Daily Archives: April 11, 2011

Covering Up “Camelot”

April 11, 2011
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Covering Up “Camelot”

By Mike Gray Of course, there was a very real conspiracy behind The History Channel’s decision to dump the miniseries . It doesn’t take Glenn Beck’s blackboard to connect those dots. But after watching The Kennedys, I am completely at a loss to figure out why anyone seriously found the material objectionable. The broadcast broke no new ground. Likely, the keepers of the fictional Camelot flame simply didn’t want another reminder of the vast disconnect between calculated and conjured myth in the wake of Mr. Kennedy’s tragic death and actual reality. Whether one reads a good book about the Kennedy years or watches The Kennedys on ReelzChannel, one thing is clear—there were potential ethical and moral time bombs threatening his presidency. And there is a credible case to be made that had Kennedy lived beyond that fateful fall day in 1963, and had he managed to be reelected in 1964 (not at all a sure thing), he may not have survived a second term, politically. That’s right. As Hugh Sidey suggested before his death in 2005—the same Hugh Sidey, who as an editor at Time Magazine during the Kennedy years, was also a Camelot insider—JFK’s various and sundry moral,

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Eleven Ways Big Government Wrings Money Out of Its Citizens

April 11, 2011
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Eleven Ways Big Government Wrings Money Out of Its Citizens

By Mike Gray About a century ago a group of brilliant Italian scholars set out to study the nature of the state and its monetary affairs. One of them, Amilcare Puviani, tried to answer this question: If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of its population, what would it do? He came up with eleven strategies that such a government would employ. They’re worth examining: 1. The use of indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the tax is hidden in the price of goods 2. Inflation, by which the state reduces the value of everyone else’s currency 3. Borrowing, so as to postpone the necessary taxation 4. Gift and luxury taxes, where the tax accompanies the receipt or purchase of something special, lessening the annoyance of the tax 5. Temporary taxes, which somehow never get repealed when the emergency passes 6. Taxes that exploit social conflict, by placing higher taxes on unpopular groups (such as the rich, or cigarette smokers, or windfall profit makers) 7. The threat of social collapse or withholding monopoly government services if taxes are reduced 8. Collection of the total tax burden in relatively small increments (a sales tax,

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Planned Parenthood and Abortion — The Numbers Don’t Always Tell the Whole Story

April 11, 2011
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Planned Parenthood and Abortion — The Numbers Don’t Always Tell the Whole Story

By Mike Gray Though 98 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services to pregnant women are abortion, Planned Parenthood and its political allies have sworn up and down that taxpayer dollars do not pay for abortion. But of course they do. Planned Parenthood gets one-third of its entire budget from taxpayer funding and performed more than 650,000 abortions between 2008 and 2009. An abortion is expensive. Its cost includes pay for the doctor, supporting medical staff, their health benefits packages and malpractice insurance. As clinic director, I saw how money affiliate clinics receive from several sources is combined into one pot, not set aside for specific services. Planned Parenthood’s claim that abortions make up just 3 percent of its services is also a gimmick. That number is actually closer to 12 percent, but strategically skewed by unbundling family planning services so that each patient shows anywhere from five to 20 “visits” per appointment (i.e., 12 packs of birth control equals 12 visits) and doing the opposite with abortion visits, bundling them together so that each appointment equals one visit. The resulting difference between family planning and abortion “visits” is striking. But that’s not the only deception Planned Parenthood is spreading . .

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Who Has a Right to Abridge Freedom of Speech?

April 11, 2011
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Who Has a Right to Abridge Freedom of Speech?

By Mike Gray Short answer: nobody. The 1st Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech ….” So that does it for Congress. But the Supreme Court and other federal magistrates think they know what’s free speech and what isn’t — and legislate from the bench accordingly. Evidently, magisterial federal judges believe the congressional limitations imposed by Amendment One don’t apply to them. The Supremes have whittled down the 1st Amendment so much that American citizens aren’t really sure what they can say in public discourse. This is about as far from what the Founding Fathers intended as it can get. Small wonder certain Liberal-Progressive groups flee to the sheltering arms of federal judges like a little kid on a playground who just got called a bad name. They want free speech for everybody — everybody who agrees with them, that is. Mike Adams, columnist and criminology professor at UNC-Wilmington, recently had to run a gantlet of sorts in a lawsuit he brought against his employers: In my original complaint filed against the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2007, my attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund alleged that my application for promotion had

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“We never pay any-one Dane-geld”

April 11, 2011
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“We never pay any-one Dane-geld”

By Mike Gray In light of the ascendancy of regressive politics and religions that pose a threat to Western society, historian Clayton E. Cramer believes Rudyard Kipling‘s poem “Dane-Geld” (1911) might be “due for a renaissance”: King Alfred the Great, the Danish invasion of England, and Alfred’s efforts to drive the Danes out of the land inevitably led to a discussion of the Danegeld. The Danegeld was the tribute that the Danes required of the English to avoid further depredations — and England’s decision to no longer pay the Danegeld is part of the war that drives the Danes out. Here’s the poem: Dane-Geld A.D. 980-1016 It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbour and to say: — “We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.” And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld And then you’ll get rid of the Dane! It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: — “Though

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“A Weapon of Political Retribution”

April 11, 2011
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“A Weapon of Political Retribution”

By Mike Gray Roosevelt thus became the first president to practice on a large scale what Madison had called “the spirit of party and faction” and what Field had called the “war of the poor against the rich.” With a steeply progressive income tax in place, Roosevelt used the federal treasury to reward, among others, farmers (who were paid not to plant crops), silver miners (who had the price of their product artificially inflated), and southerners in the vote-rich Tennessee Valley (with dams and cheap electricity). . . . . Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, conceded in 1975 that “my father may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.” But he was quick to add that “each of his successors followed his lead.” That is a key point: once the machinery of retribution is in place, it is hard for politicians to resist using it. When Richard Nixon, a Republican, became president, he sounded like his Democrat counterparts when he described whom he wanted as commissioner of internal revenue. Nixon said, “I want to be sure that he is . . . ruthless .

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Myth Busted: Easter Not Derived from a Pagan Holiday

April 11, 2011
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Myth Busted: Easter Not Derived from a Pagan Holiday

By Mike Gray You can thank Bible translator William Tyndale (1496-1536) for the following common English expressions: Atonement Jehovah scapegoat let there be light the powers that be my brother’s keeper the salt of the earth a law unto themselves filthy lucre it came to pass gave up the ghost the signs of the times the spirit is willing live and move and have our being You can also thank Tyndale, who worked with Hebrew and Greek to convert the Bible into the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for the word “Easter” (which he spelled “ester”): Anglo-Saxon itself is a Germanic language, and this is the genuine origin of the term Easter. Germans likewise used the word Oster or Ostern for both Passover and our Easter. . . . when the Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) first translated the Bible into German (1545), he used a number of German words relating to this, such as Osterfest (Passover/Easter), Osterlamm (Passover lamb). . . . . So the pagan derivation of Easter is conspiratorial fantasy. The word is Anglo-Saxon, and derived from the Germanic Oster meaning Passover, and is related to the words for Resurrection. — Jonathan Sarfati As for Jesus being crucified on a Friday

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Is Music an Example of “Exaptation”?

April 11, 2011
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Is Music an Example of “Exaptation”?

By Mike Gray The embedding of words, skills, or sequences in melody and meter is uniquely human. — Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain It would be altogether opposed to the principle of evolution, if we were to admit that man’s musical capacity has been developed from the tones used in impassioned speech. — Charles Darwin, Descent of Man Our susceptibility to musical imagery indeed requires exceedingly sensitive and refined systems for perceiving and remembering music, systems far beyond anything in any nonhuman primate. — Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to the making of plinking noises? … As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless … It could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. — Steven Pinker Since there is clearly no adaptive advantage to music, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have relied on the concept of exaptation: a process describing features that, in an evolutionary framework, were originally selected for one purpose but have since been co-opted for a different purpose. — Greg Demme egardless of all this—the extent to which human musical powers and susceptibilities are

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