So we now have a double mystery: an extremely dangerous regime in Iran doing we know not what, and standing against it, an American president who does not know what he is doing.
The flow of medical supplies waiting to be distributed to tens of thousands of earthquake victims in Haiti was delayed for weeks by a massive supply of condoms dominating the space of the main storage facility...
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shipping containers of medical supplies were unable to be unloaded, sorted and distributed since an enormous supply of condoms clogged the facility till early February, when the condoms could be removed. The condoms were estimated to take up about 70% of the space in the 17,000 sq. ft. warehouse.
When Canadian General Romeo Dallaire returned from Rwanda in the aftermath of the Rwandan Massacre he noted in a 1996 speech that military personnel referred to UN and other foreign aid as "covering the country with rubber."At least the condoms don't go to waste, however, which should make WHO, Planned Parenthood International and their ilk extremely glad:
Dallaire explained that tons of condoms and other contraceptives were being shipped to and distributed around the region in quantities far beyond what the population could use and in place of much more needed food, medicine and other critically needed aid. Medicine stores, he said, were filled with contraceptives and extremely short of any supplies to treat wounded Rwandans.
With business-savy ingenuity some in the developing world have turned the condom dumping by the West to their advantage. The BBC reported in 2004 that in one Indian city alone 600,000 condoms a day were used in the sari-weaving industry. Sari weavers use the lubrication in the condoms to soften the loom's shuttle making weaving faster, without risking stains to the silk.LifeSite News
The swelling obesity rate in the United States has also seen medical costs associated with excessive weight balloon from around 78 billion dollars a year in 1998 to around 147 billion dollars annually in 2006, a study released last year showed.
The president of NOW, one of the leading forces urging CBS to remove the ad, responded by condemning the ad's “celebration” of violence against women, in a reference to Tim’s tackling of his mom.Pro-life blogger Dr. Gerard Nadal says:
"I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it," said NOW's Terry O'Neill...
[...] the ad's great success lay in focusing attention on the pro-abortion lobby's reaction to a simple celebration of life.
"Focus on the Family are expert fisherman, and you Big Mouth Bass took the bait," said Nadal in an open letter to Planned Parenthood and NOW.
"You allowed yourselves to be exposed for just who and what you are: Haters of motherhood, fatherhood, family and babies."
Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may "honestly" think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on "the right side of history," that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.No, I have not cut and pasted the whole thing. Do read it all.
Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind "AGW" -- not "most," but all -- have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don't know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow.
This should have been obvious to climatologists from the beginning. At the simplest level, they could observe that global temperature estimates depended on a slur of constantly changing thermometer locations and time sequences. NASA's recent admissions are the more pathetic for that reason: from the top down, these were men who should have known better than to think they could fly beyond the end of such a limb.
I have argued previously for chastity: not limited to the sexual sense, of keeping one's pants on. The virtue of chastity requires us to look at the world without immediately engaging our desires. Those desires are often not sexual at all; some of the most powerful involve justifying one's livelihood. A scientist with an interest in getting a result is under huge temptation, compounded by the huge public funding on which his research depends.
Our mysterious capacity for chastity can put us above the animal level: for if we try, we can actually remove the blinkers of, "What's in it for me?" -- and discover truths larger than ourselves. The highest arts and sciences require alike the highest conditions of chastity. It is what lifts us above the groundhogs.
It is something straight out of a George Orwell novel: the Victorian government has appointed a member of parliament to become “Minister for Respect”.
the "choice" movement is not truly about giving women one
A lot of environmentalists think they need to convince people that the way they live their lives is wrong," she adds. "They want us to stop sinning so they try to scare us into conversion with predictions of high-carbon hell. But it's not an effective message.
"We need to start selling people a vision of low-carbon heaven," Ms Townsend argues.
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For Palmer, who is a United Nations adviser on climate change and religion, the green movement's appropriation of religious language and imagery has backfired.
"Environmentalists have stolen fear, guilt and sin from religion, but they have left behind celebration, hope and redemption," he says.
Johnson, the gravel-voiced British singer of Australia’s biggest rock band, has joined a growing group of critics of Geldof and the U2 singer over their very public charity work, saying they should stop lecturing audiences about charity work and instead do their good deeds in private. [...]
He then offered some words of advice to his fellow rockers: “I’m sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done.
It's a case study in the conundrum of liberal ideology: radical feminist groups declaring that a woman's choice to not have an abortion is, somehow, anti-choice.David N. Bass at The American Spectator discusses the mental gymnastics required by pro-choicers who are anti-choice when it comes to Tim Tebow's mom's choice.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, makes the valid point that feminists' worst-case scenario for the ad is that women "are exposed to an example of sacrifice for the sake of an unborn child."
Shocking, I know, especially when viewers could be watching naked women in the shower or a woman exposing her endowments during a congressional hearing.
It's a wonder anyone takes feminists seriously when their hypocrisy is so manifold.
...a novel which exalts the worst kind of self-pitying adolescent narcissism, and holds it up as an ideal, through adulthood to a senile old age.When I read those lines, I thought, 'Surely Mr. Warren will, at some point in this essay, mention the very person whom this description calls to mind.' I was not disappointed.
Indeed, one cannot look through the list of President Obama's strange and demented policy czars without spotting so many Holden Caulfields, nor escape their ever-presence among the talking heads of MSNBC. And in watching the president's State of the Union address this week, I had the distinct impression of a man whose big-government vision rests less in Marxism than in the faux-naïf of "a catcher in the rye."for any who would like to brush up on Catcher, here is Larry Thornberry's take on the novel. (American Spectator)
While it's easy to see why adolescents, particularly of the indulged sort, would find this kind of thing attractive. It's more of a mystery why grownups, some disguised as teachers and lit professors, praise this nonsense and oblige high school and college students to read it. This is almost child abuse. [...]
No one over the weekend would come out and say it, so allow me to. This literary emperor is wearing no clothes. His only novel and its chief character are contemptible.
There are many and huge ramifications, but the chief one is that the decision attacks the contemporary lobbying system. In effect, those advancing special interests are condemned to lobbying the entire electorate, instead of just lobbying the politicians behind closed doors. This directly undermines the political class. It goes to the heart of their ability to broker deals not in the public interest, and pass them into law without public debate.
And that in turn is why the response to the decision from the political class has been unfriendly to the edge of berserk. They correctly understand that "politics as usual" is now under review, actually and not rhetorically.
Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn't blaming George W. Bush, Obama blames "Washington" – a Washington mired in "partisanship" and "pettiness" and "the same tired battles" and "Washington gimmicks" that do nothing but ensure that our "problems have grown worse." Washington, Obama tells us, is "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems."
So let's have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama's speeches?
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Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.
And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness.
