License to Kill

Well, as if President Obama needed to give voters more reasons not to reelect him, word has just come out that he has ordered the unlawful killing of two American citizens.  This is not the first such scandal, however.  In particular the DOJ has been carrying out especially effective measures to ensure that we see Obama as the worst attack on America since 9/11.  Cases in point, the DOJ refuses to prosecute blacks for voter intimidation and has decided to attempt to tarnish the reputation of gun shops around the US in operation fast and furious.  And now, two American citizens have been divested  of their very lives without due process of law.  Basically, the President ordered them to be killed.  Although I do not claim to be an expert on the methods of distortion used by Liberals to justify their actions and claim that they are constitutional, I will say that I can not see anything in the constitution that gives the President the authority to kill citizens of his choice.  After all,

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. --- US Constitution, Amendment XIV, Section 1

Now granted, that was in reference to the states, but you get the idea.  According to original intent the President isn't allowed to do anything he isn't specifically given the authority to do anyhow.  If this sounds like something that one would expect to find in Nazi Germany rather than the United States that's because it is.  (But let the record show that I never compared Obama to Hitler and that I'm not a member of the Tea Party [not that I wouldn't mind associating myself with them].)

Now don't get me wrong.  I don't like the things that Samir Khan and Anwar Awlaki were doing either, but that doesn't justify Obama killing them.  As far as I can tell they didn't pose any immediate threat to anyone and the only reason I've heard that attempts to justify their killing is that they were utilizing their freedom of speech (and even if they did they should have been arrested for it and tried in court, not killed on the spot by Obama).  The point is that even though they were obviously encouraging terrorism, giving the President the power to order the death of anyone he deems a threat is rather unnerving.  Giving the President a license to kill is essentially demolishing every freedom that Americans now enjoy.  It is to annihilate every freedom that Americans have been fighting and dying for for the past 3 centuries.  I don't know about you, but I'd rather opt for the slower, more traditional methods that liberals have been using to steel our freedom rather than this fast track to Tyranny.  I guess I'm just another one of those crazy radicals.

The Facts on France

It is not uncommon to hear politicians say that France and the US are based on the same values when politicians from either country want to encourage unity and get either country to do what the other wants.  However, I think that this is untrue, and that in reality they were based on quite different values from the very first.

As I see it, the values that modern france is based off of can be summarized in it's motto, "liberté, égalité, fraternité" which means liberty, equality, and fraternity (think like world peace, brotherly love, etc).  The values that the US was formed off of can be summarized in a similar fassion the belief that all people have the God given right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or perhaps in an even more condensed form, "that all men are created equal".  Now, although these values may sound similar, they are based off of completely different schools of thought.  While France's motto describes a naive vision of every person being equal and living in peace and harmony, the US values are more realistic, taking into account that all people are evil and describing them as CREATED equal and outlining their God-given freedoms that will give everyone a shot at being the best person they can be.  This is a huge difference.  While France was based on the socialist idea of toppling the monuments so that everyone can be equal, which was conveniently displayed by the vast amount of destruction that occurred during the French Revolution, The US was based off of the idea that everyone should be allowed to do their best the elevate themselves, which is also demonstrated by the fact that the US went from being an oppressed colony of Great Britain to being one of the most prosperous nations on earth.  Not that I have anything against getting along with the French, I just don't like it when people confuse humanitarian naivety with Christian values.  (Tisk, tisk, josh, always focusing on differences and never finding areas of agreement.)

With Liberty and Justice for All. . . Sometimes

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  --- The US Constitution

So much for that.   Apparently keeping and bearing arms can still get you jailed, according to this article.

Go back and read the article.  Now that you've read the article you can read this.

Well, if we can trust Mr. Andrews then it appears that not only were his second and possibly fourth amendment rights violated, but he was also held in deplorable conditions more like one would expect to find in a third would dictatorship.  Of course, am I surprised?  No.  Not in the least.  DC is on the cutting edge the progressive movement and the thought of violating multiple constitutional rights would only be concerning if the victim is a minority or a loyal democrat.  After all, the constitution is a living and breathing document, which means that it can be interpreted however one wants it to be.  What the constitution really means is that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed unless the cops feel like doing so.  When the Constitution said unalienable rights it didn't mean that they shouldn't be stomped over whenever the government sees fit, they just thought that they might make a good place to start from and certainly didn't intend for them to be used to stop progress.  And even if they did, who are they to tell us that we can't live in a nation where people exist to serve the government and where we have no real freedom whatsoever.

Their Fair Share

It's that time again.  Time to talk about what exactly "fair share" is for the rich.  First, allow me to clarify something I thought was obviously true but has been somehow confused by the Obama administration.  Although there are some rich people who, through loopholes created by the government to try to meddle with the economy, end up paying a lower percent of taxes than those of the middle class, It's hard to imagine that this is really that prevalent when you consider that in 2008 the top 1% of tax payers payed 38.02% of all income taxes, that the top 5% payed 58.72%, that the top 10% payed 69.94%, and that the bottom 50% payed a mere 2.70% of income taxes.  (Courtesy of The Tax Foundation.)  Furthermore, the idea that these numbers are merely because the Americans in the upper tax brackets just make so much more that they can pay that much of income taxes while still paying a lower percentage.  While that's absurd anyway because there would have to be an immense difference between the rich and the poor more along the lines of medieval Europe than 21st century US, but if you still don't believe me you can go look at this chart of the tax brackets and their accompanying tax rates.

Of course, if you ask a liberal what "fair share" means for the rich (as Chris Wallace did on Fox last sunday at the 4:25 minute mark)  they'll most likely just scream something about how the rich "make a ton of money".  It's pretty obvious that their idea of fair is for everyone to be equally wealthy, since they don't think it's fair for the wealthy to have more money than they do.  I suppose this makes sense if your a socialist, but if you have American values and not greedy redistributionist opinions, it's painfully clear that the rich already pay more than they're fair share (unless you're also gullible and believe everything that David Plouffe says).  Although there isn't necessarily anything wrong with going against the principles that the US was based off of, they ought to be open about it and start calling themselves the socialist party or the anti-American party, etc.

The Cruelest Animals

I know it's unfair to pick on some poor woman by analyzing an out-of-context snippet of something she said after having a microphone pushed in front of her, I know I would say all kinds of stupid stuff, but I just couldn't help it this time.  I was listening to a BBC podcast in which a woman said that she thought that "humans are just the cruelest animals" in response to a zoo exhibit that described the gory facts of the shark fin trade and decided I just couldn't help looking at it in the form of a blog post.  After all, there are so many ways to look at it.  NOTE: this post got just a tad gory.  If you have a romantic idea about nature formed by watching Bambi and wish to maintain it you might just want to go find some other blog to read.  Try Viewpoint, that may still be a little too realistic for your liking, but at least it's less gory.

First of all, there's the part about calling humans animals.  After all, the idea that she believes that there is such a thing as cruelty and presumably also believes that it is wrong suggests that she believes in a god.  After all, we've already established that atheists have no basis for right and wrong (at least you didn't post a dissenting comment) and if she does believe in a God it would strike me as pretty odd to think that humans are just animals.  After all, must religions elevate humans above the status of animals.  

Secondly, one could look at her statement from the pragmatic side and not that there are many examples of animals being cruel to other animals.  Cases in point, cats playing with mice, killer wales bleeding and harrying female wales and their calves to death, wolves killing sheep, eating out their tongues, and leaving the rest of the carcass, deer eating off the heads of baby seabirds, etc. . .  Although the shark-fin trade is rather gruesome (including cutting off shark fins and throwing away the rest of the shark to bleed to death) I don't think it's very accurate to say that humans are any crueler than "other animals" that do everything from practicing slavery to killing for the mere fun of it.

On the other hand, you can look at it and say that she's right!  After all, from a christian perspective, humans are the only ones with the souls and the capability of feeling malice and hate and doing evil.  Because of these things, humans are the cruelest or all creation because they can be cruel on a higher level.  If a female animal eats it's own young to survive it is not being as cruel as a mother eating her own child to survive.  Because all that the animal was made to do was to survive, a female animal eating it's own young would not be evil.  Humans, on the other hand, are created to love God and their fellow humans.  Therefore, if a human mother eats her own child it goes against the divine purpose she was intended for and is being evil.  (Please note that I have nothing against my mother or any other mother for that matter and am simply using the first example that came to mind, from my memory of animal behavior that we would call cruel.)   Of course, although it's possible that she did mean it that way, I think the chances are extremely slim since she was in China, where the likelihood of being a christian is extremely small and because I doubt that someone who wanted to convey that message would phrase their statement in that way, especially in the context of an exhibit about the gore behind shark fin soup (a status symbol in China that has been in growing demand due to the growth of the middle class there). 

Finally, I shall conclude by revealing to point behind these wandering thoughts.  Um. . . Well. . . You see. . . AHA!  Yes, as I have been getting to all along (cough) the humanization of animals and the dehumanization of humans has led to some perplexing paradoxes, like the one embodied by the affore-mentioned statement.  After all, it seems strange to me that in china there would be concern over sharks when they seem to care little about they're infamous human rights abuses.  In my opinion, either there is no god and humans and "other animals" are equally unprotected by any moral law or there is a God and only humans are protected.  Instead it seems that in our postmodern world people believe that there is no god and that animals and the animals known as humans are both protected by a moral law, albeit few care to think about what exactly this moral law might be or why it is applicable to any living organism at all, whether human, animal, plant, fungus or bacteria.  Ask PETA.  Maybe they'll explain why their moral law only applies to animals and not to any of the other groups listed.  More likely they'll just rail at you and call you a veal calf slayer or a speciesist or something along those lines.

Gore the Genius

Al Gore, brilliant scientist that he is, has been running a campaign accusing big oil companies of using bad science to misinform the public.  To emphasize his point in an interview with the BBC, he described "lavishly funded" attempts to create incorrect data and compared it to the campaigns of the cigarette companies that "payed actors to dress up as doctors" to misinform.  Although I know nothing about the facts behind his statements about the cigarette company campaigns of yore, but I was somewhat surprised to hear him claim that it was critics of anthropogenic global warming that were performing bad science.  After all, that is a rather hypocritical claim to say the least.  Case in point: a study was done of the weather stations that record temperatures all around the US.  This study found that not only were a large majority of stations located near heat producing areas, like AC units, parkinglots, and buildings, but that there is varience in the materials used to coat the boxes that are used to house the thermometers.  It also found that the supposed amount of warming that the earth has experienced is well within the range of uncertainty of the instruments.  Now don't get me wrong, I definitely believe that the earth has warmed an cooled in the past, I just don't see a strong correlation between warming and fossil fuels.

Furthermore, lets not get to carried away with the lavish funding of global warming skeptics compared to supportive researches.  First of all, if anthropogenic global warming is real, any test of it, whether intended to support or tear down the theory.  That's just how science works, if it's true the tests tend to show that and if it's false they tend not to.  Furthermore, we should also keep in mind that those while the oil companies may support researchers who are skeptical of global warming, the government and other groups have been throwing huge amounts of money at those who support it as well.  If there's something morally wrong with being well funded, as the esteemed philosopher Mr. Gore has implied, then I would say that those who believe in anthropogenic global warming, such as gore, should take the plank out of their own eyes before helping the others side with the speck in their own.

One last little point.  If you don't believe already that the great master of rhetoric, Al Gore was merely stringing lame tidbits of rhetoric together to make an emotional appeal just think about this.  If he's correct and the oil companies are coming up with hokey fake data, why do they need all that lavish funding?  (Speaking of his great rhetorical skills, I've heard he has an excellent vocabulary to get his point across.)

Now I know it's unfair to go after the anthropogenic global warming theory through Al Gore, I know I wouldn't like it if someone attacked me by showing that someone really dumb didn't believe in anthropogenic global warming, but the fact that Al Gore is supposed to be the figure head for the theory makes it very tempting.  (Oh, and the fact that he's always saying stupid stuff and making false claims.)