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Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Miscellaneous Oddities

Random thoughts on various matters:

Isn't it odd that....

  • ...when one of the most critical problems we face as a society is that too few fathers seem to care to even live in the same house as their children, much less discipline them, our media ignores that problem while seeking to destroy a man, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, for disciplining too much? Why not just require him to take some parenting classes and let it go?
  • ...our media has developed an insatiable appetite for cases of spouse abuse in the NFL, an industry in which the incidence of spouse abuse is actually below the national average, but not among police officers, a profession in which spouse abuse is two to four times higher than in the NFL? Spouse abuse, it should be noted, is also pretty high in the media.
  • ...when conservatives declare that employers should not be compelled to buy birth control for female employees our political leaders sniff that Republicans are waging an unconscionable "war on women," but when we bomb the bejabbers out of ISIS in Iraq and Syria using all manner of explosive ordnance to blow the terrorists to smithereens, the administration refuses to call it a "war"?
  • ...the president and his administration claim ISIS poses a risk to our national security but if the air strikes don't stop them and if other Arab nations don't fight them we won't send ground troops in to do the job? How much of a threat to our security can Mr. Obama think ISIS is if he's not committed to doing whatever's necessary to stop and destroy them?
  • ...Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the ongoing IRS scandal has had a hard time of it since news broke that that IRS was illegally using its power to hamper the activities of groups which opposed the Obama administration, but when given the chance to explain her role in this scandal Ms Lerner invoked her fifth amendment right not to incriminate herself? Very well, but in a recent Politico story she's reported to have said that she tunes out the news reports centered on her because “I probably would have lost my mind if I had read it all, because your reaction when this happens is, ‘Wait a minute, let me explain to you what happened.’”
    Well, wait a minute, didn't she have the chance to explain to us what happened and chose not to do so thereby preventing the American people from seeing whether its government is abusing its power or not?
  • ...despite all of the forecasts of precipitous global warming, polar ice cap melting, and unprecedented storms and meteorological chaos the global temperature has stayed roughly constant for the last twenty years, polar ice is actually thicker and more extensive than it's been in several years, and our weather has actually been fairly mild in terms of hurricanes and other storms. A story in today's LA Times also dampens concerns that higher summertime temperatures in the American Northwest are due to anything other than a shift in Pacific Ocean winds.
    Maybe conditions will still change all of a sudden, but science is based on empirical evidence, and there's precious little evidence from the last two decades to warrant the conclusion that catastrophic climate change is imminent.