Silent Night

Oh dear:

The survey of 1,000 school children aged between five and seven years old reveals that 36 per cent don’t know whose birthday we celebrate on December 25 - with over one in five believing the festivities are in aid of Simon Cowell's birthday.

Read the piece. It gets worse:

In addition, the research by online retailer Woolworths.co.uk found 24 per cent of children believe that Brentwood in Essex, home to TOWIE stars favourite nightclub the Sugar Hut, was the location of Jesus' birth.

Another quarter think Jesus was born at 10 Downing Street or Buckingham Palace, with only 28 per cent of those polled able to name Bethlehem as the correct birth place...

...The confusion over festive traditions are not just confined to the nativity story with over a quarter of those polled thinking Lapland was the name of a London nightclub and 35 per cent could not even name Rudolph as one of Santa’s reindeer, despite his famous red nose.

Instead the average British child thinks the reindeer are named after celebrities, including Tulisa Contostavlos, David Beckham and Pippa Middleton...

'We’re not saying that celebrity culture has ruined the traditions of Christmas but from these results it certainly seems to have had an effect on how children think about the big day!'

They may not want to say it by I will.

Celebrity culture has ruined the traditions of Christmas and many other aspects of society.

-- Nora

Welcome To The Real World Kiddies

'Students have made an investment in their educations, then they come to the real world and they realize that that investment is essentially worthless.'

She's an arts graduate. Naturally.

-- Nora

Atheists Are Whinging Whiners

Anyway, this Wisconsin-based Christophobic group was pouting about a nativity scene in Texas and was demanding that it be taken down because Jesus was an “insult to human nature” because He taught that “men were sinners” and would one day be held accountable for their sins if they didn’t repent and would be sent to a slow roast in Dante’s House of Pain.

Dan and his ilk represent the “we will sue you” nuevo atheists who go after our nation’s Christian holidays and symbolism—but not Islam’s—because it bashes their ideas. Waah. Frickety. Waah.

--Nora

Condemned To Repeat It

Experts have warned of the ‘death of History’ after shocking figures revealed the subject is becoming virtually extinct in some areas of the country.

-- Nora

Poaching?

Why the need to co-opt members?

AN ESSAY on Hugh Jackman's Broadway show by the world's most powerful theatre critic is laced with insinuations about the Australian star's sexuality, saying that he comports himself on stage like "a flaming queen".

and

But he isn’t gay, and is bemused — as is his wife Becky, an English teacher — by the fact he has such a strong gay following on Twitter.

‘Camp? I don’t think I am,’ he says, before adding: ‘Well, maybe a little. Whatever, I get messages which suggest people think they are going to be able to “turn” me, which I find bizarre.

‘I love women. I have always loved women. The irony was that being in the choir when I was a teenager was a surefire way of meeting them.’

-- Nora

UPDATE: Kevin Rudd's Labor supporting sister takes a principled stand in opposing same-sex marriage and is cruelly pilloried for it in comments on this story and the Brisbane Times link on Facebook.

Not Ashamed

Author and columnist hits another one right out of the park:

That’s right. When Brees talks about faith, he is talking about faith in Jesus Christ. J for J, esus for esus, Jesus. Was that so hard for Layden to say out loud? The answer, apparently, is yes. He reminds me of no one so much as the reporter anti-hero of my novel True Crime, who says, “Whenever someone… says Jesus as if they really mean it… it makes my skin crawl, as if they’d said squid or intestine…”

--Nora

Race To The Bottom

Columnist Andrew Bolt, a critic of the Stolen Generation meme has often asked people to name 10 Aborigines who have been stolen from their families for racist reasons.

Well the Full Court of Australia has come close to providing the first truly documented case:

THE Family Court has declared a "notably fair" man to be a "proud Aborigine" despite both his parents saying they are white.

The court was asked to consider the matter after the man, who was raised white but began identifying as an Aborigine in 1999, got an Irish backpacker pregnant.

She wanted to go home to Ireland with their baby daughter, but the Family Court is required by law to give special consideration to Aboriginal children, and their need to retain links to their culture and heritage.

This would normally mean that an Aboriginal child could not be taken out of Australia to be raised by a non-Aboriginal parent.

After a decision and an appeal, the child was allowed to leave with her mother to Ireland.

-- Nora

Repent At Leisure

Whingers who complain that social conservatives want to 'take us back to the 1950s' might want to take a look at this piece from the Daily Mail.

Problem families are each costing the taxpayer an astonishing £75,000 every year, new figures reveal today.

Ministers have been horrified by research showing that on average £9billion is spent each year on 120,000 families blighted by jobless parents and truanting children.

More than two-thirds of this is devoted to protecting children – via social care and child support – and tackling the crime and anti-social behaviour such families often generate.

Oh my.

What to do?

Well why not go back to the 1950s? The majority of children born to parents who are married, the majority of households with the breadwinner in work, less crime.

To be sure the genie is out of the bottle but any modern government that fails to endorse and strengthen marriages and whole families (mum, dad and the kids) and work to create an improved economy and the employment it brings, becomes directly culpable for the disintegration of prosperity and social order.

-- Nora

UPDATE:
Desperately sad. Completely avoidable.

And by the time Kelsey was 17 she was dead – strangled by Willcocks in an alcohol-fuelled row over claims of sleeping around.

In the words of his barrister, ‘they were much too young, both of them’. Stuart Driver QC added: ‘It was a disastrous cocktail, because they had powerful adult feelings but the immaturity of children.’

Yesterday at Chester Crown Court, Willcocks was jailed for a minimum of 16 years after being convicted of murder.

More The Merrier?

‘I still can’t believe all that time he was living like a bigamist. He won’t accept that. He has claimed that we split up in 2003 but we didn’t. He was still spending Christmas here then. We were still sleeping together.

And people think advancing legalised polygamy will work out just fine...

-- Nora

It's All About Context

The Facebook page of the T-Base store at Sunshine Plaza, Maroochydore, features a photo of a boy wearing a "Boobies make me smile" T-shirt, and the store stocks tees with nipple-exposed shots of Kate Moss.

Adidas Global said there was no move to withdraw the T-shirt but they told The Sunday Mail they apologised to consumers affronted by the design.

Owner of the T-Base store claimed the store made the T-shirt specifically for the boy at his mother's request.

"We don't do sleazy," she said. "That was just for a laugh ... I don't sell the porn-style shirts - only artistic ones like the Kate Moss item."

People who know Nicky and I well would be the last to call us prudes. We have a playful attitude to nudity and sex as some of our classic pinup entries on Nifty Knick Knacks demonstrates.

So our endorsement of the Australian Christian Lobby's objection to the sale of what the Sunday Mail describes as 'sleazy T-shirts' is not hypocritical but logical.

Our society quite correctly regulates the age of consent for sex on the basis that one should enter a sexual relationship with a degree of maturity and that children are too physically and mentally vulnerable and immature to develop a healthy sexuality.

We quite rightly deplore paedophiles but how much do we unwittingly groom our children through the exposure to highly sexualised images in the public space and then get all surprised when teenage girls are sexting - thus turning themselves into child pornography producers?

In this case, if the owner of the T-Base store is correct and the mother of the child (he looks about 10 years old to me) had the T-shirt made for him, then I would be questioning the woman's fitness as a mother. Is there a bit of an Oedipal thing happening? What message is she giving her son with respect seeing girls and women as mere body parts? How will this impact on his ability to develop healthy relationships as he gets older?

The owner of the store is being disingenuous is suggesting that she 'doesn't do porn' and that the nude images on the T-shirts are 'art'. Indeed they may very well be art, but context is the thing.

On a gallery wall where adults can make the determination for themselves whether their children are mature enough to appreciate the work is context is one thing, having the images thrust in front of them is quite another.

Also, a further difference - are these people wearing T-shirts of nudes because they're art lovers but because they like the shock value or the mobile titillation of wearing a bit of tit and arse?

In the privacy of one's own home one can wear (or not wear) anything one chooses but in a public space we all have the responsibility to be mindful of others and to be as 'inoffensive' as possible to maintain civility in our society.

-- Nora

And Away We Go

What did I say last week about polyamorists bucking for official sanction of their relationships in light of the ALP's change of policy on same sex marriage? Five years?

Try one week.

-- Nora

Fall For Anything

Quick! Bring out the smelling salts!

A Hervey Bay mother swoons when she discovers that her Year 8 daughter has brought home... a 32 year old boyfriend?... Drugs?... A busload of OWS protestors?... Syphillis?

Quelle horreur, what could possibly cause her to go on a "crusade" right up to Education Queensland's head office?

Birgette Linding said she was mortified when her daughter came home earlier this year and recounted how Gideons Bibles had been handed out to students at the end of a Year 8 assembly at Urangan State High School.

How shocking.

And how quickly the anti-religious haters come out in comments, but also adhering to the law of unintended consequences John of Townsville's comment is a revelation: "Good, religion and the bible have no place in Queensland schools." So it would seem.

"Religion (by which they mean Christianity) is unscientific," they cry - ignoring the fact that modern science owes a significant debt to Christianity which provided most of the founding principles of science with the acknowledgement that a rational God created the world rationally and that those rational principles could be observed, repeated and understood.

These anti-Christian bigots are equally as sanctimonious as the religiousfolk they decry, smug as they are in their rigid belief system that all life evolved from nothing and that the reason we're here is because 'gravity did it'.

"We're far to logical, smart, clever, rational to believe in a sky fairy," they argue.

And yet, unmoored by the Christian belief system to use as a framework for rationality or as a foundation for ethics, these same people become easy prey for other gods - particularly Gaia The Earth Fairy who got a shout out this week at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Durbin, South Africa at which our own Climate Change Minister Greg Combet attended (carbon-neutrally, of course).

From the conference manifesto:

Rights of mother earth
74. Ensure respect for the intrinsic laws of nature.
75. The recognition and defence of the rights of Mother Earth to ensure harmony
between humanity and nature, and that their will be no commodification of the functions of nature, therefore no carbon market will be developed with that purpose.

Compare this to the instruction given to man in Genesis to have dominion over the earth.

That not is to say that we trash the planet, anymore than a logical, rational human being would trash their own house. But what it does mean, as generations of people before us knew, we are to use the resources it contains to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

This Gaia-mad, quasi-scientific, pseudo-religion demands the opposite. And if you're poor, and life is a today-to-today struggle keeping body and soul together, you're less likely to consider helping others or have the resources to do so even if you were inclined.

And any propensity to charity (particularly one which cannot be reciprocated) makes no sense within a Darwinian framework in which survival of the fittest is the only law.

So what purpose does it serve to condemn humanity to a hell it can avoid? There's a question for another day.

Such a world governed as the Gaian adherents would have it would not be a nice place to live - but get used to it folks, without the Christian world view and the compassion and grace it teaches, your world is about to get even uglier.

Oh, and a final comment to Our Lady of the Perpetually Offended, Birgette Linding - you are under no obligation to read the Bible yourself, neither is your daughter. If you don't like it, don't look.

And a few questions: Why are you so afraid of the Bible? Are you afraid that if your daughter reads it that she will find something wonderful and life changing? Are you usually so narrow minded?

-- Nora

That Why They Put The 'I' In FBI...

Author and columnist Andrew Klavan on the popular culture battleground:

But I think a more plausible explanation for it is that Ms. Dargis is full of crap. I do not believe she found the tenderness of the movie a shock, or the poorly constructed script smart, or the antiquated handling of the story uplifting. I believe she said those things only to tout a film with a pro-homosexual agenda. (I say this as a gay-friendly libertarian.) The Times is infamous for this sort of thing, as documented in William McGowan’s book Gray Lady Down. The paper lies to its readers, in other words, to promote those cultural productions that support their favored causes.

-- Nora

The Law Of Unintended Consequences II

Post one on the law of unintended consequences can be found in an update here.

This one is about the consequences of the US Government repeal of the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' homosexual policy in the military:

In an unlikely alliance, the Family Research Council (FRC) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have found a common cause: the criminalization of bestiality in the military. Both groups are calling for keeping an explicit ban on sex with animals in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) that may be eliminated by the Defense Authorization Act.

One of the many changes in the act included the removal of the sodomy section of the code after the removal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban. Few realized that the UCMJ defines sodomy either as homosexual relations or as sex with an animal. By striking out the entire sodomy provision, Congress may have decriminalized bestiality.

Yes, you're rolling your eyes now - it's a joke, surely? The White House spokesman and the assembled press pack thought so.

It's no laughing matter to PETA who are taking the issue very seriously indeed:

In watching last night's news briefing, we were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality. With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed—and for good reason. As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only—it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings.

I hope that in the future, you will address important issues with sensitivity and not dismiss them with a joke.

Redefinitions indeed...

-- Nora

There's A Good Reason Right There...

Multitasker writes treatise/stalks after being knocked back for a second date:

In addition, I’m both a right-brain and left-brain man, given that I’m both an investment manager and a philosopher/writer.

Uh-hm.

-- Nora

For A Rainy Day...

What a fabulous innovation. It would be wonderful to see this here in Australia:

When Drewery called the organization, she heard something different from the usual payday lending pitch. Wiles explained that Grace Period was a savings cooperative, one you join as you would a gym. Clients enroll as a member in the club for at least one year. Grace Period offers the new member an initial loan and establishes a workable repayment plan. Typically about $50 is deducted automatically each pay period from the member's paycheck to cover loan installments and modest club dues. These automatic payments continue for 12 months. During that time, the initial loan is repaid and additional funds accumulate as an emergency savings reserve for the member. At year's end, members can withdraw funds and close their accounts or remain members, earning interest on their savings.

-- Nora

Wolf?

The media is filled with implicit praise today as yet another school child proudly reports escaping the clutches of yet another slavering predator.

I'm sorry to be the one to ask the question - did this event actually occur?

This is the latest in a long line of child abduction alerts on the Gold Coast over the past few months, not uncoincidentally occurring in the aftermath of the discovery of the remains of Daniel Morcombe and the subsequent arrest of a suspect in his abduction and killing.

There is no doubt that the Daniel Morcombe case is true and tragic and his parents' attempts to bring something positive from the event through a child safety foundation in their son's name is very commendable indeed.

However I believe there is a link in the recent rise in reporting incidents and the statewide school tour by the Morcombes.

Children, as we know, are susceptible to suggestion. They are also keen to impress their peers and their adults and will either embellish stories or make them up from whole cloth which is why it is important to deal with lying at a very young age.

Could it be that the reports of attempted abductions could very well be a form of mass hysteria unwittingly encouraged by parents and the media?

I don't believe these children are lying for any malicious reason, I believe that at heart they want to demonstrate to their teachers and parents that they understand the 'stranger danger' message and what better way to do that than by giving the adults from whom they want approval, a real life scenario that demonstrates the their ability to look after themselves?

This is why educators who encounter claims of sexual abuse are counselled by psychologists to be very careful in evaluating those claims and give clues to look out for.

Also of concern is that an innocent enquiry by an adult to a child for directions, for example, can result in a witch hunt that ruins the lives and reputations of innocent people as in this example:

One incident in Livonia involved a tow-truck driver who assaulted a man he had seen asking two boys on the street for directions. He turned out to be a tire salesman on a business trip from Akron, Ohio, who had gotten lost with no knowledge of the slayings.

The fact of the matter is, children are more likely to be abused by people they know - whether they be someone online who has cultivated a relationship with your child, a teacher, sports coach or a family friend.

Child welfare is a serious issue and adults have a responsibility to address with issue soberly and seriously, making sure that we allow children to not only be safe, but to feel safe.

Children rely on the adults in their lives to keep their world safe which in turn gives them confidence to grow, learn and explore. If adults and the media are hysterical, fear-filled reactionaries, then what hope do our children have?

-- Nora

UPDATE: Girl's abduction report 'invented'. Told you so.

Seeing Red

Nice piece from Andrew Bolt recognising the work of the Red Frog Crew volunteers.

So I’d be in despair if my son hadn’t also told me of dozens of other young Australians up in Byron last week. About 150 of them, as I found out.

They were volunteers who patrolled the beach at all hours; checking on the drunk and troubled, and doing everything that some parents would have prayed for, had they known.

Why Indeed?

"I don't know why but we're seeing a lot of teenage girls exposing themselves on web cameras...

Why? Here's Exhibit A:



UPDATE: It's interesting that a rethink of pop culture mores occurs when one becomes a parent.

This from renowned British actor Sir David Jason:

‘Take the adverts – I was watching SpongeBob, a favourite cartoon of ours, but suddenly a scent advert came on with this girl stripping off as she walks towards the camera. It’s done for mums but they forget a lot of girls are watching these powerful images.’

Packs A Punch

Mr Yanner, who is attending the ALP conference as a business observer to lobby ministers over uranium mining in the Gulf, said he confronted several MPs about the conscience vote.

"It's a cowardly act," he told The Courier-Mail. "It's political gay bashing.

Assault is something Mr Yanner has hands on experience in dealing out.

-- Nora