While the show of President Clinton going paranoid during a Fox news interview may be further evidence of his character (or lack thereof), there is danger that it will draw attention away from something more important.  Could President Clinton have captured bin Laden and prevented 9/11?  In the bigger picture, it doesn't matter.  9/11 was a symptom, not the disease.  Capturing bin Laden might have stopped that specific attack on the United States, but some other jihadist would have made some other attack.  The desire to kill "infidels" (aka innocent non-Muslims) in the "Great Satan" would eventually have led to something similar or even worse on some other date.

It is possible that President Clinton actually did us a long-term favor by not capturing bin Laden.  This failure is one of the evidences that people like Bill Clinton, or those even further left in the Democratic party, can't be trusted with the security of this country.

Nerdus

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I have toyed with the idea of starting a bumper sticker and t-shirts business to capitalize on the fun little phrases that pop into my head.  This might be the first phrase.  I particularly like the irony of using a liberal buzzword to insult them.
It has been insanely busy at work and church, but I hope to have time to work up a series of posts on bias that I have planned.

Nerdus

I have recently found out that puppies are made in a factory.  At one of the earliest stages of production a test is performed to determine how well the dog will perform as a watchdog.  If the partially completed puppy fails this test, they make it a retriever.

Nerdus

Rebuttal from Bigicus Mutticus:

When a stranger comes to the door I protect Mrs. Maximus from behind!

 

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I have been really busy studying Confusion, the famous Canachinadian philosopher.   These are my favorite Confusionism so far:

Even a man who is on the right track can get run over by a train.

The carrot and the stick both work, but the carrot gets eaten.

 

Nerdus

 

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It wouldn’t really be very hard to figure out which prize you wanted to claim, would it?  Quantity isn’t always a good thing.  In fact, more of a bad thing is undesirable.  This can lead to some uncomfortable places when applied to voter turnout.

Over the history of democracy there has been a tendency to increase the percentage of the population that is eligible to vote and a corresponding tendency to think of more people voting as an unmitigated positive.  There have undoubtedly been vote restricting laws that were intended to harm or disenfranchise groups of people, and that was wrong.  But what if some of the rules that limited who could vote the early years of democracy had a point?  I suspect this may have been the case. 

A vote is a serious thing and not everyone is capable of being serious.  We recognize this by not allowing people to vote until they are eighteen years old.  If you have any doubts about the wisdom of not letting 16 year olds vote, let me introduce you to my son.  He is very intelligent and articulate (we have test results to prove it) and well informed (my opinion) for a 16 year old, but a 5 minute conversation is all it would take for you to be glad he can’t vote.  Unfortunately, I find he is much more capable of holding a considered opinion than most 18 year olds I’ve met, and the law allows them to vote.

This is the point at which I begin to wonder if “get out the vote” efforts are a good thing.  Do the votes of people who have made no attempt to become informed about the issues and knowledgeable of the candidates “stands” improve the quality of an election?  The key to victory in elections today is how good your strategists are at raising money and using it to get people to vote for you with as little information as possible.  Don’t think, just vote for me.

What can be done about it?  My first quite impractical thought was a voter qualification test.  Correctly answer 20 of 25 questions randomly pulled from a pool of 500 questions on current events, American History and basic civics and you get to vote.  Don’t know that there are 100 U.S. Senators? Sorry, but can’t vote for one.

 

Nerdus

 

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Mary Catherine Ham is the first person I’ve seen use it, but I’m sure she won’t be the last.  “fauxtography”. (copy this into your browser address bar if the link doesn’t work: http://www.townhall.com/blog/#ccb99f35-9062-4908-a973-e0c3811c8c4b).

It is a perfect description of the kinds of things the blogosphere has been catching the MSM doing.  I offer the following definition:

Fauxtography – The practice of using altered, cropped or otherwise misleading photographs to create a false impression equal to a lie that is a thousand words long.

I also recommend the coining of another new word – Reuterized!

Nerdus

 

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If a person who publicly proclaims that he no longer lives in Texas can't get off the ballot without making it a one candidate race because he can't prove conclusively that he won't be a resident of Texas on election day, then I should be able to get an absentee ballot to vote in Texas unless it can be proven conclusively that I won't be a resident of Texas on election day.  Sure, I’m moving to Texas (wink, wink).

The incredible disregard for anything even resembling consistency in letting Lautenberg replace Torricelli even though it clearly broke New Jersey election law to do so and then jury-rigging (Yes, I know it was just judges.  Think McGiver.) some flimsy interpretation of the U. S. Constitution to nullify Texas election law so DeLay can’t get off the ballot without leaving his party off the ballot is absolutely astounding!  The "goal" in both cases was supposedly to make sure the people had a choice.  This points out, again, how important it is to have judges that won’t use their position for partisan gains.

The next move the Republicans need to make is an all out assault to expose Ronnie Earl (the District Attorney who engineered the trumped up indictment of Tom Delay) for the complete fraud and political hack that he is.  This should become the nationally known “culture of corruption” story that the Democrats were hoping they would be able to use against the Republicans until “Dollar Bill” Jefferson’s frozen assets got defrosted by the FBI.

 

Nerdus

 

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One of the distinctions conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives,  have over liberals is the ability to see their own faults and discuss them publicly.  Doug Giles does an excellent job in his post on Gluttony (this is a Townhall link, so you may have to copy the following and paste it into the address bar of your browser: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DougGiles/2006/08/05/the_se7en_deadly_sins:_gluttony).

The best line in an excellent and balanced treatment of the subject is the explanation that churches don’t pursue the sin of gluttony as whole heartedly as some other sins because “the church is packing more pork than a congressional subcommittee.”  (In the interest of honest self disclosure, I could stand to lose a few pounds.)  He also points out that obesity is not the only form or result of gluttony.  At its core gluttony is the idolatry of worshipping food.  In modern parlance it is living to eat rather than eating to live.  Sometimes that means endless Big Macs, but other times it means being a Veegan.  In my experience the Veegan is more likely to live to eat than is the average McDonald’s customer.

The value of his post is more than just an excellent discussion of a topic near and dear to the hearts (and arteries) of many Americans of every0 political and religious stripe.  It is also a good reminder that when you point your finger at someone else you are pointing four back at yourself.  Now where are those tofu burgers we bought?

 

Nerdus

Rebuttal from Faticus Caticus:

Lacking opposable thumbs, I can eat only what Nerdus opens for me.

Faticus

 

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When Americans hear the phrase “civil war” in relation to the situation in Iraq we are likely to think of our own “Civil War”.  This can be very misleading.  The source of conflict that defined the sides in our “Civil War” was very different than in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East.

Any true Son of the South still refers to the U.S. Civil War as “The War Between the States”.  The dominant determiner of which side a person would be on was residency in a “slave state” or a “free state”.  At its base this was an economic conflict with strong ethical overtones.  This is a stark contrast to conflicts in the Middle East that are being referred to as “civil wars”.  The dominant determiner of which side a person will be on there is to which branch of Islam they are at least a nominal adherent.  An Iraqi Shiite is more likely to side with an Iranian Shiite than with an Iraqi Sunni.  As a result we see situations where Iranian Shiites come into Iraq to fight in the “civil war”.  This is much like if the U.S. Civil War had included large numbers of pro-slavery Spaniards and anti-slavery Englishmen who came to the United States to do battle for their sides.  It is a huge mistake to think fo the U.S. Civil War when you hear the phrase “civil war” used of current conflicts in the Middle East.

The best example of a similar conflict in a Western democracy is probably the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants.  While there were not a great number of direct actors from other countries, the base of the conflict was a religious affiliation.  It also featured terrorist cells who hated each other and the national authority equally.

What is a “civil war”?  That is hard to say, but one thing that is certain is that the current conflicts in the Middle East bear very little resemblance to the U.S. Civil War.

 

Nerdus

 

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Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, but this one seems to be on the order of the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of having the prospective bride and groom sleep in the same bed with a board between them (and a shotgun toting father of the prospective bride somewhere in the house).  It seems that some of the donations that helped the Green Party in Pennsylvania get enough signatures to land their candidate for the U.S. Senate on the ballot came from – Republicans!  The story is that people friendly to the Santorum campaign gave money to the Greens hoping they would draw votes away from Bobby Casey.  The Democrats, of course, are thinking about going to court since they seem to think that is where every election should actually be decided.  I think even they will have to admit that it was a smart move on the part of the Santorum campaign.

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One of the key factors that makes traditional marriage valuable, if not indispensable, to society is the security a lifelong marital relationship provides for the children.   Rebecca Hagelin addresses this from the perspective of the positive effects the presence of her father has in a woman’s life, particularly in her younger years.  She also points to a resource forfinding family positive information.  The article can be found in Townhall or at ReligionAndSpiritualityForum if there is a problem with the link to Townhall.

What is astounding is how hard many people will work to ignore the demonstrable benefits of traditional marriage and try to justify “alternative lifestyles”.  Unfortunately, this is one area where working hard is more effective than working smart.

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It was something of a sign of the times in my college years that a woman anticipating marriage had to think about what her name would become.  It even became an option that it wouldn’t change at all.  There is a new, but related, sign of the time.  My daughter’s pre-wedding decisions included getting new e-mail addresses that coordinate with the name she picked.  Oh well, we had more monogrammed stuff.

Doug Giles writes about greed as one of the seven deadly sins.  He mentions that hasn’t and won’t work, but doesn’t say why.  I have found it helpful to approach all economic systems as answers to the problem of greed, which makes it clear why most of them don’t work.

Communism tries to contain greed by involving everyone in the community in every decision.  This doesn’t work well if the group is large or the decisions are complex.

Socialism is an attempt to keep the “everyone owns everything” element of Communism while entrusting complex decisions to specialists.  The problem here is that greed has an easy path to corrupt the specialist.

Capitalism takes a different approach.  It makes one person’s greed eventually have to help others to move towards its goal.  The greed-driven individual can amass only so much single-handedly because there are only 24 hours in a day.  The path to advancement requires getting others to willingly participate in your pursuit of gain.  These may be employees or stockholders, but their cooperation is essential to further gain.  If you treat your stockholders or employees badly they will abandon you, which is expensive.

Greed is a virulent evil, but capitalism has more ability to develop antibodies than any other economic system yet devised.

 

Nerdus

 

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My apologies, but links from here directly to Townhall articles are not working.  The easiest way to get the the Mike Adams article is to copy the link below and paste it into a new browser tab or window.  You are looking for an article titled Three Men and a baby by Mike Adams.

Links to articles outside of Townhall seem to work fine, so I will source things that way when possible while looking for a way to get Townhall to Townhall to work.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/Default.aspx

Nerdus

A recent Mike Adams article responds to some common claims by homosexual activists, in particular that homosexuality must be accepted because it "is genetic".  Dr. Adams, and many of those who commented, take the argument to moral grounds.  Taking such a direction is likely to insure that it remains an argument.  There is a logically more effective answer to this particular claim, although counting on logic to mean much when talking to a Gay Rights Koo-Aid drinker is also likely a mistake.  Nonetheless, it is worth knowing the approach.
The key here is that the person advancing the "It is genetic, therefore it must be good." argument is confusing naturally occurring with good. There are a number of examples that can expose this fallacy without need for any moral agreement.   Alcoholism is the best example to use because it is also widely believed to be a genetic predisposition and it results in behavior rather than directly as physical disease.  Unless the pro-gay speaker wants to maintain that alcoholism is good, the "it's genetic" argument looses all power.  The table is set to put the pro-gay speaker on the defensive.  Two approaches are readily available.
The first is to ask the pro-gay speaker what evolutionary survival value homosexuality has.  Silence they very likely espouse Darwinism they are exposed as a fraud if they can't handle this well.  Worst case scenario is to point out that you would not likely higher a contractor who can't figure out that certain electrical or plumbing parts are designed to fit together and others aren't.
Another approach is to ask the pro-gay speaker to positively demonstrate what good homosexuality has done for society.  The probably response will be bowing at the alter of acceptance.  Continuing to ask for concrete examples, such as the continuation of the species and society through procreation will usually leave the pro-gay speaker either ranting or mumbling.

Nerdus

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