All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/

Gallup finds surge in the number of self-identified conservatives

Once in a while I want to post something that makes people happy.

Look at these graphs from the latest Gallup poll on political views. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)

Here are the numbers:

Conservatives are at 42%. Moderates at 35%. And Liberals at 20%.

And the independents?

Independents: 41%. Independent Conservatives: 36%. Independent liberals: 19%.

This is good news. But it will not be nice for us when we have to have “austerity measures” to prevent bankruptcy.

How divorce courts put men in debtor’s prisons

Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.

[…]Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.

Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”

About 45% of first marriages end in divorce, with women initiating about 70% of divorces and getting full custody about 90% of the time. False accusations are regularly used by the person who initiates the divorce in order to get restraining orders and de facto custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with them. It is a massive transfer of wealth from men to women at gunpoint, and a massive loss of liberty for men.

People keep expecting men to step up and take on the role of husband and father, but when the chips are down, 77% of young unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and his policies of destroying the economy. A job is a requirement for men to marry and to take on the role of husband and father. Not only are the schools and universities biased against men, but the industries where men dominate have also been hit hardest by the recession.

We need to spend less time on fashionable causes like environmentalism, gun control, pacifism, animal rights and universal health care, and more time on economics. It’s men who have the most to lose emotionally and financially from a divorce. Not only that, but women commit domestic violence against men at rates equal to men, but the laws (e.g. – VAWA) don’t recognize the truth. The vast majority of the social programs are for women only.

A good start would be to read this summary of the divorce courts by Stephen Baskerville, and also listen to the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage. Either we are going to encourage men to marry and praise them for marrying or we are going to discourage them and then blame them for not marrying. Men respond to incentives. As long as society as a whole chooses to remain ignorant of the facts and chooses to continue to blame men, men won’t marry.

New book on intelligent design for beginners

Jay Richards interviews Jonathan Witt, co-author of a new book “Intelligent Design Uncensored“. The other author is William A. Dembski.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

  • Who is Jonathan Witt and why does he like intelligent design?
  • The intended audience of the book is a complete beginner to ID theory
  • The book is very short (175 pages) and easy to read
  • A survey of the evidence for design from physics, biology and chemistry
  • The aim is to cover a lot of ground and answer the most popular objections
  • The cost of the book is low (just over $9 on Amazon!)
  • Advice for people interested in a career in intelligent design
  • Why do some religious people object to intelligent design?
  • Tips for explaining intelligent design to others

Previously I had been recommending the older book “Understanding Intelligent Design“, by William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell, which my Dad read and liked a TON. But I like to read entry-level books so that I have things to use with beginners and during courtship (to read together). You’ve got to keep books in mind for book study, and don’t forget about the popular DVDs on intelligent design – Unlocking the Mystery of Life, The Privileged Planet and Darwin’s Dilemma. Another good DVD is Icons of Evolution.

UPDATE: There is a whole article on the book with quotes here.