Friday, July 31, 2009

On the obesity epidemic

A good read about obesity, its causes, and what to do about it. It is especially important, given a new vein of attack that is coming from the "libertarian" camp that is screaming, "it is wrong for government to try to get people to be less fat!" I'm a libertarian, and I think that line of thinking is ridiculous, but the article does a good job of illustrating why so I'll let it do the arguing for me.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Infatuation weans, politician sees support drop

No, I'm not talking about Barack Obama. I'm talking about Sarah Palin.

A solid majority of Americans don’t want to see Sarah Palin ever become president, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Two-thirds, 67%, said they don’t ever want the former Alaska governor to be president, compared with the 21% who said they would.

While it should come as no surprise that 87% of Democrats said they don’t ever want Palin as commander-in-chief, some 43% of Republicans said the same thing—as well as 65% of independents.

Even 46% of self-identified conservatives said they do not want Palin as president, as well as 44% of those who voted for Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain in 2008.

At 44%, white evangelicals are the largest subgroup supporting Palin as president one day.


White evangelical Christians are the strongest supporters of Sarah Palin. Incidentally, these are the same people who actually believe the world is 6,000 years old. They denounce science as evil, but won't complain when receiving the newest medical treatments. Their leaders will rant and rave about homosexuals, almost like Islamic preachers do about Jews, but every few months one of them gets caught soliciting gay sex in a bathroom or engaging in an extramarital affair.

Supporters of Sarah Palin really fall into two categories: they aren't thinkers, or they aren't paying attention. When Sarah Palin speaks, it is painfully obvious that no thought or intellectual consideration went into the formation of her words. For most of us, we have a built in alarm system that stands to alert us when someone is speaking without thinking. Red flags are raised, and suddenly we are aware that the speaker is completely stupid at best, or contemptible and evil at worst. Sarah Palin's supporters don't have these built in alarms, but they do have emotions, and of course Sarah Palin's emotional appeals can be found to be agreeable. In that sense, there was a national politician last fall during the campaign who was like Adolf Hitler - appealing to emotion, instinct, fear, and anger rather than to thought, consideration, and intellect. That politician was Sarah Palin.

Honestly, if a person was ever confused about politics and wasn't sure who to support, I might suggest for them a pretty simple strategy. Find out who "white evangelicals" are supporting, and vote the opposite.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Cap-and-trade: Epic failure

The ridiculous thing about how pathetic this bill turned out to be is that theoretically, it shouldn't have been extremely difficult to make this happen. Whether or not it is actually a good idea, Democrats as a group want to intervene and reduce CO2 emissions. Republicans as a group seem to be more concerned about foreign policy, and have an incentive to see oil imports drop, and especially to see the price of oil and gas fall worldwide (thereby weakening Russia, Venezuela, Iran, etc). Obviously, there is quite a bit of overlap between these objectives. Our congress completely failed to find it. Now we are all worse off because of it.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

She is a quitter.

Old news, but Sarah Palin resigned as the governor of Alaska.

There are plenty of conservative Palin apologists out there making the case that this is a brilliant move, that shes positioned well for 2012, et cetera. I'd just like to reiterate my own position. Sarah Palin the intellectual rot of the conservative movement, personified. She is like a canary in a coal mine. So long as she is considered an actual viable candidate by a mainstream conservatives, I will be certain that the GOP is still not worth taking seriously. The sooner she is relegated to the fringe with the other lunatics, the better.