Lessons from SARS in dealing with North American Flu

The news about the North American Flu (normally called "Swine Flu" ... but there's apparently some good reasons to believe pigs are not to blame) makes this article from 2008 particularly interesting. There's some wonderful stuff on the rest of the website, too!

The Heroes of SARS

Thoughts on the election

Now that B. Hussein Obama has completed his purchase of the Presidency, a few thoughts.

I was on the campus of William Jewell College yesterday. Melissa says that there must be a budget line-item in the Obama campaign's books for sidewalk chalk. Sure enough, every few feet on all the sidewalks I was on, there was another "Vote Obama" message. One said, "Want more green cars on the road?" Another, "Worried about finding a job?" And another said, "Want affordable healthcare? Vote Obama."

The problem is, that few people (and least of all college students) stop to consider the cost of those options. Putting more green cars on the road, giving people jobs, paying for healthcare ... they all seem like good ideas, but they all have a cost. By conveniently ignoring the cost, the tax-and-spenders can buy votes with promises of things, and the voters just eat it up and march in lockstep to the polls.

In some ways, the cut-taxes-and-spend crowd is worse, because they want to buy your vote from both ends: What you'll get, and it will even cost less. Every politician tells us they want to cut out the porkbarrel spending, but it's those very porky projects that buy re-election votes. If a Congressperson truly turned down everything of a porcine nature for the home state, he or she would be out of a job come the next election, no question about it.

But giving people who won't work a bunch of freebies paid for by those who will is precisely the wrong way to build or sustain a great nation. It encourages mediocrity, or worse. When asked, "What is wrong with the redistribution of wealth, which Obama talked about as far back as a 2001 interview?", Senator McCain said it very well:

That is a bold, left-wing view of how you help people that's been tried in other countries. In America, you don't take money from one group and give it to another. You create jobs, create opportunities, and give people the ability to accumulate wealth. We have Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance. But to somehow say that when "Joe the Plumber" reaches a certain income level, we're going to take money from him and give it to somebody else, that's a fundamental contradiction of what made this country the strongest and greatest nation in the world.
Business Week November 10, 2008, p.20

I was duped ... but I'm in good company

In an earlier post, I said that the LDS church had issued an "apology" for the events at Mountain Meadows 150 years ago this past September 11. Turns out that the LDS church never intended their message to be taken as any sort of apology, and is apparently quite upset that some people took it that way.

I was led on by the first news story I read about the event, on the Deseret Morning News website. Their reporter, along with the one from the Salt Lake Tribune, simply got it wrong. According to LDS spokesperson Mark Tuttle, “We don’t use the word ‘apology.’ We used ‘profound regret.’”

Read all about it at:

Mormon Coffee
Fox News

Breaking news ...

...that I'm still reading about. It appears that the LDS church has issued an apology for their part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the cover-up which occurred after that. The killing happened 150 years ago today, and was recently the topic of a movie called "September Dawn." Read along with me:

Deseret News Article

From the LDS website

Text of Elder Henry B. Eyring's remarks

More info later as I find it.