An adolescent high-school student with all the biological parts of a male and none of the biological parts of a female declares himself to be a girl, is called by his female name at school, is allowed to play on the girls’ athletic team and to change inside the girls’ locker room with the small proviso that this be done behind a curtain. This apparently is not sufficiently sensitive to the boy/girl’s needs – I can’t use a pronoun without knowing this person’s preference for that loaded word as pronouns are war zones at the moment. Despite the wholesale capitulation of the school to all the aforementioned demands of this student, the Office for Civil Rights of the Dept of Education has insisted that standing behind a curtain or showering separately is outright discrimination and a challenge to this student’s identity.Unless the Illinois school removes the curtain and allows total access to the girls’ facilities, it stands in danger of losing all of its Title IX funding.
Dedicated to the cause of destroying the boundaries that nature has created, the NYT finally jumped the shark in its lead j’accuse editorial of Nov 5th (In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness,NYT) Those of who still believe that men and women belong in separate but equal public bathrooms are guilty now of the future suicide of a transgender teenager who won’t be able to pee in the designated toilet of the opposite sex. Think about the excrutiating mental anguish for such a person. I can relate to it, along with most other women who wait in long lines outside the ladies’ room in a theater looking longingly at the men’s room as it remains respectfully under-used.
The Times is spitting mad that voters in Houston exercised their democratic right to defeat a law that would have allowed transgenders access to bathrooms matching their subjective views of what gender they are, regardless of their visible plumbing equipment. There is a classic comic scene in which Joey Bishop is caught in his marital bed with another woman. He looks at his furious wife and quickly questions: “Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”
Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.
Styling himself an “investigative historian,” O’Reilly purports to have discovered amazing facts that have escaped the notice of real historians. The book’s intimated hypothesis is that the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later. The book says Reagan was often addled to the point of incompetence, causing senior advisers to contemplate using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Well.
Reagan was shot on the 70th day of his presidency. In the next 2,853 days he produced an economic boom and the Cold War’s endgame. Among O’Reilly’s “explanations” for Reagan’s supposed combination of creativity and befuddlement are: He was brave; “on his bad days, he couldn’t work” but on good days “he was brilliant”; Nancy Reagan was in charge; it was “almost miraculous.”
When Reagan’s unsatisfactory chief of staff Don Regan was replaced by Howard Baker, a Baker aide wrote a memo that included slanderous assessments of the president from some disgruntled Regan staffers. This memo, later regretted by its author, became, O’Reilly says, the “centerpiece” of his book. On this flimsy reed he leans the fiction (refuted by minute-by-minutes records in the Reagan Library) that, in O’Reilly’s words, “a lot of days” Reagan never left the White House’s second floor where he watched “soap operas all day long.”
The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is “Why won’t you read a book?”
Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven’t read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate.
Take the theoretical physicist and public speaker Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is, in a way, a perfect example, because he doesn’t even pretend to be a philosopher — unlike, say, Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins. Krauss recently received the 2015 Humanist of the Year award and delivered himself of a speech attacking religion; before that, he wrote a piece for The New Yorker that went viral, calling on scientists to attack religion.
Krauss’s belief — and it is a belief — is that religion and science are competing ways of explaining the world. Religion is based on dogma, and science is based on doubt, and those two are, at the end of the day, incompatible. One must win. I’ll let you guess which side Krauss is on.
What if the polls just stopped working?
Admittedly, this needs work as a plot device for a Stephen King novel. But for politics, it might be pretty awesome.
This week, businessman Matt Bevin won a stunning upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. It was only the second time in more than four decades that a Republican took the governor’s mansion in the Bluegrass State. Bevin’s margin of victory: nine percentage points.
Bevin’s win was big political news for a lot of reasons. Kentucky’s state health-care exchange, Kynect, was supposed to be the shining success story of Obamacare. Bevin vowed to dismantle it, a fatal mistake according to many inside-the-Beltway types.
The results in Kentucky — along with state-senate elections in Virginia — also demonstrated that however successful Barack Obama has been as a president, he’s been terrible for the Democratic party. On his watch, Democrats have lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, 12 governorships, 69 congressional seats, and 13 Senate seats. The GOP, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, has full or partial control of 76 percent of state legislatures.
As the attendee puts it, “His hostility to Rubio was unbridled and unfiltered.”
Marco Rubio has gotten some glowing notices in the press lately. But if the last few years are any indication, he won’t be receiving any from one of the most prominent Republican pundits in the mainstream media.
Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman and influential host of the eponymous MSNBC program Morning Joe, has been so hostile in public and private toward the Florida senator that it’s now turning heads in Republican circles.
On television and social media, Scarborough has dismissed Rubio as a wannabe student-council president and lambasted him for lying to the American people. Scarborough’s distaste is returned in kind: Rubio doesn’t think much of him, either.
The two were ships passing one another in the night in Florida. Rubio was elected to the state’s House of Representatives in 2000, and Scarborough resigned his congressional seat one year later. Both are young men of tremendous talent and promise who came out of the same political jungle and who have landed in very different places — one a presidential candidate, the other a highly successful media personality.
Report: Pope Francis Tells Jewish Delegation to Vatican Joke About Antisemitic Priest
Pope Francis told a joke about an antisemitic Catholic priest to a group of Latin American Jews visiting the Vatican last week, the UK’s Jewish Chronicle reported on Thursday.
Claudio Epelman, executive director of the Latin American Jewish Congress (LAJC), recounted the pontiff’s stab at humor: “One day during his sermon, the priest found a way to attack Jews as usual, in a vicious way. During a pause, Jesus got down from his cross, looked at the Virgin Mary and said, ‘Let’s get out of here, Mum, they don’t seem to like us.’”
The group, which included leaders of the Jewish World Congress, reportedly found the joke funny and Epelman later told the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, “It’s incredible that the Pope would tell a joke like this. It says so much about the wonderful relationship he has with Jews.”
Epelman said the Pope then prayed that God would “bring us closer together as brothers and make us better at serving those in need.”
He also said he had known the pontiff when he was Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, and that Francis always had an informal style of getting to know people, which in the end helped him connect with them.
An IDF soldier who foiled a terrorist attack near Hebron on Thursday succeeded in thwarting an earlier attack and neutralizing a total of three terrorists in the course of the past week alone, the Israeli news site Walla reported.
The 19-year-old corporal, referred to in the piece by his first initial (“T”), recounted: “When I’d secured the… junction, we noticed the suspect. We told him to cross the road and head towards us, and as he did, he pulled out a knife to stab a fellow soldier. At that moment, I cocked my rifle and fired at him.”
Commenting on last week’s foiled attack, he added, “I shot the two terrorists in order to eliminate the threat they posed.”
“T,” a combat infantry soldier in the IDF’s Kfir Brigade, is a resident of central Israel, who was only drafted into the army eight months ago.
An international conference in Vienna on 30 October – attended by all five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council – America, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom – has made an important breakthrough towards defeating Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
Together with Egypt, the EU, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Nations – the Permanent Members reached a mutual understanding that
“Da’esh (Islamic State), and other terrorist groups, as designated by the U.N. Security Council, and further, as agreed by the participants, must be defeated.”
This is the first time the five Permanent Members have reached such a consensus – acknowledging that prior measures not involving the use of armed force under Security Council Resolutions 2170 and 2178 have failed to defeat Islamic State and other designated terrorist groups – a prerequisite before there can be any hope of restoring stability and reaching lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq.
International co-operation to defeat Islamic State through a Security Council Resolution authorising the use of armed force had previously risked being vetoed by either Russia or America in the face of earlier American objections against co-operating with any armed force which included President Assad’s troops. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had declared as recently as 29 September.
The monarch of old ordered the tide to recede as a lesson to his courtiers that no mere human, not even a king, can make the world to do as it’s told. Will Steffen, the CSIRO and other grant-fed warmists face a similar problem: while modern enablers still profess to believe them, actual sea levels pay no heed
When climate scientists have a choice to peddle facts or forecasts, they go for forecasts every time. Especially on sea level rises. Let me explain. Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, ruminating last year on supposed CO2-caused sea rise, was keen to crank up the scariness. So it included a couple of art photos in its report “Counting the Costs” on our allegedly fast-rising oceans.
One pic shows a frolicking humpback whale, with the remains of a dual lane highway visible below the waves. The other photo shows an old coot (about my vintage) slumped in his lounge chair, which is floating in the sea. Alongside bobs an empty chair, with a dinghy is anchored nearby. I think the elderly gentleman must have loaded the armchairs and his vintage wife onto the dinghy to escape the sea pouring through his front door, but the wife fell overboard and that’s why he looks so sad.[i]
