News

Girl Scouts USA hands out Planned Parenthood pamplets to adolescent girls

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Story from the Washington Times.

Girl Scouts USA sponsored a session at UN Status of Woman conference where Planned Parenthood distributed brochures to adolescent Girl Scouts with no parents present. What was in the pamphlets produced by Planned Parenthood?

Excerpt:

[the pamphlet] …explained to the girls, “Some people have sex when they have been drinking or using drugs. That is your choice.”

But it gets worse. The sex guide explains, “Many people think sex is just about vaginal or anal intercourse. But there are lots of different ways to have sex and lots of different types of sex. Sex can include kissing, touching, licking, tickling, sucking and cuddling. Some people like to have aggressive sex, while others like to have soft sex and slow sex with their partners. There is no right or wrong way to have sex. Just have fun, explore and be yourself!” It tells girls to explore the prostate. Remember, this was distributed in a panel for adolescent girls.

Besides advice about the prostate, the brochure, subtitled “Rights, Sexuality and Living with HIV,” also gives incorrect and even dangerous information about rights and responsibilities. It tells the kids that, “sexual and reproductive rights are recognized around the world.” Sexual rights are hardly recognized around the world. They are not even recognized here in the sexual paradise of the United States. The brochure tells the kids that their rights are violated when governments require them to tell their HIV status to their sex partners.

[…]At the same UN meeting, which ended last Friday, the World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides produced a document saying young women “demand their sexual and reproductive rights including access to comprehensive sexuality education, and sexual and reproductive services including contraception and emergency contraception, in order to avoid unintended pregnancies” and also called for access to “safe abortion.”

[…]At a Girl Scout conference in 2004, co-sponsored by Planned Parenthood, the Girl Scouts handed out a brochure to 700 grade-school girls with the title “It’s Perfectly Normal,” a guide that celebrated masturbation and that featured explicit drawings of couples having sex and a boy putting on a condom. It also listed, no surprise here, the top ten reasons for having an abortion.

I think women used to be pro-life and pro-family, but not any more. Today it seems as though the older feminists are anxious to push younger women to perform actions that undermine romantic love, stable marriages and self-sacrificial parenting.

Commentary

Jay Richards explains when you should doubt “scientific consensus”

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Jay Richards writing in The American, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute. (H/T Evolution News via Apologetics 315)

This short article summarizes 10 things to look for that hint that “scientific consensus” as a substitute for arguments and evidence.

Excerpt:

How is the ordinary citizen to distinguish, as Andrew Coyne puts it, “between genuine authority and mere received wisdom? Conversely, how do we tell crankish imperviousness to evidence from legitimate skepticism?” Are we obligated to trust whatever we’re told is based on a scientific consensus unless we can study the science ourselves? When can you doubt a consensus? When should you doubt it?

Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, maintains, and communicates the ostensible consensus. I don’t know of any exhaustive list of signs of suspicion, but, using climate change as a test study, I propose this checklist as a rough-and-ready list of signs for when to consider doubting a scientific “consensus,” whatever the subject. One of these signs may be enough to give pause. If they start to pile up, then it’s wise to be suspicious.

Here are the 10 points he discusses:

  • Bundling well-evidenced claims together with speculative claims
  • The use of ad hominem attacks against dissenters
  • The use of coercion to force scientists to join the consensus
  • Publishing and peer review that is cliquish
  • Unwarranted exclusion of dissenters from peer-reviewed literature
  • Misrepresentation of peer-reviewed literature
  • A rush to declare a consensus before it even exists
  • When the subject matter is not easily testable (e.g. – simulations)
  • When defenders resort to phrases like “Scientists say…”
  • When science is used to push for dramatic policies
  • When journalists are not reporting the issue objectively
  • When supports appeal to scientific consensus instead of arguments

One can easily see how this list applies not only to global warming alarmism, but to Darwinism as well.

News

CBO estimates Obamacare cost to be 2 trillion from 2014-2023

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From the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs. Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.” Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.

How would we pay for all of this? According to the CBO, by diverting $1.1 trillion away from already barely-solvent Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, and by increasing taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion. Among the Medicare cuts would be cuts of $25,000 in Medicare Advantage benefits per enrollee — up from $21,000 in the previous scoring.

[…]We’d also pay for this through increased deficits.  Under strict instructions from the Democrats, the CBO gave Obamacare credit for over $400 billion (from 2014 to 2023) in phony “savings” that would allegedly result from cutting doctor’s payments under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising them back up.  As the CBO notes, one of two things could happen:  Congress could either follow through on these severe pay cuts — in which case doctors would view all Medicare patients as if they have the plague — or, Congress could eliminate these pay cuts — as everyone in Washington expects to have happen under the so-called “doc fix” — in which case the CBO projects that this bill would raise deficits by over $100 billion from 2017 to 2019 alone.

So, after racking up higher deficit spending in two years than President Bush (or any other president) did in two terms, President Obama would leave his successor a 12-figure deficit related to Obamacare alone — for the period from 2017 to 2019 alone.  That’s according to the CBO.

Someone is going to have to pay for all of this spending. Either taxes are going to go up so that we are all out of a job, or the government will print money and devalue the currency via inflation. I hope the young people who voted for Obama like the taste of grass – because that’s all they’ll be eating for the rest of their lives if this spending keeps up.