Squaring the Culture

I’m finishing off a book proposal that I’m going to take with me to CPAC tomorrow in Washington, DC, so I won’t be posting anything new on the blog today or tomorrow, unless I finish sooner than I think I will. Tune in Sunday evening, and I should be back in business. Thanks for your patience.

Another notch in the category, “Things an 8th grader could tell you that we have to waste research dollars proving.” And no, I’m not opposed to the research; I’m disgusted at the rationalizing and dissembling by social progressives as they dismantle civil society that makes this sort of research so necessary.

Dr. Brian Primack of Pitt’s outstanding medical school discussed his findings yesterday from research soon to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, demonstrating a strong correlation between hours per day listening to music containing “sexually degrading” lyrics and early teen sexual behavior, and thus also with sexually-transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. An abstract of preparatory research by the same authors may be seen here.

Dr. Brian A. Primack of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine says the study demonstrates that, among this sample of young adolescents, high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior. In fact, exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex was one of the strongest associations with sexual activity…

The study, scheduled to be published in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, says those with the most exposure to the lyrics describing degrading sex were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse, compared to those with the least exposure.

This seems to agree with a RAND study published in Pediatrics back in 2006, that reported similar findings.

The immediate question that springs to mind is, “What do they mean by ’sexually degrading’ lyrics?” The abstract and articles do not contain that information; however, I was able to find an NPR interview with one of the RAND researchers from 2006, and he defined “sexually degrading” lyrics as lyrics “…that portray women as sexual objects, men as having voracious sexual appetites, and sex itself as inconsequential.” They differentiated those from lyrics about loving all night and forever, and so forth.

The researchers seem to believe that their research illustrates a “cultural message” mechanism, wherein young people take their behavior cues concerning how to treat their budding sexuality from the messages that are available in the surrounding culture. If they frequently hear “Screwing casually is what adults do” when they’re discovering their own sexuality, then they screw casually.

Duuuuuhhh… ya think?

It would be a bit more difficult to construct the research that proves that exposure to lyrics portraying non-marital sex as wonderful, uplifting, eternal, and universal encourages teenagers to engage in sexual relations outside of committed relationships, because such messages are so common that it would be virtually impossible to find subjects not affected by them. However, it’s already been demonstrated that teens who watch more sexy TV are more likely to engage in early sexual activity, and more likely to get pregnant, than those who watch less. And frankly, I don’t have the slightest doubt that the decades-long drumbeat of approval for casual, non-committed sex in the popular media is the motive force behind the epidemic of venereal diseases and teen pregnancy our nation is suffering. And if you feel like responding “But, teen pregnancy is down,” be sure to include your answer to “Down from where?” It may be down from 2001. It’s not down from 1960, that’s for sure.

Allow me to repeat a favorite theme of mine when this topic comes up: condoms don’t help. If you wonder what’s my basis for saying this, here’s where I discuss it in detail. The short version is, birth control is not disease control, condoms fail remarkably frequently and especially among the young, and if you increase condom use by a factor of 3 while you’re increasing sexual activity by a factor of 10, both pregnancy and disease accelerate. “Condoms” is an excuse generated by the same social malefactors that tell us that random teen sexuality is “normal and healthy.” The despair and infertility of a generation is on their heads. They should be driven from polite society.

The NPR interview after the RAND study contained some interesting material illustrating why we cannot allow the music industry to police itself. Listen to this observation from Danyel Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Vibe Magazine, when asked whether rapp was getting a falsely negative image:

A lot of rappers, and more than I would like to see, especially male rappers, are saying things about women that I would not want my niece to hear until she was well into her 20s, and then only if she was forced to. But what I am saying is, while I don’t like it, everything is not for me to like. I just don’t want to shut these guys down. I want them to have their ugly moment. I think this is is an angry, ugly spurt in rap music, I think this is unfortunate, but I think it needs to happen.

Earlier in the interview, Smith offered her opinion that the burst of abusive sex talk in rap music was a reaction to years of the black community having their sexuality stifled by society. I have to wonder which years she meant; I don’t recall any racist memes that insisted that blacks were not sexual at all, or insisting that they ought not to be. Quite the contrary, in fact. I think she’s just repeating urban myths — the one that says if you tell yourself “No” to sex too much, eventually you’ll explode, and the one that says that when you fall into angry and abusive speech patterns, that “gets it off your chest” and then you’ll stop and be all better.

I have no respect for either claim; they’re both sheer nonsense. There’s all the difference in the world between repression and self-control, and learning self-control reinforces itself — it gets stronger the longer you practice it. Choosing to behave in a sexually responsible manner, even to the point of abstaining from sex until you’re married, does not hurt anyone, nor does it cause any sort of explosive behavior. (Abstaining out of neurotic fear is another story.)

Furthermore, the habit of speaking in angry and abusive patterns also reinforces itself. Sometimes it’s necessary, for a moment, to resort to candor where you’ve been practicing restraint, but that’s a completely different matter. Opening the gates to permit a flood of sexually degrading language has not “gotten it off our chests,” it has filled our ears with filth, to which we’re gradually becoming numb and taking it in stride.

Is there a parental responsibility here? Of course. However, having raised four kids myself, I can assure you that parents’ ability to limit the cultural images their kids consume is limited, especially in this age of electronic gadgetry. One could, I suppose, deprive them of music, video, computer, TV, and movies, and lock them away from their friends, and then they’d never hear any of it. As soon as one permits them to step outside the house — even to go to school, or to their friends’ houses — they have access to an array of choices over which parents have no control aside from what they’ve taught them. Even a simple cell phone creates the opportunity for musical exchange, as does any computer worth owning. This level of liberty occurs in our culture long before kids have acquired the ability to make adult consumer choices, and there’s no proper way for a parent to control it, especially in a culture where other parents don’t.

I’m a strong advocate of free speech, but there are clear limits. The “crying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” proverb applies here; if this sort of talk provably leads young people to behave in a self-destructive manner, then there exists no Constitutional protection for this sort of speech, and it should be banned. In an environment where national and international media cross borders in milliseconds, this is one of those arenas, a subset of “keeping the peace,” where a legitimate role exists for government. I would have little objection to a national ban on sexually degrading lyrics, and none at all to state and local bans.

Don’t “give them their ugly moment.” Shut them down, hard. Shut them down, now.

Today’s blog chatter focuses on polls (WaPo, Times, Gallup) that show the President’s approval ratings riding high after his first month. Despite the partisan spin on the polls that we should expect by now from the Democrats’ press poodles, these polls really do spell some serious problems for Republicans.

It’s not the headline polls that are so bad, though. Obama’s approval ratings at this point are right in line with approval ratings for new Presidents at this point in their terms, just one month in. In fact, Jules Crittenden actually discovers some growing weakness in the numbers, with Obama’s negatives doubling in the past month (from 12% to 24%) and the number of people with no opinion about him dropping (from 21% to 13%). He somehow misses the fact that nearly all the weakening is occurring among Republicans; Democrats and Independents still like him as much as they did. Crittenden also informs us that the Presidents whose 1st-month numbers were the best were 1-term Presidents (O, let it be so!)

The more disturbing numbers appear over the topic of bipartisanship. Greg Sargent (not a guy I admire) actually has the best read on this, observing that the majority in the CBS/Times poll actually would prefer Obama sticking to his campaign promises over his working in a bipartisan fashion. The Republicans in Congress, on the other hand, should be working in a bipartisan fashion, according to a full-throated 79% of those polled by CBS. Greenwald, at Salon.com (a guy I admire even less,) notes the same, and is positively crowing about it.

Now, this is not all that surprising for a President in his first 100 days. The country generally would prefer that Congress go along and give him an easy start, rather than immediately whacking him with partisan opposition. However, most Presidents don’t begin their terms with massive power-grabs by the government that promise to top the previous record deficit by a factor of 4. And the fact that the public is still wishing for a pleasant honeymoon after the stimulus whopper and Obama’s grotesquely inept management of his own cabinet appointments tells us either that they’re not paying attention, or worse, that they’ve bought the Democrats’ definition of “bipartisan” — which is, “Republicans should shut up and go along with Democrats.”

Either way, what we’re seeing is an enormous hurdle Republicans will be forced to leap if they’re to gain any traction in the coming years. The public has drunk the Kool-Aid. They’re on board with the press. They want Republicans to go away, and they want Lightworker Obama to perform his Magic. When things start turning sour (as the current policies inevitably must cause to occur, because they’re just plain bad policies,) they may even blame the Republicans for “talking down the President’s plan.” Prophets are seldom rewarded when their prophecies of doom come to pass; more often, they’re blamed.

By the way, it should not be necessary for me to say this, but due to the vicious lies of hard leftists that are already spreading, I’m forced to: there is no part of me that wants President Obama to fail. I would be the happiest man in the universe if my estimation of his character and my predictions for his performance turned out to be completely wrong. The only possible good that could come from the disaster that I’m anticipating is that people would get a solid lesson in just how evil progressivism truly is. It’s a lesson I would have hoped we would not have to learn. However, the disaster is inevitable given the man and his policies. Brace yourselves.

(The following is a copy of a newsletter I receive via email periodically from Stratfor.com. I’ve been hearing about Mexico collapsing, but had no detail until I read this. I’m providing it as I received it, verbatim. My first thought after reading it is, “Now can we build a fence?”)

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

Mexico has pretty much always been a rough-and-tumble place. In recent years, however, the security environment has deteriorated rapidly, and parts of the country have become incredibly violent. It is now common to see military weaponry such as fragmentation grenades and assault rifles used almost daily in attacks.

In fact, just last week we noted two separate strings of grenade attacks directed against police in Durango and Michoacan states. In the Michoacan incident, police in Uruapan and Lazaro Cardenas were targeted by three grenade attacks during a 12-hour period. Then on Feb. 17, a major firefight occurred just across the border from the United States in Reynosa, when Mexican authorities attempted to apprehend several armed men seen riding in a vehicle. The men fled to a nearby residence and engaged the pursuing police with gunfire, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). After the incident, in which five cartel gunmen were killed and several gunmen, cops, soldiers and civilians were wounded, aut
horities recovered a 60 mm mortar, five RPG rounds and two fragmentation grenades.

Make no mistake, considering the military weapons now being used in Mexico and the number of deaths involved, the country is in the middle of a war. In fact, there are actually three concurrent wars being waged in Mexico involving the Mexican drug cartels. The first is the battle being waged among the various Mexican drug cartels seeking control over lucrative smuggling corridors, called plazas. One such battleground is Ciudad Juarez, which provides access to the Interstate 10, Interstate 20 and Interstate 25 corridors inside the United States. The second battle is being fought between the various cartels and the Mexican government forces who are seeking to interrupt smuggling operations, curb violence and bring the cartel members to justice.

Then there is a third war being waged in Mexico, though because of its nature it is a bit more subdued. It does not get the same degree of international media attention generated by the running gun battles and grenade and RPG attacks. However, it is no less real, and in many ways it is more dangerous to innocent civilians (as well as foreign tourists and business travelers) than the pitched battles between the cartels and the Mexican government. This third war is the war being waged on the Mexican population by criminals who may or may not be involved with the cartels. Unlike the other battles, where cartel members or government forces are the primary targets and civilians are only killed as collateral damage, on this battlefront, civilians are squarely in the crosshairs.

The Criminal Front

There are many different shapes and sizes of criminal gangs in Mexico. While many of them are in some way related to the drug cartels, others have various types of connections to law enforcement — indeed, some criminal groups are composed of active and retired cops. These various types of criminal gangs target civilians in a number of ways, including, robbery, burglary, carjacking, extortion, fraud and counterfeiting. But of all the crimes committed by these gangs, perhaps the one that creates the most widespread psychological and emotional damage is kidnapping, which also is one of the most underreported crimes. There is no accurate figure for the number of kidnappings that occur in Mexico each year. All of the data regarding kidnapping is based on partial crime statistics and anecdotal accounts and, in the end, can produce only best-guess estimates. Despite this lack of hard data, however, there is little doubt — based even on the low end of these estimates — that Mexico has become the kidnapping capital of the world.

One of the difficult things about studying kidnapping in Mexico is that the crime not only is widespread, affecting almost every corner of the country, but also is executed by a wide range of actors who possess varying levels of professionalism — and very different motives. At one end of the spectrum are the high-end kidnapping gangs that abduct high-net-worth individuals and demand ransoms in the millions of dollars. Such groups employ teams of operatives who carry out specialized tasks such as collecting intelligence, conducting surveillance, snatching the target, negotiating with the victim’s family and establishing and guarding the safe houses.

At the other end of the spectrum are gangs that roam the streets and randomly kidnap targets of opportunity. These gangs are generally less professional than the high-end gangs and often will hold a victim for only a short time. In many instances, these groups hold the victim just long enough to use the victim’s ATM card to drain his or her checking account, or to receive a small ransom of perhaps several hundred or a few thousand dollars from the family. This type of opportunistic kidnapping is often referred to as an “express kidnapping”. Sometimes express kidnapping victims are held in the trunk of a car for the duration of their ordeal, which can sometimes last for days if the victim has a large amount in a checking account and a small daily ATM withdrawal limit. Other times, if an express kidnapping gang discovers it has grabbed a high-value target by accident, the gang will hold the victim longer and demand a much higher ransom. Occasionally, these express kidnapping groups will even “sell” a high-value victim to a more professional kidnapping gang.

Between these extremes there is a wide range of groups that fall somewhere in the middle. These are the groups that might target a bank vice president or branch manager rather than the bank’s CEO, or that might kidnap the owner of a restaurant or other small business rather than a wealthy industrialist. The presence of such a broad spectrum of kidnapping groups ensures that almost no segment of the population is immune from the kidnapping threat. In recent years, the sheer magnitude of the threat in Mexico and the fear it generates has led to a crime called virtual kidnapping. In a virtual kidnapping, the victim is not really kidnapped. Instead, the criminals seek to convince a target’s family that a kidnapping has occurred, and then use threats and psychological pressure to force the family to pay a quick ransom. Although virtua
l kidnapping has been around for several years, unwitting families continue to fall for the scam, which is a source of easy money. Some virtual kidnappings have even been conducted by criminals using telephones inside prisons.

As noted above, the motives for kidnapping vary. Many of the kidnappings that occur in Mexico are not conducted for ransom. Often the drug cartels will kidnap members of rival gangs or government officials in order to torture and execute them. This torture is conducted to extract information, intimidate rivals and, apparently in some cases, just to have a little fun. The bodies of such victims are frequently found beheaded or otherwise mutilated. Other times, cartel gunmen will kidnap drug dealers who are tardy in payments or who refuse to pay the “tax” required to operate in the cartel’s area of control.

Of course, cartel gunmen do not kidnap only their rivals or cops. As the cartel wars have heated up, and as drug revenues have dropped due to interference from rival cartels or the government, many cartels have resorted to kidnapping for ransom to supplement their cash flow. Perhaps the most widely known group that is engaging in this is the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO), also known as the Tijuana Cartel. The AFO has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, its smuggling operations dramatically impacted by the efforts of the U.S. and Mexican governments, as well as by attacks from other cartels and from an internal power struggle. Because of a steep decrease in smuggling revenues, the group has turned to kidnapping and extortion in order to raise the funds necessary to keep itself alive and to return to prominence as a smuggling organization.

In the Line of Fire

There is very little chance the Mexican government will be able to establish integrity in its law enforcement agencies, or bring law and order to large portions of the country, any time soon. Official corruption and ineptitude are endemic in Mexico, which means that Mexican citizens and visiting foreigners will have to face the threat of kidnapping for the foreseeable future. We believe that for civilians and visiting foreigners, the threat of kidnapping exceeds the threat of being hit by a stray bullet from a cartel firefight. Indeed, things are deteriorating so badly that even professional kidnapping negotiators, once seen as the key to a guaranteed payout, are now being kidnapped themselves. In an even more incredible twist of irony, anti-kidnapping authorities are being abducted and executed.

This environment — and the concerns it has sparked — has provided huge financial opportunities for the private security industry in Mexico. Armored car sales have gone through the roof, as have the number of uniformed guards and executive protection personnel. In fact, the demand for personnel is so acute that security companies are scrambling to find candidates. Such a scramble presents a host of obvious problems, ranging from lack of qualifications to insufficient vetting. In addition to old-fashioned security services, new security-technology companies are also cashing in on the environment of fear, but even high-tech tracking devices can have significant drawbacks and shortcomings.

For many people, armored cars and armed bodyguards can provide a false sense of security, and technology can become a deadly crutch that promotes complacency and actually increases vulnerability. Physical security measures are not enough. The presence of armed bodyguards — or armed guards combined with armored vehicles — does not provide absolute security. This is especially true in Mexico, where large teams of gunmen regularly conduct crimes using military ordnance. Frankly, there are very few executive protection details in the world that have the training and armament to withstand an assault by dozens of attackers armed with assault rifles and RPGs. Private security guards are frequently overwhelmed by Mexican criminals and either killed or forced to flee for their own safety. As we noted in May 2008 after the assassination of Edgar Millan Gomez, acting head of the Mexican Federal Police and the highest-ranking federal cop in Mexico, physical security measures must be supplemented by situational awareness, countersurveillance and protective intelligence.

Criminals look for and exploit vulnerabilities. Their chances for success increase greatly if they are allowed to conduct surveillance at will and are given the opportunity to thoroughly assess the protective security program. We have seen several cases in Mexico in which the criminals even chose to attack despite security measures. In such cases, criminals attack with adequate resources to overcome existing security. For example, if there are protective agents, the attackers will plan to neutralize them first. If there is an armored vehicle, they will find ways to defeat the armor or grab the target when he or she is outside the vehicle. Because of this, criminals must not be allowed to conduct surveillance at will.

Like many crimes, kidnapping is a process. There are certain steps that must be taken to conduct a kidnapping and certain times during the process when those executing it are vulnerable to detection. While these steps may be condensed and accomplished quite quickly in an ad hoc express kidnapping, they are nonetheless followed. In fact, because of the particular steps involved in conducting a kidnapping, the process is not unlike that followed to execute a terrorist attack. The common steps are target selection, planning, deployment, attack, escape and exploitation.

Like the perpetrators of a terrorist attack, those conducting a kidnapping are most vulnerable to detection when they are conducting surveillance — before they are ready to deploy and conduct their attack. As we’ve noted several times in past analyses, one of the secrets of countersurveillance is that most criminals are not very good at conducting surveillance. The primary reason they succeed is that no one is looking for them.

Of course, kidnappers are also very obvious once they launch their attack, pull their weapons and perhaps even begin to shoot. By this time, however, it might very well be too late to escape their attack. They will have selected their attack site and employed the forces they believe they need to complete the operation. While the kidnappers could botch their operation and the target could escape unscathed, it is simply not practical to pin one’s hopes on that possibility. It is clearly better to spot the kidnappers early and avoid their trap before it is sprung and the guns come out.

We have seen many instances of people in Mexico with armed security being kidnapped, and we believe we will likely see more cases of this in the coming months. This trend is due not only to the presence of highly armed and aggressive criminals and the low quality of some security personnel, but also to people placing their trust solely in reactive physical security. Ignoring the very real value of critical, proactive measures such as situational awareness, countersurveillance and protective intelligence can be a fatal mistake.

I’ve made it clear that I’m not a huge fan of Darwin Day, but I do acknowledge that Charles Darwin made a significant contribution to the field of biology, so I don’t mind supporting the award named after him. For those of you who never came across it, some twisted folks decided about a decade ago to present an annual Darwin Award to the person who, by causing their own death, performed the greatest service to the gene pool that year. Warning: if you do decide to visit the site, the awards really are rather dark; each of them represents a poor soul who did him- or herself in. Stupidly.

At any rate, Shelly plucked a post from an eBay message board by a person calling him- or herself junglemema314, that recounts the experience of some poor boob who deserves honorable mention in the Darwin Awards — honorable mention only because he survived. He’s lucky. See for yourselves:

Last weekend I saw something at Larry’s Pistol & Pawn Shop that sparked my interest. The occasion was our 15th anniversary and I was looking for a little something extra for my wife Julie. What I came across was a 100,000-volt, pocket/purse- sized tazer. The effects of the tazer were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse affect on your assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to safety….??

WAY TOO COOL! Long story short, I bought the device and brought it home. I loaded two AAA batteries in the darn thing and pushed the button. Nothing! I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button and pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I’d get the blue arc of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs.

AWESOME!!!

Unfortunately, I have yet to explain to Julie what that burn spot is on the face of her microwave.

Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that it couldn’t be all that bad with only two triple-A batteries, right? There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently (trusting little soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh & blood moving target. I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a second) and thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised.. Am I wrong?

Yeah, we can see where this heading already, can’t we? If this were a movie, I’d be covering my eyes and moaning “I can’t watch.”

So, there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one hand, and tazer in another. The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the batteries.

All the while I’m looking at this little device measuring about 5″ long, less than 3/4 inch in circumference; pretty cute really and (loaded with two itsy, bitsy triple-A batteries) thinking to myself, ‘no possible way!’ What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best.

I’m sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one side as to say, ‘don’t do it dipshit,’ reasoning that a one second burst from such a tiny little ol’ thing couldn’t hurt all that bad. I decided to give myself a one second burst just for heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and …

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD . . . WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . . . WHAT THE HELL!!!

I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs? The cat was making meowing sounds I had never heard before, clinging to a picture frame hanging above the fireplace, obviously in an attempt to avoid getting slammed by my body flopping all over the living room.

Note: If you ever feel compelled to ‘mug’ yourself with a tazer, one note of caution: there is no such thing as a one second burst when you zap yourself! You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand by a violent thrashing about on the floor.. A three second burst would be considered conservative.

A minute or so later (I can’t be sure, as time was a relative thing at that point,) I collected my wits (what little I had left,) sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. The recliner was upside down and about 8 feet or so from where it originally was. My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I had no control over the drooling.

Apparently I pooped on myself, but was too numb to know for sure and my sense of smell was gone. I saw a faint smoke cloud above my head which I believe came from my hair. I’m still looking for my nuts and I’m offering a significant reward for their safe return.

P.S.: My wife, can’t stop laughing about my experience, loved the gift, and now regularly threatens me with it!

If you think education is difficult, try being stupid !

I suppose the liberals in the government would insist on a warning posted prominently on the side of the device. I recommend a single word: Don’t.

I just read one of the most incredible spin jobs I’ve ever encountered.

It begins with this New York Times headline: “Obama Bans Gimmicks, and Deficit Will Rise.” The article starts like this:

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

So, we know from the beginning that what we’re about to read is how the evil, dishonest Bush lied to us to make his budgets appear less out of balance, and how the honest and trustworthy Obama will now Be Strong™ and Do The Right Thing™. This Bold, Courageous Honesty™ actually explains the enormous deficits that the Obama administration will appear to create in the coming years. With me so far?

The biggest piece of this occurs in the new, more honest handling of the Alternative Minimum Tax. The Vile Bush used to project the income from the AMT based on current levels of taxation. However, the AMT was not indexed for inflation, so bracket creep would make the AMT apply to taxpayers lower and lower on the economic scale. To save the middle-class his wealthy buddies, Vile Bush would then, sometime during the following year, propose to raise the base income to which the AMT applied, and Congress, hoping to avoid taxpayer revolt, would cravenly comply. This would reduce the take from the AMT below what had been projected. Ooooo. Devious.

So, how will Honest Obama solve this evil plot? Why, he will forthrightly and boldly refuse to adjust the AMT every year. But he is So Very Honest, according to the Times, that he will not even count in his budget projections the additional $1.2 trillion dollars in revenue that this will generate over the next 10 years. We are Saved!

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” said [OMB Director Peter R. Orszag], “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

Recent presidents and Congresses were complicit in the ploy involving the alternative minimum tax. While that tax was intended to hit the wealthiest taxpayers, it was not indexed for inflation. That fact and the tax breaks of the Bush years have meant that it could affect millions of middle-class taxpayers.

In case you weren’t following carefully, let me do this for you in English.

Bush (and, I’m guessing, Clinton, Bush Sr., and Reagan before him) would write a budget projecting revenue as the law existed at that moment. Later, Congress would adjust the Alternative Minimum Tax to eliminate bracket creep; this would result in less revenue at the end of the year than projected by the IRS at the beginning. The AMT was designed to prevent extremely wealthy taxpayers from avoiding all taxes by way of tax shelters, so Congress saw no reason to apply it to the middle class. Does this sound dishonest to you? No, not to me, either. You don’t write budgets anticipating the passage of legislation that has not passed yet.

So, what’s changing? Why, Obama is not going to adjust the AMT anymore. He’s going to let the AMT apply to taxpayers lower and lower on the economic scale. And oh, by the way, the government has just expanded the money supply incredibly, which is likely to send inflation through the roof. In other words, Obama is going to use the now-accelerated bracket creep to slam the middle class with a $1.2 trillion tax increase over the next 10 years, by expanding the population to which the AMT applies. And he’s bragging that he’s not going to use this in his budget projections — which he could not do anyway, since it would require an accurate prediction of future inflation effects on tax revenue. Sound honest to you? No, not to me, either.

Short version, Obama is going to use inflation to raise taxes hugely on the middle class, and he’s hiding it inside a claim to be correcting the previous President’s “dishonest” tactics.

I suppose we can blame the Times for this simply unbelievable bit of legerdemain, but the article claims to report the content of an interview with new OMB Director Peter R. Orszag, so the government is complicit in the spin.

Me, I’m wondering when Honest Obama is going to stop including moneys collected for Social Security in the government’s general revenue, the bit of dishonest accounting that produced somewhat more than half of the famed (and illusory) surpluses of the Clinton years. He genuinely intends transparent government, you know. Even though he rushed through the utterly urgent stimulus bill so quickly that no one could read it, then delayed signing it for four days. That was just an oversight (sans oversight.) And he’s not even asking for a do-over. What a Man.

We are SO screwed…

By the way, this solves a little dilemma that a commenter raised a few days ago regarding whether or not the administration actually planned to screw the Chinese by paying back the money they loaned us in inflated dollars. The Obama administration understands perfectly damn well how inflation is going to go, and the effects it will have on tax revenue and loan value.

Jim Treacher has a parody of an old Grammar Rock piece about how a bill becomes a law, with his take on the stimulus bill. Drawings by the amazing cartoonist Batton Lash. Here’s a sample; doesn’t this just say it all?

If you don’t remember the original, don’t miss the link near the top that takes you to the YouTube version. I’ll give you a clue, though — there’s nobody Flipping the Bird in the original.

Ace of Spades HQ pointed me toward today’s Washington Post story that recalls an incident from the campaign trail — candidate Obama lying about NAFTA to Americans while telling Canadian officials what he really intended. The emphasis is mine:

In a joint news conference, Obama said he wants to find a way to keep his campaign pledge to toughen labor and environmental standards — and told Harper so — but stressed that nothing should disrupt the free flow of trade between neighbors…

The president’s message served as a reminder of last year’s private assessment by Canadian officials that then-candidate Obama’s frequent criticism of NAFTA was nothing more than campaign speeches aimed at chasing support among Rust Belt union workers.

“Much of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy,” the Canadians concluded in a memo after meeting with Austan Goolsbee, a senior campaign aide and now a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

This comes as no surprise, of course, except perhaps to Obama’s supporters in Ohio, who arguably deserve the disillusionment they should have had the good sense to expect. However, it reminded me of another story I read earlier this week, this one from the UK Telegraph, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, about the US privately backing Pakistan’s “Sharia law for peace” deal with the Taliban, while publicly denouncing it as a “negative development.” Again, the emphasis is mine:

American officials have privately backed Pakistan’s “Sharia law for peace” deal with Taliban militants in the Swat Valley despite publicly criticising it as a “negative development”.

The deal, under which Sharia law will be introduced in the Malakhand and Kohistan districts of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province if Taliban militants end their armed campaign in the Swat Valley, has been met with alarm by Nato chiefs and British and American officials.

Nato fears the deal would create a new “safe haven” for extremists, said a spokesman on Tuesday night, while a statement from Britain’s High Commission in Islamabad said: “Previous peace deals have not provided a comprehensive and long-term solution to Swat’s problems. We need to be confident that they will end violence, not create space for further violence.”

I could talk at length about why this deal is a very bad idea for America to be backing. However, what strikes me today is the new Hopey-Changey characteristic of American foreign policy: the administration is lying to the American people while pursuing a completely different agenda internationally. They’re not even doing it subtly; it’s perfectly obvious that that’s what they’re doing, they’re getting caught at it, and nobody seems to care.

Apparently the leaders of the rest of the nations of the world are more comfortable dealing with a demagogue who routinely dismisses his own people as irrelevant, than they were dealing with one who made a serious attempt to represent the interests of his people. This, they regard as a good thing, and from the silence so far, I might infer that Democrats agree.

I’m sure the Berserker progressives who read this site (I know there are a few) will be spluttering and fuming about the BushLies™ concerning Iraq; the trouble is, those are imaginary. Leftists have been trying nonstop for something like 5 years to produce evidence that the Bush administration deliberately misled the American people, but none of it has any credibility. Quite the contrary; it’s easily provable that the Bush administration was claiming nothing different from what was generally understood by the entire world, and every investigation launched by Congress over some aspect of the controversy has vindicated the President. The only claims that have ever been plausibly disputed were concerning aluminum tubes (but they were for banned missiles,) stockpiles of chemical weapons (but there were actual chemical weapons programs,) and mobile labs (but actual, stationary chem/bio warfare labs were found.) For an administration that made hundreds of statements over several years, and relied on intelligence data that were reputed to have been completely worthless, that’s a remarkably clean record. No, the Bush administration kept some secrets for national security as all administrations do, but explained its foreign policy to the public forthrightly and consistently. What Obama is doing is different.

Aren’t you glad the world is no longer looking down on the US because of its foreign policy?

Rick Santelli of CNBC, standing on what appears to be the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, declares the nation’s disgust with the Obama administration’s plan to use their tax dollars to pay the mortgages of people who bought houses they cannot afford, and the crowd behind him approves loudly. The message: they cannot abide by a plan that penalizes those who have lived sensibly, and rewards those who have squandered. Americans instinctively know this is wrong.

Click on this link if you want to give CNBC their hit statistics, or watch the YouTube clip below.

The response to the video on CNBC’s web site, while not a scientific sample, is overwhelming enough to show how people feel:

Cue Will Smith from Men in Black: “I mean… damn.”

The sensible citizen in me wants to press on the brakes. Mobs are ugly things, and usually, they produce ugly results, even if the intent arises from a sound ethic. There’s a superb and thoughtful film done by HBO called The Jack Bull that illustrates the problem profoundly, and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you link up with somebody on Netflix and borrow it for a night. It’s a western starring John Cusack (hard to imagine, but he really does it well) and John Goodman, and it addresses the problem caused by the use of mob action to obtain justice. In the end, what it argues is that the proper, courageous, and honest execution of the law is the only barrier between civilization and anarchy.

I think Santelli of CNBC would understand this, though, and I think his call for “a Chicago Tea Party” is well within the bounds of civilized conduct. It’s good that sensible Americans would object to just, plain wrong policy in such numbers that the government might not feel entirely safe pursuing it.

Notice how carefully he circumscribes what he wants.

How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure, and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water, instead of drink the water?

Americans are not greedy people, for the most part. He doesn’t just want to keep his; he’d go along with giving folks assistance who have a chance to prosper. He’s against bailing out folks who behave irresponsibly. The folks who charge that opposition to socialism is all about greed, are simply playing a rhetorical game; the alternative to redistribution is not “greed,” it’s “responsibility.” The comments of folks on the CNBC site illustrate how well people understand this.

Why are the very people who never seem to do the right things, being rewarded with my tax dollars? This country has come to the point where there is no incentive to do what’s right! … The government should be rewarding the successful people, not making them out to be the villain and confiscating their tax dollars,to redistribute it to the people living above their means! — David

Here is the message Obama and Congress are sending: Work hard, pay your bills on time, and you will be penalized by having your hard-earned money reward those who wallow in irresponsibility and have a total disdain for those who play by the rules. — Kathy

The Obama housing plan is absolutely ridiculous. As a disabled person, I could not afford to buy a home after housing prices took off. To think that if I had bought above my means the government would have paid my mortgage makes me now feel like a jerk. — Rob

I paid off my mortgage this month. What a mistake, I should have just sat back and demanded that the government [taxpayers] help me. I’m being punished for being successful and doing what was once deemed right. — Don

There’s also a complicated question of culpability. How much of the foreclosure crisis is the result of irresponsible buyers, how much of irresponsible mortgage salesmen, how much of irresponsible bankers, how much of irresponsible housing rights activists, how much of irresponsible legislation, and how much of irresponsible government incentives? There are lots of culpable agents in the mix; but certainly, a huge percentage of the blame lands on those who simply planned badly and bit off more house than they could chew (an interesting mental image, that — chewing a house.) It is not only appropriate, but necessary for the character development of the person making the mistake, that such people pay for their mistake by the loss of the asset. I’m speaking as one who has made that mistake and paid that price personally, and I assure you: it was painful, but I survived, and it was the right thing.

So, a tea party is being planned for Lake Michigan. Will anything actually happen? I suspect that President Obama is not particularly interested in whether most Americans agree with him or not; he seems more the pragmatic type, the type who would be more worried about whether he can get away with a plan than whether most people approve of it. In some contexts, that’s not a bad thing; we might call that “a principled stand,” except in this instance, the principles on which he’s standing are insane. Among Presidents, who are responsible to the people, principled stands should be rare, and limited to those principles that are of profound worth. I don’t agree that Mr. Obama’s criteria-free egalitarianism fits the bill.

I suspect, also, that President Obama won’t change a thing until he sees that he’s actually going to suffer personally from the reaction — an impeachment effort, for instance. He may be pragmatic enough to respond to a plausible threat to his Congressional majorities, but it’s not clear that such a threat exists, nor is it clear that he would care if it did; he may just be acting out a “let’s get as much irreversible change in place as quickly as we can” strategy. There are lots of unknown quantities here; we don’t know much about the President. Thank the press.

However, protecting the legal and economic foundations of America must begin with this sort of outrage, and it’s about time somebody expressed it. Well done, Mr. Santelli.

Santelli takes an arcane shot at the very end which I’m afraid most people outside the field of finance and economics won’t get. It’s important, though: Santelli exposes the idiocy of the Keynesian notion of a government spending multiplier, the claim that whereas a dollar of consumer spending results in growth of some factor, X, a dollar of government spending results in growth of X multiplied by some number greater than 1: consumer spending X, government spending, 1.2X. If that’s true generally — as simple Keynesian models suggest — then we’d all get immensely rich if the government just spent every penny there was. It’s sheer nonsense. At best, it might be true in some narrow range of spending levels (which is not what’s claimed,) but really it doesn’t make any sense in any range. Short version, we’re not going to spend our way out of the recession. Ever. It just doesn’t work.

I recently resumed Internet chat contact with a lady I dated a few years back, who happens to hold center-left political views. Now, this woman is bright, morally sound, responsible, and devout. She’s no dummy. So it was disappointing to me that when the election of President Obama came up, the first words out of her mouth were to the effect that “The US had lost immense respect worldwide because of Bush.”

This has been one of the drumbeat issues of the political left for the past 8 years. When it first appeared, it was simply false. It was during the period when the Bush administration was attempting to build a case against Iraq in the UN, and our diplomatic efforts were being repulsed by Germany, France, Russia, and China. The critics minimized fact that some 30 other nations eventually agreed that something must be done, and joined our efforts to unseat Saddam Hussein; it was shocking, to them, that we would dismiss the opinions of such stalwart allies. They also said nothing when it became evident that key diplomats from Germany, France, and Russia all profited from Saddam Hussein’s graft, which completely explained their resistance, when Oil-For-Food was exposed as history’s largest grafting scheme. And of course, they have nothing whatsoever worthwhile to say when confronted with the fact that a huge percentage of the foreign disapproval arose because the New York Times systematically attempted to embarrass the Bush administration, by pretending that a perverted little sex ring on the night shift at a backwater prison called Abu Graib constituted official US policy, by pretending that the most humane and tolerant prisoner-of-war camp in world history was somehow a gulag, and by deliberately and illegally exposing details of America’s measures against international terrorists that were secret for good reason.

However, there is no question that the opinions of some in foreign nations have been strongly negative toward the US during the Bush years, with frequent complaints focusing on the willingness of the US to buck world opinion and act according to her own light, however that gets worded. We heard the same complaints during the Reagan years; indeed, we’re likely to hear them whenever American conservatism forms US foreign policy.

We got a little taste of what we’re dealing with in a BBC interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu this morning. Archbishop Tutu focused his comments on the pleasure the Obama election produced in the world, and how that pleasure can be maintained. The emphasis in the article is mine.

In an article for BBC News, he says it would be “wonderful” if Mr Obama apologised for the invasion of Iraq…

The Nobel Peace Prize winner adds that the UK’s standing in the world has suffered because of its co-operation with the US in the “war on terror”…

He reminds his readers of the outpouring of sympathy that followed 9/11 and how quickly it vanished in the light of the allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

“Obama, too, could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if he disappoints,” he says…

He urges the president and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to act quickly to reach out to other countries, to build bridges with them and to listen to what they say.

In other words, “do what we tell you, or we’ll be cross.” And Tutu is one of the more ethical of America’s critics.

The vocal opinions of America’s critics, who are comprised mostly of socialist- and Marxist-influenced Europeans and third-world dictators (buttressed by the occasional cleric,) express a consistent ethic. That ethic rests on the two, prominent claims of modernism that Robert Bork highlighted in his perceptive but arcanely-written work, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: moral relativism, and radical egalitarianism. These are the moral underpinnings of modern neo-Marxist strains, and also, dangerously, of the modern Democratic party in America. They insist that all forms of belief around the world are equally acceptable (except those voiced by white Christians, it turns out) and that it behooves the wealthy of the world to surrender their wealth to poorer nations until there is no longer any difference in wealth, power, or prestige among them. They complain when American Republicans conduct foreign policy out of their core beliefs, because Republicans reject both claims; they cheer when American Democrats conduct foreign policy, because Democrats agree with both claims.

What they’re complaining about, frankly, is the tarrying influence of Christianity in the ethics guiding America, which sticks out like a sore thumb when Republicans formulate policy. It’s that taste of old-world propriety: the notion that wealth is earned by hard work and ingenuity, and by justice belongs to those who earned it; the notion that the strong ought to defend the weak; the notion that people ought to be free to govern themselves, and not be coerced by tyrants; that governments and systems of thought that grant dignity to human beings are superior to those that do not; and that we should choose our allies and counselors from among those who exhibit similar virtues.

The complaint from the world when America conforms to this world view is that we don’t follow their ethics, we follow our own, and that puts our choices out of sync with their preferences. It does not take rocket science, or even deep philosophy, to understand that if our ethics are good, then the disagreement of the world is no reason to abandon them. Progressives would agree if the favored ethic of the world were reversed; they would say that the old-world ethic of the world is no reason for them to abandon their principled defense of “equality” and “tolerance.” But the shoe is on the other foot, so they denounce Republicans for “going it alone,” and congratulate themselves for “cooperating with the world.”

It’s ironic, of course; progressives lionize those individuals who live by their own light in spite of contrary opinion, when the opinions happen to be those that execrate Christian virtues. And that makes it all the sadder that a decent, ostensibly Christian woman would be fooled by the false ethics of the leftist world, and mark it as a bad thing that they disapprove of the US’ principled opposition to corrosive neo-Marxism.

Of course, by celebrating the abandonment of principled, Christian foreign policy in favor of differently-principled, progressive foreign policy, the world may get some things it would rather not have. China, for example, is reacting strongly to the Obama administration’s creation of a trillion-dollar deficit. The words of the director-general of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, were:

“We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

Rather direct, eh? I don’t blame him. The issue is that US Treasury notes are still the gold standard of world investment vehicles during a worldwide recession, so they have to keep on buying them; but the recent action of the Obama administration is going to cause dramatic inflation. What this means to the Chinese, who are now the world’s largest foreign holder of US debt, is that the money they lent to the US will be paid back in inflated dollars. In effect, we’ve borrowed roughly $700 billion from the Chinese and then deliberately inflated our own currency, so that when we pay them back, the value of what we’re paying them will be less than what we borrowed in inflation-adjusted terms. If it was done inadvertently, it’s unfortunate; if it was done deliberately, it’s theft. (See also this report on how the stimulus package will affect China.)

I think it’s safe to say that it was done deliberately; and I think it’s likewise safe to say that what the Democrats have done deliberately, excused by their moral relativism, the Republicans would never have done because they would not be excused by their Christianity.

So the world viewing the US, instead of denouncing a principled adversary, is now embracing a less-principled comrade, “like a snake in their bosom.” They may not like the unprincipled acts, and may complain; but, you know, lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. At least they won’t hate us for defending ourselves. That’s better, isn’t it?