Why Do Women Have Breasts?
I really enjoyed this one, partly because it was intellectually stimulating and partly because I am a man and just enjoy listening to things about breasts.So, now that women are obliged to carry breasts around with them all the time, it seems that many of them have taken the trouble of growing good ones.Joe Bob says check it out.Men, meanwhile, are stuck with a sub-optimal instinct. Their desires are fired by a pair of useless bags of fat. Men cannot afford to lose this instinct, however. Non-lactating breasts are like nuclear missiles -- we only need them or want them because other people have them.
The New Republic Online: Pilgrims' Progress
A joint pilgrimage to Auschwitz by Israeli Jews, Christians and Muslims:Inevitably, there are tensions. When a Christian Arab woman reads aloud a poem asking how God could have allowed "the people you chose" to be murdered, other Arabs are outraged at her seeming identification with Judaism. And, in coming here together, we all take emotional risks. For the Arab participants, who have been attacked by their own media as traitors, conceding the enormity of their enemy's tragedy risks diminishing their own. For Jews, coming to the place that teaches us the necessity of power, together with Arabs who threaten that power, risks weakening our will to fight for survival. The result of our mutual risk-taking is an exchange of sensibilities. Jews acknowledge that Auschwitz isn't just a Jewish but a universal wound, while our Arab partners discover Jewish outrage. "Where was the world?" they demand. And, with unintended irony, "Why didn't the Jews fight back?" Referring to the Nazis, a Bedouin social worker invokes that old Jewish curse, "Y'mach shmam" ("may their names be blotted out"), as if he were from Brooklyn.Well worth the entire read.
Free Drugs for Wizened Citizens
From Neal Boortz:FREE DRUGS FOR WIZENED CITIZENSStep by step ... here is how it's going to work. Print this and safe it. You can show it to your children or grandchildren to help explain why the government is taking 60% of everything they earn.
- Democrats propose a grand new spending program. Senior citizens are going to be able to use someone else's money to buy their prescription drugs. Senior citizens pledge their electoral support to Democrats as thanks.
- Republicans start chanting "me too!" and get on board with the free drugs for old folks plan, hoping that at least some of the wrinkled class will vote for them.
- Senior citizens spend an average of $650 a year on prescription drugs right now. As soon as the drug benefit is added to Medicare the pharmaceutical companies will start marketing many more drugs to old folks. "Ask your doctor about Noasital."
- Seniors will rush off to their Medicare doctors and say "Tell me about Noasital." They'll insist on a prescription for Noasital, and any other drug they happen to see advertised, and many doctors will be all too willing to go along.
- The average yearly spending by seniors on prescription drugs will skyrocket from $650 a year to thousands of dollars a year.
- In short order the projections for spending on the new prescription drug benefit will have been left in the dust. What was sold to us as a $40 billion a year program will be costing well over $100 billion a year ... and going nowhere but up. Politicians and bureaucrats will start expressing their "concerns" and a fix will be demanded.
- The "fix" to rising spending on drugs for wrinkled class will be to put limits on what Medicare will pay for certain prescription drugs, just as Medicare has already put limits on what will be paid for certain medical services.
- Pharmaceutical companies will find that they aren't making any money on selling these drugs to seniors because of the Medicare price controls. In fact, they may find that they are actually losing money. To compensate for these lost profits the pharmaceutical companies will simply increase prices for these and other drugs to their non-Medicare patients.
- As the prices of prescription drugs for non-Medicare Americans go up, so will the price of health insurance coverage. Insurance companies aren’t going to suffer these increased costs without passing them off to the insured. Basically this is the same thing that has happened in many other areas of health care. Medicare institutes price controls, health care providers make up the difference by charging other patients more, health insurance companies raise premiums … and so on.
- As prescription prices and health insurance premiums increase for non-Medicare Americans, so will the demand for politicians to step in and do something. Politicians, always hungry for both votes and power, will be all-too-happy to oblige.
- Politicians will start demagoguing drug companies. They will be called "greedy" and will be accused of "profiteering" and "exploiting" the frail health of our precious senior citizens.
- After a short period of scare-mongering the politicians will vote to institute price controls on the pharmaceutical companies. Politicians will tell us that they are doing this to reign in these greedy corporate monsters who are becoming obscenely rich on the backs of sick Americans.
- With price controls the earnings figures for pharmaceutical companies will go into the toilet.
- As earnings go down pharmaceutical companies will have less and less to spend on research and development for new drugs. Research into ways to treat disease will show down and, eventually, will become the province of government.
- Government will be the eventual beneficiary of this mess as the masses clamor for more and more government solutions to these problems that are perceived to be the fault of the private sector.
Israel News : Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
I shamed myself a little, because I had started to do what I accuse a lot of other people of doing -- I am beginning to take the slaughter of Jews as something that "just happens". This line shocked me back to reality:"It was a barbecue, people burned like torches," he said. It was worse, he said, than anything he had seen at Yad Vashem.This is worse than anything at Yad Vashem. The last time the Jews were being slaughtered, the world had plausible deniability. Today, anyone who can look at this and still insist on tying Israel's hands is complicit in the murder.
Causus Belli
Long, and well worth the read. I don't know how to feel about this impression that I get that the left is losing its best thinkers. That impression is based on seeing more and more people who identify themselves as left disagreeing with the "mainstream" left and agreeing with me (and of course I see myself as correct, or I wouldn't advocate it, would I?) My wishy-washyness comes from not being sure if I want the left so weakened.Libertarianism, at its root, is the distrust of pretty much everyone. I want to make everything political hard to do, and part of that is making sure that everyone has someone else who thinks that they are a complete idiot and not only isn't afraid to tell them, but can convince people that aren't complete idiots that they may be right. As it stands, it is starting to look like the only people that the left will be able to convince in a while is, well, complete idiots. They are burning all of their credibility while people like Totten (Hat tip to him on this one, by the way) and LaFreniere make rear-guard attempts to bring them to reason. (Well, as close to reason as the left gets.)
The good that I see coming is that the blogosphere is doing a good job of reforming the left and right into Idiotarian and Anti-Idiotarian. Through the harsh light that the blogosphere throws on everything, LGF and Totten are getting closer and closer to each other, and the Freepers and the IdiotMedia types are getting harder and harder to tell apart. As disgusted as I am with the Libertarian Party, maybe it is time for the Anti-Idiotarian Party. It just needs a better name; I hate being Anti- anything. That was the biggest problem with the Reform Party moniker -- it embraces a negative.
To quote Sam Elliot, "Aw shucks, I'm rambling again." Read the article. Here's a taste.
In a very real sense, even the chaos of the post war period is a "Liberal gift", self-determination. And that is more precious than any number of lives or any years of deprivation. Or, at least, that is the bedrock principle that the US itself was founded on (give me freedom or give me death).Joe Bob says check it out.You can disagree with this argument, but at least, finally, the US appears to be acting in accordance with our principles instead of in spite of them. And if Muslim fanatics retaliate with terrorist attacks upon the US it will be hard to argue that they are not attacking us for our principles and values.
Rich and powerful men in a rich and powerful country might make money off the war? This makes it wrong, right?
Someone always profits from a war, this is history, human nature, and politics. The demand of soldiers for bullets, bread, and uniforms can be nearly infinite. The job of sending our troops abroad and of cleaning up the messes they leave behind can be quite lucrative for related industries. And no doubt someone from one of those industries will have some insider relation to the White House.
So what? In the end I would return to my query... Is it wrong to free the oppressed and hand them their future? In the end this is the only question that matters, not whether you like the man in the White House.
Robert Novak: California's runaway recall
More on Gray Davis. He is already a lame duck. Professional petitioners will have no problem gaining that many signatures given time.While bipartisan establishment politicians remain in denial, realists now are taking the recall movement seriously. Dave Galliard, a Sacramento-based political consultant seeking signatures for recall petitions, says 520,000 voters have signed. He is aiming for 1.2 million, providing insurance that the required 897,000 valid names are collected. If this is done by July 18, an election must be held in September or October. Gov. Davis, at 21 percent approval in a recent private labor union poll, cannot be expected to survive.This one is going to heat up a lot for the next month or so.
