News

Construction workers prevent gunman from shooting up school

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Story here in the Union-Tribune. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Wes Widner)

Excerpt:

A man seemingly bent on violence and destruction stormed Kelly Elementary School in Carlsbad Friday and fired into a crowd of children on the playground, striking two girls, before being chased and tackled by nearby construction workers.

Brendan L. O’Rourke, 41, believed to be a transient, was arrested on six counts of attempted murder and various weapons charges, Carlsbad police said.

A trail of blood led to a classroom, which held two second-graders who suffered bullet wounds to their right arms, police said. The girls, ages 6 and 7, were flown to Rady Children’s Hospital for treatment and were doing well, Carlsbad Police Chief Gary Morrison said.

“We are grateful to God only two children were hurt,” Carlsbad Mayor Bud Lewis said. “We know in this tragedy, it could have been far worse.”

Several witnesses saw the gunman clad in black, running on the school grounds shortly after noon carrying a gas can and shooting at random during recess.

“He was dressed just like a bad guy,” in a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants, said neighbor Scott Chandler, who saw the violence unfold from his driveway near the schoolyard on Kelly and Riviera drives.

Chandler ran toward the school as fast as he could and caught up with two construction workers, Steven Kane and Mario Contreras, assigned to a cafeteria expansion project. They chased the gunman through the field and over a fence.

Carlos Partida, another construction worker, said he jumped into his black Ford F-150 pickup when his co-workers started chasing the gunman. Partida struck the man with his truck, knocking him to the ground, police said.

Partida, Kane and Contreras wrestled a .357 Magnum silver revolver with a wooden handle from O’Rourke.

Here’s a previous post I did about whether multiple-victim shooters prefer to target areas where people will be armed or whether they prefer to attack “gun-free zones” provided by liberal educators. The left really doesn’t understand the difference between intentions and incentives. The only people who obey gun-free zone signs are people you don’t have to fear. Criminals see a gun-free zone sign and they think that you’ve opened a shooting gallery just for them. Luckily, the men standing near the area had not attended women’s studies classes at the local elite university. They did not know that all men are evil oppressors, so they had the confidence to act on their convictions.

News

Scientist quits American Physical Society over “global warming scam”

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A prominent scientist has resigned from the American Physical Society and written a letter that exposes how scientific organizations suppress dissent and honest inquiry.

The author is Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This was posted on Watts Up With That. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

If you read the rest of the letter, you will find that the the author lists specific cases where dissent was squashed by the global warming alarmists. He suspects that the reason was money – scientists have to “discover” what the government wants them to discover, in order to create a crisis that requires… more government control.

The letter was posted at the UK Telegraph and has over 800 comments!

Commentary

Barbara Kay writes the best essay against feminism ever written

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Let me introduce the ideology of feminism with a quote from a founder of the feminist movement.

“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

Here is the greatest essay ever written against feminism – written by Barbara Kay.

Introduction:

The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years.

This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal “system”, but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.

Her first point:

As a result of feminists’ promotion of career equity with men and unrestrained sexual experimentation over early and faithful commitment, women are having fewer children later, and many are having none. Consequently, birthrates are down in all western countries, in many below the replacement levels. Canada’s current fertility rate is 1.54 per woman, behind one-child China’s 1.7.

Sadly, many women realize they want to have children, but too late. They were not warned by their Women’s Studies teachers or by feminist commentators that fertility peaks by age 25, or that late pregnancies carry elevated risks, or that induced abortions pose a risk of pre-term delivery in future pregnancies.

Abortion is now such a commonplace here that it is used as a backup form of birth control. Abortions in Quebec have doubled in the last 10 years: in 1998 16 percent of pregnancies resulted in abortion. Today 30 percent do. You don’t have to be a religious Christian to find that statistic disturbing.

All of these realities are directly traceable to feminist doctrine. Feminists’ original goal may not have been the intention to preside over the actual demographic decline of western civilization. Their goal was to empower women. But as the old saying goes, when you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.

Her second point:

Misandry, which is the female equivalent of misogyny (misanthropy is a hatred of humankind), is now entrenched in our public discourse, our education system and social services. Misandry flies beneath most people’s radar, because we have become compliant in the acceptance of theories that have nothing to do with reality, and compliant in the speech codes that accompany that tendency.

Denigration of men in ways both casual and formal are a commonplace in society.

[…]For overt misandry, one has only to survey the industry around domestic violence. You could be forgiven for thinking that domestic violence is a one-way street, for that is certainly the impression one has from the fact that there are innumerable tax-funded shelters for abused women, none for abused men, unlimited funds for campaigns to raise consciousness around abused women, none for abused men. There is not a single social services agency or charity in Canada advertising “family services” that offers counseling, shelter or legal services for men who have been physically abused by women.

Her third point:

I want to talk about the implosion of the traditional family, which can be directly traced to feminism’s repudiation of normative marriage and the role of fathers as vital to a child’s psychological well-being. In June 2006 I wrote about the imbalance, in women’s favour, in the family law system: 90 per cent of contested custody suits end in sole custody awarded to the mother. Such a skewed percentage is unthinkable in any other branch of law.

The family law system is now systemically colonized by radical feminists. Their goal is the incremental legal eclipse of men’s influence over women’s spheres of “identity” interests, which includes children. To that end the custody issue has become a front line in the gender wars, supported by all feminist academics and institutional elites, by supine cabinet ministers and by feminist judges.

Either the majority of women will come to accept her views on feminism… or marriage, and consequently Western civilization, will end.