harmonicminer

Budd Schulberg’s heroism

Imagine if one of America’s foremost writers had once been privy to a shadowy plot by Hitler’s Germany to take control of the motion picture industry through its labor organizations and force writers to clear scripts with Nazi censors, and then he courageously stepped forward to blow the whistle on the whole operation.

Wouldn’t it be bizarre if, when this man died, instead of being celebrated for such heroism, he was criticized and even attacked by colleagues for revealing the identities of those who were behind the intrigue?

This strange scenario isn’t far from what unfolded in the media last week when novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg died. The only difference is that Schulberg, once a communist, blew the whistle on Stalin’s murderous Soviet regime and the Communist Party it controlled in America.

Read it all. Exit question for recent college grads: just who WAS Stalin, anyway?

h/t: powerline

The Embryo as Human Being: A Scientific Case

For people who advocate the killing of embryonic human beings in the cause of biomedical research, the Holy Grail is an argument that would definitively establish that the human embryo, at least early in its development, is not a living human organism and therefore not a human being at all. The problem for these advocates is that all the scientific evidence points in precisely the opposite direction. Modern human embryology and developmental biology have shown that fertilization produces a new and distinct organism: a living individual of the human species in the embryonic stage of his or her development.

Some proponents of embryo-destructive research are willing to face up to these biological facts. They concede that human embryos are living individuals of the human species, but deny that this gives them the moral status of being persons. According to this argument, not all human beings are equal; not all possess inherent dignity and a right to life. Some, including those at early developmental stages, are not (or are not yet) “persons,” and they may therefore (at least in some circumstances, or in the pursuit of some goals) legitimately be killed.

There is much to be said against this position, but its defects are philosophical, not scientific. Its proponents recognize that there is no Holy Grail out there to find, and they are willing to defend the killing of human embryos while facing up to the biological facts. But then there are the Grail searchers. These people are determined to prove that what modern human embryology has been telling us is wrong, and to this end they scavenge the fields of molecular biology and human genetics.

Read it all.

Best Buy $9.99 TV offer was too good to be true

Few if any of the deals retailers have offered online during the recession have been as good as Best Buy Inc.’s sale price of $9.99 on a 52-inch TV Wednesday. But it quickly turned out the offer was too good to be true.

The electronics retailer said it will not honor the $9.99 price posted Wednesday morning on its Web site for a 52-inch Samsung flat-screen TV. By early afternoon, the TV was listed at $1,799.99, almost half off the original $3,399.99 price.

Bloggers and Twitterers lit up the Internet with posts about the offer, some insisting Best Buy must honor it, others making jokes.

Best Buy, based in Richfield, Minn., said it has corrected an online pricing error and will not honor the incorrect price. Orders made Wednesday morning at the incorrect price will be canceled and customers will receive refunds, the company said.

Best Buy did not immediately return a call for additional comment.

The Obama administration isn’t returning too many phone calls either, as people ask questions about Obama’s free medical care for the uninsured, Obama’s promise that healthcare coverage for those who have it won’t change, and Obama’s promise not to cut Medicare benefits while saving money.

Some things really ARE too good to be true.

So, if you worry about the government knowing too much about you, and then sharing all that information with medical providers, insurance companies, retailers, etc., here’s a nice illustration to make you feel better.

“Global Warming” as a term is far less often heard than “climate change” these days, because the evidence for global warming gets thinner and thinner. Driving yet one more stake in the heart of this blood-sucker on the neck of the international economy is this report that More than 60 German Scientists Dissent Over Global Warming Claims! Call Climate Fears ‘Pseudo ‘Religion’; Urge Chancellor to ‘reconsider’ views

More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists.

The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”

This latest development comes on the heels of a series of inconvenient developments for the promoters of man-made global warming fears, including new peer-reviewed studies, real world data, a growing chorus of scientists dissenting (including more UN IPCC scientists), open revolts in scientific societies and the Earth’s failure to warm. In addition, public opinion continues to turn against climate fear promotion. (See “Related Links”  for more inconvenient scientific developments.)

The July 26, 2009 German scientist letter urged Chancellor Merkel to “strongly reconsider” her position on global warming and requested a “convening of an impartial panel” that is “free of ideology” to counter the UN IPCC and review the latest climate science developments.

The scientists, from many disciplines, including physicists, meteorology, chemistry, and geology, explain that “humans have had no measurable effect on global warming through CO2 emissions. Instead the temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges and are due to natural cycles.”

Mediterranean Reflections on What Went Wrong All very thoughtful, and well worth reading in its entirety.

In California we are spending hundreds of billions on prisons, in which killers and thugs sue constantly for expanded rights, while universities lay off professors (though rarely nonacademic apparatchiks and administrators), and turn away students. Ravenna invested in thousands of hours of sculpture, we in thousands of hours of legal work in appeals and writs. Our cynical intellectual elites are becoming ever more postmodern even as the undereducated majority becomes premodern.

The state spends more and more on redistributive entitlements, less and less on infrastructure. Its population is bifurcating. A small, highly taxed elite supports museums, the arts, and gives to universities, a growing underclass swarms the emergency rooms, criminal justice system, and welfare roles.

The utopianism of the shrinking elite wants the Saturday night felon to have sophisticated jurisprudence when he is arrested, the best brain surgeon when a .44 magnum enters his skull in a gang dust-up, and humane day care, health care, and counseling—and yet now has no way any longer either to pay for it, or how to convince the growing underclass to become better educated and more productive. (To do so would demand a tragic diction and mindset).

One percent of Californians pays over 40% of our income taxes, perhaps as few as 360,000 out of some 36 million in the state. Each time one of these golden gooses flies east to no-tax Nevada, we lose about $50,000-80,000 in state taxes—or the money to keep a felon in the Corcoran prison house fed, housed, medicated, and counseled for a year. Do the math: one small businessman escapes to Tahoe or Reno, one lifer has no support.

Walter E. Williams on The Racism of Diversity

Read it all, and ponder: will YOUR son or daughter, or brother or sister, someday be in a situation where life and death decisions are being made by poorly prepared officers?

Leszek Kolakowski, 1927–2009 by George Weigel on National Review Online

R.I.P.

Gallery’s invitation to deface the Bible brings obscene response

A publicly funded exhibition is encouraging people to deface the Bible in the name of art, and visitors have responded with abuse and obscenity.

The show includes a video of a woman ripping pages from the Bible and stuffing them into her bra, knickers and mouth.

Everyone knows that Christians and Jews will respond non-violently to this kind of outrageeous “art.”

I’d love to see them try it with a Koran.