Some links of interest for your weekend reading:
Four words: He made it worse.
Making a case for tort reform.
The candidate who can win.
Time to end Medicare.
Baseball players are better athletes.
If you drove on a public highway yesterday, then you almost killed someone else in a head-on collision
Or so goes the logic which was applied to Joe Zamudio. Zamudio was the armed citizen who happened to be buying cigarettes inside a store near where Gabby Giffords was conducting her constituent meet-up. Upon hearing (and recognizing) the gunshots, he ran towards the scene and helped secure the alleged shooter. While he considered drawing his weapon, his assessment of the situation upon his arrival was to keep it holstered. From an LA Times article, we read,
A bystander with a Ruger intent on ending the violence almost shot the wrong guy. But he made a split-second decision to keep the weapon in his pocket.
(emphasis added)
So, as Massad Ayoob, firearms trainer and podcaster, says,
…by that standard, if you’re listening to this podcast while driving, you just “almost” had a hundred head-on collisions with traffic in the opposite lane.
You can listen to an extended interview of Zamudio, by the Ayoob group, in which he explains not only what happened that day he was buying cigarettes, but afterwards with the media. The Zamudio interview begins around 10 minutes into the podcast.
Note that Zamudio categorically states that he did not draw his weapon. Yet another quote from the Times article states,
Zamudio, 24, had his finger on the trigger and seconds to decide.
He lifted his finger from the trigger and ran toward the struggling men.
No, he did not have his finger on the trigger.
Bottomline: if the media ever wants to interview you, then make sure you also record the entire interview.
###
An interview of the Bell on Hell Interviewer
Audio interview of Martin Bashir, who recently interviewed Rob Bell regarding his universalist book Love Wins and, according to many Bell followers, was really mean to Bell.
###
“Ghandi’s in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?”
Christians… beware.
###
“Ideas… have consequences.”
On the conclusions of world without objective morality. Visit godawa.com
Cruel Logic – short film from Brian Godawa on Vimeo.
When you politicize health care, you get government-style efficiency. "NHS budget squeeze to blame for longer waiting times, say doctors." And for those already in hospitals, doctors are having to prescribe water to make sure the elderly stay hydrated.
If the liberals are to be believed, poverty causes crime. And yet, in this tough economic time, the FBI reports a 5.5% drop in violent crime.
In economic news, Democrats are dead set against voting for any 2011 budget. There’s been a lot of hoopla surrounding the "repayment" of the General Motors loan from the auto bailout, except that it’s just a lot of smoke and mirrors. Indeed, GM has a sweetheart tax deal that is saving it $14 billion, not to mention another $14 billion is being lost in general on those bailouts.
The Obama economic "recovery" turned 2 years old in May. Upwards of a trillion dollars spent, for what? The number of people with jobs hasn’t changed, unemployment is far worse than they said it would be if we did nothing, median incomes are down, housing prices are down 10%, and I don’t need to tell you about gas prices. If George W. Bush were President, you just know he’d be personally blamed for this, but Obama gets a pass.
Canada, by the way, has been leading the US out of this mire by reducing debt and spending, even with a socialized medicine albatross around its neck.
Immigrants are turning to that "racist" Tea Party.
When we elected Obama, that was when "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal", right? So why does he not get slammed for not signing the updated Kyoto Protocol? Bush got criticized for it, even though it was Clinton who originally didn’t sign it. Nah, couldn’t be the double-standard, liberal media.
When you make entitlements untouchable, you risk hurting those you purport to be concerned about because economic collapse hurts us all, including and especially the poor. The idea that it couldn’t happen here is severely myopic.
And finally, "smart" diplomacy". (Click for a larger version.)
Good morning.
The Indianapolis Star has the story:
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new Indiana law cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood violates Medicaid rules — a determination that could cost the state millions and possibly even billions of dollars.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services informed state officials by letter that it was denying Indiana’s new Medicaid plan because states can’t pick and choose where recipients receive health-care services.
What happens next is, at best, a guess. But almost certain is that it will add fuel to a legal and political battle likely to be watched closely across the nation.
An HHS official would not comment on what happens if Indiana does not change its law, though one possible ramification would be withholding funding.
Indiana relies on about $4 million in federal Medicaid family planning funds and more than $4 billion in total Medicaid dollars.
Sounds like gangster government at work here. From the same report:
Anti-abortion activists challenged the Obama administration’s interpretation of federal Medicaid policy, saying they believe states do have authority to defund Planned Parenthood and called the letter a strong-arm tactic.
“We’re not surprised by it,” said Indiana Right to Life Legislative Director Sue Swayze. “This is the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had. It almost feels like they’re bullying the state of Indiana over the wishes of our legislative branch.”
President Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, said, “(HHS) Secretary (Kathleen) Sebelius is strong-arming states like Indiana to protect the administration’s powerful ally Planned Parenthood.”
According to the Associated Press report, Indiana attorney general Greg Zoeller intends to continue defending the statute.
Planned Parenthood is already challenging the statute in court. The actions of HHS will only add another layer of litigation to this battle.
Hat tip: Jonathan Adler
Polls are commonplace these days and are often reported on as if they are actual factual snapshots. Joe Carter provides some useful analysis on why polls are pretty much worthless:
Although opinion polls are often treated as if they were harmless detritus of the news-cycle, they are powerful tools for promoting overconfidence and slip-shod reasoning. Take, for instance, two of the worst types of polls—those that purportedly measure “favorability” and the “job approval rating” of politicians such as the president and members of Congress. Such polls might be useful if the general public were aware of the president and legislators’ duties, and if we could appeal to a single, objective standard to judge polls’ relevance and faithfulness to truth. But we don’t. Instead, polls create an illusion of assurance, allowing us to fool ourselves into thinking we have precisely quantified our vague qualitative judgments.
Be sure to read the whole thing.
"Ku Klux Klan protests Westboro Baptist Church"
From the article:
WBC member Abigail Phelps said the KKK “have no moral authority on anything.”
“The Bible doesn’t say anywhere that it’s an abomination to be born of a certain gender or race,” she said.
And the WBC has…what moral authority, exactly?
Good morning.
Commenter Boonton has on a few occaisons mused about complex industrial accidents and the avoidence of the same.
Complex project development, in a book which came out in the 80s (Have Fun At Work, by Mr Livingstone) was an interesting read. The main thesis of the book was that complex projects (those are too large basically to fit in one smart persons brain … and he gave specific concrete ways to recognize those projects) fail. They all fail (or at the best have horrible delays and massive cost overruns). Much of the book devoted itself to orienting tech/engineer personel to recognize if your project was one of those which would fail and how to prevent that from career or psychic injury to self. As a sidelight he noted the only way that complex projects succeed. Complex projects succeed if heirarchical information pathways are removed and replaced with a model in which everyone can talk (and does talk) to everone. The cannonical such project is the Lockheed Skunkworks, which developed the SR-71, the U-2, and stealth combat aircraft. In their working environment, aerodynamicists and systems engineers sat next to draftsmen and machinists. “Can this …?” questions didn’t filter up and down the chain but you would ask the guy who might know the answer directly.
Big systems with complex working parts are put in place all over the world. Refineries, airplans, chemical plants, nuclear power plants and so on are all complex working systems. One way in which one might approach minimizing the occurance of complex accidents is to follow the Kelly Johnson/Skunkworks approach and shift it from project development to ongoing system operations. Why isn’t this done?
One reasons might be tied to morale. The Skunkworks team was a high morale operation. They had an impossible (basically) cutting edge project. They worked rediculous hours because of their excitement and the demands of the project and the basic urge human urge for success and to win, defined in this case as completion of the project, to scale that technical mountain. How can this translate to a multi-decade task of keeping equipment running safely, a far more mundane and routine task? If one identifies a clear difference in the two tasks as one of morale. High morale is essential for the operation of a non-heirarchical task/team project. High morale might also be an essential telling point in the operation of a long term operational facillity if one were to attempt to shift it to a more skunkworks-like approach to management. You can’t do that without high morale.
Ultimately government “regulation” of industrial workplace might be better served not trying to pretend it knows better how to drill offshore, run nuclear plants, and so on. It can on the other hand, have a better shot a spotting any number of ways in which workplaces are poisoned by poor morale and other working conditions conducive to failure (reckless risk taking has its own signature on morale). The point is, inspectors might be better served watching dynamics of workplace (social) chemistry and less on technical questions which they have, likely, less (or captive) expertise (not to speak of other agenda).
Good morning. I hope everying had a memorable memorial day.
I had already put Frederick Kempe’s Berlin 1961 on my list of books to read based on this review in the Wall Street Journal. But then I read this quote which makes me want to read it even more:
“I want Americans to understand how the decisions of their presidents — then and now — shape world history in ways we don’t always understand at the time of a specific event. I want readers to know that Kennedy could have prevented the Berlin Wall, if he had wished, and that in acquiescing to the border closure he not only created a more dangerous situation — but also contributed to mortgaging the future for tens of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans. The relatively small decisions that U.S. presidents make have huge, often global, consequences.”
Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds
Woohoo! Three day weekend. 😀
Walter Russell Mead has a fascinating essay on what went wrong last week for President Obama in his latest attempts to move the Middle East peace process forward. The whole thing is worth reading. But the most striking passage comes at the end when Mead turns his focus onto what makes the relationship between America and Israel so special:
As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.
It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.
Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God.
Hat tip: James Taranto
It’s a bit of a cliché in the Christian world to suggest that God made us with a God-shaped hole in us that can only be truly filled with Him. But a new study suggests that it’s not just a cliché.
An exciting, new Oxford University study has found that faith and religion come to human beings naturally — possibly instinctively. The initiative, entitled the “Cognition, Religion and Theology Project,” took three years to complete and involved more than 40 different studies in 20 countries around the globe. According to CNN, the study has some intriguing findings:
Studies around the world came up with similar findings, including widespread belief in some kind of afterlife and an instinctive tendency to suggest that natural phenomena happen for a purpose.
While the results don’t speak to whether or not God (or gods) exists, Roger Trigg, the project’s co-director, believes that the findings are immensely important to religious freedom and human rights. When considering the idea that some governments restrict religious activities, Trigg said:
“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests. There is quite a drive to think that religion is private. It isn’t just a quirky interest of a few, it’s basic human nature. This shows that it’s much more universal, prevalent, and deep-rooted. It’s got to be reckoned with. You can‘t just pretend it isn’t there.”
NASA’s Spirit has completed its mission
After operating for over 6 years, for what was supposed to be a 3 month mission, NASA has ceased attempting to communicate with the Mars Rover Spirit. Quite an accomplishment for the space agency.
###
Billboard of a man holding a cut-out of a baby deemed “controversial”
Heaven forbid we should actually imply that an unborn child is, in fact, a human being.
###
Yet, is the pro-abortion crowd on the run?
The abortion debate will not go away. The fundamental issue at stake is not reproductive freedom but the desire to extend human rights to all — even the smallest and most vulnerable human beings among us. Those who continue to ignore or deny the humanity of the unborn are increasingly on the defensive because new technologies are opening the window into the womb. What we find there are not tissues to be discarded, but human lives worth protecting.
###
###
Words, and their meaning(s)
While the title of the article states, Immigrant drivers licenses will be on table for special session, the body clarifies,
The battle to stop illegal immigrants from receiving drivers licenses will continue this year.
Sleight of hand, or editor’s oversight?
###
Do we have the Facebook revolution to thank for this?
###
Little girls, playgrounds, and thongs… yes, those kind of thongs.
