"Young men, get a 'yes' text before sex"

Sounds like a good idea.

An "I do" is even better. 

Chag Chankukah Samayach!

Happy Chankukah to all of our Jewish friends!

Yid with a Lid has an amusing and educational post on Chanukah-- The Difference Between Christmas And Chanukah (With Tongue Firmly in Cheek).

Happy and Blessed Thanksgiving to all!

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863:

'And if you order today, we'll send you this free climate science...'

Donna Laframboise from No Frakking Consensus, on a marketing article in a peer reviewed climate science journal by warmist scientist Amy Luers:

Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be This Kind of Scientist

Amy Luers calls herself “a scientist.” An online bio tells us she

holds a Ph.D. in environmental science and an M.A. in international policy studies, both from Stanford University, and a M.S. and B.S. inenvironmental resources engineering from Humboldt State University... 

Luers is... the author of an essay published this week in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Climatic Change. You can read the full text of that essay here (a backup is here). It provides some depressing insights into how professional climate activists think. 

For starters, although these people are desperate to connect with the public, they aren’t interested in actually talking to the public. It never occurs to them that ordinary Moms and Dads might reject their activist views – or their activist goals. 

Ordinary people don’t have minds, priorities, and opinions of their own. In the view of people such as Luers, they’re merely raw material. The mission is to figure out the secret formula by which they can be manipulated to support the right policies.
Luers says she wants to “strengthen climate engagement.” She therefore interviewed over 40 climate advocates, more than a dozen representatives from the foundation community, and a dozen academics…before arriving at the less-than-earth-shattering conclusion that “social scientists and advocates must work together to build a culture of learning.”...

Luers’ essay declares that her side of the climate debate needs to “take control of the conversation.” She talks about: 

creating “political support” 

“the larger political landscape” 

“longer-term political needs” 

the need to build “political will” 

building “a political and public base of support” 

She says that “political research techniques and analyses have grown in sophistication, enabling analysts to learn a good deal about what works and what does not in political campaigns.” 

She makes statements such as: “We need to start picking our battles, designing our campaigns, and assessing our losses and wins…” She’s keen on “engaging the public on climate primarily by selling it as a personally relevant issue.” 

In other words, her paper has absolutely nothing to do with science. It’s about political strategizing. The word “political” appears in it no less than 22 times. 

In 2013, this is what passes for peer-reviewed academic research. These are the sorts of essays that scientifically trained people now spend their time writing.

I've seen some of this even in my own field of work, which is hydrocephalus and cerebral blood flow research. Scientists become involved in politics and trying to "educate" the public on the perceived value of their work, to drum up funding, increase prestige, etc.

Add the ideological swill of green fanaticism, and this marketing of global warming by "scientists" becomes toxic, polluting both politics and science.

Honest scientists don't publish papers talking about how to manipulate the public, and honest journals and scientific disciplines don't tolerate it.

"it can't even launch a damn website"

From the lefty New Republic:

Liberalism has spent the better part of the past century attempting to prove that it could competently and responsibly extend the state into new reaches of American life. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the administration has badly injured that cause, confirming the worst slurs against the federal government. It has stifled bad news and fudged promises; it has failed to translate complex mechanisms of policy into plain English; it can’t even launch a damn website. What’s more, nobody responsible for the debacle has lost a job or suffered a demotion. Over time, the Affordable Care Act’s technical difficulties can be repaired. Reversing the initial impressions of government ineptitude won’t be so easy.

Obamacare is a real wake-up call, for Americans with single-digit IQ's and propeller beanies and drool on their chins who didn't notice how well liberalism managed welfare dependence, black family cohesion, inner city crime, New Orleans, Detroit, Newark, and Vietnam.

"My goodness, these liberals are... are... are... incompetent!"

:0

But, as I've repeatedly pointed out, Obamacare is no failure. The folks who run the NSA know how to design a website. Obamacare is the meticulously planned destruction of our healthcare system, so it can be rebuilt by socialists. Creative destruction. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and if you don't have a good crisis, make one.

Textbook Cloward-Piven.

No liberals, and few conservatives, understand what's going on. We elected Alinskyites, not liberals. There's not a shred of incompetence in Obamacare. Obama doesn't give a shit about losing congressional seats in mid-term elections. So what if he has to sacrifice a few liberal Democrat assholes to get the job done? Interestingly, he does care about packing the federal judiciary with leftists, to ensure the judiciary doesn't screw up the creative healthcare destruction.

Alinskyites play the long game, and they're going to win it.

Vox Day on the revolutionary impact of the entrance of millions of women into the workforce

Vox Day notes the revolution in our workforce in the 60's and 70's:

I always find it remarkable, and perhaps even a little depressing, how few people are able to grasp that the primary consequence of the addition of 70 million working women, all of whom were already consumers, to the labor force, could never have been anything else but to lower wages.

One can debate whether female workers are more or less productive than male workers, and one can certainly debate whether the societal effects were beneficial or negative, but the one thing that cannot be denied, on logical, theoretical, historical, or empirical grounds, is that the post-1950 doubling of the female labor force has had a severely depressing effect on American wages.

Of course there are very good and very bad aspects to this massive increase in employment of women that took place in the latter half of the 20th century in America.

On the good side, it brought the considerable talents and perspectives of women to bear on our work life, it provided employment of millions of women who needed it, it inspired young girls to aspire to better education, accomplishments, etc.

On the bad side, it obviously depressed wages, it made many families dependent on two-wage earner arrangements, and, perhaps most perniciously, it made increasingly extraneous the labor of the most marginalized segment of the workforce, which was mostly black men.

I suspect that the large-scale unemployment and family abandonment by black men over the past half-century is due in large part to massive increases in welfare (making the poor/black husband/father economically superfluous) and to massive increases in women in the workforce (making the poor/black husband/father economically untenable).

Don't expect to encounter this simple observation anywhere in academia or in the media for the next thousand years.

"[T]he rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."

If only we could get these far right religious nuts to respect the separation of church and state...

Sixteen people from other countries discuss what they couldn't believe about America until they moved here

I can't get the link to work. Just google the title. It's a fascinating post. 

My, how America has changed

A compilation of JFK's humor, in his honor on this sad anniversary of his assassination.

He was a deeply flawed man, like the rest of us, and did some sordid things in his personal life, but he was undeniably charming and brought a public warmth and gentility to the presidency that has only been equaled since by Reagan. In his public life as president he was a decent man. His policies were what we would today call neoconservative-- he strengthened the military, was a passionate anti-communist, and professed supply-side economics and cut taxes. The speech he was carrying in his jacket pocket when he was assassinated was a call for corporate and personal tax cuts. In fact, his Republican bonafides were lacking in only one major aspect: he was luke-warm at best on civil rights, which of course has always been a prime Republican cause. It seems that he was coming around to the Republican view on civil rights in the year before his death.

In a president, we could have done, and have done, much worse than JFK.

It's worth reflecting that in 2013 we now have a president who began his political career in the living room of a man and woman whose far-left politics and proclivity for violence are hardly distinguishable from the politics and violence of the sniper in the sixth floor window on that day in Dallas. Our current president's leftist friend and original campaign bundler even wrote a book extolling political violence and dedicated the book to the murderer of JFK's brother. Our current president moves quite comfortably in the social circle of JFK's and RFK's assassins.

My, how America has changed.

JFK was cut down on that horrible day 50 years ago. I was eight years old, and I remember the day well. A kid on a bicycle was shouting "somebody killed the president" as I left school to walk home. My father picked me up in our car, and he was very upset. We watched the coverage on our TV (an old black-and-white set with rabbit ears) all weekend. My mom was so stunned she found it difficult to say anything at all. It was the first time I ever saw my dad cry.

For years afterward my father would tear up even at the mention of President Kennedy's name. JFK was revered in our house.

He was a seriously imperfect man, but he had a place in our hearts, and even his political opponents had more than a bit of fondness for him. His death was a tragedy from which our nation has still not recovered.

On this terrible anniversary, say a prayer for President Kennedy and for his family and for our grieving nation. May God bless him. 

Does the effectiveness of science support philosophical naturalism?

James Chastek from Just Thomism:

On the inference from the success of science to Naturalism being probable 

[Scientism] attempt[s] to bootstrap from the success of a natural explanations to the probability of naturalism. The relevant argument is this one: The sciences have had such great success with natural explanations that it is improbable that non-natural explanations are true.

First off, the argument obviously works in one very limited sense: if you see enough natural explanations in a row, you’ll likely be surprised if a supernatural one comes along. Now one sense of “improbable” is indeed “surprising”, but if this is all the Naturalist argument comes to, then there needn’t be any rational basis for Naturalism, since simply being surprised by something doesn’t make the surprise rationally informed (for example, one sort of surprise comes from things we were too ignorant or too oblivious to see coming). In order for the natural success—>Naturalism inference to have a rational basis we would need some account of how often we would expect a non-naturalist explanation to occur. Thus, even granting that the scientific method could rationally deal with a hypothesis of the divine existence, how often would you expect it to do so? If that question is too hard, try your luck at a simpler one: assuming a world with only Euclidean geometries, how often would you expect geometers to develop the idea of non-Euclidean geometry? Say you lived any time between Euclid (300 B.C.) and the rise of non-Euclidean geometries in the 19th century. What p-value could you assign to the rise of non-Euclidean geometry?* Should you rationally expect it to develop after 500 years (200 A.D.)? After a millenium? When exactly? The question demands a sort of knowledge we just can’t have, whether our method is scientific or otherwise. There are historical contingencies, free choices, sheer accidents, and a hundred other things at play that keep us from ever being able to figure out whether such a thing will ever come to pass at all, much less what its probabilities are. 

And so, in an irony that the heavens have no doubt long laughed at already, the attempt to argue that the multiplication of successful natural explanations makes Naturalism more probable is itself a straightforward piece of junk science. In fact, it might not even rise to this level: junk science conclusions can at least be based on a junk p-value – but the Naturalism inference can’t even base itself on this. 

If God – that is, the ultimate cause of the universe – really exists, and if scientific methods of discovery are adequate to find him, we shouldn’t expect the discovery to occur until the science has gone on for a while (one doesn’t tend to find ultimate causes right away). This all assumes that God is a possible concept in a natural hypothesis, which can only happen if science is not methodologically naturalist. Those are three pretty significant if’s and, if anything, they seem to suggest that science could carry on a very long time before it ever can rationally raise the question of God by its own methods. It is ridiculous for us to assume we are in any position to have found the ultimate basis of things when we know our two main theories of the universe cannot both be ultimate. But whatever we think of this last reason or others that might be put against it, the fact is that we have no precise idea whatsoever of when we should expect a science capable of forming supernatural hypotheses to form its first plausible one, and so no way to make the repeated successes of natural science contribute to the probability of naturalism.

The scientistic view that the success of natural explanations demonstrates the truth of philosophical naturalism (the view that nature is all that exists) is a non-sequitur.

Consider this analogy. Among scientific disciplines, none is more "successful" than engineering. Engineering really works-- electronics, computers, cars, lights, airplanes, etc. It is, in our everyday life, the most successful kind of science. It does not follow, then, that all science must be understood in terms of engineering. There is scientific truth that does not restrict itself to engineering principles, just as there is metaphysical truth that does not restrict itself to scientific principles.

The success of one mode of inquiry does not mean that all truth can only be approached through that mode of inquiry.

In the matter of science, the view that science cannot give us the whole truth is particularly obvious, given that the assertion that science can give us the whole truth is itself not a scientific assertion.

As Chastek noted wryly, the scientistic mode of thinking is junk.

Oswald was no nut.

He was a leftist.

James Piereson in the Wall Street Journal:

JFK—Casualty of the Cold War Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who idolized Castro and hated America.

A good article, except for the assertion that JFK was a "casualty of the Cold War."

Bullshit. JFK was a casualty of a leftist.

If you want a disgusting precis of liberal propaganda, just consider the recurring assertions that Kennedy was a victim of an American propensity for violence, the incessant reference to right-wing protests and organizations in Dallas, etc, and the astonishing refusal of liberals to admit that Kennedy was murdered by a man from their end of the political spectrum.

The facts:

1) JFK was murdered by a leftist.
2) Conservatives had nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination.
3) Conservatives warned America about the danger the Left posed to our country. The assassination proved them right.
4) The nearly universal bleating from the media, academics etc. about how Kennedy's assassination demonstrated the "violent streak" in American culture was and is obscene. Kennedy was killed by one man-- a man wholly of the Left. Conservatives and mainstream Americans had nothing to do with Kennedy's murder.
5) The media and academia were and are politically quite close to Oswald on many issues.
6) Oswald was not a nut. He was a leftist who shared many of the views of the left then and now: he sympathized with Cuba, the Soviet Union, socialism, and he hated capitalism, etc. Oswald's political views would fit nicely in any number of Hollywood cocktail parties and modern Democratic Party soirees, and you couldn't fit an index card between Oswald's politics and the politics of the far-left Castro-loving loon just elected mayor of New York City.
7) Oswald's murder of Kennedy didn't make him a nut either. It just meant that he was evil, and shared the violent proclivities of University of Illinois professor Bill Ayers, Columbia professor Kathy Boudin, and many other leftists with blood on their hands.

In fact, both Ayers and Boudin killed more people than Oswald. Oswald killed two people. Ayers and Boudin killed three people each.

If Oswald's first murder victim hadn't been so prominent a person, Oswald-- a leftist cop killer like Boudin-- would be a hero to the left, a professor at some prestigious university perhaps, like Ayers and Boudin are today.

Obamacare is succeeding beyond the Left's wildest dreams

Checkmate, suckers. 

A follow-up to yesterday's post on the plummeting credulousness of the American public about Obama.

Do you really think that the government that runs the NSA which day and night gathers intimate data on 300 million Americans and eavesdrops on heads of state around the world, a government that commands the world's most powerful military, and rigged the last election by brilliantly suppressing the opposition with IRS and FEC witch-hunts really can't design a website?

Obamacare is not a failure. It is a remarkable success. It will be even more wildly successful in the years to come.

How so?

Obamacare was designed to blow the American healthcare system to smithereens. It was designed to bestow chaos and confusion and collapse. It was designed to demolish our current largely private system of healthcare and replace it with a single-payer federal system. Such has been the dream of statists for generations. Government control of healthcare-- complete control-- is a massive advance of government power, and an electoral elixir to the party of government.

The problem that Democrats faced in 2009 is that while they controlled the federal executive and legislature (and courts), they still couldn't get federal single-payer passed. So they chose the next-best alternative-- demolish the current mostly private system so that federal single payer is the only option.

It's Cloward-Piven, applied to healthcare. Obama is an old ACORN lawyer, and he took this in with his mother's milk. ACORN was created to implement Cloward-Piven (from former Leftist David Horowitz):

[T]he Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism [and implement socialism] by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

The Obamacare roll-out has been a rousing success. It will succeed finally when Americans, horrified and repulsed by a shattered healthcare system, demand decisive federal action. And the feds oh-so-reluctantly will comply, after much hand-wringing and regret, with federal single-payer.

The crisis is proceeding as planned, thank you. Only a crisis can bring about federal control of healthcare. And a crisis will bring it. Americans-- thrown off their existing plans by the tens of millions and bankrupted by exploding premiums-- will demand Healthcare Homeland Security.

Checkmate, suckers.

Et tu, Slate?

John Dickerson at ultra-liberal Slate confesses the demise of Obama's credibility. The demise is, more accurately, the loss of the public's credulousness. Obama hasn't changed at all.

He's no less credible now than when he began. 

"Islam needs an intervention"

Roger Simon, with my commentary.

Islam needs an intervention

Indeed, like a badly failing family member — an alcoholic or a drug addict — what Islam desperately needs now is not nuclear appeasement or CAIR-style “tolerance” but an intervention. 

To say that something is decidedly wrong in the Islamic world is a monumental understatement. And Muslim societies make almost no serious effort to correct themselves, ricocheting back and forth between military totalitarianism and religious totalitarianism while — like that family heroin addict — blaming everyone but themselves for their fate.
They are indeed in deep need of an intervention. The question is how to do it. 

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Of course, just by raising that question you are accused of Islamophobia, an absurd almost self-contradictory term, which always applies better to those using it. They are the ones who are phobic about Islam because they are the ones who are fearful (actually terrified) of what Islamic people will do if told the truth. So they come up with those equally absurd lies, like defining the crime of a soldier who murders his fellows while shouting “Allahu Akhbar” as “workplace violence.” 

The actual "Islamophobes" are the folks who are so afraid of Islam that they won't tell the truth about it.

This real Islamophobia has been the pathetic stance of our government and military since 9/11, made worse by the delusions of Barack Obama. Of course it has failed. How could it possibly succeed when it is fundamentally dishonest? 

Meanwhile, another large sector of our society wants us to throw up our hands at the whole thing — let these madmen destroy each other. I am sympathetic — how could I not be? We have already lost so much in treasure, human and material. 

But I will remind those people — and myself — that in our tradition we are our brother’s keeper. And that is one of the most important values, if not the key value, that gave us this great country. 

We are not Islam's keeper. Let Allah sort it out. But if they attack us, we should defend ourselves with vigor.

Furthermore, such a violent ideology left unchecked could destroy the world. It already infects over a billion Muslims, with painfully rare, though highly laudable, exceptions. 

"Infects". Yes. It is a disease of the human soul.

(The depressing truth is that I met almost all of them in my job at PJM. Where are the rest? Why is it there is no really organized attempt within Islam for any kind of serious reform — only the most momentary lip service after a terror attack?)

Carnage like the events in Pakistan and Kenya have widespread support in the Muslim world.

Islam is a deadly heresy-- a form of Arianism. You can see why the Church fought heretics with such ferocity. Heresies are deadly business. Eventually Islam will come to widespread military conflict with the West. It will be demolished militarily-- there has not been since the Battle of Vienna any Muslim army that can take the field against an Western army and survive more than a few days.

Islam will not stop murdering innocents and the West will not tolerate it forever. The real horror in all of this is that while there is no doubt that Islam and the West will come to widespread war, and that Islam will lose militarily, the Western armies may fight under the flag of fascism, which is on the rise in Europe in the wake of the eclipse of Christianity.

The world will pay an enormous price for tossing aside Christian faith. 

Surgeons?

From The Week:

Which professions have the most psychopaths?

From an unexpected and clueless source, a great case for Intelligent Design

Jerry Coyne marvels at Rubik's Cube:

Coyne:

Like everyone else, I once had a Rubik’s cube (the world’s best-selling toy, 350 million of them had been sold by 2009), but I am simply puzzle-illiterate, and gave it up quickly.

Coyne quotes Wikipedia:

The original (3×3×3) Rubik’s Cube has eight corners and twelve edges. There are 8! (40,320) ways to arrange the corner cubes. Seven can be oriented independently, and the orientation of the eighth depends on the preceding seven, giving 37 (2,187) possibilities. There are 12!/2 (239,500,800) ways to arrange the edges, since an even permutation of the corners implies an even permutation of the edges as well. (When arrangements of centres are also permitted, as described below, the rule is that the combined arrangement of corners, edges, and centres must be an even permutation.) Eleven edges can be flipped independently, with the flip of the twelfth depending on the preceding ones, giving 211 (2,048) possibilities. 

which is approximately forty-three quintillion. 

The puzzle is often advertised as having only “billions” of positions, as the larger numbers are unfamiliar to many. To put this into perspective, if one had as many standard sized Rubik’s Cubes as there are permutations, one could cover the Earth’s surface 275 times.

And Coyne is right. The combinatorial possibilities are astonishing, and the likelihood of arriving at a combination that successfully solves the puzzle is nil, unless intelligence is applied.

Living things are an immensely more complex "solution" to adaptive puzzles than a solved Rubik's Cube.

Darwinists will argue that evolution is not random. They will insist that while variation is random, natural selection is not.

Honest people will reply that we must look at evolution as a whole-- random-variation-and-natural-selection. Evolution is a solution to an adaptive puzzle, just as a correctly aligned Rubik's Cube is a solution to a puzzle.

Both solutions are impossible without intelligence, because quintillions of undirected combinatorial possibilities preclude success.

Life, like a solved Rubik's Cube, is incontrovertible evidence for intelligent design.

"We Had the Experience but Missed the Meaning"

I've got a post up on ENV, for your reading pleasure (or displeasure).

Apparently this is not a parody

An Obamacare ad::

HT: Instapundit

Why was Deepwater Horizon in deep water?

What made it necessary to drill for oil at 5000 feet of ocean depth?

Here's a post from Steve Malley at Red State about the "ham sandwich" indictment of a British Petroleum engineer involved in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Deepwater Horizon, as you'll recall, was an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded and caused a major oil leak in the Gulf.

The prosecution of the engineer (who had nothing to do with the explosion or spill itself) is a fine example of prosecutorial zeal, probably excessive, but it's just the pretense for a post I've been meaning to write for a while.

Here's the post I've been meaning to write:

Why was the Deepwater Horizon in deep water?

Huh?, you say. This is why it matters.

Ever since the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, near-shore drilling for oil near the continental U.S. has been heavily regulated by environmental laws, and in many places effectively banned. In order to obtain oil offshore, oil companies have had to build their rigs far out at sea, in deep water. The Deepwater Horizon was in 5000 feet of water. Capping it took three months. Yet there is oil available in shallow water near the coast-- in shallow water, where capping an oil leak is much safer, easier, and faster.

Oil rig accidents are inevitable. They're going to happen, despite the best precautions, regulations, etc. In the real world, accidents happen.

So why require oil rigs to drill in deep water, where blowouts of oil wells are so much more difficult to stop?

If the Deepwater Horizon had been the Shallowwater Horizon, the work to stop the leak could have been done in 50 feet of water, not 5000 feet. Much quicker, much safer.

The nutcase environmental regulations that force us to drill for oil in the deep ocean are what made the Deepwater Horizon spill so catastrophic.

Another example of the deep responsibility of environmentalists for environmental disasters is the Exxon Valdez oil spill. in 1989 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling 10 million gallons of oil into the water.

Environmentalists went berserk, naturally, but a cogent analysis of the spill would begin with this question: why were we transporting Alaskan oil by ship anyway?

From Investors Business Daily:

[The] Exxon Valdez disaster... was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. 

The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the northern border of the 48 contiguous states. Groups like the Sierra Club waged a major battle against both the Prudhoe Bay development and the pipeline. 

They lost on the drilling but won a small victory in forcing the pipeline to not traverse the continent via a safer land route but to dead end at the port of Valdez, Alaska. The rest, as they say, is history.

But for the Sierra Club and other environmentalist wackos, the oil from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope would never have been on a ship in Prince William Sound. A land pipeline would have been much safer, and would have prevented the environmental disaster.

But environmental policy in this country is not driven by good sense and accountability. The environmental regulations that contribute to environmental disasters are never questioned, and the green loons who peddle them are never called to account. The mainstream media covers for these bastards.

Search the internet in vain for any consistent account of the role that radical environmentalists play in causing environmental disasters.

Stupid arrogant counterproductive unaccountable policies are the best that radical environmentalists do. The worst thing they do-- and they do a lot of it-- is genocide. 

I'd be funny, if they weren't trying to regulate the air you exhale

CFACT interviews global warming fanatics at the UN climate meeting in Bonn, Germany.

The question: "Are you aware that there hasn't been any global warming for the past 15 years?"

Succinctly

 

HT: Elizabeth Scalia

Faster than an earthquake...

Never thought of this.

Hmmm...

But if you're like born, Wendy Davis is really totally ok with you

Texas state senator Wendy "Abortion Barbie" Davis, a Democrat candidate for Texas governor who works tirelessly to promote late-term abortions, announces that she's really pro-life:

“I’m pro-life. I care about the life of every child; every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that future.”

No doubt this will be reassuring to the usual low-information Democrat Texas voter who loves freebies from the government but isn't so hot about killin' babies. 'Heck, blondie gonna give me free stuff and don't like killin' all youngins! She got ma vote!"

If you're extra-uterine, Davis is all fer ya. She'll use public money to buy your ma's and pa's votes, like any good Democrat.

But Wendy draws the line at the mons pubis. If you're inside your mom, you're chopped meat for all she cares. If you're outside your mom, she loves ya so much that she'll rob your working neighbors at gunpoint to send ya' their money in the mail and free phones and stuff.

If you're an extrauterine Texan, Wendy's totally copacetic with that. If you're an intrauterine Texan, well... ummm... Wendy's just not that into you.

Why, exactly, is Bill Ayers invited to speak to teachers?

Two teachers raise quite obvious questions as to why commie serial bomber Bill Ayers was invited to speak to teachers about education at a conference.

Ayers is an unconvicted murderer and terrorist bomber who for reasons obscure is still sucking free air.

The teachers ask a good question. Perhaps next year the speaker at the convention can be Ted Kaczynski (speaking on environmental awareness, of course) or perhaps Kim Jung Un, who can provide a sequel to Ayers keynote speech, describing in detail what actually happens when communists take over a nation. If that's too controversial, Un could discuss the socialist approach to the prevention of childhood obesity.

Or perhaps the conference organizers could ask Columbia/NYU professor Kathy Boudin (a convicted terrorist murderer) to talk about fundraising or something.

Nothing in Nazism makes sense except in the light of evolution

Historian of Nazism Richard Weikart:

[T]he following evidence... demonstrate[s] overwhelmingly that Nazi
racial thinkers embraced human and racial evolution: 

1) Hitler believed in human evolution. 

2) The official Nazi school curriculum prominently featured biological evolution, including human evolution. 

3) Nazi racial anthropologists, including SS anthropologists, uniformly endorsed human evolution and integrated evolution into their racial ideology. 

4) Nazi periodicals, including those on racial ideology, embraced human evolution. 

5) Nazi materials designed to inculcate the Nazi worldview among SS and military men promoted human evolution as an integral part of the Nazi worldview.  

... 

I... highlight the ways that Nazi racial thought was shaped by Darwinism (defined as biological evolution through the pro-cess of natural selection). 

First, almost all Nazi racial theorists believed that humans had evolved from primates. 

Second, they provided evolutionary explanations for the development of different human races, including the Nordic or Aryan race (these two terms were used synonymously). Specifically, they believed that the Nordic race had become superior because harsh climatic conditions in north-central Europe during the Ice Ages had sharpened the struggle for existence, causing the weak to perish and leaving only the most vigorous. 

Third, they believed that the differential evolutionary development of the races provided scientific evidence for racial inequality. 

Fourth, they held that the different and unequal human races were locked in an ineluctable
struggle for existence. 

Fifth, they thought that the way for their own race to triumph in the struggle for existence was to procreate more prolifically than competing races and to gain more “living space” (Lebensraum) into which to expand. 

Sixth, many argued that Darwinism promoted a collectivist ideal. 

These six points—derived from the view that humans and human races evolved and are still evolving through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection—profoundly impacted Nazi policy. They formed the backdrop for eugenics, killing the disabled, the quest for “living space,” and racial extermination.

Weikart's paper is a superb introduction to the mountain of evidence linking the Darwinian understanding of man to Nazi racial policies and anti-Semitism. His book is a great exploration of the obvious link (not yet available on Kindle, sadly, but a great read if you don't mind dead trees).

I also highly recommend Jerry Bergman's Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (available on Kindle). Bergman's documentation is astonishingly detailed-- his chapter on Darwinism in the Nazi educational system is remarkable.

Nothing in Nazism makes sense except in the light of evolution. The debt owed to the evolutionary understanding of man by the Nazi understanding of man is obvious. Darwinian evolution is at the core of Nazi racial ideology. It is so obvious that Darwinists become unhinged at the mere mention of it. Which is ample reason to keep mentioning it.

Nazism is State Darwinism

My friend Mike Flannery has a great post on ENV about the intimate connection between Nazism and Darwinism. Mike links to Richard Weikart's new paper on the Nazi-Darwin connection. Richard is a leading historian of Nazism whose book From Darwin to Hitler is a masterpiece and a landmark in the field. Flannery's post and Weikart's paper are must-reads.

You would think that a political ideology based on racial biology that views human affairs as evolutionary selection and a struggle for existence between fitter and less fit races would be universally acknowledged as Darwinian. And of course Nazism is largely acknowledged as Darwinian in the community of academic historians.

Yet a few Darwin-Nazi deniers persist, unwilling to admit the truth about their "science" and the impact it has had on humanity. The denial of the Darwin-Nazi connection puts the deniers' embrace of an organization that demands the removal of the Star of David from a Holocaust memorial in a harsher light.

Just as communism is State Atheism, Nazism is State Darwinism. 

"If abortion was really only 3% of [Planned Parenthood]..."

Wesley Smith makes an excellent observation about the blessed closing of the abortion crematoriums in Texas in the wake of the new Texas laws protecting women from Gosnell-like unsafe facilities:

Planned Parenthood abandons Tx Poor Women

Remember when several states sought to defund Planned Parenthood because they didn’t want public money to go to an abortion provider? Oh, the screaming! These laws were so uncompassionate, PP’s defenders screamed, denying poor women basic health care! 

Yet, when Texas law required that abortionists have admitting privileges within 30 miles of an abortion clinic–which would not in any way prevent the clinics from providing poor women ”basic health care”– 12 Planned Parenthood clinics closed. 

From the CBS DFW story:

Planned Parenthood will close a dozen clinics on Friday after a federal appeals court reinstated most of the state’s controversial new abortion law. The ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals late Thursday means that many abortion clinics across the state of Texas are required to stop providing the procedure immediately.

If abortion was really only 3% of PP–as the organization claims–would a safety restriction of this kind really force twelve PP clinics to close?  

Indeed, the question must now be asked: Where is PP’s compassion? Don’t Texas poor women still need basic Ob/gyn care? Don’t they still need access to cheap birth control? Don’t they still need breast exams? Etc. Etc. Etc.?

What is that old saying? Money talks? Killing fetuses is Planned Parenthood’s realraison d’ etre. The other stuff is clearly just veneer.

Wesley makes an excellent point. If Planned Parenthood were really providing mostly basic women's health care, why would a law requiring routine safety precautions (the kind of safety precautions that are universally required at outpatient centers were surgery is performed) lead to the immediate closing of 12 clinics?

Lying butchers. Planned Parenthood is about women's health abortion and money.

"The union of your spirits here has caused Him to remain..."

Paul Stookey's Wedding Song:

He is now to be among you at the calling of your hearts
Rest assured this troubador is acting on his part.
The union of your spirits, here, has caused him to remain
For whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name
There is love. there is love. 

A man shall leave his mother and a woman leave her home
And they shall travel on to where the two shall be as one.
As it was in the beginning is now and til the end
Woman draws her life from man and gives it back again.
And there is love. there is love. 

Oh then what's to be the reason for becoming man and wife?
Is it love that brings you here or love that brings you life?
And if loving is the answer, then who's the giving for?
Do you believe in something that you've never seen before?
Oh there's love, there is love. 

Stookey, a devout Christian, wrote this beautiful ballad about Christ's Presence in marriage for the wedding of Peter Yarrow.

But it's about the most important and basic human relationship-- about the love between man and woman in marriage, which is a reflection (along with having children) of the Trinity in our daily lives.

Marriage is a sacrament. After two thousand years, the Lord's love still graces our lives and our music, in each marriage anew.

They never took it down, really

Palestinians Are Flying the Nazi Flag Again

The Palestinians are flying the Nazi flag again. 

Israel National News reported:

For at least the second time in five months, Arab residents of Beit Umar in the Palestinian Authority (PA) have placed a Nazi flag over a major thoroughfare where Jews pass in their vehicles. 

Beit Umar is located between Halhoul and the Etzion Bloc, not far from Hevron.
Soldiers from the Haruv battalion in Kfir Regiment tried to take down the flag Saturday, but encountered difficulty because it was placed very high up. 

A similar event took place at Beit Umar in May, when hundreds of residents of Gush Etzion who drove down Highway 60 were astounded to see an oversized Nazi flag flying next to a mosque in the Arab town.

Palestinian Muslims fought for Hitler in WWII. Since 1948, they would have exterminated every Jew in Israel, but for the IDF.

Their Muslim brothers in the Middle East and Africa are now engaged in a genocidal anti-Christian pogrom.

The world doesn't care.

Oh, and speaking of crimes against humanity, did you hear about the atheist who suffered a prayer mural, or the transgender student denied the right to use the opposite-sex restroom?

Why do these science apocalypses keep pausing?

From Climategate warmist Kevin Trenberth:

“Global warming is continuing but it’s being manifested in somewhat different ways,” said Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. Warming can go, for instance, to the air, water, land or to melting ice and snow. 

Warmth is spreading to ever deeper ocean levels, he said, adding that pauses in surface warming could last 15-20 years. 

Right. Climate science assures us that warm water sinks.

I guess the computer models missed that. Gotta add another epicycle.

Why do science apocalypses always keep "pausing"? The eugenic apocalypse has paused for 150 years. The population explosion has paused for 60 years. The pesticide holocaust has paused for 50 years. Global cooling has paused for 40 years. Global warming has paused for 17 years.

The difference between environmentalism and apocalyptic religious cults is becoming difficult to discern.