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Is the Islamic World Insane?
Every day, there are acts of lunacy committed in the name of Islam. Today's riot in Nigeria is just another common example. In this case, a newspaper article suggesting that the Prophet might have chosen a wife from among the contestants of the Miss World beauty pageant was enough to set off mass killing!
It is clear that large segments of the Islamic world have indeed gone insane. From terrorism to riots to the Taliban's destruction of ancient statues, fanaticism is on the rise. Today one of the greatest threats to peace is nothing more than madness - the madness of the Islamists and their followers.
It is madness to justify the intentional murder of innocents (suicide bombings in Israel, the World Trade Center attacks)!
It is madness to issue death warrants on foreign writers because you don't like what they say (Salmun Rushdie)!
It is madness to throw away the lives of your own children to kill the children of others!
It is madness to believe that these tactics will cause people to adopt your religion!
Unfortunately, the world frequently sees periods of evil madness. The radical Islamists of today are the Hitlers of yesterday, and are proud of the comparison!
Islam's mouthpieces in the west proclaim it is a peaceful religion (while at the same time seeming to condone the suicide murderers in Israel). It is long past time for responsible Muslims to loudly, publicly and frequently condemn those who engage in these acts of madness.
Not doing so is feeds the suspicion that organized Islam in the west is complicit.
The war on terrorism should really be called "The War for Sanity!"
Some days, the lunacy is just too much!
From the LA Times:
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a rule saying the government's new airport security screeners must be U.S. citizens.
The portion of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act barring non-citizens from the positions is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi ruled.
Let me get this straight... The government cannot require citizenship for a criticial national security position? I suppose they have to give hiring preference to young, angry Saudi's, too!
.... and the left marches on...
For Special Interests, They're Still Blocking Homeland Security
Just In... In order to protect their major campaign donors, the trial lawyers, the Democrats are objecting to a provision in the Homeland Security bill that is necessary to protect the nation from smallpox!
The bill would exempt from frivolous lawsuits those involved in vaccinating our citizens from smallpox. Without this provision, health care providers would be fools to give the admittedly slightly dangerous smallpox vaccine. If anything went wrong, or junk science was used to blame other problems on the vaccination campaign, they would be sued out of business.
Democrats damage our security for private profit, even as they blame the Republicans for security problems (see previous post).
How to Profit from Terrorism - Ask the Democrats about their new Strategy
The dramatic failure of the Democratic Party in the last election led to a frantic search for a new tactic. It didn't take long. With nothing positive to offer, and with their usual win-at-all-costs mentality, the Democrats have already started a cynical new campaign almost sure to work: blame the Republicans in advance for the next inevitable terrorist atrocity.
They know that the administration cannot prevent at least one more major terrorist strike within the US. They also believe that when it happens, this time, Americans will blame the Republicans for not preventing it. With a compliant press on their side, they can safely ignore their own complicity in this event and hold the Republicans responsible.
Al Quaeda is the best new ally of the Democratic Party, but don't expect the Democrats to be ashamed (Al Quaeda, on the other hand, may be ashamed to be affiliated with the Donkey party).
The drum beat has already started. With the release of the new Bin Laden tape (this author is still skeptical), the Democrat spokesmen are suddenly attacking Bush for not catching him! Expect the attacks to get worse with each success by Al Queda.
Never mind that Bush is using a CIA long abused and terrorized by Democrat lawmakers.
Never mind that he is dependent on an FBI that was kept busy chasing phantom right wing terrorists under Clinton, while Bin Laden was ignored except during times of domestic political crisis.
Never mind that Democrats insisted on laws that prevented law enforcement from preventing terrorism - only allowing prosecutions after Americans had been martyred.
Never mind that the Democrats have been holding the Homeland Security department hostage to the special interests of the unions.
Never mind that the Democrats have resisted all reasonable immigration reform.
Never mind that they have forced states to issue identification with no serious checks.
Never mind that they don't allow profiling which might catch terrorists, instead forcing grannies and Medal of Honor winners to be strip searched.
None of this will count the next time hundreds of Americans are slaughtered!
This time, the Democrats will reap a political harvest from the deaths of our citizens!
Well... sometimes the right is almost as wrong as the left. I am reminded of this every time I read conservative articles on health insurance, or when I contemplate early retirement.
The subject is health care. The problem is universal coverage (a political goal that will grow much stronger as baby boomers age and retire early).
Conservatives believe they can solve "the health care problem" by introducing market incentives to the market. They propose reforms such as personal health care accounts (similar to IRA's) where health insurance money goes into a pool that the consumer can spend only on health care. They claim this will introduce market incentives in health care shopping that will reduce health care costs, leading to less expensive health insurance, which will lead to more coverage. Another proposal is to provide tax deductibility to individually purchased health insurance.
These proposals are helpful, more or less, but they will have almost no impact on those unable to purchase insurance, who fall into the following categories:
Pre-existing conditions either prevent the purchase of insurance, or cause a whole host of diseases to not be covered. For example, if you have ever had high blood pressure, you might find that your insurance doesn't pay for your heart attack.
The latter are increasing in number. The solution to this problem is *not* free market, because health insurers simply have no market incentive to offer this insurance. The reason is what is called "adverse selection" - an insurance term referring to the tendency of people to not pay until they get sick. Because insurance is based on shared risk, adverse selection destroys its fundamental statistics. Thus the free market will always lead to the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions. I call this practice "perverse selection."
In an ideal world, one would purchase health insurance when young and healthy, and have that coverage last through life. But insurance is not sold this way. It is not portable (even with the COBRA rules). It lasts for the duration of a job plus at most 18 months, and can then be converted to perrsonal insurance (at potentially prohibitive rates). Personal insurance lasts until the insurance company decides to cancel it, or rearranges risk pools to put high risk people into ever higher cost policies (a distressingly common practice).
What this means is that "health insurance" in the US is not insurance... it is prepaid health care that expires under unresonable conditions.
One step in the right direction would be to force insurance to be separate from employment. This would cause all health insurance to be personal, and would put dramatically different incentives on the insurance issuers.
But, without further steps, it would significantly increase the uninsured, for two reasons:
A better solution is to *require* people to purchase insurance, and to do away with medical underwriting (perverse selection). Also, the reform should make insurance universally portable. Of course, this is a big government intervention which conservatives (including this author) hate.
The left's approach is to create a giant bureaucracy and try to force all decisions, in minute detail, by government. This will lead ultimately to huge costs tied to the sort of poor service that socialized medicine is known for: the British National Health System disaster; the Canadian system which has affluent Canadians purchasing their care in the US because their system can't provide it; the New Zealand system which simply will not provide expensive care to anyone over 60 - effectively sentencing them to death.
The American people must decide: If we want universal coverage, we must recognize that the current system only works by historical accident (insurance is mandatory for most employees), and that it excludes a large number of people (about 15% of the population). We must also recognize that achieving universal coverage will not be achieved by market forces alone, so this political goal is one which requires government intervention.
Conservatives need to recognize the strong political demand for health care security. This demand can only grow as boomers age. Without adequate and realistic conservative programs, Hillarycare will ultimate win the political battle.
Conservatives should also realize that the current practice of perverse selection is a drag on the economy, and provides a counter-incentive to savings and investment (why save and invest if the first illness will leave you destitute anyway?). Why form a creative company if you lose your health insurance to do so - putting all of your assets at risk?
And finally, if this problem is ever solved, this author, who has paid for health insurance through employment for decades, will finally be able to retire without risking his entire savings on medical bad luck.
The author can be reached at:
blog AT tinyvital.com
(replace the AT with @ - I post it this way to discourage spam)
This is my first blog post... We shall see if this is a suitable forum and I have the persistence to keep it up to date!
Today's post was stimulated by the New York Times article entitled "Climate Talks Shift Focus to How to Deal With Changes." (See NY Times - free subscription required).
This is a major victory for the forces of sanity! Some of the lunacy of the anti-global-warming movement has been beaten back. The more responsible members (not the Sierra club, of course) have abandoned their misguided attempt to crash the economies of the first world, especially the US, by forcing a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions. It is an amazing show of sanity on the part of the green-left - I am truly surprised!
This can only be attributed to George Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty, and the growing evidence that Kyoto was a sham.
The global warming scare is one of the longest running junk science causes of the enviro-left. It is based on poor science, and until today, advocated foolish and damaging methods to prevent the "disaster." "Global warming" has come to mean the expected warming of the earth as a result of the release of "greenhouse gases" - usually CO2.
Unfortunately for its promoters, the science behind this scare is weak. Certainly it is not unreasonable to expect some warming as a result of CO2 growth, but to believe the specific predictions used to back proposals like Kyoto is to accept uncertainty as if it were truth.
Even more damning, if Kyoto had been accepted, and if the science behind it were correct, it's impact on global temperature would have been unmeasurable (statistically in the noise level) over the next 100 years.
Kyoto would have made no practical improvement. Sadly, it would have had dramatic negative impact on economies, with (never mentioned) trickle down effects which would have increased third world poverty.
When challenged on this, the proponents of Kyoto answered that Kyoto was "only the first step." It was a trojan horse... a step that increased government restrictions on energy usage (at least in first world countries)... and of course increased the power of the green/left factions over the economies... but it had no benefit.
To achieve the purported benefit, much greater restrictions on energy use would have followed, with disastrous economic impact!
Of course, you never hear that from the mainstream press in the US - but the press bias is a topic for another day.
