01/31/12

Congressman McClintock, SOPA is a “Crippling Danger to the Internet”

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

This is excellent!

Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) delivered the following excellent speech on the House floor on Monday, January 23, 2012.

It shows the Congressman’s dedication to freedom and his perceptive understanding of the dangers creeping government infringements pose to our First Amendment liberties.

01/31/12

Bad Dreams In The Night

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

A terrifying new concept has recently reemerged in the global climatology fight and the clarion call is heralded by a book that Zombie just read: The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age.

So, let me get this straight… In the 1970’s, we were all going to freeze to death in a new ice age. In the 2000’s, we were going to be baked alive because of global warming. Now – old is new again and we are going to freeze to death once more. Oh, for crap’s sake, make up your minds, why don’t ya? More death, death, doom and death. How trite.

Just another ploy to spread global Marxism – we just HAVE TO do the following (rinse, repeat and gag):

  • Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
  • Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
  • Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
  • Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
  • In general embrace all environmental causes.

Sound familiar? Al Gore rides again in perpetuity evidently and has mated in an unholy alliance with Cass Sunstein and Progressives worldwide to force us into one global collective hell. Not surprised in the least. Zombie’s view of the whole scenario says it best:

In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological “crisis” so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn’t materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.

These elitists will not stop until they have a crisis that we all must submit to so they can have their way with us and grab the power and fortune they have dreamed of, while putting the riffraff worldwide in their place as subjugates once and for all. A New World Order of slaves and a ruling class – ride the Wayback Machine to medieval times, only on steroids with a heaping side of eugenics for all.

Read Zombie’s latest: The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era? Bad dreams in the night of a purposely created disaster/emergency to force Americans to their knees, haunts me on a nightly basis. You can only look at evil so long before it takes its toll.

01/31/12

Is Deepwater Horizon the New Ecuador?

By: Daniel J. Graeber of Oilprice.com

Nearly two years after the worst accidental offshore oil spill in the history of the energy industry, some of the biggest companies in the world are busy pointing their legal fingers at one another in court over who has to pay what in claims, damages and fines over the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A federal judge this week ruled that BP is still obligated to a clause in its contract with Transocean that would protect the rig owner from damages related to the spill. That means BP still has to shell out money to settle claims filed by those along the southern U.S. coast impacted by the spill. BP, meanwhile, is suing Halliburton, something Halliburton said was ridiculous. If the legal mess over Chevron’s case involving Ecuador is any indication, former BP boss Tony Hayward will be pushing 80 before this gets settled.

Oil gushed from the Macondo well thousands of feet below the surface for most of the summer of 2010 before crews were finally able to control the spill. Fishing lanes were closed and the coastal tourism sector, still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, suffered dearly. Eleven rig workers were killed.

A federal report determined a faulty cement barrier was at least one of the underlying causes of the accident. In October, the government outlined seven different violations for operator BP, four for rig-owner Transocean and four for Halliburton, which worked on the cement barrier. BP sued Halliburton, which said it was looking forward to court.

Ecuadorian and U.S. courts were involved in a case that more or less started in the 1970s, depending on which part you examine, when Chevron was accused of dumping billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into the rainforest. They even made a movie out of it! Both sides are locked in a legal mess that is still in some lower court somewhere hung up on who knows what. While that’s the first time an indigenous group managed to sue a giant corporation like Chevron, some legal aspects of the case that began some 40 years ago are still locked in court somewhere and there’s no end in sight.

During federal investigations into the 2010 oil spill, all three companies collectively blamed each other for the disaster that prompted Hayward to complain he wanted his life back. BP is unlikely to abandon trying to spread the financial liability anytime soon. If 30,000 Ecuadorians backed by the slick and oh-so persistent Amazon Watch can keep Chevron tied up in court for this long, one can only imagine how long the Deepwater Horizon mess will linger in the courts.

And where’s BP now? Why it’s busy planning to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, that’s where.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Deepwater-Horizon-the-New-Ecuador.html

By: Daniel J. Graeber of Oilprice.com

01/31/12

Shock Article: Bioethicists Suggest Killing Someone With ‘No Autonomy Left’ Is Not Morally Wrong

True Health Is Wealth!!

What has Glenn Beck so fired up that he said on his radio show “If this doesn’t wake your a** up this morning, then nothing will?” How about this quote from prominent bioethicists comparing killing a human being to pulling weeds from a garden.

Two bioethicists — one from Duke University, the other from the National Institute of Health — bring up the question “What makes killing wrong?” in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Using their definition of killing, the authors conclude if the person is “universally and irreversibly disabled” and has “no abilities to lose” then killing them to take organs for donation in order to save the lives of others should not be considered morally wrong.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke University (Photo: Duke University)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of practical ethics from Duke, and Franklin Miller, a senior faculty member in the NIH Department of Bioethics, state in their abstract ”What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.“ They argue that if no abilities remain then the ”dead donor rule,” which is the ethical practice that a person must be declared dead before removing vital organs, should apply to patients whose hearts have stopped and are being removed from a respirator.

This discussion has been ongoing for several years and continues with this article. BioEdge, a publication discussing bioethical news, brings a few segments from the subscription-only journal in which Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller publish their opinion. BioEdge reports that the authors are seeking to make a case for organ donation after cardiac death when a person is taken off of a respirator. Once off the respirator, the person’s organs would be immediately harvested, but even at this point, BioEdge states, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller believe the person is not yet dead because there is the possibility that his or her heart could start beating again.

Miller has written on this topic before for the New England Journal of Medicine. Here’s some of what was written in his co-authored piece from 2008 “The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation:”

Over the past few years, our reliance on the dead donor rule has again been challenged, this time by the emergence of donation after cardiac death as a pathway for organ donation. Under protocols for this type of donation, patients who are not brain-dead but who are undergoing an orchestrated withdrawal of life support are monitored for the onset of cardiac arrest. In typical protocols, patients are pronounced dead 2 to 5 minutes after the onset of asystole (on the basis of cardiac criteria), and their organs are expeditiously removed for transplantation. Although everyone agrees that many patients could be resuscitated after an interval of 2 to 5 minutes, advocates of this approach to donation say that these patients can be regarded as dead because a decision has been made not to attempt resuscitation.

In the more recent Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller article, BioEdge reports the authors as stating that “these patients are not known to be dead at the time of organ procurement.”

Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the dead donor rule is already being violated in many cases and that recognizing this violation and stopping organ donation in these conditions would drastically reduce an already limited number of donor organs for those in need. They suggest sidestepping this issue by rethinking the “norm of killing.” BioEdge has more from the authors:

“[T]he dead donor rule is routinely violated in the contemporary practice of vital organ donation. Consistency with traditional medical ethics would entail that this kind of vital organ donation must cease immediately. This outcome would, however, be extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view [because patients who could be saved will die]. Luckily, it is easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing.”

[…]

“[I]f killing were wrong just because it is causing death or the loss of life, then the same principle would apply with the same strength to pulling weeds out of a garden. If it is not immoral to weed a garden, then life as such cannot really be sacred, and killing as such cannot be morally wrong.”

BioEdge clarifies that the authors seeks to better define just what is considered killing. It adds that the authors suggest killing someone with “no autonomy left” cannot be considered “unfair” or disrespectful because it “if it does her no harm.”

Franklin Miller of the National Institute of Health. (Photo: NIH Department of Bioethics)

While Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller make this argument, BioEdge reports in a separate article that several doctors have called for a moratorium on donated organs in the event of cardiac death until the issue is resolved from an ethical standpoint. The doctors state this opinion in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

In the abstract, these doctors calling for a moratorium write:

Many believe that the ethical problems of donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) have been “worked out” and that it is unclear why DCD should be resisted. In this paper we will argue that DCD donors may not yet be dead, and therefore that organ donation during DCD may violate the dead donor rule.

[…]

Moreover, some arguments in favor of DCD, while likely true, are “straw-man arguments,” such as the great benefit of organ donation. The truth is that honesty and trustworthiness require that we face these problems instead of avoiding them. We believe that DCD is not ethically allowable because it abandons the dead donor rule, has unavoidable conflicts of interests, and implements premortem interventions which can hasten death. These important points have not been, but need to be fully disclosed to the public and incorporated into fully informed consent. These are tall orders, and require open public debate.

The issue, however, isn’t an isolated incident. The Blaze has recently published articles about a disabled man in the U.K. who is seeking the “right” to die and a 3-year-old whose parents were told she couldn’t have kidney transplant because she was “mentally retarded.” And last year, we posted the disturbing video of a British advice columnist who said if a child were disabled a loving mother would “put a pillow over its face” to smother it. Watch that clip:

Related:

Eugenics in Action

01/31/12

Could 2012 Be America’s Last Presidential Election?

Ask Marion

This is scary!!!

A little extreme, but not totally unbelievable.

I’ve asked this question to a number of people and most of them respond as if I were crazy for asking. They tell me that this is America, land of the free and that there will always be elections. I tell them that we are no longer the land of the free and that if Obama gets re-elected in 2012, that this just may be America’s last election.

In the past three years, the Obama administration has been very carefully crafting the nation for a political take over by his Marxist regime and this isn’t just my opinion. Popular radio talk show host Michael Savage is the son of Russian immigrants and is very familiar with Soviet and European history. Savage warned his listeners this week saying, “I have to tell you that if this man, God forbid, is the next president of the United States, we’re going to be living in something along the lines of – people say Europe. I don’t believe it’s going to be like Europe – I think it will be closer to Chavez’s South American dictatorship.

“This is the most corrupt, incompetent, dangerous tyrannical administration in American history. It’s not politics as usual. It’s not just Democrats versus Republicans. Obama has a long history of being at odds with American values and with America itself and the core principles of this country. They don’t want government-sponsored opinions. They only want government – sponsored ‘Pravda.’ That’s exactly what the government-media complex tells you on a daily basis – nothing but the government-media complex party line. Pay attention. Your freedom may be at stake.”

Over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a small group of people in an Iowa coffee house that, “Barack Obama is not incompetent, ladies and gentleman. He knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. He sees America differently than you see America . [Obama] has gone out of his way to divide this country in a way I haven’t seen since the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt went around to divide this country. That’s his hero. What makes America great [in Obama’s mind is that] the government takes money from somebody and gives it to somebody else. No, that’s what makes America… France .” With his control over the Executive and Judicial branches of the government, the stage is set for a complete takeover of the government. Think about it.

Since taking office, instead of helping the economy, Obama has purposely escalated the economic crisis by plunging the country into unprecedented debt. He has a number of programs that are designed to go into effect in January 2013, just in time for his second term of office. The economic burden and increased taxes on everyone will be enough to cause the final economic collapse of the country. As soon as that happens, Obama declares Martial Law and assumes dictatorial control of the nation.

The Department of Justice has already been subverting federal laws to strip us of a number of freedoms. The Supreme Court and many of the other federal courts have been seeded with socialistic liberal judges that will rule in Obama’s favor on virtually anything, thus ending constitutional rule and law.

He’s already changing the face of America’s military. Allowing homosexuals to openly serve along with changing the retirement program is causing many conservative military leaders to resign commissions and leave the military. Some Pentagon officials are also noting that an increase in the enlistment of radical Muslims into the US military where they get all the training they need on weapons and defense systems. We have no idea how many of them there are in the armed forces or in what positions they may hold.

Obama has been wielding executive powers this past year as if he were already a dictator. When Congress is not doing his bidding, he simply bypasses them and used an executive order to accomplish it anyway. This has set the stage for his disbandment of Congress. He would not be the first world leader to take control of a nation and disband the legislative branch of government.

He has been effectively using the media to anesthetize the public to the dangers he poses. Like a patient being prepped for surgery, people are numb to the changes and won’t have a clue what took place until they wake up in recovery and realize that free America has been removed and replaced with a regime that may parallel those of Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Chavez and Castro.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I earnestly pray that we are spared from what seems a certain future and that Obama is overwhelmingly defeated in 2012. Otherwise, heaven help us

h/t to Deonia Copeland