Posted in Victories on April 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Mary Ann Glendon *turns down* Notre Dame Laetare Medal:
http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/flash-mary-ann-glendon-turns-down-notre.html
Alumni stops sending in its ISK:
http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/black-monday-group-confirms-nd-alumni.html
Posted in Uncategorized on April 19, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Let me explain that I regard political correctness as worse than a lie.
A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It [is] almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.
Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.
Posted in Anti-Catholic Bigotry on Parade on April 16, 2009 | 4 Comments »
The title says it all: Pell rides papal bandwagon of death and concludes with, “Safe sex campaigns have strong political backing. But how many good Catholics will die in Africa and the Philippines before they learn that in the 21st century disobeying the Vatican line is a matter of life and death?”
Uncle Di responds:
How many people would contract AIDS (or any venereal disease) if Church teaching were followed? Zero. Yet when actions of those who hold her in contempt boomerang back upon them, she is blamed for the effects of their recklessness. As I’ve said before: other institutions are held responsible for hardships resulting from obedience to their teachings; the Church is held responsible for hardships resulting from defiance of hers…Just curious. I have no way of checking Marr’s claim that Australia waged the world’s most successful war on AIDS, but if his grasp of public health is as reliable as his history of Christian doctrine, one is — how to put it? — ill-advised to accept a clean syringe from his hands.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
James Bowman comments on what us in the blogsphere encounter all the time: defenders of The Same Old Crap demonstrating incredulity that, well, defies credulity:
There must be some significance to the fact that, for the moment at any rate, while we in America have moved on from random shootings of schoolchildren and young adults to random shootings of old people the school shootings have started turning up in Europe. The most recent example happened in Germany a couple of weeks ago. Though not extensively reported in the American press, the latest massacre got a lot of attention in Europe, as did the fact that the murderer was a keen player of violent video games — which naturally led to an effort in the anti-”censorship” media to exonerate such games from any culpability in the massacre. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Michael Deacon wrote:
It puzzles me, this implication that violent “low art” is to blame. “High art” often contains shocking violence, too, yet one never reads an article that implies a connection between “high art” and murder. Nobody, I feel fairly sure, would suggest that Shakespeare is a dangerous influence on the young. Nobody would fret that reading Hamlet might encourage an adolescent loner to murder his uncle, or that Titus Andronicus might prompt him to butcher two men, bake their remains in a pie and feed it to the men’s mother. Nobody is campaigning for the removal from the national curriculum of Romeo and Juliet on the grounds that it glamorises suicide. Like video games, literature has a habit of presenting vile characters in a favourable light. The narrator of A Clockwork Orange is a rapist – a witty, intelligent rapist. The narrator of Lolita is a paedophile — a witty, intelligent paedophile. While I was a teenager, I managed to read both these books without a horrified teacher, parent or indeed journalist dashing them from my hand.
I can’t decide just how disingenuous Mr Deacon is being, or if he really can’t see the very obvious differences between Hamlet and Grand Theft Auto IV — now available, as I mentioned in a post last week, in a version for the Nintendo DS, the successor to the Game Boy. In case he can’t, it is this. The violence of what he calls “high art” — at least that which includes Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov among its practitioners — has a moral context and that of video games has none. Is it credible that there could be no connection between a boy’s training himself up to a taste for contextless violence, violence for the mere thrill of it, and his obvious failure to have seen any moral context to his decision to gun down 15 of his classmates?
He also highlights something easily applied to the recent Notre Dame nonsense:
Though police found a cache of weapons in the Nevada man’s parents’ house, where he lived, including many of the same guns used by his hero, he hadn’t actually harmed anyone, and his lawyer argued that the e-mails, which only implied a threat instead of making one directly, had only been his way of “initiating a discussion on causes of school violence.”
Boy! You can get away with anything, so long as it initiates a discussion.
Full entry here: http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=265
Posted in Uncategorized on April 1, 2009 | 1 Comment »
And the condomaniacs get away with it because John Q Public doesn’t understand that probability is multiplicative, not additive; the odds (of preventing infection) go down as he continues his risk-taking.
NIH advertises an 86% effective rate for condoms in preventing pregnancy. Lets put that in terms we can understand:
Would you jump out of a plane with 99 others skydivers, knowing that 14 parachutes wouldn’t open? then get in and do it again and again and… the probability of surviving 10 jumps is only 22%, 20 jumps and its down to 4%, and there is only 1% chance of surviving 30 jumps.
The probability of surviving 100 jumps is .0000282%.
Now, no one will tell you the probability of a condom’s effectiveness preventing HIV infection (because to run a test would be highly immoral and even considered unethical by the secularists), so the only thing we can go on is the high failure rate of condoms in preventing pregnancy.
Hat tip to Fr. Philip here: http://hancaquam.blogspot.com/2009/03/stats-never-lie-media-usually-do.html
