Updated: Pregnancy Plague

Family, Gender, Law, Morality, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

“As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. … none older than 16.”

Question: Why aren’t the minors being removed from their parents? Were they not impregnated under their watch? What is good for the FLDS goose must surely be good for the Gloucester gander.

Recall, just a few weeks back, “Texas Department of Child Abduction” removed hundreds of children from the sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saint. The justification for such overreach was molestation: The kids were all being molested, Texas claimed. The alleged evidence was wide-spread pregnancy among the seized children. Nothing panned out. The entire case was based on a hunch and a hoax.

The same standards, surely, would have to apply to Muslim brides being imported, wed, and impregnated before reaching the age of majority.

Update (June 23): Compared to the promiscuity among minors in this Massachusetts school, the FLDS sect’s 15-year-olds are celibate. Or perhaps sterile (it must be all that organic food they eat).

Updated: Honest Abe’s Anguish

History, Iraq, Just War, Literature

“[W]hile small-time functionaries like Scott McClellan can be big enough to express remorse, self-reproach is rare in the leaders they serve. A breast-beating Bush: now that would provide a truly teachable moment.

Although never belabored, it is believed that Abraham Lincoln may have suffered misgivings for his role in ‘the butchering business’—J. R. Pole’s turn-of-phrase. Pole is Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History and Institutions at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Before Pole, a number of prominent historians had floated the idea that Lincoln might have wrestled with remorse for shedding the blood of brothers in great quantities. …”

Read more about the literary “clues to Lincoln’s possible contrition” in “Honest Abe’s Anguish,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column.

Update (June 22): TIME magazine reports that “Scott McClellan … said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to open up about his Administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise be up front about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.”

The man does have a knack for stating the obvious.

Or as I wrote in this column, McClellan has “hindsight rather than insight on his side; what he [is] imparting [is] neither new nor even newsworthy.”

But in America the simple are celebrated.

Gonad-less Girls At TNR Gun For Jim Webb

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Media

The New Republic smeared rightist Ron Paul. Now it has turned its attentions to Virginian Senator Jim Webb, whose name has been mentioned as a possible VP for Obama. Webb is no lefty.

Richard Just’s windy piece is pure crud. The man needs the discipline of a good editor. (He is the editor!) And how girlie is it to open with the exasperated, “I’m amazed.” This is a manipulative strategy to prime the reader for outrage. If only popular writers were a little less banal; would that an original idea popped into their noggins now and then.

(I’m psychologizing here—something I avoid–but I can’t help think that Webb’s unabashed manliness irks the new breed of “girlie boys.” Webb has defended his country and can defend his family. Juxtaposed to a guy who can handle guns—Omigod!—we have boys accoutered in trendy eyewear who carry on in fussy falsettos. Webb is fierce and passionate, and simply does not resonate with the “whatever” generation.)

I’ve tracked Webb’s recent political moves in a few blogs. (Here, here and here.) I like him. We had a personal exchange during the ramp-up to war. Webb would send me his pieces against the invasion, and voice his approval of my own WND ones. The man has the kind of ethics the gonad-less girls at TNR ought to envy and emulate.

Also curious is the emphasis in the Just piece on Webb’s worldview. Touching is the sudden concern about philosophy among the liberal left. Where was the “in-depth” worldview evaluation when it came to Obama’s adopted philosophy of two decades? I refer to the Black Liberation Theology preached at the church in which Obama worshipped for 20 years.

Sans Sunspots, Global Cooling Could Be Next

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Pseudoscience, Science

Regular readers of Barely a Blog will remember Phil N. Baldwin’s ground-breaking essay featured on this site last year about sun spots and global warming.

Do read or reread “Global Warming: CO2, Sunspots, Or Politics?”

Others are catching on, albeit slowly. Space Daily is reporting (in fractured syntax and grammar) that the sun has entered what appears to be a period of solar inactivity. “Solar activity refers to phenomena like sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions.”

“Solar physicists … have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.”