Return to Sanity: April 2014

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Hump Day Hunnies

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Charles Krauthammer: Story of the year - The Washington Post

Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.

Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.

In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.

That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)

It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. And felt. Six million Americans with private insurance have just lost it. And that’s just the beginning. By the Department of Health and Human Services’ own estimates, about 75 million Americans would have plans that their employers would have the right to cancel. And millions of middle-class workers who will migrate to the exchanges and don’t qualify for government subsidies will see their premiums, deductibles and co-pays go up.

It gets worse. The dislocation extends to losing one’s doctor and drug coverage, as insurance companies narrow availability to compensate for the huge costs imposed on them by the extended coverage and “free” services the new law mandates.

Rest the rest of this story here:
Charles Krauthammer: Story of the year - The Washington Post

Monday, April 28, 2014

Passive smoking – another of the Nanny State's big lies – Telegraph Blogs

(Photo credit: planetc1)

Passive smoking doesn't give you lung cancer. So says a new report publicised by the American Cancer Institute which will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone with a shred of integrity who has looked into the origins of the great "environmental tobacco smoke" meme.

It was, after all, a decade ago that the British Medical Journal, published the results of a massive, long-term survey into the effects of second-hand tobacco smoke. Between 1959 and 1989 two American researchers named James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat surveyed no few than 118,094 Californians. Fierce anti-smoking campaigners themselves, they began the research because they wanted to prove once and for all what a pernicious, socially damaging habit smoking was. Their research was initiated by the American Cancer Society and supported by the anti-smoking Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

At least it was at first. But then something rather embarrassing happened. Much to their surprise, Kabat and Enstrom discovered that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ie passive smoking), no matter how intense or prolonged, creates no significantly increased risk of heart disease or lung cancer.

Similar conclusions were reached by the World Health Organisation which concluded in 1998 after a seven-year study that the correlation between "passive smoking" and lung cancer was not "statistically significant." A 2002 report by the Greater London Assembly agreed. So too did an investigation by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.

Read the full story here:
Passive smoking – another of the Nanny State's big lies – Telegraph Blogs

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Obama Is Not That Bright | RealClearPolitics

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Jack Kelly - May 25, 2012

Barack Obama is the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected to the presidency, historian Michael Beschloss told radio talk show host Don Imus in November of 2008.

"So what is his IQ?" Mr. Imus asked. Mr. Beschloss didn't know. He was just assuming.

Many shared that assumption. Adjectives frequently applied to Mr. Obama are "smart" (278 million hits on Google), "intelligent" (62 million) and "brilliant" (24 million).

There is little evidence to support it. Mr. Obama went to Harvard, but so did George W. Bush, who some liberals consider dumber than dirt. The president won't release his transcripts, so we can't judge by his grades. Mr. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, but when he was selected, popularity mattered more than scholarship.

Mr. Obama joined an undistinguished law firm, where he tried no cases. So no help there.
Many cite the president's oratorical skills, but he often rambles when he speaks without a teleprompter. That's because his brain "is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up," wrote Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times.

Columnist Joe Klein said Mr. Obama's first autobiography "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." But Mr. Obama got help writing "Dreams from My Father" from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers," celebrity journalist Christopher Andersen claimed in his 2009 biography of Barack and Michelle.

"The book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writing," Mr. Andersen wrote.

Biographer David Maraniss published this month his interview with Genevieve Cook, who dated Mr. Obama in New York, but bears little resemblance to the "New York girlfriend" described in "Dreams." That's because she is a composite, Mr. Obama said.

Yet Mr. Obama's description closely resembles radical Diana Oughton, who was Mr. Ayers girlfriend and who blew herself to smithereens in 1970 while building a bomb intended to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, according to the blogger "Bookworm."

Mr. Obama has said a lot of unsmart things: there are 57 states; Canada has a president; "Austrian" is a language; America is "20 centuries" old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He's called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress.

President Obama's stimulus bill didn't stimulate. His subsidies to "green" firms have produced neither the jobs nor the energy he promised. Unemployment on his watch peaked at 10 percent, one of the highest rates since the Great Depression. Deficits are out of control.

"The man who promised everything is delivering nothing," wrote Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard. "Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair. ... The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large."

Could it be that Mr. Obama's "superior intellect" is a myth created by journalists to mask what may be the thinnest resume of anyone ever elected president? An example of puffery is the description of Mr. Obama as a former "professor of constitutional law." Mr. Obama was a part time instructor at the University of Chicago law school, without the title or status of professor. And, according to blogger Doug Ross, he wasn't very popular with the real professors.

"I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back," Mr. Ross wrote in March 2010. "According to my professor friend, [Obama] had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. ... The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified,"
Mr. Obama's been governing like someone with a resume too thin for a president. He's "incompetent," an "amateur," former President Bill Clinton told Hillary Clinton at a private gathering with friends, according to a new book by Ed Klein. The Clintons have vehemently denied his account.

Even Ms. Daum noticed "the gulf between the brilliant young man who wanted to change the world and the stymied president who can barely pass a piece of legislation." Mr. Obama is just too smart to be a good president, she wrote.

Or not smart enough. "The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does," said Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

2014: The Year Without Summer

(Photo credit: HikingArtist.com)

By Jeffrey Folks

In their excellent book, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, William and Nicholas Klingaman relate the history, causes, and effects of the record cold that gripped the northern hemisphere in 1816. For most in America, Europe, and Asia, the winter of 1815-1816 was the coldest in living memory. What followed in the spring and summer of that year was equally disastrous. It was an entire year of cold rains, crop failures, hunger, and economic collapse.

There were multiple causes for the extreme weather of 1816, but all of them were natural, not man-made. Chief among them, according to the Klingamans, was the massive eruption of Tamboro in present-day Indonesia. The force of the explosion was ten times greater than that of Krakatoa, which took place in 1883. Heightened volcanic activity sent ash particles into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and disrupting the northern hemispheric jet stream. One after another, polar vortexes dropped south, not just in the winter, but throughout 1816, and to a lesser extent for years afterward.

The winter of 2013-14 bears a striking resemblance to that of 1815-16, and there is every reason to believe that what follows will repeat the pattern of earlier periods of extreme cold. The consequences will not be pleasant. As some have begun to realize, periods of extreme cold are far more destructive than periods of warming.

My prediction of a “year without summer” is based partly on the record of 1816 and other years of increased volcanic activity. Like 1815, 2013 saw significant volcanic activity, with major eruptions in Indonesia, Alaska, Italy, Argentina, and Japan. It was inevitable that this "particularly eventful year" of volcanic activity would be followed by a cold winter, just as it is inevitable that more cold will follow.

Read the rest of this story here:
Articles: 2014: The Year Without Summer

Friday, April 25, 2014

Friday Funnies

Thursday, April 24, 2014

York County's "Holy Islamville"

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A radical Pakistani cleric named Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani and his followers testify to the holiness of a shrine where miracles allegedly prove his supernatural powers. The shrine isn't in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or anywhere in the Islamic world. It's in York County, South Carolina, inside a commune about 36 acres large called "Holy Islamville," located on a street named Islamville Way.

It was founded in 1982 by a group called Muslims of the Americas (MOA), led by the aforementioned Gilani. The Department of Homeland Security says it is linked to Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani militant group also led by Glani. The State Department describes ul-Fuqra as "an Islamic sect that seeks to purify Islam through violence."

Fuqra was behind many assassinations and bombings between 1979 and the early 1990s. Its biggest plot aimed to kill 4,500 Indians in Toronto during the Festival of Lights in 1991. Its destructive capacity first caught the FBI's attention in 1989 because of a raid on a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They discovered weapons and plans for various attacks, including a scheme to murder Imam Rashad Khalifa in Arizona in 1990. They succeeded, killing him exactly as the seized papers said they would. Two Fuqra members were allegedly involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and dramatic plots against New York City.

In October 1992, Fuqra's 101-acre compound at Buena Vista, Colorado was shut down. The authorities discovered it was a full-blown terrorist training camp. The members financed their efforts through a web of fake companies and various criminal activities. A poem by Gilani was found that reads: "Come join my troops and army/Says our Sheikh Gilani/Prepare to sacrifice your head/A true believer is never dead/Say ‘Victory is in the Air'/The kafir's blood will not be spared." That's the sheikh who the residents of Islamville and the other MOA compounds view as a representative of Allah that meets with Jesus in heaven, heals diseases, transforms into animals, instantly transports and leaves his body at will.

The MOA says it has 22 "villages" around the country, with its Islamberg headquarters in Hancock, New York being the most notorious. In a secret recruitment tape made by Gilani, he states the purpose of these villages: "We are establishing training camps." He tells viewers that they "are most welcome to join one of the most advanced training courses in Islamic military warfare" by contacting the group's offices in Pakistan or several locations in the U.S., including South Carolina. That's Islamville.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/south-carolinas-holy-islamville#ixzz2zoDlpz9D
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Hump Day Hunnies

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Religious People

Monday, April 21, 2014

Republicans Redistribute Wealth Better than Democrats

Ronald Reagan wearing cowboy hat at Rancho del Cielo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When President Obama ran for office in 2008 he mentioned that he intended to make income redistribution a major focus of his presidency.

Democrats claim that only their candidates are qualified to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. They characterize their adversaries, the Republican Party, as the party of the selfishly wealthy. Republican policies, Democrats say, are designed to seize wealth from the working class and poor and funnel it to the richest so the wealthiest few can hoard it. Consequently, they predict that under Republicans the working class and poor become worse off. In other words, Republican policies have the affect of allowing the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer.

An Obama supporter, on the other hand, would predict that Obama’s administration would improve the economic well-being of the middle class and poor. The rich would have less money under Obama, since he would redistribute it to the poor. Since Obama and his party dominated the Federal Government for two entire years and had the means, motive and opportunity to pass any bill to promote their redistribution goal, it is fair to say Obama’s tenure can be used to fairly appraise the efficacy of redistribution policies.

If wealth were seized by Obama and redistributed to the working class and poor, one could measure this redistribution through standard national measures including wage growth, median income, labor force participation, unemployment, and growth in wealth, and see improvement in all these measures. These measures can then be compared to the results of the policies of Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who allegedly acted to help the rich keep more of their money.

Read the full story:
Articles: Republicans Redistribute Wealth Better than Democrats

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Ron On Horrible Harry Greed | Grouchy Old Cripple

Harry Reid has completely lost it. Never a rising star on the intellectual horizon, his path is now

instead at its nadir in terms of reality, honesty, credibility, and suitability. For at least the past 10 years, his primary function in the Senate has been to obstruct, distract, concoct, and neglect. His value to the United States of America compares strongly to the value of professional wrestling to American culture.

He not only lies deliberately to mislead the public, but he lies about lying and shifts blame faster than a gearjammer carrying a load of explosives switches gears on his rig while trying to get up a steep slope in Colorado. The only things worse than the problems Reid creates in the legislature are the solutions he offers. This is the guy who said that visitors to D.C. smell bad, that the proposal to make English the national language is “racist,” and “Our system of government is a voluntary tax system . . . . Of course you have to pay them.” One of his classics, of course, is “Seniors love getting junk mail. It’s sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they’re part of the real world.”

On Social Security, he has declared that the program works fine and will be fully funded for the next 40 years because all the so-called problems with it are myths perpetuated by people who don’t like government. His most recent idiocy said that many people aren’t signing up for Obamacare because they don’t know how to use the internet. JHFC, since last OCTOBER!?!? Nobody seems to have any problem signing up for welfare, or food stamps, or unemployment.

Harry Reid needs to have a large, unwashed, Spanish-language-speaking woman with advanced psoriasis and warts tear his tongue from his mouth and slap him unconscious with it, every goddam day. He also needs to have his bladder excised, inflated, and given to Haitian urchins to play soccer with. I’d also like to see a buzzard eat his spleen and a jackal drag his intestines across a series of red anthills.

This jerkwad is the primary reason that the US has not had a budget for the past 5 years. He is a professional bottleneck, a living clog, a millstone around the neck of decency in government. Harry Reid is a severe cramp in the colon of America, a locus of time and space where progress goes to die ignominiously, a snag in the stream of common sense, an impediment to national security, and a detriment to freedom and liberty.

He is the living embodiment of bipedal malignancy, the incarnation of fatuousness, the poster child for gridlock. He should be pulled across a cheese grater every morning for 60 minutes and then rinsed in vinegar before being dressed in a dunce cap and fool’s mufti. His breathing permit should be cancelled, and his species membership revoked.

Reid clearly has some sort of major defect under his skull. I personally suspect that he is an alien plant of some sort, one that has passed its prime and is in the latter stages of mental decay. He is clearly senescent and physically decrepit. Most of the time he appears to be dazed, perplexed, flummoxed, as if a Trayvon wannabe has suckerpunched him on his way from the parking lot to the Senate Well.

He needs to be rubbed with bacon and dropped into an aquarium filled with piranha. His bones then should be ground to powder and mixed with fresh concrete to make an anchor for a safe holding his collected writings, which is then dropped from the flight deck of the USS George H. W. Bush into the Puerto Rico Trench.