Denial

From: Breaking Down The Wall Of Silence

To be conscious of unfreedom, one must have a concept of what freedom and respect for life are.

A person who has never experienced this as a child, who has only know and been exposed to extreme violence, brutality, and hypocrisy, without ever having come across a single helping witness, does not demonstrate for freedom. Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom.

People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter-arguments.

As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should no expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person. [italics from the original, breaks in text added]

[snip]

We have to show them that what was passed off on them in childhood as "a good upbringing" was a base, mendacious and idiotic ideology in which they had to believe in order to survive, and that they now wish to recirculate at the political level. And we have to show them that the people who cheated them, who engendered their misery, their hunger for power and destruction, were not Jews or Turks or Arabs or Gypsies, but their very own parents--clean, orderly citizens, God-fearing respectable churchgoers.

Alice Miller, like many other psychiatrists, wondered why so many good Germans went along with or joined in on the horrors of the Nazi regime. She determined that people obeyed horrific orders because they had been taught to do so at a very young age. They were taught to ignore mistreatment from their parents, by their parents, and carried on that practice of obedience in the face of abuse in the church and under the government. In time they denied they had been mistreated at all, because who can admit that their parents were not able to love them? Children don't see parents as damaged people, they see them as powerful and wise, and they want their parents' love more than anything else in the entire world. So they deny their own feeling and eventually the feelings of others. They find intellectual reasons to support these emotional reactions, but it's all denial, all an attempt to avoid emotional pain.

These past few days we've seen reports of one American atrocity after the other--our soldiers' frenzied joy at shooting guns at and murdering random people, our president declaring that we are all the prospective enemy of our own government, the persecution by the government of whistle-blowers, the admittance by our military that our known atrocities are just the tip of the iceberg. We have proof, and we still deny that we are a menace to the world, our wealth is based on murder and theft, our noble heritage and innate superiority a vicious lie. We deny and will continue to deny no matter how many people have to die to preserve our illusions. Worse of all, we fight to preserve our culture of death and destruction, handing over yet more money to the thieves because we can't admit they stole from us. Electing more presidents who coolly watch us and our enemies die while preaching brotherhood and equality. Telling ourselves to change from within, elect more Democrats, hold more fundraisers, gain more power. All in the service of denial.

The only way to gain more power is to give it away.

Parents who share power and responsibility with their children are teaching their children to respect themselves, to trust and believe in themselves. Societies that share power don't suffer from the social upheavals that inevitably result from power (and therefore economic) inequality. Nations that share power don't waste resources in wars. But we won't share power, because it is something that is taken in our society, not given, and jealously guarded and preserved.

All this guarding and preserving means we will commit atrocities as a matter of self-preservation, as we see it. And we will deny what we are doing every step of the way. What to see how it's done? Fortunately, I have a fine example right here at my fingertips. But that's a different post.

Technical Difficulties

I am having computer problems today so posting will be late or tomorrow. McArdle is writing about war atrocities again, and just like in Iraq, nobody can tell and people are only human and fog of war. The only thing that really upsets McArdle is people being mean to banks. Maybe Freud could figure that one out. I can't.

Meet Ross Douthat

Hi! I'm Ross Douthat. The New York Times is paying me a fortune to say that all news reporting should be biased. Since liberals are Democratic Party hacks and conservatives are much more independent-minded, all shows should be hosted by men like Michael Kinsley, Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak. All news shows should only have conservative guests as well, like on "The Daily Show." Or maybe Gore Vidal. You know who's just like Gore Vidal? Glenn Beck!

Megan McSkinner

Oh, joy! Megan McArdle, who promised not to blog about her wedding, once again blogs about her wedding. Watching a glibertarian attempt to deal with the real world is always amusing. It's like putting the world's laziest rat in a maze, where is stops and complains loudly that it's not getting its treat every time it hits a dead end. A less entitled rat would turn around and find another way, while the glibertarian rat expects to be rewarded just for showing up.

Let's watch "Ratatouille" McArdle run the maze of the post office. Our story begins with McArdle at one end of the maze, 200 wedding invitations clutched in her little paw. At the other end is a mailbox slot, which will dispense an electrical shock to the wedding pleasure centers of the rat, genus Parkslope wannabeous.

I went to the post office today to mail our wedding invitations. They are, I grant, a sort of odd shape--large and square. (This is what happens when you outsource your wedding invitations to India, apparently). So they take an odd amount of postage.

Which is why they wouldn't let me mail them.

No, I kid you not. The post office lady is, it turns out, only allowed to put ten envelopes through the machine at once--and while our wedding is intimate, it's not that small.

Oh, no! McArdle has gone down a straight corridor that ended in a wall! What will she do when faced with the barrier of odd-sized envelopes?

Fine, give me the stamps, I said.

Ah, the motivation is strong in this test subject. It's a pity, therefore, that when faced with the wall, the subject demands another wall.

No, she said, I don't have the right stamps. You should go to a "philatelic window", an entity that does not apparently exist in the local post office.

Rats! Foiled again! McArdle has run from one dead end to another. She sits, waiting for the treat to materialize anyway.

My request for stamps in smaller denominations was turned down on the grounds that I would have to put too many stamps on the envelopes.

No treat? But--she's come so far!

I was willing to inflict the indignity of multiple stamps on my wedding guests, in the name of, um, getting them their invitations on time.

She was willing to go through the wall, but the wall just didn't care.

Her tone, however, suggested that while I might be some sort of multi-stamping barbarian, the honor of the United States Post Office was at stake.

What is a glibertarian rat to do when the dispensers of treats refuse to dispense their treats on demand? Do the Treat Gods not understand that running the maze is for lesser rats, the kinds with brown coats instead of shiny white coats?

Well, that's all very nice, but the invitations are a little late getting out as it is.

It's as if the wall doesn't even care that McRat needs to get to the other side right now. Perhaps it is confused because the rat is just sitting there, but that's no excuse. McRat must reach her mail slot, however. The self-gratification brain center is too powerful to be ignored, and McRat soldiers on.

I asked for the smaller stamps, at which point I was informed that she simply did not have sufficient stamps in the correct denominations.

Another dead end. Damn this maze and its insistence on having twists and turns and making you think, remember, and plan.

So let's recap here: there are no stamps. At the post office. And they will not run the invitations through the machine, either.

There are walls. In the maze. And you have to go around them to get what you want when you buy heavy wedding invitations from India because while you are willing to go into debt for your wedding, you are not willing to appear to be of modest means before the other Parkslope rats.

Now, I have no idea whether this is regulation run amok, combined with Soviet-level distributional inefficiency; or whether she simply didn't feel like dealing with my wedding invitations, and started making up rules to force me to take my damn business elsewhere.

Glibertarian rats see plots everywhere. They think that someone is watching their every move. They are right, but it is not because the watchers enjoy dispensing tasty treats to entitled rats.

I'm not going to say that this would never happen in a private organization, either. And I know that many of my readers are even now itching to jump in and call me a privileged, whining, entitled yuppie, who has some damn nerve thinking she ought to be able to just waltz into a local post office with a bunch of non-regulation envelopes, and pay the people there to transport her mail throughout our fair land.

You know us so well.

Where the hell did I get the notion that the post office was supposed to mail the things I bring there, no matter what size they are?

From your entitled little rat brain?

(Well, actually, here, which makes no mention of the fact that the local post office may not actually be able to mail your letters. But I digress.)

All I want to say is, any private company that behaved this way should go out of business. And right now, that's how I feel about the United States Post Office. At least if they didn't exist, I'd have known I needed to make other arrangements.

Wait--didn't McRat make it to the mail slot? Where's the end of this story?

No matter; the moral of the story is clear. When you are trying to mail cards that are too heavy to take standard stamps and too big to go through the automatic system and you don't do it far enough ahead of time to accommodate your special needs, the moral of the story is that the post office is inept and mean.

h/t Downpuppy in comments

Taking Out The Trash

Brad DeLong (again) and Paul Krugman deal with Megan McArdle this time. We don't dare look too closely.

Also not worth looking at too closely is a post defending insider trading. We are struck dumb--no amount of snark can gild this putrid lily.

McArdle also click-clacks a review of Clash of the Titans. As Perseus is not a banker slaying evil minority home owners, she is not entertained.

I gather that the idea was to do a sort of homage to eighties movies—indeed, to possibly the last of the great stop-motion monster movies. It was the kind of homage that is usually delivered by drunk wedding guests with a latent crush on the bride and a too-accurate grasp of the couples' worst qualities.

How sweet. McArdle is dreaming about her ideal wedding.

Added: Tom Levenson braves the waters as well.

Oversight

Brad DeLong delicately sushis Megan McArdle so we don't have to, to our everlasting relief.

But first the back story: McArdle criticized Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for doing his job. It seems that AT&T is saying that the removal of a tax subsidy on businesses' health care will cost them a billion dollars.

Dallas-based telecommunications giant AT&T Inc. said Friday the company will record a $1 billion noncash charge in the first quarter of 2010 due to tax changes related to the passage of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Waxman's committee sent a letter [pdf] to AT&T and others making the same charge.

This new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertations are a matter of concern. They also appear to conflict with independent analyses. The Congressional Budget Office has reported that companies that insure more than 50 employees would see a decrease of up to 3% in average premium costs per person by 2016. The Business Roundtable,an association of chief executive officers from leading U.S. companies, asserted in November 2009 that health care reform could reduce predicted health insurance cost trends for businesses by more than $3,000 per employee over the next ten years.

The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing on April 21, 2010,at 10:00 a.m. in Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building to examine the impact of the new law on AT&T and other large employers. We request your personal testimony at this hearing.

To assist the Committee with its preparation for the hearing, we request that you provide the following documents from January 1,2009, through the present: (1) any analyses related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T; and (2) any documents, including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T. We also request an explanation of the accounting methods used by AT&T since 2003 to estimate the financial impact on your company of the 28% subsidy for retiree drug coverage and its deductibility or nondeductibility, including the accounting methods used in preparing the cost impact statement released by AT&T this week.

We ask that you provide the requested information by April 9, 2010. For purposes of this request, the term "senior company officials" includes all company officials at the level of Vice President and above for the company or any subsidiary. Attachments to this letter provide additional information about responding to Committee document requests and testifying before the Committee.

Just imagine, the chairman of the oversight committee is doing his job and providing oversight, asking companies to prove their claims. The nerve. How dare he do his job? Doesn't he know that the government is supposed to move out of the way so businesses can do whatever they want? Where was he during the Bush years? McArdle is incensed!

Henry Waxman's War on Accounting

[snip]

The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America.

[snip]

Obviously, Waxman is incensed because this seems to put the lie to the promise that if you like your current plan, nothing will change. But this was never true. Medicare Advantage beneficiaries are basically going to see their generous benefits slashed, retiree drug benefits suddenly cost more and may now be discontinued, and ultimately, more than a few employers will almost certainly find it cheaper to shut down their plans. If Congress didn't want those things to happen, it should have passed a different law.


If Congress thinks that it made the right tradeoffs--or at least, justiiable choices--then our Congressmen should step up and accept responsibility for what they've done. At the very least, I think we can ask that they refrain from trying to force companies to join them in denying reality by threatening congressional investigation of any company who dares to notify investors that this thing is going to cost them money.

She always supports the banks, no matter what the context. Of all the things to worship--not a god or a philosophy, not art or science or nature or the physical form. Of all the beautiful and soul-expanding experiences to form an attachment to, McArdle and her ilk choose to give their hearts and souls to money, markets and bankers. What do they give in return, the promise of status through wealth? The hope of being lifted and held above the rabble by buying chauffeurs, doormen and head waiters? Why do some people have to believe they are special?

Moral Depravity

Via Roy Edroso, we see that Megan McArdle made one of those awkward, badly made blogging videos, this time with Diane Sawyer and ABC News. Our Megan is moving up in the world, and our only regret is that Ann Althouse* hasn't found the same fame as well, because that would be much funnier. But we must go to video with the hack we have, not the hack we wish to have.

For some reason known only to the gods, ABC has decided that McArdle's English degree, MBA, and keen sense of the sweep of history make her the perfect person to interview about morality during a recession. Fortunately for McArdle, she specializes in what she would probably call the girly economic outlook, in which McArdle posts about her feelings about the economy instead of actual facts about the economy. Sawyer asks Professor McArdle about the biggest changes in morality during a recession, and McArdle replies that it is tradition to indulge in vice during good times because you have money to drink, gamble and party. During the Depression morality improved, McArdle said, because people had less money to spend on vice. Because evidently humans are binary creatures who only choose between two actions--spend money or not spend money. If you have money then of course you buy alcohol and have drunken parties, hire prostitutes, and gamble that money away. And when you have less or no money, of course you don't lie, cheat, or steal to feed your family. You don't use your last dollar to drink away your sorrows. You don't get into fights because you feel weak and worthless as a provider for your family. You don't prostitute yourself to feed your baby when your husband runs away in shame because he can't bear to watch you go hungry. You don't become a national hero by robbing banks.

My god, she's a stupid woman.

The morality of the young people was broken apart by the horrific war they had just endured. A Lost Generation, looking for someone to trust, something to believe in, something to help them forget. And the older generation clung even tighter to religion, condemning the immoral youth, just like in the sixties and eighties and any other time. In the 20s there was a resurgence of religious fundamentalism in response to the destruction in the social fabric that always occurs during and after a war.

McArdle must have read The Great Gatsby, but evidently concluded that Jay Gatsby was a superior businessman destroyed by the lower classes' envy, and the soulless, empty people in the mansions and nightclubs drank just because they could afford to buy alcohol.

So, Sawyer asks, should marijuana be legalized to provide revenue? That's an argument in favor of legalization, McArdle replies. She has perfected the art of saying nothing while talking endlessly, which is taking her far in the world of elite media. Sawyer next asks about morality after a great recession or depression. McArdle replies that during a depression people must depend on their community to help them survive, and therefore after the crises has passed, people are more moral and puritanical because they have more of a sense of obligation to those in the community and less to those outside the community. She does not mention that the US didn't' pull out of bad times until the massive government spending to prepare for and wage war, but this is, no doubt, why the 1940s were shining times of morality, instead of cesspool of murder, looting, rape, and god knows how many other atrocities, like genocide.

Stupid, stupid elite problem-solving Master of the Universe. With them in charge we're all going to die. Really. They'll bumble around and refuse to educate themselves and end up blowing up every damn one of us. I understand that people are very fond of faith-based thinking, but the lack of logic and rational thought out there is going to get us all killed.

Back in our recession, Sawyer asks McArdle about the biggest surprises of these times. McArdle replies that the biggest surprises are the relative mildness of the recession, [it's not over yet, cupcake] compared to what people predicted, and the speed in which anger at bank bailouts morphed into anger at any spending. If she wants to understand that phenomenon she should roll over in her bed of sin and talk to her tea-bagging boyfriend, who helped usher in these immoral, violent times.

*Hi, Ann!

Lesser Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: Because the government doesn't have the resources to police crooked businesses, we should get rid of the government.

Less Private Megan: Ricky Martin is gay. I just wanted to say that. Also, someone who is not officially out is gay. I just wanted to say that too. [I hope her blogging friends don't become more famous, or we'll be hearing about their sex lives too.]


More Fiscally Responsible Megan: People are worried about long-term risk on US bonds. Perhaps they think we're in a financial crises, but it is more likely that they are worried about Social Security and Medicare driving the US into default.

[That can't be right, can it? Is she really saying people are worried about the US government defaulting? Several times she's said something similar, but I must be mistaken in some way. Does she not understand the part about printing money, or am I seeing things that are not there?

And of course, there's the dreaded default risk. If people stop thinking we're good for the money, they will demand higher interest rates, and tip us into crisis.

What is she saying?]

So Much For Respect

Megan McArdle:

Big Government has written a post suggesting that the individual health care mandate will not actually be enforced by the IRS.

Hahahaha!

Big Government has written a post

Haha!

Big Government

Ha!

From Thoreau to Breitbart.

Congratulations, Atlantic.

Hell On Earth

Today is another busy work day, so I will be relatively brief. Fortunately Ross Douthat was stupid again; I don't have time for one of McArdle's fact-warping posts.

The Catholic Church has covered up its priests' sexual abuse of children, just as our secular society used to sweep such crimes under the rug. Kathryn Jean Lopez merely parrots the official Vatican line--it was all the fault of the dirty hippies and gays, who brought sex out from under the authority of straight men, where it belonged. But more is expected from a New York Times columnist, and Douthat delivers.

What the American and Irish churches have endured in the last decade and what German Catholics find themselves enduring today is all part of the same grim story: the exposure, years after the fact, of an appalling period in which the Catholic hierarchy responded to an explosion of priestly sex abuse with cover-ups, evasions and criminal negligence.

You see, the real problem here is not the children who endured rape and molestation. The real victims are the churches, which "have endured" the exposure (years after the fact, mind you--years!) of their rape and molestation, and the bishops and others who protected the child rapists and molesters instead of protecting the children. They knew that priests were raping children as they were saying Mass, leading prayers, holding confessions, administering First Communion to the little kids. Every time they blessed a child, they knew another child was being bent over and raped. Beaten in institutions. Forced to give oral sex to priests. Told it was their fault, that the child was the seducer. Forced parents to stay silent for fear of excommunication. Douthat chooses to focus on the institution and ignore the child victims, which puts him on the same level as the priests who knew what was going on but excused it away. Douthat is trying to spin child molestation, a sickening and disgusting action that should be inexcusable. But in this authority-loving world where children are seen as possessions to be treated or mistreated any way the parent chooses, the powerful will always win over the powerless, until they are stopped.

Every time you don't confess a sin it adds more sins to your plate--that is what Catholic children are told. And the priests and especially the bishops and pope were able to face God as if they had innocent hearts instead of guilty ones and tell everyone else that the must confess all their sins and go forth and sin no more, or else God would cast them out to Hell. Every minute of their lives they lived a double life, a life shadowed by sin, and yet they still conducted their business as if they were a moral authority anointed by God. It was possible to do this only if the priests, bishops and popes thought their survival and good public image was more important than the rape and molestation--the torture--of children. The Church and its unquestioned authority, they quite clearly stated from their actions, is more important than the people in it.

Now the scandal has touched the pope himself. There are two charges against Benedict XVI: first, that he allowed a pedophile priest to return to ministry while archbishop of Munich in 1980; and second, that as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1990s, he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf children 30 years before.

The second charge seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, more than 20 years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statute of limitations was waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pretrial proceedings were halted just before he died.

But the first charge is more serious. The Vatican insists that the crucial decision was made without the future pope’s knowledge, but the paper trail suggests that he could have been in the loop. At best, then-Archbishop Ratzinger was negligent. At worst, he enabled further abuse.

For those of us who admire the pope, either possibility is distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit in the scandal.

From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends of the country.

This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the church.

And here we see what Douthat is protecting; his precious culture war, in which he can use his Jesus stick to beat everyone else over the head so they won't have teh icky sex. His career, which consists of calling women sluts and cowering in fear of the Dreaded Gay Agenda, is more important that helping raped and molested children. If the Church goes down, his career goes down too. If we stop giving authority to strange white males, he goes down as well. Make no mistake, it's also in Douthat's best interest to ignore raped children, and in the pages of the New York Times, he does his very best to wrench blame away from the child molesters and rapists and smear their sins over everyone else.

Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

Disgusting. Bishops covered up the priests' and their own actions instead of going to the police. You have child rapists arrested, you don't move them from parish to parish. More spin. Douthat is forced to admit that obedience is part of the problem, but his solution is more obedience, not less.

What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the church.”

That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. Since then, he’s come to grips with the crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize investigations that should have happened long ago. Because of Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past.

Right, blame the dead pope, not the man in charge of handling the scandals under the pope--Benedict, then cardinal.

But the crisis of authority endures.

Because that's what's in danger here, that's what really counts. Not children going to bed crying in fear and dread of the next day. Not bruised bodies. Not destroyed minds. Not the children.

There has been some accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf this papacy.

Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s darkest eras.

This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.

Which is exactly what the priests, bishops and popes want--to control the entire situation. Substitute meaningless confession and repentance for arrest, trial, jail, and, sadly, the terrible sexual abuse that is tolerated in our prisons today. Because the important thing here is that the priests have the chance for God's forgiveness, not that children have vindication and the rapes are punished. In the eyes of the Church the children are invisible, just as they were during the crimes. And that is what the rape and molestation of thousands of children over centuries proves to us--what really matters is that the powerful maintain their power over the lives of others.

The Church is not God. The papal hierarchy is not God. The multi-million dollar Church estates are not God. The gold, jewels, Prada shoes, missals, tabernacles, vestments, abortion protests, political lobbying are not God. The children are the face of God, and if you turn your back on them, you have nothing left.

There is no more church. There are abusers and their enablers, and their victims. If the institutions are permitted to continue, the pope, priests and bishops will be just like Dick Cheney, who learned that the only sin is getting caught.

The next time they won't be so careless.

Gimme More Money Or The Tribe Dies

NRO On-line:

Emergency NRO Webathon
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Now more than ever, we need your help yelling Stop. We need your help to demand Repeal, to protect Liberty, and to halt aggrandizing Government!

Let others despair – NRO is going to battle ’til victory. We face more Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Emanuel fights ahead, massive election battles in November, and so much more.

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Jonah Goldberg on Twitter:

On agenda this weekend: Watch DVR'd New: Breaking Bad, V, Flashforward, Community, 30 Rock. Ah productivity.

2:10 PM Mar 26th via web

Nobody Can Know Anything, Ever

Shorter David Brooks: Our elite are not to blame for this economic disaster; economists failed because nobody can know anything, ever.

Did I mention that one of David Brooks' favorite economics blogger is Megan McArdle?

The establishment — and yes, this week there really is such a thing — is saying we have to pass [Bush's bank bailout] even if it’s ugly. The greater risk is inaction, not bad action. I happen to agree with this position, for what it’s worth, influenced by the brilliant economic blogger Megan McArdle, who points out that given how bad the Great Depression was, it’s probably worth taking heroic measures to prevent another.

The elite say we have to give tax-payer money to the banks so we must do what they say. But our elite economists were wrong. But that's not their fault because economics is an art, not a science, and now our elite say economics is broken. But our elite will figure out the solution. All they have to do is look back to earlier elites, who will tell the present elites what to do, so they can tell David Brooks, who can then tell us.

This amounts to rediscovering the humility of an earlier time. After all, Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, Friedrich von Hayek built his philosophy on an awareness of our own ignorance, and John Maynard Keynes “was not prepared to sacrifice realism to mathematics,” as the biographer Robert Skidelsky put it. Economics is a “moral science,” Keynes wrote. It deals with “motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One has to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogenous.”

In Act IV, in other words, economists are taking baby steps into the world of emotion, social relationships, imagination, love and virtue. In Act V, I predict, they will blow up their whole field.

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.

Sociologists and theologians might disagree, but Brooks is busy creating a new reality here, and the old reality will just have to suck it up.

Once this is accepted, economics would again become a subsection of history and moral philosophy. It will be a powerful language for analyzing certain sorts of activity. Economists will be able to describe how some people acted in some specific contexts. They will be able to draw out some suggestive lessons to keep in mind while thinking about other people and other contexts — just as historians, psychologists and novelists do.

At the end of Act V, economics will be realistic, but it will be an art, not a science.

That's one powerful assessment of failure there. Our economics didn't fail us, economics failed our economists-our elite. Who are never wrong, even when they are.

The Third Rail Of McArdle

(Busy today--more posting tomorrow.)

Megan McArdle (or, as she likes to be called, McStupid), has decided to attack social security,, which is rather a mistake as her manipulations are easily refuted.

Every since the early eighties, when the Greenspan commission kicked the can down the road with a combination of tax increases and later retirement ages, analysts have been awaiting the day when the system would finally go into deficit. That date has been sliding around between 2016 and 2020 for some years now, but the suspense is finally over: the system is going into deficit this year.

Not doing a bit of research, I remember this was known and planned for.

Now, we all know that this week, McArdle said one of the stupidest things a grown human can say. ("Tyranny of the Majority") My friends, this week she tops herself. She's become quite the Jonah Goldberg.

This is the canary in the coal mine; if Social Security's finances are in trouble, Medicare's will also be looking worse. While I was at the Kauffman Foundation's economics blogger forum last Friday, a show of hands indicated that about 80% of the people there thought America would have a serious fiscal crisis in the next two decades. This is how it starts--not with a bang, but with a moderate decline in revenues.

I'll have to read a lot about Social Security to respond, but if she's going to operate on this level of clumsy misdirection and feeble lying, it'll be fun.

Shorter Megan McArdle

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Kathryn Jean Lopez Calls Bart Stupak A Slut

Kathryn Jean Lopez volunteered for the Prom Committee and the power has gone to her head.

I have no idea what Bart Stupak was thinking. Perhaps he couldn’t endure the pressure on him, on his staff, and, most intimately, on his family. Perhaps he lacked an appreciation of the power he had to hold up the president’s signature legislation for the sake of the unborn and then got entranced by the pats on the back he got from leadership for saving their day, which he very likely did. A Democrat who wanted to vote for universal health care, in the end, Stupak proved himself the cheapest of dates. He traded all this power — power that had Nancy Pelosi screaming at a pro-life Democrat on the House floor Sunday — for a mess of pottage: for a farce of an executive order that holds no power over the codified statute of Obamacare.

Throughout the whole ordeal — both while Stupak was fighting and after he caved — I couldn’t get the late Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey out of my mind. He was pro-life, and he was a Democrat. And he didn’t actually have a home in the Democratic party. If you’re pro-life and you’re a Democrat, for decades now, you’ve found yourself empty-handed, duped, angry, or humiliated.

That's right, sluts, he'll take your virtue and leave you alone and humiliated. Sure, first Obama was all, "Hey there!" and winking at Stupak and offering him a ride in his sports car, but after he used him and cast him aside for the next cute legislator, Stupak was left with nothing but a cheap corsage and his regrets.

In 1992, Casey won reelection with over a million votes. That and being the governor of Pennsylvania, a key swing state right next door to New York, would normally get you a slot at a Madison Square Garden Democratic convention. But not for Casey. In a move reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s refusal even to talk to his own ambassador to the Vatican, who stood outside the president’s office for hours trying to deliver a letter from the pope on the president’s decision to veto a ban on partial-birth abortion, the White House refused even to respond to Casey’s requests for a place on stage during the 1996 national convention. The Democratic party, which claims to be a beacon of tolerance, doesn’t have a lot of it when it comes to those who defend the most innocent among us.

Casey was a good girl and where did it get him? The other Democratic Seducer-in-Chief did the same thing! Casey waited by the phone all day but Bill Clinton never called, even though Casey had a letter from the pope! The pope! If a letter from the pope won't get you an invitation to the prom, what will? The pope defends the innocent children as long as they are unborn. After they are born, not so much, and you'd better learn to not let the priest stand directly behind you. But that's not the point--protecting the children is the point!

Casey called abortion “inconsistent with our national character, with our national purpose, with all that we’ve done, and with everything we hope to be.”

Of course, our current president, who claims to be all about hope, went to that same school and tried to wash the conscience of Casey from our political memories. But he can’t. And for a while, it looked as if Bart Stupak wouldn’t let him.

So much for that.

Do you think jut because he goes to school with you that he won't use you? You fool! You'll be forgotten just like the last girl in your sorry position. You think you'll hold out, but then he gets out the Barry White and it's good-bye panties, hello public humiliation.

What we saw in the health-care debate is that the Democratic party — as defined by its national leaders — is a party that, when given a choice between abortion and universal health care, as it was on Friday night before Stupak gave in, chooses abortion.

I think she's trying to say that instead of going to Planned Parenthood for reproductive health care, Slutty McStupak had an abortion instead, but my Wingnut translation skills are taxed to the limit here.

Soon, the farce that is the executive order Bart Stupak agreed to will undergo the analysis of more observers than just the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Politics may well wake up the party leadership. If it doesn’t, politicians of conscience are going to have to walk. “Pro-life” is just talk if you’re a vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker and a vote for the most radical embrace of abortion by a branch of the federal government since Roe v. Wade.

In other words, for the moment, “pro-life Democrat” is a category that doesn’t really exist. As for the pro-life Democrat “no” votes left standing alone and useless last night, God bless them.

Therefore, Kathryn Jean does hereby petition the student council from letting any slutty Democrats from going to the prom and ruining it for everyone else, who just want to have a nice time without any hanky-panky going on that will earn them eternal damnation.

Whatsoever You Do

In "More On Health Care Predictions," Megan McArdle expends many, many unnecessary words to attack her enemies, the liberal bloggers. For all of life is a pissing contest between yourself and your peers, attempting to one-up them and get their attention. McArdle is not yet reduced to staring at photos of politicians until she sees a hidden picture like Ann Althouse, but she's getting there.

McArdle discusses cost and benefit and accountability but she does not discuss people, whom she reduces to numbers on a balance sheet. McArdle thinks people exist to maximize their economic potential. She doesn't have the faintest clue that we exist to love and be loved, and to give of yourself to your fellow man is the greatest privilege on earth.

Death! Destruction! Totalitarianism! Meooooow!

Megan McArdle is devastated. Bereft. Heartbroken. Crushed. She's a sad little kitty.

Obviously, yes, I was upset yesterday. I'm glad that this could bring so much joy to peoples' hearts, and of course to know that for many people, the happiest part of passing health care reform seems to have been knowing that it made people like me unhappy.

It's hard to be the center of the universe. Here you are, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and Big Thinkerish, but people keep doing things you don't like. What the hell is wrong with them? Don't they care about Megan McArdle at all? Do they even think about what she wants? Or do they just think of ways to make her unhappy, like trying to get health care or end wars? How freaking selfish can other people be??

The people wondering why I was so upset should contemplate that first, I think you people just screwed up both our health care system, and our fiscal system (even further), and that if I'm right, that's not really funny.

Awwww. Sad Kitty ignored the death of Iraqis (and actually tried with all her might to downplay their deaths) and the irresponsible actions of her banking gods, but now she's terrified. Little Miss Megan thought it was fine for our elite to plunge the world into an economic crises, but health care will mean the death of our nation, just like national health care brought down all these countries that have it: "Afghanistan, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iraq*, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine and the United Kingdom."

Yes, we are providing universal health care for Afghanistan. The child of a Muslim warlord gets health care from the American government, but the child of an American worker and tax-payer does not.

McArdle has not really backed down from any of her lies and distortions about health care; she still repeats them in ever-shifting form. She simply dismisses the facts, saying that government is bad and it should stay out of health care.

Once the government gets into the business of providing our health care, the government gets into the business of deciding whose life matters, and how much. It gets into the business of deciding what we "really" want, where what we really want can never be a second chocolate eclair that might make us a size fourteen and raise the cost of treating us.

I realize that to most people, these are airy-fairy considerations that should be overridden by the many "practical" considerations of the awesomeness of central health care. Well, I'm actually pretty underwhelmed by that awesomeness, for reasons I'll happily elaborate elsewhere. But not here, because fundamentally, to me, the effect on the tax code and the relative efficiency of various sorts of bureaucracy are mostly beside the point. The real issue is the effect on future lives, and future freedom. And in my opinion, they way in overwhelmingly on the side of stopping further government encroachments into health care provision.

Unfortunately for everyone who was paid to fight health care reform, the Republicans ruined the economy, lost the election, and lost the opportunity to watch more Americans die in the street or cheap apartments. McArdle only makes herself look hysterical, ill-informed, and hopelessly partisan by predicting the end of the world as we know it.

If you think there is actually no chance that I'm right, you need to go read a book like Jonah Leher's How We Decide.

You have to admire her belief in her mental powers. However, she forgets one tiny detail:



Otto: Don't call me stupid.

Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself. The London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes. I looked 'em up.


(My computer went haywire for a moment, so this post was edited after publishing.)

The Future After Health Care

America, I come to you with a heavy heart and a dark cloud floating over my head, the kind with little flashes of lighting and rumbly noises. Do you know what happens when you elect a man who promises to reform health care and then makes some reforms on health care? You have failure, my friends! Failure! Have we no protection from the people we elected to reform health care actually reforming health care? Don't they care that we had an election in which the Democrats, who are for health care reform, were elected to reform health care? How long must we be ruled by our elected representatives? The scandal! The tragedy!

But you'll get yours, oh yes, you will. The Republicans will disagree with you! Will refuse to support you or do what you want! It is to laugh, the idea that the Republicans won't withhold their support! I laugh at your supposition of comity, mutual support, and bipartisanship!

My only consolation is that all the people who were elected to reform health care will be sent howling into the wilderness for supporting health care reform. How they hate the mouth-breathers who elected them to support health care reform. The best route to electoral success has never been to do what your constituents elected you to do.

I hope Obama enjoys his success. That'll teach him. He's sure to be rejected by the electorate for obeying their wishes. Not that it matters what the people think; nobody listens to me them anyway.

In Which The Poor Disappoint Their Lords And Masters

David Brooks takes a look at the stranglehold the elite has on the economy and deduces that the problem is "a devastating crisis of authority."

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

Brooks looks to British philosopher and theologian Philip Blond for guidance on how to deal with the failures of our society.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

The right keeps insisting that a cultural revolution took place in the 1960s, in which the Anglo-Saxon culture that made America the pinnacle of political, moral and economic achievement was rejected in place of dirty hippie culture, with its "do your own thing" philosophy. Back over in reality, where the rest of us live, we know that the only thing rejected was the authority of the elite, as minorities fought for equal treatment by the law and society. Our society didn't dissolve into communal living. We didn't stop making wars, earning money, creating families. We just made it harder for the dominant White culture to exclude everyone else. Conservatives, who by definition try to maintain the dominance of White males, were frightened by the loss of authority and power. The right has been hysterical about the dirty hippies who spoiled their ability to enforce dominance in public ever since, and has been livid at the idea of any of their privileges being given to the people they see as morally, mentally and socially inferior.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

Not so fast, Skippy. You can call it a revolution in the feeble attempt to make it sound like a fight for freedom, but the "market revolution" was never anything but the elite's successful attempt to avoid any checks or balances on their unremitting greed. The free market revolution was a revolt against government regulation, the bane of the rich and soon-to-be super rich. Milton Friedman's belief in eliminating government regulation via eliminating taxes, an eternally winning campaign platform, merely shifted the burden of paying for the government to later generations, who would be stuck with the ensuing debt.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

More rewriting of history. "The state had to come in and repair the damage" is a cute way of saying that Obama's backers had him give tax-payer money to the elite when they destroyed their own houses of business through their greed. No elite is supposed to suffer, ever.

The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities.

Oddly enough, that's what happens when you give all the power and money to a small group of people. They don't share the wealth and power. The "gigantic government" is not auditing the people who put them into office, it's busy waging wars that enrich arms dealers, making sweetheart deals, and securing natural resources for corporate use, all of which need the force and resources of the government.

The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, four million security cameras.

Gosh, it seems that individuals demanding equal rights leads to crime and a police state. Not rising inequality and the elite's growing stranglehold on the poor and powerless.

Brooks' solution is, naturally, more conservatism.

The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

In other words, Blond would somehow take power from the powerful and spread it around. How is he going to convince the elite to share power? What do you think, Skippy?

America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.

I see. It's the poor's duty to restore the elites' trustworthiness. It's the responsibility of the powerless to stop worrying about individual rights, the bane of conservatives' existence, and worry instead about how the elite can get back all the power respect they had before the natives became so uppity. It's the poor's job to force corporations to pay their workers more, stop mergers and acquisitions, eliminate unfair corporate advantages, and eliminate corporate subsidies and bailouts. Somehow. Like Libertarianism, Brooks' pet ideas can't and won't work, but they do serve their purpose--telling the little people that their current straighted circumstances are all their fault, and if they just stopped worrying about their rights and quietly obeyed and respected their elite, none of this mess would have happened in the first place. After all, it works for religion--why not politics?

Your Lovin' Don't Pay My Bills

Megan McArdle is feeling the sting of public disapproval. Her commenters are pointing out that there is no excuse for defending tea baggers who are tormenting a sick man and McArdle simply can't figure out what all the fuss is about. After all, they were throwing money at the man. Money! How could anyone protest something as wonderful and special as money? What is human dignity compared to cold, hard cash?

No matter how frail his condition, could the fellow on the ground possibly have been seriously endangered by having two bills hurled his way?

I'd certainly be willing to take such harsh treatment from the nice folks at Progress Ohio.

McArdle can't even stand negative words on the internet, let alone someone screaming and throwing things at her. When her commenters point out that callous disregard for other human beings is a characteristic of sociopathy, McArdle rushes to defend herself.

The tendency of both sides in this debate to ratchet up the rhetoric until everyone who disagrees with you is a sociopath, and every protest is 1960's Birmingham, is getting ridiculous--and it demeans both actual people who suffered physical violence, and the intelligence of those around you. If you are that confident about your beliefs on this very complicated topic, then you cannot possibly be making a rational and informed decision.

Actually, this topic is very clear-cut, for once. Don't harass sick people. McArdle has to make it complicated to obfuscate the fact that she is supporting tea baggers once again. To do so, she has to make utterly moronic statements. Being confident might be an indication of lack of knowledge and logic for McArdle, but it is not for everyone. Beliefs becomes knowledge if the belief is true and justified by the facts. And it is not only possible but it is necessary to make choices in life because problems must be solved or they will get worse.

McArdle is a Libertarian because it enables her refuse to make a choice or a decision. She has so little confidence in her opinions (admittedly, for good reason) that she managed to find a political philosophy that let her endlessly give useless advice that will never be taken and for which she will never be held accountable.

Megan McArdle: You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I have a workable political program. I'm a libertarian. My political ideas are always unpopular.

She can look wise without actually having any wisdom and give advice knowing very well it will never be implemented. Since she doesn't expect any results or consequences, she can vomit out anything damn thing she wants, no matter how foolish, cruel, or ignorant. And when she is criticized, she can state that nobody knows anything ever, so her critics must be wrong.

McArdle didn't have to repost the video of the harassment and fluff the tea baggers. There's no upside to doing so in this case except to support and defend her friends. Why defend an indefensible act when you could have just ignored it? Doesn't the wide-spread criticism of her actions ever make her reconsider what she is doing?

Isn't it amazing how people who disagree with you never have any but the vilest reasons for their beliefs, and are always logically and factually incorrect to boot?

I guess not. Instead of addressing her mistakes of fact and logic, she sneers at her critics. Instead of trying to determine why people are saying she is callous, she dismisses the criticism with a few sarcastic words. McArdle to a commenter:

I find it interesting that *your* inability to imagine how anyone could possibly disagree with you about the utility or justice of a social program must mean that *I* have a problem with empathy.

Less sarcastically, "sociopath" is a social disorder, not a political one, and disagreeing with you about social policy is not a symptom. To put it gently, the belief that disagreeing with you might be a symptom of such a disorder suggests a few DSM-IV diagnoses of its own--Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality would be where I'd start looking.

Except that oh, right, it's totally moronic to start diagnosing people I've never met over the internet, on the basis of statements I don't like, and without a degree in psychiatry.

If you disagree with her you are a narcissist, because you are sure you are right and nobody can ever be sure that they are right. Even the people who research the facts, logically work through the problem, and determine a course of action can't be confident enough in their intellectual capacity and hard work to actually make a decision. Decisions are too hard. Just as McArdle thought Saddam had WMD because she would have had WMD, McArdle thinks nobody can reason because she can't reason. And compassion is narcissism, for it is paternalistic to determine that someone is in need and should be helped.

Someone should have told God about Libertarianism. He could have skipped that whole Jesus thing and saved Himself the trouble of suffering and dying to save His children, who should have pulled themselves up by their sandal straps anyway.