All posts by Wintery Knight

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Another way that the secular left kills millions of people

UPDATE: Welcome readers from the the Western Experience! Thanks for the link, Jason!

On this blog, we’ve talked about how the secular left killed 100 million people in the wars of atheistic communism, and we analyzed why atheism leads naturally to these atrocities by elevating the pursuit of selfish happiness over the human rights of others, (because human rights and rational morality are not rationally grounded on atheism).

We’ve also talked about the 50 million unborn children killed by abortionists in the United States alone, since abortion was made legal. That’s millions of unborn children killed so that adults can be irresponsible about their sexual choices, and not have to deal with the consequences.

But there is another way that leftists kill millions of innocent people…

Here is an article about it from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Green Hell)

Excerpt:

In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world’s poor will suffer as a result.

The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The aim “is to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner,” said WHO and the U.N. Environment Program in a statement on May 6…

“Sadly, WHO’s about-face has nothing to do with science or health and everything to do with bending to the will of well-placed environmentalists,” says Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria. “Bed net manufacturers and sellers of less-effective insecticides also don’t benefit when DDT is employed and therefore oppose it, often behind the scenes.”

UPDATE: You can find more quotations from environmentalists about their real goals in this post.

The biggest mystery in the world is how the secular left managed to paint themselves as rational and non-violent. Maybe we should be reminding them about what it takes to be moral, and why their secular-left worldview doesn’t ground morality. Ideas have consequences. When people on the left try to find meaning and purpose in unscientific delusions like eco-fascism, there will be consequences.

Cap and Trade

And don’t think that we in the West will avoid the consequences of eco-fascism. Once the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill is passed, we can look forward to our own disasters.

The Heritage Foundation lists 10 things we can expect from the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill:

KILLS MORE JOBS AND KILLS THE ECONOMY

Cap and Tax Top Ten List

  1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
  2. It Will Not Make a Substantive Impact on the Environment
  3. It Will Kill Jobs
  4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
  5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
  6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing, and Haircuts
  7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
  8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
  9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
  10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” Under a Cap-and-Trade Program (January 2008) –follow link for video

More details are at the linked article.

Further study

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that this bill will be the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. (H/T Heritage Foundation)

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post notes that the bill creates huge opportunities for fraud, waste and corruption. (H/T Chilling Effect, Heritage Foundation)

What are our troops doing on Memorial day?

I thought that I would observe Memorial day by taking some time to read about the exploits of our military forces in the field, so that I would be able to more fully appreciate the sacrifices they are making to provide me with liberty, prosperity and SECURITY.

I looked around and found this article by Bill Roggio, on the Long War Journal. (H/T Foundation for Defense of Democracies)

Excerpt:

Afghan commandos and US troops are battling the Taliban for control of a region in northern Helmand province that serves as a command and control center as well as a major drug processing center.

The combined forces launched an attack against the Taliban in the town of Marja in the Nad Ali District late at night on March 18. The town is described by the US military as “a main command node” and a “hub of narcotics processing” for the Taliban in Helmand province. According to Quqnoos, an English language Afghan news outlet, Marja has been under Taliban control for more than a year and a half.

Afghan commandos and US forces took control of the center of the town and targeted the bazaar, which is described as “a nucleus of militant activity.” There the forces discovered two “war rooms stocked with maps, communication equipment, Russian-made night vision goggles and US military vehicle parts,” as well as a variety of weapons.

The soldiers also discovered a large amount of home made explosives and “packaged into gallon-size drums and prepared for use in vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices,” as well as 14,750 kilograms of black tar opium, 11 kilograms of processed heroin and 30 kilograms of morphine.

Thirty-four Taliban fighters have been killed during what the US military called heavy fighting to control the town. Sixteen fighters were killed in an airstrike in the bazaar as the Taliban attempted to retake control of the town. Six more Taliban fighters surrendered during Coalition raids in the town.

For more reading, why not check out some of the military bloggers?

If you want to help out our troops, you can send them things through Soldier’s Angels. Earlier this year, I won a contest in our office for sending the most stuff to our adopted units! It’s fun! If anyone wants a list of what they like to get, please e-mail me.

For our Canadian readers, I understand that your Memorial Day is November the 11th, to celebrate the armistice of the first world war. But in case you like to be reminded about your important role in providing freedom from tyranny, here is something I wrote recently about your prime minister Stephen Harper, and his surprise visit to see the Canadian troops deployed in Afghanistan. There are photos!

God Bless our troops!

One of the best things about being a Christian is other Christians

I wanted to highlight some of the Christian blogs that I’ve discovered since I started blogging.

The top one in the list is definitely Neil Simpson’s blog. I was just reading over there today and he was really hard on poor Dawn Eden, whose book on chastity I have read. I recommend it, although she doesn’t go as far as I would. Anyway, she’s responded in the comments. She is currently taking classes in philosophy and theology, so it should be a good fight between her and Neil! Dawn’s blog is here.

I also noticed this post over on Laura’s blog, but it’s cross-posted on Hot Air. Laura writes about how the left implicitly doesn’t trust parents to make decisions about how they address the topic of sex when talking to their own children. She writes about the left’s view of parents:

Our teens are political pawns for the left.  They’re helpless victims of our prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes),  socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship,  mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer.   The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.

Over on Muddling Toward Maturity, he links to a Chuck Colson story on how the self-esteem movement in education and parenting has undermined civility in our children. Here is an excerpt from Chuck Colson:

Whether or not today’s kids are actually “ruder than ever,” the article and others like it reflect the sense that something has gone wrong in the way we raise our children. Specifically, it has to do with “popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem.”

These movements produce parents who “[respond] with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way.” By “getting in the child’s way,” they mean doing anything that might make the child feel less-than-wonderful about him or herself—in the classroom, among their peers, or on the playing field.

Denyse O’Leary takes on the theistic evolutionists here at Post-Darwinist. I love it when she gets mad at them! She gets right to the heart of the issue: is there objective evidence of intelligent agency active in nature? Intelligent design supporters say YES, atheists and theistic evolutionists (but I repeat myself) say NO.

A video of Denyse talking about her book “The Spiritual Brain” here: (H/T Mindful Hack)

She talks about whether faith is good for people, and how people invent genes to explain their bad behavior.

Kreitsauce writes about the importance of self-denial and self-sacrifice in the Christian worldview, which is neglected these days now that the church has bowed to the society at large and reduced Christianity to feelings of happiness.

Discipleship, in contrast to narcissism, brings true satisfaction with life, because life gains a whole new sense of meaning and purpose. We have real freedom to do what is right, to live a life of intimacy with God. This life of discipleship and self-denial does not mean living without desire or without anything that brings pleasure. God does not call us to the monastery but to live life in the world but not of the world.

Chad at Truthbomb Apologetics has a post up that I will be writing about shortly, because it’s that good. He links to an episode of Casey Luskin’s ID The Future podcast featuring a discussion between a Darwinist and Socrates. He has an excerpt from the dialog here on his blog. The entire dialog is in a PDF on his site.

Tough Questions answered has an analysis showing which “Christian” groups swung from Bush to Obama, as well as this post on post-Christian morality in secular-leftist European nations. TQA cites this article from First Things that argues what I have been arguing recently in my series on atheism and morality.

Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose (or would have chosen) to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands…

The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred will be definitively put to rest by 2040.

…In an interview for a British magazine during the summer of 2005, Singer said that if he faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save the animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child’s death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value.

Yes, there is consistent, authentic atheist morality: the happiness of the strong trumps the non-existent human rights of the weak.

My buddy Rich and I scrap over whether chastity is better than marriage over at the Pugnacious Irishman. (He’s getting married shortly, and my friend Robb is getting married tomorrow, so it’s a hot topic for me!)

Over on the Western Experience, Jason has a post up on how Dick Cheney is taking on Obama on his lousy policies. Here’s a clip:

Unqualified teleprompter-reader versus qualified statesman. Nice Deb has a complete round-up here, featuring Michelle Malkin and others. I have to tell you, I am really liking what Liz Cheney has to say these days, as well.

By the way, if you’re into Obama versus the evidence, check out this video on the real value of Obama’s health care reforms, which I found at the Christian blog Verum Serum.

If you have not bookmarked this blog, better do it. They are a new blog, but they are producing high-quality videos and getting linked by major blogs.