The Necropolitan Sentinel

This blog's policy is now to add "Acting" before the official title of anyone in the [scandal plagued Obama] administration, even if they are temporary or non-confirmed officials with "Acting" already in their titles.

Examples: Acting Attorney General Eric Holder, Acting National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Acting White House Spokesman Jay Carney, Acting POTUS Barack Obama.

Thanks.

More suggestions here.

I don't know whether Glenn Reynolds has mentioned that the InstaWife has a new book out, called Men on Strike, but here's a link. Nor am I certain that Stacy McCain has announced that Young Private McCain graduated Airborne last night, but somehow Harvard Distinguished Visiting Fellow Soledad O'Brien got wind of it:

@rsmccain great article.And congrats to him.

— Soledad O'Brien (@Soledad_OBrien) May 18, 2013

UPDATE: Bob Belvedere discovers I am channeling Al Jolson, because that's the way I jelly roll.

Jeff shares his nausea over yesterday's Benghazi testimony and the Dem/media reaction:

Having said all that, I’ll now offer this:  Jay Carney, like Bill Richardson before him in a different context, is precisely right:  this entire investigation is in fact political.  And that’s because we have in the Democrats a party that is committed to power and deconstructing cultural standards.   What they are not in any way committed to is any set of truths save for those they manufacture and can drive by way of perception and repetition and a compliant governmental mouthpiece masquerading as a free press:  they have rejected the very notion of any reality outside of the reality the create and nurture; they have surrendered the desire for obtaining a measure of objectivity (which they know cannot be reached in its purest form) for the linguistic turn, the ability to use the failures of metaphysical objectivity to promote an epistemology that is based almost entirely on consensus and a will to power.

Once this commitment is made, the rest becomes about winning that battle by controlling the means to garnering consensus and power:  the press, the culture, the academy, the very kernel assumptions of the language.  Which is why I’ve long called this — our first New Left presidency — the postmodern presidency, a faculty lounge cabal whereby all the theoretical work produced by left-wing sociologists and linguists and economists, driven by a desire to upset the paradigm of individual autonomy and a shackled, dispersed government and to undercut the Enlightenment, has been marshaled into a governing strategy whose aim it is to demonize individualism and to destroy capitalism.  Fundamental transformation, with the leftist academics and activists living out their dream of ruling a Utopia of their engineering.

So yes, it is political.  And the personal being the political in the leftist mind, it is impossible to escape being political.  Making their accusations that the Republicans are politicizing Benghazi by way of looking for objective truths a truism in their minds, there being nothing outside of the political, the perceptional, the manufactured and finessed and controlled.

Embrace this accusation:  to  left wing Democrats, the very notion that we can find truths by combing through facts is “political”; or to put it another way, truth is nothing more to them than a political posture.  They have made that claim and now they should be forced to have it hung around their neck permanently.

I have to say, I share those feelings with him, and I think that his diagnosis is correct. People have to undergo a lot of indoctrination in order to become so fundamentally screwed up.

Bob Belvedere looks closely at one of the registers in which liberation anti-theology is playing out. This liberation consists in making yourself and your fellow citizens slaves to libido, apparently, with 13-year-old girls as legal anthropomorphic Fleshlights.

Duane Lester's is the best single video treatment regarding the core issues here that I've seen so far:

Via Danger in the comments to my last post, the best video round-up I've seen so far is here.

The best-contrasted images:

A little reminder about Hillary's involvement in the Watergate investigation. I had, by the way, to use Bing to find that image, which I'd seen on Facebook earlier in the day, because for some reason it's hard to find on Google. (And who could forget Ted Kennedy's actually treasonous bargaining with "the odious Yuri Andropov"? Well, just about nobody, because most people were never made aware that the Lion of the Senate was a partisan quisling.)

Not entirely unrelated is this video of the mother of a SEAL killed, at least in part, due to the ridiculous counter-Muslim-offending ROE imposed on her son and his comrades:

Via Meep, how I feel when I watch the media covering for this.

Having said that, I'm hoping someone will do a supercut of all the vicious, insulting, demeaning, bald-faced, self-serving lies various administration officials have told about Benghazi, interspersed with testimony that contradicts them. It would run about 45 minutes, I'm guessing, and the person who did it would have to be sure he wasn't violating his parole or probation. Then you could add in the worst of the MSM coverage, and, voila! you'd have a full-length feature.

I know Film Ladd is retired, but maybe you all could propose a Kickstarter project to him, nudge-nudge.

UPDATE: Guy Benson has the best round-up of the Benghazi revelations stemming from Wednesday's hearing, with the caveat that there was one class of security shortfalls from established guidelines that Secretary Clinton had to sign off on. Whoever was responsible for signing off on the others has probably not been called to account, though some folks did get the underbus treatment.

People who keep a watch on murderous Islamist supremacists tell us always to listen, not to what they say to Western media outlets for the public consumption of the dhimmis, but to what they say to one another. What they say to one another is, we are waging war for Allah, and anyone who is not with us is against us. A distinction between the temporal state and religion is not at all what they are about. Even though the progressive project is meant to drive religion out of the public sphere, on the grounds that it is fanatical and dangerous, and impedes the establishment of the earthly paradise of socialized Utopia, sec-progs continue to coddle the Islamists in their midst, while demonizing Christians in general. The idea of a differentiation between the functions of church and state is unique in world history, and arises out of the Old Testament stories of High Priests on the one hand, and Kings on the other, then secured by the Crucified Jew's statements regarding rendering what is Caesar's to Caesar and declaring that His Kingdom is not of this temporal world. Secular progressivism agrees with Islamist supremacists that there should be no such distinction, but differs in that their set of values and ideology.has no apparent religious content. Still, they treat those precepts as if they were religious injuctions carved on tablets of stone and handed down by stern moralizers from the mountaintop of theory. The Howard Kurtz episode over Jason Collins is a good example of what happens when one who is privileged to have a voice in their media complex steps out of line:

Howard Kurtz had to arrange his own interrogation the other day on CNN’s Reliable Sources, inviting two very somber media reporters to appear and question him about the high offense of having blogged out of tune on the Jason Collins story. A few other lesser offenses — such as the time he confused Congressman Darrell Issa for his spokesman — were also probed, but clearly it was his mishandling of a gay icon that had precipitated this august proceeding.

By the end of the segment, Kurtz looked a bit disoriented, having agreed to a string of “reckless” errors and damaged credibility. But he duly thanked his interrogators for a “fair” inquiry.

The segment was ideological policing masquerading as media criticism. Kurtz’s supposedly catastrophic misreporting on the Jason Collins story consisted of saying in a blog post that he had failed to disclose that he was once engaged when in fact Collins had written as much in his coming-out story in Sports Illustrated. As one of the questioners put it with comic gravity, Kurtz had failed to “fully and adequately” read the story.

This oversight was treated by one and all during the segment as a monstrous error, to be spoken of and scrutinized tremulously, for it smacked of moral and attitudinal defects in Kurtz . . . .

The grotesquery continued with Niall Ferguson's public self-excoriation for having suggested that John Maynard Keynes's economic philosophy might have been influenced by his sexual orientation and the general Bloomsburian YOLO ethos.

Taboos defining what can and cannot be said or done in 'decent society' all emerge from a dominant ethos. While they are all paranoiacally bendering over fears of a Christianist totalitarian plot ripped from the pages of The Handmaid's Tale, the supporters of the Progressive Agenda are happy to enable Obama in his project of undermining the limitations on executive power specified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They're so anxious to have their Utopia that they really never think that they are paving the way for totalitarianism, which might take forms that they have not anticipated. A couple of days ago, Obama told a group of university students not to listen to alarmists who believe that Big Government will have too much power to run their lives, despite the extraordinary care of the Founding Fathers, who knew a thing or two about tyranny, to make it clear that the constitutional apparatus of a Republic that they were putting in place was designed to prevent government from having too much power over citizens' lives. Joe Biden then went out and thundered before a different audience that all and any checks on voting were fundamentally immoral. There are some pretty good reasons to restrict voting to citizens who are properly registered to vote, but partisans wish to extend the privilege to anyone who happens to be in the country under whatever circumstances at all are claiming that it is a matter of civil, if not human rights, that you permit the value of citizenship to be defined down to virtually nothing. You may recall that a Guardian writer in 2004 argued that because US elections have such consequences for people abroad, they ought to be able to vote in them. The Founders were rather more sober about sovereignty, although an alarming number of Senators voted to cede legislation regarding guns to the UN . . . a prospect for which there is no constitutional authority whatsoever. The sec-progs want to recast as indecent and immoral any such objection, at least if made aloud in the public sphere. And as Jonathan Adler noted yesterday, states have the right, despite what the Department of Justice might claim, to opt to enforce federal laws or not enforce them. Federal officers may enforce federal laws in those states, but a state itself has no obligation to apply its resources to the enforcement of laws that it doesn't wish to enforce. On the other hand, the President is bound to execute the laws as they are written, not as he chooses. It is so specified in the Constitution and by the imperious "shall" of his oath of office. In a society that had a decent regard for the actual law, with a functional press, Holder and Napolitano would be hounded out of office for publicly proclaiming that in their view the executive branch has the privilege of deciding which laws to enforce and which not. So, the executive branch refuses to enforce immigration law as written, and attempts to prevent state laws regarding immigration, and wants to be rewarded for their lawlessness with the passage of a new immigration law that will automatically confer citizenship on millions, with an estimated cost of $6.3 trillion, at a time when the US is already $15 trillion in debt.

At the time that Obama ran against Bush the younger, back in 2008, though John McCain was the Republican nominee, and a bad one at that, it was, in his view, immoral to shackle the nation with such debt. He promised as a candidate to halve the federal debt by the end of his first term, but inflated it instead at just short of twice the rate of Bush the Younger. Suddenly, the immorality of such borrowing against the wages of future generations ceased to be immoral. If you search Google, you will discover some 22.5 million occasions of writers using the formula "grim milestone" to describe numbers attached to bad things that occurred under the Younger Bush. It became so hackneyed a formula that we mocked it. But although the number of combat deaths, particularly in Afghanistan, has accelerated under Obama, and the actual number of wars in which we are now engaged, whether declared or undeclared has actually increased, there are only 448k uses of the formula "grim milestone" in relation to Obama compiled by Google. The ubiquitous street marches to stop the wars, depicting Bush as a monster with vampire teeth, and Cheney as a Sith Lord, have all miraculously vanished, leading one to suspect that the anti-war elements weren't really very anti-war, in the main, but concerned with agitprop in the service of the Progressive agenda. What rankled about Bush was that he was ideologically opposed to at least some of their domestic agenda, not that he was a warmonger, though being ideologues many of them were probably unaware of their rank hypocrisy.

A functional press might point such matters out, but we do not have a functional press. When the administration lied about Benghazi, badly, the press, with a handful of notable exceptions such as Sharyl Attkisson, decided that it was more important to protect an administration whose policy agenda they supported than actually to inform Americans that they had been lied to. In the presidential debates between Obama and Romney, Candy Crowley even went out of her way to try to help Obama create the false impression that he had declared the attack at Benghazi a terrorist action immediately after it happened. Numerous others, who ought to have known better, touted the State Department's buggered up self-investigation by the ARB as evidence that Republicans and the Fox network had tried to mislead the American public into believing that there was a scandal regarding the administration's inaction before and during the attack on the mission in Benghazi, and an attempted cover up. As I've tried to show, the President attempted to pin blame on Innocence of Muslims to create a pretext for mau-mauing America into voluntarily weakening its First Amendment right to criticize Islam and Islamists as it sees fit. For some reason, he found it necessary not only to deny that administration incompetence had resulted in the deaths of those Americans, but also to turn it into an opportunity for extortion on the behalf of Islam, in the name of which the Ambassador and his companions had been assassinated.

Director of National Intelligence head James Clapper may not have been the person who altered the Benghazi talking points, but he certainly knows who did. Those points were stripped of all references to al Qaeda and its affiliates at the direction of Victoria Nuland, responding to pressure from her superiors, who did not wish to be held responsible for having repeatedly refused requests for better security from those on the ground in Benghazi. The Department of State was aware that al Qaeda affiliates were in Libya, they were aware of other attacks against Western targets, they were aware that Benghazi was a famous source of jihadists for radical Islam in all parts of the Muslim world, and they were aware that the US mission was essentially "the last flag flying" in that city. Despite knowing all those things, and despite the ominous warnings from the Ambassador and those responsible for security, and despite the local Islamist militia's telling them that they would no longer provide cover, they went ahead and found a security firm that would provide guards who had no bullets, because their over-riding concern was that they not offend Libyans. When the compound was overrun, and the survivors made it to their fallback location to be attacked again, they did nothing. Leon Panetta subsequently claimed that nothing could be done, and the lapdog media lapped up this spilled saucer of shinola with relish. The pivot from overriding concern for the sensitivities of Libyans to CYA was so abrupt that Susan Rice went on Face the Nation to contradict the Libyan President, who had appeared minutes before and told America that the murders in Benghazi had been carried out by Islamist terrorists. Even now, Clapper cannot bring himself to tell America who those terrorists were. As Charles Krauthammer astutely surmised, Obama blessed State's fictions because it was convenient in the context of his election campaign. He'd been at pains to show that the execution of bin Laden demonstrated that al Qaeda was "on the run" throughout the globe. Al Qaeda had other messaging ideas.

Everybody has ideological blind spots, but most people do not gin up pretexts for imposing them on other people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster caused by one. Islamists say to one another, and sometimes to us, that they consider us enemies and wish to kill us wherever and however they can. The Brothers Tsarniev were radicalized here in the United States, it is true. But they were radicalized in the US by people who are hostile to the US and what it represents, including secularism, and by jihadists abroad whose messages are available over the Internet. Secularists cannot begin to wrap their heads around these facts, because they are inconsistent with their ideology, and their ideology concerning Islam is perfectly incoherent. In the wake of the Boston bombings, many of them were more concerned that there should be a backlash against Muslims as a result, should it be discovered that the bombers were Muslim. It was their duty to try to derail this train of speculation, rather than to withhold judgment, as they later counselled us all to do, after they'd had their go at predicting that it would be TEA Partiers or Christianists, or Anybody But Muslims. Much of the preemptive obfuscation was rooted in the multi-culti aspects of their ideology. They were afraid that if it did turn out to be Islamist terrorists after all, there would be a backlash. But the backlash that they feared the most was not that the animals who do not share their ideology would become violent towards Muslims, but against their ideology per se, which they share with the President, Hillary, and their progressive minions in government, think tanks, universities, and the press. They hypercathected in an attempt to prevent the reality of Islamist terrorism from seeping into the public psyche, and their own. When it was discovered that the bombers were Muslims after all, they attempted to minimize the importance of that information.

A survey whose results were published at HuffPo shows that a plurality of Americans does not believe that there is much of a link between Islam and violence. That is the result of ideological indoctrination, which is aimed at making it indecent to posit such a link, much less to assert one. The story in the Muslim world is very different, as represented by Pew, who did the survey touted in the HuffPo. In their poll of Muslims living in Muslim dominated countries, Muslims voiced the opinion at the ratio of about 4:1 that they were more frightened at the prospect of Islamist extremist violence than Christian extremist violence. In most of those countries, they live with it quite a bit more than we do, but the Progressive ideologues aren't really interested in what they have to say. They know better. Yes, of course we should be concerned about their sensitivities, but we needn't concern ourselves with their knowledge, because we derive ours from ideology, which is much more reliable than actual experience.

That's arrogant, perhaps, but it's the typical result of ideological brainwashing that exalts theory over empiricism, because theory directs attention to certain data by making it relevant, and away from other data by making it irrelevant. Stacy can point a Progressive at a mountain of evidence that Howard Zinn was in fact an important member of the Communist Party USA, and linked to numerous other communist front groups in the US whose guidance came from Moscow, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the information was collected by the FBI, and therefore cannot be trusted, although Zinn is unimpeachable, even if you can prove that he lied about being a member of CPUSA. Among Zinn's contributions to US education, apart from his People's History, which demonstrates to students in American public schools that the US is the most horrible nation on the face of the earth ever in history, and that they must feel guilty for it, and embrace socialism and change their country, is another one debunking the myth of US exceptionalism. Despite the manifest failures of communism, which is what Zinn is arguing for in fact, and despite the enormous body counts attributable in recent history to communist regimes, far exceeding those in capitalist democracies in the same period, and despite their imperialism, what will be exceptional instead is the manner in which communism will be made manifest in the US, where it will be benevolent. Meanwhile, Obama goes to Mexico to tell the Mexicans that their problems are largely the result of their propinquity to Yankeedom, including the violent convulsions that his administration helped to create by handing 'assault weapons' to drug mafiosi, by deliberately suppressing the enforcement of the laws regarding the sale of firearms. 

Benghazi and Fast and Furious were both administration-driven disasters, and in both cases the administration has tried to capitalize on them to advance its agenda. They have the stones to blame you, citizen, and it is you who must change to prevent more bloodshed.

It's embarrassing to have to revisit this fact, yet the necessity is once more upon me. Today, David French wrote at NRO, following the Breitbart story, to reiterate the media's complicity in advancing Obama's radical agenda. In particular, he noted a column by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post's "On Faith" section lending authority to Mikey Weinstein's wacko belief that the US military is full of fundamentalist Christian "dominionists" seeking world domination who are anti-semitic, misogynistic Islamophobes, bent on "spiritually raping" those over whom they have authority by proselytizing. In the comments, many secular humanist numbskulls jumped in to express their vivid imaginings of the coming Christianist totalitarian state that would be ushered in by the "militarized Christianity" forced upon their cohort by these very dangerous people.

Included in Quinn's argument was a complaint, brought by a military college student, that one of his teachers said after the Boston Marathon bombings that he was willing to stake his life on the likelihood that the culprits were Muslim. I'm pretty sure that I could find Quinn arguing somewhere that Obama was, at core, a rather orthodox Christian, just as Bill Ayers says that he wishes Obama were a radical, but that he's not. I do know that she applauds him for going to church to prove he's not Muslim. That's not why most professing Christians go to church, as far as I know, but we apparently force him to do so by not believing everything he tells us about himself, despite peppering his two autobiographies with numerous lies and expressing fantastic fabulations in many other contexts. We are guilty of a lack of faith. Nowhere in either of his successful election runs has a single person asked Obama whether he believed in the divinity of Christ, which I'm sure is very convenient for Obama. Some of those of us who profess Christianity would see that as a non-negotiable feature of what it means to be Christian. In truth, Obama's not only a non-believer in the Christianity that he professes to profess, but is hostile to it. He is hostile to Judaism, as well. I'm not saying that he's an anti-semite. He has ethnic Jews among his closest advisors, just not any who haven't removed themselves from the Judeo-Christian tradition in search of a secular-progressive utopia. If he were a Christian, he might object to what is happening to the Copts in Egypt, where he helped the Muslim Brotherhood gain power so that they could exterminate the brutes, but he just doesn't care.

There was certainly a lot of profiling among Quinn's own cadre about who the terrorists were likely to be. Many said that they fit the profile of TEA Party anti-government types. They were wrong, and the unnamed instructor at the military college was right. That their guesses were wrong, and his was not, means nothing to them at all, because they are secure in their 'scientific' precepts, no matter how often they are disproved by mere reality, just as the precepts of Climate Change (formerly Global Warming) are not amenable to any negotiation, no matter how often the models on which they are supposed to rely are disproved by the cold indifference of physical fact. If you've seen any of the Common Core curriculum, you know that they intend the 'spiritual raping' of young people with such pseudo-science, in order to make them properly susceptible to salvation by means of the elite minds who will figure it all out. They are the Progressive Holy Priesthood.

An enormous clue to Obama's non-Christianity, if the racialist creed of his Chicago church weren't enough, ought to have been his stark opposition as an Illinois Senator to born-alive legislation. Roman pagans didn't have many complaints about infanticide. It wasn't until those crazy Judaical followers of Christ began preaching that it was beneath human dignity to murder other human beings because they were defective or unwanted that anyone elsewhere in the Empire gave it much thought. The President, who so glibly lies about himself to complete media complacency, thinks it a wonder of human history that a gay basketball player will publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation, because candor is a virtue to be approved publicly but practiced sparingly. Trayvon Martin was apparently in dire need of humanization by comparison with a hypothetical male child to the President, because you are all such hateful racists, but it's impossible for him to pronounce on Gosnell because that's an ongoing legal matter. We mustn't turn the clock back to the benighted 1950s, but turn it back to the progressive Roman Empire instead, when the head of state was not only its temporal leader, but a divinity in his own right and also the chief priest to the far-flung domains, including that inhabited by that troublesome Jew who proclaimed that there was a spiritual empire apart from that one the Romans ruled.

The idea of a separation of church and state proceeds from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Part of the reason, I suspect, that progressives seem to coddle Islamic theocrats is that they admire that ideological unity. Certainly, it's mind-boggling to think that people so alarmed by the thought of theocracy as those who comment on Quinn's piece seem to have no problem with the rise of non-secular Muslim theocracies that treat their discontents, whether they are other Muslims or Christians or Jews or Buddhists or simply gay, as sub-humans, for the fault of not believing as they ought. The reason they don't care is simply that they are willing to go along with the enslavement and abuse of other human beings, so long as the President's domestic policies suit them. They are all about human rights, so long as they are not inconvenient to them. Jews have long been, in a variety of historical settings, an impediment to various secular utopias, which is why they have had to be liquidated at intervals. They simply will not listen to 'reason.' Now, it is the turn of fundamentalist Christians, and morons like Sally Quinn and Mikey Weinstein, who do not see that progressives wish to do away with any Judeo-Christian opposition to their Marxist materialism and will use them as progressive utopian states have always used useful idiots.

Obama golfed in the lead-up to the vote on gun control, then threw a hissy when it didn't go his way. He then stated that he would seek to circumvent Congress. Those who spent years railing against the spectre of a Unitary Executive under Bush did not bat an eye, although the precedents set by such measures undermine the process of democracy as established by our founding charter. They are so dense that they seem not to believe this can ever blow up in their faces. The Constitution does provide mechanisms for its own alteration, but the proggies are dead set against having to go through the trouble of using them, even as they claim that 90% of Americans wish to see the legislation (which was never explained in detail to them, in part because legislators and journalists never bothered to learn, but also from benign neglect) passed. If the President had any hand in guiding the legislation proposed, apart from handing his adherents the sort of laundry list he usually does by way of leadership, I have not heard of it. What I have heard, though . . . and correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't know much about guns . . . is that as written the definition of what constitutes a particularly dangerous firearms that ought not be in the hands of mere American citizens was so flawed that even Harry Reid threw up his hands, finally. I confess that I believe Obama's lack of interest in the actual content of the bill, apart from his usual wish listing, was mostly a matter of laziness, but it could also be that he was advised to stay away from it in order to insulate him from revisitations of Fast and Furious, the 'flawed' program to supply guns to Mexican drug mafiosi over which he invoked Executive Privilege in order not to have to come clean to the American people. In order for Fast and Furious to occur, such gun laws as there were had secretly to be suppressed by the agencies that were supposed to be enforcing them, and those agencies, along with those responsible for immigration, continue to be told not to enforce some of them. Janet Napolitano told Congress that it was the President's prerogative to choose which ones he would like enforced and which ones not, which would have caused many months of furor if she had been a Bush appointee. Eric Holder stonewalled Congress, was held in contempt, and declared that he contemned them for holding him so. That debacle was followed by Benghazi, which may also have been spurred by back-door weapons dealing on the part of his administration. There is now an IG investigation into the Blue Ribbon investigation which was to have cleared the administration (and also, particularly, former Secretary of State and possible presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) from blame. It appears that certain people with first-hand knowledge of what happened there were somehow overlooked in the process of collecting all the evidence, just as one key witness to Issa's Fast and Furious panel was found by the administration to have business in Iraq so pressing that it prohibited his being able to testify in any form whatsoever. Then an Obama enthusiast and his brother decided to explode a couple of improvised bombs at the Boston Marathon, inadvertently dealing a tremendous blow to the gigantic amnesty bill that the administration had hoped to push through. None of this pattern of absurd incompetence and cover-up can be traced to any ideological defect in Obamaism. It is the fault of obstructionists, just as Gosnell was.

Just as a rule of thumb, though, if anyone tells you Obama is Christian, you can discount anything else they tell you with respect to religion.

Here in Vermont, the good people of Waldorf are going about their business. They are weaving fuzzy organic spaces in their personal cocoons and sending out dendrites of support and concern to other Waldorf families. They are buying organic nutriment for themselves and their children, and fermenting active cultures, trying to restimulate their little corners of the violated biosphere out of their post-industrial lethargy, bidding them to enrich and increase and to bless them with sustaining vegetable matter on which to batten, and suffering their cows to feed on the democratic grass without the poisonous addition of steroids or antibiotics, if they happen still, rather guiltily, to eat meat.

They live in a folkloric space with a folkloric science that they are saving from the ravages of industrialization. Although they embrace the soft political aims of progress, their project is deeply conservative. They gather their wool, and they dye it and spin it, and knit it and weave it, and they teach their children these homespun crafts. They surround themselves with talismans against what they perceive as the disconnect between the natural world and modern American living, bringing into their homes their crystals and tallow candles, their bees wax icons, their flower arrangements. Television, video games—anything a Mennonite might eschew—they bar their doors against.

Good for them. They have the courage of their convictions. Doubtless, it is a good thing to be makers, and to teach one's children to be makers. In the round of the seasons, they celebrate a denatured, fuzzy Christianity, with momentary references to St. Michael and the major religious holidays in the course of the revolving calendar, infused with pantheistic naturalism and a strangely incongruous belief in reincarnation. They wish to be kind to each other and to themselves, and aspire to learn mindfulness and contentment. They are ambitious to be gentle and nurturing and yogic.

They believe in a God who is also warm and fuzzy, and largely contiguous with nature, by which I mean that the are capital-R Romantics. Their educational methods are informed by the philosophy of the German educator Rudolf Steiner, an early 20th century systematist influenced by Piaget's developmental ideas. Beneath the methodology lies a revolt against the particular kind of mechanistic science that shaped the 19th century German educational technocracy, and which seeks to rescue a knowledge of artisanship and home economics, folklore and narrative play, and seeks to reconstruct the organization of the village and the homely dynamics of the cottage, maintaining a sense of connectedness with nature rather than domination over it. It is established as a kind of anti-matrix, or, more properly, an anti-'patrix'. Its fundamental conservatism is also manifested in, for example, its use of the idea of the archetypal dispositions of choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine in describing human varietals and tailoring educational plans to suit them. Because of these heterodoxies, anthroposophical schools have come under scrutiny by various educational establishments, for example for fostering an unscientific belief in homeopathy and for the resistance of many Waldorf families to innoculation programs. Proponents point out that as a result of the centrality of experimentation to the curriculum, Waldorf students tend to emerge with a measurably better understanding of science than students whose tutelage relies largely on textbooks. In other cases, anthroposophy has been attacked as fundamentally racist, due to the purported views of Steiner on the subject (of which I am ignorant), although in certain places the curriculum has been modified in the direction of afrocentrism, et cetera.

My purpose is not to criticize Waldorfers. As an empiricist, I am willing to accept whatever educational methods seem to produce the best results. My interpretation of what constitutes good results is liable to be quite different from what the secular humanists believe. I do think, though, that the Waldorfers are blissfully unaware of how threatening to their project is the 'liberal' state that they overwhelmingly support. Their philosopy may be anodyne, but it is still an attempt to carve out an educational and social space separate and distinct from that provided by the statists in service of the state, and ultimately that is unjustifiable in the eyes of the totalitarians. For the moment, they are not as directly in the line of fire as, say, the Catholics, whose views regarding human nature and moral agency are distinctly repugnant to secular humanist ideology, but the totalitarian state that their embrace of 'tolerance' facilitates (and they do embrace it, as I am reminded daily on Facebook) will brook no rivals or divided allegiances. As bucolic and unoffensive as they wish to be and to present themselves as being, they are sowing the (non-genetically modified) seeds of their own destruction.

It was not until Obama signed the bill that they like to refer to as the Monsanto Protection Act that most of them had any qualms whatsoever regarding the administration. My views on GMO are certainly not as alarmist as theirs, but I do think that it's reasonable for them to demand that GMO foodstuffs be labelled as such, because it is a concern to them. What strikes me as very odd is that they seem to have little or no interest in the rest of the administration's agenda, particularly as set forth with regard to education:

Research fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student-monitoring techniques such as “functional magnetic resonance imaging” and “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”

The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards. The report instead reveals Common Core’s progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust, [and] service orientation.”

That’s right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on children’s feelings, beliefs, “biases,” and “flexibility” instead of doing their own jobs of imparting knowledge — and minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush continue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database system’s circumvention of federal student-privacy laws.

It's hard to imagine a more reductionistic and invasive approach to the production of good citizens, but as Marshall McLuhan observed a long time ago, the medium is the message, and in this case the medium says that the totalized surveillance state has the right to treat the children who are nominally yours as though they were lab rats (which should, on the other hand, be liberated).

Yesterday, I read a case in point:

Children who are given anti-racism lessons in school are more likely to be intolerant outside the classroom, a major study found yesterday.

It said accusing white pupils of racism causes animosity, and discussing sensitive ethnic concerns such as honour killings paints minority group children in a bad light.

The survey said children who live in mixed neighbourhoods are often free of hostility towards other racial groups.
But it found that ‘when more attention in class is being paid to the multicultural society, the liberalising effect of positive contact in class on youngsters’ xenophobic attitude decreases’.

*******

The teenagers, drawn from different class and racial backgrounds, and with differing academic abilities, were questioned on their attitudes to those from different ethnic backgrounds and about multicultural teaching in their schools. 

It said boys tended to be more intolerant of other groups than girls, and intolerance was greatest among those with strong religious or ethnic identity, among those from Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds, and those with the lowest educational achievements.

But it said the teaching of multiculturalism had an ‘unexpected negative effect’.

It added: ‘The impact of positive inter- ethnic contact in class disappears  or even reverses when multiculturalism is more emphasised during  lessons. Discussing discrimination and the customs and habits of  other cultures during lessons affects the youngsters’ xenophobic attitudes indirectly.’

The report added that bad feelings among minority groups could be generated by discussion of topics such as honour killings or female circumcision. Animosity could also be caused by ‘a one-sided offender- victim approach to racism’.

*******

Patricia Morgan, an author on  the family and education, said  yesterday: ‘If you rub children’s noses in their supposed racism, they resent it.

‘Pupils are being accused of things they haven’t thought or done. Multiculturalism attempts to manipulate children’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions, it amounts to indoctrination, and it doesn’t work. It is counter-productive.

‘This study shows that when people try to manipulate children’s minds, it bounces back on them.’

There are two parts to this finding: 1) accusing people of harboring bias that they don't have makes them resentful, and 2) discussion of certain cultural differences must be bracketed, because if honestly presented they might cause unpleasant feelings of loathing and disgust. The first is a matter of common sense, and the second is counselling censorship. It is easy to imagine that similar results might be expected from early childhood sex education.

I could name a hundred other issues toward which they express a strange apathy, for all their cultivating mindfulness, but it is hard to imagine a more mechanistic approach to the informing of young minds. The specific grounds on which their educational system will be indicted are those of diversity. The standard curriculum consists in a recapitulation of European culture, particularly in the early years. So, for example, students in the grade schools will be exposed to Old Testament stories at the appropriate developmental stage, then Norse myths, then Greek and Roman myths. All of this is far too Eurocentric for the educrats.

Now, these myths, or stories, or narratives, or however you wish to refer to them, arise out of the particularities of specific cultures and their self-understandings. Whatever we may think of their relative merits, they are expressions of cultures that were at one time successful, and that had distinct views of the relations of people to God (or gods), to the natural world, and to members of their own society and those outside of it. Haeckel's maxim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is the undergirding and shaping theme of the curriculum, and that phylogenic understanding is drawn from Western history, which must be demolished and deracinated (because it promotes privileged white Europeanism) in accordance with the elite Progressive design (except for the moment in institutions such as La Raza, where aspects are temporarily promoted for ideological purposes). The great project of Progressivism is to destroy in the name of diversity all particular expressions of culture, especially Western culture, in the service of generalized ahistorical precepts that do not emerge from, but are imposed from, a post-historical perspective. The historical success of Western culture is viewed by this elitist cadre not as a representation of merit, but as a symptom of comparative cultural neurosis. History is baggage. It must be forgotten.

This is only a contemporary expression of an old utopian strategy.

To my bitter clinger friends in the Waldorf community I say, "Good luck with that." You will not be spared.

We are told that people are 'evolving' on gay marriage, and like any other metaphor that is widely abused by forgetting that it is a metaphor, this one deserves a long, hard look. Ecosystems may evolve, certainly. Individual organisms within ecosystems may evolve, and they may die out if they do not evolve successfully, for whatever reasons. We are told that human intervention into these ecosystems is disruptive, that all of what is important in the world is ecologically related. We are asked to intervene to save species that have been subject to pressure. We are told that unless we surrender our initiative to a worldwide regulatory body that will oversee it, and not abuse that authority because it is populated by individuals who have special insight and an exalted, really transhuman, nature, we will destroy ourselves. It makes one skeptical when one sees how the data is manipulated in order to bring the point home, but we are asked to disregard those individual trees for the forest, to deploy another hoary metaphor, because all of this lying is being committed for our good and the good of the species.

Human societies are said to have 'evolved' in ways that are sometimes beneficial. In the old days, we are told, farmers lived in harmony with the land that they tilled and the animals that they husbanded. We are told that we have lost that connection, and that in order to restore it we must pay more for our locally grown organic foodstuffs. We have a moral obligation to do so. Apparently, in some circumstances it is possible for societies to 'evolve' in ways that are detrimental to them. Never mind that the technology that I am now employing to make this argument publicly has come about by way of the exploitation of resources including fossil fuels, or that the conveniences taken for granted by the climate scaremongers emerged from the advantages secured by the use of fossil fuels, they must be subjected to the taxation treatment that we reserve for what we care to call vices, by which we mean that the government has a warrant to extract as much from the harmful practices that it claims to want to eradicate as it can without killing the host harm (although it sometimes kills it). It makes no difference at all whether you point out the gross hypocrisy of people who rail against the wealthy earning millions by virtue of their political offices, or whether you note that they love to fly to their lavish conventions on the wings of fossil-fuel propelled airships, or that their schemes for the creation of a 'green economy' that will benefit legions of new 'green-collar workers' implode whenever they touch reality, or that the smugmobiles that they tout are far out of reach of the Volk and have to be subsidized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per unit, or that Al Gore is building another massive villa on the shore of a sea that is catastrophically rising as a result of anthropogenic global warming, or that the railed-against system of capitalism seems to be capable of addressing the problems it is supposed to have created far more effectively than government fiat, you shall not be heard. That capitalism is an ecology of some subtlety, and that it becomes less functional as a result of market distortions created by political fiat, nobody appears to want you to know.

Nobody wants you to know what happened in Kermit Gosnell's charnel houses. When Jeffrey Dahmer killed all those people in Milwaukee, I seem to recall, we heard a great deal about it. When a black man was found to have murdered a bunch of black women in Cleveland and stuffed their corpses around his residence, that received a good deal less attention, possibly because we have been hearing for decades that it is always white men who are serial killers. Statistics are the enemy in such cases. We saw it this week when some feckless twats tried to make a racial issue of mass killings with guns by segregating out any mention of less spectacular but chronic and pervasive murders committed with guns by blacks in inner cities. That those victims were also untimely dead, that their families and friends suffered just as much as did the family and friends of people killed at Columbine or Sandy Hook, that a disproportionate number of these crimes were committed in places where there is strict 'gun control'–none of that matters, and you are racist merely by virtue of having mentioned the facts. It is always the facts that are most pornographic to 'progressives.' They made unmarried motherhood normative, and fortunately that hasn't had an deleterious consequences.

The fact is that gay rights advocates argued that civil unions were to be instituted in order to secure for domestic partners the same legal status as married couples. They would never try to force someone to adopt the point of view that their jointures were identical to those that had been from time immemorial considered marriage. They just wanted a seat at the table, you see. But civil unions were not enough. They wanted 'gay marriage.' And after they had 'gay marriage,' a terminology that applied considerable torsion on the concept of marriage as it had been understood for millenia, they would then agitate to drop the modifier, 'gay.' There would be only one form of marriage, and anyone who admitted any distinction relating to sexual orientation would be a bigot, would be ostracized, would be said to have discriminated (although a gay man may be a person of discriminating taste) . . . which would be incriminating. That they themselves would continue privately to make the distinction, that they would realize that their metaphorical 'marriage' was not quite the same thing as that of heterosexual people, would be their business, and theirs alone. Woe betide anyone who claims otherwise. They need to be ostracized, disciplined, punished, harassed, sued.

Marriage, like other human institutions, can be said to have 'evolved' in the service of a wide variety of societies in a wide variety of cultures in various times and locations around the world. The ancient Greeks, we are told, depending on the particular city state or other portion of what we generally refer to when we speak of ancient Greek society, practiced homosexuality more or less openly according to more or less codified rules of engagement, and yet there and in other cultures where homosexuality is comparatively unsuppressed, nothing like gay marriage ever did take root. It would seem therefore that whatever the function of marriage was in those societies that practiced it–and those are the vast majority that we know about–it was felt to be necessary for heterosexual couples only. And this arrangement, sanctioned by religion and the polity, imposed certain obligations on those people who partook of it and in their judgments believed that it was right for them not only as members of the religion or polity or both, but also as individuals. The irony is, as many have noted, that those most opposed to the entire institution of marriage, those who treated it most scornfully, who trivialized it mocked it most mercilessly as a form of bondage, now discover that it is impossible for them to be happy without at least having the 'right' to it. But that is not a contradiction, really, because they continue to seek to destroy it by denaturing it. Gays have a right to their own 'culture,' as some of them continually have reminded us by being way 'out' with leather fetish, bathhouses, and public orgies, but nobody else has a right to any sort of culture from which they are excluded in any way. Any such culture and its institutions must be destroyed. That is what, finally, is meant by 'diversity' on any number of fronts.

You might have thought that after all the pooh-poohing about the slippery-slope warnings of alarmists that they would have wanted to disprove them, and show that their motives were as they had represented them, but they don't care about any of that at all. What's important is the power of unremitting iconoclasm and erasure of anything that is not new-normative. They have allied themselves with some pretty unsavory bedfellows, including the hyper-abortionists, racialists, millenialist Gaiaists, thought-crimes advocates and most appallingly the Islamist enablers. They are not at all alarmed to see the general erosion of American liberties or the constitutional abuses wrought by progressivism generally, including all the invasions of privacy, if it means more power; and unfortunately they have in this way proved themselves every bit as grasping as any other faction in American politics. This is 'evolution.' Tolerance, diversity and coexistence now mean that people who do not belong to any of the approved victim-categories will sit down and shut up, because someone else's subjectivity trumps theirs. This also is 'evolution.'

At one point, eighty or so years ago, a whole lot of Germans and then Austrians 'evolved' into a condition of fascism. For many decades we have been told that this was a 'bad thing,' but now we are told that continual bombardment with progressive agitprop touting utopia at the cost of surrendering individual will and rights to the greater good of the collective is a duty and a privilege. Mayor Bloomberg's allies have discovered a right of parents to raise healthy children that is somehow infringed when other people purchase large sugary drinks. Politicians have a right not to be inconveniently petitioned by the citizenry. Public unions have a right to return crap services at a premium in wages in benefits, and to employ taxpayers' children to help them agitate for more, as a part of their education in what 'democracy' looks like. Sea turtle eggs must be protected so that they can grow into sea turtles who will lay more sea turtle eggs, but a human fetus of whatever state of gestation (or beyond, for some people) has no more resemblance to a human being than a pig does . . . although you should not think of eating one because of the way they are raised in captivity and because of all the successful purely vegan societies that have existed throughout the ages. Animal fat was once, several years ago, terrible for you (and you should try Olestra), but now is seen to have been included in various culture's diets because it really turns out according to some new traditionalists who are very selective about their traditions to have been necessary to the health of your human organism. Soybeans, they now tell us, are really awful for you, after decades of touting their benefits. Evolution, you see. It was global warming, and talk of the end of winter, until it became climate change, which could express itself in an infinite variety of ways, all of which were evidence that it was being exacerbated by our addiction to fossil fuels. It was terrible when the US was 'addicted' to foreign oil, because of those nasty imperialist entanglements, but now we must try however we can to smother development of domestic energy resources in order to bring about ecotopia. Oh, and bunches of Britons died of cold this past winter because of daft policies foisted on them by greenies who have a symbiotic relationship with government, who find their alarmism useful in remaking society in the progressive image. Had they died properly, like people killed in a French heat wave, there would be a great deal of breast-beating and tearing of hair, but for the moment it is simpy an incongruous factoid that cannot be fit into any officially recognized, hygienic-certified cognitive framework, and so is not worthy of much notice.

Does it give people any pause that those who advocate most loudly for the 'dignity' of a cradle-to-grave health system that will save money by furnishing dignified deaths to people who have outlived their usefulness to the tax-hungry common weal, and whose best and highest use will now be confiscatory death taxes, show so little concern for the 'dignity' of little humans in charnel houses like Gosnell's? No, you simply don't understand. Does it grate, at all, that those legislators who rail against the greed of the well-to-do and their privileges have exempted themselves from the provisions of their own health legislation, or that they would never demean their offices by taking a pay cut or reining in their expenditures simply because the government is out of money, or that they don't think it important that the Constitution's imperious 'shall' obligates them to produce annual budgets, or that they do not force their staffs to pay off their tax debts, or that they so typically become personally wealthy in the course of their public service? Silence, fatuous twerp! They will tell you when it is appropriate to be idealistic, and what you are saying is inappropriate. Do you feel that you are not receiving a good return for what you contribute to the coffers of government? You ingrate, you are receiving top-dollar value at rock-bottom prices! Indeed, this unseemly parsimony on your part merits rebuke!

This is 'evolution.' This is 'progress.' This is 'reason':

(Othello, I.iii)

Our panders sell us our perdition, and call it wisdom. That is what progressivism is.

UPDATE:

And, like clockwork, an article from ABC about the innovative weddings for these innovative marriages:

Crocker and Kibort even bristle at the term "gay marriage."

"I don't gay park. I don't have gay lunch," says Kibort. "You don't say you're going to an interracial marriage. It isn't a gay marriage. It's a marriage."

Of course not. And that is why the term 'jazz' is so prejudicial to music that is indistinguisable from classical, to anyone who has ears.

To marry someone of the opposite sex is no different from marrying someone of the same sex, because there's no difference between the sexes, right? Men and women don't think differently, despite all the scientific evidence, or if they do, it's just because they have been disparately socialized (not evolved, pig!), unless the research shows something that might be construed to the advantage of women. Gay men don't think differently from straight men, except sexually–unless they want to claim that they do, and the same for lesbians. If heteros do think differently from one another in certain ways, that doesn't mean there's anything different about their relationships. Gays and lesbians never make a big deal of the difference between their own sexuality and that of heterosexuals, so why should we make any distinction, now, FFS? They're just the same, with the distinction that their marginalization has given them unique insight into the human condition, so they are the same only better. So shut up, supremacist. Our weddings are different, they're distinctive, they have panache, they're not tethered to your tired formulas, but they're just the same.

UPDATEx2:

Oh, look: men are just an accident of 'dumb design.' How evolution happens in a direction that is so unhelpful is anybody's guess. 

Who is Anti-Gay Superman? I don't know.

Superheroes seem to proliferate so rapidly that I'm unable to keep up. Even when I was a kid, in the pre-X-Men days, I couldn't have named very many of Spiderman's foes or any of the Batman ones that weren't on the TV show. I could have identified the members of the Fantastic Four by their powers (like the really crappy power of a hot chick in spandex being able to turn herself invisible), but not their names. I wasn't a comics junky beyond Mad magazine, so, as irresponsible as it may seem, I don't think I can be responsible for familiarity with Anti-Gay Superman.

The author of this movie script is to be Orson Scott Card, who is apparently Mormon and opposed to gay marriage. My elder son got me to read some of his books 8 or 9 years ago, and I retain some impressions from them, but I didn't find them extraordinary, or want to re-read them. He seemed to me a competent writer with a core cluster of reasonably interesting ideas. He's pretty workmanlike, which is not a bad thing in a superhero script writer, in my opinion.

But as for Anti-Gay Superman, I don't see the interest. Will he (or his alter ego) refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? It seems a rather flimsy premise for a superhero movie. Will he beat up lesbians, or fly around San Francisco using his X-ray vision to peer into the bedrooms of homosexual couples? How are they going to get an NC-17 rating? So many questions.

Meanwhile, gay activists who are pressuring DC to fire Card, due to his opposition to their agenda, are comparing him with Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. I can't recall a lot of gay outcry against the many Holocaust deniers and Islamist supremacists who beat, torture, imprison and execute gays in the Muslim world, but maybe I just don't read the right blogs. If it weren't homophobic, I'd accuse anyone making such comparisons of being a bit of a drama queen.

As for supremacism, generally, I don't remember the gay community making a lot of noise, either, about our domestic black Nation of Islam, which isn't exactly gay-friendly. And if they're not going to stand up to that kind of very overt intolerance, which really is a kind of slow-motion holocaust, I don't see the point in getting worked up about a scriptwriter's personal beliefs. A lot of gays seem to think Roman Polanski has been maltreated, considering all he did was drug and rape a little girl who came to see him about a movie part. On the other hand, Orson Scott Card has expressed opinions contrary to theirs, and they are offended. It seems that Card's most offensive expressed view is that homosexuals can be 'cured' of the behaviors that he finds offensive. Gays, in turn, wish to cure DC Comics of their employing someone with whom they disagree . . . by punishing them. They want people like Card to be closeted. It's because they are tolerant, you see. Don't ask, don't tell.

Dumbledore was gay? So what? Professor X? I don't care. I think Anti-Gay Superman sounds like a crap superhero, but you're on your own, boys. Try to be a little less stuck on yourselves, please.

Via I Hate the Media.