About Me

Name: John Ostrowski
Biography
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

Archives

Blog Search

Search

From neoconservative to libertarian ...

Posted by John Ostrowski on Sunday, May 20, 2007 4:39:08 PM
... in one year. Check it out if you haven't already.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Ron Paul vs. Sean Hannity

Posted by John Ostrowski on Thursday, May 17, 2007 1:59:19 AM
In one night, Ron Paul took on two neocons and made fools of them both. Here's the clip of Paul and Hannity going at it:


Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Conservatives and just war: friends no longer

Posted by John Ostrowski on Thursday, May 17, 2007 1:38:52 AM
I invite everyone to check out my latest article at LewRockwell.com, written mainly in response to John Hawkins' latest column ("Five Things You Can't Say in America") on Townhall. Leave comments here if you like. Here's a sample:

This embrace of utilitarian thinking by conservatives is incredibly disheartening, but it seems that they are left with no other options. The rationale for the war has shifted from disarming Saddam, to bringing democracy to Iraq, to fighting the terrorists there rather than here as the situation has worsened. When no weapons were found, it became a fight for democracy. When democracy was established and chaos remained, suddenly it became a fight against terrorists in Iraq. The prospect for success has become increasingly dismal, and this latest column by Hawkins must be seen as a desperate response to this reality, but still a response that makes no sense morally or practically.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Ignoring the plank

Posted by John Ostrowski on Monday, May 14, 2007 8:33:54 PM
It seems Laurie David and Cambria Gordon have written a book about global warming for kids, as well as a letter to go with it. The letter read like a generic enviro-doomsday script so I'll skip that part. What I found hilarious at one point was this statement:

"The more people who understand global warming, the better... "

Pity that David and Gordon didn't follow their own advice. If they understood global warming, they wouldn't be so hysterical about it.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Is the pope about to lay the smackdown on dissidents?

Posted by John Ostrowski on Wednesday, May 09, 2007 2:22:39 PM

It seems as though the pope is about to get serious with pro-abortion politicians. Reuters reports:


The Pope was asked whether he supported Mexican Church leaders threatening to excommunicate leftist parliamentarians who last month voted to legalize abortion in Mexico City.

"Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon (church) law which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the body of Christ," he said.

"They (Mexican Church leaders) did nothing new, surprising or arbitrary. They simply announced publicly what is contained in the law of the Church... which expresses our appreciation for life and that human individuality, human personality is present from the first moment (of life)".

This is certainly nice to see. Perhaps now people will realize that you can't be both a Catholic and a NARAL shrill.

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Progress and modern eugenics

Posted by John Ostrowski on Wednesday, May 09, 2007 4:27:48 AM
Sick. Evil. The first two words that come to my mind when considering the fact that 90% of couples who learn that their child has Down Syndrome choose to abort. So many lives tossed in the trash bin of society. To the left, this is progress. We are not burdened by those who, though no fault of their own, were born differently than us. Mention sex selection via abortion and people go nuts. How could you be so cold? But children with Down Syndrome are killed and disposed. It seems that we can tolerate differences in the 23rd chromosome but not in the 21st. The unrepentant perpetrators of this evil (for we can hope that some people will see their error) will one day answer for their crimes. They have silenced thousands of children, but their own screams will continue for all eternity.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Blood to appease the angry god

Posted by John Ostrowski on Monday, May 07, 2007 1:45:59 PM

If god(s) is/are angry, perhaps killing someone as a sacrifice will calm him/her/whatever. This was the thinking in much of the world for quite some time. Remember the Aztecs who, until the Spanish Conquistadors (yes, those much-maligned barbaric Westerners) came to the Americas and were so repulsed by this perversity of human sacrifice that they imposed Christianity (and thus saved countless lives)? Well, we could use some new spiritual Conquistadors to convert what seems like the entire world.

If you haven't caught the news:

[Hu Tao of China's State Environmental Protection Administration] said China's one-child per couple policy introduced in the early 1980s, for instance, had a side-effect of braking global warming by limiting the population to 1.3 billion against a projected 1.6 billion without the policy.

"This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions," he told a conference in Oslo last month. China is the number two emitter of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, behind the United States and ahead of Russia.

Abortions to appease Mother Earth. I'm sure the Freakanomics crowd is eating this up.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Natural vs. positive law: who is humble?

Posted by John Ostrowski on Monday, May 07, 2007 11:51:56 AM
One of the frequent criticism of natural law proponents by positivists that deny the existence of natural law is that natural lawyers are simply cloaking their own ideology in a mantle of false humility. It seems to me that this is an unfair characterization.

Positivists criticize natural lawyers because their presuppositions necessitate that they assume prima facie that natural law is untrue, and they conclude, unfairly, that natural lawyers are thus cloaking their ideology in false humility. There are two problems in reasoning. First, their assumption that natural law is false. Second, their conclusion that if it is false, its adherents are liars instead of simply misguided. I can level the same criticism back at positivists. Positivism is false, and legal positivists thus assert, falsely, that they are above the dictates above natural law. Even if one takes positivism as true, there is still the troubling reality that legal positivists in position of power believe that they are qualified to determine the law.

I will end with a quotation from the great Catholic liberal (in the classical sense of the term) Frédéric Bastiat:

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"—from The Law

In short, the positivists are the true elitists.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (2) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Ron Paul: Nutjob fringe candidate?

Posted by John Ostrowski on Sunday, May 06, 2007 6:18:18 PM
For some reason there seems to be a conscious effort on the part of many of the right to marginalize Ron Paul and his views. I don't know if it's fair to say that the Republican establishment is afraid of Ron Paul at this point, because he hasn't made a huge dent, but I do believe his influence in being felt in conservative circles (witness Paul's answer to the ID question and that subsequent backtracking by the rest of the field). People are finally beginning to give Paul and his opinions as much respect (respect, not clout) as the other candidates. Unfortunately, there remain a large amount of people online whose only answer to Ron Paul is to slander him, his opinions and his supporters. I posted what I thought was a relatively innocent post about Fred Thompson on this blog and got quite a vitriolic response from some. This happened to other users as well.

One of the constant charges that comes up is that Paul supporters consistently hack and cheat at online polls, and thus he is not included in them anymore (see the second link). If anyone has proof of this, I would like to see it.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous1Next »