Comments on the blogosphere are a total joke. And by joke, I don’t mean funny. I mean “something not to be taken seriously.”
Case in point: When Santorum did well in Iowa on Jan. 3, 2012, many news sites wrote about the Duggers supporting him. The articles I saw were pretty evenhanded, but it was the comments I found most interesting.
You see, for many years I suspected that there was a covert strategy involved in blog comments, and this suspicion grew even stronger as I observed and participated on the Ruth Institute blog. It was clear that there was no debate among those commenters who disagreed with us; there was none of the give and take one might expect in a debate. They were uniformly one sided, as if they had a single intention behind them.
Unfortunately, I could never confirm my suspicions, except once, Read more…
December 13th, 2011
Betsy
Neat!
by Bill Bumpas
Researchers have found the fossils of about 75 bus-sized whales, including more than 20 perfectly intact skeletons, over a hill in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and scientists are trying to figure out how they ended up there together — half a mile from the ocean. One scientist has hypothesized the region used to be a “lagoon-like environment” and that the whales died between two million and seven million years ago. Read more…
I am going up to San Francisco this morning for the Prop 8 hearings this afternoon. I will be live-blogging on the NOM site and here on the Ruth Institute blog.
We at the Ruth blog have decided to no longer allow Ari to have posting privileges over here. His sarcasm has gone over the line and we don’t care to be associated with it. Those who are interested in hearing what Ari has to say can find him at his own blog. We will stick to reporting on all aspects of the marriage issue in a civil way.
Sincerely,
Jenny and Betsy
P.S. Ari is not an employee of either NOM or the Ruth Institute. He was merely a volunteer contributor here who used to be helpful and engaging. I apologize for not policing the material on his blog more closely, as it was linked to us. That was entirely my fault, and mine alone. ~Betsy
November 17th, 2011
Betsy
First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults. Read more…
November 14th, 2011
Betsy
Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?” Read more…
September 23rd, 2011
Betsy
This is from a New England free market think tank. I think CT is their home base. In any case, the move to unionize child care workers is evidently a national drive. Dr. Morse reported on the comparable law in CA in her post on the GOP convention.
Forced unions = more than $1 million in dues
In two executive orders, Malloy begins the process of unionizing daycare providers and home health care workers. The orders also a include a card check provision that takes away the right of workers to vote by secret ballot.
From www.RaisingHale.com.
September 23rd, 2011
Betsy
Washington, DC – The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) announced today that John Eastman, a distinguished Constitutional law scholar, is taking on the role of Chairman of the Board for NOM. Read more…
The Presidential Straw poll here at the convention is open until 5 PM. Based on the organized presence I see here, I predict the winner will be either Rick Perry or Roon Paul. Lots of signs, t-shirts and enthusiasm for those two. No one else has a significant, organized presence.
I’m just saying.
Please notice the Rick Perry volunteer at the CA Republican convention. I confronted some of them, and asked, “I just have one question for you Rick Perry people: do you realize that Rick Perry has dressed you up as Aggies?” Of course, since they are all from California, they were completely innocent of the fact that they are wearing the colors of Texas A&M!
A Rick Perry volunteer in CA
Later, I met a gentleman who was some kind of volunteer coordinator for Perry. He admitted that yes indeed, the choice of colors was deliberate. I asked if he were intentionally dissing the Longhorns.
He added, “the Longhorns will not wear these shirts: we have to get them orange shirts. We have photos of Rick Perry volunteers in IO, wearing orange Longhorn shirts. The Baylor students have to have green shirts; the Aggies have to have maroon. Texans take their school colors very seriously.”
That is what I call a real political chameleon!
There was a celebrity sighting at the Prop 8 trial today. That grey-haired guy in the center of the photo is Rob Reiner. He stood at the podium next to Ted Olsen during the press conference after the hearing. He should. He has been funding these legal challenges.
Power to the people. The rich and beautiful people.
An August 19, 2011, report incorrectly attributed certain stances on pedophilia to the American Psychiatric Association, when in fact those stances are of a group of mental health practitioners not affiliated with the APA.
The original headline for the August 19 story read: “Report: APA wants to destigmatize pedophilia” — and was unintentionally misleading.
OneNewsNow has revised its story and posted it here.
by Thomas C. Reeves
In a recent Gallup poll, only 21 per cent of Americans called themselves liberals.
A few years ago I wrote a piece on the eventual victory of the Left in America. Almost all of the most relevant indicators pointed in that direction: The mainstream media, the public schools, colleges and universities, and the major Protestant denominations were dominated by liberals. There were numerous stories of the federal government increasingly cracking down on free speech and thought. The traditional family and marriage were widely ridiculed. Porn was commonplace and available to all. Much of popular music was anarchic. Tattoos and assorted clips and mutilations were routine. The welfare state had hooked millions. Secularism seemed to dominate. The election of Barak Obama, a man of stern leftist ideology, seemed to seal the argument. America appeared to be on its way toward becoming modern-day England, a nearly bankrupt nanny state that flaunts its political correctness and base culture while at the same time being unable to defend itself against the internal violence generated by its own leftist commitments. Read more…
Submitted to me by Leo:
With the backdrop of the London riots, Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings is as fresh and prophetic today as it was in 1919 when it was published. Copybook headings were proverbs that English schoolchildren would copy to practice handwriting. Kipling contrasted the wisdom contained in those bracing maxims with the foolishness of glib and easy promises throughout the ages. It is unlikely that something would come to be regarded as a piece of universal wisdom by accident, just like it is unlikely that universal norms in marriage arose by accident. Sometimes a society would ignore the voice of wisdom crying in the marketplace (Prov. 1:20-33), and then in Kipling’s phrase, “presently word would come that a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.” Here are four stanzas of the poem for your enjoyment and edification: Read more…
The response to my post, A Word on Terminology has confirmed my intuition that I am correct to abstain from using the term “same sex marriage.” Three things have led me to conclude that my instincts are correct about this:
1. The wailing, weeping and general indignation meeting being held all around the Left side of the Blogosphere.
2. My friend, Bill May, of Catholics for the Common Good, confirms my opinion. (I always listen when Bill talks.) He pointed me to a tract that his organization has written on the subject, a tract which I highly recommend to all Regular Ruth Readers, Friends with Wrong or Right Ideas.
3. Finally, and most importantly, in the aforesaid wailing and indignation, advocates of the redefinition of marriage have, perhaps inadvertently, revealed just how radical they really are. See for instance, comment #12, which states in part: Read more…
By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC
Sometimes an article cuts through the fog of public debate and discourse to capture the true essence of a movement or belief system. Recently, a transhumanist named Kyle Munkittrick posted just such an article at the Discover magazine website, encapsulating in a nutshell everything that is wrong with transhumanism (about which nearly everything is wrong). Read more…
Mrs. Mendelson just gave birth to their fourth child yesterday. The ever irrepressible Ari wrote on his facebook wall: “Thinking of various, creative and brazen ways to trick, fool or deceive my new daughter. She was, after all, born yesterday.”
(Everyone please note: this is a joke. Don’t get upset! Betsy has full authority to suppress comments from anyone who takes this too seriously!)
All kidding aside, congratulations to all the Mendelsons!
Yet another story blaming gay suicide on society’s failure to conform to the desires of the Sex Radicals and Gay-ists. So I wonder, did you know:
divorce doubles a man’s risk of suicide, but does not particularly affect women’s propensity to commit suicide? (Augustine Kposowa, Journal of Epidemiology and community Health, 2000; 54: 254-261)
Swedish adolescents living in single parent homes were twice as likely to commit suicide as adolescents in two parent households? (Odds ratio: 2.43 for girls, and 1.83 for boys.) ( Ringback, et al. The Lancet, Vol 361, 25 January 2003.)
Why don’t we take the suffering of these adults and children seriously?
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