The High Road

So, the Libertarian Party has been making a stink on Facebook about what a terrible blow for personal liberty it is that California didn't legalize marijuana this time around. This is one of the several reasons that, although I describe myself as a libertarian, I will never associate myself with the Libertarian Party.
While I don't have a philosophical issue with people doing whatever they want to their own bodies, marijuana can affect more people than those who actually use it.

But let's put aside the societal problems. Let's imagine that I *shudder* move to California--and the way our country has been going since 2006, forced relocation probably wasn't far off in the agenda. Why would I vote to legalize a whole new toxin for people to put into their systems, when I HAVE TO PAY FOR THEIR MEDICAL EXPENSES?

Seriously; it was bad enough when I was being forced to buy a house for every deadbeat in the country. Now that the Obama administration has destroyed the health insurance industry, only to replace it with a government-regulated medical coverage industry, expenses are skyrocketing and we're all legally obligated to make those payments. Give me a free market economy, where one can buy a true insurance policy (or choose not to), and I'll be open to toxic recreation.

"It's Just My Scientist Against Your Scientist"

In a recent discussion on the topic of abortion, I linked to a webpage from Princeton illustrating that, scientifically speaking, life begins at conception. The response to this was, "Well, I can pull up scientists who say just the opposite, so you're really just playing 'It's My Scientist Against Your Scientist."

My response: Go ahead--I triple-dog dare you.

No post has been forthcoming.

The majority of the online pro-abortion opinion against me is that I am somehow seeking to subvert a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body (and I have been told in no uncertain terms that this means I cannot call myself a libertarian!). However, it should be noted that it is not the woman's body which is being aborted; an abortion is the killing of the unborn child, with the woman's body simply an obstacle which must be bypassed.

For those abortion proponents who wish to, there is a related argument you can make to defend a woman's right to do with her body as she wishes: you should oppose research and public service announcements regarding Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. After all, if you already believe that a fetus has no right to life, then it certainly has no claim at all to good health, and ingesting alcohol is (unlike an abortion surgery) something which the expectant mother really does do to her own body--the fetus is only indirectly affected.

Hardly Historic

So, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC and others are reporting that on Sunday night, the House of Representatives passed an "historic" health care bill. In point of fact, the is nothing historic about this bill.

From the Soviet Constitution (1936):

Article 42. Citizens of the USSR have the right to health protection.

Other socialist dictatorships, such as Fascist Italy and NAZI Germany, had the same mandates. This is not to say that people interested in universal health care are NAZI's or Communists; it is only to illustrate the roots of the school of thought which gave birth to these ideas. Remember, when the government runs health, the government RUNS health--by ceding control of our own health-care to the Federal government, we have given up the protection of Bill of Rights and given the Federal government license to regulate and penalize any activity which may affect our health in any way.

I know that there are people out there who are either devoted leftists, or who think that they're apolitical and don't realize how deeply the left has affected their thinking, who don't see a problem with this. Being "healthy" is good for us, so who cares if the government mandates it? Ignoring the obvious question of who defines what "healthy" is (by guidelines currently accepted by the U. S. government, Arnold Schwarzeneger at the height of his bodybuilding career was grossly obese), let's look at the right of the government to mandate how we live our lives at all.

What if this mandate had come from the Right instead of the Left? What if, instead of Nancy Pelosi deciding that she knew what was best for everyone's physical well-being, Newt Gingrich decided that he knew what was best for everyone's spiritual well-being? After all, from his point of view, the well-being of your eternal soul is far more important than the well-being of your physical body. What if he formed a coalition that rammed through (against massive protests) a measure which mandated that every American citizen would attend services at a Roman Catholic church weekly, and that if anyone could not afford a minimum required tithe, federal funds would be used to subsidize them?

Would you still fail to see the Constitutional problems of the Federal government mandating activities and funding them with taxpayers' money? Please let me know what you think below.

CDC Statistics

I've been looking for site with this data for a while.

It turns out that the Center for Disease Control has a searchable database for all injury-related statistics in the United States. Just to be fair--so that no one can object to my tailoring the data--I compared ALL gun-related deaths with ALL automobile-related deaths. That means murders, accidents, suicides, everything, for both categories.

2005 is the latest year currently available; that year, there were 30,694 gun related deaths. That's terrible, of course... but there were also 45,520 automobile-related deaths. That's 50% more automobile-related deaths than gun-related deaths. Given that gun ownership is protected by the U. S. Constitution, but car ownership isn't, that makes anti-gun lobbyists fairly hypocritical. If they were really interested in saving lives, they would be lobbying against the unprotected CARS first.

Always remember: gun control isn't about guns. It's about control.

On Dieting

A new study being published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 322 people over two years trying three different types of diets. The big winner in over-all weight loss and cholesterol improvement: Atkins.

Now, women tended to lose more weight on the Mediterannean diet (a peer reviewer said this demonstrated that women were more experienced at complex diets; I wonder if it doesn't just demonstrate that there are metabolic differences between men and women?), and a fat-restrictive diet was better for diabetics controlling blood sugar. Overall, however, this demonstrates what I've been telling people for years--it's not just a simple matter of counting calories. Insulin is what puts the calories in your fat cells, and carbohydrates are what stimulate the release of insulin.

Update: Fox News reports