Thursday, September 30, 2010

Scientists Use Giant Fudge to Seek Shower Mould on Goldilocks

Habitable zone relative to size of stars                     Image via Wikipedia
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today."


"I have almost no doubt about it."

Well, yes. But he's using Giant Fudge to search for Shower Mould on Goldilocks, so he would say that, wouldn't he?!


Read the latest in the quest for life on other planets here.
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Best Garlic Bread Ever. Best Onion Rings Ever.

Murray's of Minneapolis is a steak joint time-locked in the 1940s.  When I asked some Minnesotans about Murray's, they said it was a "supper club".  I didn't have a clue what a supper club is/was, but, I get the idea it's a dinner place with linen table cloths that features evening entertainment.

We went on Friday for their Mon-Fri. early-bird special. And what a special it was!  The garlic bread was the best ever -- crisp, salty, packed with garlic, butter, and a no-doubt secret seasoning!  It was awesome!

The restaurant has been in the family since its inception, and many of the waitresses are long-timers.  We were fortunate; we got one, and she couldn't have been nicer.  She definitely added to the experience.

For my appetizer, I chose the onion rings over the Caesar salad and the other options. The onion rings were best ever -- delicate, light, with the same awesome seasoning as the garlic bread.

For main course, I had a delicious steak, and for dessert, their sliced bread pudding that packed a rum sauce punch -- it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!

All for $20.

The pianist was just gearing up as our early-bird was winding down.

We'll be back (Lord willing).

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

A Great Day For Prostitutes and Liberals

Stickers on a pay phone advertising the servic...Image via Wikipedia
Ontario judges, acting as usual on the basis of nothing more profound than personal likes and dislikes,  have struck down Canada's prostitution laws. Can cash-intensive government training grants, overseers, seminars, etc. etc. be far behind??

The ruling strikes down a law rooted in a high view of human beings. It represents a continuation of the slippery moral slide that Pierre Trudeau put the country on.  It will appeal to pimps, prostitutes,  johns, abortionists, and Liberals, who have been trying to make prostitution "just another career choice" for years -- hello, Hedy Fry?!

The great thing about Canada is you don't have to think about moral issues for yourself -- judges get paid to do it for you.  And we know they're uniquely qualified because they wear frilly robes and we don't.

And, hey, and what's with this politically incorrect "prostitute" talk -- it's "sex worker", bud.  Or, in the case of "it's just-another-job" Liberals, "mom",  "sis" or "daughter", maybe.

A good day for Liberals, a bad day for Canada.

Article here.

An alternate view from Canada's Barbara Kay.

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Quote of the Day: "The Creation Not Only of All Matter and Energy, But of Spacetime Itself"

"An initial cosmological singularity . . . forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. . . . On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself."  -- Paul Davies, quoted by William Lane Craig, here.
      
Lots of good stuff on P.C.W. (Paul) Davies, at Wiki.
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Pew Forum Religious Knowledge Quiz

Cults and new religious movements in literatur...Image via Wikipedia
How much do you know about religion?

Take the Quiz.

If you read this article first, it will give you at least one answer.

The questions are pretty basic, but one or two could be a bit tricky.

 I answered 14 questions, went and got a haircut, came back, answered the 15th, and it gave me a score of 1/15. I'm pretty sure I actually got 15/15.  Honest ("thou shalt not bear false witness").

Let me know how you do.

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Tomorrow's Headline: Big Chicken Fights Back!

CHENGDU, CHINA - FEBRUARY 5:  Panda fans welco...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
China has slapped duties on American chickens.

It's only a matter of time until the might of American chicken producers is unleashed.  Tomorrow's headlines today, courtesy of the Ball Bounces: Big Chicken Fights Back!

To the tune of American Woman:

American Chicken, stay a way from me-hee
American Chicken, just let me be-hee
Don't come knockin, let me be
I won't be your fricassee
Now Chicken...
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Monday, September 27, 2010

UN To Appoint Space Ambassador To Greet Alien Visitors

“.... we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Indeed.

The UK's Telegraph has the scoop.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Quote of the Day: "Canada Has Gone Out of Its Way to make Criminals Invincible and Victims Vulnerable"

Canada has gone out of its way to make criminals as invincible, and victims as vulnerable, as possible. This wasn’t the aim of gun control, of course, only the result. -- George Jonas

Read the whole article. You'll enjoy the last paragraph (or your Ball Bounces money back).

Friday, September 24, 2010

Most Delicious Steak Ever


At 7 pm. September 23, 2010 I had the best, most delicious steak I have ever eaten at the B*A*N*K Restaurant, Minneapolis.

It was a generous rib-eye, medium.

It came with macaroni.

Cows, beware.

And that's the way the beef-eating Ball bounces.

B*A*N*K Restaurant Minneapolis.



Wednesday, September 22, 2010

West Australia Environmentalism


The West Australia Dept. of the Environment has decreed the land in the picture above a "watercourse".  It is shown Winter 2010 at "peak flow".

The sign has been added for effect.

It's good to know the environmentalists are alive and well and living in west Australia.  They may be flowing upstream but they've got their feet planted firmly on the watercourse ground.

h/t JoNova.
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Quote of the Day: "On Balance Islam’s Loathing of Other Cultures Seems Less Damaging"

America AloneImage by Double_Nickel via Flickr
What could be worse than Islam's loathing of the West?  The West's loathing of itself:

"If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own." -- Mark Steyn.

Mark Steyn weighs in on Koran-burning and the leftist West's capitulation to militant Islam.

Steyn says it better than anybody. Please read the article Mollifying Muslims, and Muslifying Mollies.
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Sunday, September 19, 2010

Israel: State of Fear

Ten reasons for Israel to fear.

From The Despair of Zion by Walter Reich:

1. The Palestinians will never accept the existence of Israel, and systematically teach their children that they must never do so, either.

2. Palestinians will always demand more concessions until there is no Israel.

3. Palestinians attack Israel from behind civilian human shields, but any response by Israel, however careful, that harms those civilians is condemned, while the tactic itself, which is a crime of war, is ignored.

4. Increasingly, the military war against Israel, in which Israel can defend itself, is being replaced by a public  relations war, in which Israel invariably loses.

5. The worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel is selective and hypocritical, but is finding increasing support.

6. The most vicious canard of all—that Israel is a Nazi state—is, with increasing frequency, hurled against the Jewish state.

7. Even if there is a two-state solution, what will happen the day after tomorrow?

8. Meanwhile, Iran is readying its nuclear warheads.

9. The idea is spreading that U.S. support for Israel is the root cause of America’s problems in the
Middle East.

10. Not pursuing a two-state solution leaves only a one-state solution—an alternative that is profoundly anti-Zionist.

Full article here.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Sweet Breakthrough In DNA Research

Forget the human genome. This is really important.


Chocolate, yum.

Can unlocking the ultimate mysteries of the universe be far behind?

Does the unifying theory involve chocolate?

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The Ball Bounces to Ayn Rand

You never know where the Balliverse is going to end up -- it expands in all directions, at once. A discussion on logic and cosmology quickly turned to the subject of... Ayn Rand.

Author Ayn Rand                                 Image via Wikipedia
I dug into the dusty recesses of the Ball mental archives and recalled reading an insightful article on Ayn Rand. Managed to dig it up.

Excerpts:
... taken as a whole, there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy. "My personal life is a postscript to my novels," she wrote in the afterword to Atlas Shrugged. "It consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books—and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters." As both books document, that statement was self-delusion on a grand scale.
One of the extensions of these premises to daily life is that "[o]ne must never attempt to fake reality in any manner," in words from The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) that appear in variations throughout Rand's work. To fake reality despoils that which makes human beings human. Wishful thinking, unrealistic hopes, duplicity, refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions—all these amount to faking reality and, to Rand, were despicable. But Rand herself faked reality throughout her life, beginning in small ways and ending with the construction of a delusional alternative reality that took over her life.
Like most persons, Ayn had trouble living her ideal. Which should make persons wary of attempting to follow her philosophy of life.  If she couldn't do it, what makes you think you can?

h/t Kathie Shaidle.

Whole enchilada here.
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Friday, September 17, 2010

Quote of the Day: "It Is Like Asking What Is North of the North Pole"

Shows slices of expansion of universe without ...                                  Image via Wikipedia
The universe began from a state of infinite density. . . . Space and time were created in that event and so was all the matter in the universe. It is not meaningful to ask what happened before the Big Bang; it is like asking what is north of the North Pole. Similarly, it is not sensible to ask where the Big Bang took place. The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the answer can only be that the Big Bang happened everywhere. -- Richard J. Gott, et.al., "Will the Universe Expand Forever?" Scientific American (March 1976), p. 65.
Or, as the ancient Hebrew sage put it, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Quoted by William Lane Craig, here.
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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Quote of the Day: "The Stimulus Made It All Possible": The Public Sector Albatross

IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC.                 Image via Wikipedia
... even after a recent decline, state and local governments employ nearly 1.7 million more people than they did 2000 - a gain of nine percent during a decade when private employment decreased by a net three percent.
Obama's infusion of federal aid to states and localities didn't just "save" jobs. It also pumped up the paychecks of heavily unionized public employees who already earn more, on average, than the people who pay their salaries.
While private sector wages were dropping along with employment in 2009, the average annual wage for state government employees was up in 45 states, including fiscal basket cases such as Illinois, Michigan, New York, and New Jersey. The average local government wage rose at least slightly in every state, even crisis-wracked California. The stimulus helped make it all possible.
But the 2009 and 2010 federal stimulus packages are just a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of benefits promised to America's current generation of public sector employees. Pension and retirement health care insurance coverage for state and local government workers across the country represent unfunded liabilities that could exceed $2 trillion, and may reach $4.7 trillion. Even in the Obama era, that's real money.
The public sector compensation burden threatens to crush future generations of Americans. In the process, it also threatens to starve the very public services and infrastructure that government exists to provide.
The rise of public sector levels, wages, benefits, and entitlements is a slowly rising tide that, if left unchecked, imperils the ongoing viability of the US and Canada as nations of substantially free citizens.

Our way of life is at risk, thanks to growing governments and the ensuing entitlements that inexorably follow. Canadians are too meek to resist and too polite to complain; it will be interesting to see what the feisty can-do Americans do.

Read the whole thang here.

For some contradictory views, try a Zemanta article, below.
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Fear of Islam

"Arabic Language" in the Arabic Al-B...                                   Image via Wikipedia

Who would have imagined, on the day the Twin Towers fell, that nine years later we’d be so scared of Muslim reactions that the plan of some crank to burn a few copies of the Koran would become the lead story on the evening news and cause the president himself to plead with the guy to call it off? ....  How could we have become so timid, so terrified, so quickly? How could an American president, in the middle of war and economic crisis, give so much as a moment’s notice to such a piddling non-story?
Nine years after jihadists murdered 2,977 people on American soil, the sight of American leaders quaking in their boots at the thought of some clown’s offending the Muslim world is nothing less than obscene.
 -- Bruce Bawer, City Journal.
                  
Read the whole article, here.

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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Quote of the Day: "Not Plato, not Aristotle, not al-Ghazali, not Maimonides..."

La fenêtre provençale 5 (Saint-Saturnin-Lès-Apt)Image by Vainsang via Flickr
The Philosophy ProFeser on the misuse of the accusation of logical fallacies:
As I have often complained, certain atheist philosophers ritualistically present the cosmological argument for the existence of God as if it went like this: Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause, namely God. After raising the obvious objections (“If everything has a cause, then what caused God?” etc.), they then treat even the most sophisticated defenses of the cosmological argument as if they were desperate attempts to patch up this transparently feeble line of reasoning. But as I noted in several earlier posts..., none of the major philosophers who have defended the cosmological argument – not Plato, not Aristotle, not al-Ghazali, not Maimonides, not Thomas Aquinas, not John Duns Scotus, not G.W. Leibniz, not Samuel Clarke, not Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, not Mortimer Adler, not William Lane Craig, not Richard Swinburne, and not anyone else as far as I know – ever put forward this silly argument. It is the philosophical equivalent of an urban legend – an argument that “everyone knows” has been defended for centuries, which in fact has never been defended. And yet such ludicrous caricatures are frequently put forward as “evidence” of how lame the traditional arguments for God’s existence are, and used as an excuse for not bothering even to read work done in the philosophy of religion. (“If the main arguments are that bad, what’s the point?”)
Feser concludes:
In this way, the study of logic becomes precisely the opposite of what it is supposed to be – a rhetorical gimmick, a cudgel with which to beat opponents and advance agendas rather than an aid to the disinterested pursuit of truth. In the name of attacking sophistry and fallacy, a higher-order sophistry – a “meta-sophistry,” if you will – is perpetrated. 
The whole article may be viewed here.
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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Scientism

The Word LogoImage via Wikipedia
Is science the sole or primary arbiter of what is real and true?

Several contributors to the Ball Bounces seem to think so.  There's a term for this view. It is called scientism.

Good definition of scientism here.

Under scientism, you could never be sure that your mother loved you, because love does not submit itself to scientific detection and analysis.  All we can observe are its effects.

Ultimate truth is not merely molecular; it is personal and moral.

In the beginning was the Word.
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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Dishonest Gain

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase
Hello  Ball,

I have tried to reach you on Skype phone, but your line was busy, so I decided to write you this message.  I have been in search of someone with this last  name " Ball", so when I saw you online, I was pushed to contact you and see how best we can assist each other. I am YAQOOB Y. HASSAN, a Bank Officer here  in U. A. E. I believe it is the wish of God for me to come across you now. I am having an important business discussion I wish to share with you which I  believe will interest you, because it is in connection with your last name and you are going to benefit from it.

One Late Michael  Ball, a citizen of your country had a fixed deposit with my bank in 2004 for 60 calendar months, valued at US$26,700,000.00 (Twenty Six Million, Seven Hundred Thousand US Dollars) the due date for this deposit contract was last 22nd of February 2009.  Sadly Michael was among the death victims in   the May 26 2006 Earthquake disaster in Jawa, Indonesia that killed over 5,000 people.  He was in Indonesia on a business trip and  that was how he met his   end.  My bank management is yet to know about his death, I knew about it because he was my friend and I am his account officer.  Michael did not mention any   Next of Kin/ Heir when the account was opened, and he was not married and no children.  Last week my Bank Management requested that Michael should give  instructions on what to do about his funds, if to renew the contract.  I know this will  happen and that is why I have been looking for a means to handle the   situation, because if my Bank Directors happens to know that Michael is dead and do not have any Heir, they will take the funds for their personal  use, so I  don't want such to happen.  That was why when I saw your last name I was happy and I am now seeking your co-operation to present you as Next of Kin/ Heir to   the account, since you have the same last name with him and my bank head quarters will release the account to you. There is no risk involved; the transaction   will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of law.
It is better that we claim the money, than allowing the Bank Directors to take it, they are rich already.  I am not a greedy person, so I am suggesting we   share the funds equal, 50/50% to both parties, my share will assist me to start my own company which has been my dream.  Let me know your mind on this and   please do treat this information as TOP SECRET. We shall go over the details once I receive your urgent response strictly through my personal email address, qhassanyousuf@gmail.com

We can as well discuss this on phone; let me know when you will be available to speak with me on Skype.  Have a nice day and God bless. Anticipating your  communication.

Yaqoob Y. Hassan.
qhassanyousuf@gmail.com

* * *

Dear Mr. Hassan,

Thank you for taking the time to contact me.

Sorry to hear of Mr. Ball's untimely death.

As much as I could use the extra $13,350,000.00, it would be dishonest of me to pretend to be a relative of the late Mr. Michael Ball.

I suggest you tell your Bank directors the truth, and, if they run off with the funds, you should contact the appropriate UAE authorities.

Best wishes on your dream of starting your own company.

Is it internet-related by any chance?

Sincerely,


Mr. Ball Bounces.


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Quote of the Day: "It’s like a Parody Apocalypse"

Canada's Rex Murphy says it best.


Weighing in on the Koran-burning farce:

There was the Vatican, there was Tony Blair. In Canada, Stephen Harper, Peter McKay and Michael Ignatieff weighed in. And General David Petraeus, the overlord of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, astonishingly proclaimed that Terry Jones’ stunt would undermine the “total effort” of the war in Afghanistan.

There is something profoundly unserious here, undignified and immensely off base. The first General of the United States, and the Secretary of Defense of the greatest war machine in the history of the world are both deferring to some fringe evangelist for fear that he might … what? Might lose the war for them? If this is the splinter the war on terror is hanging on to then it is, I fear, a house of cards in both theatres.
You can have the whole enchilada here.


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Saturday, September 11, 2010

To Burn or Not to Burn

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA STRIP - DECEMBER 23: Masked ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Burning a group's holy book like the Koran or The God Delusion is really not a good idea -- but  I doubt that atheists would react with rage and violence. Unlike Muslims.

A Muslim cleric says, "“If he’d gone through with it [the Koran burning], it would have been tantamount to war, a war that would have rallied Muslims all over the world.”

But what about Muslims burning Bibles, and destroying Christian symbols -- doesn't this count for something?  Somehow the soon-to-be-freshly-enraged Muslim world and the poodle-media apparently missed this story from 2007.
Father Manuel Musallem, head of Gaza's Latin church, told the AP that Muslims have ransacked, burned and looted a school and convent that are part of the Gaza Strip's small Romany Catholic community. He told the AP that crosses were broken, damage was done to a statue of Jesus, and at the Rosary Sister School and nearby convent, prayer books were burned.
Father Musalam additionally told The Jerusalem Post that the Muslim gunmen used rocket-propeled grenades (RPGs) to blow through the doors of the church and school, before burning Bibles and destroying every cross they could get their hands on.   
When the West fails to criticize the destruction of Bibles and crosses by Muslims, yet justifies Muslim rage and terror over the destruction of a Koran, it strengthens Islam.

When Obama calls for tolerance on 9/11, he clearly means tolerance by the West of Islam -- he clearly does not mean his words as a rebuke of Islamic actions of intolerance towards the West.

Islam is going to steam-roller over the West and its pliant double-standard of holding itself to one standard and other cultures to another.

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Quote of the Day: "A Young Atheist Cannot Be Too Careful Of His Reading"

C. S. LewisImage via Wikipedia
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." -- C. S. Lewis

Friday, September 10, 2010

Quote of the Day: "If There Were No God There Would Be No Atheists"

G.K. ChestertonImage by giveawayboy via Flickr
"If there were no God, there would be no atheists." -- G. K. Chesterton.

Of course, without God there would be no creation, and, therefore, being an atheist would not be an option.  But let's suppose there was a universe that was uncaused by a living, intelligent, purposeful, moral being. Would we expect it to look like our universe?

I think not.

We should not expect an uncreated universe to exhibit the order, laws, and exquisite indicators of design, rationality, and moral sense that our universe does.


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Thursday, September 09, 2010

Quote of the Day: "The sad truth is the West Bank wall has worked"

Gilad Shalit on Hamas poster, NablusImage via Wikipedia
They haven't had a car bombing in two and a half years. And the sad truth really is that the wall with the West Bank has actually worked.... The wall is functioning. And the Gaza strip is so small and so isolated they feel that those folks, the Hamas folks are not that big of a threat... -- Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel
Time Magazine is sad the wall the Israelis built to keep the terrorists killers out has "worked".  It breaks us all up, Time. If only more Israelis had gotten blown up. Oh, the humanity!  All we are saying, is give Israelis in pieces a chance.

Let's hope the guy misspoke or was having an off day, because I don't believe the left actually wants to see Israelis killed.

Source: Newsbusters.
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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

More on Stephen Hawking's Shark-Jump

From a letter-writer to the National Post:
Isaac NewtonImage via Wikipedia
Stephen Hawking claims that the discovery of a planet orbiting another ‘sun’ makes Earth’s conditions for life less remarkable, and has helped to deconstruct Isaac Newton’s view that the universe must have been created by God. Newton, were he alive today, would most probably disagree. The faith difference between the two eminent scientists is not due to the amount of knowledge available to each, but to the attitude taken by each to the knowledge available. Isaac Newton’s genius discovered the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion, the binomial theorem in math, calculus, the light spectrum and the reflecting telescope. Yet Isaac Newton claimed that his discoveries could only barely begin to appreciate God’s creation. He said he felt “…like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (cited in Westfall 1980, p.863)  It is unlikely that Newton would think that situation significantly altered by the macroscopic or microscopic discoveries made since his time.
-- Edward Field, Langley, B.C.
Well said, Edward. Belief in God is based far more on the predisposition of one's mind, heart, and will, than on any objective analysis of facts.

Perhaps we could even say that salvation is based on a form of supernatural selection -- where Nature God selects those whose hearts are inclined to him, those who have an inkling he exists and a longing to know him, while those whose hearts are disinclined towards him, or towards knowledge of the true God (and therefore unsuited to remain in his presence and fellowship for eternity -- they would be miserable) are destroyed.
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Quote of the Day: ""We Could Deal With Islamists Except For One Thing"

This from David Pryce-Jones (not to be confused with David Hyde Pierce):
We could deal with those Islamists except for one thing: A large segment of our fashionable opinion-makers, so to speak the Burumas of this world, think that Islamists aren’t as bad as all that; and if they are, then we are still worse, and what we stand for isn’t really worth defending. So the public doesn’t know what to think, and a few self-appointed custodians push them into all manner of doubt and guilt by accusing anyone who criticizes, or — horrors! — laughs at Islamists of Islamophobia, racism, fascism, etc. etc.
h/t Mark Steyn.

Half of the West's problem is a loss of self-confidence bordering on self-loathing.  The other half is the lefty-West's cheerful under-estimation of the depravity of human nature and the over-estimation of other cultures.

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Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Because We're Entitled To Our Entitlements

This image shows Nicolas Sarkozy who is presid...                                  Image via Wikipedia
Commuters Walloped by Strikes in France, London
Public transit ground to a halt across France and on the London Tube on Tuesday, with tourists and commuters bearing the brunt of a wave of discontent over government austerity measures.
The strikes came as European Union finance ministers met in Brussels amid worries that the government debt crises that alarmed markets worldwide earlier this year could flare up again. The ministers are discussing introducing a levy on banks and whether a tax on financial transactions can deal with another banking crisis.
In France, the strike coincides with the start of debate in parliament over a plan to overhaul the money-losing pension system so it will break even in 2018. The government insists the reform is essential as people are living longer, and it has urged everyone to show "courage" as it tries to chip away at the huge national debt.
The French retirement age of 60 is already among the lowest in Europe. In contrast, neighboring Germany has decided to bump up the retirement age from 65 to 67 and the U.S. Social Security system is gradually raising the retirement age to 67 as well.
Unions were hoping to mobilize 2 million street protesters at more than 200 demonstrations throughout France on Tuesday, at a time when Sarkozy's approval ratings hover in the mid-30 percent range. A similar effort June 24 drew nearly 800,000 people.
Enjoying the fruits of socialism is every human being's right; paying for it is someone else's problem.

Never let reality get in the way of a good thing.™
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Quote of the Day: "Three Enduring Gaps"

a few years after the big bangImage by gari.baldi via Flickr
Arguments from design are not intended to be "proofs". Nor are they arguments from ignorance. They simply draw attention to the three "enduring gaps" that are called out in Genesis chapter one with the word "created".
1: God created the heaven and the earth. This gives us a clue that we won't be able to explain the Big Bang using the tools available to us. Surprise! We can't.
2: God created life. Once again, abiogenesis is a discipline with very little going for it beyond speculation. The more we know about the cellular machinery, the less feasible the speculation becomes.
3: God created man in His own image. Indeed, the more we hear that man is "just" another ape, the more the scaffolding of that argument (i.e., the internet, publishing, podcasts, video, language, etc) defeat it.
-- Doug,  in the Comments section of a blog post, here.
Doug is a Canadian blogger.

Critics dismiss some theistic arguments as "god of the gaps", however, in the case of these three "enduring gaps" -- great phrase, Doug! -- it is not what we don't know, it is what we do know.  Everything that begins to exist must have a sufficient cause and reason -- and the only sufficient explanatory cause for "us" is God.

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Monday, September 06, 2010

Gaia Speaks: "Take That, Al Gore!"

Image representing Al Gore as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
In an action that will have conservative commentators buzzing, the Earth moved suddenly and sharply to the right over the week-end:

"‘One side of the Earth has lurched to the right ... up to 11ft and in some places been thrust up,’ he said.’" -- Daily Mail, reporting on New Zealand's earthquake.

This sudden but sensible move by the Earth to the right can only be viewed as a pointed rebuke to Al Gore and the leftist global warming crowd (who will no doubt blame the earthquake itself on global warming).

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"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"