As IF Times

link No him or her; preschool fights gender bias – Yahoo! News.

It’s not even a slippery slope, Western culture is in full free fall.  The people described in the linked article are seeking to completely eradicate any gender bias at all in the upbringing of small children.  While in today’s increasingly politically correct world, this may not seem that strange, it’s only because of the increasing tolerance to strangeness that society has been made to endure over the past few generations.  The kind of social engineering being pushed by these ‘educators’ is not that different from oh, let’s say the Amish who insist on eschewing modern conveniences in their daily lives.  Certainly, people can do what they wish in an enclosed society, but the actions of these ‘educators’ are being promulgated to society at large, at least in ‘progressive’ Sweden.   Upon reflection, how is this any different from cult behaviour?  Is the entire nation of Sweden becoming a cult?

According to the website toptenz.net, the definition of a cult is:

“…A “cult” typically refers to a  social group devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding population considers to be outside the mainstream. Cults usually expect a large amount of time and money to be devoted as well. And sometimes a cult will ask the ultimate price, your life…”

The website goes on to list the top organizations which they consider to be cults including, Scientology, The Unification Church, Hare Krishnas as well as the Mansons, Heaven’s Gate and The Branch Davidians.  People in the mainstream of society may find some of their beliefs strange and thus practitioners are viewed somewhat cautiously.  I wonder if the inhabitants of an entire nation can be viewed that way.  Apparently, just because people look like Bjorn Borg or Heidi Klum doesn’t exclude them from living in nutville.

To attempt to ‘de-sex’ kids at a young age is the latest in wrong headed social engineering.  People can deny all they want the different proclivities of the sexes, but it is to deny the process of nature.  As if that’s going to be a winner.  If nature had intended there to be no differences between the sexes, humans would all be hermaphrodites with both sets of sex organs.  We’d in fact be worms with better clothing. Years from now, if humans still survive, scientists will find that there is a suicide gene implanted in some humans which makes them want to destroy themselves.  Either that or a stupid gene, which incidentally would explain a lot of things. 

It’s one thing to live according to a set of beliefs, but when you start to monkey around with the very recipe of nature, the beliefs get a bit suspect.  The Amish may be considered eccentric in their beliefs, but at least they recognize that men are men and women are women.  A darn good arrangement.

link Rare Drop in Sunspot Activity Could Cause Little Ice Age – International Business Times.

I wonder how they know it’s ‘rare’?  While advances in science and research have been marvelous over the past 100 years, some of the conclusions that are offered should prod some questions as to their validity.  It’s not known for how long observing sun spot activity has been a scientific pursuit, at least for those who don’t wind up blind, but when they observe that sunspot activity is  ‘rare’, we presume it means over the lifetime of the sun and not just of the person.

Of course we really don’t know the history of the sun to assign what actually constitutes rare.  It’s been around for a few million years and man only invented telescopes a short while ago in relative terms.  In fact, the activity may not be rare at all, it may just happen at night.  But let’s assume that there’s legitimate reason to label this sunspot activity rare.

If that’s the case, we expect that there must be records kept over at least the past 3000 years which document the instances of sunspot activity.  This in itself would be amazing since these days,  we can’t even find a birth certificate issued 50 odd years ago.  According to the article, some Chinese sun-gazers made note of this activity in 600 B.C. as did some German astronomers in the 1840’s. Anyone’s guess is good as to why they would do this.   It’s a stretch to believe that people in those days recorded these kinds of ‘scientific’ observations as part of some official capacity.  You’d have to convince me that governments had nothing better to do than to pay someone to look at the sun.  More likely, they were eccentrics who pursued this stuff like someone cataloging types of cat hair.  Nevertheless, the conclusion is that based on such historical records,  sunspot activity is linked to temperature fluctuations here on earth.  Unfortunately, according to the article, not enough to offset global warming.

I guess it all sounds plausible.  As plausible as the doom the Mayans felt when they witnessed a rare eclipse back in the day, doubly so if you were a virgin.  There’s an old anecdotal story about a scientist studying the relationship between removing the legs on a bug and its hearing.  As the scientist removed each leg,  he commanded the bug to move, which of course it did. Upon removing the last leg, the command to move elicited no movement from the bug.  The conclusion was that when you remove legs from a bug, it goes deaf.  I can’t help but think of this when articles like this claiming really questionable science comes to light. Call me a skeptic.