Welfare and Prison Systems Reward Wrong Behaviours

I confess that I watch The X Factor.

For some time a few years ago the groups were doing badly in the competition. As a consequence the number of applications from groups to enter the contest fell so low, that new groups had to be formed by the judges putting together individual contestants in order to have enough entries for the group category.

In the last few years X Factor groups have performed remarkably well, with some of them becoming household names and selling who knows how many records even internationally.

Now the judges have no more problems in finding sufficient numbers of groups applying to the X Factor.

This is the illustration of one of the simplest and most universal principles governing all animal behaviour, human and non-human alike: a desired result, called "reward" in psychology's learning theory jargon, encourages the rewarded behaviour, while an undesired result, called "punishment" in psychology terminology, discourages, deters from the punished behaviour.

Yet this simple, commonsensical thing that everybody understands and knows (which governs, for example, the education, socialization and acculturation of children) is not applied in some of the most important areas of our society and our authorities' policies.

The most blatant example of a perverse system of incentives rewarding the wrong behaviour is the welfare state. Everybody knows that, with welfare the way is run now, many people are actively encouraged by paradoxical, corrupting, deleterious government policies (which, to its credit, the current UK government is trying to reform) to stay away from work often all their lives and for generations, to have more children out of wedlock and without a father, and generally to scrounge from taxpayers as much as they can.

People who work hard are "rewarded" by high taxation.

Similarly, with the noble purpose of preventing them from re-offending, prison inmates are offered free training, life skills programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, substance-abuse counselling, job placement and housing when they are released. In these circumstances, you can say that crime certainly pays. Lots of people who want these desirables know that all they have to do to get them is to break the law and be considered at risk of re-offending.

This is what ideology, in particular socialist ideology, does to people, in power and non: they abandon the tools of reason and empiricism, logic and observation of evidence, to follow instead the diktats of their pet superstition.

Golden Dawn Offices Bombed

And people still think that we face a problem coming from the rise of the Right and a threat from right-wing fascism.

The worst, real fascists are in the Left.

Golden Dawn, the Greek ultra-nationalist, right-wing party that has been very successful in the last election in June, winning 18 seats in the 300-seat Greek parliament with 7 per cent of the vote, has seen its offices repeatedly attacked by anarchists and leftists in the past.

Golden Dawn enjoys great popularity among the Greek people because, among other things, it helps them in practical ways to face the dire economic situation they are in and protects them from violence by immigrants doing the job the police neglect to do. Recent opinion polls by independent polling companies show that the popularity of the party has risen since the election, with support for Golden Dawn standing at 14 per cent in October, making it the third most popular party in the country.

Digital Journal:

Media reports linking Golden Dawn to violent attacks are frequent: less reported are the attacks by the extreme-left against Golden Dawn.

Today, at 4am, a bomb exploded outside its offices near Athens, the latest in a spate of bomb attacks.

A makeshift bomb explosion ripped through a wall and smashed the windows of an adjacent building, causing no injuries but extensive damage not only to Golden Dawn's offices but also to a store on the ground floor and to adjacent shops and houses, according to the police.

The Telegraph:

A police official, who declined to be named, said the attack was most likely carried out by a far-Left group. "It was a powerful blast that caused a lot of damage," he said. "It looks like [domestic] terrorism."

The device packed with dynamite was placed outside the party's local offices in Aspropyrgos, an industrial suburb west of Athens.

Photo source

What Is Happening Today 4-12-2012

News in pills. The latest events worth knowing

That Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is newly pregnant and in hospital with a rare and acute morning sickness you already know, but it's just a starter.

The Pope has his new personal Twitter account, @pontifex (Latin word for "pontiff"), in 8 languages, starting tweeting in just over a week. The description: "Welcome to the official Twitter page of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican City · news.va". No tweet yet in his account, but already over 300,000 followers in the first 24 hours, which are at this moment approaching 400,000, and still counting.

Today thousands of Egyptians marched on the presidential palace in Cairo to protest the assumption by Islamist president Morsi of almost unrestricted powers for himself as well as a draft constitution, hurriedly adopted by his allies, that will establish Egypt as a Sharia state, burying any vestige of democracy. Is this "the Death of the ‘Arab Spring’", as Robert Spencer describes it, nearly 2 years after it started?

Obama held a reception party for Led Zeppelin, David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman while discussions to avoid the fiscal cliff continue. Many commentators observed that he could have waited until the fiscal cliff talks were done and a deal had been reached. This is not the first time that Obama puts being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities (or playing golf) ahead of doing his job. If America goes over the fiscal cliff, millions of Americans will suffer. But the president doesn’t seem to care.

In Sudan, Christians living in the Nuba Mountains continue to be the target of bombers as the government continues to fight a rebel group in the region. Will the world speak up to protect the Christians in the Nuba Mountains? Don't hold your breath.

A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs today, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to Syria's state media. Obama and other world leaders warn Syria against using chemical weapons. Nato has now given the go ahead for Patriot surface-to-air missiles to be deployed along Turkey's border with Syria.

In the meantime, in another "Arab Spring" country, Yemen, an Amnesty International report released today details ‘horrific’ abuses. It documents that in its 16-month rule between February 2011 and June 2012, during which it took over parts of southern Yemen, Al Qaida beheaded an alleged sorcerer, crucified a man accused of spying and amputated a man’s hand for stealing, in a “human rights catastrophe”. The report also accuses Yemen’s government of abuses.

In the US, Iraqi refugee were arrested for bombing Arizona Social Security office with IED. The mainstream media are silent about it.

Still in America, Speaker John A. Boehner initiated yesterday a small purge of rebellious (mostly conservative) Republicans from prominent economy committees, sending a harsh message before the approaching vote on a fiscal cliff deal.

Christians in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh continue to face persecution at the hands of Hindu radicals. Police remain complicit to the violence perpetrated against Christians.

The highest US military court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, yesterday ousted the judge in the Fort Hood shooting case for “bias”. It ruled that Col. Gregory Gross didn't appear impartial while presiding over the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the 2009 shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others. The "bias" consisted in the judge's order to have the suspect's beard forcibly shaved before his court-martial, which the court threw out.

In the US, a newly-released colour photo showing George Zimmerman with bloody injuries, allegedly taken on the night of his altercation with Trayvon Martin which ended up with Zimmerman shooting the 17-year-old dead, could prove that the killing was an act of self-defense and that "media coverage of the story was an exercise in manufactured race-baiting".

In Mali, Jihad gang boss Oumar Ould Hamaha declares war on all music everywhere. He says: "We are in a struggle [Jihad] against all the musicians of the world".

Yes, There Is a Link between Islam and Paedophilia

People often make comments to the effect that there is no relationship between being Muslim and paedophilia, that this non-indigenous religious group has been unjustly targeted.

As an example, here's what I found posted in a student forum:

What I've never been able to grasp is why whenever middle-eastern men commit a crime, they are not identified by their nationality, but by their religion? This is blatantly an attempt to make Islam look bad. If a brit were to rape a teenager, it wouldn't say "Chrisitan [sic] male rapes teenager". How do you even know that these people are in fact muslims? Is it their names?

This might seem irrelevant, but if their seemingly muslim heritage is the only thing that links them together, then it is not at all an epidemic. I could just as easily find an epidemic of increasing Christian murderers in the UK.

PS: I'm not a muslim myself. I just find this extremely hypocritical.

Someone else in the forum corrected the poster saying that these childrens' sexual abuse crimes are not commited by "middle-eastern men" but mostly by UK Pakistanis.

Putting aside the factual errors of the comment quoted above and its naivety, it nevertheless expresses a recurring opinion that we hear frequently.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, far from being targeted, Muslim paedophiles have been let off the hook for decades by police, social services and media, who were too afraid to establish the connection between Muslims and paedophilia and left them undisturbed to go about their business sometimes for as long as 40 years.

It is interesting to note that one of the people responsible for the cover-up, Joyce Thacker, Rotherham Council's Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, is the same woman who took three children away from their foster parents because these were members of the right-wing UK Independence Party. In the end, both these scandals helped UKIP and the BNP achieve second and third place in the recent Rotherham by-election, which gave UKIP in particular a record result.

Second, even today, after the truth has been exposed, there is a strong reluctance in public discourse to make this link, reluctance of which the comments I described above are an example. Just look at this video clip of an episode of the BBC programme Question Time to see a glaring case of people falling over backwards in order not to say the "M" word. So great is in many the fear to be called racist and Islamophobic, that they resort to any way to avoid saying "Muslim" and "paedophile" in the same breath, even if it means offending others.

Non-Muslim Asians like Hindus and Sikhs have resented the fact that Muslim paedophiles have been called "Asian men", implying an involvement of the Asian community as a whole which does not exist.

And, as is so blatantly and painfully obvious in the Question Time video clip, Catholicism and the Catholic Church have been dragged into this discussion for no other reason than to distract the public, to draw attention away from the fact that the paedophiles we are talking about are indeed Muslim.

So other, innocent religious groups have been unjustly blamed to avoid accusing the real culprits.

Third, there is a high statistical correlation between the UK's Muslim community and paedophile gangs. The Times and The Daily Mail in 2011 reported some illuminating figures:

Charities and agencies working in conjunction with the police to help victims of sexual abuse in such cases have publicly denied there is a link between ethnicity and the on-street grooming of young girls by gangs and pimps.

But researchers identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by groups of men.

The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offences.

In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child.

Three of the 56 were white, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community.

Those convicted allegedly represent only a small proportion of what one detective called a ‘tidal wave’ of offending in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and the Midlands.

The fourth is a very strong argument that goes straight to the core and deep to the foundations of the correlation between Islam and paedophilia.

Islam does not forbid paedophilia, indeed it allows and even rules about it. The following Quranic verse refers to times when divorce is allowed  - notice "those too who have not had their courses", meaning prepubescent girls (wives) who had not started menstruating:

And (as for) those of your women who have despaired of menstruation, if you have a doubt, their prescribed time shall be three months, and of those too who have not had their courses; and (as for) the pregnant women, their prescribed time is that they lay down their burden; and whoever is careful of (his duty to) Allah He will make easy for him his affair.

Qur'an 65:4

And from the Bukhari, a collection generally regarded as the most authentic of all hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) collections:

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death). Bukhari 7.62.88

"Allah's Apostle said to me, "Have you got married O Jabir?" I replied, "Yes." He asked "What, a virgin or a matron?" I replied, "Not a virgin but a matron." He said, "Why did you not marry a young girl who would have fondled with you?" Bukhari 59:382

Another hadith compilation confirms what he meant by "young girl":

'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: “Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine.” (Sahih Muslim 3309)

It seems hard to believe that Islam has no problem with paedophilia if you don't know that Muhammad, who is for Muslims the ideal man, the "perfect example", the supreme example of conduct, the model to follow and imitate, just as Jesus is for Christians, was indeed a paedophile. He married Aisha, one of his wives, when she was 6 and had complete sexual intercourse with her when she was 9.

The argument that in those times the law and public moral code were different is irrelevant here. First of all, a religion, to be worthy of that name, must give ethical guidance and directions. The self-proclaimed founder of a new religion who passively follows the diktats of contemporary mores without questioning them, without having a vision for the future - as Jesus Christ did, whose ethics is modern and in fact pioneering even today, after 2 millennia -, does not deserve the title of prophet and his is not a religion.

Secondarily, that argument must be overturned. Paradoxically, saying that Muhammad just followed the rules of his day not only gives him and his pseudo-religion the coup de grace, but also encapsulates in one sentence what is wrong with Islam: a 7th-century AD warlord who was simply a slave of his time, killing, slaughtering, having multiple wives, having sex with children, was no better and no worse than many others of his contemporaries; but what has made him so perverse is that he enshrined all these terrible behaviours into moral guidelines for the posterity, so that what could have been consigned to history long time ago, barbarism, gratuitous violence, oppression of women, paedophilia - among his other abominable activities -, has now been set in stone for all future generations to obey to and adopt as an ideal way to conduct one's life.

And this leads us to the fifth point, that paedophilia is commonly practiced with the blessing of the law in Muslim countries today, in 2012, as child marriage. From WikiIslam:

A second look at the question; was Muhammad a pedophile? One of the most disturbing things about Islam is that it does not categorically condemn pedophilia. Indeed, it cannot, for to do so would draw attention to the pedophilia of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Many Muslims cannot condemn pedophilia even if they would like to, for they would have to abandon Islam. Muslims tacitly approve of pedophilia, even if they are embarrassed to say so. So mesmerized are Muslims by the example of Muhammad's pedophilia that they are unable to categorically denounce pedophilia or feel shame. It is prevalent in many Muslim countries disguised as child marriage. The UN is today trying to stop the evil of child marriage among the backward Islamic regions of Asia and Africa. The future of some 300 million young girls depends on it.

Scholar of Islam Raymond Ibrahim writes:

Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed."

The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."

Rotherham By-Election: UKIP Is Second, BNP Third

In a historic victory for the UK Independence Party, it has achieved a record second place in the by-election held in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

It has been the highest percentage of the vote ever achieved by the party in any parliamentary election: 21.8%. This is the second time UKIP's candidate Jane Collins has come second in a by-election, after having won 12.2% last year in neighbouring Barnsley Central.

It was also a victory for the British National Party, which came third, before Respect and the Tories.

The fact that the Labour-run Rotherham Council had removed children from a foster home only because the foster couple are members of UKIP may have played a role in the results of the election, which was won by Labour in this safe seat for the left-wing party.

Rotherham was also one of the Northern English towns where Muslim paedophile gangs were allowed to groom and prey on youngsters without being disturbed by local police or social services or, for that matter, by the media, not for months or years but for decades. Even now, after all this has come to light, the media are still keeping silent on the matter, and an official inquiry into child sex gangs has failed to highlight the targeting of white girls by Pakistani Muslim men.

This scandalous neglect of duty and cover-up may also have helped the politically incorrect UKIP and BNP to win supporters.

The by-election was caused by the resignation of Labour MP Denis MacShane, called by some "MacShame", who as a journalist was sacked by the BBC for gross dishonesty, as an MP was found by the standards watchdog guilty of having submitted 19 false invoices "plainly intended to deceive", and who began his career as president of the NUJ (National Union of Journalists) by creating the NUJ Guidelines on Race Reporting in the 1970s, which dictated the very same kind of journalistic self-censorship, when it comes to ethnic and non-indigenous religious groups, that stopped the media from reporting and exposing scandals like the widespread paedophilia described above.

Labour Haemorrhaging Votes to UKIP in Rotherham in Guy Fawkes' Blog was written before the election results were known:

Outside of the Leveson bubble there are some actual, real, political events also going on today. Perhaps most interestingly the by-election in Rotherham. Labour’s nerves are reaching a crescendo, and not just due to the prospect of the Homeland candidate splitting the left-wing vote. This morning Peter Watt warns that the party are losing votes to UKIP by the bucket full:

“UKIP will take votes from Labour as well as the Tories in Rotherham today…the assumption that UKIP is just a threat to the Tories is dangerous and the fact that the Rotherham foster-carers were former Labour voters is not really a surprise. The quicker we wake up to the fact that most voters are not like people who attend Labour party meetings the better. Some of them even read the Daily Mail.”

While Harry Wallop notes in the Telegraph:

“Today, Rotherham goes to the polls in a parliamentary by-election. That all the talk is about Ukip rather than Labour, which has provided the town’s MP since 1933, is a remarkable turn of events…Despite the momentum, Ukip is still small, with a mere 19,000 members – the equivalent of just a few tables of pub drinkers in each constituency. But these sums appear to hold little truck in Rotherham, where the lack of jobs and prospects are the main concerns.”

UKIP’s price in Rotherham has come in to 8/1. Guido reckons that Labour are still going to take their ‘safe seat’, but numbers are going to be very, very interesting…

Prohibition to Use the Word "Christmas" Is Unconstitutional

With the Christmas Festivities approaching, we'll see many more cases of this nonsense, and not just in the US but all over Western countries.

College Wants Club to Change 'Christmas' to 'Holiday' for Tree Sale Fundraiser:

School officials at a community college in western North Carolina replaced the word "Christmas" with "holiday" in a student club's announcement of a Christmas tree sale aimed at raising funds for charity, says a religious freedom law group. "We cannot market your trees in association solely with a Christian event," a college official told the club, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.

Lawyers from ADF responded by sending a letter to Western Piedmont Community College pointing out that it had violated the constitutional rights of the club.

"It's ridiculous that anyone would have to think twice about using the word 'Christmas' as part of a Christmas tree sale," said Legal Counsel Matt Sharp. "Not only is it perfectly constitutional to use the word 'Christmas,' it is unconstitutional to prohibit use of it. This is another perfect example of the immense misunderstanding that far too many college officials have about what the First Amendment truly requires."

The student-led BEST Society is sponsoring the sale, which ends on Dec. 6. The club completed the necessary paperwork to have the event announced through numerous means on campus. The text they requested, "The BEST Society will be selling Christmas Trees," appeared correctly initially in late October, but after a few days, the text was changed to "The BEST Society will be selling Holiday Trees," according to ADF.

"As a result of this forced changed to their advertisements," the ADF letter explains, "the BEST Society has received complaints from community members, several of whom have indicated that they will not purchase trees from the group because of the change in wording. This has resulted in direct harm to the club's fundraising activity, the proceeds of which are being used to support Angel Tree, an organization that provides Christmas gifts to children."

The letter goes on to say that "the censorship of the BEST Society's message, and the requirement that its advertisements use the phrase 'holiday tree' rather than Christmas tree, is a violation of the constitutional rights of the club members."

ADF is asking that the college, located in Morgantown, return the club's original wording to the announcements wherever they appear so that no legal action will be necessary.

Incidents such as the college's removal of "Christmas" have been tagged over the last several years as part of the "war on Christmas," a type of cultural debate in the U.S. where displays of the Christian holiday in the public square have been met with disapproval by primarily atheist groups. Although the activists often cite a "separation of church and state" clause in the Constitution as a defense for their reasoning, many legal experts say that their interpretation is a misnomer. The clause was meant to prevent government enforcement of a particular religion and not meant to exclude public expressions of faith.

Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is an alliance-building legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.

Persecution of Christians in Japan

The conference "Religious Discrimination in Japan" was recently held, organized by several human rights and religious freedom NGOs :

In the last 40 years, about 4000 members of the Unification Church as well as members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were kidnapped, confined and submitted to brainwashing for days, weeks, months and sometimes years in total impunity to force them to recant their faith.

This video presents two shocking testimonies (presented at the UN office in Geneva on Oct 31st, 2012): Mr. Toru Goto, who has been kidnapped and confined for his beliefs during 13 years and Mrs. Mitsuko Antal, member of the Unification Church, both of them kidnapped by their own relatives and tortured by Japanese citizens, professional faith-breakers and deprogrammers.

Unfortunately, the Japan Ministry of Justice has turned a blind eye to the severe human rights violations by non-state actors and treated them merely as a "family matter". Even the media in Japan has imposed a total blackout on these crimes.

The United Nations have been alerted to the problem but have done nothing about it:

While Japan was lightly criticized for discrimination including religious discrimination during its UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on 31 October 2012, the international community failed to note the refusal of Japanese authorities to protect the human rights of thousands of members of minority religions who have been violently abducted by family members and forced to change their religion, Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) reported today.

“Despite having objective evidence of gross negligence by the authorities concerning kidnapping and coercion of Japanese citizens, UN delegations ignored the issue and thus helped Japan maintain its strategy of denial,” said Willy Fautre, president of HRWF, which undertook research on the issue and published a report on “Abduction and Deprivation of Freedom for the Purpose of Religious De-conversion” in late 2011. Human Rights Without Frontiers and other organizations made submissions on the issue to the UN prior to the UPR review and met with numerous UN delegations to ask that the issue be raised with Japanese authorities.

If I say "Japan" and "persecution of Christians" you wouldn't think that the two go well together, would you?

Japan is traditionally Buddhist and we all think that we know Buddhism to be a pacifist, tolerant religion. Yet how much do we know about it? Buddhism's pacifism is more of a stereotype than anything else. And Western people have in recent decades developed a guilt complex, a self-flagellation inclination that induces them to look at others with excessively benevolent eyes.

In The Religions Next Door: What We Need To Know About Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and what Reporters Are Missing (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , American author Marvin N. Olasky (page 129) writes:

Although many Americans equate Buddhism with the search for serenity, two books by Methodist-turned-Buddhist Brian Victoria show that Zen Buddhist priests before and during World War II taught Japan's military leaders to be serene about killing others and, if necessary, themselves. As samurai warriors in previous centuries had found Zen's mind control useful in developing combat consciousness, so kamikaze pilots visited Zen monasteries for spiritual preparation before their last flights.

Buddhism also has its parallels to the teaching by some Muslim clerics that dying in the process of killing enemies guarantees passage to paradise. Some Zen priests during World War II told prospective kamikaze attackers that they would gain improved karma for the next life, and in a deeper sense would lose nothing, since life is unreal and there is really no difference between life and death. Mr. Victoria shows that D.T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s and became the prime spreader in America of Zen's mystique, stated in 1938 that Zen's "ascetic tendency" helped the Japanese soldier to learn "that to go straight forward and crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him."

Mr. Victoria also shows that Hakuun Yasutani, who helped in the 1960s to make Zen popular in the United States, was a major militarist before and during World War II, and even wrote in 1943 a book expressing hatred of "the scheming Jews." Stung by such evidence, leaders of Myoshin-ji - the headquarters temple for one major Zen sect - issued shortly after 9/11 an apology noting that "in the past our nation, under the banner of Holy War, initiated a conflict that led to great suffering." Myoshin-ji noted specifically that its members "conducted fundraising drives to purchase military aircraft."

Other Buddhist groups besides the Zen sects supported Japan's aggression and looked to historical warrant for it, and there was plenty.

The book continues by enumerating some of the many bloody conflicts and wars fought by Japanese Buddhists, including priests.

Regarding Christianity, Buddhist leaders were ruthless in their persecution, torture and massacre of Christians in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, desperate to prevent Christianity from becoming Japan's main religion after the opening of trade between the country and Europe. Not even a single Christian should be left alive in Japan, the slaughter had to be complete. The threat from Christianity was so great that different Buddhist sects put aside their disagreements and joined forces.