A Bob Hope line that needs to be looped again and again for the sake of George Clooney, Whoopie Goldberg, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Arianna Huffington, and Alec Baldwin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWpU8sX10_4
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
LYING FOR A GOOD CAUSE?
It was Monday morning at Oceanside’s El Camino High School when a uniformed officer entered a classroom to announce that several students had been killed in a drunk-driving accident. The officer offered a brief eulogy, placed a rose on a deceased student’s empty seat, and left.
This solemn scenario was repeated in twenty junior and senior classrooms. Incredibly, many of the students (and others misinformed via cell phones) were left to marinate in their grief for two hours before an assembly was held that made it clear their classmates were really alive.
In an athletic field demonstration the artificially-bloodied bodies of the presumed-dead students were pulled from a wrecked vehicle by emergency personnel. It was an ironic way of reversing the belief that their friends and acquaintances were dead.
Some students were angry at being emotionally manipulated in order to make a point about prom night safety—at being involuntarily incorporated into a dramatic scheme that makes driving-school’s “Red Asphalt” films seem tame by comparison. Others were consoled at the thought that helping just one person justifies everything. Unfortunately, adults who approved this extreme variant of the “Every 15 Minutes” program offered the same clichéd rationale—a costless benefit analysis.
On the other hand, Richard Yoast, director of the American Medical Association’s Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse, claims that data for the effectiveness of this scared-straight approach is lacking—an observation conceded by the program’s national founder, Dean Wilson, who insisted that El Camino’s event was “not what we teach.”
When I read about this well-intentioned deception, it brought to mind the experiments conducted at Yale University by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. Milgram’s work involved tricking persons into thinking they were administering electrical shocks to individuals who were taking part in a “learning” program.
Wrong answers to questions called for ever-higher levels of electrical shocks. Things were set up so that control-board operators could hear steadily increasing cries of agony and pleas for help coming from the “learners”—followed at a certain stage by total silence.
The control-board operators didn’t know that they were, in fact, the real subjects of the experiment. Nor did they know that the “learners” were part of an elaborate ruse to see how far the volunteers would go in obeying the voice of authority.
The results of the experiment were surprising on two levels. First, two-thirds of the volunteers continued to obey the man in the white smock even when it appeared that the “learner” was being fried to death. Second, the experiment demonstrated Milgram’s own appalling willingness to manipulate human beings to gain some dissertation material on human motivation.
Today, lying for a “good cause” has become a way of life for many activists. Truth is considered of small value compared to the good that can be done by spreading lies.
To conceal the primary transmission factors in the epidemic, AIDS was declared to be an equal-opportunity disease that’s just as likely to affect heterosexuals—a lie. To promote a health-uber-alles agenda, even occasional contact with secondhand smoke was portrayed as a mortal danger—a lie. To heighten the victimization status of women and to forge a clear link between male contact sports and battery, Super Bowl Sunday was solemnly declared to be the day on which most women are beaten by their spouses—a lie. And to scare gullible lemmings into ceding control of their lives to eco-priests, head charlatan Al Gore inserts lies about twenty-foot ocean-level increases into presentations filled with distortions and speculative half-truths.
In truth, those who are willing to lie for the sake of a political agenda are also willing, for the same cause, to manipulate human beings like maze rats.
This solemn scenario was repeated in twenty junior and senior classrooms. Incredibly, many of the students (and others misinformed via cell phones) were left to marinate in their grief for two hours before an assembly was held that made it clear their classmates were really alive.
In an athletic field demonstration the artificially-bloodied bodies of the presumed-dead students were pulled from a wrecked vehicle by emergency personnel. It was an ironic way of reversing the belief that their friends and acquaintances were dead.
Some students were angry at being emotionally manipulated in order to make a point about prom night safety—at being involuntarily incorporated into a dramatic scheme that makes driving-school’s “Red Asphalt” films seem tame by comparison. Others were consoled at the thought that helping just one person justifies everything. Unfortunately, adults who approved this extreme variant of the “Every 15 Minutes” program offered the same clichéd rationale—a costless benefit analysis.
On the other hand, Richard Yoast, director of the American Medical Association’s Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse, claims that data for the effectiveness of this scared-straight approach is lacking—an observation conceded by the program’s national founder, Dean Wilson, who insisted that El Camino’s event was “not what we teach.”
When I read about this well-intentioned deception, it brought to mind the experiments conducted at Yale University by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. Milgram’s work involved tricking persons into thinking they were administering electrical shocks to individuals who were taking part in a “learning” program.
Wrong answers to questions called for ever-higher levels of electrical shocks. Things were set up so that control-board operators could hear steadily increasing cries of agony and pleas for help coming from the “learners”—followed at a certain stage by total silence.
The control-board operators didn’t know that they were, in fact, the real subjects of the experiment. Nor did they know that the “learners” were part of an elaborate ruse to see how far the volunteers would go in obeying the voice of authority.
The results of the experiment were surprising on two levels. First, two-thirds of the volunteers continued to obey the man in the white smock even when it appeared that the “learner” was being fried to death. Second, the experiment demonstrated Milgram’s own appalling willingness to manipulate human beings to gain some dissertation material on human motivation.
Today, lying for a “good cause” has become a way of life for many activists. Truth is considered of small value compared to the good that can be done by spreading lies.
To conceal the primary transmission factors in the epidemic, AIDS was declared to be an equal-opportunity disease that’s just as likely to affect heterosexuals—a lie. To promote a health-uber-alles agenda, even occasional contact with secondhand smoke was portrayed as a mortal danger—a lie. To heighten the victimization status of women and to forge a clear link between male contact sports and battery, Super Bowl Sunday was solemnly declared to be the day on which most women are beaten by their spouses—a lie. And to scare gullible lemmings into ceding control of their lives to eco-priests, head charlatan Al Gore inserts lies about twenty-foot ocean-level increases into presentations filled with distortions and speculative half-truths.
In truth, those who are willing to lie for the sake of a political agenda are also willing, for the same cause, to manipulate human beings like maze rats.
Friday, June 20, 2008
LIBERAL FASCISM, CANADIAN STYLE
The hate-speech "trial" of columnist Mark Steyn in Canada foreshadows what the U.S. is in for--and to a certain extent, experiences right now!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
BANNING FREEDOM OF RELIGION
Having declared by a 4-3 vote that “husband and wife” are purely accidental terms when it comes to the definition of marriage, the California Supremes are now mulling over a case that promises to stigmatize moral conviction as unlawful bigotry.
The question at issue involves an Oceanside woman whose desire to be impregnated at the medical center of her choice conflicted with the consciences of doctors at the North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group. The matter of conscience involved the fact that the mother-to-be was a lesbian.
The patient in her mid-thirties was already a mother but apparently wanted to increase the number of little ones that she and her same-sex partner were caring for. The doctors at the medical center, however, weren’t willing to be directly involved in promoting a state of affairs they deemed immoral.
In taking this stand the doctors’ consciences were in harmony with the scriptures of every major religious tradition in history—none of which recognize same-sex unions. The doctors’ convictions might also have been shaped by the quaint notion that children deserve to have both a father and a mother and that individuals who intentionally deprive their offspring of one or the other are engaging in an act of stunning self-centeredness.
The plaintiff, however, insists that doctors don’t have a right to make judgments that she and her attorney equate with racism. Echoing a similar sentiment, one of the court justices asked how the doctors’ position differed from that of a pharmacist who refused to sell medicine to “people like you.”
Absent from this analogy was any reflection on the doctors’ obligation to consider the welfare of the fatherless children they would be helping to bring into the world. More egregiously, the plaintiff’s race-based argument ignores the fact that men and women are biologically and genetically different in profound ways—despite the academic idiocy of the 1970s that continues to be selectively invoked in elite circles.
More to the point is this complaint by the plaintiff: “It does do a great deal of damage to a person when you tell them they aren’t worthy of having a child or having a family.”
The politically correct grammar of that statement coincides perfectly with the idea that moral judgments (at least those of the traditional variety) make people feel bad and thus must be expunged.
Public opposition to homosexual activity has already been criminalized in a Canadian jurisdiction where a pastor was ordered to apologize and pay $5,000 for the “pain and suffering” his words inflicted on an aggrieved activist. Canada, of course, doesn’t have a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and religion. But the Constitution doesn’t seem to be an obstacle for activist judges when it comes to doing the politically correct thing.
Whatever the court decides in this particular case, I am confident our judicial masters will eventually rule that traditional religious and moral convictions about homosexuality constitute “hate-speech” and must be consigned to the privacy of one’s closet.
So much for freedom of religion.
The question at issue involves an Oceanside woman whose desire to be impregnated at the medical center of her choice conflicted with the consciences of doctors at the North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group. The matter of conscience involved the fact that the mother-to-be was a lesbian.
The patient in her mid-thirties was already a mother but apparently wanted to increase the number of little ones that she and her same-sex partner were caring for. The doctors at the medical center, however, weren’t willing to be directly involved in promoting a state of affairs they deemed immoral.
In taking this stand the doctors’ consciences were in harmony with the scriptures of every major religious tradition in history—none of which recognize same-sex unions. The doctors’ convictions might also have been shaped by the quaint notion that children deserve to have both a father and a mother and that individuals who intentionally deprive their offspring of one or the other are engaging in an act of stunning self-centeredness.
The plaintiff, however, insists that doctors don’t have a right to make judgments that she and her attorney equate with racism. Echoing a similar sentiment, one of the court justices asked how the doctors’ position differed from that of a pharmacist who refused to sell medicine to “people like you.”
Absent from this analogy was any reflection on the doctors’ obligation to consider the welfare of the fatherless children they would be helping to bring into the world. More egregiously, the plaintiff’s race-based argument ignores the fact that men and women are biologically and genetically different in profound ways—despite the academic idiocy of the 1970s that continues to be selectively invoked in elite circles.
More to the point is this complaint by the plaintiff: “It does do a great deal of damage to a person when you tell them they aren’t worthy of having a child or having a family.”
The politically correct grammar of that statement coincides perfectly with the idea that moral judgments (at least those of the traditional variety) make people feel bad and thus must be expunged.
Public opposition to homosexual activity has already been criminalized in a Canadian jurisdiction where a pastor was ordered to apologize and pay $5,000 for the “pain and suffering” his words inflicted on an aggrieved activist. Canada, of course, doesn’t have a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and religion. But the Constitution doesn’t seem to be an obstacle for activist judges when it comes to doing the politically correct thing.
Whatever the court decides in this particular case, I am confident our judicial masters will eventually rule that traditional religious and moral convictions about homosexuality constitute “hate-speech” and must be consigned to the privacy of one’s closet.
So much for freedom of religion.
Friday, June 06, 2008
HOW "LIBERAL" HEALTH CARE WOULD KILL TED KENNEDY
Here's an ironic twist. If Ted Kennedy had to live under the health care system he favors, he'd be dead!
Click the link.
Click the link.
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