HIP, HIP HOORAY HAPPY ABORTION DAY

In South Korea, Japan, China and other spots around the globe, universities are training students in the skills needed to drive their nations’ economies. Here in Australia, young minds are being immersed in the likes of Adelaide University’s Dr Erica Millar’s crusade to make abortions happy and festive affairs. As her university profile explains, sort of (emphasis added):

Erica’s research expertise is in the sociology and cultural politics of reproduction. She is interested in representations of reproduction, systems of stratified reproduction, reproductive justice movements, and biopolitics. Erica’s most recent research is on the cultural politics of abortion. Her project combines feminist theory with theories of emotion, neoliberal governmentality, critical race studies and biopolitics to examine how the decisions women make about their pregnancies are regulated in the late modern era. She is especially concerned with identifying, theorising, and historicising the emotions that circulate alongside representations of abortion, including maternal happiness, abortion shame, and foetocentric grief. She has published several articles on the topic and her monograph Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice has recently been published by Zed Books.

As to Ms Millar’s hope that abortions will come to be seen as moments of joy, she’s deadly serious:

…the idea that abortion could or should be a happy experience for women is virtually unrepresentable in the current socio-political landscape. Instead, an array of negative emotions—particularly grief, shame, regret and distress—dominate the representational terrain of abortion.

The emotions of abortion contrast sharply with the position motherhood occupies as the unassailable placeholder for women’s happiness. Erica Millar explains how cultural and political forces continue to circumscribe the decisions women make about their pregnancies, forces that are commonly disguised under the rhetoric of choice. In doing so, she provides an account of how women’s freedom is constrained in the neoliberal era of choice.

The various blurbs and reviews for Ms Millar’s book may be read at Amazon, available via this link or the one below. Her groundbreaking work on Anxious White Nationalism and the Biopolitics of Abortion will also be appreciated by those seeking a greater understanding of our universities and how they came to be as they are. A sample:

…a history of maternal citizenship for white women, which reverberates in the present, and the articulation of the desire to eradicate abortion (amongst white women) alongside other key biopolitical technologies—the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the exclusion of non-white immigrants from the nation. The figure of the aborting woman thus stands alongside other bodies perceived as threats to white sociocultural hegemony in Australia and one of its key institutions—the white, hetero-family. In the 1970s, such figures included the communist, the divorcee and the (non-white) immigrant, and in the 2000s, the lesbian mother, the single mother and the boatperson.

A Special Prosecutor Should Probe Democrats’ Malfeasance By Nicholas L. Waddy

When the 2016 presidential election ended, the media somehow found the time to expose one of the greatest scandals of that or any other election cycle: active efforts of the Democratic National Committee favoring Hillary Clinton’s nomination and undermining the campaign of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Now it appears that former interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile’s revelations about her party’s interference in the primaries may only have been a small taste of what really happened. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee may also have been part of a broad effort to undermine Trump that involved the FBI, the Department of Justice, intelligence agencies, and—irony of ironies!—Russian spies. This anti-Trump cabal has escaped public notice almost entirely, given the media’s obsession with the transparently false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

This is all the more reason why Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to shine a light on this outrageous and potentially criminal conduct.

Although there are many indicators of election meddling on the part of the Left, the most important is the existence of the so-called Steele Dossier, a compilation of unflattering facts, pseudo-facts, and blatant fabrications designed to undermine the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The dossier was the work of British spy-for-hire Christopher Steele, paid for initially by anti-Trump conservatives. Later, the DNC and the Clinton campaign bankrolled Steele’s efforts, and the dossier, to the tune of millions of dollars. The dossier was shopped around to various media outlets, which, to their credit, mostly scoffed at its contents.

The FBI, however, took the dossier seriously enough to use it to begin an investigation of the Trump campaign and to obtain a warrant against Trump associate Carter Page. The FBI even offered to pay Steele to continue his work. And from where did the most salacious and bogus claims in the dossier come? Russian spies supplied these tidbits, in exchange for cash from Steele, who ultimately received funding from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Now, opposition research is perfectly legitimate. Paying the agents of a foreign state to reveal and/or concoct damaging information about one’s political adversary, however, is manifestly unethical, and it remains an open question whether the Democrats or the Clinton campaign committed crimes in the course of their effort to discredit and defeat Trump. That the party which engaged in this outrageous behavior would then turn around and baselessly accuse its opponents of doing the same thing is, well, breathtaking in its audacity.

ROGER KIMBALL: TAKING TRUMP SERIOUSLY

Trying to take Trump seriously, Michael’s Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner on Thursday, is significant for at least two reasons. One is that anything Barone writes is certain to be thoughtful, authoritatively researched, and grounded in reality. His columns, like his work in general, are not fired mainly by ideology but by a desire to understand. What Cardinal Newman said of Aristotle could, mutatis mutandis, be said of Barone: about most things, to think like him is to think correctly.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/29/taking-trump-seriously/

But there is another sense in which this particular column is significant. Given Barone’s stature as a conservative but non-ideological commentator, his judicious and fair-minded assessment may mark a turning point in the broader public reception of President Trump’s initiatives.

Remember: the moment that Donald Trump achieved the impossible, defeating the anointed candidate Hillary Clinton, a vast coalition formed like a toxic mold to blight his presidency and deny him the legitimacy that he had won at the ballot box and the Electoral College.

Irony-free females in pink “pussy hats” marched in their thousands to protest against Trump’s “vulgarity”; B-list Hollywood narcissists made embarrassing videos in which they pleaded with members of the Electoral College to renege on their responsibility to vote for their party’s candidate; frenzied commentators at CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other outposts of woke hysteria regurgitated rumors, fantasies, innuendos, and gossip on the basis of “sources” indistinguishable from their personal political animus; black-masked members of Antifa and kindred covens of criminal disgruntlement rampaged on college campuses, destroying property and injuring people with whom they disagreed in order to protest the violence and intolerance of Donald Trump; the entire academic establishment, that sprawling congeries of preening though unearned smugness and moral self-infatuation, contracted in one brow of hate-spewing woe to demonstrate its unwavering commitment to sclerotic ideological conformity.

“The Embarrassing Ravings of a Mad Uncle”
All across the fruited plain, pampered members of the entitled class shouted at others to “check their privilege” while signaling their approval of a “resistance” movement whose only reality was a resistance to the results of a free, open, and democratic election. On the one hand, it was a perfect illustration of what Charles Mackay called “the madness of crowds”; on the other, it was a vivid embodiment of something Sigmund Freud might have congregated under the heading of “infantile neurosis.”

White Privilege: An Article of Left-Wing Faith By Eileen F. Toplansky

In Yiddish, the term dreck means excrement, dung, crap, or worthless junk. It is an apt term for the deliberate psychological damage being inflicted upon young Americans as they navigate the leftist swamp of higher education.

White privilege, or whiteness studies, is now an entrenched part of far too many -ology and humanities classes. This notion of white skin privilege has become an “article of faith among progressives,” who assert that “whites, by definition and DNA, would remain racists, even if unwittingly, until the end of time.”

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, describes “white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets[.] White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” (McIntosh, 1989). She distributes the following, and students are asked to mark those that apply. A few of the items include:

I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the food I grew up with, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial responsibility.
I can take a job or enroll in a college with an affirmative action policy without having my co-workers or peers assume I got it because of my race.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated.
I am never asked to speak for all of the people of my racial group.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the person in charge[,] I will be facing a person of my race.
If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
I can easily see posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.
I can walk into a classroom and know I will not be the only member of my race.
I can enroll in a class at college and be sure that the majority of my professors will be of my race.

Social Justice Warriors Melt Down Over New York Times Chopsticks Photo By John Ellis

One of the nice things about being a writer in 2018 is that SJWs will continue to find new and absurd ways to get their feelings hurt. Even if nothing else is happening, I can always count on a group of SJWs providing me with something to write about. This time, a horde of them provided me a gift by taking to Twitter to express their dismay at a photo of chopsticks accompanying a New York Times story about a new Japanese restaurant.

The restaurant, called Jade Sixty, will be opening in NYC soon. The Times article reports that “a good portion of the menu at this new restaurant is pure New York steakhouse: nine cuts of beef, surf & turf, whole chicken and seafood platters. But the rest of the menu looks to Asia for inspiration, offering soup dumplings, chicken won tons, rock shrimp tempura, chicken yakitori, crispy spring rolls and a deep list of sushi specialties.”

Sounds delicious. And since my wife has an office in NYC, I look forward to sampling the menu.

In an attempt to help the soon-to-open restaurant spread the word, the New York Times included a photo of food accompanied by chopsticks. Apparently, the Times didn’t realize how important it is to get the chopsticks placement correct. They found out the hard way that the incorrect placement of chopsticks is racist. To be fair to the Times, I would bet that over 99.9 percent of the population wouldn’t have thought about it, either.

Predictably, HuffPost joined in the whining and smugly pointed out that “the chopstick photo is a reminder that the Times has been occasionally tone deaf towards Asian food and culture despite their ubiquity in New York City.”

Coptic Christian Church Near Cairo Attacked At least 9 were killed in shooting, the latest in a string against Egypt’s Christian minority By Dahlia Kholaif

CAIRO—A gun attack on a church near Egypt’s capital killed at least nine people and wounded five others early Friday, officials said, the latest in a string of assaults targeting the Christian minority.

The assailant, armed with an explosive device and a machine gun, fired at the entrance of Saint Mina Coptic Church in Helwan, a southern suburb of Cairo, as he tried to cross a security barricade to enter the house of worship, Egypt’s Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Security forces arrested the perpetrator after shooting him, preventing further deaths, the interior ministry said, noting that the assailant is an active extremist who has taken part in previous assaults.

Islamic State on Friday claimed responsibility for the assault on the church. In a statement posted by its media arm Amaq, the extremist group said the attack was carried out by “covert units” but didn’t give any details.

The surge in militancy, especially against Coptic Christians, has triggered rare criticism against Presidential Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, even from Copts who make up some of his staunchest supporters. Egypt’s Christians make up about 10% of the country’s more than 90 million population.

The former military chief vowed to wipe out militancy when he ran for office in 2014, and continues to project himself as a regional bulwark against terrorism ahead of next year’s presidential race. But a yearslong crackdown on Islamist supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi has only bolstered the insurgents.

The attack comes amidst ramped-up security measures by authorities around churches ahead of Coptic Christmas celebrations, which take place in early January. The largest religious minority in Egypt has suffered a sharp increase in attacks from extremists, including twin bomb attacks on Palm Sunday in April and one at Cairo’s main Coptic Christian cathedral compound last December that left dozens dead.

The Arab world’s most populous nation is grappling with an uptick in terror strikes, with militants targeting security forces and civilians in recent months. Hundreds were killed and injured last month when gunmen armed with explosives attacked a Sufi-linked mosque in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula, the deadliest assault in the country’s modern history. Sufi rituals are deemed heretical by extremists. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Year of Historic Change in Saudi Arabia, With More to Come By Aya Batrawy

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi Arabia in 2017 laid the groundwork for momentous change next year, defying its conservative reputation for slow, cautious reforms by announcing plans to let women drive, allow movie theaters to return and to issue tourist visas. The kingdom could even get a new king.

King Salman and his ambitious 32-year-old son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, have upended decades of royal family protocol, social norms and traditional ways of doing business. They bet instead on a young generation of Saudis hungry for change and a Saudi public fed up with corruption and government bureaucracy.

Here’ a look at the major pivots of the past year and the reforms to come in 2018:

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WOMEN START DRIVING

In a surprise late-night announcement, Saudi Arabia announced in September that it would finally lift a ban on women driving , becoming the last country in the world to allow women to get behind the wheel. Activists had been arrested for driving since 1990, when the first driving campaign was launched by women who drove cars in the capital, Riyadh.

In June, the kingdom plans to begin issuing licenses to women, even allowing them to drive motorcycles, according to local reports. It will be a huge change for women who have had to rely on costly male drivers or male relatives to get to work or school or to run errands and visit friends.

In 2018, women will also be allowed to attend sporting matches in national stadiums, where they were previously banned. Designated “family sections” will ensure women are separate from male-only quarters of the stadiums. The crown prince tested public reaction to the move when he allowed women and families into the capital’s main stadium for National Day celebrations this year.

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MOVIE THEATERS RETURN

After more than 35 years, movie theaters are returning to the kingdom. They were shut down in the 1980s during a wave of ultraconservatism. Many Saudi clerics view Western movies and even Arabic films as sinful.

The first theaters are expected to open in March. Previously, Saudis could stream movies online or watch them on satellite TV. To attend a cinema, though, they would have to travel to neighboring countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

The opening of cinemas will give families and young Saudis another way to kill time as the crown prince introduces more entertainment options to encourage local spending.

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CONCERTS AND COMIC-CON

This past year, rapper Nelly and two Games of Thrones stars came to Saudi Arabia for the first time. John Travolta also visited the kingdom, meeting with fans and talking to them about the U.S. film industry.

It’s a notable shift from just a few years ago, when the religious police — known as the Muttawa — would shoo women out of malls for wearing bright nail polish, insist restaurants turn off music and break up gatherings where unrelated men and women were mixing.

MY SAY: DECEMBER 2017 A MEMORABLE MONTH

Jonathan Henry Sacks, Baron Sacks is a British Orthodox rabbi, philosopher, theologian, and politician. He served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013

Following the announcement of United States Government’s formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel, Rabbi Sacks issued the following statement:

“I welcome today’s decision by the United States to recognise as the capital of Israel, Jerusalem, whose name means “city of peace.” This recognition is an essential element in any lasting peace in the region.

“Unlike other guardians of the city, from the Romans to the Crusaders to Jordan between 1949 and 1967, Israel has protected the holy sites of all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and guaranteed access to them. Today, Jerusalem remains one of the few places in the Middle East, where Jews, Christians and Muslims are able to pray in freedom, security and peace.

“The sustained denial, in many parts of the world, of the Jewish connection with Jerusalem is dishonest, unacceptable and a key element in the refusal to recognise the Jewish people’s right to exist in the land of their origins. Mentioned over 660 times in the Hebrew Bible, Jerusalem was the beating heart of Jewish faith more than a thousand years before the birth of Christianity, and two-and-a-half millennia before the birth of Islam.

“Since then, though dispersed around the world, Jews never ceased to pray about Jerusalem, face Jerusalem, speak the language of Jerusalem, remember it at every wedding they celebrated, in every home they built, and at the high and holiest moments of the Jewish year.

“Outside the United Nations building in New York is a wall bearing the famous words of Isaiah: “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Too often the nations of the world forget the words that immediately precede these: “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.””

“Those words, spoken twenty-seven centuries ago, remain the greatest of all prayers for peace, and they remain humanity’s best hope for peace in the Middle East and the world.”

Peter Smith The Boat People of Bethlehem

Ah, Christmas, when the air rings with sleigh bells and carols, the laughter of families gathered and the happy squeals of small children destroying their new toys. Oh, and from the left side of the Yuletide table, more nonsense about the Holy Family being the original refugees.

You may have noticed the recent propaganda in support of the West absorbing unlimited numbers of Muslim refugees. It starts with the Bible and with Matthew 2:13-23 were it is told that Joseph, Mary and their children escaped to Egypt from Bethlehem in Judaea for fear of King Herod. Only when the King was dead did they return to Israel; settling in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem, because they remained wary of Herod’s son who ruled in Judaea.

Thus, so the story goes, Jesus was for a time a time a refugee in Egypt. A tenuous and tendentious leap of logic follows: if Jesus was indeed a refugee how can anyone in good conscience not welcome all refugees with open arms and generous hearts.

As an example, here is Martin O’Malley – the ex-governor of Maryland and short-lived competitor with Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president – talking with Fox News front man Tucker Carlson. “Remember Jesus too was a refugee child. What would you do if he came to your border?”

I liked Carlson’s reply: “That’s so stupid, it’s hard to respond.”

It’s monumentally stupid. Or, alternatively, is it part of a duplicitous plan to undo our civilisation and culture? Christianity being used to destroy Christendom. The devil quoting scripture for his purpose. But that can’t be right when the Archbishop of Canterbury is on board. Can it?

Here is an extract from Justin Welby’s Christmas sermon preached at Canterbury Cathedral on December 25.

Yet after the moments of miracles life goes on almost as before – the shepherds return to their sheep, Joseph settles back as a carpenter, Mary raises children. They flee as refugees, like over 60 million people today.

Get the point? Joseph, Mary and Jesus are just like tens of millions of Mussulmen from, say, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Somalia. The fact that the latter follow a poisonous creed which denies the divinity of Christ; who follow a false prophet as prophesised by Christ; and who have allegiance to a god who instructs them to disdain and kill infidels, is all by the way to the Archbishop apparently.

But let’s be practical as well as spiritual. Germans, Belgians, Swedes, Italians, the French, the British, Americans and Australians, and other Westerners, face heavy costs of providing accommodation, health, welfare, education and policing in trying to absorb millions of refugees. And that is the least of it. Their very culture and values are at stake. Their safety is at stake through additional crime and, of course, through Islamic terrorism.

In Cologne, for example, separate train carriages have been set aside for women and young children. Nothing of course to do with asylum-seekers assaulting women. God forbid the authorities would ever concede that. And, yes, don’t you know, Melbourne pedestrians allegedly were mowed down by a drug-addled madman who just happened, coincidently, to be an Afghan refugee expressing grievance at the world-wide treatment of Muslims. Obviously, we are being taken for saps by the powers that be and by Christian church leaders

Clouding the Cause of Islamic Terrorism by A. Z. Mohamed

The practice of substituting political correctness for scholarship, namely educating the public in the West about actual the contents of Islam, has become so prevalent that it is undermining our ability to recognize, let alone rectify, any problems.

“Some prominent scientists and philosophers have stated openly that moral and political considerations should influence whether we accept or promulgate scientific theories… [M]isrepresenting findings in science to achieve desirable social goals will ultimately harm both science and society.” — Nathan Cofnas, writing in the journal Foundations of Science.

Many people who need structure prefer every activity proscribed for them. In addition, many people with sadistic wishes might be lured by being given permission to act on these wishes; and not only that, but they are told that these acts are, indeed, obligatory and good, and that the person acting on them is, in the view of many Islamic tenets, heroic.

Responding to findings of a recent study on what motivates both ISIS fighters and those who combat them, Arie W. Kruglanski, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and former co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said:

“The ideology component addresses individuals’ need to matter and feel significant. … It tells people what to do, such as fight and make sacrifices, in order to gain respect and admiration from others.”

Kruglanski, whose 2014 article, “Psychology Not Theology: Overcoming ISIS’ Secret Appeal,” argues that religion (in this instance, Islam) plays a smaller part in what makes terrorists tick than “the [human] need for… personal significance.” He added:

“Especially when it comes to violence that is shunned by most religions and most cultures, you need validation from a group of people that would then become your reference group. So the group component is very important, particularly when it comes to antisocial activities that are forbidden or shunned.”