A Whole Lot About Mostly Nothing

The Nanny State shows increasing signs of ascendancy when a Quebec court decides that dad has been too harsh in forbidding his daughter from attending a school trip.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn’t discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip.

The judge’s decision, made from the bench, applies only to the girl’s unusual circumstances, lawyers for both sides said, trying to dispel visions of grounded teenagers rushing to the nearest courthouse to overturn their parents’ punishments.

Madam Justice’s “logic”?

Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment.

She said the girl has already been forbidden to use the Internet and her father also punished her by cancelling her participation in an extracurricular event.

The trip, a three-day outing within Quebec supervised by teachers and volunteer parents, marked her Grade 6 class graduation from elementary school.

“She’s becoming a big girl. … It’s a unique event in her life,” Ms. Fortin said.

How in the name of all creation does a freaking court decide if poor little Spoiled BratGirl is a “big” enough girl to override Dad’s legitimate discipline concerns?

This crap is going on in Canada, I know. But it may well meander its way down here, at which point, if I am still a parent, I must consider moving to another country that still recognizes the family as the primary social unit of society.

What is the logical end of this sort of State intervention? What kinds of kids can we look forward to?

See, now little spoiled Mackenzie can now sue her dad and get the correct car with the correct color.

This is no little cavil I am ranting about here. This is nothing less than the huge signpost that society as we know it is about to crumble.

Talk about rising divorce rates, homosexual marriage, rising teen pregnancy and STD transmission rates. Yes, those are all there as well. Take away a parent’s right to discipline, and now the State is signaling that it is the primary arbiter of society. And we all know how well the State does when it manages the monopoly on some service/commodity: It all goes to hell.

This is, simply put, really bad, bad news.

ANCHORESS as usual has more info, as well as coverage on the Canadian school that called Child Welfare on a family because a teacher’s aid felt the child was being abused based on what a local psychic had been telling her, and the school administration bought this nonsense!! Anchoress also talks about Canada’s outlawing of spanking and its lockdown on free speech.

On the left, Richard Dawkins. On the right, PZ Myers (picture brought to you from the Sixth Circle of Dante’s Inferno.)

(They are) curiously limited. (They are) mechanic(s) of the brain. (They have) cut it to pieces with (their) scalpels and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control.

-Dr. Sam Weizak from Stephen King’s Dead Zone.

Ray Kurzweil wants to live forever, and claims that he will be able to do so after the upcoming “singularity’ occurs. He states that soon, we will be able to replace most if not all of our organs, and then after that, digitally “download” our consciousnesses onto computers, so that in the event we keep ourselves downloaded, we can live forever. Currently, he takes over 180 vitamins a day to prolong his life (so damned many pills, he has to hire help to manage which pills to take when) and sees a Denver-area physician once a week for longevity treatments. This physician charges $6000 per visit.

Somehow, some way, we all yearn for the unreachable, the immortal, the divine. There is that impossible desire within each of us for that level of perfection that cannot be achieved here on earth.

Aquinas taught many. many moons ago that this yearning for a perfection that we cannot know from experience here on earth shows that there must in fact be a God; how else can we explain this inexplicable yearning?

Kurzweil feels this. But as a committed rationalist, he must pursue his arid vision of digital immortality, and he sinks ridiculous sums of money into that pursuit.

What a tragedy it shall be for the man when he finally does die, sees that the old Manichean dualism is but a sham and a freeway to waste and misery.

(The title comes from a Larry Niven novelette of the same label and can be found in his short story collection Tales of Known Space. I recommend it without reservation. A scientist thinks he has the secret to unlimited power by harnessing the potential found in a quantum black hole. Of course, the man loses control of the forces he is manipulating and they destroy him. A timeless tale. Kurzweil is re-living it as we speak.)

Creepy.

I can’t help it.  I listen to the chanting on this video, apparently the brainchild of Will.I.Am. of the Black-Eyed Peas, and I start flashing back to videos of hundreds of crazed brownshirts stamping their feet, hurling their arms straight out and screaming “Sieg HEIL” at the appearance of their Fuhrer.

Now, I understand that Obama is no fascist, and I am not trying to compare him to Hitler.  But I AM comparing the fawning of his sycophants to that of the unthinking adulation and obedience the Germans gave to der Fuhrer.  And that adulation is dangerous, both to Obama, his followers and the country at-large.

HT: Anchoress 

. . .seriously. He spends SO much time slamming it, both Fundamentalism and Catholicism, he reeks of the homobigot who is scared to come out of the closet.

One of his most recent idiocies is entitled “Christianity’s Sins Against Science.” He then outlines 12 categories of offense. I thought I’d spend some little time showing just how stupid they are. Please note, I am not engaging in rational arguing throughout. For the most part, I am sniping at a man who is -deep down- terrified of Christianity.

Oh. And as a quick aside, one might level the charge against me that I am a closet Myers admirer, since I spend so much time deriding him. Only in one sense. He is overweight and past 40, as am I. We both have beards and teach. But he gets to teach at the UNiversity, where he gets breaks ALL THE TIME. I am jealous of those breaks. Nothing else.  I’ve got the better marriage, much better break on the kids (his and mine) and the wiser outlook.  Oh, and I guess we’re both curmedgeons, in a way.

Anyway, his list: (more…)

SNAP.

The basics: Kids from intact families develop sexual habits at a more reasonable (and appropriately delayed) rate than their blended-family peers, and that delay in the development of sexual activity makes for a generally happier life.

Wow. Whodathunkit?

via SC&A.

Updated links:

SC&A

Mamacita.

. . .only because I spend so much time doing the Don Quixote in here to the Pharyngulite/Kraken windmill, this post requires studious attention from (limited) admirers and (probably even more limited) critics.

Shea hits the nail on the head -as usual-: (more…)

. . with absolutely deft yet powerful logic bombs.

Sadly, there is yet no “smart” bomb that can penetrate the minds of the willfully hidebound.

I am thinking of making his post required reading for my apologetics class.

. . .I’ve NEVER SEEN a more compelling argument.  I mean, Christianity might as well fold up its tent and go home now.

Let’s flaunt Jane Fonda and John Phillip Law, let’s disrespect religion, let’s give gay men and women some dignity, let’s just do everything to make the other side gnash their teeth and tear at their beards and rend their garments…because we’re so much better.

More verbal diarrhea from the Internet’s resident cholera-of-the-brain victim, PZ Myers.

The phrase in bold is just teeming with irony.  Granted, Myers is attempting to be ironic in making such a statement.  He would claim that he never makes ad hominem arguments.  But therein lies the deeper irony: His arguments against religion are either deeply flawed, fallacious straw-man errors or outright ad-him claims/attacks.  Basically, his argument in favor of unbridled atheistic nihilism is simply what he wrote above; “because we’re so much better.”  This really is the best he can do.  And he couches it as irony.
And he’ll keep sitting there in dumbfounded bemusement as hordes of American sensibilities continue to disregard his out-there ravings.

Notice I don’t provide a link.  Frankly, I’m too lazy and nauseated.  I simply don’t want to visit his sad little site again to copy-and-paste his address.  It’s Pharyngula, if anyone is really interested.

LINK

At this link, you will find a very disturbing and painful video of Parkinson’s victim Michael J. Fox, stumping for Missouri Senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill. She is one who is willing to expand research into embryonic stem-cell research in hopes of finding cures for chronic, painful diseases such as theParkinson’s Disease that Mr. Fox suffers from so tragically.

Fox, given his illness, is probably not to be blamed for the making of this video. I cannot imagine the frustration with his increasingly debilitated condition, nor his rage at what he perceives to be the deliberate desire to keep him sick.

But no one wishes for Marty McFly to be sick. Just like no one in this country would wish for their fighter pilots to die unnecessarily in extremes of low pressure and bone-cracking cold.

But they WOULD object to studies being done -to humans- to determine the absolute limits of humans in those conditions. Such as forcing human subjects to spend the night outdoors, in sub-zero conditions, without clothing, and being subject to repeated dousings with cold water to simulate ditching conditions in the North Atlantic.

It would not be the issue of who would benefit from the studies that would appall putatively objective observers. What would offend them would be the callous and inhumane treatment of the experimental subjects; observers would cry -with justified outrage- that to strip the inherent dignity of the human person for the sake of scientific progress is morally reprehensible.

And these studies have been done. By the Nazis, of course.

Just like torture.

And in both cases, the observers would be both ethically and morally correct.

But the modern -or post-modern- observers turns this logic on its head in defense of embryonic stem-cell research. There, the dignity of the human person is routinely denied -even as ever having existed- in the name of the furtherance of science so that Marty McFly might be able to sit still and hold a conversation without looking like a speed freak with a speech disorder.

In the end, I cannot blame Fox for making this sordid and repulsive video. And the source of its repulsion is not the sight of Fox himself. That alone evokes sympathy -or at least empathy- and fills one with a sense of tragedy.

What is repulsive is the tag line:

I’m Claire McCaskill, and I approved this message.

McCaskill has no problem with the exploitation of the wounded and sick, so that the slaughter of innocents may continue unabated. Her position is one of evil, and it must not be allowed in the halls of public decision making.

McCaskill herself is not evil, but she has endorsed the creation of one of the most evil campaign images I ever hope to see in the seemingly ever-increasing squalor that is American public debate.

I do not like voting Republican. But with messages such as these, I simply CANNOT vote Democratic.

And as for the berserk Pandagonites that would dare to use this post to suggest that this is all part of. . .

(A conspiracy that leads Christians to). . . spout. . . the exact same empty platitudes about abortion and Teh Gheyz, then the reason is that red staters are under a non-stop, top-down, pseudo-Christian propaganda blitz that preys on people’s. . .anxieties. . . (link)

Yeah, Mandy, it’s a conspiracy, all right. Led from the top down. The problem is, the top in this case is the teachings of a creature much greater than you or me. The difference between the two of us is that I at least try to understand and follow what He is saying. You deliberately ignore Him.

You and McCaskill are certainly free to continue to do so. At the peril of more than your lives. Your souls.

God have mercy on this country. Cause God also knows that if I were in charge. . .I’d be far less patient.

More of that good, ol’ time, down-home Missouri mudslinging. . .

UPDATE:  The Anchoress, as usual, has her finger on the pulse of this sordid nonsense.