Author: Papa Giorgio

The Cultural Impact of Darwinian Evolution ~ John West, PhD

Published by Papa Giorgio

One of the philosophical implications mentioned (via Darwin) of “Beehive Ethics”

….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.

But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.

If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.

Read more in these posts:

Another concept often lost on the average person:

Let’s consider a basic question: Why does the natural world make any sense to begin with? Albert Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Why should we be able to grasp the beauty, elegance, and complexity of our universe?

Einstein understood a basic truth about science, namely, that it relies upon certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world. These assumptions include the existence of an external world that is orderly and rational, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions, even though they cannot be independently proven. Oxford professor John C. Lennox asks a penetrating question, “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible. So we are entitled to ask: Where does the conviction come from?”” Why is the world orderly? And why do our minds comprehend this order?

Toward the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins admits that since we are the product of natural selection, our senses cannot be fully trusted. After all, according to Darwinian evolution, our senses have been formed to aid survival, not necessarily to deliver true belief. Since a human being has been cobbled together through the blind process of natural selection acting on random mutation, says Dawkins, it’s unlikely that our views of the world are completely true. Outspoken philosopher of neuro-science Patricia Churchland agrees:

  • The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it… enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

Dawkins is on the right track to suggest that naturalism should lead people to be skeptical about trusting their senses. Dawkins just doesn’t take his skepticism far enough. In Miracles, C. S. Lewis points out that knowledge depends upon the reliability of our mental faculties. If human reasoning is not trustworthy, then no scientific conclusions can be considered true or false. In fact, we couldn’t have any knowledge about the world, period. Our senses must be reliable to acquire knowledge of the world, and our reasoning faculties must be reliable to process the acquired knowledge. But this raises a particularly thorny dilemma for atheism. If the mind has developed through the blind, irrational, and material process of Darwinian evolution, then why should we trust it at all? Why should we believe that the human brain—the outcome of an accidental process—actually puts us in touch with reality? Science cannot be used as an answer to this question, because science itself relies upon these very assumptions.

Even Charles Darwin was aware of this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” If Darwinian evolution is true, we should distrust the cognitive faculties that make science possible.

Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2010), 37-38.

Professor Fired By the IPS For Not Towing AGW Line

Published by Papa Giorgio

Climate Depot has this story — exclusive story — of the ever growing cultural Marxist censorship in academia:

Dr. Caleb Rossiter was “terminated” via email as an “Associate Fellow” from the progressive group Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), following his May 4th, 2014 Wall Street Journal OpEd titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called man-made global warming an “unproved science.” Rossiter also championed the expansion of carbon based energy in Africa.  Dr.  Rossiter is an adjunct professor at American University. Rossiter, who has taught courses in climate statistics, holds a PhD in policy analysis and a masters degree in mathematics.

In an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Dr. Rossiter explained: “If people ever say that fears of censorship for ‘climate change’ views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them…because my analysis and theirs ‘diverge.’”

“I have tried to get [IPS] to discuss and explain their rejection of my analysis,’ Rossiter told Climate Depot. “When I countered a claim of ‘rapidly accelerating’ temperature change with the [UN] IPCC’s own data’, showing the nearly 20-year temperature pause — the best response I ever got was ‘Caleb, I don’t have time for this.’”

What’s NOT In Your Wallet? School Blocks Conservative Sites

Published by Papa Giorgio

(FOXCT) 18-year-old Andrew Lampart, a senior at Nonnewaug High School, said he made the discovery when he was doing research for a classroom debate on gun control in May. Lampart said he first noticed that he could not get on the web site for the National Rifle Association.

“So, I went over to the other side. And I went over on sites such as Moms Demand Action or Newtown Action Alliance and I could get on these Web sites but not the others,” Lampart said.

Lampart investigated further, by broadening his search terms to Connecticut’s political parties.

“I immediately found out that the State Democrat web site was unblocked but the State GOP web site was blocked.”

Lampart even looked at Web sites focusing on abortion issues and religion. He found that “right-to-life” groups were blocked by the public school firewall but that Planned Parenthood and Pro-Choice America were not. He also tried to get on web sites such as Christianity.com and the Vatican’s web site but both were blocked. Islam-guide.com he found, was not.

“They’re trying to, in my opinion, shelter us from what’s actually going on around the country and around the world by blocking these web sites. It should be the other way around. The web sites should be unblocked so that students can get different viewpoints from different sides of each argument,” Lampart said.

…read more…

The “Rape Culture” Myth (George Will and Heather Mac Donald)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Lies of the Left

Dennis Prager reads from Heather Mac Donald’s article in from The City Journal about the “rape culture.” As usual, the left over-exaggerates… and what parent would put their daughter in AP classes to prepare them for the worse crime wave in human history, which is: one-in-five women are rapped at college. OBVIOUSLY the definition is the issue.

As society gets further away from Judeo-Christian norms… more-and-more regret will rear its head from drunken hook-ups.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/

A great back-and-forth between George Will and some Democrat Senators who — as HotAir points out in George’s response to their asinine letter, these “Senators were likely faced with the difficult task of flipping back and forth to dictionary.com to translate Will’s writing, so we should probably have some sympathy.” HotAir continues:

  • For the entire time I have been writing I have cited George Will as one of the top five wordsmiths of our generation. Whether you agree with him or not… whether you think he leans too far in one philosophical direction or the other… there is no denying that Will is a master of the English language and flexes it like Mr. Olympia in the final pose-off. 

Here is more from HotAir on the fun tiff:

In case you missed the origins of this story earlier in the week, George Will took to his usual platform at the Washington Post with some words of caution regarding federal government intervention regarding sexual assaults on the nation’s college campuses. In it, he attempted to inject corrective remedies into some of the hyperbole currently engulfing the topic. Of course, in his usual fashion, Will led off with a paragraph which seemed designed to poke a stick in a few wasp nests.

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

A careful reading of Will’s full editorial would show that he was essentially making two points. First, the “math” being cited to define the number of sexual assaults taking place was unfit for a 3rd grade Common Core tutorial. Second, Will noted that expanding and inflating the definition of sexual assaults to include micro-agressions – such as a boy staring for too long at a young coed with a low cut blouse – would tend to dilute the pool of actual assaults and diminish the seriousness of the real problem.

Such a stance brought the usual list of suspects up on their hind legs and into an immediate attack posture. This culminated in a coalition of Democratic Senators (Feinstein, Blumenthal, Tammy Baldwin and Robert Casey) penning a letter to the WaPo, chastising them for allowing Will to breath the same air as the rest of us.

After running their letter and litany of complaints, this weekend the Post ran a rare response from George Will….

Here is a larger portion of George Will’s response from the WASHINGTON POST:

The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”

As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.

Read the senators’ letter here, and Will’s response in full here.

After laying out a detailed case of what by Julia Pollak experienced in the military as a woman, she goes on to compare this experinece to her experience at Harvard. A MUST read, great article! I pick up as she enters the comparison: 

…Compare all this to the model for sexual assault prevention and response at the institution I belonged to before the military—Harvard College. There, complaints of sexual assault are filed with the Administrative Board, or “Ad Board,” comprised of deans and faculty members. The written policies regarding sexual assault are far less favorable to victims, requiring non-consent to be expressed “verbally or physically” and requiring the Ad Board members to be “sufficiently persuaded” that an assault occurred.

In stark contrast to the stories I’ve heard about military perpetrators landing up in Leavenworth Prison, Harvard’s history of dealing with sexual assault cases might easily give more encouragement to perpetrators than victims.

During my time at Harvard College, between 2005 and 2009, I had one friend who was sexually assaulted by a fellow student, another who was beaten by her boyfriend (a fellow student), and another who was involved in a highly improper and abusive relationship with a professor. Not one of these incidents was ever reported.

In the five years from 2005 to 2010, according to the Harvard Crimson, eight cases of sexual misconduct were brought before Harvard’s Ad Board. Only three perpetrators were required to withdraw from Harvard College for at least six months, and none received a permanent expulsion.

So perhaps, instead of being a punching bag on Capitol Hill, the military should be studied as a model for sexual assault awareness, prevention, and response policy, especially among young people aged 18 to 24.

To place the military’s sexual assault problem in a wider context, here are some illustrative numbers. According to an anonymous survey, service members may have experienced as many as 26,000 instances of “unwanted sexual contact” in 2012. In other words, about 6.1% of female service members and 1.2% of male service members experienced unwanted sexual contact that year. Note that this number includes a substantial number of cases that occurred before the victim entered the military, as well as cases involving civilian perpetrators.

Although it is difficult to make direct comparisons due to differences in the way survey questions are asked, rates of sexual assault outside the military appear to be similar—if not higher. A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that 6.7% of all women had experienced sexual violence, rape, or attempted rape in the 12-month period preceding the study. Since sexual assault rates are highest among the young, the CDC finding implies that the incidence of sexual assault is even higher than 6.7% among military-aged women. The CDC also found that between 20 and 25 percent of women, and approximately 6.1 percent of men, are victims of an attempted or completed sexual assault while they are in college.

And perhaps that model should be exported to the nation’s college campuses, where sexual assault is equally prevalent but far more hidden; where sexual assault policies and practices are outdated; and where the fear of litigation or falling rankings makes university administrations reluctant to expel offenders and eager to brush the problem under the carpet.

…READ IT ALL…

The State of Immigration ~ Busses, Taxes, Health & Military Bases

Published by Papa Giorgio

(AP) The Border Patrol has been overwhelmed by a surge of undocumented immigrants crossing the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, including nearly 50,000 children traveling on their own, the AP reported.

[….]

(American Thinker) …Then there are contagions like Chagas Disease, a parasitic illness that was endemic to South and Central America but now infects between 100,000 and 500,000 illegal immigrants currently living in the US. 

The CDC considers Chagas Disease one of the “neglected parasitic infections (NPI), a group of five parasitic diseases that have been targeted by CDC for public health action,” another of which is guinea-worm. The guinea-worm parasite, an uninvited alien of a different kind, causes severe pain as the worm works its way though a human host’s subcutaneous tissue.

Hepatitis A-E are viral infections that attack the liver.  And then there’s highly-contagious tuberculosis, which had been brought under control in the US, but thanks to a border that remains open, is growing harder to control.

Incurable Multi-Drug-Resistant (MDR) Tuberculosis, a strain resistant to all standard anti-TB drugs, is now on the rise in the US.

In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Reuben Granich, a lead investigator for the CDC, concluded: “Reluctant to label the infected as ‘illegal’ or even ‘undocumented’ aliens…407 known cases of MDR-TB, 84% were ‘foreign-born’ patients, mainly from Mexico and the Philippines who’d been in the U.S. less than five years.”…

…Recently, shoppers in Nyack, NY were exposed to measles in Palisades Center Mall. So, a word to the wise: the next time a French fry falls on the table in the food court or the handle of a shopping cart is grabbed, remember that along with open borders and liberal politicians come diseases and various deadly pathogens either formerly eradicated or never endemic to the US in the first place, are waiting for a new host, and you are nominated.

The Washington Examiner has this bit of a stat I have been seeing floating around:

A city-sized rush of about 120,000 illegal immigrant children and teens from Latin America is expected to crash through the U.S. border this year, twice the administration’s prediction, leading humanitarians to seek much more than the $1.5 billion spent to handle the runaways.

U.S. authorities report that there was massive surge in May of children trying to escape crime, drug gangs and sexual exploitation in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, leading them to cast aside the administration’s prediction of 60,000, which was still more than twice the 24,000 apprehended last year.

“It’s a city of children,” said Annie Wilson, executive vice president for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), a national group that works with the government to settle child refugees and exiles.

“It’s 100,000 kids on their feet walking out of their country,” she said, adding that the numbers are “unprecedented” and due more to avoiding threats back home than the lure of America.

“In desperation, people have chosen the impossible odds of fleeing over what seems like the certainty of death and fear,” added Rev. David Vasquez, a campus pastor for Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and an immigration advocate….

Some scary warnings creep into the large amount of illegals crossing our very porous border with major health problems, as Front Page Magazine notes, illegal aliens bringing 60 percent lethal drug-resistant TB to the united states.

They have a dream. And it just might kill you.

A member of Congress who for more than 30 years worked as a doctor says the baggage that illegal aliens are bringing into the United States now is killing people.

Last week it was reported that a persistent strain of tuberculosis had developed in some Los Angeles neighborhoods. Officials said as many as 4,500 people may have been exposed to the disease.

Besides California and Florida, the states with the greatest number of multi-drug-resistant TB are Texas and New York, all having large numbers of illegal aliens within their borders. Florida was recently ranked as having the third largest illegal alien population by the Department of Homeland Security. Many illegals in Florida come from the Caribbean and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere, some of which have widespread problems with tuberculosis.

Diversity is bringing a diverse variety of plagues to the United States allowing Americans to benefit from exposure to new and exotic strains of diseases.

The Nepalese man detained at the U.S. border carries a particularly deadly strain—XDR, “extensively drug-resistant” TB. His TB is resistant to at least eight of the 15 or so standard drugs, according to a U.S. government description of the case reviewed by the Journal. His XDR strain has been seen only once before in the U.S., in another patient of Nepalese origin, according to the government description.

The Nepalese patient was taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol in late November as he tried to cross the border illegally near McAllen, Texas.

It remains unclear whether other people in custody with the Nepalese detainee might have been infected. By the time the Border Patrol learned of his infection, other people detained with him would have been transferred elsewhere, the CBP official said. Detainees who are suspected of being ill are placed in cells by themselves.

Daily Mail: Obama opens third military base to deal with flood of illegal child immigrants as officials insist they are being cared for despite abuse allegations

  • Base at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, will initially hold 600 ‘unaccompanied minors’
  • There has been a tidal wave of children trying to slip into the States
  • They are largely from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala

ABC 15: “We are starting to see chicken pox, MRSA staph infections, we are starting to see different viruses,” ….”It’s unclear how many were treated for illness.

Watchdog Wire: While traditional media sources report researchers as attributing the rise in whooping cough cases to a new type of pertussis vaccine considered safer but less effective over time along with reduced rates of inoculations, one has to also wonder the impact of illegal immigration. ….. “‘Data from the Texas Department of Health Services shows that Austin’s Travis County had 79 infant pertussis cases last year, which was the highest number of cases among major counties in Texas. Also, Travis had the smallest number of infant population [2010 Census] but also the highest percentage of infants that contracted the disease. Dallas County was the second highest with 63 cases, Harris County in Houston third with 43, and Bexar County of San Antonio with 21 cases.'”

ABC 15: PHOENIX – After finding out bus loads of undocumented immigrants were being dropped off in Phoenix, many wonder what’s happening to them when they step off the bus.

A local organization is helping them by letting them use cell phones to call family in other states so they can get bus tickets out of Phoenix.

Many of those bused to Phoenix are families with children. Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials say most are from Central America and were detained in Texas.

Xiomara Maldonado told ABC15 that when she dreamed of coming to the United States, she never imagined how it would turn out.

“They saw us like animals,” she said about the holding facility in Texas.

She and her son are from Honduras. They entered the U.S. illegally and were caught in McAllen, Texas.

She said conditions were horrendous.

“Everyone was packed in like sardines. Too close to sleep. They came in the middle of the night to drop off bread and bang on the doors,” she said.

They both hadn’t bathed or slept in days when they were taken from Wilcox, Ariz. and loaded onto a bus headed for Phoenix….

Bill Whittle is joined by Steve Green, and, in for Scott Ott, Eboni K. Williams. Incensed about the recent decision to place illegal immigrants in Arizona (without asking the state or having any clear strategy), and also concerned about Eric Holder’s recent announcement that the Justice Dept. will provide attorneys to illegals, Bill vents about the lawlessness on Trifecta.

Michelle Malkin: …San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base opened its doors as an illegal immigrant camp last month. Port Hueneme Naval Base in Ventura County, California will shelter nearly 600 illegal border-crossing children and teens. The Fort Sill Army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, was ordered on Friday to take in 1,200 illegal aliens despite the objections of GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, who blasted the White House for blindsiding her and her state:

“The Obama administration continues to fail in its duty to protect our borders and continues to promote policies that encourage, rather than discourage, illegal immigration.”

A makeshift detention center in Nogales, Arizona is being used as the central clearing station for the latest illegal alien surge. The deluge is a threat to national security, public safety, and public health – not to mention a slap in the face to the law-abiding men and women in uniform on those bases and a kick in the teeth to law-abiding people around the world patiently waiting for approval of their visas.

Meanwhile, a law enforcement source in Texas tells me this week that countless illegal aliens are being released into the general public despite testing positive for tuberculosis. “The feds are putting them on public transportation to God knows where,” he said….

Breitbart: …Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said more than 1,000 illegal immigrant children will be dropped off in Arizona this weekend, continuing what she said is the Obama administration’s “dangerous policy” of dumping illegal immigrants from Central American countries into Arizona, something that will continue into the foreseeable future. Officials in Arizona said that though the illegal immigrants have been told to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center within 15 days, they have no idea where the illegal immigrants are going.

The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs told Brewer that 432 such children were expected to be transported on Friday and another 734 over the weekend.

Brewer said that she was “disturbed and outraged” that the Obama administration continues to implement this “dangerous and inhumane policy” while “neglecting to answer crucial questions our citizens demand and deserve.” She noted, “Not only does the federal government have no plan to stop this disgraceful policy, it also has no plan to deal with the endless waves of illegal aliens once they are released here.”

“If the Obama administration put half the effort into securing our border as it has invested to institute this operation, our state and nation would not be facing this situation,” she said. “This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure – now apparently intentionally – while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable.”

Breitbart Texas first reported photos of illegal immigrants from Central America being warehoused in Texas, and Arizona may face a similar situation as officials scrambled to find medical supplies for the recently dumped illegal immigrants.

A holding center in Nogales had to be opened “because the Department of Health and Human Services had nowhere to turn,” and a Department of Homeland Security official told the Associated Press “that children are sleeping on plastic cots but about 2,000 mattresses have been ordered, and portable toilets and showers have been brought to the holding center –  a warehouse that has not been used for detention in years.”

The warehouse reportedly has a capacity of about 1,500, and a Homeland Security official said, “As quickly as we move them out, we get more. We believe this is just a start.”…

Democrats Are Handing the Keys of the Middle-East To Radicals

Published by Papa Giorgio

Think your gas cost a lot now Prius owners? With the new restrictions on coal plants and coming taxes on electric cars… you eco-fascist liberals will get a bigger bite than most driving to work. Karma’s a bitch!

Gateway Pundit:

Retired United States Army Lieutenant Colonel and author Ralph Peters says the recent Al-Qaeda victories in Iraq are the greatest Islamist conquests since the 12th Century.

“Patty Ann, this is President Obama’s real legacy. The creation of the first jihadi state in modern history stretching from central Syria to Central Iraq and now approaching Baghdad all because President Obama saw everything through a political lense. He’s gonna end the War in Iraq. He refused to negotiate seriously for residual US presence.

And now, just to put this in perspective for viewers, with this jihadi conquest of Mosul and jihadi forces approaching Baghdad, this is shaping up to be the biggest Arab jihadi victory since the 12th Century, 1187, and the fall of Crusader Jerusalem. This is momentous.”

The Iraqi government asked the United States for airstrikes in western Iraq on surging Al-Qaeda groups. But, Barack Obama has turned them down.

Bush wanted a base in Iraq to be able to stop such incursions. Obama is handing the keys of the Middle-East over to radicals.

It’s An Obama World!

Trigger Words, Or Picture, Cause The ELOI Trolls Discomfort

Published by Papa Giorgio

This was a photo posted by a loving boyfriend of his girlfriend… out… experiencing life, and this is what was said by some:

“Jessa, of all the things you can be representing, please consider this … with all the horrific and senseless killings that have been occurring in our society lately, it’s not the wisest thing in the world to be casually holding a machine gun in a photo for all to see,” one individual wrote in a comment.

“No human needs a machine gun,” another added.

“While I believe in the right to bare arms, I can’t believe a Christian would send out this photo because it’s fun. if you want to be an adult act like one. I doubt her parents are proud of that picture,” echoed yet another person.

(Via The Blaze)

As this American culture is battered with the hyper-sensitivity of political correctness in even “trigger words” ~ even a picture sends some into a tizzy.

Welcome to the world of cultural Marxism. I noticed as well, over at The View, when WIll Cain showed with simple facts how liberals say over-arching statements to support a specific that the previous statement does not address:

Whoopi argued that shootings/crime with gun was going up, Will Cain said no, it is going down (see previous post):

While Cain was guest-hosting “The View” on Wednesday, Whoopi Goldberg, a gun owner, began a segment by saying there have been 74 school shootings since the tragedy at Sandy Hook in 2012. Cain immediately stepped in to correct her.

“I don’t think it is the 74th,” Cain said. “That’s a stat put out by this group called Everytown USA, who is for gun control. We know a couple stats, these are by Pew and the FBI. Gun violence is down drastically over the last 20 years. I mean, drastically. What I will tell you is, every time these terrible things happen, we want to learn a lesson. And it’s understandable — we want to grab sanity. … What can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen? I don’t know. Crazy people exist.”

“I will suggest this,” Cain continued. “I think when the media reports so breathlessly and salaciously on these things, these guys copycat each other.”

(The Blaze)

BTW, it looks — to me — like Will Cain was holding back. He has an image to uphold with the entertainment world, the Views pop-culture. It seems like he could have unloaded (pun intended) much more than he did… but was aware of whom he was talking to.

  • Whoopi says: “If it’s ten a week, or five a week, it’s too many man… it’s too many kids… it’s too many…”
  • Will Cain responds, almost facetiously [but politely with a sarcastic smile on his face] says: “I can’t disagree with that. It’s Always too many.”

If you cannot win an argument on the specifics, make up a meta-narrative to win. I wish to also point out a similarity between people posting on Jessa Duggar’s pic posted by Ben Seewald, and the above video. At one point the co-host, Sherri Shepherd — bless her little heart — said that you can take a semi-automatic and spray the crowd in 5-seconds:

“If you have a semi-automatic – I’m not talkin’ about a regular ‘pow-pow’ ….”

Will Cain responds to her diatribe, and then we get this convoluted non-response to tug on uneducated heart strings:

“In five-seconds a semi-automatic can spray this entire audience.”

This is like someone on the shot of Jesse Duggar saying: “No human needs a machine gun.” DUMB! And frustrating. No one had machine guns in any of the shootings so enamored in the press by the Left.

The Left has no idea about guns. Remember this statement from Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette who has been the lead in two Congresses by sponsoring a bill for a federal ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines:

Another example comes from California State Senator Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) who made a fool of himself as he attempted to explain the capacity of an automatic rifle — HERE. Jesse’s pic was just another example for the trolls of the Left to show their devolution in interacting with the world around them… creating a more secluded world where they dream of lollipops and unicorns farting rainbows.

May I also note the “legalism” many people put on the Christian faith. When someone says basically that a Christian shouldn’t own or take pictures holding a gun… they are applying a layer of legalism only found in the most fundamentalist churches. However, this is the point of the illiberal egalitarianism found on the left (cultural Marxism via political correctness). It is legalistic. And Galatians rejects this type of Phariseism, clearly, and resolutely.

Another Piece To The Benghazi Puzzle — Phone Calls

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Gateway Pundit:

Eric Stahl, a retired major in the U.S. Air Force, told Baier (see video below) that members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff were confused by repeated references to a video as the driving force behind the attacks, because the administration “knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.”

Stahl added:

“Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”

A second source confirmed these reports and stated that security teams on the ground were receiving intelligence about the terrorist phone calls in real time.

Mass Shootings Have Decreased ~ Obama vs. Australia

Published by Papa Giorgio

The American Spectator has this great information that sets the record clear by giving guidelines to the debate:

Type “mass shootings” and “common” into a search engine and you’ll get all sorts of breathless commentary that might lead one to believe there Americans face a genuine epidemic of shooting rampages. A few headlines:

  • Vox: “Mass shootings on campus are getting more common and more deadly.”
  • ThinkProgress: “Mass Shootings Are Becoming More Frequent.”
  • NPR: “Study: Mass Shootings Are On The Rise Across U.S.”
  • Washington Post: “Why are mass shootings becoming more common?”

[….]

Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review…

I want to break here and post something Mother Jones said in trying to define what a Mass Shooting is… “she” says this:

Broadly speaking, the term refers to an incident involving multiple victims of gun violence. But there is no official set of criteria or definition for a mass shooting, according to criminology experts and FBI officials who have spoken with Mother Jones.

Mother Jones then goes on to quote the definition — after being ambiguous about it — as four or more [excluding the shooter]. Wikipedia says this:

The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others.

  • Aggrawal A. (2005) Mass Murder. In: Payne-James JJ, Byard RW, Corey TS, Henderson C (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 3, Pp. 216-223. Elsevier Academic Press, London
  • “Serial Murder – Federal Bureau of Investigation”. Fbi.gov. Retrieved 2012-03-07.

It is odd to me why Mother Jones would be ambiguous about it while at the same time use the accepted FBI terminology/definition. At any rate, I HIGHLY suggest reading this Debunking of Mother Jones’ “10 Pro-Gun Myths,” worth the read.

Obama recently praised Australian gun-control.

ANN COULTER tackles this “Australian Stat” often mentioned. She quotes the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal as saying this:

Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia’s gun laws, as if it’s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:

“After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. … Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent … said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.”

John Lott Responds:

…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.

For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…

…ELSEWHERE he states:

…This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country. That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.

Australians own as many guns now as they did at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, despite more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, new research reveals.

A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .

Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels. One doesn’t need a semi-auto to commit suicide. While Australia’s population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent. If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that. Obviously that pattern wasn’t what was observed….

Crime is dropping recently in Australia, but this can be attributed to gun ownership rising back up to the previous rates before the ban. GAY PATRIOT comments on the before mentioned Obama quote about Australia:

I reiterate the two hidden rules of “Common Sense Gun Laws:”

1. “We only want to keep guns away from dangerous persons.”

2. “Anyone who owns a gun is a dangerous person.”

NATIONAL REVIEW also makes the point that in order to praise Australian “success,” one is praising anti-Constitutional actions:

Let me be clear, as Obama likes to say: You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.

[….]

Obama gave the impression that gun-violence is on the increase. This is false. As both Pew and the Department of Justice recorded last year, the majority of Americans believe that gun violence is proliferating when it is in fact dropping. This year marked a 20-year low. More than anything, America has a copycat problem in its schools.

Just a long side-note, continuing with the AMERICAN SPECTATOR article:

 

…The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.

Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN  (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings).  “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.

The rare nature of these incidents also holds true for safety in K-12 schools, which garnered a significant amount of attention in the wake of the tragedies in Columbine and Newtown. According to two reports by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of a child “dying in school in any given year from homicide or suicide was less than one in 1 million between 1992 and 1994 and slightly greater than one in 2 million between 1994 and 1999.”

…READ IT ALL…

Of course any story like the above needs a positive one added to it. The Blaze has this:

Two armed criminals reportedly put a gun to a 17-year-old girl’s head on Monday night as she was outside retrieving something from a car. The man, whose intentions still aren’t entirely clear, then ordered the teenager to take them into her house — a decision that would prove to have deadly consequences.

Peering out the window of the St. Louis home were the girl’s mother and father, each prepared to protect their daughter with deadly force. There was also a 5-year-old boy in the house, though his relationship to the family wasn’t known on Tuesday.

The girl’s father, a 34-year-old man, reportedly observed the men walking towards his home while holding a gun to his daughter’s head, a sight that no father ever wants to see. He quickly retrieved his firearm and his wife did the same.

The brave dad then confronted the two criminals and opened fire, hitting both suspects with accurate shots…