ken

Finally, a reason to vote against Bush

by

that can be taken seriously – that isn’t either a blatant distortion (Iraq is a disaster!), a reason to vote for Bush (he’s going to reduce Social Security benefits! He’s going to go to war against Iran!), or a failing that Kerry would magnify if he got the chance (he spends too damn much money!)

Apparently, the current administration is pushing for a UN convention intended to ban all forms of cloning worldwide. (Another link here; Kleiman’s post has a link to a Financial Times article that requires registration and payment)

This is absolutely insane. To protect organisms that cannot possibly be people, that don’t even have the most rudimentary brains that are the first and most basic requirement for sentient life, the Administration is advocating that all of humanity be forbidden to investigate or use techniques that may lead to the possibility of transplanting your own matching organs or even replacing your entire body, and show an exciting prospect for one day finally eliminating the dreaded, agonizing, degenerative disease that has plagued every last generation of humanity since the very beginning of the race, perhaps in time to save you from certain death.

To be sure, the UN has no power to actually enforce such a prohibition, and the US Congress declined to enact one on its own and would probably continue to do so even if the UN asked it to. But how much needed and useful investment would go on in this country in the presence of an Administration that openly advocates criminalizing the fruit of such long and expensive labors?

If only his opponent, and his entire party, weren’t so openly hostile to the very idea of market forces being allowed to produce technological improvements, price reduction, and increased supply in the medical field, and in favor of “solving” the problems caused by ill-advised interventions in the marketplace by adding more interventions.

If only his opposition wasn’t so disdainful of the very possibility of bringing some measure of liberty and democracy to places that knew only oppression and jihad, or so committed to the notion that the introduction of free-market capitalism is a provocation that enrages the locals and understandably makes them turn into jihadis and plot revenge against such outrageous injury.

Damn, I’m really beginning to hate this election.

(Update: Maybe Bush is pushing for UN action because it has little practical effect, while allowing him to pretend to take positive action against the evils of cloning and stem-cell research. If we grant that assumption, this move goes into the “reasons to vote for Bush” column. But I don’t know if that explanation makes sense. What do y’all think?)

Clear descriptive language

by

Certainly something we could use more of – a lot of problems would go away if things were simply called by their right names.

Here’s a beautiful example of the difference between language intended to obfuscate and language intended to illustrate.

“FDA lifts ban on…” should be the headline every time the FDA “approves” a drug.

More draft nonsense

by

They just don’t quit, do they?

Apparently the new line is that Bush’s secret plan for the war on terror requires expanding the military, and there is no possible way to expand the military without a draft. Notice that these guys refuse to even discuss the possibility of recruiting extra soldiers. (Not that Democrats were ever big on recruiting soldiers as opposed to conscripting them…)

(All this talk is making me wonder if we will have a draft – through the refusal of Congressional Democrats to raise the military’s authorized strength without one… while pushing the line that Bush is endangering us by resisting this obviously needed move.)

I wish we had expanded our forces two years ago, to give us more of a reserve for dealing with contingencies (like mullahs getting uncomfortably close to posessing nuclear weapons) and to finally kill, once and for all, the odious practice that Jefferson Davis introduced to these shores by showing it to be completely superfluous (at best). I’m pretty sure an expansion is going to have to happen within the next few months, and I’m confident that when that time comes, we’ll all get to see just how full of it these scare-mongerers are about George W. Bush.

Shifting the Blame

by

I submit another reason to vote against our friends on the left, including their current presidential candidate John Kerry.

Those guys have a long-standing habit of shifting the blame for their own mistakes, failures, and disasters onto their victims and innocent bystanders. This behavior has been going on for more than 70 years.

(Sure, there are claims that Bush is shifting the blame for his own failures in Iraq to… someone else. But I’m not about to fault him for refusing to accept the blame for the actions of our enemies, especially when he told us forthrightly, repeatedly, from the very beginning that we would need much more time to destroy them than we have spent so far.)

A couple of recent examples should suffice.

Some time ago Congress passed a law providing free health care for some of our population. Some of the beneficiaries were damaging their own health and driving up the cost to be covered by the government by smoking cigarettes. Congress made no provision limiting the liability of the government in cases where the recipients of medical aid damaged their own health in this way.

According to the Clinton Administration, this was all somehow the fault of the tobacco companies – they were alleged to be responsible for costs incurred by a program passed by Congress with no input whatsoever from the tobacco companies. The administration proceeded to extort large sums of money, ostensibly to repay this cost, and the states ended up following suit.

More recently, Wal-Mart stands accused of transferring costs onto the government – because of welfare payments made to some of their lower-paid employees according to laws passed by Congress, again without input from Wal-Mart. Apparently, if you hire people that make less than the welfare threshold, it somehow becomes your fault that the government is giving them welfare payments, and never mind that they’d be getting even more welfare payments if you didn’t hire them. Extensive punitive action has not yet occured, but if this “logic” doesn’t soon get the ridicule it deserves, it’s only a matter of time.

This kind of outrageous dishonesty should not be rewarded at the ballot box.

Hostage house found

by

According to CENTCOM, a house apparently used as a place to hold captives was found by officers who also intercepted more would-be victims.

They also found two bottles of anesthetic which was presumably intended to drug the victims and make them appear docile on video.

(Thanks to
Junkyard Blog for the link)