Archive for the ‘Mind’ Category
German Homeschooling Familly Granted Asylum In The United States
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010This German family has been persecuted for a long time:
The long wait is over for a German family that immigrated to Morristown in search of the freedom to homeschool their five children.
A U.S. immigration judge granted political asylum to the family Tuesday afternoon in Memphis.
The decision clears the way for Uwe Romeike, his wife and their five children to stay in Morristown where they have been living since 2008.
German state constitutions require children to attend public or private schools and parents can face prison time or fines if they don’t comply.
Romeike, an evangelical Christian, said he believes the German curriculum is “against Christian values.”
Now, as long as their education stays free here in America.
Republican Men, Gird Yer Loins
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
A woman’s hormonal cycle will start to mesh with other women when in proximity. A man’s hormones also seemed to be linked to other men. Via Allahpundit on Twitter comes this research gem from Scientific American:
With its winners and losers, politics is a lot like sports. Now biologists have the testosterone—or lack thereof—to prove it. Specifically, they have found that male voters who back a losing candidate experience a drop in the hormone.
Immediately before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election result, neuroscientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor collected the saliva of 163 college-age participants to determine the amount of testosterone in their systems. Male voters for winner Barack Obama had stable levels of testosterone, but the hormone rapidly declined in males who cast ballots for losers John McCain and Robert Barr. Female voters showed no significant testosterone changes after victory or defeat of their candidate.
Past research has shown that winning and losing in sports matches and other competitions affect testosterone levels in men. The new findings, published online October 21 by PLoS ONE, reveal that politics can influence testosterone in men “just as if they directly engaged head to head in a contest for dominance,” says Kevin LaBar of Duke, the study’s senior researcher.
So the solution, then, is to have winning GOP candidates. I expect Republican men to experience a testosterone surge in the coming year. Something to look forward to.
An Actual Hitler Story: Seriously, Not A Politician Like Hitler, Actual Hitler
Monday, December 7th, 2009Hitler’s body was burned by the KGB:
Adolf Hitler’s remains were burned and dumped into an East German river by Soviet agents 25 years after the end of World War II, Interfax reported, citing Vasily Khristoforov, the Federal Security Service’s chief archivist.
The remains of Hitler, his companion Eva Braun and the family of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were destroyed in April 1970 on the secret orders of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the Russian news agency said today. Andropov went on to become Soviet leader from 1982 until his death in 1984.
The Soviets were concerned that graves of Third Reich leaders might one day attract Nazi sympathizers, Interfax said. The remains were burned and dumped into the Biederitz River, outside the eastern city of Magdeburg, according to the news service.
So, Hitler got torched. I’m glad he’s dust. The thought of his remains remaining is disturbing. Some souls shouldn’t exist.
President Obama And His Hasan Problem–UPDATED
Friday, November 6th, 2009How does a man weened on politically correct thought, race grievance, and collective versus individual responsibility deal with this:
American born
Muslim man
Soldier
Psychiatrist
Murderer
Terrorist
Here was the President’s response:
President Obama gave a shout out before his statements about the rampage at Ft. Hood. Does that seem dissonant to you? Bookworm calls it “frightening insensitivity“.
Robert George of NBC in Chicago writes:
But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow — that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.” Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?
Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That’s the least that should occur.
As more uncomfortable information comes out, information President Obama probably knew even yesterday, it will raise more questions. For example, the killer yelled “Allahu Akbar” while he shot his fellow soldiers. In addition, Hasan gave a weird presentation on the Koran during Grand Rounds. Jimmie Bise of Sundries Shack, said on Twitter:
It is this simple: 12 people were murdered yesterday by a man who holds political views the MSM has guaranteed us aren’t dangerous.
And when Jake Tapper just asked Robert Gibbs when an attack becomes a terrorist attack, the response, according to David Almacy also reporting on Twitter was this:
In an answer to @jaketapper, Robert Gibbs just said that he doesn’t have the theoretical background to define “terrorist attack.” Wow.
When faced with the uncomfortable facts, President Obama and his administration are having a collective psychic break. Reality is not conforming to the fantasy they’ve built.
So far, it seems that this killing spree, this terrorist attack, could have been prevented. This man’s radical Islamist views were widely known. He did not hide them. He did not hide that he didn’t want to go to Iraq. He did not hide that he disagreed with America’s wars. He did not hide his frustration about President Obama. He even praised evil–beheadings and terrorism.
Since it’s politically incorrect to “profile” for terrorists or look for threats proactively, how is one to prevent such events? President Obama’s answer has been to pretend. If he ignores threats, they will go away. But they’re not going away. Neither individual or group or State-sponsoring terrorists are going away. And pretending they don’t exist or aren’t serious and deadly is liable to get a man killed. Or many men.
And so, President Obama’s decision to make light of the Ft. Hood killings by burying the story into a pre-planned press-conference makes sense. This act of terrorism revealed all the lies liberals tell themselves and tell others. There are two choices in this situation, then: One, admit the lie and speak the truth. Or two, continue the delusion.
President Obama has chosen to continue the delusion. If he can, and the mainstream media continues to aid and abet him, he’ll reframe this “unfortunate incident” as the actions of one “troubled individual” who should have “received help sooner.” And it looks like he’ll get help in that regard.
But for normal people, this attack was a terrorist attack by a Muslim man schooled in hate-filled ideology. Hasan would have rather killed his fellow soldiers rather than go to an Islamic nation and help his own country find justice there. That is, Hasan was a Muslim first, and a radical one at that, and a countryman second. And because no one can name Islamism evil, because that might make someone uncomfortable, what is there to say?
So the President and his press people fumble around, trying to find some politically correct verbiage to describe evil. And they can’t. What this man did was wrong and heinous. There are no excuses. He was an individual and he’s responsible. He was an educated doctor, a psychiatrist, and enlightenment did not prevent the taint of radical ideology. And he was also a murderer who intended not just to kill, but terrorize.
He is everything President Obama wants to pretend doesn’t exist. Well. America can’t afford to indulge President Obama and his liberal minions their p.c. fantasies. It gets citizens killed. The Ft. Hood massacre was a reality-check.
Updated:
Michelle Malkin reports that Hasan had “extra weapons training”.
Michael Goldfarb on Obama searching for the “real cause” of the massacre.
Updated:
Shrinkwrapped discusses the psychology:
When the immediate reaction of Islamic spokesmen is to warn everyone of Islamophobia, they too are supporting the projection and externalization that is the hallmark of radical Islam and the “lone, psychiatrically deranged” paranoid.
Every effort should be made to resolutely maintain a posture that specifically and emphatically denies the use of projection and externalization to the radical Islamists. Groups like CAIR should be confronted by our MSM and government on a regular basis to expose their use of such psychological processes for all to see. Whenever a “lone, psychiatrically deranged” individual commits an atrocity, we must be alert to attempts to shift the psychological impetus for the attack from the attacker to the surround. It is an unhappy reality that confronting a paranoid’s projection and externalization does not work in a therapeutic context. It either convinces the paranoid that you are part of the persecutory conspiracy or, if accepted and internalized, leads to significant depression. However, we cannot treat terror as a therapeutic situation. When Muslims support, in their speech and writing, convictions that reflect the use of projection and externalization, they must be considered potential dangers to the community. This requires a form of “racial profiling” but the alternative is to wait for an atrocity of such significant proportions that “lone, psychiatrically deranged” non-Muslims begin to take things into their own hands.
Is Yelling The New Spanking? Yes.
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009Morally superior Gen X moms and dads seem entirely reasonable until they see the limits of “limits” like time-outs, banal blabbing and gentle cajoling. Kids regard their parents with utter contempt. Well, some do. Depends on the kid’s personality. And parents, once exasperated, go there. No, they might not spank their child. They’ll yell. Or arm yank. Or threaten. Or push. Or thump (thwack in the head with fingers). Or pinch. Something, anything, to reorder the disordered relationship–the one where the kid is running the show, and the parent feels drug around by the nose by a two and half foot troll.
The New York Time’s takes on the “overachieving” parents’ angst via Instapundit:
Parental yelling today may be partly a releasing of stress for multitasking, overachieving adults, parenting experts say.
“Yelling is done when parents feel irritable and anxious,” said Harold S. Koplewicz, the founder of the New York University Child Study Center. “It can be as simple as ‘I’m overwhelmed, I’m running late for work, I had a fight with my wife, I have a project due — and my son left his homework upstairs.’ ”
Numerous studies exist on the effect of corporal punishment on children. A new one came out just last month. Led by a researcher at Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy, the study concluded that spanking children when they are very young (1-year-old) can slow their intellectual development and lead to aggressive behavior as they grow older. But there is far less data on the more common habit of shouting and screaming in families.
Something jumps out at me: as the child of parents who viewed spanking as their Christian duty (spare the rod and all that), I can assure the researchers it is not like yelling is new. Yelling happened in the bad old days, too.
Re: parenting styles: Kids are resilient. An occasional “losing it” moment isn’t going to scar a child for life.
However, when a parent creates an environment where he or she is consistently out of control, where he chooses to respond to a child in anger, rather than reason, the child realizes the child is in control. Someone owns the buttons. Either, the parent is controlling the nuke button or the kid is. I would suggest that the kid will grow increasingly insecure when he can’t count on mom or dad to be in charge. He doesn’t want to be in charge. He wants to relax into well-known boundaries.
So, parents need to keep an eternal guard on their emotions. Some kids are very smart and manipulative and get a kick out of mom and dad being as easy as a wind-up toy. Teenage boys seem to especially enjoy spinning old mom like a top. The parent teaches disrespect for both himself and the child.
I hate to burst the bubble of New Agey parenting types who scream at their kids for not eating the lentils, you’re no better than the out-of-control spankers of yore. The key is who is in charge? Screaming just declares your impotence just as reckless spanking indicated a desire for immediate control without thought. In both cases, it’s the easy way.
Parenting is brutally difficult. It is a constant personal challenge. The big picture: What is right for the kid? is lost in a personal haze of fatigue, hormones, blood sugar, emotional misery or whatever. Every parent realizes his personal limitations almost immediately–a crying, inconsolable infant is often the first test of many.
So yellers need to knock it off and grow up. Someone has to be the parent. It should be the parent.
Podcast: Not Hot For Teacher With Jimmie Bise And Tabitha Hale
Thursday, October 15th, 2009Jimmie Bise of Sundries Shack and Tabitha Hale of Pink Elephant Pundit join me to discuss the spork incident which morphed into discussing socialism and central educational planning which morphed into talking the Nobel Peace prize. Believe it or not, it all relates.
To subscribe on iTunes, just click here!
Spanking Lowers I.Q.
Friday, September 25th, 2009Well, that will disappoint some of the readers here. Oh wait! Not that kind of spanking. Here’s the study:
The results of a survey of more than 17,000 university students from 32 countries “show that the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ,” Straus wrote in his presentation.
In looking at spanking just in the United States, Straus and a fellow researcher reviewed data on IQ scores from 806 children between 2 and 4 years old and another 704 kids aged 5 to 9.
When their IQs were tested again four years later, children in the younger group who were not spanked scored five points higher, on average, than did children who had been spanked. In the group of older children, spanking resulted in an average loss of 2.8 points.
“How often parents spanked made a difference,” Straus said in a news release from the university. “The more spanking, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”
I think the study writers were beaten as children.
First, when looking across cultures, how does one control for something like spanking? All Australian children eat vegemite, or however you spell it. Does that make an IQ difference? Do spanked children who eat vegemite have higher or lower IQs?
Not to mention, this statement, an obvious one, invalidates the whole study:
Those findings are plausible and make some sense, Briggs said, but she added that it’s difficult to tease out all the other factors that could play a role in IQ scores — including poverty and parental education.
Ya think? How about the parents being morons themselves since IQ is highly heritable?
Second, the presumption is that spanking a child is an out-of-control parenting experience:
Dr. Stephen Ajl, a child abuse pediatrician, director of pediatric ambulatory care at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and medical director of the Jane Barker Brooklyn Children’s Advocacy Center in New York City, said that “spanking and other forms of corporal punishment mean that someone has lost control, and if that goes on on a chronic basis, it may affect some part of children’s psychological well-being.”
And though some people believe that they can use spanking as a form of punishment without losing control, Briggs said that’s very difficult to do all the time.
“When you’re physical with your child, you open that floodgate, and the likelihood that it could veer into where you don’t have as much control increases,” Briggs said. “Plus, if you’re just spanking, you haven’t taught your child anything.”
You can’t tell me the culture of beating a kid with a stick for every response is the same as a parent who spanks a kid for running into the street. Even if the second parent is out-of-control or angry, sometimes it’s not bad for a kid to get “rebooted” now and again.
This study was put forth for political reasons. Liberals don’t like spanking. They think it’s barbaric. They also believe everyone can be rehabilitated. Ironically, the children who never learn consequences as a kid grows up to being surprised, and in jail, dealing with consequences.
Can a child grow up without ever being spanked and turn out fine? Yes. Can a child receive corporal punishment and turn out fine? Yes. The bigger thing is love being the foundation.
Also: Spanking is NOT hitting. There is a huge difference between the two. Beating is another whole level of abuse. Liberals like conflating these things because nuance scares them. They want a rule for parents to follow, but the fact is, every child is different. Family personalities are different. Parents must make different choices with different kids.
Bottom line, libs need to butt out.
Wayne Elise: The Modern Dale Carnegie Explains How To Talk To Women, Tech & Dating, And Sex V. Sensuality
Thursday, September 24th, 2009A persistent complaint in the male-dominated political blogosphere is the difficulty getting a woman. Guys like Ace and Allah have made their hard luck in love laments part of their schtick. Well.
Wayne Elise makes his living helping men find women. I suggested to him that we should have a lonely hearts male blogger meet-up, video tape it and see how good he really is. I personally wonder if the male bloggers protest too much and actually have healthy personal lives or if they’re in dire need of his services. Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?
Anyway, we also talked about the culture and how it’s affecting dating. He noted that women are getting much more aggressive, that sex is talked about more but there seems to be less of it, and that mystery is gone, too.
At the end I discuss Obama v. Palin. Hope you’ll listen!
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Podcast: Defending The American Dream, The Tea Party Movement, And Why Are Women Unhappy?
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Erik Telford discusses becoming an empowered activist. John Hawkins and I debate why Maureen Dowd and her ilk are unhappy. Also: My defense and criticism of feminism.
Forced Abortions: Majority Of American Women Feel Coerced To Abort
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009Many women experience pressure, abuse, and coercion when faced with a surprise pregnancy. This is bearing out with research reported by LifeNews:
Elliot Institute director David Reardon, co-authored a Medical Science Monitor study of American and Russian women with the 64 percent figure.
His new report, Forced Abortion in America, documents cases of violence against women who refused to have an abortion.
It also highlights cases like the one in Maine, which saw a couple charged with abducting their pregnant daughter in an attempt to force her to have an abortion, and another in Georgia, where a woman forced her pregnant daughter to drink turpentine to cause an abortion.
Reardon says the cases are just part of an epidemic of coerced and forced abortions in the U.S.
Reardon said that cases of women being pressured, threatened, or subjected to violence if they refuse to abort are not unusual.
He pointed out that studies have shown that homicide is the leading killer of pregnant women in the U.S. and that women in abusive relationships are at risk for increased violence during pregnancy.
“In many of the cases documented for our ‘Forced Abortion in America’ report, police and witnesses reported that acts of violence and murder took place after the woman refused to abort or because the attacker didn’t want the pregnancy,” he said in a statement LifeNews.com received.
“Even if a woman isn’t physically threatened, she often faces intense pressure, abandonment, lack of support, or emotional blackmail if she doesn’t abort. While abortion is often described as a ‘choice,’ women who’ve been there tell a very different story,” he added.
It has been the rare woman in my practice who sought the abortion and feels no guilt years later. Most women were either pressured to abort or chose the abortion and feel guilt later and remorse later. It is the rare woman who truly “chose”. It is a rarer woman who has no regret over her choice.
