Xenophobia is passé. Now we are being taught anthropophobia, or fear of other people. Fear is a powerful emotion: it is sometimes rational, but it can cloud our reasoning. A number of fallacies pervade the Covid-19 debate. One is the fallacy of the missing denominator: we are told that X number of people have died […]
Both countries and companies have taken advantage of the misery of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the loneliness and the misery of millions to burnish their image. China has donated masks and ventilators; companies have offered free stuff like online yoga lessons, audiobooks, museum tours, movies and software. Great PR! But the most audacious offering […]
The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, businesses—must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives. Neither the Trump administration nor Congress […]
Just four days after going under coronavirus shutdown, Magna, Utah, was at the epicenter of a 5.7 earthquake on March 18. Greg Schulz, a Magna municipal administrator quipped, “I have a standing order: if we have another Horseman of the Apocalypse ride over the hill, I’m shooting him.” A sense of humor can be a potent […]
Swedish nurses’ conscience case rejected by European Court of Human Rights. Ellinor Grimmark and Linda Steen, two Swedish nurses who have been denied midwife posts for refusing to carry out abortions, have now lost their legal bid to take Sweden to court for violating their beliefs after they took their case to the European Court […]
The world over, commitment to democratic values is worryingly weak. For those old enough or educated enough to remember, humanity still lives very much in the shadow of the bloody 20th century (the most murderous in human history) with its failed political ideologies and the resulting huge loss of life. It was democracy that won […]
The T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland was established by a £20,000 donation from Thomas Charles Beirne, a devout Catholic businessman and Papal Knight who was warden of the University from 1928 to 1941. The vast tract of beautiful riverside land on which the university sits in St Lucia was donated by pioneering doctor […]
The UK government funded the LGBT Lobby Stonewall to produce a programme; ‘Creating an LGBT inclusive Primary Curriculum’ which has been designed to erode ‘heteronormative’ assumptions in primary schools. The programme embeds same sex relationships throughout the curriculum, using psychological techniques such as ‘usualising’, ‘actualising’ and desensitization to make these relationships appear normal to our youngest children. Teachers are […]
Are we bored with gender equality? Does the advent of International Women’s Day not make our hearts race? Just in case, the United Nations Development Programme came up with a sensational statistic for IWD 2020: “close to 90 percent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women,” reported the UN body in […]
Cassie Jaye, now 33, was a struggling actress in Hollywood in her late teens and early twenties. Her story sheds light on the Weinstein debacle. She describes how young beautiful actresses have contracts with publicists and now the publicists find them entry-level work with the rich and powerful of Los Angeles. A beautiful young woman might […]
Why does the Catholic Church hate gay people? Perhaps you have asked that same question yourself. As a Catholic priest, I have certainly heard it. Now I would like to address it. But first, permit me to change the question slightly. Since I emphatically do not think that the Catholic Church hates anybody, I think a better […]
The official death toll from the Covid-19/coronavirus now stands at over 2,500 people. There are over 80,000 cases worldwide. The people I’ve talked to about this epidemic fall into two camps. Those in the first camp say that this needs to be put into perspective, the number of people who die each year from the […]
The eminent expert in communicating science botches his explanation. Twitter may not be the best medium for explaining the science of eugenics to a wary public, as the sometime Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Richard Dawkins, discovered this week. Professor Dawkins, now aged 78, renowned as an […]
In 2010, President Barack Obama made January National Slavery and Human Trafficking Awareness Month. It’s incredible that anyone needs to be aware of slavery 157 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. But it still exists. “Human trafficking erodes personal dignity and destroys the moral fabric of society,” said President Trump when he launched this year’s commemoration. “It […]
In a culture that has championed feminism, the Women’s March, #MeToo, and national campaigns to close the gender pay gap, life as a full-time homemaker seems anything but progressive. And yet, the growing #TradWife social media movement celebrates the classic domestic female as its role model. The movement, often illustrated with 1950s posters of apple-cheeked […]