Make a Difference

Day: April 20, 2009

The Courageous Heart Of Irena Sendler

Can’t wait for this CBS made for broadcast movie to be shown in Australia.

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

As a Polish Catholic social worker in the early 1940s, Irena Sendler created and led a conspiracy of women who moved in and out of Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto disguised as nurses employed by Warsaw’s Health Department. Though they worked under the guise of merely attempting to prevent and contain the spread of Typhus and Spotted Fever, Sendler and her brave cohorts emerged each time with the children of consenting Jewish parents. The children were sometimes sedated and hidden inside boxes, suitcases and coffins as a means of rescuing them from their imminent deportation to death camps. They were given new identities and placed with Polish families and in convents. Sendler kept a hidden record of their birth names and where they were placed with the hope that they would some day be reunited with their own families.

In 1943, the Nazis discovered Sendler’s daring and dangerous ruse and arrested her. She was tortured by Gestapo agents and suffered broken feet. On the day of her scheduled execution she was rescued by “Zegota,” the underground network with which she worked to save the Jewish children.

As a result of Sendler’s efforts, approximately 2,500 children were smuggled to safety. Not a single child she rescued was ever betrayed or discovered by the Nazis.

Wind Farms An Expensive Waste Of Time

A real-world test performed by the Dutch province of Zeeland (a very windy place) confirms that small windmills are a fundamentally flawed technology. Twelve wind turbines were placed in a row on an open plain. Their energy yield was measured over a period of one year (April 1, 2008 – March 31, 2009). The average wind velocity during these 12 months was 3.8 meters per second (slightly higher than average). Three windmills broke.

The others produced some energy. But at outrageous costs compared with traditional methods of power production.

Financial payback time is much longer than their life expectancy and in urban areas they will not even deliver as much energy as was needed to produce them.

I’m sure larger wind turbines have the same fundamental flaws – high cost, high breakdown rates, energy used to produce, install and maintain them is out of proportion to the energy they produce, and other methods of energy production need to built anyway, because wind power cannot be relied on for consistent supply.

Via Small Dead Animals.

Real Beauty

Eric at Big Hollywood writes about real beauty – the kind Susan Boyle has, and real ugliness, the kind Janeane Garofalo has.

I won’t say much more – it’s worth reading the whole thing.

But I share his frustration at the view expressed by Garofalo and others that the only possible reason any one could disagree with Barack Obama about anything is because he is black.

Worried about tax policy? No you’re not. You’re a racist redneck.

Worried about where money for massive ‘stimulus’ spending is going to come from? No you’re not. You’re a racist redneck.

Worried about Obama’s foreign policy? No you’re not…. You get the idea.

One of the convenient things about that kind of thinking is that you never have to bother engaging with people’s concerns or answering their questions. You can just dismiss them because they are, you know, racist rednecks. But given the kind of nonsensical nastiness Garofalo apparently believes, a lack of further engagement with her is probably a good thing.

And aren’t rednecks ordinary working people, the kind the Democrats were supposed to represent?

Imanutjob Kicks Off UN Hitler Birthday Celebrations

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and described the Holocaust as a “myth” — arrived in Geneva late on Sunday as one of the few heads of state attending the conference.

Setting off for Switzerland, Ahmadinejad , who is seeking re-election in June, was quoted by Iran’s state broadcaster as saying ‘The Zionist ideology and regime are the flag bearers of racism.’

Various UN and human rights organisations have claimed that by not attending the Durban II conference the US, Australia and others are ‘turning their backs on victims of racism.’  Rubbish.

They would have a lot more credibility if they told Imanutjob to shut up and tidy up his own back yard.

How can anyone with a shred of decency or intelligence attend a conference where Imanutjob and others dominate proceedings, whose countries routinely hang or behead gay men, stone women who have been raped, and permit the marriage of girls as young a six to much older men, or, as in the case of Burma and Sudan, are carrying out systematic murders of any of their own citizens who are not the right race or religion?

The whole thing is just an bloody, expensive, embarassment.

Gay Lobby Demands Total Compliance

Or else.

Miss North Carolina Kristen Dalton won the Miss USA title earlier today. Good for her.

But trouble started after runner-up Carrie Prejean (Miss California) was asked this question: ‘Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalise same-sex marriage … do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?’

Carrie said: ‘We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offence to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.’

Some in the audience obviously agreed. But many others booed her.

She was asked her opinion. What was she supposed to do – lie?

But no, it’s not good enough. No one is allowed to doubt the all encompassing beauty of gay marriage, far less actually voice such a repugnant opinion.

‘It’s ugly,’ said Scott Ihrig, a gay man, who attended the pageant with his partner. ‘I think it’s ridiculous that she got first runner-up. That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are.’

Yes there are lots of them, so they must be right, and no one is allowed to think any different.

Fights then broke out in the lobby. Something is ugly here, but it isn’t Carrie.

Leading Earth Scientist Says Climate Alarmists Like Creationists.

Because both global warming alarmists and creationists care more about defending their entrenched positions than they do for the evidence.

In comments on another blog I was recently accused of being a denialist because I pointed out that the world was not getting any warmer, and that there was no correlation between human production of CO2 and changes in global climate.

Science is about asking questions. It is not denial to look at the evidence.

Saturday’s Australian has another surprisingly fair story about Professor Ian Plimer – Australia’s best known geologist. A couple of excerpts below:

While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary.

Climate changes are cyclical and driven by the Earth’s position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the planet’s orbit, ocean currents and plate tectonics. When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate.

To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons “all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos”, Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take.

“The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make a great comparison … between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar.”

Running On New Server

Whew!

Everything transferred over quickly and easily.

The new layout needs some tidying up. I will do this over  the next few days.

If you notice any bugs or have any suggestions, let me know. Comment, or email me (address is on the profile page).

Posting back to normal this afternoon.

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