Silent Conquest: A Tale of Sharia and Western Self-Censorship

At yesterday’s debut showing of Silent Conquest: The End of Freedom of Expression in the West at The Heritage Foundation, one of the most shocking moments was a comment by Lars Hedegaard, a Danish historian and chairman of the Danish Free Press Society.

Hedegaard was asked: Could the screening of this movie and the free intellectual discussion of the advance of Islamic Sharia law in the West have taken place at a European—say British—think tank “No, I don’t think so” was his chilling answer.

The subjects of Islam and Sharia have simply become taboo in many European countries. Free speech advocates, among them moderate Muslim voices, are deeply concerned.

As shown in Silent Conquest, throughout Europe, in Canada, and even in the United States, judicial systems in countries with large Muslim minorities are under pressure to adopt Sharia free speech restrictions. As a result, in many places, including Denmark, it is now a crime to say anything negative about Islam or the prophet Mohammed, regardless of whether such statements are factual or not. The concept that even offensive speech is protected—so fundamental to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment—is collapsing.

Even if those accused of insulting Islam are acquitted, as Hedegaard himself was after a grueling legal battle, outraged Muslims may take matters in their own hands. Hedegaard narrowly escaped assassination in February when a Muslim immigrant posing as a mailman attempted to shoot him. Another Dane, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard of Mohammed cartoon fame, survived two assaults by knife-wielding immigrants and is now under permanent police protection. (The fact that Denmark has stringent anti-gun laws protected neither from attack, one might add.)

The extent of the problem is startling. In 2010, Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders was acquitted after being charged with the crime of “insulting Muslims” and “inciting hatred of Muslims.” That same year, Hedegaard was charged with hate speech and finally acquitted two years later by the Danish Supreme Court. In France, actress Brigitte Bardot was sentenced to a two-month suspended sentence and a fine of $15,000 for complaining about Muslims in her neighborhood. In Canada, author Mark Steyn was acquitted in 2008 after a prolonged legal battle over his article “Why the Future Belongs to Islam.”

Even though some are acquitted, all of this has a chilling effect. Europeans “are acting as though Sharia law has already been adopted in Europe,” Nasar Khader, a moderate Muslim member of the Danish parliament, stated in the movie.

Disturbingly, so does the U.S. government. While the 9/11 Commission report from 2007 contained hundreds of references to words such as Islam, Muslim, and Jihad, not a single instance of these words is found in the national security strategy documents of the Obama Administration, a deliberate government decision. Furthermore, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threw U.S. support behind U.N. anti-blasphemy Resolution 16/18 in December 2011, which would effectively repress free speech if enacted in member countries.

At least in the United States, the First Amendment still stands as a bulwark, and lawmakers have taken up the cause of free speech and the free exercise of religion. On March 7, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) introduced S. Res. 69, “Calling for the protection of religious rights and freedoms in the Arab world.” It specifically “urges in the strongest possible terms that the United States Government lead the international effort to repeal existing blasphemy laws.”

Though it is not likely the Obama Administration will heed this plea, it is imperative for the future of this country, this civilization, that the defenders of freedom remain vigilant.

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$2.7 Million to Figure Out Why Lesbians Drink Too Much

Apparently it wasn’t outrageous enough that the federal government flushed away $1.5 million of our money trying to figure out why most lesbians are so fat. Now this:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $2.7 million to study why lesbians are at a higher “risk for hazardous drinking.”

The University of Illinois has received grants since 2009 for its project, “Cumulative Stress and Hazardous Drinking in a Community of Adult Lesbians,” which aims to develop “culturally sensitive” strategies to prevent lesbians from being drunks.

If the bureaurats doling out our money want to know why lesbians drink too much and eat too much, I’ll tell them: because people who construct their public identity around being sexual perverts are by definition psychologically unhealthy in the extreme. Such people will tend to seek refuge from their neuroses and self-hatred in overeating and substance abuse. Now where do I collect my $2.7 million

Given that the government is funding this grotesque parody of research, you might have seen this coming:

Furthermore, the problem may be worse for “lesbians of color,” the researchers say.

Now that the feds set the priorities, doctors have deprioritized curing cancer in favor of “health disparities” — that is, the quixotic quest for evidence that disease is more unhealthy for privileged non-whites, who therefore deserve yet more special attention.

This is why it is absolutely crucial to medical research that the government have nothing whatsoever to do with funding it.

Click here if you really want to see a fat drunken lesbian.

On a tip from Clingtomyguns.

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How Stalin Fooled the World and Why It Matters Today

Τhere are two ways that liberal historians usually look at Stalin. The most leftward of these is to see Stalin as a victim of German and American imperialism who struggled to maintain the peace in the face of aggressive expansionistic efforts by Nazi Germany and the United States.

Such a revisionist history would seem to have been thoroughly discredited in this day and age, despite its persistence in the early days of the Cold War, but it continues resurfacing, most recently in an Oliver Stone documentary series.

But for the most part, Khrushchev’s disavowal of Stalin completed a process that began once the Soviet dictator cut a deal with Hitler, triggering a growing Destalinization cascade on the left. Stalinists still persisted in the West, but their influence on the authoring of history steadily diminished. Instead they embraced a different version of history that would salvage the ideological integrity of the left.

In this more conventional version of history, Stalin was not truly a Communist, but a non-ideological dictator who had seized control of the Soviet ship of state and transformed a promisingly progressive revolution into a backward feudal tyranny.

This version of history had been developed by the Trotskyites and a number of disaffected groups on the left and with the Cold War; it became the conventional version of history. After the fall of the USSR, it was embraced by nationalists looking to resurrect Stalin as a monarch, rather than a party man.

Stalin indeed appeared to have jettisoned bits of the old international Communist agenda and zeroed in on domestic purges. The constant civil bloodshed convinced many of his potential enemies that Stalin’s USSR was mainly a threat to its own people. They viewed Stalin as a domestic tyrant, rather than an international Red Emperor.

But as Robert Gellately argues in Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War, accepting the view of Stalin as a pragmatic tyrant may have been the worst mistake that they ever made.

Gellately takes on both versions of Stalin, contending that the Soviet tyrant was not the victim of warmongering, but the author of the Cold War who had deliberately sought a global conflict for the sake of Communist ideology and Communist power.

The linkage between these two elements is vitally important. By reducing Stalin and his Soviet Union to mere tyrant and tyranny, revisionist liberal historians could successfully argue that they just wanted to be left alone. And if Stalin had been no more than a tyrant and the USSR no more than a pedestal for his cult of personality, that reading of history might have some plausibility.

Only by rediscovering Stalin as an ideological tyrant and the USSR as a Red Empire, as Gellately does, is that revisionist reading of the Cold War rendered null and void.

As early as 1920, Stalin was already envisioning a Red Empire, in Gellately’s words, that would encompass Russia and much of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s actions in both World War II and the Cold War were aimed at realizing that Red Empire.

Gellately takes note of Stalin’s self-definition as a “professional revolutionary and party organizer” and connects it to his international ambitions. The Stalin who emerges in Stalin’s Curse does not represent a break with the leftist history of the revolution, but a continuation of it. While liberal history insists on viewing Stalinism as a break from Leninism, Gellately makes a convincing case for the reign of Stalin as a natural extension of the reign of Lenin.

Most compellingly, Stalin’s Curse argues for recognizing Stalin’s strategic acumen in outwitting FDR and Churchill, as he had been unable to outwit Hitler, using the familiar narrative of Russian victimhood in a war that he had clumsily stumbled into to demand territorial concessions all the way up to Germany.  And yet Stalin’s achievements largely came from the willingness of his Western allies to lose sight of what he was and what he represented.

In one telling moment, that has a dreadful modern resonance, FDR, while staying in the bugged Soviet mission, is warned by Churchill that Stalin was preparing “a Communist replacement for the Polish government.”

The Soviet agent overhearing the conversation listens to FDR accuse Churchill of preparing an anti-Communist government and recalls “thinking how strange it was” for the president to “put Churchill and Stalin on the same plane” and to think of himself as “the arbiter between them.”

That moment is not the only one in Stalin’s Curse that bears such historical echoes. The National Front coalitions that the Soviet Union used to take over Eastern Europe bear a strong similarity to the Islamist coalitions used to take over the Arab Spring. And the willingness of the West to believe the comforting lies that they were told remind us that our disastrous foreign policy did not emerge yesterday.

While Stalin casually disposed of hundreds of thousands of lives, he took few major strategic risks, relying on attrition to do his work for him. As a canny negotiator, Stalin used every peace offer as an opening bid to expand his control replicating his battlefield strategy at the negotiating table

When FDR and Churchill thought that they were shaping a final settlement for Europe, they were actually engaging in an endless bargaining session that would only be settled with the Red Army.

History concerns itself with dry facts, but has less to say about human minds, and so it is difficult to know whether FDR and Churchill were fooled or whether they chose to be fooled. When FDR and Churchill praised Stalin’s integrity and sincerity, had they been deceived by the world’s greatest actor or did they allow themselves to be deceived so that the terrible compromises they made seemed more palatable

This question, like so many of the others in Stalin’s Curse, remains applicable today. While Stalin is dead, there are many lesser Stalins like Morsi, small vicious men with an unlimited capacity for bloodshed and an even more unlimited ability to fool Western leaders into believing in their sincerity and goodness.

The negotiations that allowed Stalin to gobble up so many countries have been repeated again and again. And every time that diplomats call for a diplomatic solution in North Korea and Iran, we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.

And that may be Stalin’s true curse.

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When Science Looks Like Religion

The battle for the claim to which tribe is truly “scientific” has again heated up. Fueled by a prickly exchange between Michael Shermer, assuming the liberals-are-anti-science corner in Scientific American, and Mother Jones‘ Chris Mooney, who literally wrote the book on how bad conservatives are at science, writers for different blogs and magazines  put forth their best pitches for their own team. This is hardly the first time this debate has occurred. After all, no intelligent person of any worldview wants to be told that they are actually the ones who have been wasting time admiring the shadows on the cave wall. However, as Stan wrote on Friday, most sides in political discussions have moral inclinations that align with scientific evidence at least part of the time. This means that there is a high likelihood that different political groups will be “right” on certain issues, although not for the right reasons. In rushing to claim the mantle of scientific backing, political groups merely seek and publicize scientific findings that reinforce their priors.

Humanity has a bad track record of selectively appealing to authority to justify our biases. For much of human history, public figures would defend their positions by demonstrating how they coincided with their god’s will or expectations. The respective gods’ wills and expectations of the world’s major religions have consistently changed according to the new needs and developments of their more modern adherents (save for a tiny minority of orthodox groups). This could either suggest that all of their gods happened to be hip, understandable deities that conveniently mellowed over time (humorous, but unlikely) or that the spiritual leadership of these religions simply lowered the moral standard that modern living was expected to meet. Like our modern tendency to cover our personal biases with the veneer of science, God’s will became less of an end and more of a means.

As this recent episode demonstrates, today, intellectual opinions and policy proposals are defended by appealing to a new higher authority: science. This is, of course, a significant improvement. The scientific method is the best approach that we have developed to remove human bias in empirical inquiry to date. It’s nice to live in a world where assertions are expected to be backed by evidence and weighed against alternative explanations, despite the fact that some people use it to reinforce, rather than challenge, their priors. However, the tendency for laypeople to blindly embrace whatever is described to them as “science” as a moral truth is no more comforting a standard than the one that preceded it. In replacing gods with the scientific method, might we run the risk of mistaking the scientific method for a god, free of error and human bias

Even practitioners of science from time to time fall prey to a religious preference for dogmatism over detached truth-seeking. During last week’s discussion on which political group is “better” at science, one of my friends posted an interview of psychologist Jonathan Haidt from last year. In it, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson poses the question de rigueur, to which Haidt delivers an even-handed response: conservatives and liberals are both “bad” at the science that offends their moral sensibilities. In Europe, for instance, it is the left that is generally regarded as anti-science because much of the research conducted in those countries-on nuclear power and genetically-modified foods-tends to push the left’s buttons and invokes their public ire. In the US, it is the religious right who doles scorn and obstruction upon scientists who conduct taboo research on, say, biotechnology or climate change. So far, so good.

It is when Haidt draws comparisons between science and religion that he first draws the skepticism of his interviewer and things get interesting. Wilson acknowledges that scientists are not exempt from the biases that make us all human, but suggests that the mechanisms they have developed to minimize their influence-like peer review, empirical standards, and open discussion-largely squashes any scientist’s attempts to merely affirm his moral matrix by disguising it as science. Haidt agrees that it is possible for the scientific community to internally police their collective proclivities to search for the answers that they want to find rather than the answer that is most likely correct. However, Haidt suggests that these internal mechanisms will only properly function when a given body of  scientists is diverse enough to contain alternative points of view and detached enough to not allow emotional connections to cloud their better judgments towards their cherished subjects of inquiry.

The Norwegian documentary Hjernevask created by comedian Harald Eia provides one good example of how adherence to the standard social science model has taken a turn towards the canonical in the narrator’s home country. Throughout the seven part series, Eia first visits his old sociology professors that taught him everything he knew about gender, race, and class differences; namely, that they are almost completely culturally determined and it is unthinkable to suggest otherwise. Next, Eia travels to globe to consult big name international experts-luminaries like Steven Pinker, Simon Baron-Cohen, and David Buss-on their differing opinions on the matter. Needless to say, these gentleman found several problems with the hard cultural determinism of the Norwegian sociologists, particularly concerning the sociologists’ ambivalence towards twin study research that suggests that significant portions of our personality are biologically, not culturally, determined.

In formulaic fashion, during each episode Eia returns to the sociologists to which he originally spoke and shows them the videos of their ideological opponents across the pond. Rather than responding to these criticisms with research results that support their positions or cast doubt on their adversaries’, the sociologists that were interviewed simply waved away the critiques. The inconvenient studies were either “not interesting,” or “contrary to what [the sociologist] felt and experienced.” Ironically, many of these sociologists accused the other scientists of only looking for the biological explanation that they wanted to find, despite the fact that all of the British and American scientists readily conceded that culture does account for a small part of our personality outcomes. Because the Norwegian sociological community is not diverse enough and is too emotionally connected with its subject of inquiry, this academic body acts less like a scientific group and more like a religious sect.

The claim that science is like a religion is a bold one. It certainly caught David Sloan Wilson off guard when Haidt first suggested it. After Haidt pressed Wilson to consider his own (decidedly unpleasant) experience introducing the concept of multi-level selection to his peers and subsequently invoking their reflexive hostilities, the claim became less abstract and more convincing. Science is not religion, but if the proper safeguards to prevent groupthink and emotional attachment are not present within a discipline, it can sometimes function like one. Like our ancestor’s tendency to slap their preferences with the Word of God to make it a moral truth, some modern social scientists also continue to fall prey to the false allure of deifying their preferences under the guise of “science.”

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Standoff in Cyprus

The IMF/EU bank heist is being put on hold because the president can’t get the votes to approve the theft.  Zerohedge reports:

Moments ago the state-run CYBC media reported perhaps the most material news ahead of tomorrow’s Cyprus parliamentary vote, which at this point will likely be rescheduled once more, for the simple reason that yet another key Cypriot party, DIKO, has come out and decided to vote against the depositor-loss law on the Parliament’s docket tomorrow. This is notable because while yesterday JPM, in its „bazooka” assessment speculated that DIKO would vote for the law which made sense previously as DIKO had supported president Anastasiades in his election bid, which gave a pro-bailout vote a one vote margin. As a result of today’s flip, the party’s 9 votes will now be aligned with the „anti” votes of AKEL  and EDEK, whose combined 33 votes mean the proposed bailout law has no chance of passing as they have the needed 29 votes to block any bail-in out proposal!

That’s 33 against and 20 for.  It should be interesting to learn to what extent the EU and the Cypriot president were bluffing when they claimed a financial armageddon would result from a failure of the bailout plan.  I suspect it’s going to look at lot more like the consequences of the US sequester, which absolutely no one in the USA appears to have even noticed.

Jim Sinclair notes: „The government leaders in Cyprus are trying to back-pedal right now in order to save their lives. Let me say it again, they are trying to save their own lives. Remember, ‘revenge is best served cold.’ This means the revenge never comes at the moment of the miscreant act. But it will come in time.  To take money from the leading economic entities in Russia, is to take money from the former KGB officers, and taking money from them is extremely dangerous. I think the reality has quickly set in for the leaders of Cyprus that they have aided in the confiscation of the most serious and dangerous money you could possibly touch. It has these leaders more afraid for their lives than their bank accounts.”

UPDATE: „the Eurogroup will give Cyprus more flexibility on bank levy, and that Cyprus should safeguard depositors under €100,000, even as the full €5.8 billion deposit goal must still be hit.”

Perhaps my math skills are insufficient to grok the sense, but I don’t see how increasing the hit Russian depositors are going to take from 10% to 15.6% is going to make frightened parliamentarians any more sanguine about voting for the $75 billion bank heist.

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Rocks Can Kill

Rock ThrowingLast Thursday, a woman was driving past the city of Ariel with her three young daughters in the car. At the same time, a group of Palestinians threw rocks at a truck coming in the other direction. The truck veered off its lane, and collided with the family’s car, causing moderate injuries to the mother and to the two older daughters. The youngest, a three-year-old child, was critically injured, and rushed to the nearest hospital. Doctors are working tirelessly to save her life.

Rock throwing is common in Judea and Samaria, and along with Molotov Cocktail and booby-trapped tire throwing, is a terror act that comes under the definition of ‘popular terror’. These incidents happen daily, and are easily ignored by the mainstream media, because they don’t seem that serious. But did you know that a simple rock can kill

January 29, 1983: Esther Ohana (21)

Killed by a rock thrown at her car while driving near the Palestinian village Dahariya, on her way from Be’er Sheva to Jerusalem. The rock hit her head and put her in a coma. On February 12, after two weeks in a vegetative state, she passed away.

February 24, 1989: Stf. Sgt. Benny Meisner (25)

Killed when he was struck in the head by a concrete block in Nablus.

October 6, 2000: Bachor Jean (54)

Killed during the second Intifada by rocks thrown at his vehicle while he was travelling from Haifa to Rishon Lezion. The rocks shattered the windshield and struck his chest. His brother, who was driving the car, sped to the hospital but was too late. The perpetrators were found to be from the nearby Arab village Jisar a-Zarka.

Israeli casualties caused by rock throwing

Top Left to Right: Koby Mandell , Yehuda Haim Shoham , Esther Ohana
Center: Yosef Ishran
Bottom Left to Right: Bachor Jean , Asher Palmer and his infant son Jonathan , Stf. Sgt. Benny Meisner

May 7, 2001: Koby Mandell (13) and Yosef Ishran (14)

Were beaten to death with rocks when they were hiking in the outskirts of their village, Tekoa, in Judea and Samaria. Their bodies were found in a cave, covered with stones. The perpetrators have still not been found.

June 2, 2001: Yehuda Haim Shoham (5-month old baby)

Died of his wounds after rocks were thrown at his parents’ car while driving near the Palestinian village of Isawiya. The family was returning from relatives at Ra’anana to their house in Shiloh, when a Palestinian threw a rock at the front windshield, went through, and hit the baby in the back seat.

September 23, 2011: Asher Palmer (25) and his infant son Jonathan (12-month old baby)

Killed when their car veered and crashed into a tunnel after rocks were thrown at their front windshield while driving near Kiryat Arba. Later on, two Palestinians from the nearby village of Halhul admitted to instigating the attack.

The Judea and Samaria region has already seen 1,195 rock throwing incidents in 2013 alone.

In 1999, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that damage caused by rocks thrown at a vehicle is considered a hate crime, not a traffic accident. Rock throwing may seem harmless, but rocks can kill. If we ignore rock throwing, we potentially encourage even more severe hate crimes and higher-scale terror attacks.

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Filter Bubbles Versus Viral Memes: Why We Have More Common Ground than Ever Before

Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, some have wondered whether the medium might cause us to lose our common ground. There is conceivably enough material out there for every individual on the planet to enshroud himself in his own informational universe, almost entirely divorced from everyone else. But in fact, the opposite is occurring. More than ever, viral memes are piercing our carefully crafted filter bubbles, and it is only going to get worse.

Economists say a system exhibits network externalities when adding users increases the value for everyone. The name comes from obvious applications of this concept—telephones are only valuable to an individual to the extent that other individuals can be reached through the telephone network, for instance. Email has the same property, and so do social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

In the context of blog traffic, Clay Shirky notes that if adding an additional reader to a blog will increase the probability that it will get yet another reader “by even a fractional amount”, the resulting distribution of traffic will be a power law. Network externalities create this effect because the additional users have increased the value for the remaining potential users. Networked industries are extremely skewed; the bigger the network, the greater the skew.

Network externalities turn out to apply more universally than is immediately obvious. How we value just about anything is highly influenced by the 5-15 people closest to us in our social circles. The set of 5-15 people closest to each of them probably overlaps but is not the same as our innermost circle. A series of interlinking circles expands outwards until it encompasses all of mankind. As Paul Adams shows in Grouped, we have been networked in this sense for all of human history.

When one person decides to, say, buy a particular brand of clothing, it increases the chances that one of the people closest to him will buy that brand, too. This increases the chances that one of the people closest to them will buy it, and so on, cascading outward ad infinitum. An increasing probability doesn’t mean a definite outcome, so not everything bought by anyone ends up being bought by everyone else. But every so often the spiral of increasing probabilities plays out in a process that, when it happens to online content, we call “going viral”.

The phenomenon of going viral makes a joke of the daily me and The Filter Bubble theories of Internet echo chambers. The bubble is all too easily penetrated, and the daily me bears far too great a resemblance to the daily everybody else.

Consider the social life of one individual as a set of concentric circles. Every so often, it seems like everyone in a particular circle is talking about the same thing. It happens most frequently with the innermost circle, which the individual is most engaged with. Sometimes a topic spreads to the next level, and occasionally it reaches the most remote circles. More often, content originating from the outer layers invades our inner circles.

All the Internet does, from this perspective, is bring the circles closer and closer together in informational space. Recent studies suggest that products like Facebook decrease the degrees of separation between people.

If you’re like me, you follow a wide variety of people on Twitter, but you can lump them into semi-coherent groupings. They each tend to follow their own dynamics, on any given day. Sometimes, one of them will blow up—during an Apple event, the techies basically dominate my whole feed. Sometimes, everyone blows up about the same thing. Rather than allowing me to segment myself into my little niche communities in my hidden informational universe, Twitter makes it harder for me to ignore the topic of the moment.

Contra Negroponte and Pariser, this is mostly a nuisance. I don’t care about most of the stories that go viral, and I would prefer to ignore them entirely. It used to be that random extreme events—unrepresentative of the larger reality—would dominate the news cycle. Now, they also dominate online conversations.

Although I take great pains to avoid the story of the moment, in the end there’s only so much I can do while choosing to remain online. And the benefits of using the Internet are worth the costs, even if I do have to tolerate a lot of pointless common ground.

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Archbishop Chrysostomos:

There is something eschatologically exotic about Greek Islands. St John the Apostle received his apocalyptic vision on Patmos. It warned of the ‘Whore of Babylon’ and the coming of ‘the Beast’, whilst exhorting endurance through persecution by instilling hope in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Archbishop Chrysostomos of Paphos received his apocalyptic vision on Cyprus. It warned of the ‘villainy of Europeans’, whilst exhorting ‘Cyprus must as soon as possible leave the eurozone’.

These revelations are separated by almost two millennia, but their prophetic themes are the same: the cosmic battle is still good versus evil, and God will irrupt into human history and judge the wicked. Laodicean attitudes are not acceptable: the proud, self-satisfied and ‘lukewarm’ must take drastic action if they are to be saved:

Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. (Rev 3:17f)

Archbishop Chrysostomos hasn’t quite told Cypriots to go and buy gold that is ‘tried in the fire’, but he might as well have done. The euro gave them the illusion of being ‘increased with goods’, and having ‘need of nothing’. But the Beast has left them ‘wretched, and miserable, and poor’.

Only three months ago the Archbishop was reminding his flock that they ‘belong to the great family of European nations and must therefore fight for the rights that all Europeans enjoy’. In the trauma of financial crisis, he socialised the problem, pleading that ‘we are all obliged to take our share our responsibility’.

Not any more. Enough is enough. Archbishop Chrysostomos has discovered the Gospel of Thatcher, now preaching fervently about the virtues of privatisation. „Business competition leads to economic progress,” he declares, fully persuaded that a programme of privatisation of public organisations should be rolled out as soon as possible, beginning with Cyprus Τelecommunications Authority.

But President Anastasiades prefers to raid the bank accounts of the thrifty, despite denying throughout the recent general election campaign that he would do anything of the sort. All account holders will lose 9.9 per cent of their deposits over „100,000, with a 6.75 per cent levy on smaller amounts. The indebted and profligate are to be spared this tax: there is no longer any virtue in saving. The objective is to raise „5.8bn to help fund another euro bailout. Bizarrely, in the absurd Mammon merry-go-round, bankrupt Greece is contributing „billions from its own bailout injection.

The euro project is devoid of all morality: there is no ethical perspective; no fiscal integrity; no framework of values to protect the rights of the common people. Cypriots are now prevented from accessing their own hard-earned savings, and all online transactions are prohibited. This is brutal. It is, quite literally, daylight robbery. But the ECBeast needs feeding, and its appetite is insatiable. Once it has consumed Greece and Cyprus, it will open its jaws on Spain, Italy and Portugal. If savings may legally be raided in Cyprus, why not elsewhere? The contagion is unrelenting; financial collapse inevitable.

Governments are urging caution; politicians are pleading for calm. They insist that the Greek island is ‘exceptional’ and the measures are ‘unique’. It is a lie. If you can do this once, you can do it again. People’s savings are no longer secure in any eurozone bank.

Into the darkness of this trauma and chaos comes an apocalyptic vision of the future. It is positive, joyous and victorious, heralding complete reformation and a new world order. Archbishop Chrysostomos has called for people’s deposits to be left intact and for his country to leave the eurozone. This heralds the second coming of the the Cypriot pound.

That is bold, prophetic, wise and welcome. Archbishop Chrysostomos is His Grace’s kind of cleric.

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The Medicine Man and the Democrat Party’s Base: A Return to the Primal Cave

The primitive tribalism into which American culture-especially its intelligentsia-is tumbling may hold the key to understanding how “leaders” like Barack Obama are thrust to the fore.I have almost finished wading through a stack of World Lit Survey papers as my Spring Break ends.  (Spring comes early down South.)  One of the essay options I created deals with the shaman, a shadowy figure whose prominence in tribal cultures thrusts him into the center of many myths and legends.  The shaman is a liminal (literally, “threshold”) character.  Also known as the witch doctor, the medicine man, and the master of the hunt, he mediates between worlds: the corporal and spiritual worlds, the human and animal worlds, the rational and irrational worlds.  He flits back and forth across the interface between what we can understand and what we cannot.  He communes with departed souls and returns with prophetic knowledge, detects animal spirit-chatter and finds out where the herds have gone, contacts offended deities and placates the wrath that authors plagues and storms.  He often wears hides or antlers to represent how his allegiance is divided between the human and the animal.  He may even, in some cases, be a “she” intermittently.  The Greek seer Teiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years, and the great Achilles was disguised as a maiden when Odysseus craftily enlisted him to join the expedition against Troy.

The shaman’s supernatural powers come at a cost, however.  Often himself a descendant of the gods, he does not recognize and is not held to certain cultural rules-a dispensation which renders his relationship with the rest of the community very uneasy.  For instance, the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh is apparently violating both the marriage and the parental bond at the beginning of his sketchy epic baked into fragmented clay.  His infractions are so severe that the gods must send along a second shaman-Enkidu-to protect Uruk.  The Irish Cu Chulainn, once seized by the ecstasy of his murderous battle fury, must be pacified through a series of rituals that includes tribal maidens stripping bare before him so as to stir his shame.  He also steals his bride Emer, murdering her father, and later kills his own son in combat (conceived by the daughter of the warrior/witch/prophetess Scathach).  Herakles, the premier Greco-Roman shaman, has a colorful history of slaying or taming monstrous creatures that devastate the domain of culture; but in one of his “restful” moments, he succumbs to sudden dementia and slaughters his wife and children.

All three of these figures journey to the Other World (less obviously the Land of the Dead in Irish myth than in the two Mediterranean traditions).  In fact, a subtle contradiction nestles deeply within shamanic legends.  On the one hand, we see a wild, semi-divine berserker who can protect culture from nature’s predators precisely because he himself is part inhuman monster.  He is a dynamo of fearsome aggression.  On the other hand, we find a spiritual traveler who can reach normally imperceptible dimensions in a trance.  This morph of the shaman plays an essentially passive role of drifting among spirits and receiving messages.  Eventually, I believe, oral tribalism evolves into a more complicated socio-cultural state where the wild man is confined to legends about vanquishing ferocious beasts and overpowering hostile armies, while the Other World Traveler becomes a roving Sinbad the Sailor tossed upon one exotic shore after another.  Homer’s Achilles takes no journey to the Underworld, and Homer’s Odysseus does not slay dozens or hundreds in raging combat.  The distinction between epic and romance is born.

Why these comments in a space dedicated to contemporary American political and cultural life?  Because myths never die.  They are like some Saharan plant whose seeds remain dormant for years, then suddenly germinate after a downpour and launch a wondrous shoot through its whole life-cycle in two weeks.  The seeds of myth lie sleeping within all of us.  Whenever our culture’s sophisticated layers of insulation wear thin, timeless patterns of behavior suddenly blossom-and the flower can be very dark.  This is evident, for example, in combat veterans who try to readjust to civilian life.  The rules of “common decency” may suddenly strike them as absurd.  They have dreams-nightmares-unknown to ordinary people.  In extreme and terribly tragic cases, a few may kill family members before they take their own lives.  Like the ancient shaman, they once protected society against the forces of brutal savagery, but they could only do so by becoming half-savage themselves.  The Heraklean lion’s skin cannot simply be shucked off by signing a few papers.

I will go a step further.  As I have ruminated over the shaman this past week, the notion has settled upon me that our ever less literate, more tribal culture has been trying for several decades to resurrect the medicine man.  Specifically, the base of the Democrat Party has been engaged in this primitive dance whenever it selects presidential candidates.  Here is my evidence.

Some of us have long marveled that the left side of the aisle can be so righteously indignant when a Republican takes a mistress or keeps a secret project off the books, yet the same hard-core Democrats merely shrug, or even celebrate, when a Bill Clinton is caught lifting skirts or a Barack Obama trapped telling whoppers about Benghazi.  How does that work-how is that fair?  It’s fair because Republican candidates have no business even auditioning for the part of “medicine man”.  The more they stress their rationality, their reverence for the rules, their fidelity to traditional marriage bonds, etc., etc., the more they demonstrate that they are not shamanic material.  They are the village elders who always quote proverbs correctly and always sacrifice the right animal in the right season with the right prayer.  That won’t save the tribe: that doesn’t give us a champion possessed of demonic powers.  We need someone (screams the grass-roots Democrat in his or her paroxysm of impatience with reality) who will claim virgins as his due, who will grind the rules under his heels like a whirling dervish, who will rain thunderbolts from the sky without compunction.  Our witch doctor must hear voices that do not speak to ordinary mortals.  We will waive communal restrictions upon hallucinogens in his case because they lift him to places where we could never go.  We will applaud him, in fact, for concealing his past, obscuring our collective future, and veiling the present in childish fabrications; for his ways are not our ways, and if we could understand the prophecies that swell his garlanded head, then they would clearly not contain a mystical roadmap.

Ed Muskie was no shaman, of course; neither was Michael Dukakis.  George McGovern and Jesse Jackson-and Bobby Kennedy (whose end was a little too close for comfort to the ritual human sacrifices we have uncovered in northwestern European peat bogs)-drew much nearer to the margin.  Yet they were, precisely, marginal: marginal to the party’s base, that is, which still contained significant numbers of Catholic factory-workers, Southern farmers, and World War Two vets.  By the time Bill Clinton rose with the cream (or the scum, depending upon your assessment of the brew), the base’s forty-somethings had entirely changed.  They had spent their college days enjoying free sex, smoking dope, relinquishing clothes, protesting final exams, and lobbying for content-free courses.  The archway to their adulthood had been constructed of bricks minted from self-indulgence, contempt for convention, counter-conformity, irrationality, and narcissism.  They were bright in their way, these votaries of the new Dionysus.  Some were extremely so.  They cut their intellectual teeth on crafting sophistical arguments that elevated chaos over order, hedonism over discipline, and lunacy over reason.  You have to be pretty bright to prove that down is up (though convincing yourself as well as the audience of potheads probably justifies an intellectual downgrade).

And Bill was their guy, their High Priest.  Everything about him was “edgy”.  He looked less like his mentor William Fulbright than like Elvis.  He was prettier than his wife, with his blue eyes, his curly golden hair, and his nose and mouth more suggestive of malleable clay than of mature bone and sinew.  His dead-beat dad had abused his mother and hadn’t hung around to rear the kid, who ended up being the most improbable of Rhodes scholars and the most predictable of draft-dodgers.  When the kid played the saxophone, one recalled troubling jests about the instrument’s possessing vaguely phallic qualities; and when the rumors about “eruptions” began to surface, one somehow reflected-in spite of oneself-that dogs can’t be blamed for howling at the moon.

Clinton was not “America’s first black president”: he was her first shaman-president.  White America-or, to be exact, the Flower Children of the Democrat Party now turned into Ben and Jerry-associated the two.  “Negritude”, to them, meant a crazed, inspired, and inspirational kind of spirituality-a connection with “otherness”.  To be black, to them, was to enjoy instant and automatic escape from all the order, reason, system, discipline, self-interest, and self-sacrifice that had straitjacketed their parents’ generation (dubbed The Greatest Generation by a frivolous journalist who, on the eve of the 2008 election, murmured in delighted tingles at Charley Rose’s table, “We don’t really know who Barack Obama is”).  Obama, the half-black man-the man whose black half had no American slave past-the quasi-Hawaiian who might have been born in Indonesia and whose all-Kenyan Muslim father had also deserted the family-would be the ultimate realization of this white-liberal blackness, in all its shamanic glory.  By contrast, American blacks whose roots led straight back into slavery and the Jim Crow ordeal were not black at all if they studied, dressed, behaved, and spoke in the orthodox manner: Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Alan Keyes.  These were all “race traitors” to the white Ben-and-Jerry base.

In the interim-the Interregnum-Al Gore and John Kerry sought to assume the bison robe and the great eagle-feather headdress.  Gore attempted to sell himself as Nature Man, not only by greening up every word that fell from his mouth but by delivering those words with inexplicable, almost maniacal bursts of warpath vocalization.  He also employed academic priestess of the vagina Naomi Wolf (with her fox-tail tresses) to lend a further Bacchic tinge to his campaign.  (Was Al’s name in Lakota, perhaps, Dances-With-Wolf?)  It almost worked: it worked better, at any rate, than Kerry’s weak bid.  Despite his very best efforts, Kerry always appeared too rational in his raving: his battle frenzy was too calculated, its Purple Hearts too tidily arranged.  The sorceress in his life was a Catsup queen, and his mad prophecies either made too much sense or too clearly served his selfish interests in their folly.  Beltway pundits called him an “insider”, unlike Clinton; but the real difference was that Clinton came across as genuinely libidinous, uncivilized, out-of-control, and hence god-like, whereas Kerry was all sarcasm and subterfuge-a malcontented sub-chieftain rather than a bonafide medicine man.

The Party was ready for the real thing, a genuine stark-raving mad “transformative figure”.  It hefted Barack Obama out of his mid-life mediocrity, therefore, wrapped him in the shaggy mantle, and fitted him with antlers.  Nobody knew anything about him?  So much the better: Jason wandered into Corinth fatefully wearing a single sandal.  He might not even have been born an American?  So much the better: Cu Chulainn was born to a mother chased into exile, and Enkidu ran wild among the antelope after his creation.  His true father was known to be a West-hating socialist from a nation recently subjugated by Great Britain?  So much the better: the volatile divinities who sired Gilgamesh, Cu Chulainn, and Herakles all receded back into the gray heavens after filling a mortal woman’s womb.

In fact, every “criticism” of candidate Obama raised by his adversaries-the weed-smoking of his high school days, the hate-speech in his chosen church of twenty years, his friendships with known subversives and criminals, his instruction at the hands of sociopathic chaos-worshipers (half-man, half-beast cave-dwellers like the centaur Cheiron who tutored Achilles)… all of it simply pushed the Mysterious Stranger farther into the margin, where he appeared more and more convincing as The One Who Communes with Spirits.  His very name sounded so like Osama that the late Teddy Kennedy struggled to separate the two.  Odysseus’s name, too-The Hated One-had once exploited its apotropaic qualities to smuggle its owner into and out of deadly spaces.  This man who almost bore the name of America’s most hated enemy was said by his promoters to be the one, the only one, capable of mediating between opposed powers.  He would do it with his strong medicine, with his charms and spells.  He didn’t have a plan, and he didn’t need one.  Plans are rational, and hence forever doomed to failure.  This No Man would blind the Cyclops with heady drink and a fiery thyrsus.

In a way, I pity Barack Obama.  From the beginning, he has been caught up in incredibly dynamic and unruly forces of whose dangers he has no inkling.  The most primitive version of the shaman never finds a happy ending.  While the Other World Traveler returns safe from the Far Side with rare new knowledge, the Berserker is always consumed in the fire of his own meteoric transit.  Obama’s Achilles half has begun, since the last election, to overpower his Odysseus half, especially in his hubristic gun-grab and in his quest to command the planet through drones.  The myths tell us what happens next, and the myths don’t lie.  For thousands of years, they have dictated the same ending.  People who have rejected rule by their basic passions in favor of rule by reason and higher morality may hope to cheat the devil… but the crowd surrounding this puny man-who-would-be-king is not cut of that cloth.

The more pressing question to me concerns the identity of that very crowd.  Who are these people-what, precisely is the Democrat Party’s base these days?  Why do its members, though superficially well educated, behave like chanting, milling, pipe-smoking ritualists in tribal paint?  Has the follow-the-leader indoctrination of sex and drugs to which they were incessantly submitted throughout their college years really sunk such deep roots?  One must conclude that it has.  After all, Charles Manson’s girls were similarly indoctrinated-and we saw to what lengths they were capable of being led.

So the final question, for me (and I hope I am not alone in asking it), is this: who is the Devil behind the indoctrination?  Who is the new Charles Manson?  Who is distributing all these ghost-shirts on our campuses?  Is there an evil genius pulling the strings-a Doomsday clique consisting of people like George Soros, Saul Alinsky, and late initiates like Bill Gates?  Or is chaos simply the raw-natural state of human affairs, self-sustaining whenever weeds run riot through civilization’s garden?  Isn’t sex pleasant enough in itself that young people will surrender their lives to it without much need of manipulation?  Isn’t the self-disgust that follows a wholly carnal lifestyle agonizing enough that it will drive sufferers to escapist drugs without any further trickery?  Are we being hazed into the slaughterhouse, or are we merely slaughtering ourselves?  Is there a Mahdi ordering his people into the conflagration, or is a populace in love with fire arbitrarily selecting a Mahdi to preside over its mass-suicide?

The myths say that Troy burned to the ground, Atlantis sank into the sea, and Croesus was executed upon the gilded ruins of his kingdom.  We may utterly vanish, too.  Soros and Gates will vanish with us-the myths are clear about that, and the image of their crew in one of Dante’s pitchy bolgias holds a little comfort.  As we wait to see, however, into what abyss these mad revelers of the Left will carry us, lofting their clueless Voodoo Prince on their shoulders at every step, let us not entirely forget the true god who redeemed us from the mythic cycle of hubris and tragedy.  Let us call the Old Man by his real name and recognize that the line between right and wrong grows clearer every day.

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Obamacare, Socialism, And Rick Perry’s Assumptions

“The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals, as evidenced by the last two presidential elections. That’s what they think. That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012.”

Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) drew applause with that line, as he spoke at last week’s “Conservative Political Action Conference’ (“CPAC”) in Maryland. And if there’s any sure-fire way to draw applause from a conservative audience in 2013, taking a swipe at both the media and the Republican Party is probably a good strategy.

Yet if there is somehow a false narrative in “the media” about America abandoning conservative ideals, it may also be true that the notion of America adhering to some set of conservative ideals is, perhaps, a bit of a false narrative as well. Implicit in Perry’s message is the assumption that, if only a “truly conservative” presidential candidate had appeared at the top of the ballot in the 2012 presidential election, then the outcome of the election would have been quite different, and our nation’s public policy would therefore look very different. And there is no doubt some grain of truth to his claim – neither fiscal conservatives nor social conservatives had any particular affinity for Mitt Romney, and this was probably part of what led to the lackluster voter turnout.

Yet evidence suggests that, even in heavily Republican regions of the country, very left-leaning, socialistic, Obama-styled public policy ideas are nonetheless thriving. Voters in these regions may give lots of lip service to things like the sanctity of life and traditional marriage, but the ideals of limited government and fiscal conservatism seem to have been abandoned in favor of President Obama’s explosive growth of social welfare programs. This would seem to refute Governor Perry’s assumptions about our country – and it should be alarming to all Americans.

Consider, for example, the predominantly Republican state of Arkansas (a state that Romney won in 2012).  The state’s Governor, Mike Beebe, and U.S. Senator Mark Pryor are both Democrats. But Lieutenant Governor Mark Darr, U.S. Senator John Boozman, all four of the state’s U.S. House members and the majorities in both the state House of Representatives and State Senate, all belong in the Republican category.

Yet despite all the “R’s” that abound in the state, Arkansas has nonetheless gone full-tilt with the implementation of Obamacare.  This is to say that the state has implemented a government-run health insurance exchange (26 states in the country have thus far refused to do this), and they have also voluntarily chosen to lower eligibility standards for Medicaid and, thus, to expand the number of Medicaid recipients.

Jay Bradford, Commissioner of the Arkansas Department of insurance, openly admits that the implementation of the insurance exchange will actually raise the price of insurance that cash-paying consumers have to face, but notes that the federal government is currently offering so much money in subsidies so insurance companies can offer either free or reduced-rate coverage (to those who qualify), that the opportunity was too good to pass-up.  One can imagine that the decision to expand Medicaid in Arkansas was also based on another one of the President’s “too good to pass up” offers, in as much as the Obama Administration is currently offering to pay 100% of a state’s Medicaid expansion costs (the offer expires at the end of this year).

In case that isn’t sufficiently eye-opening, consider Idaho (yet another state that Mr. Romney won last year). Every one of Idaho’s statewide elective offices, including the office of Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Education, Controller, Treasurer, and Secretary of State, is occupied by a Republican.  The state’s two U.S. Senators, and its two U.S. House of Representatives members, are all Republicans. And the Republican Party holds super-majorities in both the state House of Representatives, and the state Senate.

Yet, despite Idaho being an extremely “red” state, a majority of Republicans in the state House and Senate have nonetheless sided with the minority of Democrats in the legislature and have voted to implement an Obamacare insurance exchange in the state (Republican Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter has been pushing his party to do this since last December). Estimates are that, despite the state’s tiny population of less than 1.8 million, insurance companies that operate in the state will take in upwards of $200 – $300 million in federal subsidies, once the insurance exchange is put in place.

Both Arkansas and Idaho have historically qualified as “pro life” states. Socially conservative Protestantism reigns supreme in Arkansas, while both Mormonism and Protestant Evangelicalism are predominate among the Idaho electorate. And three weeks ago Arkansas adopted the toughest statewide abortion restriction in the country.  Yet these two states have both embraced Obamacare, despite the fact that the Obamacare insurance exchanges promise to provide funding for abortion-inducing drugs, and, likely, for the procedure of “mechanical abortion” itself.

The point of all this is obvious:  in regions of the country where voters still profess to be “conservative,” “pro life,” and “Republican,” they are nonetheless empowering state and local leaders who are bringing about very liberal, socialistic public policy and who are expanding government dependency.  Ideas about competitive private enterprise, private sector charity, and personal self-sufficiency are giving way to the promises of government welfare, even as the rhetoric of “traditional marriage” and “the sanctity of life” remains intact.

Rick Perry may be right, and America may once again “choose conservatism” as long as it is presented by the proper candidate.

It may also be true that Barack Obama has more fundamentally altered the fabric of America than anybody cares to admit.

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