"You can keep your Chevy as long as it’s a Cadillac": Obama essentially mandated “Cadillac health plans” when what many people wanted was a trusty old Chevy

Millions of Americans are waking up this week to the realization that the health care plans they liked will no longer be available because they don’t satisfy the requirements set forth in the risibly named Affordable Care Act (ACA) 

writes Benny Huang.

The total number who have already lost their coverage is about two million, a number that Democrats have tried hard to downplay. Though two million is certainly a minority in a country with a population of about 315 million, that’s still more than the individual populations of fourteen states and the District of Columbia. And that’s just in the first month of (almost) full implementation. The future forebodes more.

President Obama was unequivocal and repetitious in his assurances that anyone who wanted to stick with their current plan would be allowed to do so. In an odd turn of events, an actual journalist posed an actual question about this to Press Secretary Jay Carney. I must admit that I was shocked, though less so when I found out that it was Ed Henry, a Fox News reporter. No wonder liberals want him excluded from the press pool.

 … “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people,” said the President. “…If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take that away. No matter what.”

 … What the government has done is essentially outlawed bare-bones plans that served many people well because they did only what insurance is supposed to do—provide care in case of catastrophic injury or illness. He essentially mandated “Cadillac health plans” when what many people wanted was a trusty old Chevy. As if people couldn’t have bought the Cadillac plans before, of their own volition.

 … You can keep your Chevy as long as it’s a Cadillac.

It’s more than a little strange that, in all of the many instances in which the president and others made the identical promise, they never managed to include that caveat. They were clear. No one would lose their plan. No one.

 … So rest easy tonight. The Ministry of Truth says everything’s gonna be all right. The site continues: “Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to ‘uncover’ the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.” The page asserts that conservative critics who claimed that Obamacare would mean the end of their plans are dead wrong. Because the president said he wouldn’t do that.

Bam! Debunked, sucka!

The website has further instructions for good Obamabots. “As part of our effort to push back on the misinformation about health insurance reform, we’ve launched Whitehouse.gov/realitycheck. It’s full of videos and tools you can use to share the facts with your friends and family.”

The site then encourages people to snitch on anyone who says otherwise. “If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov”

 Lois Lerner will get right on it, lickety-split.

Related: There’s a reason Obama is the best funded candidate in world history, and it is NOT because he eschews corporate money

Benjamin Duffy Novella: I Know Where Kevin Is

Check out Benjamin Duffy's novella, I Know Where Kevin Is, on Straylight.

Why totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes: "Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world”

As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught.  It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press.  But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.  Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies.  But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Recently I came across this surprising Psychology Today article by Barbara Oakley entitled Why Most Journalists Are Democrats (A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches).

What I found [while working in the USSR several decades ago] was so much propaganda about the wonders of Soviet Socialist Mankind and the horrors of Western Democracy that the people exposed to it might as well have had electrodes implanted to control their thoughts.  There were no governmental checks and balances and nothing even close to a free press—so positions of power were filled by nasty sorts who kept good people in fear for their lives if they didn’t think the right thoughts.  Soviet Socialism, as it turned out, was a perverse system that killed motivation even as it made fear as natural as breathing.

Why wasn’t this widely reported in the Western press?

As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats.  And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies.  Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?

We’ll get to that.  First—why are most journalists Democrats?

Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an important role in choosing a job.  People choosing to do work related to prisons, for example, commonly show quite different characteristics than those who volunteer for work in helping disadvantaged youths.  Academicians have very different characteristics than CEOs—or politicians, for that matter.

Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: "Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal.

Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college.  Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective.  Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences.  Modern neuroscience is showing how flawed many of these policies have been—structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, for example, help explain why remedial programs simply helped them become better at conning people.

Academics in the social sciences tend to give short shrift to the dramatic failures and corruption within US educational system or unions. (Think here of the Detroit Public School system, or the National Education Association, whose former officers have written: “The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”)  Instead, because of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government—at least the type of government that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs for their students—are good.  This type of teaching makes the Democratic Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable, and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less likely.  (How many social scientists predicted that the billions spent on busing and the Projects would worsen the situations they were meant to solve, as ultimately happened?)  It’s no wonder that journalists enter the profession as Democrats, then keep their beliefs intact through all-too-common tendencies to conform.

Journalists sometimes say conservatives and political independents don’t go into journalism because they’re more interested in money.  The unspoken message, of course, is that conservatives are greedy bastards who don’t have a social conscience.  But many conservatives go through college to become stay-at-home housewives—they’re hardly Gordon Geckos.  More likely, conservatives are turned off by the propaganda dished out in their social science classes.

 … This also ignores journalism’s own issues with greed and corruption—most despicably with Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union for the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of stories that uncritically backed Stalinist propaganda, denied the Ukrainian famine, and defended Stalin's infamous trials. Duranty lived lavishly in Stalin’s good graces.  (Meanwhile, the Times has never returned the Pulitzer.)

 … Professors in the humanities and social sciences are taken aback by the kinds of claims I’m making here.  How could there possibly be such problems within a discipline—or multiple disciplines—without most academicians being aware of them?  But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it's actually not the right thing at all.  It

 … As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught.  It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press.  But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.  Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies.  But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  That’s why, when Robert Conquest was asked whether he wanted to retitle his updated The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges, his answer was: Yes, how about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?

How Denmark Saved Its Jews From the Nazis

Denmark was the only European country to save almost all of its Jewish residents from the Holocaust

writes Der Spiegel's Gerhard Spörl for ABC News (danke zu DG).

 After being tipped off about imminent roundups by prominent Nazis, resisters evacuated the country's 7,000 Jews to Sweden by boat. A new book examines this historical anomaly.

A French contempt for Obama's zigzag about Iran: Obama's pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality

Fed up with U.S. waffling, France may be ready to take a harder line on Iran

writes John Vinocur in a piece entitled "France Covers Obama's Middle East Retreat" appearing in the… Wall Street Journal. (Question: has the most conservative commentator of the New York Times been fired, now that the name International Herald Tribune has been relinquished?) .

In an interview with the Associated Press on Oct. 4, Barack Obama depicted Iran as a country living with sanctions "put in place because Iran had not been following international guidelines, and had behaved in ways that made a lot of people feel they were pursuing a nuclear weapon."

For French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, that was a pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality. Two days later, in an interview with Europe 1 radio, Mr. Fabius drew a darker, edgier picture. "As we speak," he said, Iran keeps the centrifuges turning that are needed to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But Iran is also pursuing a second, separate track toward atomic weapons with the construction, at Arak, of a heavy-water reactor producing plutonium.

That project might take "around a year" to complete. And "if it is completed, you won't be able to destroy it," Mr. Fabius said, "because if you bomb plutonium, it will leak." At that point, he said, for "the Americans, the Israelis and others," there would no longer be adequate sanctions to stop Tehran.

He gave no hint of who those "others" might be. But here was the French foreign minister talking about a possible military engagement against Iran in a more forceful manner than anything summoned so far by the U.S. president. Mr. Fabius was not advocating a strike, volunteering eventual French participation, or indulging in simple Obama-bashing. But he was expressing a kind of French contempt for the U.S. administration's evasive vocabulary about the Iran endgame.

 … Camille Grand, the director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, argues that this France is different. Think of its first-in role in Libya, its successful military operation against al Qaeda in Mali, its readiness to strike Syria alongside America—at least until Mr. Obama's reversal, which left French President François Hollande "flabbergasted," according to Le Monde.

Writing for the World Today magazine, Mr. Grand describes a France that is troubled about the dwindling prospect of Western countries "enforcing" peace and security. "This more interventionist and Atlanticist France," he says, "sees U.S. leadership often lacking resolve, hesitant, tempted by strategic retrenchment."

It's a view that jibes with France's experience with Mr. Obama's erratic policy. Last October, the White House contacted both France and Britain to say that America would move to an interventionist position on Syria akin to theirs after the November U.S. election. Pfft. Both French and British officials told me that after being kept in the dark for two months, they learned in January this year that the White House plan was dead.

A French official also said that in a discussion on Mali in October 2012, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta promised, referring to an eventual French incursion, "Whatever you need, ask me. You'll get it."

As it turned out, the White House overruled Mr. Panetta, according to the official. The administration actually asked France for cash in exchange for tanker aircraft to support French forces when they entered Mali in January. Once the $50,000 per hour charge for planes to confront al Qaeda had become a news story, it was dropped.

This waffling entrenched French doubt about the Obama administration. In relation to Iran and Syria, Mr. Fabius went on the record in July asking if the "international community" couldn't stop Bashar Assad —and the "international community" obviously hasn't—then "where's the credibility of our assurances Iran will not get nuclear arms?"

Last week, I asked an Élysée Palace official about the solidity of two parts of the notional French position: One, that the Iranian mullahs must officially "renounce" their nuclear-weapons ambitions, and two, that they must make an unmistakable "strategic leap" that would demonstrate they are not trying to retain options that could possibly lead to making a bomb.

The official said: "To have credibility on security issues like Iran you must be firm and consistent, and not zigzag," choosing a kind of semi-polite international code word to describe Mr. Obama's course on Syria.

But French diplomacy is not the U.S. Congress, which has been demonstrably tougher than the White House or France on sanctions (and possibly other alternatives) to punish Tehran's endless defiance. …

A Profile in Cowardice: Obama Chickens Out, Will Skip Gettysburg Sesquicentennial

Obama chickens out, skips Gettysburg ceremony 

comments the Central Pennsylvania Patriot News's Donald Gilliland (merci à AG) regarding the report that the White House has turned down the opportunity to take part in the ceremonies commemorating the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Sally Jewell.

John Usher.

Ring any bells?

Didn't think so.

They're both nobodies - well, actually, they're both Secretaries of the Interior.

The difference is when Usher travelled to Gettysburg, he went with his President.

When Jewell goes this November, she'll be the headliner - her President is taking a pass.

Obama will be a no-show at the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

For a president who has so demonstrably associated himself with Lincoln - the heir of Lincoln's policies who announced his candidacy from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield and used the Lincoln Bible (twice) at his inauguration - this is nothing less than a profile in cowardice.

In the end, Barack Obama simply didn't have the stones.

It's sad.

And telling.

History will note that Lincoln's legacy did not live up to the challenge. 

However, the Ku Klux Klan will be present…

Like all other people, living as well as historical, Abraham Lincoln is only important insofar as he can be made to participate in the left's agenda.

Note: this blogger is at work with artist Dan Greenberg on a graphic novel biography of Abraham Lincoln.

The Sexual Revolution’s promise of a new age of freedom is already manifesting itself as a new form of tyranny

The Women for Men Organization carries extracts from Stephen Baskerville’s September lecture at Patrick Henry College (thanks to Instapundit).

Finally, and least understood, but perhaps most dangerous of all:  New gender crimes and new forms of criminality, based on sexual relations, are rapidly debasing our understanding of justice and criminalizing our population.  This has received almost no attention, but it is what returns us to the politics of the gulag and the laogai.

Even as they perceive the unmistakable logic unfolding, the sexual revolution’s most severe critics still insist that [in the words of one] “the women’s movement has produced no gulags – not yet, anyway.” But the sexual revolution’s most severe critics are not well informed.

In a rare scholarly investigation, feminist Marie Gottschalk attributes exploding prison populations not to conservative law-and-order campaigns but to militant feminist agitation.  “The women’s movement became a vanguard of conservative law-and-order politics,” she writes.  “Women’s organisations played a central role in the consolidation of this conservative victims’ rights movement that emerged in the 1970s.” Though she labels it “conservative,” conservatives who insist on the necessity of mass incarceration do not understand what they are defending.

What Gottschalk has stumbled upon is our own homegrown version of Stalinism:  the process by which triumphant radicals first challenge and then commandeer both traditional values and the instruments of state repression for their own purposes as they trade ideological purity for power.

Since the inception of their Revolution – and well beneath the media radar screen – militants have been creating a panoply of new crimes and expanded redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexual relations.  While it is very likely that the sexual revolution has also increased incidents of real sex crimes, the new gender crimes are different:  they exploit the fear of sex crimes, but they redefine these politically to include not simply acts but deviations from orthodox political doctrines.  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;
  

Here is Stephen Baskerville’s speech in full:

Though a student of politics, I believe some things that are not – and should never be – political.  This College in fact represents several such institutions of critical importance:  the Gospel of Jesus Christ, most importantly.  The academy itself is another.  By the nature of our mission and our constituency here at PHC, we also hold dear a third institution, which also should not be politicized: the family.

In all these cases, I think, we as a society do have a broad consensus (at least in principle, and often for diverse reasons) that these are not political matters and should not be politicized.  And yet today all three are highly contentious politically …

Ironically, it is precisely the accusation against Christians who resist the politicization of all these institutions is that it is we who are politicizing them.  And while some may indeed be guilty of this sin, other Christians seem so alarmed that they advocate withdrawal from civic life altogether.  So I think it is worth confronting this question directly.

This paradox, I want to suggest, is in fact an optical illusion.  It demonstrates the existing saturation of our culture with pervasive political ideology – ideology so subtle that it does indeed manifest itself in popular and civic culture among many people who are not conscious of acting out political motives at all.

 … The most extreme manifestations of radical ideology so far were the totalitarian movements of the last century:  Nazism and Communism.  The sheer scale of the totalitarian horror places them almost beyond comparison.  Communism alone has been held accountable for up to 100 million deaths by Stephane Courtois in The Black Book of Communism, with perhaps 25 million more deaths by the Nazis and other Fascists.

And yet incomprehensible as such numbers are, the horror on the human spirit itself may be even more unfathomable.  With due allowance for technological advance, population growth, and even of course for human depravity, something happened in the twentieth century to allow the Devil free rein in the political cultures of previously civilized countries.  And I am not sure we have really come up with a suitable explanation for why.

The post-war scholars often described these nightmares as political religions, with their own secularized soteriologies, ecclesiologies, and eschatologies.  Leszek Kolakowski called it “the self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression.”  One common feature was to treat the state as savior, and in practice they did invariably exalt the power of the state.

The level of death perpetrated by these political religions may become comprehensible by considering what drives them.  Ideologies take many forms, many of which are mutually incompatible.  But they all share certain features.

Though they claim to advance rights, or equality, or justice – values that in their place may be seductively legitimate – the real aim is power – or as currently phrased, “empowerment.”  In comparison with this shared common goal, differences in content are secondary.  This is why alliances of convenience are readily formed between seemingly incompatible agendas: Hitler and Stalin, or Islamists and feminists.  “Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,” wrote the communist dissident Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s.  “Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations…– all can be changed and sacrificed.  But not power.”

But what renders ideologies deadly is that the craving for power is rationalized by a very specific kind of hate:  If Henry Adams can be believed when he described politics itself as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” it becomes easier to see why political religions develop theologies of death.  For they always entail grievances, and they thrive on resentment – grievances that must be redressed by wielding government power and resentment that is open-ended and unquenchable.

At some point, it would be worth exploring the theology of resentment.  One obvious reason why Christian faith is not an ideology is because of its unique and highly qualified relationship with the state; Christianity does not augment state power but limits it.  Yet equally plausible is that Christianity is not an ideology because it has a unique theology of resentment.  All true ideologies channel grievances into government power, with the ultimate aim of settling scores against politically defined criminals.  Christianity alone offers a theology of forgiveness that neutralizes resentment and channels its sources into service for others and for God.

I am not convinced that we have learned enough from the twentieth century experience.  We hope for “the end of ideology” and pledge our determination that it will happen “never again”.  But like generals proverbially preparing fortifications against the threats posed by the previous war, we erect intellectual Maginot Lines against the ideologies of yesteryear.  But eventually the new ideologues find out, not so much how to break through our defenses, as how to make an end run around them.

I am not alone in believing that we again face the threat of radical and even total ideologies, and that we are similarly unprepared.  The excuse to evade it as an intangible decline of the culture is made plausible by the fact that today’s new fanaticisms are not as openly militaristic as those of the last century (an exception is Islamism).  Yet their subtlety may render them, in the long run, potentially more destructive.

Radical movements have taken many forms.  We have seen religious radicalism, radical republicanism, nationalism, and socialism.  The totalitarian movements derived their resentments from national humiliation and inequalities of social class and economic status.  But they have not exhausted the matter.

Each has shared traits with its predecessors, but each has also rebelled against its parent systems’ beliefs and taken on new ones that make it ever more intrusive, violent, and, as we saw before, total.

The grievances change and find new enemies on which to fixate.  But the resentment remains, because resentment is simply the form of pride that is directed at those possessing power that we feel we deserve.  The resentments are expressed not at individuals – who can be confronted personally or formally charged and tried for recognized crimes according to accepted rules of evidence – but against impersonal groups: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, Jews, the Christian West, or Dead White Males.  Membership in a politically designated category is the crime.  And the accused are always guilty.

~~~

Since the collapse of European Communism, two rivals have emerged for the claim of global ideological leadership.  Both have roots in the socialist and fascist movements that preceded them.

The more obvious appears a throwback to the days of religious radicalism.  This is “Islamism,” or Islam as a political ideology.  In fact, it inherited elements of earlier Western nationalism and socialism, on whose grievances it continues to thrive.

Its less obvious rival has emerged in the Western democracies, where we see an assortment of “soft ideologies”: racial nationalism, multiculturalism, environmentalism – some of which raise legitimate concerns, but whose common denominator, again, is always deification of the state.

But far above the others in its grip over both culture and politics, is the one that has been, not the most, but the least subject to scrutiny by academic scholars (like us).  Indeed, it is unchallengeable in academia and the media.  With the discrediting of ideologies based on nationality and race, and on economic and social theories, the ideological mind has found new grievances.

~~~

  … Today’s most critical political battleground is the family, and of all the soft ideologies, the most elusive and dangerous is the one encompassing the matrix of issues involving the family, children, and sexuality.

For well over a century – and especially over the last four decades – an agenda of sexual radicalism has exercised a growing influence over the public life of the Western world.  It now constitutes a major and multi-faceted crisis, whose dimensions we do not yet fully understand.  Helen Alvare has coined the term “sexualityism,” for what she describes as “a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, [and] inconsequential sex.”

But today’s sexual ideology is much more than immorality, though it certainly begins with that, and many of the consequences are readily apparent.  As a student of politics, my purpose is to focus on a less obvious danger that is at the heart of this College’s mission:  the loss of liberty.  By examining the politics we can see precisely how sexual license is rapidly destroying true freedom.   Following its predecessors, the Sexual Revolution’s promise of a new age of freedom is already manifesting itself as a new form of tyranny.

This new ideology uses sexuality – and also its products, children – as instruments to acquire political power.  Of course, sexuality has been a feature of politics since the days of Medea or Potiphar’s wife.  But today we are seeing an old phenomenon in a new form.  One scholar calls it the “ideology of the erotic.”  It replaces the older demand for “social justice” with what is now being called “erotic justice.”

This ideology must be confronted in its entirety if we are to understand the enormity of what is taking place in our civilization.  For it manifests itself differently in its confrontations with the different groups and institutions that have become the targets of its open-ended grievances:  the unborn, the family, marriage, heterosexuals, religious believers, the military, and men.  Few of these objects of resentment see their experiences as shared with others.  But it does not require a religious conservative to sense that it is unhealthy for any society to have its civic life so dominated by sex as ours has now become.  When sex becomes a society’s political currency, the public agenda comes to be controlled by those willing to use sexuality as a weapon to acquire power.

Again, this is not new.  It was the argument of Plato – but much more profoundly of the Prophets such as Hosea – that sexual indulgence leads to the abuse of power and to tyranny.  “Since sexual ‘liberation’ has social chaos as one of its inevitable sequelae,” writes E. Michael Jones, “sexual liberation begets…the need for social control.”

In many ways this is the logical conclusion of modern history.  For as Jones observes, “Sexual revolution is, if not synonymous with revolution in the modern sense…then certainly it is contemporaneous.”  Jones describes how sexualized radicalism emerged during the revolutions in France, Russia, and elsewhere.  We know that the feminists had intimate associations with the Bolsheviks and before them with the Jacobins.  And homosexual activists have played an integral role in the rise of Fascist politics, including Nazism.

In some ways, it is also the purest distillation of radical politics.  As today’s militants clearly realize (and as does any teenager), sex is itself a powerful instrument of rebellion.  Combining this with the lust for political power, this new ideology blends two human drives that are, each in its own way, ruthless and insatiable.

Both liberals and conservatives have perceived this as a crisis of culture and a manifestation of extreme individualism.  Militants have garnered liberal support – and incurred conservative displeasure – by couching their demands in the language of individual rights.  But both liberals and conservatives see only half the picture.

“Liberty,” as Burke observed, “when men act in bodies, is power.”  More than the freedom of individuals, this is an assertion of power by organized groups.  Its methods are strikingly similar to its predecessors’.  The Hungarian Stalinist Matyas Rakosi coined the term “salami tactics” to describe how 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.  The sexual agenda now pervades precisely these institutions throughout the West, as well as universities, schools, charities, foundations, medicine, corporations, churches, civil service bureaucracies, and international organizations – with very little challenge, all have become thoroughly saturated with what Newsweek calls the “politics of sex.”

Framing this as a decline of culture leaves us paralyzed and provides an excuse for pointless lamenting and bemoaning.  It reduces us to precisely what Christians should never become:  scolds.  When the late distinguished political scientist James Q. Wilson confronted the family crisis, his response was to invoke “culture” and throw up his hands in despair:  “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture,” he wrote, “you will realize that there is very little one can do.”

This is also agenda that is moving today on a direct collision course with the Christian faith.  Sexual liberationists – some with official, taxpayer-funded positions – openly describe religious beliefs and believers as the principal obstacles to their freedom and power.

~~~

 Some long-standing battlegrounds are familiar:  abortion most obviously, and more recently same-sex marriage.  But these are only the most salient manifestations.  Almost every public debate today is somehow sexualized.

The new government healthcare is much less about medicine than about sexual freedom: not only abortion and contraception, but also enabling and proliferating single-motherhood.  It has produced the remarkable innovation that, for the first time, Americans must make purchases and finance measures which violate their consciences as a cost of living in their own country.

Healthcare is not the only rationalization for curtailing freedom of religion.  In the Western democracies, the most serious threats to religious freedom all come from demands for sexual liberation:

• preachers have been arrested for expressing views about sexual morality;

• town clerks have lost their positions for not officiating same-sex marriages;

• business owners have been put out of business for “discrimination” against cohabiting couples; 

• adoption agencies have been closed because they refuse to place children with same-sex couples;

• Christian firemen have been ordered to participate in sexually explicit political demonstrations, that mock their religion, and police to display symbols of sexual liberation in police stations;

• European Union directives would allow private citizens to be looted financially for expressing their moral convictions.

This is not likely to be the end of the pressure.  Military chaplains and other are deprived of their freedom of belief and expression.

The military in general is another priority target of militants.  Our willingness to sexualize and feminize, and indeed emasculate, the armed forces – an institution whose existential qualities can only be described as masculine – vividly illustrates how boundless is the determination to purge our civilization of what may be the central object of the radicals’ resentment:  heterosexual masculinity.

The blending of sexual liberation with political ideology is starkly seen in open-ended sex “education” programs.  Many observe this has now reached the point of exposing children to government-authorized pornography.  Less readily appreciated is that this peculiar pedagogy combines instruction in sexual technique with indoctrination in the politics of “gender relations” and “sexual orientation”.  The sexual awakening of children and adolescents is channelled, from the start, into political doctrines.

Disturbing as these developments are, they are only the most obvious.  Equally serious manifestations are much less readily recognized, and generally ignored.  Yet to address this effectively, we must confront the all the heads of the hydra.

The politicization of children and use of children as instruments and weapons for adults to acquire power – often in the name of “children’s rights” – is another consequence.  The corollary is the suppression of parental rights.  Homeschoolers are only the most obvious targets.  The confiscation of children from their parents — legally innocent parents — by government officials is now out-of-control throughout the West, and the number of mechanisms by which it is effected is increasing.

Children are also used to rationalize an array of coercive policy innovations:  from seat-belt laws to tobacco and gun lawsuits to welfare programs and international treaties.  If one wishes to create an entrée for government to intrude into the private lives of adults, the way to neutralize opposition is to present it as being “for the children.”

This both facilitates, and is facilitated by, the separation of children from their parents, a process initiated by the system of unilateral and involuntary divorce, whereby one parent, usually the father, is summarily stripped of his authority and banished from the home.  This may well be the most destructive work of sexual militants, yet it is also completely ignored.  As Alex Harris shows in the George Wyeth Review, the most glaring anomaly in the “pro-family” platform is the failure to defend the family against the divorce regime.  Albert Mohler has called this willing blindness “the scandal of the Evangelical conscience.”  It is no accident that the only regimes ever to enact such measures were Jacobin France and Bolshevik Russia, followed by California.

Combined with the epidemics of cohabitation and unwed childbearing, this has produced tens of millions of fatherless children, who are now wreaking havoc with our social order.  In a self-perpetuating spiral, this both rationalizes, and is exacerbated by, the bloated, open-ended welfare state (an institution created by socialist ideology but now rationalized and expanded by feminists).

This in turn has dramatically increased almost all social ills, above all criminality, substance abuse, and truancy – all more directly attributable to fatherless homes than any other factor, including poverty and race.

These social pathologies in turn rationalize almost all domestic public spending, which is now bankrupting the Western democracies.  Virtually the entire domestic budget of every government from Italy to Missouri is justified by problems proceeding from single-parent homes and connected forms of family dissolution.  This is why the Wall Street Journal and others have attributed the financial crisis entirely to the welfare state.  Yet it is seldom appreciated that the costs are not simply welfare expenditures themselves, but far more, the destructive and self-destructive behavior among the young that necessitates most domestic spending.  By spending money to turn children into criminals, addicts, drop-outs, and single mothers, welfare is government’s self-expanding engine to generate problems for itself to solve.  History’s most affluent societies are voluntarily bankrupting themselves, financially as well as morally, by underwriting sexual decadence.

Sexualisation is also rapidly transforming our armed forces into a gargantuan welfare state whose generous benefits, intended for real families, act as a magnet for single mothers and, now perhaps, homosexuals with sexually transmitted diseases.

Abroad too, programs marked as assistance for economic development have become a system of global welfare, wreaking the same devastation on families as in the Western democracies, proliferating single-parent homes, perpetuating the problems they claim to be solving, and turning entire populations into dependents on Western aid officials.  With Marxist-Leninist ideology now discredited in the global South, aid programs are designed and administered according to feminist doctrine, and increasingly they are also used as leverage by wealthy countries to pressure traditional societies to compromise their religious principles by accepting the homosexual agenda.

Also in the global South, the AIDS epidemic has been politicized and exacerbated by sexual ideologues, who sabotage effective, proven campaigns for abstinence and fidelity in favor of ideologically inspired but useless condom distributions, resulting in further spread of the disease and millions of needless deaths.  Edward Green of Harvard University calls it “the greatest avoidable epidemic in history.”

At this point of Stephen Baskerville's speech come the extracts at the top of this post concerning "New gender crimes and new forms of criminality". Then, on to:

These new gender crimes have been created not despite the new sexual freedom but as the inseparable corollary to it.  The new crimes operate in concert with the new freedoms and smoothly combine expanded sexual license with diminished civic freedom, and indeed, state repression.  This is why Jones can write that “Sexual revolution is a form of political control.”

And here we can see – writ large in the workings of today’s public policy – precisely the dynamic highlighted by Jones, by Dr Veith, by the Puritans, by the Prophets and others in the Bible itself:  that sin enslaves and license destroys freedom.  And yet as always, the tyranny is now being permitted to triumph almost unopposed because it does not come in precisely the form we expected.  Indeed, the tyranny is sometimes advanced by the very prophets who warn against it.

The crime usually begins as some new sexual freedom demanded in strident terms as necessary to liberate women from some form of “oppression” – though crucially, the new freedom is also enticing to men, especially young men with strong libidos and few responsibilities.  This then degenerates into a corollary criminal accusation against (usually) the man who takes the bait by indulging in the newly permitted pleasure:

• Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of “rape” in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual.  (This is especially rampant on college campuses.)

• Demands for access to workplaces, universities, the military, and other previously male venues (accompanied with equally strident demands to engage there in female-only activities, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding) invite accusations of sexual “harassment” against the men when relations inevitably develop (and often turn sour), regardless of who initiates them.

• Cohabitation and “no-fault” divorce are demanded to liberate women from “patriarchal” marriage but quickly generate accusations of male abandonment (even when the woman ends the marriage), as well as domestic “violence” and “child abuse,” in order to procure custody of children and the financial awards they bring.

• The proclaimed right to raise children outside wedlock and without fathers to protect and discipline them soon turns into demands to prosecute adolescents and even children for “bullying” one another and eventually for more serious matters (such as real crime).

• Defiant declarations that women do not need men for financial support quickly give way to demands to arrest and incarcerate without trial men who do not provide women with adequate income in the form of alimony or child support.

• Assertions that women do not need men for protection soon produce hysterical outcries for intrusive police powers, innovative punishments, and expanded penal institutions to punish ever-proliferating and loosely-defined forms of “violence against women,” even when no physical contact or threat of it is involved.  (Homosexuals are now mimicking this strategy.)

• The demanded right to engage in homosexual acts and public sexual displays translates almost automatically into the power to arrest or otherwise stop the mouths of preachers, “bullies,” and anyone else who objects or ridicules or offends the “feelings” or “pride” of homosexuals.

• Demands to legalize prostitution feed hysteria to find and prosecute unnamed “sex traffickers.”

• (My favorite, given our setting in higher education:)  Demands for unisex bathing facilities in university residences lead to… – well, any young man lacking the intelligence to detect the trap awaiting him there may not belong in a university in the first place.

And more.

Radical ideology has thus transformed our government into a matriarchal leviathan that operates like a massive, bureaucratic version of…Potiphar’s wife.  Our progressive doctrines have not eliminated a “gender stereotype,” as we were promised; they have merely politicized it – in this case that of the temptress, the seductress who lures men into a “honeytrap” by offers of pleasure before springing a trap that today can mean decades in prison.

Here too, we also see the familiar pattern of radical ideologies creating the very evils they then re-package as grievances, and which then serve to rationalize further “empowerment”.  (Djilas pointed this out of Communism.)  “Utopians are actually multiplying the social problems they claim to be solving,” notes Bryce Christensen.  “Gender-neutering utopians adroitly turn the social problems they cause into a justification for seizing yet more power.”

This is the dialectical logic and sleight-of-hand that transformed the French Revolution from proclaiming the Rights of Man to instigating the Reign of Terror.  The fanatical Antoine de St. Just could have been speaking for the Sexual rather than the French Revolution when he proclaimed, “No freedom for the enemies of freedom!”

~~~

These loosely-defined crimes are debasing our understanding of justice and our justice system itself.  They politicize criminal procedure, render the law vague and subjective, erode due process protections, and incarcerate vast numbers of men and some women who have no inkling that they are committing a crime.  Until recently, no one had ever heard of most of these crimes and even now no one really understands what they mean because no definition exists.

Seldom are these quasi-crimes adjudicated by trials or juries in standard courts.  Instead guilt (but seldom innocence) is summarily pronounced by specialized or pseudo-judges: “judges surrogate,” lawyers, social workers, school administrators, campus tribunals, welfare officials, and other petty functionaries with a vested interest in accumulating offenders to administer.  Accusers are identified as “victims” in official documents, and the accused are publicly labeled as “perpetrators,” “abusers,” or other terms that presume guilt – even before they are tried (if they are tried).  The distinction between crime and ordinary conflict is blurred or eliminated, with clear acts of criminal violence (for which existing criminal law has always provided) jumbled together with open-ended terms like “abuse” and “exploitation” to suggest that anything that might fall under these vague but opprobrious terms is also a crime demanding that someone be arrested.  The crime is often defined subjectively, with guilt determined not by the objective act of the accused but by the “feelings” of the accuser.  Guilt can be defined by the accuser feeling “offended,” making the accused guilty by definition.
 
Convictions and high conviction rates are presented as goals to be pursued for their own sake, regardless of the evidence in particular cases.  Proceedings are rigged with paid “victim-advocates”: professional witnesses (usually feminists) hired to testify against defendants they do not know and about whose alleged guilt they have no first-hand knowledge in order to secure conviction and maximum punishment.  Yet the accused are given no equivalent advocate-witnesses to testify for them and often no opportunity even to speak on their own behalf.  Throughout, the presumption of innocence has been replaced with a presumption of guilt, and knowingly false accusations are unpunished and even encouraged.

Government advertising campaigns claim to “raise awareness” of undefined new crimes allegedly committed by unnamed nonviolent malefactors, and vilify groups en masse by reducing individuals to categories – “abusers,” “rapists,” “batterers,” “harassers,” “deadbeats,” “bullies,” “stalkers,” “pedophiles,” “traffickers” (all reminiscent of Communist campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries” and “anti-social elements”).  Government statistics purporting to quantify these crimes are based not on verifiable convictions but on “reports” that are “confirmed” not by any judicial proceeding but by civil servants.  Statistics and reports are based on definitions so vague that it is not clear what if anything is being reported.  Accusers are officially “certified” as victims by civil servants, such as welfare agencies, with no judicial proceeding, implicitly entitling the officially certified victims to have their alleged victimizers punished.  For many incarcerations, government statistics and documentation, which in the United States and other free societies are required by law, are not published and do not exist.  (In other words, secret incarcerations.)  Accusers can profit financially by their accusations, by looting the accused, even without supplying any proof of a crime, as can third parties such as lawyers and pressure groups.

The government propaganda campaigns intimidate anyone who dares challenge the party line and make fair trials impossible for those actually accused of belonging to these categories.  Accusations quickly become available as weapons to be used in personal and political vendettas.  Patently false accusations are processed because they rationalize budgets of feminized and sexualized law-enforcement agencies by turning law-abiding citizens into safe, nonviolent criminals for female and homosexual policepersons to arrest.

The innocent are easily railroaded into prison because the radicals’ accusations encounter no opposition, even from conservatives.  Few, radical or conservative, are willing to place themselves in a position of appearing to defend “sex crimes” or “sex offenders.”

The result is mob justice and a spiral of silence by journalists, scholars, and other presumed watchdogs.  The accused are quickly abandoned by friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and pastors.

And sadly, it must be said that, when it comes to claims of sexually based crimes, Christians are among the most squeamish and ready to look the other way.
 
Far from questioning the accusations, conservatives credulously hasten to add their voices to the radicals in condemning “crimes” of which they have little understanding.  One need only observe the zeal with which conservative political operatives abandon traditional stigmas against quaint, old-fashioned concepts like adultery or fornication and adopt agitprop jargon, whose full implications they cannot possibly understand, when they opportunistically accuse President Bill Clinton of “sexual harassment” or Muslims of “homophobia.”

In short, driven by pressure from sexual revolutionaries, the deified government – having banished the traditional Christian definition of sin – is creating its own political redefinition of sin as crime, and punishing it with prison.  Perhaps even more serious, by failing to question the new official government-approved definition of sin, we can all of us – through linguistic sleights-of-hand so subtle we hardly notice – find that our traditional Christian morality is being syncretized and displaced (even in our own minds) by radical ideology.

~~~

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.

The continuing redefinition of marriage now being proposed by homosexuals is another new freedom that can end nowhere but in prison and in death.  We see this in the growing confrontation between sexual militants and the Christian faith.  “The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether,” writes Rod Dreher, referring to same-sex marriage.  “It…remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity.”

But the question may be answered less by theologians than by gendarmes.  The militants are well aware that the Christian faith is the most formidable obstacle to both unlimited sexual freedom and the political power it is being used to acquire.

Compared to the measures against others, those used against Christians so far are mild.  But the penal machinery erected to criminalize some can easily be marshalled against others.  It is only by the grace of God and the vigilance of some here on this campus that homeschoolers remain free.  The same methods put in place by feminists to criminalize fathers and men are already being proposed by homosexual militants to curtail the freedom of Christians.  Reminiscent of Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s famous lines about the dangers of remaining silent as others are led away in handcuffs, Christians who held their tongues when these measures were used against men by feminists now find similar measures being used against them by both feminists and homosexual militants.

~~~

 Christianity itself is also being weakened from within by these pressures on a global scale.  “Most of the reasons” for differences between the Christianity of the affluent West and the impoverished South “involve disputes over gender and sexuality,” observes historian Philip Jenkins.  “These have proved the defining issues that separate progressives and conservatives, ecclesiastical left and right.”

They are also increasingly the issues that separate Christians from other faiths, and this dilution of Christian morality also weakens us in relation to our rivals.

“Religion is central to sexual regulation in almost all societies,” writes homosexualist scholar Dennis Altman.  “Indeed, it may well be that the primary social function of religion is to control sexuality.”  This is highly simplistic, but it does demonstrate one concrete reason why the decline of faith in the West leads directly not only to the erosion of both social order and civic freedom, but also to the growth of rival, often “political” religions.

Our liberal illusion that we can simply ignore sex and leave it unregulated is foolish and leaves us vulnerable not only to social chaos, but also to those who will step in and regulate it for their own purposes, imposing criminal penalties and rationalizing their repression with various politicized theologies.  “Ironically,” Altman observes, “those countries which rejected religion in the name of Communism tended to adopt their own version of sexual puritanism, which often matched those of the religions they assailed.”  Today’s sexual revolutionaries are simply refining what the Bolsheviks’ began.

But of course not all “religion” is the same.  Political pseudo-religions are far less effective for this purpose than real ones, however flawed.  This may explain why Leninist-Maoist ideologies, that once dominated movements of “national liberation” in the global South, have given way to Islamism.

Radical Islamism is not usually seen as a sexual ideology, and its theoretical incompatibility with the others is obvious.  Yet it too bases its claim to political power on control over the terms of sexuality.  “The centrality of gender relations in the political ideology of Islam” [in the words of one writer] is widely acknowledged by scholars, whatever difficulty they may have making sense of it.  “The issue of women is not marginal,” write Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit; “it lies at the heart of Islamic [radicalism].”  The relationship between sexual discipline and strong family life, on the one hand, and political freedom – so clearly demonstrated by the Puritans – is now largely forgotten in the West.  But Islamists understand it keenly.  They are using their own simplified version of sexual purity to build a radical and highly repressive alternative to the Western freedom that is the legacy of the Puritans.

Whereas the last century saw an often collusive ideological polarity between the “right” of fascism and the “left” of communism, with liberalism squeezed in the middle, our century has become dominated by a polarity of Islamism versus feminist-homosexualism, each seeking political hegemony by regulating the terms of sexuality and the family.  What is squeezed out today – and it is no accident that it is the foremost target of both sexual and Islamist militants – is the Christian alternative, whose uniquely successful approach to family life and sexual morality has been rewarded with the most stable, free, and prosperous societies in human history.

~~~

It is understandable, but also perhaps ironic, that these trends engender such despair among Christians.  For properly understood, they offer vivid validations of important truths of the Christian Gospel.  Christian morality – for which Christians have been ridiculed mercilessly in recent decades – now stands starkly vindicated before the world as the protector of health, stability, prosperity, and freedom.  Seldom have we enjoyed such moral authority to confront the mistakes of public policy and offer, as the remedy, the truths of the Gospel.  And yet we seem resigned to defeat.

Yes, we do “preach” in the vulgar sense of that word:  We nag and bemoan and wag our fingers at others – for their divorces or their homosexuality or their pornography.  But the real opportunity now is to move outside our “comfort zone” and bring the unique insights and authority that God has revealed to us on family matters to bear on today’s public policy crises.

It is especially incumbent upon Christian intellectuals to make these issues the highest priority of scholarly inquiry.  There could hardly be a field of investigation more appropriate or more glaringly demanding the attention of Christian scholars than one that validates vital truths of the Gospel for our public life.  And yet Christian scholars hardly seem interested.  Indeed, we seem timid if not terrified to apply the tools of learning and scholarship to this challenge.

See also An Open Letter to Patrick Henry College for David R. Usher's reply to criticisms of Stephen Baskerville's speech…

Something that Sure Feels Good

Xavier Gorce:

• Oh boy!

• It sure feels good to get indignant!

A Turning of the Page for the IHT (the INYT), Yes, But a Turning Back

IHT readers complain about the International Herald Tribune's name change (to the International New York Times):

To realize what the name IHT meant, read Roger Cohen’s column, “Adieu IHT, bonjour INYT” (Oct. 15). Will the new name inspire the same romance? If loyalty to the IHT brand was as immense as Mr. Cohen describes, why change the name in the first place?

Renaat Horemans, Mol, Belgium

 

I remember reading my first European edition of the New York Herald Tribune on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 1961, upon arrival in London. Since then, except for two short stays in the United States, I have read it virtually every day. I was delighted in 1967 when the paper took a step away from New York exceptionalism by dropping the geographical reference in the masthead. The International Herald Tribune now sounded like a true international paper rather than an international edition of a U.S. paper, and year by year it seemed to grow more and more into that role. 

Yes, the resurrection of “New York” in the title is a “turning of the page,” but in my view it is a turning back of the page, which is a pity.

Joel McClellan, Geneva

Obama involved, publicly, from the beginning, with his aggressive public statements: The IRS conservative targeting scandal is an ugly story indeed

It’s past time for the media to begin asking President Obama tough questions about the IRS conservative targeting scandal 

says Fox's Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).

After all he was involved, publicly, from the beginning.

 … What was sold to the American public as a low-level scandal perpetrated by a few rogue employees – a scandal stopped after senior officials became aware and asserted control – is now (to borrow a Watergate phrase) “no longer operative.”

Instead, we detail a long-running assault on the Tea Party, beginning shortly after its emergence in 2009, that is empowered, encouraged, and orchestrated not only by senior IRS officials in Washington, but also through outright targeting by the White House, Congressional Democrats, and the mainstream media.

In fact, the IRS was doing little more than focusing its attention exactly where the president of the United States told it to focus – on the groups the president himself identified as a “threat to democracy.”

Consider President Obama’s aggressive public statements – made just as we now know senior IRS officials were intentionally and aggressively scrutinizing conservative groups’ applications for tax exemption.

On August 9, 2010 the president warned of “attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names” during his weekly radio address.  The President said:  We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them . . . you don’t know if it’s a foreign controlled corporation. ... The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”

On September 16, 2010, President Obama once again warned that some unidentified “foreign-controlled entity” could be providing “millions of dollars” for “attack ads.”  Less than one week later, he complained that “nobody knows” the identities of the individuals who support conservative groups.

On September 22, 2010, President Obama warned of groups opposing his policies “pos[ing] as non-for-profit social and welfare trade groups” and he claimed such groups were “guided by seasoned Republican political operatives” and potentially supported by some unidentified “foreign controlled entity.”

On October 14, 2010, President Obama called organizations with “benign sounding” names “a problem for democracy”; the next week he complained about individuals who “hide behind those front groups,” called such groups a “threat to our democracy,” and claimed such groups were engaged in “unsupervised” spending.

Next, consider the IRS’s actions following those statements.  Not only did the IRS continue its targeting, it issued broad questionnaires that made unconstitutionally-intrusive inquiries designed to get answers to exactly the questions President Obama posed.

Who are your donors?

What is the political activity of your family and associates?

What are the passwords for your websites?

After all, according to the president, you’re only afraid to answer these questions if “you’ve got something to hide.”

The demagoguery is breathtaking.  Not only does he raise the wholly-unsubstantiated possibility of shadowy “foreign” involvement in the Tea Party groups, a charge incredible on its face, but he goes the extra mile of calling such groups, a “threat to our democracy.”

When the president of the United States declares these groups a “threat to our democracy” is it any surprise that his enthusiastic supporters (and donors) within the IRS responded with an unprecedented campaign of selective targeting, intimidation, and governmental intrusion?

One grows weary of stating the obvious, but if President Bush had declared a specific category of citizen groups a “threat to democracy” potentially run by “political operatives” or “foreign-controlled,” and the IRS launched an unprecedented campaign of targeting and intrusive questioning, the mainstream media would have been relentless not only in its independent investigations but in its calls for accountability – at the highest levels.

Was the president of the United States involved in the IRS scandal?  He was the one who identified the targets – in the most public manner possible.

A president singling out citizens groups for targeting and intrusive questioning merely because he dislikes their message and fears their political influence?

Now that is a “threat to democracy.”

Where Did the Fear of Poisoned Halloween Candy Come From?

Where Did the Fear of Poisoned Halloween Candy Come From? asks Dan Lewis of Now I Know at the Smithsonian.

Although there have been reports of razor blades and other foreign objects embedded in Halloween candy (or apples—although anyone giving out an apple on Halloween is already suspect), these dangers are almost always obvious with the most cursory glance.

What about poison, which, being invisible and generally hard to detect, is the more nefarious way to taint candy? You have little reason to be concerned there either. Landers stated, “many reports” of such terrible acts have occurred, however, they are almost entirely the stuff of myth.

Almost entirely.

For nearly 30 years, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best has been investigating allegations of strangers poisoning kids’ Halloween candy. As of this writing, he hasn’t identified a single confirmed example of a stranger murdering a child in this fashion.

Another danger to society, which various governments — from local to state-lever — have attempted to respond to and to counter, which turns out to be overwrought, exaggerated, and a simple myth…

Anyone Countering Leftist "Reforms" Is Now an "Immobilist"

To no one's surprise, Xavier Gorce manages to demonize anyone opposed to leftist reforms:

• And here we have our best-selling No sign model: light, sober, always in fashion…

• It can be adapted to any theme: open unions, gay marriage, school controversies…

• Ideal for counter-protesting any type of reform…

• It is the sign for all mobilized immobilists

Trust and Refrain (from Verifying)

 
Serguei on Impunity

• Assad to UN observers:
Don't worry about the noise!
We're just carrying out the destruction of conventional weapons…

No We Can't: Obama Is No Longer a Cool Guy for the Europeans, He Is a Cold Guy

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Europe was taken with a furious case of Obamamania.

writes Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde.

For a long time, the U.S. president retained a much higher popularity on the other side of the Atlantic than that of the average European leader, even when his popularity collapsed among his own citizens. Obama resembled neither Angela Merkel nor Nicolas Sarkozy. Obama was a cool president.

This summer, the image caved in. The "Yes We Can" president became the "Yes We Scan" leader. In press cartoons, large ears pushed out. It's not the repulsion inspired by his predecessor, George W. Bush — not yet — but the charm is gone. Without Hillary Clinton's talents, Barack Obama is not cool, he is cold.

 … Summoned to justify himself by the heads of state and government of Brazil, Mexico, France, and Germany, all friendly countries, the cool president has sought neither to apologize nor even to explain.

CONFIDENCE "DEEPLY UNDERMINED"

Truth be told, Barack Obama has lost count of the friendly leaders he has offended. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, is furious at his Iran policy and makes no bones about it in Washington. Also concerned about the opening to Iran, the Saudis are furious regarding America's Syrian policy and sulk profoundly under their white ghutrah. Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil, is furious about having been bugged and canceled her visit to Washington.

Sorely disappointed by Barack Obama's absconding at the Bali summit two weeks ago, leaders of Southeast Asia countries have still not figured out how the president of the most powerful country in the world, singing the praises of America's return to the Asia Pacific for the past four years, gave up a tour of the utmost importance due to budget problems.

David Cameron and François Hollande are having a hard time digesting the casualness with which Barack Obama treated them in the Syrian crisis, they who bravely marched to the frontlines only to realize later that the United States preferred to deal directly — and solo, if you please — with Vladimir Putin. And now it is Angela Merkel, the most placid of allies, the top student in her class, who gets angry.

 … Her disappointment is only more profound. She no longer has confidence in Barack Obama.

 … politically and commercially, the loss of confidence caused by the management of the NSA file by the Obama administration will do more damage than the last European Council.

En français :

Lorsque Barack Obama a été élu, en 2008, l'Europe a été saisie d'un furieux accès d'Obamania

écrit Sylvie Kauffmann dans Le Monde.

Longtemps, le président américain a conservé de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique une popularité bien supérieure à celle de la moyenne des dirigeants européens, même lorsque sa cote s'effondrait auprès de ses propres concitoyens. Obama ne ressemblait ni à Angela Merkel ni à Nicolas Sarkozy. Obama était un président cool.

Cet été, l'image a basculé. Le président du « yes we can » est devenu celui du « yes we scan ». Sur les dessins de presse, de grandes oreilles lui ont poussé. Ce n'est pas -– pas encore -– la répulsion qu'a pu inspirer son prédécesseur, George W. Bush, mais le charme s'est évaporé. Privé du talent d'Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama n'est plus cool, il est froid.

 … Sommé de se justifier par les chefs d'Etat et de gouvernement du Brésil, du Mexique, de France ou d'Allemagne, tous des pays amis, le président cool n'a cherché ni à s'excuser ni même à s'expliquer.

CONFIANCE « GRAVEMENT TROMPÉE »

A vrai dire, Barack Obama ne compte plus les dirigeants amis qu'il s'est mis à dos. Benyamin Nétanyahou, le premier ministre israélien, est furieux de sa politique iranienne et le fait savoir à Washington. Egalement inquiets de l'ouverture vers l'Iran, les Saoudiens sont furieux de la politique syrienne des Etats-Unis et boudent sérieusement sous la ghutrah blanche. Dilma Rousseff, la présidente du Brésil, est furieuse d'avoir été mise sur écoute et a annulé sa visite à Washington.

Cruellement déçus par la défection de Barack Obama au sommet de Bali il y a deux semaines, les dirigeants des pays d'Asie du Sud-Est n'ont toujours pas compris comment le président du pays le plus puissant de la planète, qui leur chante le retour de l'Amérique dans l'Asie-Pacifique depuis quatre ans, renonce à une tournée de la première importance à cause de problèmes budgétaires.

David Cameron et François Hollande ont beaucoup de mal à digérer la désinvolture avec laquelle Barack Obama les a traités dans la crise syrienne, eux qui sont bravement montés au créneau mais ont compris un peu tard que les Etats-Unis préféraient traiter directement, et seuls-s'il-vous-plaît, avec Vladimir Poutine. Et voilà maintenant Angela Merkel, l'alliée la plus placide, la première de la classe, qui se met en colère.

 … la déception n'en est que plus profonde. Elle ne fait plus confiance à Barack Obama.

 … politiquement et commercialement, la perte de confiance provoquée par la gestion du dossier NSA par l'administration Obama fera plus de dégâts que le dernier Conseil européen.

Just So There's No Mistake and You REALLY Know How Bad T'Is Over There with the Murderous Rednecks in Gun-Lovin' Country

Une nuit par an,
le crime est légal.

In France, distributors of The Purge have decided to give the anti-conservative movie an English-language title: American Nightmare.

Just so, y'know, audiences know where the really inhumane and monstrous people live and in what country the real danger to humanity comes from…

36-Year-Old Dane on Welfare Since She Was 16: the "Danish model of government is close to a religion"

It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly

writes Suzanne Daley in a New York Times article which states outright that the "Danish model of government is close to a religion here".

Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.  

It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

 … Denmark has among the highest marginal income-tax rates in the world, with the top bracket of 56.5 percent kicking in on incomes of more than about $80,000. But in exchange, the Danes get a cradle-to-grave safety net that includes free health care, a free university education and hefty payouts to even the richest citizens. 

Parents in all income brackets, for instance, get quarterly checks from the government to help defray child-care costs. The elderly get free maid service if they need it, even if they are wealthy.

 … “In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it,” said Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, who has been outspoken on the subject. “My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it.

“But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.” 

 … Joachim B. Olsen, the skeptical politician from the Liberal Alliance party who visited Carina 16 months ago in her pleasant Copenhagen apartment, is particularly alarmed. He says Sweden, which is already considered generous, has far fewer citizens living on government benefits. If Denmark followed Sweden’s example, it would have about 250,000 fewer people living on benefits of various sorts. 

“The welfare state here has spiraled out of control,” Mr. Olsen said. “It has done a lot of good, but we have been unwilling to talk about the negative side. For a very long time it has been taboo to talk about the Carinas.” 

 … It remains possible that the cost-cutting push will hurt the left-wing coalition that leads the government. By and large, though, the changes have passed easily in Parliament and been happily endorsed by conservatives like Mr. Olsen, who does his best to keep his meeting with Carina in the headlines. 

Carina was not the only welfare recipient to fuel the sense that Denmark’s system has somehow gotten out of kilter. Robert Nielsen, 45, made headlines last September when he was interviewed on television, admitting that he had basically been on welfare since 2001. 

Mr. Nielsen said he was able-bodied but had no intention of taking a demeaning job, like working at a fast-food restaurant. He made do quite well on welfare, he said. He even owns his own co-op apartment. 

Unlike Carina, who will no longer give interviews, Mr. Nielsen, called “Lazy Robert” by the news media, seems to be enjoying the attention. He says that he is greeted warmly on the street all the time. “Luckily, I am born and live in Denmark, where the government is willing to support my life,” he said.

Update: Worse Than Albania — Waiting in Sweden's national health care queues can take over a year

Omaha Beach Seen From the Skies

Denise Chery has a series of a dozen photos on the website of Geo magazine (a European version of the National Geographic with a green border replacing the yellow one) showing Normandy from the skies.

One third of those show battlefields from the D-Day landings in June 1944, including Pointe du Hoc, the military cemetery at Omaha Beach, and the remains of the artificial harbor at Arromanches; in addition, there's the statue of William the Conqueror from the point he left the continent in 1066 for the conquest of England
Read a brief account of the D-Day landings in 1944