Bradley Manning, The Hero of Gays and Wikileaks and the Impotence of the Obama Government

As various American communities are comtemplating elevating gay unions to become marriages, perhaps it would be good for the less thinking to know more about the gay community.  

Bradley Manning, a  gay soul languishing in the military……. lonely.   Poor boy is not a happy soul, a lefty in the making, to be sure.   And, malisciously  or heroically, depending upon your political restraints, taps into “secret” government files and sends them off to Julian Assange, another winner in the human underworld, the founder of Wikileaks.

Apparently the two hit it off well, but these details are perhaps still secret, unlike  the United States Department of State secrets now mostly dealing with poor American president Mr. Obama and his dealings with friends and the less friendly.

How is it possible that some PFC twerp in the military can have access to the endless amounts of recorded material allegedly highly protected from enemy and New York Times snooping to compromise America’s security?

To find out more about PFC  Manning, who he is and about his  sufferings while on duty, please click here to become better acquainted with the gay community:

http://montrealsimon.blogspot.com/2010/11/wikileaks-bradley-manning-and-my-new.html

Will the Obama wusses at the Attorney General’s office, you know, the Eric Holder models, get involved………Perhaps, the Department of Defense?     Will the nation’s enemies at the New York Times be confronted for their treason?  Will Bradley Manning be punished for his?

Not with Barack Hussein Obama as president.

Who Is Vivian Schiller? Why Is She So Ugly?

    (This following comment was  recorded at  ”I Am Modern” responding to  an extensive article about Vivian Schiller, the CEO and President of NPR, who suddenly appeared in the news as an annalyst involved with the firing and psychological description  of Juan Williams, now exclusively at Fox News.)

written by DEI, October 29,2010

“Vivian’s comment about juan Williams: ‘His feelings that he expressed on Fox News are really between him and his, you know, psychiartrist or his publicist. Take your pick.’ You really need to watch the video of her when she made this comment. Schiller allowed a smirk to appear on her face. This was a telling moment. NPR’s Board of Directors need to do their job and ask for her resignation at best or fire her publicly at worst. “

Vivian Schiller’s ugliness is not at all rare in the Vivian Schiller world.   This ugly person, if one accepts the adage, “handsome is as handsome does”, is actually a mother.   Her past includes Soviet life and Ted Turner, not a good mix, but not everyone who receives a Master’s Degree from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont turns into a snot.

Here is the  page from “I Am Modern” advertised as “Health Beauty:  a “Life Style” magazine for Modern Women”   featuring Ms. Schiller.    Being Lefty and a snot is a common and often  inevitable combination among America’s Left, the folks determined  to manage everyone’s lives.

Perhaps Ms. Vivian Schiller is a better person  in real life other than a Lefty snot…..Here is your opportunity to find out:  Click below to read about Ms. Vivian Schiller at “I Am Modern”.               http://www.iammodern.com/vivian-schiller.html

Our America Is Ailing. Nick Gillespie at Reason.com Offers a Cynical (or Realistic) Take on the Change in D.C. Power

Nick Gillespie wrote an article at Reason.com review the prospects of anything  positive might occur from the new Congress to begin to nurse our ailing America back to more normal fiscal, moral, and administrative health. 

It’s a good read, so click on:        http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/29/did-the-midterms-matter

Dennis Prager Exposes a Major Lie from the Big Left: NPR, PBS, and ABC Hosts

The greatest enemy to the modern Marxist Left is a two-in-one foe, Christian and Free Enterprise America.  It is of no concern to the Left  that American Marxists lie……the goal, the creation of a Marxist authority  is what matters.

Marxism is a religion based on atheism and authoritarianism similar to Islamic dictatorships based on Allah which rule from  platforms of power and intolerance.  Democracies cannot exist in these two religion-dedicated ideologies. 

Dennis Prager wrote an outstanding article several months ago, in August, actually to illustrate an extreme America’s once cherished Liberals have distorted truth to satisfy views from the Marxist Left:

“There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student from modern liberalism. It was its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism; the liberal-led Korean and Vietnam Wars were examples. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the left, which had been morally confused about communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

After the Vietnam War, even liberals who continued to describe communism as evil were labeled “right-wingers” and “Cold Warriors.” And the United States, with its moral flaws, was often likened to the Soviet Union. I recall asking the pre-eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that the United States was a morally superior society to that of the Soviet Union. He would not.

Little has changed regarding the Left’s inability to identify and confront evil. And its moral equation of good guys and bad guys was made evident again in recent weeks by hosts on three major liberal networks — ABC, NPR and PBS.

First, on May 25, PBS host Tavis Smiley interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim Somali writer and activist for human, especially women’s, rights in Islamic countries. After mentioning American Muslim terrorists Maj. Nidal Hasan (who murdered 13 and injured 30 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood) and Faisal Shahzad (who attempted to murder hundreds in Times Square), this dialogue ensued:

Ali: “Somehow, the idea got into their (Hasan’s and Shahzad’s) minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.”

Smiley: “But Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Ali: “Do they blow people up?”

Smiley: “Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine is — I could do this all day long. There are so many more examples of Christians — and I happen to be a Christian.

“There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.”

Then, on Aug. 22, Michel Martin, host of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” in discussing whether the Islamic Center and mosque planned for near ground zero should be moved, said this on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Howard Kurtz:

“Should anybody move a Catholic church? Did anybody move a Christian church after Timothy McVeigh, who adhered to a cultic white supremacist cultic version of Christianity, bombed (the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City)?”

And third, on Aug. 26, ABC “20/20″ anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted this to his nearly one million followers:

“To all my christian brothers and sisters, especially catholics — before u condemn muslims for violence, remember the crusades….study them.”

I have known Smiley since the 1980s when we both worked at the same radio station in Los Angeles. He is smart, and he is a gentleman who has accorded me great respect both on his television show and off air.

How, then, does such a man equate Muslims who murder in the name of Islam with Americans who “murder every day,” none one of whom commit their murders in the name of Christianity?

How does Martin equate the thousands of Islamic terrorists around the world, all of whom are devout Muslims, with a single American — one who, in any case, professed no religion, let alone Christianity?

And how does Cuomo claim that Christians cannot condemn Muslims for violence because of the Christian Crusades?

First of all, the Crusades occurred a thousand years ago. One might as well argue that Jews cannot condemn Christian and secular anti-Semitic violence because Jews destroyed Canaanite communities 3,200 years ago.

Second, it is hardly a defense of Muslims to have to go back a thousand years to find comparable Christian conduct.

Third, even then there is little moral equivalence. The Crusades were waged in order to recapture lands that had been Christian for centuries until Muslim armies attacked them and destroyed most Christian communities in the Middle East. (Some Crusaders also massacred whole Jewish communities in Germany on the way to the Holy Land, and that was a grotesque evil — which Church officials condemned at the time.) As the dean of Western Islamic scholars, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis, has written, “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”

So how did Smiley, Martin and Cuomo make such morally egregious statements?

The answer is not that these are bad people, let alone that they are not repulsed by terrorist violence.

The answer is leftism, the way of looking at the world that permeates high schools, universities, news and entertainment media. Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of accurate moral judgments: They regarded America and the Soviet Union as morally similar. And today, they claim that people they call “extremists” within Christianity (who are they?) and Islamist terrorists and their supporters pose equal threats to America and the world.

That is how bright and decent people become moral relativists and thereby undermine the battles against the greatest evils — communist totalitarianism in its time and Islamic totalitarianism in ours.

The only solution is to keep exposing leftist moral confusion. One problem, however, is that in countries without talk radio, an equivalent to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, conservative columnists and a vigorous anti-left political party, this is largely impossible.

The other major problem is that the media that dominate American life have little problem, indeed largely concur, with the foolish and dangerous comments made by their mainstream media colleagues. That is why these comments, worthy of universal moral condemnation, were ignored by the mainstream (i.e., leftwing) media. Instead, they directed mind-numbing attention and waves of opprobrium toward Dr. Laura.

Those who don’t fight real evils fight imaginary ones.”

Comment:  Where do these leftists learn such rot?

Obama’s Democrat Party Will Continue to Attack America to Expand Leftwing Power

Paul Mirengoff came up with yet another excellent PowerLine article, titled, “Congressional Democrats Remind Us Why They Still Need a Shellacking”!  and I confess, the “Still” is my addition.

The reasons for this shellacking which STILL should be in progress is well outlined:

“The lame duck session of Congress should be focusing on the nation’s core business – passing a budget and deciding whether our tax rates will stay where they are beginning in January or increase for some or all of us. However, the Democrats seem focused instead on more peripheral matters that are of special interest to their special interest constituencies – namely the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (for the gay component of the Democratic base) and enactment of the “DREAM Act” (for the Hispanic component).

Before the election, the Democrats included both of these left-liberal agenda items in a proposed Defense Appropriations bill. The bill failed. Now, the Dems have decided to push both as stand-alone legislation.

To get the ball rolling on reconsideration of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a two-day hearing on December 2 and 3 regarding the Pentagon’s report on the impact of repealing the policy. To accommodate the Democrats, Defense Secretary Gates moved up the report’s release date by a day, to Nov. 30. This gives committee members an additional day to review the report. However, a two or three-day review period is still insufficient when the issue is changing basic military policy. So is a two-day hearing.

Fortunately, it seems unlikely that don’t ask, don’t tell will be repealed. Lindsey Graham, a pretty good vote counter, told Chris Wallace today that he doesn’t believe “there’s anywhere near the votes to repeal DADT on the Republican side.” Graham predicted that “in the lame-duck session DADT isn’t going anywhere.”

The Dream Act probably won’t go anywhere either. In all likelihood, Harry Reid is pushing the legislation not because he thinks it will pass but rather as a thank you to the Hispanic voters who helped re-elect him, and because he wants to keep Hispanic voters stoked up with anti-Republican sentiment.

Republicans should oblige Reid. There are, in my view, individuals encompassed by the DREAM Act for whom a good case for citizenship can be made. But, as David Frum shows, the DREAM Act paints with too broad of a brush and would almost certainly become the vehicle for fraud and abuse. Moreover, the Act would likely act as a magnet for future illegal immigration. In Frum’s words:

DREAM stands as an ongoing invitation, forever and ever. DREAM’s benefits extend not only to people who happen NOW to be illegally present inside the United States. DREAM’s benefits will be extended to all those who may enter illegally in future. DREAM’s message goes forth to Indonesia, to Egypt, to India, to China, to anywhere where teenagers find $7 an hour more attractive than $7 a day: come now and come early. Don’t waste your time acquiring an education before you arrive. We’ll subsidize your education right here in America.

The Democrats’ decision to put repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell and the DREAM Act on the front-burner of the lame duck session provides a timely reminder of how grateful we should be that their power in the new Congress will be so markedly diminished.”

Comment:  I have claimed for a long time as I claim here, that the Democrat Party no longer is an American institution interested in improving  the condition of the country at home and abroad.  As Dennis Prager so often reminds his listeners, “The Left is interested in power”, its primary reason for existing.

Liberals are no longer alive politically in the Democrat Party.  Ask yourself,  anyone, and everyone you know,   what are the current policies of the Democrat Party which purport to strengthen the Union, not the disunion of the nation?

Spreading hate is one of the most popular tools the Marxist Left uses in any society, democratic or authoritarian, to exploit hatreds to advance their favorite, most loyal and best organized victimhood groups.   Whether the groups themselves are Marxist does not matter.   American gays, latinos, blacks, feminists, union members were not born to hate either Americans or conservatives.   They have been taught to do so by Marxist persuasion for political purpose.

Read more about Obama’s friend, Bill Ayers, and his crowd.

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The New York Times: PRAVDA and IZVESTIA All Wrapped Up Into One Propaganda Sheet?

Throughout much of the 1950s and a decade later, I subscribed to the main newsprint pieces of the good old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, “Pravda”, the ‘organ’ of the “Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”,  and the other, “Izvestia”, “News of the Deputies of the Workers, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Pravda was usually a bigger organ….supplying 6 pages of Communist Party “news”, while Izvestia was usually confined to four.

Headlines in the official Communist Party newsprint, the newsprint that mattered if something  that mattered was intended to matter, (always a guess for readers world wide…..rather similar to goings on in the Obama administration)  would run something like, “Unity and Solidarity Are the Strength of the Peoples”……or   “Heartwarming Meeting in Moscow”  accompanied by the words of the “Speech of Comrade N. S. Khrushchyov.”   Close by or on page 2 would be a couple columns announcing, “Socialist Power and Peace Growing Ever Stronger”.

Don’t expect to spend time looking for ads.  When Marxist governments run economics as well as every other area of human activity, there is no need for advertising……..except to pump up the government itself, a 24-7 activity and devotion in the Marxist world of communication. 

The New York Times still carries advertising.   Big Business has always had dealings with Marxists. 

The Times  has an army of opinion people representing nearly every leftwing American victimhood group.   “How can anyone open the American mind to the plight of the black, of the latino, of the poor, of any “victim” of American capitalism the New York Times bosses deem worthy in their leftist dreams without expressing outrage?”   After all, America is the most racist nation in the world to these writers.   They know for they  live in Manhattan, and so, are determined to open the American mind.

Dotted here and there among the newspages of the New York Times, also exist the skilled, honest and professional reporters…….so no one can claim this Big Business enterprise has reached  Pravda  status yet.  That its management  censors widely,  infers untruths, and avoids topics unfavoring to current managment’s Leftwing religion.  for whatever reasons, unscrupulous or unavoidable, is the right of the publisher of the Times to do so in our free, nonMarxist society.

It is the responsibility of the American public to recognize its bias and deceit when it is presented.

It should be understood, however, by the vast American unaware, that the dream of those who ‘invented’ the USSR, came from Marxists devoted to enforce equality among its peoples.   Equality in any society must be determined and controlled by those who rule……roughly the same folks who lead the newspaper brigades rallying around Barack Hussein Obama.  As in any leftwing theory,  those who run goverrnment are never counted among the people who must obey government.

Scott W. Johnson at PowerLine wrote the following article, “The Times Then and Now”, and gives us an example of its leftist duplicity:

“The New York Times is participating in the dissemination of the stolen State Department cables that have been made available to it in one way or another via WikiLeaks. My friend Steve Hayward recalls that only last year the New York Times ostentatiously declined to publish or post any of the Climategate emails because they had been illegally obtained. Surely readers will recall Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s inspiring statement of principle: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”

Interested readers may want to compare and contrast Revkin’s statement of principle with the editorial note posted by the Times on the WikiLeaks documents this afternoon. Today the Times cites the availability of the documents elsewhere and the pubic interest in their revelations as supporting their publication by the Times. Both factors applied in roughly equal measure to the Climategate emails.

Without belaboring the point, let us note simply that the two statements are logically irreconcilable. Perhaps something other than principle and logic were at work then, or are at work now. Given the Times’s outrageous behavior during the Bush administration, the same observation applies to the Times’s protestations of good faith.”

UPDATE: James Delingpole cruelly belabors the point…

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California and Illinois Considered Among Ten Biggest Government Default Risks

The “Build America” Debt Bomb

Build America Bonds (BABs) were created as part of the stimulus bill to re-energize the municipal bond market, which contracted sharply in late 2008, says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

States and cities jumped deeply into this new market.

• California alone has issued some $21 billion in BABs, mostly as a substitute for its general obligation debt to support everything from school construction to sewer projects.
• New Jersey has used up to $500 million to recapitalize its depleted transportation trust fund.
• Columbus, Ohio, issued $131 million in BABs to start construction of a downtown convention hotel.
• In Dallas, Texas, when no private operator would finance a new convention hotel, the city went ahead with a government-subsidized hotel, courtesy of $388 million in BABs.

But the BAB program hasn’t been the unqualified success its advocates claim, says Malanga.

Indeed, in June, based on the cost of insurance contracts, CMA Datavision listed California and Illinois among the 10 biggest government default risks in the world.  Illinois was at greater risk of default than Iraq.  Yet thanks to the BAB subsidy, Illinois was still able to borrow some $300 million in bonds by offering a 7.1 percent interest rate.

Meanwhile, investors are realizing that states and localities face long-term costs in addition to their muni debt, especially retirement obligations.

• Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester assess the 50 states’ unfunded pension bill at $3 trillion, and they say that the municipal tab for pensions could reach $500 billion.
• That is on top of some $2.8 trillion in outstanding state and local borrowing, according to the Federal Reserve.

Source: Steven Malanga, “The ‘Build America’ Debt Bomb,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2010.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575621062239887650.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The above information is provided by the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Wikileaks: The Truth Behind Telling Lies? Or Lies Behind Telling Truth?

The most dishonest wheeler-dealers in the world are diplomats in a nation’s ‘foreign office’.   Lying or ‘coloring’ the truth is a most important part of  business in this world of ‘foreign affairs”.   Hillary Clinton is right at home employed as director  of America’s  nest of tale-tellers.   No one can ever “figure out” when she’s telling the truth, but one can assume it occasionally occurs.  

Think of the stories the State Deparments of the past 30 years have told us about good things about to happen in North Korea, if they accept  this  or that bribe.   Think of Jimmy Carter performing  his love for “diplomacy” bribes.   Maybe Wikileaks can snoop into Pyongyang’s collection of ‘secrets’ about Jimmy.

But Wikileakers are Lefties who wish to defeat   the democratic West, particularly the  one free enterprise nation still in existence, the United States of America.    Those ‘defending’ the democratic West are weaklings preferring to hide or ignore their frailties, or are leftwingers themselves.

The leftwing American establishment media have been very quiet covering this espionage bonanza designed to embarrass or cripple American diplomacy…….at a time when America is crippled by a weak and strange ‘president’……and a leftist to boot. 

We go abroad to guardian.co.uk for this article by Timothy Garton Ash, “US Embassy Cables:  A Banquet of Secrets.”…….and then a subtitle:  “A diplomat’s nightmare is a historian’s dream”.

“It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare. Here, for all to see, are the confidences of friends, allies and rivals, garnished with American diplomats’ frank, sometimes excoriating assessments of them. Over the next couple of weeks, you, the readers of the Guardian, will enjoy a multi-course banquet from the history of the present.

The historian usually has to wait 20 or 30 years to find such treasures. Here, the most recent dispatches are little more than 30 weeks old. And what a trove this is. It contains more than 250,000 documents. Most of those I have seen, on my dives into a vast ocean, are well over 1,000 words long. If my sample is at all representative, there must be a total at least 250m words – and perhaps up to half a billion. As all archival researchers know, there is a special quality of understanding that comes from exposure to a large body of sources, be it a novelist’s letters, a ministry’s papers or diplomatic traffic – even though much of the material is routine. With prolonged immersion, you get a deep sense of priorities, character, thought patterns.

Most of this material is medium-and high-level political reporting from around the world, plus instructions from Washington. It is important to remember that we do not have the top categories of secrecy here – Nodis (president, secretary of state, head of mission only), Roger, Exdis, Docklamp (between defence attaches and the defense intelligence agency only). What we have is still a royal banquet.

Small wonder the state department is crying blue murder. Yet, from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of “the war on terror” in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. In recent years, I have found the American foreign service to be somewhat underwhelming, reach-me-down, dandruffy, especially when compared with other, more confident arms of US government, such as the Pentagon and the treasury. But what we find here is often first rate.

As readers will discover, the man who is now America’s top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily “with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans”.

Burns’s analyses of Russian politics are astute. So are his colleagues’ reports from Berlin, Paris and London. In a 2008 dispatch from Berlin, the then grand coalition government of Christian and Social democrats in Germany is compared to “the proverbial couple that hated each other but stay together for the sake of the children”. From Paris, there is a hilarious pen portrait of the antics of Nicolas (and Carla) Sarkozy. And we the British would do well to take a look at our neurotic obsession with our so-called “special relationship” with Washington, as it appears in the unsentimental mirror of confidential dispatches from the US embassy in London.

Reassuringly, we also find occasional signs of the British Foreign Office standing up for our values. According to a report from 2008, one senior British diplomat, Mariot Leslie, “was very frank that HMG did object to some of what the USG [government] does (eg, renditions) and therefore does have some redlines”.

It is very disturbing to find telegrams signed off by Hillary Clinton which seem to suggest that regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks – such as grubbing around for top UN officials’ credit card and biometric details. Clarification is now urgently needed from Foggy Bottom (the seat of the state department) of who exactly was expected to do what under these human intelligence directives.

More broadly, what you see in this diplomatic traffic is how security and counter-terrorism concerns have pervaded every aspect of American foreign policy. But you also see how serious the threats are, and how little the west is in control of them. There is devastating stuff here about the Iranian nuclear programme and the extent not merely of Israeli but Arab fears of it (“cut off the head of the snake”, a Saudi ambassador reports his king urging the Americans); the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile to rogue Islamists; anarchy and corruption on a massive scale in Afghanistan; al-Qaida in Yemen; and tales of the power of the Russian mafia gangs, that make John le Carré’s latest novel look almost understated.

There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things. The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same.

Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are “going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world”. The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. “Don’t even think of it,” he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day’s New York Times.

There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.

One thing I’d bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what?”

Further comment:   From the distance of my tiny office and ancient, yet ongoing education, these disclosures should be a curse upon all those who have perpetrated them through sabotage,  guile or stupidity, beginning with  officials and offices within the Barack Hussein Obama administration.  On the otherhand I am as curious as the next guy.

However, if anyone is killed, murdered  as a result of revelations from these documents, the principals should be charged for committing a capital offense,  treason.   There are times in any society when announcements must be announced and followed through. 

American Culture Sucks…..Diseased by Narcissism and Ignorance

Prager friends, I can’t tell you how much I hate that word in the title of this writing….”Sucks”.  Thanks to my living in our modern American  society in which I still do, to the complaints of some and smiles of others,  I cannot think of a better word to use for effect and perfection of meaning to describe today’s dominant American values.

We live in today’s America in a culture glorifying and cultivating:

PLEASURE, nearly all of it physical, ESCAPE  from responsibility, IGNORANCE of the known,  IMMATURITY which pleasure, escape and ignorance protect, and CHILDLESSNESS, the cultural rejection of becoming an adult and fulfill the needs of the culture itself.   

This stirs to memory one of my favorite quotes of all, that of  historian, Arnold Toynbee:

“GREAT CIVILIZATIONS ARE NOT MURDERED.  THEY COMMIT SUICIDE”  and that is what I believe we, Americans, are doing……committing suicide because we have lost our soul…..traditional American values  based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

Please read the following article by Jennifer Braceras at the Boston Herald:  “WHO NEEDS MARRIAGE?”

“In a culture that glorifies unwed parents like “Brangelina,” Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, is it any wonder that Time magazine has declared the institution of marriage to be on the verge of extinction?

In a recent cover story entitled “Who Needs Marriage?” the news-weekly (itself on the verge of extinction) unveils Pew Research Center findings that today fewer American adults are married than ever before (about 50 percent compared to nearly 70 percent in 1960), only 46 percent of unmarried people would like to get married and almost 40 percent of American adults think marriage is obsolete.

Why? In part, because Americans no longer consider “tying the knot” a prerequisite for sex or child-rearing. So while many Americans continue to celebrate marriage (witness the appeal of shows like “The Bachelor” and the collective obsession with the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton), they no longer view it as necessary.

America’s view of marriage as just another “lifestyle choice” is not without costs. Although Time attempts to paint a rosy picture of changing families and alternative parenting arrangements, the Pew study contains some sobering facts about American children:

Only 64 percent live with married parents, as compared to 87 percent in 1960.

Some 41 percent of babies are born out of wedlock (an eight-fold increase since 1960).

Today 72 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock.

Before they turn 15, 21 percent of children will see their mothers cohabitate with two different live-in-partners. (An additional 8 percent will see their mothers serially cohabitate with three or more partners.)

When it comes to marriage, political correctness has given birth (literally) to an epidemic of illegitimacy and single-parenting. And these demographics have important social and economic consequences.

In 2008 the median household income of married adults was 41 percent higher than that of single adults after adjusting for household size. So children of unmarried parents are, on average, financially disadvantaged.

Although Time suggests that economic inequality leads to lower marriage rates in some communities, the magazine has cause and effect reversed. In fact, as Kay Hymowitz clearly explains in her book, “Marriage and Caste in America,” single motherhood is a primary cause of entrenched poverty, not the other way around.

If these economic disparities aren’t enough of a reason to stop celebrating single motherhood, Hymowitz shows that even controlling for income, race and education level, children of single mothers are less likely to succeed academically and are more likely to suffer from substance abuse, commit crimes and have children at a young age (often when they are themselves unmarried).

The Pew study is frightening precisely because it reveals a “tale o

precisely because it reveals a “tale of two cities” – one where babies are born to two-parent families and lead successful and essentially middle-class lives, and another where babies are born to single moms and lead economically and socially disadvantaged lives because of it.

Two generations ago, adults viewed marriage in practical terms. Yes, marriage served a romantic purpose. But it also served as the primary vehicle for socialization and economic advancement of the next generation.

Having divorced marriage from sex and child-rearing, American marriage today serves only the narcissistic need for self-fulfillment. We have forgotten that marriage is not just about adult happiness, but also about the responsibilities of parenthood and preparing future generations to thrive and succeed.

So “who needs marriage?” Despite the hand-wringing at Time magazine, the answer is really quite obvious.  Kids do.”

Added comment:  It is because of “KIDS” a culture’s gay community must not be provided  marriage, for the purpose of the institution is to produce the next generation of life by a real father and real mother….hopefully to produce  better people than in the past….an old American dream.  Society should provide a second tier, a legal tier providing legal protections, for those  who are partners.   Clever people can work out the nitty gritty, but the purpose, if the culture is interested in NOT committing suicide, is to restore child-raising to the highest purpose of civilized life.

“Big Business” is primarily a follower and “Big Government a  primary instigator  of cultural change:  but  both are run by bureaucrats whose purpose has nothing to do with the moral content of what they are selling.  Big Religion, Big Education  and Big Politics aren’t  interest either.   Security almost always triumphs over Virtue…..and it should never be forgotten that the human female is not at all interested in “Liberty”, by nature.