A good column from John Lott

Here. In it, he points out that the Obama administration's measure of "jobs created or saved" more or less means that if a dollar is spent to employ someone, it is a "job created or saved"--whether or not the person's employment depended on that program.

Of course, the little detail that each job "created or saved" is costing a cool million dollars or more doesn't seem to faze Dear Leader, but that isn't the important point; the important point is that honest accounting (as opposed to the government kind) wouldn't find anywhere near the 640,000 jobs claimed by the President.

Rather, the data seem to be indicating that taking eight hundred billion dollars out of the private sector has actually put about three million people out of work--a drastic example of what Bastiat noted as "that which is not seen." Had only Lott seen fit to reference that great work in his column, it might have helped many clue in to the true damage being done by Dear Leader.

Regarding that damage, I'd also like to point my readers (all five of you?) to some great posts by my friend "ColdFusionGuy" on the subjects of excessive debt and the decline of nations. Dear Leader may think that the nation can weather the debt burden he is imposing, but reality is that when debt exceeds income by a certain amount, merely paying the interest puts a serious crimp on one's economy.

Finally, I have a touch of pride in my alma mater, which appears to be one of very few colleges and universities which do not ban students and visitors from lawfully carrying a pistol. So people there are marginally safer from being attacked.

Of course, it does NOT protect students from the trauma of cheering for a football team that drops games to Central, from the stench wafting from Cedar Village, or from the fact that too many there are not terribly interested in obtaining an education. The sad news is that students will still need to deal with these hazards of being a Spartan.

More for the Trivium

The difficulties that Mike Huckabee is currently having answering why he commuted the sentence of a burglar after having served a typical sentence for burglary seems to indicate to me how badly rhetoric has fallon on hard times, as well as how badly our nation's capability for understanding has fallen. People are talking about the release of a burglar after 11 years as if it were a weekend pass for a murderer and rapist after only 10 years, and because our rhetorical skills are absent, too many are unable to see the difference.

If you want to do something great for our country, I can think of few things that would be more powerful than to actually teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric--either picking it up yourself, or teaching it to your (or someone else's) children.

In similar thoughts, remember that earlier comment about Jack Chick's "endorsement" of the KJV? I'm grateful that, even with my mediocre rhetorical skills, the careful presentation of facts in the case has pulled a number of people away from Chick's nonsense.

One correction, though. The most powerful argument against the booklet was not the preface, translator's notes, or even the text of the actual 1611 KJV. It was the title page. My apologies.

Conservatives are not exactly looking smart here....

....by attacking Mike Huckabee for commuting the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, murderer of four Washington police officers. Why?

He had been convicted to up to 108 years in prison for aggravated robbery, burglary, robbery and two counts of theft of property--crimes committed when he was 17. Now call me weird, but 108 years is usually a sentence given for forcible rape or first degree murder, not robbery and burglary. What Huckabee did was simply to commute part of the sentence (to an overall 48 years), making him eligible for parole in 11 years.

Which is, ahem, a typical sentence for burglary. So I don't fault Huckabee for setting the stage for his parole. I do, however, fault authorities for not taking firmer, "three strikes" kind of actions when it became clear that his crimes were not simply youthful sins--in 2001 and this year. Had they simply revoked the 2001 parole, he would have been in jail for another 36 years, plus a sentence for burglary.

And, ahem, four innocent victims of his crime spree would now be alive.

I hear Gerry Faust is available...

....Notre Dame has fired their head coach.

Now this is scary

Vox Day illustrates something that should scare the dickens out of us; overall debt levels in our country exceed levels seen at the peak of the Great Depression. Scarier; consumer spending didn't recover until over a decade after that peak of debt. Scariest; the only part of debt that appears to be declining, and that only marginally, is individual debt. One would infer that individuals right now are acting more intelligently than corporations, government, and government sponsored enterprises.

All in all, it seems that overall debt levels have gotten to the point where the only way out is mass repudiation of certain debts. Hopefully government allows this to happen before we "bail ourselves out" into poverty.

More to be thankful for

It's been a rough year with losing my mom, but there was a comfort this weekend as my family met relatives of my wife's we never knew existed. Apparently, her grandmother had had a child out of wedlock, allowed her to be adopted, and she'd grown up and come to know Christ just a few hours from us in Minnesota. We met four generations of faithful followers of Christ, including a cousin who had adopted eight children out of foster care after being told that one biological child was enough.

One of them had lost most of her hands and legs to an infection, but stole our hearts as she gamboled around the house almost as ably as any other child--my wife didn't even notice due to her activity and cheer.

How do they get to four faithful generations? I don't know completely, but I have a hunch it has something to do with worshipping together and then getting together each Sunday for a meal. Potlucks have an important part in (informal) Baptist theology, and our new family members sure showed us how powerful this can be.

Now this is different

A pop-up screen showed me this new book from Zondervan; The Dude Abides, the Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. I guess that says something about our lives when a most powerful cultural connection to the Good News is a documentary like "Fargo," but I hesitate to speculate on what that message might be.

Reasons for thankfulness

It hasn't been an easy year for me--for that matter for a lot of people--but it still pays to be thankful.

I'm personally thankful that we get to worry about diseases of overeating instead of starvation.

I'm glad that I get to worry about cancer instead of cholera.

I'm grateful that as wrongheaded as many churches' theology is, we've got the right to worship according to our own conscience.

I'm grateful that as poor as I think our leaders are, we still have the right to vote them out of office in a few years.

I'm grateful for the Scriptures.

I'm grateful for long days at work instead of no days at work.

I'm grateful for plane tickets to say good bye in person.

I'm grateful for sometimes mischievous children when many have none.

And I'm grateful for the wife who still looks great after carrying and nursing all of them.

The cost of immorality

Or, at least a little part of it, specifically a little procedure that women love to hate. I'm referring to the "pap smear," and this gynecologist indicates that the primary reason for that procedure is STD infection, specifically HPV. Evidently, about half of sexually active teens and young adults have it.

And so we can figure out one little part of the cost of fornication. Due to the legitimate fear of HPV and cervical cancer, approximately 100 million women at least ought to have this procedure done every year or so at a cost of around $100 plus the cost of the appointment--about another $100 or so. End result is that this STD--just one of 28--likely costs the nation somewhere between ten and twenty billion dollars annually (assuming some don't get it done), even before treatment costs for cervical cancer are accounted for.

Needless to say, I highly recommend Dr. Matt's blog. I also am tempted to see what kind of reaction my wife gets if she suggests to her ob/gyn that she'd like to reduce the frequency of testing due to the low risk we're blessed to have.

After seeing this,

I want to fly to Greenland or Murmansk and buy my dear sweet wife a coat made of polar bear fur. Right after I enjoy a large piece of meat for dinner while wearing leather shoes and praising God for the good things we have because of animal testing.

Or, put differently, if the IQ scale is truly a normal distribution, we know who occupies the negative portion of the curve. Environmentalists and animal rights activists.

(and just to make things clear, my friend ColdFusionGuy is not one of them!)

A perfect picture of government health care....

.....is the recent "study" that purported to provide evidence against routine mammographies and self-examinations. Now apart from the scientific evidence, which appears to be unequivocally on the OTHER side of the argument, there is a very interesting fact; no oncologists were included on the panel.

You read that right; a study about cancer did not bother to consult any doctors who are trained to treat it. It gets worse.

Nobody on the panel appeared to notice or care that this was happening. Certainly nobody resigned in protest, which would have been the responsible thing to do.

Government healthcare; where the untrained don't know or don't care that it's important to have somebody around who knows what they're doing. One would think that our nation's most famous smoker might clue in to possible consequences to disregarding oncologists, but apparently not.

Now this is interesting

Apparently a hacker has released a number of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climactic Research Centre--emails which seem to indicate that scientists there are actively manipulating data to make it seem as if the theory were valid when....real data actually would not indicate this. If you want to look at the evidence yourself, the link has a link to a zip file with the emails.

If true, it looks like any number of people should have research grants revoked about yesterday. This is also a great reason why science must be reproducible; when results are shared or duplicated--or not--shenanigans like this are exposed for the frauds they are.

Afterthought: given that the person who released the files apparently knew where to look for incriminating documents, I am guessing that the heroic party who released these documents is an IT professional at the University of East Anglia. Whoever you are, thank you!

A Puritan medication for depression....

....is a Biblical view of work, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal. Here's the author's weblog if you'd like to see more of her work. H/T Cold Fusion Guy, and I'm off to get some remunerative antidepressants!

Why the government schools don't teach logic,

part MMMCXVII, courtesy of the IAAF, which claims that sex tests on runner Caster Semenya will be "kept secret."

Apparently, they expect us to believe that they wouldn't have been trumpeting the results--and decrying the need for a test--had the tests found Semenya was a girl. We will have our answer as Semenya does not participate in further world class track events, as this silence makes it pretty clear that Semenya is a boy.

Hopefully he gets the help he needs to live a relatively normal life.

Time for some good news

OK, no sense being relentlessly negative all day. Here are a couple of pieces of good news, as well as something quite absurd.

First of all, a Somali pirate attack on a Maersk container ship was repelled by armed guards. The only downside, IMO, is that they didn't have a few "ma deuces" to tear the pirate boats to shreds before they could even come within range of the pirates' AKs and RPGs. Well done, though.

Second, a Delaware store clerk has shot and killed at least one armed robber--and possibly wounded others--who apparently had no clue that liquor store clerks are often armed for this very reason. One thug off the streets, and no legal or incarceration bills for the taxpayer to pay.

Now something absurd; drug companies are apparently trying to develop drugs for women with "low sex drive" which apparently work by reducing inhibitions. Never mind the fact, of course, that alcohol, flowers, chocolate, backrubs, and other "inhibition reducers" are readily available without a prescription. Just consider the fact that SSRIs (this drug is one) aren't removed from the blood within hours like alcohol is, and the further reality that it's not exactly safe for a woman to be walking around with permanently reduced inhibitions. Rather, they're trying to develop a drug to cause one of the classic symptoms of manic depression.