The racist side of progressiveness

String and torture those ethnic minorities?

And they said the Tea Parties were racist, without proof.

Just give the dog up

This is a community service announcement. I repeat this is a community service announcement:   

There’s a one in billion chance…but if you’ve seen Natalie’s dog….please contact the Herald Sun Newspaper or the pound. His name is Cooper.

Also, it would be nice if some pop stars came up with some kind of group album, with emotional lyrics.

The lady knows how to shoot

The august Ann Coulter:

There's only one policy of any kind that has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws. In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect.

And the effect was not small. States that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced multiple-shooting attacks by 60 percent and reduced the death and injury from these attacks by nearly 80 percent.

Charles Krauthammer is all over the place

Or so says David Solway:

A lauded political analyst from whom much is anticipated, a man of presumed conservative principles, an eminence by consensus, he now occasionally prattles away in fluent liberalspeak, attacking a patriot like Geert Wilders and, in practical effect, inflating the “achievements” of a schismatic like Barack Obama.

Granted, Geert isn’t trying to make Charles wear a burka.

On gun control and emotionalism

 Turning to the cold facts (John Lott is in fine form):

Supporters blame those gun ban failures on the ease of getting guns in the rest of the country. They claim that unless the ban covers the entire country, it isn't a fair test of how well a ban will work. Still, that doesn't explain why gun bans actually increase, rather than decrease, murder rates. As I demonstrate in my third edition of "More Guns, Less Crime," even in island nations such as Ireland, the U.K. and Jamaica -- with easily defendable borders -- gun bans have failed to stop drug gangs from obtaining both drugs and guns (see the figures here). In Australia, murder rates were flat after many types of guns were banned in 1996.

Fortunately, polls indicate that voters have become more educated about the problems surrounding these knee-jerk, quick-fix solutions. A new Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll found that a slim 9 percent believe the Tucson shootings could be blamed on lenient gun control laws.

My new opinion piece is posted

“America, don’t repeat Australia’s gun control mistake,” The Daily Caller (Washington D.C.), January 19, 2011. Read more.  

Straightforward arguments welcomed

Straightforward argument:

Criminals break laws. That’s why they’re criminals. What don’t liberals get about that formula? Gun control doesn’t work.

Fun presentation to go with it.

A very Australian ark

Floods can bring out the best and worst in people. Columnist Andrew Bolt writes, “Rodney Dowton does the Australian thing at Lake Burrendong, saving locals from the floods.” More great photos in the UK’s Mail Online here.  As for the looters, well let’s just say I’m not opposed to floggings.  

My new opinion piece is posted

“Perhaps Gay Marriage Is an Economic Issue, Mr. Barron,” The Patriot Post (Chattanooga, Tennessee), January 14, 2011. Read more.

Weddings or dress ups?

Headline:

The Grand Pantomime: There Is No Such Thing as Same-Sex Marriage

Subheadline: 

Same-sex marriage is a fiction. Even if everyone believes that the fiction is

Stuart Schneiderman who has taught English literature and practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy states:

If they want to make their marriage real, they must consummate it. And that means that the meaning of marriage lies in the possibility of procreation. A marriage unconsummated is not a marriage. It is nullified, as though the ceremony had never happened.  

To become real, a marriage requires the possibility of conception.  It does not require conception. Failure to conceive has never been grounds for nullification.  Older, presumably infertile, couples are allowed to marry because if they had performed the same act in the past they might have conceived a child. 

From its inception, the institution of marriage has always granted male/female couples the presumption of fertility.  A couple that can never, between themselves, perform the generative sexual act cannot be married, regardless of what the state and the courts say.

He concludes:

Most people know that same-sex couples are not really married. Some of them are too polite to say so. Others are being cowed into going along.

After all, it’s just a harmless illusion, so why not just go along? 

Not to be too dramatic, but what happens to us when we are forced to accept that reality is what we say it is? What happens to us when we believe that we can change reality by controlling what people say and how they think? 

All of a sudden, this does not feel quite so harmless.

Well someone had to say it.

Time to question Portugal’s drug culture

So Portugal went soft on drugs and now life is honk dory. Or at least that’s the propaganda spouted by drug-first libertarians and harm minimization socialists. The other side of the story:

Studies show Portugal is a classic example of what not to do. Drug-induced deaths in Portugal climbed to 314 in 2007 - significantly more than the 280 deaths recorded when decriminalization started in 2001. While heroin accounts for most overdose deaths, consumption rates for amphetamines and cocaine doubled. Cocaine seizures increased sevenfold between 2001 and 2006, making Portugal's cocaine-seizure rate the sixth-highest in the world.

The claim that HIV cases have dropped couldn't be further from the truth. Portugal remains the country with the highest incidence of intravenous drug-related AIDS, and it is the only country recording a recent increase. The number of new cases of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C in Portugal recorded among drug users is eight times the average found in other member states of the European Union.

Canada, the capital of political correctness?

Free speechlessness 

Sure. Their ski fields are great. “But” maintains James Allan in Quadrant Online, Australia, “Canada is also the capital of political correctness run rampant, to an extent few Australians would credit as plausible. You get the newspaper columnist Mark Steyn taken before various Canadian Human Rights tribunals not for the fact what he wrote was false but rather simply because people were offended.  And then there’s the stand-up Canadian comedian taken before these same officious bureaucrats for hurting the feelings of a lesbian member of his audience.” To foreigners that’s the joke.

Ramadan-sensitive police

Still unconvinced? Canada too is home to both thought police and Ramadan-sensitive police (although it isn’t always easy to tell them apart). Recently, for example, the feminized cops have been apologizing to Ottawa Muslims for arresting them during Ramadan, a Muslim fasting period. (Seriously.) From the Vancouver Sun: “There is no reason for police to explain or apologize to the Muslim community when they arrest a Muslim, Siddiqui said. The notion that Muslims need special treatment or that their religious sensibilities need to be addressed is both patronizing and condescending, and effectively sets Muslims apart from other Canadians.”

Bedwetting adults

“In Canada especially, where hurt feelings are now specifically compensated in human rights law, taking offence looks like a growth industry,” explains the National Post’s Joseph Brean. “Tom Flanagan, a former aide to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, learned this recently when police investigated him for counselling CBC viewers to commit murder, after he quipped in a CBC interview that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated.” He concludes: “But

when the urge to complain is enabled and encouraged, and every humourless butt-inski has a global audience, the danger is that Canada becomes a nation of prudes....” Sad, really.

Overprotected students 

Even the education system (if that’s the right term). In Canada Free Press, Dr. Tim Ball writes, “The concept of classifying results as negative is part of the practice of not allowing failure. Students are imbued with the idea that a negative result is a failure. For example, in universities they write research papers or carry out lab experiments. They only pursue positive results. For example, if they research a topic they will only consider evidence that supports their original hypothesis. Some will abandon a topic rather than consider the null hypothesis.” No wonder “climate science” is felt.