The "How Could We Have Known?" Stage of History.

Odd that the many of the same people who want to make tobacco illegal are in favor of pot legalization.

//The terrible truth about cannabis: Expert's devastating 20-year study finally demolishes claims that smoking pot is harmless

One in six teenagers who regularly smoke the drug become dependent

It doubles risk of developing psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia 

Heavy use in adolescence appears to impair intellectual development

Driving after smoking cannabis doubles risk of having a car crash 

Study's author said: 'If cannabis is not addictive then neither is heroin' //

Bummer.

Slouching toward Gomorrah -

English rioters prove the idiocy of  undermining the family:

Last Thursday, in an article snappily entitled “Why didn’t the looters’ parents know where they were? Why didn’t they teach them about right and wrong? Answer: society has undermined the family”, I quoted Fr Finigan saying that “For several decades our country has undermined marriage, the family, and the rights of parents… Now all of a sudden, we want parents to step in and tell their teenage children how to behave”, and Melanie Phillips pointing to “family breakdown and mass fatherlessness” as one of the principal underlying causes of the riots and looting of last week. I concluded (and I don’t apologise for returning to this theme now: a lot more needs to be said about it, and now is the time to say it) that of all the things the government now needs to do, “it’s the married family which is the institution that needs rebuilding most urgently”.


I am as certain of that as anything I have ever written, and I’ve been saying it for over 20 years: I was saying it, for instance, when I was attacking (in the Mail and also the Telegraph) as it went through the Commons the parliamentary bill which became that disastrous piece of (Tory) legislation called the Children Act 1989, which abolished parental rights (substituting for them the much weaker “parental responsibility”), which encouraged parents not to spend too much time with their children, which even preposterously gave children the right to take legal action against their parents for attempting to discipline them, which made it “unlawful for a parent or carer to smack their child, except where this amounts to ‘reasonable punishment’;” and which specified that “Whether a ‘smack’ amounts to reasonable punishment will depend on the circumstances of each case taking into consideration factors like the age of the child and the nature of the smack.” If the child didn’t think it “reasonable” he could go to the police. It was an Act which, in short, deliberately weakened the authority of parents over their children and made the state a kind of co-parent.

Well, who needs to give parents the authority to teach morality? 

After all, the State can do that job.

*Sheesh*

The first stage of History asks, "what could it hurt?"  The second stage asks, "How were we supposed to know?"

Homosexual marriage is intended to redefine marriage according to supporter.

Four pols change their stance as effort to legalize gay marriage gains momentum in state Senate

Those who flipped Monday were Democratic Sens. Joseph Addabbo and Shirley Huntley of Queens and Carl Kruger of Brooklyn as well as Rochester Republican James Alesi.


Twenty nine of 30 Dems now support the measure.

"What we're about to do is redefine what the American family is," Kruger said. "And that's a good thing."

From the "Theology of the Body" file - C.S. Lewis on the Problem of Porn.

Here is C.S. Lewis' observation on the problem of, well, uhm..."self-love."

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself…After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison." -C.S. Lewis

And here is Jewish Feminist Naomi Wolf's take on a similar issue:

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.


For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Amazingly similar conclusions from singularly different people, one before and one after the Sexual Revolution.

History is a two act play - The first act asks, "what could it hurt?"  The second act whines, "How were we supposed to know?"

We are about to leave the "What could it hurt?" stage of History.

Four in Ten American Babies are Born Outside of Marriage.

The number of children born outside marriage in the United States has increased dramatically to four out of ten of all births.


Figures show that 41 per cent of children born in 2008 did not have married parents - up from 28 per cent in 1990.

Researchers have concluded that although Christian values still play an important role in American society, public attitudes have changed.

Having a child out of wedlock does not carry the stigma and shame it once did, they say.

The study also found that in America there is a declining number of teenage mothers and rising numbers of older parents.

By comparison, Britain has the worst teenage pregnancy rate in Europe with 45 per cent of children born outside of wedlock in 2008.

When Labour came to power in 1997, 36 per cent of children were born outside marriage.

The U.S. research, taken from census reports and health statistics by the Pew Research Centre, also outlines a trend of couples in western societies marrying later in life and delaying parenthood until they can afford it.

In 1990 only 9 per cent of births were to women 35 years and older and 13 per cent were to teenagers, but by 2008 10 per cent of births were to teenagers and 14 per cent were to older women.

'The demography of motherhood in the U.S. has shifted strikingly in the past two decades,' the report said.

The share of births to unmarried mothers had increased most among white and traditionally Catholic Hispanic women.

Mothers are also better educated than they were two decades ago. In 2006 more than half of mothers of newborns had some college education, an increase from 41 per cent in 1990.

The percentage was even higher among mothers 35 years and older, with 71 per cent.

'The higher share of college-educated mothers stems both from their rising birth rates and from women's increasing educational attainment,' the report explained.

Attitudes have also altered in the past 20 years as the stigma of unmarried parenthood has softened and Americans marry later in life.

But two is still the ideal number of children in a family for many Americans, which hasn't changed since the 1970s - and many couples cited 'the joy of having children' as the reason for starting a family.

However, a half century after the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of birth control pills, nearly half of parents said 'there wasn't a reason; it just happened.'

Well, jeepers, spend decades claiming that marriage is optional and guess what happens.

It looks like we are about to move from the "What could it hurt" stage to the "How were we supposed to know" stage.

There are two stages in human existence - First, we say, "What could go wrong?"...

...then we say, "How could we have known?"


Mark Steyn on the self-liquidation of post-modern Western Civilization:

Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Angela Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it's over 40 percent. And for the ever dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there's precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that's before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year for Greeks who retire at 58.


Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still just about functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end, it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?