Mother Nature Raises Hell this Summer

The North-American heatwave has made many cities more hellish than usual. Whether it's Pennsylvania roadways turning into bubbling tar pits or ozone-smog choking people in DC, the last two weeks of summer have been a little challenging.

"In this heat, it's not just about discomfort," said Latoya White, a health worker in the capital. "For many people it's about survival." Indeed, besides heat stroke and dehydration, Harvard recently published research showing hot weather raises the danger of heart attack.

Air conditioning is one way to escape the heat. But what do you do when your AC fails? Many units in Oklahoma have stopped working because "the units aren't really built to handle this kind of heat for this prolonged period of time." I've seen units failing in New York for the same reason. My parent's compressor actually burst even though they only cool to a modest 78 degrees Fahrenheit.

Don't try to flee to Canada either, because their central countryside is being ravaged by hundreds of wildfires:

These fires are being caused by increasingly hot weather, drier conditions and DAILY LIGHTNING STRIKES. These fires are so bad, they're polluting the air across the Great Lakes in Minnesota.

As if that's not scary enough, this heatwave actually gets worse at night. "While the current heat wave has recorded 12 all-time daily highs so far this month, it also has registered 98 all-time overnight highs," said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA went on to report that "when temperatures overnight do not cool to levels that provide relief, it increases the stress on people without air conditioning, on livestock and on crops" and that this is "consistent with what we would expect in a greenhouse-warmed world."

Given all of the above, it's very hard to accept this weather as "normal climate progression." Instead, it really feels more like Hell-On-Earth.

SUPER CONGRESS

It's becoming more nightmarish to follow the U.S. Budget Negotiations. The August 2nd "doomsday" deadline is rapidly approaching. (Doomsday is when the Treasury loses borrowing ability and we risk a budget default.) And since bratty Congress hasn't been able to agree enough to pass anything, the "debt ceiling negotiators" have a new solution:

MAKE A SUPER CONGRESS !
What's so great about Super Congress? Well, they will be able to pass laws super-fast without having to be too accountable to the public. "This 'Super Congress'...isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers." Any new laws they approve will be fast-tracked through both chambers of "Little Congress" (our current House + Senate), where regular "little" lawmakers could not amend their laws, only give each an up or down vote. And those "little" votes are less powerful than today's votes. The proposed Super Congress only ever needs 51% to pass any law, and they don't need presidential approval (i.e. vetos have no effect on them).

So, does this sound like a good idea to you? It's not like the the regular Congress we have now is particularly heroic. I mean, Republicans want to extend the debt ceiling just long enough to have it fail pre-election season, while Democrats want to extend it just a little bit longer, till post-election. That's why they can't agree to pass something before financial doomsday. So now we're being held hostage to create a Super Congress to save us from disaster?

It feels more like a Super-Villain Congress. And I'm not the first person to think lawmakers with unlimited power would be dangerous. You've heard the saying that "absolute power corrupts absolutely?" Well, this whole message board seems to agree that "any new branch of government, especially one with 'extraordinary new powers' scares the hell out me. No thanks!"

Cut Wealthcare

As the US tries to balance their budget, we have some words of advice from crazy liberal Senator Bernie Sanders: "The Republicans are suggesting that we balance the budget on the backs of the sick, the children, the elderly, the poor, [this] is morally unacceptable, and economically a very bad policy. Especially at a time when the richest people are becoming richer."

He also states that social security is paid for by it's payroll tax, and does not actually contribute to the national deficit. Is this true? I don't know because I'm not a budget expert. But I DO know that most liberal Americans don't want social benefits cut, they want THESE things cut:


In the words of one Keith Olbermann fan, "CUT WEALTHCARE, NOT HEALTHCARE."

Wax your Daughter, Save for College!

It must be confusing growing up in America these days. Sexting is illegal, yet waxing for preteen girls is now a trend. So girl-children's bodies have to look sexy, but they are not allowed to share this sexiness with anyone else in any way.

Why should a tween girl worry about primping an area of her body no one is supposed to see? Well, one salon owner informs us that "Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing... and put the money in the bank for her college education instead!"

Eliminating future work while saving money? What American could pass on a chance like this?! After all, college IS ridiculously expensive. And it's not like there could be any downside to the procedure...

Teaching young girls that pain equals beauty and social acceptance, that's a great lesson. You're never too young to learn how to change your body to please men! Some prudes disagree, of course, like children's advocate Dr. Levin, who believes, "Girls shouldn’t be taught so early to focus on how they look and that things like money, makeup and looking good buy happiness, instead of the skills that they possess....Should parents feed into that negativity or create an environment to help girls resist it?"

But if parents learned to teach their daughters that we can be worthy of love without cosmetic procedures, how would the beauticians feed their own children?

America is Pro-Life...and Pro-Unplanned Pregnancy?

LifeNews has a wonderful way with statistics. They can take data that shows 76% of Americans support legal abortion, 50% of Americans favor the current legal status of abortion, and come back with a headline that says AMERICA IS PRO-LIFE.

How do they do this? Well, it's all based on a Gallup poll that can be viewed directly here. Originally Gallup asked people to support 1 of 3 categories; abortion legal in any circumstances, abortion legal in some, and abortion legal in none. When split this way, 27% favored legal in all, 49% favored legal in some, and 22% favored legal in none. So only 22% were for banning abortion.

Gallup then fixed the stats by splitting the middle category into those who wanted abortion legal in most circumstances, and those who wanted it to be legal in only a few. In this way they got 10% of voters wanting legal abortion "under most circumstances," and 39% wanting it to be legal in "only a few circumstances." So now they can say that 39% + 22% = 63% of Americans support no or severely limited abortion.

Does this mean America really is Pro-Life? Well, you can split the stats anyway you want. You can say that only 22% of Americans favor banning abortion completely. 50% of Americans DO want to allow abortion in "some circumstances." And this is what we already allow (our circumstance being abortions up until the third trimester.) So half the country wants NO change to our abortion policy.

Even when looking only at the extreme views, MORE (27%) Americans favor always allowing abortion rather than never allowing abortion (22%). So any way you cut it, most Americans don't favor a change to our abortion policy. But Gallup biased the results by splitting up the middle group. The lesson: If you split up the majority of a group, you can transform their consensus into a series of conflicting categories, hiding the true majority opinion.

So most Americans want to allow abortion under some circumstances. But most Americans also support severely limited abortion. Can all of this be true while America is still Pro-Life? Rest assured, it can all be true. It's just that we have to really think about what "Pro-Life" means.

Remember, we can hide the true majority opinion if we split up a group into conflicting categories. In America, we have "Pro-Choice" and "Pro-Life" categories. Both positive sounding terms. But they're not really that clear and distinct, because pro-choice people could also be pro-life in many circumstances. The difference is that pro-life on a political level means everyone has to be pro-life, all the time, or be criminally responsible and morally wrong. So really, we might rename the Pro-Life position "Pro-Forced Birth" or "Pro-Unplanned Pregnancy."

I wonder how THAT would bias the statistics? If Pro-Life means abortion is NEVER legal, under any circumstances, that would mean only 22% of America supports it (according to this poll). America is not THIS kind of pro-life. But if we allow pro-life to mean allowing abortion only under a few circumstances, without defining exactly WHAT those circumstances are, it's much easier to include the majority of Americans as pro-life.

So it seems no one really wants to have abortions, but most people feel it should be allowable in certain circumstances. There is our general consensus. Now if we could just leave the law to allow for that, American could move on from this whole issue.