Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Clinical Waste
Clinical waste. That’s basically what an aborted fetus is now considered as, at least at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge.
One of the country’s leading hospitals is throwing aborted babies into the same incinerator used for rubbish to save only £18.50 each time, it has emerged.
But, it’s not as gruesome as it sounds, according to the hospital, anyway.
A white sheet is placed over the front of the furnace and the process is witnessed by two members of staff working in bereavement care.
Clinical waste. Jeebus.
Hospital admits to burning aborted babies in waste incinerator
Feelings, For the Children
At Hillsborough High School, in Florida, the student published paper attempted to publish an article on the so called “achievement gap.” You know the one, the gap between test scores of students based on race.
The article, which was yanked by the school’s principal, William Orr, was not publishing anything new, radical, or offensive, in that the article contained data that is easily available from the federal government, who wants no child left behind, or, the State of Florida’s own Education Department’s website. So why was the article yanked?
"If it’s something that has a potential to hurt students’ self-esteem, then I have an obligation not to let that happen,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the job of the school newspaper to embarrass the students."
Feelings, can’t have those hurt, can we.
It’s interesting to note, also, the school’s thoughts on if the article would have been published in a real newspaper, you know, one that doesn’t have students reporting.
"If it had appeared in the Tampa Tribune or St. Petersburg Times, we wouldn’t have thought anything of it,” said Bertha Baker, assistant principal for administration. “But a student newspaper has to be a little more sensitive to the feelings of the students."
Free Markets
The technique was first confined to patients who had suffered burns or congenital malformations of the eye. But word spread and about 80 percent are now done for cosmetic reasons.
The above quote was culled from a Reuters article titled Eyelash transplants set to sweep nip tuck world.
Though I personally think the $3,000.00 cost, per eye, spent for an eyelash transplant is mere vanity stroking, I like the idea that when the demand called, the market responded.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Don't Miss the Connection
In a post titled Know Your Enemy, Billy Beck has this to say about Hillary Clinton.
She is a steely-eyed Stalinist, on a mission to save the world. Her religion is temporally coincident with the leftist philosophy which has suffused the time of her life, and there is actually no fundamental contradiction here. People might scream about abortion in this context, but that is really only a (logically) high-level concrete of no serious consequence to her fundamentals. You can point out that contradiction, she will dismiss it flippantly and then carry on. It’s not a big deal because her basic socialism is unquestionably Christian in character.
In response to Billy’s post, Bithead, over at Bit’sBlog, titles a post Oh, I’ll questiton it... and states the following.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly Christian about the policies of Stalin.
Now, were you to say that she has taken on Christianity as an affectation so as to reduce voter resistance to her and her policies, you would be a great deal more accurate. I put that in the same mold as Bubba waltzing out of a church with a huge Bible in his hand, and then going back to the oval office to find Monica still waiting for him, under the desk. There’s no question in my mind whatever, that both of them wrapped themselves in the outward trappings of Christianity for one reason; to advance their political goals.
Bithead then ends his post with this comment.
Christianity as a belief structure holds no motivation for either of them. Rather, being identified so is a means to power, for it’s own sake. That, in fact, is the only thing that’s ever driven either one of them.
While Bithead is correct that there is not “anything particularly Christian about the policies of Stalin,” and that there is an expediency to the Clinton’s being associated with Christianity, I think he is misunderstanding the premise of Billy’s post.
Stalin’s policies were, indeed, monsterous. His policies devoured hordes of individuals, not very Christian, as he attempted to guild the fallacy that is socialism. Be that as it may, the socialist mind, and the Christian mind, are not that far apart in their ideologies to “save the world."
There are many similarities between Christianity and Socialism, both ideologies founded by Jews who in their own lifetimes were hated by the authorities and had to flee to other countries. Marxism has its own “old and new testaments”: Das Kapital and State and Revolution respectively. There are direct comparisons between the letters of the apostles and those books written by exiles to “believers”in other countries giving advice etc. such as Lenin’s “What is to be done?”.
Crimes have been committed in the name of the two ideologies by people who really didn’t represent the movements; the Spanish inquisition, witch burning, and Stalinist terror.
More importantly, both want to change the world for the better, eliminate poverty of both lifestyle and health (even though Christ said that the poor would always be with us), restore and improve the natural environment and bring an end to wars. Even though we disagree on homosexuality, sex before marriage and abortion, in those issues on which we have common ground socialists and Christians have had a long and healthy tradition of working together in the past and no doubt will have in the future.
The above quote was written by a third year chemistry student, and I do not think that one needs a more learned discourse from some professorial moonbat in this case to understand that the connection Billy points to in his post is unquestionably there.
Quote for the Day and Late at Night
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
The above quote was lifted from the Samizdata website and is part of a post which notes a disturbing aspect of admittance to late night drinking and dancing clubs in Britain. The disturbing aspect of admittance, is the requirement for these clubs to fingerprint those wishing to avail themselves of the clubs’ services. Though a patron may decline to submit to such an intrusion, the club is obligated by the state to request that the patrons comply, and, I would wager, that at some point in the not too distant future those wishing to patronize the clubs will similarly be under the same state obligation.
The piece is titled “Power tends to corrupt,” but unfortunately not always.
Obama Wama Ding Dong
Yesterday’s big political news seemed to be centered around Barack Obama, who might, or might not, declare to run for president in 2008. Many of the articles I quickly perused, which noted this, presented this supposed news as, well, news. I find this as rather disingenuous since every article I’ve perused on Obama over the past year or so has presented Obama as sort of a reincarnation of Camelot themed graciousness in African American packaging.
Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, notes Obama’s maybe, maybe not, 2008 presidential campaign trial balloon in a piece titled Why Not Obama?
The opening paragraphs of Cohen’s piece initially seem to imply that Cohen is skeptical of Obama’s worthiness for the high office of president.
Ancient Rome had a term for a certain political process: cursus honorum, the honors race. It was, I am told by Anthony Everitt in his new biography, “Augustus,” the process by which politicians moved up the ladder. Along the way, they were evaluated until, finally, some made it to the top. Nowadays, the system is different. All you have to do is appear on “Oprah.”
I am referring, obviously and insidiously, to Barack Obama, who announced Sunday that he might run for president. This followed, of course, the aforementioned appearance on “Oprah” which I, diligent in pursuit of truth, watched. This is how I learned that Obama loves his wife and she loves him and they both love their children. Cursus honorum this is not.
But Cohen’s skepticism regarding Obama only lasts for the first three paragraphs of his piece and then oh so subtlely shifts gears.
And yet I cheer his announcement that he might announce he is going to announce—something like that. I say this not just because I have been following his career out of the corner of my eye—my, my, ain’t he a natural!—but because I’ve actually been reading his speeches. The one he gave on the role of religion in politics was as smart a speech as I’ve ever read. It’s the sort of thing John F. Kennedy could have given, only his would have been written by someone else, probably Ted Sorensen.
In the remainder of Cohen’s piece, he exhults Obama’s heritage (American mother, African father - ain’t that American?) and the message his “complexion” sends, and his stance on Iraq, both now and prior to the actions which commenced over there, and then Cohen ends his piece with a full on acceptance of Obama as a contendor.
But if he could sharpen the focus of the other candidates about Iraq, if he could somehow disengage the United States from Iraq—if he could, in other words, stop wasting American (and other) lives—then his candidacy would hardly be an insult to the system, as some insist, but a gift.
I, for one, accept.
Let the Obama Wama Ding Dong in 2008 begin.
Ya Big Baby
Growing up with five brothers I often heard, and used, the term, “Ya big baby.” At one time or another, each of us brothers subjected the others to some sort of brotherly abuse, either physical or mental, which subsequently could lead to one of us heading for mom’s apron strings wailing out about how the abuser was “going to get it now,” and the typical retort to that little threat was “Ya big baby.”
Fortunately, my mother, who was busy enough running a household of eight kids and a dog, would usually tell the offended one to go work it out with the offendee, rather than coddling us, so we toughened up pretty good and learned to manage our own affairs. Pity that this isn’t more prevalent in life today.
I mention this because I just read an excerpt from Michael Bywater’s book Big Babies (no link at Amazon) which makes for an interesting morning read. From the piece.
Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn’t done or which it hadn’t even occurred to you to do.
The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.
The excerpt was published in the Telegraph and is titled We’re all big babies.
Monday, October 23, 2006
She's Easy
It seems as if there is always one woman in the crowd, or at a party, who has the reputation of being “easy.” The woman may straightforwardly be promiscuous, or may simply be susceptible to the age old problem of PWD (promiscuous when drunk).
Of course most individuals, when they consider promiscuity, consider it in light of sexual situations, rather than voting, but this morning, Monique Doyle Spencer likens the sale of her vote, to the Democratic party, to promiscuity.
But, dear Democratic leadership, I have news: I am not speaking to you anymore. I know the truth now: You take me for granted. You know I will vote with you. You don’t have to do a thing for me, I’ll still get in the back seat. And this has got to stop.
Note that Ms. Spencer acknowledges her voting promiscuity “has got to stop,” but, she does not acknowledge that she is the one who has to stop it. Instead, she calls on the “dear Democratic leadership,” like she’s a brainwashed North Korean, to end her back seat weakness.
Ms. Spencer titled her op-ed piece, published in the Boston Globe How to get my vote?, but a more apt title could be, “You’ve Got My Vote, Will You Call Me in the Morning, Dear?”
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Dr. of Socialism in Training
The New York Times has published an op-ed piece written by Rebecca Jacobsen. Ms. Jacobsen, per the short bio at the end of the piece, is “a former teacher” and is currently a “doctoral candidate in the politics and education program” at Teachers College, Columbia Universtiy.
It is indeed a sorry state of affairs that such a program exists, because it produces individuals, in this case Ms. Jacobsen, who have the audacity to state things like this.
One of the most important functions of school is to teach citizenship and community responsibility to each new generation.
Shouldn’t the most important function of schools be to teach individuals to learn history, math, spelling, and English, and to instill a thirst for additional knowledge by encouraging students to continually ask questions of the world which surrounds them, rather than to create automatons spouting the party line?
Ms. Jacobsen’s op-ed piece is titled Press #1 for a Bad Idea.
Friday, October 20, 2006
On Rats Racing
Via Arts & Letters Daily, we are treated to a Will Wilkinson piece titled Out of position: Against the politics of relative standing.
In his piece, Wilkinson deconstructs the specious arguments of those arguing the relative position, and though the piece is a bit long (get a fresh cuppa in your hand), it’s definitely worth a read. From the piece.
Policy arguments like Cassidy’s that pivot on the alleged importance of relative position rather than absolute opportunity and wealth, are now much in vogue—on the left, at least. The politics of relative position is the egalitarian welfare statist’s new favorite game. Richard Layard, head of the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance and member of the British House of Lords, argues that considerations of relative position justify regulating and even censoring advertising, for it makes us feel bad to see people who own things we cannot afford, and even if we can afford them, having them wouldn’t make us happy.[3] British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson claims that low relative income is a direct cause of illness, and that equalising income redistribution ought to be reconceived as a ‘public health’ measure.[4] Cornell University economist Robert Frank argues in rigorous detail for a steep consumption tax designed to dampen the alleged enthusiasm for zero-sum status races through the display of opulence.[5] ‘Every time [some people] raise their relative income (which they like),’ Layard writes, following Frank, ‘they lower the relative income of other people (which those people dislike). This is an “external disbenefit” imposed on others, a form of physical pollution.’[6] The solution? Slap a tax on ‘the polluting activity’—you and me working hard to get a raise—in order to get us to play more and produce less.
Are these arguments any good? Does our taste for relative position help vindicate egalitarian social democracy? The answer is no. A more benign and scientifically adequate picture of human nature, together with a more up-to-date notion of ‘externalities,’ show the politics of relative position to be a non-starter.
Sexual Overload
Ben Stein, writing at The American Spectator, has some interesting commentary, spurred by the Foley Follies, on sex in American society.
...The media and the pundits are acting as if something brand new happened when a grown up discovered the sexuality of teenagers. They’re acting as if teenagers are innocent little children who never heard of sex until they got e-mails from a Member of Congress.
The truth is just the opposite. This is a nation that is absolutely drenched in juvenile sex. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but it sure was going on when I was a teenager and that was a long time ago in the days of James Dean. The problem is vastly more prevalent now.
The rest of Stein’s piece, titled Pedophile Nation is worth a read.
Books for Bullets
In Oklahoma, an individual by the name of Bill Crozier is running for the position of state superintendent of education. Crozier is proposing, as a protective measure for students, not to arm teachers in the classroom, but this,
...said he believes old textbooks could be used to stop bullets shot from weapons wielded by school intruders.
If elected, he said he would put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self-defense.
Now there’s an election promise for you. The only problem, as Bill demonstrated for teevee station KOCO in Okalahoma, is this.
Crozier’s experiment began with shots fired at a calculus textbook from an AK-47 Russian-style assault rifle. The shot penetrated two textbooks at once.
Though, in fairness, Crozier’s experiment was successful when handguns were utilized during the experiment.
The story is titled Candidate: Use Textbooks As Shields From School Shooters and comes complete with video.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Ohio - We Are the State and You Will Do As We Say
Self reliance is seemingly an anathema to the state. Oh sure, I hear politicians, both from the right and the left, mouthing platitudes to self reliance. In fact, just yesterday afternoon, I overheard Senator Obama mouth just those platitudes on Oprah’s show as I stood in the kitchen peeling a few potatoes.
In actuality, though, the state desires nothing more than that each and every individual become beholden to the state for life and liberty.
A prime example of this follows.
Two northeast Ohio counties are being ordered by the state to try to boost the number of Amish receiving food stamps.
But, you say, don’t the Amish shun any government involvement in their lives? Of course they do, but the state has spoken and the two Ohio counties, Geauga and Holmes, will kowtow to the state’s will in the following manner.
Geauga and Holmes counties plan to start advertising campaigns to encourage Amish to enroll in the subsidy program. Holmes may use a billboard to get the message out.
If I understand the Amish at all, the counties’ campaign will fail miserably, but even so it does not excuse the imbecility of the state’s position.
Officials To Try To Boost Number Of Amish Receiving Food Stamps
Via WSJ’s Best of the Web.
Reflect on This
Via the Mises Blog, we are treated to a piece written by Jayant Bhandari titled Let Cultures Play Out Their Own Problems.
Though Bhandari is writing in regards to India’s culture, the words he has penned have implications for every society where interference by outside forces (think about Iraq) are attempting to accelerate changes in society. From Bhandari’s piece.
An individual can cajole, persuade, or even beg, but he has no right to use force to stop others from killing themselves. Most importantly, institutions, particularly the state, should certainly stay out of all such affairs. The state’s involvement is inherently corrupting, invariably creating worse problems than it solves. It cannot change the problems’ roots. It can only sanitize the façade, brushing the real problems under the carpet. Problems will then simmer and, eventually, surface in new avatars.
I Hope She Beats the Rap
A 67-year-old Brazilian grandmother who shot and wounded a bag-snatcher in Rio de Janeiro will get a medal from the crime-ridden city’s legislators even though she faces trial for illegal gun possession.
Go Granny!
About
The author is an ex-submariner, questioner of authority, cigar smoking fly-fishing fanatic who wants to live to be 103
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- Artificially Mandated Demand Consequences - Redux
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