Dead Cant Rant

Just heard this on XM 72 “Spa”, the channel formerly known as XM 77 “Audio Visions” before the (grumble grumble) Sirius merger that (grumble grumble) started screwing with all of my XM audio goodness…

Beautiful song though. Need to find it. Not on iTunes. Bummer…

This is outrageous. Prince Harry acts like a red-blooded male soldier and is condemned by the uptight wussy Brits. Watch the video.

The next time someone says the War in Iraq is a failure, show them this story:  For first time, Christmas official holiday in Iraq.

In his homily on Thursday, Chaldean Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly praised the establishment of Christmas as an official holiday as a step toward easing tensions.

“I thank the government for giving chances to all to serve each other for the general benefit, and I thank it too for making this day an official holiday where we pray to God to make us trust each other as brothers,” he said at the Christmas Mass before several dozen worshippers in the small chapel of a Baghdad monastery.

A senior Shiite cleric, Ammar al-Hakim, attended the Mass flanked by bodyguards in a gesture of cooperation with Christians.

“I thank the visitors here and ask them to share happiness and love with their brothers on Christmas; by this they will build a glorious Iraq,” the cardinal said.

“We came here to bring a message of love, respect and gratitude to our Christian brothers and to share happiness with them as we have shared sadness with them during the cruel targeting they came under,” al-Hakim said in an interview with al-Furat TV. “We will do our best for equality between people and a good life for all, whatever their religious, sectarian and ethnic background.”

He is the son and heir-apparent of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, Iraq’s biggest mainstream Shiite party.

Twice as many people would rather donate embryos to research than let another family raise them as children. What does that say about our society? From The Frozen Ones: The morally deserted world of spare embryos at Salon:

In the United States alone, approximately 500,000 embryos now lie suspended in this frozen world. Thousands more accumulate every year. They go there because we make more embryos than are necessary for one child, and we set some aside in case we need them for a second child. They’re our backup kids. In our heads, they aren’t real yet. But in the freezer, they are.

President Bush, God bless him, wants to find homes for them. He wants the parents who made them to let others gestate, deliver, and raise them. It’s a beautiful thought. But a survey published last week in Fertility and Sterility says it’s not going to happen. The survey sampled more than 1,000 people who had embryos on ice. Only 7 percent said they were very likely to give their embryos to other parents. Twice as many were willing to consider donating embryos for research as for reproduction.

Why? Because we don’t want other people raising our kids. In the survey, the authors found that “concern about or responsibility for the health or welfare of the embryo or the child it could become … was negatively associated with reproductive donation and positively associated with options not resulting in a child.” For these people, the “sense of responsibility precludes their allowing their embryos to become children in any family except their own.”

This is creepy and a genius look at evil and human life all at the same time.

Read it and get smarter.

List of Common Misconceptions

Why do “journalists” insist on spreading lies? From the Wall Street Journal:  If This Isn’t Terrorism, What Is?

Last week in Mumbai we witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see.

…

Why did Britain’s highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the “militants” showed a “wanton disregard for race or creed” when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected. Why did the “experts” invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?

Unfortunately in recent years we have become used to leftist media burying their heads in the sand about the threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses, in much the same way as they once refused to report accurately on communist atrocities.

…

For much of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that “an office building” had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such).

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Meanwhile — perhaps even more disgracefully — a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

Has the New York Times learned anything since the Holocaust, when, even after the war ended in the spring of 1945, the paper infamously refused to report that the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and so on killed in the camps had been Jews, and killed as Jews?

Something to think about whenever you hear someone promoting the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”:

Notice that “factoid” at the bottom of the screen?

Congress temporarily suspended “equal time” rule for candidates on TV to allow the Nixon-Kennedy debate

Remember that when you hear talk of re-installing the so called “fairness doctrine”.

It prevents free and open discussion of politics. You couldn’t even hold a debate without the permission of Congress. And there’s nothing fair about that.

The average score on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Civics Literacy Quiz is 49%. College teachers only score a meager 55%.

I got 91% with my dumb ol’ Alabama High School edumucashion.

Now if only I could write well enough to demonstrate it…

Incidentally, Renee found a lot of free material at the ISI website. Their “Online Education in Liberty” library has lectures on free markets, morality and ethics, national security and more are available to read, watch, or listen to as MP3s.