The polar bears might be okay after all, and more

  • A lit­tle Thurs­day round-up, since none of these quite mer­its a post all its own:

    • Global warm­ing set­back: polar bears might not be dying: — The sci­en­tist who made the polar bear the unof­fi­cial poster child from man­made global warm­ing is on leave and being inves­ti­gated for “sci­en­tific misconduct,’in part over the integrity of those findings.

      Not long ago, a young friend assured me that global warm­ing was not a hoax. I didn’t want to start an argu­ment over it, but it made me think about my posi­tion. I don’t think the whole thing is a hoax exactly, because I don’t think there’s a will­ful intent to mis­rep­re­sent and invent facts — not gen­er­ally, any­way. But I do think, to bor­row Al’s par­lance, that it’s a con­ve­nient truth. It came along at a time when a gen­er­a­tion who believed that they were almost invul­ner­a­ble encoun­tered a world full of the same fright­en­ing weather and cat­a­clysms that had ter­ri­fied humans since the begin­ning of time. This just COULDN’T be the same as what hap­pened to unen­light­ened peo­ple and peas­ants and cave­men! It HAD to be dif­fer­ent. It HAD to fit into the same over­all pat­tern of blam­ing rich nations and heart­less indus­tri­al­ists. And so, almost mag­i­cally … it did.

      And on the more prag­matic and less West­ern­ized side, once things got rolling, if you fol­low the money in the whole global warm­ing activist front, you’ll find that the amount of money rid­ing on global warm­ing being true are just stag­ger­ing. There are entire nations ready to pay into a fund that will be over­seen by the U.N. — bil­lions of dol­lars depend on global warm­ing being true, man­made, imme­di­ately threat­en­ing and pre­ventable. I’m sorry, but I’m just too big a cynic to think that even sci­en­tists are immune from that one-two punch of a ready-made belief AND huge, whop­ping amounts of grants and funds.

    • Rationing health­care: U.K. says ‘Okay!’ — The government-run health­care sys­tem in Eng­land is run­ning out of money, and so they’ve put those need­ing hip replace­ments, cataract surg­eries and other “lesser needs” patients on notice.

      It comes at a bad time in our ongo­ing health­care debate, but then, it might inject a note of com­mon sense into our rhetoric. When things were going hot and heavy about the onset of Oba­macare, there were these con­stant assur­ances (and threats and accu­sa­tions and whines) from the true believ­ers that we would NEVER ration healthcare.

      What non­sense! I was hop­ing that the pub­lic would rise up as one and say, “Baloney!” but it didn’t seem to hap­pen. Of COURSE the gov­ern­ment would ration health­care. You absolutely, pos­i­tively can not pay for every man, woman and child to have every pos­si­ble treat­ment, surgery, test and what­not. Right now, those choices are made partly by insur­ance com­pa­nies (who seem to every­one like the bad­dies, but they have the ugli­est end of the job), partly by doc­tors and partly by patients. In the pro­posed sys­tem, we would min­i­mize or elim­i­nate the insur­ance com­pa­nies’ role and move it into gov­ern­men­tal control.

      For those who believe that the gov­ern­ment is bet­ter equipped to han­dle such sen­si­tive deci­sions, stand strong and say so. The choice is between a bureau­cracy and a profit-oriented indus­try, but no mat­ter who’s in charge, grandma might not get her new hip.

    • Saw the last Harry Pot­ter movie — and to get ready for the final install­ment, I rented all the oth­ers and I’ve been mak­ing my way through from the begin­ning. Might have more to say on that later. The only notice­able results so far is that I have been infected with the Harry Pot­ter theme as an ear­worm. For that alone, Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowl­ing should pay me a mil­lion dollars.

    Other quick­ies via Drudge:

    • Shades of God­frey Cass! — a skele­ton found in a bank chim­ney has solved a 27-year-old mys­tery. The young man went miss­ing; turns out he might have been try­ing to rob the bank.
    • Real­is­tic doll makes waves — peo­ple in Dal­las com­plained that a girl’s baby-doll was too real-looking and it was freak­ing them out when she’d leave it float­ing in the pool.
    • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Aster­oid Edi­tion — We’ve got stow­aways! Turns out there may be aster­oids hitch­ing a ride in Earth’s orbit. The nerve!

    That’s all from me today. Happy Thurs­day, all!


    Related posts:

    1. Global warm­ing takes a wee nap
    2. Harry Pot­ter and the Splin­tery Broomstick
    3. Is the Mouse afraid of the Lion?
    4. Colder than it’s sup­posed to be
    5. Tested by reasoning

    July 28th, 2011 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Greg 07.28.2011

    I love the draw­ing. That is all. :)

  • Grace

    Now you know what I’m up to when I’m sup­posed to be work­ing. ;-)

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required