Robert Stacy McCain has, once again, in his own initimable fashion, sallied forth from his citadel, clad in the armour of defiance and eager to poke his lance into the eye of any milksop evolutionist who happens to be strolling back from his or her laboratory clutching a copy of “The Origin of the Species”.

A minion had probably casually mentioned that Jazz Shaw had posted something about evolution and politics at Hot Air and clearly it was enough to set the Fedora on fire

I’m a six-days-and-a-rib kind of guy — a fundamentalist Bible-thumper — because (a) the Bible is true, and (b) saying so makes liberals’ heads explode.
One of the things that the Darwinist laity fail to recognize is how much of their supposed “evidence” of evolution is actually man-made. For example, go to the natural history museum and look at that display illustrating the alleged evolution of the horse. The fossil skeletons are all lined up in a row, purporting to show a direct line of ancestry.
But no such thing is proved by that display

Love it when people offer up that old evolutionist = atheist misconception….puts those Jesuits in a tight spot, doesn’t it. The trouble is that many good Christians and Jews and Hindus also quite happily accept evolution and also believe in a Deity/First Cause.

Science isn’t a religion – it’s a method of thinking based on evidence. No true scientist would say that any theory was 100% correct, they just say the weight of the evidence appears to indicate the theory provides a reasonable explanation.

Religion is not evidence based – it is faith based so comparisons with science are pointless. Genesis makes sense as a folk myth but not as a scientific explanation of the origin of humans.  However it would be difficult to debate this with RSM since he asserts that only one folk myth about creation (amongst thousands of similar tribal legends) is true.

Darwin (an agnostic rather than an atheist) also believed that religion and science demanded different thought processes….

Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities

Or take George Coyne – a Jesuit and, at one time, Director of the Vatican Observatory – who has fewer doubts than Darwin about the existence of God…

Although God transcends the universe, he is working in it through his providence and continuous creation. This stress on God’s immanence is not to place a limitation upon God. Far from it. It reveals a God who made a universe that has within it, through evolution, a certain dynamism, as seen by science, and thus participates in the very creativity of God. God emptied himself so that he could share his infinite love with his creation.  Such a view of God’s relationship to his creation can be found in early Christian writings, especially in those of St. Augustine in his comments on Genesis.

On the other hand maybe the creationist garland is part of the Runyonesque tough guy image that Stacy has invented for himself along with the hat….

Still, even when he is spouting nonsense he always does it in style (as I have admitted here when I caught him out on another rodomontade long on emotion but short on research) and if he ever came to England I would love to buy him a beer in my local pub  (“The Darwin Arms”)

Stacy, I  agree with you on a lot of political/cultural issues but I’m afraid I’ll have to nail my disagreement onto your door just as Luther did over that papal nonsense of selling indulgences in return for subscribing to the rebuild St Peters fund….

No doubt my criticism has RSM as worried as Manchester United are with the news that they are playing against a bunch of part timers from my home town though I am comforted that a right wing blog goddess has also attempted to knock his hat to one side in the comments on his post……very respectfully, of course.

My only worry is that my friend, the beautiful and gifted Cubachi, might take his side…..sigh….

Street Hill is a narrow road that curves down to the busy Balcombe Road (B2036) just a few hundred yards to Junction 10A of the M23. Even if one car is parked on the curve a driving hazard is created for vehicles coming down the hill to join the Balcombe Road so something like this is not at all helpful…

That’s right, a whole load of Sky vans parked the length of Street Hill…

Thanks a bunch, Mr Murdoch and Sky for regularly making life difficult for us. I note that your company is celebrating record profits so maybe it could afford to park it’s vans offroad. Goodness knows what the drivers are doing while their vehicles are left along there for a day but why should they worry about inconveniencing us once every few weeks – after all when Sky’s vans aren’t there a local dealer finds it useful to leave some of their stock on Street Hill.

Most of them in the picture happen to be Toyotas but I don’t think this has been done by a Toyota Dealer. These cars were stored here for most of the day last week, it’s a regular event and it is a favourite parking spot for employees of Crawley Audi so maybe we could look in that direction….after all it should be comparatively easy to trace the provenance of this car

Maybe worth contacting Sherlock Holmes?

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale caused quite a storm when her article about the superiority of Chinese mothers was published in the Wall Street Journal. Although I don’t agree with everything she said I loved the shrieks and screams it produced amongst the chattering classes both here and in the USA

First, I’ve noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

As a parent and grandparent, and after forty years of teaching teenagers in some pretty tough schools I would say Amy has a point there. Children can usually recognise false praise within a microsecond of it being given and quickly become adept at using the self esteem card to ward off any attempt to defer their own gratification.

J E Dyer, a retired naval intelligence officer and evangelical Christian, was also impressed by Chua but felt that the debate sparked off by her article needed to be seen within a cultural context.

The narrower focus on whether children should be channeled, pressured, and denied recreation is unquestionably worthwhile, but it doesn’t fully illuminate the cultural context in which our choices about that are made. For Westerners, the maternal type is as much as about the mother as it is about the performance of the children

.
Enter Sarah Palin, according to Dyer, Mama Grizzly rather than Tiger Mom

The Western counterpart of the Tiger Mom—the American counterpart in particular—can arguably be identified as the Mama Grizzly. Palin is one instance of the type: a mother of five, she runs a family business with her husband, but raising her children is Job One. She doesn’t expect her children to be perfect; she teaches them principles for honest and honorable life, and accepts that the day will come when she must trust them to act on those principles. She does encourage the children to try new things, master the skills that mean survival in the environment they will live in, and find what they love in life and what they want most to do.

Chua’s message seems to demand a total focus on the relationship between parents and children and the need to fit in with society’s expectations, very much part of the Confucian tradition. But Sarah Palin exemplifies a more western approach to society,

In this culture, a mother’s business is to broker the moral project of society for her children. And, as with all brokerage, it’s a two-sided challenge: the archetypal Mama Grizzly is as determined to shape society for her children as she is to shape her children for society.

Hence Palin’s entry into politics was initially driven by a desire to improve the community within which her children would grow and develop. Chua spent hours pushing her children to score highly in their school assignments and perform flawlessly at musical recitals. Palin spent countless hours at PTA meetings trying to ensure that her kids – and others – got a better deal.

Dyer, quite rightly in my opinion, feels that differing cultures can learn from each other

There is much to admire and learn from in Chinese and other Asian cultures. The definitive features of Western culture—society as a moral project, women as integral moral participants—are echoes of the Law of Moses and the tenets of Christianity. But in other things—honoring parents, respecting the elderly, avoiding debt, resisting sloth—the Asian cultures often reflect God’s prescription for the blessed life better than ours.

Read the rest of Dyer’s piece here – and maybe you might, like me, imagine the most famous episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska never made – the Palins and the Chuas go camping….

Sadly it appears that Allahpundit at Hot Air has finally come to the conclusion that Palin is toast. (see Allahpundit “Palin is toast” post #143) As he helpfully points out when you lose the support of such red hot Palinistas as Krauthammer, Gillespie and GOP “strategists” then your days are numbered. Even over here the creepy but incredibly influential Alex Massie (“we always read Alex Massie before we clear the dogs mess in the garden” says Mrs G of Pimlico) has to admit that only her hardcore supporters would ever vote for her now.

They are implying that she should really have adopted the deckchair ploy (“under pressure fold like a deckchair”) that has enabled so many conservative politicians on both sides of the pond to gain the approval of the chattering classes and their mouthpieces in the elite media. But her refusal to either keep quiet or accept some partial responsibility for the Tucson shootings means that she can never now attend a social event in New York, Washington or Los Angeles and be welcomed with open arms and thus be immune from obeying well established rules on a commercial flight.

That is such a pity because the initial reaction to her Facebook video response from Ed Morrissey and Hot Air readers, including many of those traditionally critical of Palin, was extremely positive. But clearly, just like British Communist Party members in 1939 when Moscow signed the Nazi/Soviet Pact, they must now obey the orders of their overlords and perform a political about turn.

Yes – Palin is toast, once again…….

Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph thinks Sarah Palin is “nuts” for using the term “blood libel” in her response to the Tucson killings and the subsequent media feeding frenzy.

1. She’s so ignorant that she doesn’t know that “blood libel” refers to the myth that Jews drink the blood of sacrificed children.
2. She does know what it means, and blurted it out anyway.

Interesting.

I guess the self styled religious expert Thompson is referring to the infamous Damascus Blood Libel of 1840. In that year a French monk, Father Thomas, vanished into thin air and the French consul in Damascus, Ratti Menton, claimed that Jewish merchants were responsible for the monk’s disappearance.

It was all part and parcel of a French attempt to re establish influence in Syria when it returned to direct Ottoman rule after several years of Egyptian control. The French were very close to the previous regime – indeed many Syrian Muslims feared that soon their land would eventually come under French rule. Once Ottoman authority was restored in 1840 some Muslims began advocating a policy of repressing the Christian minority so Menton needed an event to divert their anger elsewhere and the monk’s disappearance offered an opportunity too good to miss.

Until the early years of the nineteenth century traditionally relationships between Muslims and Jews in Syria had been relatively peaceful. But with the influx of many French priests and monks during the 1830s there came also a tradition of virulent medieval anti Semitism which expressed itself in dark tales of secret Jewish rituals which required human blood for the celebration of Passover rites.

Rumours began to spread through Damascus that Father Thomas had been murdered for such a reason. Within days an all enveloping frenzy of speculation led to the arrest, torture and subsequent confession of several pillars of the Jewish community with the French consul often at the forefront of the action.

However, when news of this event reached Europe and the USA many leading Jews used their contacts to publicise the plight of their co-religionists and strong diplomatic pressure from Britain, Austria and the United States persuaded the Sultan in Constantinople to order not only the release of the prisoners and a recognition of their innocence but also to issue an edict condemning the very nature of the blood libel frenzy

“…and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth…”.

For a while the Sultan’s words dampened the flames but during the rest of the century there were sporadic blood libel eruptions often fostered by  newspapers and pamphleteers throughout the middle east. Now, even in modern times, in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, taking an anti Israeli slant, the ferment is still bubbling away.

Thompson is obviously taking Palin to task because, he claims, the term can only refer to a specifically Jewish context.

Is he right?

Not according to Jim Geraghty at NRO who has dug up several examples of “blood libel” being used in the context of exploiting an incident involving death or the danger of death for political gain by making accusations against individuals or groups without any factual evidence – interestingly most of these come from the political left.

Even more tellingly Alan Dershowitz, a leading American jurist, a Jew and politically no friend of Sarah Palin would know exactly where to file Thompson’s pontification – straight into the bin…

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People,its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

It would seem clear that Palin’s use of the blood libel phrase in a wider sense outside a specifically Jewish context is nothing new in terms of political debate. But there could have been something much more significant in her mind when she chose to use that phrase. She might well have glanced through a widely praised book on the 1840 incident written by Professor Jonathan Frankel. Daniel Pipes, in his review of the book, thought it was a well written account of what had happened. However he believed Frankel’s main achievement was not so much the telling of the story but his analysis of it’s impact upon world Jewry

But the real impact of the Damascus affair, Frankel shows, lay in Europe, where it led to a formidable backlash against Jews, the greatest in years. Jews found themselves completely unprepared for the tribulations they suffered but learned from this tragedy to organize and lobby, and from that came the first stirrings of modern Jewish solidarity, the basis of the formidable institutions that followed.

Perhaps Palin is also giving a message to conservatives on how to deal with a permanently hostile media which never hesitates to use lies and gross insults to demonise and break anything it perceives as a threat to it’s monopoly and privileges – but maybe that is far to subtle for Mr Thompson to grasp….indeed I doubt he even bothered to listen to the whole speech. Someone probably mentioned the blood libel phrase while he was checking his six figure salary and he decided to be terribly terribly clever…. 

Exit question – might it not be time for Damian Thompson to arrange an appointment with his therapist?

cross posted at C4P

Concerned about political violence in the USA?  No problem –  the UK Guardian has it sorted. The   Fort Hood shootings, the Times Square bomber, the Pentagon shooter, Amy Bishop, the Beltway snipers were all the work of male, white, right wing Christian fundamentalists inflamed by the same sort of reckless rhetoric that swept America before the November midterms

The US already had a distinctive history of political violence in the modern era. The assassinations of the 1960s, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and a series of attacks on abortion clinics have all been evidence of the readiness of a small but significant group of mainly male, mainly white, mainly rightwing, mainly religious conservative Americans to use lawless, lethal violence against real or imagined examples of political movements or institutions by which they deem themselves threatened. Now Congresswoman Giffords and the score of people who were shot with her in Tucson are their latest victims, gunned down in the 21st-century wild west.

Fortunately, says the Guardian there still are some sensible, level headed non political fellows around to lead us back to common decency

It is hard to disagree with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik in Tucson, who lamented after the shooting that “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous”.

Ignore wingnuts like William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor, Cornell Law School who try to suggest the Guardian is indulging in reckless rhetoric itself – it’s a left/liberal newspaper therefore, by definition, it is never wrong and never distorts the truth.

Eric Holder – your time has come….

Personally, I’d be more reassured by a sheriff who concentrated on facts rather than over-heated, sweeping generalisations.

Thus Toby Harnden, of the UK Daily Telegraph demonstrates the art of the cold, disdainful put down that does more to cut the pompous self importance of blowhard Sheriff Dupnik down to size than the acres of of angry denunciations across the right blogosphere. It certainly needed to be done because Dupnik’s fevered speculation about the right being behind the attack on Congresswoman Giffords did more to raise the temperature of this topic outside the USA than anything else.

We have a fairly low opinion of our own British politicians and journalists and we assume that their US counterparts are bottom feeders of the same ilk. But when Dupnik appeared on our screens with his infamous vitriol statement people sat up and took notice because they assumed that your local sheriff would be, like our own chief constables, an unelected career police officer with no public political affiliation. Although such officers clearly have their own political views any outward manifestation of party political bias would mean instant dismissal from the supervising police authority. Initially our own media treated Dupnik as such a official, assuming that he was speaking from a position of strict political neutrality

Harnden took great pains to puncture this particular balloon

Even the local sheriff (a Democrat) has been getting in on the act.

The headline for Harnden’s piece says it all

The unseemly rush to blame Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Republicans for murder in Arizona

He has obviously been trawling the right blogosphere (unusually for a UK hack) and picked up on the hypocrisy of the serpentine Markos Moulitsas who tweeted vicious hate rants about Sarah Palin and the Tea Party while at the same time quietly removing an attack piece against Giffords on his own site.

As he points out if you did happen to be a foaming at the mouth redneck militiaman constantly looking out for black helicopters and searching to vent your spleen on a politician who embodied everything you hated then the lady outside the Tucson supermarket would have been very low on your list.

Giffords herself doesn’t quite fit the likely victim of an enraged Right-winger. She is a Blue Dog Democrat, a deficit hawk and voted to lift the ban on guns in DC and voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. On Thursday, she took part in the reading of the Constitution in the House, reading aloud the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, speech and peaceful assembly.
She’s certainly not the “progressive” that Hanoi Jane tweeted about and provoked as much anger on the Left as on the Right for her political stances. Just the other day, a blogger at DailyKos said that Giffords was “dead to me” for failing to back Pelosi.

I have not always seen eye to eye with Toby Harnden over Governor Palin in some of my C4P posts and no doubt in the future will have cause to criticise him once more but he deserves much respect for his calm and well reasoned reporting of this terrible tragedy.

This is a time for sombre reflection and a calming (rather than an escalation) of rhetoric. Sadly, however, some see it as another opportunity to score political points and vilify those they hate.

Read the rest of his piece here – and then look at his post on Christina Green’s father. This man whose beloved little girl was gunned down in the Giffords attack shows up the Krugmans and Dupniks for the opportunistic political vultures they really are.

Thank you, Mr Harnden, for introducing an element of reason and common sense into this fevered debate.

Michael Gove, the Tory Education Secretary in the coalition government, was a staunch Labour Party activist and trade unionist in his younger days partly because of his upbringing and a belief that working class children were being betrayed by the educational system.

He is now a leading conservative intellectual but still feels angry about the failure of our state schools to provide working class students with a decent education and the fact that children of wealthier parents who can afford private schools get a head start in life. But rather than the old leftist panacea of outlawing private schools and increasing taxes to allow local councils to spend more on “education” (including teachers’ pay) Gove came to the conclusion that the dead hand of the state education establishment (local education authorities (LEAs),teacher unions, education academics etc) was not keen on allowing any notion of competition to upset their cosy monopoly.

So one of his first decisions within days of entering office was to allow a wide variety of groups – charities, universities, businesses, educational groups, teachers or groups of parents – to submit proposals for setting up Free Schools, funded by the state but outside the existing LEA structure and, crucially, not subject to the cumbersome salary agreements negotiated through teacher unions.

Naturally the education establishment (and their chattering class allies at the BBC and The Guardian) are dead set against it – and their influence should not be under estimated. They did their best to undermine Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to reform them during the 80s mainly because she tried to work within the system and in 1997 they crowed in triumph when the new Labour Government put the education establishment back in the saddle. But now  they sense a whiff of danger because Gove is trying to set up an alternative system to compete with them – so the leading teachers union, the NUT, is acting as the spearhead of the status quo by pulling out all the stops to try and push the Free School bus off the road.

One of the classic ploys for any interest group is, of course, the “survey” which always (surprise, surprise) conveniently appears to buttress their own case.

A NUT-commissioned YouGov survey of 1,021 parents in the approved locations found 31% were against setting one up in their area, while 26% were in favour and 29% were neither in favour nor against.

In actual fact, given margins of error, those figures do not seem to indicate strong feelings either way but, of course, it’s the headline not the numbers that stick in the mind and Christine Blower, General Secretary of the NUT gave it both barrels

This survey clearly shows that parents are not clamouring to set up free schools, have no issue with schools being accountable to the community through democratically elected local authorities and absolutely reject the premise of their children’s education being handed over to private companies.
“Free schools are not wanted or needed. They are divisive and unaccountable. The teaching profession and parents know this. It is time the Government stopped playing with the educational future of this country based on nothing more than the fact they can.”

Unfortunately for Ms Blower and her cohorts another set of figures have come out which totally undermines the claim that change is not needed

The UK has more young people without work or education than even Romania and Bulgaria.
Only four of the 27 European Union nations have more poorly educated and unskilled young people.
In just five years, 12 EU countries have overhauled Britain and now have fewer youngsters adrift without qualifications or hope.
Among them are France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Ireland.
Even the likes of Romania and Bulgaria have now overtaken Britain in terms of their proportion of young men and women with decent education and job chances, the EU research showed.

One reader summed up this disaster perfectly

We should be very angry with what the left dominated teaching establishment has done to our children. Through their dogma and child-centred policies they have managed to produce a semi-literate generation that will fail the next. I could weep.

No further comment needed…

Two Tory faces in this government.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley recently crowed “no more nanny state” by claiming that henceforward he would end Labour’s penchant for lecturing and hectoring us about lifestyles. Local councils and businesses would no longer be coerced into creating and financing battalions of jobsworths whose sole purpose was to preach to us about how stupid we were while stacking up mouth watering wads of cash from our pockets via our taxes.

Good news?

Fat chance….

Instead of being lectured we are going to be “nudged” (aka bribed) by vouchers and goodies partly funded by the food and transport industries. Children will be nudged into walking to school. Shoppers will be nudged into buying healthy foods – and (no surprise here) it’s all based on a book written by two US academics…maybe he was too busy reading the book to remind his officials to be prepared for outbreaks of flu this winter.

Groan….

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles (a grand moniker for the man in charge of local government) says he is abolishing rules set up by the Blair regime forcing councils to charge high parking fees and restrict parking places in new developments all in the name of getting people to abandon their cars for public transport (something, of course, that no politician ever does, except for a PR photo op)

He is putting those decisions fairly and squarely back into the hands of local authorities and local councillors who will no longer be able to blame Whitehall when confronted by angry motorists and town centre retailers.

Moreover he is being aided and abetted by Transport Secretary Philip Hammond who says – brace yourself BBC Guardianistas  – “Cars are a lifeline for many people”

Lansley’s soft nannying “Nudge” programme will inevitably employ scores of busybodies to implement, organise and supervise. Pickles, by abolishing those parking rules will,hopefully, need fewer civil servants in his department.

Exit question – who is the real conservative?

BTW – if you like the sound of Eric Pickles then read this and you might like him even more. Indeed there are some people who are already wondering that if David Cameron ever got involved with a bus……

Naturally the BBC, like many other news organisations, likes to use the end of the year to make predict possible story lines for the forthcoming year. Seeing that our old friend Allahpundit used the recent CNN poll to rehash his regular monthly “Palin on way out” traffic bait (picked up by Telegraph hack Toby Harnden….surprise,surprise) and that neither of them deemed it worthy to notice the questionable nature of the conclusions drawn (from 1000 adults rather than registered voters..) I thought it might be interesting to look at some BBC crystal gazing for 2011.

Now the left leaning Beeb has never been a particular friend of Gov Palin but it has been less sniffy than the right wing Telegraph and Mail. So it was quite enlightening to see that of the five BBC correspondents who offered their predictions three of them, Stephen Sackur, Mark Mardell and Paul Mason mentioned her name as if she were a canny politician who has the potential to be considered a serious contender for the White House.

See what they said here – it’s not earth shattering but there is almost an element of respect.

Could it be that they didn’t get the memo from Politico?