Category Archives: News

News

Conservative speakers take on political correctness at U Mass

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Ratio Christi event at Ohio State University featuring Frank Turek
Conservative speakers face liberal students on campus

My friend N. sent me this video of a campus event at the EXTREMELY liberal University of Massachusetts. This is the center of the leftist universe, the worst place in the world for conservatives students.

WARNING: this video contains the most horrible swearing and language you can possibly imagine, and it will scar you for life. But it is really interesting to see how non-leftist ideas are received on a liberal university campus. It’s just incredible, the screaming, shouting, insults, threats of violence – all from the secular left. It is so bad that even I cringed at some of the un-PC talk and thought the mean conservatives went too far at times. Even I was offended!

Here’s the video:

Do not watch this with little kids or even teens around, it’s just horrible, like watching a train wreck with everyone on fire and screaming and dying. I really feel bad about posting it, but my friend loved it so much, and I was permanently scarred by it. Holy snark, have the universities ever become radicalized by the secular left.

Speakers:

  • Milo Yiannopoulos
  • Christina Hoff Sommers
  • Steven Crowder

Summary:

Feminism:

  • Milo: feminism is cancer
  • Sommers: feminist theory is put forward with lies, misrepresentations and false statistics
  • Steven: the leftist students are shouting down the speakers because they are spoiled, entitled brats

Political correctness:

  • Milo: etiquette is good for discussions, but political correctness undermines the pursuit of truth, and can even have deadly consequences, e.g. – citizens refusing to report the Muslim rape gangs in the UK because of fear of political correctness
  • Sommers: etiquette is good for discussions, but political correctness is a way of pushing one set of political views and shutting down discussions
  • Steven: political correctness is a tool for shutting down discussions used by people who don’t have reason or evidence on their side

Hate speech:

  • Milo: we should allow people who are extremists on either side to speak, because that allows people to hear them and reject them
  • Sommers: some students are shouting down speakers because they oppose intellectual diversity, and are afraid that conservative views are correct and others will be persuaded if they are allowed to hear them
  • Steven: leftists fear intellectual diversity, they shout down conservative speakers because they live in a bubble where they never hear libertarian or conservative points of view
  • Milo: leftists are guilty of the worst kind of bigotry: they insist that gay people be leftists, that black people be leftists and women be leftists, they treat conservatives in these minority groups horribly

Is there a wage gap between men and women?

  • Sommers: the evidence shows that the differences in pay are explained by what women choose to study, time women take time off for babies, how many hours women work, and other choices
  • Sommers: women should major in things like economics and engineering, not feminist dance therapy

Are 1 in 5 women sexually assaulted on campus?

  • Steven: a lot of these sensationalized rape claims later turn out to be false, e.g. – Columbia mattress girl, Virginia Rolling Stone girl
  • Sommers: this is another example of how feminists advance an agenda by misusing statistics, but the number from real government studies is 1 in 53

This ends the panel discussion. I cannot write what the questions are, because the questioners were almost entirely rude, and just stood up and said lots of swear words, which you can apparently get credit for at the University of Massachusetts.

Several of my friends posted this video clip, taken from a member of the audience, which gives you a close up view of how indoctrinated in leftism the students are:

It seems to me that the barbarians are inside the gates, and the zombie apocalypse is nearly upon us. Can you imagine living next to one of these little psychopaths?

News

Kansas enacts law to attach work requirement to welfare benefits

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Kansas governor Sam Brownback
Kansas governor Sam Brownback

This story is from the Daily Signal, and it’s about a new (April 2015) Kansas law that produced great effects in the last year.

It says:

Over the past several years, the number of Americans on food stamps has soared. In particular, since 2009, the number of “able-bodied-adults” without dependents receiving food stamps more than doubled nationally. Part of this increase is due to a federal rule that allowed states to waive food stamps’ modest work requirement. However, states such as Kansas and Maine chose to reinstate work requirements. Comparing and contrasting the two approaches provides powerful new evidence about the effectiveness of work.

According to a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability, before Kansas instituted a work requirement, 93 percent of food stamp recipients were in poverty, with 84 percent in severe poverty. Few of the food stamp recipients claimed any income. Only 21 percent were working at all, and two-fifths of those working were working fewer than 20 hours per week.

Once work requirements were established, thousands of food stamp recipients moved into the workforce, promoting income gains and a decrease in poverty. Forty percent of the individuals who left the food stamp ranks found employment within three months, and about 60 percent found employment within a year. They saw an average income increase of 127 percent. Half of those who left the rolls and are working have earnings above the poverty level. Even many of those who stayed on food stamps saw their income increase significantly.

Work programs provide opportunities such as job training and employment search services. For example, in Kansas, workfare helped one man, who was unemployed for four years and on food stamps, find employment in the publishing industry where he now earns $45,000 annually. Another Kansan who was also previously unemployed and dependent on food stamps for over three years, now has an annual income of $34,000.

Furthermore, with the implementation of the work requirement in Kansas, the caseload dropped by 75 percent. Previously, Kansas was spending $5.5 million per month on food stamp benefits for able-bodied adults; it now spends $1.2 million.

So, I am doing a hunt to find the best states to live in, and Kansas is in my top 5. They have Governor Sam Brownback, and he has just done a magnificent job pushing conservative policies – not just social policies, but fiscal too. It’s a great state, but still edged out by Oklahoma and Tennessee, in my opinion. We’ll see what else Governor Brownback has in store, though.

You might think that all the news is bad, and that no one is putting into place any conservative policies. Well, of course the good red states are putting in these policies, and of course these policies are achieving the desired objectives. If you elect Democrats, you get Detroit. If you elect Republicans, you get welfare reform that lifts people out of dependency and into earned success. I’m sure that they feel better about not being dependent, too.

News

Are the Galapagos finch beaks evidence of Darwinian evolution?

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Jonathan Wells has an article about it at Evolution News.

It says:

When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835, he collected specimens of the local wildlife. These included some finches that he threw into bags, many of them mislabeled. Although the Galápagos finches had little impact on Darwin’s thinking (he doesn’t even mention them in The Origin of Species), biologists who studied them a century later called them “Darwin’s finches” and invented the myth that Darwin had correlated differences in the finches’ beaks with different food sources (he hadn’t). According to the myth, Darwin was inspired by the finches to formulate his theory of evolution, thoughaccording to historian of science Frank Sulloway “nothing could be further from the truth.”

In the 1970s, biologists studied a population of medium ground finches on one of the islands in great detail. When a severe drought left only large, hard-to-crack seeds, 85 percent of the birds perished. The survivors had beaks that were about 5 percent larger than the average beak size in the original population. The biologists estimated that if similar droughts occurred once every ten years, the population could become a new species in only 200 years. In a 1999 booklet defending evolution, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences called the finches “a particularly compelling example” of the origin of species.

But after the drought, birds with smaller beaks flourished again, and the average beak size of the population returned to normal. No net evolution had occurred. No matter; Darwin’s finches became an icon of evolution that is still featured in most biology textbooks.

In the 1980s, a population of large ground finches, with larger beaks than the medium ground finches, migrated to the island. When a drought in 2004-2005 again reduced the food supply, the medium and large ground finch populations both declined. But since even the largest beaks among the medium ground finches were no match for the beaks of the large ground finches, the latter pretty much monopolized the larger seeds and the former had to make do with smaller seeds. This time, the medium ground finches that survived the drought had beaks that were smaller than the average size in the original population. Biologists studying the finches argued that birds with smaller beaks were better able to eat the tiny seeds that were left after the large ground finches ate the big ones, and they concluded that this was again an example of “evolutionary change.”

[…]Wait a minute. Average beak size increased slightly during one drought, only to return to normal after the rains return. Then average beak size decreased slightly during another drought. A region of DNA is correlated with beak size. And somehow that tells us how finches evolved in the first place?

There is an important distinction to make between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Changes within a type is micro-evolution. Evolving a new organ type or body plan is macro-evolution. There is plenty of evidence for micro-evolution, but no evidence for macro-evolution.

What needs to be proven by the Darwinists is that the same process that results in different average beak size in a population of finches after a drought can create the finches in the first place. I think that Darwinists are credulous – they believe what they want to believe because they want to believe it, even if the evidence is incredibly weak. Darwinists must demonstrate that heritable variations can result in the generation of new organ types and body plans. Changes in average beak size is not interesting. What is needed is to show how the beaks, much less the wings, evolved in the first place.

Icons of Evolution

Jonathan has actually written about a number of  misleading things that you may mind in Biology textbooks.

Here are the sections in his book “Icons of Evolution“:

  • The Miller-Urey Experiment
  • Darwin’s Tree of Life
  • Homology in Vertebrate Limbs
  • Haeckel’s Embroys
  • Archaeopteryx–The Missing Link
  • Peppered Moths
  • Darwin’s Finches
  • Four-Winged Fruit Flies
  • Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution
  • From Ape to Human: The Ultimate Icon

Dr. Wells holds a Ph.D in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley.