What Real Men Look Like

WaPo:

Samuel de Champlain is little known to most Americans, except as the namesake of a frigid lake. Generally speaking, we're biased against the French and bored by Canada. In school books, France's role in the making of our nation doesn't extend much beyond Lafayette, the French-and-Indian War and the Louisiana Purchase.

So it may surprise American readers that Champlain not only founded Quebec City but reached Plymouth Harbor 15 years before the Pilgrims. He explored Cape Cod and Maine and probed upstate New York as far inland as Syracuse. Millions of Americans descend from early settlers who followed Champlain to New France, a domain that in his day extended from Canada to Philadelphia.

Champlain also stands out for the stunning breadth and drama of his career. This is a man who never learned to swim, yet shot American rapids in bark canoes and crossed the Atlantic 27 times without losing a ship. He sought peace with Indians but marched on the Mohawk, defeating them in battle while plucking an arrow from his neck. He was also a talented spy, mapmaker, artist, naturalist and writer -- as well as a gourmand who founded the first gastronomic society in America, the Ordre de Bon Temps. In short, it's hard to imagine a more appealing biographical subject than this French action-figure with high ideals and a taste for moose meat and beaver tail.

It's also hard to conjure a historian better suited to reintroducing Champlain to U.S. readers than David Hackett Fischer, the acclaimed author of several works on colonial America and trans-Atlantic history (his last, Washington's Crossing, won a Pulitzer Prize). In his exhaustively researched new book, Champlain's Dream, Fischer depicts the French explorer as the rare European who genuinely believed in coexisting peacefully with natives, through trade alliances, cultural tolerance and intermarriage. This distinguished Champlain from his Spanish contemporaries, who routinely enslaved and slaughtered Indians, and from early English colonists, who generally lived apart from natives and drove them from their land.

To a remarkable degree, Champlain lived up to his ideals and realized the dream of colonizing New France without brute conquest. This contributes, however, to a disappointing biography. Fischer is so admiring of his subject that he presents Champlain as more monument than man. The Frenchman appears almost perfect, and perfectly dull.

Fischer's skills as a narrative historian also seem to have deserted him. In earlier books, Fischer focused tightly on dramatic events such as Paul Revere's ride and Washington's crossing of the Delaware. Here, he works in wide-angle, panning across continents and decades. This approach cries out for ruthless editing, which he fails to provide. Champlain's Dream is dense with extraneous characters and detail, and very slow going for anyone but a devoted student of the subject (for whom Fischer tacks on 200 pages of appendices and notes).

Fischer's failure to give pace to his story or life to his protagonist is a disservice not only to the reader but to Champlain, whose own writing is rich with adventure and keen observation. Fischer sometimes quotes Champlain to effect, but too often he substitutes his own cliché-ridden and generic prose: "Champlain's most important school was the sea itself." "He took pleasure in the discovery of humanity with all its infinite variety." France's royal court "teemed with life and throbbed with energy." The author even undercuts Champlain's graphic and disapproving tales of Indian torture and cannibalism: "Scholars have explained this ancient custom," Fischer writes, "as a ceremony or ritual, rooted in cultural practice and religious belief."

Fischer also deals skittishly with Champlain's love life, or lack thereof. He claims that Champlain "was strongly attracted to women," but the evidence he provides suggests otherwise. Champlain's only documented attachment was to a well-connected French girl he wed when she was 12 and he at least 40. The union brought with it a large dowry and an agreement that the marriage not be consummated for two years. When that time came, the teenaged bride fled Champlain, and though she returned, "One wonders if they were living as man and wife," Fischer writes. She later fled their childless union to enter a convent.

Champlain apparently kept chaste with Indians, too, despite frank approaches by native women during his three decades in America. Of this, Fischer writes only that Champlain "acted like a holy man," in contrast to other Frenchmen, adding that his abstinence enhanced his "spiritual power" among Indians. To ignore the possibility that Champlain was homosexual seems an odd bit of coyness in the 21st century.

Fischer strikes another fogey note by telling us repeatedly how much Native Americans loved Champlain. (The sources for these flattering anecdotes are, inescapably, European accounts, since contact-era Indians left no written record.) He is likewise at pains to exonerate Champlain for his attacks on the Iroquois. By mowing down these troublesome Indians with his musket, he writes, Champlain sought "a middle way of peace through the carefully calibrated use of limited force." Fischer deals only briefly and belatedly with the devastating impact of European diseases on Indians. Then, in the book's conclusion, he cites the autobiography of Black Hawk, written two centuries after Champlain's death, to remind us yet again how much Indians admired "the great white general" who treated natives "as kin."

The best chapters of Fischer's book come near the end, when Champlain is mostly off stage. Here, Fischer gives a fascinating survey of immigrants to French Canada and the hybrid culture they and their descendants created. Words that have vanished in France still endure in North America, while others blend the New World and Old: For instance, the dogsled command Mush! derives from the French "Marche!"

Fischer also tells of the many people who bridged French and Indian culture, thanks to an early form of student-exchange program. Champlain often placed young men with Indian tribes to learn their language and ways, while he took in native children himself. A number of these truchements, or interpreters, became explorers, and the French fur traders who followed often took Indian wives. Today, the mixed-race descendants of these voyagers and French-Indian settlers may number 12 million -- a statistic that speaks more eloquently to Champlain's dream than the 500 pages of hagiography that precede it. ·

Idiots On Parade: why socialist economics could not work and made life ugly and uncomfortable

Thanks to reader VK for this terrific heads up. She pointed us to this article in the Social Affairs Unit blog.

The exhibition Cold War Design at the V&A is both a disgrace and a joke. It purports to identify a cold war in design between the Soviets and the Americans between 1945-70 and to place it in an historical and economic context but it gets both the history and the economics wrong and quite disgracefully so.

It is a joke because East European design was a joke. As the tragedy of Stalin was succeeded by the farce of Khrushchev, so the crushingly ugly monumentalism of his tyranny was replaced by the badly designed everyday products that were the subject of popular humour. Stalin's architects designed crass buildings, Khrushchev and Brezhnev's designers produced rubbish artefacts. The exhibition speaks of two roads to modernism but there was never anything modern about socialism.

The exhibition tries to reduce all western consumer goods to being items in cold war competition and a by-product of technical advances made by the military.

Well designed office products by Olivetti and Italian coffee machines alike are regarded as having been made to promote the benefits of the free market. There is a dreadful ambiguity here. They did promote the benefits of the free market. Under no other system would it have been possible to design them in a way that would appeal to customers and fulfil a felt need.
Let us have no nonsense about advertisers promoting false needs. Is coffee a false need?

Were the Germans who drank Ersatzkaffee made of acorns during and after World War II as false in their needs as in their coffee? Should the "false" Olivetti typewriter and its successor the word processor be ditched to bring back hunched male clerks on high stools writing copper plate in ledgers? Was it wrong to deskill Mr Pooter, the City calligrapher, and hand his work over to the pert young female products of the Board schools just to satisfy a false need for legibility?

Elsewhere in the exhibition we are asked to admire "Hedwig Bollhagen's
elegant unadorned" East German coffee set 1961, produced by one of East Germany's leading ceramicists. Her work never went into mass production even though she owned one of the country's few private businesses (her goods were traded under the counter) nor that there was never any decent coffee to put in such coffee cups as there were. In East Germany you had to measure out your life without coffee spoons. We were endlessly told during the cold war that the prices paid to peasants growing coffee were too low, never that a key reason for this was the unwillingness of the Soviet block to allow their consumers to buy the coffee they wanted.

Many of the East European designs in this exhibition were mere prototypes that never went into production. Sometimes they are elegant but it is the elegance of a Potemkin village. In an aristocratic society it is possible to admire the craftsmanship of a one-off coffee service for the very rich and to ignore the dirty clay pots from which the poor sup their beer but in industrial societies production ought to be for the broad masses and design must reflect this.

Soviet design could not do so because no-one ever considered the wishes of ordinary people. In fairness, from an aesthetic point of view, it was an egalitarian society. Even the elite lived ugly, though in far more comfortable ugliness than the moujiks. There were no Faberge Easter eggs, but then there was no Easter either, the key occasion that in Tsarist times had brought beauty into the world of the peasant.

The well-designed Italian goods did promote the virtues of the free market but that was not their main purpose. After they had been produced, no doubt they could be placed in exhibitions and used to illustrate the superiority of the West over Soviet socialism but so what? When you are competing for prestige or propaganda you compete with what you've got.

The curators' waspish comments on the Italian Vespa motor scooter are even crasser than those about Olivetti. They stress that the Vespa was adapted from scooters used by US parachutists during the Second World War in order to portray Western goods as a spin-off of militarism. One of the sillier critics writing about the exhibition, who presumably got his ideas from what he saw, adds that the Vespa was

mass-produced with American money to bind the once-fascist nation to its consumerist cause.

But were the Italians ever so enthusiastic for Mussolini and world conquest that they ceased to seek and enjoy well-designed goods? Was it such a wrench to the fanatically militaristic Italians to give up being soldiers of an all-conquering state that they had to be placated with scooters?

Consumerism is not an ideology, not a Weltanshauung in the sense that Fascism and Communism were. Putting the suffix –ism on something does not make it a belief system. In truth there is no such thing as consumerism. Our central belief is that individuals should be free to make choices - that is our ideology; the providers of goods and services merely compete for the attention of free women and men. That is all. A scooter is a scooter is a scooter. It is not an ideology but an effective means of transportation. It only becomes an advertisement for capitalism because it does well what it is designed to do.

It is amazing to see in the exhibition as an example of good East European design a "Trabi", an East German Trabant motor car. On days when the wind blew from the East it was the main source of pollution in West Berlin. After reunification it had to be banned because of the amount of dirt it put into the air. In what sense was it well designed? It doesn't even look good.

The Eastern jokers knew far more about cars than the V&A:

How do you double the value of a Trabi?
Fill the petrol tank.

Why has the Lada got a heated rear window?
So that it keeps your hands warm when you push it through the snow.

Everywhere in the exhibition we are told how innovation and design improvements in consumer goods came from the investments in science and technology needed for competition in defence. But in that case why could the Soviets who were very good at designing tanks (better even than the Nazi ones) not transfer their skills to the designing of a decent car.

The Soviets could not even design civilian planes that worked. Their internal airlines were notorious for their bad safety record, something they concealed from their own public by not permitting stories about air crashes to get into the press. If the Soviets could design an outstanding jet fighter for their covert pilots to use in the Korean War, why could they not design a plane that could get their own citizens safely from Moscow to Tashkent or Kiev?

But the exhibition does not mention these grotesque failures that reveal how worthless Soviet design was - instead it highlights Soviet propaganda successes, notably Sputnik the first satellite and Vostok the first space capsule, the one that took Yuri Gagarin into orbit, following the dog Laika. There is a huge Soviet poster of him in the exhibition by Vadim Volikov entitled "Glory to Soviet Science, Glory to Soviet Man - the First Cosmonaut, 1961". Gagarin is flanked by a rocket and holds a red sphere in his hand with a hammer and sickle on it. The idiots running the exhibition comment

perhaps it represents the planet's future as a socialist world without national, social or class divisions.

They have no evidence for this. It might just as well mean "he holds the whole world in his hand", i.e. the Soviet Union is omnipotent.

There is one richly comic item though - the full pressure space suit worn by Alexsei Leonov for his first space walk. It was so rigid that he had problems getting back into the spacecraft through the airlock and got stuck, presumably with his head back in and his arse sticking out in space. What a wonderful comedy film that would have made. No wonder the Russians never got to the moon.

It is the principle of the entire exhibition that Soviet posters, prototypes, rhetoric and imagined utopias are placed in opposition to western achieved design. Even the Soviet lead in rockets was a mark of their incompetence in design. The Soviets could not make their warheads smaller, so they had to make their rockets bigger and ended up bolting together World War II style German rockets. Sputnik was a by-product of this and is in essence a triumph of Nazi science and of the Nazi scientists kidnapped and forcibly deported to the Soviet Union in 1945-6.

But no one in Moscow dared to sing the local equivalent of

... the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

The simplicity of the best western design was not an attempt to off-set the horrors of Socialist Realism but a result of the endless pressure due to competition in pricing to make things cheaper by using less raw materials in production and to occupy less space in people's homes.

The only small things the Soviets ever pioneered were the miniature cameras and recording devices for the KGB on display in the exhibition. Even jewellery imitated this as in Vaclav Cagler's Neck Piece (Czech) 1968-9, a piece of futuristic jewellery with mirrored discs for covert observation. Socialist production maximises the use of raw materials because that makes total production look larger which looks good in the figures and socialist design goes for size for a similar reason. Never tell a socialist that size doesn't matter.

It was not that their designers arbitrarily chose clumsiness but rather that a system in which value is measured by cost (as in the British educational system) forced clumsiness upon them.

The transistor was an American invention and the transistor radio a Japanese triumph. If it had been left to the Soviets they would have gone on using valves because for all their investment in science education (some of it better than ours) they could never innovate. In turn their designers would have gone on producing huge boxes to hold the radios taking up half the space in their average working class family's tiny living room. It would have been seen as a suitable outlet for the huge speeches of the Soviet leaders. It would be interesting to know how quickly they phased valves out when the transistor arrived since socialist planners do not like liquidating obsolete physical plant, even though it has become effectively worthless.

There is a curious insert in the middle of the exhibition covering the year 1968. Here for reasons that are obscure is a poster from the radical French Atelier Populaire 1968, telling us "Voter c'est mourir un peu", (To vote is to die a little), showing a coffin with a ballot box on top and marked with de Gaulle's Cross of Lorraine. It is accompanied by illustrations and accounts of the police putting down student riots in France and Italy. But there is also a photo of an utterly empty Wenceslas Square in Prague. In the foreground is the photographer's watch on a wrist, showing the time when a planned rally would have been at full strength. It had been cancelled because the Warsaw pact forces had warned that they would crush it with the utmost violence.

Here we see, though it is not remarked on in the exhibition, the total contrast between the crushed Czechs who wanted freedom to vote and to purchase and the cowardly pampered scum of Paris and Milan who were against voting, against freedom, against consumption and who knew that in a democratic country they could be violent with impunity. De Gaulle was not going to crush them beneath the tracks of his tanks.

In Milan in 1968 Giancarlo de Carlo installed a barricade of freezers and television sets in the Milan Triennale held in the Palazzo dell' Arte

fashioned from the debris of modern capitalism ...[to] draw attention to the effects of modern consumerism on society.

Two hours after it opened radical protesters occupied the building! De Carlo who was obviously a devotee of onanism, a complete Kuwaiti tanker-merchant banker, tried to engage them in discussion and was upset when a week later the police threw them out.

There is something sickening about radicals who protested against the goods that were making life easier for ordinary working-class housewives but who loved Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution and even imitated its uniforms. The mass murders the famines and the total lack of freedom were acceptable to them as were the public humiliation of ordinary individuals on a scale not seen since the Nazis made the Jews scrub the streets of Vienna.

There is also much that is sickening about this exhibition that praises the horrors of socialism with faint damns. The Soviet Union in the cold war was not an alternative road to modernism and modernity but a stagnant society that blocked all possibility of reform. At the time we feared communism because of its military power. Today we despise it for its failure. The cold war was a just war and we won. That is all you need to know. There is only one reason for going to the exhibition at the V and A and that is to sneer.

The Thin Line: Love And Hate

The Independent:

The same brain circuitry is involved in both extreme emotions – but hate retains a semblance of rationality

Love and hate are intimately linked within the human brain, according to a study that has discovered the biological basis for the two most intense emotions.

Scientists studying the physical nature of hate have found that some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for it are the same as those that are used during the feeling of romantic love – although love and hate appear to be polar opposites.

A study using a brain scanner to investigate the neural circuits that become active when people look at a photograph of someone they say they hate has found that the "hate circuit" shares something in common with the love circuit.

The findings could explain why both hate and romantic love can result in similar acts of extreme behaviour – both heroic and evil – said Professor Semir Zeki of University College London, who led the study published in the on-line journal PloS ONE.

"Hate is often considered to be an evil passion that should, in a better world, be tamed, controlled and eradicated. Yet to the biologist, hate is a passion that is of equal interest to love," Professor Zeki said.

"Like love, it is often seemingly irrational and can lead individual to heroic and evil deeds. How can two opposite sentiments lead to the same behaviour?"

The study advertised for volunteers to take part in the study and 17 people were chosen who professed a deep hatred for one individual. Most chose an ex-lover or a competitor at work, although one woman expressed an intense hatred for a famous political figure.

Professor Zeki and John Romaya of the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology analysed the activity of the neural circuits in the brain that lit up when the volunteers were viewing photos of the hated person.

They found that the hate circuit includes parts of the brain called the putamen and the insula, found in the sub-cortex of the organ. The putamen is already known to be involved in the perception of contempt and disgust and may also be part of the motor system involved in movement and action.

"Significantly, the putamen and the insula are also both activated by romantic love. This is not surprising. The putamen could also be involved in the preparation of aggressive acts in a romantic context, as in situations when a rival presents a danger," Professor Zeki said.

"Previous studies have suggested that the insula may be involved in responses to distressing stimuli, and the viewing of both a loved and a hated face may constitute such a distressing signal."

One major difference between love and hate appears to be in the fact that large parts of the cerebral cortex – associated with judgement and reasoning – become de-activated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate.

"This may seem surprising since hate can also be an all-consuming passion like love. But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgemental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgement in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise exact revenge," Professor Zeki said.

"Interestingly, the activity of some of these structures in response to a hated face is proportional in strength to the declared intensity of hate, thus allowing the subjective state of hate to be objectively quantified. This finding may have implications in criminal cases."

The Media Jihad Marches On

Congratulations, America.

We now live in a country where the likes and ideas of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmandinejad are afforded equal, if not greater respect than ideas and principles of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. The applause and attention given to Chavez and Ahmandinejad by the media and million of adoring idiots are proof positive of that truth.

Thanks in no small measure to a corrupt media that has made it abundantly clear that journalism serves an agenda before it serves it’s own ideals, Cindy Sheehan and a half dozen fellow protesters are given tremendous media attention- and more than the almost 35,000 people, as Fausta notes, including politicians, dignitaries and Nobel Prize winners that showed up at the UN protesting the appearance of Chavez and Ahmandinejad are ignored.

This is the same media that ordained Barack Onama as America's savior.

See Fausta for more absurdities- and more tragedies, authored by Chavez, et al.

The majority of members of that august body headquartered on NY’s East River celebrated Chavez and Ahmandinejad’s ‘free expression’ of derision and excoriation for our nation and our leaders, who believe the ideals of Lincoln and Jefferson are noble, true and universal. The majority of the regimes represented at the United Nations stomp on human rights, liberties and a free press in their own countries. They are encouraged by a biased American media, and a leftist agenda that (like them) cares not a whit about the lives and freedom of billions of people. They are driven with the idea, hope and prayer that what Jefferson Lincoln and built, they will tear down.

Much of academia, in concert with the media, are so filled with hubris, hate and bigotry, that they willingly propagate racist agendas and wild conspiracy theories that malign our nation, so that might be participants in dismantling this ‘great experiment.’ Academic institutions, suffered from academic ED, lamely defend their employees by citing ‘free expression,’ over truth as an academic priority.

The ideals we as a nation stand for, are receding into the past. Those ideals are being replaced with doubt, deceit and corrupted ideologies of hate and intolerance. The very tyranny and oppression those who first came to this country were escaping, has found a welcome home here.

Does anyone think that Abraham Lincoln could get elected today? A lawyer only by virtue of an apprenticeship, he was self taught and self educated. He was poor and he was not a handsome man. His wife was never in the best of ’spirits.’ He had no speech writer and he was, as Horace Greely recalled,

“…an heir of poverty and insignificance, obscure, untaught, buried throughout his childhood in the primitive forests…Nevertheless, become a central figure in the Western Hemisphere, an object of honor, love and reverence through out the civilized world…He was not born a king of men…but a child of the people… by dint of firm resolve, and patient effort and dogged perseverance.”

Such a man could not today be elected to a local school board.

Is there a politician today who could pen Lincoln’s intimate words to Mrs Bixby, of Boston,on behalf of a grateful nation?

The Anchoress broadcasts in Chavez Clearly Listened To Dems And Air America, some real and ugly truths that have contributed to the an environment of the lowest common denominators.

But maybe some on the left finally understand that while they’ve been having fun and laughing while calling President Bush every manner of ugly name and insult, dangerous people have been watching…

And I’m sure some Democrats were shocked to see just how ugly their words sounded, when coming out of the mouth of someone else, someone with “no right,” to spew hate for political expediency.

There are some on the left who are suggesting that Hugo Chavez’s remarks are simply an indicator that the world “disrespects” President Bush…well…I wonder who gave them the idea that they could? Was it John Kerry calling him a “fucking liar,” and not having to answer for that rudeness to anyone while the press shrugged it off? Good heavens, Bush calls terrorism “evil” and he was mocked and criticized for using that word, but the press never had a problem with “fucking liar, fucking crooks and thieves” or with adolescent musings about the president’s name and female genitalia. It was alllllll soooooo funnnnneeeeeee, newsreaders could hardly deliver the spite without grinning, themselves.

(watch for the idiot brigade- and media- to defend their behavior, with even more invective directed at the administration)

The truth is, many on the left excoriated Rangel and Pelosi for their remarks.

The Anchoress isn’t done. She follows through to the bitter- and truthful end:

But if Bush is being disrespected, then the Democrats need to look to themselves and their actions and understand how complicit they have been in encouraging it. Dems like Charlie Rangel, who called President Bush “Bull Connor,” knowing full well how wrong, inaccurate, unfair and inflammatory that was, or like the idiots who called Bush “a genocidal racist” after Hurricane Katrina, or like the party (and the press) who spent years telling America about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction only to later pretend they never said such things, and to pretend further that somehow Bush’s believing the same things they believed…made him a liar…

The press repeated it, ad nauseum, and the press and the Dems promoted films with that message, and books, until that damnable, transparent and nonsensical lie was repeated enough…because everyone knows that if you tell a big lie enough, it becomes “the truth…”

If tinpot tyrants and madmen now come to the United Nations and believe they can say anything they wish about The American President, it is because - as some of us have been warning, for some time - while all manner or irresponsible nonsense and hate has been directed at this president…the world has been watching.

And now, these tyrants and madmen sound eerily like the Democrats and the press and the left.

It is as if the media jihad had it’s own 9/11, intent on killing what they hate, replete with the requisite deceit and pious claims of justification. All the while, the left dances with same joy and fervor in same way and with same celebration of equally dysfunctional Muslims that danced on 9/11.

The media, two bit academic hacks and left desperately want you to believe that these tin pot dicators and dysfunctional and dangerous lunatics that are playing with nuclear programs are sincere when they say, “we love Americans, we just hate your government.” We are civilized.” (notwithstanding this).

Indeed, the well worn phrase, ‘Slaughter the Jews!’ and similar such sentiments, are really no more than an Arab world terms of endearment, right? After all, why else would the media and left ignore that kind of remarks, right?

Despite well documented records of abuse, repression, racism, bigotry and worse, the media, academic hacks and the left want you to believe that the likes and ideas of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmandinejad are more representative of what are American values than are Jefferson and Lincoln.

Congratulations, America.

Portions of this post have been previously published.

Refusing To Evolve: The Leftist Creed

Why isn’t there a single example of a successful ‘People’s Paradise’? How is it that the best of intentioned revolutionaries was never able to produce a functional society? Why is it that societies that espouse economic equality and predicated on well meaning ideals, either secular or religious, have proved to be abject failures?

Leftists mistakenly believe that a collective ‘unity’ of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies empower a society. Their strength, they believe, are in the numbers of those who share their ideologies. Leftists also believe that they have every right to design a society based on what they believe is in the best interest of that society. They also believe that an unwillingness to conform to their ideals, poses a threat, and quite possibly, a danger to the society of their creation.

Capitalism, as Dr Sanity points out, is predicated on the diversity of beliefs, thoughts and ideologies.

For example, the Leftists state takes a dim view of anyone or group that might demand lower taxes, changes in the state welfare benefits, or demands any kind of accountability, because less of burden on the individual and less control of the individual by the state, might empower that individual. In the Leftist state, any kind of individualism and real self expression, empowered or otherwise, represents a threat to the state.

Last year, millions of Frenchmen turned out to protest an employers right to fire them from their jobs- even if their job performance was sub par. They demanded that the French government protect them from being held accountable to their employers. There are business owners in France that are afraid to initiate the complex procedures for firing employees, out the fear of retribution and violence.

Despite the leftist of stated disdain for capitalism and materialism, we have noted that

For today’s leftist, it is about ‘the color of one’s skin’ and not the ‘content of character. It is about image and not substance. The deliberate obfuscation continues and the blurring of reality continues. As the left indicts America as self absorbed and drunk with materialistic inclinations, they ignore yet another truth

…the most self absorbed and materialistic regimes are the leaders of the most tyrannical regimes in Africa and the Arab world, where greed, corruption, excess and deceit are the defining adjectives of those regimes. Those levels of greed, excess, corruption and self serving attitudes rival the most fanatical religious extremists in their tenacious expressions by citizens of all strata in those countries- and these are the leaders the left reveres.

Of course, progressives naturally see themselves as forward thinking. They believe their way of viewing the world is an improvement over the ‘old way’- hard work for greater personal gain, for example.

(it is interesting to note how ‘progressives’ have aligned themselves with Hollywood- the most narcissistic and self centered group of people on the planet. They are also among the most removed from the real world, believing themselves to be a kind of aristocracy, entitled to material things others would have to pay for. There is much truth to the old saying. ‘You are known by the company you keep.’ The ‘progressives’ have made clear their attachment to the phony aristocracy of Hollywood trumps the relationship they might have with the rest of us, ‘the little people.’)

The only agenda the left have refused to endorse is the only agenda that has succeeded and the one agenda that is gaining ground, worldwide- capitalism. The real revolutions today are not for socialism, but rather, for political and economic freedoms.

‘People’s Revolutions’ today aren’t about failed Marxist or socialist agendas. Leftist revolutionaries cannot hide the truth any longer. Today’s revolutions are about power and the exercise and abuse of power in any way they see fit.

Of course, the ‘progressives’ cannot and will not acknowledge the truth that the greatest philosophers and thinkers were free to think and present their cases to the population. It is the progressives, that want to present their own versions of history, religion and ideologies, without having to explain or defend themselves. Disagree with them and the wrath of the State will come down on you.

It is clear that many ‘progressives’ are actually regressive. The ‘my way or the highway’ kind of thinking is devolutionary, as if any and all disagreements are always invalid. The vitriol and visceral hatred of the current administration is a good example. No difference of opinion will be tolerated. Disagree and the well oiled machine of personal destruction comes out. The shameful display of that truth was evident during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Tens, if not hundreds of millions have died because of leftist ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies. Disagree with the powers that be or want to be, and there are calls of, ‘Death to…! Disagree loud enough and you are marked for death. We all got a taste of that as the cartoon riots unfolded. That was a clear case of ‘my way or the highway’ unleashed on democratic societies.

‘My way or the highway’ is a nothing more than a regression to a more barbaric time, when disputes, disagreements and different ideas were settled only when blood was spilled. That was an earlier incarnation of ‘my way or the highway.’

What leftists desperately want you to forget is that we are morally obligated not to get along with those whose ideas are and beliefs espouse violence, hate and evil. We are morally obligated not to give them a platform to preach their hate and we are morally obligated not to equate their values with our own. While we cannot stop anyone from believing what they will, we are morally obligated to deny them credibility.

(It is astonishing to note that while most people would agree that Adolph Hitler would never have been allowed a platform to preach his hate here, there are still those who believe that Josef Stalin, the man responsible for one hundred million deaths, would have rightfully been a allowed a platform.)

Mankind evolved and political expression advanced when societies came to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs. We advanced because we allowed each of us the freedom the opportunity to achieve whatever it was we were capable of in any endeavor we chose. No one told us what to do, what to think or what to invent. In free societies, possibilities were open to all, irrespective of their political persuasion.

The Soviets produced engineers by the millions. They built the world’s largest hotel, the Rossiya, in Moscow, meant to be showcase of Soviet superiority. When you get up close and inside, it is hard to miss the walls that are crooked and floors that are uneven. It is true the Russians led early on in the space race. It is also true that many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died over the years because money that was spent on the space race was diverted from providing food to Soviet citizens. That malaise infected Communist eastern Europe. Once a net exporter of grain, Poland reached a point where she could barely feed herself. To put that in perspective, at one time Poland grew more grain than France or Canada.

The Judeo-Christian ethic is just that- an ethic, an ideology that was to serve as the basis and foundation upon which a free nation might be built. The Judeo-Christian ethic is not an endorsement of religion- it is an endorsement of ideas, not the least of which is the validity and importance of freedom. The Judeo-Christian ethic has been the blueprint, revised over time, that has come to be a definition of freedom. The ideas contained in those ethics have come to define the boundaries of our freedom and our obligations to out society. We have been blessed with freedom and democracy as a way of life.

It is also true that free societies not only exist, but they prosper and progress as well. If there were no free societies and democracies, our world would look exactly like much of the Arab world today- failed states torn apart by internal strife and political mayhem, with hundreds of millions of people languishing in a netherworld, where their only purpose is to serve the needs and whims of a regime that cares nothing for them and attaches no value to their life.

For the most part, progressives do not want to acknowledge that there is not a single example of a regime they have endorsed that has not resorted to murder, oppression and repression. There are some regimes are authoritarian, caring only about controlling behavior. There are other regimes are totalitarian, seeking to control not only behavior, but thought as well. The only regime ever supported by the left (only to be later abandoned) that made a success of itself was Israel.

Real freedom represents the highest political and ethical expression and aspirations of the human condition.

After witnessing the spectacular and bloody imposition and failures of ideologies embraced by leftists, one can only conclude that those ideologies have proved to be a monumental failure on the scale of political evolution. Leftist ideologies cannot be made to adapt to the real world environment that places freedom atop the evolutionary that scale, because leftist ideologies refuses to adapt and acknowledge that people are best served when free to choose for themselves.

Leftists have failed to adapt and evolve to the reality that accelerating freedom is the destiny of mankind. We are meant to be free choose, free to believe, and free to express themselves in any way they see fit, free of interference.

That is the equivalent of debating the merits of the wheel.

Confusion And The Crumbling Nation

America and Americans are confused.

Since our inception as a nation, we and our allies have been confronted by adversaries and antagonists, all easily identified by perverted agendas designed to thwart democratic values or ideas that would subjugate millions. There was a time when our nation had great clarity. Now, we are confused. It seems we cannot identify those ideas and leaders that ought to be repulsive and immediately rejected.

Our adversaries take offense when we point out blatant examples of outrageous, repressive, oppressive and murderous behavior. We back away, chastising our own ‘insensitivity.’ We are told that we are hated for our very existence- and we cannot or wil not refute those absurdities. The good we have done, the gifts we have brought forth mean nothing.

When we are taken to task by brutish and cruel leaders of failed nation-states, we are ashamed. We are laughed at because of our confusion and how easily we can be manipulated.

In a way, this confusion is a part of the human condition. We defy our realities so that we might be something we cannot be, someone other than ourselves. We will deny truth, logic and even our own collective nature in that pursuit. We live in the here and now, dealing with our realities and our lives. All the while, we want to be elsewhere or to be someone else in a place and time, where and when our ‘inner greatness’ is immediately recognized and appreciated. All that is missing is the road map, the American Idol competition that might recognize our magnificence. Many will fight with great ferocity to defend our ambiguity and refusal to take a stand and many care little who gets hurt in the process.

The struggle with the tentative ‘would have, should have,’ that so aptly defines a cultural malaise is played out every day. Those who sure of themselves and their beliefs or take comfort in them, are suspect outsiders. What is wrong with them?

Rather than seek real solutions to real problems that affect real people that can be addressed and solved with hard work, there is a collective lemming-like drive to find ‘inner peace.’ Myopic New Age religions, Yoga, mystical expressions of faith have all supplanted the need for good works. Anything that does not demand commitment and accountability is good. Any expression of faith that requires accountability and real commitment is bad. We do not need to answer to God. It his He/She/It that needs to answer to us. God, the Master Of The Universe And Creator has no business making demands on us.

The only clarity is that we must be tolerant and forgiving of those who say God told them to kill us (See We’re The Problem And Other Fantasies for the absurdity of such thinking).

Free societies and civilizations are distinguished by how they see the world and in how they problem solve. They value life, knowledge and morality, in that order.

Life is understood in the finite and infinite expression. When we encounter death in our lives, we realize that our infinite existence is not a possibility. Intellectually, we know this to be an absolute truth. With greater knowledge, our understanding of our finite selves is increased. Nevertheless, we seek immortality. We look for ways to extend our physical existence and we are willing to do just about anything to find that elusive fountain of youth.

Our quest for that fountain does not really represent a quest for longevity. Despite our intellectual awareness and an ever increasing body of knowledge, what we really seek is immortality. We want to defy and deny the truth about ourselves and about the finite creatures we are. Even as our longevity has increased, so has our obsession with immortality. Medicine and lifestyle can indeed give us a few more years and cosmetic surgery can create all kinds of illusions. Still, no matter all our efforts, we cannot defy nature. We are not meant for immortality.

How tragically confused one must be to believe that longevity is the mark of a quality life.Western nations measure the quality of life in terms of age and lifespan. There is no measure of the meaningfulness of life.

In addition to the pursuit of life, western man seeks knowledge. In addition to immortality, he wants to be in possession of all the mysteries of the universe.

Next to life itself, man seeks infinity in the field of knowledge. He wants not only to be immortal, but to have boundless knowledge. It is true we have made great strides in our knowledge base, but we are barely scratching the surface of the secrets of the cosmos. Those for whom longevity and the obsessive search for knowledge are paramount, will be long forgotten.

The final human endeavor in which man seeks to leave a mark is in his expression of morality. It is in this arena that our failures are greatest.

The incongruity of our efforts are almost comical. On the one hand, we seek immortality. On the other hand, some seek to terminate the lives of those they feel have no quality of life. The same people who speak of moral and cultural relativism are often the very same people who believe that those who are a burden to them may be removed. They will go to great lengths to accommodate and make room for others, yet they will not tolerate those near and dear who might be a ‘burden.’

If man put as much effort into seeking a moral immortality as he does in seeking a physical immortality, the world would be a much better place.

Mankind can essentially be divided into two camps: One camp (western society) has come to see no morality other than the kind that serves the self. The other camp sees morality in imposing one set of beliefs over another, be they religious or political at any and all costs and force if necessary. That is why Communism and religious fundamentalism are so appealing to many: They require self discipline and commitment, two very human desires. The western pursuit of pleasure is counter intuitive (we want immortality and uber morality but we aren’t willing to rid ourselves of the pleasurable behaviors and adopt the necessary discipline and commitment to achieve that immortality and morality. Then, we blame others for our weaknesses and bad behavior). ‘We are doomed to fail’ is a mantra instilled in children today.

America’s participation in the first World War was predicated on the belief that we were making the world safe for democracy. In the second World War, we saw our participation as necessary to save the world from real slavery and oppression. As we and our allies pushed the Nazi forces back, we were seen by those we liberated as saviors. There was no moral ambiguity whatsoever. The Cold War was not fought for sovereignty of Siberia, but rather, to maintain the sovereignty over our beliefs.

Today, America is not so sure of herself. When faced by oppressive and repressive regimes that are no different than those evil regimes of the past, we falter and hesitate.

We are in a word, confused.

There was a time when China was understood to be among the most oppressive regimes in the world. Today we trade with China and break bread with them as if they were our moral equals. Political oppression is still rampant, tens of thousands of state sanctioned murders occur every year, prisoners are shot so that their organs might be harvested and Chinese miners are not given safety equipment because the regime has done the math. Replacing coal miners is cheaper than keeping them alive.

There was a time when African Americans were invisible in this nation. Now, universities have entire programs that dwell on ‘blackness.’ We went from fighting to include minorities into our nation to fighting to exclude minorities from our melting pot. The pendulum swings are extreme.

The American nation has much to be proud of and very little to be confused about.

Our greatest moments as a nation and people have always been the result of not caring about our personal longevity, not caring about what the books said what and wasn’t possible and about not caring about a morality that was self centered.

We built a nation with wretched refuse that made this country their home (see Culture Character And Cheese and Democracies Don’t Care). They may have come from elsewhere, but America was the place millions wanted to make home. They saw this nations certainty and commitment to freedom as another kind of Rock of Ages. They saw a nation that while not perfect, was a nation ‘whose best days were yet to come.’

Immigrants came- and still come- with the express desire to participate, to have his opr her voice heard. Immigrants can be active participants in whatever political party or organization they desire. They are free to passionately argue their beliefs with neighbors who speak their language and other neighbors who don’t, free of the fear of retribution. Immigrants are not confused about what America stands for and for whom she will stand up. America is not a terrible place as the lines for residency visas attest. No one in those lines really sees what America stands for as ambiguous or confused.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to symbolize America to the world. He was a not perfect and certainly flawed. Nevertheless, when the Nazi threat to Europe was at it’s darkest, Roosevelt behaved in a way that was quintessentially American. At great personal risk to his political career, he lied to Congress outright so that Europe might be saved from Nazi tyranny. He cared little about his physical limitation. He cared less about what his diplomats (including Joe Kennedy) said about not getting involved and he cared least of all about the self serving isolationist morality that enveloped the nation.

FDR represented American moral certainty to a fearful world. Had the American president been Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Hoover- two fine men- the swastika would have flown over the capitals of the Continent and Europeans would have been enslaved.

World War Two was FDR’s second victory. He stemmed the tide of Communism on these shores during the depression by feeding the poor and hungry. He tied the nation together with roads, electricity and national parks. demonstrated in front of the White House, but their pleas fell on empty ears. The secret answer was that the Jewish situation should not be brought to prominence because it would hinder the war effort, and a conference between Roosevelt and Eisenhower rejected the plan to bomb the concentration camps. Thus, the Jewish confidence in people was shattered.

Confusion can be helpful when it inspires a cathartic experience. We can find meaning, clarity and direction. Those liberating results come about only when we seek a higher purpose. We have to seek not more confusion, but less so that our lives however long or short have meaning. We have to seek knowledge that enhances our meaning and existence and we have to seek a morality that elevates ourselves and others at the same time. We cannot allow a pretend morality to immobilize us. We have to be sure of ourselves, of we are, in what we stand for and in what direction we must forge ahead.

America is not a perfect place, of course. That said, it is incumbent on us to make it better. That is the real legacy of the ‘wretched refuse.’

We wrote

Of the almost 7 billion people on this planet, only 300 million are Americans. To put that in perspective, less than 5% of the population of this planet are Americans- and yet, the world is obsessed with our existence and what we represent. In the course of just over 200 years, we have provided the world with ideas, contributions and realities that are in the consciousness of every human being on the planet. Given our numbers and short history, we should not have had this profound influence on history and mankind- and yet, we have. The secret to our our successes and influence can be attributed to one powerful word: Freedom.

That is a truth we ought never be confused about.

For a terrific- and related- look at the America we have become, see Dr Sanity’s superb Beyond Parody, posted today.

Portions of this post have been previously published.

On This Day, We Remember

We wrote the following four years ago, on this day.

On this day, we see Divine Justice.

On the day we remember that ‘band of brothers,’ our veterans and their comrades who were left behind, Yasser Arafat has breathed his last.

Immortalized in a poem entitled Flanders Field, on Vimy Ridge and a host of other long forgotten blood soaked battlefields, we, from who’s ranks and families came those quiet men of honor, can clearly differentiate between the sacred glory of warriors for peace and liberty and the profane idolater of evil, Yasser Arafat.

Much will be written and said about Arafat over the next few days. Some will eulogize him as a great leader and father figure to the Palestinians and others will apologize and justify much of what he has done. Others, even more effusive, will refer to him as the ultimate ‘freedom fighter,’ as if to say he too, shared the honor of a noble warrior.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Arafat was a terrorist of the worst kind. He attempted to put a noble face on his evil and to have it seen as good.

“Terrorism” is a description of a means, a method of deliberately attacking or threatening to attack civilian targets in order to achieve political goals. “Freedom fighting” is a description of an end, as a freedom fighter’s goal is national liberation. An individual could participate in “terrorism” and “freedom fighting” simultaneously, because one word describes means, while the other describes ends. To say that a Palestinian suicide bomber is not condemnable as a terrorist because the bomber’s cause is national liberation is to argue that the end justifies the means.”

Arafat espoused the deliberate attempt to legitimize his evil deeds, by couching those deeds in terms of honor- as if somehow words alone could transform reality.

Those men, from the Great War, WW2, Korea, Vietnam and now, Iraq, share no moral equivalence to Yasser Arafat’s ‘freedom fighting.’

Those men fought a war to bring freedom and liberty as opposed to those who would take them away.

Those men fought a war for to defend the highest principles, that all men should be free.

Those men fought a war in the hope, naive perhaps, that through their efforts, blood and tears, there would be an end to all wars.

Believing in those principles, some of those men were never to come home. Some are buried in fields, close and far away. Some graves remain unmarked, at the bottom of a forever cold ocean, with young and good men entombed in deep dark waters, never to have the sun shine on on their final resting places.

Families too, paid for their sacrifices.

Children who never again would see their father.

Wives learning that, ‘what God hath brought together‘ can be ‘torn asunder,’ at the hands of other men that held close evil to their heats.

Parents, having to live through nature in reverse, burying their sons and daughters.

Yasser Arafat and his ilk know nothing of such nobility. They know nothing of sacrifice, only of greed and deceit. They fought not for the principles that make men great, but rather for what makes men petty and cruel.

They rejoice at the death of innocents and in a world turned upside down, refer to the murderers as ‘martyrs,’ to be glorified amd revered.

In all of wars darkest hours, we spoke of high ideals and principles. We spoke of freedom and the determination that we would pay, with our blood, not to destroy, but rather, so that ourselves and others may live free. Our leaders asked not for glory, but rather suffered in anguish at the loss of young lives:

“I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle

“I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which shall attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. “

So said Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to a mother who lost 5 sons, defending the nation. These are not the words of a leader, who with calculated indifference, pushed children into harms way, so as to garner sympathy for himself and his cause.

Arafat and his disciples were incapable of even understanding what liberty means, much less the Altar of Freedom Lincoln referred to.

The Palestinians deserve a homeland, no doubt. They deserve to make the decisions and choices that will affect their lives. They do not have that right to take that away from others, as so many of openly say they wish to do.

Freedom is earned, not given away. Freedom must been paid for and sometimes defended, with the blood of patriots.

Arafat never offered freedom to his people, only tyranny and hate.

It is on this day, we can clearly contrast the differences between mean of real honor and those that defile it.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Sleep well, oh Band of Brothers. The torch you have passed is in good hands. We, the silent majority of people of good will, have not broken faith with you. Those noble ideals and beliefs for which you paid so much, are safe in the hands of all good, free men.

See also The Easter Monday That Changed The World.

Nationhood is earned, not bestowed. Nations are formed to build societies, not to destroy others. These are realities the Palestinians and Arab world have yet to learn. Healthy cultures define heroism as saving lives. Failed cultures define heroism by those who take lives. Healthy cultures elevate their citizenry. Failed cultures deprive and steal from their citizenry. Yes, it really is that simple.

Shame And Consequences, Revisited

Last night, MaxedOutMama posted about an incident that occurred on school grounds. A disabled girl was sexually assaulted by a group of boys- and the event was videotaped. What is important here is that crime isn't the story. Read the post and then read Carson's guest post/essay. In it she talks about 'shame'- an almost archaic notion nowadays. Perhaps if 'shame' were applied more liberally, the tragic events reported on might never have occurred.

Doctor said "Adam, sex kills"
So come inside and die
Here Comes The Grump [Adam Ant/Marco Pirroni]

"Daddy, what does regret mean?"
"Well son, the funny thing about regret is, It's better to regret something you have done, Than to regret something you haven't done."
Sweat Loaf [Butthole Surfers]

One of the traits of adolescence is a belief in one's own immortality. It can't happen to you. When 16 year-olds were getting married and having kids—in that order—there wasn't so much of this teenaged angst floating around. But now coming of age extends over a longer period of years. When do people become adults? The law varies. The state law here for consensual sex is 16, right along with driving. Voting comes at 18. Drinking, 21.

Sixteen. Even that seems woefully young to be making these decisions. How many women out there were having sex at 16? Lots of hands raised. How many of you wish you could go back in time and send yourself a letter? (You'd just throw it away. Remember, you were 16.) Before I get buckets of hate mail from people telling me they married their high school sweetheart, I know you are out there. But the reason the rest of us think your stories are so sweet is that we regret the horror of our own stories.

Or maybe it's just the horror of my own story? Can I share? This does come under the heading of TMI, so I'll make it brief. I was sexually abused for 6 years, from age 11 to 17, by my stepbrother. Child of divorce from the age of 5, probable bi-polar mother (never officially diagnosed), passive-aggressive father. I was the sensitive one. That was seen as a bad thing. Sensitive, apparently, means that I couldn't play the game of "Pretend that Mommy is Not a Screaming She-Devil." By the time I was 11, I had learned the lesson that my sensitivity was abnormal, and my needs weren't important.

It always looks worse in black and white. But for me, it was just life.

In any case, I have been an advocate in many forums (virtual & real) for parents whose childhood was less than ideal. OK, yeah, that would be all of us, but my target is parents who were abused as children. And within that group and out of it, I have talked to women who acted out in their teens the anger, fear and search for love that they experienced growing up. Not once have I heard a woman say, "When I lost my virginity at 15 (or earlier), it was the best decision. I was so ready. The moment was right." What I've heard—and remember, this is my cause, so for a while I was practically walking up to strangers saying, "Hi, my name is Carson, and I'm an Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse"—what I've heard is regret, painful regret. Even women who had more typical early sexual experiences, unless they waited until they were at least in college, they lacked the emotional maturity to process the experience, to make the decision for the right reasons. While the degree of pain will vary, sex ended up being something other than the meeting of two minds, two bodies in a fantastically great time.

We began this conversation with oral sex, and the belief that it isn't sex. Unless it's within the context of an ongoing relationship, there's only one person being gratified, and it ain't her. Sex between adults of any age is reciprocal. There's a dominance/submission dynamic in the teen world of romance to begin with, and the woman is just a tool, the means to an end. Is this what we're teaching our boys? And is this the role we want for our daughters? Trading sexual favors for popularity?

That's not what I want for my own children. Every parent wants to protect their kids from pain. But in protecting them from pain, we've eliminated shame. Not a comfortable feeling, but as a deterrent to self-destructive behavior, it's pretty powerful. Which is worse? Shame that helps us avoid poor choices in the first place? Or shame for years of poor choices, accompanied by the physical repercussions. I don't want my children to be ashamed of their bodies. But if they make mistakes, they should know that what they did is wrong. That's not just in the sexual arena, but in life. Part of maturity is taking the responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Whether it's my daughter's current issue of spilling her milk every meal or sexual behavior, I will be right by her, guiding her through mopping up the mess. But she will be the one with the towel in her hands, cleaning up. Even though it would be easier for me to just do it for her!

The talk is all about safe sex. Skipping any emotional issues, let's talk about safe sex. It's not just about birth control, but about disease prevention. If you think a condom or oral sex makes it safe, do some research on syphilis, HPV, genital lice and possibly Hepatitis C. Take a look at the risk factors for cervical cancer.

Let's tell the truth about sex. Let's talk about how ridiculous it is to stigmatize people who choose not to have it. Let's talk about the emotional pain that it causes. Let's talk about sex as rebellion, as a weapon against parents, as a route to popularity, as a salve to numb a wounded heart, to find temporary oblivion, as the way to feel really good, but to make yourself really vulnerable. Sex is more complicated than a stick shift, more political than any election, and is as potentially destructive as any drink.

Tell the truth. Rip the scabs off, let the light in. Our children deserve better.

Portions of this post have been previosuly published.

Buffalo Shuffle

The Atlantic:

The quirky 1998 indie movie Buffalo ’66, famed for its cameos (“Hey, wasn’t that guy in the bowling alley Jan-Michael Vincent?”), shows some Buffalo residents as stuck psychologically in the mid-1960s, when the city’s heavy industry was mighty and the Buffalo Bills were football’s best team. I spent my boyhood in Buffalo and its Pleasantville-like border suburb, Kenmore; the area then thrived, and the magnificent Bills were its embodiment. As a 13-year-old, I attended the New Year’s Day, 1967, contest between the Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs to determine which would face the Green Bay Packers in the inaugural Super Bowl. The game was at War Memorial Stadium, since demolished, a majestic Works Progress Administration edifice built by masons and known locally as the Rockpile; it stood right in the midst of the city, with no parking lots, because when the place was built fans arrived on foot or by streetcar. The sense of civic excitement was keen on that 1967 day; the Bills were the defending American Football League champions. But Dudley Meredith fumbled the opening kickoff, giving the Chiefs an easy touchdown, then—no, I can’t go any further into that awful memory. Forty-one years later, looking up an account of the game, just coming across the name Dudley Meredith sent a chill along my spine. Kansas City met Green Bay in the first Super Bowl, and for Buffalo—the team and the place—it’s been downhill since.

All true sons and daughters of Buffalo share a magic-realist belief that the city’s fate and the Bills’ are intertwined. Since that long-ago loss, Buffalo’s steel and grain-milling industries have gone from boom to bust. The city’s population has shrunk by nearly half. Abandoned grain silos line the urban lakefront like timber Paul Bunyan forgot to harvest. Had the Bills won the first Super Bowl, none of this would have happened!

Next month, in the first regular-season NFL game ever to be played in Canada, the Bills will host the Miami Dolphins at the Rogers Centre, in flourishing Toronto. Under a recently signed agreement, the Bills will play a regular-season “home” game in Toronto, about 100 miles by car from Buffalo, in each of the next four years as well.

The Rogers Centre deal is widely seen as the first step toward an eventual move of the Bills to Ontario, and a “last one turn off the lights” moment for Buffalo. The Bills’ owner, Ralph Wilson, who recently turned 90, is fiercely loyal to the city, but someday Wilson will cross the river, and between estate taxes and inheritances to his three daughters, the Bills may need to be sold when he passes. The Toronto communications magnate Ted Rogers, owner of the Rogers Centre, is an obvious potential customer.

But there’s another, more hopeful possibility: the current arrangement might actually help keep the Bills in Buffalo—and perhaps even catalyze the city’s revival.

A long-term deal by which the Bills play in both Toronto and Buffalo might make economic sense. Television revenue is the same for all NFL teams, meaning there’s no small-city penalty for games in Buffalo; and despite its depressed economics, Buffalo is consistently in the top 10 for NFL attendance. If some games were played in Canada, the cost of season tickets in Buffalo would decline because of a smaller home slate, keeping season tickets affordable and attendance high. And the team would add a fan base in North America’s fifth-largest city, giving itself two sets of supporters—one set quite prosperous, paying for tickets and merchandise with the suddenly valuable Canadian dollar.

The Bills could help forge mutual affection between the cities—even a regional identity. Buffalo’s civic promotion has generally reached southward; in this newly globalized world, it should reach northward, toward a country that is as underappreciated among nations as Buffalo is among cities.

Connections to cosmopolitan, multi­cultural Toronto might change Buffalo’s image from backward-­focused to wave-of-the-future. Toronto is growing by leaps and bounds, and some portion of the growth may already be spilling over; most of the immigrants to Buffalo in recent years were Canadian. Buffalo offers urban living free of traffic jams and boasts one of the nation’s last under­developed stretches of premium waterfront. During its City of Light heyday, when Buffalo was the first electrified metropolis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and other fabled names designed homes and parks. In the lovely Delaware Park area, magnificent Beaux Arts homes sell at exceedingly low prices compared with homes in elite U.S. cities—or in Toronto.

So long as the Bills keep a foot in the city, they keep alive the dream of a Super Bowl win—a hope that an infusion of Loonies (Canadian dollars) might sustain. And should the Bills win the Super Bowl, Buffalo will return to national prominence. I don’t just think this will happen, I know it will.

Syria Invites Obama, Asks For Apology And Makes Demands

Living in a Salvador Dali painting:

Asia Times:

DAMASCUS - In the Muslim world, men take pride in their first born baby boy and they are often called "the father of X" for the remainder of their lives. In turn, first born boys are named after their grandfathers, and this explains why Syrians affectionately call Barack Obama "Abu Hussein" (father of Hussein).

He does not have a baby boy - just two beautiful girls - yet that doesn't really matter for the overwhelmed Syrians who woke up to hear the news coming in from Washington on November 5 that Barack Hussein Obama had become the 44th president of the United States.

As far as they are concerned, his father's name is Hussein and when Obama gets a baby boy, he is going to call him Hussein. That is the tradition in the Muslim world after all, and Obama comes from Muslim lineage in Kenya. Gamal Abdul-Nasser of Egypt was "Abu Khaled", Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is "Abu Hadi", Palestinian Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat was "Abu Ammar" and for masses in the Arab world, Barack Obama is "Abu Hussein".

This terminology was coined by ordinary Syrians who watched the presidential race with enthusiasm glad to see the end of President George W Bush.

All the same, Syrians have no illusions that the president-elect is going to be a savior for the Arabs. They hope that he will be more fair and even-handed when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and end the tension that started between Damascus and Washington under the Bush administration. They realize, however, that his election shows just how far America has come in terms of racial equality, and everybody in Damascus - young and old - is impressed.

In August, hosted by an American organization called Search for Common Ground, three Syrians went to Washington and met with think-tanks, newspapers and loyalists of Obama, discussing ways to move bilateral relations forward once Bush leaves the White House.

For the past 12 months, Damascus has welcomed a wide array of US officials who are either members of the Obama team or supporters of the new president. All of them came carrying a similar message: The policy of no dialogue with Damascus under Bush has been unproductive for the region and the United States. That is going to change, they said, when Obama reaches the White House.

All of them were warmly received by the Syrians, at a popular and official level, including former ambassador Daniel Kurtzer and former national security advisor under president Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The latter even spoke to students at one of the new private universities in Syria, who applauded strongly whenever he mentioned "President Obama".

Syrians were especially thrilled when Obama refused to praise the US strike on Syria in October, unlike his Republican opponent Senator John McCain. Syrian dailies and magazines have been running front page news of Obama - almost neglecting McCain.

Officially, Syria is yet to comment on Obama's victory and President Bashar al-Assad was often quoted during the presidential race as saying that Syria would wait to see the position of winner towards the Middle East once he reached the White House.

Syria was worried at Obama's strong support for Israel - although it came as no surprise - during his visit to Tel Aviv some months ago. They have not forgotten the overwhelming support Arabs showed for George W Bush in 2000, thinking that he would be a much better president for the Arabs than Al Gore. Therefore, officially, it is still a wait-and-see policy, although there is universal unsaid conviction that McCain would have been an extension of Bush and at least Obama - a man who champions change - is going to be different.

The Syrians are willing to cooperate with Obama on a variety of issues, prime on the list being Iraq. In the words of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem, Syria will help secure an "honorable exit" for the US from Iraq. Damascus was very close to suspending diplomatic relations with Baghdad after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki failed to prevent the October strike on Syria - which was launched from Iraqi territory - but did not do so, to keep channels open with the Obama administration and to better deliver security in Iraq.

Syrian troop numbers have been reduced at the border, but not withdrawn completely, in objection to the raid, but security coordination with Baghdad (at a ministerial level) remains intact, to prevent jihadis from crossing the border into Iraq.

If Obama sends off positive signals to Syria, troops can return to the Syrian-Iraqi border. Syria's newly appointed ambassador, Nawaf al-Fares, remains at his job in Baghdad, building bridges with Iraqi Sunnis (he hails from a prominent tribe that overlaps between Syria and Iraq). On the day of the Obama victory, Assad received a delegation sent to Damascus by Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Scores of Iraqi leaders - Shi'ite, Kurd and Sunni - have been coming to Syria for the past four years, meeting with Syrian officials who are trying to build bridges between warring factions to help normalize and stabilize Iraq.

Syria can also still use its weight in the region to moderate the behavior of non-state players like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and find solutions for the US standoff with Iran over its nuclear program. What the Syrians are expecting 11 weeks from now when Obama is sworn in as president is the following:

• Appointment of a US ambassador to Syria. The post has been vacant since Margaret Scooby was withdrawn when relations plummeted over Lebanon in 2005. This would be accompanied by greater room to maneuver for Syria's ambassador to the US, Imad Mustapha, who has been spurned by the Bush administration because of his criticism of how Bush treated Syria.
• An end to the anti-Syrian rhetoric coming out of the White House and State Department since 2003. That would automatically reduce the anti-Syrian sentiment in the US media. Recognition of Syria's cooperation on border security with Iraq. Cooperation with Syria to deal with the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria.
• Lifting - in due course - of the sanctions that were imposed on Damascus and abolishment of the Syrian Accountability Act.
• Willingness to sponsor Syria's indirect peace talks with Israel, currently on hold in Turkey. That is something Bush curtly refused to do since the talks started in April 2008, claiming that Syria was more interested in a peace process than a peace treaty. Syria is sincere and the new White House must acknowledge that to deliver peaceful results in the Middle East.
• American guarantees and willingness to serve as an honest broker could make the talks successful, the Syrians believe, transforming them from indirect to direct negotiations. Syria is determined to regain the occupied Golan Heights (taken by Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967) and Obama must help Syria achieve that if he is sincere about change in the region.
• Recognizing that no problems can be solved in the Middle East without Syria with regard to the Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese. Bush launched his famous "roadmap" for peace between Israel and Palestine, but bypassed the Syrians. If another roadmap were to be launched, Syria would have to be included.
• Help Syria combat Islamic fundamentalism that has been flowing into its territory from north Lebanon and Iraq. The deadly September 27 attack in Damascus - which left nearly 40 Syrians dead and injured - should have been a wake-up call for the Americans that unless cooperation is forthcoming from the US, Syria might become a battleground for extremists, as in the 1980s. Intelligence cooperation and technical assistance with the Americans is needed to curb and combat this Islamic threat.
• An apology, compensation and explanation for the air raid on Syria that left eight Syrian civilians dead in October 2008.
• Help normalize relations between Syria and America on a people-to-people level, which have been strained since Bush came to power in 2001. That would include giving visas to Syrians wanting to study or work in the US

When all this is done, Syria would be willing to open its arms to Abu Hussein, receiving him perhaps as a guest of honor in Damascus, the way it did with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Damascus.

Welcome to the world of Obamanomics

The National Post

As the fervor fades and the hoopla dies, the world will have to get used to a new word: Obamanomics.

It includes tax hikes for the rich, tax cuts for the poor and middle class, a renegotiation of NAFTA, greater union power, windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, higher taxes on capital gains and corporate dividends, and more comprehensive health care insurance.

It may deliver the greater income equality Americans apparently desire but also likely slower growth. Despite the vast tax hikes, it will cost a vast sum and U.S. federal finances, already ravaged by bailouts and recession, will slide deeper into the red.

It is not particularly market-friendly but that does not mean the markets will not like an Obama presidency. If Obama can give the United States back its confidence, restore its reputation and sense of optimism, markets will take the bait as they have done with Democratic presidents so often in the past.

If he can become a Clinton-style pragmatist, resists caving to every whim of a deeply left Congress, and does not meddle with the financial bailouts that seem to be gingerly gaining traction, markets may even run with his presidency. The year from hell for investors could then be nearing an end.

At its heart, Obamanomics is essentially about taking more money from the rich and giving it to the poor, plain old-fashioned "neighborliness" as Obama has described it or, as others have less charitably so: taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those that don't.

Under his income tax plan, Mr. Obama says he will provide tax cuts for 95% of Americans. He will do this by repealing Bush tax cuts and bumping the top rates back to 36% from 33% and to 39.6% from 35%. Individuals earning over US$200,000 and families over US$250,000 will see sizable tax increases. This includes sole proprietors of businesses like lawyers, accountants or plumbers called Joe.

Since 38% of Americans currently do not pay federal income taxes, Obama will provide them with refundable tax credits. Under his plan, 48% of Americans will thus pay no income tax.

"For the people that don't pay taxes, he is simply going to write them a cheque," says Andy Busch, global foreign exchange strategist at BMO Capital Markets. "That is income redistribution at its worst and produces very little value."

Other plans include raising taxes on capital gains and dividends to 20% from 15% for families earning more than US$250,000. He plans to leave the corporate tax rate at 35%, which in a world of rapidly falling rates, looks positively antibussiness. He will introduce windfall taxes on oil and gas companies but offer US$4-billion in credits to U.S. automakers to retool to greener cars.

Much has been made of Obama's plan to renegotiate NAFTA, though no-one seems to believe he will actually make it more protectionist. On the push for greater union power however, there has been no softening of tone.

He was a co-sponsor with Joe Bidden of the Employee Free Choice Act. It would allow a union to be certified once a simple majority have signed union cards, eliminating the time-honoured secret ballot. The bill died last year but under an Obama presidency is sure to get resurrected.

Bottom line is the Obama plan is likely to be a drag on growth and it will cost money. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates Obama's program would add US$3.5-trillion to U.S. debt over the next 10 years, including interest. His plans for health care - which may be delayed by financial necessity - would tack on another US$1.6-trillion.

That is on top of the US$2.3-trillion increase the Congressional Budget Office forecasts over the next decade due to recent stimulus measures and financial bailouts.

"It runs up a very large deficit," says Roberton Williams, a principal researcher at the center. "In general, tax cuts that are not accompanied by spending cuts have a long-term negative on the economy." It means taxes will have to be raised later - just as the draw-down from the Baby Boomers begin.

With the U.S. economy festering and job cuts mounting, it is likely Obama will have to hold back on many of his grand plans.

One hopes that once he is able to manoeuvre, he is more Clinton than Carter.

As economist Arthur Laffer recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, Clinton thoroughly reformed the welfare system, making job searches mandatory, pushed NAFTA through against union wishes, signed the largest capital gains tax cut in history and reduced spending as a share of GDP by three percentage points - more than the next best four presidents combined.

If Obama is also more practical than progressive and he manages to catch a break from a recuperating economy ‹-thanks to the dirty work performed by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - markets will breath a big sigh of relief.

Global stocks down as markets respong to Obama win

For The Left, Obama Is Entitled To The Presidency

Count on Gagdad Bob to provide profound insight and real clarity:

…for the left, Obama “is entitled to the presidency.” You see, for them “It’s only justice. Think about that word ‘justice’ and try filling in ‘revenge.’ ‘Social justice’ means the revenge of the poor against the rich, of the radical women against the men who’ve stood them up and hurt their feelings all their lives, and the revenge of black people finally doin’ down the whites — as Jeremiah Wright makes so abundantly clear.”

What the left calls “social justice” is actually “the revenge of the psychologically oppressed against people who look happier and more satisfied with their lives.” As such, it is intimately related to the psychoanalytic understanding of envy, which is an unconscious mechanism that goes about destroying what one does not have, in order to eliminate the emotional pain of not having it. [emp-SC&A]

…what they unconsciously mean is social revenge. Ah ha! Suddenly their nonsensical economic proposals make sense! They’re not supposed to make sense to the conscious mind, which demands logic and reason, but to the unconscious mind, which demands passion, instinctual release, and emotional satisfaction. Guffaw ha! It’s like the key to their whole keynesdumb!

As with the Islamists, the emotional thrill of hacking off someone’s head is the sufficient reason for doing so. The rest is commentary and pretext. Likewise, the emotional satisfaction of “sticking it to the rich” is the sufficient reason for doing so. It feels good. The intellectual justification is just a thin veneer on the surface of the emotional drive, which is destructive, not creative. The same with such self-defeating policies as rent control, anti-free trade, a “living wage,” socialized medicine, and “windfall profits taxes” (let’s hope that Sarah Palin is not actually in favor of them, or that she will be quickly disabused once someone explains their folly to her).

Then it suddenly made sense to me why the Democrat base is composed of the under- and overeducated. Many if not most intellectual mediocrities with too much education — New York Times idiotorialists and the like — live in a kind of detached and abstract world. As such, they long for “authenticity,” or some such replacement for actual being, the latter of which results from the higher unification of truth and action, or will and beauty, or virtue and truth.

This is why left-wing intellectuals identify on the one hand with the impulsive underclass, but also why they patronize and defend the worst kinds of so-called art, which are really more about a flight from being, into a kind of human-animal mockery of it. This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not a flight, but it feels like one until you hit bottom. Unless you keep digging. Which is the job of liberal arts departments…

…the Left feels “entitled to power, because in their own eyes they have Truth and Morality on their side. They are Mahatma Gandhi, they are Dr. King, they are the vanguard of the marching proletariat. It’s not just Big O who has the incomprehensible egomania. His inner circle and vast numbers of his supporters do, too. Entitlement, grandiosity, narcissism: In psychiatric thinking they all suffer from secret feelings of inferiority, narcissistic wounds to their self-esteem. Every time they lose, those nagging feelings come up again. So they are always overcompensating, trying to bully reality into the shape they need.”

As a friend was reminding me the other day, the left cannot argue in good faith, since they do not see the political spectrum as a “polarity,” so to speak, between left and right. Rather, they see it as a continuum, with the right as a kind of atavistic holdover from an earlier age. They are more sophisticated than we are, so they needn’t bother even seriously contending with our arguments. Again, it is a breathtakingly transparent projection.

This is why the left is so hysterical about Sarah Palin. On the one hand, they flatter themselves with the notion that they represent the province of “strong women,” but obviously the opposite is true. The left is the province of weak and victimized women who cannot get through life without Father Government protecting them. It is the same with blacks. They are the party of weak, dependent, and victimized blacks who cannot get by without the assistance of white liberals who can assuage their unconscious guilt by pandering to blacks. It’s just an unconscious dance of mutual projective identification…

Read it all.

Portions of this post have been previously published.

If Obama Wins, Blacks' Dreams Will Come True: Then What?

Chicago Sun Times:

'This is a time that even folks of my generation have never seen before," says Timuel Black.

Black has seen many a lifetime from his lifelong perch on Chicago's South Side. The revered scholar, historian, political activist and grass-roots intellectual turns 90 on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day. He was born and raised in Bronzeville, the historic and iconic heart of black Chicago.

He is my most reliable barometer of what thoughtful African Americans are saying. I caught up with by phone last week. He had just returned home after voting early for You Know Who.

So what will black folks be thinking as Sen. Barack Obama seals the deal -- to become America's first black president?

Black -- and every African American he knows -- desperately wants Obama to win. "Barack is the best that America has to offer," he says.

He notes that the senator's saga -- born and bred in Hawaii and Indonesia, schooled in the Ivy League, a life of relative privilege -- is not shared by the preponderance of American blacks. "He has a different experience."

Indeed. Blacks must tamp down their sky-high expectations. Obama is running to become president of the world. We must learn to share.

By necessity, he has run a post-racial campaign. "To be a good president, you first have to be president," said Black, professor emeritus of social sciences at the City Colleges of Chicago. "I am not being derogatory, but explanatory."

The reality is that on Tuesday, we will elect a black president. Period.

Obama's virtually flawless campaign reaped big love from millions around the world.

It is fitting that, a few days ago, as the campaign thundered toward its grand crescendo, he finally got the love from America's mythical first black president, Bill Clinton. It is also ironic. While Clinton has trotted himself around as the black man's best friend, Obama will win tomorrow -- and win big -- by vigilantly avoiding talking about people of color and the maladies they face.

Obama will indeed be the real first black president. To be a successful American president, he will have to devise a way to pull us out of a historic quagmire.

African Americans -- and a lot of other people -- better hunker down for some disappointment. Their hero is already getting fitted for the economic and political straitjacket he'll wear for the next four years. The Middle East wars will rage on and that shiny piggy bank known as the U.S. Treasury will be busted. As black folks always say, when they let us take over, you know things are pretty dire.

One thing Obama has going for him: He will look stupendous compared with the current occupant of the White House. Incompetent predecessors present propitious opportunities.

So how will he govern? Turn on the tube and watch the conservative pundits sniff: It goes something like "America is a center-right nation, but Obama will surely govern from the left." He will inevitably overreach and fail, they cackle. They are gleefully awaiting the fall.

I'm betting they'll be waiting a long time. Obama is the consummate pragmatist. If he governs the way he campaigned, he will put lipstick on the pig. (You heard it here first -- watch for an Obama/Palin matchup in 2012.)

I asked Tim Black what he will be thinking about on Election Day. "I will be hopin' and dreamin.' Not thinking too much."