Thank Heavens there is a foreign press to tell us what our president is doing.

Obama goes golfing on Memorial Day, which, according to Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph, might be fine for us working schlubs, but he's the fargin' Commander in Chief, and is supposed to be sharing in the sacrifice of his military:

Can you imagine David Cameron enjoying a round of golf on Remembrance Sunday? It would be inconceivable for the British Prime Minister to do so, and not just because of the usually dire weather at that time of the year. Above all, it would be viewed as an act of extremely bad taste on a day when the nation remembers and mourns her war dead. I can’t imagine the PM even considering it, and I’m sure his advisers would be horrified at the idea. And if the prime minister ever did play golf on such a sacrosanct day he would be given a massive drubbing by the British press, and it would never be repeated.


Contrast this with President Obama’s decision to play golf yesterday, Memorial Day, for the 70th time during his 28-month long presidency. For tens of millions of Americans, Memorial Day is a time for remembrance of the huge sacrifices made by servicemen and women on the battlefield. The president did pay his respects in the morning, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, but later in the day traveled to Fort Belvoir to play golf. The story has not been reported so far in a single US newspaper, but was made public by veteran White House correspondent Keith Koffler on his blog.

And:

Does it matter if the president chooses to play golf on Memorial Day, and for the second time in his presidency (he did so as well in 2009)? I think it does, and it displays extraordinarily bad judgment, not only by Obama himself but also by his advisers. His chief of staff for example should have firmly cautioned against it. President Obama is not just any American but Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. The United States is currently engaged in a major war in Afghanistan with over 100,000 troops on the ground, and more than 1,500 have already laid down their lives for their country.


The least the president can do on Memorial Day is spend the whole day with veterans and servicemen’s families while acknowledging their sacrifice. As Koffler points out above, President George W. Bush stopped playing golf out of respect for the families of Iraq War dead. This demonstrated not only good judgment but humility and respect for the men and women who keep America safe. It is little wonder that, as Gallup reveals in a new poll, US military personnel and veterans give Barack Obama lower marks for his job performance than members of the general public. The president’s actions smack of poor taste, as well a lack of empathy and support for the US military, hardly the kind of leadership the White House should be projecting at a time of war.

From the "Commies are Evil" file - there is no vision of dystopia imagined by a Science Fiction writer that the Communists can't out-imagine...

...and bring into reality.

You've got your man-created famines in the Ukraine, and your intergenerational prison camps in Korea, and your one-child policy backed by forced abortions and sterilizations in China, and now you've got your abduction of "illegal children" whose parents aren't able to pay their illegal child fines:

The fines now imposed on violators of the one-child policy are, by any standards, enormous. In one Chinese county, declared by the UNFPA to be a “Model Birth Control County,” we photographed a billboard of birth control regulations that warned:

Those who illegally reproduce … will be assessed, when their illegal behavior is discovered, a “social compensation fee” based on a unit calculated from a year’s salary for urban dwellers and based on a year’s income after expenses for rural dwellers.

Those who illegally give birth to one child will be assessed a fine 3 to 5 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a second child will be assessed a fine from 5 to 7 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a third child will be assessed a fine from 7 to 9 times their annual income; those who give birth to 4 or more illegal children will be assessed a fine extrapolated from the above schedule of multiples. For those who illegally take in a child, have an extramarital birth, or have an out of wedlock birth, both parties involved will be assessed a “social compensation fee” according to the above schedule of (income) multiples.

That these fines were actually imposed was clear from our discussions with ordinary Chinese. We were told again and again that violators are fined “tens of thousands of renminbi,” or “20,000 or 30,000 renminbi.” These are enormous sums of money by Chinese standards. One woman reported that she and her husband had been forced to take out a 10-year loan to pay the 25,000 renminbi fine that had been assessed for each of her two illegal daughters. To pay off this “child mortgage,” her husband had been forced to go to work in the city.

And:

When we asked what would happen if a couple couldn’t afford to pay the fine, we were told that offenders would be visited by population control officials who would “seal off” their homes, and possibly even destroy them, as punishment for non-payment.


But these punishments pale in comparison with reports of child abduction. In Lipu county, another UNFPA Model Birth Control County, located in northern Guangxi province, we were told by a village official that “At the present time, if you don’t pay the fine, they come and abduct the baby you just gave birth to and give it to someone else.”

This practice of child abduction has recently been confirmed by the Chinese government. According to a report in the Caixin Century magazine, authorities in the southern Chinese province of Hunan have begun investigating a report that population control officials had seized at least 16 babies born in violation of strict family planning rules, sent them to state-run orphanages, and then sold them abroad for adoption. “Before 1997, they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy, but after 2000 they began to confiscate our children,” the magazine quoted villager Yuan Chaoren as saying.

The children, reportedly from Longhui county near Hunan province’s Shaoyang city, had been abducted by who accused their parents of breaching the one-child policy or illegally adopting children. The local family planning office then sent the children to local orphanages, which listed them as being available for adoption, the report said, adding the office could get 1,000 renminbi or more for each child. The orphanages in turn receive $3,000 to $5,000 for each child adopted overseas, money that is paid by the adoptive parents. The magazine reported that at least one migrant worker said she had found her daughter had been adopted abroad and was now living in the United States.

Via Mark Shea.

Based on the way the issue is constantly depicted in the cultural media, it is understandable that so many Americans believe this wrong factoid...

...on the other hand, it is weird how this false belief is never one that atheists and liberals trot out to prove that Americans are scientifically illiterate.

According to Gallup, most Americans believe that Homosexuals make up 25% of the population.



The truth is that something under 2% of the population is male homosexual, with female homosexuals amounting to .2% of the population (despite efforts to claim that the number is more like 10% of the population, which has never been verified.)  Here is a recent study on the subject: 

Key findings from the research brief are as follows:


 An estimated 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and an estimated 0.3% of adults are transgender.

 This implies that there are approximately 9 million LGBT Americans, a figure roughly equivalent to the population of New Jersey.

 Among adults who identify as LGB, bisexuals comprise a slight majority (1.8% compared to 1.7% who identify as lesbian or gay).

 Women are substantially more likely than men to identify as bisexual. Bisexuals comprise more than half of the lesbian and bisexual population among women in eight of the nine surveys considered in the brief. Conversely, gay men comprise substantially more than half of gay and bisexual men in seven of the nine surveys.

 Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as LGB. An estimated 19 million Americans (8.2%) report that they have engaged in same-sex sexual behavior and nearly 25.6 million Americans (11%) acknowledge at least some same-sex sexual attraction.

 Understanding the size of the LGBT population is a critical first step to informing a host of public policy and research topics. The surveys highlighted in this report demonstrate the viability of sexual orientation and gender identity questions on large national population-based surveys. Adding these questions to more national, state, and local data sources is critical to developing research that enables a better understanding of the understudied LGBT community.

So, in order to get the percentage over 2%, bixexuals have to be included, which is weird because so much of the apologetic in favor of homosexual rights is that GLBT individuals can't choose, and it seems that bisexuals can choose and are choosing.

The inference of the Gallup polls contradiction of reality is interesting.  It seems that a sizeable percentage of the population are over-estimating the population of homosexuals.  It would seem that if one believed that there really was 25% of the population that was homosexual, then that would affect how we viewed the "normality" of homosexuality and are views on social policy relative to the legalization of homosexual marriage.  Quite simply, it would seem that if so many people were denied access to marriage, something has got to change.

This may seem counter-intuitive because it would seem that the smaller the population, the less likely changes in policy would have a significant effect on marriage as an institution.  On the other hand, if it is such a small number it doesn't seem like such a great denial of rights in the aggregate, although on an individual basis the effect is the same if the population is 1% or 25%.

Perhaps, it is just some "common sense" utilitarianism at work there.

Another point is that it isn't clear if the over-estimate comes from a collusion of forces that want to ramp up people's belief that there is a large population of homosexuals, or if it is an artifact of television shows making sure that a homosexual character is included, or if it is that so much attention is paid to homosexual issues, that most people just assume that there must be a larger population of homosexuals than actually exists in their own experience.

"Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion."


- G. K. Chesterton

In which we discover "hyper-dispensationalism." 

From that blog whose name we dare not utter, lest we summon its proprietor in a cloud of sulfurous smoke:

[Pastor Joel] Finck is one of the leading defenders of the particular (and popular) version of Hyper-Dispensationalism espoused by Cornelius R. Stam and the Berean Bible Society (bereanbiblesociety.org). Stam wrote one of the clearest (and most theologically and hermeneutically absurd) defenses of the theology in the book Things That Differ: The Fundamentals of Dispensationalism (1951). Stam's ultimate purpose in his writings was to argue that his theology (along with Charles Baker) was the true version of Dispensationalism that all the previous Dispensational thinkers had missed, and in doing so, mainline evangelicalism had missed the "true theology boat" altogether.


As you might have guessed, this kind of situation is going to produce some bad theology. As I pointed out almost a year ago (here), Finck and the BBS believe the following:

1. The Bible is divided up into absolute dispensations.[1] Therefore…

2. Paul introduces a completely new gospel (the “mystery” was revealed to him only) with the inauguration of the Dispensation of Grace.[2] Therefore…

2A.There are “two gospels” in the New Testament that are not compatible with each other[3]; Peter, Jesus, and all those prior to Paul believed in works-righteous salvation while Paul taught a gospel of grace.[4] Therefore…

2B. Only Paul’s epistles are the basis for doctrine today,[5] and people are not saved by the teachings of Jesus or Peter, but exclusively by the gospel of Paul.[6]

3.There is no “Great Commission” in Matthew’s gospel.[7]

4. Water baptism is no longer a church ordinance. In fact, it’s “dangerous.”[8]

All very logical, but doesn't it sort of miss the point about Jesus and all that?
All one can say is "Chesterton was right."

From the "They Haven't Got a Clue " file.

Dr. Michael Sidibe praised Pope Benedict for giving new room for dialogue, apparently by saying something new.

The head of the U.N. AIDS agency told a Vatican conference Saturday that the pope had opened the door to greater dialogue with his groundbreaking comments on condoms and HIV prevention – even as Vatican officials stressed abstinence and marital fidelity as the best prevention.


Dr. Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, was invited to speak to the conference on preventing HIV and caring for HIV-positive people, a significant event in and of itself, given that the Vatican usually only invites like-minded outsiders to its conferences and UNAIDS has not been like-minded on this issue at all.

UNAIDS holds that condoms are an "integral and essential" part of HIV prevention programs, which it says should also include education about delaying the start of sexual activity, limiting sexual partners and marital fidelity. The Catholic Church opposes condom use as part of its overall opposition to artificial contraception.

The Church does, however, play a crucial role in caring for HIV-positive people, particularly in Africa where some two-thirds of the world's 22 million infected people live. It runs hospitals and hospices, orphanages and clinics and has played a critical role in helping to de-stigmatize those with the virus and stress the need for changes in sexual behavior to stop its spread.

But the Church has long been accused of contributing to the AIDS crisis because of its opposition to condoms.

That was why Pope Benedict XVI made headlines last year when he said in the book "Light of the World" that a male prostitute who intends to use a condom might be taking a first step toward greater responsibility because he is looking out for the welfare of his partner.

"This is very important," Sidibe told the conference. "This has helped me to understand his position better and has opened up a new space for dialogue."

At the same time, however, the Vatican officials speaking at the conference either glossed over or made no reference whatsoever to Benedict's condom remarks – evidence of a certain "one step forward, two steps back" mentality that often characterizes developments in the Catholic Church.

Dr. Sidibe and the author of this column demonstrate that they have spent so much time listening to their "amen corner" that their ability to hear and understand something other than what they want to hear has atrophied.

Benedict did not endorse condom usage.  What he did was say that when a person choose to commit a moral wrong in a way that limits worse evils to other people rather than lesser evils, that person may be making the first steps toward a conversion. 

That's all.

It's nothing new really, and hardly surprising, except to people who can't handle shades of gray in their moral outlook.

More evidence that the Viking settlements in Greenland...

...were wiped out by the Little Ice Age.

This time the evidence is "lake cores" from the area in which the Vikings lived.

Cool and all that, but isn't this pretty settled?

Inconstant Sun.

New arguments for the proposition that the "Little Ice Age" was caused by the Sun dimming for an extended period.

Water is wet, the sky is blue, and ...

pretty flirty women can get men to give them free stuff.

Here's the video.


Documentary : Sexy Girls Have It Easy from Bright Hand Pictures on Vimeo.


Here's the article.

From the "Whisky Tango Foxtrot" File....

Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake.

Italian government officials have accused the country's top seismologist of manslaughter, after failing to predict a natural disaster that struck Italy in 2009, a massive devastating earthquake that killed 308 people.


A shocked spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) likened the accusations to a witch hunt.

"It has a medieval flavor to it -- like witches are being put on trial," the stunned spokesman told FoxNews.com.

Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), will face trial along with six other scientists and technicians, after failing to predict the future and the impending disaster.

Earthquakes are, of course, nearly impossible to predict, seismologists say. In fact, according to the website for the USGS, no major quake has ever been predicted successfully.

And:

The seven scientists were placed under investigation almost a year ago, according to a news story on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) -- the world's largest general-science society and a leading voice for the interests of scientists worldwide.


Alan Leschner, chief executive of AAAS, said his group wrote a letter to the Italian government last year -- clearly, to no avail.

"Whoever made these accusations misunderstands the nature of science, the nature of the discipline and how difficult it is to predict anything with the surety they expect," Leschner told FoxNews.com.

The case could have a "chilling effect" on scientists, he noted.

"It reflects a lack of understanding about what science can and can't do," he said. "And frankly, it will have an effect of intimidating scientists ... This just feels like either scapegoating or an attempt to intimidate a community. This really seems inappropriate."

Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella said that the seven defendants had supplied "imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information," in a press conference following a meeting held by the committee 6 days before the quake, reported the Italian daily Corriere della Sera

In doing so, they "thwarted the activities designed to protect the public," the judge said.

Boschi's lawyer, Marcello Melandri, has been taking the news badly, reported the AAAS story. He was particularly stunned because -- despite of the near impossibility of predicting earthquakes Boshi had been indicating that a large earthquake would be coming, though he did not say when.

Melandri told the AAAS that Boschi never sought to reassure the population of L'Aquila that there was no threat. On the contrary, the INGV head made it clear that "at some point it is probable that there will be a big earthquake."

In addition to Boschi, those facing trial are:

* Franco Barberi, committee vice president;

* Bernardo De Bernardinis, at the time vice president of Italy's Civil Protection Department and now president of the country's Institute for Environmental Protection and Research;

* Giulio Selvaggi, director of the National Earthquake Center;

* Gian Michele Calvi, director of the European Center for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering;

* Claudio Eva, an earth scientist at the University of Genoa; and

* Mauro Dolce, director of the office of seismic risk at the Civil Protection Department

Hah! That will teach those know-it-all geologists with their know-it-all geologist smirks and their condescending geologist attitude, all full of "I'm a geologist so fall down and worship me," to make better predictions.

Seriously, WTF?

Unless this is blow-back from the New Atheist agitprop and people are starting to believe that "Science can tell us everything."

For years we've been pouring money into education and ...

...for years we've seen a deterioration in education, including fewer electives, more restrictions on the best students, and, of course, declining test scores.

It's interesting that during the same time, teaching has become highly lucrative.

Tracy Coenen takes up my mantra, "I never, ever want to hear that teachers are underpaid again."  But she has the data to back it up:

Quite by accident, I came across a database listing teacher salaries and benefits for the metro Milwaukee area. The database allows you to enter any teacher or administrator’s last name, and see the value of their salary and benefits for the 2006-07 school year. This is all public information that is required to be made available by the Department of Public Instruction.


I know a few teachers in the area, and I knew they were well-paid. But I had no idea how much. For all of the teachers that I entered into the system, I came up with salaries in the range of $50,000 to $70,000 per year, and benefits in the range of $30,000 to 40,000 per year.

That means the teachers I know, who all have experience in the range of 5 to 15 years, are being compensated in the neighborhood of $80,000 to $110,000 for working part time.

Part time, you say? Yes, part time. That’s what a teacher’s job is… part time. Your average professional logs between 40 and 50 hours a week, for about 48 weeks a year (if you factor in holidays and vacation time). That’s about 1,920 to 2,400 working hours per year.

A teacher works 180 school days, plus I’ll give them another 10 days for meetings and conventions. (Although here, almost no one goes to conventions even though they’re theoretically mandatory.) The workday of a teacher is about 6 hours, even including “correcting papers” or other fluff that makes it sound like they work more. But 6 hours is a pretty generous estimate of the time actually spent working.

That means a teacher works 1,140 hours a year, which is only about 60% of the low end of other professionals, and about 48% of the high end for other professionals. So a teacher works about half as much as other professionals.

And in the Milwaukee area, they’re being compensated $80,000 to $100,000 for that part time job. I don’t ever want to hear again that teachers aren’t paid enough. That is outrageous compensation for what amounts to a part-time job.

And is it any accident that teachers are among the biggest whiners when it comes to complaining about how hard they work, or that they are also the profession that turns out for the Democrats whenever any attempt is made to control spending?

On tolerance.

Shortly before running in the front door of the room marked "tolerance" and running out the back door, we lived in the world that John Stuart Mill made.

This will probably come as a surprise for those who think I am the living embodiement of intolerance because I hold definite opinions - and who don't seem to notice that I hang out with people who don't belong to my intellectual tribe - but, in college, one of my areas of study was John Stuart Mill, and particularly his ideas on tolerance.

A second surprise for a lot of people is that Mill was advocating for social tolerance - not just legal tolerance - so that people with unpopular ideas could flourish.  He thought this was good because - as a true heir to his father's utilitarianism - those ideas just might be useful.  So, Mill was against social ostracism as much as he was against legal sanctions being used against ideas.

This is a short clip from someone named "Molotov Mitchell" who runs a series of these "For the Record" shorts.  They are obviously designed to catch the extremely short attention span of the post-internet generation.  There is something very Millian about Mitchell's description of his social ostracism for speaking his conscience and in Mitchell's advice not to sell out.

"The China Domino has Fallen."

China is beginning to export inflation to the rest of the world:

China is about the export inflation to the rest of the world in a process that will resemble the fall of three dominos, one of which is already fallen, according to Societe Generale.


In a massive report titled "The China Domino has Fallen!" Soc Gen analysts outline the three dominos of the Chinese inflation export scheme, and their current progress.

• Domestic inflation: China switch to a consumer driven economy means more domestic demand. Supply remains constant, so prices rise. This is already happening.

• China exports inflation: "This dynamic seems as inevitable as gravity itself." Chinese demand for oil and steel has pushed prices up in those markets. Now it is effecting commodities like cotton and food products. That's being passed on to developed markets like the U.S., and it will really hit home in 2012. This is in the process of happening.

• China demand shock: The country's long-term economic rebalancing results in an permanent increase in global demand. Supply is sticky, and it will take time for it to catch up, thus limiting the world's ability to cope with this rise in demand. This is starting to happen.

Continuing the "Rainbow Tour."

Nobel Prize winner refuses to meet with Nobel Prize winning President:

Lech Walesa, Poland's Solidarity-era legend, ex-president and 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner said Friday he would not accept an invitation to meet with fellow Nobel winner US President Barack Obama.


"It's difficult to tell journalists what you'd like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won't tell him, I won't meet him, it doesn't suit me," Walesa told Poland's public broadcaster TVP.

Obama is due to arrive in Poland later Friday after the G8 summit in France.

Walesa was originally scheduled to meet Obama Saturday along with other key figures in Poland's post-1989 transition from communism to democracy.

According to sources close to Walesa, he was expecting a personal invitation from Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 shortly after taking office.

Looks like the "star quality" is running thin.

Ed Schultz gives Good Apology.
He's an obnoxious loud-mouth, but his apology to Laura Ingraham for calling her a "slut" was - in the words of  Brent Bozell - a man's apology.

For her part, Laura Ingraham stayed classy and accepted the apology.

Cricket chirps and bird call from NOW.

Mystery solved.

On the botched toast front, it appears that no one briefed our President that making the toast cues the music with the words "to her majesty the Queen," so if you want to say something, say it before the fargin' toast.

If you watch around 12:10, you'll see Obama cue the music with the words "to her majesty the Queen," and then go on with his toast.

Watch this more complete video of the state dinner, particularly the speech by the Queen starting at 2:30 and going to about 6:30, when the Queen finally gets to the toast, which cues the music.



Bottom line - his fault.

Is it too much to get the guy some kind of protocol secretary?

Although with that "2008" signature, this is pretty surreal.

Remembering Obama's Gaffes in England.

In the interest of balance against the heckling jugheads who would have pounced on this if it had involved Bush, let's commemorate a couple of gaffes from Obama's week in England - one of which is disturbing, the second of which is probably just clumsy.

The disturbing one occurred when Obama dated his signature in a guest book with the date of "May 24 2008."

Everyone wishes they could turn back the clock sometimes, and it turns out Barack Obama is no different.

He got the date wrong by three years when he signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey today on his official visit to the UK - despite apparently asking the dean what day it was.

As a tough election looms next year and he faces criticism for his handling of the financial crisis, perhaps Mr Obama wished it was indeed May 24, 2008, when he was still a rising superstar.

Perhaps, and this is speculation, someone else dated the signature and that person is on drugs or signed the guest book in such a way as to embarass the President, although that is really doubtful given the way that the signature book was set-up.

If it's not someone else, then we have a right to ask, is the President on drugs?  What could cause him to sign "2008" in "2011"?  That's just disturbingly weird.

The second incident involved Obama giving a toast that was interrupted by "God Save the Queen," which he talked over.

traditional sequence took a strange turn on Tuesday evening as President Barack Obama dined with the Queen.

Obama was delivering a toast to the Queen, not unusual, but what happened next was. He fumbled -- or the orchestra was in error, you be the judge (watch below) -- leaving the Queen to look extremely uncomfortable.

The toast went awry after Obama said, "I propose a toast. To her majesty the Queen." The orchestra thought he was done, and began playing God Save The Queen. But he wasn't. And Obama continued his toast as the song played in the background

Well, that kind of thing could happen, and if it does happen, there is just no good way to get out of it without looking lame.  Here's the video.



I'm not "hoo-hahing" here.  I'm embarassed for our President, but we have had numerous occasions where leftist jugheads would use similar instances - Bush throwing up in Japan or having a shoe thrown at him in Iraq, for example -  for "humor." 

I'm not waiting to see whether John Stewart or Saturday Night Live turns either of these into a skit at Obama's expense, although Stewart may mention it out of some vestigial sense that his pose of speaking truth to power will be utterly compromised if he goes 100% in the tank for Obama.

Update:

Anne Althouse resolutely refuses to mock Obama's toast gaffe because it is too painful to watch, but she really does:

What if you gave a toast and nobody raised their glass with you, because they were in the middle of a solemn ritual that you had thought was the solemn ritual that is your toast but was their national anthem and the elderly queen was queenly enough to say gently to you "that's very kind"? You would carefully place your glass on the table and stand stiffly like everyone else and hope that the wide frown on your face expressed not your nightmare experience but some simulacrum of the "national anthem face" you should have had there all along, when you were blabbing that Shakespeare — Shakespeare! — to try to butter them up about what a great country they think they have. Oh! The rigidity of this horror!

I don't want to cut Obama slack - because I still think he should have been dragged over glass for bowing to foreign monarchs - but I think someone miscued the orchestra.

Losing Support.

Key Jewish breaks with Obama.

Reading?  I can take it or leave it.

6 strange but real addictions.

I didn't understand the one about "tanorexia" until the doctor explained that tanning can cause the release of endorphins.

Not that I'd know anything about tanning causing the release of endorphins from my personal experience....

More Cool Science Stuff.

Feuding white dwarf stars:

These observations revealed that uniquely both the white dwarf stars in this pairing are composed largely of helium. Most white dwarfs tend to have largely inert cores of carbon and oxygen that have formed over the star’s long life when it has used up most of its hydrogen and helium. Helium white dwarfs are a sure sign that the star has undergone some extreme mass loss at some point. To find two such helium white dwarfs stars is a clear sign to astronomers that both stars have had an exotic and mutually destructive past.


What was originally the most massive star of the pair had once actually began to expand to become a red giant but its outer hydrogen envelope was ripped off by its companion. This meant the star never got an opportunity to start fusing its helium and it was left as a helium white dwarf. When the companion star then began expanded it also had its expanding layer torn off by the first star - but as the first star was already reduced to a white dwarf it could not use that new material. That hydrogen was therefore simply lost to the star system leaving behind helium white dwarfs.

In just over 1 billion years, the two stars feud will end as they will spiral together and merge, finally igniting each other’s helium to become an object known as a hot subdwarf which should last for 100 million years

And, then, there is an all-male species of clams:

Amidst the animal kingdom’s menagerie of sexual practices, those of Corbicula clams stand out.


A common freshwater genus about the size of a half-dollar, most Corbicula species reproduce by cloning. That’s odd, albeit not extraordinary. They’re also physically hermaphroditic but genetically male — again odd, but not extraordinary.

What’s really strange is that, once in a great while, they hijack fresh DNA from other clams.

“They can steal the eggs of other species,” said David Hillis, a University of Texas at Austin computational biologist whose Corbicula investigations are described May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Usually, the whole maternal genome is then kicked out. But sometimes they keep some of the genes, and incorporate them into their own genome.”

At a glimpse, Corbicula reproduction seems to be of the unexceptional, sperm-meets-egg-in-the-water marine variety. But in most cases, sperm and egg come from the same clam, which produces both. Then, after fertilization, egg genes are ejected from the embryo. Should currents happen to mix sperm and egg from different clams, the same happens. In either case the result is a clone descended from one original clam’s sperm.


Cloning’s great advantage is that it lets organisms quit worrying about finding the right mate, which is of course themselves, and channel all that time and energy elsewhere. Once considered an evolutionary aberration, cloning is now seen as a fairly common and successful reproductive strategy. But every self-cloning species is confronted by what Hillis calls the Xerox principle: with each round of copying, errors are introduced. Genomes become smudged and, over time, unreadable.

Cloners have evolved a variety of solutions to this problem. Some species of fungi, along with a fish called the Amazon molly, reproduce sexually just often enough to prevent their gene pools from drying. Certain all-female lizards can alternate between single and double-sexed–species status as needed, or rely on chromosome mix-up mechanisms that bootstrap them into genetic diversity. One class of animals can even absorb the DNA of its deceased (see sidebar). But how Corbicula stayed genetically vital was unknown.

That nature, she is one strange date.

For Future Reference.

This.

And this.

So, basically, you're saying that Stalin did kill people because he was an atheist.

P.Z. Myers argues that atheists - who he likes to call "freethinkers" - are by their adherence to atheism inherently leftist - which he likes to call "progressive":

Maybe there should be more overt activism for civil rights in general, in addition to the more focused attention given to atheist/humanist issues. Freethought movements should be about human dignity and freedom in all domains, not just religion. We should own these issues; we need to be on the right side of history. And on the purely self-interested side, these organizations can also grow their base by embracing greater equality. Let's be the opposite of Jim Wallis and the Sojourners (who I could never stand, anyway).


Of course, such a move would piss off the libertarian/conservative wing of the atheist movement, but I can't see a down side to jettisoning them, anyway.

Myers' post is entitled "Godless goals are progressive goals," which is pretty much the way that Stalin would have phrased it.


Vox Day points out the amazing cognitive dissonance of atheists on "what it means to be an atheist" that Myers' argument illustrates:

One thing I always enjoy about atheists is the shameless way they perform the Atheist Dance. They are such hopelessly muddled thinkers that they constantly define and redefine words as it happens to suit them at the moment, not infrequently contradicting themselves multiple times in a single article, blog post, or book. An atheist will claim that there is absolutely nothing that can be determined about him by the mere fact of his atheism except for his non-belief in a creator God, then immediately turn around and insist that of course he doesn't believe in the power of crystals or Noah's Flood... because he is an atheist and therefore obviously doesn't believe in anything insufficiently "proven" by science... except for historical events that a sufficient number of people believe to be true... except for those related to religion. And so forth.

Vox Day also has some interesting data on the gender imbalance in abortion rates:

And it is amusing that PZ thinks that murdering unborn children is "the right side of history"; I have absolutely no doubt that the atheists of the future will be denying that pro-abortion equalitarians were motivated by their atheism in much the same way that atheists today deny that rabidly murderous Communists were motivated by their atheism.


Calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. The feminists and equalitarians have FAR more blood on their hands than the National Socialists ever did. Consider that in India, there are only 893 girls born for every 1,000 boys. In China, the girl/boy birth ratio is .855. And the more educated and wealthy a woman is, the more likely it is that she will murder her daughter.

A modest proposal.

Victor Davis Hanson has a suggestion about reforming California's higher educational system that is just so crazy that it might work - raise admission requirements:

The CSU system — California’s multi-campus university system, and indeed the largest in the world — is once again faced with a $1 billion annual funding shortfall, and might have to raise tuition by 30 percent. The usual accounts of frozen salaries, unfilled positions, and cancelled classes flood the news. But rather than damn the voters or the Republican legislators who in the past have proved reluctant to increase California’s 10 percent–plus income tax, nearly 10 percent aggregate sales tax, and the nation’s highest gas taxes, it might prove wiser to look inward.


What percentage of the faculty enjoy released time from classes? Are the numbers of administrators necessary, and might they take a pay cut? In my over two decades of experience with CSU students, about 65 percent attend class after the third week; will tuition hikes discourage those who otherwise would have gone to, but did not belong in, college? We hear of student outrage, but most faculty at CSU would probably admit privately that a large minority of their students simply do not do the work or attend class regularly, and that a larger percentage still are laden with electronic appurtenances and drive nice cars. The point is not to bash the students or the faculty, but to ask the university to reexamine the way it does business.

Maybe raising admission standards would improve the quality of student, end the trend toward watered-down classes, and encourage those who do not belong at CSU to invest their time more productively in the work place. As it is now, over 50 percent of incoming freshmen in CSU must take remedial classes to qualify for university courses; why are they there in the first place?

Faculty could reexamine release time and ensure that those who are not teaching full loads justify such subsidies by demonstrating greater output of research and publication. My experience is that all too often, sabbaticals and release times did not result in publishable scholarship. I think everyone in the system accepts that there are vastly too many CSU administrators, and their pay and spiked pension perks were long ago unsustainable.

In other words, before we get the annual student/faculty/administrator assault on the legislature and tax-strapped people of California damning their stinginess, there should be some introspection that the most highly taxed state in the nation may well not be getting a first-class university system that is turning out well-educated graduates in four years. When most CSU student do not enter college prepared to take college courses, and when most do not graduate in four years, something is terribly wrong — and that wrong may well not be remedied by ever larger budgets.

It's the Seventh Day Adventists all over again.

Camping explains that May 21 was the day of the "spiritual judgment."

It was not the first time Camping was forced to explain when his prediction didn't come to pass. The 89-year-old retired civil engineer also prophesied the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said later that didn't happen then because of a mathematical error.


Through chatting with a friend over what he acknowledged was a very difficult weekend, it dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ's judgment, he said.

The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, he said, when the apocalypse comes. But because God's judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there's no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.

"We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning," he said. "The fact is there is only one kind of people who will ascend into heaven ... if God has saved them they're going to be caught up."

That "spiritual judgment" seems to be a standard move for apocalypses.  After their failed prophecy, the originators of the Seventh Day Adventist church formulated the idea of an "investigative judgment":
 

The investigative judgment is a unique Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, which asserts that a divine judgment of professed Christians has been in progress since 1844. It is intimately related to the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and was described by the church's prophet and pioneer Ellen G. White as one of the pillars of Adventist belief.[1][2] It is a major component of the broader Adventist understanding of the "heavenly sanctuary", and the two are sometimes spoken of interchangeably.

And:

William Miller and his followers, the Millerite Adventist movement consisted of a group of about 50,000 believers [7] expecting Jesus Christ to return to earth on October 22, 1844. They arrived at this date from an interpretation of the Bible verse Daniel 8:14. They understood the 2300 days to represent 2300 years (according to the day-year principle of prophetic interpretation), a time period stretching from the biblical era to the nineteenth century. However Miller had not been the first to arrive at this interpretation, as he himself emphasized. Others had earlier concluded that a prophetic period of 2300 years was to end "around the year 1843" (Miller's earlier estimate).[8]


When Jesus did not return as expected ( an event Adventists call the "Great Disappointment") several alternative interpretations of the prophecy were put forward. The majority of Millerites abandoned the 1844 date, however about 50 members [9] out of the larger group of 50,000 ( including Hiram Edson and O. R. L. Crosier) concluded the event predicted by Daniel 8:14 was not the second coming, but rather Christ's entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary.[10] Edson had claimed to have a vision in a cornfield the day after the Great Disappointment, which resulted in a series of Bible studies with other Millerites to test the validity of his solution.

This became the foundation for the Adventist doctrine of the sanctuary, and the people who held it became the nucleus of what would emerge from other "Adventist" groups as the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The revelation was greatly encouraging for the [Seventh-day] Adventists. As Ellen White wrote later, "The scripture which above all others had been both the foundation and the central pillar of the advent faith, was the declaration, 'Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.'" (quoting Daniel 8:14)[11] She also predicted that criticism of the belief would come.[12]

 

When my grandmother was an adult...

...she didn't know that there were billions of galaxies.

According to Io9:

This star may not look like much, but in 1923 it changed our understanding of the universe forever. It showed us that the Milky Way wasn't a lonely island universe, but instead just one of billions and billions of galaxies.


It seems weird to think that less than a hundred years ago we still had no idea that other galaxies existed. While humanity had long since realized that the Earth revolved around the Sun - and in turn that the Sun revolved around the center of the Milky Way - astronomers still clung to the last vestiges of the ancient notion that we were at the center of the universe. In this case, that meant that our galaxy was the universe, meaning the entire cosmos was just this one vast collection of stars.

Our nearest major galactic neighbor is Andromeda, which in the early 1900s most astronomers just considered a "spiral nebula." This meant it was a blurry patch of light and nobody was quite sure what it was, but it was most assuredly inside our galaxy. At least, that was the orthodox view, but astronomers like Edwin Hubble weren't so sure. And that's when the discovery of this star, today known simply as Hubble variable number one, was so crucial.

A Cepheid variable star is one that brightens and dims in a predictable pattern, and by 1923 variable stars were already well established as a very reliable way to judge astronomical distances. When Hubble calculated the distance of star V1, he changed cosmology forever. The star was unquestionably outside our own galaxy and located far away in that of the Andromeda galaxy. And so the universe once again grew larger in the eyes of astronomers, and we more or less entered the modern age of cosmology.

I wonder what it was like for people to adjust to the idea that the Earth went around the sun, but that transformation is buried in history, back in the days of my great-to-the-15th-grandparents.  

But what it was like to go through the mental transformation involving the idea that our world is only a part of a galaxy that itself is only one out of billions of galaxies was something that I could have asked about, if I had only known to ask.

The Apostate.

It looks like David Mamet is not going to be invited to all the right Hollywood parties:

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.


For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody.

Not that the playwright’s political transformation is such a surprise. In 2008, he wrote an op-ed for The Village Voice (of all confrontational places), “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” That article was somewhat more tentative than its title, which may have been added for dramatic effect by the newspaper’s editors.

Not so The Secret Knowledge. Mamet has come a ways in three years from a chrysalis bewildered and astonished by his new found views to an author writing in white heat. The new book is a full-throated intellectual attack on liberalism in almost all its aspects from someone who was there, a former leftwing intellectual of prominence, a Pulitzer Prize winner even (and one who deserved it, unlike the New York Times’ Walter Duranty).

Mamet's reason for "converting" could read from a thread I recently was involved with on Facebook:

We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

I pray that, sometime in my lifetime, the self-satisfied '60s will finally end.

Free Speech lives among our educated elites...

... as long as we understand that "free speech" means "speech other than that which we don't like."

Here is an amusing video of conservative students taking a petition around campus to ban Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck from the radio. What's particularly revealing is how the student gets signers to affirm that they believe in "free speech."

What give this video added poignancy is that it was filmed at Fresno State.

What can we say about a man who predicts the end of the world by a certain date, based on nothing more than his weird, idiosyncratic beliefs, and, then, when the date rolls around....

...and turns out to be completely wrong, picks a new date.

Well, if we're environmentalists, we give him prizes and awards. [See Ehrlich, Paul.]

In 1968, Ehrlich predicted the end of the world by famine during the 1970s.

Notwithstanding the fact that by 1980, none of his predictions had come true, Ehrlich still felt enough of the prophetic fever that he made a bet with Julian Simon based on his prediction that the world was running out of natural resources.  He lost the bet in a spectacular fashion and wised up enough to refuse Simon's offer to go "double or nothing."

None of that stopped the left from showering Ehrlich with all kinds of awards, or from continuing to make prophecies, such as the one he was awarded in 2009 in then Socialist Spain:

One major problem is the growing population. According to Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, there will be two and a half billion more people by the middle of the century, and each new person will have a disproportionately greater impact on the environment. The United States is the fastest growing industrialized nation.


"Americans should go childless, or limit themselves to a single offspring, as an act of patriotism," said Ehrlich, who warns that expanding consumption will damage our life-support systems – causing a decline of food security and depletion of water recourses – and a possibly severe decline in standards of living. "All of the additional mining, harvesting, building and manufacturing to provide for growing numbers of people increase greenhouse gas emissions and cause greater climate disruption," he said.

Ehrlich believes it will take drastic measures to stave off global catastrophe. Even if everyone implemented all the environmental solutions suggested by Al Gore in his movie “The Inconvenient Truth,” it "would delay the end of civilization by 17 hours," Ehrlich said.

So, more than 30 years after his failed prophecy, Ehrlich is still rescheduling judgment day.

Unfortunately, Ehrlich's lunacy isn't followed by a handful of crazy cultists.  No, Ehrlich and other environmental doomsayers managed to persuade the Chinese government to join their apocalyptic cult, which then induced China to institute its disastrous "One-child policy," with the concomittant forced abortion policy.

As James Taranto points out in yesterday's column, even though the failed prophecies of Environmentalists are far more damaging than any prophecy made by an obvious loon like Harold Camping, the media keeps it powder dry when it comes to failed Environmentalist predictions:

Something else bothers us about the media mockery of Harold Camping, as justifiable as it may be. Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule? Reuters notes that "Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994." Ha ha, you can't believe anything this guy says! But who jeered at the U.N.'s false prediction that there would be 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010? We did, but not Reuters.


Doomsday superstitions seem to fulfill a basic psychological need. On the surface, the thought that God or global warming will destroy the world within our lifetimes is horrifying. But all of us are doomed; within a matter of decades, every person alive will experience the end of his own world. A belief in the hereafter makes the thought of death less terrifying. But so does a disbelief in the here, after. If the world is to end with us--if there is no life for anyone after our death--we are not so insignificant after all.

To reject traditional religion is not, as the American Atheists might have it, to transform oneself into a perfectly rational being. Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.

Or the attention paid to Camping may just be ideological point scoring coupled with the need to distract attention away from fellow travelers and their failed prophecies.

More Happy Joy-Joy for California!

The Economist describes California's High Speed Rail project as a "mess."

The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density—and affluence—of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.


California wants a share of that bullet-train hubris. Where Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin have turned down billions of federal dollars for high-speed rail, the Golden State has been pressing on with its $43-billion scheme to build a high-speed rail service from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, with spurs eventually to San Diego, Sacramento and San Luis Obispo.

The irony is that California has the highest rate of car-ownership in the country, if not the world. It also, despite years of neglect, has one of the best road networks anywhere—certainly leagues ahead of Japan’s. On top of that, it enjoys a highly competitive network of budget airlines serving its main cities. The Los Angeles Times got it about right when it editorialised on May 16th that “California’s much-vaunted high-speed rail project is, to put it bluntly, a train wreck”.

And an expensive one at that. Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in some $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and Citizens Against Government Waste put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.

That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state's Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion—and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.

The report warns lawmakers in Sacramento not to appropriate any money for the project until big changes are made in the way it is managed. The biggest such change is to transfer day-to-day operations from the High-Speed Rail Authority (HSRA), set up to oversee the project, to the California Department of Transportation. Caltrans, which designs and manages the state’s major roadworks, is widely respected around the world for its engineering prowess and professionalism.

That has not stopped the HSRA from racing to get construction started by 2012. To be fair to the authority, $3.6 billion of the funding from the federal government is stimulus money earmarked for use before the presidential election in 2012. While it would make more sense to use this cash to make a start on the link between San Francisco and San Jose, the only part of the proposed route not plagued with political infighting is the sparsely populated Central Valley. Besides, the White House has insisted that the stimulus money be used to create jobs within the Central Valley, where unemployment in many farming communities exceeds 20%.

As a result, the first section of California’s high-speed railway, estimated to cost $5.5 billion, will run 65 miles between the tiny towns of Bordon and Corcoran in the midst of the Central Valley’s farmland. When it was announced last December, critics promptly labelled it “the line to nowhere”.

In short, a political boondoggle that will waste money and accomplish nothing.

How the Mighty Media Monopoly has Fallen.

How the left must be having a moment of "acid indigestion."

FoxNews is most trusted news source; ABC and CBS are among the least trusted.

Liberals received some more bad news this week as a new Suffolk University poll revealed that Fox News is the most trusted political news source among those surveyed.


FOX News — 28%

CNN — 18%

Undecided —12%

NBC — 10%

Other — 10%

MSNBC — 7%

ABC — 6%

CBS — 6%

C-SPAN — 3%

For CNN the poll was a little bit of good news at a time the network is struggling with it’s primetime lineup, and after they received a black-eye this week for omitting former New York governor and current CNN host Eliot Spitzer from a story on political sex scandals.

The news wasn’t so good for MSNBC which finished a distant third to its cable news brethren with just 7% of respondents saying that they trusted the liberal cable news network.

Here is the poll.

According to the poll, Bill O'Reilly (9%) is the most trusted newsman, beating out his closest competition, Anderson Cooper (6%).  Brian Williams (NBC)(4%), Katie Couric (CBS)(3%) and Dianne Sawyer (ABC)(3%) lost or tied Mike Huckabee (4%).  Keith Olbermann got a 0% rating under trustworthiness.

Congratulations mainstream media! You acted like every other monopoly and treated your customers as if they had no choice but to use your services, which was a business plan that worked like gangbusters until we had a choice.

The New Civility.

Netanyahu booed at AIPAC.

Around 10:30 tonight, Benjamin Netanyahu finally took the stage at the AIPAC conference. Six times during his speech he was interrupted by hecklers; he calmly drank water while the audience cheered him to drown out the heckling, and at one point cracked, “Do you think they would allow these protests in Gaza?” AIPAC president Lee Rosenberg made some news last week with an email to AIPAC conference attendees warning them to be polite to President Obama. That was aimed, of course, at those on the Right who think ill of Obama and his treatment of Israel. There was one lone boo during Obama’s speech on Sunday. Maybe Rosenberg should have added a note about being polite to Netanyahu as well, which would have been an acknowledgment of the fact that the loudest voices of incivility in the United States when it comes to the U.S.-Israel relationship come from the post-Zionist Left.

History is complicated.

Allied diplomats urged Pius XII to stay silent about Nazi deportations:

US and British diplomats discussed exerting pressure on Pope Pius XII to be silent about the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, according to newly discovered documentation.


The British feared that the wartime pope might make a “radio appeal on behalf of the Jews in Hungary” and that in the course of his broadcast would “also criticise what the Russians are doing in occupied territory”.

Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, told an American diplomat that “something should be done to prevail upon the pope not to do this as it will have very serious political repercussions”.

Osborne’s comments were made to Franklin Gowen, an assistant to Myron Taylor, the US special representative to the Vatican.

Gowen recorded the conversation in a letter to Taylor, saying he had promised Osborne that he would bring his concerns to the “immediate attention” of the US ambassador.

“It was understood that, pending your reaction, he would not take any steps vis-a-vis the Holy See,” Gowen told Taylor.

In the letter, Gowen also said that Mgr Domenico Tardini, the Vatican assistant secretary of state, had told him 10 days earlier that Pope Pius would not “make any radio appeal because if he did so he would, in fairness, to all have to criticise the Russians”, a member of the Allies.

He said he withheld this information from Osborne in the belief that it would be best for Taylor to impart it himself following a meeting with Pope Pius scheduled the day after the letter was written.

The letter was dated November 7, 1944, as the Nazis were organising mass deportations of Jews from Budapest, the Hungarian capital, to death camps in Poland, Austria and Germany.

Rome had been liberated by the US Fifth Army the previous June and, with the Vatican behind Allied lines, the pope had more freedom to speak out.

But as the head of a neutral state, he understood that he could not condemn the war crimes of one side without condemning those of the other.

However, on November 19 – less than two weeks after Gowen wrote his letter – the Vatican joined the neutral states of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden to appeal to the Hungarian government to end the deportations.

The British Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert, an internationally recognised expert on the Holocaust, said in his 2002 book, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, that at that time the Catholic Church in Budapest was hiding 25,000 Jews in homes and religious institutions.

Simultaneously, the Red Army of the Soviet Union was advancing westward across Europe and killing and raping many innocent people as it was driving Adolf Hitler’s armies into retreat.

Gowen’s letter was made public for the first time by the New York-based Pave the Way Foundation, which is conducting research into the actions of Pope Pius, assisted by a US Catholic lawyer, Ronald Rychlak; German historian Michael Hesemann; and a journalist, Dimitri Cavalli.

Gary Krupp, president of the foundation, told the American Catholic News Service that the Allies feared any condemnation of Josef Stalin’s armies “would work against the unified war effort of the Allies”.

He said the letter was significant because it showed the pressures that confronted Pope Pius, who has been criticised for his alleged silence in the face of the Holocaust.

“The simple reality, which seems to be ignored by many critics, is that the Vatican was a neutral government that used its neutrality to save thousands of lives,” said Mr Krupp.

Gowen’s letter was found by Rychlak among Taylor’s documents and has been posted on the Pave the Way Foundation website.

Another letter made public by the foundation discusses help for Jewish fugitives, with Osborne telling Harold Tittman, another of Taylor’s aides, that it must be destroyed because it might endanger the life an Italian priest who was rescuing Jews if it fell into enemy hands.

It was dated May 20, 1944, barely three weeks before Rome fell to the Allies and, according to the Pave the Way Foundation, shows how the work of rescuing Jews was conducted in secrecy, with most documentary evidence of such activities destroyed almost instantly.

A few points.

First, this letter doesn't itself show that Pius was pressured by the Allies; it shows that the Allies were concerned that a balanced condemnation of Nazi and Soviet atrocities was not in the Allies war effort. This isn't surprising in that the Soviet's were as evil as the Nazis and the democracies had made the devil's deal in allying with them.

Was Pius pressured by Allies into remaining silent?  The Allied embassies undoubtedly expressed their concern to Pius.  Pius had acted as the go-between in an early effort to coordinate a coup against Hitler between German conspirators and the Allies.  Pius also made it permissible for Catholics to work with Communists in America, which was of incredible advantage for the American war effort. Pius was not unaware of existing political facts.

Second, I've seen other sources which quote Pius as expressing the concern that if he condemned the Nazis, he would also have to condemn the Soviets, which he knew would be detrimental to the Allied war effort, which Pius clearly supported.

Third, I wasn't aware of the figure of 25, 000 Hungarian Jews being hidden by Catholic institutions. 

WTF?  Professional wrestling is fake...

...and the con by which it is sold to the public is called "kayfabe"?

Who knew?

Harold Camping "flabbergasted."

According to SF Gate:

The man who said the world was going to end appeared at his front door in Alameda a day later, very much alive but not so well.


"It has been a really tough weekend," said Harold Camping, the 89-year-old fundamentalist radio preacher who convinced hundreds of his followers that the rapture would occur on Saturday at 6 p.m.

Massive earthquakes would strike, he said. Believers would ascend to heaven and the rest would be left to wander a godforsaken planet until Oct. 21, when Camping promised a fiery end to the world.

But on Sunday, almost 18 hours after he thought he'd be in heaven, there was Camping, "flabbergasted" in Alameda, wearing tan slacks, a tucked-in polo shirt and a light jacket.

Birds chirped. A gentle breeze blew. Across the street, neighbors focused on their yard work and the latest neighborhood gossip.

"I'm looking for answers," Camping said, adding that meant frequent prayer and consultations with friends.

"But now I have nothing else to say," he said, closing the door to his home. "I'll be back to work Monday and will say more then."

People will never learn.

Americans funnelling money to Hezbollah.

I stumbled across this Toledo Blade story about the conviction of a Toledo couple who committed insurance fraud in order to funnel the money to Hezbollah:

A Toledo couple will be sentenced to prison after pleading guilty in federal court Monday to charges that they conspired to smuggle money to a terrorist group in Lebanon.


Hor Akl pleaded guilty to five counts pertaining to conspiracy and interstate commerce in support of terrorism. He could be sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

His wife, Amera Akl, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. She faces nearly four years in prison when sentenced.

As part of the plea agreement, an arson charge that would have carried a 10-year prison sentence was dropped against Hor Akl and two charges, including an arson-related charge, were dropped against his wife.

The couple was charged in June, 2010, in a 36-page indictment filed in U.S. District Court. It alleged they “did knowingly combine, conspire, and agree” to aid the terrorist group Hezbollah. They are alleged to have sent money and supplies to a foreign terrorist organization beginning on Aug. 30, 2009.

Counts one and two, pertaining to conspiracy and interstate commerce in support of terrorism, named both the husband and his wife, as did count six, which alleged the two of them collected $17,296 from a fraudulent insurance claim in early 2002. Prosecutors say they intentionally set a 1998 Jeep Cherokee on fire in late 2001 to destroy information, and that they committed wire and mail fraud in so doing.

On counts three, four, and five, Mr. Akl was charged with defrauding creditors, making false statements under oath, and fraudulently transferring or concealing property as it related to a bankruptcy filed in August, 2008.

So, did the Akl's burn the car to get money for Hezbollah?

Why did this surface now?  Was it discovered as part of a bankruptcy filing?

Weird.

From the "Truth is Stranger than Fiction because Fiction has to be Plausible" file.

Police taser 86 year old bed-ridden grandmother after cutting off the flow to her oxygen by standing on the oxygen hose.

Those are the allegations of a civil complaint, so they could be accurate.

Makes you wonder what really happened.

[Via Mark Shea.]

And by "tolerance" we mean "laws that prevent you from discriminating against us, but let us discriminate against you."

This is so absolutely nuts that I'm tempted to think it is one of those instant urban legends spread by e-mail, but here it is in First Things:

Apparently, Only Christians Can Be Guilty of Religious Discrimination

Friday, February 18, 2011, 12:38 PM

Joe Carter

The University of California-Davis has a peculiar new religious discrimination policy:

The UC-Davis policy defines “Religious/Spiritual Discrimination” as “the loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.”

“Christians deserve the same protections against religious discrimination as any other students on a public university campus,” says Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) Senior Counsel David French. “It’s ridiculously absurd to single out Christians as oppressors and non-Christians as the only oppressed people on campus when the facts show that public universities are more hostile to Christians than anyone else.”

A from ADF-allied attorney Tim Swickard to UC-Davis explains, “It is patently clear that UC Davis’s definition of religious discrimination is blatantly unconstitutional under both the Federal and California State Constitutions. The policy singles out some faiths for official school protection while denying the same protection to others solely on the basis of their particular religious views…Moreover, the UC-Davis policy is simply nonsensical given the environment on most University campuses where Christian students, if anything, are among the most likely to be subjected to discrimination because of their faith.”

The letter cites a recent study of more than 1,200 faculty at public universities that showed that professors admitted to having a significant bias against Christian students, particularly evangelicals. Fifty-three percent admitted to having negative feelings about evangelical students solely because of their religious beliefs.

I suspect that roughly a hundred percent of evangelical students have negative feelings about professors who have negative feelings about them solely because of their religious beliefs. Since the negative feelings of the students can lead to a loss of privilege for the professors, it’s obvious that these evangelical students are practicing religious discrimination. Hopefully, UC Davis will properly punish these believers for their thought-crimes.

The good news is that U.C. Davis - my alma mater - eventually realized that this venture into Orwellian newspeak was misguided:

The University of California at Davis has backed away from a policy that defined religious discrimination as Christians oppressing non-Christians after more than two dozen Christian students filed a formal complaint.


The definition was listed in a document called, “The Principles of Community.” It defined “Religious/Spiritual Discrimination” as “The loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.”

“This is radical political correctness run amok,” said David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.

The conservative advocacy group wrote a letter on behalf of more than 25 students who objected to the policy and wanted it revised.

He said it’s absurd to single out Christians as oppressors and non-Christians as the only oppressed people on campus.

Raheem Reed, an associate executive vice chancellor at UC-Davis, said he received the letter and removed the definition Wednesday afternoon.

“I certainly can see how a Christian student reading that definition might feel and that’s why it was immediately disabled and taken down,” Reed told Fox News Radio. “This is not how we define religious discrimination.”

However, one student said they complained to administrators last November about the policy and nothing was done. “Christians deserve the same protections against religious discrimination as any other students on a public university campus,” French told Fox News Radio. “The idea that a university would discriminate against Christians is a very old story, unfortunately, and one that we see played out every day.”

Via Designs on the Truth.

Why Israel cannot accept a return to its 1967 borders.

This video makes a graphic case for why it would be against Israel's national interest to accept Obama's call to return to its 1967 borders.

It was 1948 and a 45 year old man named Eric Blair was writing a book...

...while dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Scotland. Blair would be die in 1950, after the book, a caustic condemnation of Communism was published under his pen name, George Orwell, with the title "1984."

I didn't realize that Orwell was so young when he died.

There's probably more to it than this.

End of the World - The buried lede.

Ed Morisey at Hot Air ponders whether the attention given to one charlatan isn't part of a larger Kulturkampf:

Camping first predicted that Christ would return in 1994 — in fact, he published a book predicting it, although the title 1994? included a very convenient question mark. People who follow doomsday demagogues even after a spectacular failure put themselves in position for some ridicule, not to mention the false prophet himself.


Still, these are real people, and their individual stories are troubling. One mother with three children stopped working and saving for their college tuition, and her apathy about their future has become all too apparent to her kids. Another young couple with one baby and another on the way have spent all of their money in anticipation that they won’t take it with them. For most married couples, pregnancy is a time of hope and optimism, but not for this couple. And there are hundreds or thousands of people just like them who will face very difficult times indeed for having believed in a charlatan.

I suspect that the media feeding frenzy Stanley describes has less to do with an impulse to lampoon the ridiculous than an impulse to ridicule Christianity in general. Despite Camping and his followers being an extremely small fringe group, the media has covered this story as if the entire Southern Baptist church made this prediction. Stanley also concurs that this should be an extremely small story, not a dominating narrative, but also predicts that we’ve just seen the beginning of it. Come tomorrow morning, we’re going to see a deluge of snarky reports about the silly end-timers who got left behind — excuse me, Left Behind — which will all carry an unstated theme of “oh, those silly Christians and their silly beliefs!”

Camping will pass the way of all false prophets, and the media will eventually find another obsessive focus. It’s not out of bounds to chuckle over the gullibility of those who rely on false prophets, but it’s worth considering who and what benefits from this avalanche of coverage of an obscure, already-discredited crank.

I don't know that I want to chuckle at seemingly normal people who engaged in the odd behavior of putting their faith in an "obscure, already-discredited crank," but I sure would love to know what made caused anyone to believe that the end of the world could be predicted by an obscure, discredited crank.

The End of the World and the Malicious Media.

Tiffany Stanley thoughtfully examines why the silly prediction of a minor figure is getting so much media attention.

Here at TNR, we thought about joining the circus. Last week, when we learned that Camping was predicting the apocalypse, I was tasked with spending May 21—the day of the Rapture—with a few of his true-believing followers, who have been filling websites, billboards, and city squares, handing out pamphlets, and generally warning the world to repent. What an amazing story, I thought. I’ll spend time with people who believe the world is going to end, and then be able to watch their reactions when it doesn’t.


But before long, I had second thoughts. First, I ran into some accessibility snags. While the media-friendly end-timers wanted to warn heathens beforehand, they really just wanted to spend their last day on earth surrounded by loved ones, in quiet preparation. Their response to me was something like: Why would you want to follow us around on Saturday? We’re not going to be here anymore. Yes, there was a certain humor to this. But the more I looked into the story, the more it began to turn my stomach to think of spending my Saturday evening in someone’s living room, waiting for that gotcha moment when they realized it was all a lie—leaving me to file a story the next day, poking fun at their gullibility. I decided I couldn’t do it.

Yet the media coverage has continued, and now to me, the schadenfreude has turned sinister. Based on the high traffic the articles are garnering, it would seem as if many of us are intrigued voyeurs, gleeful in knowing the exact day when these people will experience their life’s greatest disappointment. We feel superior, knowing that even though they told us we were heading for death and destruction, now, they get theirs.

While some news stories have been nuanced and evenhanded, others have opted for smug superiority and cheap laughs. The Daily Beast featured “Your Guide to the End of the World,” with such salient tips as “Where’s the best place to weather this sucker?” (Note: avoid fault lines.) In its “comedy” section, Huffington Post made an exhaustive set of lists, from “9 Ways to Tell the World is Over” to “21 Reasons Why May 21 is NOT the End of the World” (on the latter: “Justin Bieber wouldn’t let it happen”). A blog item on NPR—under the headline, “The Rapture supposedly starts tonight”—invited readers to take a quiz on who is most likely to be left behind. (By an overwhelming majority, politicians will feel the fiery furnace; journalists, surprisingly, are more likely to be spared, at least ahead of bloggers and those who talk on their cell phones.)

Do the end-timers seem ignorant? Yes. Are they insane? Possibly. But should our reaction to them be chuckling glee or something more like sadness? Pay attention to their individual stories—their willingness to sacrifice everything in anticipation that their earthly lives are over—and I dare you not to feel the latter. Ashley Parker of The New York Times writes about a mom who stopped working, and stopped saving for college for her three teenaged children. One of the kids admitted, “I don’t really have motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.” At NPR, Barbara Brown Haggerty reports on a young couple, with a toddler and a baby on the way, who are spending the last of the savings. The wife says, “We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left.”

Laughing at religious fanatics is nothing new. And, at some level, there’s nothing wrong with it. But this story didn’t just take off in popularity because people wanted a quick laugh or some insight into a quirky subset of our country. There’s a cruelty underlying our desire to laugh at this story—a desire to see people humiliated and to revel in our own superiority and rationality—even though the people in question are pretty tragic characters, who either have serious problems themselves or perhaps are being taken advantage of, or both.

Sure, it’s an interesting story when a fringe group decides the world is ending tomorrow. But it’s also a small story. Come Sunday morning, as news articles flood in about the disillusioned end-timers, and those articles instantly become some of the most popular on the web—as they surely will—we might want to ask ourselves not what is wrong with this sad group of apocalyptic believers, but rather what is wrong with a society that takes such pleasure in their dysfunction.

Union Members Thrown Under the Bus.


Obama's EPA regs will cost tens of thousands of union jobs.

Good at physics, lousy at metaphysics, completely  incompetent at the history of philosphy.

Intelligence in one technical area does not eo ipso make one intelligent about other areas.

N.T. Wright on Stephen Hawkings:

It’s depressing to see Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds in his field, trying to speak as an expert on things he sadly seems to know rather less about than many averagely intelligent Christians. Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race. But in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when they die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth (or, if you like, ‘the cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, the persons of Christians because they, too, were ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.


Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of ‘going to heaven.’ Of course, if faced with the fully Christian two-stage view of what happens after death -- first, a time ‘with Christ’ in ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise,’and then, when God renews the whole creation, bodily resurrection -- he would no doubt dismiss that as incredible. But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it -- most people in England haven’t. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics, i.e. not much.

As for the creation being self-caused: I wonder if he realises that he is simply repeating a version of ancient Epicureanism? i.e. the gods are out of the picture, a long way away, so the world/human life/etc has to get on under its own steam. This is hardly a ‘conclusion’ from his study of the evidence; it’s simply a well known worldview shared by most post-Enlightenment westerners. It is the worldview which enables secular democracy to consider itself an absolute, despite its numerous and rather obvious failings right now. The depressing thing is that Hawking doesn’t seem to realize this and so hasn’t even stopped to think that there might be quite sophisticated critiques of Epicureanism, ancient and modern, which he should work through. Not least the Christian one, which again focusses on Jesus.

Of course, the old set-up of the ‘science and religion’ debate was itself deeply influenced by this same worldview, and needs realigning. In fact, the ancient Christians would have been shocked to see their worldview labelled as a ‘religion.’ It was a philosophy, a politics, a culture, a vocation... the category of ‘religion’ is part of the problem, not part of the solution.