Name:
Location: Metro Phoenix, Arizona, United States

I'm too lazy to type anything about me. Read my blog and I'm sure you'll eventually learn a few things.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

My Own Impromptus

Jacques Chirac is up to his usual blathering idiocy. He wants Europe to tax imports from the U.S. as long as we don't sign Kyoto (sorry for the NYT link, but it's what I had handy). There are a few problems with this, of course. The first would be that the U.S. had actually signed the accords, just not ratified them, but this could be the normal ignorance of a NYT journalist, as it was not placed in quotes. More to the point, any tariffs the EU would impose on U.S. goods would be met with a retaliatory tariff, so that doesn't get us very far. More to the point, though, what would Chirac do about countries that ratified the treaty, but failed to meet the emission goals laid out therein -- countries, like, oh, say, France?

For no particular reason, here is a video of Tickle Me Elmo on fire.

Ten interesting inventions are here. I'm not sure I'd call them the "ten strangest" but they are certainly not the norm.

I'm quite the fan of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. His most recent move (which isn't actually that recent, as I'm being slow to post, as usual) was to strike a blow against multiculturalism by renaming the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. This, naturally, drew protest from the usual suspects, but I say bravo.

John Edwards's new house has been getting some attention, and rightfully so. The main structure is over 28,000 square feet (it was originally designed to be two structures, but they decided to add a heated walkway between the two), plus there are an additional two houses on the lot, and, as memory serves, another building for a pool. In and of itself, I don't have a problem with anyone buying land and building such structures with their own money; however, I have two problems with Edwards doing it. The first is the immoral way he got his money in the first place. The second is his rank hypocrisy between his "two Americas" spiel and his living accomodations. At least one of his houses is located in a gated community, about which someone (I can't quite recall whom) humorously observed that the gate serves to keep one America out of the other. There are plenty of links available for this, but I'll stick with this funny little faq.

Moving up the 2004 Democrat ticket, John Kerry recently said in Davos that every spot of the globe between the two poles was experiencing warming. Well, not quite.

Might as well have a third global warming related post -- Popular Science, always a purveyor of global warming scaremongering, throws out a statement that global temperatures could rise by 10 degrees Farenheit by century's end, without indicating that it is easily the high end of the spectrum of predictions in a piece on the "scariest" ideas in science.

I'd heard about it before, but once again I'm reminded that NASA has lost the high-quality tapes of the first moon landing. Our government in action.

I'm not one to take glea in the death of a horse, but I will hardly shed a tear of the death of Barbaro. That horse had its surgery and recovery covered more closely than most human athletes. ... Though I think that if a team were to have a player who failed to recover euthanised it would generate more headlines than the horse.

William Arkin of the Washington Post is slandering our troops. I don't care to link to the actual slandering itself and drive up the web traffic there, so I direct you instead to a place which fairly summarizes and quotes from it at length.

The Yale Daily News saw fit to publish a piece decrying the "myth" that virginity is a good thing. The author makes a fair point, though one which has been made often enough before, that men and women face different societal expectations of virginity (though she carries this beyond a point which is readily defensible). The rest of the piece is some claptrap about how virgins should give it up and sleep around, and how sex outside of relationships should not be stigmatized. Sad, really.

On a lighter note, Greg Gutfeld has the top 11 reasons Islam isn't as bad as the celebrity left.

Speaking of celbrities, it seems that even those who spend their entire life in Hawaii manage to have politics that irritate me;
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, who managed to weigh over 750 lbs., was a promoter of Hawaiian independence.

More smearing of the pro-life movement from the Times, but this time the one in London: an article on the new Virgin stem-cell storage company says "
Some anti-abortion groups believe that any use of stem cells will lead to human cloning." This shows the typical media ignorance of the difference between stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Aside from groups that are against modern medecine altogether, I know of no figures in the pro-life movement who are against the use of stem cells from cord blood or adult stem cells. There is some controversy over the new Virgin endeavor, but that's over the issue of a private company operating a stem cell storage facility.

A few churches in Australia have put up "Jesus loves Osama" signs. While I understand the basis for this, it strikes me as rather misguided. First and foremost, the signs can certainly be taken offensively, which hurts the church in its evangelical mission. The quote from Matthew 5:44 which appears in small print at the bottom of the sign would make a better, if less eye-catching, sign. The sign also seems to be promoting passivity more than forgiveness.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home