Say Anything Blog

Christopher Chantrill

The good thing about living in the modern era is that we have freedom of speech and dissent is celebrated as the highest form of patriotism.

So when a Nobel laureate like James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, opines that maybe the reason that Africa is such a mess is because of intelligence you can imagine the reaction.  Said Watson, as reported by the London Times:

  The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”

Anybody reading that—even a rock-ribbed conservative—will experience a cringe of embarrassment.  The more sensitive types, those fully accredited as “non-racists,” will likely feel more.  They will feel the need to anathematize Dr. Watson, strip him of his public appointments, and deny him access to the public square.

All this embarrassment and anger is odd because the west proudly advertises itself as a culture of reason, where ideas rule, completely different from benighted Islam where a teacher can get a jail sentence for allowing the children in her charge to give a teddy-bear the name “Mohammed” (the just and merciful).

And yet dear old James Watson has been stripped of all his public appointments and sent off to ponder the error of his ways.  So what’s going on?

[...]

  Since its inception, U.S. public schooling has been a battle zone, as left-wing and right-wing activists have sought to wrest control of the system and bend it to their will.

In the nineteenth century the public schools were used to push the Protestant Bible on the Irish Catholics.  In the twentieth century they were used to push liberal political correctness on Protestant fundamentalists.

These activists understand that reason has nothing to do with it.  They want to enforce their shaming code upon the benighted masses and they are not afraid to use government power to do it.

[...]

When it comes to Nobel-quality science, go-along conformists need not apply.  Of course, the Nobel Peace Prize is another matter.

Conservatives, as you would expect, own the reasonable approach to all this.  We believe that people should be careful about sweeping claims of reason.  Every society needs its prejudices, its shaming code, and its taboos.

When liberals demand absolute free speech and freedom from shame, they end up smuggling prejudice and taboo in the back door.

But conservatives are all in favor of reason when applied in a practical, gradualist way to the advance of science, the development of law, and the reform of government.

That is why we believe, as a practical matter, that after 150 years of government education it would be a good idea to discuss some serious education reform.  If nothing else, it might reduce the conflict over our schools.  But our liberal friends say that people who want to relax government control of education “don’t care about kids.”

And we believe that after 70 years of Social Security in which life expectancy at birth has climbed about 10 years it is time to discuss reform.  But our liberal friends say that people who want to privatize Social Security want to throw granny into the street.

It’s good to know that our lefty friends insist that dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Otherwise people could easily get the impression that liberals believe that free speech is only for people who think the right thoughts.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Tom Blumer

Oh, how Old Media wants a recession. Too bad the economy isn’t cooperating.

The latest Institute for Supply Management (ISM) report on the Manufacturing Sector, covering about 15% of the non-government economy, was just released this morning, and led as follows:

  Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in November for the 10th consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the 73rd consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.

True, the reading of 50.8% was barely above the 50% cutoff point for expansion. But it’s barely lower than the 50.9% turned in last month, and still came in slightly ahead of expectations, which averaged 50.4%, according to the Associated Press, and 50.7%, according to Bloomberg.

This makes three out of three fourth quarter ISM reports showing continued growth—two in manufacturing, plus October’s non-manufacturing report that came in at 55.8%, up from 54.8% in September. If Wednesday’s ISM report on non-manufacturing for November comes in at 55.9% or higher, it will means that the economy as a whole, as ISM measures it, is not only growing, but growing faster. Recession, reschmession.

[...]

More good news for America, and bad news for the lefties.

Thomas Lifson

Likening Republicans to beasts

A new fad appears to be aborning among liberal commentators: likening Republicans to various beasts. Ron Brownstein’s current “Political Connections” column in the National Journal, a conventional-enough analysis of the race among GOP contenders for the presidency, concludes with this gem:

  There’s plenty of stinging ahead before one scorpion crawls from this bottle.

The GOP candidates are scorpions?

Could this possibly be the same Ronald Brownstein who one month ago published a book entitled The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America? Is this bestiary metaphor what Brownstein has in mind as non-partisanship? Just wondering: to what animal has he likened Hillary or Obama?

Just a couple of days ago, Erin Burnett, reading the “news” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, twice called President Bush a monkey: once as “the monkey” and then as “the monkey in the middle”. See it for yourself here.

Liberal journalists are well-known to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to employing new gimmicks of the moment. Rush Limbaugh hilariously compiled clips of liberal TV commentators hastening to employ the word “gravitas” when it was first deployed by some partisan war room as a means to denigrate then-candidate Bush by suggesting he needed a running mate with that quality to balance his own putative lack of same.

I am tempted to employ the phrase “herd behavior.” But for obvious reasons, I will refrain for the moment.

If the MSM holds true to form, Rush will soon be able to compile a menagerie of beasts in sound bites, as liberals seek to denigrate Republican candidates.

Despite the deniers and word parsers on the left, the evidence keeps piling up.

Noel Sheppard

Have you noticed the genie concerning the real modus operandi behind climate alarmism beginning to peek its head out of the bottle lately?

After the United Nations announced earlier in the week that rich countries - code for America, of course - are going to have to pay billions of dollars to help poor nations deal with global warming, several international press outlets published articles of similar content.

Is it possible media are recognizing that since the Democrat presidential candidates are all advocating a tax the rich platform it is safe to begin discussing the need for developed nations to foot the bill for international global warming solutions?

Consider an op-ed published Friday by Britain’s Guardian (emphasis added, reader is strongly advised to hide wallet or purse before proceeding):

  Our starting point is deeply inequitable with poor countries certain to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change. But rich countries are responsible for the bulk of past emissions: US emissions are currently more than 20 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per annum, Europe’s are 10-15 tonnes, China’s five or more tonnes, India’s around one tonne, and most of Africa much less than one.

  For a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, the world average per capita must drop from seven tonnes to two or three. Within these global targets, even a minimal view of equity demands that the rich countries’ reductions should be at least 80% - either made directly or purchased. An 80% target for rich countries would bring equality of only the flow of current emissions - around the two to three tonnes per capita level. In fact, they will have consumed the big majority of the available space in the atmosphere.

  Rich countries also need to provide funding for three more key elements of a global deal. First, there should be an international programme to combat deforestation, which contributes 15-20% of emissions. For $10bn-$15bn per year, half the deforestation could be stopped.

  [...]

  Finally, rich countries should honour their commitment to 0.7% of GDP in aid by 2015. This would yield increases in flows of $150bn-$200bn per year.

Sounds like virtually any Democrat presidential candidate’s tax the rich agenda, doesn’t it?

Please be advised that this column was written by Sir Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank whose October 2006 Review on the Economics of Climate Change has become a blueprint for eco-socialism worldwide.

[...]

  The “rich-must-pay” mantra seems to be catching on around the globe. And for good reason. Green campaigners and eco-scientists from Europe and the USA have been claiming for years that it’s Western GHG emissions that have been causing most of the world’s environmental problems and disasters. If that were the case, the West would have to pay a devastating price. There can be little doubt that this form of climate ‘justice’ threatens to burden the developed world with astronomical costs, undermining its international competitiveness and destroying its self-confidence. The West will rue the day they handed over the agenda of international politics and economic policy-making to their green bureaucrats and eco-scientists.

I can’t agree more. And, with Democrat presidential candidates advocating the same economic policy here, it seems a metaphysical certitude that the U.S. paying for international global warming solutions will be presented to American citizens by a green press as eco-justice for our relative prosperity.

Scarier still, with the U.N. leading the way in the spread of eco-socialism, if Americans don’t quickly recognize the developing scheme, we could be setting ourselves up for decades of international extortion from every country claiming we’re responsible for its environmental and societal problems.

More frightening is that one major political party in this nation, along with its media minions, largely agrees with this premise.

Heaven help us.

Scary stuff.  And it’s all based on a lie.

Tom Blumer

While we’re on the subject, here’s a reality check…

The quarterly report on home prices issued by the government’s Office for Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) is the most comprehensive and most reliable measure available of what is happening in the housing market.

Here is how today’s OFHEO press release describing results for the third quarter of this year started off (bolds are in original):

  For the first time in nearly thirteen years, U.S. home prices experienced a quarterly decline. The OFHEO House Price Index (HPI), which is based on data from sales and refinance transactions, was 0.4 percent lower in the third quarter than in the second quarter of 2007. This is similar to the quarterly decline of 0.3 percent (seasonally-adjusted) shown in the purchase-only index. The annual price change, comparing the third quarter of 2007 to the same period last year showed an increase of 1.8 percent, the lowest four-quarter increase since 1995. OFHEO’s purchase-only index, which is based solely on purchase price data, indicates the same rate of appreciation over the last year.

The full OFHEO report (PDF) is here.

The quarterly dip was the first since the fourth quarter of 1994. It was the worst quarterly drop since the fourth quarter of 1990, when prices fell 0.40%.

From 1995-2006, home prices nationally went up 117%, while inflation during that period was 36%. From 2002-2006, home prices went up 52%, vs. inflation of 15%.

In fact, I still say, “Bubble, schmubble.” If gas prices come down 25 cents a gallon in the next week, that will be a drop of about 8%—20 times greater than the home-price drop just reported. I don’t expect to see any reports of a gas-price “bubble” any time soon.

[...]

The MSM is making a big deal out of a predictable “crash” in a small segment of the housing market, hoping to produce bad economic effects to help the Dems in the upcoming election, but the truth keeps tripping them up.  Just think; if it were not for the “alternative media”, we wouldn’t know about any of the good news.  Scary.

When I say “predictable”, I mean that the housing loan market was jiggered to suit a social agenda, rather than being about sensible financing of housing for those who could afford it.

Christopher Alleva

Everything is Caused by Global Warming (600+ links)

Dr. John Brignell, a British engineering professor, runs a website called numberwatch. He has compiled what has to be the most complete collection of links to media stories ascribing the cause of everything under the sun to global warming.  He has already posted more than six-hundred links.

The site’s stated mission is to expose all the “scares, scams, junk, panics and flummery cooked up by the media, politicians, bureaucrats and so-called scientists and others that try to confuse the public with wrong numbers”  Professor Brignell’s motto is “Working to Combat Math Hysteria.”

This exercise is not merely a lark to show the abject absurdity of this global warming nonsense. Brignell wrote a great book titled Sorry Wrong Number, The Abuse of Measurement on this very subject.

Dr. Brignell is accepting additions to the list so if you have any send them along.

  Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated, African aid threatened, Africa hit hardest, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety,  algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic lakes disappear….(much, much more)

[...]

Reductio ad absurdum

Jumpin’ GDP: Revised Third Quarter Growth is 4.9%; Media Obsessed with Recession Talk

Economic growth for the third quarter, which was estimated at 3.9% a month ago, was revised upward to 4.9% by the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BEA announcement is here.

[...]

The increase in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from exports, personal consumption expenditures (PCE), private inventory investment, equipment and software, federal government spending, nonresidential structures, and state and local government spending that were partly offset by a negative contribution from residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

..... The real change in private inventories added 0.98 percentage point to the third-quarter change in real GDP, after adding 0.22 percentage point to the second-quarter change. Private businesses increased inventories $32.9 billion in the third quarter, following an increase of $5.8 billion in the second quarter and an increase of $0.1 billion in the first.

Ever since the fourth quarter of 2006, when there was a big downward revision to GDP because of inventory reductions, I have been wondering when the reverse was going to occur, because it almost had to. Now it has.

Two tidbits you may not see reported elsewhere (source info from BEA is here):

* If it holds, and I believe it will, this is the best quarter since 3Q03, and the second best since 2Q-2000.

* Again if it holds, the combined 2nd and 3rd quarter total of 8.7% (after the 2nd quarter’s 3.8%; quarterly percentages are presented in annualized form) is the highest since the 3Q03 and 4Q03’s 10.2%. 2Q03 and 3Q03 were a combined 11.0%.

[...]

Dennis Prager

One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world—so widely held it is not disputed—is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.

But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world’s news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.

That it is the left—and those influenced by the left-leaning news and entertainment media—that hates America can be easily shown.

[...]

There is another obvious argument against the belief that the world hates America: Many millions of people would rather live in America than in any other country. How does the left explain this? Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? Why don’t people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? Those are rich and free countries, too.

The answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers as is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel—and are not regarded as—fully German, French or Swedish. Yet, anyone of any color from any country is regarded as American the moment he or she identifies as one. The country that the left routinely calls “xenophobic” and “racist” is in fact the least racist and xenophobic country in the world.

[...]

So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question.

Read the whole thing.  It’s time we realized who the real enemy is.

J.R. Dunn

Eight Years of Liberal Hatred
In politics as in personal life, hatred is a dangerous tool. It’s like one of the early medieval cannons, just as capable of blowing up in your face as it is of lobbing a ball at the enemy. Of course, the medieval metal casters realized they had a problem and worked to correct it. Haters never seem to get that far.

For the latest evidence of this, we can thank Peter Berkowitz. Berkowitz is that rarity, a sincere liberal with as critical an eye for his own side as he has for the opposition. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The Insanity of Bush Hatred”, Berkowitz attempts to take the measure of the haters, a phenomenon generally unmentioned by the legacy media, which prefers to act as an unknowing conduit for these people (watch how quickly this changes if Madame Hillary manages to squeak in).

Berkowitz gives us several fine examples of individuals on the very edge of permanent cognitive damage from Bush Derangement Syndrome. People who can’t so much as hear the name without their faces going red and their features distorted. (My favorite is the “political moderate” who answers a civil question with: “I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks”, an excellent illustration of the psychological factor called “displacement”.)

[...]

All the same, the two Bush terms have been on unending carnival of hatred. Just to hit the high points, there’s the novel blueprinting his assassination, a film on the same topic, and probably more. We’ve had several impeachment attempts, all hopeless on their face, the latest proposed by the noted statesman Dennis Kucinich. And all this before we get to one single word of media coverage on Karl Rove, waterboarding, surveillance, Virginia Plame, or Scott McClellan.

It’s a waste of time looking for a rational explanation amid all this. None could conceivably cover every last convolution of paranoia, delusion, and obsession. “Bush hatred,” as Berkowitz writes, “is different.” It’s different because it has its roots in ideology.

Ideological Devils

We often overlook the fact that liberalism is an ideology, and has been since the days of the New Deal. It is not a doctrine or a school of thought, and does not operate by the rational rules required in those cases. It’s an ideology in the sense of a synthetic, politically-based replacement for religious belief, and it operates by the rules of an ideology—irrational, compulsive, and totally divorced from anything outside of the ideological system itself.

Hatred, along with fear, hysteria, and conformity, is a basic element of ideological thinking. I know of no exceptions. For the Nazis, the hate-figures were, of course, the Jews. For the Soviet communists, they were a shifting cast of kulaks, socialists, capitalists, Trotskyites and “wreckers” (saboteurs out to destroy communist achievements on the orders of any of the above). For the New Dealers, it was businessmen (as it is today for some Greens).

[...]

While it was forgotten amid all the adulation following his funeral, Reagan was loathed nearly as much as Bush during his presidential terms. (A critical moment in my political education occurred when I stepped out of my office moments after Reagan was shot in 1981 and saw Americans dancing in the street over the news.) Reagan, of course, was the halfwit who needed to be led around by his “handlers” lest he stumble in front of a bus or hit the wrong button on the nuclear football. Almost everything he said or did was reported to fit that image, for example, the widely-covered incident in which he referred to Thailand as “Siam”. What the reporters failed to realize was that for the first third of Reagan’s long life, the name of the place actually was Siam. (Late in the 80s, a small number of liberals began to wise up. Prominent among them was the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who published a cartoon showing one of his trademark wimpy liberals saying, “Reagan said the Berlin Wall would come down, and I said Reagan was a fool.” Each panel featured yet another statement by Reagan answered with the same refrain, until we reach the last: “Because if Reagan was right all along… ... then what kind of fool am I?”)

[...]

Any Republican elected to high office will be treated the same for the foreseeable future. So the media may as well knock off all the marveling on how hated Republican office holders are. At this point, it’s simply part of the job description. Liberalism has become the party of hate—the first major party to fit that description since the heyday of the Know-Nothings. You can check the record and see how long they lasted.

[...]

So we can look forward to more viciousness and more nastiness, more foully and more often expressed. It will only break when liberalism does.

Speed the day.

We might as well get used to it, recognize the truth of the hatred of the lefties, and get to work countering their hate-filled propaganda.
There is no other way.
They would have us lose to the terrorists in their hatred.

Jeffrey Schmidt

If you need a good idea of what government-run healthcare would mean to you and your family, look no further than Medicare, or the wrangling taking place in Washington surrounding Medicare funding.

With much of the media focused on the Democrats’ efforts to expand eligibility and funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), much less publicity has been given to Congressional deliberations on Medicare.  While SCHIP is a backdoor effort to grow government-run healthcare, the Medicare funding process is a good example of what happens once politicians get to decide how much and what sort of healthcare participants receive from the federal budget.

The Democratic-controlled Congress has been working all year to determine how to allocate an estimated $390 billion dollars to cover more than 40 million seniors and other recipients.  The process is byzantine, as the legislative process tends to be.  It involves everything from possible changes to Medicare Advantage to physician fees to reimbursements for a host of treatments and therapies housed in this mammoth program.

What the process isn’t principally about is the best healthcare for Medicare recipients.  Foremost, this is a political process with political ends in mind.  And therein is a cautionary note for voters who are flirting with the idea of socialized or universal healthcare, or some lesser proposal that is a Trojan horse in all but name.

[...]

For liberals like Paul Krugman, perhaps these are small prices to pay for healthcare decided by Washington politicians.  For the rest of us, these prices are just too high.

Read the whole thing.  When you turn anything over to the govt, it becomes political, and everything else goes out the window.
Scary stuff.

Noel Sheppard

So, did you hear the United States was recently ranked by an independent, international economic think-tank as number one in global competitiveness?

You didn’t?

Well, how could you, for according to LexisNexis, not one major American press outlet aside from Investor’s Business Daily thought the announcement was important enough to share with the citizenry.

I guess this would go too contrary to all the reports about a looming recession.

[...]

  The United States tops the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008, released today by the World Economic Forum. Switzerland is in second position followed by Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Singapore, respectively. Chile is the highest ranked country in Latin America, followed by Mexico and Costa Rica. China and India continue to lead the way among large developing economies. Several countries in the Middle East and North Africa region are in the upper half of the rankings, led by Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In sub-Saharan Africa, only South Africa and Mauritius feature in the top half of the rankings, with several countries from the region positioned at the very bottom.

  “The United States confirms its position as the most competitive economy in the world. The efficiency of the country’s markets, the sophistication of its business community, the impressive capacity for technological innovation that exists within a first-rate system of universities and research centres, all contribute to making the United States a highly competitive economy.”

The release did raise some caution:

  “However, some weaknesses, particularly related to macroeconomic imbalances, continue to present a risk to the country’s overall competitiveness potential, and to the global economy as a whole. This danger has most recently been demonstrated by the fallout and contagion caused by the country’s sub-prime mortgage crisis and the ensuing global credit crunch,” said Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and Co-Editor of the Report.

Regardless, number one is indeed number one, correct? Yet, not one major American press outlet besides IBD reported this.

Not one.

[...]

As a final sidebar, this WEF report did garner a great deal of attention, unfortunately outside the U.S. , as there were articles written about this announcement in countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Canada, India, China, Pakistan, New Zealand, England, Jordan, Korea, Russia, Israel, Brazil, Singapore, and Ireland.

I guess media in those nations are interested in such mundane things as economic global competitiveness.

Good news is good news, and our lefties don’t want to hear it.  If they really cared about the US, they would be rejoicing about this, but they aren’t.  BDS, anyone?

Bruce Walker

The Nazis were Marxists, no matter what our tainted academia and corrupt media wishes us to believe.  Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Ku Klux Klan, Maoists, radical Islam and Facists—all are on the Left, something that should be increasingly apparent to decent, honorable people in our times. The Big Lie which places Nazis on some mythical Far Right was created specifically so that there would be a bogeyman manacled on the wrists of those who wish us to move “too far” in the direction of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. 

The truth about the Nazis was that they were the antithesis of Reagan and Goldwater.  Let us consider the original Nazi movement and its evolution.  The National Socialist movement began in Austria with Walter Riehl, Rudolf Jung and Hans Knirsch, who were, as M.W. Fodor relates in his book South of Hitler, the three men who founded the National Socialist Party in Austria, and hence indirectly in Germany.  In November, 1910, these men launched what they called the Deutschsoziale Arbeiterpartei. That party was successful politically.  It established its program at Inglau in 1914.

What was this program?  It was against social and political reaction, for the working class, against the church and against the capitalist classes.  This party eventually adopted the name Deutsche Nationalsozialistche Arbeiter Partei, which, except for the order of the words, is the same name as “Nazi.” In May 1918, the German National Socialist Workers Party selected the Harkendruez, or swastika, as its symbol.  Both Hitler and Anton Drexler, the nominal founder of the Nazi Party, corresponded with this earlier, anti-capitalistic and anti-church party.

[...]

Karl Lowenstein in the 1940 book, Governments of Continental Europe, writes that there was a convergence in Bolshevism and National Socialism regarding private property, and that this was clear long before Hitler and Stalin became allies.  Such things as freedom of contract, inviolability of private property, and the right to dispose of one’s estate were cited as examples of the deep-reaching restrictions in both totalitarian states. National Socialists were socialists.  They had nothing but contempt for what socialists call “capitalism” or what normal people call economic freedom.  While it is convenient to portray Nazis as beholden to industrialists and militarists, even from the earliest days Nazis loathed not only industrialists in general but armament makers in particular.  The Nazis raised taxes, punished profits, reduced the power of owners, of managers, and of directors and championed the right of the state or the party to “protect” Germany and German workers from abuses of “capitalists

Nazis were Marxists, through and through.  Although Nazi condemned Bolshevism, the particular incarnation of Marx in Russia, and although the Nazis often bickered and fought with Fascism, the particular incarnation of Marx in Italy, Hitler and his ghastly accomplices were always and forever absolutely committed to that which we have come to call the “Far Left.”  Nazis were Marxists.

Read the whole thing; it’s very well documented.
Sounds just like Pelosi and Reid today.

Ed Kaitz

Thought this might be interesting info for those concerned with fatherhood.

By A recent AP news report has concluded, after compiling the results of numerous studies over the years, that there is a strong and disturbing link between severe child abuse and non-traditional family environments. In the article’ words:
“[Scholars and caseworkers] note an ever increasing share of America’s children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures.” 
Examples of “nontraditional family structures” include:

o Children living in homes with unrelated adults (these children are “50 times more likely to die inflicted injuries as children living with biological parents”); and

o Single parent homes or children living with stepfamiles (these children “have a higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents”). 

Lastly, the studies found that “girls whose parents divorce are at a significantly higher risk of sexual assault, whether they live with their mother or their father.” 

The studies seem to show that even children in adoptive environments seem to be ok with two parents.  The report goes on to tell in painful detail however the brief life stories of little toddlers who were beaten, drowned, thrown across rooms, and buried under cement - all victims of what Plato called “democracy’s insatiable desire for what it defines as the good”: freedom.  In this case, it is our freedom to choose “alternative” family environments and be “affirmed” every step of the way.

I am not sure what is going over at the progressive AP, but the report’s conclusions demonstrate in utterly stark terms a fundamental truth that conservatives have held dear since the time of Aristotle (or, if you are from China, since at least the time of Confucius): Natural Law.  I was told once by a very smart professor that Aristotle was much smarter than I was, and he was right.  He also told me that Aristotle would resurface every now and then, in the form of nature, to remind us in often ugly ways, of our excesses, and of our proper limits.  We know, for example, that study after study demonstrates a link between abortion and depression, and abortion and suicide.  We also know now that there are studies showing strong connections between abortion and breast cancer.  Aristotle’s great Christian interpreter, St. Thomas Aquinas, argued that divorce was also unnatural, and that two parent families were natural:
Now it is clear that in the human species the female is far from sufficing alone for the rearing of the children, since the needs of human life require many things that one person alone cannot provide.
Aquinas goes on to argue that among the “many things” human, as opposed to animal, offspring need are “instruction for the soul” and discipline, responsibilities he places mostly on the father.

Read the whole thing.  When fathers are driven away, society suffers.

The United Nations sharply reduced its estimate of HIV-AIDS sufferers in an annual report Tuesday, saying a revision of statistics from India meant there were seven million less than previously thought.

Revised figures in the latest UNAIDS study slashed an estimate for total infections this time last year to 32.7 million from 39.5 million cases, the number given in the agency’s 2006 report.

“The single biggest reason for the reduction in global HIV prevalence figures in the past year was the recent revision in India after an intensive reassessment of the epidemic in that country,” UNAIDS said in its report.

The number of people worldwide infected with HIV in 2007 totalled 2.5 million people 32.2 million are now living with the virus, the report said. More than two million people died from the disease in 2007.

“Reliable public health data are the essential foundation for an effective response,” said Kevin De Cock, head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation.

“We need to continue investing more in all countries and all aspects of strategic information relating to health,” he added.

Numbers of people living with the virus were levelling out and the percentage of the population affected was now in decline, the report said.

Two-thirds of new infections were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, although the overall number now infected in the region—where three-quarters of the world’s AIDS deaths have occurred—was down by 1.7 million this year.

About 22.5 million people living in Africa have HIV/AIDS, 68 percent of the global total, the report said.

In Asia there are now 4.9 million cases, up 440,000 from last year. Indonesia has the fastest growing epidemic on the continent, while the number of HIV cases in Vietnam has more than doubled between 2000 and 2005.

The Caribbean is the second worst-hit region of the world in per capita terms with one percent of adults—230,000 people—carrying the virus, according to the report.

The year 2007 has seen 11,000 deaths and 17,000 new infections in the island region so far, it said.

From a site called “Climate Audit”, here’s some interesting information about the accuracy of raw data from some weather stations in Death Valley, CA.

Find it here

A lot of technical jargon, but worth a read.