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April 7, 2013

Too Stupid to Survive (cont.)

Further to my post below on the US Army Reserve instructing American soldiers that Catholics and evangelicals are as scary and "extremist" as al-Qaeda and Hamas, I see that Fleet Street is doing the job American journalists won't do and reporting further fascinating details of this story. From the slide presentation. we learn that, having been told Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism are "extremist", America's fighting men are then warned:



Soldiers are prohibited from the following actions in support of Extremist Organizations...


*Creating, Organizing, or Taking a Visible Leadership Role in such an Organization.



So no serving US private can become Pope. Glad we got that cleared up. "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition" are now mutually incompatible activities.


A Russian officer famously described British troops in the Crimea as lions led by asses. That barely begins to cover the descent of America's military bureaucracy into the armored division of the Berkeley faculty lounge.


More here from Ed Driscoll. The delusions peddled over here are not unconnected to the horrors over there.

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Published on April 07, 2013 13:48

Don't Fire Until You See The Whites of Their Cassocks

This is one for the "too stupid to survive" files: US Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism.


When I first saw the headline, I assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists "extremist" groups, starting with "Evangelical Christianity" at Number One, "Al Quaeda" (misspelled under any Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, "Hamas" at Six, and "Catholicism" rounding out the Top Ten.


Think of the number of people involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic - and along the way not one of them stopped to say, "Hey, this is totally dumb."


At the beginning of America Alone, I quote Arnold Toynbee: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." The urge to suicide is always there; the trick is keeping it confined to the outer edges: In the Cold War this kind of moronic false equivalence was the province of leftie professors and fringe playwrights, who spent three decades failing to notice nobody from West Germany was climbing over the Berlin Wall to get into the East. Now this false equivalence is peddled by the politically correct eunuch bureaucracy of the US military.


When Major Hasan got a case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and opened fire at Fort Hood standing on a table yelling "Allahu Akbar!", it was just the luck of the draw: He could have been shouting the Angelus. Best to prepare for all eventualities.


As Robert Spencer says, this is not going to end well.

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Published on April 07, 2013 06:38

April 5, 2013

The ‘Vigilance’ Vigilantes

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:


“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”


For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.


#ad#Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.


Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject -- or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. The other day, Jeremy Irons found himself musing to a reporter on whether (if the issue is unequal legal treatment) a father should be allowed to marry his son for the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes. The vigilance vigilantes swung into action:


“Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons has sparked outrage,” reported the Independent in London, “by suggesting that same sex marriage could lead to incest between fathers and sons.”


Outrageous! That isn’t exactly what he said, but, once sparked, the outrage inferno was soon blazing merrily:


“Jeremy Irons’ strange anti-gay rant,” read the headline in Salon.


I wouldn’t say he was ranting. He was languidly drawling, as is his snooty Brit wont, and fighting vainly the old ennui, as if he would rather be doing anything than another tedious media interview. Indeed, he even took the precaution of averring that he didn’t “have a strong feeling either way.”


You sick bigot theocrat hater! Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted. The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and “faith-based” ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission. What’s that? I’m “scaremongering”? Well, it’s now routine in Canada, where Catholic schools in Ontario are obligated by law to set up Gay-Straight Alliance groups, where a Knights of Columbus hall in British Columbia was forced to pay compensation for declining a lesbian wedding reception, and where the Reverend Stephen Boisson wrote to his local paper objecting to various aspects of “the homosexual agenda” and was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta “Human Rights” Tribunal ordering him never to utter anything “disparaging” about homosexuals ever again, even in private. Although his conviction was eventually overturned by the Court of Queen’s Bench after a mere seven-and-a-half years of costly legal battle, no Canadian newspaper would ever publish such a letter today. The words of Chief Justice Burger would now attract a hate-crime prosecution in Canada, as the Supreme Court in Ottawa confirmed only last month.#page#


Of course, if you belong to certain approved identity groups, none of this will make any difference. The Reverend Al Sharpton, who famously observed that Africans of the ancient world had made more contributions to philosophy and mathematics than all “them Greek homos,” need not zip his lips -- any more than Bilal Philips, the Toronto Islamic scholar who argues that homosexuals should be put to death, need fear the attention of Canada’s “human rights” commissions. But for the generality of the population this will be one more subject around which one has to tiptoe on ever thinner eggshells.#ad#


I can see why gays might dislike Scalia’s tone, or be hurt by Irons’ “lack of strong feelings.” But the alternative -- that there is only one approved tone, that one must fake strong feelings -- is creepy and totalitarian and deeply threatening to any healthy society. Irons is learning, as Carrie Prejean learned a while back, that “liberals” aren’t interested in your opinion, or even your sincere support, but only that you understand that there’s one single, acceptable answer. We don’t teach kids to memorize historic dates or great poetry any more, but we do insist they memorize correct attitudes and regurgitate them correctly when required to do so in public.


Speaking of actors from across the pond, I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life Hilton Edwards, the founder of Ireland’s Gate Theatre. Hilton and the love of his life, Micháel MacLiammóir, were for many years the most famously gay couple in Dublin. At MacLiammóir’s funeral in 1978, the Taoiseach and half the Irish cabinet attended, and at the end they went up to Edwards, shook hands, and expressed their condolences -- in other words, publicly acknowledging him as “the widow.” This in a state where homosexuality was illegal, and where few people suggested that it should be otherwise. The Irish officials at the funeral treated MacLiammóir’s relict humanely and decently, not because they had to but because they wished to. I miss that kind of civilized tolerance of the other, and I wish, a mere four decades on, the victors in the culture wars might consider extending it to the losers.


Instead, the relentless propagandizing grows ever more heavy-handed: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity. Much of the progressive agenda -- on marriage, immigration, and much else -- involves not winning the argument but ruling any debate out of bounds. Perhaps like Jeremy Irons you don’t have “strong feelings” on this or that, but, if you do, enjoy them while you can.


— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

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Published on April 05, 2013 14:00

April 2, 2013

The Ascent of Man

Re that New York Times notice regretting its "mischaracterization" of "the Christian holiday of Easter", Michael Walsh is right to point out that the "correction" is equally idiotic. As Michael says, what does "resurrection into heaven" even mean? How could any expensively credentialed J-school grad type those words?


Where I think Michael understates the case is when he says that it reveals the Times as know-nothings to 1.2 billion Catholics. Leaving aside the massed ranks of Anglicans, Methodists et al, it exposes the Times to believers and non-believers alike as culturally ignorant. The Bible underpins a big chunk of western art, music, and literature, and not to know its basic concepts is to condemn yourself to bobbing around in the shallows. I don't mean just the highbrow guys, but P G Wodehouse, when Bertie Wooster and Aunt Dahlia have a showdown over his overly jaunty white mess-jacket:



There was a death-where-is-thy-sting-fullness about her manner which I found distasteful.



For any New York Times reporters, that's an allusion to Paul's "characterization" (as the Times would say) of the Resurrection to the Corinthians. The same words crop up in the hell of the Great War, in the mordant parody of a London music-hall song ("She Only Answered 'Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling'"), popular with the troops and cooked up by a couple of waggish airmen:



O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?



Not to know any of this stuff, to be as tone-deaf to it as that Times correction, is to be entirely unmoored from your cultural inheritance - regardless of one's "faith tradition" (as Al Gore would put it). I contributed a couple of arts pieces to the Times years ago, so I know a bit about the extraordinary layers of editors between the author and the page, and it's remarkable that not one person up the chain raised an eyebrow over "resurrection into heaven" before it hit the streets. Judging from leftie reaction to the "correction", to the hyper-secularists, ignorance of the peripheral tenets of a minor cult is a badge of honor. In reality, America's supposed "newspaper of record" has just announced itself to the world as civilizationally illiterate.

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Published on April 02, 2013 07:39

March 31, 2013

'End-Stage Metastasis'

I like to think I can hold my own in the apocalyptic doom-mongering department, but this guy leaves me in the dust: Reagan budget director David Stockman, writing in today's New York Times. First, the numbers:



Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.



Then, what it all adds up to:



These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net...


The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse.



It's a message for an anti-Easter: America and much of the rest of the west appear still to be living, but are already dead -- walking around, shopping and spending, while underneath every vital organ has ceased to function.

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Published on March 31, 2013 13:22

"End-Stage Metastasis"

I like to think I can hold my own in the apocalyptic doom-mongering department, but this guy leaves me in the dust: Reagan budget director David Stockman, writing in today's New York Times. First, the numbers:



Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.



Then, what it all adds up to:



These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net...


The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse.



It's a message for an anti-Easter: America and much of the rest of the west appear still to be living, but are already dead - walking around, shopping and spending, while underneath every vital organ has ceased to function.

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Published on March 31, 2013 13:22

Render unto Cesar

Easter with Google.

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Published on March 31, 2013 05:44

March 30, 2013

Till Death Do Him Part

Further to my weekend column on the evolving nature of the American family, here's a postscript on the briefly famous "pregnant man", now the last guy in America who can't get a divorce:



An Arizona judge has refused to grant a divorce to a transgender man who gave birth to three children.


The judge said there was insufficient evidence that Thomas Beatie was male when he married; the state bans same-sex marriage.



So, because he wasn't man enough to get married, he's not man enough to get divorced?

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Published on March 30, 2013 05:58

March 29, 2013

The Death of the Family

Gay marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”


That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either (a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what, say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did -- that, when it comes to destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is less effective than hollowing them out from within.


#ad#On the other hand, there are those who argue it’s a victory for the powerful undertow of bourgeois values over the surface ripples of sexual transgressiveness: Gays will now be as drearily suburban as the rest of us. A couple of years back, I saw a picture in the paper of two chubby old queens tying the knot at City Hall in Vancouver, and the thought occurred that Western liberalism had finally succeeded in boring all the fun out of homosexuality.


Which of these alternative scenarios -- the demolition of marriage or the taming of the gay -- will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right. 


Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable. One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital,” which is significantly higher than Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s left of the American family holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while beyond the perimeter the vast mounds of human rubble pile up remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because for millions of families across this land the American marriage is hollow.


If the Right’s case has been disfigured by delusion, the Left’s has been marked by a pitiful parochialism. At the Supreme Court this week, Ted Olson, the former solicitor general, was one of many to invoke comparisons with Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. But such laws were never more than a localized American perversion of marriage. In almost all other common-law jurisdictions, from the British West Indies to Australia, there was no such prohibition. Indeed, under the Raj, it’s estimated that one in three British men in the Indian subcontinent took a local wife. “Miscegenation” is a 19th-century American neologism. When the Supreme Court struck down laws on interracial marriage, it was not embarking on a wild unprecedented experiment but merely restoring the United States to the community of civilized nations within its own legal tradition. Ted Olson is a smart guy, but he sounded like Mary-Kate and Ashley’s third twin in his happy-face banalities last week.


Yet, beyond the Court, liberal appeals to “fairness” are always the easiest to make. Because, for too much of its history, this country was disfigured by halfwit rules about who can sit where on public transportation and at lunch counters, the default position of most Americans today is that everyone should have the right to sit anywhere: If a man self-identifies as a woman and wants to sit on the ladies’ toilet, where’s the harm? If a woman wants to be a soldier and sit in a foxhole in the Hindu Kush, sure, let her. If a mediocre high-school student wants to sit in a college class, that’s only fair. American “rights” have taken on the same vapid character as grade-school sports: Everyone must be allowed to participate, and everyone is entitled to the same participation ribbon.


#page#

Underneath all this apparent “fairness” is a lot of unfairness. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of adolescent daughters abused by Mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Millions of children are now raised in transient households that make not just economic opportunity but even elementary character-formation all but impossible. In the absence of an agreed moral language to address this brave new world, Americans retreat to comforting euphemisms like “blended families,” notwithstanding that the familial Cuisinart seems to atomize at least as often as it blends.


#ad#Meanwhile, social mobility declines: Doctors who once married their nurses now marry their fellow doctors; lawyers who once married their secretaries now contract with fellow super-lawyers, like dynastic unions in medieval Europe. Underneath the self-insulating elite, millions of Americans are downwardly mobile: The family farmers and mill workers, the pioneers who hacked their way into the wilderness and built a township, could afford marriage and children; indeed, it was an economic benefit. For their descendants doing minimum-wage service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology, functioning families are a tougher act, and children an economic burden. The gays looked at contemporary marriage and called the traditionalists’ bluff.


Modern Family works well on TV, less so in the rusting double-wides of decrepit mill towns where, very quickly, the accumulated social capital of two centuries is drained, and too much is too wrecked. In Europe, where dependency, decadence, and demographic decline are extinguishing some of the oldest nations on earth, a successor population is already in place in the restive Muslim housing projects. With their vibrant multicultural attitudes to feminism and homosexuality, there might even be a great sitcom in it: Pre-Modern Family -- and, ultimately, post-Modern.


“Fiscal conservatives” recoil from this kind of talk like homophobes at a bathhouse: The sooner some judge somewhere takes gay marriage off the table the sooner the right can go back to talking about debt and Obamacare without being dismissed as uptight theocratic bigots. But it doesn’t work like that. Most of the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag. The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose checks never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix.


— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

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Published on March 29, 2013 12:00

March 28, 2013

Jihadist Welfare Queen

Following Uncle Sam's coughing up of the jizya to Egypt, here's another angle on the Islamic sheikhdown racket from the United Kingdom -- Anjem Choudary, a jihadist imam who urges his followers to soak British welfare and look on it as "Jihad Seeker's Allowance”:



A controversial Muslim cleric will not face action despite telling his followers to claim benefits and saying David Cameron should be killed.


Telling fellow fanatics to claim 'jihad seeker's allowance', Anjem Choudary, who in the past has planned to disrupt the minute's silence on Remembrance Sunday, also openly mocked hard-working Britons, calling them 'slaves'.


The Sun newspaper secretly filmed him saying Islam will overrun Europe, David Cameron and Barack Obama should be killed, and called the Queen 'ugly'.



That's pretty funny for a bloke so insecure he won't let his womenfolk out of their head-to-toe body bags -- and isn't exactly Prince Charming himself. But here's the point: Her Majesty's laughably misnamed Department of Work and Pensions provides a half-million-dollar house for Choudary to live in at public expense, and in return he despises her, her government, and the wider society that sees its willingness to lavish him with benefits as proof of its own virtue and enlightenment. He's not wrong to do so.

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Published on March 28, 2013 14:05

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