Thursday, April 08, 2010


The Marketing of Evil

“The Marketing of Evil” is the title of one of the most important books of our day. When David Kupelian wrote it several years ago he caused many to understand that the breakdown of the family, the toxic culture, the slow chipping away at the moral fabric of our nation do not happen by accident. They happen because there are those who are intent on destroying a Judeo-Christian worldview and the goodness that goes along with it.

As we face this ugly truth, the good news is that Kupelian has written a sequel to help us “understand and overcome the destructive forces that are transforming America”. His new book, “How Evil Works” is essential for anyone who seeks to promote what is good. But be careful: sometimes the evil is “out there” – and sometimes it is in our own hearts. If you start feeling a bit uncomfortable as you read, it might be time to drop to your knees.

Kupelian writes: “Increasingly, Americans are forsaking their traditional faiths of Christianity and Judaism in favor of witchcraft and other pagan or New Age practices, while angry, in-your-face atheist manifestos top bestseller lists. Meanwhile, today’s culture of sexual anarchy manifests ever new and disturbing syndromes – same-sex marriage, people attempting to surgically morph into the opposite gender, pedophiles and polygamists striving to ride the gay-rights bandwagon to acceptance, and an epidemic of female schoolteachers sexually preying on their students.”

It’s time we discover just how we’ve become so accepting of the manifestation of evil around us. Could it be that our silence and casual acceptance are also evil? You’ve heard it said, “Where is the outrage?” But when I reflect on how Christ wept over the lost and the hurting, I also wonder, “Where is the heartbreak?”

It starts with you - by asking Christ to first examine your own heart, to try your thoughts, to reveal your own “wicked ways”. Jesus was very clear about confronting our own sins first. And, because we are all fallen creatures, we have to confess them every day. Each morning in order to fight my human tendency to take the easy path of cultural compliance, I ask God to forgive me, strengthen me with his spirit, and fill my heart with love for him and others. The only way to be strong enough to battle evil is to start with a contrite heart and replace seflish desires with the compassion of Christ. I must fight for truth not only because it secures freedom for me and my family, but because it secures freedom for the very ones who oppose and hate me. I must love them enough to endure the ridicule and the hatred they blindly spew my way.

Kupelian offers bold and wise advice as another critical step in overcoming evil: We need to reach the “decent but confused people” that have been seduced by the lies. And we do this by first recognizing that “our war is really just a huge confrontation between deception and truth.”

Speaking and living truth – boldly, consistently and with compassion – is the key to victory. It was Christ himself who said as recorded in John 8:32, “…the truth will make you free.”

“How Evil Works” is rich in the profound lessons of history and of today. Kupelian’s prescriptions for the victory of goodness are precise and brilliant – and must be read in their entirety.

A warning you will see woven throughout the book is how “those who are addicted to power are intent on keeping us off balance” in their effort to make us our own worst enemies - to resort to hostility and hate toward our cultural captors. Kupelian admonishes, “Don’t fall for it. There’s a world of difference between righteous indignation and seething hatred. One is based on a strong sense of justice; the other is self-destructive, out-of-control rage. If we can rise above the temptation to hate, we’re left with a truly righteous passion to right the wrongs in our beloved country.”

SOURCE



Lazy British police again

Thieves! Who cares? They are only interested in political crime. Preach what the Bible says about homosexuality and they will be after you like a shot

When two thieves stole from his store and made off on foot, shopkeeper Graham Taylor gave chase. As he pursued the thieves he encountered a policeman and asked for his help. But he was angered and bemused when the officer told him: 'You had better call the police.'

But when Mr Taylor did call the police, the officers who were assigned to deal with the theft missed the radio call - because they were celebrating at a colleague's retirement party.

Last night senior officers launched an investigation into the incident after Mr Taylor lodged a complaint.

The farce began when Mr Taylor, 50, chased the two youths from his newsagents in Hessle, East Yorkshire, after they stole a bottle of whisky and a bottle of Baileys liquor. He followed the pair on foot before running back, locking up his store and jumping in his car as the teenagers made off into a nearby cemetery.

As he circled the perimeter of the graveyard, Mr Taylor spotted the officer sitting in a marked patrol car and went over to ask for his assistance. 'I couldn't believe what he said when I asked for help,' Mr Taylor said. 'First he asked if I had reported it to the police, then asked if I had rang the police. 'He was the police; was I not reporting it there and then? Why do I need to ring the police to tell them when I told a police officer.'

Mr Taylor said he then called 999 and was assured that a patrol had been dispatched to try to arrest the thieves. But it later transpired the officers in question missed the radio call as they were celebrating a colleague's retirement party inside the police station.

Mr Taylor claims he went to the police station and found a car adorned with brightly-coloured balloons and could hear shouts and cheers coming from inside the building. He said he rang the buzzer to attract the attention of a policeman but was greeted by a Community Support Officer. Mr Taylor asked what was being done about the theft from his shop but the officer had no idea what he was talking about.

He said: 'The whole thing just became more and more farcical as we went on, it was like a scene from Carry on Constable. 'I have been raised to respect the police and the work they do. It is a really hard job and I appreciate that, but I was miserably let down when I needed them.'

The shopkeeper has since made an official complaint to Humberside Police and said he has been told by an inspector that 'mistakes have been made'. A spokesman for Humberside Police confirmed an investigation was being conducted by the Professional Standards Branch. She said: 'It is disappointing to hear that Mr Taylor feels he was given a poor service from Humberside Police.'

Police are still seeking two suspects in connection with the thefts.

SOURCE



Fathers matter to daughters too

Two years ago, I recounted in this newspaper the painful experience of growing up without a father. I reflected on my earliest memory, at the age of three, of 'my daddy', Donald Traynor, handing me play bricks, bending to kiss me on the head - and then walking out right of my life.

It was the winter of 1967, he was 49 and I never saw or heard from him again. For years, I dwelled on this rejection. Was he ever sad that he wasn't with me at Christmas or on my birthdays? Or did he simply never give me a second thought?

I grew up in a small Cotswold village with two half-brothers and a half-sister. Their father had died of cancer several years before our mother, Elizabeth Poulton, met and married my father. Her new husband, Donald, was said to be a charming, intelligent man who designed aircraft for a living. He became stepfather to my siblings - Bernard, Gerald and Teresa - and I arrived shortly after.

The relationship between my father and mother deteriorated quickly. They had very different personalities, and, I was later to discover, there were unpleasant and intolerant elements to his character which were untenable to my liberal, fair-minded mother. So my father packed up and left, never to return. He walked out of my life and contributed nothing to it - emotionally, physically or financially. He left without a trace.

I didn't even have a photo of him. There were no pictures of him - not even from the wedding or any other family occasion. I was left to grow up conjuring images of a faceless father. Throughout my childhood, his absence was a source of growing curiosity to me.

Our father, from all accounts, had been a larger-than-life character. I speculated about which, if any, of my traits were his genetic gifts to me. Did we look alike? Did we share the same sense of humour? Was he queasy at the sight of blood? Did bad manners infuriate him as much as they do me?

You might wonder why I didn't just ask my mother these questions, but she was ill with kidney disease during my childhood and we seldom, if ever, talked about my father. I feared that it would add to her poorly condition if I were to burden her with any of my numerous questions about him.

Occasionally, Bernard and Gerald would make comments about my father. They said he prized intelligence above all else and would reward them with pocket money if they could answer world knowledge questions he set them. Other than that, he made little impression on them as a stepfather.

My mum lost her battle with ill health when I was 11, and my older siblings - and their partners - assumed responsibility for me. I was 18 when I left for London and began my journalistic life working for a series of local newspapers in Central and West London.

As a young woman, I did not have my first serious relationship until I was 21 - which was old by the standards of my friends. I was always suspicious of men, never fully trusting their motives.

I met my long-term partner, Stephen, in the mid-nineties and found myself thinking more and more about my father after I became a parent myself. Shaye was born in 1997, and almost at once I felt a strong urge to find her grandfather.

Despite my achievement as a mother, and professional successes as a journalist and broadcaster, I never felt a complete person. And so it was that I spent the next decade searching for my father. I trawled the internet, library records, phone entries and county and electoral registers. I contacted missing person associations, including the Samaritans and Find-a-Parent. All put out bulletins to aid my search, but none bore fruit.

Little did I know that my father had died of cancer in a Leeds hospital 16 days after Shaye's birth, at the age of 79. Then, in 2007, my sister-in-law, Hilary, discovered his death notice while searching an ancestry website for family connections.

My quest had come to a close - and there was no happy ending. After that, it seemed the trail had gone cold - until one day in the autumn of 2008 when I received a note via an internet networking site. I did a double-take when I saw the sender's name: Stephen Glenn Traynor. He was my half-brother from my father's side, and eight years my senior. My mother had mentioned that my father had children from a previous marriage, but she knew nothing about them. Now here was one of them, telling me that he had been searching for me for several years, aware of my existence and keen to make contact.

Then it transpired that Stephen had a sister, Christine, who was 49. Suddenly, I had two new siblings. My joy was tangible. What I couldn't know was that this email would herald the start of a painful, but ultimately healing, journey.

Stephen told me that after he had left my mother, my father had briefly returned to Leeds — then he had upped and left for Australia. And just as he had cut off all contact with me, so he had abandoned Stephen and Christine — failing to support them or make contact during his time away. Donald Traynor remained in Australia for a decade before settling first in the U.S. and then Canada, where, in a nod to his talents as a jazz musician, he started a music school.

He returned to Britain in the Eighties, penniless, and lived close to Stephen and his family in Leeds, until his death from prostate cancer.

Our father, from all accounts, had been a larger-than-life character. He enjoyed a glass of whisky and was nicknamed General Patten by his neighbours because of his statesman-like presence and dominant manner. I learned that he had a bossy streak — a fact I found remarkable given that I had been nicknamed Bossy Sossy at primary school.

Then the details become a little fuzzy. Stephen recalled our father mentioning that he was a foundling baby who was left on the steps of the Swan Hotel in Harrogate (which Agatha Christie had famously fled to in the Twenties), and raised by the spinster owner. Despite exhaustive checks, I have been unable to confirm this story.

I do know that my father attended Harrogate Grammar School and went on to study music at the Birmingham School of Music. From there, he trained as an aircraft designer, completing his training with the RAF in Fairford, Gloucestershire. He had clearly been a highly motivated and ambitious man: professionally if not personally.

He also appeared to have been a serial husband. It emerged that long before I came along, and long before the marriage that produced Stephen and Christine, there had been an early marriage, in the Forties, which produced a daughter. Inevitably, Donald abandoned her, too.

He divorced each of his three wives, and abandoned each successive family, before re-marrying and creating more children. I was the result of his final marriage. My eldest half-sister is 62. She was born as the result of that first marriage in the Forties — and until recently, she didn’t even know I existed.

Her account of my father’s life places him as an orphan, rather than a foundling, adopted at birth by the owners of the Swan Hotel in Harrogate and left a sizeable inheritance by his adoptive parents, which he frittered away during his travels around the world.

Whichever version is correct, what remains abundantly clear is that our father was abandoned by his biological parents — a template he was set to repeat over and over again with his own children.

While I have sought to understand his actions as a consequence of his past, my eldest half-sister — so I am informed through her daughter, since she does not want to ‘rake up the past’ — remains unforgiving. She is angered by our father’s reckless attitude towards his inheritance, and that he did not put any money aside for his children.

At 45, I have accepted that his absence has wrought its share of emotional problems, and has had far-reaching consequences for me. According to psychologists, fathers act as ‘first boyfriends’ to their young daughters, and the relationship between them serves as a blueprint for the child’s future romantic experiences.

It is no coincidence, then, that my relationships with men have been ill-matched at best, and downright dangerous at worst. Almost all of my romantic attachments have been with men who were emotionally deficient, and frequently verbally and physically abusive. They all ended — and usually badly. My last serious relationship, with my daughter’s father, came to an end in May 2000.

I have chosen to be single and celibate since. According to a psychologist that I saw for several years, I have ‘failed to maintain a mature, stable relationship with a partner because of man issues’. She was in no doubt that they were inextricably linked to the lack of paternal care in my life.

The recent revelations about my father, despite the fact that they have painted him in a bleak light, have, nonetheless, given me a feeling of wholeness. Rather than only knowing my maternal heritage, I have been blessed with a fuller knowledge of who I am, and where I come from, warts and all. For years, I had told myself that it didn’t matter whether I knew about my father or not.

But that was only a defence mechanism to protect myself. It does matter. I am the result of two people. My father is 50 per cent of my DNA — and the importance of that cannot be underestimated.

Our fractured society has already created millions of half-siblings who have lost touch with each other — and the figures look set to increase, exponentially, over the next decade.

Now, I fear for the one in five children growing up in fatherless homes, because I know the long, dark journey that lies ahead for them.

I spent decades in self-destruct mode, battling with depression, eating disorders and alcoholism. It’s hard not to blame it all on my father’s absence. I now know that I am the daughter of a philandering, irresponsible, selfish man. But unlike my father, I accept responsibility for my actions and work strenuously not to repeat the way he chose to live his life.

So, despite being separated from my daughter’s father, I make it a priority to take her to see him several times a month at his London home. My child’s need for her Daddy is uppermost. I was reminded of this when I glimpsed, for the first time in 45 years, a picture of my father, given to me by my half-brother Stephen. I was stunned by my physical likeness to him. We share the same wide smile, identical apple-round cheeks and a similar mischievous glint in our eyes.

His thinning hair gleamed with the same red shade as mine. I have met Stephen and Christine and their families on several occasions, and we are affectionate with each other, despite being virtual strangers. Our other half-sister wants nothing to do with any of us. I suppose we serve only as a reminder of her unhappiness.

How do I feel about my father now? I think the best description is ‘calm indifference’. I have spent too many years raging about the man, and I’m not prepared to do that to myself any more.

I have told my daughter very little about her grandfather, and sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I had a son. Might he somehow have been infused with those genes that inspired my father to abandon three families, one after the other?

No matter how I try to rationalise my father’s actions, a nagging voice persists. It asks, over and over again, how can a parent leave a child without so much as a backward glance?

SOURCE



Call for civil action over racial slurs in Western Australia

One guess that the word "Boong" (Australian slang for an Aborigine, somewhat equivalent to the famous American "n-word". The "oo" is pronounced as in "book") is the target here -- amazing how they manage not to mention that though. What about "Abo"? To me it is just an abbreviation but some people get all righteous about it. There are a lot of Aborigines in Western Australia and they do have a high rate of incarceration

Interesting that vilification is already a crime but that is not enough for the bureaucrats, apparently. They want more of the action. It looks like they think the coppers are too lenient. Cops have a lot to put up with from blacks so they probably see as fair comment some things that ivory tower bureaucrats would get all hot and bothered about


The Equal Opportunity Commission wants to have the power to launch civil action against people or organisations who have racially vilified an individual in a public place.

Laws allowing civil action for racial vilification passed the Lower House in 2007 but the legislation never passed through the Upper House. It is already a criminal offence and, in at least one incident, it has been taken to court in Western Australia.

Commissioner Yvonne Henderson says racial vilification can have a major impact. "People feeling a sense of injustice and exclusion and it can lead to social problems further down the track."

The President of the Ethnic Communities Council of Western Australia, Maria Saracini, supports the call. "It deters or is aimed to deter people from engaging in conduct which is considered unlawful or un-Australian."

Yvonne Henderson says she would like a racial vilification bill to be placed on the parliamentary notice paper once again. She says people who have been the subject of racial discrimination should be able to lodge a complaint with the Commission.

"Well it would have to be in a public place. It could be a sign, it could be a poster, it could be a sticker, it could be words spoken. "It could be words broadcast by means of a P.A. system. It would have to be in some kind of public place which could include a workplace."

The Government and Opposition have been unavailable for comment.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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