Progressives And Genderism – a new ideology destroying the family, Elimination of fatherhood and motherhood?

We are witnessing an astonishing historical shift.

More than a hundred years ago, Marxism declared the relationship of man and woman in monogamous marriage as “the first class antagonism” in history. This “class-conflict” had to be overcome by destroying marriage and the family. So in 1917, Alexandra Kollontai, the first woman commissar of the Bolshevik Central Committee, set out to put this into practise through the exercise of revolutionary power:

1. A law for the dissolution of marriage
2. Legalization of abortion
3. Sexual freedom for youth
4. Legalization of homosexuality
5. Integration of women into the production process, and
6. Bringing up children in collective state institutions.

But even Lenin soon realized that this was creating social chaos. And he repealed some of these revolutionary measures.

Yet the same agenda eventually migrated to the West. It had its breakthrough with the student rebellion of the 1960s, which swept through European countries with slogans like these:

Battle the bourgeois nuclear family!

If you sleep with the same one twice, you’re a slave of bourgeois vice!

Make love not war!

This movement was fuelled by Marxist philosophers, particularly of the Frankfurt School in Germany. In their view, sexuality was to be liberated from restrictive morality – even from the taboo of incest. Sex between children, as well as sex with children, was to be allowed in order to create a “society without oppression”.

During the 1970s, marriage laws and sexual criminal laws were revised in Western countries. Pornography, abortion, and homosexuality – in this sequence – were legalized, and obligatory sexual education was introduced in schools. And during the last decade, the collectivization of bringing up small children – formerly seen as a communist aberration – has been imposed on families by EU measures. This destroys the very source of human love, which is the relationship between mother and child.

Ironically, the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries were, so to speak, “protected” by communist dictatorship from the implementation of these ideas, which had originated in Marxist ideology.

Today things have shifted even further: The radical feminist movement and the homosexual movement merged and gave birth to the gender ideology. One of its trailblazers is the philosopher Judith Butler, a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation and a proclaimed lesbian, who in 1990 published the book, Gender Trouble – Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Gender theory proclaims that our “social gender” is independent of our biological sex, so that we can “choose” whether we want to be a man or a woman.

At the policy level, this ideology becomes “Gender Mainstreaming,” which promotes:

• Subversion of the identity of man and woman by destroying “gender-stereotypes” – beginning in kindergarten; and
• Deregulation of normative standards of sexuality: Any kind of sexual practice – be it lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or transgender (LGBT) – has to be accepted by society as equivalent to heterosexuality. And this must be taught to children in school.

It has taken only 20 years for gender theory to become the ruling ideology of the West. At most universities, the new field of “gender studies” has been firmly established. In my native Germany, we have almost 200 women professors in that new field of so-called “science” – which really is nothing more than the ideological agenda of radical feminism and the homosexual movement combined. And students now must adhere to this ideology – just as their predecessors had to adhere to Marxist ideology under communism.

What Alexandra Kollontai could not achieve under a communist dictatorship has now become the global policy of the United Nations and the European Union. But the underlying agenda is disguised with words that abuse the great values of Christian culture: freedom, justice, tolerance, and human rights.

Central and Eastern European nations have now begun to realize that membership in the European Union has its costs. It not only brings them new economic possibilities but also the enforced destruction of their own value system – which, for many centuries, has served as the foundation of marriage and family.

In pursuit of their agenda, the UN and the EU work with an international network of political stakeholders, billionaire foundations, the mainstream media, and global NGOs like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and ILGA, the homosexual umbrella organization. They seek to impose the feminist and homosexual agenda on every nation around the world through the policy of gender mainstreaming and LGBT-rights.

Dear friends, we are indeed facing a global ‘anthropological revolution’, as Pope Benedict XVI termed it – one which attacks the very roots of human existence. This revolution has five political cornerstones:

1. Elimination of fatherhood and motherhood
2. Deprivation of the material basis of the family
3. Legalization of abortion
4. Homosexual “marriage,” including adoption and artificial child production
5. Sexualization of children through obligatory comprehensive sexual education.

All this requires a response. In fact, faced with the demographic crisis in the West, and the moral and social breakdown of the family, we need a global movement that creates conditions under which the deepest longings of the human heart can be fulfilled. Such a movement should include:

1. Re-awakening to the sanctity of fatherhood and motherhood
2. Provision of the material basis of the family
3. Protection of life – from conception to natural death
4. Legally defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman
5. Education of children and youth for marriage and family

As far as I can see, Russia is today the only country where there may be the possibility for church and state to rebuild the foundations of the family.

This International Forum could have a significant role in the global battle for a culture of life and the defence of marriage and family. May our political leaders be guided by wisdom and a commitment to the common good of humanity in the present political situation.

Liberals Need to Actually Use the Drawing Board?

Charity – the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need.

Altruism – The belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.

Liberalism’s core is built on the assumption that government bureaucracies can be effective instruments of altruism.  From the Democrats’ view, altruism occurs whenever money is taken from those who have it and given to those who don’t.  However, the same process equally describes a mugging.   

Democrats have failed to exercise the least due diligence in the planning, design, and testing of their core proposition.  Yet they demand we bet our prosperity and our children’s futures on it.  If it doesn't work on paper, it won't work in practice.  In practice, the 50-year-old war on poverty squandered 16 trillion dollars and destroyed the black family and left poverty unscratched.  In practice, Stalin took land from the Kulaks, gave it to collective ownership by the peasants, and starved 7,000,000 in 1932-1933.  We have an endless supply of evidence that it doesn’t work in practice.  But going backwards, does it even work on paper?

We could recommend Democrats emulate software engineering.  Tools like “use case” diagrams expose shortcomings of complex software systems in their infancy.  But it doesn’t require anything so complex to expose the lack of intellectual or moral rigor in the Democrats’ central theory. 

It is the participants' emotional states and final intentions that determine whether the world was improved by an intended act of charity.  So let's start with a simple bullet list of actions and reactions in a simple charitable act. 

A Simple Charitable Act

• Philanthropist is affected by plight of a potential beneficiary
• Philanthropist assesses the need for intervention
  • Is it serious enough to warrant interference? 
  • How much help is needed?
  • Is the victim genuine or fraudulent?
• Philanthropist gives according to his ability and conscience (or refrains from giving)
• Recipient is grateful to the giver
  • He's probably determined to make the most of his good luck, since this chance may not come again
  • He's likely to be inspired to “live up to” the gift or repay his debt,
  • or possibly embarrassed by the social stigma of accepting charity
    • Motivated to ensure that he should never feel similar shame again
• Giver feels ennobled and is likely to seek out future opportunities to repeat the experience

Sometimes the problems are big and broad.  Charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Red Cross then act as agents between large groups of donors and recipients.  But the essential dynamics remain the same: a donor celebrates in his free choice, and a grateful recipient moves toward independence and an increased value to society. 

Contrast these results with:

A Typical Government Giveaway

• Victims of a “social issue” are identified
• Politicians count the likely voters they will win or lose if they act or not
• Scapegoats are chosen
  • Claiming "injustice" helps marshal public opinion, intimidate opponents
• Democrat politicians strut and preen, congratulate themselves for their  superior compassion
• Opponents are vilified as "selfish"
• The victims are told they are entitled, have a "right" to assistance
  • No one explains where the victims get their "right" to steal others’ money  
  • No one explains why the victims’ demands to other people’s money isn’t “selfish”
• A law is passed to authorize tax money to be given to the victims
• A government agency is established to oversee the handouts
  • In fact, sometimes many are created to do similar jobs
  • Only 40% goes to the victims, 60%  pays for the agency’s overhead,
  • but the agency’s employees reliably vote Democrat
• The victims receive handouts
  • Gratitude to the taxpayers who sacrificed is replaced by gratitude to the Democrat Party thieves who steal on their behalf
  • The victims vote Democrat to express their gratitude and keep the assistance flowing
  • They often discover that it pays better to stay on public assistance indefinitely than to wean themselves
  • Victims’ aspirations for a better life fade into satisfaction with a marginally bearable status quo
• Years pass and the program grows to cover situations and problems which were never debated when the law first passed
  • Agency growth is like a metastasizing cancer
• News stories describe the corruption in the program
  • by the agency’s administrators
  • by recipients who have learned how to scam the system
• Democrats run for office on the pledge that they will root out “waste, fraud, and abuse" in the program
  • They look to the smallest possible subset of crooks to prosecute
    • After all, crooks are voters too,
    • at least they’re voters when they’re not illegal aliens
    • In any event, little is done about waste, fraud and abuse
    • Besides, it’s a teeny-tiny problem
• If loopholes are plugged, the scam artists soon figure out better ways to cheat
• Normally honest people, made cynical by the spectacle of corruption celebrated as compassion, are enticed to similarly cheat the system
• Private charity shrivels as increasing taxes shrink everyone’s ability to give
• Any suggestion that the program be terminated is met by rabid lobbyists and special interest groups
  • chanting the mantra "Rights!  Compassion!  Social Justice!"

Clearly, outsourcing our compassion to government handout programs can't work.  Altruism’s bedrock characteristic of disinterested selflessness can’t be achieved by self-serving politicians using taxpayers’ money to buy votes.  The taxpayer, who is involuntarily relieved of his “contribution” (none too gently) by the taxman, is denied his opportunity for spiritual growth.  The beneficiary is spared any emotional or material spur to self-reliance. 

The left claims to have churned crap into butter, sublimating theft into something fair and fine.  And the obvious lie is accepted by otherwise honest people.  They wouldn’t dream of robbing anyone at gunpoint.  They think nothing of sending a government to do it for them.

This isn’t altruism.  This is altruism’s perverted evil twin. 

Democrats will never be able to diagram a theoretical model of government-run altruism.  Government control will always be fertile ground for these intrinsic seeds of failure: venality, deceit, sloth, power lust, vengeance, coercion, fraud, and self-promotion.  Before anyone votes for a Democrat in November, we should all demand Democrats try to make that diagram.  I’d donate to see that.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/liberals_need_to_actually_use_the_drawing_board.html#ixzz3EG9NDZUq
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Why Do Progressives Have An Archie Bunker View Of Globalization?

One of the underappreciated aspects of the current debate over corporate tax inversions is how it represents not just an opportunity for some progressive populism, but is just another aspect of the same view which motivates the left’s general disgust with Uber and other members of the sharing economy.

It’s the same motivation behind this push by tariff-loving New Balance to prevent soldiers from buying running shoes on the open market, and instead use pro-America rhetoric to rent-seek. And it’s a similar mindset to this BuyPartisan app, designed to turn marketplace decisions into a constant barrage of political influences and guilt riddance. Oh, you bought the Brawny? Fascist. But you did it at Costco, so maybe that’s okay. Just don’t go to Burger King after.

In practice, the pro-America rhetoric on the left on this score goes well beyond the caricature of the flag-waving xenophobic NASCAR fan toward true economic backwardness, in the form of an anti-market populism which refuses to recognize that we live in a global economy. No, no, no, it insists, like Archie Bunker ranting in his chair – America is great! America can do anything! Everything is better when it comes from America! We don’t need to compete with other countries or their tax burdens or their regulations – America’s the best! Only evil greedy corporations would ever leave America or move their businesses elsewhere for decisions based on their bottom lines and their shareholders and their ability to actually do business. Forget market competition or whether the shoes fit: America rules, and you’re unpatriotic if you think we have to do things to compete in a global economy.

Of course, progressives do have a justified reason to hate globalization for the same reason that federalism proves frustrating: because it puts their tax and regulatory theories to a real world test and exposes them to competition. This requires prohibitions on entry and escape – when companies want to leave, or imports want to enter, the progressives’ only response can be using government force to prevent that from happening lest it expose the destructive policies for what they are. This requires higher and higher levels of authority and centralization of decision making, giving the bureaucratic class more power to make society in the image they wish it to be, an economic Fortress America.

This is not a new motivation. Progressivism has, from its inception, used the manipulative power of populist arguments to achieve statist ends – in Woodrow Wilson’s framing, a belief that the industrial age and made people beholden to great corporate powers, and that government must adjust to meet these challenges. And what should that adjustment be? The evolution of an enlightened age which moved beyond the rights given by Nature’s God: the elimination of checks and balances of government, and the creation of a neutral, high-minded, enlightened Administrative State to manage the lives of the people and the business of the country. As he wrote in What is Progress?:

The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.” The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. And that’s why this Archie Bunker view of the global economy is unable to deal with a circumstance where companies and individuals behave rationally and vote with their feet.

http://blog.heartland.org/2014/09/why-do-progressives-have-an-archie-bunker-view-of-globalization/

Paul Ehrlich, The Secular Saint Of The Neo-Malthusian movement?, The doom-sayers are becoming more fashionable Just As Experts Are Coming To The Vew It Has All Been One Giant False Alarm.

Malthus Theory and EUGENIC both schools coming to heavily influence the field of eugenics.

Introduction to Eugenics

The principal manifestations of eugenics are racism and abortion; eugenics is the basis for "scientific racism" and laid the foundation for legalizing abortion.
https://www.all.org/abac/eugen02.htm

In the book "The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future."
So in 1980 Simon made Mr. Ehrlich a bet. If Mr. Ehrlich's predictions about overpopulation and the depletion of resources were correct, Simon said, then over the next decade the prices of commodities would rise as they became more scarce. Simon contended that, because markets spur innovation and create efficiencies, commodity prices would fall. He proposed that each party put up $1,000 to purchase a basket of five commodities. If the prices of these went down, Mr. Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference between the 1980 and 1990 prices. If the prices went up, Simon would pay. This meant that Mr. Ehrlich's exposure was limited while Simon's was theoretically infinite.

Simon even allowed Mr. Ehrlich to rig the terms of the bet in his favor: Mr. Ehrlich was allowed to select the five commodities that would be the yardstick. Consulting two colleagues, John Holdren and John Harte, Mr. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, each of which his team supposed was especially likely to become scarce. As they settled on their terms, Mr. Sabin notes, Messrs. Ehrlich, Holdren and Harte "felt confident that they would prevail."

They didn't. In October 1990, Mr. Ehrlich mailed a check for $576.07 to Simon. Mr. Sabin diplomatically reports that "there was no note." Although world population had increased by 800 million during the term of the wager, the prices for the five metals had decreased by more than 50%. And they did so for precisely the reasons Simon predicted—technological innovation and conservation spurred on by the market.



Eugenics Society member, Margaret Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood, also advocated sterilization of the so-called unfit.
In 1950 Sanger advocated eugenic sterilization in a personal letter she wrote to Katharine Dexter McCormick, an heir to the International Harvester fortune who used her immense wealth to fund the development of the birth-control pill.

Sanger wrote, “I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. Even this will not be sufficient, because I believe that now, immediately; there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”

How did Thomas Malthus influence Darwin's theory of evolution?

By writing a book that proposed human suffering and death from starvation because the population of humans went up exponentially but the supply of food goes up arithmetically. Darwin took this idea as an insight. He figured that populations of organisms produced far more progeny then the environment could supply with resources. So a selective process would be put in place. The fitter organisms would survive and reproduce while this much less fit would lose the struggle for existence.

http://www.answers.com/Q/How_did_Thomas_Malthus_influence_Darwin's_theory_of_evolution

Charles Darwin, the biologist, was immensely impressed by Malthus' ideas, and the Malthusian theories are embedded in Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selectio (The Origin of Species, 1859, and The Descent of Man, 1871). But after Darwin borrowed ideas from economics and inserted them into biology, his cousin reversed the process and discovered ideas in biology that could be applied to humans. This is one of the first tricks that amateur magicians learn, like "finding" a coin in a child's ear. The amazing thing about Galton's stunt is that it has fooled so many people for so long.



Darwin knew that a natural population has similar inherited variability and that the size of natural populations tended to remain constant, despite a tremendous potential for reproduction. It was clear that if there were the potential for a natural selection that would parallel the conscious selection of the plant or animal breeder, a mechanism would have been found for the origin of new varieties in nature.
A critical point in Darwin's thinking came when he considered a most-unlikely piece of reading for a natural historian - the Essay on the Principle of  Population, by Thomas Robert Malthus (1798). Malthus was essentially an economist who wrote his essay considerably prior to Darwin's work. Malthus was analyzing the relationship between human population size and the availability of resources such as food. The key element in Malthus' discussion was that these two factors - population size and resource availability - could never remain in proportion to one another. Increasing population size, as Malthus reasoned, was a geometric function, but, in his view, new resources could, at best, be increased at an arithmetic rate. Inevitably, increasing population size would lead to limits in available resources, causing human populations to compete for those resources that were available. As the gap between populations and resource availability widened, this competition would become more intense, leading ultimately to war and famine.

The foundation of Malthus' theory relies on two assumptions that he views as fixed,

namely that food and passion between sexes are both essential for human's existence.

Malthus believed that the world's population tends to increase at a faster rate than its

food supply. Whereas population grows at a geometric rate, the production capacity

only grows arithmetically. Therefore, in the absence of consistent checks on

population growth, Malthus made the gloomy prediction that in a short period of time,

scarce resources will have to be shared among an increasing number of individualshttp://web.stanford.edu/~ranabr/Malthusian%20and%20Neo%20Malthusian1%20for%20webpage%20040731.pdf






The population timebomb is a myth

The human appetite for bad news knows no bounds. That is why gossip is usually malicious and why, on a grander scale, prophets of doom are always guaranteed a credulous audience. Conversely, good news – however well attested – is generally squeezed in the margins of newspapers.

In the book "The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future."
So in 1980 Simon made Mr. Ehrlich a bet. If Mr. Ehrlich's predictions about overpopulation and the depletion of resources were correct, Simon said, then over the next decade the prices of commodities would rise as they became more scarce. Simon contended that, because markets spur innovation and create efficiencies, commodity prices would fall. He proposed that each party put up $1,000 to purchase a basket of five commodities. If the prices of these went down, Mr. Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference between the 1980 and 1990 prices. If the prices went up, Simon would pay. This meant that Mr. Ehrlich's exposure was limited while Simon's was theoretically infinite.

Simon even allowed Mr. Ehrlich to rig the terms of the bet in his favor: Mr. Ehrlich was allowed to select the five commodities that would be the yardstick. Consulting two colleagues, John Holdren and John Harte, Mr. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, each of which his team supposed was especially likely to become scarce. As they settled on their terms, Mr. Sabin notes, Messrs. Ehrlich, Holdren and Harte "felt confident that they would prevail."

They didn't. In October 1990, Mr. Ehrlich mailed a check for $576.07 to Simon. Mr. Sabin diplomatically reports that "there was no note." Although world population had increased by 800 million during the term of the wager, the prices for the five metals had decreased by more than 50%. And they did so for precisely the reasons Simon predicted—technological innovation and conservation spurred on by the market.

For example, The Independent buried in a few paragraphs a story with the headline "Population growth not a threat, say engineers". But at least The Independent found some space to cover the publication of a report last week by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers entitled Population: One Planet, Too Many People? – I could find nothing about it in other newspapers.

The reason for that distinct lack of column inches is that the institution answered its own question in the negative. No, there are not (and will never be) too many people for the planet to feed. As the report's lead author, Dr Tim Fox, pointed out, its verdict is not based on speculative guesses about the development of new

agricultural processes as yet unknown: "We can meet the challenge of feeding a planet of 9 billion people through the application of existing technologies". For example, Dr Fox pointed out, in Africa, no less than half the food produced is destroyed before it reaches its local marketplace: with refrigeration and good roads, the developing world could avoid this horrendous waste.

Interestingly, another detailed report on "sustainability" published last week by the French national agricultural and development research agencies came up with the same answer. The French scientists set themselves the goal of discovering whether a global population of 9 billion, the likely peak according to the UN, could readily have access to 3,000 calories a day, even as farms take measures to cut down on the use of fossil fuels and refrain from cutting down more forests: their answer was, you will be thrilled to know, "yes".

Some people will not be so thrilled. There is an increasingly noisy claque of Malthusians who insist that an "exploding" global population (as they put it) is going to lead to disaster – from Boris Johnson to Joanna Lumley, not to mention Jeremy Irons and Prince Charles. For example, last weekend The Independent published a lengthy interview with the Bermuda-based philanthropist James Martin, who has given Oxford University $125m to set up a forecasting institute in his name. Mr Martin's own forecast is that "by mid-century we're going to be using the term 'giga-famine', meaning a famine where more than a billion people will die, a catastrophe on a scale that's never been known before on Earth."

Martin sounds uncannily like Paul Ehrlich, the secular saint of the neo-Malthusian movement. Back in the 1970s, Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb became a global best-seller on the back of his forecast that by the end of the century even the United States would be enduring mass famine and that there was no better than a 50 per chance of anyone remaining alive in Great Britain by the year 2000. You might have thought that events would have discredited Ehrlich as a forecaster, but he is still constantly cited as an authority by the population control freaks, and is himself remarkably unbothered by the fact that agricultural techniques had rapidly developed in a way which he was unable to envisage. Asked in 2000 about his prediction of a wipe-out of the UK by famine, he replied: "If you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems just like everybody else." If his original forecast had merely been that "The world – including Britain – will have all kinds of problems", I somehow doubt he would have found a publisher.

One reason why the population doomsters have come out in force in recent weeks is that, according to the UN Population Division, this year will see the number of living inhabitants hit the figure of 7 billion; or according to an imaginative piece of global palm-reading by The Guardian: "Later this year, on 31 October to be precise, a boy will be born in a rural village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His parents will not know it, but his birth will prove to be a considerable landmark for our species as his arrival will mark the moment when the human population reaches 7 billion."
Or it might not; but we get the drift: lacking only the prognosticated presence of three wise men from the East, this is a Big Moment. It's also not a bad moment, either for the parents (they'll probably be delighted it's a boy) or for the planet. While the misanthropic Malthusians will gloomily see his arrival as just "another mouth to feed", he might more charitably be seen as another human whose ingenuity, creativity and intellect can be of benefit to the world.

As a matter of fact the population doom-sayers among the media and showbusiness are becoming more fashionable just as the experts are coming round to the view that it has all been one giant false alarm. This year National Geographic magazine is making population its theme; but its lengthy opening essay was notable for its lack of alarmism. It quoted Hania Zlotnik, the director of the UN's Population Division, saying: "We still don't understand why fertility has gone down so fast in so many societies, so many cultures and religions. It's just mind-boggling. At this moment, much as I want to say there's still a problem of high fertility rates, it's only about 16 per cent of the world's population, mostly in Africa."

The most fashionable of all arguments for some sort of global anti-natalist legislation comes in the form of professed concern for the atmosphere – too many people produce too much CO2, thus damaging the planet via climate change. The Malthusians have seized on this as grist to their mill, having been refuted on every other argument. Yet Joel Cohen, the professor of populations at Columbia University's Earth Institute, told National Geographic: "Those who say the whole problem is population are wrong. It's not even the dominant factor."

Apart from anything else, the developed world, which uses vastly more energy per capita than sub-Saharan Africa (the only part of the globe with high fertility rates), is going through a period of rapid demographic decline. As Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist, pointed out last week, the world's population is not "exploding" but growing at 1 per cent a year, and the actual number of people added to the figure each year has been dropping for more than 20 years.

Still, morbid pessimism about the ability of the Earth to support its population has always been with us. In AD200, Tertullian wrote: "We are burdensome to the world; the resources are scarcely adequate for us." Of course, the resources of the planet are not, in the purely mathematical sense, infinite; but neither is the population.

This thought ought to be of some cheer; but I fear that even if the entire world of science and engineering accepts this form of rational optimism, it will not change the mind of a single Malthusian. They've been wrong for so long. Why stop now?

America must acknowledge its own eugenics problem

A few weeks ago, Germany dedicated a memorial to Nazism’s first victims: the disabled. The people of Germany have come to terms with their past.

The question now is, When will we?

The 80-foot glass panel unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten memorializes the estimated 70,000 sick and disabled people killed by the Third Reich as part of what was officially called Aktion T4 (and more informally, “Gnadentod,” which is German for “mercy death.”)

There was nothing merciful about it. Between 1939 and 1941, more than 5,000 children deemed “defective” were killed.

The program was expanded to include adults whose disabilities rendered them, in arguably the most demonic phrase ever uttered by man, lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” “Worth” was most often described in economic terms: a propaganda poster told ordinary Germans that caring for someone with “hereditary defects” cost 60,000 Reichsmarks, which came from ordinary Germans’ pockets.

There was opposition to the program, most notably from the Bishop of Münster, who denounced the program saying that “It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God” and rhetorically asked if being poor and unproductive meant “that they have lost their right to live?”

Now, before you file this away under the headings “ancient history” and “The Nazis were one of a kind,” there are two things you need to know: the Nazis learned from us, and the worldview that drove them is not ancient history.

As Edwin Black, the author of “War Against the Weak” has documented, the ideas that led to Aktion T4 “began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz . . . and yet never really stopped.”

Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE! 

By “Long Island” he means the Cold Spring Harbor Lab right here in New York, which was the driving force behind the eugenics movement in the United States. Between the turn of the twentieth century and our entry into World War II, America engaged in its own experiment in “racial hygiene.”

States prohibited marriage between the “fit” and “unfit,” often defining the latter category very broadly. They forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of people with the Supreme Court’s blessing. The number of those affected by what Chuck Colson once dubbed “Yankee Doodle Eugenics” will never be known with any certainty.

What is certain is that, by the time Hitler came to power, the U.S. had been practicing the gospel of eugenics at home and spreading that message abroad, including Germany and, yes, among those who put Aktion T4 into action. As a colleague of mine has put it, “the demonic ideas about ‘race hygiene’ that the Third Reich put into practice were, at least initially, clearly marked ‘Made With Pride in the USA.’”

What’s also certain is that, as Black says, the eugenic impulse has never really gone away. It’s why Nobel Laureate James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix, has called “stupidity” a “disease” that should be eradicated through genetic research.

And it’s why more than 90 percent of children diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero are never born. And it’s why Richard Dawkins calls not killing them “immoral.”

The temptation to “play God” whether for “the good of the race” or our own convenience is hard to resist. At the very minimum, you have to acknowledge its existence, which Germany has, but we, with a few exceptions, have not.

It is indeed a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God.

Reprinted with permission from BreakPoint.org.

Progressives Hate the US Constitution, Progressives hate the tea parties and they hate the constitution. These are the two principle impediments preventing them from finishing what Woodrow Wilson and FDR started.

The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness."

-- Woodrow Wilson

The liberal propagandists in the press tried branding us racists, but such blatant attacks don't work anymore, so they have adopted more subtle tactics.  EJ Dionne is the latest to deploy a deft combination I call the non-sequitur straw man.  Follow me as I deconstruct a piece of progressive propaganda.

Unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process

Dionne's neat rhetorical trick asserts that we tea partiers equate the US Constitution with the Holy Bible.  This is a neat trick because yes, we believe the constitution must be followed just as The Bible must be.  His unstated non-sequitur avers that since we equate the constitution with The Bible, we must also equate the founders with God Almighty.  This sets up the straw man argument that we worship the constitution and the founders.  It's a straw man because unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process.

Dionne starts out with an innocuous statement...

I offer the Republicans two cheers for their fealty to their professed ideals. We badly need a full-scale debate over what the Constitution is, means and allows -- and how Americans have argued about these questions since the beginning of the republic. This provision should be the springboard for a discussion all of us should join.

He plants a few little seeds of doubt there, but so far so good.  Next comes the premise for the non-sequitur straw man...

From its inception, the tea party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is, but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Note that this statement contains two elements, the first is plainly stated, the second one tacitly follows:  1) The constitution is a document like The Bible that government must obey; 2) Unstated:  If the constitution is the equivalent of sacred scripture, then the founders are the equivalent of an infallible God. 

Number 2 is the strawman that does not follow from the first statement.  Since EJ cannot argue with statement #1, he invents the non-sequitur strawman, statement #2, and then knocks it down: 

Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. ... They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."

See how he sets up the straw man so he can knock down those crazy rightwingers who want to tea party like it's 1776?  EJ Dionne is too smart to really believe that we deify the founders, so all I can conclude is that he is engaging in a deliberate propaganda smear.   

Progressives are not out to destroy the tea parties; they have bigger fish to fry:

An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.

Yes, let's knock that dusty bit of outmoded parchment off its pedestal.  Good progressives like EJ Dionne and Ezra Klein are just following in the footsteps of Progressivism's great grand daddy, Woodrow Wilson.  They can’t quite muster the intellectual starch of this racist scholar and failed statesman, but it’s just the right pitch for the MSNBC crowd.  It's neo-progressivism reduced to valley girl vapidity:

"The constitution is, like, so old, and full of, like, so many old words that are, like, spelled funny.  Bogus!  It's like totally irrelevant, totally!"

They want a living, breathing constitution, to which Dr. Walter E. Williams has the perfect riposte:

How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be "living"? Depending on "evolving standards," maybe my two pair could beat your flush.

Indeed.  Those who crave power and control must have "living rules."  Oh, and they also want to hold the book, because some animals are more equal than others.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/03/celebrating_the_new_gop_majority_108404.html

DEFINITION OF HATE: PROGRESSIVE SOCIALISM, How Many Times Do We Have To Mention Saul Alinsky?

Progressive Socialists (a.k.a. liberal Democrats) are like pig farmers. In an effort to bury opposing viewpoints they sling pejorative slop, labeling as “bigot,” “hater,” “wingnut” or “racist” those with whom they disagree. It’s the height of intellectual sloth.

The name calling from the left reminds me of when I was a kid and how the neighborhood bullies resorted to slinging a host of nouns, stopping short of a punch in the nose. They didn't punch because, in reality, they were sissies.

The ad hominem approach – chief among logical fallacies – undergirds an effort to both marginalize conservative viewpoints and avoid arguing on the merits the controversies of the day. For liberals, to set sail in fair debate is to navigate treacherous waters.

We’ve seen this tired tactic abused ad nauseum in recent days by the mainstream media and Democrats. Aided by hard-left outfits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center – all too eager to provide “expert analysis” tailor-made for jaundiced journalism – liberal elites have been desperate to throw poison on bourgeoning grassroots opposition to Obama’s careening Marxist agenda. It’s straight out of the “progressive” playbook: Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”

Hence, in the face of zero supporting evidence, “Tea Party” conservatives, Constitutionalists, pro-life and pro-family Americans, and generally any patriot who disagrees with the Obama administration are smeared with “hate’s” broad brush.

Progressive-Socialists don't use reason, documentation or proof to back up their claims about those with whom they disagree. They just hurl insults like a bulimic lady who seeks to satisfy her craze by hurling groceries. In both cases (i.e. the P-S and the bulimic) they are sick.

Grandma and Grandpa; your fireman neighbor; school teachers; pastors; butchers; bakers; and candlestick makers are now “potentially violent right-wing extremists.” They are, as Mark Potok, Huffington Post columnist and SPLC director puts it, “…shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” and are widely linked to “hate” and “vigilante groups.” (Knock it off, Mark. With the exception of your fellow moveon.org-types, the vast majority of Americans aren’t biting.)

Nonetheless, every once in a while, as it goes, “even a blind squirrel finds a nut.” While I rarely agree with the Mark Potoks of the world, today, on at least one issue, I find myself doing so. Cult leader Fred Phelps and his Westboro brood of “God hates F-gs” fame are infused to the marrow with pure, unadulterated hate.

Phelps hates homosexuals. He hates the military. He hates America. He apparently hates everyone. But he also hurts people. Intentionally, I believe.

Phelps contends that every time a U.S. soldier dies in combat its God’s judgment for our nation’s affirmation of homosexual sin. Best known for disrupting military funerals, Phelps is – and was – a lot of things: He’s a former Kansas Democratic gubernatorial candidate; he was an Al Gore fundraiser for the ex-Veep’s 1988 presidential run; he’s a self-styled “Baptist minister;” and he’s a buffoon.

But one man decided to fight back. As reported by the AP: “Albert Snyder of York, Pa., is suing [Phelps’] church that picketed the funeral of his son, who died in a vehicle accident in Iraq. The Westboro Baptist Church contends U.S. military deaths are God’s punishment for tolerance of homosexuality. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

   

“The appeals court ordered Snyder to pay $16,510 in court costs to Westboro and its pastor, Fred Phelps. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly has pledged to donate that amount. An American Legion spokesman says the veterans’ group has collected more than $12,000 in donations. People can also donate directly to Snyder on a Web site in his son's name.

” (To donate go to www.mathewsnyder.org).

Indeed, Phelps and his incestuous band of Dale Carnegie rejects represent hate personified. Rather than taking the biblical “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to sexual immorality, these false prophets preach counterfeit Christianity, devoid of the faith’s core tenet: redemption.

They labor under the misconception that, somehow, they are exempt from the Gospel’s central “judge not lest ye be judged” provision. “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one.’” Romans 3:10.

I pray that Phelps and Co. will both repent and seek Christ’s redemption for the harm they’ve caused people like the Snyders. I also pray that liberals will repent. By lumping together with Phelps those who recognize traditional, biblical sexual morality, homosexual activists and the left-wing media trivialize true hate.

Indeed, many Americans – perhaps most – adhere to the biblical notion that all sexual conduct outside the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman is sexually immoral. (Sorry liberals, that’s just the way it is; nothing personal. Despite disingenuous bleatings to the contrary, such beliefs are typically as far removed from hate as Phelps is from cuddly. Every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology hold this to be true. And as with all absolute truth, it just is.)

So, Fred Phelps aside, every time you hear some lefty like Anderson Cooper or Keith Olbermann despicably refer to Bible-believing Christians as “homophobes,” or who call grandma a “teabagger” (slang for a vile homosexual act), consider who the real haters are.

Whenever Mark Potok, Rachel Maddow or some liberal politico in Congress attempts to equate conservative Joe to a “right wing extremists” or a “domestic terrorist,” contemplate who the true bigots are.

The palpable irony is that leftists – with their slanderous name-calling, harsh judgments and ad hominem attacks – are, in truth, more like Phelps than those they falsely accuse.

Progress demands a vigorous, open and honest debate. “Progressives” should quit the empty name calling and stop running-scared from true progress.