heart in a cage

Photo

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0600

Photo

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:32:36 -0600

“Pretty good geo-economic lesson from SNL on US-Chinese...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0600

“Pretty good geo-economic lesson from SNL on US-Chinese relations.” (h/t ptbruiser)

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

"Reagan loathed the Wall. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was taken to an eighth-floor office..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0600

“Reagan loathed the Wall. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was taken to an eighth-floor office overlooking it and told the story of Peter Fechter, the youth who had been gunned down by East German police in 1962 as he tried to crawl over. The authorities left Fechter unattended for nearly an hour, while he bled to death. “Reagan just gritted his teeth when he heard all of this,” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime aide who was with Reagan that day. “You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look and some of the things he said that … he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go.”

- “From Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War, author Romesh Ratnesar, deputy managing editor of TIME magazine, tells the story of that speech and its delivery.”

Obama has not the testicular fortitude to be this bold or this principled.

ajamison: moviescore: vintagepeople: “All Things Beautiful”...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:53:12 -0600

ajamison:

moviescore:

vintagepeople:

“All Things Beautiful” by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis from The Assassination of Jesse James

Not sure if I can express just how much I love this song & this score. So good.

Beautiful.

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:14:06 -0600

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?:

(via danielholter)

Good grief, I sure hope so. What a crock of crap they’ve been feeding us. I intend to keep an eye on this.

"It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men"

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:23:42 -0600

“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men”

- Frederick Douglass via i heart quotes

and that’s saying quite a bit.

(via hilker)

Jesse Jackson: 'You can't vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man'

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:57:04 -0600

Jesse Jackson: 'You can't vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man':

thatisracist:

That is racist.

Identity politics at its ~~best~~ worst. The free-thinking world will rejoice when race-baiters like Jackson retire.

danielholter: davidkendall: katoleary: heylaney: I’m with...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:13:51 -0600

danielholter:

davidkendall:

katoleary:

heylaney:

I’m with Nordstrom.

legallyheidi:{Nordstrom Continues To Oppose Christmas Creep via Consumerist}

I had drinks with my aunt last weekend and she was saying that this is one of the reasons why she loves Nordstrom.

This should be legislated on a national level……

Now *I* love Nordstrom. And I’m with davidkendall again… this should be the law of the land.

My new favorite store.

Americans will spend $450 billion this Christmas. It would only take $10 billion to give the world clean water

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:11:34 -0600

Americans will spend $450 billion this Christmas. It would only take $10 billion to give the world clean water:

davereed:

water4christmas.com

via hannahbanena

"But Obama’s statement is considerably worse than [Richard] Nixon’s. Whereas Nixon merely..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0600

“But Obama’s statement is considerably worse than [Richard] Nixon’s. Whereas Nixon merely opined that Manson was guilty, Obama prejudged the outcome of the trial and sentencing. Manson and his co-defendants were tried in state court, a venue where the president has no authority. By contrast, the prosecutors who will handle cases of KSM et al. ultimately answer to Obama.

Worse still, Obama was defending his own politically charged decision to try the defendants as civilians by offering the reassurance that the outcome is preordained. The president’s claim amounts to an assertion that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is a kangaroo tribunal. If this is how the Obama administration views due process, heaven help any American who is charged with a federal crime.”

- James Taranto.

"This is how “diversity” works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0600

“This is how “diversity” works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a sea of emotion, much of it phony. Members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with “pain” and “shock” and accusations of “hate,” and university administrators make a show of pretending to care.

At some campuses, administrators and faculty members actually do practice censorship. NYU, at least in this instance, is not the worst offender in this respect. But this sort of emotional frenzy is nonetheless inimical to the spirit of rational inquiry that universities are supposed to encourage. Every incident of this sort makes it clearer how the University of Michigan played Justice O’Connor and her colleagues for fools.”

- James Taranto. Read the whole thing.

Filed under: Things that make me embarrassed to be a Christian and a conservative

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

Filed under: Things that make me embarrassed to be a Christian and a conservative:

This is anti-intellectual, historically myopic, blatantly partisan, false and embarrassing.

To put it another way, Schlafly is a fricking idiot.

WANT.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

WANT.

There is only one worthy response to...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

There is only one worthy response to this…

“I’m…too scentsy for my shirt…”

"In January 1961, Sigrid Paul gave birth to a little boy in a Berlin hospital. Her first child, it..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0600

“In January 1961, Sigrid Paul gave birth to a little boy in a Berlin hospital. Her first child, it was a difficult labour and the baby was whisked away to intensive care. As she lay recovering, Sigrid had no idea that little Torsten, as she had named him, would become inextricably and cruelly caught up in cold-war politics. Eight months later, the Berlin Wall would go up, initiating, says Sigrid, “a sequence of events with consequences beyond our wildest imagination”.

It’s the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday. Only now does Sigrid, 75, finally feel able to tell the story of how, nearly half a century ago, she and her son were trapped in a twilight zone between communist east and capitalist west. […]

[Her infant son] Torsten was given an artificial diaphragm, oesophagus and antrum (stomach exit), and in July Sigrid was finally allowed to take him home. He was still fragile and needed medicine and special food, both only available in the west. Every Monday, Sigrid would travel across the city to pick up Torsten’s life-saving package.

Then, on 12 August, everything changed. At midnight, the police and units of the East German army were given orders to close the border. Barbed-wire entanglements were rolled out and the building of the Wall began. By the time Sigrid woke on the 13th, the route from east to west was closed. She applied for a permit to the west to obtain Torsten’s food and medicine but was refused. “Our baby food is good enough,” was the reply from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) health ministry.

Within days, Torsten started coughing up blood and Sigrid took him back to the Charité hospital in east Berlin. There, a doctor named Schneeweiss did everything he could. He pumped Torsten’s stomach, but he got sicker and his temperature got higher. Sigrid was beside herself. In the early hours of the morning, Schneeweiss sent her home. “Years later, Dr Schneeweiss told me what happened,” says Sigrid. “He realised that neither he nor any other doctor at the Charité could help. The only doctors who could help were on the other side of the Berlin Wall.”

Transferring patients across the Wall was now forbidden, with one exception – heart cases. Schneeweiss knew Torsten could die if he stayed in the east. He confided in another doctor and together they falsified Torsten’s papers and listed him as a heart patient. Schneeweiss had sent Sigrid home so he could illegally spirit her baby to the other side of the Wall. “That was the moment Hartmut and I were separated from our sick child,” says Sigrid. “Torsten’s life was saved by a piece of benevolent deception schemed up by two doctors.” The decision was to shape the rest of their lives.”

- The Berlin Wall kept me apart from my baby son - The Guardian

Read the whole thing.

Good intention does not equal good policy

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

The left spends so much time and energy crusading against this ethereal enemy called “climate change”—which isn’t even confirmed or agreed upon—and their supposed trump card is “doing what’s right for the future generations,” etc. Yet to solve healthcare they would heap piles and piles of new debt onto piles and piles of current debt, all for our kids and grand kids to pay off—that is, if this economic house of cards even lasts that long.

"Check out this argument. It’s not that universal healthcare is a bad thing. It’s not even that it’s..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:22:00 -0600

“Check out this argument. It’s not that universal healthcare is a bad thing. It’s not even that it’s not worth paying for. It’s that it’s impossible. Universal Health Care (or something like it) would be a great thing. And, if we actually believe a lot of those things we say we believe about caring for the least among us, it’s probably morally required. But, if we can convince ourselves it’s impossible, we don’t have to worry about it.

Except that it isn’t impossible. The U.K. can do it. Canada can do it. Universal health care does not reduce a country to some kind of Soviet Bloc police state. Massachusetts has managed it. It’s not easy. And it’s almost certain to be difficult. But we can do it.”

- Squashed (via carpe diem, hilker, sds)

Check out this argument. It cites other programs as evidence that universal health care works. Thing is, these other programs aren’t actually “doing it.” Their programs are unsustainable, both from a quality care standpoint as well as an economic one.

These “universal” programs are only universal in that everyone pays for them. Not everyone benefits the same. Universal coverage is theoretical. Delays in treatment are abundant. Thousands of people die because they do not receive the care they were promised under this banner of health care for all. [Something about letting your yes be yes…] They are paying for (and counting on) coverage they aren’t getting. What’s moral about forcing someone into that situation?

And yes, there’s the economics of it, which doesn’t seem to be a big deal. The Massachusetts, Maine, & Tennessee programs have all failed to live up to the hype: they are enrolling nowhere near promised levels, costs for everyone are going up, and budgets are “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules. [Welcome aboard the Black Pearl!]”

That’s a nice segue into the rest of the quoted quote, the part about inevitable, unforeseen consequences. But then, I’ve always thought that universal health care is more about the short-term benefits of telling people they have health care than the long-term benefits of actually taking care of them.

(via hilker)

Exactly.

bellatoris: azspot: xkcd Hahaha, so brilliant.

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

bellatoris:

azspot:

xkcd

Hahaha, so brilliant.