timeimmortal

I think the first sex education class I had was in fourth grade, just for the record, and almost every year afterward until high school featured another iteration of the programme.

I’m sure most people my age have had a similar experience of sex-ed. And we know how well that’s worked out, don’t we? As in: not well.

Apparently the problem is that we started learning this stuff too late in life. And now, a British charity is calling for kids as young as four to be enrolled in sex-ed classes. Because apparently that will work better.

Brook chief executive Simon Blake said: “Many young people are having sex because they want to find out what it is, because they were drunk or because their mates were.

“That’s just not good enough for young people. We’ve got to have high expectations for them so they’ve got high expectations for themselves.”

He added: “All the evidence shows that if you start sex and relationships education early - before children start puberty, before they feel sexual attraction - they start having sex later.

“They are much more likely to use contraception and practise safe sex.”

If kids want to have sex to “find out what it is” firsthand, then no amount of sex-ed is going to stop them from doing so — not if you start it when they’re one or when they’re twenty. If they want the experience, they’re going to go out and get it. And if you have kids — especially underage teens — having sex as a consequence of getting drunk off their asses, then that’s your real problem, isn’t it? Maybe that’s the problem you should be solving first.

The thing is, in this age where casual attitudes and the “hookup culture” that we see displayed pretty much everywhere have made sex into a recreational activity on par with jogging, it’s almost meaningless to suggest that sex should be deferred, as meaningless as it is to suggest that jogging should be deferred. It’s both hypocritical and contradictory to suggest that sex is one more “no, nevermind” kind of activity, on one hand, and yet behave as though there is something special about it which should be waited for and deferred until one is suitably mature.

Good grief, we can’t even agree on what level of maturity is suitable in that regard!

Moreover, even if we did want to posit that there is something special and worth waiting for about sex, we’ve also done our level best to ensure that there will be no penalty for transgressing against any such social morés — there is no longer any real scandal attached to teenage pregnancy, and the governments of most Western nations will be only too anxious to throw money into the pockets of young mothers so as not to seem “cruel”. Even when people make sexual choices that we want to regard as “bad”, we do nothing to discourage them from making those choices.

And then there’s one other problem:

Sixteen-year-old Bethany, from Norwich told BBC News she had not understood the consequences of having sex early on.

“I didn’t know I could get pregnant,” she said. “I think if they started introducing sex education a bit earlier and teaching us a bit more about it so that we were more aware it would have helped me a lot.”

The first thing I learned in sex-ed, way back in fourth grade, was a functional definition of sexual intercourse. I still remember the exact phrase: “the penis must go into the vagina…”

The second thing I learned in sex-ed, way back in fourth grade, was that pregnancy was a possible result of sexual intercourse.

In. Fourth. Grade.

If a sixteen year old girl is still saying “I didn’t know I could get pregnant by having sex,” there are way bigger problems there than the age at which she was first exposed to a sex-ed programme.

This is the question that bothers Peter Hitchens this week, and it’s a good one to reflect on given the recent confrontation with police had by Christian preachers Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, who were told by police officers that the area in which they were handing out literature was a Muslim community, that their evangelism was a “hate crime,” and that if they returned to the area ever again and were perchance beaten…well, they’d already been warned.

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

It comes amid growing concern over the development of Islamic ‘no-go areas’.

The preachers, Americans Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, are demanding an apology and compensation from West Midlands Police.

They say their treatment breaks the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religious expression.

The preachers, who have the backing of the Christian Institute pressure group, say they will take the force to court for breaching their human rights if they don’t receive an apology.

They have accused the officer, PCSO Naeem Naguthney, of behaving in an ‘aggressive and threatening’ manner. A complaint by their lawyers said he interrupted as they spoke to Muslim youths about their beliefs.

Mr Abraham, 65, who was born a Muslim in Egypt and is a convert to Christianity, said: ‘He told us we were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and that that was a hate crime.

‘He was very intimidating and it concerns me that somebody holding his views can become a police officer, albeit at PCSO level.’

Mr Cunningham, 48, a fellow American Baptist missionary, said: ‘He realised we were Americans and then started ranting at us about George Bush and American foreign policy.

‘He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said he was going to take us to the police station.’

At any rate, Peter Hitchens — the sane Hitchens brother, mind — muses thusly:

Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born and raised in Muslim Pakistan, to remind us that, as he put it, ‘the beliefs, values and virtues of Great Britain have been formed by the Christian faith’?

Just as important, why did we have to wait for him to urge us to do something about restoring that faith before we either sink into a yelling chaos of knives, fists and boots, or swoon into the strong, implacable arms of Islam?

Most of our homegrown prelates are more interested in homosexuality or in spreading doubt about the gospel or urging the adoption of Sharia law.

Then again, why did it take the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to explain to us that our parliamentary system was the best guarantee of liberty in the world and to remind us of the courage and valour of our people in war?

This is not what British leaders say or even think, not least because they are busy pulling the constitution to pieces.

It is not what our children are taught in schools.

In fact, any expression of national pride is viewed with suspicion by the state, by the education system and above all by the BBC.

It was not always so. Half a century ago, we had churchmen, broadcasters, academics and military men who thought it normal to love their own country, normal to support the Christian faith which made us what we are, and were willing to defend it.

The question of what happened in the years between is one of the most interesting in history.

I suggest reading the whole thing — it isn’t terribly long, but is a good summation of just what has gone wrong with modern Britain.

There was a time when the British had the gumption and courage to stand up to all manner of menaces, internal and foreign alike, and when the British people took pride in their nation. Those days would seem to have expired, as Britain sinks more and more into two separate chasms: that of rampant, primitive and violent Islam in its immigrant communities, and that of demoralized, nihilistic secularism everywhere else. And the latter does not have the desire, strength, or courage to resist the advance of the former.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn’t looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don’t accept this, sooner or later, ’security’ is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn’t. I can remember when it wasn’t. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they’re here.

Canada is not all that far behind Britain in becoming a police state in all ways except for the actual establishment of a secret police. Our human rights commissions already censor opinions held to be “disagreeable” while at the same time serving as a vehicle of agenda and propaganda for subversive interests. Bureaucratic record-keeping is certainly monolithic enough in this country as to make the issue of a person’s ethnic origin a suitable topic for a medical form (when in reality, all that should matter is a) whether one is injured or ill and b) if so, in what way). And the dichotomy that has emerged between parental rights on one hand, and the whims of educators and health facilitators on the other, is well known here. But then, we opened that Pandora’s Box when we started giving fourteen-year old girls the option of getting an abortion, or a supply of condoms, without having to first seek parental consent, didn’t we?

Chesterton observed that if anarchists sought to throw down the small laws, they would be left with big laws instead, a none-too-subtle reminder that when one dismantles the pillars of a functional and free Western government, the result is not a governance-free anarchist paradise, but a dictatorship.

Analogous to Chesterton’s observation is the fact that if human rights commissions would seek to protect, at any cost, the human rights of every petty interest group that dares speak out, they will not be left with a paradise in which every person walks about in an optimal, self-actualized and enlightened appreciation of his or her own rights; they will be left with a place in which no person enjoys any basic rights at all. The police state loometh, in Canada as surely as in Britain.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Have a read and watch as a BBC story reporting that increases in global temperature had reversed, taking temperatures back to roughly 1998 levels, morphed into a story that foretold ominous increases in temperature.

The climate change activist who wrote to the article’s author is an interesting case. Pay special attention, O Reader, to the threat she makes to the columnist in her last message to him, by suggesting that she will strive to impugn his credibility. For bonus points, note and laugh at how she points to the oceans as heat sinks, when it has been discovered that oceanic temperatures have not changed at all in as long as we’ve been monitoring them*.

I actually take it as a good sign that proponents of global warming alarmism have to resort to bullying in circumstances like this. It means, I think, that they are beginning to feel a strain on their credibility, and that they are realizing that more and more people aren’t buying in to their lies.

* of course, the lack of a change is also a clear sign of the danger that global warming poses to us all, isn’t it, O Reader?

Can we make up our minds already?

Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

La Niná, eh? Surely this cooling trend has nothing at all to do with the fact that solar cycle 24 has only just started, meaning that we are still in a period of “solar minimum” — a minimum which has, historically, corresponded to periods of colder-than-average weather, including the Little Ice Age?

To be fair, this doesn’t make me question climate change per se…of course, the climate (being a non-static system) can be expected to change, and indeed it does. It does make me question the received wisdom of global warming alarmism, however. No net change in global temperature since 1998? Al Gore hadn’t even lost the election then!

You know what that means, right, O Reader? Yup…it’s time for another movie about how the Gospels don’t tell us the truth about the life of Jesus and/or his disciples!

The BBC is to screen a new drama about the final week in the life of Jesus Christ which appears to exonerate [Judas Iscariot] and Pontius Pilate.

Producers of The Passion have portrayed the men in a sympathetic light because they believe they have been”very harshly judged” by history.

Judas is portrayed as torn between his loyalties to Jesus and Caiaphas, who organised the plot to kill Jesus.

Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is shown struggling to manage his wife’s social aspirations and his career as he tried to”keep a lid” on tensions in Jerusalem.

Traditional Christian groups accused the BBC of rewriting the Gospel, but the makers of the series, which will be broadcast over Easter week, said they were simply trying to understand the motivations of the characters.

If the producers want to understand Judas’ motivations, and Pilate’s also, perhaps they should try the more traditional route for gaining such insight — reading the Bible, consulting reliable exegetical commentaries, and attending Mass on a consistent basis (especially during the season of Lent, which began last month and continues for another week and change). Producing glib historical fiction that seeks to portray Judas — the archetypical greedy betrayer — in a positive light is not a path that leads to understanding, but to greater confusion.

It’s so drearily predictable. Oh, one likes to pretend that all these entertainment and media organizations are just driven by profit and care only about the bottom line. And yet, almost like clockwork, something challenging Christian orthodoxy can be counted upon to emerge, from a major media organization, almost every time Easter rolls around. That’s not profit driving…that’s agenda and bias.

Don’t believe me? Let’s wait and see if some “alternative historical fiction” challenging the traditional interpretation of a Koranic story gets released during Ramadan. Then tell me there’s no bias.

Erf writes in with some potentially encouraging news. Following on the heels of the outcome of elections in northern Pakistan (in which Islamist parties lost, heavily), the possibility of a theological reformation in Islam is an exciting prospect indeed.

Erf, thank you for the update. I’d missed this story in the BBC newsfeed.

Wow — it looks like there’s a major reformation of Islam in progress in Turkey, according to BBC News. They’re reinterpereting what’s described as Islam’s second most fundamental text, the Hadith, applying the sort of analysis and verification techniques developed for the study of the Bible and other early religious texts. They mention specifically that all this violence againste and oppression of women going on in modern “Islam” was never intended by Muhommad and doesn’t belong. They even talk about interpereting statements and messages in the context of the culture and times in which they were given. For example, from the article:

“There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband’s permission and they are genuine.

“But this isn’t a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet’s time it simply wasn’t safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons.”

Here’s hoping this works, and spreads…

I would have to agree — this sort of reformative thinking must spread, and must be encouraged in its spread by…religious leaders in the West, Islamic and non-Islamic alike.

Of potential concern is the mention of how they are going to attempt to apply ” the sort of analysis and verification techniques developed for the study of the Bible and other early religious texts” to the Hadith. The University of the Saarland demonstrated a while ago (although they kept it under wraps until just recently) that when the Koran is held up to such analytical standards, its validity as a divinely inspired text rapidly crumbles, and it can demonstrably be shown to not have been dictated by the Archangel Gabriel at all — in fact, it was redacted from many extra-canonical Jewish and Christian (or Gnostic) sources.

Now, the Hadith are, if memory serves, the recorded sayings and teachings of Muhammad after he authored the Koran. Both Sunni and Shia Islam accept the validity of the Hadith in general, although the Shia Hadith also allows for the addition of additional traditions and teachings transmitted through the line of Muhammed descended from Fatima Zahra. Sunni Muslims would not recognize the validity of these additional teachings.

It would be interesting to see what would result from some genuine religious scholarly investigation of the Hadith, and one would certainly hope that at the outcome of such an investigation, a movement could get underway to attempt to reverse some of the many backward, barbaric, and misogynistic tendencies one sees in Islam the world over, and in Sharia law in particular.

But in particular, the best one can hope is that the scholars who are commissioned to do this research are able to approach their subject with no pre-existing bias or opinion about the Hadith’s teachings or the intent of Muhammad when he gave the teachings that he did. If they can do that much, this study might have some very good outcomes. Or, at least, some very honest outcomes.

A loaf of bread in Zimbabwe now costs $50,000.
Zimbabwe used to be the “bread basket of Africa“, one of the wealthier post-colonial nations responsible for a solid majority of African agricultural production. With the declaration of independence from Britain, and the coming to power of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party in 1980, however, things began to go south for this once strong nation.

A drought in 1992 was severe enough to warrant the declaration of a national disaster, but while this was severe, it is ultimately not what led to the hyperinflation and widespread poverty that now grips Zimbabwe. That took Mugabe’s government — and systemic Racism — to make happen. It began with the land redistribution policies that the ZANU-PF put in place to transfer arable land from white farmers to black farmers. At the time, white farmers comprised less than 1% of the population, but held about 70% of the arable land. Which sounds like a lot, but when you consider that an individual farmer might own a fair stretch of land, it really wasn’t. It simply means that most of the farms in Zimbabwe were run by white people, and were run well.

The forced removal from their land of these farmers meant that newer, black farmers were inheriting possession of the lands left vacant…which led, in turn, to disaster. The incoming tenants of these farms were not necessarily gifted farmers themselves, and indeed many weren’t anything more than local thugs who felt that the policy gave them an entitlement to claim some “white land” for themselves. The fact that they had to use the land — effectively — to grow crops seems never to have occurred to any of them.

This led to a rise in price of agricultural products, and ultimately plunged a nation that had once been a net exporter of foodstuffs into a famine. What is worse, Mugabe has held on to power in every election since 1980 through extensive use of vote-rigging and anti-opposition crackdowns and arrests. Additionally, the International Monetary Fund has suspended monetary aid to Zimbabwe for “failure to meet budgetary goals”: polite diplo-speak for “Mugabe and his cronies kept it all”, I suspect.

About the only positive outcome from this crisis has been the literacy rate in Zimbabwe, which sits at about 90.2% (higher than many “developed” countries). There is some hope there…for if and when Mugabe loses power (or dies), there is a chance that the nation could bounce back to its former prominence — the level of education in the populace suggests that they could put forth an effective government that could turn this whole landslide around. But until such a day as when that is possible, Zimbabwe will struggle under the most crippling debt and inflation, because of the kleptocratic and racist policies of its government. And funnelling more money into that nation will not solve the problem: it will only enable Mugabe and his various hangers-on to buy more exotic cars, and exotic vacations.

Regime change is the solution that would work, but it’s also the road nobody wants to discuss. And yet, sometimes, sending in the troops is indeed the best option.

Hat tip to Kate for the BBC link.

The venerable Mark Steyn has not been overly kind to Tony Blair or the government of the United Kingdom in recent weeks, since the bombings early in July. And it’s not a stretch to say that there’s good reason for that — how serious can a nation be in its denunciations of terrorism when that same nation does not come down like God’s Holy Wrath on the mayor of a certain large English city (which we will call “London“) who entertains and allows to speak in a public forum a radical Muslim imam who openly supports the terrorists and their agenda?

Not serious at all, right?

Steyn, and others, have also observed (again rightly) that many Western governments seem in many respects paralyzed by, or wilfully blind to, the terrorist threat. Consider:

It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

There’s something to this order of things, really. When you consider that in Leedsyou can buy jihadist video games in which you too can slaughter the infidel and become a holy martyr, or when you consider the blatantly foolish edicts coming out of English police adminstration — remove your shoes when storming the house of a suspected Islamist terrorist, out of respect, are you at all surprised that (much!) less than a week after the initial bombings in which over 50 people died, there were more attempts that the police didn’t catch?

Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he’s a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of “militants”, even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation’s own Tube station at .

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

And as various quarters sound in with talk of a backlash against Muslims in Britain, which to my knowledge is still pending, radical imams continue to denounce Western governments, including the British government under which they live and which they ostensibly claim legal protection (and, in the case of some of the bombers, publically funded fiscal support) from, and you can still buy those damn games in Leeds. But everywhere, the spirit of appeasement seems alive and well.

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 09, 2005

It’s not unreasonable to expect Tony Blair, and indeed all Western governments, to take measures, however drastic, to protect their respective populations from harm. That’s one of the reasons the government is there, right?

Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

So it is encouraging to see things like this coming out:

British prosecutors said yesterday they would consider treason charges against any Islamic extremists who express support for Terrorism.

Taken from: The Vancouver Province, August 08, 2005

Islamic extremists who incite violence or praise suicide attacks in Britain could face charges of treason, it emerged Sunday.

Taken from: Victoria Times Colonist, August 08, 2005

And hopefully, there is less to this article than there seems to be:

Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist drive was in disarray Monday after rapidly retreating from threats to invoke treason laws against extremists.

Taken from: The Windsor Star, August 09, 2005

One of the key strengths of the American, and to an equal degree the Austrailian, counter-terrorism initiatives, and indeed their relief initiatives related to the Indian Ocean tsumani, was and is quick, decisive action that they committed to and stuck to. This same quick-minded and unflappable determination has been seen in a number of smaller applications as recently as a week ago, when in ninety seconds flat, 309 people were able to evacuate from a burning airplane that skidded off the runway at Pearson Airport in Toronto — from a plane crash that was rated as “low survivability”, not one fatality was suffered. Nations need to work on the same principle when dealing with the terrorist threat — act quickly, decisively, and take care of the problem. If that means detaining imams that advocate for and profess support and praise for bombings, so be it. If that means profiling, so be it. If that means “no fly” lists, so be it. If that means, Heaven forbid, stricter immigration laws, or even temporarily suspending immigration, so be it. How many more Londoners, Iraqis, Americans, and Spaniards need to get blown up before people get this through their skulls?