Echoes in Eternity

Our newest addition...

This is another sign of the imminent collapse of Western society...

So now the global warming community acknowledges that the quantity of hurricanes is NOT linked to global warming. Never mind that many scientists (like Dr. Gray) have been saying this for years, they wouldn't listen to it until one of their own told them the obvious. Makes one wonder about the veracity of the rest of their "science."

In an utterly Orwellian moment this week, a Barack Obama supporter was forced to step down as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention after she was ticketed (you read it correctly, ticketed) for telling two neighbor children (who happen to be black) to stop playing in the trees like monkeys. Even though the Hispanic woman likely meant no racial undertones to her comment, their mother heard it and thought otherwise, calling the police, who in turn fined the woman $75 for disorderly conduct.

So now the government oppresses its citizens for SAYING the wrong thing... guess they've never heard of the First Amendment. Also, why do so many people automatically assume the worst about everyone else's motives? Are people so narcissistic that every word is a personal affront to their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc?

This whole incident brings to mind the movie (and book) The Human Stain (2000), in which Anthony Hopkins plays the part of Professor Coleman Silk, who is forced out of his job for wondering aloud in class if two perpetually-absent black students are "spooks" (meaning "ghosts"). The ironic catch: Silk is himself a black man, who has secretly lived as a white man since he was a young man (his skin color is remarkably light, allowing him to pull off this deception). That story was likely based on a true story from 1999 where a white aide to the black mayor of Washington, D.C. used the word "niggardly" (meaning "stingy" or "miserly") in regards to a budget. Unfortunately for him, an ignorant idiot (who happened to be black) heard him use that word, and reported him. The aide was forced to resign because of that one person's stupidity and everyone else's lack of common sense.

Charlton Heston died this past Saturday, possibly of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 84. He was best known for his starring roles in Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Planet of the Apes, as well as his role as president of the NRA. But that's about the limit of most people's knowledge of his politically-active life, since, as another Chuck (Mr. Norris) said this week, "the media have given only scant mention to his activism through the years, largely because it was tenaciously conservative."

Heston began his adult life as a Democrat, but by the 1970's had switched to a conservative Republican. But even before he changed party affiliations, he was already promoting conservative values, marching with Martin Luther King and fighting for civil rights before it was fashionable. Throughout his life, he put character, truth, and justice ahead of his own personal ambitions. He was an American hero and patriot who will be longer remembered than most current actors, especially the likes of George Clooney, who once unapologetically mocked Heston's illness. As a great example of Heston's bravery in the culture wars, here is a speech he gave in 1999 at the Harvard Law School.

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. "My Daddy," he said, "pretends to be people." There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling re-painted I'll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I'm never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I'm the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: if my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty, your own freedom of thought, your own compass for what is right.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."

Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I'm sure you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you, the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up a little. About a year or two ago, I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms of American citizens. I ran for office. I was elected, and now I serve. I serve as a moving target for the media who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know, I'm pretty old, but I sure Lord ain't senile.

As I've stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are -- are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 -- and long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist.

I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life -- throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I'm talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind like that. You are using language not authorized for public consumption."

But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys -- subjects bound to the British crown.

In his book, "The End of Sanity," Martin Gross writes that

"blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly twisted on us -- foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the country, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like it."

Let me read you a few examples [of political correctness]...

Now, what does all of this mean? Among other things, it means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to -- to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?
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You are the best and the brightest. You, here in this fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River. You are the cream. But I submit that you and your counterparts across the land are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it, you are, by your grandfathers' standards, cowards.
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Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Democracy is dialogue. Who will defend the core values of academia, if you, the supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead, "Don't shoot me."

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does -- does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.
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But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?

Well, the answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey the social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom.

I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam.

In that same spirit, I' m asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful. It hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated, to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water Cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort.
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When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself, jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office. When your university is pressured -- your university -- is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors, choke the halls of the Board of Regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and then gets hauled into court for sexual harassment, march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you -- petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month, boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country.

If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.

I thank you.

RIP, Mr. Heston.

Now this is just disgusting...

Melanie Phillips wrote a fantastic article this week discussing the utter moral collapse of the underclass of Western society.

You couldn’t avoid doing a double-take when you read it.

Karen Matthews, mother of the missing schoolgirl Shannon who thankfully was discovered alive and well a few days ago, referred to her daughter and one of her other six children as ‘twins’. These children are actually aged nine and ten.

But Ms Matthews says they are twins because she thinks that’s what you call children who have the same father. With seven children by five different men, she seems to have no idea of what having the same father actually means.

This little vignette is as frightening as it is illuminating. It reveals not merely ignorance of some pretty basic facts about reproduction. Far worse, one of the most fundamental and universal features of human society - the connection between children and their fathers - is something which Ms Matthews does not appear even to register.

Cases like this expose the lethal hole at the heart of our society. There has been a great deal of criticism of Ms Matthews’s household arrangements, as well as the ‘unconventional’ lifestyle of Fiona MacKeown, mother of the 15-year-old girl murdered in Goa, who produced nine children by five different fathers.

Both women have been portrayed as irresponsible or feckless mothers. Now there’s a backlash with people saying they should not be blamed.

But why not? Here are no fewer than 16 children (one of whom now tragically lies dead) who have been exposed to harm, risk, emotional neglect and worse as a result of the gross irresponsibility of their mothers and fathers.

Ms Matthews has been denounced as an unfit parent by her own mother, who has claimed that Shannon and her siblings have suffered an awful life at the violent hands of Ms Matthews’s current boyfriend in residence, Craig Meehan — a charge he has strenuously denied. Ms MacKeown, meanwhile, has subjected her children to the anarchy of a hippy lifestyle.

Herself a cannabis smoker, her eldest son has a serious drug habit and mental health problems; while her murdered daughter Scarlett’s diary has revealed a confused and distressed child who was regularly stoned on drugs and got ‘stressy’ if she went two days without sex.

Yet Ms MacKeown also deserves pity as a mother grieving for her murdered daughter. And who could not sympathise with the joy and relief of Karen Matthews at finding her child alive and well?

These women have feelings no less than anyone else, after all. The problem is that these feelings have been channelled into the most twisted tributaries so that the very essence of love - putting the interests of someone else first - and the disciplines of everyday life that are essential to safeguard those interests, are to them a closed book.

The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.

But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.

An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.

Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
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Our society has encouraged people to think they have an absolute right to live exactly as they want without anyone passing judgment upon them. You want lifestyle choice? This may be an extreme case, but what happened to 15-year-old Scarlett is the result.

Seventeen years ago, the alarm was first sounded about these problems by two sociologists, Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, who warned that the bonds of civilised society would eventually snap following the collapse of the traditional family.

From that moment, well-heeled liberals denounced and vilified not just these academics but anyone who similarly pointed out that, in general, children in fractured families suffered harm in every area of their lives.

Those who went to such lengths to suppress this truth are the very same people who are complaining today that criticism of Ms Matthews and Ms MacKeown is unfair.

They are people for whom the pursuit of adult desires is so all-consuming that they simply don’t see the distress of the children or abandoned spouses or lovers who are the casualties of this free-for-all.

They are people who think it is altogether indecent to criticise parents for negligence - but that it is not indecent to abandon children to the chaos, distress and literally life-threatening environment of fatherlessness.

Indeed, even though fractured family life vastly increases the risk of abuse, violence and murder, our deeply irresponsible overclass has put rocket fuel behind its exponential growth through tax and welfare incentives. After all, Ms MacKeown was able to travel with her children to Goa in the first place only because she had been able to save £7,000 from her welfare benefits.

In that sense, it is indeed wrong to heap all the blame on women like her or, for that matter, the fathers of these poor children. The people who are really culpable are all those who, intoning the mantra of ‘alternative lifestyle choice’, have defeated every attempt to shore up marriage and the traditional family.

In its place, they have deliberately and wickedly created over the years a legal and welfare engine of mass fatherlessness and child abandonment, resulting in a degraded and dependent underclass and a lengthening toll of human wreckage.
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Years of social engineering have brought the British family to its knees. Today, thousands of children, like the murdered Scarlett Keeling and the rescued Shannon Matthews, are paying the price.

Today, in his weekly column, Chuck Norris reproduced President Roosevelt's World War II prayer, applying it to today as our nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

With this week commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and roughly the 1,975th Holy Week of Christendom, I am overwhelmed with the convergence of two monumental sacrifices. On the one hand, there are about 4,000 service members (as well as roughly 300 coalition troops) who heroically gave up their lives for freedom. On the other hand, there is the one kingdom patriot who sacrificed his life upon a cross nearly two millennia ago for our sins. His words, which apply to both sacrificial acts of service, still resound: "Greater love has no one than this: that one lay down his life for a friend."
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This week, I present [Roosevelt's] prayer to the one who liberates our souls on behalf of those who fight and have fought to liberate from political tyrannies -- from Afghanistan to America:

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters and brothers of brave men overseas -- whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

Last week, Mike Adams, a writer on Townhall.com, called out Ann Coulter for her recent campaigning for Hillary. A couple weeks ago, I posted portions of one of her first pro-Hillary columns which made the case that voting for a liberal Democrat would be better in the long run for the country than voting for a mostly liberal (or at least wishy-washy) Republican. At the time, I hadn't decided what I was going to do as far as November is concerned, but after reading and thinking some more about the issue, I believe it most prudent to vote for McCain in November. Mike Adams makes a part of the case here:

[J]oin me in imaging the following three-part scenario: 1) the choice for President comes down to McCain and Clinton; 2) Ann Coulter sticks by her guns and supports her “girl” Hillary; 3) Clinton is elected.

It should go without saying that Roe v. Wade will never be over-turned if those three things happen. Even a one-term Clinton presidency will give her at least two picks for the USSC. And we can all expect picks with the ideology of a Laurence Tribe (or maybe an Alan Dershowitz) coming from President Rodham Clinton.

On the other hand, a President McCain may well pick judges who think like Chief Justice John Roberts. And that would provide at least some hope that Roe could be over-turned.

When it appeared that Rudy Giuliani was the front runner for the Republican nomination Ann said she could never support him for president because he is pro-choice. But Giuliani is a pro-choice Republican who opposes partial-birth abortion. Clinton is a pro-choice Democrat who supports partial-birth abortion. Why does the same litmus test not apply? What explains the inconsistency in Coulter’s position?

The answer is really very simple: Ann Coulter cares more about selling books than she cares about saving babies.

Theodore Dalrymple wrote a good piece this week on the cultural and intellectual ravages of multiculturalism in the Western world.

One of the paradoxical effects of multiculturalism as a doctrine and tenet of political correctness is how completely uninterested it renders the population in the effect its behaviour has on people of other lands when it goes abroad. And there is a good logical reason why this should be so.

I have been reading recently about the case of Scarlett Keeling, the 15 year old girl recently raped and murdered in Goa. As reported in the newspapers, her mother saw fit to leave her there while she went off elsewhere in India; and the girl herself was last seen at 4.00 am on the day of her death in a drunken state as she left a beach bar.
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Nothing, of course, can possibly excuse the crime itself; and any mother who loses a child in such a way is worthy of sympathy. No error of judgement, however serious, deserves to be punished in this fashion. Nevertheless, what the mother said in response to a senior Goanese policeman's remarks, to the effect that foreign women ought to be more careful in Goa, strikes me as the very acme of immaturity, unpleasantly leavened with arrogance.

She said,

If they are saying it's dangerous for British people, then it's the government's responsibility to warn people. There should be signs up, but there aren't. Instead, it's advertised as a hippy paradise, so you don't feel it's dangerous when you walk around.

Even allowing for the guilt that the mother must be feeling, this is a remarkable statement.

What she appears to be implying is that British visitors are so important that foreign governments have the duty to protect them at all times of the day and night from the consequences of their own behaviour, however unattractive, degraded and irresponsible it might be; and that, in the absence of official warning notices, parents should assume that it is safe and proper to leave their adolescent daughters drinking into the early hours of the morning in unknown company over which they have absolutely no control. The argument seems to go, what is now almost the norm in Britain in the line of crude, vulgar and slatternly disinhibition ought to be accepted everywhere else as the norm as well.
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This belief has two intellectual presuppositions behind it. The first is the consumerist notion that the customer is always right, in fact can do no wrong, and that the possession of purchasing power confers upon him unlimited rights while imposing equally unlimited liabilities upon those who cater to his purchasing power. If a town, for example, relies economically upon tourism, then its inhabitants have simply to accept however the tourists choose to behave. He who takes a customer's money becomes, in effect, the customer's slave; and he must accordingly swallow his pride and his disgust.

I do not think I have to spell out to civilised people what is wrong with this attitude. However much we may value a strong commerce, we do not believe in buying people, body, mind and soul; and was it not Montesquieu who said that wherever there is a commercial people, there is a polite people? I cannot help but see in this mass boorishness a harbinger of economic as well as of cultural disaster.

The second intellectual presupposition behind this arrogant and one might even say militant coarseness is multiculturalism. There is an unfortunate and frequently unnoticed corollary of the multiculturalist dogma that all cultures are equal in worth and value, in all respects: namely, that our own pattern of behaviour, whatever it may be, is also above criticism. Therefore there is no reason for us even to try to see ourselves as others see us; the duty of others is to accept us as we are, just as we, supposedly, have accepted them as they are.

And since we have become convinced that permissiveness is the highest stage of Man, and that the enjoyment of crudely sensuous pleasure is the highest and indeed only possible worthwhile goal in life, then it follows that no one has the right to criticise our behaviour when we go in search of that goal.
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Now it so happens that people who behave in this disgusting fashion usually have a sixth sense as to where it will and where it will not be tolerated; that is to say, they are both bullies and cowards. This is another very unpleasant aspect of the character that multiculturalist ideas have helped to develop.

I hesitate to put myself forward as a paragon, because as a youth I was very far from it; but when at the age of 16 I hitchhiked with a French friend round Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and France (I thought it unduly cautious of my parents that they allowed me to go no further) I was already aware of the need, not merely practical but ethical, to make myself unobjectionable to the people among whom I moved, which required that I observe them closely.

When, for example, I stayed in a monastery in France, I realised, notwithstanding the callow youth that I was, and that I was in an environment with which I was completely unfamiliar, that this was not the moment to rehearse my village-atheist arguments against the existence of God, arguments that I believed to be absolutely irrefutably valid; and I was duly rewarded for my restraint, because, all unexpectedly, I conceived a profound admiration for the monks, and developed a sympathy for them (and nuns) that has never left me since. Indeed, I rather regret that I did not have the religious faith that would have enabled me to withdraw from the world as they had - but that, of course, is another matter.

It was not any multiculturalist doctrine that enabled me to develop a sympathetic admiration for the monks. It was rather an awareness of the ethical requirement to behave differently in different surroundings that allowed me to do so, an awareness that British tourists who think that Goa (and other places) should simply put up with their coarseness have obviously never developed: for multiculturalism assures them to behave coarsely is as good as good as behaving in any other way, and that no one has the right to object to it.

The war on homeschooling and parental rights just took a big step forward in this country...

[UPDATE] The Governator has spoken up denouncing the court's decision.

“Every California child deserves a quality education, and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children. . . Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. . . This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts, and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will.”

[UPDATE] Chuck Norris has now written about this travesty of a ruling.

The Titanic of science, anthropogenic global warming, continues to take on water. This week, speaking at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, put out a clarion call for civil action against those who would promote climate change alarmism. The conference brought together over 200 scientists from around the world to discuss the science behind the faddish fraud of global warming. These skeptics (or scientists, as we used to call them) believe that climate change is vastly exaggerated and are attempting to educate the world on the issue. The following contains excerpts from the opening comments at the conference.

This is a truly historic event, the first international conference devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We’re asking questions such as:

how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?

how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?

how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and

is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?
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Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

82 percent said global warming is happening, but only

56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only

35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.”

That’s a long ways from “consensus.”
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Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of step with the real “consensus.” They claim to be certain that global warming is occurring, convinced it is due to human causes, and 100 percent confident we can predict future climates.

Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the skeptics?

These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are told by many distinguished scientists?
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These scientists and economists deserve to be heard. They have stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.

And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous.

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”
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The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say--over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people. Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still hope to.

But they have lost the debate.

Winners don’t exaggerate. Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.

As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his $200,000 honorarium. He refused. We invited some of the well-known scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.
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Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.

The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory. It can be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a “consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.
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It is my hope... that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, in the U.S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.

Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal. Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve.

So, not only has the earth's temp stayed stagnant for the last 6 years, we now learn that it looks like it is starting to cool. Now, why does that sound so familiar? Oh wait, that's right, because Dr. Gray predicted it a couple of years ago. Hmm, oh well, I guess Al Gore can go find a real job.

I happened across this column by Chuck Norris (yes, that Chuck Norris, the guy who has tears that cure cancer but unfortunately never cries). Simply put, it is amazing. Not because it says any great new truth, but because it is truth and only truth. No wishy-washiness allowed.

On March 3, a live 10-week webinar hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle, author of "A New Earth," began. Both the book and the online course purport to be able to awaken you and our world to life's grand purpose.
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But will this religious text and its subsequent Internet churchlike gathering really lead you and our world to God's gates of splendor? Is it merely a coincidence that Winfrey and Tolle's spiritual quest aligns with one of Christendom's most sacred times of year? To me, it is more evidence of the paradigm shift in our culture from its moral absolute and Judeo-Christian basis to a relativistic worldview, in which anything goes and everything is tolerated. The fact is Tolle's "A New Earth" is being adopted and transformed into Oprah's new Easter.

Like most self-help spiritual texts of this type, it is a blend of half-truths and half-fabrications. One easily could save the purchase price of "A New Earth" -- and subsequently avoid its misleading remarks -- by reading the Bible, which gives a much more thorough and accurate picture of life's purpose and the methods for overcoming its obstacles.
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The reason Tolle's psychology and spirituality is marketed so easily is that it is an eclectic mix of conventional and unconventional wisdom, and Western and Eastern beliefs, presented in a tolerant, non-threatening and nonsectarian way. In other words, it's Religion Light, in which one can be spiritual with little down and no credit.

Tolle only quotes relatively benign sayings of Jesus, avoiding the more difficult ones. For example, Tolle notes that Jesus taught that the "kingdom of heaven" is already present on earth and can be experienced right now, but Tolle overlooks Jesus' teaching that one must be born again (by believing in him as the Son of God and Savior) to see that kingdom in the future.
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My battle is not with Oprah; she has her guru (Tolle), and I have mine (Jesus). The real war is between those who assert to be bearers of the truth, such as Tolle and Jesus. And the question is: With contradicting truths, will we believe a mere man or one who claimed to be so much more? As C.S. Lewis -- the great Oxford scholar and writer of "The Chronicles of Narnia," who was once an avid atheist -- wrote:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. …

"You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

That might not be what Oprah, Tolle or others around the world want to hear on their webinar, but he is everything we all need to obtain peace with God and peace with one another.

Again, the question is: Will we turn from what's easy, what's new, what's popular -- even what's "Oprah" -- and take a step back and rediscover the answers that have been there all along? As C.S. Lewis also said: "We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."

Rick Santorum wrote an AWESOME opinion piece last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding Barack Obama's past support for de facto infanticide. Another Obama policy that isn't quite so pretty in the light of day...

American voters will choose between two candidates this election year.
One inspires hope for a brighter, better tomorrow. His rhetoric makes us feel we are, indeed, one nation indivisible - indivisible by ideology or religion, indivisible by race or creed. It is rhetoric of hope and change and possibility. It's inspiring. This candidate can make you just plain feel good to be American.

The other candidate, by contrast, is one of the Senate's fiercest partisans. This senator reflexively sides with the party's extreme wing. There's no record of working with the other side of the aisle. None. It's basically been my way or the highway, combined with a sanctimoniousness that breeds contempt among those on the other side of any issue.

Which of these two candidates should be our next president? The choice is clear, right?

Wrong, because they're both the same man - Barack Obama.

Granted, the first-term Illinois senator's lofty rhetoric of bipartisanship, unity, hope and change makes everyone feel good. But it's becoming increasingly clear that his grand campaign rhetoric does not match his partisan, ideological record. The nonpartisan National Journal, for example, recently rated Obama the Senate's most liberal member. That's besting some tough competition from orthodox liberals such as Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer.

John McCain's campaign and conservative pundits have listed the numerous times in Obama's short Senate career where he sided with the extremes in his party against broadly supported compromises on issues such as immigration, ethics reform, terrorist surveillance and war funding. Fighting on the fringe with a handful of liberals is one thing, but consider his position on an issue that passed both houses of Congress unanimously in 2002.

That bill was the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. During the partial-birth abortion debate, Congress heard testimony about babies that had survived attempted late-term abortions. Nurses testified that these preterm living, breathing babies were being thrown into medical waste bins to die or being "terminated" outside the womb. With the baby now completely separated from the mother, it was impossible to argue that the health or life of the mother was in jeopardy by giving her baby appropriate medical treatment.

The act simply prohibited the killing of a baby born alive. To address the concerns of pro-choice lawmakers, the bill included language that said nothing "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand or contract any legal status or legal right" of the baby. In other words, the bill wasn't intruding on Roe v. Wade.

Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.

Let's be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby. Infanticide - I wonder if he'll add this to the list of changes in his next victory speech and if the crowd will roar: "Yes, we can."
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Justifying the killing of newborn babies is deeply troubling, but just as striking is his rigid adherence to doctrinaire liberalism. Apparently, the "audacity of hope" is limited only to those babies born at full term and beyond. Worse, given his support for late-term partial-birth abortions that supporters argued were necessary to end the life of genetically imperfect children, it may be more accurate to say the audacity of hope applies only to those babies born healthy at full term.

Obama's supporters say his rhetoric makes them believe again.

Is this the kind of change and leader you believe in?