On a serious note, part two...

Sorry to interrupt the levity again, but I have found two more stories I wish to expound upon, involving two of my favorite topics- political correctness and secular science.  You have been warned!

Things to think about, number one:

This first one is a story I wish no one, anywhere, had to tell.  It takes place in an English city of South Yorkshire named Rotherham.  Rotherham, like many nearby cities, apparently has a large Pakistani population.  It also had a dark secret.  For the last sixteen years, gangs of Pakistani men have been subjecting children- mainly pre-teen girls- to all manor of attacks.  And their very ethnicity has protected them.  Quotes from the BBC articles:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.

Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

"Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist”

Professor Alexis Jay

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.

Among the other sins of the town council were apparent quashing of investigations and news stories for the reasons seen above, along with a fear of targeting the gangs that were doing this- because they were "Asian", and targeting a gang so heavily one ethnic group would be racist.

Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the latest report, said there had been "blatant" collective failures by the council's leadership, senior managers had "underplayed" the scale of the problem and South Yorkshire Police had failed to prioritise the issue.

The inquiry team found examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone".

The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".

Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.


The town's former Labour MP, Denis MacShane, claimed police had kept the abuse secret from politicians.
"The Rotherham police exposed, arrested and broke up an evil gang of internal traffickers who were sent to prison," he said.

"But it is clear the internal trafficking of barely pubescent girls is much more widespread."


In October 2012, the council, South Yorkshire Police and other agencies set up a Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) team to investigate the issues raised in the report, although South Yorkshire Police denied it had been reluctant to tackle child sexual abuse or that "ethnic origin had been a factor" in its decisions.
But the force was criticised by the Home Affairs Select Committee and told by its chairman Keith Vaz they needed to "get a grip".
Rotherham was not the only community in the North and the Midlands to have uncovered such abuse. There have also been arrests or prosecutions of groups of men in 11 towns and cities, including Oldham, Rochdale and Derby.
"In the other cases, overwhelmingly, they were men of Pakistani origin and we need to understand why this has been happening," said Mr Norfolk.

He described a previous report into gang exploitation as a "missed opportunity" because of its failure to look at the proportion of men of Pakistani origin committing such offences.




Do I highlight the ethnicity of the men because I don't like Pakistanis?  No... I highlight it because they were allowed to continue raping, molesting, murdering, and trafficking CHILDREN because someone was afraid of "racial profiling".

You know why LEOs practice racial profiling?  Because if you want eggs, you look in a henhouse.  You know why it makes me sick to hear that "it's an injustice that X percent of the prison population is black "?  Because those that have the ability, opportunity, and reason to change that statistic are more concerned with using it to attack the white man and the legal system then they are to say, "We have to find a way to keep young black men from doing the things that get them put in prison."


Mr Vaz said the council had not done enough since the 2010 prosecutions.
"In Lancashire there were 100 prosecutions the year before last, in South Yorkshire there were no prosecutions," he said.

"We're talking about hundreds of victims, of vulnerable young girls, who have not been protected because, at the end of the day, what people are looking for are prosecutions."

And where is the fine, upstanding leadership of this community while all this is going on?

... in August 2013, the council's deputy leader stepped down over claims he knew about a relationship between a girl in care and a suspected child abuser. Jahangir Akhtar denied the claims.
In July 2014 the town's mayor Barry Dodson quit over separate claims he sexually abused a 13-year-old girl in 1987. He did not comment on the claims.

To date, South Yorkshire Police say 29 people have been charged with child sexual exploitation offences in Rotherham. However, the force said it was unable to say how many had been convicted.


For those of you not of a mind to click links, may I add that Mr. Ahktar (a Pakistani, perhaps)  both knew what was going on and had copious opportunity to prevent it (the girls three children by the abuser since age 14 tell how well he did that), and that the illustrious Lord Mayor was in charge for three whole weeks before someone warned him of the shitstorm barrelling his way.

Speaking about her abuser, Isabel (a victim who spoke to the BBC under an assumed name) said: "I think because the police were aware and social services were aware and he knew that and they still didn't stop him it I think it encouraged him.
"It almost became like a game to him. He was untouchable."


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On a lighter yet perhaps more far reaching topic, I read an article about a new scientific documentary coming out this fall.  Called The Principle, It starts out with a premise that has drawn howls of protest from the crowd that gave you Global Warming:  The once dead theory that earth has a special place in the cosmos.

While most of us today assume that our brilliant scientific minds, space exploration programs, and high-tech telescopes and equipment have long since proven that the Earth orbits the sun, Mr. Delano explains that no experimental evidence has ever been obtained that unequivocally proves this to be true. As historian Lincoln Barnett states in The Universe and Dr. Einstein, “We can’t feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.” Hence, Mr. Delano states that the Copernican Principle is not a scientific fact, but rather a metaphysical assumption supported by profoundly convincing ideas and theories. His film, The Principle, is the first documentary ever to directly examine the scientific basis of the Copernican Principle by bringing together top scientific experts in a commentary, which he says, will leave us questioning our very place within the cosmos.


Now you might think that this is over the top back-to-the-Middle-Ages stuff, but the point they are trying to make is to challenge existing theory with the scientific observations already recorded.  Basically, those of you who follow such things have probably heard that cosmologists put together a microwave map of what they believe are emissions from the Big Bang itself.  And, you may have heard, they were a bit puzzled when against existing theory, the "background radiation" which has had 10 billion years to become uniform, hasn't.

...to put it simply, the Copernican Principle requires that any variation in the radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background (thermal radiation assumed to be left over from the ‘Big Bang’) be more or less randomly distributed throughout the universe. However, the results of three separate missions, starting with the WMAP satellite in 2001, has shown anomalies in the background radiation which are aligned directly with the plane of our solar system and the equator of the Earth. This never-before-seen alignment of the Earth results in an axis through the universe, which scientists have dubbed the ‘Axis of Evil,’ owing to the shocking implications for current models of the cosmos.
Laurence Krauss, American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, commented in 2005:
“When you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”


Albert Einstein set this up himself with his theory of relativity:

Einstein, puzzled by the failure of every experiment to measure the universally assumed motion of the Earth around the Sun, searched for a reason to explain why this could not be measured. The result? Einstein’s famous Theory of Relativity. Shockingly, Einstein maintained that absolute motion cannot be detected by any optical experiment as no particular frame of reference is absolute. In other words, the physics works just as well to have the Earth at the center with the Sun going around, as to have the Sun at the center with the Earth going around.

Nevertheless, Einstein maintained that even though it may look like we are at the centre of the universe with all the galaxies moving away from us (as Edward Hubble observed through his telescope in the 1920s), this is only an illusion. He maintained that since space is not flat but curved, and since space is expanding, wherever one may be located in that space, the movement of the galaxies would appear to be radiating away from that point. This theory certainly supported the Copernican Principle that there are no centers, no edges, and no special positions. 


But globs of supposedly random background radiation lined up with earth's equator?  That blows holes large enough in it to drive the Battlestar Galactica through.


“The thing that has really launched the media hysteria about our film, is that we are pulling the covers off the dirty little secret that not only is there structure, that structure is related in astonishing ways to one and precisely one location in the universe, and it happens to be us,” said Delano.
“If there is something fundamentally wrong with the Cosmological and Copernican Principle, our entire picture of reality is about to change again, and the irony is that just like the last two great scientific revolutions, both were centered around this puzzling persistent question about our place in the cosmos.”



Whether The Principle documentary presents a convincing enough argument to seriously undermine the Copernican Principle and more than four centuries of science remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, come the October 10 launch date, we can’t wait to find out.


That we being Ancient Origins, whose article was reprinted in the Epoch Times.


Am I saying that we need to throw Copernicus out with the bathwater?  No.  I am saying what I have said for a long time- Science several decades ago cast away it's founding principle of observe, conceive a theory, test and see if it works.  It now operates on, here is what I want to see, let's line up the observations that fit the plan, disregard the rest.  As I told Bob Radil, look up "predictions made at the first Earth Day " (or you can go here and scroll down to my MWN item on it), many of them made by the same cloth of pseudo-scientist who gave us global warming, and see how the "science" changes according to the direction of public hysteria desired.