Scratch Pad

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Hero Hypocrisy

We haven't seen a lot of TIME or Newsweek cover stories about the heroics of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thomas Sowell points out the insincerity of calling our soldiers "heroes" only when we are painting them as victims.

The front cover of Newsweek’s March 5th issue featured a woman with amputated legs and a sweatshirt that said “ARMY” across the front. Inside, there were pages and pages of other pictures of badly wounded and disfigured military veterans, in a long article that began under the big headline: “Forgotten Heroes.”

The utter hypocrisy of all this can be seen in the word “heroes.” There have been many acts of heroism among our troops in Iraq — but those heroes didn’t make the front cover of Newsweek.

One man fell on a grenade to protect his buddies, smothering the fatal blast with his body, so that those around him might live when he died. But that never made the front cover of Newsweek. It was barely mentioned anywhere in the liberal media.

They are not interested in heroes. They are interested in depicting victims — in the military as in civilian society.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Global warming roundup 03/07

"The Great Global Warming Hoax" shown on Channel 4 in Britian (opens in YouTube)


A tale of two markets on the Economist.com, about carbon offsets
You are a carbon-emitting American, currently purchasing Q quantity of carbon-emitting electricity in your home market, which we'll call Market #1. You want to consume more electricity, but you worry about global warming. So you buy electricity in your local market, but offset this purchase by paying someone to build the equivalent generating power in windfarms in another market.
In your home market, your purchases are sending a signal: build more (dirty) power. You have shifted the demand curve outwards, so that at any given price, more power is consumed.

I guess I was too optimistic about the Senate and House hearings (opens in RealPlayer) on global warming on March 21--I honestly thought that the congressmen (both Republican and Democrat) would ask meaningful, intelligent questions, that they would attend the entire hearings, that they would be polite, etc, etc. Just goes to show that I'm awfully naive about our government. Anyway, here's some more coverage:

Iain Murray "Al's Warming Lies and the Real "Inconvenient Truth"
John Podhortez "Al Mighty Preacher Running out of Power"
Live-blogging the hearings at Powerline forums
"Cooler Heads" briefing on "An Inconvenient Truth"