Posted By: George on Thursday, August 21, 2008
Frankly the invocation of JFK on religion has become more than a bit tiresome. The issue is not one of religion, but ethics, knowledge, judgement and wisdom. Based on Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, we know that their Catholicism has no impact on any of the above criteria.Regarding the question of when life begins, anyone with a knowledge of high school biology should know that life is never really out of the picture in procreation. The sperm and egg cells are both alive, i.e., they exhibit an active metabolism. Thus conception is not so much creation of new life per se, but a fusion of two living organisms.The other question then, and the germane one, is when does the new organism constitute a human being. Obama and his "pro choice" friends, and the brain-dead members of SCOTUS engage in an artful dodge of this issue, when they state that any such attempt at defining this is a religious issue. Not so! It is an issue that must be handled in the law, and the failure of the law to come to grips with it is an abusrdity. Witness the fact that murder is a well understood concept - the unjustified taking of a human life. Well, this presumes that you are capable of defining exactly what a living human being is. Insofar as economic snake oil is concerned, we have an upcoming 4 trillion dollar unfunded obligation in Social Security and a 40 trillion dollar unfunded obligation in Medicare. So exactly what are the Democrats doing in demanding additional governmental obligations.Regarding energy policy. I wish we could reduce dependency on foreign oil. But 50% of our use of oil is not related to transportation. So even if we were able to eliminate transit from the equation, we still would need oil. Biofules are not the answer. Time magazine pointed out that even if all the food capacity of the US were devoted to biofuels, only 20% of the need would be met. So it sounds to me like there is plenty of snake oil being distributed.
Posted By: geoff on Thursday, August 21, 2008
George: then again, Nixon was supposed to be a Quaker. There is also supposed to be a separation between church & state in the US, but little evidence.Energy policy: as they say, the US consumes 25% of the world's oil, but has only 3%, so maybe it might make sense to reduce your needs? Or is that also "snake oil" to say such a thing?
Posted By: John Handforth on Saturday, August 23, 2008
Now, if we could only solve the energy crisis with snake oil...We might run out of garden snakes and rattlers pretty quickly, but we'll always have Democrats.
