Man in Persistent Vegetative State answers questions via fMRI

From BBC:

A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain. 

It's the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-injured patient has been able to give answers clinically relevant to their care. 

Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine. 

His doctor says the discovery means medical textbooks will need rewriting.

There is abundant evidence that many patients in "Persistent Vegetative State" are aware and have complex mental states, despite being unable to communicate.

The diagnosis of PVS needs to be abandoned, because it is unreliable and it consigns a vulnerable group of severely brain-injured patients to neglect, abandonment, and even killing by starvation.

People with severe brain damage are fully human beings and persons, and should be treated with respect and compassion, with the assumption that they are aware of their surroundings and that they have internal mental states.

May we never do to another handicapped person what we did to Terri Schiavo. 

Progressive Catholics claim precedent for anti-traditionalist stance

Progressive Catholics of an earlier era
showing support for state socialism

(Dissociated Press) Progressive Catholics from across the U.S. met this week in San Francisco to proclaim their opposition to the "ultra-traditionalist patriarchal Catholic Church."

"There is a long history of courageous Catholic opposition to orthodox Catholic dogma" said Helga Quisling, president of the Catholic Womyn and men for Choice and Power, an organization of progressive Catholics. "Especially during the past century there were progressive Catholics who followed their conscience and stood with secular groups fighting for (national) socialist change."

Quisling noted that womyn are particularly oppressed today by "foreigners in our wombs who have lived for too long where they are not welcome."

"We salute our progressive secular brethren and sistren who oppose rigid antiquated Catholic teaching about the 'sanctity of life' and 'humble obedience to God' and 'love for the least among us' and other patriarchal dogma" exclaimed Quisling, who carried signs that read "Today the Church. Tomorrow the World. " and "socialists need lebensraum" and "It is my destiny to cleanse my womb of unwanted tissue".

"There have always been socialist Catholics who rejected the hierarchal power structure of the Vatican and sought common cause with the State. We have a right to free birth control, and the Church must pay for it!" Quisling noted.

"Socialism is a cause that courageous Catholics have fought for in the past", Quisling declared. "'Sanctity of Life' has always been a patriarchal ruse to oppress the volk."

"We stand with socialists, and salute with them. Socialism is the future, and forward-looking Catholics must not be shackled to traditionalist Catholic dogma."

Quisling smiled and stood tall, flicking her wrist smartly. "We catholic SOCIALISTS salute and stand with our predecessors yesterday, today, and tomorrow".

Democrat voters re-elect Democrat politician

Ho-hum, you say. But this example of Democrat democracy is unusually corrupt.

Dem voters in Illinois's 2nd Congressional district (Obama 90% last Tuesday), which includes the southeast areas of Chicago, re-elected Jesse Jackson Jr.

Jackson, is the son of shake-down artist and race-baiting con man Jesse 'never ran nothin' but his mouth' Jackson Sr.

Jackson Jr. didn't even have to campaign to win his seat in the US Congress from this gaggle of Democrat voters. He has been under federal investigation for corruption (:0), and is negotiating for a plea deal that reportedly will include prison time. This is, however, no hinderance to winning a landslide in a deep blue Democrat district. Jackson spent much of the past few months in the Mayo Clinic with a diagnosis of "bipolar disorder", likely meaning that he had difficulty deciding whether to take the bribes in checks or money orders. Quandaries can be emotionally exhausting...

Jackson replaced Dem Congressmen Mel Reynolds. Reynolds' bio:

In August 1994, Reynolds was indicted for sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer that began during the 1992 campaign.[1] Despite the charges, he continued his campaign and was re-elected that November; he had no opposition.[1] Reynolds initially denied the charges, which he claimed were racially motivated. On August 22, 1995, he was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography. He resigned his seat on October 1 of that year.[2]

Reynolds was sentenced to five years in prison, thus he expected to be released in 1998. However, in April 1997 he was convicted on 15 unrelated counts of bank fraud and lying toSEC investigators. These charges resulted in an additional sentence of 78 months in federal prison. Reynolds served all of his first sentence, and served 42 months in prison for the later charges. At that point, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentence for bank fraud. However, Reynolds had never applied for presidential clemency, which is the first step to be considered for a presidential pardon. As a result, Reynolds was released from prison and served the remaining time in a halfway house.[3][4]

Jackson and Reynolds follow the tradition of Illinois Democrats from the Chicago political machine. As several wags have noted, if you have been elected governor of deep blue Illinois you a greater chance of going to prison than if you commit murder in Illinois.

On a unrelated story, a Democrat pol who thrived in the same Illinois Democrat political machine for the past two decades was just re-elected President.

A movie quote from America's first Progressive President

American's first Progressive (i.e. Liberal) President, Woodrow Wilson was a great admirer of the Ku Klux Klan, and lent a line from his own textbook A History of the American People to D.W. Griffith's movie Birth of a Nation.

D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan, which was now a fading memory. Griffith's film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon who said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" [emphasis mine]

The film created a nationwide craze for the Klan. At a preview in Los Angeles, actors dressed as Klansmen were hired to ride by as a promotional stunt, and real-life members of the newly reorganized Klan rode up and down the street at its later official premiere in Atlanta.

In some cases, enthusiastic southern audiences fired their guns into the screen. The film's popularity and influence were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement of its factual accuracy by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as a favor to an old friend. Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the burning cross, are imitations of the film, whose imagery was itself based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old Scotland rather than on the Reconstruction Klan.

The Birth of a Nation includes extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, e.g., "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Wilson, on seeing the film in a special White House screening on February 18, 1915, exclaimed, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Wilson's family had sympathized with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at a church. When he was a young man, his party had vigorously opposed Reconstruction, and as president he resegregated the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction. 

Given the film's strong Democratic partisan message and Wilson's documented views on race and the Klan, it is not unreasonable to interpret the statement as supporting the Klan, and the word "regret" as referring to the film's depiction of Radical Republican Reconstruction. Later correspondence with the film's director, D.W. Griffith, confirms Wilson's enthusiasm about the film. Wilson's remarks were widely reported and immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof from the controversy, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial. His endorsement of the film greatly enhanced its popularity and influence, and helped Griffith to defend it against legal attack by the NAACP; the film, in turn, was a major factor leading to the creation of the second Klan in the same year.

Progressive Democrat Wilson, like most Southern progressive Democrats, had a ferocious disdain for blacks. He barred blacks from Princeton when he was president of the university, and he re-segregated the federal civil service and the army as President (both had been integrated by Republicans since Reconstruction). His Progressive Democrat colleagues and descendants segregated the South. Wilson was the patriarch of modern Democrat big-government liberalism, of which segregation was one of its more extensive social engineering projects. FDR served as a junior official in his administration, and merely carried on the enormous expansion of government that Wilson had so aggressively started.

The salient characteristic of modern Liberalism/Progressivism is not racial justice. It is big government social engineering, of which segregation was a vibrant cog. When Progressive Democrats squeezed the last drops of political juice out of segregation in the 1960's, they dropped the old moniker, called themselves Liberals, and squeezed the heck out of affirmative action and forced busing and any system of race-baiting and racial bean-counting they could get away with. They're still doing it. Old habits die hard.

Social engineering according to race and political manipulation of racial fear are the desiderata of Liberalism/Progressivism.  A color-blind society is anathema to Liberal Progressive Democrats.

"...there is is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules."

Vox Day on atheists and mass murder:

Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.

Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation![10]

Vox provides a fascinating perspective. Even if one sets aside the obvious cause-and-effect relationship between State Atheism as a ruling ideology and mass-murder,  a simple analysis of the atheist/theist beliefs of the leaders of nations is a shocking indictment of atheism.

In the 20th century, "there is is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules."

Atheism is the deadliest ideology in history, without rival. 

Napoleon Hitler

From the U.K. Daily Mail:

Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.

But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France's greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler's worst crimes against humanity.

These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon's greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon's Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.

There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust. 

Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government's human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon's bloodcurdling record for some years...

'Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon's killing did so with little thought to morality,' Claude Ribbe says today. 'There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.'

I have long thought that Napoleon was unjustly lionized. He was a military and administrative genius, but he was a megalomaniacal killer on a massive scale. He caused millions of needless deaths to serve his ego and his lust for power.

He was a child, of course, of the French Revolution. The first modern genocide was perpetrated by the Revolutionary Reign of Terror against Catholic peasants who had risen up against the Atheist State in the Vendee, the costal region of west-central France. 170,000 peasants were exterminated by the secular Revolutionary government.

"There was in the Revolution a clearly stated programme to wipe out the Vendéean race," said Philippe de Villiers, European deputy and former presidential candidate for the right-wing traditionalist Movement for France (MPF) party. 

"Why did it take place? Because a people was chosen to be liquidated on account of their religious faith. Today we demand a law officially declaring it as a genocide; we demand a statement from the president; and recognition by the United Nations." 

Mr de Villiers – who opposes Turkish entry into the EU – was in Armenia last month, where he compared the Vendée of 1794 to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. In neither case, he said, "have the perpetrators admitted their fault or asked forgiveness of the victims". 

The bloody events of the Vendée were long absent from French history books, because of the evil light they shed on the Revolutionaries. However, they were well known in the Soviet bloc. Lenin himself had studied the war there and drew inspiration for his policies towards the peasantry. 

According to the historian Alain Gérard, of the Vendéean Centre for Historical Research, "In other parts of France the revolutionaries killed the nobles or the rich bourgeoisie. But in Vendée they killed the people.

The rise of State Atheism and militant secularism unleashed something uniquely wicked in the modern world. 

Why Charles Cooke despairs

And why I despair as well:

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

Please read Cooke's essay.

The part that sticks in my throat isn't that a candidate that I oppose won. That happens a lot.

What makes me despair is that Obama this time was no Manchurian Candidate. We knew exactly who he was, and exactly what he had (and had not) done. All of the facts were on the table. He is a grossly incompetent president, no more than a demagogue.

I would have been appalled that anyone voted for him.

I really think we have turned a corner, and I don't think there is a return, in the long run. We will have some limited victories in the future, hold back the tide a bit, but in the long run we are heading for socialism and economic collapse, which are merely different stages of the same process. And what will emerge from that collapse will be very ugly.

The question is: what should conservatives do?