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Canada continues to display its commitment to freedom of expression. Oh, wait, not "freedom of expression", but "freedom from being offended or having your feelings hurt ONLY IF you aren't a straight white Christian male." That's why it's Ca-na-DUH.
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A Colorado sheriff who is Atomic Fungus-endorsed establishes his own web site after the county starts playing politics with his "controversial (read: "full of common sense") postings. Here's his site: Larimersheriff.org but it's under construction as of this writing.
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Why are police investigating this as a crime? A 14-year-old girl has a baby at school and drowns it. I don't understand what everyone's so upset about. After all, this is basically a botched late-term abortion: she failed to kill the baby before it was fully delivered and had to finish the job after the baby came out.
I say this to illustrate the fundamental craziness behind the defense of late-term abortions: it's legal to kill the baby--which can survive outside the womb!--before it is completely delivered. Before the baby's entire body comes out it's just a "lump of tissue" or "uterine contents". But once the whole thing is out of the female body, suddenly that "lump" is a "baby" and it's murder to kill it?
It would be comic if it wasn't so tragic.
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If we have to re-design nuclear weapons in order to improve their safety, we're going to have to resume underground nuclear tests.
The last two paragraphs of the article cite "nuclear-weapons specialists" who say that "an accident could still happen". These experts are from "the Center for Defense Information, an independent think tank in Washington DC" and the "OECD in Paris".
In the latter case the doofus cites what could happen if there is a "firefight" in a port where nuclear weapons are stored, and what will happen if a nuclear warhead gets shot. OMG! Flee in terror!
...Hi, I'm a complete moron who knows nothing about the design and function of nuclear warheads, and I get paid assloads of money to lobby governments in favor of eliminating them.
Nuclear bombs are not like regular bombs. You shoot a 2,000 lb HE bomb and it will explode if the bullet penetrates the casing, which is usually made from thick cast iron: thick cast iron means shrapnel, which shreds stuff that survives the explosion of the HE.
An atomic warhead, though, typically has a thick tamper around it, usually made of U-238 (depleted uranium). It's thicker than the casing of an HE bomb, because it's there to act as a neutron reflector, radiation shield, and inertial confinement for the implosion effect required to start the detonation of the bomb. Even if a bullet somehow manages to penetrate this, the HE in the bomb still may not explode. But if it does, detonation is still very unlikely, and even if the thing does somehow manage to detonate, it's most likely that it'll be a fizzle. But in the real world where we all live and work, shooting an atomic bomb will result in--at most--a radiological release.
Worrying about a bullet setting off a full-blown detonation of an atomic bomb is like worrying about your furnace producing ice cubes.
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Opening ANWR the offshore areas for exploitation, we are repeatedly told by Democrats and the media, won't do anything about the price of oil now, so we're not supposed to try these things.
We're also told by the Democrats that the high price of oil has nothing--nothing!--to do with the law of supply and demand; oh no, it's those evil speculators who are causing this! The speculators are keeping the prices artificially high! If it wasn't for the speculators, oil wouldn't cost so much!
But some say otherwise, that if we opened our deposits to exploitation, it would take the wind right out of the speculators' sails. So even if speculation is the reason oil costs so much--and it's not--opening our deposits is the best way to shut them down. Open the deposits and drive the price of oil futures down.
But Democrats don't understand economics. If they did, they'd understand why tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, and socialized medicine, and big welfare, and the Great Society, don't fix anything.
If oil should cost $60 per barrel, making a move to increse the supply of oil will drive prices toward that figure. Standing in the corner and refusing to allow it--because it'll take a few years for the oil to start flowing, thus benefitting some other politician--sure as hell doesn't fix the problem.
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Even though the UN has finally admitted that a heterosexual AIDS pandemic is not going to happen, certain people on the left apparently don't care about the facts. As usual. And so NYC is thinking of
NYC is saying that all adults should be tested for the disease. Regardless of circumstances, regardless of risk factors. What the hell difference will that make? People in Africa may or may not know their HIV status, and in how many cases does it actually prevent the spread of HIV? As far as I know, Africa has the single highest concentration of HIV cases on the planet. Just because someone gets tested, it doesn't mean they'll act conscientiously.
Jesse Helms once suggested--back in the mid-80s--that people who are HIV positive ought to be tattooed or quarantined in order to prevent the spread of the disease. O Lord was that man pilloried. Liberals displayed their usual predilection for violence; one person giving a speech said he wanted Jesse Helms dead so he could go and dance on his grave and pee on the tombstone.
Oh yeah, that's really enlightened, there, pal. Don't debate the merits (or lack thereof) of the idea; oh no--just denounce the person and wish for his death. These liberals really are liberal, aren't they? Liberals love to "talk" to America's enemies like evil dictators and bloodthirsty terrorists; but when it comes to people who disagree with them, they're all for lining 'em up and having 'em all shot.
So why the hell are the AIDS activists not denouncing this? Why aren't they getting their balls in an uproar (or their thongs in a wad) over government interference in their lifestyles?
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Now it's time for a global warming two-fer. A Wall Street Journal editorial about "Yellow Science". This article is full of things I have presented here, time and time again, about how the "science" of global warming is nothing but bullshit with a crunchy candy layer of pseudoscience on the outside.
That said, now have a panic attack because there's a 50% chance of the North pole ice cap melting entirely this summer.
...
The article claims that this is the first time in human history that the North polar ice melted to this extent, and I say BULLSHIT.
You know why I say that? I say that because China was exploring the globe centuries before Europeans did. During the Medieval Warm Period, and Chinese maps from that time period do not show polar ice up there, or at least not much.
The graph accompanying the article shows how horribly things are going up there. So much ice melted last year! And this year we're following the same track! We are doomed!
...except that what is not pointed out to the reader is the fact that the ice recovered last winter.
Look at the graph. This year's track starts a few pixels beneath last year's track. Both tracks start about 1 million square kilometers below the "average" track for 1979-2000.
...Wait, 1979-2000? Where are the numbers for 2001-2006? Why aren't they included?
Ignoring that, let's look at the graph and analyze the information it presents.
1) The "average" for a selected 21-year period, 1979-2000, shows the sea ice starting at around 16 million square kilometers and degrading by 8 million square kilometers.
2) The 2007 plot shows the sea ice starting at around 14 million square kilometers and degrading to around 6 million square kilometers, which is an 8 million square kilometer difference. That's right: the same amount of ice melted in 2007 as the per-year figure in the averaged 21-year period.
I may be looking at this incorrectly, but if the ice diminishes by 8 million square kilometers every summer--and if the difference between the selected average and the current numbers amounts to two million--how is this a definitive proof of global warming? I mean, really?
The only discrepancy I can see is that the total sea ice area is lower by about two million square kilometers. That may bear looking into; but the annual variation seems to be about dead on at roughly eight million square kilometers.
In other words, no more ice melted last year than the average of 1979-2000, which is apparently held up as the gold standard for sea ice. We're not seeing more ice melting. The start point and the end point are two million square kilometers lower than the given "standard", is all.
But two million square kilometers, out of 16 million, is about 13%. Why are they not trumpeting a 13% reduction in arctic sea ice as proof of global warming?
I think we would know more if the missing data, 2001-2006, was included in this graph. I think we would know more if the graph included data from years before 1979, too--in fact, considering what bad winters we had 1978-1980, I would wager that 1979 was a high point for arctic sea ice.
I would wager that because the eco-nazi-global-warming folks have repeatedly demonstrated the old maxim, "figures don't lie, but liars figure"--they love to manipulate data to "prove" that man-made global warming is going to eat our babies.
This article is crap; the data they give is crap. And I'm not surprised at all.