Dispel the Illusion

SHE sews, cooks, knits, gardens and raises chooks. The housewife is back – with younger women embracing traditional domestic crafts in droves, new figures show. Sewing machines have rocketed off shelves in the past six months, with Lincraft reporting a 30 per cent increase in sales. "There has been a definite trend happening and we have also started to see an increase in dress-fabric sales," said Lincraft spokesman Jeff Croft. "Demand for sewing classes has increased – and one of the biggest growth areas has been knitting yarn, with a 10-20 per cent increase in sales compared to this time last year."

The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary ... But in his strongest criticism yet of the superdatabase, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who has firsthand experience of working with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, told the Guardian ... assurances would prove worthless in the long run and warned it would prove a "hellhouse" of personal private information.

A study in the January issue of Pediatrics that is critical of virginity pledges nonetheless reveals that teens who are more religious have their first sexual encounter at the average age of 21, or four years later than teens who are not as religious ... Her analysis shows that among her sample of 934 teens with strong religious backgrounds, both the pledgers and non-pledgers became sexually active at about 21 on average. That is four years later than teens who are not as religious. She said religious beliefs play a role in teens abstaining from sex.

A team of volunteers at Live Action Films who earlier released videos of two Planned Parenthood offices advising how to conceal a reported sexual assault on a child now wants the abortion company to answer a few questions, such as how many abortions does it perform and how many reports does it submit to Child Protective Services. In an open letter and a video released today, the pro-life organization said the public should know what is going on at the company that gets millions of federal taxpayer dollars annually.

A new study offer more reasons for doubting the Freakonomics theory put forward by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt that claims legalizing abortion reduced crime. The study shows a large rise in homicides by black teens in recent years even though black women have the highest abortion rate. Respected criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University has released a new study showing homicides by blacks between the ages of 14 and 17 have jumped 34 percent from 2000 through 2007. The number of crimes for white people in the same age range did not increase.

Thousands of tourists pouring into Washington, D.C. for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration will be sharing the nation's capital with a few thousand predominantly gay leather fetishists, in town for their annual convention. Next January 16th, 17th and 18th brings the 25th annual Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend to Washington, D.C. Hosted by the city's Centaur Motorcycle Club, "a group of men with an enthusiastic interest in motorcycles, leather and other men," the event is expected to draw between 2,000 and 3,000 attendees.

When Lexie Slater-Folksman was born at 23 weeks - an age at which babies can still be aborted - she weighed just 1lb 8oz ... Lexie's case proves that the abortion laws are outdated and should be changed. At 23 weeks, Lexie was born a week before the time limit for termination ... (Her mother) said: "We're so glad to have Lexie home with us at last and it just shows how outmoded our laws on abortion are. Some mothers-to-be would be able to legally terminate their pregnancy at 23 weeks - yet my Lexie is living proof babies can survive being born so prematurely. I never realised a baby would be so well developed at 23 weeks and they do have a chance of life."

A Russian scholar predicts that's when the United States becomes the Untied States, disintegrating into six pieces that will then align with other global powers. The Wall Street Journal carries the tale of dire prognostication by Igor Panarin, who has been predicting the U.S. demise for a decade. What will bring about the U.S. disintegration? Mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation. That will ignite a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Panarin foresees the breakup in late June or early July 2010.

Protests following the passage of California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, made news headlines, but the Pacific Justice Institute reports a growing number of cases where those opposed to the ballot measure have taken out their anger more quietly: by harassing – and even firing – employees who voted for it.

A probe is under way of an Indiana Planned Parenthood after an undercover video revealed alleged criminal actions. Lila Rose of Live Action Films filmed visits to two Indiana Planned Parenthood clinics. She posed as a 13-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old man. While at the clinic, she was advised on how to get an abortion without getting the boyfriend in trouble. The Indiana attorney general's office and one grand jury are now investigating.

Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier. These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits ... "When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

Both mainstream and homosexual media around the world launched into a full-court and often vicious attack on Pope Benedict XVI following his Dec. 22 Christmas address to the Roman Curia. The furor began after the Holy Father said that protecting humankind from self-destruction was as important to Catholics as protecting the tropical rainforests. Although the pope nowhere used the word “homosexuality” in his discourse, homosexuals and others seized on a portion of his description of the Catholic understanding of the created natural order in which he described the “sacrament of creation” as “matrimony - which is the lifelong bond between a man and a woman.”

Thirteen bureaucrats and lawyers at the Canadian Human Rights Commission have worked on the investigation of the conservative website, Free Dominion, for two and a half years. And that investigation continues to this day. That’s about all the information that’s available from the access to information response provided by the CHRC to Free Dominion. I’ve never seen such a laughable disregard for Canada’s freedom of information laws as this reply is.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates ... Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.