Contra Celsum

Idyllic Cannibalism

2012-02-16T07:59:00.001+13:00

Harawira's Revisionist History: It's All Your Fault

New Zealand Maori, we are told, have lots of problems. One that doesn't get much mention is Maori have too many Hone Harawira's--folk that think like Hone. And they have far too much influence in our humble opinion.

Hone has published an indignant tirade in the NZ Herald, calling out a correspondent who opined that he had found the whole Waitangi Day ritual protest by Hone and his bus load of Occupy mates an anachronism. Hone's response is to justify such public protest over Maori grievance because, well, the grievance is justified.

Now, of course, Hone's view of New Zealand history is superficial, one-eyed and prejudiced.
His basic point, reduced to its kernel is that Maori were living as an idyllic people in Paradise until whitey came and ruined their lives. Glossed over is the terrible state of Maori tribal life in this country prior to the European settlement. Ignored is the cannibalism, the slavery, the literal farming of people to eat. Silent is Hone on the Maori warring season when war parties went out on conquest, or utu, or just to get some "decent kai" for the "long oven". Overlooked is the ecological devastation wrought on bird life as species like the majestic moa were hunted to extinction. Neglected a mention is the ever present risk of starvation in the winter months because of the primitive state of Maori agriculture.

Hone lives in a reconstructed cocoon of Maori history. In his calculus, pre-European Maori lived in a blissful state of Edenic, pre-lapsarian glory. Maori children played outside the stoop of their whares in the warmth of a happy, cheerful cannibalistic society. They were "treasured" and loved. And, Maori women--well, they were adored, respected, cherished. Never harmed. Not until European grog arrived, and then all hell broke loose.

What an idyllic picture. What a farce. But that's Hone's view. And as they say in politics, never let the facts or reality get in the way of a good story. Particularly about the past. Consider his panegyric of Maori society and the evil devastation of whitey:

You see Mr Holmes, back in 1840, Maori owned the whole of Aotearoa, and although life wasn't exactly a bunch of roses, we had strong and vibrant societies dotted all round the country, until you guys introduced the gun, the Bible and the pox of course, and wreaked havoc and devastation like we'd never seen before.

It is true of course that as soon as Maori tribes got the musket, Maori internecine warfare got a whole lot more deadly, but of course there is no moral interdiction against Maori blood lust ventured by Hone.

Hone is wont to blame all current Maori problems on the coming of the Pakeha and the alleged devastation wrought upon his people. Particularly annoying to him is his view that the Pakeha "stole" all Maori land--since Maori "owned" the whole country. What Hone's deceptive anachronism conveniently overlooks is that there were no titles to land in primitive Maori society, no bills of sale, no ownership. Just a right of possession. And sometimes Maori were dispossessed--but by rights of their own culture--which Hone almost worships--when they lost possession, they lost it. Period. Gone. No comeback. Only utu--and if that failed. Too bad. So Maori dispossessed the Moriori, to the point of extinction as a people, practising a form of genocide. And that's OK, because possession was ownership.

To introduce a Christian notion of legal title and claim that Maori ownership by de facto possession did in fact represent legal title to the land is an anachronistic fiction. Under such a primitive concept the Pakeha could not steal land from the Maori any more than Maori stole it from the Moriori. Stealing has no meaning when one does not have legal title. So Hone stands upon the legal principle and common law rights and presumes that such rights were enjoyed by Maori before Maori was not under the sovereignty of the British crown. One of the driving intentions behind the Treaty of Waitangi was to bring them under the Crown's sovereignty so as to bring Maori under the protection of British law, including, for the first time, the protections and privileges of property title and ownership.

The signing of the Treaty meant that Maori had legal rights, including the right to property, as subjects of the Crown. This was a double edged sword: they could sell off their land if they chose freely to do so, and many did. But once sold, it was lost to future generations--and it is this which folk like Hone resent and refuse to accept.

Granted the Crown acted as a imperialistic overlord at times, confiscating land without due cause--and so genuine Treaty grievances and restitution have an important and necessary place in our society.

But the most revealing of all of Hone's claims--and one that few will contest--comes when he stops pontificating about a mythical past and deals with the present.

Maori are also part of the broader fabric of our society. But did you know Mr Holmes, that in terms of health, welfare, education, employment, housing and justice, Maori statistics are still worse than everyone else in the country?

And your point, sir? The unspoken point seems to be that loss of property has caused this modern Maori degradation. This is laughable. How many people have come to this country with not a bean in their pocket and through hard work, thrift, diligence and application have made a living for themselves? Thousands upon thousands. Why not Maori? Is it a racial or ethnic inadequacy? Are Maori somehow genetically inferior?

Of course not. That is an absurd notion. Two things have devastated Maori: the first is a false and degrading doctrine of victimhood: "I am inferior in just about every social metric because whitey ripped me off." This is Hone's axe and he grinds it without ceasing. He is consequently complicit in the devastation of his own people. The more such degraded Maori believe themselves to be victims and look to external causes rather than their own duties and responsibilities as human beings, the more the devastation will grow.

The second cause of Maori degradation is the social welfare system which had exacerbated ten times over the sense of Maori grievance and the belief that they are owed something by someone else. Now this is not peculiar to Maori: it is the common mien of socialists the world over. But it is been particularly devastating amongst degraded Maori because it has been able to link up with the sense of Maori grievance peddled by Hone and his ilk.

Because New Zealand society as a whole believes in entitlements and payments which "others" have to provide it's rather hard for our culture to develop a compelling argument against the Maori sense of grievance. But for those who get sucked into the entitlement rights mentality, whatever their ethnic characteristics, the future of current degraded Maori awaits them.

Letter From America

2012-02-15T21:55:00.001+13:00

The Church of Obama

The president his issued his own Act of Supremacy.
February 11, 2012 5:00
By Mark Steyn

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’s edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain, and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-à-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them? In essence President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII: As his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a “faith-based institution” depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.

“We will soon learn,” wrote Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions.” Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s vicar on earth, has sportingly offered to maintain religious liberty for those institutions engaged in explicit religious instruction to a largely believing clientele. So we’re not talking about mandatory condom dispensers next to the pulpit at St. Pat’s — not yet.

But that is not what it means to be a Christian: The mission of a Catholic hospital is to minister to the sick. When a guy shows up in Emergency bleeding all over the floor, the nurse does not first establish whether he is Episcopalian or Muslim; when an indigent is in line at the soup kitchen the volunteer does not pause the ladle until she has determined whether he is a card-carrying papist. The government has redefined religion as equivalent to your Sunday best: You can take it out for an hour to go to church, but you gotta mothball it in the closet the rest of the week. So Catholic institutions cannot comply with Commissar Sebelius and still be in any meaningful sense Catholic.

If you’re an atheist or one of America’s ever more lapsed Catholics, you’re probably shrugging: What’s the big deal? But the new Act of Supremacy doesn’t stop with religious institutions. As Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it: “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by this mandate.” And so would any of his burrito boys who object to being forced to make “health care” arrangements at odds with their conscience.

None of this should come as a surprise. As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the secretary “shall,” another 200 to the secretary “may,” and 139 to the secretary “determines.” So the secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack “shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities whatsoever they be.” In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius’s jurisdictional authority:

“The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.”
Before Obama’s Act of Supremacy did the English language ever have need for such a phrase? “Tooth-level surveillance”: from the Declaration of Independence to dentured servitude in a mere quarter-millennium.
Henry VIII lacked the technological wherewithal to conduct tooth-level surveillance. In my friskier days, I dated a girl from an eminent English Catholic family whose ancestral home, like many of the period, had a priest’s hiding hole built into the wall behind an upstairs fireplace. These were a last desperate refuge for clerics who declined to subordinate their conscience to state authority. In my time, we liked to go in there and make out. Bit of a squeeze, but it all adds to the fun — as long as you don’t have to spend weeks, months, and years back there. In an age of tooth-level surveillance, tyranny is subtler, incremental but eminently enforceable: regulatory penalties, denial of licenses, frozen bank accounts. Will the Church muster the will to resist? Or (as Archbishop Dolan’s pitifully naïve remarks suggest) will this merely be one more faint bleat lost in what Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith?

In England, those who dissented from the strictures of the state church came to be known as Nonconformists. That’s a good way of looking at it: The English Parliament passed various “Acts of Uniformity.” Why?

Because they could. Obamacare, which governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy and micro-regulates both body and conscience, is the ultimate Act of Uniformity. Is there anyone who needs contraception who can’t get it? Taxpayers give half a billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, who shovel out IUDs like aspirin. Colleges hand out free condoms, and the Washington Post quotes middle-aged student “T Squalls, 30” approving his university’s decision to upgrade to the Trojan “super-size Magnum.”

But there’s still one or two Nonconformists out there, and they have to be forced into ideological compliance. “Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment,” Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post offered to Chris Matthews on MSNBC. At the National Press Club, young Catholics argued that the overwhelming majority of their coreligionists disregard the Church’s teachings on contraception, so let’s bring the vox Dei into alignment with the vox populi. Get with the program, get with the Act of Uniformity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: First, other pillars of civil society are crowded out of the public space; then, the individual gets crowded out, even in his most private, tooth-level space. President Obama, Commissar Sebelius, and many others believe in one-size-fits-all national government — uniformity, conformity, supremacy from Maine to Hawaii, for all but favored cronies. It is a doomed experiment — and on the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Letter From America

2012-02-15T21:46:00.001+13:00

Update on Global Christian Persecution

Conrad Black provides a review and a call to action by governments. The latter is unlikely, but Black's argument needs to be made and heard, in any event. But the cries of God's people to the Throne of Grace will be more powerful and efficacious in any case. Our hope lies in God not in Government.

Global Persecution of Christians
By Conrad Black
February 9, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith. Because Christianity is, by a wide margin, the world’s largest religion, the leading religion in the traditionally most advanced areas of the world, and, despite its many fissures, the best organized, largely because of the relatively tight and authoritarian structure of the Roman Catholic Church, the West is not accustomed to thinking of Christians as a minority, much less a persecuted one.

The ratings of offending countries always put North Korea as the worst, followed by Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the Maldives, Yemen, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Laos, Pakistan, Sudan, and, farther back but still prominently odious, Libya, Syria, Oman, Egypt, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority, Vietnam, Cuba, and China. While there is no shortage of incidents in India, where there is serious religious friction between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs as well, most offending countries are Islamic or Communist.

The reluctance of the leading predominantly Christian countries to speak out against these outrages is remarkable. Many of the delinquent countries are ostensible allies such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Oman, Egypt, and Kuwait. Obviously, some countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) are in too chaotic a condition to be expected to maintain religious liberties, but Saudi Arabia is a tightly controlled state that in many respects cooperates closely with the United States. It is a joint government of the royal House of Saud with the leadership of the extremist Wahhabi Islamist sect, and while the Saudi government is a functioning ally, especially against any extension of Iranian influence among Shiites in Sunni-led countries such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia also pays for 95 percent of externally financed Islamist institutions across the Muslim world. And these are overwhelmingly fundamentalist and virulently hostile to the West and to all non-Islamic religions. Official Saudi media regularly condemn and incite violence against Christians and Jews.

The recent Muslim attacks on Egypt’s Christian Copts caused the military to intervene against the Christians, killing dozens of them, which action the military government then blamed on the “inexperience” of the soldiers involved. (Unlimited experience is not required to foretell the consequences of firing automatic weapons and rifles at unarmed demonstrators at point-blank range.)

Many of the outrages are perpetrated by groups the West is conditioned to thinking of as minorities, especially Muslims in general. But the response of the Western secular leaders to these monstrous events has been achingly slow. British prime minister David Cameron did recently promise that there would be no British aid to countries that mistreated religious minorities. But it has become almost a cliché for shabby leaders of underdeveloped countries to attack Christian minorities. Zimbabwe under the infamous Robert Mugabe is one of the latest regimes routinely to attack Christian institutions because of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Evangelical criticism of the violence and corruption of his governing ZANU party. South Sudan was the scene of perhaps the vilest and most widespread abuse, as the Muslim Sudanese government killed approximately a million South Sudanese Christians and animists over the last decade or so. (Unfortunately, tribalism in South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has partly replaced the oppression of the Muslim north.)

The Palestinians, despite their generations-old and very effective portrayal of themselves as a dispossessed and brutally abused minority, discriminate scandalously against Christians, even though the local Roman Catholic authority for many years, Michael Sabah, was obsequiously deferential to the terrorist Arafat regime. And the anti-Christian violence in Nigeria has flared up dangerously, though in that country the Christians are almost as numerous as, and more prosperous than, the Muslims, and the frictions are largely on tribal, geographic, and economic as well as sectarian lines.

In general, secular oppression strengthens the Christian churches, a lesson the Chinese are already starting to learn, to their embarrassment. They admit to 80 million Christians in China, though the real number is probably about 120 million, or almost 10 percent of the country’s population. There are about 30 million people combined in the Protestant front organization and the Catholic Patriotic Association, the state-dominated Catholic “Church” that John Paul II and Benedict XVI have refused to acknowledge (causing the Vatican to continue, with commendable unconcern for diplomatic fashion, to recognize Taiwan as China). This official framework conforms exactly to Napoleon’s famous dictum that “of course, the people must have their religion and of course, the state must control it.” But as many as 90 million Chinese are in “house churches,” semi-secret Christian, mainly Roman Catholic, congregations that evade the overlordship of the Communist state and are growing rapidly.

In the 20th century, the number of Roman Catholics in Africa grew from 1.9 million to 130 million, an advance of over 6,700 percent (and most of the 1.9 million who started the century were French North Africans). In 1900, one-quarter of the world’s Roman Catholics were in the southern hemisphere. If present trends continue, the corresponding total will be three-quarters in 2050.

In the end, the effort to stamp out spirituality, exalt materialism, and reduce religious structures to mere appendages of discredited pagan and atheistic governments that commit the ancient Roman heresy of elevating the incumbent rulers to the status of presumptive deities is bound to fail. Man is not perfectible; men are not gods; and spiritual forces exist. Even horrible crises like the sexual-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are matters of defective and sinning personnel, not invalidations of the Ark of eternal truths, which is why Roman Catholic Church attendance and recruitment have not been much affected by it.
However great the suffering and oppression inflicted on Christians by Godless regimes, the effort won’t succeed. Where the problem is religions’ persecuting other religions, as in the mistreatment of other sects in Islamic countries, the more frequent outcome is the flight of the oppressed, as the Jews and most of the Middle Eastern Christians have shown.

This raises again the troubling indulgence of the persecution of Christianity by the West. It is an Achilles’ heel of Western tolerance that it causes the West to hesitate to complain of the conduct of communities regarded in the West as underdogs, even when they are oppressing Christians. Christianity is, after all, the beneficiary of 1,700 years of establishment and dominant market share and the author of no mean sequence of abuses itself, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to Victorian humbug.

That, unfortunately, is not a full explanation of this inattentive lassitude. The shameful truth is that most Western media are atheistic and consider Christianity fundamentally no better than the Muslims who attack and kill Christians and desecrate the moral and religious foundations of the West.

The diverting but insubstantial gadfly Christopher Hitchens was more widely mourned in the Western media than any Christian victim of the Muslims or Communists in recent memory. The atheism of most of the Western media and academia has made the West vulnerable to the outrageous allegations of the Muslims that the West is an anthill of infidels. And it has left our political leaders relatively indifferent to Islamic and Communist oppression of Christians, as their electorates are under-informed of these atrocities by the media and don’t require a robust official response to them. This encourages the Islamists and Communists to believe that they may continue to impress their followers and gratify their own ideological and intellectual inferiorities by beating up the local hostages of the brand leader with impunity.

The West must resolve to defend human rights whenever it is not wholly impractical to do so, at least with splendid tongue lashings such as the Holy See regularly administers in these matters (without, as Stalin remarked, the benefit of any military divisions to hand to enforce them). And, where possible, Western society and its governments must insist on adequate publicity of these atrocities and appropriate punishment of them.

More generally, we, the whole West, are going to have to come to grips, eventually, with the Enlightenment. A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical. The failure to grasp this intellectual and philosophical nettle for 250 years rests heavily upon us today, and can only become more onerous.

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Watering Down the Bible

2012-02-15T07:43:00.001+13:00

Shame is a Given: All its Permutations Are Not

In recent days we have been invited to sign an (electronic) petition protesting against biblical translation organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators. Apparently these well-meaning folk have been busy preparing a translation of the Bible into Arabic, especially for the Muslim world.

There has been an overt, deliberate attempt to remove references to the "Father" and the "Son" from the text of this translations of the Bible. Why? Well, apparently we all want to celebrate what we have in common with Islamic believers and not offend them from the "real" message of the Bible (whatever that might be).

Reportedly a significant number of Wycliffe missionary and support staff have resigned.
Appeals, arguments, and protests have fallen on deaf ears. When you are doing "God's work" don't let a few pathetic remonstrants stand in your way.

Like Prufrock, we have seen all this before. We know what the outcome will be. After World War I, liberalism and progressivism gained a vice-like grip on many parts of the Western church. These "parts" have usually been called the "mainline" denominations. These folk inherited the modern missionary movement whereby hundreds of thousands of missionaries had spread out across the globe, proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But liberal, humanistic "believers" began to be troubled by what they saw as offensive arrogance on the part of Christians in the West.

Rodney Stark takes up the story:

In the aftermath of World War I, liberal condemnations of missionizing great increasingly strident and public. . . . (L)iberal Protestants charged that Christianity has no greater claim to religious truths than do other religions, and that the entire mission effort must accept the validity of non-Christian religions rather than try to replace them. Rodney Stark, One True God [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p.99)

One very influential book in these circles of culturally superior and effete Christians was written by William Hocking of Harvard Divinity School. It was entitled Re-Thinking Missions. The basic thesis was that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity: its truth belonged to the human mind everywhere, just in different forms. Like Islam, for example. The outcome: within two generations, the modern missionary movement had ceased to exist--at least in the halls of "mainline" denominations. In 1935, missionaries from mainline denominations represented about half those on the field. By 1996, it had fallen to just 4.2 percent.

So we have a pretty good idea about what is going to happen to Wycliffe and those associated with it. Relying as it does on voluntary donations, and from volunteering linguists and life-long field workers, it will attenuate and wither. We suspect that, unless it repents, Wycliffe will cease to exist in a generation.

Those who try to add their own offence to the Gospel bring dishonour to Christ. Those who try to detract from the offence of the Gospel are dishonoured by God. And, just co-incidentally, it is the very worst thing that could be done for Islamic people world-wide.

Christian Voting Calculus

2012-02-14T21:52:00.000+13:00

With Lots More Flies

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 08 February 2012

Well, then, it is starting to look as though the Republican primary race might still be going on when they all get to Idaho. Santorum pulled off a hat trick last night, winning Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, taking a little sheen off of the Romney inevitability lustre.

There are four contenders left, two of whom I could vote for in good conscience (Santorum and Paul), and two of whom I couldn't (Romney and Gingrich). I say this knowing that either Romney or Gingrich would likely be way less destructive for the nation (in the short run) than Obama has been.

So why not vote for them then?
The answer is that there is such a thing as slow-mo destruction, and this is a pattern that has been institutionalized by the Republican Party. It is the way they do things. If enough people hold their nose and vote for them, they call it a mandate, and arrange for a bigger pile the next time around, this time with lots more flies.

Neither Santorum nor Paul are pristine perfect, and so I understand the slow-mo argument can be applied to both of them as well. Are we going to get more compassionate conservatism, of the kind that bought a tricked-out Lexus, filled up the tank, and gave the keys to Obama? Or are we going to get more squishiness on homo-marriage, the kind of squishiness that destroys civilizations?

In the end you make a judgment call. What you are doing is making is a judgment call on a candidate's root instincts. This is the reason political judgments like this should not affect a believer's fellowship with another differing believer -- it is possible to share the principle, and differ over the application. I can fully see someone who agrees with me entirely on the principle feeling as though he has more options than I do, or fewer. God bless him, and every bone in his head. Little joke. We have that kind of relationship. I can say things like that.
You play it as it lays. If the race were down to Romney and Paul when it gets to Idaho, I would certainly vote for Paul -- wanting to give as much leverage to the fiscal sanity contingent at the convention as I could. They might be able to pull Romney out into the sunshine in edifying ways. At the same time, they could do no real damage on social issues or radical Islamic policy issues, and so there you go. But if Santorum is a viable non-Romney candidate when the circus gets to town, then in my judgment, that is the way to go.

I can say this not begrudging the delegate heft that the Paul party will have earned up to that point. Their performance has been impressive, and ought to be honored and treated with respect. The winner will make a grave mistake if he simply throws them a bone. Where they have been talking sense, give them high respect. Where they have not been, then it may at that point be passed over in discrete silence.

Seduced by Silken Words

2012-02-14T07:00:00.001+13:00

Castles in the Air

The problem with the debt levels of modern omni-competent pretender governments is that they become so big no-one can actually conceive of the amount of money owed. It becomes an abstract, meaningless number. Therefore, everyone just tends to shrug their shoulders and carry on. Like infinity, it cannot be calculated--yet it becomes strangely meaningful in the end. National debt does not affect the man-in-the-street--until it does--and by then it is too late. The end of life as they knew it will be at hand.

The end occurs when governments cannot pay back their impossible debts, or when they attempt to do so, and the people revolt. Default or revolt: they are the two most likely outcomes when government runs out of other people's money. Welcome to Greece (and Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, the UK and the United States).

Here is a visual presentation seeking to get the quantum of Greek debt across to the average Joe. It also summarises who has lent the money becoming creditors to the Greek nation and people. Stupid institutions; stupid people. Stupid us.

Greek Debt

Lest We Forget

2012-02-13T20:49:00.000+13:00

A Seething Mass of Maggots

Michelle Malkin provides some historical background to the political storm over Christians and churches and Christian institutions being forced to provide contraception and abortifacients. Beneath it lurks the liberal fascination with eugenics.

‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.

When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services.
Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.”

In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.”

Speaking with CBS veteran journalist Mike Wallace in 1957, long after her racist views had supposedly mellowed, Sanger again revealed her true colors: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Sanger also elaborated on her anti-Catholic animus, telling one of Wallace’s reporters that New York Catholics had no right to protest the use of their tax dollars for birth city birth-control programs: “(I)t’s not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control — even among its own members.” When Wallace pressed her (“In other words, you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense?”), Sanger laughed nervously and disavowed the remarks.

Fast forward: Five decades and 16 million aborted black babies later, Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda has migrated from inner-city “birth control bureaus” to public school-based health clinics to the White House — forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars just as Sanger championed. Several undercover stings by Live Action, pro-life documentarians, have exposed Planned Parenthood staff accepting donations over the years from callers posing as eugenics cheerleaders who wanted to earmark their contributions for the cause of aborting minority babies. “We can definitely designate it for an African-American,” a Tulsa, Okla., Planned Parenthood employee eagerly promised.

What has cheap, easy and unmonitored “choice” for poor women in inner cities wrought? Nightmares like the Philadelphia Horror, where serial baby-killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic death squad oversaw the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable black and Hispanic babies over 4 decades — along with several minority mothers who may have lost their lives in his grimy birth control bureau.

City and state authorities looked the other way while jars of baby parts and reports of botched abortions and infanticides piled up. Beltway Democrats who now bray about their concern for “women’s health” were silent about the Gosnell massacre and countless others like it in America’s ghettos. Why?

The Obama administration is crawling with the modern-day heirs of the eugenics movement, from Planned Parenthood golden girl Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services to the president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren — an outspoken proponent of forced abortions and mass sterilizations and a self-proclaimed protege of eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

Brown envisioned a government regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.” He urged readers to “reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

Listen carefully as this White House dresses its Obamacare abortion mandate in the white lab coat of “reproductive services” for all. The language of “access to birth control” is the duplicitous code of Sanger’s ideological grim reapers.

Stubborn Facts

2012-02-13T07:49:00.001+13:00

Costa Climatica Listing Dangerously

Years ago they used to speak of the "rust belt" to refer to states in the US which were experiencing an economic cold winter. It referred to rusting industrial sites, long abandoned. We are starting to wonder how long it will be before the term "rusting green belt" comes into common usage. No, we are not referring to swathes of greenery protected by town planning rules, but to relics of green energy projects such as wind farms and factories producing solar panels and electric cars.

It is gradually dawning on climate scientists that the data does not support their confabulations and conjectures. A growing number are defecting. But because crony capitalists and big government have colluded in pouring vast amounts of tax payers money into the pockets of companies and universities promoting our carbon Armageddon the global warming ship will not stop suddenly. But stop it inevitably will. And then the rust will set in.

Here are some of the latest leaks to spring in the grand ship SS Global Warming:

This, from Climate Change cheerleading rag, US News and World Report:

Nearly 230 billion tons of ice is melting into the ocean from glaciers, ice caps, and mountaintops annually—which is actually less than previous estimates, according to new research by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder. . . . While vast quantities of ice melting into the ocean is not exactly good news . . . according to . . . estimates, about 30 percent less ice is melting than previously thought. (Emphasis, ours)

Mmm. We thought Global Warming was going to be making the planet devoid of ice in a few short decades. Not so, it would seem. Now, this from the Guardian:

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Remember all those horror scenarios about the 1.4bn of relatively impoverished people mortally dependant on the water flow from the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau--how their lives would be degraded and diminished unless "something was done". Sorry, it was all a mistake. The climate scientists and NGO's and UN plutocrats "misspoke". Oh, well. Never mind.

Under the Cosh

2012-02-11T21:29:00.000+13:00

"The German Boot"

Greece is reportedly on the brink of leaving the Euro. We have expected that this would be the inevitable outcome. Governments cannot continue to govern when the majority of citizens believe it is causing them harm. It serves as a klaxon warning to both governments and their people that debt enslaves and ultimately impoverishes a people.

This from the Guardian:

Greece crisis reaches boiling point as Athens asks if it can stay in the euro
Ian Traynor in Brussels

Riot police detain protesters in Athens after demonstrations against EU bailout terms. Photograph: Yiorgos Karahalis/Reuters
Greece is facing an acute political and social crisis this weekend as the bankrupt state prepares to decide whether it can stay in the single currency. As riot police clashed with protesters on the streets of Athens, and five ministers resigned in protest at the scale of the spending cuts demanded in return for a new €130bn (£109bn) bailout, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister and socialist leader, said the country had until Sunday to choose whether to swallow the eurozone medicine of more cuts – or default on its debt next month and be forced out of the euro.

In an emotional speech he said: "The choice we face is one of sacrifice or even greater sacrifice – on a scale that cannot be compared. Our country, our homeland, our society has to think and make a definitive, strategic decision. If we see the salvation and future of the country in the euro area, in Europe, we have to do whatever we have to do to get the programme approved."

Police ringed the Greek parliament building following the failure of eurozone finance ministers to approve the new bailout for Greece. Prime minister Lucas Papademos had offered new austerity measures worth €3.3bn to secure the euro lifeline, but he was told the cash would not be forthcoming until savings of an additional €325m were identified. He was told to get the €3.3bn programme endorsed and come up with a plan for the new cuts – to plug a gap in this year's budget – by Sunday.

George Karatzaferis, a Greek coalition leader, spoke of national humiliation and said he would not accept the new cuts, adding that Greece was labouring "under the German boot".

"Whitey" Guilt and Pity

2012-02-11T07:25:00.012+13:00

The High Priest Prays to the Nation's God

Joris De Bres is the closest thing secular Unbelieving New Zealand has to a High Priest. The fundamental role of a priest is to represent the needs of his constituency before the deity. De Bres saw fit to deliver his annual Waitangi Day sermon to the nation with this fundamental role firmly in his heart. He played his role to a "t".

There are those who will argue that Joris is not be the brightest pin in the cushion. But, he fulfils his role as secular High Priest admirably and faithfully. His Waitangi Day his homily was directed at both Maori and the Rest. (We note that Joris nominates the Rest as "Pakeha", but that is a misdirection, or as the American say, a "mis-speak". There are Maori and non-Maori in New Zealand. We are, after all, a multi-ethnic community.)

Part of the duty of a priest is to confess sins before the god he serves. Joris fulsomely confessed the sins of Pakeha, or Whitey.

While some Maori activists were protesting at Waitangi yesterday, Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres criticised those Pakeha who still resisted moves to give "special treatment" to disadvantaged Maori, thousands of whom suffered inequality.

"I still have a sense that there is a lack of generosity in some Pakeha attitudes to Maori and there is a lack of will to see measures taken that will help to remove that disadvantage, and there is a lack of understanding of this notion that it is actually fair to deal specifically with people who are suffering unfairness."

Intoning his liturgical chants lauding "fairness", and decrying "disadvantage" he collectively took up all the sins of Whitey and sought to make atonement before his (and the nation's) god, Egalitarian--the head of the human rights pantheon.

So much guilt. So much pity. He is a worthy High Priest, is he not?

What he is really advocating, of course, is that gummint will do further obeisance to the chief god, Egalitarian by compulsorily extracting more property from citizens by taxing them more oppressively. Then he wants the gummint to distribute this extracted property to Maori, "thousands of whom suffer inequality". But he doesn't want this forced extraction to arouse racial tensions, so he appeals to Whitey guilt and pity to make us all feel terribly guilty and condescendingly pitying as the gummint thieves more of our property and gives it to the those more worthy.

In truth those Maori who are living in the slavery of inter-generational dependence have been destroyed by Whitey guilt and pity. They have been shamed, defamed, and oppressed. They have bought the lie that they are victims. They have forgotten what one of their greatest ancestors, Apirana Ngata said in the Parliament so long ago: social welfare will "be the death of our people." And so it has come to pass for so many Maori. The embrace of Joris De Bres is the kiss of death to the Maori for whom his heart bleeds. He is the deadly Healer looking to increase medicinal bleeding in order to make the patient better.

His god is Egalitarian is a manifestation of Shiva, the destroyer.

But, probably we should respect our nation's High Priest. After all, is not Egalitarian a great god above all gods? Let's all repent, as Joris insists and pour out our heart upon the disadvantaged. Here are a few of the "destroyed ones" who showed up at Waitangi. Open your hearts and your wallets, folks. Be generous, just as our High Priest says.

Well fed Maori needs your support.

Got a handout, mate?

Give me money, or else!

Emaciated Maori that need Whitey generosity

Come on. Be generous New Zealand. Has not Joris, your High Priest spoken?

Militant Atheism and Nietzsche

2012-02-10T08:21:00.000+13:00

Intellectual Gadflies

David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs "fashionable enemies") describing them as "gadflies".

He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle. He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like.

My own impatience with (their) remarks, I should confess, would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity's most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years. . . . (A)t the end of Europe's Christian centuries, the church could still boast antagonists of real stature. In the eighteenth century, David Hume was unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished. And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, there were at least marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity. Edward Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his account of Christianity's rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of positively titanic gifts . . . (D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p.5f.)

In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity--one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today. Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.

The greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who had enough of a sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of Christian faith would bring about. Moreover he had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity's history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis.

Unmistakably, he has Dawkins and Hitchens in his sights at this point. Their life's great crusade has erected a straw-man parody of the Christian faith and of Christian culture, then mounted it with a self-righteous indignity, pouring out invective, disdain, and scorn on a slur of their own making. An intellectual tour-de-force, indeed. Not so Nietzsche, who had the knowledge and integrity to grasp the nettle that confronted him.

He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with the Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.

He knew that the disappearance of the cultural values of Christianity would gradually but inevitably lead to a new set of values, the nature of which was yet to be decided. By comparison to these men, today's gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.

One cannot maintain Christian ethics and Christian morality without Christian truth, without the Living God and His Saviour, Jesus Christ. This rather obvious thought seems never have occurred to our modern militant atheists. It most certainly was obvious to someone as rigorous as Nietzsche.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-02-09T21:11:00.000+13:00

Four/Fifths of the Brimstone

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 06 February 2012

A few days ago, Ron Paul was on Piers Morgan, and demonstrated, in a breath-taking way, a certain muddledness about life. He certainly tried to stay consistent with his libertarianism, which is -- in the world of political trimmers, shifters, and dodgers -- a certain kind of admirable. The problem is that libertarianism, on its own, is a false ideology, and will therefore necessitate self-contradiction. The glory of man will always fail.
I am talking about the pro-life issue, but Paul whiffed a couple others too.

He continues far too ambiguous on the homosexual marriage issue -- as though YWVH would have been fine with the Cities of the Plain had they only had a federal system that allowed for states' rights on the issue, with each city being allowed by the Constitution to make their own decisions. Say that one of them had not legalized sodomy, we might have had one four/fifths of the brimstone. Paul also said that his libertarianism governed his child-rearing -- if he doesn't believe in coercion, then spanking should clearly be out.

On the pro-life thing, he was asked about abortion in the case of rape.
The answer to this, incidentally, is straightforward -- when a woman conceives as the result of a rape, there is one guilty party, and two innocent parties. What the pro-aborts want to do is change the ratios -- they want one victim instead of two, and they want two perpetrators instead of one. They want the man who took what didn't belong to him to be joined by a woman who imitates him by taking what doesn't belong to her.

In response to this question, Ron Paul said that a woman who is raped should go to an emergency room immediately, and get a shot of estrogen, which would prevent the implantation of a conceived child in the uterine wall. Further, he said that he would administer that shot of estrogen. Piers Morgan, astonished, said that he thought Ron Paul believed life begins at conception. Ron Paul said that he did, but that we don't know at that point whether the woman is pregnant.

This, in effect, was saying that if we don't know if someone is living in a room then it must be okay to fill it up with poison gas. This example might seem beside the point because, if we did that, we would eventually have to carry a dead body out. But, in the case of this small victim, nobody ever needs to know. But, speaking frankly, and just between us, "nobody need ever know" is not exactly a pro-life rallying cry.

The most charitable takeaway is that Ron Paul does not understand the issue, or the meaning of the words he is using. At all. He does not understand the ramifications of what it means to confess that "life begins at conception." Further, this ignorance on a point of high magnitude was coming from a medical doctor who confessed that life begins at conception, and that, provided he didn't know of that person's presence, that he personally would have no problem taking that person's life. If that's not a muddle, I don't know what would count at one.

When I was in Minneapolis last week, we had a number of really edifying conversations in the context of the speakers' dinners. One of the most edifying was the last one, where John Piper and I spent a lot of time exulting in (get this) the law of identity. A is A. A is A means that A is not something else, like B, for instance. And those who want it to be something else, or a little bit fuzzier for them, are trying to escape accountability. They don't want to be held to the terms of the argument -- whether we are talking about their own argument or someone else's.

This pro-life issue is one of the reasons I know that God expects us to grow up into the maturity of logical precision. What is a human being? When does a distinct embodiment of the image of God begin? There is no way to answer the question that does not take you back to a single cell -- there, that is a human being. And you don't get to say, as countless people would like to be able to say, that it is a human being if you would like it to be, and not if you would rather not. A is A. If it is a human being, created in the image of God, then he or she should be treated that way. If not, then not.

So which is it?

Afghanistan Stocktake

2012-02-09T08:00:00.003+13:00

So, How's It Working Out, Then?

Readers of this blog will know that we oppose the war in Afghanistan as an ill-considered utopian debacle, without ethical foundation.

To say this is not to deny the courage or skill or tenacity or application of the combatants on both sides. But it is to say that whilst the US fight in Afghanistan began as a defensive invasion to defend the US against Al Qaeda--a perfectly legitimate moral and just action--it soon morphed into "nation building", which is unethical and imperialistic. It is a classic example of the adage that little wars grow into big wars and big wars suck out all your blood.

But, we really could not expect anything else, given the US's maniacal utopian vision of bestowing the West's peculiar, secular "human rights" doctrine on the rest of humanity.
And if bestowal won't work, then there is always the barrel of a gun. But sooner or later, no matter how big one's military might, resources dry up, expenses mount, and people become war weary. Consequently, there is just no way that Obama and Clinton are going to go to war in Syria--the current hotspot--to impose western human rights utopianism on that nation, because as the headline in Drudge brazenly put it: "You can't overthrow them all." The US has gone a bridge too far.

The spurious messianic ideology is as fervently held as ever of course. It's just that the US is exhausted, having been fighting continually somewhere in the world ever since the Vietnam War. Making "the world safe for democracy" is a big task. Acting as the world's Messiah is a huge burden that would bring any nation to its knees eventually.

In Afghanistan it is becoming more clear by the day that the US has lost, not only the will to fight, but the war itself. It will depart that country only to see it return to precisely the same country it was before the US began its arrogant "nation building". This from The Guardian:

The civilian death toll for the war in Afghanistan reached a record high last year with 3,021 deaths, according to the United Nations. The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths.

The number of deaths caused by suicide bombings jumped to 450, an 80% increase over the previous year, even though the number of suicide attacks remained about the same. "A decade after the war began, the human cost of it is still rising," said Georgette Gagnon, director for human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan. The single deadliest suicide attack since 2008 occurred on 6 December, when a bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest at the entrance of a mosque in Kabul, killing 56 worshippers during the Shia Muslim rituals of Ashoura. Roadside bombs remain the biggest killer of civilians. The homemade explosives – which can be triggered by a footstep or a vehicle and are often rigged with enough explosives to destroy a tank – killed 967 people in 2011, nearly a third of the total.

The Pashtun tribesmen and the Taliban are fighting for their home valley and the way of life they have known for centuries. To them it represents who they are; their raison d'etre. When the US leaves Afghanistan it will immediately revert to what it was before their arrival--yet likely worse. No amount of scathing criticism of the world-view of Pashtun tribespeople, their culture, their degradation, their cruelty, their oppression of women--all of it justified--will change the outcome. The fact is inescapable--but rarely acknowledged: you cannot change human hearts and human culture with the barrel of a gun. What you can do with the gun, however, is to enrage a people to the point of magnificent resentment so that the hold of their culture over their hearts and minds becomes stronger than ever.

The foolish and unjust actions of the West in Afghanistan have just served to make the primitive culture of Afghanistan tribesmen many times more powerful a stronghold over hearts and minds than it was in the first place. Western human rights utopianism has a lot to answer for. But we, in the West, deserve it. Anyone with half an education in the rudiments of history and human nature could see it coming ten miles off.

The "Peace" of Islam

2012-02-08T19:47:00.001+13:00

Christians 'face deportation' in Saudi Arabia
Rights group says dozens of Ethiopian Christians have been arrested and could be deported for "illegal mingling".
(Report from AlJazeera)

Dozens of Ethiopian Christians are facing deportation from Saudi Arabia after authorities raided a private prayer service in Jeddah, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The group was reportedly arrested in a private home in Jeddah in mid-December. Most of the 35 detainees are women, and three of them told the US-based group that they were strip-searched by police. HRW said it spoke to three detainees, two women and one man, by telephone from prison. One of them said the men were beaten, and also complained of inadequate medical care and poor sanitation at the jail.

"Two of the women said that officials there forced the women to strip, and then an officer inserted her finger into each of the women’s genitals, under the pretext of searching for illegal substances hidden inside their bodies," the report said.

"Officers also kicked and beat the men in Buraiman prison, and insulted them as 'unbelievers'." The group now faces possible deportation for "illicit mingling," though HRW said Saudi Arabia has no law defining that offence. (Unrelated men and women are forbidden to mingle in public, though they are generally allowed a degree of freedom in private.)

Saudi Arabia officially bans the public practice of any religion other than Islam. The kingdom said in 2006 that it would allow non-Muslims to practice their religions in private, but the kingdom's notorious religious police continue to periodically crack down on private services. The Saudi interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

"While King Abdullah sets up an international interfaith dialogue centre, his police are trampling on the rights of believers of others faiths," said Christoph Wilcke, a senior Middle East researcher at HRW, referring to a Saudi-funded "centre for interreligious and intercultural dialogue" established in Vienna last year. "The Saudi government needs to change its own intolerant ways before it can promote religious dialogue abroad."

Waitangi Day Ennui

2012-02-08T07:44:00.001+13:00

The Gullible and the Sly Try to Tango

The histrionics at the Ti Ti Marae on Waitangi Day have become boringly predictable. The media might as well write up their news reports now for next year's Waitangi Day, so they can all have a decent day off. It would be so easy to do. In fact, why not write up ten Waitangi Day's worth, publish them in the next ten days, and then we can avoid Waitangi Day boredom for the next decade.

Here is the Veteran's take on Hone Harawira's rent-a-crowd and the failure of the Ti Ti Marae to police its own protocol.

Perhaps I am naive but it is sad to see what should be a time a national celebration high-jacked by a bunch of renegade Maori; facilitated by weak leadership from the elders of Ti Ti Marae and egged on by a news media only too anxious to highlight the negative and ignore the positive.

Lets look at that. Hone H bused in a couple of hundred ratbag supporters determined to do their best to disrupt the celebrations. Nothing much new in that. A small group of Maori radicals have been doing that for years. But where it gets really sad is that the Ti Ti Marae Komatua have aided and abetted over the top protest by their abject failure to exert authority over 'their' Marae. I understand Marae protocol. Visitors are to be welcomed and accorded respect even though individual Marae members may have issues with them. Debate on a Marae can be robust but guests have a right to be heard and not shouted down although they can expect to be challenged in debate. The antics of Hone's mob breaks Marae protocol and tramples on the 'mana' of the Marae. And just why the Marae leadership stands back and lets Titiwhai Harawiri attach herself leach like to the Prime Minister's party beggars belief. She has no mana; she denigrates Maoridom with her presence. If there is any light at the end of the tunnel it was to hear my old mate and fellow Vietnam veterans Dick (Rahiri) Dargaville, Marae Chair, say on national TV that enough was enough and the abuse of Marae protocol had to stop. Dick, words are cheap and deeds count louder but if anyone can force changes then you, as a decorated Vietnam veteran, are tough enough to do it. More power to your elbow.

Of course, The Veteran is Maori. It is becoming clearer by the day that there is no such thing as the Maori vote, or Maori opinions. Anyone who pretends they actually exist as collective entities is self-deceived. There is grievance Maori, socialist Maori, troughing Maori, entrepreneurial Maori, successful Maori, capitalist Maori, propertied Maori, Christian Maori, non-Christian Maori, criminal Maori, dead-beat Maori, and so on. Opinions and convictions are equally diverse. To use "Maori" as a collective noun has become deceptive and misleading. It is now in the same grammatically-deceptive territory as using "European", or "feminist" as collective nouns.

Maori diversity is to be lauded and celebrated, not ignored. Of course there are plenty who would argue that only grievance Maori, socialist Maori, troughing Maori, criminal Maori, and dead-beat Maori speak the one authentic Maori voice. Only lazy, indolent "obfuscators", the gullible, and sly manipulators will persist with this fabrication.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

2012-02-07T20:08:00.001+13:00

Solid Joys and Lasting Pleasure

Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 31 January 2012

The world is charged with the grandeur of God, as the poet put it, and it will flame out like shook foil. The world is only a set of blinders for the blind. In all other respects, the world is front-loaded with God's glory. And in order for us to see that glory, really see it, the world has to get thicker -- not thinner.

C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful way, shows us this in the second half of The Last Battle, and throughout The Great Divorce. The world really is "transparent," and it is such through being really solid. The world is that which enables us to see God's glory, and those who try to help this process along by treating the world as ephemeral and wispy are making a great mistake. The world does not need to be diluted to help God's glory shine through. Do you glorify the jeweller by smashing the diamonds?

God has chosen how to reveal Himself. The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God, not that they obscure it. They obscure it only for the obscurantists.

Thinning out the world, gnostic style, does not glorify God. Focusing on the world as it is, without reference to Him, does not glorify Him. But seeing what He has done, the way He has done it, with matter packed tight, does glorify Him. This is why Christian hedonism doesn't not climb up to the Beatific Vision by means of a material ladder in order to then kick the ladder away. We will always have bodies, and God will always speak to us in this way. It can only get more solid -- in the great words of Newton's hymn -- "solid joys and lasting pleasures, none but Zion's children know."

Real Political Leadership

2012-02-07T07:31:00.002+13:00

The Defining Issue of Our Generation

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has been identified as a rising star in the Republican Party in the US. He shows every sign of a man for whom principle trumps political games. He recently gave a speech on abortion. He argued that it is the defining issue of any society.

“The issue of life is not a political issue, nor is it a policy issue, it is a definitional issue. It is a basic core issue that every society needs to answer,” he said. “The answer that you give to that issue ends up defining which kind of society you have.” Rubio criticized those who back away from the pro-life fight because it “makes us uncomfortable,” explaining that while other issues — like jobs, the debt, and the economy — are important, abortion is more than a political issue.

He laid into Roe vs Wade, claiming that virtually everyone agrees that it was an egregious, terrible decision by the Supreme Court--an overreach of power and an unconstitutional act. It is long past time that it be overturned.

The Catholic senator explained that irrespective of an American’s view on abortion, the belief that Roe v. Wade was a bad legal decision should be universal. “It is perhaps the most egregious and devastating example of a court that has decided that because a political branch will not deal with an issue they think is important, they’re going to step in and make a policy decision and literally create a Constitutional right,” Rubio said, reinforcing the point that Americans should reject Roe v. Wade “on legal grounds alone.”

Rubio is refreshing because he does not fall into the secularist trap of leaving his Christian faith outside the door when he enters the public square. He makes no apologies for it; rather he insists upon it being heard.

The religious condemnation of abortion is central to Rubio’s pro-life stance. “Virtually every faith condemns the practice of abortion, recognizes that life is a gift from the Creator and compels followers to believe that as well, as a basic tenet of their faith,” he explained.

Here is his take-down of the "woman's right to choose" defence of uterine murder.

According to Rubio, all the arguments in favor of abortion can be easily knocked down. The most common, he explained, is that of the right of a woman to do what she pleases with her own body. “But there is another right, and that is the right to live. And so when you analyze this issue on a pro-life vs. pro-choice basis, what we basically have are two rights that are in conflict with each other,” he said.

“And we as a society must decide what to do when two rights are in conflict with one another.” While the pro-choice community argues that the right to choose trumps the unborn’s right to live because it is not viable on its own, Rubio explained, the viability argument is a slippery slope.

“They say, ‘Well, they are not viable without the support of the mother.’ That also cannot be a good argument, because a newborn isn’t viable without the mother either. A 1-year-old child, a 2-year-old child — leave a 2-year-old child by himself, leave a 6-month-old child by himself, they are not viable either,” he said, joking that 19-year olds probably shouldn’t be left alone either. Rubio insisted that in the struggle between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn, the deck is stacked against the unborn because they cannot vote. He urged the audience to be the voice for those who cannot speak.

Abortion is the defining issue of our time.

“The way we look at [human rights atrocities] in history and condemn them — this era will be condemned for this, I have no doubt about it,” Rubio said. “Our job is to accelerate the process of getting there, to ensure that sooner rather than later — God willing, in our lifetime — we can arrive to a consciousness in this nation that this is wrong, that the right to life is a fundamental one that trumps virtually any other right I can imagine, because without it none of the other rights matter.”

Rubio compared today’s pro-life movement to abolitionism, the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage. “At the end of the day our nation can never truly become what it fully was intended to be unless it deals with this issue squarely,” he said. “America cannot truly fulfil its destiny unless this issue is resolved. It’s that important.”

Rubio explained the importance of the task in religious terms, saying that he will one day need to answer to God for his actions and failing to fight against abortion — after all the gifts God has bestowed on him — is simply not an option.

“America is great because God has blessed America. And America has always honored that blessing by being an example to the world. … There is nothing that America can give this world right now more important than to show that all life — irrespective of the circumstances of its creation, irrespective of the circumstances of its birth, irrespective of the conditions of that they find themselves in — all life, in a planet where life is increasingly not valued, in a planet where people are summarily discarded, all life is worthy of protection. All life enjoys God’s love,” Rubio concluded to a standing ovation.

It's Official: Global Warming Has Stopped

2012-02-06T20:00:00.004+13:00

Even the UK Met Office Agrees

Reprinted from the Mail Online.

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)
Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

By David Rose

Last updated at 5:38 AM on 29th January 2012

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century. Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts. ‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming. CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid. ‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’. ‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand. ‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. ‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997. The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’ Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

A New Broom in Town

2012-02-06T08:35:00.012+13:00

Cheering From the Terraces

OK, let's be honest. Government schools in New Zealand are really union controlled schools. We refer, of course, to the teacher and principals' unions: the NZEI, the PPTA, and the NZ Principals' Federation. Long ago these entities decided that they were the experts in education and operating schools. Consequently they assumed the mantle of being a second-guessing critic of all government educational policies.

To be sure there are plenty of teachers in the government education system who are dedicated professionals and are really focused upon kids. On the other hand, far too many have been brain-washed in pedagogic theory that can best be described as "unteaching".
Less is more. The less you teach, the more educated the child will become--or so prevailing pedagogic theory has it. We are not kidding. It's called constructivist pedagogy--the now dominant theory which advocates as little top-down curriculum content as possible and as much learning constructed by the child themselves as practicable. Teachers are facilitators, not instructors.

People who oppose such enlightened views are ignorant troglodytes on the purlieu of humanity. The teachers unions (and far too many government educrats warming seats in the Ministry of Education) are the illuminati who alone understand this. Naturally, when these self-duped higher beings have to cope with a Minister of Education and with a government which has a different view, by definition their opponents are seen as ignorant, destructive, anti-education, and reactionary.

Into this mess came National Standards--the idea that every child would be tested every year for their proficiency in reading, writing, and maths. Horror. A six-inch gun had just fired across the rusting bows of constructivist idiocy. For the past three years we have witnessed a guerrilla campaign waged by the unions against the introduction, and now application, of National Standards testing.

The previous Minister of Education, Anne Tolley was pilloried and spat upon from one end of the country to the other. We have no doubt that many a voodoo doll festooned with pins beyond number lies in the dark cupboards and wardrobes of our educational illuminati, dragged out in closed union meetings. In fact, we have it on good authority that meetings of local union chapters have introduced a "closed session" component which involves everyone present inserting needles into a voodoo doll--a ritual is known as Tolleying.

No doubt the controllers of the government school system heaved a huge sigh of relief when Anne Tolley was replaced by Hekia Parata--a novice. It raises more than a belly laugh to see the union spluttering and dribbling now that it has dawned on them that whereas Tolley had a hide of a Neanderthal, Parata seems to have the hide and teeth of a T-Rex and, worse, is on the hunt.

The latest stoush is over whether the government will publish the results of school testing so that the whole wide world can rank schools as to how effective they are in teaching really advanced and obscure subjects like reading, writing and arithmetic. This has always been a big beef with the educational illuminati: if you are going to test whatever else you do, don't publish the results! Why? It will harm the children. Spare us!

Tolley equivocated on the issue. (To be fair, it was probably a battle for another day--like now.)

Enter Hekia Parata. She shows every sign of spoiling for a fight from the moment her Ministerial Warrant was issued. This, according to the NZ Herald:

New Education Minister Hekia Parata and the primary teachers' union, the NZEI, could be on an early collision course over league tables comparing schools. Not only has the minister rejected the union's calls to prevent the compilation of tables using national standards reporting data, she may get the Ministry of Education to compile official league tables.

She indicated they could compare schools in the same decile grouping [one to 10], as happens in Australia.
"We invest billions of dollars in the education sector and New Zealanders are entitled to know what value we are getting for that money," the minister said yesterday. "That means having accurate information available."
Parents placed a lot of trust in principals and teachers, she said. "And that trust should be returned by letting parents know accurate information about what's happening."

She said making information available is part of the democratic tradition in New Zealand and was one she wanted to see continue.

Hekia Parata talked favourably about the Australian website Myschool [Myschool.edu.au], which compares statistically similar schools in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy against national testing, and also records a school's progress in lifting achievement. Asked if she would consider getting the Ministry of Education to set up a similar website to the one in Australia, she said: "I would consider that, yes".

All power to you, Minister. Go for it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Letter from the UK

2012-02-04T21:21:00.014+13:00

Riots Clarify Issues

It appears there is a silver lining to the dark cloud of last year's riots in the UK. Labour politicians are calling for a walk-back on the UK's anti-smacking legislation. We in NZ should take note. If a peaceful petition where 80 percent of the electorate wanted Parliament to amend anti-smacking legislation so as to recognise the rights and responsibilities of parents had no effect, maybe a few riots should be the order of the day.

Where are those "Occupy" people when you need them? It might be very helpful if they would get serious and raise a decent riot.

This, from the Guardian.

Raising the controversial issue of smacking children is "necessary and right", a senior Labour MP has said, after he was criticised for suggesting working-class parents needed to be able to discipline their children without fear of prosecution.

David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, said the government should not impose how parents disciplined their children and said many families felt confused and disempowered by laws around punishing children. The row erupted after Lammy was accused of partly blaming last year's riots on parents' inability to smack their children in order punish them. He later said the riots could not be blamed on smacking, but that the issue needed to be tackled. "There are groups of people in this country who are confused by the law and we need to listen to those people," he told the Guardian. "There is a divide between professionals and parents who feel quite differently."

Lammy denied that supporting parents' right to physically punish their children in any way condoned violence or abuse against children. "It is up to parents to determine the way they want to help their children navigate boundaries and how they define right and wrong, it is not for the state to define that for them," he said. "The state is not there on the 15th floor of a tower block, where there may be drug dealers and violence and families may be struggling." He added: "This is not about abuse, not about hitting or about violence, and it certainly isn't about domestic violence."

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, weighed into the debate saying that the "benefit of the doubt" should be given to parents. "People do feel anxious about imposing discipline on their children, whether the law will support them," he told BBC Radio 5 live's Pienaar's Politics. "I think there ought to be some confirmation that the benefit of the doubt will always be given to parents in these matters and they should be seen as the natural figures of authority in this respect." This must not result in a "licence for physical abuse or for violence", he added.

Lammy said: "Initially I was sceptical about it, but after a while I really started to listen to what people were saying. There is a confusion about the law – people in my constituency think that smacking has been banned and their experience is of living in fear of social services turning up on their doorstep. Lots of middle-class people don't have that experience, they have never met social services in their lives and can't understand that fear."

Before 2004, parents were able to use "reasonable chastisement", with contentious cases decided by a judge. But the introduction of the Children's Act specified that parents were allowed to smack their offspring without causing the "reddening of the skin" and left decisions to social workers over whether or not parents had overstepped the mark.

In an interview with LBC Radio, the former education minister appeared to suggest that Labour's 2004 decision to tighten up the smacking law was partly to blame for last summer's riots, which erupted in his north London constituency. "Many of my constituents came up to me after the riots and blamed the Labour government, saying: 'You guys stopped us being able to smack our children'," he said. But he told the Guardian that had not been his intention. "It would be quite wrong to suggest that smacking or not smacking was in any way responsible for the riots," he said. "There were many, many issues examined by a range of reports including the Guardian and LSE."

In the BBC interview Lammy admitted to "very occasionally" smacking his three- and five-year-old sons and said working-class parents should be able to physically discipline their children to prevent them from joining gangs and getting involved in knife crime. He said: "The law used to allow 'reasonable chastisement', but current legislation stops actions that lead to a reddening of the skin – which for a lot of my non-white residents isn't really an issue." Parents in Tottenham had to raise their children against the background "with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime just outside the window", but "no longer feel sovereign in their own homes" because of the laws, he added.

Lammy said he had received many messages of support from across the country. "People are contacting me saying 'Thank goodness someone is talking about this, it is a real issue and I think you are right.'"
The MP said he had received criticism from professionals "largely liberal in bent" and from people who had suffered abuse and were worried about his comments. "I feel this is a very sensitive issue and it has to be dealt with in a calibrated and careful way. But talking about it is a necessary and right thing whatever the conclusion." . . . .

Extenutating Circumstances

2012-02-04T08:01:00.005+13:00

" Honour" Murders and Islam

"Honour" murders are in the news again. In Canada. The nation is reportedly shocked. Here is a summary of the case:

Zainab Shafia's crime was to run off to marry a man her parents hated. Middle sister Sahar's crime was to wear revealing clothes and have secret boyfriends. Youngest sister Geeti's crime was to do badly in school and call social workers for help dealing with a family home in turmoil. The punishment for all three teenage Canadian sisters was the same: death.

Their executioner: their brother, acting on instructions from the father to run their car off the road. Another family member, their father's first wife in a polygamous marriage, was also killed.

Hamed Shafia, his father, Mohammed, and his mother, Tooba Mohammed Yahya, were sentenced to life in prison for murder, with Judge Robert Maranger excoriating their "twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

CNN and other media outlets are rushing to assure everyone that honour murders are not Islamic.
One of the more positive things is that some Islamic scholars are denouncing the practice.

Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly endorsed the Canadian judge's verdict, insisting that "honor murders" had no place and no support in Islam. "There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family," said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England.

"This idea that 'somehow a girl has besmirched our honor and therefore the thing to do is kill her' is bizarre, and Muslims should stop using this defense," he said, arguing that the practice is cultural, not religious in origin. "You cannot say this is what Islam approves of. You can say this is what their culture approves of," he said.

Yes, and no. The problem is that Islam struggles to be separated from its cultural manifestations. There is no separation of church and state in Islam: there is no church, period. Islamic traditions (hadith) are just as important as the Quran. Sharia law and Islam and the culture that produced the Quran, the hadith, and sharia are pretty much inseparable. Consequently, throughout much of the Islamic world, honour murders are treated more lightly--almost as justifiable homicide, or murder with extenuating circumstances.

Several Arab countries and territories, including Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, have laws providing lesser sentences for honor murders than for other murders, Human Rights Watch says. Egypt and Jordan also have laws that have been interpreted to allow reduced sentences for honor crimes, the group says.

The is a direct reversal of the Christian legal tradition where killing family members is regarded as a particularly aggravated and heinous form of murder.