Discrimination in America.

Professor Timothy Larsen offers a story that brought back some memories:

John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an “opinion” piece and the required theme was “traditional marriage.” John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, “Which Bible would that be?” On the very same page, John’s phrase, “Christians who read the Bible,” provoked the same retort, “Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?” (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a “sermon,” and given an F, with the words, “I reject your dogmatism,” written at the bottom by way of explanation.


Thereafter, John could never get better than a C for papers without any marked errors or corrections. When he asked for a reason why yet another grade was so poor he was told that it was inappropriate to quote C. S. Lewis in work for an English class because he was “a pastor.” (Lewis, of course, was actually an English professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was wrong to quote Lewis simply because he had said something recognizably Christian.) Eventually John complained to the department chair, who said curtly that he could do nothing until the course was over. John took this to mean that the chair would do nothing and just accepted the bad grade.

In my case, it was an Economics class in 1979 where I defended nuclear power in the face of the TA's condemnation of nuclear power.  After that, I couldn't get better than a "B", which made Econ my worst grade in college.

It happens.

Class War.

One aspect of the "social contract" was that while government workers had job security, they wouldn't make as much as private sector workers.  Not surprisingly, given who is in control, over the years we've seen that element of the social contract degrade with a wealth transfer from the private sector to the government.  The result is that we now have government employees who have better retirement and salary and benefits and job security than private employees.  This disparity is breeding discontent, which has been recognized even by the Clinton-era Comptroller David Walker:

David Walker, the U.S. comptroller appointed by President Bill Clinton who continued in the role under George Bush, on Friday gave a bracing indictment of the pension and salary benefits being rewarded to government workers at the federal, state and local level. Walker said that public sector workers are growing prosperous on the back of private sector workers.


“There is a huge gap. State and local plans on average … are much more lucrative than typical plans for employees. State and local government employees, on average, have greater job security than people in the private sector. And state and local government employees, in the middle of government, in many cases make more money than their private sector counterparts,” Walker said during a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to Pew numbers provided by the Chamber, the budget gap to cover state employees’ benefits totals $1 trillion.

“Therefore, if governments expect taxpayers to pay more taxes to fund lucrative benefit programs that are much better than the average employee gets, in jobs that more job security and in some cases make more money than their private sector counterparts, that ain’t gonna happen,” he said. “But the only way it’s not going to happen is if there’s transparency and if the cover is blown, so that pressure is brought to bear to make changes.”

Edifying Thought for the Day.

Who knew that there were "100 Hot Women from New Jersey"?

Lisa Edelstein - aka Dr. Lisa Cuddy from House (and a former cheerleader for Donald Trump's New Jersey Generals) - clocks in at #7.

Apologetics and Debate.

Via Apologetics 315, I listened to this debate between Walter Martin and Van Hale on "Is Mormonism Christian?"

I thought that the Mormon apologist, Van Hale, came out the better on style with his calm approach in the face of a tough audience.  He made some basic errors, such as misstating the Arian Controversy, but I don't think that the Christian apologist, Walter Martin, helped himself with his personal attacks.

What got me though was the that the debate sounded old.  I believe the debate must have been recorded in the '70s or '80s, but the way they were talking - and the use of metaphors - sounded like it would have been at home in the '40s.  Has the American accent changed over the last 50 years?  Has our style of arguing changed subtly? 

I was curious about these men, so following up I found out that Van Hale subsequently stated his belief that the Book of Mormon may not be historically accurate - he actually thinks that the historicity of the Book of Mormon is "incidental" to its function as a divinely inspired work. 

I guess that such a thing is possible.  Job is not a work of history, but it does teach something about the human condition.  On the other hand, what would the point be of a multi-volume "alternate history" that never happened.  Who would have written such a lengthy pseudo-historical work if that person wasn't trying to create the impression that the work was true history?

We're in the best of hands.

With this kind of calm, reasoned logic, it is no wonder why the economy is circling the bowl.



Daniel Foster at NRO points out:

How many times have you found yourself thinking: “You know, I used to disagree with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) on policy issue X, but then he took to the floor of the House, screamed at the top of his lungs, and shouted me down as a coward, and I’ve since come around to his position.”

Novelist Anne Rice says that Episcopalians are not Christian!

Well, actually she announces that she is leaving Christianity - but not Christ - with this statement:

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten …years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.


Later she wrote:

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Rice has been into her own version of Christianity for the last decade. 

Are we living inside a Black Hole?

This is about science, not the economy.

Some scientists are speculating that every Black Hole contains a universe.

When the density of matter reaches gargantuan proportions (more than about 1050 kilograms per cubic metre) inside a black hole, torsion manifests itself as a force that counters gravity. This prevents matter compressing indefinitely to reach infinite density, so there is no singularity. Instead, says Poplawski, matter rebounds and starts expanding again.


Now, in what is sure to be a controversial study, Poplawski has applied these ideas to model the behaviour of space-time inside a black hole the instant it starts rebounding (arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587). The scenario resembles what happens when you compress a spring: Poplawski has calculated that gravity initially overcomes torsion's repulsive force and keeps compressing matter, but eventually the repulsive force gets so strong that the matter stops collapsing and rebounds. Poplawski's calculations show that space-time inside the black hole expands to about 1.4 times its smallest size in as little as 10-46 seconds.

This staggeringly fast bounce-back, says Poplawski, could have been what led to the expanding universe we observe today.

How would we know if we are living inside a black hole? Well, a spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, and this should show up as a "preferred direction" in our universe, says Poplawski. Such a preferred direction would result in the violation of a property of space-time called Lorentz symmetry, which links space and time. It has been suggested that such a violation could be responsible for the observed oscillations of neutrinos from one type to another (Physical Review D, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.74.105009).

So, we could only know that our universe was created in a Black Hole indirectly through our observation of the universe, but not directly.

And, yet, atheists laugh at Aquinas for his "Five Ways."

Separate but equal.

John McWhorter offers a solution to the problem of African-American culture stigmatizing academic achievement as "acting white" - segregated schools:

The response to my Bloggingheads conversation with Stanford Law's Richard Thompson Ford on the ''acting white'' issue is making me feel old.


My entree into the race debate was in my 2000 book, Losing the Race, where I argued that a crucial reason for the gap in scholarly performance between even middle-class black students and white ones was that to be Young, Gifted and Black is often to also find oneself tarred as ''acting white'' by black peers.

And:

That's when the whole ''acting white'' phenomenon started -- since then passed on and morphing into an attitude. That's how things can go with human beings: The logical drifts into the visceral, the objective drifts into the subjective. Now it's no longer about white kids tripping you in the hall. It has been recruited as one of the many ways that any teenager can fashion a sense of group membership.


But yes, it's more of a problem to think of school as "white" than to just think of it as uncool. "I was a nerd, and those kids responded accordingly," Bouie recounts. But this neglects the added sting of also being accused of hating your own people. My mother, good nerd that she was in Atlanta in the '40s, was teased as a "walking encyclopedia" by her black peers. But no one accused her of thinking she was white. None of those '40s Atlanta kids would have imagined saying that. The reason is what Buck devoted his book to: "Think you're white?" for liking school is something new in the black community.

And:

Call them ''segregated'' and enable the mission creep that terms like pathology end up being misused under. ''Segregation,'' OK, but why does your breast probably swell at the thought of a graduation ceremony at Spelman or Howard? In all-black schools, nobody gets called ''acting white'' for liking school. This is important.


As such, we must beware the tack that Matthew Yglesias takes, showing that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math have narrowed between black and white students since 1978. Yglesias calls this evidence that desegregation, which has increased during that period, must be OK. And sure, it can be. But it's well-known that the coalescence of black and white students' performance scores largely got stuck as of the early '80s. Note how the gap in 1999 was 32 percent, when it was 33 percent back in 1982. Or, why was there more of a gap in 2004 than way back in 1986?

This is a case for desegregation? I suggest not

I shouldn't have to point out that McWhorter is the "young, gifted and black" linguist, and author of the fantastically insightful "Doing Our Own Thing." 

What will happen is that the data will be ignored.  Our political and specialist classes are committed to an ideological position that prohibits them from looking at the data and seeing anything other than that which their ideology projects onto it.

Doctor Who.

My oldest daughter has become a Doctor Who fan.  So, here is every Doctor Who theme from the shows inception in 1963.

Great moments in deep thought.


The audience reaction is amazingly refreshing.



Via Mark Shea.

Religious Rorschach Test.

Your sense of the sacred - or where you come from doctrinally - probably determines your reaction to this story on the Canadian Anglican priestess who gave a Communion wafer to a new parishioner's dog.

Reverend Marguerite Rea of St Peter's Anglican Church, in Toronto, received complaints from Christians all over Canada after she fed communion bread to a German Shepherd cross named Trapper.


Area Bishop Patrick Yu said the priest had contravened church policy with her "strange and shocking" actions.

Ms Rea said it had been a "simple church act of reaching out" to a new congregation member and his pet.

"If I have hurt, upset or embarrassed anyone, I apologise," she told her congregation on Sunday morning, the Toronto Star reports.

And:

Mr Keith has since been told that he and his dog are most welcome at the church, but Trapper can no longer receive communion.


"This has blown me away. The church is even getting e-mails from Catholics," said the truck driver.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the people in the church love Trapper and the kids play with him. It was just one person who got his nose out of joint.

"Holy smokes. We are living in the downtown core. This is small stuff. I thought it was innocent and it made me think of the Blessing of the Animals."

Mark Shea opines:

If we actually take the Catholic Church's teaching seriously concerning the validity of Anglican sacraments, then all that happened here was that a woman pretending to be a priest gave a dog a treat she pretended was the body of Christ. "Woman feeds dog" is not something I choose to spend energy getting upset about. How Piskies choose to conduct their liturgical antics in the privacy of the own sanctuary is up to them, just so long as they don't try to tell my communion what we should believe and do. I'm much more concerned with Piskies whose antics are aimed at the public square. And, of course, I hope that the people whose minds are so clouded that they can't see any problem with this kind of nonsense wlll come to an appreciation of actual apostolic Christianity.

Maybe so, but if I were Episcopalian, this would be another reason to wish for a Reformation.

Backstory.

Here is an article on the background of Kenneth Howell, the University of Illinois professor fired - or put on leave - for daring to teach Natural Law to an offended student.

Interesting biography.  The callow student could learn a lot from this man.

District Court Judge Scoffs at Obama Administration's Preemption Argument...

....against the Arizona "check immigration status" law.

According to Ed Morrissey relaying information from the Washington Post:

Why can't Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?" U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton asked in a pointed exchange with Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler. Her comment came during a rare federal court hearing in the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R).


Bolton, a Democratic appointee, also questioned a core part of the Justice Department's argument that she should declare the law unconstitutional: that it is "preempted" by federal law because immigration enforcement is an exclusive federal prerogative.

"How is there a preemption issue?" the judge asked. "I understand there may be other issues, but you're arguing preemption. Where is the preemption if everybody who is arrested for some crime has their immigration status checked?"

According to Morrissey:

Answer: there is none. Even the DoJ recognizes that. They have a BIET program that is designed to help local law enforcement personnel do exactly what the White House complains Arizona is doing. Checking people who are arrested or detained for valid ID, and probing their status if they fail to have it, is so basic to law enforcement that Bolton must feel as though she’s slipped into the Twilight Zone.

"Sharia in New Jersey: Muslim husband rapes wife, judge sees no sexual assault because Islam forbids wives to refuse sex"

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch reports that a New Jersey judge ruled that a Muslim man could not be convicted of raping his wife - who had filed for divorce - because of the man's Muslim beliefs that his wife could never refuse his sexual advances.

Muhammad said: "If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning" (Bukhari 4.54.460).


He also said: "By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel's saddle" (Ibn Majah 1854).

And now a New Jersey judge sees no evidence that a Muslim committed sexual assault of his wife -- not because he didn't do it, but because he was acting on his Islamic beliefs: "This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited."

The Court of Appeals reversed this decision.

Of course, it is within the living memory of Americans that this kind of argument was rejected in American law.  The idea that a New Jersey judge would revive this principle out of multi-cultural sensitivity is outrageous.

Here is the Appellate decision via the Volokh Conspiracy.

Welcome to the New Europe: More Muslim Riots in France.

According to Pajama Media:

You probably didn’t hear about it, but Muslim youths rioted in Grenoble, France, on July 16, sparking some of the worst instability the country has faced since the 2005 riots. Now, like then, most of the media declined to mention the religious or ethnic background of the rioters, instead painting them as unruly youngsters and covering the eyes of the public to the slow dissolution of France as we know it.

The violence began soon after a Muslim robbed a casino and opened fire as he tried to flee the police, who then shot and killed him. This apparently raised the ire of major elements of the mostly Muslim urban communities who live in poor neighborhoods unassimilated into the greater society. The shooting was seen as an attack on Muslims, rather than an act of justice. Shortly following a speech by an Islamic cleric at a ceremony for the robber, the match was struck. As of now, there are no media reports revealing what the cleric said, if anything, to stoke the flame.

The picture was taken by a friend last week in Switzerland.

Amazing.

Tackiness and the MSM.

From scratching his face with his middle finger during a speech while mentioning Hillary Clinton to dressing down the Supreme Court during the State of the Nation, Obama has shown himself to be a classless thug.  Obama pulled the same "use the opportunity to embarass someone who couldn't walk out or respond during a speech" technique against Congressman Pete Hoekstra.

Needless to say, Obama's unprecedented level of discourtesy was not only not pointed out by the Media, but the Media conspired in exploiting Obama's rudeness.

Dissension in the Land of Hope and Change.

Leftwing bloggers may sit this election out:

It appears if the progressive-leftist activists of the Netroots have their way, what happens in Vegas is not going to stay in Vegas. They want it to play out at ballot boxes across the country in November, resulting in the Democrats losing seats in Congress. Obama has never been that openly kind to the Lefty bloggers. Rahm being in the WH hasn't helped. Actually, the Netroots was more powerful in 2007, than it is today. The Democrats can only have one deliverer, after all. And it's now Obama, not Markos Moulitsas.

The quickest way to get rid of bad laws is to enforce them...

...and the quickest way to get rid of the way that liberals use race as blanket smear is to turn it around on them.

I don't think that Shirley Sherrod should necessarily have been fired for her story about being a racist twenty years ago, but I don't think that Trent Lott deserved to be pilloried for his smarmy tribute to the elderly Strom Thurmond either.  But, then, I'm with Anne Althouse in thinking that the full video doesn't change the picture that much.

The video is disturbing on so many levels.  First, this government official feels that it alright to confess to being racist because she then says that she had an epiphany and decided that the real answer was to engage in class war?  This is good because one set of irrational hatred is better than another?  Color me unimpressed.

Second, the audience's reaction was disturbing.  They approved her story even before she talked about her conversion.  The audience - NAACP members - would have been entirely satisfied if the story had ended with her sticking it to the white farmer.  That's not good.

Third, check out the NAACP's reaction - they acted as if they knew the story was about a speaker confessing to be a racist, which is strange if that kind of thing doesn't happen frequently enough for the organization to have a reasonable belief that they'd been caught. 

The dirty linen here is that the Left has been using the charge of racism against conservatives for years while knowinglly practicing their own brand of racism.  The way to end that kind of hypocrisy is to hold the Left to the same standard that they hold everyone else to.

The "T-shirt test."

Vox Day recommends this system for determining a woman's sexual experience:

But how can a man tell if a woman is clever enough to avoid claiming complete inexperience and doesn't give it away by breaking out bedroom gymnastics worthy of Cirque du Soleil? It's quite easy if you happen to have access to her clothing drawer. Women attempt to steal status-branded t-shirts and sweatshirts whenever they have a fling with a man. It's a bizarre form of competitive female trophy-hunting; a Harvard Hockey t-shirt trumps a nice, but generic University of Oregon sweatshirt.* So, you can be sure that every t-shirt advertising a college she never attended, a sporting event she never saw, a military service** to which neither she nor any family member are connected, or, if she actually went to that college, a sport she never played, represents a notch on her bedpost that she doesn't report as a boyfriend. If she keeps around a few worn-out favorites of the sort she'd never buy in a million years but somehow keep managing to survive periodic wardrobe purges, you can be sure that they once belonged to other men.


And if she has a drawer full of t-shirts representing the entire SEC plus half the Big Ten, Notre Dame, and two Ivies, you had better run, not walk, to the nearest medical clinic.

Hmmm....sounds plausible, but is it true?

Manifesto!

This essay by Angelo Codevilla offers an rich analysis of why America doesn't work.

Separation of the Press and the State.

Columbia University's President Lee Bollinger argues for government subsidies for the old media so the United States can stay competitive with Communist China and Al-Jazeera.

We should think about American journalism as a mixed system, where the mission is to get the balance right.


To me a key priority is to strengthen our public broadcasting role in the global arena. In today's rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China's CCTV and Xinhua news, as well as Qatar's Al Jazeera. The U.S. government's international broadcasters, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, were developed during the Cold War as tools of our anticommunist foreign policy. In a sign of how anachronistic our system is in a digital age, these broadcasters are legally forbidden from airing within the U.S.

This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters. The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need. Let's demonstrate great journalism's essential role in a free and dynamic society.

Yes, obviously.  We need the "right mix" of government subsidized liberal propoganda and whatever else we're allowed to hear, just like Communist China and Al Jazeera.

What a moron.

The History Channel....

....a never-ending source of cliche story-lines:

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.


Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

Advice for Obama...

...from Victor Davis Hanson:

1) Impose a moratorium on all the racial talk. After the beer summit, the “stupidly,” the “stereotyping,” the “cowards,” the Van Jones rants, the “wise Latina,” the suing Arizona, the exempting the Black Panthers, the al-Qaeda-as-racists (e.g., nine years after 9/11 we at last have a reason to really hate these terrorists), etc., we get the message that race permeates the presidential worldview — and that all issues, from those of terrorism to policing to immigration to the environment, are seen largely through racial us/them lenses. This obsession has turned off an increasing multi-racial nation, and is reaching the point of caricature. Take a deep breath, Mr. President, and promise to go through one day without self-referencing yourself as black, without speaking to an identity-politics group, and without reviewing the American past in terms of race. Just one day …

The Carter administration was the same way.

Read the whole thing.

In an alternate universe where Spock has a goatee, pale is cool.

As a melanin-impaired redhead, I find this Indian ad touting the efficacy of a skin-whitening cream to be hilarious:

Skin-whitening creams for men and women have proved popular in India. Still, foreign companies have been criticized in the local media for playing up a perceived preference for lighter skin color.


Last year a column in the Times of India, lampooned the introduction of "Healthy White Skin Lightening Body Milk" by Vaseline as designed to ensure "an Aryan glow from head to toes."

At the time, the piece noted that the billboard advertising included the following pitch:

When it's healthy and cared for, our skin has the natural ability to maintain a light tone and clear texture. Unfortunately, when it's exposed to the sun, the skin's natural lightening processes are interrupted. Pigment producing cells become increasingly active, tanning the skin, and leaving it several shades darker than it's supposed to be.

New, Vaseline Healthy White skin lightening body milk works with the skin to reverse signs of darkening and prevent future pigmentation. A balanced combination of vitamin B3, yoghurt serum and conditioning moisturizers hydrate and even out skin tone. Triple sunscreens help prevent future darkening and encourage the skin to lighten itself.

Curse those active pigment producing cells that leave skin darker than it's supposed to be.

Spooky.

4 Commuters and the devil get stuck in an elevator: a movie by M. Night Shyamalan.

See the preview at io-9.

Huh?  PCUSA agrees to ordain active homosexuals but declines to ordain homosexual marriages.

And the principle behind this would be what? 

This is "perspicacious" in Scripture how?

Hours after giving their blessing to ordaining noncelibate gays and lesbians, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declined late Thursday to change the church's definition of marriage, in effect refusing to allow same-sex marriages within their denomination.


If the proposal had been approved, the church's definition of marriage would have changed from a commitment between "a woman and a man'' to "two people" and allowed church weddings in states that have legalized gay marriage.

The late-night decision to table the proposal and subject it to two more years of study caught many delegates at the denomination's gathering at the Minneapolis Convention Center by surprise, and there was a stunned silence as delegates absorbed the action.

One, Virginia Thibeaux of San Anselmo, Calif., said she was "devastated and disappointed" by the shelving of a decision on whether to change the church's definition of marriage. "It's the M.O. for Presbyterians to do more studying," she said.

Cindy Bolbach, the general assembly's moderator, said the proposal's failure indicated that delegates just weren't ready to make a decision on the marriage definition question, and "want to continue to talk about it."

Oh, it's the "more time to talk about it" principle.

Michael Liccione in the comments at Called to Communion offers this explanation:

I notice that the PCA has just approved ordaining actively gay and lesbian clergy while refusing to bless same-sex unions. As my friend and ex-colleague Kevin Staley-Joyce remarks: “The fact [that] this is an incremental compromise is evidenced by the logical incompatibility of the two decisions: If gay romance is not only ethical but healthy and appropriate for spiritual leaders, how can it not be enshrined in a church marriage?”


This whole kabuki dance is evidence that mainline Protestantism has simply lost a truly Christian understanding of sexuality as well as of ordination. Many of the more conservative Protestants, of course, still insist that sodomy is wrong and that same-sex “marriage” is an abomination. They say that stance is biblical. Indeed it is, if we assume that what the human authors meant then is what God means even now—an assumption that the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations increasingly rejects. But once it’s conceded that married couples may actively render infertile sexual acts that would otherwise be fertile, there simply is no logical barrier to holding that a sexual relationship can be good, even sanctifying, when the sexual acts are not the sort of acts that can lead to conception. That’s why resistance to same-sex marriage is slowly but steadily collapsing in the Mainline. The ordination of actively gay and lesbian clergy is only a stage in the dance.

Corrupt Science.

An AGW proponent castigates the corruption he finds in the post-Climategate inquiries.

The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann -- the paleoclimatologist who came up with "the hockey stick" -- would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for "lack of credible evidence", it will not even investigate them. (At this, MIT's Richard Lindzen tells the committee, "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?" The report continues: "The Investigatory Committee did not respond to Dr Lindzen's statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.") Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers -- so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.


You think I exaggerate?

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research...

Had Dr. Mann's conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions...

Clearly, Dr. Mann's reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

So, the measure of honest science is.....ability to generate funding.

On the actual Climategate inquiry, the author, Clive Crook, writes:

Like Pearce, The Economist rightly draws attention to the failure of the Russell inquiry to ask Phil Jones of the CRU whether he actually deleted any emails to defeat FoI requests. It calls this omission "rather remarkable". Pearce calls it "extraordinary". Myself, I would prefer to call it "astonishing and indefensible". I don't see how, having spotted this, the magazine can conclude that the report, overall, was "thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics." (Well, the critics make such unreasonable demands! Look into the charges, they say. Hear from the other side. Ask the obvious questions. It never stops: you just can't satisfy these people.)

None of this restores confidence in science, at least where science intersects with fashionable public policy.

Father Barron: Pray for Christopher Hitchens.

From CNN blogs:

But what struck me with particular power as I surveyed the Catholic media was that the vast, vast majority of Catholics reported Hitchens’ disease and then, with transparent sincerity, urged people to pray for him.


In making that recommendation, of course, they were on very sure ground indeed. Jesus said, “Love your enemies; bless those who curse you; pray for those who maltreat you." Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the enemy of Christianity—even of Christians—but he is also a child of God, loved into being and destined for eternal life. Therefore, followers of Jesus must pray for him and want what is best for him.

Hitchens seeks by means of specious argument, insinuation, and sometimes plain smear-tactics to undermine religion. He ought to be opposed, vigorously, with counter-argument and clarification of fact. But all the while, he ought to be respected.

One of the greatest Catholic apologists of all time, G.K. Chesterton, debated the agnostic George Bernard Shaw up and down England, and their arguments were often pointed and aggressive; but after the debates, the two friends could be seen drinking and laughing together. That’s a model of how a Christian treats his intellectual opponents.

So read Christopher Hitchens; disagree with him and get angry with him; defend the faith against his attacks. And pray for him.

Terms that a liberal can understand - Al Qaeda is evil because it's racist...

...not because it is committed to killing Americans.

According to Jake Tapper, Obama is trying out a new angle on terrorism:

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups' willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.


Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains."

Earlier today a senior administration official said the Obama administration believes that Al Shabaab carried out the attack.

Explaining the president's comment, an administration official said Mr. Obama "references the fact that both U.S. intelligence and past al Qaeda actions make clear that al Qaeda -- and the groups like al Shabaab that they inspire -- do not value African life. The actions of al Qaeda and the groups that it has inspired show a willingness to sacrifice innocent African life to reach their targets."

And:

Additionally, U.S. intelligence has indicated that al Qaeda leadership specifically targets and recruits black Africans to become suicide bombers because they believe that poor economic and social conditions make them more susceptible to recruitment than Arabs," the official said. "Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations."


"In short," the official said, "al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life."

Well, now we definitely know that Al Qaeda is evil.

Seriously, though, why should we be surprised that a person who matured in a culture that analyzed everything in terms of race and racism would still view the world through the paradigm of race and racism?

Update:

Andrew McCarthy puts it this way:

The race obsession of the Obama administration is a sight to behold. Remember, these are people who adamantly refuse to see the Islamic underpinnings of jihadist terror, although those underpinnings are obvious and undeniable to anyone willing to look. Yet, racism, their unified field theory for interpreting all human phenomena, somehow explains al Qaeda. Sure.

Bad Voters!

Liberal radio talk show host, Bill Press, blames the voters for Obama's bad poll numbers:

I think this says more about the American people than it does about President Obama. I think it just shows once again that the American people are spoiled. Basically, spoiled-- as a people, we are too critical. We are quick to rush to judgment, we are too negative, we are too impatient.

Well, it's true that when Obama promised that the seas would begin to recede he didn't say when they would recede.

Sauce for the Gander alert.

The National Rifle Association's log-rolling to defeat the free market that might charge gun owners a higher premium for having a gun in their houses is outrageous, as any such log-rolling is.  Jonathon Chait in The New Republic writes:

A huge portion of the conservative backlash against health care reform was premised on the notion that reform would force people who choose to lead healthy, responsible lives to subsidize bad decisions by fat, lazy slobs. In reality, our health or lack thereof lies mostly outside our own control. But here is a way that the Affordable Care Act really is forcing responsible people to subsidize the irresponsible decisions of others:

In the health care debate this year, for instance, the N.R.A.’s lobbyists worked with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to include a little-noticed provision banning insurance companies from charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes.

Of course, people who keep guns in their home are choosing to run the risk of incurring injury or death. (Gun owners are eleven times more likely to have a household member attempt suicide, and four times more likely to suffer an accidental homicide or shooting injury, as to successfully use the gun in self-defense.) But now those of us who choose not to run this risk have to pay to subsidize their risky lifestyle. Let's see some conservative outrage!

If owning a gun results in higher risks, then gun owners should pay higher premiums. They shouldn't use politically clout in order to be bought off and transfer the cost to non-gun owners.

How about a little freakin' principle for a change.

Now here is a nightmare scenario that gets completely ignored.

It's right out of Soylent Green.

China's population control policy in action:

The AP article was published toward the end of a 20-day campaign, in heavily populated Puning County in Guangdong Province, to sterilize men and women who were accused of violating national birth control policies. In the village of Daba, a physician boasted that his surgical team was working non-stop from 8:00 in the morning to 4:00 AM the following day. On April 12, the fifth day, Puning officials announced that they were already halfway to their goal of 10,000 sterilizations.


The recent campaign in Puning, during which thousands of Chinese citizens were driven like livestock into family planning centers, was no anomaly. In Shandong, 7,000 women were sterilized by force in 2005, and Chen Guangcheng, a lawyer, spent years in prison for denouncing the involuntary surgical procedures.

"Driven like livestock"....you sometimes get the feeling that some Americans involved in Planned Parenthood would think that would be a good starting policy.

Communist regimes are expert at creating real life science fiction scenarios based on "science":

The one-child policy was originally designed as a trade-off between material progress and the fundamental human right to raise a family. Limits to Growth, the notorious 1974 report by the Club of Rome about “overpopulation” and scarce resources, was based on wild assumptions and sketchy data. Its alarmist predictions were backed, however, by state-of-the-art computer modeling, which so impressed a visiting systems control specialist from China that he went home and designed a program to make projections about the Chinese population. The apocalyptic scenario that he presented to Communist Party officials left only two alternatives: population control or disaster. Chinese leaders quickly and enthusiastically embraced these findings of “Western science,” which incidentally shielded them from responsibility for economic failures. From then on, population was to blame.

And there is a real cost:

The human costs of the one-child policy have been incalculable. Huo Datong, a psychoanalyst who trained in France and practices in China, says that “the trauma of the only child is the major challenge confronting China.” In a book titled China on the Psychiatrist’s Couch he explained that “the One-Child Policy strikes at the heart of the Chinese family structure, which is founded on many children—a sign of prosperity…. The government cannot eradicate the Chinese cultural desire to be the father or mother of many children…. A new equilibrium has to be devised.” Congressman Smith described the devastation more bluntly. “Women are severely harmed emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Chinese women are violated by the state. The suicide rate for Chinese women—about 500 a day—far exceeds suicide rates anywhere on earth.”

Females of all ages have suffered disproportionately from the government restrictions. Mosher writes, “Within a few years of the introduction of the one-child policy, hundreds of thousands of baby girls were being drowned, smothered, or abandoned at birth each year…even in relatively wealthy areas like the Pearl River Delta, where female infanticide was unknown in earlier times.”

The increased availability of techniques for determining the sex of a fetus has led to widespread selective abortion. An official report notes that currently 119 boys are born for every 100 girls (in 1982 the ratio was 108 boys to 100 girls). It is expected that by 2020 between 25 and 30 million Chinese men will have no prospects of marrying.

This gender imbalance has already led to a host of social ills: higher rates of crime, homosexuality, and divorce, and a lucrative market in surrogate mothers (usually recruited by agencies from poor villages). The Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing admits that there is trafficking in North Korean and Vietnamese women, who are sold to single Chinese farmers. These “undocumented slaves” are often resold to other networks or else handed over to the Chinese police, who receive a bounty for sending them back across the border.

Speaking of Doomsday Scenarios....

....remember overpopulation?  We used to lose sleep over that.  Heck, the Chinese have created their own nightmare scenario of 30 million "unmarriable" males based on that nightmare. So, why don't we hear about it anymore?

Because it doesn't fit the narrative, according to an environmentalist magazine:

For a start, the population bomb that I remember being scared by 40 years ago as a schoolkid is being defused fast. Back then, most women round the world had five or six children. Today's women have just half as many as their mothers -- an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.


This is getting close to the long-term replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don't make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Women are cutting their family sizes not because governments tell them to, but for their own good and the good of their families -- and if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

This is a stunning change in just one generation. Why don't we hear more about it? Because it doesn't fit the doomsday agenda.

Half the world now has fewer than the "replacement level" of children. That includes Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, most of the Far East from Japan to Thailand, and much of the Middle East from Algeria to Iran.

Being an environmentalist, the author suggests a war on "consumption."

The good news is that the world will not end...

...in a giant methane bubble released by the BP oil disaster.

Now, find some other disaster scenario to lose sleep over.

Great Moments in Represenative Democracy - Democrat Rep blows up at constituents for not accepting his "talking points."



Big Government observes:

Democrats Gone Wild: Rep. Ciro Rodriguez Loses Itby Mike Flynn


I’ve often noted that I expect this to be a long, hot summer. The mid-term elections are inching closer and Democrats are having to finally admit that they are in real political trouble. For those keeping score at home, let’s recap; the economy sucks, there are no new jobs, the stimulus failed, the government is bleeding money, ObamaCare is unpopular, the Feds have screwed up the gulf oil spill and we are facing potentially the biggest tax hike in history at the end of the year.



If they weren’t trying to seize control of huge swaths of the economy, I might almost feel sorry for Democrat Congressman having to face voters with such a “record.” They blindly followed the Democrat leadership and listened to the chattering class in DC who assured them everything would be okay; the progressive agenda was secretly popular with the public. Instead, I’ll enjoy video snippets like this, which shows another Democrat House member losing his temper in the face of public anger with their agenda. Recently, Rep. Ciro Rodriquez (D-TX) met with some local constituents about our nation’s current state of affairs. It did not go well.

Wow.

I want to make two points; Rep. Rodriguez is an elected official with a duty to represent his constituents in Congress, no matter their political persuasion, and, he volunteered and asked for this job. He wasn’t ordered into this position by some judge, as some kind of sentence. He wants this job. It is a bit stunning that, at the first sign of criticism, he loses his temper so quickly. A confident politician would have been able to field this question.

When called out on it, Rodriquez ought to have been able to field the questions in a manner that didn’t resort to threats and a violent outburst. That he couldn’t tells you all you need to know about the political landscape today.

My friends, there is only one word to describe what you see in this video: PANIC.

Character Matters.

With Bill Clinton, we learned that the personal character of our politicans doesn't matter.  Is the politician a rapist? It doesn't matter if the politician is a Democrat.

With Barrack Obama, we learned that the agenda, ideology and character of the people that our politician surround themselves doesn't matter either.  Did the politician surround himself with extremist racists or Chicago crooks?  It doesn't matter if the politician is a Democrat.

Needless to say, this rule does not apply to the personal character of any politician who is a Republican. For those people, it matters very much if the media can tie the politician to some tangential connection to a racist group or some kind of personal pecadillo.  The fact that Sarah Palin may have spoken to a radical Alaskan separatist group and Newt Gingrich is divorced are very important.  Likewise, Sarah Palin's family and family life is fair game for one and all.

According to Roger Simon, these kinds of things really do matter, even for Barrack Obama:

Barack Obama told us on several occasions then that he had not been aware of Wright’s extreme black nationalist views during the candidate’s twenty years in the reverend’s church. That made no sense, since Obama had dedicated his book to Wright, had his children baptized by him, etc. Also, Wright’s separatist brand of black liberation theology was no doubt quite familiar to Obama. It had been to many of us for decades.


Yet the mainstream media paid little attention, or tried not to, certainly did not deign to investigate in any depth. Indeed they went so far that many of them declared Obama’s attendant speech on race a masterpiece of the MLKing sort, when it was no more than an assemblage of clichés and mendacious clichés at that, since they covered up the obvious uncomfortable truth that the candidate knew all about Wright and, unlike Oprah Winfrey who left the Trinity Church years before, chose to ignore it for reasons he could or would not be honest about.

So we were lied to about this by Obama and the MSM winked. Yet it was a far more significant lie than Clinton’s proclamations about Monica Lewinsky, which only peripherally affected affairs of state and were obviously the desperate acts of a man caught cheating. Obama’s prevarication was about the very essence of his political views. Widely desirous of electing its first black president — I felt this myself but did not act upon it — the nation gulped and swallowed the lie, but, consciously or unconsciously, it did not forget.

Now we are where we are. We have a president that no one wants to listen to because we do not fully believe him. His own party is deserting him not just because they know his ideas are unpopular. They also know he is unable to convince anyone. We have shut him off.

And now the revelations of J. Christian Adams have shown that his Department of Justice has a racial bias not entirely dissimilar to those of Reverend Wright. Again the MSM is doing its best to ignore this, but the damage is still there and growing and Obama will not be able, this time, to make a speech in his defense.

It’s over. For all the excitement of his election, having lied his way into office, Barack Obama was essentially DOA his first night at the White House.

How could the Obama administration have ever foreseen this? 

It turns out that the possibility of future taxes and governmental burdens on income and business activity actually depresses current business activity.  Unexpected!

Michael Barone writes:

Home mortgage interest rates are the lowest in history, but house sales are plunging. Banks can make money easily because of the Federal Reserve's low interest rates, but they're not making many loans. Major corporations are sitting on something like $2 trillion in cash, but they're not investing.


Unemployment is running at 10 percent, rounded off, for the 11th straight month, but few employers are hiring and a million people have stopped looking for work in the last year. Small-business hiring is at a nine-month low, and retail sales are tailing off.

Government policies designed to stimulate the economy seem to be having the opposite effect. Consumers aren't buying, businesses aren't hiring, and those fortunate enough to have some cash on hand don't seem to be investing.


I call it the mattress economy.

People seem to be following this investment strategy. Step one: Go to Mattress Discounters and buy the biggest mattress you can find. Step two: Take it home, and stuff all your money in it. Step three: Lie down, and get some rest.

This hurts the economy, but it's a rational response to the Obama Democrats' public policies. And that's not just the view of their political opponents.

Consider the complaint of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, head of the Business Roundtable, which has been playing footsie with the Obama administration for most of the last 18 months. "By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life," Seidenberg recently wrote, "government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise new capital and create new businesses."

Or take a look at Obama backer Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com website. "Why aren't businesses hiring?" asks tax lawyer Hale "Bonddad" Stewart. "Uncertainty: There has been a tremendous amount of change over the last 12 months. Businesses are still trying to figure out what this means for their bottom line. Until there are firm answers, they will freeze hiring."

Instead of stimulating the economy, the Obama Democrats' policies have shocked it into immobility. People are lying on their mattresses, waiting for the next shock. At least one is definitely coming: The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year, which means that high earners can be sure they will very soon keep less of what they make.

Atlas Shrugged.

Gentlemen, it's them or us.

Do we want to live as men or live in a world of "sparkly vampires" and "Eat, Pray, Love"?

Watch the damn movie.

More cool but very basic mysteries of life you have wondered about...

Today, io-9 answers the question, "why are clouds white"? 

After all, we know that water droplets are transparant since we see them when they fall on us.

So, why are clouds - which are nothing but a whole bunch of water droplets - white?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Visible light comes at us in many different wavelengths, each corresponding to a slightly different color. When all the wavelengths combine, they show up as white light. White light may be a combination of wavelengths, but it's not a permanent combination of them. Under certain circumstances, wavelengths can be separated out. For example, earth's atmosphere tends to scatter blue light, while letting the other wavelengths of light pass through in a straight line. Because of this, the sky is blue – made up of diffuse, scattered light – while the sunlight that falls around us tends to be more golden, because the blue wavelengths of light have been filtered out. That's called Rayleigh scattering.


Clouds also scatter light. Unlike oxygen and nitrogen molecules, which are picky about which kind of light they scatter, larger water droplets scatter all kinds of light in all directions. This is called Mie Scattering. When we look up at clouds, we see red light, blue light, yellow and orange and green light, all coming at us. We can't see the individual colors, though, because since they're all coming at our eye from the same place. Together, they all combine - Power Ranger style - to make white light. That's what hits our eyes, and makes us perceive clouds as white.

Rayleigh Scattering, check.  Mie Scattering, check. Sunlight is golden, check.  It's all good.

The Orthodox theologian who compared the PCUSA's gay agenda to modern paganism....

...probably won't be asked to deliver the opening speech to the next PCUSA General Assembly:

An Orthodox Church theologian who was invited to greet the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has criticized its approval of non-celibate homosexual clergy.


The Reverend Siarhei Hardun of Belarus said that vote and efforts to approve same-gender "marriage" looked to him like an attempt to "invent a new religion -- a sort of modern paganism."

"Christian morality is as old as Christianity itself. It doesn't need to be invented now," he said of attempts to create what he described as a "new morality."

Hardun added, "When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible."

The Orthodox priest's remarks drew applause from conservative Presbyterians who made similar arguments at the gathering in Minneapolis.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Francis Beckwith, in the comments of Called to Communion, on the problem of infinite regression of scriptural authority:

[Jason wrote;] No, the Bible is THE FINAL AUTHORITY, the confessions, councils and creeds are only authoritative in that they agree with scripture.”


[Francis Beckwith wrote:]  But this principle–”the Bible is THE FINAL AUTHORITY, the confessions, councils and creeds are only authoritative in that they agree with scripture”–is itself a confession. So, if confessions are not authoritative, then we can, without contradiction, reject your confession as well. On the other hand, if your confession ought to be believed, it must believed on the grounds that it agrees with Scripture. But it does not agree with Scripture, since the Scripture never claims it is the final authority. And besides, it could not be, since the collection of books we call Scripture had to be compiled and thus the grounds for the compilation–what books belong and don’t belong in Scripture–is logically prior to the Scripture itself. Thus, there is an authority–the grounds of the compilation–that determines what belongs in Scripture. So, Scripture is not “the final authority.”

Now, if you want to claim that Scripture as final authority is your fundamental presupposition, that’s your right. But then one can say in response: It isn’t to me. And you will say: It is. And again: It isn’t. Now we are at an impasse that cannot be resolve by appealing to Scripture, since the debate is over whether Scripture is the final authority.

Glorifying Eco-terrorist Violence: Whale Wars.

I've been seeing Animal Planet's "Whale Wars" ads and my basic reaction has been "W.T.F?"  It seems that the ads are depicting acts of violence, such as throwing acid at the crew of whaling boats, as heroic.  It seems to me that such conduct is nothing short of violent thuggery.

Apparently, Richard Spilman at the Huffington Post agrees:

What's not to like? The show is action on the high seas; ocean combat to save the whales! Everyone likes whales. I like whales. Who doesn't like whales? What great television for those bored with shows about fishing off Alaska, Ice Road Truckers or the Real Housewives of Duluth!


So what is the problem with "Whale Wars"? The problem is that it is cheap exploitation in praise of what is nothing less than eco-terrorism. It is the glorification of vigilantism on the high seas. And oh, by the way, the Sea Shepherds do almost nothing to protect the whales where they really do need protection.

While "Whale Wars" presents a simplistic case of us against them, the noble environmentalists against the evil whalers, the reality, of course, is not so black and white. By international agreement with the International Whaling Commission, the Japanese were allowed to kill up to a nine hundred minke whales and fifty fin whales in 2007/2008 in the Antarctic ocean for "research purposes." Critics claim that this is thinly disguised commercial whaling. Whatever it may be, minke whales, in particular, are not considered to be particularly threatened. Estimates have placed the minke population in the Southern Hemisphere in the range of 200,000-416,700 whales.

Negotiating international agreements may not make for rousing "reality TV" but it has made a significant difference in actually "saving the whales."

The Sea Shepherds on "Whale Wars" are abolitionist animal rights activists. They believe that every whale is sacred and should be preserved. On this basis, they justify aggressively interfering with and attempting to disable whaling ships in international waters, including pelting the ships with bottles containing butyric acid, which recently injured four Japanese crew members. Their zealotry is strongly reminiscent of anti-abortion extremists. (Both groups share a fondness for butyric acid attacks.) The Sea Shepherds also attempt to maneuver Zodiac boats in between the whalers and their prey. More seriously, they have taken to ramming Japanese whalers with their ship, the Steve Irwin. (They deny this but several videos of the Irwin ramming a whaler are widely available.) Members of the Sea Shepherds have also boarded whalers at sea and in one case the Sea Shepherds interfered with the search and rescue of a Japanese sailor washed overboard. (The Sea Shepherds deny they interfered but that is not the opinion of those conducting the search and rescue.)

The Sea Shepherds fly the Jolly Roger flag of piracy. I think that they should be more accurately described as eco-terrorists.

"''Hitler's Pope' saved thousands of Jewish lives."

This is old news, but worth repeating.  According to the Telegraph, Pope Pius XII secretly issued thousands of visas to save Jewish lives:

 Pope Pius, who was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.


The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based inter-faith group.


He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for “non-Aryan Catholics” and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Elliot Hershberg, the chairman of the Pave the Way Foundation, said:“ We believe that many Jews who were successful in leaving

Europe may not have had any idea that their visas and travel documents were obtained through these Vatican efforts.

“Everything we have found thus far seems to indicate the known negative perception of Pope Pius XII is wrong.”

And:

The appeal from Cardinal Pacelli, then the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was dated Nov 30, 1938 – 20 days after Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass”.


Cardinal Pacelli was able to ask for the visas because the 1933 concordat he signed with the Nazis specifically provided protection for Jews who converted to Christianity.

Dr Ed Kessler, the director of the Cambridge-based Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths, said: “It is clear that Pius XII facilitated the saving of Roman Jews.”

In December, Pope Benedict XVI placed Pius one step closer to sainthood when he declared him “Venerable”, meaning that the Church believes he lived a life of “heroic virtue”.

Two miracles are needed to canonise him as a saint and the Vatican is investigating at least one apparently inexplicable healing.

Some Jewish groups want the process frozen until the Vatican is ready to open its secret wartime archives in 2014.

Sir Martin Gilbert, a British historian and the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust, has said that Pope Pius XII should be considered as a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority.

Great Quotes.

The Weekly Standard offers these quotes from Marine General James Mattis, who was selected this week to head CENTCOM:

Mattis is extraordinarily well-read and well-spoken, but he’s also willing to be direct and blunt on occasion. The Scrapbook has enjoyed some of the Mattisisms that have been circulating since the announcement of his pick, and thought you would too:

♦ Speaking to tribal leaders in Iraq: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f— with me, I’ll kill you all.”

♦ Convincing an Iraqi that the United States wouldn’t cut and run: “I said I am never going to leave. I told him I had found a little piece of property down on the Euphrates River and I was going to have a retirement home built there. I did that because I wanted to disabuse him of any sense that he could wait me out.”
 
♦ Advice to soldiers and Marines: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

Repeal the Natural Law so that students won't feel uncomfortable.

University of Illinois professor fired for teaching in an Introduction to Catholicism class that the Catholic Church taught that homosexual conduct is wrong from a Natural Law perspective.

An adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois has lost his teaching job there, and he claims it is a violation of his academic freedom.


Kenneth Howell was told after the spring semester ended that he would no longer be teaching in the UI's Department of Religion. The decision came after a student complained about a discussion of homosexuality in the class in which Howell taught that the Catholic Church believes homosexual acts are morally wrong.

Howell has been an adjunct lecturer in the department for nine years, during which he taught two courses, Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought. He was also director of the Institute of Catholic Thought, part of St. John's Catholic Newman Center on campus and the Catholic Diocese of Peoria. Funding for his salary came from the Institute of Catholic Thought.

One of his lectures in the introductory class on Catholicism focuses on the application of natural law theory to a social issue. In early May, Howell wrote a lengthy e-mail to his students, in preparation for an exam, in which he discusses how the theory of utilitarianism and natural law theory would judge the morality of homosexual acts.

"Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY," he wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The News-Gazette. "In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same."

He went on to write there has been a disassociation of sexual activity from morality and procreation, in contradiction of Natural Moral Theory.

The student complaint came in a May 13 e-mail to Robert McKim, head of the religion department. The author of the e-mail said he was writing on behalf of a friend – a student in Howell's class, who wanted to remain anonymous. The e-mail complained about Howell's statements about homosexuality, which the student called "hate speech."

"Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing," the student wrote in the e-mail. "Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another. The courses at this institution should be geared to contribute to the public discourse and promote independent thought; not limit one's worldview and ostracize people of a certain sexual orientation."

Who is a professor teaching a course on Natural Law to teach that anything actually violates Natural Law.
Francis Beckworth observes:

When I was in college (79-83), I was told by my professors, who ranged from liberal to Marxist, that at the university I would hear and read things that would challenge what I learned at home and church. In fact, my favorite professor, Randy Sheldon (a Marxist sociologist), called it "culture shock."


But, as Randy would sometimes put it, if you disagree with your professor, your job is to offer contrary arguments, and it is the duty of the professor and your fellow students to answer you with reasoned respect, even if they find your views as troubling as you find theirs.

This was the animating spirit of university life that drew me to it. It was not a place for crybabies or bullies. It was a place for serious men and women willing to undergo mutual interrogation in a climate of brutal honesty in which recrimination for holding controversial views was worse than being wrong.

The aggrieved student in the Howell case is the product of a generation of institutional coddling that rewards intellectual immaturity if it can feign personal offense.

 
Yes, but back then, the "challenging" ideas were always from the Left.  Anything other than ideas from the Left are by definition "exclusivist" and "racist" and therefore not entitled to the protection afforded "free speech."

Here's an answer to a question you probably never asked...

What would the Earth look like if it stopped spinning?

What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? We don't have any reason to think it will in the next few million millennia, but Witold Fraczek, an employee of geographic imaging software company ESRI, was curious. He used ArcGIS, the company's flagship software, to build a virtual model of the planet in the absence of centrifugal force.


Currently, the spin of our planet (it goes 1,667 kilometers per hour at the equator) pulls the mass of water toward the equator, creating an unsightly ellipsoidal bulge, and the oceans we are familiar with.

Fraczek modeled the gradual change in the planet's geography that would happen as Earth slowed to a halt. As the spin stopped, the oceans would all fall back toward the poles, drowning everything north of Chicago and south of Buenos Aires and creating two massive circumpolar oceans. Wrapped around the middle of the planet would be a single equatorial megacontinent, with giant dry valleys where the old Atlantic and Pacific used to be. The immobile planet would be a perfect, if somewhat mountainous, sphere.

Obviously we need to regulate anything that could lead to this nightmare scenario.

Free thought versus Thoughtcrime.

Maggie Gallagher at NRO  observes that the stake of the homosexual marriage debate is defining  as "bigots" those people who continue to hold the traditionally obvious position that marriage is an institution that is essentially connected to the project of "making babies." She writes:

At a private conference last year, I was asked why I did not begin my talks by acknowledging in some fashion the legitimacy of same-sex relationships — either through support for civil unions or some other way. “Like it or not,” I am told, “that is the currency to be taken seriously.” I wasn’t fast enough to think of this at the time, but what I should have done was whip out my birth certificate and say, “Here, here’s the currency I need to speak up in defense of marriage. I was born free. I may or may not die free. Power is a reality. But I will not volunteer to live in a world where an idea as good and reasonable as ‘to make a marriage you need a husband and wife’ gets treated a radioactive proposition that you need to ‘pay some price’ in order to express.” Marriage deserves its unique status, because these are the only unions that can make new life and connect children in love to their mother and father. On that ground, I will stand or fall.

Amen.

On the same subject, Vox Day observes that a Massachusetts federal judge has ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional as violating the Equal Protection rights of homosexual couples. Day correctly observes that if there is nothing sacrosanct about the "man and woman" part of "one man and one woman", there is equally nothing sacrosanct about the "one" part either:

  And now that the one man, one woman definition has been arbitrarily struck down on nonsensical grounds, there can be absolutely no question that the one man, one woman part will be challenged and struck down as well. All of the homogamy supporters who claim otherwise are already wrong, as anyone who happens to have read a pro-polygamy press release will know. That's a done deal. It's a bit more of a stretch to be able to tell if people will also be able to marry animals due to the presumed consent issues, but you can bet that some horse-loving freakshow is going to try. It's legal in New Zealand, you know.

Well, why not?  If the purpose of "marriage" is not related to "making babies," then why not 10 men or a man and an ocelot.

Wintery Knight links to an article pointing out what happens when the truth is ignored, in this case, ingoring the complimentary of men and women in favor of the specious belief that men and women are fungible:

Ultimately, she said, the emotional rollercoaster forced her to reconsider her lesbian plunge – something she clearly says she “chose,” and was not born into. “Unlike most men, women, of course, offer each other endless support and there’s hardly ever any lack of communication,” she said. “But – bizarre as it may seem – I found myself longing for exactly the opposite.”


Following “a calculated decision to try men again,” Clune says that she found in her future husband Richard a “quiet kindness” and “lack of neediness” that appealed to her. “I felt we were walking alongside each other rather than spending life locked in face-to-face intimacy or combat,” she wrote. “It felt natural and not at all scary. He was sanguine about my past and never suffered the insecurities I had come to expect.”

From the article:

Clune, who is also known as a cabaret performer, actress, and broadcaster, says she was raised in a "very traditional Irish Catholic" home and and fell in love with a man at 17. It was in college that she stumbled upon a pamphlet claiming that heterosexuality is a mere construct to be altered at will, which prompted her to break up with her boyfriend and live the typical lesbian lifestyle for the next 12 years, until she was 34 years old.


"I was excited by the close bond a relationship with another female could bring," she writes.

But the experience was not as she at first envisioned it to be. In an interview with the Times' Penny Wark in October 2005, Clune called lesbian culture "dictatorial and intimidating" and "the opposite of the sapphic fluffy nirvana I expected."

Despite the closeness of her relationships, Clune admits that the hyper-emotional world of a female-to-female sexual bond was "exhausting." "The women I went out with were by and large more inclined to be insecure and to need reassurance and I found myself in the male role of endlessly reassuring my girlfriends," she writes. "The subtle mood changes of everyday life would be picked over inexhaustibly."

So much for "sapphic fluffy nirvanas."

The article also alludes to a secret side of homosexual relationships that is carefully ignored in the lovingly nurtured stereotypes - the high level of gay on gay violence within homosexual relationships:

"One of the key criteria of lesbianism is emotional dependency," said Goldberg. "In male gay relationships, it's much more about sex. More typically [with] lesbian women ... it's much more serial monogamy.


"Your relationship lasts 2-3 years [in which] you can't live without the other person, your whole world is this person, which is why there's so much jealousy in the lesbian world, and why there's so much violence in the lesbian world."

Goldberg said it was also not uncommon for women, often more "sexually fluid" than men, to choose to enter the lesbian lifestyle after some experience of disillusionment with men, before returning to heterosexuality.

Optimism

This is why I like Father Barron.  Where I look out and see a bunch of obnoxious morons, he sees people who care enough to write a response to his Youtube videos.

Climategate report finds...

that the "trick" designed to "hide the decline" was misleading:

Here is the report.  The "misleading" conclusion is buried in the report.

The Political Manipulation of Science.

One of life's great truths is that if you are being accused of doing something you are not doing, then you can bet that your accuser is doing it.  A case in point is the charge that Republicans politically manipulate science.  The evidence thus far is that the left has been caught red handed in falsifying "scientific" data for political purposes in the areas of climate change and abortion.  Another area of liberal political manipulation of science is the social science of homosexual relationships.

There is an inherent risk that anyone who has anything to say about gay male or lesbian parenting, no matter how cautious, will be misunderstood at best and vilified at worst. Nevertheless, the mission of a university professor includes seeking new ways to look at old issues, to resist all forms of intimidation, and to ensure that multiple sides of controversial issues are considered. Since there are more voices promoting the virtues of parenting by people defining themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT), I will present here an alternative, possibly minority, view that focuses on some of the possible risks associated with gay and lesbian parenting.


This is a challenging area. As one hint about the difficulties, consider this: when a group of authors published three articles (two even in the same journal) on data from the same set of lesbian parents about 1980, the two articles reporting favorable outcomes were cited 65 times compared to only two citations for the one article reporting unfavorable outcomes. In other cases, the worse the methodological quality of the research, the more likely it is to have been cited in major reviews of the literature.

The methodological quality of much of the literature is poor. Many studies have not controlled for parental educational and family per-capita income differences between lesbian and heterosexual families. Regardless, between February and June of 2010 no less than three articles have concluded that two lesbian mothers may, on average, tend to be better parents than heterosexual parents (Biblarz & Stacey, 2010; Gartrell & Bos, 2010; Biblarz & Savci, 2010) -- quite a controversial position. However, serious concerns remain.

Sexual Fidelity

Research is increasingly clear that many lesbigay partners enter into their versions of a committed relationship with expectations that cheating is acceptable. Some research suggests that gay men have more stable relationships only if cheating is permitted. Michael Bettinger (2006) reported: “An important difference between gay men and heterosexuals is that the majority of gay men in committed relationships are not monogamous”.

Dr. Esther Rothblum has reported that whereas women (lesbian or heterosexual) seldom permit sexual affairs, “40 percent of gay men in civil unions have an agreement that non-monogamy is permitted and over half have had sex outside their current relationship”. If gay marriage means accepting sexual non-monogamy within marriage, we must accept an inherent change in the intrinsic meaning of marriage and ultimately the meaning of responsible parenting.

Relationship Stability and Children

Another issue concerns the relationship between having children and staying together for the sake of the children. Though gay and lesbian couples in some studies appear to have higher quality, more satisfying relationships, they also appear less likely to remain stable when children are involved. Recent studies by Patterson and by Nanette Gartrell in the United States, as well as Scandinavian research, confirm this outcome, even when the GLBT subjects sampled had much higher levels of education than the heterosexual subjects.

Recently, Gartrell and Bos reported that over 56 per cent of lesbian parents had separated by the time their child was 17 years old. Based on the mothers’ reports of the children’s psychological adjustment, the adverse impact of that instability was not quite statistically significant. Comparable studies of heterosexual parents have found rates of separation ranging from 3 per cent to less than 30 percent over similar timeframes.

As yet, we have no published data on the stability of legally married LGBT parents. However, recent evidence indicates that very few GLBT individuals come together with the intention of having children and few, in fact, ever have children; if they do have a child, few spend the entire year with that child.

Effects on Children

Richard Redding, writing in a 2008 issue of the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, concluded that gay parents were more likely to have gay children. My meta-analyses of 26 studies and ten books on GLBT parenting concur with his findings (Schumm, in press). Furthermore, my research indicates that many literature reviews have systematically excluded information about negative child outcomes associated with gay parenting -- that is, greater levels of insecure attachment and drug abuse among daughters of gay fathers. The most recent review of literature on GLBT families did not mention Sirota’s (2009) research, even though I reported a summary of it two years ago.

Space does not permit an adequate treatment here, but some research suggests differential effects on sex role orientations of children and their views of non-monogamous sexuality. My hunch is that delayed gratification orientation may be an important intervening variable for understanding the influence of parental sexual orientation on child outcomes, but I am not aware of any studies on that variable.

Again, there appear to be differences in reporting of child outcomes, depending on the source of the data – whether parents, children, or teachers, for example. My sense is that maternal reports tend to be influenced by what the writers understand to be socially desirable outcomes, especially if the mothers sense the political purposes of the study.