Ship of Fools

Media cover-up: warmist scientists trapped by ice are just “tourists”

Andrew Bolt –, Tuesday, December, 31, 2013, (9:12am)
Global warming - dud predictions, Global warming - propaganda

The farce: warmist scientists and reporters sail to Antarctica to find signs of the global warming they claim has changed that continent since Douglas Mawson explored it a century ago. Instead, they find sea ice when Mawson didn’t and their ship is locked in.
Be clear about the joke here. This Australasian Antarctica Expedition was meant to scare us about global warming changing Antarctica, causing melting instead of all this damn ice. As the expedition leaders said on their website:

… there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming… We are going south to ... determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.

Now to the media cover-up.
Note the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage this morning. It has a reporter on the third ice-breaker to go to the expedition’s help, only to be driven back by thick ice. There is no mention in her stories of global warming, the trapped mission’s quixotic quest or how stupid those warmists now look. There is no mention that sea ice around Antarctica has steadily increased over the past three decades, contrary to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits its climate models predicted.
Instead, the SMH republishes a tweet from the trapped expedition’s leader, Professor Chris Turney, still insisting he’s unnaturally warm despite being packed in by ice:

Turney is now the Black Knight of global warming:

In fact, it does indeed rain in Antarctica in summer, as the Mawson’s Huts Foundation demonstrates.
Then there’s this:

Jo Nova is astonished by a media cover-up that has changed what was a ship of climate scientists into a ship of mere “tourists”:

A month ago the mission of the $1.5m expedition was “to answer questions about climate change”. Now the ABC describes the Australasian expedition as “a Russian ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica.” ...
Let there be no doubt, the mission was to document and record scientific changes in Antarctica and to broadcast that to the world. Most scientific missions don’t have a dedicated media team, but this one named a staff of five journalists. There is a journalist and a documentary maker from the Guardian as well as a senior producer from the Science Unit at the BBC world service. (See the media list.) If they’d discovered less sea ice, fewer penguins, or big cracks, we know the images would be all over the mass media and it would be evidence for “climate change”.
But with the MV Akademik Shokalskiy trapped by thick sea ice, the mission apparently is to call it a tourist boat. The BBC now tell us the mission was “to follow the route explorer Douglas Mawson travelled a century ago”. Don’t mention the climate…
The spin is that team has “met heavy ice”. Not “been trapped by unprecedentedly thick sea ice, unlike anything Mawson ever saw, and in record levels”. If they had met thin sea ice, would it have been described as a dangerously thin layer, a risk for penguins, and a stark reminder of how much the climate is changing? Would it have been an undeniable factoid?
It’s not what the ABC says, it’s what they don’t say (a.k.a. “lying by omission"). The headlines could read “Global warming scientists trapped in Antarctica by record sea ice they didn’t predict”. As if. That would be against the religion.

Instead, there are reports from the ABC like this, with no mention of climate change or what the “passengers” on the “cruise ship” were actually up to:

TONY EASTLEY: The Australian operation to rescue passengers from a Russian cruise ship stuck in thick Antarctic sea ice, is continuing this morning, but it’s slow going.

The Aurora Australis ice-breaker is the third vessel to try to help the stricken expedition ship, which has been trapped since Christmas Eve.
Authorities say the scientists and tourist on board the Russian vessel are packed and ready to go.
But deteriorating conditions mean any rescue is unlikely any time soon.

Another ABC report that fails to mention the scientists and journalists were actually trying to prove global warming was changing Antarctica:

An Australian icebreaker has abandoned its attempt to rescue a Russian-flagged ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica due to adverse weather conditions…
The Akademik Shokalskiy had been retracing Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition and conducting scientific research when sea ice closed in about 1,500 nautical miles south of Hobart.
The 74 people on board, including scientists, crew members and paying passengers, have been stranded since Christmas Eve.

More from Watts Up With That.
By the way, how much is the rescue of these warmists costing - in money and emissions

Game,set & match

Good on George Brandis for standing up (in such an erudite way) to the bully 'persons' of the left:

But some things never change, like the reaction of the claque of bilious pseudo-intellectuals who constitute what passes for a left-wing commentariat in this country. Mike Carlton, Catherine Deveney, Van Badham and their ilk were nothing if not boorishly predictable.

They and their followers unleashed a storm of hatred and bile against Wilson on social media, the like of which I have never seen. The irony that these people pose as the enemies of “hate speech” was lost on them, if not on others.

He also highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of left-wing fanaticism.

the Nietzschian era

A profound illustration by David Thompson as to why our civilization has reached a dangerous point in history.

Poor Mr Power is getting quite a kicking in the comments, which now number over 900, thanks largely to links from non-Guardian readers. Sadly, so far as I can see, he’s not responding to his critics. Any of them. Instead, he’s taken to Twitter, where he tells us, rather triumphantly; 

"I wrote this about sexist men and BBQs and the comments went wild. 930 so far. Anyone would think I touched a nerve."

If you want to know who such people are, how they imagine the world and what they will ignore… that’s a big clue. You do have to marvel at a mind that when faced with a barrage of refutation and factual corrections can somehow construe this as validation. The fact that so many people are mocking him and pointing out his errors is, amazingly, proof that he is righteous. An achievement he then declares to the world. That’s not an everyday kind of vanity. That’s something else

Post Modernism, its obsessions and its 'luvvies' wedded to their moral high grounds steeped in relativistic values have so destroyed reason and logic that the only 'logical' step remaining is for power to replace persuasion.
Orwell and Huxley foresaw it accurately, just timed it a couple of decades short.

Monbiots moonbattery

This piece from David Thompson's blog provides a conflicted snapshot of the Utopian perspectives held by urban elites.
These are the people who hold academically fashionable, neo-Marxist views of society whilst living (usually) on the upper-register of the 'capitalistic' scale.
They are those who eulogise the 'labourer' yet whose own knowledge of labour and the production of goods is often severely limited to protesting 'slave labour products', and who worship the environment (Gaia) but live in high-rise apartments surrounded with tons of concrete (plus the occasional 'pot'-plant).
These are luvvies who are deeply embedded in the urban jungle and its surrounding culture of theatres, restaurants, politically correct opinions and groovy hangouts.
Most (according to Australian Tourism statistics) holiday overseas rather than travelling through the Australian outback and under-settled areas (no 'culture' you understand).
And almost all that I have encountered (and in the 'high' arts arena I have encountered many) view the 'underclasses' (everyone that is except the suburban mortgaged, white, middle-classes) through blinkered 'Rousseauin' beer-glasses.

'Moonbat' Monbiot is a prime example:

......the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours:

A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey... Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.

Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”

We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly.

Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.
 

complete article @ :  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois

Persecution?

Left wing hypocrisy

Funny Darwin

I happen to be; as one of my more frustrated critics accused; 'a medieval theologist', or put another way, a believer in the absolute truth of the gospel, i.e. in no ways a Darwinist...having said that I found this article to be very funny and even if some of the incidents are too bizarre to be believed (although truth is often stranger than fiction), they are therefore imaginatively funny. I think the Zimbabwean bus driver should have won, but then having grown up in Africa I can see it happening.

The 2013 Darwin Awards Are Out! Posted on August 20, 2013by Jim G.

Yes, it’s that magical time of year again when the Darwin Awards are bestowed, honoring the least evolved among us.

Here Is The Glorious Winner:

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

And Now, The Honorable Mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

6.. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, is a crime committed?]

7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”

9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast… The frustrated gunman walked away. [*A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER]

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had and the perp had been punished enough!

In the interest of bettering mankind, please share these with friends and family…. unless of course one of these individuals by chance is a distant relative or long lost friend. In that case, be glad they are distant and hope they remain lost.

Cultural genocide

A timely wake-up call from David Limbaugh to engage in the culture wars. Not as condemners but as those who realise that we are all 'incomplete', tainted, faulty, prone to weaknesses, i.e we are ALL sinners in need of forgiveness and mercy. However we also need to stand up to the forces that would silence our voices and thus condemn our fellow travellers.

As many are now belatedly realizing, the option of sitting out the culture wars is increasingly closed to us if we value our liberties, as we conservatives claim we do. Despite all of its sermonizing, the militant left will not live and let live. They demand uniformity of thought, and those who dissent from their PC standards are to be shunned and silenced.

The left is outraged that someone like Robertson would be so judgmental as to call homosexual behavior sinful. Yet they are, in effect, condemning as sinful those who express this opinion.
........................................................................

But we're approaching that time -- we already may have arrived -- when the belief in certain scriptures will be deemed intolerably sinful and the believer outcast as a hater.
Gay activists have redefined hate to mean disapproval of certain lifestyles or practices, but in reality, if there's any hatred going on, it's from the activists toward the Christians who don't agree with them.
Christians and other social conservatives must fight for their beliefs and rights in this culture and quit foolishly believing their liberties will survive if they sit passively on the sidelines.

http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2013/12/20/the-lefts-militant-proactive-intolerance-n1766201/page/2

Bear bait

This is a small excerpt from an article on national borders (i.e.national sovereignty) vs. the European Union by Theodore Dalrymple. The article concerns the fact that EU bureaucrats are currently pushing for "Euro scepticism" to be declared a psychiatric disorder. The implications are extensive and frightening particularly for those of a 'spiritual' disposition. Charles Colson warned some years ago that those who believed in a superior being might one day be labelled as having a psychiatric disorder, this push by EU authorities shows how easily such thinking could be both entertained and facilitated. This small excerpt shows how any argument against the 'collective' threatens rather than providing opportunity for discussion and when that happens the only solution is power.

Recently I attended the public defence of a PhD dissertation at Leiden University by a young Dutch legal philosopher, Thierry Baudet, published in English as The Significance of Borders: Why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States. What was striking to me as an observer was the extreme emotional antagonism of some of the professors to the candidate argument. It was not merely that they thought him in error, or even thought him wicked: it was their entire Weltanschauung that he challenged and threatened, and upon which they had based their lives and careers. At least one was quite literally shaking as he spoke.
 

This is also an indication of how far ahead the 'intellectual elites' have managed to forge with their 'One World government plans'. That to question the idea is not merely to differ in opinion, but it is morally inferior and more than that; it is threatening to the status quo. And we all know what happens when you threaten a bureaucrat with his finger on many triggers!

Please forgive my conspiracy mindset, I usually deplore such thinking but find myself in that forbidden zone more and more these days. I suspect that when the moment does finally arrive it will come upon us like a bear trap...seemingly sudden and without warning, that is until we look back and see the signs along the back path.

I so hope that I am wrong and that all is copacetic.

Dalrymples full article is @ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8817531/why-borders-matter/

Eco power play

Jo Nova speaks out about selective law enforcement:

It’s one rule for you, and another for their friends. If a coal plant was wiping out thousands of birds and bats you can be sure Greenpeace would be launching a campaign. But when an industrial turbine with blade-tips travelling at 180mph does the killing, who cares?

The law for normals makes it expensive to kill birds and bats:

“Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, BP was fined $100 million for the damage it caused to bird populations in the area, both migratory and resident. — AlaskaDispatch

“Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest. — NY Times

And it was going to get expensive for windfarms:

“Nov 22 2013 Duke Energy has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two Wyoming wind farms. – audublog

That was the first time a windfarm got pinged. And it works out to be about $6000 a bird. Could get expensive, eh?

“The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines every year in the U.S. However, that number is said to be a low-ball estimate by independent researchers. Each year 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines in the U.S., according a study by K. Shawn Smallwood that was published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. — dailycaller.com

Killing 400,000 birds at $6k each would make windpower in the US about $2 billion* more expensive, and less viable, than it already is. But industrial wind turbines are special friends of big-government and they were given licenses to kill “accidentally” for up to five years. But I guess the five year licenses were expiring, so the Obama administration reassessed the rule and now says it’s OK to kill them for 30 years.

“The Interior Department on Friday unveiled a final rule extending the length of permits that allow facilities to unintentionally kill protected bald and golden eagles.The regulations are a major victory for the wind and solar industry, among others, which will now be able to obtain permits for as long as 30 years — a sixfold increase from the previous five-year limit.

I like the newspeak from the Department of Bird-Killing explaining why 30 years of carcasses is a good thing:

“This change will facilitate the responsible development of renewable energy and other projects designed to operate for decades, while continuing to protect eagles consistent with our statutory mandates,” the department said in its regulation. -- The Hill

Five years of bird deaths was not responsible, but 30 years of deaths is? Anyone would protect eagles like this, of course.

In the end it amounts to another $20$2 billion dollar subsidy for renewables (and a lot more dead birds). But it’s all for the sake of the planet.

But there is a bigger issue at stake here. When is a law not a law? When the government can issue licenses to break it. Selective enforcement anyone? Since Duke Energy may be one of the only wind operators to have to pay the bird-killing tithe, I have to ask, what did they do wrong? Perhaps they didn’t butter up the right people on the right day?

WWF would be outraged if coal fired plants got 30 year exemptions for busting bald eagles.

When is a dead bird a tragedy for an eco-green? Only when it scores a political point.

As usual, it’s not about the environment. It’s only power and politics

Welcome to Dante's dream...

A witty couple of paragraphs exposing the psychic dissonance exhibited on a regular basis by our 'intellecual betters', i.e. the PoMo elite:

In the comments, svh notes that Laurie’s article, which denounces the modern campus as akin to “a military dictatorship,” omits any mention of why the police might find it necessary to be on campus, let alone use force against students. As regular readers will know, Laurie’s mental landscape is one in which she and her peers are always and forever the victims of the drama, irrespective of who did what to whom. As elevated beings, the fault is never theirs. This conceit requires certain omissions and failures of memory, in order to imagine a world where self-styled revolutionaries and would-be anarchist ninjas are subject to inexplicable and unprovoked beating. The violence, you see, just fell out of the sky for no particular reason.

In Laurie’s mind, presumably, nothing you see in this video actually happened. Nobody laid siege to someone else’s property, terrorising staff and trapping them in their offices. Nobody barricaded fire escapes and used mob force repeatedly, while denouncing any kind of physical retaliation or attempt to enforce the law. No, the thuggery and shoving, the attempts to intimidate and impose on others… that somehow didn’t happen. It was, in Laurie’s mind, “a peaceful occupation.”

Like so many of her comrades, Laurie relies on a kind of faux naiveté - according to which, laying siege to a building and trapping staff for hours while chanting “Fuck the police” is in no way provocative or an invitation for scuffles and violence. Using mob coercion against random people, and then against the police, is what pacifists do, at least in the minds of idiots and pathological liars. Idiots and liars who then affect shock and indignation when that violence escalates, inevitably, as planned, while relishing the publicity and Heroic Victim Status.

If the inversion of reality isn’t sufficiently bold, consider yesterday’s student protest against the police response to such “peaceful” occupations. One protest organiser, University of London Union president Michael Chessum, insisted, “The vast majority of the trouble that happens in protests is because of [the police] presence.” And not because of masked mobs acting out their adolescent power fantasies. ULU vice president Daniel Cooper shared his thoughts via Twitter, “Today was a huge show of our force. Who’s universities? OUR universities! Who’s streets? OUR streets!” Setting aside the primary school spelling, Mr Cooper and his fellow radicals can apparently claim ownership of whatever they please, impose on whomever they please, and exult in this use of force while denouncing “fascism.”

Meanwhile on the streets of central London, students were keen to demonstrate their moral credentials too, by breaking down other people’s gates, setting bins on fire, blocking traffic for hours and trashing police vehicles. To show the world how unnecessary police involvement is.

Thank goodness these socialist intellectuals are showing us the way.
 

In reporting, TV interviews, radio interviews and through various other information outlets I see and hear these folk making claims that stagger the imagination. Yet they truly seem to believe the rubbish and downright lies that they promote. It can only be some form of psychological schizophrenia or delusion. And these are the people who are to all intents and purposes the ones who influence the ones who keep their fingers on the triggers.

Welcome to the global loony bin.

In developing news a reader responded to the above article:

As we saw from her cheerleading for – sorry, reporting on - Occupy, in Laurie’s mental landscape she and her peers are always and forever the victims, irrespective of who did what to whom first, and then did it again harder. The fault is never theirs. This conceit necessitates certain omissions and in turn implies that the occupiers were collectively subject to some inexplicable and unprovoked beating. The violence just fell out of the sky for no particular reason. It’s colossally dishonest, indeed delusional, but it follows the general rules of such behaviour. From what I can make out, those rules are fairly simple:

1. Adopt the nearest available minor cause – say, the privatisation of some campus support services - and amplify hyperbolically, preferably invoking unprecedented hardship, class war and the end of civilisation.

2. Claim to speak and act on behalf of all members of whatever this week’s oppressed group happens to be, even (or especially) if actual support for the ostensible cause is contentious and limited. Don’t let impracticality stop you. Or logic, or maths. Remember to be grandiose and self-flattering at all times.

3. Occupy someone else’s property, obstruct and intimidate law-abiding people, cause as much disruption as possible and make absurd demands. Wear a mask and act like you’re an Anarchist Ninja (and not just an obnoxious little wanker). Remember to establish your Marxoid / ‘anarchist’ credentials with some gratuitous shoving and vandalism. Property is theft, man.

4. Continue aggravating others with noise, trespass, expense and inconvenience, escalating as necessary, until enough people are sufficiently scared or pissed off to call the police.

5. On their arrival, provoke the police by refusing to obey the law or normal standards of civility. Scream and swear at them, make threats, while congratulating yourself on just how brave you are. Barricade fire escapes and trap and frighten random people. Heighten tensions with more abusive chants, projectiles, shoving, etc. Use mob force and the threat of violence repeatedly while denouncing any kind of physical retaliation or attempt to enforce the law. With cameras everywhere, remember to be passive-aggressive too. You’re the victim here. Pretend that you’re being kicked by a police officer who isn’t actually kicking you.

6. When the police do respond physically and things get out of hand - just as you’d planned - cry “police state” and “brutality” then use it as a pretext for the next fit of delinquent psychodrama.
 

On reflection I do believe that if you want to really understand what is going on it is advisable to familiarise yourself with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

Ignorance as intellect

Beautifully stated, succinct and to the point:

You have to despair at the stupidity of so much media today, so often made manifest by the cynicism of the idiot who trusts nothing but the ignorance he takes for his superior intellect. Who trusts his own uniformed prejudices about the considered professional judgment of our intelligence agencies and the politicians overseeing them.

Interesting!!!!!

"Can you answer this question correctly? As between liberals and conservatives, who donates more to charity? The answer is it isn't even close. According to the book "Who Really Cares" by Arthur Brooks, conservative-headed households are more generous with their money by some 30 percent and also give far more of their time."

Celebrity downside

Wisdom from Breakpoint:

 

What Jesus said about the dangers of wealth is just as true about celebrity in our postmodern age, and for most of the same reasons: It distorts our sense of self, both in relationship to others and to God.

And that’s before we take into account the hyper-sexualized nature of most of pop culture.

So the best advice I can give Christian parents is, to paraphrase Willie Nelson, “mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be pop stars.”

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t encourage their interest in creative endeavours such as music, theatre, and the visual arts. Quite the contrary. As Eric Metaxas and I have said many times on BreakPoint, we need more Christians in all these fields, pointing people to Truth and beauty through their work. But there’s a world of difference between being a celebrity and being an artist. The celebrity draws attention to himself, the artist to his work.

The celebrity thinks success is being famous. The artist knows success is being faithful. The celebrity chooses style over substance. The artist knows looking good is never as important as being good.

While artists can glorify God, celebrities, almost by definition, probably won’t. Because more often than not, there’s only room for one star in their firmament.

Obfuscation alert!

Ann Coulter sums up the level of argumentation in politically correct/PoMo Western culture:

Whenever liberals (in Australia Labor/Green/Leftie) are in a tight spot, they adopt the scorched-earth policy of argumentation. With no answer, they start demanding that you define words: What do you mean "liberal"? What do you mean "democracy"? What do you mean "patriotism"?

They retreat from argument, burning the English language as they go.

Myth-busters unite

Another 'cultural' myth bites the dust:

Consider one of the Goldberg family's favorite shows: Bravo's "Top Chef," in which the "cheftestants" compete in various culinary challenges for the title of -- duh -- Top Chef. Surely, a cooking show should be safe viewing for all ages. But for 10 years running, the cast has cursed nonstop. Worse, the profanity isn't really bleeped out, merely "bleeped at," in the words of the New York Times.

In 2008, head judge Tom Colicchio rightly chastised the cast and posted an apology on the show's website for all the "gutter language." Nothing's changed. Defenders of the cursing insist it reflects the reality of culinary culture. I'm sure that's true. But journalistic accuracy is a pretty hypocritical defense for a show that has chefs making haute cuisine from vending machines amid egregiously staged product placements. (Also, the cursing is utterly gratuitous. I, for one, have never concluded a delicious meal with the exclamation, "Wow, the guy who made this must be really foul-mouthed!")

And such hypocrisy gets at the core of the problem. Vulgarity has become cultural shorthand for everything from seriousness to rebelliousness to "keeping it real." But it's closer to the opposite.

Colicchio notes the chefs are always "on their best behavior" when they're around him. They never curse in front of the judges. Nor would they, one hopes, around their kids or customers. But when they're on TV -- broadcast to millions (including the judges, their customers and their kids) -- they think it's obligatory to let the expletives fly.

In other words, the standards of the common culture are lower than they are in nearly every other walk of life. Which means they're not really standards at all. If anything, the new taboo is decency.

Almost there!

Thomas Sowell:

"Many people take pride in defying the conventions of society. Those conventions of society are also known as civilization. Defying them wholesale means going back to barbarism. Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians."

To true blue

As Ronald Reagan once said, "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"

Left-Right

FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate on policing speech and the redefinition of “liberal”:

The thing that makes me laugh the most is that I am considered a right-winger by people on the academic left. Only people on the academic left are sufficiently narrow-minded to call me a right-winger. In fact, I’m a liberal, but I’m a civil libertarian liberal, an old-fashioned liberal, who not only believes in the decent society that helps its most unfortunate members survive, but who also happens to believe in freedom. So much of the left today doesn’t believe in liberty, especially the academic left. There’s something wrong with calling the academic left liberalism – they’re not liberals at all. They’re really leftist totalitarians.

If that last line strikes you as unfair, you may want to revisit this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or… hell, just click the tag marked academia.

THE BUREAUCRATIC SOFT SHOE SHUFFLE BOONDOGGLE

 Have you ever noticed what happens when you lob a stone into the centre of a mass of insects feeding on a dead carcass? There is an instant explosion of movement away from the point of impact. The vermin flee as rapidly as possible from that spot where the most immanent damage is liable to be experienced.

 And so it is with bureaucrats when there is bl...ame to be apportioned for an error, mistake or system failure. Alas, we are experiencing such a moment in regards to Bryany, another hiccup in her short but already slightly checkered history.

 It all began when she wanted to study a ‘grown-up’ subject for her SACE, that is; she chose the way of VET (vocational education training) as one of her subjects for year 12. Great, we thought, having a TAFE qualification should prove advantageous in her still to come (then) employment prospects. Little did we know the extent to which the increasingly bureaucratised (see: blame adverse) Australian education system would play its part in upping the discomfiture levels of those ‘unusual’ students and in particular the parents of such children?

 As it turned out Bryany’s powerful personality, natural charms and abilities procured for her a dream job without the need for the nod of approval from said academic overseers however, the ongoing farrago does appear to have the potential to put a spanner-in-the works regarding her longer term university plans, that is in our current understanding of how things pan out (though she has this uncanny ability to circumvent such mundane barriers).

Thus we are embroiled in the battle for culpability. This is a significant struggle I can assure you because at the very mention of the word responsibility, collars are turned up, faces averted and tremulous tones assert in true Shultzerian terms: “we know nothing!” , it’s not our fault”, we were not told” and so forth. When evidence is produced to disprove such disclaimers the lines change to: “WE cannot be blamed, it is the students fault, they knew this was an adult course and therefore we adults cannot be blamed for the student’s error”. And would you not know it but all of the relevant documents that attest to failure, apportion blame etcetera, have been ‘lost’.

 We are currently maintaining the path of proportional benevolence and giving the relevant educational authorities room to recant but soon I fear we are going to have to pass the details onto authorities with an axe to grind and see if political election sloganeering translates into actual action.

 Watch this space.

Duh!

Well articulated Shaun O'Doyle:

There is also the ‘reading Genesis scientifically’ (p. 66) canard. Young-age creationists do not read Genesis as science but as history. Pattemore, like many theistic evolutionists, doesn’t seem to understand the difference. It seems that a ‘scientific’ account of history for Pattemore (and others like him) seems roughly to mean an account of what really happened in the physical world. If so, then that is how we understand Genesis 1–11, but why call that ‘scientific’? That just causes concept confusion—science is not history. Science is about repeatable present process; history is about unrepeatable past events. Science can be used in the study of history, but it cannot be the final authority on determining historicity in a universe governed by the God of Scripture since at the very least science cannot constrain how God might act. Science can’t ‘tell’ us how God acted, only people can—and only God is sure to produce a reliable account.
 

A dilemma some well intentioned but obviously non-reflective folk fall foul of. And I include even those who appear reflective; i.e. with a vast string of letters behind their names, because smart does not preclude fallibility.

Pattemore’s tone towards his opponents is also problematic: “Although the proponents [of young-age creationism] claim the authority of Scripture for these beliefs, their activity is also driven by certain fears or perceived dangers” (p. 35). He then proceeds to list more than half a dozen fears that supposedly drive the beliefs of biblical creationists. Pattemore doesn’t claim this only for biblical creationists: “Does Intelligent Design harbour undercurrents of fear too? I suspect it does” (p. 36). He then lists the supposed ‘fears’ of ID proponents. Apparently anyone who believes in some form of Special Creation is motivated by fear. Pattemore must be nigh omniscient to know just what motivates his ideological opponents! C.S. Lewis called this ‘Bulverism’¹³—the fallacy of pontificating on the motives one’s opponents have for their ‘obviously irrational’ belief before actually disproving their belief.

Victims of victimology

More profound insight from one of America's most perspicacious sons, Thomas Sowell:

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise -- and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.

Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York's lower east side.

You can find the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University -- that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

Imaginary enemies

A short excerpt from a brief article on the inanity of identity politics and the damage it is causing:

An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…

The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.

The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.

 

 

The whole article is worth reading and to be found @

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html#more

The not-so-hidden agenda behind the ABC!

When you come across an article that effectively articulates your own particular viewpoint and does it in a seemingly effortless and erudite way, then it behoves one to publish it without alteration.
This is a small excerpt:

The ruse of open-mindedness, over the past half-century, has enabled bohemia-styled socialists to capture the commanding heights of our erstwhile Judeo-Christian nation, from the education system and academia to many of our mainstream Christian denominations. The march of the left through our social institutions has been that much more effective for the marchers themselves believing they march to their own drum. They are all – cough, cough – individuals. We have to accept the probability, as astonishing as it might sound, that Mark Scott genuinely thinks the ghosts of Media Watch past and present have been without “ideological bias”. Conservatives must also face the likelihood that ABC management really believes publishing Edward Snowden’s leaked documents best serves Australia’s national interest – the national interest being best served by the humiliation of a Coalition government and undermining its “stop the boats” agenda.

...this gem is hidden within the article:  'The ABC’s undeclared mission statement is to reconfigure Australian society;(italics & bold mine) the takedown of Tony Abbott’s character, paradoxically, is nothing personal.

The complete article can be found @: http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/taxes-abc/

To be PC or not to be PC, that is.....

A very instructive excerpt, particularly for an artist:

....the late Doris Lessing on language, academia and political correctness:

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on. A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.” An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyse a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

We can only hope this is so!

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…

There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s. In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….

Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…

In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.

The warming religion will collapse from its sheer cost

Andrew Bolt –, Tuesday, December, 03, 2013, (6:46am)

How many billions of dollars have been squandered on pretending to do something about the weather? On placating the great Climate God?
Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions…
There are past examples. In the U.S. in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda. The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states. The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s.
In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….
Global warming differs from the previous two affairs. Global warming has become a religion. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint…
In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science. However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.

For example:

In fact:

“‘Real Risk of a Maunder Minimum ‘Little Ice Age’ announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University. ‘Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age]…, explained Paul Hudson, the BBC’s climate correspondent. If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as ‘occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and cold summers is, according to him, ‘more likely than not to happen.”

Time to act

The following excerpt makes for sobering reading. Whilst I am convinced that Barry is indeed as duplicitous as this passage would suggest, I do not believe he is quite as competent as this author allows. However, that does not mean that he is not being directed by extremely competent strategists and alternate powers-behind-the-throne as it were. His history suggests that this is indeed a probability and again his history suggests that this 'brains trust' is more than capable of capitalising on any and all events:

Obama understands this base so well because he is one of them. Obama is not merely playing for short-term political interest. He actually believes in what he is doing. He agrees with the happy talk about how great it is to pivot to a pro-Iran policy. He, too, feels the personal satisfaction of seeing the Israelis in trouble and fear.

In this sense, the president is cynically taking advantage of the ObamaCare panic in his own party. Democrats at risk of losing their seats will allow him to push an appeasement policy so dangerous that normally he would be stopped by outraged bipartisan opposition.

Because of the blow ObamaCare has dealt the party, Democrats can't afford to embarrass the president with a foreign policy failure. They, too, are desperate for cheerful New York Times reading for their voters. Letting Iran go nuclear, even a Mideast war, is not as important to them as their doomed feeling from the ObamaCare launch.

This is irresponsible politics as its worst: the ObamaCare of foreign policy

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/desperate_democrats_bow_to_iran.html#ixzz2m5HwbKpF

And yet I cannot say I am surprised. Unfortunately it indicates that the gloves have come off in the undeclared culture wars between conservative and 'progressive'(the TRULY fascist) ideological values in the Western cultures. In Australia the hard left perspectives of the 'Green[Gramscian]/Labor[Fabian]/main-stream-media[useful idiots]' have now been unveiled and they no longer disguise their Judeo-Christian culture crippling agendas any more. You only have to read the Fairfax mouthpieces and/or listen to the ABC to see and hear that.

Good! Let the battle commence. Conservative and traditionally minded people and governing parties have got to start fighting fire with fire. Conservatives are notoriously dis-inclined to manipulate and play the nepotistic game, hence 'conservative values', however there needs to be a scorched earth policy put in place before the conservatives can begin to build.

 In Australia the Abbott government must put aside its timidity and begin to cauterize the wounds created in our society by successive layers of ideological poison. Unions, higher (and lower) education needs to be addressed, the media mouthpieces must be matched by well funded alternative voices and where public money is being used to subvert coalition values such money flows must be stopped.

The inevitable bleating, screaming, and subsequent catatonic behaviours must be borne stoically but not listened to if this government is to put Australia on the path to greatness once again. The ABC must be neutered, if the enemies of Australia want to engage challenging the newly elected government, fine! But it is not right that 'we the conservative(majority)public' must pay towards our own demise. That is just stupid and suicidal.

The one thing that the conservative/traditionalists have in their favour is courage. The 'progressives' have so neutered their own value systems that there is nothing left that they will truly fight for, they lack the courage as well as the fortitude. What will be seen, and is being manifested all over the place is that the true ideological motivations and groups who hide behind the mealy-mouthpieces will emerge from the shadows and those are going to be tough...but we can still win. Not least because those behind the scenes are Godless and at this moment still in the minority. But time is of the essence.

Madness rules

Creeping (creepy?) totalitarianism:

If you ever wanted evidence that big government leads to small citizens, just take a look at the madness emanating out of the ACT’s health bureaucrats. According to a report, ACT bureaucrats want to ban any “high risk” food from being sold at community events.

What are the “high risk” foods? Box Jellyfish jelly? Stonefish with salad? Blue-ringed octopi with chips? If you guessed any of these things you’d be wrong, according to the report:

NOT content with interfering in fund-raising barbecues, the ACT government’s food safety bureaucrats have turned their attention to school fetes, telling parents they cannot sell their homemade quiches any more.

The government has this month enforced bans on a list of popular home-made dishes, telling parents they cannot sell foods it has labelled ”high risk”. That list includes spring rolls, casseroles or any other dishes containing meat or dairy, such as cakes containing custard or cream.

Astonishingly the article then goes on to identify that this proposal has been flagged despite:

ACT Health also [having] no data on food poisonings at school fund-raising events.

This is madness. Risk isn’t something to be avoided, it is something to be managed. The trade off from such a stupid proposal is that civil society is smashed for regulator’s piece of mind. It’s the perfect example of big government being the enemy of community.

- See more at: http://freedomwatch.ipa.org.au/marie-antoinette-bureaucrats-cry-dont-let-them-eat-quiche/#sthash.05YQRCs6.dpuf

To see or not to see......

One of the (many) reasons that the Post Modernist trashes history is because they consider themselves (evolutionarily thinking) to be further down the ever increasing track of intelligence formation and therefore above all that has come before. An illusion that holds profound and disastrous consequences.
In fact if the bible is true (and I believe it is) we are actually 'devolving' in both physical and mental capacity and it appears neuro-science backs me up in this assumption.

Discover magazine claims that the size of human brain is gradually decreasing for the past 20,000 years.“Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,” according to a Daily Mail report quoting Kathleen McAuliffe in Discover magazine.
 

What is so very tragic is that they sacrifice the vast stores of knowledge accumulated by other clever people over generations and that they do it all for an illusion. The truly intelligent like Newton acknowledged that it was not by their intelligence alone that brilliant men (and women) made huge advancements, but it was by standing on the shoulders of those who went before them.

Take for example Blaise Pascal. One of histories most creative geniuses. I love his perspicacious take on the modern human condition and in particular this extract about the way we ferret out amusements to occupy our every waking minute because we hate having to think to deeply.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.

Pascal says there are two ways people avoid thinking about such matters: diversion and indifference. Regarding diversion, he says we fill up our time with relatively useless activities simply to avoid facing the truth of our wretchedness. "The natural misfortune of our mortality and weakness is so miserable," he says, "that nothing can console us when we really think about it. . . . The only good thing for man, therefore, is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances." Business, gambling, and entertainment are examples of things which keep us busy in this way.

The other response to our condition is indifference. The most important question we can ask is What happens after death? Life is but a few short years, and death is forever. Our state after death should be of paramount importance, shouldn't it? But the attitude people take is this:

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

Pascal is appalled that people think this way, and he wants to shake people out of their stupor and make them think about eternity. Thus, the condition of man is his starting point for moving people toward a genuine knowledge of God.

Collectivist mania

The logical outcomes of the collectivist dystopia;

The famine swept through the Soviet Union in 1932-33 following Josef Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Fertile Ukraine, the Soviet Union's bread basket, was worst hit.

When its harvest failed to meet the Kremlin's targets in 1932, officials and activists were sent to villages to confiscate grain and food. The confiscations continued well into 1933, reducing entire families to starvation.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/ukraines_forgotten_holocaust

..........and yet many today who have grown up with the benefits and yes, in the excesses of 'capitalistic culture' still hold misplaced theories about the benefits of socialism. Perhaps because they fancy themselves as being in the driving seat and therefore isolated from such dire consequences.

Think again mush-heads, you and your ilk will probably be the first persons the barbarians will reduce to fertilizer. Who are these 'babrbarians you ask? They are the ones who take over once the opposition is reduced to weak, 'all-you-need-is love airheads and 'academic' minded 'girly-boys.'

A Christian conscience

It appears that Italy's catholic community are showing the worlds protestant communities the way forward. I pray we take it.

More and more doctors in Italy are conscientious objectors.

Each year the annual report on abortion of the Ministry of Health to the Italian Parliament reads like a broken record: fewer doctors and other medical personnel are willing to perform abortions while the number of abortions in Italy continues to trend downwards. The 2013 annual report was no exception.

Final data for 2011 show that 69 percent of doctors in Italy refuse to perform abortions compared with 59 percent in 1983. In one-third of all Italian regions 80 percent or more of gynecologists are conscientious objectors including Lazio, the region that includes Rome. The number of abortion compliant gynecologists in all of Italy (population 61 million) has declined from 1,913 in 2001 to 1,507 in 2011.

In Lombardy, Italy’s most prosperous region, the leftist Vice President of the Regional Council recently presented a medical report that indicated that in one of six hospitals all doctors refuse to perform abortions. In most of the others, the majority of doctors are abortion objectors and the same holds true for other medical personnel. Fearing that the availability of abortion may have a dim future, the leftist regional officials are anxiously looking for willing medical personnel.

As the number of doctors who are conscientious objectors grows, the number of abortions continues to decline. Abortion was introduced in Italy in 1978 via Law 194/78, the same legislation mandating an annual report to Parliament by the Minister of Health. As in any country when abortion is introduced the number skyrockets so that by 1982 abortions peaked at 234,801. Since then abortion numbers have declined every year, except for minor upticks in 1997 and 2005. Preliminary data for 2012 show that abortions in Italy numbered nearly 106,000, registered a 4.9 percent decline from the previous year and a 55 percent decline from the peak.

The total abortion tally would be even lower except for the high percentage of foreign women, nearly 34 percent in 2011, who are counted in the Italian abortion statistics. Most live in Italy but some reside elsewhere. The percentage of foreign women, most of whom are from Eastern European countries which have some of the highest abortion rates in the world according to the World Health Organization, seems to have stabilized and accounted for about one-third of all abortions in the past few years.

Considering that there were few foreign women undergoing abortions in the peak year 1982, the decline in abortions by Italian women alone actually dropped 69 percent by 2011. The abortion rate for all Italian women was 6.6 per 1,000 (2009 data) whereas for foreign women it was 24.1 per 1,000, indicating foreigners skew upwards the overall abortion rate for Italy.

For both Italian and foreign women, the main reasons given for resorting to abortion were already having the desired number of children – even though 60 percent of women had only one child – and economic problems. However, many foreign women also indicated they experienced failure with birth control methods, perhaps due to incorrect use.

Italian abortion rates have declined across the board for all age groups, from under 20 to 45-49. In the first decade of legalization, mostly married women underwent abortion. By 2011 the unmarried or formerly married exceeded currently married women by 57 percent to 43 percent. Interestingly, in the United States the latest data (2008) showed much greater disparity, with married women accounting for only 15 percent of all abortions.

Today Italy has one of the lowest abortion rates among developed countries, especially when compared with the United States. An international comparison of abortion rates per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, for the period 2008-2011 showed Italy as having the fifth lowest rate among 20 countries at 9.4 per 1,000. By comparison the United States ranked fifth highest with 19.6 per 1,000. Switzerland had the lowest rate, 6.8 and Russia the highest at 40.3.

A comparison of abortion rates by age groups shows another considerable contrast with the United States. Sadly, the teen abortion rate in the United States is more than three times that of Italy. The same disparity can be observed in the 20-24 age bracket. Rates are roughly comparable only among groups of older women.

P C teachers

I do enjoy the wisdom of Thomas Sowell:

If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think — that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today.

It is worse than that. Too many teachers, from the elementary schools to the graduate schools, see their role as indoctrinating students with what these teachers regard as the right beliefs and opinions. Usually that means the left’s beliefs and opinions.

The merits or demerits of those ideas is far less important than whether or not students learn to analyze and weigh those merits and demerits. Educators used to say, “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.”

Today, students can spend years in educational institutions, discussing all sorts of issues, without ever having heard a coherent statement of the other side of those issues that differ from what their politically correct teachers say.

There are students in our most prestigious law schools who have never heard arguments for the social importance of property rights — not just for those fortunate enough to own property, but for those who don’t own a square inch of real estate or a single share of stock. How they would view the issues if they did is a moot point because they have heard only one side of the issue.

People who go through life never having heard the other side of issues ranging from environmentalism to minimum wage laws are nevertheless emboldened to lash out in ignorance at anyone who disturbs their vision of the world. The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools.

peek-a-boo

Worth a peek:

A discussion on the state of the left with Ophelia Benson, editor of the rationalist website Butterflies & Wheels and co-author of Why Truth Matters.

“...if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is.”
 

"..................... DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

".....................................I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.

It strikes me as important to have some point of contrast to whatever the prevailing outlook is, but at the moment I’m pretty much repelled by the contrast that’s available, and I doubt I’m alone in this. I think we can safely dismiss the various tribes of the far left as a moral farce and practical irrelevance. So what we have, at least in the UK, is plenty of anti-US sentiment and oppositional posturing – what Nick Cohen called “the anti-imperialism of fools” – which leads to any number of absurd positions. Perhaps the most reprehensible of these were the protestations of “solidarity” with Hassan Nasrallah, despite his openly genocidal ambitions.

But I also think of the leftwing art critic, Julian Stallabrass, who wrote in the New Left Review about the spectacle of terrorism and seemed ever so slightly titillated by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” And I think of the London Review of Books, which has published more than one strangely approving account of Hizballah’s “uncompromising” stance and use of suicide bombing.

I mention these things because they’re not just fringe curiosities - variations of these postures have come to define much of the mainstream left and can be found in the Guardian and Independent on a fairly regular basis. And it’s hard to miss mainstream commentators repeating the same relativistic denunciations of “Western ways of thinking” and the supposed “Eurocentric arrogance” of the Enlightenment. It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.

I remember Terry Eagleton’s description of jihadist suicide bombers - who murder and dismember people on a fairly arbitrary basis - as “tragic heroes” reacting to “injustice”, as if they had no agency of their own, and with the insinuation of some moral equivalence with their victims, including the people who leapt from the windows of a burning World Trade Centre. The fact that Islamist conceptions of “justice” are enormously loaded, unattainably so, and somewhat different from our own didn’t appear to be a detail worthy of comment. And if one suggests that it might be worth looking at Islamist theology, its lineage, and how it explicitly redefines these basic moral terms, one is very likely to be shouted down as an ‘Islamophobe.’

When I see attempts to ignore such details, or to stifle debate, or to control the terms of debate, or to shut down thought before it can happen, I most often find those attempts coming from the left. This wasn’t always the case, of course; but right now I don’t see too many leftists standing up for free speech and the testing of ideas. Those that do are, of course, assailed from the left. Instead I hear lots of talk about “sensitivity” and “respect for other cultures.” And if a person doesn’t want an open debate to take place and wants to define in advance what kind of language is permissible and which subjects are off-limits, that usually indicates the weakness of their position and, more to the point, an awareness of just how weak that position is. Which, I guess, brings us back to the issue of denial.

Lol and then weep for the future

One world government anyone?
Note the PoMo/neo-marxist over-the-top language. If it were not so serious it would be hillarious, like a Benny Hill skit. 

The regime’s PressTV ran an op-ed analysis on Saturday with a headline “Iran deals deathblow to U.S. global hegemony.” The analysis, by Finian Cunningham, an Irishman whom the outlet calls “a prominent expert in international affairs,” blames America for much of the world’s problems and warns of its decline.

“Iran, however, presents a greater and more problematic challenge to U.S. global hegemony,” Cunningham wrote. “The U.S. in 2013 is a very different animal from what it was in 1945. Now it resembles more a lumbering giant. Gone is its former economic prowess and its arteries are sclerotic with its internal social decay and malaise. … Iran exerts a controlling influence over the vital drug that keeps the American economic system alive – the world’s supply of oil and gas. Any war with Iran, if the U.S. were so foolish to embark on it, would result in a deathblow to the waning American and global economy.”

Cunningham said the story will not end there: “The attainment of world peace, justice and sustainability does not only necessitate the collapse of American hegemony. We need to overthrow the underlying capitalist economic system that gives rise to such destructive hegemonic powers. Iran represents a deathblow to the American empire, but the people of the world will need to build on the ruins.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/iran-warns-of-world-war-iii/#wbaj964zvw3o8hb6.99