News and Politics

Well, I actually sat through the President’s speech tonight.  I didn’t find much interesting in the speech due to the constant leaks of the details.   There were no changes in the rules of engagement, no direct strategies to demoralize the enemy, etc.  However, one thing really caught my ear:

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

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After millions of deaths, it’s finally great to see some sense returning to the world. The world’s greatest and safest insecticide has finally been cleared to return to saving lives:

The U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) reversed 30 years of policy yesterday, giving DDT a “clean bill of health” for controlling malaria, and it asked environmental groups to support limited use of the insecticide to save the lives of African babies.

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Up till now, I’ve viewed the debate about the recent 9/11 docudrama (what ever the hell that means) “The Path to 9/11” with great amusement. I found it funny that the right wing now stood in defense of the mini-series when not three years ago they were up in arms about the broadcast of another silly mini-series about Ronald Reagan. I thought it just another futile political infight about the portrayals of national leaders in entertainment television. Or in other words, a much ado about nothing.

I’m an ocasional reader of the Korean Central News Agency of DPRK (KCNA) which is the external propaganda wing of North Korea. It’s a priceless resource for the study of the silliness of political propaganda. One of my favorites recently was an article in which a North Korean woman’s soccer victory was responsible for the increase in the country’s electrical output:

Ri Chol Su, a worker of the Pyongyang Thermal Power Complex, said: “I was greatly excited to hear the news that our girls won the world championship. This encouraged us to achieve an unprecedented high boost in the electricity production today.

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What’s going on Chicagoans? Have you lost as sense of manly honor? First you ban a food that no one eats, Foie Gras. But that one made a bit of sense. I’m sure that all waterfowl in the city of Chicago are registered Democrats and you have to look out for your constituents.

But then I find this quote in an article about the name change of Marshall Field’s to Macy’s:

I found this old video of Milton Friedman making an astounding explanation for the morality of freedom and capitalism:

It’s worth it to watch the whole thing, but just take one outstanding excerpted quote:

I think there has been one underlying and basic fallacy in this whole set of Social Security and welfare measures. And that is the fallacy, this is at the bottom of it, the fallacy that it is feasible and possible to do good with other people’s money. Now that view has two flaws: If I want to do good with other people’s money, I first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people’s money, at it’s very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It’s against freedom because I have to use force to get the money.

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Now here is a theory I can get behind:

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

[Via: The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory]

I hadn’t heard this quote from the Great Communicator and thought I’d pass it along:

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

[Via: Quote Details: Ronald Reagan: How do you tell… - The Quotations Page]

Here’s your duck tape quote of the day. Apparently the real issue of 9/11 was the need for a flag-burning amendment:

“Ask the men and women who stood on top of the (World) Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment,” - Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif

[Via: www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish]

Perry de Havilland over at Samzidata, in his usual English way, has a much more calm response to this Marxism on the Right article:

To be a libertarian is to believe that society (which is the sum of its parts but not more than that), not the state, is what actually matters, and moreover the state, far from being society’s protector as conservatives fondly imagine, is as often as not highly corrosive to many of the very values conservatives often implausibly claim to champion.

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