Stephen Hawking's fairy tale

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

He's correct, of course, that the brain is a magnificent computer, though brain component failure is not the normal cause of death, rather the failure of supporting systems.

He's also correct that the human brain doesn't go to heaven or hell. From dust it came and to dust it returns, no different than, say, one's kidneys.The human soul, however, is another question. Either Hawking considers the brain and the soul one and the same or is of the impression that humans do not have a soul.

On the existence of heaven, however, he's the one telling fairy tales. Or Jesus Christ was an absolute lunatic and liar.

Your call.

Ignorance is bliss

Until it mercilessly gropes your nether regions.

Before the assault, Ms. [Lara] Logan said, she did not know about the levels of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other countries regularly experienced.

How could that possibly be?

In which farting becomes a criminal act

Indigenous Andean Gaia worship, writ large. Because what's good for Bolivia must be thrust upon us all.

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country. [...]

Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth... grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities, and the right to be free from pollution.

Jesus is the Light of the World

You don't need to erect a 25-foot cross to prove it. Just get out there and live like He asked you to. Serving the community will work a far greater eternal reward for you than peeving them off.

No place for religion in Quebec schools

Excepting the Cult of Gaia, of course.

Is the cult of environmentalism now so zealous and pernicious that it has come to this – a six-year-old Quebec kindergartener is punished for bringing a sandwich to school in a plastic bag? What’s next, suspending him for using a nightlight that has an incandescent bulb rather than a compact fluorescent one? [...]

Recently, Felix began crying when his mom went to pack his lunch in a resealable plastic bag. When asked what the trouble was, Felix told his parents that his kindergarten class had had a draw for a stuffed toy, but that he had been excluded from the contest because his teacher had found a plastic sandwich bag in his lunch kit. So he pleaded with his mom not to make him an enviro-criminal again.

For the record....

Educational curriculum always promulgates a set of beliefs and ideals, subtly, in most cases, and incessantly, year over year over year. There is always an indisputable dogma being promoted and reinforced. Educators themselves are hardly objective. Except for the scattered "rogue" teacher, they promote and enforce the cultural, religious and sociological ideals of the system in lockstep. Breaking the mold makes you a troublemaker and is a surefire way to crimp your status with the school administration and hinder your advancement through the union ranks. If you're not a believer, if you're not "with the program," then you're in for a rough ride.

And so it is that in Quebec public schools, while organized religious activities of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, etc., are considered verboten outside of some sort of innocuous World Religion and Ethics course, a totalitarian environmentalist program can be implemented at a school-wide level with compliance rewarded and non-compliance punished down to the youngest child.

Similarly, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is poised to "take over" all education curriculum, including that of private and home schools, according to the Family Coalition Party of Ontario.

The question is not whether or not any credo will be taught to the next generation as much as it is which one(s) will be taught.

"Why the left hates Sarah Palin"

Until now, I have contended that Sarah Palin would be positively portrayed from coast to coast to coast in the media if she simply became a member of the DNC.

I have learned that I am wrong. Not only is it logically impossible for Palin to belong to the party of the neo-liberals, she would continue to be hated even if she was a Democrat because of who she is.

Via SDA, Evan Sayet offers a very interesting perspective on the reasons behind the left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin. The main thesis:

... what is it about Ms. Palin’s life story that generates this blind loathing?  The answer is that, at every turn, Ms. Palin’s story debunks the myths of victimization and self-centeredness that is at the heart of the modern liberal ideology.

Update 1: I almost forgot. The whole "blood libel" brouhaha. The Jews do not own that term. They have been victims of the promulgation of multiple blood libels, true, but blood libel as a term or concept is not verboten because Jews have been victimized by it. The term blood libel can be reasonably and logically applied whenever a person or a people group are falsely accused of a ritualistic murder of children.

Sarah Palin has been falsely accused of being an accessory to the murder of innocent people in Arizona, one of whom was a precious 9-year-old innocent girl, Christina Green. The only point on which one could therefore possibly dispute Palin's usage of the term blood libel is in regards to ritual. In all other respects, her usage of the term is accurate both historically and by definition.

Update 2: Another insightful view by "recovering liberal" Robin of Berkeley, who adds real life application and experience to the reasons expounded by Sayet. Hat tip again to SDA.

I've always wondered why Barbara was chosen to be tortured, and not a nerdy girl instead.  But after beholding the horrible treatment of Sarah Palin, I finally understand: Barb was a sweet and happy and innocent child.  The leaders of [our summer camp] pack wanted to knock her down from her high horse. [...]

... there's a darker reason for the abject hatred of Palin, and the clues can be found in that Catskill Mountains bunk.  Because evil can manifest when people project their own badness and shame onto another.

People on the left hate Palin for one simple reason: because she is everything they are not.  She is their polar opposite because her life journey has diverged from the prescribed liberal path. 

Update 3: James Taranto, WSJ. Neo-liberal women hate Sarah Palin because

a) she is beautiful,
b) "she has risen above her station" without following the feminist liberal line or attending an Ivy League school or compromising her values, and
c) she does not support abortion.

If only Palin was rank, held an MBA from Harvard, slept with a couple profs or execs to punch through the glass ceiling, forced her unwed daughter to have an abortion and just flushed her defective Trig, they would love her. Which is precisely what Robin of Berkeley is saying.

"The feminist deception"

Caroline Glick hauls the "feminist" movement on the carpet.^* Do read it all.

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.

But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as "structurally" discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women. [...]

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement.

^* I put feminist in quotes for reasons alluded to by Glick. It seems to me the majority of women agree on a limited set of fundamentals, e.g. women's suffrage, educational and career opportunities, to name a couple. Beyond these there is great diversity of opinion about what is real feminism.