Magic Statistics

Islamist organsations in several countries are threatening reprisals against Europeans over the twelve cartoons originally published last 30 September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Alleged Islamist leader Mullah Krekar, who has been living in Norway as a refugee since 1991, says, "The war has begun".

Mr Krekar said Muslims in Norway are preparing to fight. It does not matter if the governments of Norway and Denmark apologize, the war is on.

Islamist organizations all over the world are issuing threats towards Europeans. The Islamist terrorist group Hizbollah announced that it is preparing suicide attacks in Denmark and Norway. A senior imam in Kuwait, Nazem al-Masbah, said that those who have published cartoons of Muhammad should be murdered. He also threatened all citizens of the countries where the twelve Danish cartoons . . . have been published with death.

Here’s a question: Why did it take over three months for Muslims to react so angrily? The Times of London has published a helpful timeline of the gathering storm. This, I think, is a crucial portion:

November-December: A delegation from Danish Islamic groups visit the Middle East to spread publicity about the cartoons. Rumours circulate and additional images, not originally published in Jyllands-Posten, are attributed to the newspaper. [emphasis added]

November 14: Jamaat-e-Islami, a Pakistan-based group, protests in Islamabad.

The delegation of Danish Muslims prepared a booklet of materials, including the original twelve cartoons, along with three others that had never been published. Lorenzo Vidino reports at The Counterterrorism Blog:

[T]he Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face. But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that "mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty".

Meanwhile, several more newspapers in Europe have re-printed the original twelve cartoons.

American media, on the other hand, have pointedly refused to show them "out of respect for Islam". These are the same media outlets that evince no such scrupulosity when it comes to mocking Christanity. Michelle Malkin documents the hypocrisy.

Here at home, this blog’s upsurge in traffic, noted here, continues unabated. Today’s 1,000th visitor just arrived at my big post from Pennsylvania via a trackback from The Brussels Journal.

In the new issue of The [UK] Spectator, Boris Johnson reviews The Revenge of Gaia, a new book by green prophet James Lovelock.

Gaia is the Earth herself; she is Mother Nature; she taps her foot in ever-growing impatience at the antics of our species; and, according to Professor Lovelock, she is about to exact the most terrifying punishment for our excesses. She is about to get carboniferous on our ass.

Global warming will soon accelerate to an unbearable level. Earth’s inhabitants are going to fry.

"Billions will die," says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a "broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords", and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.

The Arctic the last refuge for humanity? Whew!

If Lovelock is right, the environment is too far gone to save, so why bother trying? Johnson finds the eco-apocalyptic vision perversely fascinating. It sounds like 28 Days Later and Invasion of the Body Snatchers rolled into one. And yet . . .

But the more one listens to sacerdotal figures such as Lovelock, and the more one studies public reactions to his prophecies, the clearer it is that we are not just dealing with science (though science is a large part of it); this is partly a religious phenomenon.
. . .
And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful. One sect says we must build more windfarms, and these high priests will be displeased with what Lovelock has to say. Another priestly caste curses the Government's obsession with nuclear power - a programme Lovelock has had the courage to support.

This is religion, all right, but since it’s impossible to be sure that your acts of propitiation or atonement have appeased the deity, it's pagan not Christian. For the New Testament teaches that Jesus has made full atonement for sin. The religious aspect of this pagan apocalypse sounds like what St Paul decried as worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.

Quebec has had a universal government-funded daycare program since 1997; the rest of Canada has no such program. A new study by the C.D. Howe Institute compares the effects of the two child-care regimes on children, parents, and the economy. Conclusion: Quebec's program is good for the economy, but not for children and parents.

[W]hile $5-a-day child care had positive economic impacts by increasing the proportion of working mothers in Quebec by 21 per cent - more than twice the rate in the rest of Canada - it had negative effects on the well-being of children and parents.

Comparing children age 4 or under in Quebec with those in the rest of Canada from 1994 to 2003, the researchers noted the increase in everything from aggressive behaviour to throat infections was much greater in Quebec - suggesting that children were worse off after the $1-billion-a-year program was introduced in 1997.
. . .
For almost every measure, we find an increased use of child care was associated with a decrease in their well-being relative to other children, the authors write. The well-being of parents also declined, with more mothers reporting depression. There was also a greater incidence of hostile parenting and dissatisfaction with spouses.

The authors also point out that their findings corroborate those of a 2003 US study that reported a correlation between aggression and misbehaviour in children and time spent away from maternal care.

The study and background information can be accessed here.

via Mere Comments.

Scientists agree that dinosaurs became extinct, but they can't agree on the cause. Was it an asteroid striking the earth some 65 million years ago, or was it a gradual process taking millions of years? The question has set off a heated debate.

[A] bitter row has broken out on CCNet, a scholarly electronic network, over a paper by Peter Schulte of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and colleagues in the journal Sedimentary Geology: they conclude that two cores drilled in Brazos, Texas, provide new support for the much-loved disaster movie scenario.

Geologists generally support a cataclysmic disaster scenario, but dinosaur scientists are unconvinced.

Though common wisdom among many scientists favours an asteroid strike ending the age of dinosaurs, one group of scientists remains doggedly undecided about this vision of apocalypse: dinosaur experts.

Angela Milner, of the Natural History Museum, London, said yesterday: "There is absolutely no consensus as to whether there was a sole cause and what it was. The feud does not involve people who work on dinosaurs, but sedimentologists and hard rock geologists."

According to paleontologists and other natural historians, the fossil record appears to show that dinosaurs disappeared gradually. Earth scientists, however, are divided between two competing disaster theories: crash or burn–meteorite strike or volcanic activity.

After extensive public consultation, Malta has announced that an image of the baptism of Christ will appear on Maltese Euro coins, to be issued on 1 January 2008.

Trust Reuters to classify this as an oddly enough news article. Philistines!

via The Pearcey Report.

(I'd like to visit Europe again some day but, sadly, that will not be feasible in the foreseeable future.)

The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For the Epistle: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St Luke 2:22-40