Fox Business host John Stossel on Sunday asserted that most government was unnecessary because companies like Walmart would spontaneously provide assistance to disaster victims “in many more ways” than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could.
“Ever feel like government makes too many plans that come to naught?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Stossel during a segment on Fox & Friends. “It’s kind of a bold idea. You’re saying that not every human activity needs to be planned from above. Some things spontaneously work themselves out pretty well.”
According to Stossel, Americans would be better off with less government and more “spontaneous order,” a term coined by economist Friedrich Hayek which states that order will naturally emerge from chaos.Edwards goes on to point out that "Spontaneous Order" didn't work out so well in Iraq and Libya (and I'll add Afghanistan and Syria and Crimea and Chile and Argentina and Somalia and Chechnya and and and).
"What stuns me the most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the Bozos do in Washington and our state capitols...Politics is not a picture on the wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." --Molly Ivins
The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman began scouring the Bible three years ago to do something that apparently had never been done: the cataloging of every word uttered by every woman in the more than 2,000-year-old holy book.
Meeting in a church library, Freeman and an unlikely research team systematically pored over every Bible chapter, documenting the words on spreadsheets and inserting context and highlights. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.
The results give surprise insights into the lives of women ranging from Abigail to Zipporah. Eve, for example, may be the Bible’s most well-known woman, but she utters only 74 words. Yet an unnamed “Shulamite woman” in the Song of Solomon holds forth with 1,425.Here's a brief recap of the scorecard for ya:
Fewer than 100 woman say anything at all in the bible. We get to know the names of fewer than 50 of those women. And while there're about one-million-one-hundred-thousand words total in the bible, those very few women speak fewer than fourteen-thousand of those 1.1 million words.Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is it that roughly 50% of the human beings on the planet account for less than 1.3% of the words in the "most important book in the entire history of the fucking world"?
There will be no "boycott" of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress next month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.
But while she downplayed reports of an organized protest, she suggested some lawmakers might just be too busy to attend. And at least two Democrats have already decided they won't be on hand.
"I don't think anybody should use the word 'boycott,'" Pelosi said in her weekly press conference. "When these heads of state come, people are here doing their work, they're trying to pass legislation, they're meeting with their constituents and the rest. It's not a high-priority item for them."Pelosi's pretty cagey. This is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more proposition, and here's what I think we can do to help out:
We told them that it was only a matter of time before a childhood disease that had nearly been eliminated from the US would come roaring back if they failed to vaccinate their children. And that’s precisely what has happened. Measles has come roaring back, but not simply because a child incubating measles visited Disneyland.
Twenty years ago, if the same child had visited Disneyland, the measles would have stopped with him or her. Everyone else was protected — not because everyone was vaccinated — but because of herd immunity. When a high enough proportion of the population is vaccinated, the disease simply can’t spread because the odds of one unvaccinated person coming in contact with another are very low.
Of course, we told them that. We patiently explained herd immunity, debunked claims of an association between vaccines and autism, demolished accusations of “toxins” in vaccines, but they didn’t listen. Why? Because we thought the problem was that anti-vax parents didn’t understand science. That’s undoubtedly true, but the anti-vax movement is NOT about science and never was.Her contention is that these are the driving factors:
First, it explains why efforts to educate anti-vax parents about the science of immunology has been such a spectacular failure. It is not, and has never been, about the science.Put it together with this:
We need to highlight the fact that unreflective defiance is just the flip side of unreflective acceptance. There’s nothing praiseworthy about it. Only teenagers think that refusing to do what authority figures recommend marks them as independent. Adults know that doing the exact opposite of what authority figures recommend is a sign of immaturity, not deliberation, and certainly not education.And suddenly, a lot of the problems with certain parts of our body politic get a little easier to understand. On just about any topic - Climate Change, ObamaCare, Public Schools, Poverty, Crime, Drugs - it's not about the facts; it's about how some people insist on believing they know as much about it as the people who actually know something about it, simply because they feel entitled to believe they know.
