Bill Gates, don't be surprised if Democrats running for re-election slowly back away from you for awhile.
Yeah, when he's on his deathbed he'll have an "oh, snap" moment and suddenly realize that a million dollars pays for doctors and nurses also. They get paid money to do their job, Bill, just like teachers. Are there other basic facts of life you've forgotten? Fire hot, sky blue, here's how you tie your shoe.
James Jay Lee is an environmentalist wacko who was radicalized in part by watching Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Currently he is holding hostages in the Discovery Building. Here's the dweeb's manifesto in which he describes human babies as being pollution, disgusting and filthy. Here's a semi-amusing excerpt:
Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.
The humans? The planet does not need humans.
Anne Nicol Gaylor is an old lady who likes to buy abortion services for poor women. Is she a eugenicist who wants to "clean up the chaff of humanity"? Probably. Excerpt:
On Gaylor's 80th birthday she sponsored a fund-raising event to raise funds to kill more children in the womb. Those funds go mostly to poor women to assist them in taking the life of the children in their womb. There is no effort to offer counseling or any kind of abortion alternative. Erickson writes, "Gaylor used the occasion of her 80th birthday to hold a fund-raising party for the fund at the Madison home of Dr. Dennis Christensen, an abortion provider who has since retired. Gaylor sent invitations far afield, including one to a well-to-do woman in California she'd never met but who had donated to the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The woman sent her regrets and a $20,000 check."
The bureaucratic rationing of health care is on it's way. It is stupid to think otherwise. If you do, better read Nat Hentoff's piece, "Health Care Rationing Obama Believes In". Excerpt:
Unlike Obama, Berwick is enthusiastically, openly candid in his support of Britain's socialistic National Health Service. In a 2008 speech to British physicians, our new health czar said: "I am romantic about National Health Service. I love it (because it is) 'generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just.'"
That "just" National Health Care Service decides which care can be too costly for the government to pay. Its real-time decider of life-or-death outcomes is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Here is how "nicely" it works, described by Michael Tanner, senior fellow and health-care expert at the Cato Institute (where I, too, am a senior fellow):
"It acts as a comparative-effectiveness tool for the National Health Care Service, comparing various treatments and determining whether the benefits the patients receives - SUCH AS PROLONGED LIFE - are cost-efficient for the government" (lifenews.com, May 27).
So listen to our very own decider of how the Obama administration will lower our national debt by cutting inefficient health-care costs. After declaring his ardent romantic attachment to the British system, Berwick said: "All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country." He will, of course, be too busy to attend the funerals of the sacrificial Americans whose lives - not only those of the elderly - may thereby be cut short.
I have always frowned at the radio whenever Rush Limbaugh confidently announces "There are no Pro-life Democrats." I've known some Pro-life Democrats--very sincere people. Obviously he means that there are no Pro-life Democrats in Congress, a claim at which I suppose I balk mainly due to my congenital optimism. Because it is getting harder and harder to support my opinion and ever more clear to see that once again, Rush is right. Witness the latest evidence detailed in the American Catholic blog. Excerpt:
Representative Joe Pitts (R. Pa) has introduced a new bill that bans abortion funding from ObamaCare. It largely replicates the language of the old Stupak Amendment. The bill has 57 co-sponsors and growing. Thus far these real pro-life Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors: Reps. Travis Childers of Mississippi, Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, Tim Holden of Pennsylvania, Dan Lipinski of Illinois, Jim Marshall of Georgia, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina and Gene Taylor of Mississippi. I salute each of them. Each of them voted against the final pro-abort version of ObamaCare. Bart Stupak and his “pro-life” Democrats who hid behind the fig leaf of the meaningless executive order in order to vote for ObamaCare, are of course not supporting this legislation. I think this is significant. ObamaCare passed. From the perspective of a truly pro-life Democrat who supported ObamaCare, why not amend the law now to ban abortion funding? Failure to support this legislation should finish the idea that such a Democrat in Congress is in any sense pro-life. This legislation should of course be a major voting issue for all pro-lifers in November.
Gerard Nadal, a molecular microbiologist, blogs about a recent interview with Fathers For Good regarding the link between abortion and breast cancer as well as the link between taking birth-control bills and cancer. Excerpt:
Fathers for Good: Briefly explain what you see as the abortion-breast cancer link.
Dr. Nadal: I first learned of the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link about three years ago when I came across a book entitled, Breast Cancer, Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill, written Chris Kahlenborn, a medical doctor. It’s a great read for those who are not medical professionals.
In brief, when women become pregnant for the first time, they make vastly increased amounts of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which stimulate the milk-producing tissue of the breast to undergo massive proliferation during the first trimester. These cells form the immature and cancer-prone Type-1 and Type-2 lobules. In the last trimester, hormonal changes will mature 85% of these lobules into cancer-resistant Type-3 and Type-4 lobules. Terminating the pregnancy through induced abortion robs these lobules of the last trimester’s maturation and leaves behind a great deal of newly made, cancer-prone cells.
Most women who have had miscarriages have miscarried precisely because they are not producing enough of the hormones estrogen and progesterone and have not undergone the proliferation of breast lobules. Therefore, they don’t share the same risk as women who have had induced abortions.
FFG: How is the birth-control pill implicated?
Dr. Nadal: The pill contains very high doses of synthetic estrogen and progesterone, which mimic a pregnancy followed by abortion on a monthly basis. Studies have shown frightening rates of breast cancer for women taking the pill or estrogen replacement therapy in menopause. They all share the same mechanism for cancer production as induced abortion. One recent study leads some of us to believe that the synthetic form of estrogen in the pill may be responsible for a particularly aggressive and deadly form of breast cancer called Triple Negative Breast Cancer.
Ann Coulter shows the absolute hypocrisy of the line "hey, it's only speech!" in this piece about those despicable Phelps cult people. Here's the meat:
True, speech will often be involved in inflicting emotional distress on someone, say, for example, standing outside a funeral with signs that say "God Hates You!"
Similarly, words are used in committing treason ("The Americans are over here!"), robbery ("Your money or your life!") and sexual harassment ("Have sex with me or you're fired."). Copyright law prohibits speech that uses someone else's words, and insider trading and trade-secrets laws prohibit the use of words revealing insider information or trade secrets.
The fact that "speech" was involved in the Fred Phelps cult's assault on Matthew Snyder's funeral is a mundane and irrelevant fact. The question is: Did that speech constitute intentional infliction of emotional distress? Hey, look! That reasonable man over there is nodding his head "yes." If so, the First Amendment is as irrelevant as it is to a copyright law violation.
The Supreme Court has upheld shockingly restrictive bans on speech outside of abortion clinics: content-based restrictions on the speech of pro-lifers singing, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world."
Is abortion more sacrosanct than a son's funeral? Is singing "Jesus loves the little children" deserving of less First Amendment protection than placards saying, "God Loves Dead Soldiers"? Hey, reasonable man over there -- got a minute?
The blogosphere is sort of like a fun house with a vast array of forked paths which defy normal architecture. You'll start reading one thing, but jump to a link in the middle of a paragraph and you might never go back. This is why I think the term web-surfing as derived from channel surfing is a shade inaccurate; channel surfing with a TV remote is merely a sequential scan of options whereas the following of links from one page to another has a logical connection or at least some sort of subjective relationship in the reader's mind.
This is true even when no explicit link is provided. I was reading a post by Amy Welborn last week called "Coming to you from Yale" about her daughter's application interview to the Ivy League school. At some point she completely removed the post, most likely due to comments which were candidly discussing the pros and cons of attending a prestigious university which is terribly expensive and not terribly friendly to the claims and moral principles of Christianity. One of the readers brought up the infamous smeared fetus art exhibit as an example of the poison ivy league culture.
Another comment pointed out a piece by Walter Kirn called "How I lost my mind at Princeton" which I found by Googling. It was certainly worth wading through the banalities of Welborn's temporary post to find Kirn's nightmarish recollection of his mental breakdown.
Twenty-five years ago, at age 19, I lost my mind at Princeton University, the place where I'd gone to find my mind (and, if possible, enlarge it) after sailing away from my rural Midwestern home on the magic carpet of high standardized-test scores. My breakdown was social and intellectual rather than narrowly psychological, triggered by two great sources of grinding stress: a class system dominated by the wealthy that kept me in the shadows of campus life and, No. 2, the mental confusion bred by the baffling new academic fashions known as “Deconstructionism” and “Theory.” The clubby rich descendants of the old guard, with their scuffed-up Topsider shoes and sun-bleached polo shirts, their guaranteed jobs at family brokerages, and their spiffy BMW coupes for weekend jaunts to Nantucket and the Cape, made me feel marginal and shabby, while the lofty proponents of Theory made me feel dumb.
And ultimately, once my alienation had festered, I could barely communicate or think. At the low point of my breakdown, spoken words sounded like globs of sonic mud, while written words writhed on the page like dying spiders. I could still speak, but I knew not what I uttered. I merely moved my lips and hoped.
The nemesis we'd confronted, our common adversary, was an impoverished definition of human intelligence itself—one that inevitably, I came to think, molded and deformed our spirits. To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) and raised on the pseudo-scientific notion that mental worth can be ranked in cold "percentiles," intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It was an empty vessel, void of content and void of passion, too.
Of course, religion has classically provided the answers to transcendent and ultimate questions of life. The problem is that everyone is afraid religion might offend somebody. Therefore we will continue to accept insanity instead as the lesser of two evils, even among the best and brightest among us. I guess "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" is old hat in the modern world. Welcome to Princeton; here's your straight jacket.
Well, I already posted about "pillution" here, but LifeSite news has the scoop now, and it ain't just fish, fellas.
VATICAN CITY, January 7, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An eminent doctor writing for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano has stated that hormones from the contraceptive pill are causing a significant rise in male infertility in western nations.
Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, President of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations (FIAMC), writes that "we have sufficient data to affirm that one of the reasons for the not insignificant rise in male infertility in the west (due to increasingly fewer sperm in men), is the environmental contamination caused by 'the pill'."
"We are confronted with a clear anti-ecological effect that demands further explanation from the manufacturers," continued Castellvi, who also noted that the abortifacient and carcinogenic effects of the contraceptive pill are also well known (see LifeSiteNews coverage at http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jan/09010504.html).
Castellvi's statements echo similar utterances made by numerous other medical and scientific experts since 2004. Female hormones from birth control pills, which enter the water supply through urination, are being blamed for declining sperm counts in human and animal populations, the growth of female sex organs in male fish, breast growth in young men, and early onset of puberty in young girls.
In September of last year, a scientist at the University of Montreal's Department of Chemistry announced the discovery that Montreal's water treatment plant was dumping estrogen products into rivers at a level 90 times the critical amount, a level far beyond the minimum for disrupting the fertility of fish.
Last week, Mexico's Secretariat of Health issued a warning that use of the contraceptive pill during pregnancy could raise the risk of "genital ambiguity," also known as hermaphrodism, in newborns.
