Uncommon Commentary #207: The "Arab Spring" Spews Blood

A recent news article read in part:

"Outside his [i.e., Gaddafi's; see below] Bab al-Aziziya compound, which rebels captured, there was another grim scene -- one that suggested mass, execution-style killings of civilians. About two dozen bodies -- some with their hands bound by plastic ties and with bullet wounds to the head -- lay scattered on grassy lots in an area where Qaddafi sympathizers had camped out for months. The identities of the dead were unclear, but they were in all likelihood activists who had set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Qaddafi in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign. Five or six bodies were in a tent erected on a roundabout that had served as a field clinic. One still had an IV [sic] in his arm, and another body was completely charred, its legs missing. The body of a doctor, in his green hospital gown, was found dumped in the canal."

As I recall, NATO entry into the Libyan civil war was justified for the sake of preventing massacre, specifically that of the rebels who were then bottled up in Benghazi. It seems that what the Western intervention has really done is substitute one bloodbath for another.
Some might say that such atrocities, though regrettable, are a price worth paying for the sake of supposedly bringing "democracy" to Libya. I, on the other hand, have never seen the point of helping to end the regime of Gaddafi (this being probably the most accurate spelling of his name). He was a tyrannical ruler, but not a jihadist; it has been reported that "Libyan rebel hierarchy mostly constitutes members from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a organization on the US State Department's list of foreign terrorists," which means that Gaddafi's overthrow is actually undesirable in relation to the War upon Terror. (This doesn't mean that we ought to have propped him up, but merely that we ought to have adhered to the limits in the UN Security Council's "no-fly zone" resolution, which authorized military action only for the immediate purpose of preventing an humanitarian crisis; see the above paragraph.)  President Yo'Mama's (see the list of domanisms) de-facto commitment of our forces to the anti-Gaddafi cause, thus effectively aiding the opposite side in the battle with terrorism, may well be remembered as the worst of all his blunders.

Uncommon Commentary #206: Joe Biden, Go Ridin'

Specifically, ridin' off into the sunset. (See the last paragraph.) The creep—I mean, Veep—has again put his foot into his mouth, which he does so often that he'll probably contract athlete's-tongue. On this occasion, Vice-President Blatherskate was in the city Chengdu in the People's Republic of China, making prepared remarks—which means that he doesn't even have the excuse of misspeaking—on the entitlement-explosion crisis in the US. He said:

“… But [sic] as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people [sic]. Not sustainable.”

Biden, therefore, voiced no concerns over the PRC's means of enforcing its population-control policy, which include imprisonment, fines, beatings, mandated abortions and sterilizations, and loss of employment or of government benefits; his only objection was on demographic grounds, namely, that if the Chinese kill off too many future taxpayers, there won't be enough revenue to support current taxpayers once the latter have retired. (He reportedly has backtracked on his statements to the Chinese audience, but he can't undo the fact that he made them.)

The whole Obombast administration deserves to be discharged by the voters, but we'll have to wait until November of next year for the chance to bring that about. In the meantime, why doesn't the President improve matters ever so slightly by administering a mercy-killing to the career of his running-mate, as Nixon did in the case of Spiro Agnew?

Uncommon Commentary #205: Nature Isn't the Only Mother Who's Savage

The New York Times recently ran an article called The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy, about pregnant women who, discovering that they are carrying twins, choose to have one of their unborns aborted. The reason given is nearly always that one makes a better parent if one must parent fewer children. This bureaucratic approach to motherhood has already received comment at LiveAction.org; what I'd like to add is that the trend provides additional evidence that we human beings, made by God to be "only a little lower than the heavenly beings" [Psalms 8:5], increasingly behave more like animals. Many species of bird, especially birds of prey, lay two eggs each mating season; the chick that hatches first will take advantage of its greater size to dominate its sibling, attacking it repeatedly and ensuring its weakness by monopolizing the food brought by the pair's elders. The younger one almost inevitably dies as a consequence of this bullying, but its demise is cruelly logical in our fallen world, for the parents are unable to feed more than one offspring; zoologists tell us that the birds' laying two eggs rather than one makes for an avian insurance policy, since, if something should befall one egg, there will be another to keep alive the dream of successful reproduction.

The birds, of course, have the excuse that they are only brutes acting from instinct; what excuse do we have?

Uncommon Commentary #204

Two days ago I saw a headline that read "Obama Returns to Call for More Revenue in Pitching Bigger Deficit Plan"; shouldn't there be a hyphen between "bigger" and "deficit?"

Uncommon Commentary #203: Gore Throws a Temperature Tantrum

If there's any more insufferable twit than Al Gore, I don't know who it is. (There are others, e.g., Michael Mooron, who are as insufferable.) Speaking to the Aspen Institute on, appropriately, Insufferable Twit Day (Obama's birthday), Gore (as related by the left-wing Colorado Independent) said that tobacco companies “succeeded in delaying the implementation of the Surgeon General’s report for 40 years – 40 years! In every one of those 40 years the average number of Americans [sic] killed by cigarettes each year exceeded the total number of Americans [sic] killed in all of World War II: 450,000 per year. [Actually, the purported figure is 434,000.—Doman] My sister was one of them. … It was evil, evil, evil.”

This "model of media manipulation," he blustered on, “was transported whole cloth [?—Doman] into the climate debate. And some of the exact [sic] same people [sic]—I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanos.’ Bull____! ‘It may be sunspots.’ Bull____! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bull____! When you go and [redundancy] talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again [redundancy]. There’s no longer a shared reality [?—Doman] on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. … It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the god____ word climate....They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”

And so, a person who (according to the Washington Post article Gore's Grades Belie Image of Studiousness) performed poorly in college science courses joins the likes of Oliver Stone and Hillary [sic] Clinton in charging that a conspiracy of the opposition has invented all the evidence that refutes his position. I cannot agree with Climate Depot, one of the skeptics of the anthropogenic-warming theory whom he accuses of taking part in the alleged cover-up, that "This is psychologically healthy development for Gore [because he's admitting that his side is losing]." Do the false ecological messiah's words (especially the part about paying "pseudo-scientists") sound to you like those of a normal person, or like the ravings of a paranoiac? Gory [misspelling intentional] has been contemptible for decades, but he was also ridiculous; now, he's also frightening.

Miscellaneous Musing #37

One observation that I've made (though not, heretofore, in print) about polytheistic religions is that the deity of the sky is always depicted as male, whereas that of the earth is always female; this can't be coincidence.  Early peoples must have noticed that, just as a woman cannot conceive a child without copulating with a man, the earth cannot bring forth crops (or even crabgrass) without being watered from the heavens.  It was only logical for people in a pre-scientific age to come to think of raindrops as the semen of a god in the sky, coming down to penetrate a goddess who personified the earth; the fact that plants need time to grow up from the soil, just as it takes an average of 274 days for a human baby to gestate in the womb, would have strengthened this identification between the forces of nature and the human sexes.  Of the aforesaid I've no doubt (even though, despite the well-established equation in primitive religions between natural and human fertility, I've never heard of anyone else propounding this theory); one can further speculate that this religious development, by promoting the idea of a god who has masculine attributes and lives in Heaven, may have helped prepare the way for belief in the existence of the one, true God.
(Since I developed this theory, I've received some confirmation of it in learning that, in China, "the earth couples with the dragon"—the dragon being a controller of weather—is a common phrase for rain.)

Miscellaneous Musing #36

War is a necessary evil in our fallen world, although this doesn't mean that every war is necessary; most wars have been fought for the un-Christian purpose of aggrandizement.