Freedom Through Obedience

Pope Benedict: Now repeat after me: You put your left arm in, you pull your left arm out....


Via poor, dim K-Lo, it seems the pope had a great deal to say about religious freedom when he visited Cuba. Some truths, it seems, are more equal than others:

...

The truth is a desire of the human person, the search for which always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom. Many, without a doubt, would prefer to take the easy way out, trying to avoid this task. Some, like Pontius Pilate, ironically question the possibility of even knowing what truth is (cf. Jn 18:38), claiming is incapable of knowing it or denying that there exists a truth valid for all. This attitude, as in the case of scepticism and relativism, changes hearts, making them cold, wavering, distant from others and closed. There are too many who, like the Roman governor, wash their hands and let the water of history drain away without taking a stand.

Take that, Megan McArdle! Of course we know what the truth is; it is whatever our authority tells us it is. And our enemies, who refuse to acknowledge that our truth is the only truth, are bad people; cold and indecisive.

On the other hand, there are those who wrongly interpret this search for the truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves up in “their truth”, and try to impose it on others.

Can you believe all those people who insist that their truth is the only truth, which is just irrational and fanatical. If not terroristic. When your religion is the only religion and you are the only person who is right, it just defies logic and reason to refuse to admit the "truth."

These are like the blind scribes who, upon seeing Jesus beaten and bloody, cry out furiously, “Crucify him!” (cf. Jn 19:6). Anyone who acts irrationally cannot become a disciple of Jesus. Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the pursuit of truth. God created man with an innate vocation to the truth and he gave him reason for this purpose. Certainly, it is not irrationality but rather the yearning for truth which the Christian faith promotes. Each man and woman has to seek the truth and to choose it when he or she finds it, even at the risk of embracing sacrifices.

Our belief in our truth is not irrational because we are right and they are wrong. God said so. And if you do not want to "embrace the truth," well, you might just have to make a few sacrifices and do what others want. And if you don't, we have people trying to pass legislation to ensure that you will be forced to acknowledge the truth.

Furthermore, the truth which stands above humanity is an unavoidable condition for attaining freedom, since in it we discover the foundation of an ethics on which all can converge and which contains clear and precise indications concerning life and death, duties and rights, marriage, family and society, in short, regarding the inviolable dignity of the human person. This ethical patrimony can bring together different cultures, peoples and religions, authorities and citizens, citizens among themselves, and believers in Christ and non-believers.

If everyone would just do as the Catholic Church demands, then everyone would be united in obedience! And hey, guys--you're on top! Give a little, get a little, wink-wink. After all, there's nothing more ethical than Christianity!

...

Dear friends, do not hesitate to follow Jesus Christ. In him we find the truth about God and about mankind. He helps us to overcome our selfishness, to rise above our vain struggles and to conquer all that oppresses us. The one who does evil, who sins, becomes its slave and will never attain freedom (cf. Jn 8:34). Only by renouncing hatred and our hard and blind hearts will we be free and a new life will well up in us.

Freedom through obedience!

...

The right to freedom of religion, both in its private and in its public dimension, manifests the unity of the human person, who is at once a citizen and a believer. It also legitimizes the fact that believers have a contribution to make to the building up of society. Strengthening religious freedom consolidates social bonds, nourishes the hope of a better world, creates favourable conditions for peace and harmonious development, while at the same time establishing solid foundations for securing the rights of future generations.

Since Catholicism is the only true religion, Catholics must be free to practice their religion without restraint. Religious belief is essential for one's humanity. Since peace and harmony are inevitable side effects of Christianity, Catholics must be able to dictate social policy.

When the Church upholds this human right, she is not claiming any special privileges for herself. She wishes only to be faithful to the command of her divine founder, conscious that, where Christ is present, we become more human and our humanity becomes authentic. This is why the Church seeks to give witness by her preaching and teaching, both in catechesis and in the schools and universities. It is greatly to be hoped that the moment will soon arrive when, here too, the Church can bring to the fields of knowledge the benefits of the mission which the Lord entrusted to her and which she can never neglect.

Catholics are not asking for special privileges since the worship of Jesus Christ is the basis for the one true religion. Because only Catholicism is a real religion, Catholics must be permitted to control education.

It makes perfect sense to me.

Truth And Consequences

Speaking of brain trusts, James O'Keefe has built up one of his own at Project Veritas, a name that is more wishful thinking than reality. It's very difficult to expose the truth when you don't have the faintest idea how to determine what is true and what is false. People who depend on self-aggrandizing belief systems instead of facts tend to think that a fact is anything that they want to be true.

For instance, someone named Brian Meinders, director of communications at Veritas, in his wisdom and through the use of his keen analytical reasoning, informed Charles Seife, a journalism professor at New York University, that Veritas was owed an apology for something Mr. Seife said on his blog.

Professor,

My name is Brian Meinders, and I'm the Director of Communications for Project Veritas. I've read your blog entry on James and Project Veritas, and am writing to express my concern with several factual errors contained in your post. You wrote that we broke the law by accepting tax deductible donations before having been approved by the IRS as a nonprofit. IRS regulations permit organizations with pending applications to collect donations which become fully tax deductible when the application is processed and accepted. All of the donations in question were consequently fully tax deductible; we did nothing wrong in soliciting them and those of our donors who made them and wrote them off on their taxes also did nothing wrong.

Poor Mr. Meinders. It must be very difficult to embark on a national project of shaming and humiliating our evil liberal evil academic overlords when you are working from a mental and moral disadvantage. You try and try to reveal the truth to the world while, entirely coincidentally, racking up a little fame, money and access to young women, but something always seems to go wrong....

From Professor Seife's response:

Dear Brian,

You were in violation of IRS regulations by claiming that you were 501(c)(3) when your status was pending. If you were a 501(c)(3) as you claimed, you would have been required to furnish it as you yourself admit.

You also told donors that their contributions would be tax deductible when you had no right to say so. As you admit, the contributions only become tax deductible when the 501(c)(3) status is granted.

The fact that the 501(c)(3) status became official later, and those donations did, in fact, become tax deductible are irrelevant to the fact that when I was requesting information -- under the erroneous assumption that your website was accurate about your 501(c)(3) status -- you were in violation of IRS regulations.

Indeed, it seems you were fully aware that you were not in compliance with the law once I pointed it out. Could you explain why you removed the claim of 501(c)(3) status and tax-deductible donations very shortly after I got into contact with Ms. Kluck?

In short, it seems to me that my blog post is entirely factually correct. That being said, though, if you could point to a specific phrase or clause that you believe is factually incorrect, please let me know, and I'll see if a correction is warranted. (Regardless, I am posting your communication to my blog so that your concerns about my post are properly aired.)

Mr. Meinders, through stupidity or malevolence or both, overlooked one little detail--Project Veritas said it had tax-exempt status when it did not; status was pending, not granted. Just as James O'Keefe repeatedly ignored the laws he was breaking in his attempt to humiliate anyone whom he might be able to use as a footstool in his attempts to gain fame and fortune.  Stupid people with stupid goals using stupid methods. Failure is both inevitable and, fortunately, very funny.

Right now Mr. O'Keefe has more than a few problems on his plate. It seems that unattractive but horny young men with neither brains nor morals end up with all sorts of difficulties.

It's a right-wing rabble-rouser showdown! Jazz-handed pimp impersonator James O'Keefe is at "#WAR" with a former Project Veritas colleague who is now blogging an O'Keefe tell-all involving stolen panties, drugged beers, a "rape barn," "taped intimate moments," a $20K pay-off, and barbs about "black welfare queens." James O'Keefe has graduated from creepy seductions to a full-blown sex scandal.
Harvard grad student Nadia Naffe recently filed a criminal harassment complaint against James. Citing insufficient evidence, a judge dismissed the case. Now Nadia is on a scorched earth cyber rampage. "If he wants a fight, bring it on. This is #WAR," she tweeted last night, after retweeting outraged utterances from an unofficial Rubio4President account about James' "rape barn." On her personal blog, she is currently on part two of a sprawling anti-O'Keefe opus.

Since Nadia Naffe also worked with O'Keefe her own character is questionable as well, but as a graduate student at Harvard she is presumably much smarter than O'Keefe. So far O'Keefe has managed to do more damage to others than himself, but it is only a matter of time before he manages to self-immolate.

I'll bring the marshmallows.

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 8

The fantasy.

The reality.

"Dagny is myself, with any possible flaws eliminated, Ayn [Rand] once said."*

Chapter 9 The Sacred And The Profane

When we last visited Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, they were expressing their contempt and disdain for each other by having sex. As our chapter opens, Dagny is sprawled on the bed in post-coital bliss, while Reardon is---not.

"I want you to know this."

He stood by the bed, dressed, looking down at her. His voice had pronounced it evenly, with great clarity and no inflection. She looked up at him obediently. He said:

What I feel for you is contempt. But it's nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don't love you. I've never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore--for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind. You're not. You're as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don't. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who'd tell me that you were capable of doing what I've had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise, not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you--I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal's sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren't we. Well, this is all that's left of us--and I want no self-deception about it.

Reardon goes on to tell her that he wants "no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect," and he will accept the consequences of their act of depravity. Dagny laughs in his face, telling him that she glories in their depravity.

"It's I who will depend on any whim of yours. You'll have me any time you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It's such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please--I'm not afraid to admit it--I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve."

Dagny tells Reardon that her greatest pride in life is to earn the right to be used sexually by him. Reardon has "earned" her through his manly, individualist superiority, and she has earned the right to owned and discarded by him through her own superiority.

When he threw her down on the bed, their bodies met like the two sounds that broke against each other in the air of the room: the sound of his tortured moan and of her laughter.

This is what passes for hot sex in the libertarian universe. But it is in keeping with the libertarian belief that their theories do not need to have any relationship to reality whatsoever. The idle fantasies of young men and women who spent too much time plotting revenge against lesser minds and too little time actually talking to anyone else tend to veer into melodrama and self-aggrandizement, it seems. Nobody, not even libertarians, want to give up love, intimacy, caring, and every other tender emotion so they can force their partner to submit to their crushing superiority, or submit mockingly to the moral defeat of their mate. In her biography of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden, who was able to both adore Rand and see her clearly for what she was from the distance of time, said:

In [Atlas Shrugged]. Francisco presents Ayn's theory of sex, saying."A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.  Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself...He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience--or to fake--a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut...There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.... Love is our response to our highest value--and can be nothing else."

It is an intriguing theory--and a potentially dangerous one, which already had had explosive effects on Ayn's life. It had led her to wildly aggrandize the men who were her sexual choices--Leo and Frank--and it would continue to do so in the future; if the men to whom she was attracted were not heroes, then what would her choices say about her? And it had led her to denounce those of her friends who were not able to demonstrate that their choices were similarly exalted....Few things in life are so complex and so little understood as that which motivates our passionate sexual response; to require, as proof of psychological health, that this motivation lead only to the choice of a "hero," is to inflict, on oneself and others, inestimable damage.

...

In Atlas Shrugged, through the relationship of Dagny and Galt, Rand was creating the "ideal" romance....The passion, the capacity for joy, the hero-worship, the violent sexuality, the longing for submission to a stronger force, that had found its outlet only in her novels, was screaming to be lived before it was too late, and could no longer be denied.

She could not find what she needed with a man who was a contemporary and an equal. Such a man might challenge the whole structure of the fantasy in which she progressively had begun to live--the fantasy in which she was flawless, serene, morally and intellectually superior to those around her, the apotheosis of rationality, the woman without self-doubts or inner conflicts. And so she chose a boy--a brilliant, talented boy, but still a boy, who posed no threat, who revered her and would confirm the fantasy picture she could allow no one to threaten.

Rand coolly informed her husband Frank O'Connor, who was dependent on her financially, and Barbara Branden that she and Nathaniel Branden were going to have an affair. There was nothing Frank could do about it. He was a passive man who had no marketable skills. He had been happy on their California ranch but went along when Rand decided that they would be happier in New York. He had to do what his wife wanted or be out on the street, penniless and to old to start a career. He and Rand had inevitably grown apart and Rand would take out her frustration on him by flying into a rage over small things, or discard friends who disagreed with her image of herself. They were both unhappy, but Rand, according to Barbara Branden, assumed that Frank felt what Rand felt and wanted what Rand wanted.

This is something out of space and out of time. If the four of us were lesser people, it could never have happened and you could never accept it. But we're not lesser people....It's right and rational that Nathan and I between us can last only a few years. I could never be an old woman pursing a younger man.

Of course she was and she did. Branden was 25 and Rand was 50. But Rand convinced herself that her affair was natural and right, just as selfish people who harm others to get their own way always convince themselves that their actions will benefit everyone.  In a 1964 interview with Playboy, Rand explained her philosophy regarding love and happiness.

PLAYBOY: You hold that one's own happiness is the highest end, and that self-sacrifice is immoral. Does this apply to love as well as work?

RAND: To love more than to anything else. When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

PLAYBOY: You have denounced the puritan notion that physical love is ugly or evil; yet you have written that "Indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence are possible only to those who regard sex and themselves as evil." Would you say that discriminate and selective indulgence in sex is moral?

RAND: I would say that a selective and discriminate sex life is not an indulgence. The term indulgence implies that it is an action taken lightly and casually. I say that sex is one of the most important aspects of man's life and, therefore, must never be approached lightly or casually. A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important.

PLAYBOY: Does this mean, in your view, that sex should involve only married partners?

RAND: Not necessarily. What sex should involve is a very serious relationship. Whether that relationship should or should not become a marriage is a question which depends on the circumstances and the context of the two persons' lives. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives -- a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one's choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values.

PLAYBOY: As one who champions the cause of enlightened self-interest, how do you feel about dedicating one's life to hedonistic self-gratification?

RAND: I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality. Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, that pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence, that only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality. To say that pleasure should be the standard of morality simply means that whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. This means that you are to be guided by chance feelings, emotions and whims, not by your mind. My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism. I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means. One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational. It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a rational standard and what are the rational values to pursue.

...

PLAYBOY: Isn't the individual equipped with powerful, nonrational biological drives?

RAND: He is not. A man is equipped with a certain kind of physical mechanism and certain needs, but without any knowledge of how to fulfill them. For instance, man needs food. He experiences hunger. But, unless he learns first to identify this hunger, then to know that he needs food and how to obtain it, he will starve. The need, the hunger, will not tell him how to satisfy it. Man is born with certain physical and psychological needs, but he can neither discover them nor satisfy them without the use of his mind. Man has to discover what is right or wrong for him as a rational being. His so-called urges will not tell him what to do.

Rand's attempt to reduce sexuality to a rational response is, of course, doomed to failure; man does possess instincts and emotions don't always come from reason as Rand theorized. When Rand thought she was using reason to explain her affair with Nathanial Branden she was using rationalization instead. Overwhelmed by the strength and newness of sexual feelings and deeply insecure about their sexual desirability, teenagers might easily envy the self-confidence of the Rand heroes, who have passionate affairs based on mutual recognition of innate superiority. When you are young, Dagny Taggart, Hank Reardon and John Galt might seem like the epitome of heroic and sexual ideals. Barbara Branden said:

Ayn had established herself among her young friends, through the rigor of her argumentation and the forcefulness of her personality, as the epitome and the standard of the human potential, of everything we were struggling to become and everything we loved. I felt that she had given me so much, she had pulled me out of the intellectual morass of adolescence and had helped me to make sense of a complex, confusing world, she had given me friendship, and knowledge, and love. She had opened wide the doors of her own shining world to admit me, she had consistently encouraged me to achieve my most treasured goals, in my work, in my person, in my life; she had healed my wounds and ended my lonely distance from the world around me; she had taught me to exchange the leaking life raft on which I'd floundered for a sturdy, high-speed cruiser; she had shown me the grandeur and the limitless possibilities of existence. It was unthinkable that I should interfere with her happiness or that I should run from the sight of it. She had given me the possibility of mine.

Atlas Shrugged is a power fantasy, and unfortunately Rand's power fantasy was partially sexual in nature; because she did not want to deal with such incoherent, inconvenient things as emotions, all her heroes must be overcome to indulge in them. Dagny must be forced to physically submit and Reardon must be morally overcome, to fulfill Rand's sexual fantasies of power and submission at the hands of a superior man. In her own life Rand chose a passive man who gave into her at all times but her disconnect between fantasy and reality is ignored by her devout followers.

But it's not enough to have gods to worship, one must have demons to despise as well. After we leave Reardon and Dagny to their exalted and violent passion, Rand describes James Taggart's encounter with a young pretty drugstore clerk, Cherryl Brooks. As always, it is striking how today's libertarians sound exactly like the looters and moochers they despise. James says:

"How do you know what's good, anyway? Who knows what's good? Who can ever know? There are no absolutes--as Dr. Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion. How do you know that that [Reardon] bridge hasn't collapsed? You only think it hasn't. How do you know that there's any bridge at all?"

Nobody knows anything ever; nobody can do anything ever. The constant lament of the Megan McArdle libertarians, who ignore facts, reason and logic so they can continue to enjoy the perks and pleasures of being sycophants of the ruling class. James listens to Cherryl praise him for Dagny's accomplishments and escorts her home, giving up the chance to sleep with her because, "He felt nothing. The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure." The scum very conveniently don't feel anything but rage and jealousy in Atlas Shrugged, which is of course why they deserve their eventual and inevitable deaths and destruction.

Meanwhile, Reardon and Dagny continue their well-deserved affair, with Reardon slapping Dagny and twisting her arms behind her back, throwing her on her knees, and Ayn Rand making sure that we know exactly how much pleasure Dagny feels at being treated with cold and angry violence and pain. In Rand's libertarian world it's always Christmas and never winter; Dagny is never harmed more than she wants to be harmed. Reardon simultaneously worships and degrades Dagny, a ridiculous situation that bears no relation on reality. A man as cold, cruel, arrogant and emotionally deadened as Reardon would glory in breaking down another person, making himself feel better by destroying everything good in Dagny, but these characters were never meant to be real people with real emotions. They are Heroes, and their heroic acts are always right.

Part II of The Sacred and The Profane to follow.


*From The Passion Of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden

Guest Posting For Dummies

Do you know how you ensure that you will not be replaced by your guest posters? Find some who are even more bubble-headed than you are. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tells us that the best way to ensure we have no more giant financial crises is to almost completely deregulate the financial system and Avik S. A. Roy tells us that we need to privatize the VA hospital system to end its monopoly of the military health care system. He also tells us that if birth control is free, women will all want expensive "designer" birth control instead of that less-trendy WalMart birth control. Because buying birth control is like choosing a handbag when you're one of those shopping-happy, shallow-brained women creatures. And speaking of which, don't forget Katherine Mangu-Ward, who wants to privatize space exploration so private business can reap the profits--after the government funds the "real science."

It's quite the brain trust.




(I am still working on Atlas Shrugged. I will be working on Atlas Shrugged forever and forever, world without end. Amen.)

Dirty Old Men

It's difficult to figure out why the push-back against Rush Limbaugh finally reached critical mass after all this time. There might be an unspoken factor behind the Rush Limbaugh self-destruction: his aging.

The sight of this old man demanding a young woman's sex tape is enough to turn off anyone. Followers want their leaders to be better than they are, richer and more attractive. (The richer you are the less attractive you have to be.) Once conservatives no longer want to fantasize about having your money (or you), you're toast.

And Sarah Palin is about five years away from having the same problem. When your popularity is based on a fantasy, it only lasts as long as the fantasy lasts.

ADDED: Digby discussed this as well.

Coming Soon(ish): Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 8

Picture from here.

Or, A Phlebotinum, A Train, A Psychopath, And His Lover.

The Greatest Tweet Of All Time

At last, my prayers have been answered! Thank you, Jesus!

Break out the booze, boys, it's time to celebrate!

Megan McArdle is now on book leave!

Click to read the Good News!

McArdle's book will explain how failure leads to success, a field in which she has considerable experience. We look forward to the chapters on choosing the right womb, honing interview techniques  by making girls cry in the rest room, and the use of shopping therapy to squash any inconvenient twinges of conscience. We expect that the central metaphor will be how five year olds must be able to play with spaghetti or we will end up with 80% less corporate innovation.

The only remaining question is, who will replace the irreplaceable McArdle? Who could ever fill her stylish yet affordable shoes?

The Atlantic is happpy to announce that an empty shirt will take the place of Megan McArdle, who is on book leave. We do not know whether she is writing or reading one.

Fair And Balanced

We have been very critical of Megan McArdle here at the Snark so we wish to commend her for her thoughtful and reasonable posts regarding her mother's health care. McArdle notes that our system has its flaws but in the end it is still the best of all possible worlds.

Ultimately, there's never going to be a perfect solution. There are good reasons for families to have a care-giving roles--and good reasons why that's often difficult. It's possible that for all the complaints, the current system represents the right set of tradeoffs: we ask families to pitch in when they can, and provide extra help when they can't.

We wish to praise the braveness with which Ms. McArdle faces the ever-mounting bills, the insurance companies, the lack of sleep, and the lost work opportunities. Not everyone would be as happy to pick up those burdens, especially as time passes and the burdens begin to take their toll. Fortunately we also know that whenever God closes a door he opens a window, and if the insurance companies refuse to pay one can just yell at them, very few people go into bankruptcy for medical bills, and a more socialist type of health care would kill millions.

While I Was Sleeping

While I was sleeping off a headache, Andrew Breitbart slept the Big Sleep. Mr. Breitbart's biggest successes entailed finding easy targets to humiliate with doctored videos so he could smear their employers. He will be greatly missed by those who enjoy seeing minority women humiliated.

Mr. Breitbart, a loving family man, died shortly after going "on a walk" around 9 pm. During his walk he just happened to stop by a neighborhood bar, where he spent a couple of hours drinking and having animated conversations about politics with complete strangers. Less than an hour after he returned home, he was dead.

The conservative world will greatly miss this "happy warrior," who was never happier than when he was engaging his many enemies in a face-to-face shouting match. Early speculation says that he died from a bad heart.

Selective Concern

Just in case we forget how monumentally hypocritical and astoundingly selective Megan McArdle is in her concern for her fellow man:

Federal Worker Pay: How Much is Too Much?
By Megan McArdle

[snipped text]

The right question is not "Would these people make less in the private sector?" It is "Are we getting a high enough quality workforce?" And also "Could we get the workforce we need for less?" At any rate, that's the right question if you view government programs as a means to provide services. If you primarily view them as existing for the benefit of the people they employ, then of course, the right question is "how can we employ even more people at ever higher wages?"

My answer to that last question is a resounding "basta!". My answer to the first is, "I don't know". On the middle issue, however, I think the CBO's data suggest that we could probably get workers with a bachelor's or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality.

People who make $20,000 plus benefits per year make too much and we should be finding a way to make them work for less. People who make $350,000 plus benefits are poor suffering souls who deserve our sympathy because they expected to make much more money.

Pity The Poor Rich Man

Recently someone posted a fake restaurant check that supposedly exposed the callous greed of a One-Percenter. There was no concrete evidence of such a check in the story so it is no surprise that the story was a fake or a plant. Sometimes a post or article seems too good to be true, too close a fit to one's preconceived beliefs, to perfect an expression of one's philosophy of life. Therefore let us look at what most assuredly must be a tantalizing bit of troll-bait purportedly written and posted by Mrs. Megan McArdle with a healthy scepticism. There is no way this could possibly be real.

Just look at the title!

Are the Rich Completely Undeserving of Sympathy?

Give me a break! After instigating an unbelievable amount of flack for her ceaseless support for the very rich, especially the bankster class that has done so much to destroy our country's economy due to their massive greed and callous disregard for the rest of humanity, we are supposed to believe that McArdle actually wrote an article begging us to weep for the wealthy who are forced to cut back on private school tuition because of the crises they helped create?

I saw a fair amount of chortling this morning about this Bloomberg piece on wealthy financial-industry types who are having to cut back because of plummeting bonuses. And to be sure, some of the cuts are in the "Call me a Waaaah-mbulance" category: can't go to Aspen any more? Had to cut back that three-bedroom summer rental to only one month? Why yes, that is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing a dirge.

See? McArdle doesn't have sympathy for the rapacious rich. She doesn't care if the 1%, who spent so much time telling the poor that they are poor because they are immoral and lazy, are less rich than they used to be. That would be hypocritical and, frankly, stupid.

And yet,

Oh, crap.

some of the difficulties that people are complaining about are genuinely, well, difficult. Yes, your kids have been absurdly privileged, getting to attend expensive private schools with lots of amenities. On the other hand, all my parent friends seem to think that it's actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else, particularly in the middle of a school year. I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.

You thought you pitied the child who was forced to camp in a tent or in cheap motel  until you met a child who could no longer afford Choate.

Let's not forget that these are kids we're talking about--we shouldn't take joy in uspetting them, even if their parents happen to make a lot more money than we do.

Kids who grew up to be Megan McArdle or Ross Douthat or Luke Russe[r]t, the next generation of arrogant, privileged jerks who look down on the poor. Nobody owes them a seat at the head table. They can just muddle along like the rest of us in public schools. At least they are still very comfortable.

Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that's perfectly affordable on the income they've been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don't feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them. We recognize that this it is really terrible to be forced out of a home where you've built loads of happy memories and dreams--and not incidentally, to possibly be forced to yank your kids out of the aforementioned schools.

We warned the upper class a long time ago that they were not the true elite, they were vulnerable to the whims of power just like everyone else, and that when the shit hit the fan, they too would suffer. They didn't listen because they were making too much money and were too arrogant to listen to people with less money.

Why are people supposed to shrug off the exact same thing because they're rich? It's still really awful to lose your house. I hardly think it's whining to worry about this when your income drops and your fixed expenses don't.

She's wrong, but she should be used to that by now.

Of course--like many middle class families--wealthy families have taken on many more fixed expenses than they should. In America, at least, we tend to get this stuff backwards.

Yes, the rich are just like middle class families, who are losing their retirement and home and chance to give their kids a college education.

I believe that Elizabeth Warren has made this point--when people get into financial trouble, they often say, "Well, I didn't take fancy vacations or go to restaurants all the time or buy 17 pairs of Jimmy Choos." But (with the exception of some really compulsive spenders) this isn't the stuff that gets people into trouble. It's the big house with the stretch mortgage that you convinced yourself you had to have because it was in a good school district and you needed a yard and a bedroom apiece for the kids. It's that brand new SUV (or Volvo station wagon) you persuaded yourself to buy because it was important to have a safe car. It's the school activities or travel sports teams that cost thousands of dollars, which you let your kids start in ninth grade because you didn't know that you'd have to break their hearts by pulling them out in their junior year. The divorce decree you signed because you didn't realize your income was going to drop by a third.

It takes a person with balls of brass to use The Two Income Trap to support her argument after famously trashing (one of) its author.

Pricey vacations can be cut back. Mortgage payments can't. It's not the luxuries that usually get people into trouble--it's paying too much for "the basics".

And in New York, it's really, really easy to pay too much. One of the guys in the article makes $350,000 and lives in 1200 square feet with three kids. This is the way the lower rungs of the lower middle class lives in the rest of the country. New Yorkers face an overwhelming temptation to push their housing budget to the limit, because what's available on a conservative budget is really inconvenient unless you either make a whole lot of money, or lucked into a great deal in a down market or a transitional neighborhood.

This, from the woman who tells us that she is not here to pay for others' lifestyle choices, and that living in New York is a lifestyle choice. New York real estate prices are why God created New Jersey.

That's not to excuse the folks who spend too much on housing--apartments in vibrant New York neighborhoods are a consumption good, not an entitlement, and people who find the privations unbearable should move to the suburbs. But I certainly understand it--especially because people tend to take cues on what is "safe" or "reasonable" from the behavior of the people around them. Virtually every single person I know in New York spends well over a third of their income on housing. Which is one of the reasons I no longer live in New York.

Another is her lack of success in breaking into the banking industry and the need to move closer to the DC wingnut welfare infrastructure.

I could understand the laughter if the people in the article had been moaning about how terrible and unjust it is to be forced to suffer along on $350,000 a year. But in fact, none of the affluent people he speaks to hold out their experience as somehow equivalent to that of a famine-stricken child in Somalia--"they aren't asking for sympathy", says one source; "I wouldn't want to whine", says another. The closest we get to a "poor little me" is M. Todd Henderson: "Yes, terminal diseases are worse than getting the flu," he said. "But you suffer when you get the flu."

The fact is that no matter how much you make, seeing your income fall below the expenses you've committed to is difficult. Obviously, people whose expenses are closer to the minimum deserve more of our sympathy, and our help. But I'm not sure that this means we're supposed to be happy when it happens to someone richer than we are.

One of the people mentioned in the article McArdle read actually created CDOs. Another spent $17,000 a year on his dogs. Now they are forced to bargain shop for salmon. One poor rich family has to wash their own dishes--or maybe the maid does; these people seem to have a far different idea of poverty than most people.

But on the up side, at least now they have a lower tax bracket and are much less likely to go Galt. No doubt they will be inspired to work even harder, since all rich people became rich through hard work and clean morals. Practicing austerity will make them better people; sacrifice is good for the character. And we have some final advice for the newly less-wealthy: all they have to do is go to school, work hard, put off having kids, get married, and no doubt they'll be back to skiing in Aspen and renting summer cottages in the Hamptons in no time.

Coming Attractions That Never Come

I have not forgotten Atlas Shrugged and will cover the next chapter very soon. However, I have just picked up Ross Douthat's Privilege and will cover its chunky goodness as well. So far in our story, Ross is eternally shocked to discover that nothing is the way he thinks it should be, and he is deeply disappointed in both it and you, whoever you might be.

Let's Meet In The Middle!

Shorter Ross Douthat: In honor of President Eisenhower, we need to settle for a president who is less ideological and more, oh, what is that term I am looking for.....  I know! Middle of the road. Perhaps--centrist.

Power And Money

Power begets money and money begets power. If you have enough money you can buy power, rewriting laws  to your advantage that will make you richer. If you have enough power you can stifle dissent, or at the very least drown it out in a cacophony of attacks. All you have to do is pay out a few million to make billions, for there is always an eager horde who will gladly obey anyone with power. Authoritarian followers are most comfortable in a hierarchy, in which they know whom to obey and whom to force to obey them. They want clearly defined lines, detailed laws and rigid rules. They live to obey their authority; follow his commands, fight his enemies, and sacrifice for his good to prove their devotion.

Naturally, authoritarian leaders enjoy this arrangement very much as well. They believe that laws are for the followers, that they are innately superior to the followers, and that their rightful place is in the lead, reaping their rightful awards. Authoritarian followers who are born to a high position in their hierarchy sometimes think that they are actually authoritarian leaders. We call these people libertarians. Deep inside they realize their proper position on the totem pole but they have enough power and wealth to separate themselves physically above the rabble and they have the full force and power of the real leaders behind their backs. Just as long as they continue to support their leaders, the elite followers can wield an inordinate amount of power against the lower castes.

The elite followers are also highly motivated to wield it in an arbitrary and petty manner, since they must constantly be given proof that they are, indeed, leaders and not lowly followers. One way to do that is through petty power plays, such as jerking around women's health care. Another way is to blandly lie to the lower orders, knowing full well that there is nothing they can do about it. If the looters and moochers complain they can be drowned out by the employees and devotees of the rich. If they start to become dangerous they can be forced to back down by the legal and security systems, which are under the ultimate control of the elite. There is nothing the 99% can do to these liars, and they know it.

In fact, they find it highly amusing to watch the rabble struggle against their betters. They gather on balconies, manicured fingers wrapped around glasses of expensive wine, and laugh at the sheep as they bleat their despair. And they mock the feeble attempts of the poor to hold them accountable for their lies, to be so very pathetic as to think the truth matters, instead of power and wealth.

Which brings us, yet again, to Megan McArdle. As I noted before, Megan McArdle has been on a tear lately, attacking a man who had made himself an enemy of her elite. She has written six posts, a couple of them incredibly long, in the defense of Heartland Institute and the Koch brothers, despite the fact that she says she has no interests in common with either. But they are her elite, and when they are attacked she leaps to defend them, a trait that has made her happy and wealthy. She does not need to be told to obey. Obedience in the service of the elites is a way of life for authoritarian followers. She enjoys it. Her critics make her laugh.

Megan McArdle capped her support of the Koch brothers and the Heartland Institute with a very sarcastic post about an Obama fundraising letter capitalizing on the unpopularity of the Koches.

I just received a new mailer from BarackObama.com. Even before the primaries are finished, Obama is apparently kicking off the campaign against his now-inevitable opponent: the Koch brothers.

Friend -- In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who have bankrolled Tea Party extremism and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.

Obviously, the campaign is not yet fully fleshed out. How will Obama distinguish himself from the Kochs on important issues like the Iranian missile program, gay marriage, and national education standards? How will he counter the favorability boost that the Kochs are expected to get from the fact that their name sounds like a popular soft drink (and will people get confused when pollsters ask them if they prefer "Coke, or Obama")? Will he be courting the paleolibertarians whose hatred of the Kochs is second only to that of the Center for American Progress? How will he counter if the Kochs promise to lower gas prices in exchange for the presidency?

I know it's customary to whine about the permanent election, but I confess, I'm excited to see this one unfold. Sure, it was historic to have our first black president--not to mention the first president who was a professor at my alma mater--and I don't mean to take anything away from that. But it would also be a pretty big landmark to have our first joint presidency.

Not that that will influence my vote, mind you. I vote the issues. Which is why I'm not proffering an endorsement until I know how the Kochs feel about soda taxes and those videos of animals being killed. 

Full disclosure: my husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch foundation.

 I reproduce the entire post so the reader can see the full context and the extent of McArdle's amusement at the presumption of the lower orders to criticize their betters. McArdle, however, did not want to see her amusement  dimmed by any whining and complaining from what she refers to as the "peanut gallery." She did not want to have to fight all those old, embarrassing arguments about her connections to power. She prefers to to think of her self as a witty, intrepid girl reporter, a Hildy Johnson, or perhaps a Dorothy Parker, the feminine shining star of the Algonquin Atlantic Round Table, or a film noir femme fatale, deadly yet seductive. She does not like to think of herself as the willing and sycophantic tool of the elite. So she lied, claiming that "my husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch foundation" was a full disclosure. Sure, it might piss off a few people to repeat this ellipses twice in one week while excoriating Peter Gleick for lying to the Heartland Institute to trick them into sending him some of their propaganda. But who cares? If they do she'll just go on the attack, if she can stop laughing long enough, and there is nothing they can do about it.

susanoftexas 1 day ago
Full disclosure: my husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch foundation.

At Reason magazine, where he still works as associate editor.

From Sourcewatch:

The Reason Foundation is a self-described "libertarian" [1] think tank. The Reason Foundation's projects include NewEnvironmentalism.org and Privatization.org, as well as Reason Magazine[2] It is part of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation network.
The Reason Foundation is funded, in part, by what are known as the "Koch Family Foundations,"[3] and David Koch serves as a Reason trustee. [4]

[From the list of Reason funders]
Between 1985 and 2009, the Reason Foundation received funding from the following sources, in the following amounts: [13]
Koch Family Foundations:
Charles G. Koch Foundation $57,000Claude R. Lambe Foundation $857,000David H. Koch Foundation $1,522,212


[Why does anyone care what the Koches do?]

Koch Industries is also a major polluter. During the 1990s, its faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a landmark penalty of $35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In Minnesota, it was fined an additional $8 million for discharging oil into streams. During the months leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, the company faced even more liability, in the form of a 97-count federal indictment charging it with concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. Koch Industries was ranked number 10 on the list of Toxic 100 Air Polluters by the Political Economy Research Institute in March, 2010. [1][2]
In a study released in the spring of 2010, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the United States’ top ten air polluters. [15]
Republican TiesIf convicted, the company faced fines of up to $352 million, plus possible jail time for company executives. After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.
Koch had contributed $800,000 to the Bush election campaign and other Republican candidates.
Alex Beehler, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, previously served at Koch as director of environmental and regulatory affairs and concurrently served at the Charles G. Koch Foundation as vice president for environmental projects. [16] Beehler was later nominated and re-nominated by the Bush White House, to become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Inspector General. [17]

Ms. McArdle also donated her time to the Koch's IHS [Institute For Humane Studies] 50th Anniversary Dinner; Charles Koch is its chairman.

There is no shame in being closely aligned with billionaires, as Ms. McArdle has noted. Everyone has to be paid by someone. Journalists should all be as open as possible when it comes to their actions, as Ms. McArdle has noted repeatedly in reference to Mr. Gleick.
35 people liked this.


McMegan 1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I am curious to know what you think that this little section has to do with my decision to donate my time to the Institute for Humane Studies, or how that constitutes my being "paid by someone".
19 people liked this.


susanoftexas 1 day agoin reply to McMegan
You want to know what your donation of your time to the Koch brothers has to do with your ties to the Koch brothers? Do you also want to know what your husband's continuing employment at Reason has to do with his ties to Reason?
13 people liked this.


McMegan 1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I didn't donate my time to "the Kochs"; I donated it to the Institute for Humane Studies, an organization whose goals I support. Is anyone who donates time or money to an organization to which George Soros donates also "tied to Soros"? Does that donation somehow constitute getting "paid by" George Soros?
36 people liked this.

Money is fungible on the left, but not on the right, as I pointed out in the comments one of her posts. Any time or money donated to or received from the Koches frees up money to spend on Republican candidates and destroying environmental regulation, or paying fines for wrongful deaths and oil spills.

susanoftexas 1 day agoin reply to McMegan
So you deny that you are affiliated in any way with the Koch brothers.
7 people liked this.


McMegan1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I have met Charles Koch twice, for about a minute each time. I don't think I have never met David Koch. I receive no personal income from the Kochs, nor, to my knowledge, from any institution with which they are affiliated. I believe that David Koch is still a donor to the Reason Foundation, but I do not know that to be the case, and what I write is certainly not affected by that--except to the extent that the tedious disclosures mean that I spend somewhat less time making fun of the hilarious conspiracy-mongering than I otherwise would. The Kochs had nothing to do with my support of IHS, which predates my learning of their existence.

I'm curious, Susan: who's paying you to troll my blog? Could it be . . . SOROS??? Surely you wouldn't waste all this time to so little effect unless someone was paying you, would you?
43 people liked this. Like Reply


susanoftexas1 day agoin reply to McMegan
Like you, I donate my time.
11 people liked this.

Again, McArdle avoids the truth. DC is a community property "state" and half of her husband's income at Reason magazine is hers. For the purposes of her response she pretends that she receives no personal income from the Koches. She easily convinces herself that a magazine supported in part by the Koches, which pays her husband, is a far enough connection to deny it altogether. McArdle also pretends that people do not donate their time or effort and must be paid to do anything. In her youth she had volunteered for various organizations and of course she donated her time to the Koches for their annual Institute of Humane Studies dinner.

When I wrote that comment I did not realize that her involvement with the IHS was far greater than I knew or she led us to believe. McArdle is an alumni alumnus of the IHS Journalism Internship Program and was on the 2011 faculty for their summer seminar program. For which, I am guessing, she did not donate her time.

Shortly after my comments McArdle changed her disclosure, without noting her changes. The new disclosure:

Full disclosure: my husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations. We also sometimes use Vanity Fair paper napkins and Dixie brand paper products, which are owned by the Kochs.

Tee-hee! There's nothing funnier than the yapping of the little people and their silly demands for accountability and the truth.

K-Lo. At Large.

Be Healed
by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Last night I happened upon a healing Mass in the District of Columbia. How’s that for Providential? Talk about answering a call. God sure is timely.

“We are all cracked and broken individuals. We are all broken in one way or another,” the main celebrant said during the homily.

That’s not psychobabble when said before exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. More like “wisdom from above.”

And there were college kids from George Washington University, submitting to the power of prayer, on their knees in front of the Lord God. And staying through the end of a much longer than usual Sunday Mass.

“The mind is the battleground: thoughts ideas and suggestions. Pray for the mind of Jesus,” the homilist had advised.

And so they did. And so we must.

That's right, kids. Submit on your knees to the power from your authority, let your authority's love heal your broken heart,  give up your thoughts to your authority.

Power And Obedience

It's about power.

Children have no power. They are utterly at the mercy of their parents, and if their parents refuse to share power with their children, telling the children that only those in authority can have power and those without must submit to those who do, the children will still feel powerless when they become adults. Adults are not powerless but the habit of obedience has become ingrained in their minds. It is the basis for their relationships with everyone else and the rest of the world. There is a power hierarchy that must be maintained, with the Ultimate Authority on top, the Ultimate Authority's representatives below, and everyone else at the bottom. Everyone must know his place and stay in it.

But power is given, not taken. The authoritarian follower must be persuaded to ignore his own wants and obey the wants of the authority. This is easily done with children; they will do anything to gain their parents' love and approval. Children cannot live without it and are terrified of losing it. So children learn to give in, follow and obey, in exchange for love and belonging. But now we have a dilemma: if authoritarian followers have no authority, where does parental authority come from? And this is where God comes into the hierarchy. God gives authority to his men followers, who give authority over children to their women. No matter how weak and powerless one might feel, nobody can refuse to submit to the Ultimate Authority! God wants you to be good because he loves you and knows what is best for you. God wants you to sacrifice your own wants for his wants and in return he will give you perfect love. You might have to suffer to satisfy his wants but nobody said God wanted you to do what you want, think what you want, or believe what you want. You must submit and obey God, or he won't love you anymore and he will take his perfect, eternal love away from you and leave you alone and unprotected against the terrible dangers of the world.

Most people believe this with their entire being.

Rick Santorum is far from alone in professing a belief in Satan. In fact, most Americans believe in the devil too.

...

While such frank talk about spiritual warfare is uncommon among presidential candidates, surveys over the past few decades have shown that the majority of Americans do believe in Satan.

According to a 2007 Gallup poll, seven in 10 Americans said they believe in “the Devil,” while 8 percent were not sure. Twenty-one percent said they don’t believe in the devil.

Eighty-six percent said they believe in God, while 8 percent were not sure and 6 percent said they don’t believe in God.

A 2009 Harris Interactive survey found 60 percent of American adults believe in the devil, while 82 percent said they believe in God.

...

Santorum on Tuesday defended his 2008 speech.
“You know, I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil,” he told reporters following a rally in Phoenix. “I think if somehow or another, because you’re a person of faith you believe in good and evil [is] a disqualifier for president, we’re going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president.”

Snarr said the media is right to dissect the speech.
"Is the media making too much of it? No. He has chosen to make a very public interpretation of the trajectory of the United States (specifically citing an opposition candidate) and his public political theology should be discussed thoroughly," Snarr said in an email response.

She added: "This is not to say, however, that a belief in Satan or even spiritual warfare puts him at the 'extreme' end of Christianity. Belief in Satan and Satan's activity is present in multiple Christian traditions and particularly important for more theologically conservative evangelical believers— of whom there are many in the U.S."

In religion, good and evil mean obedient and disobedient. We are good when we do what God wants, we are bad when we do what we want. Popular myths tell us that Satan was an angel until he disobeyed God. He thought he was "as God." that is, that he could do what he wanted instead of what God wanted.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The devil is a fallen angel who in his fall has drawn multitudes of the heavenly host in his train. Our Lord terms him "the Prince of this world" (John 14:30); he is the tempter of the human race and tries to involve them in his fall (Matthew 25:41; 2 Peter 2:4; Ephesians 6:12; 2 Corinthians 11:14; 12:7).

In his pride he thought his wants were equal to to the wants of his authority.  Obedience to authority is intricately interwoven into Christianity because it is intricately interwoven into the first and most dependent relationship of our lives,  our relationship with our parents. We believe in God because we believe in obedience to authority. When we need an ultimate authority we just make one up.

When you are trying to enforce belief in an authority, you must persuade people to obey. If someone else does not want to obey authority there is no way he can be forced to be obedient.  If someone would rather die than obey there is nothing the authority can do, and the authority's power is exposed as the weak thing that it truly is. Death is the ultimate act of defiance and no amount of authority can force it to submit.  If you believe that you have the same rights as the authority then the authority has no power over you. The authority must convince you that it has authority over you, getting you to voluntarily obey.

He tells you that disobedience is evil and obedience is good. He promises you rewards (love/freedom from death) in return for obedience and punishment (withdrawal of love/death) in return for disobedience. Most especially, he claims ownership of death (and therefore life). It belongs to God and God alone, as interpreted by God's obedient servants, the male clergy. No euthanasia. No pulling the plug. No abortion or suicide. No birth control. Only authority can kill; government can send men to war or lethally inject but individuals cannot kill.

The struggle is not between good and evil. It is between obedience and disobedience. Authoritarians do not want to force everyone to be good, they want to force everyone to obey. Therefore they will never be satisfied with anything else but public displays of obedience and they will never be satisfied with any single act of obedience. The process is what counts; the public act of submission is to authority is what they crave. The love-starved obedient child must obey to feel a sense of belonging and the resentful, angry, obedient child must force others to obey as he was forced.

They will never be satisfied.

If authoritarians are able to outlaw abortion they will try to outlaw birth control. If they outlaw birth control they will try to outlaw premarital sex. If they outlaw premarital sex they will try to control women's clothing. If they control women's clothing they will try to control women's movements. And always, they will try to control women's thoughts, to convince them to voluntarily give up their power in a public show of submission and obedience.

They are nothing but voices. They have no power except the power that we give them.

Never give up.  Never submit.

Crimes Against Humanity

Yes, this putz actually picked this picture for his bio.

It's bad enough that The Heartland Institute is a think tank that attempts to kill people slowly through reducing regulations on dangerous industries in exchange for money from oil, tobacco and drug companies. (And are admittedly trying to create propaganda for school children.)   But it's downright evil to employ boy plagiarist Ben Domenech  to edit their "Health Care News." His op-eds are, unsurprisingly, the same kind of boiler-plate, rightwing hysteria that he has cranked out ever since he was a toddler pundit.

Some 150 years later their descendants stood shoulder to shoulder in defiance of a distant, tyrannical regime, paying dearly to establish that our rights come from our Creator, not from government, and that no government can take them away.

Obama, Pelosi, Sebelius and their allies clearly think otherwise. But it’s possible they have crossed a line here that is without national precedent. And some lines, once crossed, set in motion changes in the course of human events. In the end, free people either allow their nations to slide into full acceptance of the denial of human liberty, or gather in uprisings against tyranny around such dangerous ideas as “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

He's talking about contraception coverage but he could be discussing anything. That's the sort of crap you can crank out in your spare time between loading up your Amazon cart and wandering your neighborhood in search of hipster pubs. It's enough to make you feel sorry for billionaire industrialists. They had to cheat and steal to get their money. Their pundits have to do little more than fart out some well-worn copy and light up a celebratory cigar.

Liars

Nothing disturbs Megan McArdle more than dishonesty, especially in professional circumstances. She was just devastated about the Heartland Institute document leak, and simply cannot believe that Peter Gleick lied to get them. She has written five posts on the matter and promises us more, as she is utterly fascinated by fakery in the media. In her latest post, McArdle wonders how anyone could ever be so unprofessional as to lie.

[...] I am not surprised by leaks--but I was very surprised that a man of Gleick's stature would take this sort of risk, on such flimsy evidence.

It is, on the other hand, perfectly acceptable to pass on propaganda when a drug company employee tells you that 80% of drug company profits come from the US, and therefore health insurance reform will kill innovation. It is also acceptable to believe whatever you are told from company flacks without question--and without proof.

 

Scientists and journalists are held to higher standards than, say, your average computer hacker. Trust in our work product is dependent on our personal integrity, because it can't always be verified independently.

 

Which is why an Ivy League reputation is so very useful. People assume you know more than you actually do. And when you lie to your readers they can't verify the information, which you are at pains to point out.*

Impersonating an actual person is well over the line that any reputable journalist needs to maintain. I might try to get a job at a Food Lion to expose unsafe food handling. I would not represent myself as a health inspector, or the regional VP. I don't do things that are illegal--at least, not things that are illegal in the stable western democracy in which I live.

McArdle is far too careful for that. She also would never be so foolish as to admit that she had done anything wrong; she makes up new lies every time an old lie is exposed.

 

Nor would I ever, ever claim that a document came from Heartland unless I had personally received it from them, gotten them to confirm its provenance, or authenticated it with multiple independent sources.

 

Instead she would accept a fake statistic and lie that she had seen corroborating evidence on financial statements.

 

Or perhaps she would read a grossly wrong blog post, not bother to check any sources, and tell her audience that the Black Panthers carried guns at a Bush rally.

 

Or lie about Goldman, Sachs to a television audience.

But she would never break the law.

 

McArdle is so distraught by the Heartland deception that she goes on to insinuate, without actually accusing him, that Gleick himself wrote the allegedly fake memo. But even if he did not write it, there must be something terribly wrong with a person who would lie to further his agenda.

 

And ethics aside, what Gleick did is insane for someone in his position--so crazy that I confess to wondering whether he doesn't have some sort of underlying medical condition that requires urgent treatment. The reason he did it was even crazier. I would probably have thrown that memo away. I might have spent a few hours idly checking it out. I would definitely not have risked jail or personal ruin over something so questionable, and which provided evidence of . . . what? That Heartland exists? That it has a budget? That it spends that budget promoting views which Gleick finds reprehensible?

Jail? Personal ruin? Why would he worry about those? It's perfectly okay to lie to further your agenda. As long as you never admit you it and your agenda is backed by right-wing billionaires, that is. Otherwise you will find yourself in serious trouble, when the liars on the right toss you into the churning machinery of their propaganda machine.





*McArdle: "But they were not speaking on the record, and financial statements are not necessarily a very good guide to allocating the net profitability of a drug, because of various tedious pricing strategies involving market timing that you can read about in an exhaustive volume from the OECD that I have on my desk, if you want to come to my office, or spend $100 to buy it yourself."

K-Lo A Go Go

Sweet joy in the morning, Kathryn Jean Lopez has her very own little blog!

Oh, honey. Are you sure about that title?

Title aside, K-Lo is a busy little bee. There are fetuses to save and priest to praise, and K-Lo gets right to work. K-Lo qutoes Timothy Dolan on the even of his promotion to cardianl.

“As grateful as I am for being a Cardinal, I really want to be a saint,”Cardinal Dolan said to the media after the Feb. 18 ceremony. “I mean that, and I’ve got a long way to go but it is all about holiness, it is all about friendship with Jesus and it is all about being a saint. And that’s what I want to be.”

Cardinal Dolan said he was particularly moved by the announcement of two new American saints at the conclusion of the consistory.

In total, Pope Benedict announced seven new saints who will be canonized on Oct. 21. The group includes Blesseds Marianne Cope and Kateri Tekakwitha, who will become the first Native American to be declared a saint.

Cardinal Dolan said he recognized this week that his elevation means having to resist the unholy lure of power and prestige.

“I said, ‘Dolan you got temptations.’ I’ve always had them, but now I’ve got one that could go to my head – literally,” he said, pointing to his new red biretta hat. He told himself,” ‘you can’t (let that happen) because it is all about humility and it is all about service and love and staying close to God and his people. That’s what it’s about it’s not about power and prestige.’”

Bless his humble heart. It's all about God's people. Well, some of God's people.

As an auxiliary Roman Catholic bishop, Dolan was criticized for his handling of Roman Catholic priests accused of sexual misconduct, accused of being on a "witch hunt" to dismiss abusive priests.[6] He spoke with parishes, victims, and the media about the scandals, and invited victims of clerical abuse to come forward.[6] Commenting on his meetings with them, Dolan said, "...[i]t is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation, and the suffering that victims feel, because I've spent the last four months being with them, crying with them, having them express their anger to me."[51] In 2011, Dolan thanked Bill Donohue for a press release, reproduced on the Archdiocese of New York website, in which Donahue referred to the non-profit support group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests a "phony victims' group".[52]

The little whiners.

The Voice Of God: Hear And Obey

It was a dark and stormy night and Ross Douthat tossed fitfully in his sleep, his soft damp hands clinging to Nursie Bear and his soft, damp whimpering following the lightning strikes like a particularly annoying type of thunder.

In his dream, God's voice rolled through Ross's mind.

"ROSS DOUTHAT!"

"Yes, God? It's me, Ross," dream Ross answered.

"I know that, Ross. That's why I called your name. Ross, I have a mission for you. It's come to my attention, being omniscient as you know, that women are still having sex without my permission. This must stop."

"I'm trying, God! I tried to tell women to stop having abortions but they ignored me. Then I tried to get them to stop taking birth control but they ignored me again. Why does everyone ignore me?" Ross mumbled.

"Ross, you need to tell women to stop having abortions and using birth control. If that doesn't work, try to get on their good side. Find something that both sides can agree on, something moderate. Women want to get married, right? They read wedding magazines and go to romantic comedies and wear pink dresses and have babies. Tell them that birth control kills babies, Ross! Save the eggs, Ross, and save the world!" God thundered in unconscious imitation of Heroes, which He was currently watching on Netflix.

"I'll do it, God! I'll tell those women to submit to my, I mean your, will!"

You almost have to admire the stupid son of a bitch. He just doesn't give up. When the anti-contraception attack on women's freedom backfired, Ross Douthat decided that "safe, legal and rare" had to be winning argument. At last! The magic words that will bring the right and left together to control all those sluts who are having sex without holding God in between their legs like the proverbial aspirin!

The ‘Safe, Legal, Rare’ Illusion
By ROSS ["Every Egg Is Sacred"] DOUTHAT

AMID the sound and fury of the latest culture-war battles — first over breast cancer dollars and Planned Parenthood, and then over the White House’s attempt to require that religious employers cover contraception and potential abortifacients — it’s easy to forget that there is at least some common ground in American politics on sex, pregnancy, marriage and abortion.

And we all know that sound and fury signify nothing, don't we? So let's watch Douthat set up a convenient straw man to put in between clean, sex-free Ross Douthat and all those harlots who want to have sex.

Even the most pro-choice politicians, for instance, usually emphasize that they want to reduce the need for abortion, and make the practice rare as well as safe and legal.

Oh Ross. We are so disappointed in you.  Guess what is missing from your missive? Gone from your Goliad? Vacant from your Vitae? Women. The people who are actually affected by Douthat's distaste for sex. We don't care what politicians think or say as long as they leave these decisions to the individual.

Even the fiercest conservative critics of the White House’s contraception mandate — yes, Rick Santorum included — agree that artificial birth control should be legal and available.

Douthat can't write two paragraphs about women's naughty parts without lying. Rick Santorum does not want birth control to be legal and available.

Candidates often say things when polling in the single digits that come back to haunt them when they start leading the polls. Last October, Rick Santorum gave an interview with an Evangelical blog called Caffeinated Thoughts, in which he said contraception is “not okay,” and that this would be a public policy issue he would tackle as President. In particular, he said he would “get rid of any idea that you have to have abortion coverage or contraceptive coverage” as a government policy.

Heck, let's let him speak for himself.

 One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”


It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure. And that’s certainly a part of it—and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong—but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.

Again, I know most Presidents don’t talk about those things, and maybe people don’t want us to talk about those things, but I think it’s important that you are who you are. I’m not running for preacher. I’m not running for pastor, but these are important public policy issues. These how profound impact on the health of our society.

Fortunately His Frothyness will never be president. Back  to Douthat:

And both Democrats and Republicans generally agree that the country would be better off with fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer unwanted children, fewer absent fathers, fewer out-of-wedlock births.

We also think the country would be better off with fewer wars, fewer give-aways to banks, fewer broken laws and fewer bombings, but sadly we don't seem to have any choice in those matters.

Where cultural liberals and social conservatives differ is on the means that will achieve these ends. The liberal vision tends to emphasize access to contraception as the surest path to stable families, wanted children and low abortion rates.

No, the liberal vision is a world in which celibate or nearly celibate men are not crouching between our legs, terrified that women will get to control their own lives instead of letting men control them.

The more direct control that women have over when and whether sex makes babies, liberals argue, the less likely they’ll be to get pregnant at the wrong time and with the wrong partner — and the less likely they’ll be to even consider having an abortion. (Slate’s Will Saletan has memorably termed this “the pro-life case for Planned Parenthood.”)

No, liberals argue that our sexuality is nobody's business but our own.

The conservative narrative, by contrast, argues that it’s more important to promote chastity, monogamy and fidelity than to worry about whether there’s a prophylactic in every bedroom drawer or bathroom cabinet.

To the extent that contraceptive use has a significant role in the conservative vision (and obviously there’s some Catholic-Protestant disagreement), it’s in the context of already stable, already committed relationships.

Here we can see the creaky wheels of Douthat's head turn as he tries to avoid saying anything that might turn off his audience while also trying to convince his audience to support his sexual hang-ups. Douthat hopes to tell everyone that the Catholic Church doesn't really care all that much about condoms because the Church said that it's a worse sin to infect a sexual partner with a disease than to use a condom. That would not fool a small child, if Douthat happened to lecture a small child about contraception, which he probably has. Douthat gives the men in the audience a wink and a nudge, saying that it's kind of okay for men to use condoms but those sluts women can just forget about any birth control and do when the men tell them to do.

Monogamy, not chemicals or latex, is the main line of defense against unwanted pregnancies.

Married women don't want to be breeders either. Married women use birth control and have abortions. Poor Douthat; he is fated to eternally flounder around in the hope of finding the magic word that will stop all that screwing around.  "Monogamy" seems like a winner, right? Who could knock that?

The problem with the conservative story is that it doesn’t map particularly well onto contemporary mores and life patterns. A successful chastity-centric culture seems to depend on a level of social cohesion, religious intensity and shared values that exists only in small pockets of the country. Mormon Utah, for instance, largely lives up to the conservative ideal, with some of America’s lowest rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births and abortions. But many other socially conservative regions (particularly in the South) feature higher rates of unwed and teenage parenthood than in the country as a whole.

Mormons are sure are conservative!   (Say, isn't that Mitt Romney feller a Mormon? ) But married Mormon women use birth control too.

Early church leaders took strong stances against the use of birth control, but that position has progressively softened until now the membership is counseled to make its own decisions (Heaton& Calkins,1 983). Members have been encouraged to control fertility only for "unselfish reasons," such a s the health o f the mother, and to avoid the more worldly excuses, such as finances ( Burr, Yorgason, & Baker, 1982). The most recent official pronouncement from the First Presidency of the church was sent to the local church  leaders in April, 1969. It said in part:

Where husband and wife enjoy health and vigor and are free from impurities that would be entailed upon their posterity, it is contrary to the teachings of the Church artificially to curtail or prevent the birth of children. We believe that those who practice birth control w ill reap disappointment by and by.

However, Mormons are just as likely as the national population to use birth control to space their children, though they use it less frequently and start later (Heaton & Calkins, 1-983).

Now that Douthat has set up his strawman, he lets it fight his mighty battle against screwing.

Liberals love to cite these numbers as proof that social conservatism is a flop. But the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well. To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

At the same time, if liberal social policies really led inexorably to fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions, you would expect “blue” regions of the country to have lower teen pregnancy rates and fewer abortions per capita than demographically similar “red” regions.


But that isn’t what the data show. Instead, abortion rates are frequently higher in more liberal states, where access is often largely unrestricted, than in more conservative states, which are more likely to have parental consent laws, waiting periods, and so on. “Safe, legal and rare” is a nice slogan, but liberal policies don’t always seem to deliver the “rare” part.


What’s more, another Guttmacher Institute study suggests that liberal states don’t necessarily do better than conservative ones at preventing teenagers from getting pregnant in the first place. Instead, the lower teenage birth rates in many blue states are mostly just a consequence of (again) their higher abortion rates. Liberal California, for instance, has a higher teen pregnancy rate than socially conservative Alabama; the Californian teenage birth rate is only lower because the Californian abortion rate is more than twice as high.

That's one powerful strawman, Ross! It's just too bad that Douthat's imaginary argument is an irrelevant issue that has nothing to do with individual choice and freedom from religious control.

These are realities liberals should keep in mind when tempted to rail against conservatives for rejecting the intuitive-seeming promise of “more condoms, fewer abortions.” What’s intuitive isn’t always true, and if social conservatives haven’t figured out how to make all good things go together in post-sexual-revolution America, neither have social liberals.

And since nobody is perfect and Douthat has convinced the world that the Catholic Church never wanted to eradicate birth control, those liberals better be a little more humble towards their conservative brethren, and let the Pope tell them what they are and are not permitted to do.

At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight.

(How can Douthat bear to live in that den of sin, with women aborting their babies right and left before his very eyes? Or rather in the privacy of their doctor's office after making their very personal decision?)
 
By golly, as long as even one woman has an abortion, the left had better shut up and do what it's told. And by the left, Ross Douthat means the women.