Where’s the outrage? Prejudice against redheads has become so intense that sperm banks are refusing their genetic material, the Daily Caller reports. When will society finally stand up to protect this oppressed minority? (H/t to Ben Domenech.)
Manners and Morals
Rolling With the Punches
The Difference Between Failure and Defeat? Character. by Warren Moore Yesterday the Instapundit linked to an article in the NYT Magazine that discussed efforts toward character education in some public and private schools up there. While in many respects I’m dubious about that sort of thing — having a wife who teaches in the public schools can be disillusioning that way — I think some of the virtues the schools are trying to teach seem interesting. In particular, a key component of some of the programs is the development of what is called “grit”, a particular sort of perseverance that allows certain people to keep plugging when things aren’t working out. As one headmaster notes (and as Insty quotes): “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are
Parents Make Millions for Not Having an Abortion (But It’s Not What You Might Think)
A jury in Florida didn’t think Bryan Santana was worth $9 million, as his parents figured, but half that much: On September 9, a West Palm Beach jury awarded parents Rodolfo Santana and Ana Mejia $4.5 million because they did not get accurate information from Dr. Marie Morel and OB/GYN Specialists of the Palm Beaches. Their son Bryan Santana, now age 3, was born disabled. He has no arms and only one leg. The argument made by his parents was that if the clinic had told them their son was so disabled, they would have aborted him. And since they didn’t get a chance to terminate Bryan in the womb, and obviously they can’t legally do it now, they wanted millions of dollars. — Paul Cooper Apparently, being imperfect justifies abortion in many people’s eyes: In the UK there are limits on when you can abort a baby unless that baby has severe disabilities. The UK law does not define those disabilities but allows abortion up until the moment of birth if the child is disabled. Why? Obviously the message is that a child with disabilities has less value or reason to live. . . . . In America, 90%
The Evasion of the Earbud People
It would be a mistake to blame the technology. As usual, it’s how people use — and abuse — it: Now that the Earbud People have invaded, they’ve taken over subways, academia, buses, and sidewalks from coast to coast and around the globe. They’re passively receiving sounds that they alone can hear. Other than mob violence or criminal behavior, theirs is the most antisocial public behavior one can imagine. Its only rivals are the Bluetooth-enabled cell phone conversations that turn all who engage in them into irritating public speakers, exposing their private thoughts to the unwilling listeners in the world at large. The young take all this for granted. They know no other ways of behaving in public. But to those who remember the pleasures of either conversation or solitude, the loss suffered by the Earbud People seems tragic. Earbud people are like heavily-medicated people — swathed in an inner universe that’s at once protective and unreflective. They’re neither in touch with others nor with themselves. Maybe they are once they’re at home, or at work, but they lose a lot of the joys of living when they’re out in public by encasing themselves, like walking mummies, in the sounds
A Western Government Declares BC/AD To Be Un-PC
— and some people aren’t at all happy about it: Australia is to remove the birth of Jesus as a reference point for dates in school history books. Under the new politically correct curriculum, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, yesterday condemned the move as an ‘intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.’ He described the phrase ‘common era’ as ‘meaningless,’ and compared it to using ‘festive season’ instead of Christmas. The changes, introduced by the government, were supposed to be pushed through next year, but have been delayed by the row. The terms CE and BCE have been popularised in academic and scientific publications. One of Australia’s political party leaders, Christopher Pyne, also registered his objections: ‘Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,’ he said. ‘Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people,’
Britain’s Dysfunctional Welfare State — Is This America’s Future?
Liberal Progressivism is evidently an infectious “meme” throughout Anglophone culture. In the wake of the rioting in Great Britain last month (often perpetrated by “children” raised by the welfare state), Melanie Phillips offers her diagnosis of the etiology of this “meme” and a prognosis for how to deal with it: The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism. These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children); and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’. And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense. From this side of The Pond, what Phillips says sounds awfully
The Acceptable American Hatred
There will be blood, suggests columnist Kevin Jackson at The Black Sphere. The author of The BIG Black Lie deftly critiques U.S. Rep. Andre Carson’s (D-IN) calumnies against the Tea Party and by extension all Caucasian non-statists, explains why this summer’s U.S. mob violence is just the beginning, and, most important of all, sardonically identifies a central assumption of today’s American culture: it’s quite all right to hate . . . the right people: In an America where black achievement can be seen and heard everywhere, Andre Carson and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are crying foul, saying that the Tea Party wants to take America back to the ‘60’s. Don’t believe your lying eyes showcasing black achievement all over America, because black people are being oppressed. By the Tea Party who wants black people “hanging from trees.”Yes, the three-year old Tea Party movement is responsible for the decades of degradation within the black community, according to Carson and other members of the CBC. Who knew it was the Tea Party doing all those drive-bys in black neighborhoods, and robbing black folks. Here I thought it was black thugs and gang members. Who knew it was the
Death Cult Sacrifices Could Soon Be Coming to Your Neighborhood
Because of a virtually uncontrolled southern border (thank you, Washington), a bizarre, inchoate collection of rituals — including human sacrifice — might soon be generating headline news where you happen to live (and it would have to be local news — mainstream national media shy away from reporting negatively on the current administration’s “immigration” policies): . . . the cult itself is not an actual religion so it’s unclear who actually belongs to it. The veneration of Santa Muerte is a magical tradition that has little in the way of moral or philosophical instruction. Instead it simply transmits a series of rites designed to appease a being devotees think is an ancient goddess of death who once demanded people be killed in horrible ways to appease her. And while not all of the cultists commit crimes, a significant number of them come from the ranks of violent gangs, the virulently racist and anti-Semitic Reconquista movement, and impressionable dabblers in the occult seeking thrills. While not the organized threat of militant Islam, Santa Muerte’s spread into our major cities among those who are part of the unseen underground is still a potential danger we need to recognize. — Rob
Did Thomas Jefferson Really Have Children by a Slave?
Everybody “knows” he did, right? In a book due out Thursday, eminent scholars say it’s unlikely that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children, disputing a decade’s worth of conventional wisdom that the author of the Declaration of Independence sired offspring with one of his slaves. The debate has ensnared historians for years, and many thought the issue was settled when DNA testing in the late 1990s confirmed that a Jefferson male fathered Hemings’ youngest son, Eston. But, with one lone dissenter, the panel of 13 scholars doubted the claim and said the evidence points instead to Jefferson’s brother Randolph as the father. The scholars also disputed accounts that said Hemings’ children received special treatment from Jefferson, which some saw as evidence of a special bond between the third president and Hemings. There seems to be reason to doubt Jefferson’s patrimony: Claims that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson started in Paris are unlikely because she was living with his daughters at their boarding school across the city at the time. The “Jefferson family” DNA used in the 1998 test came from descendants of his uncle, which the scholars said means any one of two dozen Jefferson men living in Virginia
Pedophiles Push for Acceptance — With a Little Help from Their Friends in Academia and Government
On Townhall.com, Matt Barber registers his reactions to a recent conference: On Wednesday, Aug. 17, I – along with the venerable child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman – attended a conference hosted by the pedophile group B4U-ACT. Around 50 individuals were in attendance, including a number of admitted pedophiles (or “minor-attracted persons” as they euphemistically prefer), a few self-described “gay activists” and several supportive mental-health professionals. World renowned “sexologist” Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, saying: “I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.” The aim of these groups is what Barber terms “sexual anarchy” (although they probably wouldn’t characterize it as such): Make no mistake: Children are the target of what I call the “sexual anarchy movement.” Whether it’s the movement’s pedophile wing that seeks to literally rape children, or its radical pro-abortion, homosexualist and feminist wings, which seek to rape the minds of children, the larger sexual anarchy movement has a shared goal: Attack, corrupt and destroy God’s design for human sexuality. Children are just collateral damage. Sexual anarchists know that to own the future, they must own the minds of our children. Hence, groups like B4U-ACT, GLSEN (The Gay Lesbian Straight
Cultural Marxism — Is It Here to Stay?
If it does, you can blame … J. R. R. Tolkien? . . . one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call “West Coast White nationalism” because West Coast White nationalism, a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of a racially defined new order of society, you take one look at them and you think that they’re hippies or you think that they’re liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like Eastern spirituality, and drinking fruit juice, and wearing sandals, and granola, and vegetarianism, and organic food and organic farming, all these sort of things that you think are kind of hippie things. If you look at the roots of a lot of the West Coast hippie culture and also the hippie culture in Europe for that matter, a lot of it goes back to Tolkien. What doesn’t come from the New Left, let’s say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien which is pretty much directly connected with European Traditionalism. — Greg Johnson According to this view, ’60s hippies took Tolkien’s “message of
“Homofascists” Make Sure Social Media Are Unsafe
Erik Rush has discovered just how unsafe: Several pages on Facebook run by these homofascist operatives have compiled information on specific individuals. Their principals not only post scathing screeds about said “homophobes,” but they have gone as far as to contact their friends, family members, employers and clients. They have disseminated information about these “offenders” on those pages, for the express purpose of making the lives of these people as unpleasant as possible. Some have even lost their jobs as a result of employer retaliation by bosses who are “sympathetic to the cause.” It will probably not surprise that these militant homosexuals have a decidedly anti-Christian bent and that the majority of their targets are those of that faith. “Christer” is the salacious invective used on one page, usually with an even more insulting descriptor preceding. The Culture War, often regarded as a myth, is still being waged, with increasing numbers of “casualties” among those who hold to traditional views about sexuality: Relative to persecution and free speech, of course, liberals are consummate hypocrites, so a definite double standard exists relative to their tolerance of others’ beliefs versus their expectation for tolerance of their own. I have witnessed countless instances
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