Saturday, December 13, 2008

I'm Old

[sigh]

My great-grandmother lived to be nearly 100 (missed it by three months). She used to tell me about horse-drawn vehicles and when she got her first real fridge. The last delivery of heating coal was still in her basement when she died. And I remember seeing a horse-sled and scythes in her garage.

She went from that to NASA and miniskirts and the internet (she was a total news junkie and would have loved it). She saw the entire modernization of America over the course of her life.

Thinking of her while I've blogged a lot today (sorry), I suddenly remembered when you used to have to type out all the stuff instead of just clicking a button.

I used to feel old for vinyl records and a complete lack of remote controls. Now I feel old simply by not typing.

How old did my dear great-grandmother feel?

You Can't Handle Le Truth

Apparently, the French President has spiked a report on electric cars because the report basically says they are not viable.

Once again, the left shows itself unable to just be open, honest and transparent.

McCain's Blackberries

Ooops!

Enviro-Bias

Why should we have been surprised by the pro-left bias in the press during this election season when we had the pro-left environmental bias before us for years and years and years.

The latest example I've stumbled across is this jellyfish story that blames global warming for lots of jellyfish.

The article points out near the end that the "researchers quoted in the report said this one may be a natural cycle."

Then the article immediately says this,
""There is clear, clean evidence that certain types of human-caused environmental stresses are triggering jellyfish swarms in some locations," William Hamner of the University of California Los Angeles says in the report.

These include pollution-induced "dead zones", higher water temperatures and the spread of alien jellyfish species by shipping."
So which is it? Normal cyclical occurances or man-made global warming?

If you don't know, then does it matter?

And just out of curiousity, if the oceans take up over 70% of the Earth and humans can only inhabit about 10% of the remaining landspace and the atmosphere has only warmed up a degree or two in the last 60 years, then how in the world could these jellyfish blooms be our fault?

Pile On Blago

It's so nice to know this is the political culture our next administration was raised in.

Blagojevich & Harris & Obama & Emanuel

Feeling Ill

This whole saga just breaks my heart as well as makes me feel ill.

How evil are you to do this to a child, your child?

A Man of Sound Beliefs

I've read this man's book and I have personally met him.

But best of all, Czech President Vaclav Klaus is right when he "hit out at the EU climate deal concluded Friday and described global climate issues as "a silly luxury.""

I'm so glad he is getting the EU Presidency this January. Watch him, he's very sound as my British husband says.

Spend the money

Sheesh.

They are worth millions. Could afford to stay anywhere for a month. And he just dropped something like $40,000 on a ring for his wife.

Rent for a damn month for goodness sakes!

Who am I talking about? The Obamas, of course. Wanting to push their way in early apparently.

Eye-Candy

I might actually watch the Oscars this year if Hugh Jackman is hosting.

He is one sweet piece of eye-candy!

Yummy.

1973 Ice Storms

I grew up in Conn. and I remember the ice storms of 1973 when they forced us out of our home.

I also remember the big fear back then being the coming ice age, not global warming.

At any rate, I hope my relatives in Mass. and New Hampshire are okay, going through this ice storm.

Is this car weird or cool?

I can't make up my mind whether this is the oddest looking car or the coolest.

Non-Man-Made Climate "Change"

Because the Earth has never experienced any change in its climate until 1940, this article about supervolcanos possibly causing a mass extinction 250+ million years ago is such a pleasure to read.

Environmentalists who wring their hands over our atmosphere heating up one single degree in one hundred years are either so very lame or trying to get us to believe them so they can control our lifestyles.

I'll tell you one thing, I live in the South. No one will take away my air conditioning. No one.

Paper of Record

This article from the New York Post is so dead on accurate - especially about China - that I urge everyone to read it. The potential glimpses of our future are well worth knowing and remembering.

PC BS

In Great Britain, a country where Christianity is the state religion and the sum of all ethnic minorities (religious or otherwise) make up less than 10% of the total population, a school was informed that its school choir could not sing at a Christmas event because its songs were "too religious".

It's Christmas You Freakin' Heathens!

Christmas!!

This is PC BS and heaps of scorn should be continuously poured over these event organizers' heads for their sheer idiocy.

Lest We Forget

I liked this so much, I am posting it in its entirety.

The Legacy of December 13 [Gabe Ledeen]

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s capture by U.S. forces, when he was pulled dirty, afraid, and alone from a hole in Tikrit, Iraq. Five years from that day, Iraqis continue to face a somewhat uncertain future fraught with challenges and perils. Critics of the war complain that there is no certainty that democracy can take root in Iraq, and lament the possibility that this “experiment” will fail. These cynics are correct in asserting that our achievements in Iraq remain fragile and potentially reversible, and they may be justified in their skepticism about an Iraqi democracy’s staying power. One thing is certain though: The Iraqi people, who have never had reason to, are now learning how to hope. They no longer face each day with the certainty that conditions are immutable and inevitable, as they had been forced to do for so many years under Saddam’s regime.

Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his supporters terrorized the people of Iraq and subjected them to violence and maltreatment without reason or restraint. His record of rape, torture, murder, and oppression is well documented but marginalized and deflected by critics who claim that the violence of the war overshadows Hussein’s heinous crimes. This argument does not, and cannot stand. During Saddam Hussein’s reign, Iraqis had no sense that the terror would ever end. The individual citizen had neither the right nor the ability to oppose Saddam’s henchmen, who took what they wanted, killed and raped at will, and tortured (think hooks, blowtorches, and electricity) to intimidate or eliminate potential enemies. The purpose of this evil was solely to maintain Saddam’s power and strengthen his regime by dominating the will of the people. He was held up as something more than human, above all laws and criticism and accountable to no one. Operation Desert Storm did little to give Iraqis lasting hope that Saddam would be defeated, and when he ruthlessly crushed the Shia and Kurds after the war without response from the West, they recognized it as another validation of Saddam’s invincibility.

When U.S. soldiers pulled Saddam Hussein from that hole in Tikrit, the spell that had held Iraqis captive for decades was broken. Suddenly, there was a glimmer of hope for a population who had never had the right to dream of a better life. That hope is what differentiates every day before December 13, 2003, from every day since. It is the hope that things will get better, that the individual life can mean something. That the next generation can live a better life than the current one, and that through effort and will the people can make tomorrow better than today. This hope is fundamental to meaningful human existence, but is often taken for granted by Americans who have never endured a life where its expression is denied by a cruel dictator. Some suggest that Saddam’s dictatorship, though cruel and oppressive, was the only way to effectively control the tribes, maintain order, and govern the country. Day by day the Iraqi people are proving them wrong; this is the legacy of December 13.

— Gabe Ledeen is the director of the Vets For Freedom Educational Institute. He served two tours in al Anbar, Iraq, as a Marine officer with an infantry battalion.

Friday, December 12, 2008

He Doesn't Really Mean It

I hope!

WRONG

Colin Powell (whom I like) lashed out at Sarah Palin (whom I love) about her promotion of small town values.

He is wrong that there NOT more urban dwellers than there are suburban and rural dwellers. Small town values are better than big city ones.

How do I know? I grew up in a small town outside a HUGE city. Lived in huge city and now live in suburbs.

The urban elite need to get over themselves. Easy access to a museum or play does not a intellectual make. Nor does it make anyone a better person where it counts, in their character, in their fair dealings, in their common sense.

The Creation of a Conservative

This lovely article, again from culture11.com, traces this fellow's evolution into a conservative while at Yale.

Needless to say, he cites lots of intellectuals and philosophers but it is actually a pretty easy read and pleasantly illuminating.

I particularly liked this bit - yes I know it is long but it is worth it....

No matter how I try, I can’t identify the precise moment I first called myself a conservative. I know that in my rejection of rationalism, I considered duty and community as alternate sources of meaning; I know that I was powerfully moved by Burke’s paean to the “decent drapery of life,” his condemnations of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” and the “new conquering empire of light and reason.” If I’m strict with myself, though, it also had something to do with the people I spent time with. The most interesting, intense, and intellectual people I have ever encountered – then or since – are the men and women of the Party of the Right. Their style of Socratic dialogue, their conviction that ideas had consequences, their valorization of truth, all appealed to me: even when I had nothing, I looked to them for hints. When I finally started over, my first tentative steps away from ideology took me rightward.

My first real certainty, after Eliot, was that alienation had been implicit in my old world-picture. If we cannot understand ourselves as meaningful participants in something, we regard ourselves as fundamentally other; if all we can truly establish is our own existence as “things that think,” we have nothing to do with our fellows. Language and logic are not enough to bridge those gaps: it requires something more. In opposition to that liberal, rights-based worldview, I looked to love and to tradition.

I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man’s isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity. Those were the things I had hated in myself, and I saw them starkly illustrated in the modern world.

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism terrified me not for its historical lessons, but because there but for the grace of God went I. She describes the “uprootedness and superfluousness” that followed ”the break-down of political institutions and social traditions,” and subsequent creation of pseudo-rationalist ideologies to provide some measure of meaning. Totalitarianism “teach[es] and glorif[ies] the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started.” If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he’ll cling to some – any – ideology as though his life depends on it. (His ego does.) Wherever it takes him, he won’t dare to let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating in the abyss again.

I had been drowning. In my longing for certainty, I might have latched on to some murderous ideology. It was only by luck, or by that awful daring of a moment’s surrender, that I’d sacrificed the logical consistency of ideology for compassion. I wanted everyone to have that: I wanted human connection to be easier, closer, more meaningful, so that rationalism wouldn’t seem such an appealing option in the future. I wanted to encourage compassion and community, though I didn’t know how.

The Day The World Blew Up

Culture11.com is a fabulous site. Check it out.

And this review of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake is scathing. And quite rightly, because the idea that Klaatu would unleash Gort is absurd. The whole point as to give warning, not to actually exterminate humans because they are "hurting" the earth.

I mean seriously, all humans must die because we're bad for the earth? We live on earth. We evolved on earth. We are as much a part of the earth as any other living creature. That we have science and technology is a good thing.

Environmentalist movies are dumb.

Suck It Greenwich

I grew up in a town that in the late 70s/early 80s was mentioned three times in the book, "The Preppy Handbook".

The town is a bedroom community of New York City called Darien, CT. All white and insular, my family was not a terrific fit (we were neither well-off nor preppy) but the schools were amazing - one of my English teachers was a former editor of Time Magazine, even if most of the people were crap.

Yet even well-heeled Darien was a little insecure regarding flashy Greenwich, CT with its Rolls-Royce dealership and celebrity inhabitants (nouveau riche!).

Well, even though I left Darien in 1985 and except for one brief period, have not lived there since, I am pleased to see that my old town is, according to this article, the second most affluent town in America.

It's pathetic I know since we have NOTHING like the wealth of those people, but I am still taking pathetic joy that Greenwich isn't on the list.

My childhood in Darien was not a happy one and I would never live there again, but how weird that I still feel slightly loyal to it.

How Boris Saved Christmas

Boris Johnson that shagdog of a British politician and current Mayor of London has saved Christmas from the PC devils infesting City Hall (and just about everywhere else).

Hopefully, American politicians will follow Boris's example - grow a spine and start fighting for Christmas here too!

Neato

This is just cool.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

How About A Little Perspective EPA?

The EPA has just published a list of "Most Wanted Eco-Terrorists".

At first I thought good, they are going after the real eco-terrorists whose acts of violence have killed people.

No. They are going after polluters. Stupid EPA.

Now some of these polluters are doing terrible things and should be brought to justice, no doubt about it. Like this jerk:

Raul Chavez-Beltran, another fugitive on the list, ran an environmental cleanup company in El Paso, Texas, that is accused of transporting hazardous waste from factories along the Mexican border and improperly disposing and storing it in the U.S. In one case, he allegedly stockpiled mercury-laced soil from an environmental spill in a warehouse.
But other "most wanted eco-terrorists" are kinda lame. For example:

Also at large are the father and son team of Carlos and Allesandro Giordano, who were arrested in 2003 as the owners of Autodelta USA, a company that was illegally importing and selling Alfa Romeos that did not meet U.S. emission or safety standards. The two men are believed to be hiding out in Italy.
Yes, the high volume of non-safety standard Alfa Romeos clogging our streets is directly responsible for the (mild to nonexistant) smog over our cities.

I mean come on, a little perspective here. This excellent article by Bryan Denson of the Oregonian via Rick Ross shows what real eco-terrorists are doing.

Eco-terrorism escalated across the nation in the late 1990s. Underground saboteurs, claiming to act on behalf of the natural world, repeatedly struck such enterprises as logging, skiing, genetic research, home building and auto sales. They are suspected in 69 major attacks since January 1999, including 14 in the Pacific Northwest, The Oregonian found in an ongoing analysis of the crimes.

But serious cases of eco-terrorism took a precipitous plunge after July 16, when the Earth Liberation Front set fire to an oil company building in suburban Detroit. Since then, eco-terrorists have been tied to just six major crimes, compared to 21 during the same period last year. The last major act of eco-terrorism in the United States occurred more than two months ago, when the Earth Liberation Front set fire to a genetic research center under construction at the University of Minnesota, causing $630,000 damage.
Polluting is wrong and should be punished. But violence, and mayhem are worse.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Flying Black Aces

The Tuskegee Airmen have always been honored in my family and now they will be honored with invites to the inauguration.

Good.

My grandfather was a B-17 pilot in WWII. He flew more bombing raids in Europe than the Memphis Belle.

During one raid, his plane got pretty beaten up. And by beaten up, I mean a giant hole blown out of his fuselage. A division of the Tuskegee Airmen called the Flying Black Aces saved him. They escorted his limping plane to safety over liberated France and told him it was safe to take the plane down.

My grandfather begged them to escort him to England because if he didn't make it home to base, his wife would get an MIA and he didn't want her to go through that.

So at great personal risk, the Flying Black Aces got my grandfather and his crew safely home.

For love. And out of love.

My grandfather said until the day he died that if he ever met one of those men, he would "kiss their ass in Macy's windows."

He's gone now so those fine gentlemen are safe from my grandfather's lips but I continue his pledge to honor those gentlemen by thanking every military person I meet for their service.

And thank you again gentlemen for saving my grandfather. Without you, my father, myself, and my children might never have been born.

For our country and for my family, your heroism has had lasting impact.

Be Careful Who Your Mascot Is

When charismatic mega-fauna attack.

The polar bear has become the symbol of global-warming fear-mongering.

Apparently you should be afraid. This polar bear may have eaten her young.

Why do they have to act like animals?

Tide isn't rising it is turning

Man-made global warming is finally undergoing the scientific scrutiny it deserves. I am certain we will learn shocking new information.

Like the sun warms the earth!

650 Scientists are protesting the UN's IPCC claims. Hooray!

Soon may we hit critical mass.

Pile On

Today's list of articles about Illinois' corruption.

A Day in the Life of Chicago
Psst! Wanna buy a Senate seat?
By David Freddoso

Ink by the Barrell, Graft by the Pound
A made-for-Chicago script.
By Kathleen Parker

Democratic Culture of Corruption
Illinois invades.
By Michelle Malkin

State of Shame
By SCOTT TUROW

The Chicago Way, on Tape
This wiretap was golden.

The Blagojevich Case: Why Did Fitzgerald Act Now?
A corruption investigation stopped short.
By Byron York

For what it is worth

This is an illuminating interview with President G.W. Bush.

Learning, not repeating

As with all things socialism, we can learn from other's mistakes, rather than repeat them.

For example, nationalized healthcare? Look at Great Britain, then turn away.

The same goes with this government job creation scheme a la 1933. Building infrastructure is vital, but it is a state's responsibility for the most part. Plus, who wants a construction job when all they've ever done is work in IT?

This article from the Washington Post (!) pretty much sums it up. Japan tried it in the 1990s and it failed.

Gal Down

Sorry for the lack of posts today.

My lovely in-laws are arriving in about 2 1/2 hours for a month long stay over the Christmas holidays.

Have been running around like mad, trying to be organized.

Will blog later.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Cyber Shopping Is My Friend

I shop like a man. I am a purpose-driven shopper.

I decide I need something. I go out and buy it. I come home.

I don't get any enjoyment out of visiting store after store looking for the perfect shade of purple gloves.

Could. Not. Care. Less.

Which is why I just LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Internet shopping. Some of them are like big department stores. Some of them are department stores. But it's just me and the computer.

No whining kids. No long waits at the cashier. No heavy bags to lug about.

Sooo much easier, it is almost worth paying the shipping costs.

All that said, I will still probably do a substantial chunk of my Christmas shopping at Nordstrom Rack (the best bargains ever!) and a few random shops.

However I will recommend a couple of happy websites that have become my shopping standbys.

If you go to hasbrotoyshop.com and search for "play-a-thon" you can get 10 Hasbro toys (some dups) for $80 plus shipping. It is sorted by age category and is perfect for gifts to a wide variety of kids. You may just want to order one to have on hand for birthday gifts throughout the year.

Oh, and pearloutlet.com is my go-to place for high-value, high-impact, LOW priced pearl jewelry. Their products come in beautiful presentation boxes and with a signed by a gemologist certificate verifying replacement value.

I do love a bargain.

Finally, winecountrygiftbaskets.com has a whole section of gift baskets ranging from $20 - $200 with free shipping. And their online ordering is fantastic. You can select up to 50 different baskets going to 50 different people, order them all at once and put it on one credit card. If you live in a state that doesn't let you ship wine by mail, no problem. They have a wide variety of non-wine baskets too.

Sweet.

From My Email

Join the Fight Against Union Corruption

Dear Friends:

Every so often, Congress considers bills that are so dangerous - so much of a threat to the fabric of our democracy - that we have no choice but to stand up and fight.

Right now, we are faced with such an issue: organized labor's proposal to kill the secret ballot in Union organizing elections.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, we are prepared to spend whatever it takes to defeat this Big Labor power grab:

"...the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it will spend about $10 million in the coming months to fight legislation that would allow workers to organize without a secret ballot vote...Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the Chamber, said defeating the measure was the lobby group's top priority in the coming session of Congress, and he described the coming fight in Congress over the issue as a "firestorm bordering on Armageddon."

If this bill passes, it will result in push-button unionism and effectively gag employers and anti-union workers. It would also result in panels of government arbitrators creating labor contracts and work rules governing every aspect of the workplace.

We need your help - and there are several ways you can take action today:

Sign the Petition to Save the Secret Ballot.
View Our Latest Television Ad to Meet 'Bill the Union Boss.'
Vote in our Online Poll to Share Your Views on this Issue.
Our leaders in Washington need to work to fix the economy first - not pass dangerous laws that do little more than cost American jobs and lead to higher prices for American consumers.

Take action today to make sure the unions don't win this battle.

Sincerely,

Bill Miller
Senior Vice President and National Political Director

Who Cares

I have never understood why someone would care how much Oprah weighs.

Content of Character, folks. Not content of fridge (or skin color or whatever).

How do you spell Chicago?

C O R R U P T I O N

Technically, it's the Illinios Governor Rod Blagojevich who's in trouble for "allegedly" attempting to sell Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder but what is it with Chicago and Illinios that corrupt (criminal) politicians just gravitate there?

This article is stressing that there's no link to Obama but based on how well "investigative journalists" were at investigating Obama during the election, I'll probably never believe there was absolutely no connection. It was Obama's senate seat for crying out loud, he must have at least heard about Blagojevich's doings through the political grapevine there.

I think I like this line best of all, "Fitzgerald described the situation by saying: "We were in the middle of a corruption crime spree and we wanted to stop it."

Monday, December 8, 2008

Class Act

Nothing says class than groping a cardboard cutout.

So Not Leadership

Reagan fired the traffic controllers for less.

Better Not Red

As a Star Trek fan, this is Glorious. Simply Wonderful.

Disgraced Words

Oxford University Press has removed words like bishop, chapel, and monarch from its Junior Dictionary because the "publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society".

So how does excluding words regarding the state religion of Great Britian reflect a multicultural society?

Smells like PC BS to me.

Smoker-in-Chief

Tom Brokaw challenged Obama on his 20 years plus smoking habit in this interview here published by Reuters.

Brokaw was actually tough on Obama's smoking. Obama assured Brokaw that there would be "no smoking in the White House".

Of course, not.

I bet you a dollar however, there will be smoking on the White House grounds.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Bikini Atoll

Watching Science Channel right now - program running is Radioactive Paradise.

It's about the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests and ironically, they can't find radioactivity at the test sites. Life there is flourishing and it looks real pretty.

Even the coral reefs are coming back.

Mother Nature is a pretty tough broad.

No Thank YOU

I wrote about Columbia University's eminent domain abuse here and got this response from long-suffering Mr. Sprayregen. I'm putting his comment in its own post because I think everyone should visit his website and sign his petition.

Dear Kris - thanks so much for highlighting this abuse. It can - and does - happen to anyone.

For more information, go to our website -

www.mylandismine.com

Nick Sprayregen

Reason Number 37,657,439

I have many, many, many reasons why I loath and despise Universal Healthcare aka government-run medical rationing.

This is just one of a gazillion examples of why it is so very, very bad.

In fact read Lorraine Morgan's whole story in the Daily Mail (UK).

Read it remembering that this is what socialized government-run medicine is like in a largely homogeneous industrialized country - Great Britain. Do not for a minute imagine that the US government could do it any better here in America which has a far greater spectrum of humanity and is a far larger country.

How Not To Create Jobs

From OpenMarket.org:

How Not to Create Jobs
Posted by Ryan Young

President-elect Obama has a plan to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years.

One of his ideas is to install energy-efficient light bulbs in federal office buildings.

In other words, we’re about to find out exactly how many federal employees it takes to screw in a light bulb.

My guess: a lot.

American Ingenuity

You just got to love it. Americans imagine something and then make it happen. We turn science fiction musings into household appliances and more.

It's called ingenuity and I'm very proud of our scientists and the cutting-edge technology like this Missile Defence program that keep us ahead of the rest of the planet.

Hooray!

As Instapundit Glenn Reynold's headline his link to this article, William "Freezer Cash" Jefferson is defeated.

This is very good news indeed.

But What Chemical Pollutant?

A new report is coming out tomorrow stating that chemical pollutants are turning male fish into females.

What could this pollutant be?

If you read my husband's book, you'd know it is artificial estrogen being urinated into the water system by women taking birth control pills.

This article about the report goes to great lengths to buy that fact. You finally get to this fact 12 paragraphs down.

Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.
Of course, telling women that when they take birth control pills, they are poisoning the world's fish and wildlife population is simple not done. The charity CHEMTrust is publishing this report and if you can't tell from the name that this charity does NOT trust chemicals, then see for yourself at their website. Just remember not to believe CHEMTrust until you've checked their research against an real scientific institute's.

The article in question jumps through many hoops to blame chemicals but I sincerely doubt the "scientific" research the soon-to-be-released report is based on will win any Nobel prizes.

Chapter Six of my husband's book covers a lot of this. Here are a few excerpts:

Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in 43 different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat . Most amusingly, soy bean, that product so beloved of the vegetarian liberal environmentalist, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens. One study found that, even ten years ago, the US soy harvest was producing about 230 million pounds of those natural endocrine modulators annually . Given that soy flour, soy protein and soybean oil are now ubiquitous in the western diet, these hormones are being consumed in hundreds of products every day.

Given all the sources of these natural phytoestrogens, it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms. Yet all the environmentalists' attention has been focused on that tiny number.
AND
Let's get back to our main point, the silence of environmentalists over the synthetic estrogen from contraceptive pills. How much are humans ingesting daily from those sources? Brace yourselves. The medicines used in hormone replacement therapy contribute about 3,350 micrograms per day. The birth control pill contributes about 16,675 micrograms per day. The so-called "Morning After Pill" weighs in at a whopping 333,500 micrograms per day .

These are massive amounts of fully-potent estrogen and they are passing into the environment, causing the problems in fish that we have already discussed. We've also seen how much effort the environmentalists have put into attacking the sources of the much less significant industrial estrogen mimics. Therefore, there's a problem, and it's similar to phantom problems the liberals have made a big fuss over. Put two and two together and you should get four, but math was never the liberal environmentalist's strong point.

A Rare and Decent Opinion Piece in the NYT

Wonders never cease, the New York Times has published an opinion piece that I actually agree with.

Astonishing.

UnFairness Doctrine

Better wake up and pay attention to this little bit of legislation or you'll find your access to information severely limited.

Liberals and Obama are talking about re-instating the so-called Fairness Doctrine which requires broadcasters to give equal balance to all points of view. Sounds about right until you read George Will's article in Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailing the dispicable history of this particular ideological doctrine.

When government regulation of the content of broadcasts began in 1927, the supposed justification was the scarcity of radio spectrum. In 1928 and 1929, when Republicans ran Washington, a New York station owned by the Socialist Party was warned to show “due regard” for others’ opinions, and the government blocked the Chicago Federation of Labor’s attempted purchase of a station because all stations should serve “the general public.” In 1939, when Democrats ran Washington, the government conditioned renewal of one station’s license on that station’s promise to desist from anti-FDR editorials.

In 1969, when the Supreme Court declared the fairness doctrine constitutional, it probably did not know the Kennedy administration’s use of it, as one official described it: “Our massive strategy was to use the fairness doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” Richard Nixon emulated this practice. In 1973, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, a liberal, said the doctrine “has no place in our First Amendment regime” because it “enables administration after administration to toy with TV or radio.”
This doctrine must not come to pass. It is a gag-order on conservative viewpoints.

Pearl Harbor Day

As this NRO post reminds me, today is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

First, a thank you to all who served and are serving. Our country wouldn't be free if you were not protecting us. Or as the poet once said (I paraphrase), we sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand at the ready.

Second, the post I linked to, also reminds us that we must remember these anniversaries because to forget them is to invite another vicious attack on our homeland soil.

This is worth watching as well.

Soup Pants

A NYC fashion boutique is offering free soup to its customers in the hopes that they will buy some designer fashions.

If you go to a store for free soup are you really going to drop a couple of hundred dollars on a pair of designer pants?

Or are you more likely to spill soup on them?