News

Latest FL Senate poll – Rubio 40, Crist 32, Meek 17

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FL Senate candidate Marco Rubio

Yahoo! Poll is here.

Excerpt:

Democrats will get their stronger candidate if Kendrick Meek wins the Florida Senate primary tonight as expected- but the biggest winner coming out of the primary may be Marco Rubio. PPP finds he would begin the general election in the lead at 40%, followed by Charlie Crist at 32%, and Meek at 17%.

[…]PPP’s last poll of the race in mid-July found Crist in the lead at 35% to 29% for Rubio and 17% for Meek. Two major developments have shifted the race in Rubio’s direction though. The first is that Democrats are now going for Meek 39-38 where before they were going for Crist 44-35. As Democrats have gotten to know Meek over the course of the primary campaign they’ve generally decided they like him and that’s cut into Crist’s support for the general election.

The other big difference is that many Republican voters have moved off the fence and they’ve almost universally moved into the Rubio column. Where Rubio had a 54-23 lead with GOP voters in July, it’s now increased to 69-20. Many Republicans were up in the air between Crist and Rubio previously but whatever they’ve seen over the last month has moved them more firmly into the Rubio column.

It’s not just that Rubio is a perfect candidate, it’s that Crist needs to be defeated.

UPDATE:

Oh, he’s got a fundraiser going on right now! They already hit their goal way before the deadline, but they just raised the goal! People are crazy about this guy.

Commentary

My friend loves his wife because she defends traditional marriage

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Actually that’s just one of the reasons… you should hear this guy go on about how his wife encouraged him to learn apologetics during the run-up to their marriage.

Here’s an essay she wrote to a pro-SSM friend:

Marriage is the union of a man and a woman who are not already married. No one has the unrestricted right to marry whoever they want, male or female, nor should they. Otherwise where does it stop? Should there be group marriage? Marriage to or between underage children? Marriage with animals? Forced marriage? Well, some of those things already happen in other countries and cultures, and I would say they’re all a net negative on society.

I truly feel for anyone who has a desire for any such relationship, whether it’s that they were born that way or because of some type of past abuse, but that doesn’t mean society has to endorse it and call it marriage. Tolerance is not good enough for gay rights advocates – it’s all out approval or nothing. And don’t say the slippery slope argument is baloney, because it’s not.

What is the purpose of marriage? To provide the best environment for raising children and protection of women and stability of society. Study after study shows that children do best when raised in the home of their mother and father. It’s only recently that marriage was pursued by people because they were in love. Marriage has been in trouble lately in the US, and it’s no surprise that children are turning to gangs, drugs, crime, promiscuity and so on in the search for love and family. I’ve seen this over and over among my own relatives and friends. If you haven’t seen it, you’re pretty blessed, and rare.

I doubt you’re interested in my point of view or will even read this, but here’s a pretty good analysis of the issue:

Based on evidence, gay marriage would not improve society.

I don’t hate gay people (it’s ridiculous that I should even have to say this, but I do feel the need). As above, I even think it’s better for a child to be adopted by a gay person/couple rather than stay in foster care. I have gay friends, family members, blah blah blah insert disclaimer here. I’m just not afraid to say that some things are better for society, and this is the case here.

I think most Americans are like me in that we believe gay people should be treated with kindness, but that the term “gay marriage” is an oxymoron. Even in California, gay marriage was very recently rejected when put to a vote by the people, in spite of a huge campaign on behalf of it.

Don’t worry, I’m surrounded by your point of view all the time, so I’ve already heard all the arguments. ;) And the fact that many fail at heterosexual marriage is not an argument for gay marriage, it’s an argument to reform heterosexual marriage in the eyes of the law and of society. ;) No fault divorce has been terrible for society, including my own immediate family. Some states now have what they call “covenant marriage” which is much stricter in letting people get married and the circumstances under which they can divorce. If that had been available to me, I would have done that.

Ah, she is marvelous. No wonder he loves her – who wouldn’t? When I read a woman writing about marriage, men and children like that, I can believe that lots of women do understand marriage, and that they really do care about their husbands and their children. She must be such a trustworthy and effective Christian mother – her kids are lucky that she can be so persuasive.

The main thing that I like is that she doesn’t think that marriage is some arrangement that is for people who are “in love”. It not about the feelings of the adults at all. There is a specific purpose for marriage, and that purpose is a social purpose. It’s not about individuals getting validation based on the sincerity of their feelings, it’s about bonding two people together who are going to stay together so that they can raise the next generation. It’s a commitment and it’s hard!

Women – if you want to make a man like you, try writing an essay like that to an opponent of your Christian or conservative or traditional views, and then CC your husband/suitor, and add a message saying you look forward to learning more about these issues together with him. Reading essays like this and see how proud her husband is of her makes me think well of marriage. It IS fun to be married and to talk about things like this.

News

NYT reports on new study showing no link between disasters and AGW

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Story here in the radically leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

A new analysis of nearly two dozen papers assessing trends in disaster losses in light of climate change finds no convincing link. The author concludes that, so far, the rise in disaster losses is mainly a function of more investments getting in harm’s way as communities in places vulnerable to natural hazards grow.

The paper — “Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?” — is in press in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It was written by Laurens M. Bouwer, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam focused on climate and water resources (and a lead author of a chapter in the 2001 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). You can read more about the paper at the blog of Roger Pielke, Jr., which drew my attention to this work.

Here’s more from from Roger Pielke’s blog post.

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has just put online a review paper (peer reviewed) by Laurens Bouwer, of the Institute for Environmental Studies at  Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, titled, “Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?“.

Readers of this blog already know the answer to this question, and here is Bouwers’ conclusion:

The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters.

Bouwers rightly acknowledges that there are uncertainties in such studies, and in particular, there will be a need to refine efforts to evaluate changing vulnerability and exposure in future such work, especially as the signal of greenhouse gas driven climate change is expected to become larger.  However, such uncertainties are not presently so large as to undercut Bouwers’ conclusion, e.g.,

A rigorous check on the potential introduction of bias from a failure to consider vulnerability reduction in normalization methods is to compare trends in geophysical variables with those in the normalized data. Normalized hurricane losses for instance match with variability in hurricane landfalls (Pielke et al. 2008). If vulnerability reduction would have resulted in a bias, it would show itself as a divergence between the geophysical and normalized loss data. In this case, the effects of vulnerability reduction apparently are not so large as to introduce a bias.

A pre-publication version of the paper is available here in PDF.

I hope this means that we can finally drill in Alaska now. Because I am tired of sending money and jobs overseas to people who really may not like us very much. We’re not going to explode the planet, and if we make our own energy here, not only do we get the jobs, but we can do it cleaner than they can.