http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10304285/Nick-Clegg-backs-teachers-who-want-pupils-to-remove-veils-in-class.html By Peter Dominiczak, Political Correspondent The Deputy Prime Minister said that he can “totally understand” why people say that children should not to be allowed to wear full-face veils during lessons. Mr Clegg said that teachers “want to be able to make contact” with their pupils. His comments came after he said that he […]
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By Nathan Harden
Richard Dawkins, an Oxford University professor and author of a bestselling book defending atheism entitled, “The God Delusion,” has provoked outrage with his comments on child sex abuse:
Salon.com reports:
In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called “mild pedophilia,” which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes “lasting harm.”
Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,” and that to condemn this “mild touching up” as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.
“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.
Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
Read the full story here. [1]
I find these comments as sad as they are infuriating. But they are the logical extension of Dawkins’s belief system. In a world without God, there is no such thing as an absolute right and wrong. In this sense, though we may rightly be shocked by his remarks, we shouldn’t be surprised by them. This is what moral relativism means–plain and simple. At least we can say this for Mr. Dawkins–he is being logically consistent.
Normally, Dawkins’s brand of cocky, biting atheism angers me. But today, as I read his words, I can’t help feeling sorry for the man. His life no longer has moral meaning, even to himself.
It’s sad.
Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad [2].
http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-america-ready-for-obamacare/?print=1 This is the second in a series of articles on the rollout of Obamacare and how the law will change our health care system. Each week, we will publish two articles: one on the changes in medicine and medical care, and one on changes in the insurance industry. We hope this series of articles […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-muslims-are-coming/print/ This Friday marks the Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles premiere of a documentary called The Muslims Are Coming!, which features a band of Muslim comedians touring middle America “to explore the issue of Islamophobia!” The exclamation mark is there to let you know that the show is going to be great fun! And all […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-violence-we-dont-see/
Lashawn Marten was playing chess when he announced, “I hate white people.” Then he began hitting random white people who were walking by. By the time he was done, several were wounded and one lay dead.
I have walked by countless times and seen the chess players sitting near the overhang of the Union Square subway entrance; mostly black men daring white passerby into a money game. At the fountain to the left, Moonies squat on a blanket and sing their sonorous chants. To the right, the remnants of Occupy Wall Street set up tables to collect money and dispense buttons.
In warmer weather, break dancers perform on the stairs and office workers sit beneath the statue of George Washington expelling the British and eat lunch. Elderly Puerto Rican men push makeshift wooden carts piled with unlabeled bottles of homebrewed soda pop.
Jeffrey Babbitt, the man Lashawn beat to death, looks familiar to me because he has that type of New York face that you pass on the street. You see it worn by plumbers and high school teachers. It’s the badge of the vanishing New York City working class.
No conclusions will be drawn from the murder. Lashawn Marten was obviously mentally ill. And if his mental illness took the form of violent racism toward white people, that is an incidental fact. The murder is an incident. The details are incidental. No conclusions will be drawn from what happened between the chess tables.
Incidents take place all around us, but patterns have to be articulated. The incident is insignificant. It’s the pattern that counts.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/diana-west-swimming-against-the-mainstream?f=puball
“The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
That was the wisdom offered by award-winning novelist David Foster Wallace to the Kenyon College class of 2005, after he opened his memorable commencement address with this “didactic little parable-ish story”:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The graduates were then challenged by Wallace to recognize that their education did not necessarily teach them “how to think,” but rather to realize their ability to determine what to think about. The rest of his speech focused on that determination and the resulting differences in interpretation based on one’s self-awareness and worldview.
Wallace’s wise “This is Water” words came to mind as I watched the drama begin to unfold around conservative author Diana West’s new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. For if “water” could represent the generally-accepted reality about whatever it is a person might determine to think deeply about and then challenge — then not only has West, like the “older fish” in Wallace’s story, been “swimming the other way.” She also asked, “How’s the water?” and proceeded to write a book about her discoveries after she dared peer closely into the water’s depths.
West’s book seems to have stirred major ripples in the taken-for-granted narrative; ripples that have splashed the toes of the mainstream and its recognized experts, both liberal and conservative.
From the left, the negative response was expected. From the right, the reaction from some influential sources could be described, at the very least, as perplexing.
The current that West dared swim against? Narratives such as: McCarthy was wrong; powerful and influential communist spies and sympathizers did not really infiltrate the highest levels of our government, media, and entertainment; and any such spying since proven by historians had no real influence on our strategy during World War II or in its resolution and aftermath.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-threatens-widespread-retaliation-against-us-and-allies?f=puball Iran is ramping up its threats to the United States even as the American effort against Iranian client state Syria has ground to a crawl. President Obama made his case to the American people and the world community Tuesday night that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad must not be allowed to escape the consequences of using […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/final-flight-wasp-lillian-glezen-wray
During her first year at Texas Tech, Lillian Glezen made a bet with one of her sisters that,
if she earned a “B” in math, she would get to ride in a small plane.
From that first airplane ride, she knew that she wanted to learn to fly.
Lillian Glezen Wray, affectionately known as “Jay” as well as “Nanny Duke” and “Grandma Turtle,” was born in Gilmer, Texas on Dec. 9, 1913 to Thomas Hamilton and Lillian Corn Glezen. The young couple had recently moved their growing family from Indiana to Texas. Lillian was not only the youngest of eleven children, she was the only “native Texan” and a true tomboy.
Lillian attended Gilmer public schools, where she became an excellent tennis player. Following her high school graduation, she attended East Texas State Teachers College in Commerce, Texas (now Texas A&M Commerce) and Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
When America was attacked at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Lillian was working as a switchboard operator at the Southwest Phone Company in Waco, Texas. After Pearl Harbor, she soon moved to Fort Worth and took a job Consolidated Aircraft, working as an inspector on the B-24 assembly line. She used part of her pay to take flying lessons. When she had acquired the number of newly reduced minimum required flying hours (35), she applied for WASP training and was accepted into class 44-W-9.
In April of 1944, Lillian and 106 other young women pilots arrived in Sweetwater, Texas and reported to Avenger Field for WASP training. After seven months of AAF flying training, in November, 1944, Lillian and fifty-four of her classmates graduated, received their silver WASP wings, and became Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP, the first women in history to fly America’s military aircraft).
She was then stationed at Goodfellow Army Air Base in San Angelo, Texas, where she flew AT-6s and BT-13s, training male cadets. She also occasionally ferried PT-19s to other air bases.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=67E27069-2249-4F27-9747-557223C8C4F2
The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying about having a Ph.D., the group announced on Wednesday.
“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”
O’Bagy told POLITICO’s Kate Brannen in an interview Monday that she had submitted and defended her dissertation and was waiting for Georgetown University to confer her degree.
Subject: Porn at Buena High School in Sierra Vista, Arizona
Below is a picture and an excerpt out of the book Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia.
This is a 10th grade literature book that was used in my son’s class at Buena High School in Sierra Vista, Arizona. The whole class read this book out loud during class. Everyone in the class had a copy of this book.
Notice the Buena High bar code on the cover.
The following excerpt is taken from page 80 (screenshot of page shown above):
“Dreaming in Cuban”
by Cristina Garcia
PAGE 80
Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breast and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs. He entered her repeatedly from behind.
Felicia learned what pleased him. She tied his arms above his head with their underclothing and slapping him sharply when he asked.
“You’re my bitch,” Hugo said, groaning.
In the morning he left, promising to return in the summer.
See two articles:
1) By Dana R. Casey, a high-school English teacher, who explains exactly how the Common Core Standards can warp vulnerable teenagers’ minds, setting them up to accept the next wave of anti-American sentiment.
8.18.13 – “A Monstrous Story for a Monstrous Curriculum: The Ugly Heart of Common Core” – by Dana R. Casey –http://dcclothesline.com/2013/08/25/a-monstrous-story-for-a-monstrous-curriculum-the-ugly-heart-of-common-core/
2) “The Perfect Plan To Destroy America: Nationalize Education” — http://educationviews.org/the-perfect-plan-to-destroy-america-nationalize-education/
(From Donna Garner):
