All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
News

Obama cuts missile defense as Iran test-fires missile that can hit Israel

4 Comments

Yesterday I linked to the story about Obama’s decision to weaken our nuclear capabilities, and a while back I blogged about the ACORN lawyer’s cuts to missile defense, just as North Korea was ramping up its medium-range missile program.

Here is a quick refresher:

Closing Velocity had some more details on the missile defense cuts. (H/T Hot Air)

  • Total cuts in missile defense: $1.4 billion or roughly 15%.
  • Cancel second Airborne Laser (ABL) aircraft, keep the one remaining ABL prototype as a testbed and revert to pure R&D.
  • No increases in Ground-based Interceptor (GBI) deployment in Alaska. Remaining silos will stay unfilled. European GBIs will be decided on later during the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
  • Termination of the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) program.

    • Well, now we can add Iran to the list of nations emboldened by Obama’s weak foreign policy.

    The Heritage Foundation reports: (from their 33 Minutes blog)

    Earlier this week we mentioned Iran’s defiance and nuclear ambitions, President Barack Obama’s too-friendly request to enter into talks with Iran, the necessity to build agreed-upon missile defense shields in Poland and the Czech Republic, and Israel’s desire to take more aggressive action against Iran. Today’s post reaffirms why we blogged about these issues.

    My Way News reports that Iran test-fired an advanced missile today, with a range far enough to hit Israel, southeastern Europe, and our bases in the Middle East. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made this claim. So, despite Obama’s “tough” words of warning, Iran is busy developing and apparently testing its ballistic missile capability.

    That Iran doesn’t have nuclear capability at this very moment is beside the point. A team of U.S. and Russian scientists just released a report stating Iran would have such capability in as few as five years. In light of this recent missile test-fire, will our president take a more aggressive approach to dealing with Iran, or will he stand by his decision to give the rogue nation a year-end deadline?

    Here’s Nile Gardiner and a leftist journalist on MSNBC:

    This reminds me of a quotation from Ronald Reagan’s debate against the 2nd worst president ever, Democrat Jimmy Carter.

    And I’m only here to tell you that I believe with all my heart that our first priority must be world peace, and that use of force is always and only a last resort, when everything else has failed, and then only with regard to our national security. Now, I believe, also, that this meeting this mission, this responsibility for preserving the peace, which I believe is a responsibility peculiar to our country, and that we cannot shirk our responsibility as a leader of the free world because we’re the only ones that can do it. Therefore, the burden of maintaining the peace falls on us. And to maintain that peace requires strength. America has never gotten in a war because we were too strong.

    We had 8 years of constant terrorist attacks with the Democrat Clinton. We had 7 years of security, liberty and properity with the Republican Bush, who had the moral clarity, (from his Christian worldview), to oppose tyranny. Let’s see how well Obama’s diplomacy works. Somehow, I don’t think Obama’s appeasement of torturing, murdering dictators will be as effective as peace through strength.

    UPDATE: Gateway Pundit links to details on the missile. Range is 2000 km, two-stage solid fuel.

    News

    Obama’s car regulations will kill more Americans than the Iraq war

    Leave a comment

    The Heritage Foundation reports on Obama’s proposed regulations on fuel economy.

    Time for practice. Time to pile into the…Toyota Prius? Maybe the Yaris. Or surely the Smart Car will do. Those are three of eleven cars that meet President Obama’s new emissions standards that include “nothing larger than a midsize sedan, even when you include hybrids.”

    Eleven choices of vehicle? The soccer moms will not be liking that.

    But it gets worse. It’s going to cost another 50,000 jobs added on to Obama’s massive count.

    Keith Henessey writes: (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)

    NHTSA estimated that a similar option would cost almost 50,000 U.S. auto manufacturing jobs over five years.

    See Table VII-1 on page 586 of the NHTSA analysis.  NHTSA estimated that the TC=TB option, which I’m using as a proxy for the Obama plan, would result in the following job losses among U.S. auto workers:

    MY 2011

    MY 2012

    MY 2013

    MY 2014

    MY 2015

    8,232

    24,610

    30,545

    36,106

    48,847

    Compared to the Bush draft final rule, this is 37,000 more jobs lost.

    Since I know this table is inflammatory, I will anticipate some of the responses:

    • This is an estimate for the job loss from the TC=TB option analyzed by NHTSA in 2007.  This is the closest proxy for the Obama rule, and I’m convinced it’s a good proxy until someone demonstrates otherwise.  But technically, it’s not a job loss estimate for the Obama proposal.
    • This estimate was done in a different economic environment (late 2008), and before the U.S. government owned 1.5 major U.S. auto manufacturers.  My guess, however, is that these changed conditions should push the estimated job loss up from the above estimate, rather than down.
    • There’s a false precision in the above table.  It’s just what NHTSA’s model spits out.  …I don’t put any weight on the precise annual estimates.

    And it gets even worse than that.

    Steve Milloy writes about the really bad problem on Green Hell blog: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

    The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that will be announced today may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

    Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007.

    As discussed in my new book Green Hell, the only way for carmakers to meet these standard is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars.

    The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000 deaths per year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that every 100-pound reduction in the weight of small cars increases annual traffic fatalities by as much as 715.

    In contrast in the more than six years since the Iraq war began, there have been 4,296 deaths among American military personnel.

    The Iraq war cost 550 billion and 4300 lives. And for this we got more liberty and security. Obama is spending trillions and trillions of dollars, and he wants to kill 2,000 Americans per year? I am not even talking about his subsidies to kill more unborn babies at home and abroad. This is on top of that!

    Polemics

    Is morality rational, on Christian theism?

    3 Comments

    Last week, I posted a list of 13 questions that Christians could use to get discussions going with their atheist friends. We got 10 responses to the questions. On Monday, we took a look at the minimal requirements for robust, prescriptive morality. On Tuesday, we evaluated whether the minimal requirements are rationally grounded on atheism. Today, we’ll evaluate Christianity.

    The case for Christian theism

    Christian morality is based on the objective truth of the Christian faith. So, let’s recall how people argue for Christianity.

    Arguments for theism:

    And then there are arguments for Christianity in particular:

    And here are the rebuttals and refutations to the arguments against Christian theism:

    So, let’s assume Christian theism is true, and go on to see if it rationally grounds the minimal requirements for morality.

    Evaluation

    1) Objective moral values: GROUNDED

    Objective moral values are grounded in God’s unchanging nature. His own character is the standard for what counts as good and evil. The standard is not variable, but fixed, by God’s unchanging nature.

    2) Objective moral duties: GROUNDED

    Objective moral duties are grounded in God’s commands, which flow from the values in his nature and become duties for his creatures.

    3) Moral accountability: GROUNDED

    On Christian theism, there is a final judgment after death in which good will be rewarded and evil will be punished, proportionally.

    4) Free will: GROUNDED

    On Christian theism, each person is a union of a material body and a non-material mind / soul. The actions of the non-material mind / soul are not determined by material processes, and humans are therefore able to make real choices.

    5) Ultimate significance: GROUNDED

    On Christian theism, death is not the end of the story. Each moral action performed is part of on ongoing relationships with God, and people. So, no action is meaningless, because all your actions relate to God, who exists eternally, or to other people, who also exist eternally into the future.

    Conclusion

    Christian theism grounds all of the minimal requirements needed for rational morality. In Christian theism, we see the fusion of prudence (Acting morally is what I am designed to do in order to flourish, i.e. – “eudaimonia”) and submission to a loving God (I will act morally to respect God, because he loves me the most). More to come on the latter point!

    Tomorrow, I’ll post my own answers to the 13 questions, since Commenter ECM and moderate-leftist unitarian Rick demand that I do.

    Further study

    You can get the full story on the requirements for rational morality in a published, peer-reviewed paper written by William Lane Craig here. You can also hear and see him present the paper to an audience of students and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. The audio is clipped at 67 minutes, the video is the full 84 minutes. There is 45 minutes of Q&A, with many atheist challengers.

    The video of this lecture is the best material you can get on this issue, and the Q&A from the hostile audience is vital to the lesson. More debates on atheism and morality can be found on the debate and lecture page.

    You can find a post contrasting the morality of an authentic, consistent Christian with an authentic, consistent non-Christian here. A post examining how atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million innocent people in the 20th century alone is here. A post analyzing the tiny number of deaths that religion was responsible for is here.