Question: When Is All Saints Day 2011?
All Saints Day celebrates the lives of all Christians who have died in a state of grace. What is the date of All Saints Day 2011?
Answer: All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation, falls on Tuesday, November 1, 2011.
It took the mainstream media nearly a year to catch up with the John Edwards Affair, but only weeks into Herman Cain’s narrow frontrunner status for the GOP nomination, the goodfellas at Politico are letting the uppity black conservative have it.Glen Reynolds asks:
They begin their “Exclusive: Two women accused Herman Cain of inappropriate behavior” this way:
During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.
It goes on with a fair amount of unsourced innuendo. Is there any way we can ever know the truth of this? Probably not since the parties are said to have agreed to remain silent for a five-figure payment, a paltry amount in this day and age. One thing is certain, whatever Cain did (if anything), it certainly isn’t in the ballpark of using campaign funds to support a mistress and love child while your wife is dying of cancer or even inserting a cigar in the pudenda of an unpaid intern in the corridors of the Oval Office. Those are certainly more than five-figure infractions — more like eight-figure.
Nevertheless, Cain’s campaign is taking a body blow. We’ll see what emerges. But I would like to mention one thing. Back in 1991, during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, I believed Anita Hill. Years later, my life had changed, and I came to meet Thomas himself at a social gathering. He turned out to be a delightful, unassuming person — it was hard to believe a Supreme Court justice could be so down to Earth and decent to be with on a social level.
I liked him a lot and am now skeptical that I was right about Hill. Maybe it had been just a high-tech lynching. Of course, I don’t know for sure — how can you in these things? But that’s the point, isn’t it? We all live on the knife edge of accusation. I’m the CEO of a media company and I am frequently concerned that I will be sued for sexual harassment. I’m not that kind of person at all, but given the way things are now, you can’t be too careful. I dare not compliment a woman on her hairdo in the workplace for fear I am open to suit.
Meanwhile, a question: Would Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Anna Palmer and Kenneth Vogel have put their names on a similar piece, with no named sources, aimed at Barack Obama? Would Politico have run it?Every time I think the mainstream media can disgrace itself no further, it goes and prove me wrong.
TAKING AIM AT BISHOP FINNDarn. I hate it when things are not black or white.
This ad, written by Bill Donohue, was rejected by the Kansas City Star, without explanation. The close relationship between the newspaper and SNAP is disturbing, but to turn down $25,000 is still surprising. The Star can impose a gag rule on us, but it cannot control us. We intend to let everyone in Kansas City, Missouri know about this matter.
TAKING AIM AT BISHOP FINN
There is nothing wrong with asking legitimate questions about the way Bishop Robert Finn handled the Fr. Shawn Ratigan matter. But there is something wrong about not asking legitimate questions about the politics of those out to sink him. First, let’s recap what actually happened.
Last December, crotch-shot pictures of young girls, fully clothed, were found on Fr. Ratigan’s computer; there was one photo of a naked girl. The very next day, the Diocese contacted a police officer and described the naked picture; a Diocesan attorney was shown it. Because the photo was not sexual in nature, it was determined that it did not constitute child pornography. This explains why the Independent Review Board was not contacted—there was no specific allegation of child abuse.
When Fr. Ratigan discovered that the Diocese had learned of his fetish, he attempted suicide. When he recovered, he was immediately sent for psychiatric evaluation. It is important to note that Bishop Finn, who never saw any of the photos, did this precisely because he was considering the possibility of removing Fr. Ratigan from ministry. After evaluation (the priest was diagnosed as suffering from depression, but was not judged to be a pedophile), Fr. Ratigan was placed in a spot away from children and subjected to various restrictions. After he violated them, the Diocese called the cops. That’s when more disturbing photos were found. At the same time, Bishop Finn contacted an attorney to do an independent investigation into this matter.
Fair-minded persons may question whether the Diocese was too lenient, but unless there is reason to believe that a crime has been committed, there is no cause for contacting the authorities. Yet the Diocese—unlike the officials of other organizations faced with the same situation—contacted a police officer and a lawyer immediately. [Note: in 2007, a huge investigation by the Associated Press of teacher sexual misconduct revealed that Missouri school districts were guilty of “backroom deals” that allowed molesting teachers to “quietly move on.” So where is the dust-up about this? Where are the calls for grand jury probes?] Why, then, the attempt to get Bishop Finn?
Clohessy wants Bishop Finn behind bars for not moving fast enough on this matter. But when Clohessy was working for SNAP in the 1990s, he refused to contact the authorities when he learned of a man who was sexually abusing young men. That man was his brother, Kevin, a Catholic priest. Feeling conflicted, David wondered, “he’s my brother; he’s an abuser. Do I treat him like my brother? Do I treat him like an abuser?” He chose the former. “He [Kevin] told me he was getting help, getting treatment.” This is understandable. What is not understandable is his outrage at bishops when they voice the same sentiment about their brother priests. The duplicity is sickening.And:
Is SNAP really upset about child porn, or just when a priest is involved? Dr. Steve Taylor is a psychiatrist who is in prison for downloading child porn on his computer. He is not just an ordinary shrink with a sick appetite—he worked for SNAP for years. Before his conviction, Barbara Blaine, the founder of SNAP, intervened on his behalf and wrote to the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners asking them to give consideration to Taylor’s alleged humanitarian work—she didn’t want him to lose his license. Had Taylor been a priest, her reaction would have been vengeful.
In August, SNAP accused New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan of covering up an alleged incident involving a teenage girl who said she was “inappropriately touched” by an 87-year-old priest. Dolan knew nothing about it until the cops were called. SNAP has yet to apologize. It also accused Dolan of “acting secretively” about a previous case where a priest was suspended. But Dolan was not in New York at the time—he was the Archbishop of Milwaukee. Moreover, at the SNAP conference, Dolan was accused of shielding 55 molesting priests. This is libelous. But it is what we have come to expect from these people—a SNAP official once spat in the Archbishop’s face.And:
SNAP is so anti-priest that its Kentucky chapter leader once lobbied state authorities to warn residents when Catholic priests who have been accused, but not convicted, of sexual abuse move into their neighborhood. Just priests. A few years ago, in California, a boy’s father alleged that his son had been abused by a priest in the 1990s. The case was dismissed. The alleged victim, now a grown man, said it never happened. When SNAP then learned that this innocent priest was appointed to a sex abuse panel, it went ballistic. In SNAP’s mind, once a priest is charged, he’s guilty, no matter what the verdict says.
Between 2009-2010 (the latest years for which data are available), there was a 42 percent increase in false allegations against priests. So-called repressed memory figures prominently in these bogus charges. A few years ago, researchers at Harvard Medical School studied this phenomenon and concluded that it has no scientific basis—it is purely a cultural invention. Harvard psychology professor Richard J. McNally also studied this subject. “The notion that the mind protects itself by banishing the most disturbing, terrifying events is psychiatric folklore.” He added, “The more traumatic and stressful something is, the less likely someone is to forget it.”
A Mormon-Catholic Ticket Would be Groundbreaking and Typically AmericanRight now, the Supreme Court is 7-2 Catholic/Jewish, the Speaker of the House is Catholic, the Senate Majority leader is Mormon, the Veep is Catholic - a bad Catholic, but nonetheless still in the Catholic column - and the President is...well, who knows what he is.
When Elena Kagan was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 2010, it was an historic event: For the first time in American history, there was no Protestant member of the nation's' highest court.
Could 2012 be a presidential ticket of a major party without a protestant?
Were Mitt Romney to be the Republican presidential nominee and were he to choose a Catholic running mate--say, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie--that would seem to be such an event. Of course, the Obama-Biden ticket was historically WASP-free, an African-American attendee of the United Church of Christ--until the Jeremiah Wright controversy church--and a Roman Catholic.
Occupy SF warned by city officials about unsanitary conditions
Occu-sty? City officials are warning Occupy SF protesters at Justin Herman Plaza about the "imminent public health hazard" the encampment creates. (Mike Koozmin/The Examiner) It’s now an Occu-sty. Feces, vomit, tampons, urine and the flies that love them all have soiled Justin Herman Plaza since Occupy SF moved in, according to city officials.
A letter from The City that was recently distributed at Justin Herman Plaza warns that the encampment is an “imminent public health hazard.”
Department.
The letter offers grimy accounts of the many bodily fluids seen by public health and park officials.
“Several piles of vomit were observed along the side of the park,” according to the letter. “Pile of feces and tampons found at a nearby pathway."
In a statement, Occupy SF said The City is creating "a sanitation problem by design," partly because it only allows portable toilets to be acceesed during the day.
The camp on Tuesday evening received a letter from San Francisco police Chief Greg Suhr saying participants are subject to arrest.
Police had not made any moves to break down the camp Wednesday morning.
On Monday, the world’s 7 billionth person is expected to be born. Somewhere. Look for the media and the usual worn-out handwringers to strike up the usual dirge. I’m sure Paul Ehrlich has a full dance card for the day. The “Tom Friedman Random Column Generator” app can retire early for the day, after disgorging “Hot, Flat, and Even More Crowded, Oh, And By The Way, Did I Mention That China. Is. Awesome.?”And:
In other words, the whole “population bomb” shtick, the summa of Malthusianism, is going to have another short-lived revival on Monday, though it is likely to be staged so far off-Broadway that Frank Rich’s intern won’t even give it much coverage after the opening night footlights are switched off. In other words, this milestone is going to be a one-day story, at best.
Which is quite a contrast from the old days when Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, was a worldwide best-seller, national and international population control organizations and lobbies were set up, and so forth. In the meantime, global fertility rates have fallen so fast that we can now foresee the peak of global population a few decades out, after which we will likely start to see the world’s population start to shrink fairly dramatically. A few people in the media have started to notice: Reuters notes that falling population may present more serious social problems than rising population. (How will we pay for our welfare states, to example?) And Christopher White over on the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse Blog offers some observations on how some nations are starting to regret their population-suppression policies.
As Connelly lays out in painstaking detail, population control programs, aimed chiefly at developing nations, proliferated despite clear human rights abuses and, more importantly, new data and information that called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of the crisis mongers. Connelly recalls computer projections and economic models that offered precise and “scientifically grounded” projections of future global ruin from population growth, all of which were quickly falsified. The mass famines and food riots that were predicted never occurred; fertility rates began to fall everywhere, even in nations that lacked “family planning” programs. The coercive nature of the population control programs in the field was appalling. India, in particular, became “a vast laboratory for the ultimate population control campaign,” the chilling practices of which Connelly recounts:
Sterilizations were performed on 80-year-old men, uncomprehending subjects with mental problems, and others who died from untreated complications. There was no incentive to follow up patients. The Planning Commission found that the quality of postoperative care was “the weakest link.” In Maharashtra, 52 percent of men complained of pain, and 16 percent had sepsis or unhealed wounds. Over 40 percent were unable to see a doctor. Almost 58 percent of women surveyed experienced pain after IUD insertion, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent had severe and excessive bleeding. Considering that iron deficiency was endemic in India, one can only imagine the toll the IUD program took on the health of Indian women.These events Connelly describes took place in 1967, but instead of backing off, the Indian government—under constant pressure and lavish financial backing from the international population control organizations—intensified these coercive programs in the 1970s. Among other measures India required that families with three or more children had to be sterilized to be eligible for new housing (which the government, not the private market, controlled). “This war against the poor also swept across the countryside,” Connelly notes:
In one case, the village of Uttawar in Haryana was surrounded by police, hundreds were taken into custody, and every eligible male was sterilized. Hearing what had happened, thousands gathered to defend another village named Pipli. Four were killed when police fired upon the crowd. Protesters gave up only when, according to one report, a senior government official threatened aerial bombardment. The director of family planning in Maharashtra, D.N. Pai, considered it a problem of “people pollution” and defended the government: “If some excesses appear, don’t blame me…. You must consider it something like a war. There could be a certain amount of misfiring out of enthusiasm. There has been pressure to show results. Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”In all, over 8 million sterilizations, many of them forced, were conducted in India in 1976—”draconian population control,” Connelly writes, “practiced on an unprecedented scale…. There is no way to count the number who were being hauled away to sterilization camps against their will.” Nearly 2,000 died from botched surgical procedures. The people of India finally put the brakes on this coercive utopianism, at the ballot box: the Congress Party, which had championed the family planning program as one of its main policies, was swept from office in a landslide, losing 141 of 142 contested seats in the areas with the highest rate of sterilizations.
City officials temporarily denied Occupy Madison a new street use permit Wednesday after protesters violated public health and safety conditions and failed to follow the correct processes to renew or amend a permit.
The permit, which expired Wednesday at noon, required Occupy Madison protesters to relocate from their current space at 30 West Mifflin Street, also called 30 on the Square.
A neighboring hotel’s staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters.
In addition, officials agreed further occupation should not be allowed to continue without restrooms on site to avoid further public health violations.
A topless and drunken woman led police on a car chase along route 422 at speeds of up to 128mph before surrendering to officers.It was such an important story that the London Daily Mail had to give it full coverage even though the arrest happened in Ohio!
Erin B. Holdsworth, 28, of Hiram, Ohio, was found to be wearing only fishnet stockings, a g-string and high heels when she was arrested in Auburn Township.
11, 16. For just as a snake does not walk with open strides but wriggles along by the tiny little movements of its scales, so the careless glide little by little along the slippery path of failure, and beginning from a distorted appetite for being like God they end up by becoming like beasts. So it is that stripped naked of their first robe48 they earned the skin garments of mortality.49 For man’s true honor is God’s image and likeness in him, but it can only be preserved when facing him50 from whom its impression is received. And so the less love he has for what is his very own the more closely can he cling to God. But out of greed to experience his own power he tumbled down at a nod from himself into himself as though down to the middle level. And then, while he wants to be like God under nobody, he is thrust down as a punishment from his own half-way level to the bottom, to the things in which the beasts find their pleasure. And thus, since his honor consists in being like God and his disgrace in being like an animal, man established in honor did not understand; he was matched with senseless cattle and became like them (Ps 49:12).
So this channel of the mind is busy reasoning in a lively fashion about temporal and bodily things in its task of activity, and along comes that carnal or animal sense with a tempting suggestion for self-enjoyment, that is, for enjoying something as one’s very own private good and not as a public and common good which is what the unchangeable good is;
This led to two other tensions. First, in defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, I argued, as noted above, that although some of the Church’s leading theologians and several regional councils accepted what is known today as the Catholic canon, others disagreed and embraced what is known today as the Protestant canon. It soon became clear to me that this did not help my case, since by employing this argumentative strategy, I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.
After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.
Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge. Take, for example, a portion of the revised and expanded Evangelical Theological Society statement of faith suggested (and eventually rejected by the membership) by two ETS members following my return to the Catholic Church. It states that, “this written word of God consists of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.”
But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts. In other words, if the sixty-six books are the supreme authority on matters of belief, and the number of books is a belief, and one cannot find that belief in any of the books, then the belief that Scripture consists of sixty-six particular books is an extra-biblical belief, an item of theological knowledge that is prima facie non-biblical.
For the Catholic, this is not a problem, since the Bible is the book of the Church, and thus there is an organic unity between the fixing of the canon and the development of doctrine and Christian practice.
Leftist Authoritarians Love to Use the Military…
…as a laboratory for social experimentation. Why? Because the military is sworn to obey orders. So while its a dodgy proposition that a leftist authoritarian will get the courts to impose some new experimental regime on free citizens, he can always simply command the military to impose some demented idea on the troops and they *have* to do it cuz it’s orders.
However, even the military has its limits. So the Administration’s most recent attempts to say, “Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve of gay marriage!” are being met with resistance by the fact that thousands of military chaplains are finding ways to resist the demand that they perform gay “marriage”.
On September 30, 2011, the Pentagon issued a directive to all military chaplains to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies and to make military chapels available for any such private ceremonies.
In response to the Pentagon directive, the Catholic Archdiocese for Military Service issued a statement that no Catholic chaplains serving in the military will perform or participate in any same-sex marriage ceremonies at any military chapels. In conjunction with the Catholic response, members of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty have issued a statement indicating that they will also not participate in performing same-sex ceremonies.
The Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty represents over 2,000 military chaplains. Serving as a military chaplain for 28 years, now retired Col. Ron Crews, executive director of the organization said,
“They made a very strong statement saying that no Catholic chaplains serving in the military will participate in any same-sex ceremonies at any chapels. We appreciate that strong stand. So we just wanted to let the Department of Defense know that it’s not only the Catholic chaplains, but that some 2,000 chaplains who come from evangelical backgrounds are saying our chaplains will not participate in same-sex ceremonies in the military.”Col. Crews also said that they are petitioning Congress to pass a right of conscience clause to be added to the revised code allowing military chaplains the right of not being forced to conduct or be involved in any activity, such as performing same-sex marriage ceremonies, that goes against their religious beliefs and what they strongly believe the Bible to say about homosexuality.
Hundreds of years ago in northern Japan, a sect of Buddhism practiced a now-illegal form of burial. Existing only in fairy tales until its recent discovery, Sokushinbutsu was a slow, painful death that monks practiced on themselves, resulting in a near-perfect preservation of their bodies.
The process was long and arduous; taking almost 6 years to complete. For the first 1,000 days, the monk would change his diet to consist of nothing but nuts and seeds while exercising daily to eliminate as much body fat as possible. After 666 days, he would move on to an even more restricting diet; eating nothing but roots and tree bark. Finally, as the 1,000 days came to a close a special tea made of toxic sap was drunk; slowly poisoning the body and making it inedible to maggots.
The final step consisted of locking oneself in a small tomb in the lotus position with nothing but an air tube and a bell. After the bell stopped ringing on a regular basis, the monk was presumed dead and the tomb was sealed. 1,000 days later, the monks would uncover the tomb to assess the success of the mummification.
Fully-preserved monks were venerated as a Buddha, given a permanent viewing platform within the temple. The majority who decomposed as normal were still praised for their dedication. With only a handful of preserved bodies left, we can only guess how many monks attempted this.
What makes this entire melodramatic episode even more curious are the rather questionable moral stances of Richard Dawkins himself. Consider the following: In an article in Scientific American (November, 1995) Dawkins informed us in blunt, raw language his existential view of reality, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This of course is an honest and candid expression of the atheistic worldview. In a purely materialistic universe there is no room for metaphysical realities like good and evil. As atheistic philosopher Joel Marks has pointed out, “The religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality…atheism implies amorality, and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality.” This echoes the disturbing observation of another famous atheist, Sigmund Freud: “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick; since objectively neither has any existence.”
In an article written for Edge in 2006, Dawkins explained that in a materialistic, deterministic universe, “blame and responsibility” [emphasis mine], “indeed evil and good” are nothing more than mental constructs and “useful fictions,” that are “built into our brains by…Darwinian Evolution.” Atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse heartily agrees: “Morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator.” If there is no metaphysically existent good and evil, if atheism implies amorality, if morality is a useful fiction and an illusion, if in objective reality life has no meaning and no value; why exactly is Dawkins so morally indignant about a war that took place 3,300 years ago and a modern Christian theologian’s rather dispassionate and thoughtful attempt to understand the meaning of that war? Dawkins also conveniently ignores that the greatest mass murderers in the history of mankind have all been atheists; Josef Stalin: 20-30,000,000 Mao Tse Tung: 50-70,000,000 Pol Pot: around 2,000,000. It’s worth noting that these men committed their atrocities, not 3,300 years ago, but in middle of the 20th century! I am not even remotely suggesting that Dawkins is capable of mass murder, but one would think that this simple historical fact might temper his righteous indignation just a bit.
All of this leads us to the conclusion that the accusation which Dawkins has hurled at Craig is not the reason for his refusal to engage in the debate, it is the excuse. The real reason why Dawkins will not debate Craig is the same reason why he refuses to debate Dr. Stephen Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, about the Origin of Life. He is afraid. He is afraid of debating opponents of the caliber of William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Atheist author Sam Harris has observed that Craig is “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into my fellow atheists.” Even a non-believing blogger for The Guardian, Daniel Came (“As a skeptic, I tend to agree…regarding the falsehood of theism.”), writes that, “Hence, it is quite obvious that Dawkins is opportunistically using these remarks as a smokescreen to hide the real reasons for his refusal to debate with Craig.” C’mon Professor Dawkins, you’re not fooling anybody; it’s time to come out of the hen-house and fight like a man.
Is there anything, after all, that does not bear a likeness to God after its own kind and fashion, seeing that God made all things very good for no other reason than that he himself is supremely good? Insofar then as anything that is is good, to that extent it bears some likeness, even though a very remote one, to the highest good, and if this is a natural likeness it is of course a right and well-ordered likeness; if it is faulty, then of course it is a sordid and perverted one. Even in their very sins, you see, souls are pursuing nothing but a kind of likeness to God with a proud and topsy-turvy and, if I may so put it, a slavish freedom. Thus our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin unless they had been told, You will be like gods (Gn 3:5).Saint Augustine of Hippo; John E. Rotelle; Edmund Hill (2011-01-23). The Trinity (The Works of Saint Augustine) (p. 312). New City Press. Kindle Edition.
"Consider some examples. One country that makes frequent headlines for its relatively short working week is France, not least because of its own debate about the 35-hour week. But France is not the lowest: a look at the figures shows that the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark work even fewer hours per year on average, while Germany works only marginally more (see graph). The UK may have higher employment, but it barely clocks up more working hours per year than France or Germany, and trails well behind the OECD average.
Though Koreans easily work the most hours per year in the OECD area, the US is also well above average: in 2005 annual hours worked in the US were 15% higher than the European Union (EU15) average.
This has not always been the case though. In the mid 1970s Europeans worked significantly longer hours. It was only in the mid-1980s that hours worked in the US began to exceed those in Europe. True, US hours worked have eased back, but not as much as in Europe: in the US they fell from about 1,850 hours worked annually in the 1960s to just over 1,700 in 2004, while western Europe’s decreased from over 2,100 to 1,600 in the same period. Since the 1970s US hours have in fact been broadly stable, whereas they have fallen sharply in Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg and France."
"Americans work much more than Europeans: according to the OECD a typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. Unemployment in the US is lower than in many European countries (though since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?"These are statistics I've been aware of for a long time, mostly because I rarely get vacations, but then I'm self-employed in the private sector.
"The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it."How much of that is due to the cultural trends from '60s, such as the cult of authenticity described by John McWhorter in his excellent book "Doing Our Own Thing."
Stuart Buck, a lawyer, wrote Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation in 2010, published by Yale University Press. He argued that traditionally segregated black schools featured teachers, counselors, and others of the same race as the student population of the schools, who in many cases became mentors to the students. However, the integration of schools since the mid- to late-20th century may have caused schools to appear to some black students to be controlled or dominated by whites. Consequently, a black student trying to achieve high educational success may be seen primarily as trying to make him or herself appear superior to others.[10]On a similar point, I posted Huntley-Brinkley's sign off from 1970 with the observation that it is like looking at the manners and mores of a lost world.
Consider just how thoroughly dishonest the Democrats have been. The White House falsely claimed that its health care overhaul would reduce the deficit. To make this appear to be true, it counted 10 years of CLASS incoming revenue but just five years of expenses. Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota admitted it was “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” And then he voted for it. Classless.
“Totally unsustainable.” That’s how Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described the CLASS Act in sworn testimony before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year. Then she continued to foist it upon America anyway. Classless.
But a funny thing happened along the way to the Democrats’ health care utopia. The stubbornly inescapable and elegantly simple Stein’s Law, named for the late economist Herbert Stein, kicked in with a vengeance: “Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.” Collecting 10 years of revenues for every five years of expenses can’t go on forever, and now even HHS admits there is “no viable path forward” for the CLASS Act. Despite HHS’ fatal prognosis for the program, it wants to keep the program on the books anyway so at some point it can attempt a resurrection. Classless.
“No viable path forward.” Remember that phrase because you’ll be hearing it more often as the rest of Obamacare faces its own day of reckoning with Stein’s Law. The CLASS Act collapse is a harbinger of things to come, and two lessons are critically important:
First, the CLASS Act is nonviable for the same reason that the rest of Obamacare is nonviable: There simply isn’t enough of other people’s money to pay for it. Obamacare is propped up by the individual mandate, which forces would-be free Americans to purchase far more health insurance than they need as an obvious means to transfer wealth. Because Obamacare doles out welfare goodies to families earning up to $88,500 a year - imagine that - a whole lot of wealth needs to be transferred. The individual mandate, as currently adjudicated in federal court, has been ruled unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court resurrects the mandate, it’s likely an even higher court - the voters - will strike it down.
As you can see, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in anthropology is about 30:1. This obviously has an effect in the orientation of the discipline in terms of the values which they impart to their students. A substantial number of anthropologists don’t consider themselves scientists. Quite often they’re clearly activists, and you know very well what direction their activism is going to go. As one of five non-progressive people involved in science communication I have seen firsthand how narrow-minded and partisan people who come out of the social sciences aside from economics can be. While a liberal biologist is strongly influenced by their political outlook and will defend it forcefully, anthropologists seem trained to throw around scurrilous terms and associations as if that was the ultimate training of their profession. While normal people believe that their ideological opponents are wrong, it seems that many anthropologists as activists believe that their political enemies are malevolent demons. Who wants to continue funding wannabe-kommissars?
To recap, here is my main issue with the current proponents of the liberal arts:
1 – The professoriate seems inordinately hostile to half the political spectrum. That’s fine if you’re drawing from private resources, but this is not usually the case.
2 – Those without social capital derived from family connections need to accrue specialized technical skills to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper middle class individuals with an entree into white collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford to focus on becoming more polished. Everyone should not be given the same advice, because not everyone starts from the same life circumstances.
3 – The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it.
4 – Those liberal arts graduates who are very bright are too often enamored of the latest intellectual fashion, and are keener upon signalling their ideological purity and intellectual superiority than actually understanding anything.
The possibility of reaching God through song would also stick with Neville. His father attended Trinity Methodist Church across the street from their home on Valence Street in New Orleans. Aaron and his brothers would occasionally sing in the choir. But his mother, Amelia, was a Catholic, and her sons would be raised in her faith.I also like Neville's devotion to St. Jude:
At Amelia’s insistence, the Neville children attended St. Monica’s Catholic School. Nearly 60 years later, Aaron Neville recalls the experience with fondness: “St. Monica’s was always a safe place for me. Between that and my mom, I was taught morals—something the world is lacking today a lot.”
In addition to morals, the catechism, and the poem “Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue,” Neville learned something else from the white sisters who taught in the all-black school: racial tolerance and brotherhood. All these years later, he cannot forget their witness. “They had to run from the Klan, got death threats,” he said. “And that taught me a lot. Even today I don’t see no color. I saw a holy lady, and she was teaching me—they were like my parents away from home.”
St. Monica’s also introduced Aaron to a song that would haunt him for the rest of his days. “I became fascinated by the Ave Maria,” Neville recalls. “I didn’t know the words. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but it just used to do something to my heart. And later on in life, it became a light at the end of the tunnel for whatever I was going through. I would get a cleansing feeling. That sound of praising the Blessed Lady was like a saving grace for me, especially when I was at the bottom of a pit.”
Back home in New Orleans, Amelia and Joel Neville were praying novenas at the Shrine of St. Jude on the edge of the French Quarter—praying that the saint of hopeless cases, the saint of last resort, the saint of the impossible would intercede on Aaron’s behalf.Because while St. Anthony may help you find things, when you are in the deep gimchee, St. Jude is your "go-to guy."
Fingering the St. Jude medallions dangling from his earrings, Neville remembers praying to his “man” himself. While awaiting trial, he returned home on bond. He joined his mother most afternoons at the popular Shrine of St. Ann downtown. Crawling up the steps of the outdoor shrine on his knees, he asked St. Jude to help him to sing, to break free of the drugs, and somehow to deliver him from prison.
On the day of his sentencing in California, Neville was assured that a lenient judge would hear his case. “But the judge was on vacation,” he says, rolling his eyes, “and this other judge was giving out time like it was ice water.”
“I said, ‘I want to get out of here.’ But I knew if I ran I’d never be able to sing, so I had to take my punishment. So I went in front of the judge, and I had my St. Jude prayer book in my pocket and my St. Jude medal. And I’m standing there and that judge said I was found guilty, so he sentenced me to what the law prescribed: one to 14 years. My legs turned to butter. And then he said, ‘But I suspend that sentence.’ I looked over at my lawyer, and he just shook his head. My lawyer was holding me up. So, hey, St. Jude was my man.”
A California man became stuck in a baby swing for about nine hours after a wager went horribly wrong, police said.Well, at least he won the bet.
After making a $100 bet with friends, the 21 year old lubricated himself with laundry detergent and squeezed into the swing, the Times-Herald reported.
But the man became stuck, and his friends decided to leave him swinging in Blue Rock Springs Park overnight.
He was discovered when a groundskeeper heard screaming around 6:00 a.m. local time Saturday.
Firefighters freed the man by cutting the swing's chains. He was taken to a local hospital, where the baby seat was removed with a cast cutter.
The man sustained non-life-threatening injuries.
Some of the data in this study was taken from Global Historical Climatology Network, administered by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) -- a source of data also used in past studies by the NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Center. But the entire data set is more than five times as big as any other study, encompassing 39,000 weather stations. Thus the study isn't entirely independent from past results, but does offer some fresh blood.
The data indicates two things, one of which the press releases glosses over.
1. The Earth does appear to have warmed.
2. Warming appears to have hit a standstill since 2000.
The second point is disguised as most of the initial press releases focus on a decadal averaged figure. Since the late 1990s were a period of net increase, they make the first part of the 2000s also look like a period of increase when the decadal rolling average is applied. The real picture is seen below:
Note the relative flat line over the last decade, which is eye-catching, even if you discount the steep decline in 2010. Now witness how this contrasts with the trend over the last decade in the rolling average shown in the press release:
...it seems unfortunate that the misleading rolling average was selected of these two figures. This chart conveys what appears to be one accurate piece of information to the reader -- that the temperature has warmed over the last half century, but also conveys an inaccurate impression that warming has continued over the last decade.
The case for global warming and global climate change has -- among those scientists who study it -- reached that level of consensus. I've encountered a great deal of skepticism over email and on this blog, and although I've been more than happy to write about the details I understand well, I myself am not a climate scientist, so I don't get to be part of the experts who weigh in on its validity. I have to trust the experts, and the consensus they do reach.Here is the graph this guy uses:
And basically, there are four simple components of the consensus:
1. The Earth is getting warmer, and the warming is accelerating.
2. This warming is primarily due to human emission of greenhouse gases.
3. If the emission of greenhouse gases continues unabated, this will continue to force the Earth's average temperature to rise. As a consequence, the icecaps will melt, the sea level will rise, and the climate across many regions of the world will change dramatically.
4. And finally, these happenings -- and the ensuing natural disasters that arise from them (flooding, drought, etc.) -- are bad things that we can and should do something about in order to avoid them.
Occupy Wall Street does remind me of the 60’s anti-war movement inasmuch as they were both based on a lie. The dirty, filthy hippies didn’t care about the Vietnam War; what they wanted was an end to the draft. That’s why, after Nixon ended the draft, the anti-war movement broke up even though the war would rage for a few more years.
OWS is based on the same lie. These smelly, selfish, narcissistic, spoiled loser creeps want their student loans forgiven. They claim to be outraged over the government’s bailout of Wall Street (which is worth being outraged over) and yet they want their own government bailout and in large part support President GoldmanSachsFailureTeleprompter.
The only purists in both movements were and are the communists, fascists, and anarchists (but I repeat myself) using all that selfish, crybaby energy to further their own goals. Oh, and the corrupt MSM doing everything they can to hide these truths and dim-witted Hollywood one-percenters desperate to pretend that begging to be a student loan welfare queen by defecating in a ziploc bag in the middle of a park is somehow avant-garde.
I’d like to suggest another possible societal paradigm: China’s one child policy. This policy says that urban, married couples may have only one child. Approximately 40% of China’s population is subject to this policy. The government takes it very seriously, going so far as to force abortions of full term babies on unwilling women:And:
So was it capitalism that deadened those drivers and passers-by to the death of one little girl, or was it a culture that traditionally devalues girls and that has, for thirty years, had enforced a government policy that, inevitably, means that girls are killed in utero? If girls are so valueless in utero, why should their value increase ex utero? The message that Chinese citizens have absorbed is simple: Don’t get involved as a general matter because the government is likely to come after you — and considering the risk, you should especially avoid getting involved with a manifestly disposable citizen, i.e., one little girl in bright pink trousers.
It is sheer lunacy to attempt to blame capitalism for the more than a dozen people who walked by, indifferent to the suffering of the dying little girl. These are people who have been taught for the entirety of their existence that a) there are too many people and b) killing little girls is a social good. Now they're supposed to suddenly switch gears because there is one less undesirable little girl to overpopulate China?
Quite clearly, that's not going to happen. There is nothing wrong with those Chinese individuals that isn't the result of social engineering. This is the New Chinese Man that Mao wanted to create. They aren't monsters so much as they are the product of a monstrous society, raised from birth to be blind to the suffering and death of little girls.
Last week’s release of FBI documents finally put in writing what nobody had ever said on the record: The FBI suspected that former Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and lobbyists close to him were running a scheme to funnel earmarks to sham companies and nonprofits to benefit the lawmaker’s friends and former staffers.And:
Bits and pieces of this story were kicked around for years before Murtha died in February 2010. The Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, the Washington Post and others had documented the odd appearance of earmarks for tiny defense contractors that just happened to open an office in western Pennsylvania and just happened to hire one of the lobbying firms close to Murtha and just happened to begin making campaign donations to Murtha and other Members of Congress close to him.
Reporters could do little but assemble the coincidences and couldn’t prove there was anything wrong with the bigger picture.
But it turns out the FBI was reading the stories and was very interested — interested enough that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into Murtha and some of the lobbyists in his orbit, a fact that never leaked while Murtha was alive
Federal agents had begun investigating Murtha in 2007 upon hearing allegations that the PMA Group, a lobbying firm run by former defense appropriations staffer Paul Magliocchetti, had paid for Murtha to have a driver. The PMA Group was raided by the FBI in February 2008, and the firm shut down the following year. Magliocchetti is serving a 27-month prison sentence for running a scheme to reimburse friends, family members and colleagues for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions to Murtha and other Members of Congress.
The FBI investigation also suggested that a staff member in Murtha’s office may have failed to disclose thousands of dollars in income and assets on her annual financial disclosure forms; that money from Murtha’s campaign fund may have been used to buy guns for the personal use of another Murtha staffer; that Murtha may have steered contracts and earmarks to other family members; that staff members may have violated the one-year ban on lobbying Murtha’s office after leaving his employ; and that KSA may have run a fraudulent political action committee.
There is no evidence in the released documents that the FBI pursed any of these cases.
Sloan of CREW said the FBI files prove a long-sought point: “It was as bad as we said it was. It wasn’t nothing; it wasn’t OK.”
142 legal secretaries surveyed and not one preferred working with a woman partner.Of course, there are some notorious male attorneys who are complete jerks to work for.
Why? Lawprof Felice Batlan elicited these comments:
• “Females are harder on their female assistants, more detail oriented, and they have to try harder to prove themselves, so they put that on you. And they are passive aggressive where a guy will just tell you the task and not get emotionally involved and make it personal.”
• “I just feel that men are a little more flexible and less emotional than women. This could be because the female partners feel more pressure to perform.”
• “Female attorneys have a tendency to downgrade a legal secretary.”
• “I am a female legal secretary, but I avoid working for women because [they are] such a pain in the ass! They are too emotional and demeaning.”
• “Female attorneys are either mean because they're trying to be like their male counterparts or too nice/too emotional because they can't handle the stress. Either way, their attitude/lack of maturity somehow involves you being a punching bag.”
• Women lawyers have “an air about them.”
The most obvious theme there is: emotion. It's the old: Women are more emotional. A secondary theme is: Women display the effects of the discrimination they've experienced. It's a complex mix, apparently.
Obviously, the secretaries' perspectives are subjective, and they themselves are women (95% of those surveyed were) so whatever is true of women — they're emotional/they're victims of discrimination — would, presumably, also be true of them.
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH: Latest Statistics Show Continued Denominational Decline
TEC will be out of business in 26 years figures reveal
2010 attendance figures for the Episcopal Church reveal a denomination in steep decline.
Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) in 2009 was 682,963. In 2010, ASA was 657,831, a decrease of 25,132.
The 10-year change in attendance has seen a decrease of 23%.
57% of all churches have lost more than 10% of their attendees in the last 5 years.
Median attendance per church has gone from 72 in 2006 to 65 in 2010, pushing many more churches below the threshold of the required number of attendees to support running a parish and to pay clergy.
54% of churches had fewer people attending in 2010 vs. 2009. Annual attendance declines are accelerating across the board.
The decline was 3% in 2006, 2008, and 2009. It was 5% in 2007 and is now back at 4% for 2010. This points to a widespread decline across the whole church.
The decline cannot be blamed on a few churches/dioceses leaving the denomination.
The gospel of lawsuits doesn't seem to be winning any converts and is slowly hemorrhaging viable dioceses. Active homosexual laity, priests and two bishops have failed to draw in anticipated crowds.
57-year-old man living by himself in Japan began to notice small things amiss in his house -- objects wouldn't be where he'd left them. Food would disappear that he swore he didn't remember eating. He'd wake up to strange sounds in the middle of the night, but every time he'd go and check them out, the door would be locked, the windows tightly shut. Nobody was there.Yuck!
Was he losing his mind? Being messed with by a shy poltergeist? To find out, he set up a series of spy cameras around his house. The next morning, he ran back the footage on the camera and that's when he saw it. A strange woman crawling out of a cupboard like it was the TV in The Ring. And if you think that's terrifying, imagine what happened inside his stomach when, at the end of the video, she crawled back into the cupboard. The one that was just a couple of feet away from where he was standing, watching the video.
Presumably in an effort to maintain bowel control, the man assumed the woman was a burglar who was only temporarily hiding in the cupboard, and had since left. He called the police, who pointed out that all the locks on his doors and windows were undisturbed. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that anybody had broken in -- in other words (cue dramatic strings) the woman had been in the house all along.
After a thorough search, the woman was found nervously huddled in a small cupboard. Apparently she had sneaked into the house and slept, ate and even took showers there for an entire year without being detected. Think of all the things you've done in your most private moments -- the things you thought nobody would ever see. Now imagine a homeless Japanese woman had been watching it all. Yeah. We'll let that one sink in for a moment.
The first woman's alleged offenses were minor. She did not pose an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others. She actively resisted arrest insofar as she refused to get out of her car when instructed to do so and stiffened her body and clutched her steering wheel to frustrate the officers' efforts to remove her from her car. She did not evade arrest by flight, and no other exigent circumstances existed at the time. She was seven months pregnant, which the officers knew, and they tased her three times within less than one minute, inflicting extreme pain on her. A reasonable fact-finder could conclude, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to her, that the officers' use of force was unreasonable and therefore constitutionally excessive. However, at the time, there were three circuit courts of appeals cases rejecting claims that the use of a taser constituted excessive force; there were no circuit taser cases finding a Fourth Amendment violation. The second woman also stated a claim for excessive force; however, because the law was not clearly established at the time of both incidents, the police officers were entitled to qualified immunity.Tasering a 7 month pregnant women? Huh?
Mattos v. Agarano, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 20957 (9th Cir. Haw. Oct. 17, 2011)
It’s shocking, but incontrovertible: Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.It seems that this might be the achille's heels of modernity's fetish for individualism; there simply are cases where the "right" choice for an individual is manifestly the "wrong" choice for society.
The phenomenon is most pronounced in certain Asian populations where the birth of girls is especially discouraged, but is not limited to Asia. Hvistendahl shows that sex-selection is not culturally or uniquely Asian. Male-child preference exists everywhere. Sex-selection abortion rises as birth rates fall, as wealth increases (especially in developing nations), and as technology for identifying a child’s gender in utero becomes more reliable and more available.
Sex-selection abortion occurs in America, too, and the practice is likely to increase. In August, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a simple blood test seven weeks into pregnancy can reliably identify the sex of the child. Watch for a spike in abortion rates over the next few years as parents find it easier and cheaper to “choose” to have a boy by killing the fetus if—in a bitter reversal of an expression of joy—“it’s a girl.”
The shocking reality of sex-selection abortion cries out for laws banning the practice. Polls have shown that about 95% of the American people oppose sex-selection abortion. Even those who style themselves “pro-choice” overwhelmingly agree that abortion should not be allowed when the reason for such a choice is that the child to be born is female. The most pernicious radical feminist argument for abortion rights—that abortion is essential for “gender equality”—doubles back on itself in the case of sex-selection abortion: If abortion on the basis of the sex of the child—killing girls because they are not boys—is not sex discrimination, it is hard to know what is. (Hvistendahl is, awkwardly, pro-choice, yet horrified by the consequences of “unnatural selection.”)
Four states—Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and most recently Arizona—have enacted laws prohibiting sex-selection abortion. Those laws have yet to be tested in the courts. At least seven other states have considered bills that would ban the practice. A sex-selection-ban bill was introduced in Congress in 2009—I worked with committee staff on the bill—but it died in the then Democrat-controlled House.
Are such bans constitutional, under the Supreme Court’s decisions creating a right to abortion? The question such laws present is a dramatic one, challenging the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade in the most fundamental and direct of ways: Does the U.S. Constitution create a right to abortion, even when the woman’s reason for abortion is that she does not like the sex of her unborn child?
Sadly, the answer, under the Supreme Court’s absurd, through-the-looking-glass constitutional law of abortion, is yes. Under Roe and the Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a woman has a constitutional right to abort for any reason up to the point of “viability,” when the child could live outside the mother’s womb. Even after viability, a woman may abort for any “health” reason, an exception that ends up swallowing the rule: The Court’s abortion decisions define “health” justifications for abortion to include any “emotional,” “psychological,” or “familial” reason for wanting an abortion.
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