The Elizabeth Smart Effect

 Elizabeth Smart is an amazing woman. Abducted at age 14 through her bedroom window one night by a drifter whom her father had hired for some odd jobs, she spent the next nine months being raped several times a day. When she was finally found by investigators hidden in plain sight on the streets of Sandy, Utah, she had been so utterly brainwashed that, thinking her family would never take her back, she initially refused to even admit who she was.
But from that low point, she made an amazing comeback. After making up the year of school she'd missed, she went on to graduate from BYU and flew back from a Mission in France to testify at her abuser's trial for kidnapping and rape. Then, incredibly, she became a journalist for NBC, interviewing women like her who had been kidnapped by sexual abusers. Unlike abuse victims who desire anonymity, she has never been afraid to tell her story and in fact used it to catapult her to national attention, using that platform to advocate against sexual assault.
In honor of Elizabeth and her willingness to share every facet of her horrifying experience, I'm naming a little-understood phenomenon after her: The Elizabeth Smart Effect. Simply put, this is the tendency of traumatic rape victims not to have functioning reproductive systems during the time they are under the control of their abusers. Despite the daily rapes, Elizabeth never fell pregnant until after she had married her legal husband. How could this be?

Some may offer the obvious answer that her abuser wasn't fertile himself, and was thus unable to impregnate her. But what about numerous other victims who demonstrate the same effect? In The Slave Across the Street, Theresa Flores relates her experience of serving as a teenage concubine to an entire underworld crime network for over a year--without ever falling pregnant. And the anecdotes are countless; despite pregnancy resulting from single rapes that happened to coincide with a woman already being fertile, rapes that are part of an ongoing abusive situation really do sometimes seem to shut down a woman's reproductive system, so that she never does go through a fertile cycle until the abuse ends.

More study on this is definitely needed--but will it ever come? The political establishment, particularly the pro-abortion wing, clings desperately to the idea that women who are raped NEED the option of snuffing out of any life that results from that rape, and anyone referencing the Elizabeth Smart Effect is likely to get shouted down--or, in the famous case of Todd Akin, even voted out of office just for mentioning it. If there is a biological phenomenon behind the Elizabeth Smart Effect, isolating it, describing it, and publishing it will face some formidable political hurdles.

Life in Prison for helping women and babies? Time to get out of New York!

Government oppression has now reached the point that the White Man recommends that his readers move out of New York state as soon as practical. Just as an example of how topsy-turvy their legal system is, note that the same state whose legislators rose to their feet and cheered after passing a law that permits homicide of newly-delivered babies has now charged a midwife with homicide for doing her job of referring an unborn baby to the higher level of care that it apparently required. She's also been charged with the ridiculous charges of fraud and identity theft just for filling out the onerous forms that the government requires in order for her to do her job of assisting mothers with the birth of their babies--no such forms being required of the murderers who kill babies at their mothers' request. To reiterate, according the government of New York State, a doctor who strangles a newborn baby with his own hands is not guilty of homicide if the baby dies; An assailant who stabs a baby in its mother's womb, thus killing it, is not guilty of homicide; but a midwife who refers a pregnant woman to a hospital to finish out her delivery IS guilty of homicide if the baby dies. I'll be posting further updates here.
UPDATE FEBRUARY 8:
Apparently Mrs. Catlin has a sensible judge, who released her on her own recognizance (i.e. without bail) until the trial, which probably won't be for at least a year.

Demographic Winter

If you found this post interesting, you've got to watch this whole video:
Demographic Winter
There are only two possible ways to stave off the impending Demographic Winter: stop killing babies, or start killing old people.

Since this video was made, the Netherlands has been paying mothers to have children, and paying doctors to kill adults. But their welfare state still collapsed.

An Upside-down Christmas Tree in China

In an earlier post, I pointed out that national fertility rates tend to fall wherever national income rises. While such is indeed the case in China, the drop is further exacerbated by the national One-Child Policy, which went into effect in 1979. Not surprisingly, there's now a big drop in the 30-34-year-old cohort of the Chinese population. As China's population growth slows to a crawl, there's some talk of eliminating the policy, or at least cutting it back further (only about a third of Chinese couples are currently subject to the restriction).

But actually, it's already too late. The pre-policy Chinese couples are already fast heading out of their peak childbearing years, so for an entire generation to come, the reproductive potential of the Chinese is going to be severely curtailed.

In order do their part to keep China's population from dropping, every couple consisting of two only grandchildren (the 'little emperors') would have to first produce six children just to replace themselves and their parents; then another eight to replace their grandparents! Obviously, that is not going to happen. Instead, as the larger cohorts of the population die off, the population will peak, then start a long and continuous decline--even if the birth rate doubles or triples among the remaining cohorts as they come of childbearing age.

That results in an Upside Down Christmas Tree.

A Nuclear Iran only six weeks away--unless Israel stops it

I could be commenting on a daily basis on the buildup of the Persio-Israeli war, but I hate to overstate the obvious: unless Iran stops working on a nuclear weapon with which to target Israel, it will be attacked before the year is out. Period.

Regardless of how the National Election goes in the United States--helped by the fact that Romney is leading both in fundraising and at the poll, and that the next cover of Newsweek will contain a death knell for a Second Obama Administration--Israel is prepared to go it alone in defence of its national existence. And DEBKAfile has reported that Iran is within about six weeks of having 250 kilograms of 20-percent grade uranium, exactly enough to build its first nuclear bomb.

That deadline prompted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s comment Sunday, Aug. 12: “All threats against the home front are dwarfed by one – Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear arms!” Hence the leak by an unnamed Israeli security source Sunday, Aug. 12, disclosing Iran’s progress in developing the detonator and fuses for a nuclear warhead ready for the Shehab-3 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel.

The Obama administration continues to waffle about its willingness to stand by Israel when the preemptive attack occurs; apparently they think they have the Jewish Vote sewed up, or that by such posturing they can postpone any such attack until after the November Elections. But Israel is not going to wait; November may well be to late.

So, we have three forces at work:
1) In Iran, government forces are feverishly working to have an operational nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking Dimona as soon as possible. The sooner they can launch it, the less Israel will be prepared.
 2) In Israel, government forces are feverishly preparing for long-distance strikes against Bushehr, Natanz, and/or Fordo, and the retaliatory strikes sure to come from Iran, Lebanon, and possibly Syria and even Egypt. The sooner they can launch them, the less likelihood of Iran having a nuclear weapon to with which to shoot back.
3) In America, government forces are simultaneously:
a) working to undermine Iran's capability for a nuclear first strike
b) working to undermine Israel's ability to launch a surprise preemptive strike
c) working to arm Israel against the Iranian attack which is sure to come, whether or not Israel strikes first.

The war only awaits a convergence of All Systems Are Go signals from Israel and at least one of the other two countries. Should the US and Israel agree on an attack, it will commence forthwith. Should Iran reach the level of preparedness that Israel is at, the preemptive strike will be launched unilaterally. The only other possibility is that Iran is further ahead than anyone knows, and will preemptively launch the first nuclear-tipped missile ever to be used in warfare.

If that does happen, it's going to be in the next few weeks.

The Persio-American War: Yet another report on not much to report

Now that June is half over and nothing much is happening, I thought I'd weigh in on the Iran war issue. DEBKA keeps telling us two things: One, that the Iranian government continues to stop short of launching a full-fledged weapons development program--although they have enriched enough uranium by now (up to 27%, far above the 3-4% needed for fuel grade) that when they do, it will be more like six to eight weapons being developed simultaneously; second, that it is primarily heavy pressure from President Obama that has held them back as Iran continues to pass the various milestones on its way to launching a weapons program.

Now, to its embarrassment, the Obama administration has admitted its role in the Stuxnet virus. Just how close this secretive account is to the truth we can't be sure, but since Israel all along has been hinting at its role, we now know our suspicions to be more or less correct.

Given that the US and Israel have been working together on the cyberwarfare front, it's clear that they have a united agenda in physically taking out Iran's nuclear capability, and any assault on that front will be a joint effort.

One last note: the success of Stuxnet on the one hand, and targeted assassinations on the other, show that the Israeli/American axis has an incredible intelligence reach. When an Iranian nuclear scientist sneezes, they know whether or not it's because he has a cold. It's unlikely, especially given the wide success of Flame, that there is any development in the Iranian nuclear program which the axis doesn't know in enough detail to guide the deadline for moving this war from the virtual to the actual.

And by the way: determining just when Flame intel started to pour into Ft. Meade should be pretty easy: just look for a big uptick in enrollment at the Basic Farsi programs of the Defense Foreign Language Institute.

The Death of the Life Sentence

I have earlier posted about the death of capital punishment in the USA for any crime other than murder (see also this later post), Caryl Chessman being the last person to be convicted of such a crime, in 1948.* But following his eventual execution an unheard-of twelve years later, even executions for first degree murder fell sharply. As a a result, there are still people in prison who killed as long as 40 or 50 years ago. The longest case I am now aware of was that of Thomas Hagan, aka Talmage Hayer and Mujahid Halim, who, after 16 rejections by the parole board, was finally released in 2010, forty-five years after his conviction for the part he played in the assassination of Malcomb X. The two other assassins had already been out for about 15 years. Not very far behind him is Sirhan Sirhan, who has been denied parole 14 times for his role in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. None of the other assassins were ever brought to trial. In each case, there appear to be political considerations for keeping these men behind bars for so long.

In another case, the parole board actually appears determined to take the phrase "life in prison" seriously, due to the heinous--and, admittedly, political--nature of the murder: Charles Manson, who entered Death Row in 1971 for the role he played in the murder of Sharon Tate, had not yet been executed when his sentence was changed to life; he has been denied parole 11 times. Of his co-defendants, Charles Watson has been refused parole 14 times, Leslie Van Houten 19 times, and Patricia Krenwinkel 13 times. Susan Atkins died of brain cancer in prison after 18 rejections of parole. The nearly 40 years she spent as a female in prison constituted a record in the California penal system--a record now held by Krenwinkel, as Van Houten spent some time out on bond during a 1977 retrial.

Note that all of these murderers had originally been given a death sentence, with the exception of the black-on-black killing of Malcomb X, in which they were given 20 years (thus the mid-'80 release) to life. But a sentence of life in prison for murder, originally handed down as such (and I include in that definition any sentence of 80 years or more, which by definition could be considered tantamount to life), has--[but see Update]--never resulted in any death by reason of old age ending such a sentence; in any case, no one has ever yet served even 50 years of such a sentence. In a word, it is meaningless.

The replacement of execution with an imaginary life sentence dates as far back as 1924, when Clarance Darrow talked his underage clients Leopold and Loeb into pleading guilty to murder, not because they were actually admitting their culpability, but as a means of avoiding the death sentence. He succeeded in convincing their judge that the boys could not be held responsible for the brutal premeditated murder of Bobby Franks, and they were sentenced them to the intrinsically meaningless "Life plus 99 years."  It should come as no surprise that neither defendant spent any more than 33 years behind bars for the murder.

It is possible, even likely, that one of Tate's murderers will end up serving 50 years in prison for the crime. But I venture to predict that no American criminal, sentenced after the Supreme Court lifted the ban on execution in 1976, will ever again serve over 30 years in prison for any heinous crime--and, for those committed to mental institutions for murder, I predict an even shorter timeframe.

UPDATE APRIL 3, 2012
* I should clarify that I speak here of State crimes. Forty years ago, murder was not a federal crime, and until recent decades, federal executions (for espionage, treason, and desertion) had also diminished to nothingness--with only three in the 20th century, all during wartime, and none since 1953. But since the mid-1990's, it has become fashionable to try murderers in federal court, where they are more likely to receive a death sentence--but don't always. Under this new regime, life sentences in lieu of execution may well mean just that. But this is a new system yet, so only time will tell.

UPDATE APRIL 10, 2013
Ironically, even as I wrote this post, an inmate approaching death at the University Medical Center was finishing off a sixty-five year life sentence--now considered a world record. William Heirens, like Lee Boyd Malvo, was a juvenile when the murders for which he was convicted were committed--thus allowing him the maximum potential life sentence. Heirens, who probably didn't have enough evidence against him to convict him, confessed to three murders in order to bargain himself out of a potential death sentence. Malvo, on the other hand, was convicted in court of the Beltway Sniper attacks, and guaranteed a life sentence only by a 2005 decision of the Supreme Court to deny the death sentence for any crimes committed by juveniles. This may very well result in the breaking of Heirens' record, some fifty or sixty years from now--but time will tell. The idea that a person still represents a threat to society as an eighty year old man, based on something he did as a teen, may not endure that long.

Update November 2017:
Charles Manson, age 83, has finally died after 46 uninterrupted years in prison. That's going to go down as a record for someone who had received a death sentence. The Family's gruesome murders actually served to bring back both the death penalty and life imprisonment to California--at the time murderers seldom served more than 15 years for their crime. In 2016, Sirhan Sirhan was turned down for parole the 15th consecutive time. Ironically, protesting his innocence (he continues to demand a new trial) virtually guarantees that he will never be released. Of Manson's associates--including some I hadn't mentioned earlier--Leslie Van Houten was finally awarded parole on her 21st attempt, but this was overturned by Governor Brown; Patricia Krenwinkel was denied parole again; and Charles Watson, who was married, had children, and divorced in prison, has been denied parole 17 times. Bruce Davis has been denied parole an incredible 30 times, most recently by Governor Brown's veto. Robert Beausoleil, who was also sentenced to death for the murder of Gary Hinman, has been incarcerated since 1970, having been denied parole at least 18 times.

The most pro-abortion President and his aborted sibling

Barack Hussein Obama's Immigration File has been released following a request under the Freedom of Information Act. It contains some pretty damning information in and among such tidbits as:

- Barack Obama was deported from the US in 1964 after overstaying his student visa.
- He claimed to have been legally separated from his wife Ann in February 1964.
- He listed Barack II as a US citizen, even though no one disputes that he had Kenyan citizenship at the time.
- He was officially suspected of bigamy, as "no one could figure out how many wives he had."
- He alternately gave his birth date as June 18 in 1934 and 1936. See this post for details.
- He was considered "to be a slippery character."
- His Kenyan girlfriend flew to London in January 1964, presumably to have the child she was carrying for Barack legally killed. After this time, Barack "had money problems." Harvard was so disgusted with his behavior, they recommended he be deported.
- His address while at Harvard was The Koinonia Foundation. He also received stipends from the African American Institute, the Laubach Literacy Fund, and the Phelps-Stokes Fund--in addition to scholarships from the universities he attended.
- On some forms, he did not admit to being married. On one of these, he named his child as Roy Obama, with no wife listed.
- At the time his son Barack was born, he was in possession of a valid British passport.
- And, perhaps the most important of all: As far as the Immigration & Naturalization Service was concerned, Barack and his US citizen wife "Ann S. Dunham" had a child born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. And they had been married since Feb 2, 1961.
- The INS considered deporting him as early as April 1961 for bigamy but he explained that he had verbally divorced his wife in Kenya before coming to the US, and planned to give up his then-unborn child for adoption. He was cautioned about "his playboy ways."
- His race upon entry to the US was listed as "Kenya."

We can tentatively draw some conclusions from this data:
1) Barack H. Obama I impregnated a girl while at Harvard and sent her off to London for an abortion. Due to his several sources of income, he was probably able to pay for it.
2) Ann Dunham was not the only girl Barack impregnated while at college, but apparently the only one who refused to have their child killed.
3) Barack, Ann, and Barry never lived together as a family. Barack was simply a baby-daddy and never supported Ann or Barry financially.
4) During the time period that his son Barry was born, Barack Obama I was not visiting Kenya, but working on a Dole pineapple plantation for $1.33 an hour (pretty good wages in 1961).
5) The INS has no record of Barack Obama leaving the US between his arrival in 1959 and his expulsion in 1964.

Finally:
Either President Obama's Kenyan Birth Certificate is a fraud, or someone has stolen information from his father's INS file regarding a trip back to Kenya in the summer of 1961. Given the two generations of slippery characters, either scenario is possible, although the latter is highly unlikely, given the information that remains in the file. But given the documented distance between Barack and Ann almost from the beginning of their relationship, it's highly unlikely he would have taken her back home for a visit right when she was expecting their illegitimate child.

In other words, it appears that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in America, after all. But that doesn't necessarily make him a Natural Born American Citizen, by his own definition as a presidential candidate.

This is the video I referred to in the previous post

Islam will not take over the world after all, it appears

This video shows that the changes I predicted would happen in Muslim countries are already underway.

UPDATE DEC 20, 2012
The overall US birth rate decreased by 8% between 2007 and 2010, with a drop of 14% among foreign-born women. The overall birth rate has fallen to 63.2 births per 1,000 women who are of childbearing age. That is down from 122.7 births in 1957 at the peak of the Baby Boom.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 15, 2016
I may have spoken prematurely.  A closer look at the Pew Report shows that, whether they be way above replacement rate, or just barely, Muslim birthrates top those of non-Muslims in every area. So Muslims continue to grow as a proportion of every population.

Why did the wolly mammoth go extinct?

Think about it. What possible good are tusks that curve back around 270 degrees?

Deportation on the rise

Did you know that thousands of Americans are being deported to other countries--countries in which they are foreigners? Well, it's happening, and it's going to get worse--a lot worse.

Imagine this. An Afro-American veteran, the son of Afro-American veterans--once by birth, once by adoption--is deported after living for 40 years as an American to a country where he doesn't know the language, isn't connected to the culture, and has no known relatives--all because his mother, whom he never knew, was a German citizen. This is the case of Rudi Robinson, who has been banned from the US since 2003. By being adopted out of one American family into another, he lost out on being able to inherit either his natural or his adopted father's American citizenship, and reverted to the citizenship of his mother, a prostitute born in Nazi Germany.

The US Government is not at present deporting, either externally or internally, any holders of American passports. But I do know of a couple of cases in which it revoked the passports of Americans who had been born overseas, forcing them to go through naturalization before they could get new ones.

American citizenship, which our own African-American president was ineligible to inherit from his teen-aged mother who was fornicating with a married alien, is turning out to be not such an easy thing to hang on to for those who weren't born in the U.S.A. It's no wonder he doesn't want anyone to see his birth certificate; imagine him being deported to Kenya once he and his party fall from power!

At least he'd be able to live high on the hog there, with his numerous US Government pensions, aside from the forfeited presidential one. But he'd probably really miss the Secret Service protection.

Is murder a hate crime? It all depends on whom you kill.

You probably haven't heard this one, have you?

CORUNNA, Mich. (AP) -- A jury has convicted a trucker of first-degree murder in the fatal shootings of an abortion protester and a businessman in a small Michigan community.

The jury found Harlan Drake guilty Thursday, rejecting his insanity defense at trial in Shiawassee County, 25 miles west of Flint. The 34-year-old faces life in prison without parole.

Drake testified for hours, admitting he killed James Pouillon and Mike Fuoss last September.

Drake testified that he didn't like Pouillon regularly standing outside Owosso High School with a picture of a dead fetus.

Drake's mother had formerly worked at Fuoss' gravel business and had disputes with the owner.

Taser death ruled a homicide

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, the time has now passed in which The Policeman Is Your Friend. Police officers are so focused on their own self-preservation that they're only about as safe as a junkyard dog. Leashed in by the law, they're only a threat to the intruders; but watch out if their sense of self-preservation or even self-importance snaps the flimsy leash. Then they go like murder after the guests.

Delano Smith found this out when the police entered the building he was in to investigate a disturbance. They found Mr. Smith in a disturbed state surrounded by broken furniture, broken glass, and his own blood. Now, as far as I know, it's not a crime to break furniture or glass, even if you get cut in the process. But the police proceeded to take him down anyway--for his own protection, of course. But when, like the little boy who didn't want a spanking, he wouldn't hold still or submit to their ministrations, they let loose with their Tasers--several of them. As a result, Delano died.

It's rather ironic that police would kill a man for his own protection, but that's what their job has degenerated to now that the criminals they catch are just sent back out on the streets, often before the arresting officer has even finished his shift.

One wonders if Delano Smith might still be alive had the police sent an attack dog after him instead of firing their Tasers at him. At least police dogs are trained to go for the right arm--not the jugular.

Trouble in Paradise: One member dead, one injured, rest of family in custody

I get a lot of hits on this blog from people searching for information on Michael Pearl. It really spiked yesterday, apparently due to the connection being made between Mike's child-training publications and the recent death of an allegedly 7-year old Liberian girl in Paradise, California. So, it's only fair to my readers that I make some comment.

Really, I'd rather not. While Mike's theology can be quite different than that embraced by historical Christianity, his child training methods aren't unusual enough that I've ever felt a need to comment on them. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is proverb that's been around at least as long as the English language. That the world view that it represents has been increasingly abandoned in my own lifetime says more about the direction our society is headed than it does about Mike Pearl's orthodoxy.

Here's the story, as told in the Paradise Post:

Paradise, CA: Feb 8, 2010 . . . The Schatzes were arrested early Saturday morning, after Elizabeth Schatz called 9-1-1 to report that her 7-year-old daughter was not breathing. Officers arrived to find the girl, Lydia Schatz, in full cardiac arrest. Officer Tim Denecochea performed CPR and the girl was resuscitated and began breathing again at Feather River Hospital with aid of life support. However, she was pronounced dead later that morning before she could be airlifted to Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento.
She died en route to the Chico Municipal Airport after bad weather prevented a helicopter from making the flight. Police confirmed Monday that the girl was beaten for mispronouncing a word. Officers found 11-year-old Zariah Schatz in the home during the investigation, suffering from significant injuries.

She is listed in critical condition at the Sacramento children's hospital, suffering from kidney failure among other injuries. She is undergoing dialysis treatment in hopes it will help the organs recover. The two girls had reportedly been adopted by the Schatz couple along with a 3-year-old girl from an orphanage in Liberia about three years ago. The other children reportedly told investigators the parents blamed the 11-year-old for "being a bad influence" on her younger siblings. Ramsey said the evidence suggests 7-year-old Lydia Schatz was being disciplined "for hours" prior to the 911 call for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson. When police searched the family's Crestwood Drive residence, they took a photograph of a 15-inch length of tubing lying on the parents' bed next to a children's book about a frog and a toad, which Ramsey said the girl had been reading from.

An autopsy was scheduled to be conducted yesterday to determine the cause of the girl's death, but the results have not been released. Paradise police said they had no record of any prior child abuse complaints against the Schatz couple. Neighbors said the Schatz' were a deeply religious and private family who home-schooled their children and seemed to regiment their behavior.

And this, from the Oroville news feed:

OROVILLE -- A fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to "train" children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister.

Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey confirmed Thursday that other children in the home who have been interviewed told investigators "this philosophy was espoused by their parents." Ramsey said he is also exploring a possible connection to a Web site that endorses "biblical discipline" using the same rubber or plastic tube alleged to have been used to whip the two young ridge girls by their adoptive parents.

In court Thursday, a judge granted a two-week postponement before the children's parents, Kevin Schatz, 46, and Elizabeth Schatz, 42, enter a plea to murder and torture charges that could carry two life terms in prison. The delay will allow the mother to retain legal counsel as her husband did earlier.

The father's attorney, Michael Harvey, declined to comment regarding the specific allegations against the couple until he has a chance to review the evidence.
"All I can say is the family is shocked; they are grieving the loss of their daughter and (ask) that people of faith will pray for everybody involved," the defense attorney stated outside of court Thursday.

The Schatzes were arrested Saturday morning after their adopted daughter, Lydia, age 7, stopped breathing. She was subsequently pronounced dead. Her 11-year-old sister, Zariah Schatz, remains in critical condition at a Sacramento children's hospital, though she is showing some signs of recovery. The two were adopted at the same time with an infant girl, now 3, from the same African orphanage about three years ago, Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to "hours" of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents' bedroom.

Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died. The two young girls reportedly sustained deep bruising and multiple "whip-like" marks on their back, buttocks and legs, which authorities believe resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired their kidneys and possibly other vital organs, said Ramsey.
He said investigators are researching a possible connection to an Internet Web site set up by "fundamentalist Christian people" that recommends use of the same whip-like implement "as an appropriate tool for biblical chastisement ... to train a child from infancy to make them a happier child and more obedient to God because they are obedient to the will of their parents," said Ramsey.

The district attorney said some of the Schatzes' six biological children, who were removed from the family home for their protection following the parents' arrest, have made statements suggesting the ridge couple shared this philosophy.

The other children in the home said the same rubber or plastic tube was used on all of them "as a standard method of discipline, but certainly not to the extent of these two girls," Ramsey added. He said it's not clear at this point whether the Schatzes ever visited the Web site in question, which Ramsey stressed "does not endorse hurting or beating a child," nor is connected to any specific church.

I’m not going to comment on the murder charges, other than to say that it’s been legal for some parents to torture and kill some of their children in California since 1967, when Governor Reagan signed a law that decriminalized abortion. More than forty years later, Californians obviously have yet to come to terms with the implications of paterfamilias--or, as the case may be, materfamilias--as a means of population control. Granted, neither of the Schatzes appear to have a medical license, nor is their home a free-standing medical facility protected by the Free Access to Clinic Entrances law. So under current law in America, in which both beating one’s slave to death and killing one’s child after a birth certificate has been issued are both illegal, they appear to be guilty of either being at least a decade or two ahead of their time, or a century and a half behind it.

Let’s focus in this web post on the alleged Michael Pearl connection. Now, I know Michael Pearl to be a great fan of the old-fashioned sport of tomahawk-tossing. In fact, he’s so good at it, he even gives lessons. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that a 15-year old homeschooler joins Mike Pearl at a Family Camp in Tennessee for a week and takes up an interest in tomahawk throwing. Mike gives the person some good pointers, shows how far away to stand, how to aim carefully at the target, et cetera. The person than returns home with one of the tomahawks Mike recommends, and expertly buries one in a neighbor’s skull from 15 paces out. Somebody then calls 911, and the headlines soon read: AUTHORITIES INVESTIGATING TOMAHAWK MURDERER’S TIES TO TENNESSEE EVANGELIST.

Can somebody tell me how this is in any way different?

The Law Killeth--and killeth--and killeth again.

The White Man has not been in any mood lately to blog about political matters. Nearly every day another e-mail arrives, duly certified as being from an unmonitored e-mail account at The White House. The thief sending the emails tries very hard to convince me that his plans to steal from me are all in my own best interests, but I remain unconvinced. As does he; soon it will be a crime not to gamble over my health. Sigh.

But at any rate, my keyboard has not yet been muzzled, and I take to cyberspace today to comment on yet another dead child, found strapped in a car on a hot day. Hardly a week goes by in the hot summer months without another such report, despite the fact that in some states it is now a crime to leave an infant strapped in an unmoving car. Of course it was already a crime to leave an infant unstrapped in a moving car, and that is the point of this blog.

All laws have consequences, and the consequences of a law are never fully foreseen at the time it is implemented. No one suspected that children would die in unmoving cars as a result of it being a crime to allow them to get hurt in a moving car, but that is what it appears has happened.

It is not easy to strap a child into an approved car seat; it's much easier to hold him on your lap. But the fact is, it's just plain safer for a child to be strapped in a car seat while the car is moving at a high rate of speed down the road. Just for safety's sake, most parents would want their infant securely buckled in while out on the open road.

But ah, the law doesn't allow parents to use their own judgment in such matters. A 5-minute stop-and-go drive to the grocery store 10 blocks away may necessitate spending another 5 minutes just buckling all the children in. And in many families' case, the laws now stipulate that every one of their children needs his own car seat--thus requiring a van for what in most countries of the world a compact car would more than suffice. Stopping at the store adds another 2-3 minutes unbuckling them all, then another 5 minutes getting them back in to go home.

Is it any wonder, then, that many parents prefer to leave their sleeping children strapped in the car while they run into the store quickly to buy something? I certainly do. And thus as an inevitable result of more and more draconian car seat laws (especially the one making it a crime to put an infant in the front seat where he could be killed by the mandatory air bag)--coupled with the wide availability of vehicular air conditioning and a paranoia over car theft--duly imprisoned infants continue to roast to death in their parents' cars.

Yet another unintended consequence from yet another series of laws "in our best interests." Sigh.

Children: Cheaper than Chimps

It's not easy to direct a Primate Testing Laboratory these days. Never mind that it's almost impossible to come up with a new anti-viral vaccine (swine flu, anyone?) without primate testing, and that it wasn't until chimps were deliberately infected with it that the Hepatitis C virus could be isolated (before that the disease it caused was just referred to as "non-A, non-B Hepatitis"). And never mind that chimps are far more fecund in well-managed captivity then they are in the wild. There are entire organizations devoted to the promotion of "human rights" for chimpanzees, and they will not rest until every living chimp is released (never say that ideas don't have consequences). And as a result--without even having to join a union--laboratory chimps enjoy incredibly cushy employment benefits. Granted, without valid Social Security numbers, the chimps can't be paid in cash or equivalents--but their employment benefit packages are pretty impressive. Working mother chimps, for example, are now paid to breastfeed their babies for the first six months to a year (wow, what a maternity leave policy). From there, the chimps go to work as guinea pigs, getting injected with diseases that won't hurt them (they don't even get AIDS from the HI virus) so that they can be carefully studied in order to produce treatments for humans.

After 3 or 4 years in the lab, a chimp's life work is done. But alas, chimps live for at least 10 times that long. Time for early retirement! A laboratory chimp now moves to a tropical resort where it can live out its years being provided with free food and water. Well, first of all, a stop by the operating theatre where its ability to procreate is removed; we don't want any population explosions at those resorts now, do we? And this despite the fact that chimps are a Threatened Species in the wild.

Total cost over the lifetime of a laboratory chimp? Half a million dollars, or about $125,000 per year of services rendered. Those chimps are making more than their keepers! And if a chimp manages to escape wars, rebellions, and ecoterrorists, it may well live 50 years, at an average cost of $10,000 per year per chimp.

As someone very well acquainted with childraising, I can attest that children can be easily raised and educated from infancy through adulthood for a little over $2000 per year each. They get a bit more expensive after that, but--unlike chimps--by then they are earning their own way.

So, bring them on--children are way cheaper than chimps! Unless you send your children to public school in New Jersey--that alone adds $20,000 a head that somebody is having to pay for, year after year.

Don't like slavery? Then don't own one: A lesson from history

As a historian, The White Man is always on the lookout for those who are repeating history rather than learning it. One such situation seems to be emerging in regards to the threatened abolition of abortion.

More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh coined the word 'feminazi' to describe women who were determined to push their radical views on the majority. This category of person has not gone away, and it is interesting to see the parallels between the antiabolitionists of the 21st century and the antiabolitionists of the 19th century.

The antiabolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were, of course, opposed to the abolition of slavery, which had begun in the late 18th century in New England and soon spread to the remainder of states north of the Mason-Dixon line. Parity thus achieved was then maintained by Congress admitting new states to the Union in a careful balance of slave and free. But by 1846, the former territories of the South had all become slave states, and the balance could no longer be maintained with the consecutive admission of Iowa and Wisconsin into the Union as free states.

As the antiabolitionists saw their relative presentation in Washington diminishing, they became more and more adamant about imposing slavery on the new territories whether they wanted it or not. It was this belligerence more than anything else that precipitated the Civil War.

The antiabolitionists of the 20th and 21st centuries are opposed to the abolition of abortion. With poll results showing a continued drop in the support for decriminalized abortion among the American populace, they are becoming more and more belligerent. Unable to force abortion on any more Americans, they are intent on exporting it throughout the world, as evidenced by President Obama's repeal of the Mexico City Policy, and the recent passage in the House of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act.

It is hoped that these antiabolitionists will learn a lesson from history. Abolitionists were successful only on their home turf, as long as antiabolitionists were content to keep slavery on theirs. Only once the antiabolitionists began forcibly exporting slavery to states that voted against it, like Kansas, did blood began to flow. And by the time it stopped flowing, the South was in ruins and slavery was universally abolished.

Antiabolitionists like the taunting slogan, "Don't like abortion? Then don't have one!" But by forcing the US State Department to blacklist nations that refuse to remove anti-abortion laws from their books, they run the risk of awakening a sleeping giant, and eventually finding that the resulting backlash will re-criminalize abortion in their own nation.

And as before, Bleeding Kansas appears to be the tipping point.

Tiller the Killer: Let's set the record straight

The White Man mourns the untimely death of George Tiller, who recently became the victim of an illegal late-term abortion; very late-term, it occurred some 822 months after he began to grow inside his mother's womb. The abortionist has been identified as Scott Roeder, who was neither officially trained nor licensed to perform the procedure that resulted in Tiller's death. Neither was the facility where the abortion was performed--Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita--approved for this procedure. As a result, Roeder has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder, a non-capital offense in Bleeding Kansas.

The purpose of this post is not to offer an opinion as to whether this abortion was right or wrong, or whether laws against this type of abortion should be passed or upheld. It is just to address some of the incorrect or inconsistent statements flying around in regards to George Tiller and his fatal encounter with Scott Roeder.

First of all, it is commonly alleged that most of the people George Tiller killed were deformed babies. On the other hand, we have George Tiller himself stating in 1995, more than 13 years before he himself was aborted:

"We have some experience with late terminations: about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past 5 years."

So, there you have it. Although he went on to abort another 50,000 patients, the ratio at that time was less than one per cent deformed babies and over 99 per cent healthy babies. This says nothing of the deformed and healthy women who died as collateral damage when he was going after their offspring.

It has been mentioned several times that an earlier illegal abortion was attempted on George Tiller, by Rachelle Ranae Shannon, in 1993. This botched abortion resulted in superficial wounds to the patient's arms, but no lasting damage, and Tiller survived to kill again. What's often claimed regarding "Shelly" Shannon is that she received a life sentence for attempted murder. This isn't true; she received 11 years. After being arrested for the illegal abortion attempt, however, she confessed to a number of federal offenses and is now doing time for arson, interference with commerce by force and interstate travel in aid of racketeering--which, in her case, carried almost double the penalty for attempted murder. She continues to unsuccessfully appeal these convictions, and is scheduled to be released in another 9 years.

It's also claimed that she is imprisoned in California; this was true at one point, but as of press time she's housed in a low-security federal prison for white females in Minnesota.

The claim is also being noised abroad that what George Tiller did included the rare late-term abortion. In fact, it was his specialty, and women came from around the country to participate. It has been a lot more rare for the past week, that much is obvious; but as long as Women's Health Care Services remained open, it was one of the most common surgical procedures in Wichita.

Finally, we could go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars George Tiller spent keeping the law off his case, but nothing misleading seems to have been reported on this topic. Suffice it to say that his demise probably means a significant drop in funding for the Wichita political machine.

Another holocaust in the making?

I got this in an email today.


The relevant text reads:

"It was called The Holocaust, when millions of people perished because of their faith."

There's something wrong with the picture here. None of the millions of people listed "perished just because of their faith." The Jews who died in the holocaust were not killed primarily for their religious beliefs, or even for living out those religious beliefs. They were killed because of their race. And the reason it was so easy to identify their race was because it was listed on their birth certificates--and thus on their identity documents. And their census records.

As it is today.

In that sense, we are all set for another holocaust to come along at any time.

Religion can be changed. Race can't.

Those who don't learn from history will have to repeat it.

And by the way, this is no joke. The White Man does not celebrate National Atheists Day.