Though begun as “Armistice Day,” Veterans Day has expanded in the United States as a day for all those brave men and women who fight to keep us free.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, let us remember they who risked everything for freedom, including their very lives.
Requiescat in pace.
News of the Week for November 10th, 2013
Idiocy so strong, it speaks volumes about itself…
Is this some of that Common Core math? (cc @michellemalkin; @twitchyteam) pic.twitter.com/3ICfJiC1nO
— Adam (@GPIA7R) November 5, 2013
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the Obamacare contraceptive mandate and being an undue burden on religious freedom:
“We hold that the plaintiffs — the business owners and their companies — may challenge the mandate. We further hold that compelling them to cover those services substantially burdens their religious-exercise rights. Under RFRA the government must justify the burden under the standard of strict scrutiny. So far it has not done so, and we doubt that it can.”
The full ruling can be read below:
7th Circuit Court's ruling on Korte, et al. vs. Sebelius by ThePoliticalHat
Hat Tip: Instapundit.
One of the major ideological components of the broader Left is a perverted sense of “justice” wherein there is an equality of outcome and everyone is the same. The obvious downside is that this means that they’d “rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were lass rich.”
They are so obsessed with this false “equality” that they’d actually perpetuate the gravest of discriminatory actions, and so treat people as innately unequal. They justify this because to them, the individual means nothing and has no existence outside of the collective. Obedience to the collective is what is important, and the collective can only thrive like the Volonté Générale false god it is when individual achievement is abolished and no longer celebrated. True equality, to the Left, means treating unequal people unequally such that a superficial appearance of “equality” is achieved.
No where is this better seen than the University of Georgia’s Student Government Association hosted an event during a so-called “Social Justice Week” entitled “No More Success Stories: Dinner, Dialogue, Making A Difference.” It is reminiscent of both the short story Harrison Bergeron as well as Atlas Shrugged.
Sen. Mike Lee spoke at the Heritage Foundation and spoke of the steps needed to develop a conservative reform agenda that will appeal to the broader electorate.
Sen. Lee crouches his proposals in “moderate” or even left-of-center terminology. In contrast, his actual policy proposals themselves are right-of-center small government ideas. As DrewM pointed out at the Ace of Spades HQ:
“I’ve argued before in various places that conservatives need candidates who are better liars. Democrats run candidates in red/purple states that talk a reasonable game back home but when they get to DC, they vote the Reid/Pelosi/Obama line without fail. The GOP on the other hand has a nasty habit of running candidates that talk a very conservative game and then vote like moderates when it counts. Conservatives need to find a way to flip that calculus within the GOP if the marriage is to survive.
When comparing America’s mostly private healthcare system with the socialized systems in other countries, it is oft mentioned by supporters of socialized medicine that people in America live shorter lives, are more obese, &c., than people in developed countries with socialized health systems. Of course, this is a classic case of lies, damned lies, and statistics.
One of the better metrics of comparison is the survival rate for cancer. With healthy people, or those who need relatively cheap medical assistance with a high probability of effectiveness, socialized medicine is great since they don’t have to directly pay much money out of pocket. However, it is in those cases where a disease is severe or the chance of survival is far from certain, and treatment often very expensive, that we can best judge. The United States, with its uninsured and “greedy” private healthcare market ranks right up there in the top ranks.
Unsurprisingly, the reality of the situation has led to some advocates of socialized healthcare to incoherently declare that that isn’t really so.
Two students who lived far apart committed suicide, one after killing his teacher. The connection between the two? Both watched anti-bullying videos promoted by their schools, and some are blaming the videos for pushing the students over the edge.
An Illinois mother of one of the students said:
“All I know is they were discussing the bullying, and showing kids bullying, and at the end of the show they showed pictures of kids that took their lives… When a child or a person is at the end of their rope, and they don’t think there’s anywhere to go, and they don’t think anyone’s doing anything about it, and they see something on video, and they relate.
“…You’re dealing with kids. Kids don’t look at the long-term situation — they look at the short term, they look at the pain they feel now, how can they end that pain.”
Another student, this time in Nevada, watches a film that “depicted two stories in which bullying drove one student to commit suicide by hanging and another to bring a gun on a school bus.” This is a very disturbing parallel with the case in Nevada.
The videos did not induce the students to kill themselves anymore than a Judas Priest or Ozzy record would. However, it is not beyond reason that “it can affect people, especially kids that are in a dark place.” These kids who killed themselves most likely has serious problems before bullying or anti-bullying videos crossed their paths.
Wisconsin talk show host Vicki McKenna uncovered an odious school assignment for an English class where students are told to choose who dies based on a hypothetical lifeboat situation. Some of the factors that the students are taught to ponder include the race and religion of the survivors, including a Mormon who “sympathizes with anti-black views.”
The assignment can be seen below:
#CommonCore aligned ENGLISH assignment for S.MKE HS: pick survivors on a lifeboat based on EXTERNAL factors like race pic.twitter.com/qBoemAsP4z
— Vicki Mckenna (@VickiMcKenna) October 18, 2013
Heaven forbid that students understand how to spell correctly or bother to read good literature!
News of the Week for November 3rd, 2013
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