One of the most annoying things about the holiday season is Kwanzaa. It’s a made up holiday that practically no one celebrates, it’s insulting to African Americans, and Ron Karenga, who invented the holiday in the 60′s, was convicted of torturing two women in the 70′s. Karenga was a black nationalist who became a Marxist after being released from prison. The man is a lifetime scumbag, and the fact that anyone recognizes his sole “contribution” is puzzling to me. I’m not sure why the mainstream press has given this guy and his holiday a free pass. Is it because he’s become some kind of secular humanist? This is not enlightenment; it’s just another generation of psychobabble. Imagine if David Duke twenty years from now created a holiday for Caucasians based on secular humanism. Who would waste time promoting it? Heck, even Duke didn’t torture people. It’s preposterous. Kwanzaa shouldn’t be celebrated, it should be forgotten.
Kwanzaa is a December holiday as much as Festivus is a holiday. Actually it’s possible that one could make a stronger argument for recognizing Festivus as a holiday. At least it wasn’t created by a racist who was convicted of torture. Kwanzaa is another example of how the liberals have used teachers unions to ram bizzaro education on to young people. Is it any wonder why Americans grow up with basically no knowledge of the Constitution? All that time devoted to memorizing the “seven principles of Kwanzaa” and no one knows the real truth behind the hoax.
Climate Change is one of my favorite topics and Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. Now, they’re together forever.
Reuters published an article a few days ago about a University of South Carolina study that claims heat is the leading weather related cause of death of Americans. The research is significant because the study will be used by Alarmists to warn us about the dangers of Global Warming. The study is deeply flawed though and thanks to Watts Up With That? for debunking this so quickly.
However, this result is based on questionable data. The study used results for mortality from extreme heat and cold that can be traced to the National Climatic Data Center. But these data are substantially different from mortality data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) based on the Compressed Mortality File for the United States. The latter uses death certificate records, which provide the cause of each recorded death (based on medical opinion). It is reasonable to believe that regarding the cause of death, particularly for extreme cold and heat, medical opinion as captured in death certificate records is more reliable than determinations made by the meteorologists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NCDC (even if they have Ph.Ds.).
It should also be noted that more Americans die during the Winter than any other season. Watts followed up the post with another look at cold related deaths. It’s not even a close comparison.
Carl M. Cannon has written a delightful self-parody about liberals whose worldview is that of science fiction. This fascination with the Kennedy’s has got to stop at some point. Has there ever been a family covered more in politics that contributed so little to the nation? Now Caroline Kennedy is being recommended for the vacant Senate seat in New York because she’s JFK’s daughter. Well then, I guess it doesn’t take much qualification to be a senator for New York.
He also must have known, although we didn’t discuss it, that if he ever were elected a member of the U.S. Senate, as his father and two uncles had been, that the talk in political circles would inevitably turn to the presidency, as it also had for Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy.John did not survive that summer, his death being yet another cruel blow to his only sibling, sister Caroline. I was reminded recently of a fateful scene in Star Wars–the movie, not the nuclear defense shield. [The link is here, about three minutes and ten seconds into the clip...] Yoda, the Jedi master, is ruminating with Obi-Wan Kenobi about young Luke Skywalker, another Crown Prince whose enthusiasms as a pilot sometimes outweigh his good judgment–and who has a sister of his own.
“Reckless is he,” says Yoda. “Now, matters are worse.”
“That boy is our last hope,” says Obi-Wan.
“No,” replies Yoda. “There is another.”
One of the most ridiculous parts of our government are subsidies. A couple of weeks ago I drove through central Florida and the amount of sugarcane being grown is astounding. It’s especially eye-opening since the American taxpayer is funding the crops. As I’ve mentioned previously the US government subsidizes the price of sugar. The price of sugar in the US is twice what it’s worth on the world market. Poor farmers aren’t the ones benefiting from these handouts. The people harvesting (doing the real work) on these farms are some of the poorest citizens in Florida. It seems like common sense would eventually prevail and our leaders would quit wasting money on farm subsidies.
Unfortunately it doesn’t appear like our next president is going to challenge the status quo. In typical big government fashion Obama has appointed Iowa Governor Vilsack as the new Secretary of Agriculture. Obama might as well have appointed Senator Tom Harkin Secretary. So much for not cowering to special interests.
“If Iowa doesn’t fare well in this go-around, it’s hard to see any circumstance that would come around that we would do any better,” said David Roederer, who was chief of staff for former Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. Roederer and others argued that the politics of this year’s election cycle have left Iowa with an unprecedented role in the nation’s political agenda. Renewable fuels in particular will have key advocates high in the new administration, they said. “Governor Vilsack is really in tune to the ethanol stuff,” said state Sen. Gene Fraise, D-Fort Madison, a farmer who heads the Senate Agriculture Committee. “He’ll be in there swinging for us on that one. It can’t be anything but good.”
The nation is already paying higher prices for food due to the ethanol subsidies. In many ways it’s difficult to believe that Iowa could get more. It looks like it’s going to be a good time to a rich farmer in Iowa. This isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue. The two parties do not agree on much, but when they’re both happy it’s like the American tax payer is getting screwed. Every politician in Iowa is happy with the current arrangement because the government is funneling money it doesn’t have on agriculture we don’t need while bankrupting us. Will we ever have real honest leadership in this country?
The wait is over. Time has their man and their cover. I wondered last week what Time would do for the cover. This whole iconic style is a bit of a flashback to some of the darker regimes of the twentieth century. I can’t begrudge too much. If people want to turn a regular politician into some kind of messiah like icon they’re well within their rights. It’s still ridiculous .
My great hope, which I pray for fervently and daily, is that the change promised by our incoming president, Barack Obama, will be real and permanent. Mr. Obama has repeatedly promised to bring an end to the current BCS Bowl system. You know, it’s the postseason college football system that deprives us all of any satisfactory ending to the college football season.
On at least two or three occasions, Mr. Obama has made it clear that he too would like to do away with the current system in favor of a playoff system. This is change I can believe in, and it almost swayed my vote this past November, since the other candidate was stupefyingly silent on this issue, choosing instead to fire up his constituency with phrases like, “I will reach across the aisle… I have fought my party on many issues… The Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy…” and so on and so forth.
Anyway, I believe in a Living Constitution, one which designates that the powers of the United States government are limited to college and professional sports. I propose an amendment which makes this permanent and cedes all other previous powers to the states.
Some will say this is ridiculous; that it’s a return to the dastardly Articles of Confederation. I say, however, that it’s not even close. Our esteemed Congress has proven time and again how effective it is regarding issues of sport. Witness the many hearings on steroids where giants such as Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens were reduced to shaking masses of steroidal Jell-o. Mmmmm, mmmm, good!
If Congress has this kind of power, to destroy careers and render Hall of Fame performances useless, imagine what it can do in the future! Imagine all the people, watching college football playoffs with beer. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
But it is possible, only if we the people would rise up and demand of our representatives an equitable and television-friendly world of sports. Don’t worry about GM, Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, embryonic stem cell research, fruit flies, biofuels, Global Warming (or Climate Change, depending on how warm or cold it is this year), health care, and whatnot. Let we the people through our local and state governments handle those problems; we’ll leave it to the federal government to work on the important and complex issues.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that people can sue tobacco companies for deceptive advertising. I guess all those people who smoked “light cigarettes” were conned into smoking. This was a typical 5-4 ruling by the court with Justice Kennedy providing the swing vote. The Associate Press contributed to the report in the Wall Street Journal.
More broadly, the decision undercuts a legal theory that the business community has employed in an effort to insulate itself from consumer lawsuits filed in state court. With increasing success, companies have been arguing that federal regulation of their products implicitly barred state action, whether by consumers or state government itself, to hold them liable for injury.The court broke along familiar ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy, a maverick conservative, joining the majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens. Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer also joined the majority. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Justice Kennedy is a maverick conservative? The Kennedy that gave us Kelo v. City of New London or Kennedy v. Louisiana? There’s nothing remotely conservative about Kennedy or his decisions. I’m getting annoyed with this term “maverick conservative.” I guess a liberal by any other name is a maverick conservative. Future mavericks include Colon Powell, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and last but not least Joseph Lieberman. This is another example of an AP editorial in the middle of simple news story.
Seth Borenstein is a writer for the Associated Depressed. Supposedly the AP reports “news,” but this article (aptly titled Obama left with little time to curb global warming) is basically a press release for climate alarmism. The article fits in all the right keywords (Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize, Scientist, and of course, “we’re out of time”).
Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.The average global temperature in 2008 is likely to wind up slightly under 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about a tenth of a degree cooler than last year. When Clinton was inaugurated, 57.9 easily would have been the warmest year on record. Now, that temperature would qualify as the ninth warmest year.
I don’t have the time or energy to go line by line, but there’s nothing alarming about global sea ice. It’s odd that Mother Nature is to blame for the current cooling trend. La Nina is a “weather variation” and the cause for the cool down. 1998 is widely cited as the warmest year ever but the fact that it was an El Nino year is seldom mentioned. Did Mother Nature take that year off? Why wasn’t that a weather variation? It’s difficult to believe that a journalist would be so stupid but Borenstein proves that intelligence isn’t a requirment to throw shoes for the AP. The idea that Obama or any other person in the world is going to stop climate fluctuations is hilarious.
Merry Christmas from the Parowan Prophet Leland Freeborn. The LA Times has an article full of good cheer and nuclear Armageddon. Freeborn believe Obama won’t become president because the Russia will decide to nuke us this Christmas.
“I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the ‘riots’ that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn’t lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said.”These riots, according to his prophecy, will encourage the “old, hard-line Soviet guard” to seize the moment and rain down nukes on the United States, killing at least 100 million of us.”Prepare now,” Freeborn’s letter concluded. “We are downwind from Las Vegas. I hope you can survive.”
I guess the Russians forgot about the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction and have decided just to let the chips fall where they may. It’s a good thing Freeborn has a site dedicated to nuclear survival.
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