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Labels: telescopes Labels: global warming Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: gun rights Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: sinuses
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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Is Britain Run By Idiots?
Dave Hardy points to this utterly amazing British newspaper story:A Chief constable was accused of 'madness' last night after refusing to release pictures of two escaped murderers amid fears it might breach their human rights.
It gets even more bizarre:
Derbyshire's top policeman David Coleman claimed the killers posed 'no risk' to locals, while the force said it had to consider the Human Rights Act and data protection laws when asked to publish 'wanted' photographs of the two men.
Mr Coleman's attitude towards murderers Jason Croft and Michael Nixon contrasts sharply with his ruthless crackdown on speeding drivers in recent years - including a 62-year-old who was jailed after being caught doing 38mph in a 30mph zone.
The father of a teenager bludgeoned to death by Nixon angrily suggested Mr Coleman and his force needed to 'sort their priorities out' and revealed the police had not bothered to contact him to say his son's killer was on the run.
Jimmy Leckey, whose 19-year-old son Paul was murdered in 1995, said: 'This is madness, totally ridiculous. The police should be out there catching dangerous criminals rather than chasing motorists.
'And to suggest they had to consider Nixon's human rights is unbelievable. He is a convicted murderer. What about my human rights and my son's human rights?'
Derbyshire Constabulary had been asked by the media to provide pictures of Nixon and Croft, both 28, after it emerged they had absconded from Sudbury open prison in Derbyshire two months ago.
Both are still on the run, but the Derbyshire force said there was 'no proper policing purpose' in releasing pictures and claimed the men posed no risk to Derbyshire residents because they were thought to have left the county.
The force added that the Chief Constable had to take into account 'the Human Rights and Data Protection Acts' before releasing any photos.
Mr Coleman's decision was dismissed as 'absolute nonsense' by the Lord Chancellor, was blasted by incredulous MPs and was even ridiculed by the ultraliberal human rights group Liberty.
Mr Coleman was left humiliated when Greater Manchester Police released the photos of the two wanted men together with an appeal for information, making a mockery of Derbyshire's claims that publishing the pictures would breach guidelines set by the Association of Chief Police Officers.Nixon and Croft were both being held at the category D Sudbury open prison to finish their life sentences, which were both imposed in 1996.
"Life sentence" in Britain means ten years?
The two men, both from Manchester, were being held there to help prepare them for release, and had been allowed periods of home leave and work placements. Croft went missing on October 31 and Nixon failed to appear at a roll call on November 2. [emphasis added]
Gates of Vienna reports on a doctor whose computers were stolen, and he called the police--who made only perfunctory efforts to find them--but did threaten him with prosecution for offering rewards to get them back:After police showed little interest in investigating a burglary at his home, Dr Otto Chan decided to take action himself to retrieve the stolen property.
Imagine an entire country run by the ACLU.
He pinned up posters around his neighbourhood offering a reward for anyone who returned the computers, Christmas presents and priceless family photographs.
So the 50-year-old radiologist was astonished when officers threatened to arrest him – for attempting to buy stolen goods.
Police said he had breached the Theft Act by promising in the posters that there would be ‘no questions asked’.
Dr Chan, who has never been in trouble with the law, said last night: ‘It is ridiculous.
‘The police couldn’t even be bothered to send an officer to see me about the burglary but as soon as I try and get my own property back they are straight on the phone warning I could be prosecuted.’
The ordeal began when Dr Chan, a father of six, returned from a two-week holiday in France on December 30. In the early hours of New Year’s Eve as the family slept, thieves smashed through the back door of his home in Belsize Park, North London.
They grabbed three computers worth more than £3,000 and a pile of unopened Christmas presents.
The heist was especially heartbreaking because the laptops contained hundreds of precious photographs of his wife Zaide, 35, their children and his grandchild, as well as the text of more than 150 lectures on radiology.
If A Man With A Machete Threatens You, What Should You Do?
If you live in New Zealand, defending yourself with a gun seems to be the wrong thing to do:A man who was shot when he threatened a gun shop worker with a machete has been sent to jail.
Now, there's not much detail there, and I can imagine circumstances where that might be the wrong response here--but those would have to be really, really weird circumstances--so weird that I can't even imagine them.
Ricky Beckham's lawyer says his client was sentenced to two years and nine months' jail in the High Court at Auckland on Friday.
The unemployed man had earlier admitted a charge of aggravated burglary after the incident in Penrose in July last year.
The man who allegedly shot Beckham, Greg Carvell, says he is disgusted with the sentence.
Mr Carvell is facing a firearms charge over the incident and is due to appear in court again later this month.
Mayor Newsom Behaving Like The People Who Elect Him
Remember when Mayor Newsom decided that San Francisco didn't have to obey state law about what constitutes marriage? Remember when his wife (now ex-wife) gave an extremely vulgar speech to a gay fundraiser about how he was straight only because of her unique talents? Remember when he announced his support for an initiative that he admitted was illegal and would be struck down by the courts (at great expense to the city) anyway? Oh yeah, it just keeps getting more and more sleazy:Staring into a crush of television cameras, the usually boisterous Gavin Newsom stepped up to the microphone Thursday and, in hushed tones, admitting to an affair with his former appointments secretary, the wife of his good friend and campaign manager.
Progressive sorts like to imagine that this latest scandal is in spite of his progressive views. It isn't. If you believe that the only real measure of right and wrong is what humans put together, and if you believe that there are no rules other than those that we make up and change as we feel like--and these are the essence of progressive thought--then why not cheat with your friend's wife?
"I want to make it clear that everything you've heard and read is true," Newsom said, "and I am deeply sorry about that."
For the popular politician, his contrition marked a low point in a stellar rise that had made Newsom, at 39, one of the most talked about mayors in the country.
He is again today, but not for reasons he had hoped.
The City Hall sex scandal that burst wide open Thursday had friends and political allies asking: Just what was he thinking?
Newsom had built an international reputation as a bold thinker -- promoting gay marriage, universal health care and environmental firsts.
"What is going on inside his head?" said David Binder, a San Francisco political insider who knows Newsom casually and has worked for his political allies. "You guess this is probably something very difficult for him to admit and he has some issues he has to resolve."
I feel really sorry for the guy who found out about this--because his wife, who also worked for the mayor, had to go into substance abuse treatment:Rippey-Tourk, a former Santa Rosa TV anchor, took a leave of absence from the mayor's office last summer and sought treatment for substance abuse in Arizona. She had once denied the affair to her husband, but last week told him it had occurred.
By the way--this affair took place apparently while he was still married to the vulgar actress.
Tourk, who had worked for Newsom as a key deputy chief of staff before heading his re-election campaign, held a one-hour closed-door meeting Wednesday with Newsom at the campaign office where he told Newsom he knew about the affair. Then he quit.
Newsom apologized to his former aide by name at Thursday's news conference, saying "I have hurt someone I care deeply about, Alex Tourk, his friends and family, and that is something that I have to live with."
This Terra Rossa Blog That Is Advertising Here...
It purports to be conservatives looking for alternative energy futures. When I read the postings--and then the comments from readers--I find myself wondering if Terra Rossa is actually run by "conservatives" in the same sense that Michael Bellesiles claimed to be a conservative, Republican, gun owner when he wrote Arming America. Or perhaps in the same sense of conservative as advocates of gay marriage call themselves "conservatives" because they want to create more families.
There's something about the tone of a lot of the postings that suggests that this is a disinformation campaign by environmentalists, rather along the lines of the purported Republican activists who intentionally deceived people in 2004 in order to encourage Republicans to vote for Kerry because he was the "true conservative." I had a number of emails along these same lines at the time, clearly following rock star Moby's suggestion that leftists lie about their beliefs on websites and chat rooms to derail Bush's re-election campaign.
Now, there are legitimate conservative arguments for reducing consumption of fuels from nations where the money eventually ends up in the hands of terrorists. If anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were clearly established to be the primary or only cause of global warming, there might be a conservative argument for governmental actions to stop this. But AGW at this point is still pretty dubious from a science standpoint, and Terra Rossa's bloggers sound more like clever environmentalists than conservatives.
UPDATE: One reader points out that the biographies of the people who are behind this don't seem to fit leftist posers. Another reader points out that one of the participants, Rev. Richard Cizik, is involved with the rising environmental movement within evangelical Christianity. I suspect that what we may be seeing is conservatives who are operating out of their depth, and have bought into the environmentalist claims about AGW without bothering to examine how much serious question there is concerning it.
Books Trickling In; My Relative Absence From Blogging
Yesterday, one of the three expected boxes of my new book arrived. Today, another box arrived. Since all three were mailed the same day, I'm utterly mystified why they are arriving day by day. But they are arriving!
I have not been blogging much because I am busily trying to make ScopeRoller products. There has been an unexpected rush of orders the last few days. In the interests of efficiency, instead of making one at a time, I'm trying to make several sets alike in one operation, both to save time moving tooling around, and because it produces a more consistent set of results. But the net result is that I get very little free time in the evenings to blog.
Also, the Moonlite Telescope dual rate focuser arrived--and considering that it ended up costing $330, I would say that I more than got my money's worth. The finish, the smoothness of the focuser, and the general appearance--wow! It makes the rest of Big Bertha look like it was assembled by cavemen--and gives me reason to replace Big Bertha's tube with something a bit less savage. The good news is that 20" inside diameter Sonotube (an excellent lightweight choice for this) will cost me about $35! Once I get done using some epoxy to make it into pseudo-fiberglass, it will look dramatically sharper, and weigh perhaps 60 pounds less than the current Sonotube and wooden construction.
Four Proposals In The Idaho Legislature To Reduce Taxes on Groceries
And all of them seem designed to maximize complexity:Here are what the bills would do, and how much their sponsors estimate they will cost the state budget:
Which means that poor people won't get any benefit until they file their tax returns--a year or more after they have paid the income tax. If they aren't making enough that they have to file a tax return (and there are parts of Idaho where this could easily be the case), it would be very easy to forget to file a tax return to get a little of their money back.
• Gov. Butch Otter's low-income tax relief plan: Otter wants to target the grocery tax credit to low-income Idahoans, who would each get up to $90, based on income levels. Many Idahoans would lose their existing credit. Budget cost: $22 million• GOP rank-and-file tax credit increase: Led by Treasure Valley GOP Rep. Cliff Bayer and Sen. Russ Fulcher, a group of Republicans from both houses want to boost the credit to $50 per person and $70 per senior, regardless of income. Budget cost: $47.5 million
All the complexity problem of Otter's problem, and the same problema about low-income Idahoans who might not file a tax return to get $50 back. At the same time, because people making more than $20,000 a year pretty much have to file a tax return, the biggest beneficiaries will be middle and upper income Idahoans. There's nothing wrong with that--but if the goal is to alleviate the misery of the poorest Idahoans, they will get the least benefit from it.• Democratic leader Wendy Jaquet's food tax cut: The Ketchum Democrat would simply cut the tax from 6 percent to 3 percent on groceries — "relief daily at the cash register," she said. Budget cost: $90 million
At least it is immediate relief--but two different sales tax rates? I suspect a fair number of cash registers around the state will have no problem with a "taxable" vs. "non-taxable" calculation (remember that California, among other states, already makes groceries non-taxable), but two different sale tax rates? Does Wendy Jaquet know what it is going to cost for existing businesses to either have their registers reprogrammed, or buy new ones?• Food-tax phase-out: In a plan similar to one proposed by Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, Reps. Phil Hart, R-Athol, and Jim Clark, R-Hayden, proposed a four-year phase-out of the grocery tax. Budget cost: $34.5 million a year
If the rate declines each year for groceries, then it has the complexity problem of Jaquet's plan.
Go ahead: bite the bullet. Abolish the sales tax on groceries. If the full cost is too high (and from reading these estimates, it sounds like the full cost would be $180 million), then delay the repeal until one more year has passed, and put that $180 million they collect in 2007 aside to cover tax revenues losses in 2008. Sure, that well will be dry in 2009, but the phase-out proposed by Hart and Clark clearly plan on the grocery sales tax well being dry four years from now.
Alternatively, raise the current state excise tax on cigarettes ($0.57 per pack) to cover the grocery sales tax loss. If the choice is discouraging cigarette use by raising that tax (which is already a separate computation from sales tax) or discouraging poor families from feeding their kids with a sales tax, I know which makes more sense.
Global Warming: More Books Coming Out
I was disgusted to hear Senator McCain (who is pretty much a liberal, as much as some people want to believe otherwise) going along with the need to "do something" about global warming. The evidence just keeps accumulating that man's contribution to global warming is minor, at worst:Global warming comes and goes in 1,500 year cycles which may have more to do with cosmic rays than fossil fuel emissions, according to a new book.
If the genuine warming now being seen is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide, it would have started earlier, according to the book by two veteran American climate sceptics, Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.
Mr Avery, who was in London yesterday, said: “If this were a CO2 driven warming it should have started in 1940 and risen strongly from there. In fact warming started in 1850 and rose sharply until 1940 then decreased for 35 years.”
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Mr Avery believes that only half the warming that has happened since 1940 - 0.2 degrees according to his measurements - can be ascribed to man made emissions. The rest he says is natural variability.
“If you factor in the warming from the cyclical trends, it is not very frightening,” he said.
The authors of Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 1,500 Years, say that history, ice core studies and stalagmites all agree on a natural cycle at roughly that interval that is superimposed on the longer, stronger ice ages and interglacial phases.
They point as evidence of this natural cycle to the “Climate Optimum” - a period of warmer and wetter weather than the present Earth’s climate, which took place 9,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago, and a cooling event 2,600 years ago.
During the Roman warming period from 200 BC to around AD 600 North Africa and the Sahara were wetter and supported crops. In more recent times they point to the Medieval warming of 900 to 1300, when Eric the Red’s descendants colonised Greenland and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1850 which saw the Norse dairy farmers on Greenland grow short from malnutrition and eventually die out.
...
This theory was validated in a recent paper in a Royal Society journal by scientists from the Danish National Space Centre who showed that sub-atomic particles - cosmic rays from exploding stars - play a major role in making clouds. During the past century cosmic rays became scarcer as vigorous activity by the sun forced them away. So there was less cloud cover to reflect away sunlight and a warmer world, according to the Danish scientists.
The book's authors say the 60 per cent reduction in fossil fuel emissions demanded from First World countries by international scientists working for the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) would deliver a “crippling blow” to the world economy that could be avoided without damaging the planet.
This is a Horrifying Story of Political Correctness
This from the London Evening Standard. I get the impression it is a bit of a tabloid, but the story should give pause to anyone who insists that there is no overlap between pedophiles and homosexuality:Liam Lucas was just one of the children abused by predatory paedophiles who took advantage of far-Left Islington Council's childcare policies in the Eighties and Nineties, when it pro-actively recruited gay social workers.
Paedophiles exploited its well-intentioned commitment to equal opportunities and soon most of Islington's 12 children's homes had child molesters on the staff who cynically pretended to be ordinary homosexuals. Numerous children and other staff made allegations of abuse, but were branded homophobes and ignored.
Liam - now 29, in a permanent relationship and the proud father of year-old Isabella - was even falsely classified as gay by Islington social services, which decided he should be fostered only by single men.
...
A lengthy investigation by The Mail on Sunday's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, resulted in government-ordered inquiries, but at least 26 members of Islington social services staff, despite being accused of grave offences, were simply allowed to resign, often with glowing references.
Mr and Mrs Cairns and their foster son Liam were so concerned by the 'rigidity' of the current debate about adoption and equal opportunities for gays, and the invisibility of children's needs, that they have decided to go public.
The Church of England's own adoption agency already allows gay adoptions, and it is thought the Archbishop's support for the Catholic Church's exemption plea mainly reflects the importance he places on freedom of conscience and thought.
Mrs Cairns is herself a leading socialwork academic, author and trainer. "I am not anti gay, any more than is Rowan Williams,' she said.
"I have a close relative who is gay, and I am emphatically not opposed to gay adoption. I am, however, deeply concerned by the bullying, intolerant nature of the present attacks on people with religious or other concerns about it.
"It feels horribly familiar and I fear that rigid thinking about equal opportunities may again blind people to paedophiles who claim to be gay, when all they really want is access to vulnerable children.
"On radio and TV this week I have repeatedly heard politicians insist that every adoption agency, whatever its religious beliefs about the best home for children, must offer gay people "equality of access to all goods and services".
...
Liam himself said: "There's a lot about my childhood I can't remember. There's a lot I can remember and wish I couldn't. The best I can say about it is that it's over, and that I learned a lot, that will probably make me a better person in the end."
He was in and out of Islington's care from the age of two, and witnessed his birth mother suffer domestic violence and descend into drug addiction. When he was nine she died of a heroin overdose.
The distraught, vulnerable boy was initially fostered by a motherly woman who asked to keep him. But the council instead sent him, from age five to 11, to a 'therapeutic' boarding school, New Barns in Gloucestershire. This was later closed following a child abuse and pornography scandal.
During school holidays he was fostered by a man later imprisoned for abusing another child in his care. When Liam was nine, Islington placed him in its children's home in Grosvenor Avenue, run by two single males. Both were eventually accused of abuse but escaped investigation by moving to Thailand.
Last year, Thai police charged the deputy head, Nick Rabet, 57, with serious sexual offences against 30 Thai boys, the youngest six years old. He escaped trial by killing himself.
Liam initially liked Rabet, a 'big kid' who pretended he was a sheriff and even wore a sheriff's badge. The unqualified social worker owned a Sussex manor house, which he had turned into a children's activity centre, with quad bikes, pinball machines and horses. He took Liam there at weekends.
Liam was abused by a friend of Rabet's, a senior social services colleague. It is believed he backed the council's decision to find the boy a gay foster father.
Mr and Mrs Cairns spotted Islington's advertisement in 1990 in a fostering magazine.
Mrs Cairns was haunted by the then 13-year-old boy's photo, and the council's claim that he was 'suitable for a single man'.
She said: "I instinctively felt that the ad was aimed at paedophiles."
Mrs Cairns and her husband, also a senior figure in social services, already had three children but immediately applied to foster Liam.
"Islington insisted Liam wouldn't settle in a family because they had decided he was gay,' she said. "I said, "So what? Don't gay people have families?" Besides, he was still a child - how could they be sure?'
Mrs Cairns believes children in care who genuinely identify as gay can particularly benefit from gay carers, but she mistrusts adults deciding children's sexuality for them. Former Islington senior social worker Liz Davies, who blew the whistle on the abuse scandal, said: "Other Islington children were also falsely classed as gay at a very young age."
A rebel Islington social worker defied his bosses and supported Mr and Mrs Cairns' fostering bid after Liam begged him: "I just want a family, I just want to be normal."
Mrs Cairns said: "He arrived and looked around and said, "Please, please don't send me back."'
...
Eventually, he disclosed abuse at both the home and at boarding school. But his sympathetic social worker, and Liam's files, simply vanished and nothing was done.
Mrs Cairns found the vice-chairman of the school governors, Peter Righton, former Director of Education at the National Institute for Social Work, had for years openly advocated sex with boys in care.
"Righton and I had sat together on the body which regulated social work training. I researched everything he had published and I felt sick. I was devastated by the betrayal of trust, and social work's naivety.
"He got away with this, and influenced social workers to this day, because they feared seeming "homophobic" by challenging him."
It prompted Mrs Cairns to begin confiding secretly with Scotland Yard.
The impasse ended in 1991, when police discovered Rabet's Sussex children's centre was partly financed by convicted child pornographers and that he was part of a ring of wealthy, well-connected paedophiles.
Police also discovered that Righton was a founder member of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange, which campaigned for the age of consent to be reduced to four.
In 1992, Righton was convicted of importing child pornography from Holland. Later, two teachers at New Barns were convicted of sexual abuse, five others tried, and the school was abruptly closed.
Islington admitted 32 'gross errors' in its treatment of Liam, and paid him £5,000 compensation.
His principal abuser quit Britain for a Third World country and is believed to have adopted a boy there.
Liam had a breakdown in 1994 after the ordeal of giving evidence at the trial of New Barns staff.
He became angry, took to drugs and drink, was violent and smashed things. "My descent into crime was sudden and violent and frightened me as much as everybody else,' he admitted.
Liam tried to hang himself and even attempted to strangle Mrs Cairns. She said: "He was wild-eyed and kept saying, "What do you mean, you love me? What does that mean?"
"He couldn't trust anyone, he was a child broken by grief and betrayal. It broke my heart but I had to report him to the police for our own safety."
Can't Sleep: Must Review Books!
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Random House, 2004, 356 pp.
Okay, I'm the last person around here to read this book. My daughter read it--and was utterly horrified by the sort of monsters running Iran. (I haven't been silent about this, you know. Maybe I'm less effective than Professor Nafisi's book.)
My wife read it--but she was already utterly horrified by the monsters running Iran.
Now I've read it--and I confess, I knew that Iran was run by monsters, but I didn't realize that they were both this vicious and this incredibly petty. Nafisi describes a society that was (and still somewhat is) Taliban Lite, but somewhat more competent in its totalitarianism.
Azar Nafisi was, by her own accounts, a leftist, enjoying the benefits of an American education in English literature, at the time of the Iranian Revolution. She describes the sad situation wherein many leftists, and especially those more doctrinaire and political than herself, chose to make common ground with the ayatollahs because they perceived America and the West as the greatest threat--and you get the implication that Nafisi thinks some of this was because Iranian leftists were getting marching orders from Moscow. She freely acknowledges that she and many others on the left refused to get behind the Prime Minister who ended up in charge after the Shah's ouster--and who was probably the best hope for a relatively free society, instead of the ayatollahs.
It would not be the first time that the left miscalculated its ability to win a fight, and in the process, destroyed their allies in the expectation of being the last ones standing after the war. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia certainly gives you that same impression--that the Soviet-backed party chose to disarm its anarchist allies in Barcelona (provoking a civil war within the Spanish Civil War) because it was convinced that it was going to beat Franco. Wrong!
This book is not going to make it into my list of great memoirs of life in a totalitarian society. Those would be Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil.
What makes Reading Lolita in Tehran miss that list of great books is, paradoxically, what probably makes it so effective at opening eyes in literary circles. You see, Nafisi tells her tale structured around the English literature that she was teaching at various Iranian universities--and finally, among a small circle of her former students in her home, when she tired of having teach behind a veil. Vladmir Nabokov. Henry James. Jane Austen. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
If you have an MA in British Literature (like my wife) or read Henry James, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for pleasure (like my daughter), this is a fascinating exploration of how the works of these great writers interplays with the life of women in a profoundly anti-female society. Otherwise, you might find all of this discussion somewhere between boring and pretentious.
What makes this book work, however, is Nafisi's portrayal of the barbarism of the Iranian government. Some of these are comparatively little things--like prohibiting women from having their hair exposed in public. Nafisi paints an evocative portrait of the liberation that comes when one of her students travels to Syria--where she is allowed to wear jeans and T-shirt, and get sunlight and wind across her arms.
Some of these barbarous acts are the large scale crimes that we have come to expect of societies that enjoy the support and respect of the American left, such as the mass executions and disappearances of intellectuals.
Some are crimes that are misogny raised to unimaginable levels. One of her students spent time in prison for participating in anti-Revolutionary demonstrations, shortly after Khomeini came to power. Many of the women who were arrested were passed around by the guards to be raped before being executed, so that there could be certainty that they were "dishonored" and therefore unsuitable for Muslim Paradise.
Some are crimes that served no purpose at all, except to demonstrate the truly childish nature of the people that run Iran. For example, the Baha'i faith originated in Iran. Of all the world's religions, the Baha'i have probably the smallest list of crimes that they have perpetrated in the name of religion, partly because it is not a very old religion, and because of its pacifism. In 1993, the Iranian government bulldozed a Baha'i cemetery in Tehran, as part of their campaign to utterly destroy one of the larger minority religions.
Along with these crimes large and small, there are the countless indignities that women were subjected to by the Iranian government. One of her students got in trouble for eating an apple "seductively." There are many similar examples that show that the purists that ran (and run) Iran are suffering from very severe projection problems--that they have trouble controlling their sexual urges, and consequently place all the blame on women.
It is very fashionable in some circles to call the Christian Right the "American Taliban" and compare them to the government of Iran. I think anyone that reads Nafisi's book will realize how absurd of a comparison that is.
Just to Clarify...
The article in the Gainesville Times quoting me is accurate:Incidents like last week's shooting are often cited by gun ownership advocates as examples of the importance of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
I did explain what I meant by "sensible gun control": laws that seek to disarm felons, the mentally ill, and minors (without parental consent), not laws that seek to disarm the law-abiding.
"I think it's a good argument in favor of sensible gun control," said Clayton Cramer, the author of "Armed America: How and Why GunsBecame As American As Apple Pie." Cramer, of Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, runs a Internet Web log that chronicles news reports of self-defense shootings, including the Hall County incident.
I Keep Looking for the Punchline, But I'm Not Finding It
I heard the start of this interview on NPR the other day, but I actually had something to do, so I didn't hear the full interview. Probably best. I would have blown a fuse, I think. Professor Volokh quotes the author of American Fascists--a book about the Christian right--as saying that they are fascists, and their freedom of speech should be suppressed:This is the awful paradox of tolerance. There arise moments when those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible should no longer be tolerated. They must be held accountable by institutions that maintain the free exchange of ideas and liberty.
I am reminded of an incident during the Sandinista period of Nicaragua. One of the opposition newspapers, La Prensa, had published an article about press censorship. The government shut them down, explaining that La Prensa "accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie, and we could not let them publish it."
The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.
Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right threatens the democratic state. And the movement has targeted the last remaining obstacles to its systems of indoctrination, mounting a fierce campaign to defeat hate-crime legislation, fearing the courts could apply it to them as they spew hate talk over the radio, television and Internet.
The claim that Hedges makes is that the Christian right supports execution of homosexuals. I'm aware of the "Christian reconstructionists" who Hedges now calls "Christian dominionists" who want Levitical law back in force for homosexuality. There might be dozens or even hundreds of such people in the United States. I've never met one. I've attended churches for 28 years that are generally quite a bit more fundamentalist than I can completely agree with, and I have never heard anyone, either from the pulpit or in less formal settings suggest that homosexuals should even be in prison, much less executed.
Hedges is a fascist. You don't have to scratch very deep to figure out why. Elton John's recent call for state suppression of religion because Christianity "promotes hatred ... against gays" (while ignoring Islam, that executes gays, instead of politely disapproving of it) shows what is really going on.
Hedges is an intolerant person. But I'm not a fascist. I'm prepared to tolerate his intolerance and even his promotion of fascist ideas.
I Couldn't Have Made Up This Story
1. Fiction has to make sense. Real life doesn't.
2. Note the comment near the end of the article about another child confused about her sexuality--and remember what I have been pointing out for some time about the strong correlation between childhood sexual abuse and sexual orientation as an adult:A boy of 12 is believed to have become the world's youngest sex change patient after convincing doctors that he wanted to live the rest of his life as a female.
As I have said before, sex changes make homosexuality seem downright normal by comparison, and many of those who have sex changes decide that they aren't happy as that other sex, either. What's next? "I was born in the wrong body. I think I should have been born as a chimpanzee. Can I get a species-reassignment surgery?"
The boy - originally called Tim, but now known as Kim - has started to receive hormone treatment, in preparation for the operation that will eventually complete the sex change.
Tim was diagnosed as a transsexual two years ago, when doctors and psychiatrists concluded that his claims to be "in the wrong body" were so deeply felt that he required treatment. The therapy involves artificially arresting male puberty, with a series of potent hormone injections before the administration of female hormones to initiate the development of features such as breasts.
Now aged 14, and officially registered as a female, Kim looks like a typical girl of her age. She dresses in fashionable clothes, has long blonde hair and blue eyes and dreams of moving to Paris to become a fashion designer. Her parents, who initially assumed their son was going through a temporary phase, eventually grew accustomed to seeing him as a girl.
The family's full identity has not been made public. But Kim's father, known as Lutz P. – speaking to the German publications Der Spiegel and Stern – said that as a child, the boy liked to play with Barbie dolls, enjoyed wearing dresses and, from the age of two, insisted that he was a girl. "We saw Kim as a girl, but not as a problem. Our life was surprisingly normal."
Kim reacted badly to the first signs of puberty, he said. "At that stage we realised that she was terrified of growing facial hair and her voice breaking."
...
Dr Achim Wuesthof, an endocrinologist specialising in children and adolescents, who is treating the teenager at a clinic in Hamburg, said the procedure had been a success so far. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, he said that even though under-16s were not permitted to undergo a sex change in other countries, he and his colleagues felt that in this case it had been best to start earlier. He said: "To the best of my knowledge, Kim is the youngest sex change patient in the world. According to German law, two independent psychiatrists must confirm that the child is indeed transsexual and approve the sex change. Once that has been done, it is best to start as early as possible.
"Transsexuals experience the onset of puberty, and the physical changes it brings, as a serious trauma. But there is a general lack of empathy with cases like Kim's, mostly because people know little about the condition. Imagine a man that suddenly starts growing breasts or a woman that starts growing a beard against their will – that is how Kim and people like her experience puberty.
"They are not freaks, nor do they suffer mental illness. They are simply trapped in the wrong bodies. That is why it is best to help them as early as possible and reduce the trauma for them and their families."
The problem that Dr Meyenburg and other psychiatrists faced was distinguishing a true transsexual personality from a temporary gender identity crisis. Dr Meyenburg quoted an example of a 15-year-old girl who wanted to change her sex, but who revealed during counselling that she had suffered brutal sexual abuse by her father – a case for psychological, rather than hormonal therapy.
Truly Weird Dreams
These Breathe Right strips really do help me to get deep in REM sleep--with all sorts of utterly bizarre dreams as a result. Last night's dream was that we woke up late for church, and my wife was in such a hurry to get there on time (which is definitely not how my wife operates) that by the time I got to church, I realized, "Oh no, I'm still wearing pajamas and a bathrobe."
After a short squabble with her about borrowing her car keys to head home and get dressed (against, not how my wife operates), I drive back through Boise. But Boise State University football is getting ready to play one of their rivals, and the mascots representative of the rival are everywhere in the streets--vast numbers of huge black crows, many of which have been hit by cars, and are being swept up by Animal Control, and herds of enormous, furry, positively Pleistocene-looking black boars with red stripes dyed into their shaggy black fur. (Perhaps BSU was playing the GEICO Cavemen?)
