News Roundup
Last National Kids’ Day, British kids said God was the most famous person in the world. This year the Queen and Harry Potter are more famous than God, and being happy is more important than being famous, healthy or rich.
Are you seeing your maternal or paternal set of grandparents this holiday season? A new study finds that maternal grandparents put a higher priority on face-to-face contact with their grandchildren. They are more willing to travel to make frequent visits. The study says evolutionary psychology is the cause.
Use your DNA to find your soulmate! Scientificmatch.com, an online dating service, uses DNA samples to predict physical chemistry – the key to better sex and healthier kids.
Senators, both Republican and Democrat, benefitted from farm subsidies. Read the list here.
Dana Parsons writes about a family suing a high school teacher for making anti-religious remarks the parents say made their son uncomfortable and unable to learn. According to a tape recording, the teacher said, “When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth.”
Bush has pushed health savings accounts for the poor, and now a program in Indiana will put them to the test. Someone making $20,000 a year could get health coverage for about $19 a week.
Vermonters top the list of parents who read to their kids. Some 67 percent say they read to their children daily, but Mississippi came in last at 38 percent.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a male deity made of meatballs and noodles, head of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and popularized on the Internet. But the American Academy of Religion says he’s more than that: He’s a “didactic device” and a “folk-humor hybrid body.”
John Leo writes about a conservative Princeton student who faked a conservative hate crime, writing himself threatening letters and faking his own beating.




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back to top9 Comments to “News Roundup”
Regarding the John Leo article on fake hate crimes on college campuses:
There is only one “trinity” left in which to believe in most academic communities today–”Race-Gender-Class.” (Faith-Freedom-Family are out as well as Father-Son-Holy Spirit). There is no way to get more sympathy in that context (regardless of your political sympathies) than to make it look like you are a victim of group or identity discrimination.
Since the mainstream media have no template other than ‘Race-Gender-Class,’ and since they major in “identity politics,” they often rush to cover claims of hate crimes with a mindless frnezy (though it often depends on who the victim is).
Anyone with this “I’m a victim” mentality ingrained so deeply that they would fake victimhood is NO genuine conservative in real life, regardless of who they claim to vote for.
I might add that genuine liberals are also correct to disown such fakers, since the upshot of swuch fakery is to water down the community’s ability to take seriously all the “claims” of racism at the same level of passion over time. Real threats lose their grip on us when fake threats keep occurring.
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#1
Speaking of victim mentalities, don’t forget the conservative Christians’ We are victims of demands for ‘gay marriage’ syndrome, often seen right here on worldmagblog.
Full disclosures: 1) my daughter is in a relationship with another woman; 2) I don’t support gay marriage, though I do support civil unions; 3) At Thanksgiving, my wife and I celebrated 42 years of erratically civil marriage
As the previous poster declaims: Real threats lose their grip on us when fake threats keep occurring..
Yes, indeedy.
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Speaking of all that, I was interested in the note about “study says evolutionary psychology is the cause” (of maternal grandparents putting higher priority on face to face contact).
Following the link, I found another article that says, “Grandparents Relate To Adopted Grandchildren The Same As Biological Grandchildren (Apr. 16, 2007) — Grandparents of adopted grandchildren relate to them as an integral part of the family — just as they relate to their biological grandchildren.
This is interesting to me in that my daughter, unable to have children (for medical reasons) has taken the last name of her (non-wedded to her) partner and has adopted her partner’s birth daughter.
I guess in that in a strange way makes my wife and I adoptive grandparents, though we usually just think of “three and five/sixths years old” (as she told me last week) Random Granddaughter as our grandaughter.
They are coming to visit us tomorrow and Monday for Christmas meatballs dinner and to admire the hemlock I chopped down with my chain saw (cannot tell a lie) Christmas tree in our living room.
Your victimhood at my daughter’s no gay marriage or pride that gay people don’t need no stinkin’ gay marriages in our depraved society is up to you along with your varying marriage.
My mileage will be out of here after the first of the year
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As many people here think I am a stinkin liberal, I post a link to cnn’s “Dumbest Moments in Business” [for last year).
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/101dumbest/2007/full_list/index.html
However, in line with the discussion recently about incandescent bulbs and flourescent bulbs on wmb recently, I will point out that “fluorescent bulbs are so yesterday.”
The two largest lighting companies in the world, General Electric and Philips (Netherlands) are leading the charge into LED lights to replace them both.
Full disclosure: part of my investing philosophy is to invest in evil companies. Piggybacking on my cynical attitude, when my wife started her IRA, she purchased General Electric stock.
Rather to our surprise, GE is now positioning itself as an environmentalist company. This makes us nervous, but the LED lighting initiative does suggest that making money by doing good may have legs. Go figure.
We don’t own any Philips stock.
Is there an abortifacient investment play anybody here knows about? How many “free enterprise is wonderful” wmb participants would invest in such a company if it were profitable?
Just wondering.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/101dumbest/2007/full_list/index.html
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Random Name wrote; “Speaking of victim mentalities, don’t forget the conservative Christians’ We are victims of demands for ‘gay marriage’ syndrome…”
I think you missed it Random. “We” are not necessarily the main “victims of demands for gay marriage”, but children will be as they are increasingly infused with confusion and increasingly deprived of two-parent families with a mom and a dad.
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#Increasingly “infused with confusion.”
I don’t know. Christians have been doing a pretty good job of infusing with confusion for a very long time.
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Random Name, that may be but it’s still no reason to make their confusion worse and take it to a deeper level, which (in my humble opinion) same-sex marriage would do.
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Joel,
Unlike you, who apparently believe that you have the answer for almost everything, I am uncertain about many things and do not pretend that I am not.
As you know, I am not particularly an advocate of “gay marriage.” However, homosexuals are part of humanity and always have been.
Belief that prayer will “cure” people who otherwise behave in ethical and sensible ways is neither helpful nor accurate. That obviously fallacious belief does not give me much confidence in the rest of your convictions and recommendations.
Given these difficult issues, we can try and integrate people who are not harming others by their daily actions into our society or we can harass them in petty ways.
You make your best choice and I make mine. Time will tell a little about the results, though neither of us will live long enough to get much useful information.
I will die as I lived, in doubt. I am not sure about you, but it is quite possible you will die as you lived, with a pretty closed mind.
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#5: children will be as they are increasingly infused with confusion and increasingly deprived of two-parent families with a mom and a dad.
Ok Rdean, stop laughing and steady your hands.
So, are you saying that gay people should marry straight people? It worked for Larry Craig and Ted Haggard. Oh, or are you saying that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to have children? Or, are you saying that gay people should stop taking in crack babies and children with disabilities that straight people throw away? Or, are you saying that gay people should go through their entire lives without romantic love, alone, so they can be happy when they die, crawling and begging for forgiveness for “existing”?
We know that children can’t be “turned”. Gay isn’t like “werewolf”. Hey, since the religious believe in spirits and the arcane, do they believe in werewolves and vampires? Just asking. You never know.
#7: in my humble opinion
Humble, but hardly informed. You have “facts”? No, nevermind, that never stopped the religious before. It comes from living in the world you want rather than dealing with the world that is actually here. You know, the “real one”. Children of gay people become gay at EXACTLY the same rate as other children. What they have learned is to be accepting of people unlike themselves, you know, love your brother as yourself.
Back to the “real world”, guess who is having a much larger positive influence in Iraq?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22376176/
Since Islam has been written into the Iraq constitution as the “national religion”, it only stands to reason that Iran would have much more influence. We are mostly Christians, they are ALL Muslims. They did chase out the rest of their Christians. Why would they listen to us? The US has created a radical, fundamentalist Islamic government in the Middle East. A country that will most certainly end up as a vassal to Iran, if it hasn’t already. It just gets worse and worse.
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