Happy Father's Day

(This post is based on a previous one, entitled Witch Hunts in Contemporary America)

We thought that feminism was all (or mostly) about "date rape and sexual harassment" and the like, and we believed (or at least hoped) that perhaps the term "feminazis" was slightly exaggerated, finding the gals (and their male allies) slightly inoffensive and amusing; and so it is highly distressing to find our society has been warped and hamstrung for the past 30 years by related, if unrecognized, hysterics — with the government and the law on the side of the feminists (i.e., the statists and the state interventionists). What is double maddening (as we can read in the second and third next-to-last paragraphs) is how the bleeding-hearted liberals deliberately (if unconsciously (?)) create poverty and add ever more people to the ranks of the poor.

Just read what Stephen Baskerville reports from the trenches (emphasis in bold mine) in Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family):

…the ideologues who control organized feminism today have found that the penal apparatus provides an effective instrument for waging gender warfare on the most personal level, institutionalizing feminist ideology within private life, and criminalizing individual men (and sometimes women) who fail to measure up to the feminist ideal of ideologically correct behavior in their private lives…

Child custody is not the only area where feminists have discovered they can commandeer the criminal justice system to punish ideologically incorrect private behavior, and certainly it is not the best known. Their agenda in more politically salient issues such as date rape and sexual harassment has commanded far more media and scholarly attention (where it is frequently characterized as "totalitarian"). "Feminism today, in its erasure of the boundaries between public and private, is writing a new chapter in the dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom," observes Daphne Patai, "… whereby one's every gesture, every thought, is exposed to the judgment of one's fellow citizens."

Yet while the trends are connected, the intrusive tendencies of law governing sexual harassment or date rape are minor compared to the invasiveness government-enforced feminism has already realized in family law. Yet this receives no comparable scrutiny from critics of feminism, let alone from the mainstream media or civil libertarians. As recently as 1996 a scholarly critique of "feminine jurisprudence" did not address family law at all. Nevertheless, we were warned then that "through the use of civil rather than criminal law for purposes of censorship, and under the guise of legislating equality, large areas of speech are becoming per se illegal, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans."

…Ostensibly scientific feminist scholarship is similarly revealing. Fathers trying to see their children following unproven accusations is described as "further violence" and the "threat of kidnapping"; simply responding to court proceedings is described as "violence." One highly influential feminist scholar claims to have examined 100,000 cases where women "reported" that "the batterer threatened to kidnap their children," "batterers had threatened legal custody action," and "the battering man used court-ordered visitation as an occasion to continue verbal and emotional abuse of the woman." This is not violence; it is fathers trying to recover their children through the same legal process by which their children were removed and which, in most cases, they themselves did not initiate.

…What we confront here is a bureaucratic machine of a kind that has never before been seen in the United States or the other English-speaking democracies. … The implications reach far beyond fathers and even beyond the family itself, for forcibly severing the intimate bond between parents and their children threatens the liberties of all of us. "The right to one's own children … is perhaps the most basic individual right," writes Susan Shell, "so basic we hardly think of it." By establishing a private sphere of life from which the state is excluded, family bonds also serve as the foundation of a free society. "No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply … a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth," Shell continues.

…To understand what is at work here, it is necessary to examine and discard some legal jargon that serves more to obfuscate than to illuminate. Foremost is the term "custody," which I have adopted in my title. Common sense notions of young children needing their mother — along with the mistaken belief that fathers are behind the dissolution of most marriages — lead many people to accept the overwhelming bias towards mothers in custody decisions. But it is important to understand that "custody" is not the right to parent one's children; it is the power to prevent someone else from parenting his children and to marshal the penal apparatus — courts, police, and jails — to ensure he stays away from them. [Similarly, it would be more correct to speak of plundered pops than deadbeat dads.]

…Contrary to popular belief (and centuries of common-law precedent), child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, of even agreeing to a divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced over their objections and who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement, in short, for all divorcing mothers…

…child support is no longer primarily a method for requiring men to take responsibility for the offspring they have sired and then abandoned, as most people are led to believe. Overwhelmingly it is now a regime whereby "a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children."

…Ironically, the one thing that cannot be debated in the court is legal guilt or innocence — such as violating the marriage contract or leveling false accusations. For to admit the most rudimentary notions of justice would be to undermine the logic of the proceeding.

…In the jargon of family law, faithfully parroted by the media and academia, this father has "lost custody," a simple and harmless enough sounding formulation of events, so common as to be mundane. But this jargon disguises far-reaching implications. In plain English, this father's unauthorized association with his own children is now a crime.

…the media will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that we are in a massive epidemic of government-sponsored child stealing. So pervasive is the demonization of fathers today that fathers themselves share in it even after they have become its victims. "It is typical for a man to believe … the media myth of the Evil Male," writes Robert Seidenberg. "While he knows that he is a great father himself, he thinks everybody else is a deadbeat dad."

…The growth of this machinery has been accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign that has served to justify punitive measures against citizens who are not convicted of any crime. "is there a species on the planet who is more unjustly maligned than fathers?" writes columnist Naomi Lakritz. "Fathers are abusers, bullies, deadbeats, molesters, and all-around sexist clods who have a lot of gall wanting a relationship with their children once the intital moment of conception is over."

… "The overwhelming majority of so-called 'dead-beat dads' are just judicially created," says [an] attorney. "Why all this talk about so-called 'deadbeat dads'? Because there is a lot of money to be made through that myth." … Contrary to highly publicized but inaccurate figures on the cost of divorce to women, peer-reviewed economic research concluded that "it is the non-custodial parent, usually the father, who suffers the most [from divorce]."

…The December 1999 issue of Government Executive, a trade journal that describes itself as "government's business magazine" representing public and private bureaucracies, ran a cover story that blared out, "Where's Dad? HHS is leading a forceful change to make deadbeat parents pay up." … Strikingly, the article never addressed its own question, the most likely answer being that Dad is being kept away by the government.

…"We're ratcheting up the pressure on these deadbeats," Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano tells the New York Post, which allows its pages to be used to publicly "shame" citizens who have been convicted of no crime by publishing their photograph. Were these citizens wanted for murder, they would be described as "suspects," but the government and media have already convicted them.

…social scientists have found that as much as 95 percent of fathers having no unemployment problems for the previous five years pay their ordered child support regularly, and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. Columnist Kathleen Parker concluded that "the 'deadbeat dad' is an egregious exaggeration, a caricature of a few desperate men who for various reasons — sometimes pretty good ones — fail to hand over their paycheck, assuming they have one." Deborah Simmons of the Washington Times observes that "there is scant evidence that crackdowns … serve any purpose other than to increase the bank accounts of those special-interest groups pushing enforcement."

…The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and its state affiliates now maintain an army of some 60,000 enforcement agents (13 times that of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has about 4,600 agents worldwide) … What may be most striking about this police mobilization is that the initiative has come entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem exist until government officials began saying they did … Needless to say, the voices of pursued parents are seldom heard amid the chorus of condemnation. The bipartisan certainty of their guilt is sufficient to set aside their right to trial and declare them public enemies by general acclaim. Yet there is reason to believe that this problem is largely an optical illusion and that what is being portrayed as irresponsible fathers is in reality a massive abuse of government power.

… What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business — not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil — are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

…But what may be most insidious — because it undermines the material foundations of constitutional government — is when systematic means are mobilized to finance unconstitutional government operations. Like any system of accountable government, the divorce regime can only be sustained so long as it can be paid for. This is the effect of the system of child support, coerced on pain of incarceration whose children have been seized by the courts literally through "no fault" of their own.

…The federal funding also supplies an added incentive to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into payers by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce)…

Perhaps most destructive is that this federal funding is subsidizing middle-class divorce and fatherless children. "While the new measures resulted in virtually no measurable improvement in the lives of impoverished single-mother families,' [Robert] Seidenberg points out, "it did create a windfall of income for middle-class and upper-middle-class divorced women." Misleadingly promoted as a measure to help poor children whose mostly young and unmarried fathers had allegedly abandoned them, the new laws ended up as a means to plunder middle-aged and middle-class fathers who had done no such thing and whose children were taken from them through literally "no fault" or agreement of their own. Empirical evidence indicates that this is precisely the effect. Economist Robert Willis calculates that child-support levels vastly exceeding the cost of raising children creates "an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother. His analysis indicates that only between one-fifth and one-third of child-support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. "We believe that this recent entitlement," write two other scholars, "… has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving a child."

This simply extends well-established findings that increased welfare payments result in increased divorce. In this case, however, a dimension of law enforcement is added, which effectively becomes a system of federal divorce enforcement … In other words, a mother can simply escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing, whereupon she acquires the police as a private collection agency who will force him, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay her the family income that she then controls alone.

…The pursuit of these fathers by armed federal agents has now reached the dimensions of a national witch hunt, by far the most extensive this country has ever seen … A look at the government machinery reveals that it was created not in response to claims of widespread nonpayment but before them, and that it was less a response to "deadbeat dads" than a mechanism to create them.

…Men who are truly intent on abandoning their progeny have little difficulty in disappearing; it is fathers who want to see their children who allow themselves to be snared. This may reveal the cruelest and most cynical side of the child-support machine: its willingness to use a father's love for his children to plunder and destroy him.…

To the question of why so many ejected fathers are unemployed or penurious, this is not to difficult to answer once one understands how the courts operate. Once the children are separated from their father, neither the courts nor the bureaucracy has much incentive to ensure his continued solvency — indeed, a solvent father is a threat — so they can happily reduce him to penury. After all, a fresh supply of fathers is constantly being brought into the system. The myopia was starkly illustrated during periodic controversies over whether to give child support priority over other debts in bankruptcy proceedings, when noone stops to ask the obvious question of why so many allegedly well-heeled "deadbeats" were going through bankruptcy in the first place…

To what extent child support is responsible for the very poverty it is claimed to alleviate is unclear. It has long been known that the vast majority of the homeless are male. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that family courts may be partially responsible for their plight.

…Do these questions matter? Yes, they do matter, because in these questions lies the difference between a father who is pursued because he has abandoned his children and a father who is pursued because he refuses to abandon his children. Courts exist to dispense justice against those who violate the law or agreements. When they abandon this role to become a "social service delivery system" it is much more likely that the justice and penal systems will be perverted to persecute the innocent.

Overstretched, Needed to Defend Home, Blah, Blah, Blah

While all of the states leverage is, as ever, employed to make arms sales, and yacking “biz-tellectuals” write sonnets to the Rafale, or the near holiness of any other precious piece of overpriced rubbish the state tangled arms industries come out with, the French Army’s gear is thoroughly FUBAR. So much so that Sarko just penned a “reduction and improvement” program for the French armed services.

According to confidential defence documents leaked to the French press, less than half of France's Leclerc tanks – 142 out of 346 – are operational and even these regularly break down.

Less than half of its Puma helicopters, 37 per cent of its Lynx choppers and 33 per cent of its Super Frelon models – built 40 years ago – are in a fit state to fly, according to documents seen by Le Parisien newspaper.

Two thirds of France's Mirage F1 reconnaissance jets are unusable at present.

Like with the left in the US, the nattering is identical: they are a failure, but they shouldn’t be given a cent. They are “overstretched”, but should be reduced. As it is, there will be fewer soldiers ready for duty in the “la Grande armée de la République” then there are Girl Scouts in Canada. And of course even that would be considered excessive if we were talking about the Boy Scouts.

According to army officials, the precarious state of France's defence equipment almost led to catastrophe in April, when French special forces rescued the passengers and crew of a luxury yacht held by pirates off the Somali coast.

Although ultimately a success, the rescue operation nearly foundered at an early stage, when two of the frigates carrying troops suffered engine failure, and a launch laden with special forces' equipment sunk under its weight.

Later, an Atlantic 2 jet tracking the pirates above Somali territory suffered engine failure and had to make an emergency landing in Yemen.

"External operations, in the Ivory Coast and Lebanon are a fig leaf: we are able to keep up the pretence but in ten years our defence apparatus will fall apart," one high-ranking official said.

In truth, they have it kind of rough. They deploy their forces to various parts of Africa and the near East with the expectation of benignly satisfying the public’s need to imagine that they are there broadly doing good with kid gloves.

But it only works if you don’t have a lot of illusions about the world, and the violence in it, let them do their jobs, and give them a way to do it.

Moreover, every time the issue comes up, there is a parroted “that a reason for MORE Europe, not LESS Europe” routine that they go through: always a call for military intergrations. All well and good, but all of the parties are looking for a second peace dividend which lays the burden of a professional force at the feet of the UK and the smaller states with experienced forces such as the Danes and the Dutch – hardly a way to develop a broad, unified military force with a doctrine unique to their needs. In fact it would lean even MORE heavily on the US and the force segment retrained through US cooperation as we’ve seen with the Poles.

Again, if they really want it, they have to actually want it and show it. So far, other than the UK and the Dutch, as usual the other players remain in a staring contest over who can SEEM to take action in Afghanistan with the least possible risk.

The Sun’s Fine-tuning Knob Still not Found

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate,"

The environmental movement is no longer about clean air, land, and water. It’s a Gramscian distraction for political leverage which has made a mockery of science.

God Save Ireland, Said the Heroes

God save Ireland, said they all…

Yet Another Successful 5 Year Plan

Starting next month, members of the European Parliament will travel in style on their own specially designed high-speed train from their office in Brussels to their other office in Strasbourg, France. The parliament holds its preparatory meetings in Brussels and its plenary sessions in Strasbourg meaning that every month, 377 MEPs and their staff need to be transported between the two cities. The new train is being touted (mostly by the French who built it) as an eco-friendly and cost-effective alternative to flying.

To make it even MORE “eco-friendly” why don’t they dust off Stalin’s train car?

Cato's Daniel Mitchell compares the train to the special highway lanes once enjoyed by high-ranking Soviet officials.

Beside the Caligula-like nature of that perc paid for by people who don’t get vote on whether or not the want to be forcibly relocated to this new nation, the “proletariat” it’s intended to serve aren’t quite yet pleased:

Despite the luxurious accomodations, MEPs are still griping that the train's late arrival in Strasbourg will "deprive colleagues of their midday break and the possibility of a proper lunch."

From the Zombie-Cult of those with too much Time on their Hands

With no UK teams in Euro 2008, who should British supporters throw their weight behind in the European Football Championship?

Naturally – they speak for the world! The entire world - without the slightest hint of irony or awareness of the condescention or imperialism in the tone.

The World Development Movement, a UK development charity, however, wants the bereft supporters to choose a European team based on which of their home countries is most committed to international development or most advanced in the battle against climate change.

Go team? No way – because you know, when you compete, we all lose. And since sports can be seen as a analog for war (if you torture the logic enough) then you should think war is bad too. Or something...

So goes the tripe from the muddled Euro-lefty mind. Proving that their burning interests in whatever-it-is-this-week and whatever holy green hoop they want you to jump through are really just a game:

The criteria include aid spending, carbon emissions, electricity from renewable energy, military spending, inequality and corruption.

According to the ranking, Netherlands pumps out the highest amount of carbon dioxide of countries in Euro 2008, emitting 16 tonnes per person. Turkey, Romania and Croatia emit the least with three to four tonnes per person.

Rationalizing: it’s the new “beautiful game”.

Cuddly egalitarian Sweden comes out as the most 'supportable' in the ranking, followed by Austria and Croatia, while Italy, Greece and Russia are bottom of the ethical league.

Cuddly and egalitarian? Have these people ever been there? I put this in the same place as all that sad fake blue-collarism you see among leftists in America who want to be liked... want to be a “man’s man”, but don’t know how – so they force themselves to “pick a home team” in baseball, and get worked up about microbrews because they’re egalitarian in their Beeriness, but still permits one to be distinctively lecturesome in their choices.

Either way, it’s as lacking in any sort of genuine interest on their part that only their friends who are equally emotionally debilitated will buy it.

Crisis on Omaha: The Chaos in Normandy

What if the Normandy invasion had occurred on June 6th, 2008?
(Danke zu Strummin' Joe)

How would the modern media have reported the "more and more desperate events in Normandy"?

They Were Against It Before They Were for it

Just another day of outrageous lunacy at Libération PropagandaStaffel where leftism gives license to call the Irish despotic, supersticious bible thumpers if they vote non to the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty. Never mind the fact that the French left and its' propaganda rags were the great lodestar of wisdom when it came to the rejection of the French rejection of the EU Constitution.

Ireland is the European nation that has most obviously benefited from the construction of Europe. There are even Irish who are happy about it. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they have become the majority.

Basically their getting the hate treatment here because they're rejecting this week's hypocritical Libération theology where among other things, that as a large beneficiary from EU funds, that they were unwilling to be bought off and simply unquestionably accept the Treaty conditions.

He even goes so far to console himself with the emotional detrius of class theory dialectics. Big words for spewing scripted buffonery, actually:

Despite the desolate beauty of its rainy landscape, Ireland remained the nation persecuted by history whose sons both had to emigrate driven by famine and were tyrannically oppressed by the English.

He goes on to wring his hands over their insolent near-rejection of the treaty of Nice, and their general dislike of following orders in spite of their entrepreneurial prosperity which he thinks was handed to them. Of course this makes no sense to the unprogrammed, but for the sake of argument we'll take it that at least he's saying that sincerely, since he also calls this Europe's “global” crisis. After all Europe IS the globe, as we all know, and not just flat.

But what truly makes the item's writer a slut is the veering his mental Mr. Choo-choo off the track of simple disappointed anger into the usual overbroad theorization of cause. In spite of conceding that the young and the educated also oppose the Lisbon Treaty as much as anyone else he still manages to say humorlessly:

As always in referendum campaigns, the most absurd fantasies triumph, the most absurd rumors, the most shameless take hold multiply to infinity. They plunged again into the democracy of opinions with its demagogues, populists, confabulators, and its myth obsessed. It's a technique which is irresistible to a culture riddled with superstitions.

Like all good lefties, he concludes that if democracy means anything, their rejection can be vetoed. I wonder who will get worked up about that “forcing of democracy” on the Irish?

al-Guardian More Likely to Believe al-Queda than the US Government

The usual impotent rage on their news and opinion sites sound more or less like this when they’re intelligible:

The US military-industrial-televangelist complex keeps power by fomenting instability and violence.

and other forms of the confluence of anything, anything, and everything that they can beat off to:

Barack Obama puppet boy of the New World Order ...bought and paid for by big corporations , next president of the USA (United States of Advertising)

In a more sober moment:

Last month an Arabic satellite TV channel broadcast a chilling video of a group of Iraqi teenagers called the "Youths of Heaven" - their faces masked and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, chanting "Allahu Akbar" and vowing to blow themselves up with "crusaders and apostates." The film of these aspiring suicide bombers, all said to be under 16, was produced by al-Furqan, the media arm of the Islamic State of Iraq, aka al-Qaida. But such material is rare these days, with film coming out of Iraq looking suspiciously like posed training sessions with little of the live action of ambushes that has been the staple fare of jihadi websites.

Two weeks ago, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, made waves when he said in an interview that al-Qaida has suffered "near-strategic defeat" in Iraq. To many observers it was a surprisingly upbeat view just a year after gloomy assessments of the dangers that Osama bin Laden still posed. In fact, few security sources - including key counter-terrorism officials canvassed by the Guardian - and independent experts disagree, though the US military is more circumspect.

That they are too touchy and self-absorbed to hear the idea “attract as many of them into one place and kill them” spoken out loud, but for now this bit of awarness will do.

The "phony 'Bush lied' story line": President's statements (all!) "substantiated by intelligence information"

The RNC & McCain Campaign should be putting together a VIDEO RIGHT NOW with clips of Pres Bush overlaid by the WaPo Quotes

writes Larwyn, who is referring to the generally anti-Bush, anti-Republican, anti-Iraq War Washington Post and its editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, writing a piece entitled 'Bush Lied'? If Only It Were That Simple. The Anchoress has the best coverage (also check out her hyperlinked stories), saying

What a long, strange trip it’s been, and here, some years later, we finally get someone in the press to tell it straight: Bush did not lie.

Of course, not only does this disprove the charge that Bush lied, the converse is that it pretty much proves that his opponents, his accusers (both American and foreign!), did lie (in the very fact that they charged him with lying), and that they were lying all the time. (And if you think lying is too strong a term, and want to say that they "were mistaken", that would be fine with me — except for one thing: that was/is an alternative explanation that they never allowed for Bush and/or the neocons!)

Take out the three-and-a-half-year-old NP post, Is Bush the World's Worst Leader?, and see if it isn't as pertinent today as it was in October 2004:

When confronted by a militant leftist many years ago who was ticking off all the sins and failures of capitalist democracy, Winston Churchill finally indicated that he agreed with the man. "Democracy is the worst form of government", nodded the Old Lion. He marked a pause, before adding, "…with the exception of all the rest."

That is what I think about when I am confronted by angry people, American or foreign, who proceed to tell me what a "disaster" George W Bush has been and who can tick off his every sin and bewail the sorry record of his administration. (Not to mention every sin linked to America and capitalist society.) Bush, I agree with them, is the worst leader in the world, and the worst politician, and the worst liar, and the man with the worst record… with the exception of… all the rest. (And the same can be said of capitalism compared to the rest of the world's economic systems…)

Foremost among the liars worse than Bush is Saddam Hussein, of course. The tyrant was a known fibber, doubling as a psychopath and — last but not least — a man repeatedly seeking war-making capabilities, and if Dubya mentioned WMD as a reason to oust the dictator, it's not because he (Dubya) was lying, but because Saddam had built the reputation he had.

Take the members of the "peace camp". Their foremost lie lay in their eagerness to castigate Bush and his administration, in the process conveniently forgetting that Saddam was the liar with the reputation just mentioned and that their secret services, as much as the CIA and MI6, had concluded that Saddam was hiding WMD.

In addition, they gave credence to the pretense that with just a bit of goodwill, the United Nations could, and would, solve the entire problem and entice the murderer of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, if not to share power, at least to tone down on his killing… This being the same organization that threw a democracy out of its seat in the UN human rights committee (it happened to be Uncle Sam, but it could just as well have been any other Western-type democracy) while elevating countries like Libya or Syria to its chairmanship. It was also the organization that, when subsequently faced with genocide in Sudan, proceeded to do little else but issue communiqués deploring the situation and calling upon the murderers to ease up on their killing.

Take the United Nations as a whole, which, in unison with the "peace camp" members, pretended to be objective, detached, and holier than thou, when its members, in fact, were involved in the largest scam in human history. This, of course, brings us back to the Peace Camp, which pretended that their only, or their foremost, concern was a just and lasting peace, in contrast to Bush's "war for oil" when, in fact, it would have been more appropriate to have the pre-conflict situation termed as their "tyranny for oil" gambit.

Then there are the pacifists, both private citizens and government bigwigs, who marched through the streets and/or made rousing speeches, pretending that the largest threat to the world today was Uncle Sam.

Then there are the media outlets, both within the United States and abroad, which echoed those sentiments, while making much out of the fact that Iraq now is supposedly in chaos and insecurity — as if having the thuggish members of Saddam's secret police enter into your home with impunity, take away your parents, spouse, and/or children, and torture and murder them, can in any way be likened to an environment of public safety and to the absence of chaos.

To be totally honest, I liken the accusations concerning Bush and Blair's claims about Saddam's WMD to accusing Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or Montgomery of lying to the Rangers when they ordered them to storm the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944, to neutralize some long-range cannons (weapons of mass destruction, one could call them); after sustaining heavy losses, the Rangers found that the cannons were nowhere to be found, the Germans having removed them from the Normandy coast not long before.

History has a long flow of evidence showing that when Uncle Sam is being attacked, castigated, or mocked, it is usually the people, institutions, and countries doing the berating who are the worse sinners. And who have something to hide, as much from the rest of the world as from themselves.

To quote Sir Winston again, "a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Lire la version française…

Just FYI, here is part of the Washington Post article:

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said.

There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

On chemical weapons, then? "Substantiated by intelligence information."

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence." Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you've mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to terrorism.

But statements regarding Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

In the report's final section, the committee takes issue with Bush's statements about Saddam Hussein's intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

After all, it was not Bush, but Rockefeller, who said in October 2002: "There has been some debate over how 'imminent' a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can."

As the Doctors Prepared Their Sharpened Instruments to Remove the Donor's Organs, Something… Twitched

…les chirurgiens pouvant pratiquer les prélèvements d'organes n'étaient pas immédiatement disponibles. Lorsqu'ils arrivent au bloc, leurs confrères pratiquent le massage cardiaque depuis une heure et trente minutes, sans résultat apparent. Mais au moment même où ils s'apprêtent à opérer, les médecins ont la très grande surprise de découvrir que leur patient présente des signes de respiration spontanée, une réactivité pupillaire et un début de réaction à la stimulation douloureuse.

Can you imagine what would would be the reaction should this type of scandal happen in the United States? (And rightly so.) A dead (sic) organ donor ready to have his vitals removed who starts twitching and moving! Isn't this the type of story Michael Moore would have used in his film Sicko?

But it happened to happen in a country with a health system that someone like Michael Moore — not to mention the French/European élites themselves — would present as an archetype model (or the closest thing to that) in contrast to the outrageous, heinous, and scandal-ridden national shame of the United States; and so, instead, Jean-Yves Nau begins his article by treating his Le Monde readers to an unimpassioned, passive, non-alarmist, philosophical debate.

C'est une affaire aux frontières de la vie et de la mort. Un dossier qui suscite émotion et réflexion chez les professionnels de la réanimation médicale et chez les responsables chargés de la bioéthique. Qui les oblige à se demander quels critères objectifs permettent de dire à partir de quand un malade sur lequel on pratique une réanimation peut être considéré comme un donneur d'organes. Sachant que ces organes, une fois greffés, permettront de prolonger l'espérance de vie d'autres malades.

Tell all your Anti-Western Hippy, Anti-Mondialiste Friends

Despite their perfect dirt-eating peasant vision, this is the reality of the places they idolize. Places where this is called “progressive”:

An eight-year-old girl decided last week to go the Sana’a West Court to prosecute her father, who forced her to marry a 30-year-old man.

Nojoud Muhammed Nasser arrived at court by herself on Wednesday, April 2, looking for a judge to handle her case against her father, Muhammed Nasser, who forced her two months ago to marry Faez Ali Thamer, a man 22 years her senior. The child also asked for a divorce, accusing her husband of sexual and domestic abuse.

Oddly enough, we must celebrate and lionize these people in their innocent, natural state, even if they have Manson Family Values a one-worldy, new agey thing going on...

“Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 290

The divine and unquestionably virtuous Casque Bleu show their mettle in the face of human misery, need, and cannibalism triggering starvation:

UNITED NATIONS -- A U.N. official showed up at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in 2006 with an alarming story: The U.N. Development Program office he ran in North Korea had stashed thousands of dollars in counterfeit U.S. cash in a safe, diverted tens of millions more into the coffers of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and possibly supported North Korea's weapons programs.

For the next year and half, Artjon "Tony" Shkurtaj, an Albanian national who served as the UNDP's operations manager in Pyongyang, guided U.S. officials on a tour of U.N. malfeasance in North Korea, furnishing internal U.N. documents and an insiders' analysis of how the global body violated its rules and helped North Korea obtain hard currency and sensitive high-tech equipment.

“ Valedictory Tour ? ”

VoA:

U.S. President George Bush is on his way to Europe for talks with European Union leaders in Slovenia, and discussions in Germany, Italy, the Vatican, France and the United Kingdom. VOA White House Correspondent Paula Wolfson reports it is likely to be his last official visit to the region, before leaving office.

White House National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley says the president will pursue a broad agenda in Europe.

"At the U.S.-European Union summit and during his bilateral stops, the President will encourage Europe to work with the United States to confront a series of global challenges that face us both," he said.

Those challenges include trade, climate change, the global food crisis and a wide range of security issues - from encouraging stability in the Balkans to bringing peace to the Middle East.

BBC:

Bush eyes economy on Europe trip

IHT says he’s out to shake someones’ Trichet to see what nuts fall out:

"I'll talk about our nation's commitment to a strong dollar," he said at the White House before leaving on an eight-day visit to Europe. "A strong dollar is in our nation's interests. It's in the interest of a global economy."

On the other hand, Deutsche Welle, ever serious about interviewing people who think earthquakes are caused by Global Warming ©®, passed the whole thing off as a “valedictory tour.”

The political Messiah of the early 21st century, a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr

Obamania has gripped most of Europe writes Katrin Bennhold. But the enthusiasm is particularly striking in France.

…"He inspires different people for different reasons, but he inspires most people," said [Samuel Solvit, president of France's support committee for Barack Obama], whose 2,000-person-strong committee is the biggest in Europe and includes prominent members like Axel Poniatowski, president of the foreign affairs commission at the National Assembly, and Mayor Bertrand Delanoë of Paris.

…Several opinion polls have suggested that if Europeans could vote on Nov. 4, they would cast their ballot for Obama, who is admiringly described as a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

…Indeed, as the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warned Friday, European enthusiasts have elevated the senator to a role he will find hard to fulfill — "a savior of mankind, a sort of political Messiah of the early 21st century."

Speaking of messiahs and JFK, Jonah Goldberg says in his Liberal Fascism that

we must ask, what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit a fascist playbook: the creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glorify the state and its programs, invocations of a new "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader.

…John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives — the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.

Which is why Barack Obama is so enormously popular everywhere else in the world, i.e., in the places where the flame of liberty has never taken root as deep as (despite all the leftists' attempts to root it out) in America (and where it never will)… When you read the following paragraph, note that Jonah Goldberg wrote it before (long before) Obama became the Democratic Party's main contender (and before "hope" and "change" became his rallying cry).

[FDR's] New Deal gave Americans "hope" and "faith" in a "cause larger than themselves." Hope for what? Faith in what? What "cause"? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society — which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.

That Lisbon thing continues to go full steam ahead

This is gonna be cool.

Many Men Will Pass This Way…

The story of D-Day.

Many Men Will Pass This Way…

Remember what happened…

Uncle Barack's Cabin

Beyond their moral haughtiness and their tendency to give lessons to everyone in the world (Americans above all), the true spirit of Europeans come through (see U*2's post below)…

Typical European Class: After topless 13 year old girls on mass market magazine covers, the Germans go for their gold standard: overt racism

Remember Americans, you are hated here and you will still be hated even if Obama is elected. Hell, they hated you when Clinton was President.

Mud Slung Right'n'Left on the Football Field

…"l'hypocrisie d'un milieu où aucune vérité n'est bonne à dire"

While former soccer champion Emmanuel Petit tears into the reputation of France's national football team, calling it essentially a sham, an unauthorized biography of all-time great Zinédine Zidane is causing a ruckus…

Who knows what they will tax next?

Who knows what they will tax next?

Qui sait ce qu'ils taxeront ensuite ?
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Europe’s Venal Pedophiliac Culture

I’m really glad that they generally hate America. It means we’re doing something right.

Germany's largest-circulation newspaper, the tabloid Bild, which routinely places nude photos of women on its front page, has admitted that it published a topless photo of a 13-year-old girl.

On August 8, 2003, as part of a reader contest seeking the "hottest girl of summer," the newspaper ran a topless photo of "Melanie from Leipzig." Generally, the newspaper includes the age of the models it uses on its front page, but on that date, it was conspicuously absent.

”Na, und?” You say?

A major German newspaper admits it ran a naked photo of a 13-year-old girl on its front page as part of a contest to find the country's "hottest summer girl."

This is all that the “openmindedness” that they keep referring to amounts to as making European culture and its’ precious, holy self something they keep promoting as the social model for the world. An aberration, you say? Not what the ‘social model’ really leads to? Hardly. It’s promoted as groundbreaking social commentary, dialogue, and literature to think that we’re nothing more than mindless rutting beasts without a conscience, and are incapable of reasoning anything else (but are intellectually superior to those simpletons and patrician damp squibs in North America!)

Witch Hunts in Contemporary America: Is the United States Turning Into a Fascist Country?

The question above is one we would normally associate with a liberal column (or hysterics) and dismiss with a sigh or a smirk. It is therefore with profound sadness that I confess that the title is mine, with no irony intended.

Indeed, if I were not of the optimistic type, I would have titled this post Has America (Already) Turned Into a Fascist State? Like many conservatives, I assume, I have been more of the optimistic type, thinking that conservatives lovers of liberty were winning the battle of ideas against the liberals statists, or at least doing a pretty good job of holding their own.

It is therefore highly distressing to discover a book that not only says that conservatives are losing — scratch that; that Americans and lovers of liberty are losing the war but that they have hardly been aware of the main battle in the first place, which has swept by under their (under our) noses.

We thought that feminism was all (or mostly) about "date rape and sexual harassment" and the like, and we believed (or at least hoped) that perhaps the term "feminazis" was slightly exaggerated, finding the gals (and their male allies) slightly inoffensive and amusing; and so it is that we find our society has been warped and hamstrung for the past 30 years by related, if unrecognized, hysterics — with the government and the law on the side of the feminists (i.e., the statists and the state interventionists). What is double maddening (as we can read in the second and third next-to-last paragraphs) is how the bleeding-hearted liberals deliberately (if unconsciously (?)) create poverty and add ever more people to the ranks of the poor.

By fascist, naturally, I don't mean the popular meaning used by liberals, i.e., to "describe anything outside the control of the state". No, I mean just the opposite, the type described by Jonah Goldberg in his Liberal Fascism:

Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept in which every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole.

In that respect, I call upon Stephen Baskerville's Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family) which I have been reading for the past couple of weeks, during which time I have been feeling ever more down, pessimistic, depressed, all the while trying not to "tremble for my nation". Just read what Baskerville reports from the trenches (emphasis in bold mine):

…the ideologues who control organized feminism today have found that the penal apparatus provides an effective instrument for waging gender warfare on the most personal level, institutionalizing feminist ideology within private life, and criminalizing individual men (and sometimes women) who fail to measure up to the feminist ideal of ideologically correct behavior in their private lives…

Child custody is not the only area where feminists have discovered they can commandeer the criminal justice system to punish ideologically incorrect private behavior, and certainly it is not the best known. Their agenda in more politically salient issues such as date rape and sexual harassment has commanded far more media and scholarly attention (where it is frequently characterized as "totalitarian"). "Feminism today, in its erasure of the boundaries between public and private, is writing a new chapter in the dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom," observes Daphne Patai, "… whereby one's every gesture, every thought, is exposed to the judgment of one's fellow citizens."

Yet while the trends are connected, the intrusive tendencies of law governing sexual harassment or date rape are minor compared to the invasiveness government-enforced feminism has already realized in family law. Yet this receives no comparable scrutiny from critics of feminism, let alone from the mainstream media or civil libertarians. As recently as 1996 a scholarly critique of "feminine jurisprudence" did not address family law at all. Nevertheless, we were warned then that "through the use of civil rather than criminal law for purposes of censorship, and under the guise of legislating equality, large areas of speech are becoming per se illegal, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans."

…Ostensibly scientific feminist scholarship is similarly revealing. Fathers trying to see their children following unproven accusations is described as "further violence" and the "threat of kidnapping"; simply responding to court proceedings is described as "violence." One highly influential feminist scholar claims to have examined 100,000 cases where women "reported" that "the batterer threatened to kidnap their children," "batterers had threatened legal custody action," and "the battering man used court-ordered visitation as an occasion to continue verbal and emotional abuse of the woman." This is not violence; it is fathers trying to recover their children through the same legal process by which their children were removed and which, in most cases, they themselves did not initiate.

…What we confront here is a bureaucratic machine of a kind that has never before been seen in the United States or the other English-speaking democracies. … The implications reach far beyond fathers and even beyond the family itself, for forcibly severing the intimate bond between parents and their children threatens the liberties of all of us. "The right to one's own children … is perhaps the most basic individual right," writes Susan Shell, "so basic we hardly think of it." By establishing a private sphere of life from which the state is excluded, family bonds also serve as the foundation of a free society. "No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply … a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth," Shell continues.

…To understand what is at work here, it is necessary to examine and discard some legal jargon that serves more to obfuscate than to illuminate. Foremost is the term "custody," which I have adopted in my title. Common sense notions of young children needing their mother — along with the mistaken belief that fathers are behind the dissolution of most marriages — lead many people to accept the overwhelming bias towards mothers in custody decisions. But it is important to understand that "custody" is not the right to parent one's children; it is the power to prevent someone else from parenting his children and to marshal the penal apparatus — courts, police, and jails — to ensure he stays away from them. [Similarly, it would be more correct to speak of plundered pops than deadbeat dads.]

…Contrary to popular belief (and centuries of common-law precedent), child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, of even agreeing to a divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced over their objections and who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement, in short, for all divorcing mothers…

…child support is no longer primarily a method for requiring men to take responsibility for the offspring they have sired and then abandoned, as most people are led to believe. Overwhelmingly it is now a regime whereby "a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children."

…Ironically, the one thing that cannot be debated in the court is legal guilt or innocence — such as violating the marriage contract or leveling false accusations. For to admit the most rudimentary notions of justice would be to undermine the logic of the proceeding.

…In the jargon of family law, faithfully parroted by the media and academia, this father has "lost custody," a simple and harmless enough sounding formulation of events, so common as to be mundane. But this jargon disguises far-reaching implications. In plain English, this father's unauthorized association with his own children is now a crime.

…the media will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that we are in a massive epidemic of government-sponsored child stealing. So pervasive is the demonization of fathers today that fathers themselves share in it even after they have become its victims. "It is typical for a man to believe … the media myth of the Evil Male," writes Robert Seidenberg. "While he knows that he is a great father himself, he thinks everybody else is a deadbeat dad."

…The growth of this machinery has been accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign that has served to justify punitive measures against citizens who are not convicted of any crime. "is there a species on the planet who is more unjustly maligned than fathers?" writes columnist Naomi Lakritz. "Fathers are abusers, bullies, deadbeats, molesters, and all-around sexist clods who have a lot of gall wanting a relationship with their children once the initial moment of conception is over."

… "The overwhelming majority of so-called 'dead-beat dads' are just judicially created," says [an] attorney. "Why all this talk about so-called 'deadbeat dads'? Because there is a lot of money to be made through that myth." … Contrary to highly publicized but inaccurate figures on the cost of divorce to women, peer-reviewed economic research concluded that "it is the non-custodial parent, usually the father, who suffers the most [from divorce]."

…The December 1999 issue of Government Executive, a trade journal that describes itself as "government's business magazine" representing public and private bureaucracies, ran a cover story that blared out, "Where's Dad? HHS is leading a forceful change to make deadbeat parents pay up." … Strikingly, the article never addressed its own question, the most likely answer being that Dad is being kept away by the government.

…"We're ratcheting up the pressure on these deadbeats," Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano tells the New York Post, which allows its pages to be used to publicly "shame" citizens who have been convicted of no crime by publishing their photograph. Were these citizens wanted for murder, they would be described as "suspects," but the government and media have already convicted them.

…social scientists have found that as much as 95 percent of fathers having no unemployment problems for the previous five years pay their ordered child support regularly, and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. Columnist Kathleen Parker concluded that "the 'deadbeat dad' is an egregious exaggeration, a caricature of a few desperate men who for various reasons — sometimes pretty good ones — fail to hand over their paycheck, assuming they have one." Deborah Simmons of the Washington Times observes that "there is scant evidence that crackdowns … serve any purpose other than to increase the bank accounts of those special-interest groups pushing enforcement."

…The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and its state affiliates now maintain an army of some 60,000 enforcement agents (13 times that of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has about 4,600 agents worldwide) … What may be most striking about this police mobilization is that the initiative has come entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem exist until government officials began saying they did … Needless to say, the voices of pursued parents are seldom heard amid the chorus of condemnation. The bipartisan certainty of their guilt is sufficient to set aside their right to trial and declare them public enemies by general acclaim. Yet there is reason to believe that this problem is largely an optical illusion and that what is being portrayed as irresponsible fathers is in reality a massive abuse of government power.

… What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business — not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil — are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

…But what may be most insidious — because it undermines the material foundations of constitutional government — is when systematic means are mobilized to finance unconstitutional government operations. Like any system of accountable government, the divorce regime can only be sustained so long as it can be paid for. This is the effect of the system of child support, coerced on pain of incarceration whose children have been seized by the courts literally through "no fault" of their own.

…The federal funding also supplies an added incentive to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into payers by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce)…

Perhaps most destructive is that this federal funding is subsidizing middle-class divorce and fatherless children. "While the new measures resulted in virtually no measurable improvement in the lives of impoverished single-mother families,' [Robert] Seidenberg points out, "it did create a windfall of income for middle-class and upper-middle-class divorced women." Misleadingly promoted as a measure to help poor children whose mostly young and unmarried fathers had allegedly abandoned them, the new laws ended up as a means to plunder middle-aged and middle-class fathers who had done no such thing and whose children were taken from them through literally "no fault" or agreement of their own. Empirical evidence indicates that this is precisely the effect. Economist Robert Willis calculates that child-support levels vastly exceeding the cost of raising children creates "an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother. His analysis indicates that only between one-fifth and one-third of child-support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. "We believe that this recent entitlement," write two other scholars, "… has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving a child."


This simply extends well-established findings that increased welfare payments result in increased divorce. In this case, however, a dimension of law enforcement is added, which effectively becomes a system of federal divorce enforcement … In other words, a mother can simply escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing, whereupon she acquires the police as a private collection agency who will force him, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay her the family income that she then controls alone.

…The pursuit of these fathers by armed federal agents has now reached the dimensions of a national witch hunt, by far the most extensive this country has ever seen … A look at the government machinery reveals that it was created not in response to claims of widespread nonpayment but before them, and that it was less a response to "deadbeat dads" than a mechanism to create them.

…Men who are truly intent on abandoning their progeny have little difficulty in disappearing; it is fathers who want to see their children who allow themselves to be snared. This may reveal the cruelest and most cynical side of the child-support machine: its willingness to use a father's love for his children to plunder and destroy him.…

To the question of why so many ejected fathers are unemployed or penurious, this is not to difficult to answer once one understands how the courts operate. Once the children are separated from their father, neither the courts nor the bureaucracy has much incentive to ensure his continued solvency — indeed, a solvent father is a threat — so they can happily reduce him to penury. After all, a fresh supply of fathers is constantly being brought into the system. The myopia was starkly illustrated during periodic controversies over whether to give child support priority over other debts in bankruptcy proceedings, when noone stops to ask the obvious question of why so many allegedly well-heeled "deadbeats" were going through bankruptcy in the first place…

To what extent child support is responsible for the very poverty it is claimed to alleviate is unclear. It has long been known that the vast majority of the homeless are male. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that family courts may be partially responsible for their plight.

…Do these questions matter? Yes, they do matter, because in these questions lies the difference between a father who is pursued because he has abandoned his children and a father who is pursued because he refuses to abandon his children. Courts exist to dispense justice against those who violate the law or agreements. When they abandon this role to become a "social service delivery system" it is much more likely that the justice and penal systems will be perverted to persecute the innocent.

Update: “We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”; Ces parents qui tuent leurs enfants quand ils se séparent in Le Monde; Breaking the French Family Up Even More By Giving Parental Rights to the Step-Parent; Au Japon, la garde partagée est un combat in Le Monde

Update 2: Protecting Children by Empowering Parents: check out the Parental Rights website…

Update 3: A truly new kind of politics, the most personal and thus potentially the most total ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations

Update 4: An Exposé of the Family Court System: Parents Have a Right to the Care, Custody, and Companionship of Their Children

Update 5: A Legal System Run Amok: The Violence Against Women Act includes a definition of domestic violence that is so wide you could drive a Mack truck through it

Update 6 by Phyllis Schlafly: Marriage is being assaulted by unilateral divorce, feminist hostility toward marriage, the bias of family courts against fathers, and the taxpayer-paid financial incentives that subsidize illegitimate births

Update 7 by a feminist veteran of the 1980s fight for the rights of a woman to be believed (which brought about a culture of “women don’t lie”) whose perspective changed somewhat when her own son was falsely accused decades later of attempted sexual assault: If you think that women don’t lie to get back at men, how naive can you be? And who is going to protect our sons? (Related: "More than 30 percent of [Baltimore's rape] cases investigated by detectives each year are deemed unfounded")

Update 8 by Phyllis Schlafly: Federal and state laws and subsidies that undermine marriage are the biggest fiscal as well as cultural issue of our times

Update 9: Frustrated with years of exasperating distress thanks to the divorce industry, a father sets himself on fire on the steps of a New Hampshire courthouse; Tom Ball's Last Statement: "The only thing you really have in this world is your family"; Now, thanks to the government, neither we nor our children have that

Update 10: Father's Day should be a call to action

Update 11: Ignored in the Facebook Killer story: the divorce industry's contribution to the father going bonkers in the first place ("How does it feel to not have your child when I did not have mine for three months?")

Update 12 by Phyllis Schlafly: Feminist Pork — Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie

Trailers for two documentaries: Overruled (Government Invasion of Your Parental Rights) and Guilty Until Proven Innocent


Update 13: Phyllis Schlafly on the feminist theory that in all sexual controversies or accusations, the man is guilty unless he proves himself innocent 

Update 14: Glenn Reynolds:

One characteristic of modern feminism is the strong belief that men are not entitled to judge women for anything, coupled with the equally strong belief that women are entitled to judge men for everything.

Update 15: from Stephen Baskerville himself:

The Sexual Revolution’s promise of a new age of freedom is already manifesting itself as a new form of tyranny … determined, disciplined, and organized activists can seize power by wheedling their way into key institutions, such as the police, justice system, penal apparatus, and military … New gender crimes and new forms of criminality, based on sexual relations, are rapidly debasing our understanding of justice and criminalizing our population. … The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon:

• “rape” that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that;
  

• domestic “violence” that involves no violence or any physical contact or threat of it;
  

• sexual “harassment” that can mean anything from simple flirtation to unauthorized opinions about morality or politics;
  

• “child abuse” that is routine parental discipline, or homeschooling, or concocted altogether to win advantage in divorce court;
  

• “bullying” that involves criticism of the homosexual agenda or other differences of belief and opinion; 

• “that is forcibly divorced fathers trying to see their own children;

 … It is in this context that current attacks on marriage and the family must be seen.  Past redefinitions of marriage effected by unilateral and involuntary divorce laws have already resulted in the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.  In the name of divorce, legally unimpeachable citizens are now summarily evicted from their homes, forcible separated from their children, expropriated of all they possess, and incarcerated without trial – while the world mouths excuses and averts its eyes.  The divorce apparat is the government’s purpose-built mechanism for dismembering families and criminalizing the embodiments of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.

Update 16: from Dalrock:

 … starting in the late sixties we reorganized our legal and social structure with the (unquestioned) assumption that replacing marriage wasn’t a necessary evil, but a moral imperative. … Suddenly child support and alimony went from necessary evil to an open bribe available to any woman who was willing to betray her husband and children. Now we not only promise a woman cash and prizes if she will agree to betray her family, but we have created a presumption of guilt on the part of the very husband she sells out.

Update 17 — from Dalrock, again:

 … we don’t live in a sane culture, we live in a feminist culture.   Feminism’s founding motto is “I never get to have any fun!”  Instead of curbing the worst instincts of women, our culture instead amplifies them.

A Frenchman's D-Day Wish Comes True

As he was driving along a Normandy river 12 years ago, Hugues Eliard suddenly did a double take. Out in the mud was an odd shape. He stopped his car and, lo and behold, it was indeed the hulk a World War II-era Higgins Boat, the ones which sent Allied forces ashore on D-Day.

A new goal took root in the Frenchman's mind, one that would change his life. He would clean the LCVP, restore it to its former glory, and, last but not least, make it seaworthy. It took lots — lots — of hard, back-breaking work and longer — much longer — than Eliard had anticipated but twelve years later, the Higgins Boat is afloat and ready to take part in D-Day celebrations on June 6…

This Liberal Will Be All About Socializing — Uh, Ah, Will Be About…

Maxine Waters seems to admit what the word liberal really means…

Europe is just one gigantic whorehouse

Please wipe before leaving...

Europe fucking sucks

... and if you like Europe, fuck you too.

How to Lie in One Easy Step

Big ego stroking headline: Europe's Rich-Poor Gap Smaller Than America's - But only if you can compare Alabama to Alabama, but Portugal to the entire EU, and ignore the sum-total of what it means to be poor in Europe versus America..

However, the gap between the rich and poor in Portugal, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia is greater than that in the United States, according to the commission report.

The report shows that those most at risk of falling into poverty in the EU are single parents, the retired, the unemployed and families with only one income.

So how about comparing Tirana to Vienna? Can we go there too? As you can see, the fetishizing of national league tables, cherry-picked data, and the like which have no bearing on personal behavior, are used to explain away personal behavior.

But who’s counting? What they’re fishing for isn’t a way of understanding the state of life at the lower end of the ladder in order to improve it, they’re trying to wax their dolphins.

Waziristan on the Seine

You know what? I couldn't give two shits about either one of these assholes. They're French and they deserve to wallow in the socialist theocratic hellhole of a bed that they've made for themselves. The funniest part of this whole mess is watching French Leftists fall over themselves explaining about how it has nothing to do with Islam and that French secularism is fully intact.

So, Which Candidate Actually RESISTED Marxist Indoctrination?

“It seems that Senator Obama's Old party was called the New Party. The party was a Marxist Political coalition. This was not a guilt by association thing. Senator Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.”

Be Thankful

From the unctuous Euractiv website:

Highlighting the bloc's lack of political direction, the May paper raises issues relating to Europe's political, economic and international objectives as well as limits to further enlargement.

Chopin stresses that it is essential to clarify the aims of the EU in order to "define the Union's goals and shed light on the European project".

If history and common opinion is any sort of guide, we should all be thankful for the EU's lack of direction. Soren Kern summed up the alternative nicely:

The Reform Treaty, in its essence, is all about the centralization of political power by an unelected ruling clique in Brussels that wants to pursue its superpower ambitions free from the constraints of democracy.