Perhaps Mr Obama's biggest political flaw is that he seems to view himself as the personification of virtue and right-thinking.
Decline is a choice. The selfish pampered profligates of the postwar West made theirs, and for good measure and to ward off the day of reckoning consigned their kids and grandkids to it, too. It would seem to me unlikely that the next generation will be willing or so easily diverted by electronic novelties to reduce themselves to serfs in a vain attempt to sustain an unsustainable system. So something will happen: Greek riots? Total societal collapse? Best to keep the jetpack fuelled and ready. If you can find somewhere to go.
So, I suppose Polley is saying that its okay for her to use corporate dollars to fund her films, but they shouldn't get any credit for it.Such as Al Gore, Bono, Oprah...
[...]
The most hilarious thing about Polley's actions are their likely results. By trumpeting her moral outrage and pissily yanking her name from the project, she ensures that far more people know of her involvement in it then otherwise would. Instead of simply being the director of a short film no one would have noticed, she is now the principled ex-director of a short film making headlines for the whiff of corporate greed wafting up. So, not only does the fact that she directed this film get far more publicity, she increases her standing among the moral heavyweights of the age.
For our governments [or dioceses] have created vast bureaucracies, employing immense numbers whose livelihoods depend entirely (whether they realize it or not) upon the capacity of profit-earning people to pay constantly increasing taxes.People of good will, it's time to take back the culture.
[...]
The idea that we can spend our way out of a debt [or faith] crisis -- or what I called above, "Keynesianism gone nuts" -- has already been rejected by the Tea Party movement in the U.S., and has always been rejected by voters of conservative tendency. They know what's wrong with the present order, and have an important teaching function to the rest of the electorate, which doesn't get it yet.
But more urgently, we are in need of a positive conception of how to rebuild economy and society, when Nanny State collapses under her own weight. For yelling "run!" is only a short-term solution.
Whereas the Church suggests that you lay off the cheeseburgers on Friday and not covet your neighbour's flat screen TV as part of your plan for eternal salvation, the environmental movement proposes to tax both the burger and the flat screen and force McDonald's to sell falafels on Mondays all in the name of carbon emissions. The old saying is that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but some days I think the greens missed that lesson, and, assuming that honey was oppressive to both bees and flies, decided to force feed us a good dose of vinegar.
After years of trying to scare us with imminent doom, I think it is time for a rest.
Melburnians have always been known as foodies, but now they have a new reason to eat out.
Fed up [heh] with violence and the bad wrap [sic—or was it meant as a friendly non-racist ethnic flatbread pun?] her city was receiving, Mia Northrop decided to embrace Melbourne's love of food in a show of support for the Indian and migrant community.
On February 24, she is encouraging people all over Australia to take part in Vindaloo Against Violence.
Ms Northrop, who works as a digital media designer, says the idea is simple.
"The idea is that you just go to your local Indian restaurant and just dine on Indian food as a way of embracing the Indian community," she said.
So... men wearing Islamic women's clothing: is that where the "draagt" part comes in?
To protest the Islamophobia of Geert Wilders, a male teacher from Eindhoven has taken to wearing a Muslim headscarf in public.
Look, I like a neat visual shorthand as much as the next fellow, but this is almost too perfect a symbol of what's happening on the Continent: European men are auditioning for the part of Muslim women.
We'd try to represent every possible skin colour and shading, all major non-European language groups, the least probable national origins, some interesting religious affiliations, the widest possible range of body weights and ages, a selection of common physical disabilities, and as many sexual orientations as we were able to identify through diligent research -- all to be included through combinations of faculties, or absence of faculties, to the exclusion only of white heterosexual males.Maybe they could have "CHRC" emblazoned across their jerseys (since CCCP has already been used).
So we now have a double mystery: an extremely dangerous regime in Iran doing we know not what, and standing against it, an American president who does not know what he is doing.
The flow of medical supplies waiting to be distributed to tens of thousands of earthquake victims in Haiti was delayed for weeks by a massive supply of condoms dominating the space of the main storage facility...
[...]
shipping containers of medical supplies were unable to be unloaded, sorted and distributed since an enormous supply of condoms clogged the facility till early February, when the condoms could be removed. The condoms were estimated to take up about 70% of the space in the 17,000 sq. ft. warehouse.
When Canadian General Romeo Dallaire returned from Rwanda in the aftermath of the Rwandan Massacre he noted in a 1996 speech that military personnel referred to UN and other foreign aid as "covering the country with rubber."At least the condoms don't go to waste, however, which should make WHO, Planned Parenthood International and their ilk extremely glad:
Dallaire explained that tons of condoms and other contraceptives were being shipped to and distributed around the region in quantities far beyond what the population could use and in place of much more needed food, medicine and other critically needed aid. Medicine stores, he said, were filled with contraceptives and extremely short of any supplies to treat wounded Rwandans.
With business-savy ingenuity some in the developing world have turned the condom dumping by the West to their advantage. The BBC reported in 2004 that in one Indian city alone 600,000 condoms a day were used in the sari-weaving industry. Sari weavers use the lubrication in the condoms to soften the loom's shuttle making weaving faster, without risking stains to the silk.LifeSite News
The swelling obesity rate in the United States has also seen medical costs associated with excessive weight balloon from around 78 billion dollars a year in 1998 to around 147 billion dollars annually in 2006, a study released last year showed.
The president of NOW, one of the leading forces urging CBS to remove the ad, responded by condemning the ad's “celebration” of violence against women, in a reference to Tim’s tackling of his mom.Pro-life blogger Dr. Gerard Nadal says:
"I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it," said NOW's Terry O'Neill...
[...] the ad's great success lay in focusing attention on the pro-abortion lobby's reaction to a simple celebration of life.
"Focus on the Family are expert fisherman, and you Big Mouth Bass took the bait," said Nadal in an open letter to Planned Parenthood and NOW.
"You allowed yourselves to be exposed for just who and what you are: Haters of motherhood, fatherhood, family and babies."
Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may "honestly" think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on "the right side of history," that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.No, I have not cut and pasted the whole thing. Do read it all.
Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind "AGW" -- not "most," but all -- have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don't know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow.
This should have been obvious to climatologists from the beginning. At the simplest level, they could observe that global temperature estimates depended on a slur of constantly changing thermometer locations and time sequences. NASA's recent admissions are the more pathetic for that reason: from the top down, these were men who should have known better than to think they could fly beyond the end of such a limb.
I have argued previously for chastity: not limited to the sexual sense, of keeping one's pants on. The virtue of chastity requires us to look at the world without immediately engaging our desires. Those desires are often not sexual at all; some of the most powerful involve justifying one's livelihood. A scientist with an interest in getting a result is under huge temptation, compounded by the huge public funding on which his research depends.
Our mysterious capacity for chastity can put us above the animal level: for if we try, we can actually remove the blinkers of, "What's in it for me?" -- and discover truths larger than ourselves. The highest arts and sciences require alike the highest conditions of chastity. It is what lifts us above the groundhogs.
It is something straight out of a George Orwell novel: the Victorian government has appointed a member of parliament to become “Minister for Respect”.
the "choice" movement is not truly about giving women one
A lot of environmentalists think they need to convince people that the way they live their lives is wrong," she adds. "They want us to stop sinning so they try to scare us into conversion with predictions of high-carbon hell. But it's not an effective message.
"We need to start selling people a vision of low-carbon heaven," Ms Townsend argues.
[...]
For Palmer, who is a United Nations adviser on climate change and religion, the green movement's appropriation of religious language and imagery has backfired.
"Environmentalists have stolen fear, guilt and sin from religion, but they have left behind celebration, hope and redemption," he says.
Johnson, the gravel-voiced British singer of Australia’s biggest rock band, has joined a growing group of critics of Geldof and the U2 singer over their very public charity work, saying they should stop lecturing audiences about charity work and instead do their good deeds in private. [...]
He then offered some words of advice to his fellow rockers: “I’m sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done.
It's a case study in the conundrum of liberal ideology: radical feminist groups declaring that a woman's choice to not have an abortion is, somehow, anti-choice.David N. Bass at The American Spectator discusses the mental gymnastics required by pro-choicers who are anti-choice when it comes to Tim Tebow's mom's choice.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, makes the valid point that feminists' worst-case scenario for the ad is that women "are exposed to an example of sacrifice for the sake of an unborn child."
Shocking, I know, especially when viewers could be watching naked women in the shower or a woman exposing her endowments during a congressional hearing.
It's a wonder anyone takes feminists seriously when their hypocrisy is so manifold.
...a novel which exalts the worst kind of self-pitying adolescent narcissism, and holds it up as an ideal, through adulthood to a senile old age.When I read those lines, I thought, 'Surely Mr. Warren will, at some point in this essay, mention the very person whom this description calls to mind.' I was not disappointed.
Indeed, one cannot look through the list of President Obama's strange and demented policy czars without spotting so many Holden Caulfields, nor escape their ever-presence among the talking heads of MSNBC. And in watching the president's State of the Union address this week, I had the distinct impression of a man whose big-government vision rests less in Marxism than in the faux-naïf of "a catcher in the rye."for any who would like to brush up on Catcher, here is Larry Thornberry's take on the novel. (American Spectator)
While it's easy to see why adolescents, particularly of the indulged sort, would find this kind of thing attractive. It's more of a mystery why grownups, some disguised as teachers and lit professors, praise this nonsense and oblige high school and college students to read it. This is almost child abuse. [...]
No one over the weekend would come out and say it, so allow me to. This literary emperor is wearing no clothes. His only novel and its chief character are contemptible.
There are many and huge ramifications, but the chief one is that the decision attacks the contemporary lobbying system. In effect, those advancing special interests are condemned to lobbying the entire electorate, instead of just lobbying the politicians behind closed doors. This directly undermines the political class. It goes to the heart of their ability to broker deals not in the public interest, and pass them into law without public debate.
And that in turn is why the response to the decision from the political class has been unfriendly to the edge of berserk. They correctly understand that "politics as usual" is now under review, actually and not rhetorically.
Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn't blaming George W. Bush, Obama blames "Washington" – a Washington mired in "partisanship" and "pettiness" and "the same tired battles" and "Washington gimmicks" that do nothing but ensure that our "problems have grown worse." Washington, Obama tells us, is "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems."
So let's have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama's speeches?
[...]
Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.
And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness.
Debt is not the answer to economic problems, there or here; more bureaucracy is not the answer; nor is the further empowerment of public sector unions to hold taxpayers to ransom.
And as to terrorism and foreign threats, Mr. Brown was able to play, before the most politically correct constituency in the U.S., variations on the theme: "American taxpayer dollars should go to buying weapons to kill terrorists, not pay for lawyers to defend them."
Hallelujah! ... And don't thank Martha Coakley for throwing that election; the polls show indisputably it is Obama we must thank. By "pushing his envelope" an inch too far, he has accomplished what took George III far more effort.
For your penance, you will re-read David Warren's essay "Generous to a fault."
"Quincy Jones is ready to redo charity song 'We Are the World' to benefit Haiti quake recovery" (The Canadian Press)
The refusal of the courts to recognize unborn babies as persons, in order to allow abortion, shows the protective effect of the concept of personhood and that, unless expressly excluded, all human beings are persons. Currently, we also use the word person to distinguish humans from animals, in order to establish that every human deserves "special respect" as compared with animals.As for me, I wish society would confer legal status upon our current "human non-persons" (the unborn).
We used to regard humans as special on the basis that they had a soul, a Divine spark, and animals did not. Far from everyone accepts that today. But most people at least act as though we humans have a "human spirit," a metaphysical, although not necessarily supernatural, element as part of the essence of our humanness. The beautiful Sanskrit farewell, loosely translated, "The Light in me recognizes the Light in you," captures this reality.
[...]
We must have greater respect for all life, and I would add to that, in particular, human life. Restricting personhood to humans is one way we recognize and implement the latter.
"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office…. People are angry and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."
The impulse to "write a cheque" to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies.
Love is not a declaration, but instead an action, and those who are troubled by the hideous conditions in which so many on our planet live and die had better devote more time than is required by PayPal.
A hard and unwelcome truth (to those who want the charitable equivalent of instant gratification) is the limit on the amount of money that can be usefully spent on a disaster, before counter-productive efforts begin to dominate all spending. By counter-productive I mean, especially, in a case like Haiti, restoring the circumstances that keep its people in desperation, including the power of a kleptocracy to create political obstacles to any direct human enterprise -- whether profitable or charitable.
“While millions of people are suffering unbelievably and are without the most basic necessities, Planned Parenthood wants to grab the donations that should be going to provide medical care, food, clothing, and housing, and funnel it to its local affiliate that pushes condoms on children as young as 10 years old,” she continued.
God wants us to learn the combination of faith and action that David showed, that balance between his grace and our work that will give us victory every time. [...]
How often do we rely too much on God and neglect the work that he calls us to do, whether in evangelization or in our own growth in holiness? And how often do we rely on our own strength, doing the “work of the Lord” but neglecting the “Lord of the work”? Both approaches are fraught with danger. The first one can leave us feeling fruitless and frustrated. The second one can leave us full of ourselves or worn out and dispirited. But the middle way—the way of cooperation between divine grace and human work—brings not only fruitfulness but refreshment and joy as well.Entire meditation here.
Germany's DAPD news agency says the autobahn was reopened after three hours when it was believed that the pigs had left on their own accord.
Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg said that faith schools must not become "asylums of insular religious identity."Ummm...I think that means that faith schools must not actually believe and teach the faith that they proclaim, lest their students (who were put there by parents who wanted them to learn in a faith-filled environment) assimilate the... er...faith. In other words, Mr. Clegg wants faith schools to be no different from non-faith schools. (Unless, of course, the faith is environmentalism. Then they can be as insular and asylum-like as they please.)
A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie."Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "
"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," Hill wrote on the forum. "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."
Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality....which pretty much explains it. Like that guy in that Christmas movie said, "If they would rather die... they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."
One witch-doctor led us to his secret shrine and said he had clients who regularly captured children and brought their blood and body parts to be consumed by spirits.It's horrifying, backward and savage indeed. We do, however, have our own version of child sacrifice here in North America, but it's clinical and legal (until the umbilical cord is severed), and sometimes it's socially acceptable beyond that point (as when gassing a disabled child to death). We have an Anti-Human-Sacrifice Taskforce too, in the various facets of the pro-life and human dignity movements.
Meanwhile, a former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son.
The Ugandan government told us that human sacrifice is on the increase, and according to the head of the country's Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.
Richard and Margie Cressy were arrested by the Montgomery County Sheriff on child endangerment charges for not registering their children, ages 8-14, at the local district. The Cressys submitted and won official approval for their homeschool curriculum for the 2009-2010 school year, but soon after were arrested for not having done so in previous years.I can just envision the jailhouse scene from the upcoming made-for-TV movie:
U.S. National Cancer Institute researcher Dr. Louise Brinton, who was the chief organizer of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop in 2003 that persuaded women that it was "well established" that "abortion is not associated with increased breast cancer risk," has reversed her position and now admits that abortion and oral contraceptives raise breast cancer risks.
As a new year and a new decade begin, it is time to accept an unpleasant reality:'s international reputation as a progressive middle power is gone. [woohoo!!] Instead, our country is increasingly seen as a human-rights-denying eco-outlaw [if bloody only! Maybe nixing the CHRC would clinch that...] that has lost its way and its special status as a standard bearer for a better world. This change is largely the doing of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the ideology that has motivated him and his mentors for decades. [remind me to vote for that man!] Canada
image: http://www.lordotrings.com/tour/nazgul.aspThere’s wishing on stars, magic and dreams coming true — but also emphasis on hard work and accomplishment, with a clear message that wishing on stars isn’t enough. There’s a handsome prince and a magical kiss, but here too it’s clear that merely hoping that someday your prince will come is inadequate as a life strategy.
There’s a villain with magical powers — but instead of Disneyfied magic, like Aladdin’s friendly genie, the film’s New Orleans voodoo is an occult world of terrifying powers and principalities in which the villain himself is at much at risk as anyone. It’s almost Disney’s most overtly Christian depiction of magic and evil at least since Sleeping Beauty, if not ever — though the waters are muddied by a benevolent, swamp-dwelling hoodoo mama in a sort of fairy-godmother role.
Ours must be the first society in history that has tried to stop the killers by imposing collective punishment on ourselves.
How did we arrive at this absurd impasse? Because of our elaborately overdeveloped concern for human rights, combined with our towering fear of the hurt feelings of Muslims. If everyone is equal, then differential treatment must be racist, which is why we have decided that your grandma from Moose Jaw gets the same pat-down as a devout young male Muslim from Nigeria who did a recent stint at a religious school in Yemen.
The case of the underwear bomber certainly revealed lapses in the system. But there will always be lapses in the system. Trying to safeguard against the last thing a suicide killer tried – Surrender your liquids, Granny! – is merely theatre, because it's not the technique that needs to be intercepted, it's the killers.
“In times of peace and prosperity, this center would completely defy common sense. But today, only two weeks after a terrorist attempted to blow up a plane over our country, this center is absolutely ridiculous,” Barrasso said in a prepared statement. “The CIA’s resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves – not polar bears on icebergs.”
I know how to be a worthy green person. Eat too many chocolate truffles and then go jump on a trampoline. It works every time.
Ms. ATWOOD: Indeed, we now have the Green Bible among us, which I did not know when I was writing this book, which has tasteful linen covers, ecologically correct paper, the green parts in green. Introduction by Archbishop Tutu. And a list at the end of useful things you can do to be a more worthy green person.
Time to give Notting Hill nobody a rest, cut back on "lifestyle," and soft and fluffy. Mrs Beazley and Mrs Pinkerton of 'Dumb Old Housewives' might replace Ms Johnson and Ms Standing. Bet they're cheaper than Steyn.Yes, Duncan (and Spectator staff), Mrs. Pinkerton and Mrs. Beazly are cheaper than Steyn. But then, you get what you pay for. We will do anything that is not illegal, immoral, fattening, or inordinately demanding on family time. Call us.
And then we had Gerald Ford as president. That was silly enough; but then we had Jimmy Carter. And through almost all of that decade, a prime minister up here named Pierre Trudeau. Believe it or not, these men were taken seriously. We can only begin to see what a strange era that was, only begin to appreciate the flakiness into which public life had descended, at this distance.
That the 1970s also represented a kind of aesthetic nadir for Western Civilization we may see by examining contemporary magazines. Even with our current, deeply depressed standards, we instinctively flinch at their apparel. It was by extension a boring, pointless decade: I pity anyone who had to grow up in that era, and am inclined to understand their propensity to mind-altering drugs.
