Taking risks, suffering consequences

Nearly two weeks have passed since CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan was sexually and physically assaulted in Tahrir Square, Cairo, by a group of Egyptian Muslim males who thought she was a Jew. Similarly, nearly two weeks have passed since Angella Johnson was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square, though not as severely as Logan, thankfully. More than three weeks have passed since CNN’s Anderson Cooper and his crew were assaulted and ABC’s Brian Hartman was carjacked and threatened with beheading. Reports indicate approximately 140 journalists have been injured or killed in Egypt in the past month. And just this past week, four Americans, including a Christian missionary couple sailing around the world distributing Bibles, were captured and killed by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden.

In each of these cases, the associated risks were well-known and accepted by the would-be victims. The acceptance of the potential consequences, even in naïveté, does not mean the victims deserved to be assaulted or killed. This argument, made by some in recent weeks, is particularly insidious for it implies that risk-takers should be punished for daring to take risks. It carries undertones of cowardice and timidity, of condemnation for those who dare to accomplish great things, of malice toward those who courageously accept the enormous potential sum on the risk calculator.

I condemn that line of thinking because risk-taking is the substance of life. Rewards are often the greatest where the risks are highest. Unfortunately, those risks sometimes materialize and the consequences are very costly, even to the taking of human lives.

Men (and women) who risk little accomplish little. We need more men and women who are willing to risk greatly to accomplish incredible things and less men and women who would sneer at those who stumble in the fight. Men and women that risk great loss to report news from the four corners of the globe, or bring the Gospel to the four corners of the globe, deserve our respect. I do not count them among the timid and weak souls; they are the bold, the living and the free. They deserve sympathy as much as any other man when the risks they accept as part of a job, or simply as a matter of living, materialize and cause them great harm.

The victims in each of these cases are bearing the consequences of their decisions. As much as we may wish to do so, it is now impossible to absolve them of the consequences they accepted and subsequently received. There is little point in reminding them of the fact they accepted the risk. They well know; they're living through it. And far be it from me to condemn them post facto for taking great risks. All we should say is that it is too bad the risks materialized, and then do our very best to sympathize with those who live to tell of their ordeal and grieve with those whose loved ones paid the ultimate price for freedom.

Happy hunting, boys!

Grey seal hunt begins. In your honour:

Recipe: Seal Flipper Pie

4 seal flippers
1 L water
500 ml soda
125 ml fat pork, diced
1 cup milk
2 white onions, chopped
5 ml salt
60 ml flour
250 ml cold water
5 ml Worcestershire sauce

Soak flippers in 1 L of water and soda. Trim off excess fat. dry flippers and dip in seasoned flour. Brown in pork fat. Add onions and make a gravy of flour, water, and sauce. Pour over flippers. Cover and bake at 160C for 2-3 hours. Make a pastry and cover the flippers. Bake at 220C for 30 minutes. Serves 6-8.

Go ahead Austrian man

... marry a 6-year-old girl and have sex with her when she is 9. It's not paedophilia as long as you're still married to her when she's 18. After all, what's good for the Muslim is good for the kaffir too, yes?

“Paedophilia” is factually incorrect, since paedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. Nevertheless, it does not apply to mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18. It is a “denigration of religious teachings” and are found guilty and sentenced to 120 days, which approaches the minimum of € 480.

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.

Daily Dose of Islamicism

Via.

[14-year-old] Hena was raped by her 40-year-old relative Mahbub on Sunday. Next day, a fatwa was announced at a [Bangladesh] village arbitration that she must be given 100 lashes. She fell unconscious after nearly 80 lashes.

Fatally injured Hena was rushed to Naria health complex where she succumbed to her injuries.

But remember: Canadian culture and its Judeo-Christian moral foundation are not superior to any others.

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.

"He's supporting Israel. Israel is our enemy"

Why islamist Egyptians hate Mubarak.

"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.

Dangerous ideas

By now everyone with any exposure to media has heard about the tragic shooting of Arizona's Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

In the ensuing search for answers, left-leaning pundits and politicos have all ten fingers and toes pointed toward the "evil" political right, as they usually do, this time particularly on the Tea Party and the Evil Alaskan, Sarah Palin. Fervent the neo-liberal statists are. Thoughtful and grounded in reality and history they are not.

Here in Canada, Globe and Mail columnists are busy indirectly casting aspersions a spotlight on American conservatism too, blaming Fox News for the state of political discourse in America and lamenting America's "gun problem." Indeed, how fortunate are we Canadians to not have Fox News, which might actually break through the incessant neo-liberal subterfuge filter every now and then and bring some counterpoints to the op-ed-masquerading-as-news "reporting" of the Neil MacDonald types! How blessed we are to be free of the danger of diverse thought and raucous political opinion! And guns?! Thank God for the RCMP, who pull more long guns out of the homes of hunters, sportsmen and farmers each year than they do handguns out of the hands of gangbangers, criminals and organized crime persons. Ah Canada, the great white coddled.

I digress. In the aftermath of this tragedy more than a few are seizing the moment to paint individual liberty and anything close to it as "dangerous." The right to arm oneself, the right to free speech, the corollary of open political discourse, the right to free assembly, and so on. In the wake of the Giffords shooting, inalienable freedoms are today being tagged either directly or indirectly as dangerous.

More dangerous than the bullets fired by mentally unstable men or women, however -- the real danger, if you will -- are the arguments and thoughts of those who would capitalize on tragic events to lay groundwork for the removal of rights and liberties from free men and women.

Enter William Galston at The New Republic, via Frum Forum, making the case for involuntary treatment and commitment of the "mentally disturbed," which early reports indicate accused shooter Jared Loughner certainly is. Galston's motive is security and he argues for these two changes to law.

First, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance. [...]

Second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others, let alone a “substantial” or “imminent” danger, as many states do. A delusional loss of contact with reality should be enough to trigger a process that starts with multiple offers of voluntary assistance and ends with involuntary treatment, including commitment if necessary.

Galston's argument is without doubt the most dangerous idea yet to float to the surface in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Readers should note that the proposed amendments have the greatest potential for harm when used in concert: coercion to report mental disturbance + forcible incarceration based on delusion alone.

If this equation does not illustrate the danger of Galston's preferences, here are some explicit reasons why Galston's amendments need to be flushed.

1. Mandatory disclosure overrides patient-doctor confidentiality, which upends privacy law. There is no need to inform the armed branches of the state about the mental state of citizens who pose no imminent threat to themselves or anyone else. The deal on the table is to exchange privacy all the time for the off chance that the state may be able to protect you from a delusional individual at some point in the future. Run away now.
   
   
2. Even if armed with knowledge about who's less than stable mentally, there is no guarantee whatsoever that police are going to be able to stop a mentally disturbed person from committing a crime. We all know that when seconds count the police are only minutes away. So what are police going to do? Monitor mental cases 24/7/365? Put tracking ankle bracelets on them or implant tracking devices under their skin? Or would they simply incarcerate each and every person reported to them via psychologists and psychiatrists? My bet is on the easiest route with potentially lower overall cost and the least risk to officers: confinement. Hence the nefarious power of Gaston's forcible incarceration.
   
   
3. Definitions are powerful. He who gets to decide the scope of the terms decides, by Galston's terms, who gets drugged and committed. So, who defines concepts such as "mental illness" or "delusional" or "credible evidence of mental disturbance?" Richard Dawkins, for example, like all totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century, considers religious belief patently delusional. His New Athiest comrade, Sam Harris, considers religious teaching to children a form of child abuse. Zealots on either side of the political spectrum sometimes seriously consider their opponents to mentally disturbed, delusional, even evil. Totalitarians regard political dissenters to be a threat to the public good. Some neo-liberals consider watching Fox News or believing in Creation to be evidence of being a few fries short of a happy meal. The Trojan horse of Galston's argument is terminology. With very slight tweaks in the scope of the relevant terms there can then be violations of religious and political freedom the ramifications of which Americans have seen only on foreign soil, but which Galston seems to have either forgotten or is willing to risk bringing to America.

So it is that tomorrow, under Galston's law, the very same people pointing fingers and toes at Sarah Palin and conservatives today would have the tools at their disposal to institutionalize those they consider mentally disturbed and make Fox News illegal. I'm sure that sounds fantastic to some but history tells us these sort of ideas are the most dangerous of all, for they lay a foundation that evil men leverage to crush political dissent, religious freedom and general liberty.

I hope and pray the Giffords tragedy will not go down in history as a turning point in the freedoms and rights of Americans. I suspect if you could ask Ms. Giffords today, she'd say much the same.

Update: ElRushbo strikes again. A teaser:

It was interesting on Good Morning America today, and it was interesting what wasn't in the New York Times today that they no doubt heard, that they edited out. [...]

This morning on Good Morning America a portion of an interview Ashleigh Banfield did with Zach Osler, who is a high school friend of the shooter Jared Loughner.  Ashleigh Banfield: "What was his motive in Saturday's attack and what about the speculation that he may have been fueled by partisan politics and rhetoric in the media?"

OSLER: He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn't listen to political radio. He didn't take sides. He wasn't on the left; he wasn't on the right.

RUSH: Doesn't that kind of debunk virtually all speculation that we have heard since 30 minutes after the shooting on Saturday in the media?

Abortion City, NY

The [New York] city health department last month released statistics that showed 41 percent of pregnancies were terminated in 2009.

Lament.

I am a violent parent

... so saith leftist nutbar Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette. Ezra Levant, ripping her a new one:

Celine Hervieux-Payette has introduced bill S-204 that, if passed into law, would expose parents to assault charges for spanking a child, QMI Agency's Brian Lilley reports.

She would repeal Criminal Code section 43, which protects parents and teachers "using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child," as long as that force is "reasonable under the circumstances." [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada is liberal, especially on social issues. You've got to go to the hard left the anti-parent left, the government-is-your-nanny left to be further left than they are.

Which Hervieux-Payette certainly is.

She's the same senator who wants a law forcing Canadian companies to have 50% of their directors be women.

It's not surprising that someone who thinks the government is a better parent than actual parents are, also thinks the government is better at running businesses than actual businesses are.

So what would Hervieux-Payette's enlightened Canada look like? Her speech promoting her bill is revealing.

Canadian parents who spank, even in accordance with the Supreme Court's rule about gentleness, are "violent," she says.

I have but one statement and one question.

The statement is for Mme. Hervieux-Payette: PISS OFF!

The question is for everyone: When are we going to call on government to allow the election and turfing of Senators?

Recession proof, eh?

Uh oh. Looks like some private sector CEOs are making a lot of money and aren't feeling the pinch of the recession.

It reminds me of another group that is doing very well while the private sector takes a pounding.

Merry Christmas!

From our family to yours, a very merry Christmas and sincere hopes for a bright and prosperous 2011.

To center our thoughts this day on Christ, His miraculous advent and glorious plan of salvation, "The Servant King" by Graham Kendrick.

From heaven you came, Helpless Babe,

Entered our world, Your glory veiled;

Not to be served but to serve,

And give Your life that we might live.

This is our God, the Servant King,
He calls us now to follow Him,
To bring our lives as a daily offering
Of worship to the Servant King.

There in the garden of tears,

My heavy load He chose to bear;

His heart with sorrow was torn,

'Yet not My will but Yours,' He said.

Come see His hands and His feet,

The scars that speak of sacrifice;

Hands that flung stars into space

To cruel nails surrendered.

So let us learn how to serve,

And in our lives enthrone Him;

Each other's needs to prefer,

For it is Christ we're serving.

Houston, we have a problem

U.S. Population: 308,745,538. U.S. National Debt: $13,875,380,000,000 and counting.

That's $45,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

And for those that advocate big-freedom limited government, like me, a tax lesson.

... growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Update: What happens when a state goes after millionaires? They leave. Oregon should have learned from Maryland. But, hey, since when have politicians let common sense stand in the way of a plan to take more money from people who've earned it?

Crying rape

Rape is not something to spoken of lightly, neither is it a charge to be laid haphazardly. It is one of the most serious of crimes, and our laws reflect this by harshness of penalty.

Yet in recent weeks it seems a few women have decided to try and leverage the gravity of this abhorrent type of abuse either for personal gain or to add weight to their arguments or as an act of revenge, to their eternal shame.

WABC/Channel 7 weather babe Heidi Jones was arrested for perpetrating the ultimate snow job -- falsely claiming to cops that a man had tried to rape her while she was jogging in Central Park...

Khloe Kardashian has come under fire from a number of women's advocates after comparing the TSA's new screening procedures to "rape," during an appearance on "Lopez Tonight."

And, more controversially, the rape charges involving Wikileaks' Julian Assange, which may be proven bona fide but presently appear to be flimsy cases of consent withdrawn ipso facto due to bruised female egos, busted condoms and subsequent refusal to get an HIV test.

Playing fast and loose with the charge of rape denigrates its real victims and exposes a monumental ignorance of its severity and impact. What is more, accusations of false rape affect perceptions of future legitimate claims, much like crying wolf. After all, who could blame the New York police officer for thinking about Heidi Jones the next time a woman presents at the local precinct saying she was raped in Central Park?