Gaza: an insane solution

But it's slightly more sane than staying in a country where your rations are restricted and idiots on both sides are using your children for human shields.

The Palestinians don't have much, but they do have junk- some of which floats. I wonder what the Israeli gunships would do if faced with a massive seasteading flotilla , taking advantage of the 1.5 km/hr current to evacuate to Crete?



It would be a harrowing journey, but given the warm waters of the Mediterranian, quite possible.

In support of Iraqi Christians

Download this JPG and use it as your avatar everywhere if you support the right of Iraqis to be Christian.

What happens when you try to cheat somebody with Asperger's

The letter I intend to send to Lifewise Insurance and the State, which are claiming that denial of care for the first $10,500 is the standard Bronze Level Affordable Health Care contract in Oregon. Upon review, they are correct. You pay the premiums, and they do nothing, unless you happen to use more than $10,500 worth of services, at which point they finally step in and do something. ----------------------------------------- I clearly was not given the opportunity to review this Policy Information Sheet before signing. It is equally clear that I signed up for insurance in which I pay premiums and get nothing back until I spend over $10,500 in a year for my family. The enclosed bill for preventative care that I received from my doctor’s office proves this goes far beyond just prescriptions, and well into denial of care; however it is within the terms of the contract. I have no doubt that I have now been told the truth; and that the Affordable Care Act minimums are somehow worse for my particular situation than the plan I had before that did not somehow meet those minimums. Apparently, health insurance that actually bothers to pay something for care, is not within those minimums. You asked how you can avoid these problems in the future. I suggest a big flashing warning on all Bronze Level plans on Cover Oregon: This Plan Will Not Pay Any Claim Until the Full Deductible Is Met, Even if it Pushes Your Family Into Bankruptcy. Where I come from, in Silverton, Oregon, we have a name for a contract like that- fraudulent. However, it is apparently now clearly allowed by the big city lawyers who have rewritten our laws to be against the consumer in every instance. Luckily, as of July 21, I have the chance to sign up for group insurance for my family, and will be doing so. I will remember to avoid any Bronze Level “Affordable Care Act” plan in the future, as it is clear that my government is in collusion with the insurance companies, and such plans are neither Affordable nor Care. Please cancel my Bronze Level Plan, and we will be sending this letter instead of our August Premium. Maybe one day we’ll have the violent revolution we need to get our country back from people who write contracts to avoid actually doing anything for the money they receive, but I’m not holding my breath. I have no faith left that my government is actually doing anything to deserve my taxes.

Feminism causes ISIS

The Gender Confusion Challenge to Army Recruitment - Crisis Magazine: "Psychologists and sociologists have known for a long time that gangs are particularly appealing to fatherless boys because boys who lack the guidance of fathers are most likely to feel insecure about their masculine identity, and thus most likely to seek confirmation of it in the ultra-masculine activities of gangs."



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Every once in a while, John Stewart hides a brilliant idea in a joke.

"Gaza Strip map2" by Gringer (talk) 14:01, 8 January 2009 (UTC) - SVG version of File:Gaza_Strip_map.png, created using Inkscape v. 0.46. with help from GIMP 2.4.7.: For Country Borders: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza-Strip Overview Map For roads, text, and population areas, I traced/typed from File:Gaza_Strip_map.png Minimap made using Israel location map.svg by User:NordNordWest Colours in the main map were changed to those in w:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps#Map_colors. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the Gaza Strip. The Joke John Steward made is "They have two borders- Israel and Egypt- and both are closed. Where are they supposed to evacuate to?"

What many people don't know is "Palestine" is a foreign word, an Ottoman name for "Filistinian" or "Philistine", also known as South Syria. The Philistines were the successors to the great Phoenecian Empire, the greatest sailing trade empire of the region. Look at that map, look at that other border- do you think we western countries have a way to evacuate civilians out of the area?

From a CNN alert in my inbox this morning

At least three rockets were fired from Gaza toward southern Israel, about two hours after a temporary lull in hostilities began to allow humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Gaza, the Israeli military said.

Hamas to the rest of the world: We don't need your stinkin' humanitarian supplies.

The Bad Evangelist Club: Sola Scriptura and the “Essentials”? | Catholic Lane

The Bad Evangelist Club: Sola Scriptura and the “Essentials”? | Catholic Lane: "
Belief in God.
Belief in Christ Jesus’ deity and humanity – that He is both God and man (Cf. John 1:1; Colossians 2:9; 1 John 4:1-4; Romans 10:9).
Belief that you are a sinner in need of God’s mercy (Cf. 1 John 1:10).
Belief that Christ Jesus died on the Cross and rose bodily from the grave (Cf. John 2:19-21; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4).
Belief that grace through faith in Christ is necessary for salvation (Romans 5:1; Ephesians 2:8-9; Galatians 3:1-2, 5:1-4)."



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Also known as "Heads I win, Tails the Church Loses".

'Weird Al' Yankovic On Parody In The Age Of YouTube : NPR

'Weird Al' Yankovic On Parody In The Age Of YouTube : NPR: " I went to college and got my degree in architecture, and I thought that someday I would be an adult and have a real job."



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Weird Al has a degree in architecture?!?!?  I now want to hire him to build a theme park.

Crazy idea of the week

Penance cards for common problems. A saint on the front related to the problem, a QR code on the back leading to some form of help for the problem. For instance, a card with St. Augustine of Hippo on the front may have a QR code on the back leading to the website of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Judge compares incest and paedophilia to past attitudes towards homosexuality, claiming they might not be taboo anymore

Australia first, I would not have predicted that.



Judge compares incest and paedophilia to past attitudes towards homosexuality, claiming they might not be taboo anymore: "A Sydney judge has compared incest and paedophilia to homosexuality, saying the community may no longer see sexual contact between siblings and between adults and children as “unnatural” or “taboo”."



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The end of an era, the beginning of the New Orthodoxy

Fr. Longnecker writes that the vocation crisis in the American Branch of the Roman Catholic Church is over, largely because the hyper-partisan, weak faith Baby Boomers are dying out, and the Post Vatican II Conservatives, formed by their generational parents aborting their siblings and basically abandoning the responsibilities of adulthood, are taking over.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine: "I see pitchforks."



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An interesting letter from a most interesting personality. I heard him on the Lars Larson show yesterday on the way home. He's "not a billionaire" in that his net worth is only in the high 950s. $950 million that is.

He has a very interesting economic theory in which wealth is created not by production, but by consumerism. And to have consumerism, you need consumers- you need people making enough money to buy what you are selling. Therefore, the inflation of the minimum wage is a good thing- because it means more people, who have the money to pay higher prices.

Euthanasia: A Further Erosion of Familial Understanding

Euthanasia: A Further Erosion of Familial Understanding: "For him, reading about this stuff had thrown everything I'd said about abortion into a completely different light. What he'd realized is that once you concede the principle that some lives are not worth as much as others, that many human lives are not worth living, you undermine the whole edifice of universal human dignity. Once you've made one exception, why not others?"



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Yep, that's exactly why euthanasia and abortion- one at the end of life, the other at the beginning, but both taking away life that could be lived- is wrong.

Ten Facts You Probably Should Know about the New Caliphate - Aleteia

Ten Facts You Probably Should Know about the New Caliphate - Aleteia: "Simply put, it’s a government under a caliph, but the implications of a caliphate are enormous. “Caliph” means a “successor,” i.e. of the prophet Muhammad. Therefore, Ibrahim claims to be the supreme worldwide religious and political ruler of all Muslims, the one to whom ALL owe allegiance."



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I wonder if a good student of St. Francis of Assisi can turn this caliphate into a sultanate?

A Lesson in Euthanasia on how to die

How A Woman's Plan To Kill Herself Helped Her Family Grieve : Shots - Health News : NPR: "But it can happen. "Life does come to an end. I know that all too well now, with my wife's passing just a few weeks ago. She died at the end of May," says Dr. Bill Toffler.

Toffler is a physician in Portland, Ore., who opposes assisted suicide. He is critical of Ganzini's study, saying that it includes too few people to make the assertions it makes about assisted suicide not harming family members, particularly since it doesn't include family members like him, who fundamentally oppose suicide for any reason.

"I know personally, having lived in Oregon, that there are people who are hurt — grieved very much by a loved one who thought so little of their relationship that they ended their life," Toffler says.

But Toffler does agree that finding a way to gather before death to memorialize life and acknowledge its end is profoundly helpful. Like the Bems, his family went through the dying process with his wife, Marlene Benedetti Toffler. At the very end, there were four of them there — Bill, a daughter and a son, and a close friend.

They gathered around this person they loved, helping her — and themselves — as she passed."



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A libertarian way to curb bribery

Austrian economists tell us that you tax what you want to discourage and subsidize what you want to encourage. How about a 400% tax on campaign contributions?

Nevada woman whose Obamacare enrollment was delayed died of cancer - NY Daily News

Could have sworn liberals online assured me that this sort of thing could never happen.



Nevada woman whose Obamacare enrollment was delayed died of cancer - NY Daily News: "Linda Rolain, who has battled an aggressive brain tumor but didn’t receive insurance coverage until it was too late — despite numerous attempts to enroll in Nevada’s problem-plagued insurance exchange — succumbed to her cancer Monday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported."



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Pope Francis says world economic system inevitably leads to war

Pope Francis says world economic system inevitably leads to war: " Pope Francis said the world economic system inevitably promotes military conflict as a way to enrich the most powerful nations."



Last week Pope Francis said this- and the Catholic blogosphere exploded.  But what I don't understand is what did he say that Henry Kissinger didn't tell President Ford in 1974?

"So why don't you just make yourself legal?" How immigration process works (and doesn't) in the U.S.

"So why don't you just make yourself legal?" How immigration process works (and doesn't) in the U.S.: "Obtaining a green card means navigating one of the two principal ways of getting permanent legal status in the U.S.: family or specialized work. To apply for a green card on the basis of family, you need to be a spouse, parent, child or sibling of a citizen. (Green-card holders can petition only for their spouses or unmarried children.) Then it’s time to get in line. For green-card seekers, the U.S. has a quota of about 25,000 green cards per country each year. That means Moldova (population: 3.5 million) gets the same number of green cards as Mexico (population: 112 million). The wait time depends on demand. If you’re in Mexico, India, the Philippines or another nation with many applicants, expect a wait of years or even decades. (Right now, for example, the U.S. is considering Filipino siblings who applied in January 1989.)"



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Jose Vargas is a Filipino whose mother made what I would consider a major parental mistake- when he was 12, she gave up her parental rights, turned his welfare over to smugglers, and sent him to relatives who themselves were undocumented.  I don't understand why she thought newspapers would pay more in the United States or be around longer than in Manila; or why she was willing to turn the welfare of a child over to criminals.  But that's what she did.  And in response, I've learned something that I have been wondering for a long time- that our current green card system cares only about ethnic country of origin, not about individuals.



On this 4th of July of 2014, that is hopelessly outdated.



We have this new thing, Total Information Awareness.  It has been called spying, those who think we still have privacy don't like it, but it is basically anything you do, outside of your house, is recorded.  It's possible with computers today to record the entire economic history of every one of the 7 billion human beings on the planet, with plenty of processing time left over for another 80 billion.



With this, we have opportunities.  For one thing, we can make green card processing individual, not quota based.  We have the full public history of every human being on the planet, it's a basic database lookup for criminals and such, and we can give any individual an answer in 30 minutes or less.



But we can do a lot more if we invest in this technology.  We'll know the dietary habits of every human being on the planet, and can rearrange our supply chains to eliminate hunger and open new markets.



This is also the force multiplier we need if we're going to defeat theSola Jihadi of the Muwahiddun.  The key to solo jihad warfare is the individual; the individual needs tools to attack, and with watching every transaction on the planet, we'll be alerted to purchases of those tools- by anybody.

Privacy is used primarily to do evil things.  To harm our neighbor.  It's time to step up to a new morality- and stop harming our neighbor.

Let Freedom Ring? Let Jesus Reign! - Harvesting the Fruit of the Vatican II

Let Freedom Ring? Let Jesus Reign! - Harvesting the Fruit of the Vatican II: "Don’t get me wrong, being an American is a great privilege, but that’s not going to get us to Heaven; being a faithful Catholic is what will get us to Heaven. As such, I refuse to ignore the uncomfortable truth that the U.S. Constitution, in particular its approach to religious liberty, is fatally flawed."



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Viva Christo Rey!

Why "choosing" a transgender might be wrong

The best thing I've ever read yet on why choosing a false gender for a 5 year old is a perverse act of child abuse- and what a parent should do instead.

Sesame Street Tells Lies that Hurt Kids (OR, Why “Any Group of People / Living Together And Loving Each Other” ISN’T “Doing the Family Thing”)

Sesame Street Tells Lies that Hurt Kids (OR, Why “Any Group of People / Living Together And Loving Each Other” ISN’T “Doing the Family Thing”): "That said, it is exactly because we have a strict definition of family that we have adoption at all!  Children in the adoption system have, for many different reasons, been deprived of a mother and father.  Because we have traditionally had a strict definition of family that recognizes that kids need moms and dads to function at their best, we work hard as a society to hook these children up with moms and dads through adoption."



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Why the Hobby Lobby Decision is actually good

It means, in the end that corporations, at least until they are sold out to the stock market, have to actually be ethical and live by the ethics of the entrepreneurs who created them.