And The Other Half Are Lying

'Half of drivers' admit speeding.

And some people think the Poms are no fun.

Well some of them are.

-- Nora

No Discussion Title

There's something gloriously Orwellian when BBC discussion board moderators announce of the very first post on a topic:

This posting has been hidden during moderation because it broke the House Rules in some way.

... but it's followed by a discussion that you can read between the lines of to figure out what they were discussing.

Reminds one of the hilarious job The Smoking Gun did on Bill Clinton.

-- Nick

Stupid People

It's perhaps the one thing you don't have to be shown how to do:

Children should be shown explicit videos of masturbation as part of sex education, campaigners said yesterday.

But one can appreciate that, coming from the Family Planning Association, it's something they might like to encourage.

-- Nick

Mister (Mohamm)Ed

Straight from the horse's mouth:

"There is no such thing as a Muslim good guy," said Arzu Merali, co-author of a report by the Islamic Human Rights Commission...

-- Nick

Contradiction In Terms

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has caved to homosexual activists and nixed pleas by the Catholic Church to be allowed to refuse placing children with same-sex couples through their adoption agencies.

The Catholic Church says it may may now be forced to close its agencies in the UK, as did the US wing of the church.

Homosexual rights groups, predictably:

protested that the Church was "blackmailing" the Government.

...while conveniently ignoring the fact that there are many other adoption agencies they could go to who take a much more politically correct and less morally principled stand on the issue.

Meanwhile, Blair comes out with this contradictory doozy:

"I have always personally been in favour of the right of gay couples to adopt. Our priority will always be the welfare of the child," he said.

If welfare of children is the priority, the last thing one should be doing is placing already traumatised children in homosexual households:

In 1999, homosexual activist Dan Savage published the book, The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant - An Adoption Story. The author comments:

"Having children is no longer about propagating the species... [it is] something for grownups to do, a pastime, a hobby. So why not kids? Gay men need hobbies, too. …. I've done drag. I did Barbie drag, dominatrix drag, nun drag, and glamour drag. Now I'm going to do dad drag."

American website the Child Welfare Information Gateway - an organisation with an apparently somewhat Nineteen Eighty-Four reverse meaning name - had its own Blair moment in 2000 when it stated:

The bulk of evidence to date indicates that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are no more likely to become homosexual than children raised by heterosexuals. As one researcher put it, "If heterosexual parenting is insufficient to ensure that children will also be heterosexual, then there is no reason to conclude that children of homosexuals also will be gay".

But surely logic would suggest that if the majority of heterosexual parents produce heterosexual children, then homosexual parents will produce homosexuals.

Just ask Ry and Cade, two unfortunate young women featured in:

...a recent article, "Growing Up With Mom and Mom," published in the October 24 issue of The New York Times Magazine, (in which) Susan Dominus tells the story of two girls, Ry and Cade, who were artificially conceived and raised by a lesbian couple.

The story of these girls could not be more poignant. Having reached adulthood, one daughter became a lesbian and the other, though heterosexual, lives in a continuous state of tension between her formation and her own feelings. Dominus writes:

"Sometimes when she's with her boyfriend, she [Ry] told me the first night we met, 'I feel guilty about how much privilege I feel as a straight couple, but I also love the privilege. …. At the same time, it's like this nightmare to be totally absorbed into this stupid straight world.' She made a face, half-sticking her tongue out. 'So at the same time, it's sad for me. I feel like I'm losing something else.''

She narrates her intimate struggle:

''It took me a lot of struggle to realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.'' Further on, Ry reports about how she was intrigued but ''repulsed'' by heterosexual relations, afraid of the 'sexist soul-losing domain of oppression.' Her parting thought: 'I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight relationship.'"

Furthermore, there is no 'bulk of evidence' supporting the supposedly benign nature of homosexual households.

When Robert Lerner, Ph.D, and Althea Nagai, Ph.D. evaluated studies favouring adoption by homosexuals, they found them fatally flawed:

Completely misconstrue and thus blatantly misuse the standard logic of statistical hypothesis testing (e.g., they attempt to affirm the null hypothesis, which is wrong; one can only fail to reject the null hypothesis) - Fail to use proper or even any control groups - Use wildly unrepresentative nonrandom samples - Use far too few cases to draw any valid conclusions - Fail to control for essential variables when presenting their findings - misanalyses its own data, which in fact show that the daughters of lesbian couples are more likely to engage in lesbian sexual experimentation as adults than are the daughters of heterosexual couples.

The greatest irony of the growing Church versus State clash in the UK is that it finds some Anglicans and the majority of Catholics on common ground with an unexpected third group:

The Muslim Council of Britain said it fully supported the "principled stand" by the Church leaders.

The Muslim Council of Britain would also fully support stoning homosexuals to death.

The Catholics just want to stop state sponsored child abuse.

-- Nick

Summer Reading

One might have noticed Nick undertaking much of the posting duties over the past few weeks.

I've not been idle, but instead using the summer break to catch up on some reading.

I had always wondered about the claim that it was Muslims that brought Greek and Roman philosophy to the ignorant, pre-Enlightenment Christendom of Medieval Europe. It appears to be accepted as 'the common sense' but had never really rung true.

If it were so - that Muslims were progressive, enlightened folk who could show those Christians a thing or two about science and philosophy - then what happened?

Apart from some architecture, little appears to remain, historically or contemporaniously, of such academic ventures.

So was it actually true?

It would appear not.

The opinion web site American Thinker has run a series of outstanding articles that critically examines the role Islam has played in spreading science and philosophy. I'll link to each of these sites and give a little foretaste of the arguments you'll find.

What Islamic Science and Philosophy?
By Jonathan David Carson

If the true cause of events is the will of Allah, and if the will of Allah is inscrutable, then the causes of events are inscrutable and science a vain pursuit. The issue is ultimately whether the universe and its creator are in any way intelligible. The West, with its traditions of natural law and natural theology, agrees for the most part that the universe is astonishingly intelligible and God somewhat so. Islam, at least at its most rigorous, denies any intelligibility whatsoever to either.

Islam and the Problem of Rationality
By Patrick Poole

Occasionalism was rigorously opposed by the two great philosophers of Medieval Europe, Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, along with the great medieval Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who lived and wrote in Muslim-occupied Spain. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) also addressed the threat posed by Islamic occasionalism by affirming the ancient Christian truth that God created the universe ex nihilo (from nothing). This prevented the volunteerist view from gaining ground in the West, and thus occasionalism, merely by stating that God had actually created, and that objects in the natural world created by God have an actual inherent existence and do not need to be constantly recreated.

Hyping Islam 's role in the History of Science
By Jonathan David Carson

The 'Islamic scholars' who translated 'ancient Greece's natural philosophy' were a curious group of Muslims, since all or almost all of the translators from Greek to Arabic were Christians or Jews, as were the translators from Arabic to Latin. Consider the astonishing statement of Bernard Lewis in The Muslim Discovery of Europe:

We know of no Muslim scholar or man of letters before the eighteenth century who sought to learn a western language, still less of any attempt to produce grammars, dictionaries, or other language tools. Translations are few and far between. Those that are known are works chosen for practical purposes [philosophy being considered a practical discipline] and the translations are made by converts [who knew western languages before conversion] or non—Muslims.

The not-so-golden age of Islamic philosophy
By Jonathan David Carson

When Islam conquered most of the Christian lands of Asia and the Middle East and all of them on the north coast of Africa, including Egypt and with it Alexandria, part of the spoils of victory were small centers of Hellenistic scholarship, often Nestorian Christian, that continued for a while translating Greek philosophy into Syriac. Eventually most of the extant writings of Aristotle were translated into Arabic, generally via Syriac, sometimes via Hebrew, on rare occasions directly, together with influential pseudo—Aristotelian texts. These translations became the basis of the Aristotelianism of the Islamic world, which was innocent of the Greek of the original and of the originality of its author.

Islam, Christianity, Classical Civilization, and Modernity
By Jonathan David Carson

When it became apparent to the early Church that it might have to wait a long time before the end of world and that it would, as a result, have to develop institutions and a way of life appropriate for a long sojourn on earth, perhaps the most pressing issue was how to respond to the immense legacy of the ancient Mediterranean. With but a few exceptions, Tertullian being the most prominent, the Fathers of the Church took the attitude most succinctly expressed by Saint Ambrose: Christians should "spoil the Egyptians" by using for their own purposes the treasures of the ancient world, including its philosophy.

Despite what opponents of Christianity say and what perhaps most educated people believe, the mainstream of Christianity has always been open to the achievements of the world in which it lives, whether they be the Plato and Aristotle of ancient Greece, the science and mathematics of medieval India and early Islam, the intellectual and political successes of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, or the scientific advances of the modern world.

Understanding what little Islam had to contribute to the understanding of the world and progress was despoiled by Islamic thinking itself, had me wondering about the information sources it twisted for the selfish and murderous impulses of its leader Mohammed.

Fortunately someone else has done the leg work, Craig Winn whose web site Prophet of Doom, contains the full text of his book that goes nearly line by line to explain the origins and flaws of the Koran and its expository Suras and Hadiths.

As Winn summarises in an 'open letter to the reader':

Islam is a caustic blend of regurgitated paganism and twisted Bible stories. Muhammad, its lone prophet, conceived his religion solely to satiate his lust for power, sex, and money. He was a terrorist. And if you think these conclusions are shocking, wait until you see the evidence.

Mix yourself a Long Island Iced, sit back in a comfy lounger and enjoy the read.

Long Island Iced Tea
0.5 Shot Vodka
0.5 Shot White Rum
0.5 Shot Gin
0.5 Shot Tequila
0.5 Shot Triple Sec
1 Dash Coke
1 Teaspoon Caster Sugar
0.5 Shot Lemon Juice
Shake all the ingredients except the coke with ice and strain into a highball. Then pour the coke on the top.

-- Nora

Labor's Multicultural Fantasy

PM John Howard drops the word multicultural from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, renames it the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the predictable whinging begins.

Labor's multicultural affairs puppet, Laurie Ferguson, indulges in a little of the Leftist's favourite activity, a hate fantasy:

“Mr Howard is ... a person who expressed great amazement when the first Italian moved opposite his house and he saw them tiling their front patio,”...

Then he claims:

“This is going to force certain rules, force people down certain lines, and force people to have some sort of conformity which is just not viable,” he said.

It's all moot. Multiculturalism is dead whether John Howard says so or not:

In another scene, a map of Australia is overlaid with the red, white and green of the Lebanese flag and the words "Under new management".

It would certainly appear so.

-- Nick

Burn Baby, Burn

Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen fled to India after writing an article criticising the burqa resulted in an Islamic death fatwa against her in her homeland.

Here's part of what she wrote:

Why are women covered? Because they are sex objects. Because when men see them, they are roused. Why should women have to be penalised for men's sexual problems? Even women have sexual urges. But men are not covered for that. In no religion formulated by men are women considered to have a separate existence, or as human beings having desires and opinions separate from men's. The purdah rules humiliate not only women but men too. If women walk about without purdah, it's as if men will look at them with lustful eyes, or pounce on them, or rape them. Do they lose all their senses when they see any woman without burqa?

Some do.

Nasreen continues:

Some 1,500 years ago, it was decided for an individual's personal reasons that women should have purdah and since then millions of Muslim women all over the world have had to suffer it. So many old customs have died a natural death, but not purdah. Instead, of late, there has been a mad craze to revive it... What should women do? They should protest against this discrimination. They should proclaim a war against the wrongs and ill-treatment meted out to them for hundreds of years. They should snatch from the men their freedom and their rights. They should throw away this apparel of discrimination and burn their burqas.

Shades of the (apparently mythical) bra-burning '60s. Of course, Western feminists, now so reluctant to help their Muslim sisters, didn't have to worry about being stoned to death for their actions.

(via DhimmiWatch)

-- Nick

Dinner At Eight

Welcome to The Thin Man's first remote post.

We're blogging from dear friends of the Charles', Incog and Neto from Highland Warriors.

Incog has gently chided me for being remiss on supplying the cocktails of late and I'm afraid my own excuse is that work has been extraordinary busy.

Mr Incog, a well travelled gent, has obtained a fabulous reproduction edition of the seminar cocktail guide, The Savoy Cocktail Book.

It is my pleasure to offer not one but two fine cocktail selections that we are planning to imbibe tonight.

One Exciting Night
1 Dash Orange Juice
1/3 French Vermouth
1/3 Italian Vermouth
1/3 Plymouth Gin
Shake well and strain into Port Wine Glass. Squeeze lemon peel on top. Frost edge of glass with castor sugar.

Savoy Hotel Special Cocktail (no.2)
2 Dashes Dubonnet
1/3 French Vermouth
2/3 Plymouth Gin
Shake well and strain into cocktail glass. Squeeze orange peel on top.

-- Nora

Go Nancy!

"I am woman, hear me roar," sang Helen Reddy in the feminist favourite song.

Now it may be a case of "Ok, you're a woman, so shut up about it and get on with the job." Patrick Hynes writes:

"Nothing irritates male voters more than to have a woman politician belligerently point out the obvious: that she is a woman," one prominent Republican pollster in Washington told me. "In focus group after focus group, we see support from white men nosedive when female politicians from either party deliberately suggest that their gender makes them better suited for high office."

I can validate this phenomenon from personal experience. I once observed a focus group for a client, a Republican woman candidate for Congress. She was thought to have innumerable weaknesses, though we considered her gender an obvious strength. We were thrilled to see that she sustained her favorability when we highlighted her presumed shortcomings to participants. But when we played up the gender-angle, the needle plunged among white guys. The focus group fundamentally altered our approach to voters.

"That’s the kind of thing you see whenever these situations arise," my source told me. "Generally speaking, being a woman is an electoral advantage, but running as a woman is a weakness."

Hynes suggests new US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may harm Hillary Clinton's tilt at the White House by carping on about girl power.

I knew Pelosi couldn't be all bad.

-- Nick

UPDATE: Clinton formally announces her intention to seek nomination as the Democrat candidate and more of her pals immediately 'help her out':

"I am one of the millions of women who have waited all their lives to see the first woman sworn in as president of the United States _ and now we have our best opportunity to see that dream fulfilled," said Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY's list, which raises money for Democratic women who run for office.

Clinton also repulses a lot of women voters. In comments from the above:

Anyone who can look the other way while her husband had an affair with an employee in her own house puts her integrity in question. It made my skin crawl when she went on for the sole purpose of politics. I know she lost a lot of respect from women all over the US.

Let Them Eat Cod

There's something fishy about global warming:

PARTS of the North Atlantic are setting winter heat records, allowing species ranging from swordfish to jellyfish to thrive beyond their normal ranges in a shift linked by many scientists to global warming... "The global oceans have been warming since the middle 1970s and several studies have shown that the warming can be attributed to a human-produced signal," said James Hurrell of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

No explanation of course for the final paragraph:

Not all is gloom, however. In a sign of how higher temperatures might help some fish stocks, a period of warmer waters in the 1920s allowed cod to spawn off Greenland and let a new stock break away from Icelandic waters. In the cooler 1960s, cod were unable to reproduce off Greenland and the stock collapsed.

-- Nick

UPDATE: More of the same kind of thing:

OBESE patients hospitalised with heart failure tend to fare better than their lean counterparts, new research suggests.

The Toxic Avenger

Prime Minister John Howard is criticised by Muslim community leaders for taping a message of support for a multidenominational Australia Day gathering of Christians:

Mr (Yasser) Soliman, a member of the PM's Muslim Community Reference Group, said Mr Howard should think twice about addressing the group. "It is a dangerous thing for a senior politician to do," he said. "I can't stop the Prime Minister addressing who he wants to, but he should be very cautious, especially with groups which have a history of toxic-hate speech."

While Muslim leaders are free to call for jihad against the kuffirs, the Christians accused of 'toxic-hate speech' had to face court - but the case was ultimately thrown out:

Last month the Victorian Court of Appeal threw out the charges brought in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal which had sought to jail Pastor Nalliah and Daniel Scot for allegedly inciting hatred, contempt, revulsion and ridicule of Muslims.

The 'inciting hatred, contempt, revulsion and ridicule of Muslims' was to quote directly from the Koran.

Soliman is correct when he suggests the PM should be cautious with groups that have a history of toxic-hate speech.

He should disband the Muslim Community Reference Group immediately.

-- Nick

Methinks They Do Protest Too Much

A pimply faced youth who's scored the job of TV writer at Newsweek says the TV series 24 is:

"a neocon sex fantasy"

If 24 is jollies for the right, then The West Wing - several seasons of fantasising how the 21st century 'should' have started in Washington - was a liberal left wet dream.

And why do Libs always associate power with sex?

(via Hot Air)

-- Nick

Should Have Slept On It

Interesting research about lazy sleepy teenagers:

Research shows that teenagers need about 9 1/4 hours' sleep... When the body clock turns off, the brain secretes the sleep chemical, melatonin. Sleep researchers have found that melatonin is produced in adolescents much later in the evening than in younger kids.

Writer Michael Carr-Gregg suggests later school start times might help, pointing to Victorian research showing:

...a 10am-4pm school day was associated with less bad behaviour and better academic results.

He also suggests:

Roads and trains and trams would be less clogged if commuters did not have to compete with kids going to school.

Now you're talking. But has anyone asked the parental taxi drivers if their employers will let them start even later too?

-- Nick

The Enemy Within

Even when you know something's been happening, it's still shocking when you actually see it for yourself:

Undercover Mosque. Broadcast: Monday 15 January.

A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organisations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.

The entire Channel 4 documentary is viewable at the link above. Lengthy but watch the whole thing.

Then consider whether 'there'll always be an England'.

(via Hot Air)

-- Nick

Family Ties

The Daily Telegraph reports on Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks and it's almost worth ignoring their shameless stalking of children and ignorance that Camp X-Ray was closed in 2002 for this quote from the grandfather of Hicks' kids, Dennis Sparrow:

"He didn't care about the kids before he left, he f....d off on them then and now all of a sudden it's all about him missing his kids," Mr Sparrow said at his home in nearby Munno Para. "Dave and his lawyers think it will help his case if he wheels the kids out - well f... them."

Indeed.

Read the whole story. It's an entirely different view of the terrorist whose father Terry Hicks believes deserves a 'fair go'.

-- Nick

Non-Brains Based

No wonder modern teens have the attention spans of gnats:

SHOW and tell is one assessment task suggested for Year 12 English students in South Australian schools by the state's curriculum board.

Year 12 English.

No wonder they're damn near functionally illiterate too.

-- Nick

I'll Drink To That

Good idea:

A DRUGS and alcohol expert says road deaths could be reduced in Queensland if the legal drinking age went back to 21.

The idea is backed by evidence of it having worked elsewhere:

Professor Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland, who has researched the effects of drinking on young people, said that where the legal drinking age in the US was raised to 21 in the 1980s, road fatalities fell... His call is supported by the Australian Medical Association and Drug Free Australia. Drug Free Australia spokeswoman Wendy Herbert said raising the drinking age back up to 21 in the US reduced traffic fatalities in 18 to 20-year-olds by 13 per cent.

-- Nick

A Lack Of Priorities

Police detected 26 people carrying illegal drugs into a public dance party in Melbourne - and let them all go:

Although not charged, they were cautioned and directed to a drug diversion program, the spokeswoman said.

But wash your car in Melbourne and:

Victorian households face $430 on-the-spot fines

...and may have their water virtually cut off, all enforced by a special squad of:

...140 inspectors... patrolling suburban streets... with the power to issue on-the-spot fines and even cut supply to households flouting tough new water restrictions.

As Victoria and South Australia began stage three water restrictions, limiting sprinkler use and watering times for residents and businesses, water inspectors toured Melbourne hunting down water wasters.

Water authorities said using the "fairly drastic" powers to reduce supply to a trickle for households that refused to reduce water use was a last resort aimed at those with an "obvious disregard to the restrictions".

But Victoria's government has no problems with illegal drug users with an "obvious disregard to the restrictions".

-- Nick