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Mark Steyn was in the National Review commenting on some of our breeding arrangements.
… The abortion lobby talks about a world where every child is “wanted.†If you get pregnant at 19 or 23, you most likely didn’t really “want†a child: It just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. By contrast, if you conceive at 42 after half a million bucks’ worth of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the world that there’s a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it to Miss Stewart’s. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: Even if you haven’t paid the clinic a bundle for the stork’s little bundle, you’re aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be. When you contemplate society’s changing attitudes to childhood — the “war against boys†that Christina Hoff Sommers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever-tighter chain — you have to wonder how much of that derives from the fact that “young moms†are increasingly middle-aged. I wish Miss Stewart happiness and fulfillment, but she seems a sad emblem of a world that insists on time-honored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of reordering the most basic building blocks of society. …
Financial Times with a timely op-ed; Pick stocks, buy houses, don’t worry.
Here’s what I like about the so-called housing bust. Every house is for sale. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise this is a voyeur’s dream. First off, before this creeps out, know this: I’m now in the market to buy a house.
I’ve been renting for the past couple of years and now is the time to buy. There’s not only blood in the streets; there’s full-scale hemorrhaging. I’ll get to specific numbers in a second but this is the exact time you should be considering buying. There’s no rush, however. You have a good year before the next stampede begins, but begin it will. So I’m taking my time checking out houses as they come up for sale.
Let me belt it out: US household assets are $54,000bn. Liquid net worth (cash, mutual funds, bonds etc) is $27,500bn. Household debt is $13,000bn. In other words, the US household balance sheet is looking great: $54,000bn in assets ($27,500bn liquid) to cover $13,000bn in debt. Heck, we’re under-leveraged as a country right now and should probably take on more debt. …
American Thinker shows how the media, this time Reuters, shape the new about the economy.
The headline on the Reuters story syndicated all over the world today is “Wal-Mart Hits the Wall: World’s largest retailer issues bleak forecast, pointing to cash-squeezed customers, higher fuel prices, interest rates.” The accompanying story describes Wal-Mart as “struggling” — which would carry dire implications for the U.S. economy, because Wal-Mart, which serves 127 million customers every week, “is considered a barometer of the health of the U.S. retail sector.” The clear thrust of the article is that Wal-Mart, and hence the U.S. economy, is in trouble.
Really? What the article actually shows is that Wal-Mart’s second-quarter sales “were $91.99 billion, up almost 9 percent from a year ago.” Moreover, its earnings rose to $3.1 billion, up from $2.08 billion a year ago. So, in reality, sales and profits were higher than last year. These are not the financials of a company that is in trouble. …
Victor Davis Hanson wonders what the last 17 months of W’s administration will bring.
… The responsibility of governance is not the same thing as easy op-ed criticism, and the nation is learning just that as it listens to our would-be future presidents—whether Obama’s apparent Pakistan invasion option, or Hillary’s pandering with pseudo-accent to African-Americans, or the obsessions of Mrs. Edwards with Obama, or her husband’s continual embarrassment of living high in one nation, while lecturing others about the needs of the other.
I say all this remembering that friends used to tell me that in March 1991 George Bush would win by a landslide in 1992, and in 1987 Ronald Reagan would either be impeached or resign, or that after 9/11 and the despicable pardons, Bill Clinton would be ranked among our very worst presidents.
The point is that few know exactly how the country and the world will look by November 2008, but it may very well be that the U.S. will enjoy a position of strength and respect abroad and security at home — and someone still in office in late 2008 will get a great deal of credit for that.
Tony Blankley, watching the defeatist Dems run for cover, reminds us of things they have said.
… The Democrats, after spending the winter, spring and early summer frantically calling to get out of Iraq as fast as their little feet could carry them, are now, as autumn approaches, demonstrating their Olympic-class backpedaling skills.
By winter (with the complicity of the drive-by media — hat tip to Rush), the Democrats hope to expunge the historic record of their failure of war nerve this spring. This is the moment for Republicans — from the president, to the candidates for president, to the incumbents and challengers for offices all the way down to dog catcher (and especially dog catcher) to remind the public of the springtime Democratic Party defeatism and lost nerve. …
… The leadership of the Democratic Party has, by their public words this spring, disgraced themselves for a generation. Republicans have the right — and the duty — to engrave in the public mind the springtime Democratic perfidy and cowardice in the face of the enemy.
This spring and early summer: Sen. Harry Reid said the war is lost, Gov. Richardson said that on his first day in the Oval Office he would order our troops to leave Iraq immediately (even if it meant throwing down their weapons on the way out), Hillary bragged that if Bush doesn’t end the war, she would do so immediately upon her arriving in the Oval Office (God preserve us), Sen. Obama took pride of place in his adamantine opposition to, and immediate departure from, the Iraq war. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on the media’s war against the American people.
Roy Spencer in Tech Central reviews the growing evidence against global warming.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the global warming debate has now escalated from a minor skirmish to an all-out war. Although we who are skeptical of the claim that global warming is mostly manmade have become accustomed to being the ones that take on casualties, last week was particularly brutal for those who say we have only 8 years and 5 months left to turn things around, greenhouse gas emissions-wise.
I’m talking about the other side – the global warming alarmists.
First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States – 1934 is. The temperature adjustment is admittedly small, yet there seemed to be no rush to retract the oft-repeated alarmist statements that have seared “1998!” into our brains as the rallying cry for the fight against global warming.
Then, the issue of spurious heat influences on the thermometers that NOAA uses to monitor global temperatures has reared its ugly head. Personally, I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. Ordinary citizens are now traveling throughout their home states, taking pictures of the local conditions around these thermometer sites.
To everyone’s astonishment, all kinds of spurious heat sources have cropped up over the years next to the thermometers. Air conditioning exhaust fans, burn barrels, asphalt parking lots, roofs, jet exhaust. Who could have known? Shocking. …
John Stossel and the farm bill.
By now you’ve probably heard that a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states:
From 1999 through 2005, the USDA “paid $1.1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,801 deceased individuals. … 40 percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years, and 19 percent to those dead for seven or more years.” One dead farmer got more than $400,000 during those years.
And they say you can’t take it with you.
Defending the USDA, the GAO adds, “The complex nature of some farming operations — such as entities embedded within other entities — can make it difficult for USDA to avoid making payments to deceased individuals.”
Exactly. The agricultural section of the U.S. code is nearly 1,800 pages.
There’s an easy way to avoid such absurdities: Abolish all farm subsidies. …
Walter Williams speculates on how many people get killed by environmentalists.
Environmentalists, with the help of politicians and other government officials, have an agenda that has cost thousands of American lives.
In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building flood gates on Lake Pontchartrain, like those in the Netherlands that protect cities from North Sea storms. In 1977, the gates were about to be built, but the Environmental Defense Fund and Save Our Wetlands sought a court injunction to block the project.
According to John Berlau’s recent book, “Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health,” U.S. Attorney Gerald Gallinghouse told the court that not building the gates could kill thousands of New Orleanians. Judge Charles Schwartz issued the injunction despite the evidence refuting claims of environmental damage.
We’re told that DDT is harmful to humans and animals. Berlau, a research fellow at the Washington, D.C-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, “Not a single study linking DDT exposure to human toxicity has ever been replicated.” In one long-term study, volunteers ate 32 ounces of DDT for a year and a half, and 16 years later, they suffered no increased risk of adverse health effects.
Despite evidence that, properly used, DDT is neither harmful to humans nor animals, environmental extremists fight for a continued ban. This has led to millions of illnesses and deaths from malaria, especially in Africa. After WWII, DDT saved millions upon millions of lives in India, Southeast Asia and South America. In some cases, malaria deaths fell to near zero. With bans on DDT, malaria deaths and illnesses have skyrocketed. …
Imus update from Neal Boortz.
The French News Agency thinks we’re stupid. We get a good chance to see what their propaganda’s like.
BoreMe.com with world class insults
News Biscuit wonders what it’s like to have a child prodigy for a kid.