Higher education under attack from within, by disaffected students

College campuses – once the bastion of diverse opinion, a garden where ideas thrived, where contrary viewpoints were freely expressed – are fast becoming cesspools of narrow-mindedness that stifle free speech, where political correctness rules over common sense, where free thinking is discouraged, and they are occupied more and more by students offended because someone expressed a different opinion, didn’t pay proper deference, or wore the “wrong” costume on Halloween.

Student protests are returning to 1960s/70s levels, and arise because some students think that there aren’t enough minority professors on campus while others decry a lack of “social justice,” and some have called for hunger strikes over what they perceive as a lack of support for students of color.

If students don’t like a professor’s point of view, or they detect “microaggressions” in the classroom, they feel led to demand the professor resign or be fired. You are a Hispanic kid and someone wears a sombrero and a poncho on Halloween, it’s time for a protest.

And did you know that the First Amendment makes some college kids feel unsafe? Would you ever have imagined that such an idea could take hold on an American college campus?

The vice president of the Missouri Students Association, Brenda Smith-Lezama, told MSNBC last week, "I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here." Poor little thing must be terrified listening to rap or watching television or movie drama. And she suffers under the delusion that her comfort is more important than someone else’s.

While these kids have yet to accomplish much, they believe the world must work to calm their fears, perceptions that may be adequate to drive protests and hunger strikes, but their perceptions do not necessarily reflect reality. The concerns expressed by these students are precisely the types of things the liberal attitudes that prevail on campuses today work to eliminate.

Many of the complaints have a racial element, but they really center on hypersensitive feelings about things that have always been normal aspects of life. Suddenly, these normal campus happenings that students – white students, black students, Asian and Hispanic students, female students – have dealt with successfully for decades and with little or no difficulty, are now scary and threatening.

College once was a place where kids learned to think. Today, many of them seem to know only how to feel; emotion rules rationality. Listening to different ideas used to be enlightening, mind-expanding. Now, it makes the kiddies cry for their mommies.

Missing from these children-in-adult-bodies is even the suspicion that not everything revolves around them, that they are not the be-all and end-all of the known universe.

And they also want someone to pay their college loans off for them, because … well, just because.

The process of gaining entry to an institution of higher learning is long established and has worked well for decades. Colleges and universities are places where the qualified my go to advance their education, and most of the onus is on the student to fund their education through parental help, scholarship assistance, student loans, the GI Bill, or good old hard work. And then it is the student’s responsibility to perform as expected academically to complete their degree requirements, and then go out and get a job and become a productive member of society.

That is called “life,” and life is not a smooth ride, most times. But tens of millions of Americans have successfully navigated the sometimes-troubled waters successfully without being coddled and nursed along the way. Conquering challenges and facing adversity head-on build character.

The whining behavior demonstrated on several campuses recently shows a fundamental failure of thousands of young people to have learned the basic rules of life, and have their minds grow up at the same rate as their bodies.

However, bowing to the whims of students is letting the inmates run the asylum. College is a place for learning, or once was. Professors led the learning process, administrators ran the school, and the students worked hard and did what they had to do to master the material at a satisfactory level. If students weren’t happy in a particular environment, or couldn’t hack it, they were free to leave. Or they could simply adapt. If that dynamic isn’t restored very soon, we may as well shut down colleges, because they will no longer provide a benefit.

As bad as this is for higher education, it is much worse for America. A generation or two with millions of young people among them who can’t cope with the simplistic problems of going to college surely won’t be able to be good citizens, to hold down jobs in a productive economy, or staff a strong, able military capable of defending the country, or even make sensible decisions about for whom they will vote. They can hardly be expected to weigh complex arguments rationally, when anything that doesn’t agree with their narrow ideas makes them hide under their beds.

This is what liberalism hath wrought, and it will most likely get worse.

America’s schools reflect cultural problems

The news about U.S. education from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is much less than satisfactory, showing that Americans aged 16 to 34 – the so-called millennial generation – scored lower than their peers in 15 of the 22 countries participating in the assessment, despite being regarded as the most educated generation in U.S. history.

The group ranked last for numeracy, tied with Spain and Italy, and last in problem solving in technology-rich environments, tied with the Slovak Republic, Ireland and Poland.

The Educational Testing Service, which reported the results, notes that America’s huge investment in K-12 education has produced disappointing results when compared with students in other countries.

The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) commented on the report’s conclusions that “while more young Americans have attained higher education levels since 2003, those who have at least a high school education have demonstrated declining numeracy scores.”

The PIACC assessment is not the only discouraging news on the education front.

Reporting on an analysis of achievement differences in 28 countries in the Organisation (sic) for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), NCPA notes that the U.S. has a higher percentage of 15 year-old students living in single-parent families than all countries except Hungary, with the U.S. showing 20.7 percent of those students, and Hungary having 20.8 percent. The average of all countries with 15 year-olds living in single-parent families is 13.7 percent, meaning the U.S. has half again more than the average of OECD countries.

Ludger Woessman of the University of Munich performed the analysis, and NCPA notes that he reported that “single-parent homes tend to have fewer resources – and less time – to devote to their children, and various studies indicate that children of single parents in the United States face greater emotional distress and have lower educational attainment,” and that generally, “children of single-parent families score lower than students in two-parent families, on average scoring 18 points worse.”

The difference in performance between single- and two-parent families is more pronounced in the U.S., amounting to approximately one grade level, and is further affected by socio-economic status, immigration status, and parent’s education levels.

Not that additional proof is needed that our cultural decay, particularly where the family is concerned, has far reaching implications, this information ought to serve notice that if we don’t restore traditional American values and reestablish stable families, our future is bleak.

Back in 2005 Bloomberg Business reported that “Today's U.S. workforce is the most educated in the world,” citing statistics showing that 85 percent of Americans had at least a high school diploma, more than three times as many as in 1940, and that five times more Americans had a college degree over that same period.

It was this focus on education that Bloomberg cited as the reason for the U.S. economy being the world’s largest.

But Bloomberg offered this warning: “But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline,” citing a report by the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education. The report goes on to say that as highly educated baby boomers age out of the workforce, young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees, will replace them, and those replacements will earn less, and therefore drive down the standard of living.

Today we have a growing number of young people less interested in getting an education, and an education system that provides far too many of those who do go to school an inadequate education.

There are many examples where public schools seem to have renounced common sense and adopted politically correct paradigms. In one, a six year-old boy was suspended for “sexual harassment” for giving a female classmate a peck on the cheek. A high school senior was given in-school suspension for the felonious act of saying, “bless you” when a classmate sneezed. A seven year-old boy was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, and supposedly saying “Bang, bang.” An elementary school impounded a third-grade boy’s batch of 30 homemade birthday cupcakes because they were adorned with green plastic figurines representing World War II soldiers.

It is important how many Americans are high school and college graduates, but more important is that they actually command useful information that prepares them to be good citizens and get and hold a job. If we have become more concerned with infecting schools with politically correct nonsense, or focus more on test results than on making sure students know American and world history, can perform functional math, can communicate effectively, understand basic science and economics, and can think critically, diplomas and degrees will mean little or nothing.

Education must again become purely the domain of states and localities, and parents must have not only primary responsibility for how their kids perform in school, but they must also have the ability to send their kids to schools that perform best.

A Scottish “slam poet’s” sad story of her abortion while a teenager

“I Think She Was a She” is a poem written by “slam poet” Leyla Josephine, in which she talks about the abortion she had as a teenager.

Before getting into the content of this poem, you might like to know just what a “slam poet” is. “A slam itself is simply a poetry competition in which poets perform original work alone or in teams before an audience, which serves as judge,” according to poets.org, the online site of the Academy of American Poets. “The work is judged as much on the manner and enthusiasm of its performance as its content or style, and many slam poems are not intended to be read silently from the page.” 

This slam poem was delivered via an online video. “I think she was a she,” the poem begins. “No, I know she was a she, and I think she would have looked exactly like me,” Ms. Josephine declares. With a heavy Scottish brogue that is sometimes difficult to understand she then goes into much detail, explaining how that as a mother she would have taken pains to protect her baby daughter, would have talked about her grandfather when the daughter was older, and would have taken pains to teach her all the things the poet’s mother had taught her.

The poem is touching and almost melancholy, something that might have been written by the mother of a child unfortunately lost before birth. But, of course, that is not what this poem is about. Here, Ms. Josephine condemns the cultural shame forced on her ever since making that fateful decision.

The tone of the poem then takes a sharp turn: “But I would’ve supported her right to choose; to choose a life for herself, a path for herself. I would’ve died for that right like she died for mine. I’m sorry, but you came at the wrong time."

Ms. Josephine is not sadly recounting a miscarriage; instead she is proudly describing why she had an abortion and how it was truly the right decision for her. “I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed. I’m so sick of keeping these words contained. I am not ashamed," she says of her decision to abort her child. She said that the child she created with the “boy I loved” was just too much responsibility for her as a teenager.

Lines of rationalization follow, as she tries desperately to justify what she did. She stubbornly claims dominion over her own body. And she regurgitates the statistics on how many abortions occur in a year in order to justify hers as just one more. And then this, in conclusion: “But this is my body, and I don’t care about your ignorant views. When I become a mother, it will be when I choose.”

Let’s review some of what she said.

Ms. Josephine states, "I would have died” for her aborted daughter’s right to choose, “just like she died for mine." The right to choose what? Aren’t we told abortion is just the process of eliminating a mass of unwanted cells, like having a tumor excised?

But she said her daughter had “died” for her right to choose, tacit recognition that her baby was living person; that abortion ended the life of her child. In which case abortion is murder, the deliberate killing of the child she and her lover created through a willful act.

"I'm sorry, but you came at the wrong time." You “came” at the wrong time? The child decided to create itself without first checking with mom and dad? Among the three persons in this story, the child, as the creation of mom and dad, had no choice whatsoever in this situation.

However, the artfully designed words that are intended to justify what she did in fact subvert that effort. She and her boyfriend willingly indulged in a sexual act, likely unprotected. For her, abortion is nothing more than a way to be rid of the consequences of her behavior.

Abortion is not a crime only because it has not been legally established that life begins at conception or at some point prior to birth. However, Ms. Josephine admits abortion ended her child’s life.

But her statement that she lacks shame at the same time reveals the contempt she holds for the life she created, and her comfort with being able to wash away that inconvenience at will.

Once accepted as a solution for inconvenient situations, abortion takes on even more bizarre forms.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sees abortion as a means to reduce the number of poor children. 

“Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe v Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.” … “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.” 

That is a stunning perspective from an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and helps explain why our country is in such deep trouble today.

Desperation at the Southern Border

Desperation on the southern border

 

Swarms of children have been pouring across America’s southern border this year. Estimates that 80,000 children will cross may be a conservative number. Destinations of origin include Honduras, Guatemala and other Central American poverty centers. Attracted by President Obama’s loose immigration policies expectations are they will not be deported. With weak border enforcement and Executive Orders favoring the illegal flow immigrants are finding crossing has many pluses for them. Entitlements are offered to anyone who makes it through the tumultuous terrain separating the countries south of the border. In many instances border guards have been told to stand down as these crowds move within their jurisdictions. Recently criminals, by the tens of thousands waiting for deportation, were released into the midst of the American landscape. Few in Congress even winked when this occurred. Obama’s strong push to legitimatize tens of millions of illegals already in the country further attracts those yet to come. A significant humanitarian catastrophe has evolved, with minimal to no resolution in site, for these vulnerable children. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2653063/Republicans-claim-Obama-policy-enticed-tens-thousands-homeless-illegal-immigrant-children-cross-border-landing-secret-government-holding-pens.html

 

Children, many younger than 12, are crossing into the United States without their parents. Most have scanty possessions with them. Facilities to house these children have been slow to come online. Basics such as food, clothing, sleeping accommodations and medical checkups have not been given the priority they deserve. Instead, believe or not, large sums of federal money have been put aside for lawyers to manage these new immigrants’ cases. Reports that children have been picked up in Texas, provided with a few basics and dumped in other states, especially Arizona have a basis in reality. Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona, has made vehement complaints to the White House. So far her concerns have fallen on deaf ears. Billions have been requested by the White House to manage this emerging crisis, with deportation not in the consideration. Obama’s utilization of children as a political tool to further enhance his immigration policies is deplorable. Worse he may have added another reason for his impeachment. Border protection is a number one priority for any president. Obama has deliberately failed to protect them. Congress must act now or the next wave will be the parents of these pawns.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/too-many-too-fast-border-children-swamping-agents-n126751

 

Mark Davis, MD President of Healthnets Review Services providing consultation to the media, government and industry on health related issues. platomd@gmail.com Dr Davis’ latest book is, Obamacare: Dead on Arrival, A Prescription for Disaster.

The evidence is mounting: Idiocy is taking control of America

With her parents’ approval, 9-year-old Kamryn shaved her head in support of her friend, 11-year-old Delaney, who is battling neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer, and recently started chemotherapy.

“It felt like the right thing to do,” Kamryn told the local TV station news reporter.

Officials at Caprock Academy in Grand Junction, Colorado, however, told Kamryn she couldn’t come back to class without a wig or until her natural hair grew back because her shaved head violates the school’s dress code.

Wonder if they told Delaney the same thing? 

*****

Schools seem to have a magnetic attraction for idiotic rules:

Several schools have banned students who have applied for admission to colleges from sharing their good news with fellow students because doing so might hurt the feelings of other students.

Another school bans the use of hand sanitizer without written permission. Perhaps a doctor’s note should be required.

And other schools have banned playing tag on the playground at recess. You remember tag? Where kids chase each other around and touch them with their hand when they catch them, saying, “You’re it?” Too dangerous, principals say. 

Josh, a second grader at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, was suspended for two days because his teacher said he shaped a strawberry prebaked toaster pastry into something resembling a gun.

A similar fate befell Nathan, a 10-year-old student at Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in the Columbus, Ohio school system. For his crime of making a gun out of his index finger and thumb, and saying, “boom,” Nathan was suspended for three days. Apparently no one saw or heard what Nathan did, except a teacher. At a meeting with the school principal, his father learned that if it happened again, the punishment could be a longer suspension, or perhaps permanent suspension.

Fortunately, the SWAT team was not called and no one was injured or died from these hideous crimes, and the criminals have been duly punished.

***** 

Did you know that in the land of the free warming your car on a cold day is illegal in some states? Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and some cities in Minnesota forbid it.

In Ohio, if the public servants Ohioans pay to protect them from the criminal element find a resident trying to warm up their icy vehicle, they can be fined $150. In Texas it’s a Class C misdemeanor with a fine of up to $500.

And in West Virginia, the fine for the first offense is $100, but if you are dumb enough to get caught trying to make your car comfortable a second time, the cost is $500.

The reason for these laws is to protect the drivers warming up their cars from their own stupidity, and also to protect others of weak will from becoming car thieves. Apparently, a running but unoccupied vehicle is just too great a temptation for some folks to resist, and these laws punish vehicle owners in order to discourage this selfish behavior, which forces otherwise law-abiding citizens to steal cars.

By that reasoning, banks, retail stores and other business should be fined for deliberately providing strong temptation for people to commit robberies. 

***** 

From Listverse.com’s 10 Ridiculous Cases of Political Correctness: 

“Xbox Live recently banned Josh Moore for violating its gamers’ code of conduct.  His offense?  Filling out his Xbox Live profile.  You see, Mr. Moore lives in West Virginia. More specifically, in FORT GAY, West Virginia. As Microsoft says, the word ‘gay’ is always offensive. Never mind that several US townships incorporate the word into their name, many people have ‘Gay’ as a first or last name, and some homosexuals do identify themselves as ‘gay.’  No, Microsoft obviously had a wise guy in their midst, and he had to go. So, despite a total lack of customer complaints, Microsoft froze Moore’s account and warned him that he could lose his prepaid subscription if he badgered Customer Service further. Fort Gay Mayor, David Thompson, tried to intervene, but was told that the city’s name didn’t matter; the word ‘gay’ was inappropriate in any context. As a result, Moore missed a Search and Destroy competition and his team lost. Microsoft has since carefully reviewed the matter and reinstated Moore with full Xbox Live privileges (translation: the story hit the web).”

*****

The parents of players on the boys baseball team at a Michigan high school took the initiative to raise private money and do the work themselves to make improvements to the field on which their sons play. But the federal government, which really should have nothing to say about a high school baseball field in Michigan, has intervened, citing federal civil rights law, and noting that the boys facility is now much nicer than the girls softball field. The Department of Justice has threatened fines for Plymouth Canton Community Schools, so the school system will remove the new scoreboard and bleachers put in by the parents.

It would obviously be unfair to simply tell the girls’ parents to get busy and take care of their own improvements, like the boys’ parents did. Better yet, the feds should just keep quiet.

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, abortion is still a national disgrace

Commentary by James Shott

An abortion-related event occurred last week, and if you were paying close attention to the news, you might have been aware of that. Hundreds of thousands of abortion opponents gathered in Washington, DC for the “March for Life,” protesting the grisly process that has terminated about 55 million future Americans in the womb since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

It wasn’t easy to find news accounts of this event. The Media Research Center reports, “the broadcast networks combined devoted a total of just 46 seconds to the March. ABC offered 24 seconds and NBC gave it 22 seconds, correctly noting the ‘huge turnout’ despite brutal weather conditions. CBS didn’t bother to cover it at all.”

This coverage totaled about 18 percent of the coverage the birth of a panda cub at National Zoo received a few days earlier. In the eyes of our dedicated network news people, one new panda is six times more important than 55 million aborted potential children, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who braved the cold to make their position known.

This helps confirm the long-held idea that we do not have a news media that furnishes the public with what it needs, but instead provides what it wants the public to know.

A fact sheet published by the Guttmacher Institute tells us that at least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45. Given that the cause of pregnancy is not a medical mystery, that is a shocking statistic.

Web4Health explains that sex without contraceptives carries an 85 percent likelihood of pregnancy, and if the most effective contraceptive methods are used properly, the chance of pregnancy drops to eight percent or less, but abstaining from sexual intercourse has a zero percent pregnancy rate, except for in vitro fertilization.

According to Guttmacher, fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76 percent of pill users and 49 percent of condom users report having used their method inconsistently. Forty-six percent of women who had abortions used no contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.

Other factors contribute to unwanted pregnancy. Some men and women are uneducated about how to have responsible sex, and contraceptives can be expensive for some.

Abortion was, in fact, the solution for more than a million women who got pregnant unintentionally last year. But as long as abortions are an easy corrective for bad luck, carelessness or bad judgment, it seems unlikely that more responsible use of contraceptives will occur.

The problem with abortion is that at some point in the pregnancy the fetus will have developed enough to be justifiably considered a human being. That point may or may not be the same point as when the fetus can survive outside the womb, but whenever that point occurs and afterward, abortion is murder. The debate goes on over just when the fetus reaches that point.

It is commonly accepted that at 20 weeks the fetus can feel pain during an abortion, and at least one researcher believes that as early as eight weeks after conception the neural structures needed to detect certain stimuli are in place. As science progresses more and more becomes known about fetal development, pushing backward toward conception the point at which the fetus is a person.

Be that as it may, it is absolutely scandalous that in America in the 21st century so many women get pregnant who don’t want to, and that so many of them choose to abort the developing life inside them.

It ought to be a point of humiliation that the great majority of unwanted pregnancies result from carelessness or negligence in the use of contraceptives, or not using contraceptives at all.

A major provider of abortions is Planned Parenthood for America, and it receives more than $500 million each year in taxpayer funds to deliver “vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of women, men, and young people worldwide,” according to its Website, “the key program [of which] provides essential health care to women, the Title X Family Planning Program.”

Planned Parenthood provided 360,000 abortions in 2013. Providing abortions to women who are pregnant and don’t want to be is not planning for parenthood.

There are couples all across this nation who cannot conceive a child and would gladly adopt an unwanted child given up for adoption. Perhaps Planned Parenthood could shift its focus from abortion to adoption, and nurture women through their unwanted pregnancy to an end that both honors life and helps those who want children, but can’t have their own.

How many great writers, scientists, artists, inventers, athletes, etc., have been summarily snuffed out before they got started?

A young pregnant wife was hospitalized for a simple attack of appendicitis and had ice applied tfso her stomach. Afterward, doctors suggested that she abort the child, because the baby would be born with disabilities. The young wife decided not to abort, and the child was born. That woman was the mother of Andrea Bocelli.

Cross-posted from Observations

The PA Protects Animals Who Shoot Children.

Yesterday little Noam Glick, age 9, was shot by a cowardly Muslim terrorist in the neck.  It has come to light that the would-be murderer was going to enter the home and destroy the whole family living there.  But instead he shot a child and ran.

The perpetrator of a suspected terror attack Saturday on a 9-year-old Israeli girl in the West Bank settlement of Psagot has likely escaped the area, the IDF said early Sunday. The search continued throughout the day, and Psagot residents were told they could return to their normal routine, after overnight fears that the attacker was still hiding out in the settlement.

The girl, Noam Glick, was injured Saturday night while playing in the yard outside her home. She said she was shot by a Palestinian gunman at very close range.

“I went outside, and Noam told us there was an Arab there,” the victim’s father, Yisrael Glick, told Army Radio on Sunday morning. “I understood this was a security situation, dangerous to our lives, the most frightening thing that can happen to a family — that a terrorist came into the house.”

He said that he heard gunshots and was able to pull his daughter into the house. The assailant fired “three shots” at her from point-blank range, he said. By the time he emerged from the house again with his weapon, he said, the attacker had fled.

Glick said that the attacker was “startled” by the girl playing in the yard, “so instead of entering the house he shot her.”

Doctors at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek medical center said the girl, who did not lose consciousness during the incident, had sustained light injuries and was in good condition. It was “not clear” whether she had been shot or stabbed, according to hospital physician Dr. Danny Fink.

“The girl’s survival is a miracle,” Fink told Maariv Sunday. The victim, who underwent surgery overnight, had a deep gash along the base of her neck and her upper chest area and was wounded in one ear, he said. She was slated for release Sunday afternoon.

According to Noam Glick’s account, the distance between her and the attacker was basically “zero,” Fink said. “The wound does not look like a gunshot,” he added, “but there were testimonies that said there were gunshots.”

Defense officials said they believed the incident was a terror attack, but were not ruling out other unspecified possibilities.

Authorities said a breach in the Psagot fence was discovered overnight, with signs of forced entry and footprints nearby.

Shortly after the incident, Israeli forces numbering in the hundreds entered the neighboring Palestinian town of al-Bireh, where the shooter was thought to have come from. Security forces, said to include troops from elite IDF units, began the search on the outskirts of the town, near a soccer stadium, and Palestinian security forces had been called in to clear the area.

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported two Palestinians were lightly injured by rubber bullets in an altercation with troops that erupted during the incursion.

Shortly after the Psagot attack, shots were reportedly fired at a motorcyclist on the road between Psagot and the nearby settlement of Kochav Ya’akov. No injuries were reported. A police official also said rocks were thrown at vehicles on the road leading into Psagot after the child was shot.

Psagot residents were told to stay in their homes past midnight Saturday; those with firearms were instructed to keep them by their side. Soldiers conducted a house-to-house search of the settlement. Residents were informed via text message to anticipate a knock on the door, to answer in Hebrew, and to await identification.

Early Sunday morning, after an overnight search, the authorities gave residents permission to resume their normal routine.

Saturday night’s incident came two weeks after an IDF soldier was killed while on duty in the West Bank city of Hebron by an unidentified shooter. The culprit remains at large despite investigations by Israeli authorities. Another soldier, off duty, was killed near the West Bank town of Qalqilya that same weekend.

SOURCE

Shoot a child and you are a hero to the Fakistinians.  To the rest of the world it is not a crime, not a sin to kill a Jewish child.  Only Fakistinians are victims.  All Jews, even a 9-year old child, is the aggressor.  Just because they are Jews.

Please keep Noam Glick and the Glick family in your prayers.

Death to Nidal Hasan and the better food in schools movement?

On November 5, 2009, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim and psychiatrist at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, opened fire on his fellow soldiers inside the center, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and killing 13 soldiers and an unborn child in her mother’s womb, and wounding 30 others.

While the victims were military personnel trained in the use of weapons, they were unarmed, forbidden from carrying on base the weapons many would use when deployed. Fortunately, Sgt. Kimberley Munley, a civilian police officer, arrived and wounded the jihadist doctor, interrupting his murderous rampage, but he shot Sgt. Munley three times, and just as the terrorist was about to finish her off, another civilian officer, Sgt. Mark Todd, shot him, and ended the killing spree.

This murderous attack left 13 dead, eight widows, one widower, 12 minor children without a father, 18 parents who lost children, 30 soldiers and one civilian police officer wounded.

There’s little positive from that event, other than that Nidal Hasan is now paralyzed from the waist down, and will likely never walk again.

Despite concerns about Hasan’s radical Islamist leanings, revealed when he was an intern at Walter Reed Medical Center, later as a physician in a PowerPoint presentation to other Army doctors, and Islamic abbreviations and phrases on his business card, the Army did not see fit to remove him from duty, or give him the punishment he so rightly deserved. In fact, an email from an Army investigator reveals the ugly politically correct nature of military service today: "Had we launched an investigation of Hasan we'd have been crucified."

Inexplicably, the charges the Department of Defense filed against Maj. Hasan ignored his Islam-based terrorist attack, but was instead labeled “workplace violence,” as if he had merely started a fight with a co-worker or thrown a chair at his boss. Such a designation deprives those soldiers killed and injured in this terrorist attack the benefits they are entitled to and would receive had accurate charges been filed.

During his opening statement at trial, in which he was convicted on all charges, Maj. Hasan apologized, not to the victims and their families, the nation or the Army, but to his fellow jihadists for not destroying more innocent life, and admitted shooting the 13 soldiers, and said he wanted the death penalty. Last week the jury sentenced him to death.

As one who believes in the death penalty for certain vicious crimes when guilt is not in question, in this case I hope that the death penalty for Nidal Hasan, a painless lethal injection, is set aside, as it has been for those in the military since 1961.

He deserves to live out his miserable life in abject misery, not in the glory of Islamic jihadist martyrdom for which he so badly hungers. Too bad that murderers, rapists, and others among the worst scum of humanity are treated so well when they are condemned to an American prison for their vicious crimes.

* * * * *

America’s First Ladies have always been advocates for important issues in our country. Rosalyn Carter championed mental health, Nancy Reagan fought against drug abuse, Barbara Bush worked to increase literacy, Hillary Clinton pushed for health reform, Laura Bush advocated for improvements in education, and Michelle Obama has worked to have a positive effect on childhood obesity.

Given the overweight nature of the US population generally, and that of the younger generation specifically, who can logically argue that a better menu in the nation’s public schools is a bad thing?

However, this particular effort has been met with resistance, and even outright rebellion, with school kids refusing to eat the better food being served in cafeterias, and school systems losing money on the deal as a result, and bailing out of the program.

One example of the growing national rebellion against the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set new nutrition standards for school cafeterias and changed the way children are qualified for school meal programs, occurred recently at a contentious meeting of the Harlan County, Kentucky school board.

Board members were treated to a raft of complaints about school meals, which were called crappy and served in portions that critics say are too small. Someone said the meals tasted like “vomit,” and one parent said, “kids can’t learn when they’re hungry.”

Parents criticized the brown wheat bread, the skim or one-percent-fat milk, and the nonfat chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.

Where this effort has gone wrong is that it attempts to mandate through law the way kids eat, and even though the standards set by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act are nutritionally superior to previous standards, school kids liked the old food and they don’t like the new food, and therefore don’t eat it.

In it’s own way this is a citizen rebellion against an over-reaching state: the people are against the government trying to tell them how to eat, among other things.

Our government has no business doing this. Perhaps this mild revolution will get the point across. But probably not.

Remembering Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used a bomb made with fertilizer and diesel fuel in a rented Ryder truck they parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City to blow up the Murrah Building. The explosion claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.

This was the worst terrorist attack on the United States until September 11, 2001.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

Continuing our head-long slide down the slippery slope of abortion

When people challenge and attempt to liberalize valued traditions, there is usually great concern that doing so is the first step down the "slippery slope," which ultimately leads to bad results. The “slippery slope” is considered a logical fallacy, but in the case of abortion, evidence supports that it is an apt argument.  

We started down this slope when abortion was legalized 40 years ago. If it was not the original intention, abortion certainly has become a thinly disguised mechanism for after-the-fact birth control. Pregnancy is not a mystery; we know what causes it. There are numerous ways to prevent pregnancy whenever people decide to forego the one certain way to prevent pregnancy: abstinence.

Birth control devices, while not perfect, are very dependable when used properly. However, somewhere along the way it was recognized that there were a lot of people facing the eventual birth of an unwanted child, and some thought that society was obligated to find a way to relieve these folks of having to bear responsibility for their actions. Abortion became the solution for unwanted pregnancy, under the curious label, "a woman's right to choose."

Each now-pregnant woman and her male partner had the right to choose to abstain from sexual intercourse and chose not to. They had the right to choose to use birth control, and either chose not to, or chose not to use it consistently or correctly, or it just didn't work one time. In the great majority of cases, birth control measures do work when used properly, and that means that in the majority of cases the right to use birth control actually was not chosen.

The "right to choose" is little more than a mechanism for prospective parents to avoid creating a child at an inconvenient time: In 2004 fully 74 percent of women getting an abortion said a child would "dramatically change their life."

Since Roe v Wade imposed legalized abortion on the nation in 1973, 55 million abortions have been performed, and approximately 1.2 million future Americans were aborted in each of the last several years. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and nearly half of those are aborted.

Planned Parenthood is the nation's most prolific provider of abortions, performing about 1-in-4 total U.S. abortions each year, chalking up 334,000 in 2011. It received $542 million from taxpayers that year, about 40 percent of its total revenues.

And since 1973 we have witnessed the slide down that slippery slope. It has been considered acceptable by a significant number of Americans to end a pregnancy anywhere from the morning after to the day when the baby should be born healthy and ready for life.

We have been treated to horrors such as partial birth abortion where the baby is allowed to be born, but not completely, with part of the child still in the birth canal so that a butcher with MD or DO after their name can kill the child before it is "born." This nefarious procedure takes hair-splitting to a new level.

A year ago a giant slide down the slippery slope occurred when two Australian ethicists – Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne, and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne – provided an answer to the question, "When does a fetus become a person?" Their answer: it doesn’t matter. They argued in the online edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics that if abortion of a fetus is allowable, so, too, should be the “termination” of a newborn.

This cold-blooded idea has now infected the United States. That same concept appeared in testimony at a Florida legislative committee that was considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion and is moving on the table and struggling for life. A Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates lobbyist endorsed the right to "post-birth abortion." The lobbyist, Alisa LaPolt Snow, stunned legislators when she said that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion "should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician."

This is nothing more than pre-meditated murder, and is not so different from first responders executing a seriously injured accident victim. And just how far does this "right" to post-birth abortion extend? The first birthday? The difficult years of adolescence? Or perhaps it will extend many years after the botched abortion when under as-yet-unknown elements of the Affordable Care Act bureaucrats may be in the position to determine that it will cost too much to keep an elderly patient alive.

Fortunately, the tide appears to be turning against the grizzly practice of abortion. Last June a Gallop poll showed that 50 percent identified themselves as "pro-life" compared to 41 percent who said they were "pro-choice." And, 51 percent said abortion is morally wrong, compared to 38 percent who said it is morally acceptable. And some state legislatures have passed tighter restrictions on the procedure.

This attitude favoring preserving life and restoring personal responsibility is one small ray of light in America's otherwise darkening culture.

Accepting Pedophiles And All Varied Paraphilia: Hebe And Epheb

Stolen from Maggie's Notebook with permission by Findalis

In August 2011 I posted an article titled Academia Normalizing Pedophiles With Minor-Attracted Persons: Hebephile, Ephebophiles and Pedophiles. The Hebes and the Ephebs were new to me. “Hebe” was the goddess of youth and cupbearer for the gods; Epheb, also from Greek mythology, and generally referring to an adolescent, but who knew this ancient mythololgy could legitimize the abuse of our children in the 21st Century. I missed most talk radio this week, but a reader emailed and told me Rush Limbaugh was talking about Academia and Pedophilia and their attempts to drag it into accepted mainstream thinking, and the reader kindly mentioned my 2011 article. You see, if your are one of these three “philes,” Ped, Epheb or Hebe, it is simply your sexual orientation, (certainly not a crime except in the eyes of the unreasonable). (See and Update below)

Normalizing Pedophilia, Hebephilia, Ephebophilia

Stacey McCain responded to Rush’s conversation this week by quoting his own article in The Washington Times in April 2002:

Promoting pedophilia
Attempts to legitimize adult-child sex on rise
By Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A new book that says child molesters are not a major peril to children is part of a larger movement within academia to promote “free sexual expression of children.”

The movement to legitimize sex between adults and children is “gathering steam,” warns Stephanie Dallam, researcher for the Leadership Council for Mental Health, Justice and the Media in Philadelphia, an organization that deals with prevention and treatment of child abuse.

“Some people view children as the next sexual frontier,” Ms. Dallam says.

Feminist writer Judith Levine’s book “Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Kids from Sex” has been condemned by those who say she excuses sexual abuse of children – a charge she strongly denies.

Ms. Levine says she was “misunderstood” after a news article last month quoted her saying a boy’s sexual experience with a priest “conceivably” could be positive.

From McCain’s article dated January 11, 2013, referring to Judith Levine’s book referenced above:

[Levine] said, “The research shows us that in some minority of cases, young – even quite young – people can have a positive sexual experience with an adult. That’s what the research shows.”

Featuring a foreword by Clinton administration Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Ms. Levine’s book endorses a Dutch law, passed in 1990, that effectively lowered the age of consent to 12. Ms. Levine cites research about “happy consensual sex among kids under 12,” and writes: “America’s drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, often it is harming them.” Read more…

Hebephilias are those who have a sexual preference for children in the early years of puberty, ages 10-14.  Ephebophilias prefer children in the later years of adolescence. Pedophiles prefer prepubescent children. At this conference, there will be an effort to establish whether or not hebephilia is a mental disorder.  Put them all together and this group is known as paraphilias.

My 2011 article centered around an August 2011 conference to exchange ideas WITH “minor-attracted persons,” sponsored by B4U-ACT, a group of paraphilia activists. The American Psychiatric Association stated that it is important to have “accurate and complete scientific information” on the Ped, the Hebes and the Ephebs. Are the three a mental disorder, or are they not (note that Ephebophilia, attraction to older adolescents, is not considered a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association).

At the 2011 conference, Dr John Z. Sadler, a professo of Medical Ethics and Psychiatry, spoke on “Decriminalizing Mental Disorder Concepts – Pedophilia as an Example.” His time at the podium examined this:

(2) If Pedophilia and related categories are to be preserved as legitimate,&nbsp nonmorally value-laden disorders, then they require a preponderance of nonmorally-value-laden diagnostic descriptors in their diagnostic criteria.

B4U-ACT makes it clear that being sexually attracted to minors is an attraction the adult does not choose to have. It just happens. We don’t know why diagnostically, and/or the person is a victim of a mental disorder, but Dr. Fred Berlin, quoted on the B4U-ACT website, clearly normalizes child predators:

Individuals whose sexual orientation is directed toward children manifest the same range of personality, temperamental, and character traits as individuals whose sexual orientation is directed toward adults. A recent Journal article documented that the vast majority of individuals with pedophilia showed no evidence of either antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder. It may be no easier for a person with pedophilia to change his or her sexual orientation than it is for a homosexual or heterosexual individual to do so.

Fred Berlin, M.D.
National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment of Sexual Trauma

The key here is Dr. John Sadler’s quest to put paraphilias into a “nonmorally value-laden disorder,” and to achieve that goal, we need “nonmorally-value-laden diagnostic descriptors” to properly put the paraphilia into a normal sexual orientation.

Rush Limbaugh explains a Guardian (UK) article:

The argument being made in the piece is that the desire for sex with children is a natural part of the human condition.  And, in fact, if we acknowledge it, and encourage it, we can actually somehow better protect children.  That’s in the story, too.  It’s the same thinking, if you remember back in the nineties, when we were told that kids are going to have sex, you can’t stop them.  And that’s why we needed to give away condoms in the schools.

Remember we had stories from Long Island about parents who said that they willingly let their daughters’ boyfriends spend the night because it was better if their daughter was gonna have sex in a clean bedroom rather than the backseat of a car.  Well, same thing here.  We can better protect children if we know that they’re having sex with adults rather than it being done on the sly…

In fact, the article in the Guardian actually quotes some academics. (For those of you in Rio Linda, that’s college professor types.  These are the people you see that have leather arm patches on their sport coats.)  Academics are quoted in the Guardian piece saying that sex with adults does not hurt children.  Normalization.  So Jon Henley decided he’d write a whole piece on this, normalizing pedophilia, where he quotes extensively and looks into it and finds out what this is all about.  Read more at Rush Limbaugh 

“Normalization” has to be great news, offering hope to pedophile priests and pastors across the globe, fathers who have abused their own children in this heinous way, female teachers who rape their young adolescent male students, and as Rush says, Jerry Sandusky. Once “nonmorally value-laden descriptors” are decided upon, published and sanctioned with the help of the American Psychiatric Association, The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) can crawl back out of their dark hole…oh but wait, maybe they didn’t make it all the way underground. The NAMBLA website, with childish colors and a sweet print of two young boys smeared with mud from playtime, lounging on a log near a seaport, greets visitors.
From Boston Magazine May 2001:

Boys flocked to the three-story, wood-shingled house on Mountain Avenue in Revere for the teenage version of the Holy Grail: an endless supply of beer and weed. Being drunk and stoned made everything-from the air hockey to the movie watching-significantly more enjoyable. There was also money to be had. The pocket cash came from the local men, who especially liked it when the local boys (hustlers, gay teens, straight teens) lounged around the house with their shirts off.

Then there were smiles all around.

There was also sex. The boys had sex with each other. The boys had sex with the men. All of this was done quietly, because neighbors would later say that they didn’t see or hear anything unusual coming from the house. There were no naked boys loitering in the doorway, no drunken men stumbling in the back yard, no obvious signs of depravity. It was a normal house, the neighbors thought, until they learned that it wasn’t.

In June 1977, police arrested the house’s owner and announced that it was the national headquarters of a sordid, pornographic sex ring. It was a stretch to call it a “ring,” but Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne declared that the arrests were just “the tip of the iceberg.” There had to be other perverted people in other wood-shingled houses. And Byrne had a way to catch them: A hotline people could call with anonymous tips about molesters…

Everybody was talking about the case, which led to the indictments of 24 men. During an interview on a Boston television station, poet and outspoken boy-lover Allen Ginsberg joked about the scandal. “I had sex when I was 8 with a man in the back of my grandfather’s candy store in Revere, and I turned out okay,” Ginsberg declared before being hurried off-stage as the station cut to a commercial…

The story wraps up what you need to know:

Could NAMBLA’s founders have had any idea that they would become America’s symbol of organized depravity? That a group founded mostly by eccentric, boy-loving leftists would come to be considered Public Enemy Number One in the nation’s battle against child sexual abuse?

NAMBLA for Obama

UPDATE 10:36 pm: The photo above is unattributed. A reader found it some time ago but cannot remember where.

Brings back rude memories of Kevin Jennings, Obama’s Safe School Czar, doesn’t it? Or ACLU President for 16 years, Nadine Strossen who kept convicted felon Steven C. Cunningham by her side, as as her Chief Aide (Strossen left the ACLU in 2008):

Steven C. Cunningham was convicted of the murky charge of Child Endangerment in the State of New Jersey. What is child endangerment? Did he fail to buckle a child’s seatbelt? Did he leave a small child at home, unattended? Did he go shopping with a child and let the child wander away? Did he allow a child to assault another child – endangering the assaulted? Did he let a child play with a medicine bottle?

No, that’s not what he did. He had three online chats with a boy that he believed was 12 years old, but was actually a police officer. According to charges filed, the phone calls were lewdly graphic and he attempted to meet “the child” somewhere. Cunningham was permanently disbarred in the State of New Jersey, but it appears that he is still licensed to practice in the State of New York and continues in the position of Chief Aide to ACLU President Nadine Strossen.

Since Strossen’s office will not confirm or deny Cunningham’s important position as her Chief Aide, why do I think he is still, indeed, with the ACLU? Here’s why: A search of New York State Unified Court System eCourts site confirms that Steven Christie Cunningham is licensed to practice in New York. Is Steven Christie Cunningham the same convicted Steven C. Cunningham? I think so. After this morning’s “no comment” from Strossen’s office, I called the phone number for Steven Christie Cunningham given on eCourts website. That call was answered by the New York Law School voicemail. When I selected Cunningham’s name from the list offered, the call was answered by Nadine Strossen’s office – the same young man who took my first call this a.m. and refused comment.

So much for the ACLU’s interest in your civil liberties or mine…our right to know if a man convicted of child endangerment is an integral part of the ACLU daily operations.

The New York State Unified Court System page today says Steven Christie Cunningham “resigned from bar – disciplinary reason” but fails to give a date. The ACLU, at the highest level, ‘normalized’ pedophilia.

As Rush said: Don’t pooh-pooh the Left’s push to normalize Pedophilia. Graphic courtesy of Wizbang

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The agenda of the Left is to destroy the morals of the people of the United States.  First destroy marriage and chastity.  Then accept Infanticide (aka Abortion) as a normal alternative to birth control.  Then accept homosexuality as just "Another lifestyle choice".  And now to accept the raping of our children.

In the Netherlands this is already acceptable.  The age of consent is 12.  A former Surgeon General and leading Doctors in this country endorse the idea.  They cry we should allow children to be raped indoctrinated into the "joys" of sex at a young age.  And the ACLU is gearing up to destroy our children in the name of "Civil Rights".

What justice will there be for our children when this becomes legal and we are forced to turn our precious children over to the local molester for indoctrination?