Wealth Redistributions is Bad for your Health

Especially if you’re poor. The weird lefty bugaboo (if it really is a bugaboo, and not just a social pry-bar) of trying to construct ‘sameness of income’ in society is a crock.

It is not the fact that Swedes in in Malmö and Vellinge are rich that is CAUSING Rosengård dysfunctional, as Wilkinson claims. If Vellinge had an economic crisis and became poor, this would have no effect of health in Rosengård (or probably a negative effect, since the hospitals would have less money). The causality is more complex.

People in corrupt southern Italy have lower health outcomes and lower economic outcomes than North Italians. The casual link is that Mafia, lack of trust, and low education make south Italians poorer, and it makes them have lower health outcomes.

The Spirit Level thinking instead childishly interprets the complex relationship that North Italians are rich makes South Italians unhealthy, because of the stress of knowing they are doing worse than North Italy.

In other words, whatever effect a social scientist wants to assume to produce an outcome is piled in, even though the data never seems to bear it out, but dispelling fond assumptions about the link between poverty and crime, (or in the case of the new left: differential income or any sort,) and so on.

Using levels for OECD countries we have no statistically significant relationship. Using levels for UN we still have no statistically significant relationship, and even find the opposite of what the book claims. Using change we find no statistically significant relationship, and the opposite of what they claim.

This does not mean Wilkinson is wrong. It just means he has no evidence for his hypothesis. Wilkinson and people who think inequality causes lower health (for example through stress) need to find exogenous experiment to verify their hypothesis. Until they have done that we cannot accept they claims as science. But not only have they not done that (to my knowledge), they are going ahead and selling their story as if they had evidence!

This is deeply unethical, because ordinary people trust academics.

Actually, I think that very few people still trust academics, which on one hand might lead to outbursts of the calling the public ignorant, anti-intellectual, or the sort, but that would be specious. For one thing, people know the stench fairly well at this point, and know that the frustrated critic is expecting the public to have the same level of aptitude in their field as they, the “expert” would.

Another fishy looking claim in "The Spirit Level" is that more equal countries are more innovative.

The funny thing is that when it comes to addressing what looks like a social stunt using statistical buckshot, for the most part, they do know a lot more about the reality of society that the crash-test dummy manipulating the science for the sake of politics or their own miserable Niedkultur:

Notice that the United States is one of the least innovative countries according to "The Spirit Level". Now, no matter how dogmatically leftists you are, it is hard to claim that the U.S., the most technologically advanced country in the world, winner of 60% of scientific Nobel prizes in the post war period, is one of the least innovative advanced nations on earth, no more innovative than Portugal.

So what it all amounts to is a study that measures the world’s ability to have the same priorities as the studies’ framers, the UK’s “Equality Trust” which says that their theory (essentially holding up communist economics as a cure for humanity’s ills, not to mention the allpowerful autocracy that it will need to do it) EXPLAINS things like individual childhood illnesses. Among their many goals for the whole of humanity:

For centuries the best way of improving the quality of life has been to raise material living standards. But we have now come to the end of what economic growth can do for developed countries. Measures of well-being or of happiness no longer rise with economic growth. Even though health goes on improving in rich countries, that improvement is no longer related to economic growth. We also know that rates of depression and anxiety have risen over the last fifty years or so.

Not only has economic growth in the rich countries ceased to bring the social benefits it once brought (and continues to bring in poorer countries), but it now threatens the planet. We are therefore the first generation to have to find new ways of improving the real quality of life. The evidence suggests that we need to shift our attention away from increasing material wealth, to the social environment and the quality of social relations in our societies.

Got that? It’s the hushed leftist argument of explaining to people how compassionate they are, even though advancements in health are only for those with economic (or political) utility to the managed society, not for the sake of the flowering of the individual, the morality of withdrawing support, or a basic respect for the dignity of the individual. The managed society (read: the state) is more relevant that the dignity of the individual, as if the existence of a good society would require the vernichtung of the autonomous individual, the retired, and the like. It leads to classic European superman theory, with Communism and Fascism fighting to lead the left. It also comes with the same tactics too: like arguments that one-party states were the real democracies, simply inverting the meaning of things, in this case calling a society where your means were less likely to rise a place that has more “social mobility”.



The evidence of statistics is not causal. It does not make you pick a column and want to join up to a behaviour. And to think that they are tacitly implying that the PUBLIC is stupid, as is obvious from signing up a bad Señor Wences impersonator as their spokes-sock.

Ignoring the evidence of the income equalized societies in the past, including their ultimate need to employ social oppressions to “keep the magic” of passivated equality construction alive, they aren’t accounting for the life-quality aspect of what they eventually led to: failed societies that couldn’t evolve, and ended up with revolutions.

On Denmark's editorial pages, "there has been a total agreement that it is a necessary war"

While the "popularity of the international campaign in Afghanistan has fallen across Europe and in the U.S.", writes the Wall Street Journal's Alistair MacDonald (tak til Vincent),

the Danes have largely maintained public support for the effort, selling the mission as a humanitarian effort rather than simply protection against a terrorist threat, and building consensus among political parties. They have reaped the benefits of a largely supportive media and the country has, to some degree, rediscovered its pride in an active military.

In addition, incidentally, the British criticism of the U.S. ignoring its allies in tales of war and combat is turned against the Brits:

"When I read a U.K. paper its just like, the U.K. and nobody else" fighting, [Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade] said.

Finally, a chicken hawk charge ("if you haven't served or aren't serving, you cannot support") is pointed out — in reverse.

When troops say, " 'We did a job and we did it good, and it is worth doing,' then it is very hard indeed for a lot of people to oppose, because those are the men and women who risk their lives," he said.

Making Jimmy Swaggart look like a lightweight

When that old time religion takes hold, look out:

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that people who do not take the threat of climate change seriously remind him of those who downplayed the growing threat of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s.

The climate change debate "reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s," Sanders said during a Senate hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency's 2011 budget.

Keep in mind, these comments did not take placed in some peyote-fuelled sweatlodge/yurt session or on the fevered sets of MSNBC, these comments took place in an official US Senate committee room.

You can watch the video here, begins at 102:25.

Embracing their Inner Dictator

Never mind the bio-fuel argument. One can only wonder where Europeans get the temerity to declare the territory of another nation a forest or a farm.

“Diversity” vs. Human Morality

"What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. Casey, the Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

- US Army Chief of Staff General Casey

The two matters cannot be compared. Diversity is simply something that can be observed when you see something that resembles a description of it. To align it with human morality, or make informed moral choices conditional to it is beyond absurd, it is to politicize and racialize the concept of good and bad. It’s as basic as that.

Mark Steyn:

The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S. educational institution or media outlet used the word "diversity" in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. "Diversity" is not a virtue; it's morally neutral: A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan's leading clitorectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it.

Let’s put it another way. What if the composition of patients in an ICU had to be diverse, and you were the one who altered the “desired complexion” of that one night. Which “virtue” would be more relevant?

Posts which write themselves

As we were saying....

Statists don't do consistency

Today's headlines write themselves:

Time everyone paid their fair share of tax

Well, not everyone:

Flat taxes are just an excuse to make the rich richer

Heaven forbid that everyone kick in a bit.

Imaginary Compassion

At least they have multi-culturally appropriate fictional characters doing something for humanity. Hidden Disaster! (VERY well hidden.)

The graphic novel follows the 'adventures' of Zana, Max et al at the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Department – known as ECHO – as they struggle to secure funding for the fictional sate of Borduvia, which has been devastated by an earthquake.

Securing funding! Look! It’s a bird! No, It’s a plane! No! It’s middle age apartment dweller with a grant application!

Zana: "No the aid is channelled through organisations like UNICEF or Oxfam. When the Commission finances them, they become what we call our 'implementing partners'."

So off it goes to someone else, leaving our Young Pioneer reading it to wonder why that characters would be there at all, or for that matter, asking:

Tesjang: "So are there many people from the European Commission here?"
[ ... ]
Zana pleads the case, explaining: "In tragedies like this, international solidarity is normal.

No, European publicity hounds and sympathy sluts chaotically fighting over who can making claims about themselves is the norm. With a budget roughly 1/600th of the ammount American individual citizens (not the government) give to charity, it's no wonder that they need to program children into trying to do as Zana and Max do, because their parents certainly aren't.

Especially amusing is that one cannot find any indication of how many “Zana and Maxes” there actually are, and I’m please to report that they cite as a source of revenue for “Humanitarian aid” as “humanitarian aid”.

Quelle Arteeste!

I’ll be happy when she’s dumpster diving like most Berliners her age.

The daughter of a celebrated literary über-dude, who was fawned over for being about the 9 782nd person to rip off the childhood passive self-pitying anguish theme from the 1980’s move “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” has been nailed for sourcing her Tsunami of the literary season from a blogger.

She is the daughter of a famous German professor and at 17, her best-selling debut novel about sex, drugs and teenage self-discovery is already in its third edition, only weeks after being published. With her book also just nominated for a major literary prize, some have begun to label Helene Hegemann insufferably precocious.

Or rather just an insufferable spud made whole flesh out of the public’s desire for just such a public character, a la Barack Obama. But I digress.

Strangely enough, she’ll probably still get to be a talk-show spittoon for the next 5 decades if the state of European public intellectualism is anything to go by. It might be the strangest kind of meal-ticket you can imagine – sort of like a Truman Capote thing without really having to accomplish anything for 30 years at a time.

Yet Ms Hegemann now faces embarrassing allegations that she stole whole chunks of material for her book from someone else's novel and other sources.

It has emerged that a key inspiration for Ms Hegemann's book was a far less well known novel called Strobo, which has sold only about 100 copies. It is by a 28-year-old Bavarian blogger who writes under the nom de plume of Airen.

Hey, dat bitch owes me money!

Interviewed last week about the charges, Ms Hegemann's defence was simply "I cannot understand what all the fuss is about."

When putting a noble face on plagiarism in the most predictable way possible by calling theft a minor philosophical burden, and airing the Joe Biden defense.

"This novel follows the aesthetic principle of intertextuality and may contain further excerpts,"

Hm. I was just about to sat that, the very moment before I was going to ask: “WHY THE HELL SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT HER FEELINGS!”

But if the young writer's ego had swollen at the praise for her work, it has now been dramatically punctured. For the charges of precocity pale in comparison to the torrent of criticism

As to what she should do at this point to ‘transtexualize’ her generation, and possibly understand them, she could join them for a while:

"Young people put on their Che Guevara hoodies and go containering for a couple of years," Bergstedt said.

And be more honest about how she roams around the trashcans of other peoples’ minds.

Funny, That

In EUtopia, you can feign intellectualism my parroting all manner of paranoiac stuff, and no-one will say that you’re part of the black helicopter crowd. It’s actually a pretty good racket.

EU President's secret bid for economic power

Am I asserting too much? Hell no! The Independent’s party line has been to address anything from a pothole to the relocation of the politically defective to re-education camps as a call for “more Europe, not less”. Of course that also applies to fevered conspiracy theories too, I guess: the members entered tehh EU with the intention of it functioning as a nation-state, except for every other thing that isn't part of some dope-addled "Age of Aquarius" fantasy.

Up in smoke (again)

When individuals are forced to pay taxes there is at least the vauge hope that some inkling of the purloined funds are spent on some noble cause. Relief for a charity case, some oldster getting heart surgery, troops being well-equipped in the field, etc. Reality has a way of shattering these myths:

One could not want a better vignette of the gulf that has opened up between our “political class” and the rest of us than a bizarre little item which emerged last week on an obscure part of the European Commission’s website. The British Government, as revealed by the EU’s Official Journal, has allocated £60 million of taxpayers’ money to be spent on buying carbon credits from the Third World for the use of government buildings and other official purposes – so that our civil servants can continue to benefit from the CO2 emissions needed to keep their offices warm and lit.

Our entire Government machine – politicians and civil servants alike – is now obsessively dedicated to the proposition that we must drastically cut our “carbon emissions” to save the planet, at virtually unlimited cost. But when it comes to the officials and politicians themselves having to make sacrifices, as our own fuel bills soar, they have quietly arranged for the rest of us to shell out £60 million to allow them to carry on much as before.

The story then becomes even more bizarre. The contracts with Barclays, J P   Morgan and co – who will retain up to £9 million in commissions – will be used to buy Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) credits under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

As with the theft of taxes used by MPs for their squalid system of expenses, one wonders how many families went without in order that this latest wasting of £60m could take place.

By the way, will the usual suspects bleat uncontrollably that the banks involved forced the government into these arrangements? Of course not, statists don't do consistency.

Let’s Please not Tell Erik, Shall we?

Italian celebrity Chef promotes cat as a fine winter-time protein.

A top Italian food writer has been suspended indefinitely from the country’s version of the television programme Ready Steady Cook for recommending stewed cat to viewers as a “succulent dish”.

Continental Drift

1967 - Communism’s promoted definition of Justice:

Justice: Ethical and legal category that refers to social equality of humanity, which is only possible only with the common ownership of the means of production, and which enables real equality in a legal sense. Justice as a standard of social relationships is not a timeless, universal, or unchanging concept. Middle-class society can claim only the formal legal equality of civil law as its highest principle of justice, because the primary purpose of justice – the protection of capitalist property – is the basis for the perpetuation of societal inequalities. Historical materialism discovered the class nature of justice and proved that the working class’s pursuit of justice requires the abolition of exploitation, social inequality, bureaucratic despotism, and imperialistic war, which means the elimination of capitalism and the establishing the common ownership of the means of production under socialism. The Marxist-Leninist concept of justice contains fundamentally includes equal social possibilities for all people to develop their personal abilities on the basis of inviolable legal and moral principles. By justice, we understand that the power of imperialism and militarism will finally be broken, the peaceful endeavors of the people will be protected, and every imperialistic attempt to misuse humanity for aggressive purposes will be ruthlessly eliminated; that socialist accomplishments are inviolable, that all citizens will be equally entitled to take part in socialist construction and through their work create a better life for all; that there will be no privileged classes that exploit and oppress the people, that the socialist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” will be realized; and that those citizen who accomplishes best results for society will enjoy the highest appreciation be honor.

2010 - a leftist activist’s definition of ‘Social Justice’:

Social workers also apply social-justice principles to structural problems in the social service agencies in which they work. Armed with the long-term goal of empowering their clients, they use knowledge of existing legal principles and organizational structure to suggest changes to protect their clients, who are often powerless and underserved. For example, social workers may learn organizational ethics to ensure that clients are treated respectfully by staff or they may examine the organization’s policies on personal client information to make sure it is held in confidence.

Often, social workers bring social justice concepts into the wider social and political arena. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington an international group of social workers issued statements condemning terrorism but calling for examination of possible underlying causes. In particular, the statements suggested that terrorism may be fueled in part by global practices that led to poverty and rage among millions of Middle Eastern citizens.

Indeed, from the beginning of their profession, social workers have been involved in “connecting the dots” between peace and social justice. According to social work philosophy … Peace is not possible where there are gross inequalities of money and power, whether between workers and managers, nations and nations or men and women.

1967 - Communism’s promoted definition of War:

War: Violent continuation of politics, organized armed combat between classes, states, or nations, which is undertaken for the economic interests or political and military goals of specific classes. Historically, war is the result of the division of community into antagonistic classes. It is rooted in the production relationships of exploitive society, today represented by imperialism. Only when that social system is overthrown in every country will the socioeconomic grounds for war will disappear.

2010 - a leftist activist’s definition of ‘war’:

go to war.... corporations send a message, support a particular mindset with charity/donations, and they pretty much make the call on the war thing... how about a war profiteering amendment.... if that incentive was gone, there would be little draw for a war of choice.

A war amendment would state that any and all contracts between the victim nation would remain in effect (with other nations and not the invading nation) so that the economy of invaded nation would not be ripped out from under the victim nation's feet so to speak.

Had the U.S. reinstated Iraq's contracts with Russia, France, Germany and others, the insurgency may have been a shadow of what it is now, and many American kids might still be alive.

I’ll omit the conventional, class based definitions, as they are simply to much like that of the Communists of the last century.

Yes We Clam!

Clam sellers in Baarle Hertog, on the Dutch-Belgian border, find a novel way to sell their products (dank u wel to Carine)…

The Vicious Spreading of Unfounded Rumors

We haven’t heard much from Georges lately because the practicing of Santeria can be so time consuming.

Postcards from Emo-land

Looking for those great European thinkers dispensing wisdom in their time of need? Good luck! Most of it amounts to anguished self-pity and emotionialized scapegoating, such as we find with this brilliantly, if not unwittingly funny notion that Europe's huge defecits and debts are the fault of American lenders calling in their paper, as if there were no lenders from any other part of the world.

The scenario employed against Greece, Portugal and Spain by New York-based international financial gamblers is all too familiar to anyone who recalls the events of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Then, as now, hedge funds targeted a country whose GDP was largely dependent on tourist dollars - Thailand - and had fiscal problems at the time.

I guess the humane thing to do would be for the rest of humanity to make loans to them and write them off, owing to the mere european-ness of those Europeans.

This self-absorbed explanation can only be explained by the notion that Thailand is a tourist economy because that's where Europeans go to beach and molest children, THEREfore an alighnment can be drawn to the last economic tale the author could find a straw-man to associate with, even if it does happen to be the erstwhile Hungarian "open democracy" funder George Soros.

The scenario employed against Greece, Portugal and Spain by New York-based international financial gamblers is all too familiar to anyone who recalls the events of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Then, as now, hedge funds targeted a country whose GDP was largely dependent on tourist dollars - Thailand - and had fiscal problems at the time.

Because spinning is the same as doing or saying, of course, and Europeans should somehow be allowed to determine taxation worldwide, of course. The passivity is only out-done by the arrogance.

A consensus is developing among Western experts that the globalisation of financial transactions has not led to overall economic growth, being now considered a huge disappointment.

I suppose that will remain true until, like the loans made to souther Europe to ease it's growth, and hedge its' risks, a big deal only if they have to pay it back. Make no mistake about it, were the bonds not offered to cover for bloated states that can't control state spending.

By allowing NY financial traders to viciously attack struggling EU members, the US is putting the transatlantic partnership in jeopardy.

As if they really were a partner, and not a hideous chore one would prefer to avoid.

The difference with America is that the US states that are overleveraged won't be in a position to make silly arguments about the standing of a nation's image and the affection with which it's held in the world.

It's as silly at the argument thrown around prior to the deposing of Saddam Hussein that if the US did what leftist activist demanded, that "the world" would love the U.S. Well, some of the world does, and some of the world doesn't, and that will always be true. But you can be sure that the entire world isn't going to buy the "lender's emotional obligations" to Europe's government employees' unions argument.

All of this over an long overdue and inevitable currency revaluation.

It’s Kind of Like Sticking it to the Man

Now there’s one passionate environmentalist

Maybe there are Pictures of them in the Zapruder Film

Next time you find some virulent loon spewing invective at you for not submitting to their demand that you convert to their religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming, just ask them the activist’s usual evasive question: ‘whose paying you?’

The difference is, though, that you won’t be asking them to degrade or evade as the phrase is normally employed, even if they are unwittingly supporting racketeering. You’ll be entitled to a factual answer:

In recent years, however, on the initiative of Lord Kinnock when he was its chairman, the British Council has been hijacked to promote the need for action on climate change. In answer to a Freedom of Information request, we can now see some of the curious ways in which the British Council has been spending our money.

More than £3.5 million has gone on recruiting a worldwide network of young "climate activists" in over 70 countries to engage in climate change propaganda – what Marxists used to call agitprop – and to pressure their politicians to join the worldwide struggle. Under a programme called Challenge Europe, £1.1 million has been paid out to fund young "climate advocates" in 17 countries across Europe, including Britain itself. But £2.5 million has been spent on a more ambitious project to recruit a global network of 100,000 activists in 60 countries across the world, led by 1,300 young "International Climate Champions", to participate in "international peer networks, both in person and online, to share ideas, projects and experiences".

Of this sum, £303,093.24 went to China; £71,262.91 to Brazil; £53,006.25 to Japan; £70,132.88 to India (including £11,000 to Dr Pachauri's Teri institute); £77,507.89 to oil-rich Qatar; and £50,000 to the US. There was £120,000 for a dozen different countries in Africa, including £14,000 to fund climate champions in starving Zimbabwe.

Then again mendacity has never been much of a problem to green advocates of the forcable primitivization of man.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote

No matter. They’re only words. They’ll only turn into policies.

Let’s Employ their Logic, which...

...would when used by European critics of anything and everything American, would throw spaghetti at the wall, and ‘merely ask questions’. Plausitting the similarity between Haiti and Belgium wouldn’t fall far outside the form of logic when anything perceived to be an authority of any sort can be marginalized, as though they were all ‘raging against the machine.’

Today in Belgium there was a nasty train accident with over 20 people killed.

Not too long ago, a typical sort of invective was ejaculated over the notion that American medical personnel in Haiti were amputating indiscriminately. Does that logic apply in Belgium at the scene of this week’s head-on commuter train crash?

The accident occurred at 0830 local time (during the morning commute) on a train line south-west of Brussels, Belgium. Two commuter trains collided head-on after one of them missed a red light. The trains are thought to have been carrying 300 people over 25 of whom died in the collision. Several of the people were injured badly enough to require amputation.

I would bet that it would be met with nothing other than guarded concern for the fate of the injured, and that the thought of criticizing the practices of the emergency medical staff on the scene in the city of Halle in Flemish Brabant.

Otherwise, feel free to ignore the rest of the Examiner article which repeated the report of amputation not found in most of the print pieces, but was reported by Deutsche-Welle, AP, and BBC. It otherwise tries to salve fear of train wrecks and otherwise try to scare people out of their cars for reasons of using the energy you're buying and taxed for anyway, in spite of decades of propaganda on the subject.
The author seems blissfully unaware that unlike a rather empty train or bus, after one drives to work, ones’ car is emitting nothing into the air. Rationalizations about the efficiency of mass transit are always founded on the notion that they are always full, all the time, and ignore that transit systems are normally exempt from energy taxes, and frequently receive unmetered energy at no cost.

Ah, but I digress.

Another part of the story is rather predictable, but just as much of a train wreck, quite frankly:

Belgian train drivers went on strike Tuesday in protest at working conditions after the head on collision between two rush hour trains in which 18 people died.

The Belgian rail company SNCB said the spontaneous walkout had been widely followed and many cancellations and delays would follow.

Conditions that they were never previously aware of? I’ll bet not. One wonders who this perfunctory and ritualized strike is really against. It flies in the face of the idea that someone, somewhere can, by bureaucratic diktat, do more than the striking railroad workers who killed these people by screwing up.

The strikers denounced the downgrading of their employment conditions, which they said could have been a factor in the deadly train crash.

Of course, of course...

As the crash investigation got underway Monday, Flemish Brabant provincial governor Lodewijk De Witte said one of the trains had apparently failed to stop at a red light and hit the other at high speed.

The train line where the crash happened is fitted with a security system designed to halt trains automatically at a stop sign.

However one of the trains was not equipped with the system, according to Marc Descheemaecker, a senior SNCB official.

Which is a great reason to rely on an automated system that isn’t installed, and otherwise demand higher pay due to some lack of awareness that this would cause, justifying some Katrina-esque looting in the face of suffering of the accident victims, their loved ones, and the survivors of those killed.

The New Urban Hillbillies

Bypassing the court, and living in their own universe, the foreign origin population of a Danish housing project are practicing their own vigilante law:

A council of elder men seems to be the deciding factor on the Vollsmose Estate in Odense, where local people seek decisions on divorces, rivalries and debts.

“We can confirm that there is a Council of Elders. We have strong suspicions that they solve a number of criminal cases internally. But that is the culture here. It’s just difficult to prove when it all happens in secrecy. The Council has existed for several years,” says Vollsmose Local Police Leader Per Frank.

The Council of Elders has been accused of ignoring a suspected paedophile and not reporting him to the police. Instead, the council banished the suspect to Germany in 2008

So how’s that “new man” Socialism collectivism thing working for ya? Probably not that well if there are people improvising quasi-“libertarian” solutions to work around it.

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

Stephen Baskerville gives a brief but in-depth (and damning) exposé of the history of America's family court system, which he calls "an abuse of government power … virtually 100%". "What we need more than anything in this country", adds the author of Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family), is "a presumption of shared parenting" as well as

an act that will preserve, that will codify the ancient, very ancient recognition in the common law — in this country and in the English common law — that parents have a right to the care, custody, and companionship of their children and to supervise their upbringing; this is decades, if not centuries of case law … it's simply common sense…