Submitted for your amusement, from a friend’s Facebook status.

I do not like this, Uncle Sam, I do not like this health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like ex-speaker Nan, I do not like this ‘YES WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree, I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free.
I do not like their smug replies when I complain about their lies.
I do not like this kind of hope. I do not like it. Nope, Nope, Nope!

Well, this was just a matter of time. "New congressional estimates say the trust fund that supports Social Security disability will run out of money by 2017, leaving the program unable to pay full benefits, unless Congress acts. About two decades later, Social Security’s much larger retirement fund is projected to run dry, too, leaving it unable to pay full benefits as well."

A Jewish friend of mine give a report on Glenn Beck’s "Restoring Courage" rally in Caesarea, Israel.

"A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them." Yes, you read that right. Read the rest of it.

Good news on the abortion front. Defenders of human life are advancing in the war of ideas.

If unions can get their gravy train, they’ll just take their ball and go home.

The long obsolete Fairness Doctrine finally, officially, dies.

When Bush’s approval ratings were low, hardly a day went by when the media made note of it. Now that Obama is in the same territory, all of a sudden approval ratings don’t seem to be news. (Just like involvement in foreign wars and casualties from the same.)

The media will ask conservatives "Yes or no, do you believe in evolution?", but they’ll never ask a liberal "Yes or no, do you believe in the Bible?"

Could you escape a terrorist attack in 15 seconds? In southern Israel, where rockets from Gaza are a nearly-daily occurrence, they have to.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (no, really, "CERN") published a report in the magazine "Nature" that shows the Sun really does have more influence over our weather, clouds specifically, and thus current climate models will need to be (and I quote) "substantially revised".

Sorry, no cartoon this week. Nothing really stuck out.

Yeah, it seems a little late to be discussing this, but a new podcast that I’ve been listening to, "The Sci-Fi Christian", which covers all sorts of topics, decided to tackle this one this past episode. I highly recommend this to sci-fi fans, Christian or otherwise.

My family didn’t do Harry Potter, at least in its heyday, and I explained why to Matt Anderson and Ben DeBono in an audio feedback I sent to them for this episode. It turned out that this feedback and their responses to it became a large part of the show. So I thought I’d toss it on the blog for your consideration as well.

The show is long, about 92 minutes, and the first third of it is news from the sci-fi and comics worlds. If you play it on the site, you can skip to 31 in and the main topic starts up. I wrote up what I was going to say before I recorded it, so below is the text of my audio feedback.

Read the rest of this entry

Adult stem cells, that is.

While highly potent embryonic stem cells are often the subject of ethical and safety controversy, adult-derived stem cells have other problems. As we age, our stem cells are less pliant and less able to transform into the stem cells that science needs to find breakthrough treatments for disease.

An exception to this can be found in the stem cells of oral mucosa, the membrane that lines the inside of our mouths. These cells do not seem to age along with the rest of our bodies. In his lab at Tel Aviv University’s Goldschleger School of Dental Medicine, Prof. Sandu Pitaru and his graduate students Keren Marinka-Kalmany, Sandra Treves, Miri Yafee and Yossi Gafni, have successfully collected cells from oral mucosa and manipulated them into stem cells.

Wounds in the mouth don’t scar; they heal by regeneration. The reasons for using embryonic stem cells keep dwindling.

I’ve heard this charge leveled at the US many times before, but recently I heard it leveled from a Christian from the left side of the political aisle. He adds, to the usual concern about wasted natural resources, that consuming so much in disproportion to our numbers is immoral and unjust.

But this is only one side of the equation. I came up with a parallel situation to demonstrate the problem.

I spend most of my money on a very few things. My biggest expense is no doubt my house. I pay so much money to one person; my mortgage banker. He and my grocer, between them, probably get the biggest chunks of change out of my annual income. I have a family doctor who, too, gets a significant portion of my resources. And, as my kids have started going to college, two colleges have been getting a bigger slice of the pie.

(At this point, I quote a paragraph from his post and apply it to my parallel situation.) As a matter of justice, it would not be reasonable to think that it’s morally acceptable for those few people to consume more than half of my resources. Even though the laws were written in such a way that they are allowed to acquire those resources legally, it makes for an immoral and unjust situation, does it not?

If all you’re looking at is the percentage of resources consumed (and that’s all his bullet points cover) and using only that criteria to determine whether it’s just or not, then my mortgage banker, my grocer, my doctor and two colleges are acting unjustly with my resources.

Except that, for those resources, I’m getting shelter, food, health care and education. I’m getting a disproportionate percentage of what I need to live from this small number of people. Perhaps they could charge less for some things and not take as many of my resources for their lifestyle, but on balance I’m getting some essentials from these few folks.

In the same way, while it is true that the US consumes a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, and while it is also true that many of us could do with less, the world gets quite a bit out of the bargain. Medical advances for longer and better lives. Educational opportunities that people come from all over to take advantage of. Technological advances in energy production to bring a higher standard of living around the world (and higher standards of living almost always result in better health). Agricultural advancements that let vegetables grow in the desert and other inhospitable conditions. And on top of all this, when the world needs protection from enemies or help during calamities, who’s the first place they turn for a shield or a helping hand? And who has the armaments and money to help out?

We do. The world’s getting quite a lot for the money.

Ask the illegal immigrant risking what he has to come to America for work. Ask the African who now has a garden courtesy of a charitable organization. Ask the Libyan who may soon be out from under a dictator. Ask the Dani tribesman in Papua, Indonesia who won’t die from an infection that is now easily curable. Ask the survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

So unless he’s ready to start laying into his grocer for the "unjust" use of his resources, it might be best to reconsider this pronouncement of immorality and unjustness.

Do you agree or disagree? My main point is that you can’t just look at the consumption side; there’s so much more to the question than that. While we consume more than our share, we produce so much from that consumption, and the benefits absolutely do not stay within our own borders. I believe the religious (question of how moral this consumption is) is being colored by the political. Not "going green" as much as you may wish me to is not, by itself (and this post isolates consumption by itself) a moral failing, or certainly can’t be used to solely just the overall morality.

I believe the Christian Left falls into this trap more often than they care to admit; conflating the political with the moral. Being against Cap & Trade or the Kyoto Protocol, or not following the Green Othodoxy is somehow immoral. We should be good stewards of our resources; I’m not denying that. But to look at the "bad" side of the equation without looking at the "good" side results in fatally flawed policies. We need to deal with the bad without damaging the good.

A couple of thoughts from the sermon yesterday:

If your church were to close tomorrow, would your community be negatively impacted?

Is yours the best church in the city, or the best church for the city?

Guns: A year after a law was passed in Virginia allowing those with permits to carry concealed weapons into bars (i.e. "alcohol-serving businesses"), gun-related crime in bars actually declined slightly. They did not turn into the shooting galleries that were predicted. This didn’t make national news, of course, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. If it had gone up, I’m quite sure we’d have heard about it for days on the evening newscasts.

Politics: First Ed Schultz and MSNBC selectively quote Gov. Rick Perry to make it sound like he’s being racist against the President. Seems you can’t say the word "black" in any context without it being called "racist". Then, MSNBC’s newest talker, Al Sharpton, takes the smear and, ironically, calls Gov. Perry divisive and ugly for saying something he didn’t ever say! Say what you want about Fox News, but if you don’t see far, far worse bias on the part of MSNBC, you’re just not paying as close attention as you think you are.

The Economy: The US may have lost it’s AAA rating from Standard and Poor’s, but on that same day, Ohio’s rating went up. Republican Governor John Kasich has presided over newly-balanced budgets, an 8.6% unemployment rate, and a steadily improving economy, coming back from the recession quicker than the Feds. This was done with reducing the size of government and rewarding job-creators.

And speaking of the economy (click for a larger version):

James Taranto explains Obama’s terms.

Obama in Iowa yesterday: "We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, got the economy moving again, created 2 million private sector jobs over the last 17 months. But over the last six months, we’ve had a run of bad luck."

Robert Heinlein, in "Time Enough for Love," 1973: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded–here and there, now and then–are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ "

Punishing job creators with higher and higher taxes is to now be referred to as "bad luck".

There have been more casualties in Afghanistan under less than 3 years of Obama than we did under 8 years of Bush. Additionally, in the first 3 years of the Iraq war, we had fewer casualties than two and a half under Obama. This is not to criticize Obama for these deaths; that’s what happen in war. But Reason magazine notes that this raises 2 questions. "First, where are the antiwar protests? And second, where is the press?" The "anti-war" protestors are, as I’ve said before, more anti-Bush (or anti-Republican) than anything else. And the press are tied up trying to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin. It’s a full-time job, y’know.

Unions hand-picked 6 of the most vulnerable Republican state senate districts to target for recall. They just needed 3 wins to take control. They could only manage 2. Granted, recall elections have been notoriously difficult to win over the years, but if Democrats and the unions that sponsor them can’t get their base energized over their own referendum on alleged "anti-worker" sentiment in hand-picked districts, that doesn’t say much about how the public views them.

Atheists seem to believe that if humanity would just get rid of this archaic religion thing, violence would drop and peace would reign. Just ask Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, or even John Lennon. Yeah, well, how did that work in the Soviet Union, where atheism was essentially the national religion? Or in Europe today, especially Britain, where religion is on the decline?

And speaking of ideas not working, how’s that gun ban in Britain working out for those store owners in the middle of the riots?

Remember the spontaneous "You lie!" outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson of S. Carolina during an address by President Obama about his health care bill? Joe said that after Obama said, "There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." Well guess what? Turns out Joe was right.

Why do we need voter ID laws? To keep this from happening; overenfranchised Democratic voters. And how about this bit of irony: "While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme."

Dale Franks of Questions & Observations has some great points about our economic situation. A couple of paragraphs, from one post talking about the hole we’re in:

And don’t come back at me with some lame "Our GDP:Debt ratio was 120% at the end of WWII" silliness.  Yes it was. And you know how we fixed it? We cut Federal spending from $92 billion in 1945 to $38 billion in 1949. For 2011, 40% of the federal budget was financed with borrowed money: We’ll spend  $3.818 trillion, of which  $1.645 trillion is borrowed. If we funded only defense, Medicare/Medicaid, and Social Security, and interest on the debt, we’d still have a deficit of $673 billion. Just to balance the budget this year—forget paying off any debt—we’d have to cut an additional ~25% from Health, Defense, and Pensions. Follow the link and download the CSV file, open it up in Excel, and run the numbers yourself. The magic number to balance the budget this year is the revenue of $2.174 trillion.

That’s $2 trillion this year, not over 10 years.

And from another post, noting that tax increases alone, even historic tax increases and an incredibly rosy set of other assumptions, aren’t going to do it. Spending cuts, substantial cuts, must happen.

In order to pay off this year’s share of the $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the government will have to collect $4.261 trillion in revenues.  With an estimated 2011 GDP of $14.922 trillion, that comes to 28.6% of GDP. If we assume government revenues rise to the historical average, the we’ll need the government to take 31.6% of GDP in tax revenues. Happily, because we’re assuming a 3% rise in GDP and revenues for every year over the next 30 years, that percentage will decline slightly every year, until, in 2041, we’ll only need to collect 20.5% of GDP in tax revenues to pay off the last installment, assuming, again, 14.8% of GDP covers the operation of government.  If we go back to the 17.8% figure, then we’ll have to collect 23.5% of GDP in revenues.

Either way, for the next 30 years, we need to collect substantially higher tax revenues than we have collected at any time in the nation’s history, and we have to do it every year for 30 years.

The point being, this is probably not possible, economically or politically. This is how bad our situation is, and how much action we need to take now on spending.

And yet, who gets blamed for trying to bring sanity back to the budget? (Click for a larger version.)

The community organizer group that our current President used to work for has been found guilty in yet another illegal scheme.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was fined the maximum of $5,000 in Las Vegas today for its role in a massive voter fraud conspiracy.

Judge Donald Mosley said if an individual, as opposed to a corporation, had been before him, he would have handed down a 10-year prison sentence. “And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” he said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

However, this is not just another case against former ACORN employees.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself, as opposed to its individual employees, has been convicted of a crime.

But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water.

The idea that every one of the convictions enumerated in the article were done by rogue employees is now swept aside. The corruption was systemic, going all the way to the top.

But they’re not done yet.

Despite the bankruptcy filing, ACORN continues to operate. Project Vote and ACORN’s mortgage bubble generator ACORN Housing (renamed Affordable Housing Centers of America) are still is business. ACORN’s state chapters now operate under assumed names such as Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and Action United (Pennsylvania).

ACORN officials openly acknowledge the network is restructuring and will re-emerge soon to help reelect President Obama in 2012.

Be on guard.

Things have been extremely quite from the supposedly "anti-war" Left ever since Obama sat down in the Oval Office. Protests over Afghanistan and Iraq evaporated. One could say that they were already too far under way to stop quickly, and thus it’s of little use now to protest. OK, but that doesn’t explain the silence over Libya. One person exhibiting what seems really to have been an anti-Bush sentiment, rather than some moral concern over war, is Harold Koh.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH, the former dean of the Yale Law School, has been one of the country’s foremost defenders of the notion that the president of the United States can’t wage wars without the approval of Congress. During the Bush administration, he was legendary for his piercing criticisms of “executive muscle flexing” in the White House’s pursuit of the so-called war on terror.

Even more, he was described by those who knew him as the inspiration for a generation of human rights activists and lawyers passionately committed to a vision of a post-imperial America as a model of constitutional restraint. His colleagues viewed him as not only a brilliant scholar but a “liberal icon.”

Suddenly, though, Mr. Koh seems to be a different person.

Just over two years ago, he became legal adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department, and in that job, he has become the administration’s defender of the right to stay engaged in a conflict against Libya without Congressional approval. He argues that the president can proceed because the country is not actually engaging in “hostilities.” Because “hostilities” is “an ambiguous standard,” he has argued, the president need not withdraw forces to meet the resolution’s requirement of an automatic pull-out, 60 days after “hostilities” begin, absent express Congressional approval for the war. The conflict is in its fourth month, and no such consent has been given.

Mr. Koh’s allies, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, are mystified and disheartened to see their hero engaging in legalistic “word play.” To them, it’s as if he has torn off his team jersey, midgame, and put on the other side’s. Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame law professor who has known Mr. Koh for a quarter-century, is seeking an answer to this question: “Where is the Harold Koh I worked with to ensure that international law, human rights and the Constitution were honored during the Bush years?”

He’s probably in the same place he always was; playing partisan politics to his party’s advantage, and making use of anyone blind enough to believe what he’s selling.

But Mr. Koh surely doesn’t run the anti-war movement. They could be out in the streets at any time of their own accord, being true to principle over politics. That they are not speaks volumes about their real intentions.

While the riots in London and its environs may have started as a peaceful vigil to protest the shooting of an alleged drug dealer, a certain sort of folk were glad to join in and ramp it up for their own purposes. Let’s ask a few of these concerned citizens why they are rampaging and looting, shall we?

You sir, why are you stealing electronics from the local shop?

And you, ma’am, what is the purpose of all this?

Now, the first fellow, who’s trying to get his taxes back, as he says, might sound to you like some Tea Partier here in the States. However, no Tea Partier thinks that those taxes should be extracted directly from the shelves of local businesses. It’s local businesses that Tea Partiers are trying to support as the real source of economic growth. So no, this is not really a conservative position being taken. It’s more of a narcissistic opportunism at work.

At least the ladies in the second video are being more honest about their motivations. They’re getting back at the rich, "showing the rich we do what we want". Ah, well this will show ’em, eh? And their definition of "rich" seems to mean anyone who owns a business, hence the open season on any business anywhere; national chain or local shop.

Going after evil corporations, getting back at the rich… Hmm, which political philosophy have I heard these sentiments from? And further, can we blame those who put forth that political philosophy for these riots, much like a shooting a few months ago was also blamed on some political philosophy? There’s actually a real, spoken connection this time, as opposed to an assumed connection before. I expect Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz to castigate the Left, er, whatever that political philosophy might be. If, that is, they want to be taken seriously.

After supposedly "resetting" relations between the US and Russia, the Russians seem to not have gotten the message.

In the past four years, Russia’s intelligence services have stepped up a campaign of intimidation and dirty tricks against U.S. officials and diplomats in Russia and the countries that used to form the Soviet Union.

U.S. diplomats and officials have found their homes broken into and vandalized, or altered in ways as trivial as bathroom use; faced anonymous or veiled threats; and in some cases found themselves set up in compromising photos or videos that are later leaked to the local press and presented as a sex scandal.

“The point was to show that ‘we can get to you where you sleep,’ ” one U.S. intelligence officer told The Washington Times. “It’s a psychological kind of attack.”

Despite a stated policy from President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev of warm U.S.-Russian ties, the campaign of intelligence intimidation – or what the CIA calls “direct action” – has persisted throughout what both sides have called a “reset” in the relations.

They have become worse in just the past year, some U.S. officials said. Also, their targets are broadening to include human rights workers and nongovernmental organizations as well as embassy staff.

Presenting a toy "reset button" is no diplomacy. Understanding who America’s enemies are, is. Indeed, we must try to get them to understand a mutual benefit, but the promise of the Obama administration has fallen flat.

Democrats  are falling all over themselves trying to paint the Tea Party as terrorists (civility watch!) and blaming them for the downgrade from Standard & Poors.

That’s like blaming Paul Revere for the British invasion.

John Hinderaker over at Powerline doesn’t think the administration can pin this on the Tea Party. In addition to noting that Obama never once provide his own version of a compromise, prior to that, when they had their chance, they did nothing.

What is most ludicrous is the Democrats’ effort to distract attention from the fact that they controlled Congress from January 2007 until January 2011. The first Congress that had any ability to be influenced by the Tea Party movement has been in office for only six months. Do the Democrats seriously expect anyone to believe that S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt arises out of something that Republican Congressmen have done in the last six months? We expect the Democrats to appeal to ignorance at all times, but this is ridiculous.

[…]

Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther.

The Tea Party has whatever power it has in Washington precisely because of this. To call them terrorists is to say that of those Americans sincerely concerned over this unsustainable cycle of debt. Is that the way to woo voters? Is that compromise? Gary Kaltbaum, an investment author, echoes this.

Last I looked, the Tea Party has never spent a dime of taxpayer money. Last I looked, the Tea Party has not spent this country into a $16 trillion deficit. Last I looked, these average Americans are only interested in a better, more efficient, and taxpayer-concerned government. How terrible they are! It is disgusting to see these political hacks continue with their talking points. The good news is that it is backfiring on them. And by the way, John Kerry voted for all this deficit spending.

I have still not seen the most important question asked of the culprits. And it is simple:

"In the year 2000, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. Why are you and on what are you now spending double that amount this year — just a decade later? Please be specific!" Wouldn’t that be a simple question?

But Janet Daley, writing for the London Telegraph, asks what may be the most foundational question, "The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society?" Ms. Daley thinks this question should be debated in Europe, where cradle-to-grave government guarantees are bleeding the Eurozone dry.

We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.

The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

And this is what the Left, and even (and especially) the Christian Left wants to turn our country into. Daley’s article is brilliant, coming as it does from inside the mire that socialism has made of Europe, so please read the whole thing. She finishes with an observation that needs to be made known far and wide.

The hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.

A new experiment suggests that the Sun may play a bigger part than first though in climate change. But since this challenges the current orthodoxy, "The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions" from that experiment. Further, a peer-reviewed study using NASA satellite data shows that the Earth is releasing more heat into space than climate computer models assumed.

Anders Breivik, the madman who was responsible for the recent massacre in Norway, is often referred to as a "Christian terrorist". Granted, he called himself "Christian", but his aims were political. But the Left really, really wants to use him to equate radical Islamic terrorism and so-called "Christian terrorism". The Blaze asks,

Have any churches or clergymen openly celebrated Breivik’s slaughter of innocents? Are young Christian children dancing in the streets anywhere in Europe, as young Muslims did in Gaza on September 11, 2001? Could any honest observer of the world over the past 30 years believe that Christianity and Islam have played equal parts in terrorist attacks?

And Chuck Colson notes, the secularization of Europe, with its refusing to understand the problem of evil and sin inherent in human nature, is not helping Norway work through this or prevent it happening again.

More rationing of health care in England. This will happen here under ObamaCare. History has already spoken.

What G. K. Chesterton had to say about the Tea Party. (Sort of.)

Obama may have inherited a mess from Bush, but y’know Reagan inherited a similar mess (in some cases, a worse mess) from Carter. And he did far better with it.

The US accuses Iran of aiding Al Qaeda. Are pitiful sanctions really helping things out here? AQ would love to get its hand on a nuke, and so would Iran.

Government, apparently in the pocket of Big Agriculture, bringing more red tape and expense to the family farm.

The Obama administration admits "the White House doesn’t create jobs". It’s about time you realized that, guys. Congress doesn’t either. Government can get out of the way (or get in the way) of business, which does create jobs.

When Sarah Palin came onto the scene, with her history of speaking truth to power, even within her own political party, I noted that the Democrats, who purport to love that sort of thing, went on the attack instead. Like watching "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and rooting against Jimmy Stewart. Now, the same Dems who purport to want grass-roots groups to help fix Washington ask the media to ignore the biggest grass-roots effort in a long time. True colors: Shown!

And speaking of "terrorists" (click for a larger version):