TrueNorth

The Secular Right

A group of conservative writers, including John Derbyshire of NRO, have started a new blog called "The Secular Right".  About time.  It has always seemed odd to me that the left wing seems to own the skeptic arena when I believe it is the natural province of the curmudgeonly conservative temperament (such as the one John Derbyshire exhibits most ably in the Corner).

Though a long-time National Review and Commentary reader, I have always felt that both publications presume their readers are mostly believers (though the secular are graciously welcomed).   I have never seen the connection myself between conservatism and religion.  To me, Christianity is a collectivist idea (like socialism) that sounds a lot better in theory than it ever works out in practice and a true conservative would be just as likely to mistrust the one as the other.

That being said, I have to definitely affirm that the guys at NRO are "my team", for better or worse.  They may have a lot of wacky ideas, but I would rather hang around with them than with the zealots at the Nation (or the snooty crowd at the New Republic, for that matter).  The most salient index of group solidarity is probably an affinity for the same kind of humour, and by that standard NRO, with the likes of Steyn and Goldberg, is definitely where I belong.

(C.S. Lewis fans may understand when I say that the character of his whom I most identify with, even allowing for the author's biases, is the atheist McPhee in "That Hideous Strength". )

Obama and infanticide

The Witherspoon Institute

It gets worse yet. In an act of breathtaking injustice which the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist's unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability. This legislation would not have banned any abortions. Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not affect abortion laws. (This is one of the points Obama and his campaign lied about until they were caught.) The federal version of the bill passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it. For him, a child marked for abortion gets no protection-even ordinary medical or comfort care-even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her mother. So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of infanticide.

GodTube

Just one more reason to be glad you are an atheist.  The mental horizons on display at this site are so limited that I actually get depressed watching these videos.

I agree!

Suddenly being green is not cool any more | Alice Thomson - Times Online

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Abortion legalized in Germany for the first time by? You guessed it...but just for "inferior" races

lifeissues.net | The Abortion and Eugenics Policies of Nazi Germany

We now turn to Nazi abortion policy. As we have seen, there had been agitation throughout the Weimar period to liberalize/legalize abortion. This resulted in a compromise: Liberalization. Abortion remained illegal but was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor, making the punishment essentially a fine and not a prison sentence.

Hence, in 1933, in their first year of power, the Nazis passed a law forbidding abortion to Germans, increasing the penalties as they had been before Weimar liberalization.(24) The Nazis wanted to increase the birthrate so as to have soldiers for their military. In March 1934, however, the Hereditary Health Court in Hamburg rendered a judgment which stated that abortion on grounds of racial health was not an offense. In its decision, it referred to a Supreme Court decision during the Weimar democracy seven years earlier, allowing the procedure for "medical necessities."(25) In June 1935 the sterilization law was also amended to allow abortions on eugenic grounds and these abortions had to be followed by sterilizations, dependent -- technically -- on the woman's consent.(26) Thus, sterilization, eugenics and abortion all come together.

For the first time in German history, abortion was legal. But one cannot ignore the roots reaching back almost fifteen years to the beginning of the Weimar democracy, during which time arguments had been made that unborn life was not that important so was therefore expendable. Despite the racial theories behind this decision there were some non-Nazis who approved because of the allowing of choice.(27) In 1938 the government announced that Jews could have abortions at any time, since this could only benefit the German people.(28) The Jews, as well as "unfit" Germans, had a "choice" most Germans did not. This meant that the Nazis saw abortion as a very useful weapon against undesirables; e.g. as an act of elimination.

Well, if you are going to give Morgenthaler the Order of Canada...

A warning from Canada to those who value life

Chaim Shmuel Golubchuk, a"h, has gone to his Eternal reward. But the issues that pitted his children Percy Golubchuk and Miriam Geller against Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg over the last seven months will long be with us.


After being informed by their father's doctors that they intended to end his life by removing his ventilation and feeding tube, the Golubchuk children sought an injunction against the hospital. They argued that their father would adamantly oppose any attempt to shorten his life, which is forbidden by Jewish law.

Comments from the founder of the Weather Channel

John Coleman's Comments Before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce | KUSI - News, Weather and Sports - San Diego, CA | Coleman's Corner

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

The future of our civilization lies in the balance.

That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

Abortion in the Third World

Mark Steyn on Women in the West on National Review Online

Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the “female feticide.” Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, “touted as the key to liberating future generations of women,” has become instead “the preferred means of eradicating them”.

The inner contradictions of liberalism

Muslim irate over transgender driving instructor

A Muslim man is threatening legal action against an all-female driving school in Britain after the company sent a transgendered man to teach his wife how to drive.

"You have sent me a man. Send me a proper female. How dare you send a man with a deep voice?" the unnamed customer told Joanne Dixon, who runs the Laugh 'n' Pass school in West Yorkshire.

Good Wired article on Greens getting everything wrong

Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

The environmental movement has never been short on noble goals. Preserving wild spaces, cleaning up the oceans, protecting watersheds, neutralizing acid rain, saving endangered species — all laudable. But today, one ecological problem outweighs all others: global warming. Restoring the Everglades, protecting the Headwaters redwoods, or saving the Illinois mud turtle won't matter if climate change plunges the planet into chaos. It's high time for greens to unite around the urgent need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Just one problem. Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs.