and paint, and new furniture — all done at no taxpayer expense, the White House says.

I would think, of all things, a makeover of the President’s office should be done at taxpayer expense.  It’s all this unconstitutional, required purchases that I think ought not be.

Tell ya’ what, I’ll trade a coat of paint and new carpeting for another unfunded mandate to be named later.

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David Brooks:

During the first half of this year, German and American political leaders engaged in an epic debate. American leaders argued that the economic crisis was so bad, governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued that a little short-term stimulus was sensible, but anything more was near-sighted. What was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence.

The debate got pointed. American economists accused German policy makers of risking a long depression. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, countered, "Governments should not become addicted to borrowing as a quick fix to stimulate demand."

The two countries followed different policy paths. According to Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, the Americans borrowed an amount equal to 6 percent of G.D.P. in an attempt to stimulate growth. The Germans spent about 1.5 percent of G.D.P. on their stimulus.

This divergence created a natural experiment. Who was right?

The early returns suggest the Germans were.

Indeed, Germany’s economy is growing at an amazing 9% annual rate and unemployment is back to what it was before the crisis.  Back home, Obama and company are considering a second stimulus.

Because the first one worked so well?

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No, I’m not talking about the "Ground Zero Mosque".  I’m talking about the Dove World Outreach Center’s plan to burn Korans on September 11th.

There’s nothing unconstitutional about doing with your own property what you wish.  Insofar as there are any relevant ordinances, it’s a local issue.  But also, people are free to exercise their right to protest and express their displeasure at such a thing, and try to convince those who are doing it to reconsider their plans, as I am trying to do.

OK, now I’m talking about the "Ground Zero Mosque".  Or both.

Are liberal websites who criticize the Dove Center’s burning of Korans and mock them anti-Christian bigots?  Certainly this criticism, in and of itself, is not proof of any such bigotry.  They just feel it’s wrong and are expressing their opinion.  I would be building a straw man to suggest that they are motivated by hate of Christians.  Equally, appealing to the constitutionality of this would be ignoring the other, more substantive, points of their protest.

And yet when the tables are turned, out come their straw men and their baseless accusations.  Liberal talking heads speak of constitutionality of building the Mosque on private property and accuse opponents of Islamophobia.  A nutty and drunk cab passenger killing his Muslim cabbie is pointed to as an example of the alleged overall fear, even though the perp was for the Mosque and the Muslim victim against it. 

Why can’t we have a civil discussion about race, religion or any sort of sensitive subject in this country?  This is a big reason why. 

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If you think the ACLU would have a conniption over that, imagine how they would have reacted had they been around for some of these other events in the video.  The "separation of church and state" doesn’t mean what they, and liberal judges, think it means.

US Capitol Tour with David Barton

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Yes, it’s that time of the week again, where I toss out a bunch of links that I was too lazy to do a full blog post on.

Turns out the Iraq war didn’t break the bank.  It’s understandable that you might think that, but that only indicates a need to get your news from more sources.  The MSM loves to parrot DNC talking points.

(Liberal) feminism is dead.  Long live (conservative) feminism!

Jim Wallis said that Marvin Olasky (World magazine editor) “lies for a living” when Olasky noted that Wallis got $200,000 from George Soros.  When it was pointed out that he, in fact, did, then came the abject apology in sackcloth and ashes, “Well, it was so small I forgot.” UPDATE:  Wallis has issued a formal apology.
Three months ago, James Cameron was ready to “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads”, speaking of those who dispute anthropogenic global warming.  At the very last minute, after changing his demands over and over for how a debate was to be run, he cancelled.  Now that takes guts.  Or something.

In England, teachers are dropping history lessons on the Holocaust and the Crusades, for fear of offending Muslims who are taught Holocaust denial and a different view of the Crusades at local mosques.  They’re afraid of challenging “anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils”.  So much for academia being the standard bearer of truth and free speech.

A back door repeal of the First Amendment by … social workers?  Well, when liberal ideologues get ahold of professional organizations, nuttiness does ensue.  Look at most unions.

And finally, a US district judge put a temporary halt to embryonic stem cell research.  Some believe this will devastate scientific research, but  Steve Breen puts it in perspective.  (Click for a larger image.)

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An Islamic cabbie was stabbed by a white guy in New York City.  The all-knowing Left jumped on this as clear proof that Republicans are to blame for this.  Juan Cole said this explicitly.  Foster Kramer at the Village Voice wondered aloud if this was the first "Ground Zero Mosque" hate crime.  (More finger pointing from the Left noted by Michelle Malkin.) 

Turns out the attacker supports the building of the mosque.  Little inconvenient truth, that.  And the cabbie?  He’s opposed to it.  This just turns the Left’s arguments upside down and they’re scrambling to deal with it, updating those posts to try to tie this attacker to the Right, or blame the Right for him regardless of his politics.

What’s next, liberals firebombing the offices of a Democrat?  Why, yes.

But hey, those Tea Partiers are just so violent, right?  Right?

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From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Last month, UPS executives proudly detailed the profitable quarter that drove the company cash trove above $4 billion. Wall Street’s response? “Show me the money.”

“You’re sitting on a lot of cash,” complained one analyst in a conference call last month with executives, joining a chorus of investors who wanted to know why UPS wasn’t paying them higher dividends or using the money to expand the company.

It’s a question that could be asked of a lot of companies these days.

Economic growth has been anemic overall, yet corporations that cut deeply during the Great Recession are seeing soaring profits. And they’re stuffing mountains of cash into their bank accounts.

But they are not hiring.

Company cash reserves topped $1.84 trillion in the first quarter, up $382 billion from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.

The nation’s businesses are sitting on that cash for a variety reasons, including still-weak customer demand and an uncertain outlook for the global economy. After the recent painful downturn, businesses say they’re also worried about how taxes and regulatory policies could change under President Obama’s administration.

“A lot of companies had near-death experiences in the last year,” said Kurt Kuehn, chief financial officer at Sandy Springs-based UPS. “People are still feeling the shock.”

Most companies probably will remain jittery — and slow to spend or hire — for several more months until there’s a brighter forecast for the economic and business climate, he added.

Companies are looking for stability in the economy, so they can plan for it.  But, as John Stossel explains, the government keeps throwing the economy out of kilter, not allowing businesses to be able to plan.

Why isn’t the economy recovering? After previous recessions, unemployment didn’t get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can and does heal itself, as the mistakes of the previous inflationary boom are corrected.

The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama’s vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.

In at least three big areas — health insurance, financial regulation and taxes — no one can know what will happen.

And hence they’ll take a wait-and-see attitude.  When the stock market is up and down all over the place, investors sit on their cash and wait for a definite bull, or even bear, market.  The same goes for corporations.  If there is no trend, they aren’t going to jump into the volatility.  And the government is creating that volatility in the name of removing it.  But the result is:

New intrusive rules for health insurance are yet to be written, and those rules will affect hiring, since most health insurance is provided by employers.

Thanks to the new 2,300 page Dodd-Frank finance regulatory act, The Wall Street Journal reports, there will be "no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies." These as-yet unknown rules will govern lending to business and other key financial activity.

The George W. Bush tax cuts might be allowed to expire. But maybe not. Social Security and Medicare are dangerously shaky. Will Congress raise the payroll tax? A "distinguished" deficit commission is meeting. What will it do? Recommend a value-added tax?

Who knows? But few employers will commit to a big investment with those clouds hanging over our heads.

Stop tinkering!

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World Vision is a humanitarian organization based on Christian values and, as part of their stated goal, they aim "to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God."  Its founder was an evangelical pastor who wanted to help orphans and other needy children.  Its articles of incorporation include doctrinal statements.

Is World Vision a church?  No, they don’t claim to be, and neither are they directly affiliated with any church or denomination.

So then; can World Vision claim the religious exemption to employee discrimination laws?  Can they require their employees to also be Christian and to represent the organization’s doctrinal stance?

That’s the question that came up before a 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court, and they release a ruling yesterday in the case Spencer v. World Vision that says that, yes, they qualify for the religious exemption.  It was a 2-to-1 decision, and the dissenter seems to think that in order to be religious you have to have worship services or, at least, Bible study or preaching. 

Eugene Volokh does a yeoman’s work distilling the ruling down to 5 points.  It’s worth a look.  The 77-page full opinion is, well, optional. 

We were one vote away from suddenly having religious organizations that don’t hold services legally considered secular and losing their right to hire folks of the same beliefs.  In today’s judicial climate, I just hope we can hang on to it.

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Once again, government tinkering screws things up.  It gave out and $8000 home buyer’s tax credit earlier this year, which boosted sales a bit, but now they’ve crashed to the worst low point since the National Association of Realtors started keeping stats in 1999.

Just like Cash for Clunkers, all we’ve done is shift future buying to the present, and then pay the price not very far down the road.  Worse, I’m wondering how many of these sales were made by folks, spurred on by the additional money, bought more home than they could afford, which is what got us into this situation in the first place.

And what got folks back then buying too much home?  Government tinkering.  There’s a trend here.

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You know racism is seriously on the decline when the New York Times is left to complain about the insufficient diversity of third base coaches in baseball.

Highly-placed Muslims around the word are coming out against the mosque near Ground Zero.  In fact, there is apparently a widespread belief among Muslims that opposing any mosque construction is a sin, so we’re probably not hearing as much opposition as it out there.

For the purposes of the November campaign, Democrats won’t be trying to sell ObamaCare as a cost savings.  Rather, they’re going to try to sell it as an improvement to health care, never mind the cost.  Oh, and that cost?  Paid for by the wealthy, so don’t worry.  Like they have an unlimited supply of cash to finance this administration’s unprecedented red-ink-o-rama.  The link has loads of claims in a recent presentation and how they just don’t pass "Common Sense 101".  One of the slides says that the Dems will work to improve the bill.  For cryin’ out loud, it just passed!  Why wasn’t it improved before passing it, if the improvements are so obvious?

New unemployment claims rose by 500,000…unexpectedly!  We’ve tried it the Democrats way for over a year now, and the stimulus just ain’t stimulating anything.  But their solution to failed plans is more of the same.  Prepare for more unexpectedness in the months to come.

Chuck Asay says it best, in pictures.  (Click for a larger version.)

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Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic:

[E]ven as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rules—politically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates.

So, we’ve been incarcerating more criminals, sentences are longer, and hence crime has fallen.  That’s a good thing, right?

Not according to Wood, who’s article starts with this sentence:

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure.

OK, so, um, I’m confused.  What measure other than the crime rate is a better measure?

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Anthony Watts calls attention to a new study on the famed/infamous "hockey stick" graph purporting to show a huge uptick in global temperatures in the 20th century.

There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann.

Proxies are things like tree rings and ice core measurements, rather than actual thermometer readings.  From the paper’s abstract:

We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

The first sentence says essentially that proxy data does not predict future temperatures any better than picking temperature numbers at random. 

Wow.

I imagine this study will get a good looking-over by those on both sides of the issue, but if it stands scrutiny it would be a huge blow to the anthropogenic global warming theory.  Stay tuned.

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First there was the "morning after" pill, and now there’s the "five mornings after" pill.

The Food and Drug Administration approved a controversial new form of emergency contraception Friday that can prevent a pregnancy as many as five days after sex.

The decision to allow the sale of the pill, which will be marketed under the brand name "ella," was welcomed by family-planning proponents as a crucial new option to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But critics condemned the decision, arguing that it was misleading to approve ella as a contraceptive because the drug could also be used to induce an abortion.

Ella can cut the chances of becoming pregnant by about two-thirds for at least 120 hours after a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex, studies have shown. The only other emergency contraceptive on the market, the so-called morning-after pill sold as Plan B, is significantly less effective, becomes less effectual with each passing day and will not work after 72 hours.

Supporters and opponents both said the decision marked the clearest evidence of a shift in the influence of political ideology at the FDA. The last time the FDA considered an emergency contraceptive — making Plan B available without a prescription — the decision was mired in controversy amid similar concerns voiced by antiabortion activists. After repeated delays, Plan B was approved for sale to women 17 and older without a prescription.

We are being desensitized to the cheapening of life.  Abortion is significant surgery, but we can reduce it to the size of a pill.  The culture of death, and those peddling sex without consequences make a further advancement.

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