Warning:  Pregnant women may wish to avoid Tylenol/Panadol

It can shrink your baby's balls.  Below is only a rodent study, but is a better one than most, so caution may be advisable.  Aspirin has fallen out of favour because of some usually minor side-effects but acetaminophen/ paracetamol seems to have much worse effects (e.g. Liver failure).  Another instance of conventional medical advice getting it ass-backwards, it seems.  Excerpt only below

JAMA. 2015;314(1):16. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.7177.

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White House blames killing by an illegal on conservatives

By claiming that the administration is doing exactly what it is not

The White House on Monday defended its immigration policies and blasted Republicans following the killing of a San Francisco woman — allegedly by an illegal immigrant.

When asked if the case was a failure of the administration’s enforcement policies, White House press secretary Josh Earnest chided Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill that would have boosted funding for border security. 

“I recognize that people want to play politics with this,” Earnest said. “The fact is the president has done everything within his power to make sure that we’re focusing our law enforcement resources on criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety.”

Kathryn Steinle, 32, was shot and killed Wednesday at a popular tourist destination in San Francisco. The suspect, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had multiple felony convictions and had been deported to Mexico five times. 

Earnest faulted the “political efforts of Republicans” for blocking “the kind of investment that we would like to make in securing our border and keeping our communities safe.”

The spokesman refused to comment on the details of the case, but he pointed to Obama’s executive actions on immigration launched last fall, which instructed the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize the deportation of people who are considered “public safety threats.”

“We have started to make changes in terms of structuring and staffing … to ensure that our law enforcement efforts are focused on felons and not on families,” he said. “These efforts would be significantly augmented had Republicans not blocked common-sense immigration reform.”

Federal authorities have suggested San Francisco bears responsibility for the fact that Lopez-Sanchez was still on the street. U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) turned him over to San Francisco authorities in March on a drug warrant. 

But he was released in April after the charges were dropped, and local law enforcement did not honor federal officials’ request to be notified when he was freed. 

“We’re not asking local law enforcement to do our job,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said, according to Fox News. “All we’re asking is that they notify us when a serious foreign national criminal offender is being released to the street so we can arrange to take custody.”

San Francisco is a “sanctuary city” that does not cooperate with federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws.

SOURCE

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The rich port: Progressive Paradise Lost

It's a progressive paradise. Public employees get 30 vacation days a year. Anyone who works over eight hours in a day gets paid time-and-a-half. Employees have strong rights.

The minimum wage is high: 77 percent of the median wage.

Environmental regulations are settled beyond the pressure of local economic interests. The forests and mountains are pristine destinations for ecotourism.

Energy costs are kept high, pushing consumption down to a level deemed "socially beneficial". Utilities have strong public backing and provide jobs to thousands.

Union jobs in shipping are protected from outsourcing to cut-rate foreign competitors.

The social safety net is buoyant and provides a solid working-class standard of living. People who are injured can rely on disability insurance to maintain their income.

Student-to-teacher ratios are very low so that every child gets the very best.

The flagship research institution is a well-funded public university. Just ten years ago, the university was linked to downtown and the suburbs by a new light rail line.

Best of all, richer people living far away pay most of the taxes. This little paradise has open access to large export markets and is part of a major currency union.

The government borrows at low interest rates and runs large deficits when output is below trend and does not give up on stimulus after a few years.

But economic output, oddly, is always below trend.

Puerto Ricans have lived through decades of this left-wing utopia, and they are fleeing it.

The island's working-age population declined by 100,000 since 2005, as the economy shifted from stagnation to depression.

In a parallel universe with free markets and low regulation, Puerto Rico could have become the Singapore of the Caribbean.

It has a sizable educated, bilingual workforce, is a natural hub for regional commerce, and has free access to U.S. markets.

Credit must be given to left-wing Gov. Alejandro Garc¡a Padilla for commissioning an independent economic report on Puerto Rico's economy, and his administration did not repudiate the economists' blistering critique of the commonwealth's progressive policies and shabby governance.

In the report, economists Anne Krueger, Ranjit Teja, and Andrew Wolfe call for spending cuts, tax reforms, and structural reforms-necessities if Puerto Rico is to resume economic growth.

Spending Cuts

Krueger, who will present her research at The Heritage Foundation on July 8th, argues that fiscal stimulus by successive Puerto Rican administrations failed to end the stagnation because it was based on a misdiagnosis.

"Solving Puerto Rico's problems through fiscal expansion has not worked," she writes, "and will not work."

Instead, spending cuts that reduce the footprint of government can return the commonwealth to solvency and allow economic growth. Their suggestions include:

Cutting subsidies to the University of Puerto Rico to save $500 million per year (throughout, annual savings are estimated as of 2020).

Cutting extra Medicaid spending to save $150 million per year.

Gradual cuts in public school employment and closure of some rural schools to reflect the shrinking number of students and save over $400 million a year

Renewing a law that freezes the real value of certain transfer-spending formulas to save $1 billion a year.

Staffing cuts at bloated public utilities.

Tax Reforms

The economists advocate comprehensive tax reform. Replacing a 35 percent corporate tax rate riddled with exemptions with a 10 to 15 percent, broad-based corporate tax would increase annual revenues by $250 million.

Governor Padilla's administration has called for a new sales tax, which the authors estimate would raise $1 billion annually.

However, many European countries can now attest that raising taxes during a crisis is a recipe for slower growth and lower revenues.

The largest potential revenue gains come from reforms to the labor market and business sector rather than from tax increases.

By spurring economic growth, Puerto Rico could add $1.35 billion in revenues without a tax increase.

Labor and Social Reforms

Tax reforms and spending policies will not be sufficient without reforms to Puerto Rico's social safety net.

By using a welfare system designed for the mainland U.S., where average wages are much higher, both federal and Puerto Rican policies discourage work.

The U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 is only slightly lower than the median wage in Puerto Rico, $9.42. Contrary to the claims of some progressives, a higher minimum wage destroys jobs.

Puerto Rico cannot compete with similar regional economies at mainland-U.S. wage rates.

But only the U.S. Congress can grant Puerto Rico a minimum wage exemption.

The economists recommend Puerto Rico repeal its European-style labor laws, which make it difficult to lay workers off, expensive to employ them, and thus risky to hire them.

Reforms of the benefits Puerto Ricans receive when they are not at work are important as well.

The economists show in one estimate that "a household of three eligible for food stamps, AFDC, Medicaid and utilities subsidies could receive $1,743 per month-as compared to a minimum wage earner's take-home earnings of $1,159."

Since the minimum and median wages are so close, the welfare income would also exceed a median wage earner's income by about $240 a month.

The authors conclude that the "federal government should therefore give the Commonwealth more latitude to adjust welfare requirements and benefits."

It would then be up to Puerto Rico's lawmakers to administer transfer payments in less distortionary ways.

Business Barriers

The World Bank's "Doing Business" survey ranks Puerto Rico significantly below the mainland U.S. in its "Ease of doing business" rankings.

One barrier to business is the Merchant Marine Jones Act, which gives a monopoly on trade between Puerto Rico and the U.S. to a small fleet of old, inefficient vessels.

This partial embargo raises prices of all sorts of consumer goods, making Puerto Rican residents poorer.

In particular, Puerto Rico has been shut out of the energy boom on the mainland.

But lack of access to mainland gas and oil is not the only reason energy prices are so high in Puerto Rico.

The report notes that only in insolvency is the Puerto Rican electrical utility beginning to address its "over-staffing and inefficiency," which have kept electricity prices high.

They recommend assigning a "high-level official" in the Puerto Rican government to improving the island's "ease of doing business ranking."

Their hope is that someone whose reputation is on the line will have the willpower to break through the bureaucratic inertia and enact reforms on registering property and permitting new businesses.

Beyond the content of Puerto Rico's policies, Krueger and her team were clearly troubled by the opacity of the commonwealth's civil service.

Their immediate problem was a lack of accurate, up-to-date economic data. But the data deficiencies reflected generally chaotic record-keeping and poor coordination throughout the central bureaucracy.

The Stricken Land

Puerto Rico's progressive policies are not a coincidence. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Rexford Tugwell, one of his most progressive lieutenants, governor of Puerto Rico in 1941.

Tugwell created a unique stream of tax revenue and used it to experiment with a centrally planned economy, extending the reach of the government of Puerto Rico into every sector of the economy.

Stricken and stunted by the plans of Tugwell and his successors, Puerto Rico has never lived up to its promise as an American commonwealth.

Now in a depression and a debt crisis, Puerto Rico serves as a warning against the very policies that Tugwell championed.

SOURCE

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Chick-fil-A Keeps Doing It Right

It’s interesting that just days after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage is a heretofore undiscovered constitutional right Chick-fil-A came out on top in a customer service satisfaction survey. In fact, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain registered the highest score in the history of the survey. 

What does same-sex marriage have to do with fried chicken? Recall that, in 2012, the company became the Rainbow Mafia’s number one target after Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy voiced his support for biblical marriage. Leftists tried to organize a boycott, but it fell flat as a conservative counter-boycott gave franchises their longest lines ever as people flocked to grab a tasty sandwich on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. 

The lesson: Stand by solid principles and make a great product, and people will come. They’ll like it, too.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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More on the theology of homosexuality

A few days ago I put up here a coverage of the claims by mainstream Christian clergy that homosexuality is permissable to Christians.  That permissiveness may be kindly meant and it may provide solace  to some tormented souls but it clearly flies in the face of both the Christian teachings in the New Testament and the Jewish teachings of the Old Testament.  Christ was a devout Jew living in a very orthodox Jewish community and, if you read Matthew chapter 19 in full, you will see that he was even more restrictive about sexual morality than were the very orthodox Pharisees.

I am therefore pleased that one of my Jewish readers has sent in some comments on the matter too.  See below.  He obviously has a searching knowledge of his own religion so I am impressed that he knows Christian thinking very well too. I had always imagined that only the most searching Protestant exegetes used the wonderful "Strong's  Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible" but I see that he uses it too.  I myself always have a copy on my desk in front of me


By Willem

I read your recent post, "Homosexuality and Christian apologetics" with considerable interest. You are of course entirely correct in what you say.

I would like to offer a couple of footnotes.

Your note that Paul refers to a chastisement - "kolasin" - that you translate as "cutting off" interested me, because a frequent consequence for a variety of transgressions in the Jews' Bible is "kareth" - which is translated as to be cut off. This is a chastisement from Heaven, rather than a punishment to be imposed by an Earthly court, and it is usually interpreted as meaning a life that is cut short - although I think the implications are more serious, involving being cut off from the Divine, and so on.

That Scripture forbids homosexual acts was, as you note, very clear to the early Christians from Leviticus 18, which proscribes and condemns a variety of possible sexual liaisons, including a variety of forms of incest.

It is surely of interest, that the vast majority of prohibited relations are simply listed as being forbidden, without further "editorial" content. In the wonderful King James version:

7 The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

8 The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness.

9 The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.

10 The nakedness of thy son's daughter, or of thy daughter's daughter, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover: for theirs is thine own nakedness.

11 The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's sister: she is thy father's near kinswoman.

13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister: for she is thy mother's near kinswoman.

14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's brother, thou shalt not approach to his wife: she is thine aunt.

15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son's wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it is thy brother's nakedness.

17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness.

18 Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time.

19 Also thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.

20 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her.

21 And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.


Remarkably, alone among so many prohibited relations, are homosexual acts labeled an "abomination."



22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

23 Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

24 Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:

25 And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.

26 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:

27 (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)

28 That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.

29 For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.

30 Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.

Bestiality is denounced as "confusion," and collectively, all of these sexual liaisons are considered "abominations," but only lying with a man as one would lie with a woman is an "abomination." (It occurs 117 in Scripture.)

"Abomination," or "to-evah" (Strong's 8441) is used in many different situations and I am not sure that we can be sure of all of its connotations today. The word for confusion, "te-vel" (Strong's 8397) is also translated as "perversion." (It occurs only twice in Scripture, in Leviticus 18 and 20.)

It is as if the Bible knows, that in the future (as I am sure it was contemporaneously, in some parts of the ancient world) homosexual liaisons would be regarded as normal, and therefore an extra emphasis is needed.

The recent recognition and sanction given to same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court of the United States, a judicial body that had never defined or opined on traditional heterosexual marriage, suggests that same-sex liaisons have a cachet and status even better than the status of traditional marriages today. In the "Reform" Jewish congregations, the rule has been for many years, that "anything goes." (If - in the last words of the founders of the Assassins, to mix creeds, "nothing is true," then "everything is permitted," is it not?)

Some 7 years ago or so, the governing body of the "Conservative" Jewish movement's Jewish Theological Seminary agreed that it would ordain as a "Rabbi" or "Cantor" a practicing homosexual, so long as he promised not to engage in anal intercourse, which the governing committee of the Conservative movement's scholars determined was the only act prohibited by Leviticus. A traditional marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple would remain beyond the limits, however.

Thus a curious situation would be possible: no Conservative congregation would employ a man as Rabbi who openly lived in a sexual relationship with a woman with whom he was not married, but a homosexual Rabbi would be employable if he openly lived in a sexual relationship with a man with whom he was not married.

It is as if the Conservative movement sees same-sex relationships as benefiting from an inherent sanctity and propriety not possible for traditional, heterosexual couples without a formal marriage.

In contrast, the traditional Jewish Weltanschauung sees the splitting of the primordial Adam into Adam & Eve as a clear depiction of what the Bible sees as the proper and inevitable sexual relationship - one man and one woman.

Finally, with respect to divorce, and the Christian Church's teaching against it - you quote Matthew 19:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

I would put this teaching in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. The entire Sermon on the Mount is of great interest in the history of Jewish religion, and as a lengthy example of the preaching and teaching of Jesus. I don't think there is any part of it that would be incongruous if preached by an orthodox Jewish preacher to an orthodox Jewish audience - as of course it was.

He says:


17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus is proceeding along the same work that the Rabbis were engaged in - building a fence around the Law - although in a different way.

That is, the Rabbis were concerned to enact additional practical restrictions, so that one's behavior would be circumscribed well before one came into danger of violating God's commands. Jesus seeks to accomplish a similar goal, but by extending the prohibitions concerning actions, to the realm of thoughts and feelings.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Jesus does not counsel that the way to avoid the frank sins and transgressions forbidden by God is to give in to the zeitgeist. He teaches a thoroughgoing rectification of the individual's inner nature, to bring it into conformity with the Divine plan. The early Christian Church surely stood up against the world, and all of the powers that were arrayed against it.

In contrast, I am amazed by the extent to which ostensibly believing Christians -and Jews!- are willing to abandon the time-proven practices and principles of their religions (practices and principles which many real martyrs have died in order to uphold against a hostile World) - in favor of the latest shibboleths of, for example, the editorial board of the New York Times.

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CLEAR ENOUGH?



The evening that the Supreme Court allowed gay marriages to be treated the same as heterosexual marriages was a victory for the militant in your face LGBT.  The white house was lit up with the rainbow colors of the LGBT.  On the anniversary of our country's founding,  July 4th this year there was no lighting of the white house in red, white, and blue.  What does that tell you about the current occupant?

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Episcopal Bishops Abandon Bible for Same-Sex Marriage

The Episcopal Church, the American branch of the World Anglican Communion, is a regrettable case study of how liberalism has eroded the foundations of our great American heritage. Many Episcopal Church (ECUSA) leaders have abandoned the church’s venerable legacy and forsaken the Almighty’s providence. Liberals in the church endeavor to interpret the Bible eisegetically versus exegetically in order that it comport with their contemporary social agenda rather than its “original intent” — much as Leftists interpret the so-called “living Constitution.” In other words, they reject the authority of the Bible (as outlined in the Episcopal Articles of Faith), much as they reject the authority of our Constitution.

The same sad story was on display again this week as ECUSA bishops voted to authorize their clergy to perform same-sex weddings beginning Nov. 1. Conservative bishops insisted on an accommodation for clergy who refuse to do so, which makes such ceremonies unlikely in several dioceses.

But the damage is done. ECUSA’s drift away from biblical truth has taken many years. In 2003, the “enlightened” U.S. bishops rebuffed the World Anglican Communion and codified their rejection of Scriptural authority by ordaining Vicky Gene Robinson, the church’s first openly homosexual bishop.

Perhaps such is the plight of a church born out of wedlock. In 1534, when the Roman Catholic Church would not grant Henry VIII an annulment from his 25-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry broke with Rome and instituted the Church of England — which granted his divorce.

Short of unfeigned repentance, another divorce, that of the Episcopal Church from the World Anglican Communion, looms just over the horizon.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Is Operetta the right musical entertainment for conservatives?

I think it is but I realize I am going to have to talk fast to make that case.

As all the surveys show, conservatives are a lot happier than Leftists. Leftists are the miseries of the world whom in the end nothing suits.  Leftist literary figure Gore Vidal once said: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little".  Leftist envy has long been known.  As a contrast, it makes me happy when other people do well. Where Leftists abhor Bill Gates, I admire him.  And I think many conservatives are like that.

So that must must influence what we like in entertainment.  Like much of Hollywood's output, Grand Opera is romantic but has sad endings.  In grand opera, the lovers mostly die in the end.  Romeo and Juliet is their model.  In "Carmen", for instance, Carmen is  in the end stabbed to death by her jealous lover.  And in "Aida", the lovers end up immured.

Operetta is much nicer.  It is also very romantic but the lovers end up happily together and heading off to get married.  Isn't that better? It sure suits me a lot better.

And operetta has wonderful songs. They are often well known but people don't realize that they originate from operetta.  Try this song, for instance. Or this one.  They're sung in German but you probably know what they're all about anyway.  Operetta was all originally in German but you can get it on DVD with English subtitles.  Sometimes you can even get them online with subtitles -- as here. Andre Rieu has a great medley of operetta tunes here.

In the end, however, it's a matter of taste.  But if you've got a romantic bone in your body you will surely enjoy Viennese operetta.  It's not heavy.  It's fun.  And there's some nice-looking ladies in it too.  See below:



No subtitles but what the clip is about it that the lady thought her husband was too boring until he moved to Vienna.  But once he moved there he acquired the Viennese spirit (Wiener Blut) and she tells him that because of that she now loves him.  And he falls back in love with his wife too.  Isn't that grand?

There's lots of detail about operetta on my personal blog.

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And here is an evocation of the real America, a profound performance of "Amazing Grace" by Condoleezza Rice & Jenny Oaks Baker.  Put online to celebrate this year's celebration of Independence day.



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Progressive Mass Hysteria

V.D. Hanson

Democracies have been fickle for 2,000 years, but the Internet makes it worse. One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian historian Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos. Thucydides uses his riveting account of the Athenian argument over the islanders' fate to warn his readers of the fickle nature of democracy.

Outraged by the revolt of the Mytileneans, the frenzied Athenians suddenly assemble and vote to condemn all the adult males on the island, regardless of the role any of them may have played in the revolt. They are to be executed en masse for rebellion, on grounds of collective guilt. The next day, however, cooler heads in Athens narrowly prevail. The radical demos just as abruptly takes a second vote and withdraws its blanket death sentence of the day before, voting instead to execute only 1,000 of the ringleaders of the rebellion.

But what about the messenger ship that was dispatched hours earlier to deliver the mass death sentence?

A second trireme is now sent off by the contrite democracy with orders to the crew to row as fast as they can, in hopes of delivering the reprieve in time. The relief vessel and its exhausted crew arrive at Lesbos at the very moment that all the adult male islanders have been lined up and are about to have their throats slit.

Thucydides uses the frightening story to warn of the wild - and often dangerous - swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture. The historian seems at times obsessed with these explosions of Athenian popular passions, offering an even longer and more hair-raising account of popular mood swings over invading Sicily. We forget sometimes that the Athenian democracy that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts.

American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation. While the government in theory still operates according to the checks and balances of the Constitution, in reality, in the hyped Internet world of modern pop culture, fevered passions can seize the majority of the population in a matter of hours.

The idea of gay marriage in 2008 earned unapologetic disapproval from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The liberal voters of California twice rejected the idea in statewide plebiscites. But after years of constant harangues in the media, boycotts, public ostracisms, and ad hominem attacks on the integrity of skeptics, the liberal political establishment - many of whose members are recipients of large amounts of cash from wealthy gay donors - suddenly flipped.

A sort of collective hysteria took over from there. In 2008 there was common assent on the part of the Democratic party's leadership that the three-millennia-old belief that marriage involved different sexes would prevail, while a separate rubric, "civil union," would be invented for homosexual couples. But by 2012 that notion was not merely outdated, but taboo. Almost overnight, supporting the erstwhile Obama position of permitting civil unions but rejecting gay marriage became tantamount to career suicide.

Ditto on illegal immigration. Barack Obama likewise swore between 2008 and 2012 that he was no despot who by executive fiat could legalize violations of immigration laws that had been passed by Congress. Yet by 2015 anyone who would agree with Obama's past vows is now rendered little more than a nativist and xenophobe - so powerful is the Orwellian engine of groupthink.

Take the Confederate-flag debate. What started out just days ago as a reasonable move by the state of South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Charleston mass shootings, to remove the Confederate battle flag from public display on state property, within hours had descended into something like the mob's frenzy over Mytilene. We have now gone well beyond removing state sanction from a flag that represented an apartheid society. Indeed, Americans of the new electronic mob are witch-hunting the past with a vengeance, as private, profit-driven companies seek to trump one another's piety by banning the merchandising of Confederate insignia. Meanwhile, our versions of the ancient sophists and demagogues are hoping that the mob can stay agitated long enough to go on to new targets, such as banning public airings of Gone with the Wind or ending respect for public monuments of prominent Confederate war dead.

At some point, the throng will exhaust itself, and realize that while removing Confederate flags from state property was a reasonable and overdue gesture, most of what followed was Mytilenean to the core. Think of the contradictions that have already arisen from the mob frenzy.

One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz.

One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz or the hammer-and-sickle Communist banner that represented the Great Famine, forced collectivization, and various cultural revolutions that led to 100 million slaughtered or starved to death in the 20th century.

One can argue that the slave-owner Robert E. Lee fought to perpetuate human bondage, but Lee never took delight in personally executing without trial his ideological enemies, in the manner of the psychopathic, pistol-toting Che Guevara, whose hip portraiture adorns all too many campus dorm rooms.

Present politics mostly define the degree of past sin and the appropriate punishments, as the revolutionary mob decides in an instant which particular historical figure deserves the most immediate ostracism and should be Trotskyized from our collective memory. Should we now remove the racist Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill? Even in my small town in central California there are schools named Jackson and Wilson. Apparently our Depression-era educators thought that the one Democratic president was a populist reformer, the other an idealistic internationalist. Yet both were abject racists, at least as we understand the charge today. In fact, no president of the 20th century disliked blacks in general and integration in particular as much as the Southern segregationist Woodrow Wilson, although he adroitly cloaked his racial hatred with a thin veneer of liberal academic respectability as president of Princeton University and author of several progressive tracts.

The writings and speeches of Margaret Sanger, founder of what evolved into Planned Parenthood, trumped the biases of Wilson. Her progressive version of eugenics fueled much of her family-planning agenda. She saw reproductive rights as inseparable from discouraging the supposedly less gifted (in her view, mostly non-whites) from having lots of children.

Should Al Gore give one of his trademark teary public confessions and, in vein-bulging angst, apologize to blacks for misrepresenting his senator father's racist votes against civil-rights legislation? Should Bill Clinton join Gore on the podium to feel our pain and say he is sorry that regional Clinton-Gore campaign affiliates often plastered "Clinton-Gore '92" on the Confederate battle flag in an effort to get out the supposed redneck vote? Will Hillary Clinton join in too and apologize for her 2008 declaration - delivered during her heated, racialized primary struggle with Barack Obama - that the polls showed "how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states [Indiana and North Carolina, where primaries had just been held] who had not completed college were supporting me."

Planned Parenthood is as likely to disown its progenitor as Princeton University is to change the name of the Wilson School of Public and International Affairs - and as the Clintons are to publicly repent for their past appeals to blue-collar whites. Apparently, on the one hand, we must understand that there are inveterate haters and symbols of unrepentant racism that should be excised from the body politic, and, on the other hand, there remain well-meaning progressives of the past, who were unfortunately captives of their times and said or wrote things (often spoken in the heat of passion, or taken out of context today) that they did not quite mean. The record of the latter group, according to modern liberal tastes, is unfortunate - but is fortunately overshadowed by their greater liberal accomplishments. Consequently, the mass hysteria against anything that reeks of past racism will be carefully steered clear of monuments honoring the pro-segregationist J. William Fulbright or former Klan leader Robert Byrd, or other liberal heroes like the racist states'-righter but Watergate icon Senator Sam Ervin, who, 20 years before Watergate, authored "The Southern Manifesto," which encouraged opposition to the desegregation of schools.

There will be no liberal watchdog or enlightened corporation that goes after the federally funded National Council of La Raza for its racist nomenclature, which can be traced back to Franco and Mussolini. We cannot properly damn the liberal Earl Warren or the progressive McClatchy newspapers for their 1941 racial rah-rahing that helped convince the progressive Roosevelt administration to implement the Japanese internment.

The damnation of past segregation by race does not extend to censure of present segregation by race in campus dorms and meeting places. No one cares much that the liberal racism that prompted Woodrow Wilson to discourage blacks from attending his beloved Princeton logically continues with the modern Ivy League university adjusting SAT scores and GPAs to ensure that Asian-Americans are not "overrepresented" in Princeton's incoming class: In both cases, utopian racialism by enlightened social engineers cannot be judged by calcified notions of color-blind fairness.

These outbursts of public frenzy at supposed enemies may reflect grassroots furor, but they are also orchestrated by progressive grandees who are inconsistent in their targeting of history's villains - offering context and exemption for liberal fascist and racist thought, speech, and iconography, while connecting their present-day political rivals to the supposed sins of the country's collective past. Manipulating the past, in other words, becomes a useful tool by which one can change the present.

In another analysis, Thucydides reminds us, in regard to the stasis at Corcyra, that in frenzied efforts to reconstruct both the past and present to fit ideological agendas, "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." So they do today, as the mob makes the necessary adjustments in going from one obsession to the next.

SOURCE

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Man Who's Never Had a Real Job Makes Rules for Businesses

With a wave of his magic wand, Barack Obama just gave five million workers a raise — or so he’d like you to believe. In an op-ed explaining his new regulations on overtime pay for salaried workers, Obama wrote, “We’ve got to keep making sure hard work is rewarded. Right now, too many Americans are working long days for less pay than they deserve. That’s partly because we’ve failed to update overtime regulations for years — and an exemption meant for highly paid, white collar employees now leaves out workers making as little as $23,660 a year — no matter how many hours they work.

 … [M]y plan [is] to extend overtime protections to nearly 5 million workers in 2016, covering all salaried workers making up to about $50,400 next year.”

And who doesn’t want a raise? Naturally, his proposal will be popular with those who think they stand to benefit, as well as those in need of an Economics 101 refresher.

The real-world results will be that employers hire fewer workers, pay lower base wages, cut hours and nix benefits like work-from-home scenarios for employees who now have to scrupulously track their hours. Just mandating higher wages doesn’t mean businesses can afford to pay them.

The conservative approach is to actually grow the economy — which, notably, Obama has not done. As John F. Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Not just the ones Obama points to with his wand.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Creativity

I often get emails from the energetic Deniz Selcuk, who, judging by his name, is a Turk.  I assume he is a he but I could be wrong.  He could be a she.  I know nothing about the naming conventions of Turkish and suspect that I never will.

Deniz is obsessively interested in creativity.  He scours the net for possibly relevant information about it.  Even so, he fell into what I gather is a rather common trap.  He assumed that there was such a thing as creativity.  More precisely, he asssumed that there was a general trait of creativity.  There are of course individual  creative acts but there is no such thing as a generally creative person.

In that way it differs from IQ.  A person who approaches one problem intelligently is highly likely to approach other problems intelligently, even quite different problems. IQ generalizes,  Creativity does not.

I managed to convince Deniz that he was wrong, which is a compliment to his open-mindedness, but I thought I should also mention here some of the things that I told him.

So how do I know that there is no such thing as creativity?  Three  ways:  From a reading of the research on the topic, from known facts and from personal experience.  I am not actually up to date with the latest research but the findings were quite consistent  when last I looked at them so I doubt that much has changed.  The finding was that a person creative in one field might be knowledgeable about other fields but was creative only in his own specialty.

And that brings me to known facts.  How many great painters were also great composers?  None.  A lot of distinguished (and undistinguished) people paint in their latter years but that is about it.

And that brings me to a Canadian lady I once knew rather well: "B".  She was head of a rather large art school here in Brisbane that formed part of one of our universities.  So the visual arts were clearly her thing.  But in her home she did not have a single device (stereo, hiFi etc) for playing music. Music hardly existed for her.  Her daughter had a small portable device but that was it.  I have no idea how creative "B" was in any visual art but she must have gained some distinction to be in the job she held.  But there was clearly zero chance of her being creative musically.

And I am much the same.  I have only one narrow field of creativity: Scientific writing.  I would not have over 200 academic journal articles in print without that.  I write only for blogs these days but I think I do that to the same old standard of care.

But is academic writing creative?  Not always.  It is just hack stuff a lot of the time.  But the hack stuff mostly doesn't get published.  The journal editor and his referees have to find something interesting in the paper to pass it for publication. They commonly accept only around 10% of what they see.

And to be interesting, you have to be creative to at least some extent.  You have to have something new to say.  That made things easy for me.  I see things from a conservative/libertarian viewpoint whereas journal editors in the social sciences almost invariably see things from a Leftist viewpoint.  So my writings were rather amazing to them. Leftists live in their own little self-constructed mental bubble that insulates them from disturbing non-Leftist thought so bursting into that bubble delivers surprise.

Leftists don't like irruptions into their bubbles, however, so what I was saying had to be very strongly defended.  My research had to be very "waterproof".  But it was, so I got published.  My usual trick towards accomplishing that was to do real sampling.  Your average Leftist psychological researcher does no sampling at all.  If he wants to find out what people think and why, he just hands out a bunch of questionnaires to his students and accepts the findings from that as valid for all people for all time.  That shows, of course, the utter intellectual poverty of most Leftists.

My approach, by contrast, was to go and knock on randomly selected doors in some big city and talk to an actual representative sample of real people!  I talked to "the people"!  Leftists often talk about "The people" but they usually know nothing about them -- as I found when comparing my findings with what was in the existing literature on the topic.

But since social scientists do in theory view sampling as important, when I presented them with some, they found it very hard to knock back.  They did manage to knock it back about 50% of the time but I mostly broke through eventually.  Since my conclusions were invariably the diametric opposite of what Leftists believe (facts and Leftism have a VERY uneasy relationship) it would only have been the unusually open-minded editor who published my stuff.  And it was.  There were three editors who published my writings repeatedly while other editors would be good for only one or two acceptances  -- generally on rather technical subjects that were not too alarming.

You might think that an ability to write well in an academic way would generalize  to other fields of writing.  Not in my experience. Being aware that I was doing well with academic writing, I tried on a couple of occasions to write short stories.  I submitted them to various publications with zero success. I will probably put them online the day before I die.  So even creative  writing does not generalize from one field to another.

So to be creative you have to have ideas and you have to work on them but that is about all you can say about creativity in general.

An interesting thing that I note is that, although I say many "outrageous" things on my blogs, I rarely get abusive email and comments from Leftists in response.  I think it means that academic-standard argument leaves them lost so they avoid reading it at all.  Must keep that bubble intact!

The ancient Greeks had an interesting theory of creativity.  They felt that there was a "muse" behind each creative person.  The muse was a spirit being who was the real creative force.  The muse would for instance "send down" the words that a writer was writing, with the writer himself having only a minor part in the final product.

That is not quite as silly as it sounds.  I have experienced something like that.  Sometimes the words I want to write pour out and it is a real challenge to get them all written down before they go away.  All that it really means, I guess, is that we can think a lot faster than we can write. But I don't blame the Greeks for thinking what they did.  It does feel the way they describe it.

Hitler

I don't think that anything I have said so far is terribly controversial so let me stir the pot a bit:  I think Hitler was a good artist.  Just the fact that everybody says he was not tends to lead me to that view.  In the simple world of propaganda, ascribing anything good to him would risk attack as morally reprehensible. But not much in life is all black and white so I see no moral risk at all at holding that there might have been one praiseworthy thing about him.  But let me nonetheless explain in two parts:

Google the words "Hitler" and "paintings" together and click "images" and you will see a veritable gallery of the many paintings and watercolors that Hitler produced in his youth.  I think a lot of them are quite good.

I cheerfully admit that I know nothing about art but I doubt that anybody does.  When skilled forgers and copyists regularly fool art critics and when random blobs of paint smeared onto a canvas by some ape or other simian are warmly praised, I think I would be embarrassed to claim that I know anything about art.  I think I would be calling myself a fool.

What rather gets me is when a painting worth millions is discovered to be a forgery, its value suddenly drops into the mere thousands.  Clearly, an evaluation of its worth reflected something other than the goodness of the art concerned -- snobbery perhaps.

So that is my first blast on the subject.  I don't think that Hitler was a great artist but he seems as good as any other outside that top range.

My second blast is that Hitler's real creative achievement was not in painting at all.  He had clear artistic instincts but they reached greatness in politics.  And I can divide that into two parts.  He was an indisputably mesmerizing orator who made most of Germany fall in love with him and his vision.  If that is not great creativity, tell me what would be.  Nobody before or since has been so successful in oratory.

From reading his inaugurals and other speeches, Abraham Lincoln probably was as good at oratory in his day but he was an old fraud too.  Lincoln convinced Americans that 600,000 of their young men had to die to abolish slavery -- when no other  nation on earth needed to shed a single drop of blood to abolish slavery.

And, getting back to Hitler, part of his political genius did include a visual component.  He was largely responsible for the design of Nazi rituals, displays and rallies and they helped make his speeches and rituals so emotionally powerful.  So that was clearly a remarkable artistic achievement. And that too would seem to be a pinnacle achievement.  I  know of no other political rallies and speeches that are re-run on TV even a thousandth as often as Hitler's.

All those re-runs surely attest that even we who are long past any sympathy with his aims are still powerfully affected by the speeches and spectacles involved. How could such a failed and disastrous politician still figure so largely in our minds?  There was clearly something about him that was way outside the ordinary.  He still fascinates.

So Hitler may have been merely a good painter but as a political persuader he was the best ever.  He was supremely creative in only one field but it was in a field that was, regrettably,  immensely  influential  -- JR.

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Media Hide Facts, Call Everyone Else a Liar

By Ann Coulter ·

When Donald Trump said something not exuberantly enthusiastic about Mexican immigrants, the media's response was to boycott him. One thing they didn't do was produce any facts showing he was wrong.

Trump said: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

The first thing a news fact-checker would have noticed is: THE GOVERNMENT WON'T TELL US HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS ARE COMMITTING CRIMES IN AMERICA.

Wouldn't that make any person of average intelligence suspicious? Not our media. They're in on the cover-up.

A curious media might also wonder why any immigrants are committing crimes in America. A nation's immigration policy, like any other government policy, ought to be used to help the people already here - including the immigrants, incidentally.

It's bad enough that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are accessing government benefits at far above the native rate, but why would any country be taking another country's criminals? We have our own criminals! No one asked for more.

Instead of counting the immigrant stock filling up our prisons, the government issues a series of comical reports claiming to tally immigrant crime. The Department of Justice relies on immigrants' self-reports of their citizenship. The U.S. census simply guesses the immigration status of inmates. The Government Accounting Office conducts its own analysis of Bureau of Prisons data.

In other words, the government hasn't the first idea how many prisoners are legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or anchor babies.

But there are clues! Only about a quarter of California inmates are white, according to a major investigative piece in The Atlantic last year - and that includes criminals convicted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when the vast majority of California's population was either black or white.

Do immigration enthusiasts imagine that more than 75 percent of the recent convicts are African-American? Blacks have high crime rates, but they make up only about 6 percent of California's entire population.

A casual perusal of the "Most Wanted" lists also suggests that the government may not have our best interests in mind when deciding who gets to live in America.

Here is the Los Angeles Police Department's list of "Most Wanted" criminal suspects:

-Jesse Enrique Monarrez (murder),

-Cesar Augusto Nistal (child molestation),

-Jose A. Padilla (murder),

-Demecio Carlos Perez (murder),

-Ramon Reyes, (robbery and murder),

-Victor Vargas (murder),

-Ruben Villa (murder)

The full "Most Wanted" list doesn't get any better.

There aren't a lot of Mexicans in New York state - half of all Mexican immigrants in the U.S. live in either Texas or California - and yet there are more Mexican prisoners in New York than there are inmates from all of Western Europe.

As for the crime of rape specifically, different groups have different criminal proclivities, and no one takes a backseat to Hispanics in terms of sex crimes.

The rate of rape in Mexico is even higher than in India, according to Professor Carlos Javier Echarri Canovas of El Colegio de Mexico. A report from the Inter-American Children's Institute explains that in Latin America, women and children are "seen as objects instead of human beings with rights and freedoms."

All peasant cultures have non-progressive views on women, but Latin America happens to have the peasant culture that's closest to the United States.

The only reason our newspapers aren't chockablock with reports of Latino sexual predators is that they are too busy broadcasting hoax news stories about non-existent gang-rapes by white men: the Duke lacrosse team (Crystal Gail Mangum), University of Virginia fraternity members (Jackie Coakley) and military contractors in Iraq (Jamie Leigh Jones).

In fact, the main way we find out about Hispanic rapists is when the media report on dead or missing girls - hoping against hope that the case will never be solved or the perp will turn out to look like the rapists on "Law and Order." When it turns out to be another Latino rapist, that fact is aggressively suppressed by the media.

New Yorkers were horrified by the case of "Baby Hope," a 4-year-old girl whose raped and murdered body turned up in an Igloo cooler off of the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. After a 20-year investigation, the police finally captured her rapist/murderer in 2003. It was Conrado Juarez, an illegal alien from Mexico, who disposed of the girl's body with the help of his illegal alien sister.

New York City is the nation's media capital. But only The New York Post reported that the child rapist was a Mexican.

In 2001, the media were fixated on the case of Chandra Levy, a congressional intern who had gone missing. All eyes were on her boss and romantic partner, Democratic congressman Gary Condit. Then it turned out she was assaulted and murdered while jogging in Rock Creek Park by Ingmar Guandique - an illegal alien from El Salvador.

There was a lot of press when three Cleveland women went missing a decade ago. By the time they escaped in 2013 from the sick sexual pervert who'd been holding them captive, it was too late for the media to ignore the story. The girls hadn't been kidnapped by the Duke lacrosse team, but by Ariel Castro.

Now, get this: While investigating Castro, the police discovered that he wasn't the only Hispanic raping young girls on his block. (All in all, it wasn't a great street for trick-or-treating.)

Castro's erstwhile neighbor, Elias Acevedo, had spent years raping, among many others, his own daughters when they were little girls. The New York Times' entire coverage of that case consisted of a tiny item on page A-18: "Ohio: Life Sentence in Murders and Rapes."

The media knew from the beginning that the monstrous gang-rape and murder of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in 1993 was instigated by Jose Ernesto Medellin, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But over the next decade, with more than a thousand news stories on that case, the fact that the lead rapist was a Mexican was not mentioned once, according to the Nexis archives.

Only when Medellin's Mexicanness was used to try to overturn his death sentence did American news consumers finally find out he was an illegal alien from Mexico. (After years of wasted judicial resources and taxpayer money being spent on Medellin's appeals, he will now be spending eternity way, way south of the border.)

Who is this media cover-up helping? Not the American girls getting raped. But also not the Latina immigrants who came to the U.S., thinking they were escaping the Latin American rape culture. So as not to hurt the feelings of immigrant rapists, the media are willing to put all girls living here at risk.

No wonder the media is sputtering at Trump. He broke the embargo on unpleasant facts about what our brilliant immigration policies are doing to the country.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Homosexuality and Christian apologetics

Derision is my normal response when people claim to be Christian and then go on to countenance homosexuality.  Both the Old and the New Testaments are crystal clear that it is an abomination to the Lord and must therefore be avoided or repented.  And yet the mainstream churches go as far as having homosexual clergy.  How do they do it?  What conceivable excuse can they have for disobeying their Lord?

In the case of the Church of England and its various offshoots the answer is clear. They DON'T believe in their Lord -- and many clergy are closeted homosexuals themselves. The present Archbishop of Canterbury does appear to believe in something but, as far as I can tell, he is a rarity among the Anglican episcopate. The Anglican clergy like gracious old buildings, gorgeous vestments, "bells and smells" and the occasional bits of respect that they get -- but proclaiming the Gospel is a very low priority for them. Even their Easter sermons are often very wishy-washy, with at best a passing mention of redemption. With honourable exceptions (as in Sydney diocese) The Anglican clergy are mostly just poseurs, atheists in drag.

Some mainstream clergy, however, do make some sort of a fist of justifying their heresy and I want to say a few things about that. Unlike Leftists, I do take an interest in what "the other side" are saying so I do know their main lines of argument. I have no fear of being tripped up by awkward facts -- and hearing both sides of any question is in principle the safest way towards a reasonable judgement about it.

And I note that real Christians generally seem to be a bit slack about countering the pseudo-Christian arguments about homosexuality. Real Christians think it is sufficient to quote the relevant texts and leave it at that.

But the pseudo Christians do have some real arguments to offer and they are good enough to lead some people astray -- so somebody needs to point out the sophistry in the pseudo-Christian arguments.  It is rather crazy that I as an atheist should take on that job but I have never lost my early interest in exegesis and theology so am reasonably positioned to do so

Argument from the first century environment

One argument I see is that homosexuality is condemned only about three times in the New Testament so they cannot really have meant it seriously.  If it really was a serious concern it would have been mentioned more often.  And Christ himself did not mention it at all.  Allied to that is an argument that Christ and the apostles lived in a Greco-Roman world where homosexuality was normal, common and unquestioned so it cannot have been seen as very wrong or it would have been condemned out of hand.

That is the sort of argument you might get from the U.S. Supreme Court -- one that completely ignores what the documents actually say -- and it seems to me to be an argument of desperation.  But let me point out the simple and major flaw in it anyway.

Christ and the early Christians lived in an environment that  was overwhelmingly Jewish.  And Jews had always stood out in their rejection of homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22 etc.).  They did indeed live in a Greco-Roman world and pedophilia had been routinely practiced by the Greeks for centuries -- something that the unfortunate Chris Brand got fired for after he pointed that out once too often.

But Israel was not Greece then any more than it is today.  Regardless of what other subjects of the Roman empire might say or do, Jews lived in a society where homosexuals risked being stoned to death.  Rejection of homosexuality could be taken as read in that environment so needed only incidental mention.  And when the apostle Paul did in fact comment directly on Roman civilization, he absolutely ranted and raved in his condemnation of it.

Paul started travelling very early on and so came into much more contract with Greco-Roman civilization than one would have done in Israel.  Most of his missions were at least initially to congregations of the Jewish diaspora so he still lived in something of a Jewish bubble.  But when it came to Rome itself he could not restrain himself.  He condemned just about everything Roman.

Read what he says about Roman practices in his epistle to the Christians in Rome, chapter 1, from verse 21 onwards.  Being a good theologian, Paul puts his condemnation in the context of what Jewish backsliders in the past had done but there is no ambiguity about the general applicability of what he says. And he is clearly motivated by what he has observed of Roman civilization, which is why he felt the need say it when writing to the congregation in Rome.  So on occasions when it was needful to condemn homosexuality, the Bible writers did just that.  I quote from verse 27:

"And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet".

And in the final verse of the chapter Paul moves into the present tense,  indicating that it is the malign influence of then-current Roman civilization on Christians that he has particularly in mind:

"Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them"

What did Christ say?

A related argument is that Christ never mentioned homosexuality so it was only that old puritan Paul who thought it was a bad thing.  Since Paul's writings form a large part of the New Testament, that is simply a repudiation of the Bible and is, if anything, an anti-Christian argument and reveals those who put it forward for what they are:  Disciples of Satan maybe but certainly not disciples of Christ.

But, that aside, context again is explanatory.  Because Christ was a devout Jew in a Jewish society, the question never arose. It was not an issue.  The Jewish law still unquestionably applied.  Let me quote the only thing that Christ said about marriage -- in Matthew 19.  He specifically put his teaching in the context of a debate about Jewish law:

"Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'.  So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Clearly, for him, marriage was between a man and a woman and it was only they who could become "one flesh". And his authority for that was what was found in the Jewish scriptures.  So there is no doubt whatever about his view of sexual relationships. Only male/female marriage was on his horizons.

Universal salvation?

A remaining argument from the pseudo Christians is that God is a God of love so therefore he must love homosexuals too. That is also an amazing argument. The Bible repeatedly makes clear that God loves his children but, like any parent, he also has rules for his children.  And just as children can be disinherited, so God can sentence unrighteous people to everlasting "kolasin" (cutting off).  Let me quote  Matthew 25.

"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world ...

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal"

The word translated as "punishment" above is in Greek "kolasin" and it simply means "cutting off". It is the word a Greek gardener might use to describe the pruning of a tree. So it would be a proper  translation to say that the goatish ones will be cut off and thrown away like the unwanted branch of a tree.

So the argument that the love of God is unconditional is utter rubbish.  You have to do your best to obey his rules if you want salvation from death.  There is no universal salvation.

So those are the arguments that the pseudo-Christians use. They are so weak that you could only accept them out of desperation. You could only accept them if you wanted to use Christianity as a false front.  They are arguments that mock the Bible, not arguments from the Bible -- JR.

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Happy aphelion

I am not superstitious but I wonder if anybody thinks it significant that it was around aphelion (when earth was most distant from the sun) that America's unilateral declaration of independence took place? It did usher in a regrettable war but ideals have emerged from it that have proven very constructive so it is undoubtedly worth celebration.

I keep the original Sabbath in an approximate sort of way and July 4 occurred this year on a Saturday so I did not post anything this year on July 4. But an Australian Sunday largely overlaps with an American Saturday so it is perhaps still appropriate for me to put up something to mark the great day. The observations below by Rick Manning seem good ones to me

American exceptionalism at risk

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In these 54 words Thomas Jefferson defined the DNA of America, and laid the foundation for individual freedom that has over the course of 239 years led to American Exceptionalism.

Jefferson’s words embodied in the Declaration of Independence were an act of treason, and those who signed the Declaration of Independence committed a heroic act of literally putting their lives, families and fortunes on the chopping block with little objective evidence that the revolution they spawned was going to be successful.

Yet, beyond the secular revolution of breaking away from the England, the American DNA was defined in the bold statement that individual rights were not granted by a government, but instead by God, and that the government itself was created to secure those rights.

This fundamental transformation away from the notion of the divine right of Kings to the subjugation of government to the people was based upon the core statement that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Created equal, the rich and poor alike, all given dignity by God with rights that no government could strip away.

A freedom like no other that has ignited Americans to dream, strive, achieve, fail and get up and try again.

Being human, those authors of the Declaration were not perfect, but they chose not to be limited by their cultural or other short-comings.  Instead they chose to set a bar high enough that Americans would always strive to achieve it, and peoples from other countries would always crave to join it.

Today we find the same underlying challenges that faced those brave men who met in Philadelphia in 1776 facing our nation.

Today, there are those who look at the faults of our nation and seek to use them to deny the underlying truths that have made America the envy of the world.

They seek to return our nation to one where natural rights are not endowed by God, but rather reduced to those which the federal government allows us to pretend that we have.

They seek to turn the meaning of the Constitutionally enumerated freedoms upside down.  One example is their attempt to turn the First Amendment on its head.  Flipping its plain meaning from the right to engage in speech, the free exercise of religion, redressing grievances to the government and of the press to a government imposed protection from these very activities under the guise that some sub-group or even the majority might be offended.

Many of the same people who defended the right of miscreants to burn the American flag, now argue that the American flag should be torn from the flag pole as it offends some who come from other cultures. They argue that the government should act to stop the free exercise of religion by virtue of declaring contrary points of view to be “hate speech.”  They argue for the government to impose a personal freedom from being exposed to ideas that they disagree with, so they can maintain a safe zone bubble.

Rather than the free exchanges of ideas that have helped America grow strong, they want a government imposed monopoly of ideas that coincides with their limited understanding of the world.

This is the battle that America has just begun to wake up to.  A national discussion that goes to the root of who we will be in the future, and those whose base argument is that government determines what rights individuals have naturally are trying to silence those who believe that individual freedoms are protected from the government rather than defined by it.

The idea of America is freedom to do, speak and take action without the shackles of a federal government overlord is at risk.  The underlying, guiding assumption of our nation’s history that the government did not bestow rights, so the government cannot take them away is being challenged.

This very revolutionary concept that has brought our nation to being the greatest the world has ever known is in imminent danger.  Should we, as a people, accede to those who wish to rule us by agreeing with their premise that rights are fungible and the government is the grantor of whatever freedom it chooses to allow, America will no longer be exceptional or unique.  Our nation will slip back into the norm of history, being ruled without rights with the people taking whatever crumbs that fall out of our master’s hands rather than striving for their own dreams.

SOURCE

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Ding Dong, the Ex-Im Bank Is Dead!

It seems like the liberty movement has taken a bit of a beating lately, with the Supreme Court defending ObamaCare subsidies, the FCC expanding its regulation of the internet, and budgets continuing to spend beyond our means and rack up more national debt. But it’s not all bad news, and at times like this it’s more important than ever to celebrate victories where we can find them. The end of the United States Export-Import Bank is one such victory.

The Bank’s charter has expired for the first time since its creation 80 years ago. This means it won’t be issuing taxpayer-backed loans to big companies with political clout. It won’t be granting special favors to green energy companies to satisfy the president’s personal preferences. It won’t be handing out your money to foreign and corrupt corporations. The expiration of Ex-Im is a blow against the cronyism and corporate favoritism that gives “pro-business” Republicans a bad name, and that’s something we should celebrate.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftist history

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You Can’t Compromise with Culture Warriors

by Jonah Goldberg

I loved reading the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books to my daughter. The somewhat Aesopian theme is that if you give the mouse what it wants – a cookie – it will just want more: a glass of milk, a straw, etc. The story came to mind last week, a week that began with many vowing to inter the Confederate flag and that ended with the Supreme Court mandating that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As far as culture-war victories go, the flag news was big, but the marriage ruling was tantamount to VE Day.

It might be too much to think that progressive activists and intellectuals would demobilize after such a “Mission Accomplished” moment. But a reasonable person might expect social-justice warriors to at least take the weekend off to celebrate.

But no. Even when the cookie is this big, the mice want something more. The call went out that there were new citadels to conquer. Within hours of the decision, Politico ran a call to arms titled “It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy: Why Group Marriage Is the Next Horizon of Social Liberalism.”

On Sunday, Time magazine had Mark Oppenheimer’s “Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions.”

Earlier in the week, as corporations and politicians were racing one another to shove the Confederate flag down the memory hole, a co-host asked CNN’s Don Lemon whether the Jefferson Memorial should be removed from the National Mall because the former president owned slaves. He said no, but that “there may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson.”

Within hours of the same sex-marriage ruling, the White House was beaming the gay-pride rainbow flag on its facade. This is the White House whose current occupant campaigned in 2008 passionately insisting that his religious faith required him to oppose gay marriage. The president and his party now consider that position to be unalloyed bigotry.

Many of us always believed Barack Obama was lying about his opposition to gay marriage – a belief corroborated when his former guru, David Axelrod, wrote in his memoir that he’d advised his client to conceal his personal view for political expediency.

It is something of a secular piety to bemoan political polarization in this nation. But polarization in and of itself shouldn’t be a problem in a democracy. The whole point of having a democratic republic, never mind the Bill of Rights, is to give people the right to disagree.

A deeper and more poisonous problem is the breakdown in trust. Again and again, progressives insist that their goals are reasonable and limited. Proponents of gay marriage insisted that they merely wanted the same rights to marry as everyone else. They mocked, scorned, and belittled anyone who suggested that polygamy would be next on their agenda. Until they started winning.

In 2013, a headline in Slate declared “Legalize Polygamy!” and a writer at the Economist editorialized, “And now on to polygamy.” The Atlantic ran a fawning piece on Diana Adams and her quest for a polyamorous “alternative to marriage.” We were also told that the fight for marriage equality had nothing to do with a larger war against organized religion and religious freedom. But we now know that was a lie, too.

The ACLU has reversed its position on religious-freedom laws, in line with the Left’s scorched-earth attacks on religious institutions and private businesses that won’t – or can’t – embrace the secular fatwa that everyone must celebrate “love” as defined by the Left.

I very much doubt we’ll get a constitutional right for teams of people to get “married,” but I have every confidence the drumbeat will grow louder. Social justice – forever ill-defined so as to maximize the power of its champions – has become not just an industry but also a permanent psychological orientation among journalists, lawyers, educators, and other members of the new class of eternal reformers.

By no means are social-justice warriors always wrong. But they are untrustworthy, because they aren’t driven by a philosophy so much as an insatiable appetite that cannot take yes for an answer. No cookie will ever satisfy them. Our politics will only get uglier, as those who resist this agenda realize that compromise is just another word for appeasement.

SOURCE

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We Have Officially Reached Peak Leftism

by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

A progressive panic attack begins as the Obama era wanes. If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected.

We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel and a peck of it, but the United States of America remains, to the Left’s dismay, plainly recognizable as herself beneath the muck. Ergo, madness and rage.

We have seen an extraordinary outburst of genuine extremism — and genuine authoritarianism — in the past several months, and it will no doubt grow more intense as we approach the constitutional dethroning of the mock messiah to whom our progressive friends literally sang hymns of praise and swore oaths of allegiance. (“I pledge to be a servant to our president” — recall all that sieg heil creepiness.)

There is an unmistakable stink of desperation about this, as though the Left intuits what the Right dares not hope: that the coming few months may in fact see progressivism’s cultural high-water mark for this generation. If there is desperation, it probably is because the Left is starting to suspect that the permanent Democratic majority it keeps promising itself may yet fail to materialize.

The Democrats won two resounding White House victories but can hardly win a majority in a state legislature (seven out of ten today are Republican-controlled) or a governorship (the Democrats are down to 18) to save their lives, while Republicans are holding their strongest position in Congress since the days of Herbert Hoover.

The Democrats have calculated that their best bet in 2016 is Hillary Rodham Clinton, that tragic bag of appetites who couldn’t close the deal in the primary last time around. “Vote for me, I’m a lady” isn’t what they thought it was: Wendy Davis, running for governor of Texas, made all the proper ceremonial incantations and appeared in heroic postures on all the right magazine covers, but finished in the 30s on Election Day. With young people trending pro-life, that old black magic ain’t what it used to be.

For the Left, it feels like time is running out. So it isn’t sufficient that same-sex marriages be legalized; bakers and florists must be locked in prison if they decline to participate in a gay couple’s ceremony. It isn’t sufficient that those wishing to undergo sex-change surgery be permitted to go their own way; the public must pay for it, and if Bruce Jenner is still “Bruce” to you, you must be driven from polite society.

It isn’t enough that the Left dominate the media and pop culture; any attempt to compete with it must be criminalized in the name of “getting big money out of politics.” Not the New York Times’s money, or Hollywood’s money, or the CEO of Goldman Sachs’s money — just the wrong sort of people’s money.

Every major Democratic presidential candidate and every Democratic senator is on record supporting the repeal of the First Amendment’s free-speech protections — i.e., carving the heart out of the Bill of Rights — to clear the way for putting all public debate under political discipline.

Like it or not, you will be shackled to hope and change. The hysterical shrieking about the fictitious rape epidemic on college campuses, the attempts to fan the unhappy events in Ferguson and Baltimore into a national racial conflagration, the silly and shallow “inequality” talk — these are signs of progressivism in decadence.

So is the brouhaha over the Confederate flag in South Carolina in the wake of the horrific massacre at Emanuel AME Church. For about 30 seconds, the political ghouls of the Left were looking to pick another gun-control fight, swooping in, in their habitually indecent fashion, before the bodies had even grown cold. But that turned out to be a dead end, since the killer acquired his gun after passing precisely the sort of background check that the Left generally hawks after a high-profile crime, regardless of whether it is relevant to the crime.

We might have spent some time thinking about whether law enforcement was too lax in the matter of the murderer’s earlier encounters with them — the South Carolina killer had a drug arrest on his record but was able to buy a gun because he had been charged only with a misdemeanor. But the Left isn’t in any mood to talk about whether the cops aren’t being hard-assed enough. So, instead, we had a fight over a completely unrelated issue: the Confederate flag flying at the state capitol in Columbia.

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective.

In the wake of the financial crisis, we got all manner of “reform,” from student-lending practices to the mandates of Elizabeth Warren’s new pet bureaucracy, involving things that had nothing at all to do with the financial crisis. Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it. A crisis is a crisis is a crisis, and if a meteor hits Ypsilanti tomorrow you can be sure that Debbie Stabenow will be calling for a $15 national minimum wage because of the plight of meteor victims.

I bear no brief for the peckerwood-trash cultural tendencies that led Fritz Hollings, then governor, and the rest of the loyal Democrats who ran segregation-era South Carolina to hoist the Confederate flag in 1962. My sympathies are more with John Brown than with John Calhoun.

Yet Lost Cause romanticism was very much in fashion for a moment, and not only among Confederate revanchists; Joan Baez, no redneck she, made a great deal of money with her recording of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in 1971. About every third Western of the era had as its hero a conflicted Confederate veteran, his wounded honor and stoicism in defeat compelling him to roam westward in search of a new beginning.

That story lives on into our own time: Who are Mal Reynolds and the Browncoats if not another remnant of the Lost Cause relocated from Virginia to the frontier in space?

Of course the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern racism. It is a good many other things, too, none of which was the cause of the massacre at Emanuel AME.

It is strange and ironic that adherents of the Democratic party — which was, for about 140 years, not only the South’s but the world’s leading white-supremacist organization — should work themselves up over one flag, raised by their fellow partisans, at this late a date; but, well, welcome to the party.

Yet Democratic concern about racist totems is selective: The Democrats are not going to change the name of their party, cancel the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, or stop naming things after Robert Byrd, senator and Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.

Hillary Clinton is not going to be made to answer for her participation in a political campaign that featured Confederate-flag imagery.

The Confederate flag, and other rebel iconography, is a marker of Southern distinctiveness, which, like American distinctiveness, is inextricably bound up with the enslavement and oppression of black people. But only the South is irredeemable in the Left’s view, and it has been so only since about 1994, when it went Republican.

Which is to say, the Confederate flag is an emblem of regional distinctiveness disapproved of by 21st-century Democrats. Their reinvigorated concern is awfully nice: When the South actually was a segregationist backwater that African-Americans were fleeing by the million — when Democrats were running the show — they were ho-hum.

Today the South is an economic powerhouse, dominated by Republicans, and attracting new African-American residents by the thousands. And so the Left and its creature, the Democratic party, insist that Southern identity as such must be anathematized.

The horrific crime that shocked the nation notwithstanding, black life in Charleston remains very different, in attractive ways, from black life in such Left-dominated horror shows as Cleveland and Detroit, and the state’s governor is, in the parlance of identity politics, a woman of color — but she is a Republican, too, and therefore there must be shrieking, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth.

This is a fraud, and some scales are starting to fall from some eyes. Americans believe broadly in sexual equality, but only a vanishing minority of us describe ourselves as “feminists.”

“Social-justice warrior” is a term of derision. The Bernie Sanders movement, like the draft-Warren movement of which it is an offshoot, is rooted in disgust at the opportunistic politics of the Clinton claque.

Young people who have heard all their lives that the Republican party and the conservative movement are for old white men — young people who may be not be quite old enough to remember Democrats’ boasting of their “double-Bubba” ticket in 1992, pairing the protégé of one Southern segregationist with the son of another — see before them Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Susana Martinez, Carly Fiorina, Tim Scott, Mia Love, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Elise Stefanik.

None of those men and women is bawling about “microaggressions” or dreaming up new sexless pronouns. None belongs to the party that hoisted Dixie over the capitol in South Carolina either. Governor Haley may be sensitive to the history of her state, but she is a member of the party of Lincoln with family roots in Punjab — it isn’t her flag.

What’s going to happen between now and November 8 of next year will be a political campaign on one side of the aisle only. On the other side, it’s going to be something between a temper tantrum and a panic attack. That’s excellent news if you’re Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, or Carly Fiorina. It’s less good news if you live in Baltimore or Philadelphia.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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