A doctor in a clinic was interviewing a new patient.
"If I find an operation necessary," he asked, "would you have the money to pay for it?"
"Listen, Doc," replied the man, "if I didn't have the money, would you find the operation necessary?"
*.*
Another man was brought to Mercy Hospital, and went in for heart surgery. The operation went well, and as the groggy man regained consciousness, he was reassured by a Sister of Mercy waiting by his bed.
"Mr. Napoli, you're going to be just fine," the nun said while patting his hand. "We do have to know, however, how you intend to pay for your stay here. Are you covered by insurance?"
"No, I'm not," the man whispered hoarsely.
"Can you pay in cash?"
"I'm afraid I can't, Sister."
"Do you have any close relatives, then?"
"Just my sister in Chicago," replied the man, but she's a spinster and a nun."
"Nuns are not spinsters, Mr. Napoli ," the nun replied. "They are married to God."
"Okay, great" the man said with a smile, "then send the bill to my brother-in-law."
*.*
A decorated war veteran, fresh off the bus, is looking for a place to stay. He hears that room and board is available from the three old spinsters at the edge of town, but is advised they are very picky in letting strangers stay there.
He decides to chance it, and limps on up to the front door. His knock is answered by Gladys. "What do you want, sonny?" she asks him.
"Ma'am, I'm just looking for a hot meal and a room for the night," he answers.
The other two old spinsters gather around the door. "Who's out there? Does he look decent?" they ask.
Gladys says, "It's a soldier, and he's got a Purple Heart on."
The other two heard-of-hearing spinsters giggle and say, "The hell with what color it is... let him in!"
*.*
BENTONVILLE, AR - In a bold move intended to curb the thousands of deaths from vehicles each and every day, Walmart has decided to stop selling auto parts, sources confirmed Tuesday.
According to shocking reports, people have purchased car parts at Walmart and then those cars have been involved in accidents, proving a direct correlation between selling auto parts and causing deaths.
"We can no longer be complicit in an industry that kills over 3,000 people a day," said a spokesperson for Walmart. "Every time we sell a muffler, steering wheel cover, or flame decal, we are potentially causing the death of a person, and we cannot support that any longer."
"It's clear that bad drivers and poor road conditions don't cause vehicular deaths - cars do."
Walmart executives said they are beating themselves with a stick to atone for the deaths they've already caused.
"Our consciences will only be clean when we've been mercilessly beaten once for each of the millions of deaths that have been caused by automobiles since Walmart began selling auto parts," said one executive before solemnly beginning to beat himself with a baseball bat.
*.*
5 out of 6 depressed doctors recommend Russian Roulette.
Quote of the Times;
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." - 1 Peter 4:8
Link of the Times;
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/09/03/christine-blasey-fords-attorney-said-motivated-desire-defend-roe/
Issue of the Times;
Why Germany Invaded Poland by John Wear
Great Britain’s Blank Check to Poland
On March 21, 1939, while hosting French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain discussed a joint front with France, Russia and Poland to act together against German aggression. France agreed at once, and the Russians agreed on the condition that both France and Poland sign first. However, Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck vetoed the agreement on March 24, 1939.[1] Polish statesmen feared Russia more than they did Germany. Polish Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz told the French ambassador, “With the Germans we risk losing our liberty; with the Russians we lose our soul.”[2]
Another complication arose in European diplomacy when a movement among the residents of Memel in Lithuania sought to join Germany. The Allied victors in the Versailles Treaty had detached Memel from East Prussia and placed it in a separate League of Nations protectorate. Lithuania then proceeded to seize Memel from the League of Nations shortly after World War I. Memel was historically a German city which in the seven centuries of its history had never separated from its East Prussian homeland. Germany was so weak after World War I that it could not prevent the tiny new-born nation of Lithuania from seizing Memel.[3]
Germany’s occupation of Prague in March 1939 had generated uncontrollable excitement among the mostly German population of Memel. The population of Memel was clamoring to return to Germany and could no longer be restrained. The Lithuanian foreign minister traveled to Berlin on March 22, 1939, where he agreed to the immediate transfer of Memel to Germany. The annexation of Memel into Germany went through the next day. The question of Memel exploded of itself without any deliberate German plan of annexation.[4] Polish leaders agreed that the return of Memel to Germany from Lithuania would not constitute an issue of conflict between Germany and Poland.[5]
What did cause conflict between Germany and Poland was the so-called Free City of Danzig. Danzig was founded in the early 14th century and was historically the key port at the mouth of the great Vistula River. From the beginning Danzig was inhabited almost exclusively by Germans, with the Polish minority in 1922 constituting less than 3% of the city’s 365,000 inhabitants. The Treaty of Versailles converted Danzig from a German provincial capital into a League of Nations protectorate subject to numerous strictures established for the benefit of Poland. The great preponderance of the citizens of Danzig had never wanted to leave Germany, and they were eager to return to Germany in 1939. Their eagerness to join Germany was exacerbated by the fact that Germany’s economy was healthy while Poland’s economy was still mired in depression.[6]
Many of the German citizens of Danzig had consistently demonstrated their unwavering loyalty to National Socialism and its principles. They had even elected a National Socialist parliamentary majority before this result had been achieved in Germany. It was widely known that Poland was constantly seeking to increase her control over Danzig despite the wishes of Danzig’s German majority. Hitler was not opposed to Poland’s further economic aspirations at Danzig, but Hitler was resolved never to permit the establishment of a Polish political regime at Danzig. Such a renunciation of Danzig by Hitler would have been a repudiation of the loyalty of Danzig citizens to the Third Reich and their spirit of self-determination.[7]
Germany presented a proposal for a comprehensive settlement of the Danzig question with Poland on October 24, 1938. Hitler’s plan would allow Germany to annex Danzig and construct a superhighway and a railroad to East Prussia. In return Poland would be granted a permanent free port in Danzig and the right to build her own highway and railroad to the port. The entire Danzig area would also become a permanent free market for Polish goods on which no German customs duties would be levied. Germany would take the unprecedented step of recognizing and guaranteeing the existing German-Polish frontier, including the boundary in Upper Silesia established in 1922. This later provision was extremely important since the Versailles Treaty had given Poland much additional territory which Germany proposed to renounce. Hitler’s offer to guarantee Poland’s frontiers also carried with it a degree of military security that no other non-Communist nation could match.[8]
Germany’s proposed settlement with Poland was far less favorable to Germany than the Thirteenth Point of Wilson’s program at Versailles. The Versailles Treaty gave Poland large slices of territory in regions such as West Prussia and Western Posen which were overwhelmingly German. The richest industrial section of Upper Silesia was also later given to Poland despite the fact that Poland had lost the plebiscite there.[9]
Germany was willing to renounce these territories in the interest of German-Polish cooperation. This concession of Hitler’s was more than adequate to compensate for the German annexation of Danzig and construction of a superhighway and a railroad in the Corridor. The Polish diplomats themselves believed that Germany’s proposal was a sincere and realistic basis for a permanent agreement.[10]
On March 26, 1939, the Polish Ambassador to Berlin, Joseph Lipski, formally rejected Germany’s settlement proposals. The Poles had waited over five months to reject Germany’s proposals, and they refused to countenance any change in existing conditions. Lipski stated to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that “it was his painful duty to draw attention to the fact that any further pursuance of these German plans, especially where the return of Danzig to the Reich was concerned, meant war with Poland.”[11]
Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck accepted an offer from Great Britain on March 30, 1939, to give an unconditional guarantee of Poland’s independence. The British Empire agreed to go to war as an ally of Poland if the Poles decided that war was necessary. In words drafted by British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, Chamberlain spoke in the House of Commons on March 31, 1939:
I now have to inform the House…that in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to that effect.[12]
Great Britain for the first time in history had left the decision whether or not to fight a war outside of her own country to another nation. Britain’s guarantee to Poland was binding without commitments from the Polish side. The British public was astonished by this move. Despite its unprecedented nature, Halifax encountered little difficulty in persuading the British Conservative, Liberal and Labor parties to accept Great Britain’s unconditional guarantee to Poland.[13]
Numerous British historians and diplomats have criticized Britain’s unilateral guarantee of Poland. For example, British diplomat Roy Denman called the war guarantee to Poland “the most reckless undertaking ever given by a British government. It placed the decision on peace or war in Europe in the hands of a reckless, intransigent, swashbuckling military dictatorship.”[14]British historian Niall Ferguson states that the war guarantee to Poland tied Britain’s “destiny to that of a regime that was every bit as undemocratic and anti-Semitic as that of Germany.”[15]English military historian Liddell Hart stated that the Polish guarantee “placed Britain’s destiny in the hands of Poland’s rulers, men of very dubious and unstable judgment. Moreover, the guarantee was impossible to fulfill except with Russia’s help.…”[16]
American historian Richard M. Watt writes concerning Britain’s unilateral guarantee to Poland: “This enormously broad guarantee virtually left to the Poles the decision whether or not Britain would go to war. For Britain to give such a blank check to a Central European nation, particularly to Poland—a nation that Britain had generally regarded as irresponsible and greedy—was mind-boggling.”[17]
When the Belgian Minister to Germany, Vicomte Jacques Davignon, received the text of the British guarantee to Poland, he exclaimed that “blank check” was the only possible description of the British pledge. Davignon was extremely alarmed in view of the proverbial recklessness of the Poles. German State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker attempted to reassure Davignon by claiming that the situation between Germany and Poland was not tragic. However, Davignon correctly feared that the British move would produce war in a very short time.[18] Weizsäcker later exclaimed scornfully that “the British guarantee to Poland was like offering sugar to an untrained child before it had learned to listen to reason!”[19]
The Deterioration of German-Polish Relations
German-Polish relationships had become strained by the increasing harshness with which the Polish authorities handled the German minority. The Polish government in the 1930s began to confiscate the land of its German minority at bargain prices through public expropriation. The German government resented the fact that German landowners received only one-eighth of the value of their holdings from the Polish government. Since the Polish public was aware of the German situation and desired to exploit it, the German minority in Poland could not sell the land in advance of expropriation. Furthermore, Polish law forbade Germans from privately selling large areas of land.
German diplomats insisted that the November 1937 Minorities Pact with Poland for the equal treatment of German and Polish landowners be observed in 1939. Despite Polish assurances of fairness and equal treatment, German diplomats learned on February 15, 1939, that the latest expropriations of land in Poland were predominantly of German holdings. These expropriations virtually eliminated substantial German landholdings in Poland at a time when most of the larger Polish landholdings were still intact. It became evident that nothing could be done diplomatically to help the German minority in Poland.[20]
Poland threatened Germany with a partial mobilization of her forces on March 23, 1939. Hundreds of thousands of Polish Army reservists were mobilized, and Hitler was warned that Poland would fight to prevent the return of Danzig to Germany. The Poles were surprised to discover that Germany did not take this challenge seriously. Hitler, who deeply desired friendship with Poland, refrained from responding to the Polish threat of war. Germany did not threaten Poland and took no precautionary military measures in response to the Polish partial mobilization.[21]
Hitler regarded a German-Polish agreement as a highly welcome alternative to a German-Polish war. However, no further negotiations for a German-Polish agreement occurred after the British guarantee to Poland because Józef Beck refused to negotiate. Beck ignored repeated German suggestions for further negotiations because Beck knew that Halifax hoped to accomplish the complete destruction of Germany. Halifax had considered an Anglo-German war inevitable since 1936, and Britain’s anti-German policy was made public with a speech by Neville Chamberlain on March 17, 1939. Halifax discouraged German-Polish negotiations because he was counting on Poland to provide the pretext for a British pre-emptive war against Germany.[22]
The situation between Germany and Poland deteriorated rapidly during the six weeks from the Polish partial mobilization of March 23, 1939, to a speech delivered by Józef Beck on May 5, 1939. Beck’s primary purpose in delivering his speech before the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, was to convince the Polish public and the world that he was able and willing to challenge Hitler. Beck knew that Halifax had succeeded in creating a warlike atmosphere in Great Britain, and that he could go as far as he wanted without displeasing the British. Beck took an uncompromising attitude in his speech that effectively closed the door to further negotiations with Germany.
Beck made numerous false and hypocritical statements in his speech. One of the most astonishing claims in his speech was that there was nothing extraordinary about the British guarantee to Poland. He described it as a normal step in the pursuit of friendly relations with a neighboring country. This was in sharp contrast to British diplomat Sir Alexander Cadogan’s statement to Joseph Kennedy that Britain’s guarantee to Poland was without precedent in the entire history of British foreign policy.[23]
Beck ended his speech with a stirring climax that produced wild excitement in the Polish Sejm. Someone in the audience screamed loudly, “We do not need peace!” and pandemonium followed. Beck had made many Poles in the audience determined to fight Germany. This feeling resulted from their ignorance which made it impossible for them to criticize the numerous falsehoods and misstatements in Beck’s speech. Beck made the audience feel that Hitler had insulted the honor of Poland with what were actually quite reasonable peace proposals. Beck had effectively made Germany the deadly enemy of Poland.[24]
More than 1 million ethnic Germans resided in Poland at the time of Beck’s speech, and these Germans were the principal victims of the German-Polish crisis in the coming weeks. The Germans in Poland were subjected to increasing doses of violence from the dominant Poles. The British public was told repeatedly that the grievances of the German minority in Poland were largely imaginary. The average British citizen was completely unaware of the terror and fear of death that stalked these Germans in Poland. Ultimately, many thousands of Germans in Poland died in consequence of the crisis. They were among the first victims of British Foreign Secretary Halifax’s war policy against Germany.[25]
The immediate responsibility for security measures involving the German minority in Poland rested with Interior Department Ministerial Director Waclaw Zyborski. Zyborski consented to discuss the situation on June 23, 1939, with Walther Kohnert, one of the leaders of the German minority at Bromberg. Zyborski admitted to Kohnert that the Germans of Poland were in an unenviable situation, but he was not sympathetic to their plight. Zyborski ended their lengthy conversation by stating frankly that his policy required a severe treatment of the German minority in Poland. He made it clear that it was impossible for the Germans of Poland to alleviate their hard fate. The Germans in Poland were the helpless hostages of the Polish community and the Polish state.[26]
Other leaders of the German minority in Poland repeatedly appealed to the Polish government for help during this period. Sen. Hans Hasbach, the leader of the conservative German minority faction, and Dr. Rudolf Wiesner, the leader of the Young German Party, each made multiple appeals to Poland’s government to end the violence. In a futile appeal on July 6, 1939, to Premier Sławoj-Składkowski, head of Poland’s Department of Interior, Wiesner referred to the waves of public violence against the Germans at Tomaszów near Lódz, May 13-15th, at Konstantynów, May 21-22nd, and at Pabianice, June 22-23, 1939. The appeal of Wiesner produced no results. The leaders of the German political groups eventually recognized that they had no influence with Polish authorities despite their loyal attitudes toward Poland. It was “open season” on the Germans of Poland with the approval of the Polish government.[27]
Polish anti-German incidents also occurred against the German majority in the Free City of Danzig. On May 21, 1939, Zygmunt Morawski, a former Polish soldier, murdered a German at Kalthof on Danzig territory. The incident itself would not have been so unusual except for the fact that Polish officials acted as if Poland and not the League of Nations had sovereign power over Danzig. Polish officials refused to apologize for the incident, and they treated with contempt the effort of Danzig authorities to bring Morawski to trial. The Poles in Danzig considered themselves above the law.[28]
Tension steadily mounted at Danzig after the Morawski murder. The German citizens of Danzig were convinced that Poland would show them no mercy if Poland gained the upper hand. The Poles were furious when they learned that Danzig was defying Poland by organizing its own militia for home defense. The Poles blamed Hitler for this situation. The Polish government protested to German Ambassador Hans von Moltke on July 1, 1939, about the Danzig government’s military-defense measures. Józef Beck told French Ambassador Léon Noël on July 6, 1939, that the Polish government had decided that additional measures were necessary to meet the alleged threat from Danzig.[29]
On July 29, 1939, the Danzig government presented two protest notes to the Poles concerning illegal activities of Polish custom inspectors and frontier officials. The Polish government responded by terminating the export of duty-free herring and margarine from Danzig to Poland. Polish officials next announced in the early hours of August 5, 1939, that the frontiers of Danzig would be closed to the importation of all foreign food products unless the Danzig government promised by the end of the day never to interfere with the activities of Polish customs inspectors. This threat was formidable since Danzig produced only a relatively small portion of its own food. All Polish customs inspectors would also bear arms while performing their duty after August 5, 1939. The Polish ultimatum made it obvious that Poland intended to replace the League of Nations as the sovereign power at Danzig.[30]
Hitler concluded that Poland was seeking to provoke an immediate conflict with Germany. The Danzig government submitted to the Polish ultimatum in accordance with Hitler’s recommendation.[31]
Józef Beck explained to British Ambassador Kennard that the Polish government was prepared to take military measures against Danzig if it failed to accept Poland’s terms. The citizens of Danzig were convinced that Poland would have executed a full military occupation of Danzig had the Polish ultimatum been rejected. It was apparent to the German government that the British and French were either unable or unwilling to restrain the Polish government from arbitrary steps that could result in war.[32]
On August 7, 1939, the Polish censors permitted the newspaper Illustrowany KuryerCodzienny in Kraków to feature an article of unprecedented candor. The article stated that Polish units were constantly crossing the German frontier to destroy German military installations and to carry captured German military materiel into Poland. The Polish government failed to prevent the newspaper, which had the largest circulation in Poland, from telling the world that Poland was instigating a series of violations of Germany’s frontier with Poland.[33]
Polish Ambassador Jerzy Potocki unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Józef Beck to seek an agreement with Germany. Potocki later succinctly explained the situation in Poland by stating “Poland prefers Danzig to peace.”[34]
President Roosevelt knew that Poland had caused the crisis which began at Danzig, and he was worried that the American public might learn the truth about the situation. This could be a decisive factor in discouraging Roosevelt’s plan for American military intervention in Europe. Roosevelt instructed U.S. Ambassador Biddle to urge the Poles to be more careful in making it appear that German moves were responsible for any inevitable explosion at Danzig. Biddle reported to Roosevelt on August 11, 1939, that Beck expressed no interest in engaging in a series of elaborate but empty maneuvers designed to deceive the American public. Beck stated that at the moment he was content to have full British support for his policy.[35]
Roosevelt also feared that American politicians might discover the facts about the hopeless dilemma which Poland’s provocative policy created for Germany. When American Democratic Party Campaign Manager and Post-Master General James Farley visited Berlin, Roosevelt instructed the American Embassy in Berlin to prevent unsupervised contact between Farley and the German leaders. The German Foreign Office concluded on August 10, 1939 that it was impossible to penetrate the wall of security around Farley. The Germans knew that President Roosevelt was determined to prevent them from freely communicating with visiting American leaders.[36]
Polish Atrocities Force War
On August 14, 1939, the Polish authorities in East Upper Silesia launched a campaign of mass arrests against the German minority. The Poles then proceeded to close and confiscate the remaining German businesses, clubs and welfare installations. The arrested Germans were forced to march toward the interior of Poland in prisoner columns. The various German groups in Poland were frantic by this time; they feared the Poles would attempt the total extermination of the German minority in the event of war. Thousands of Germans were seeking to escape arrest by crossing the border into Germany. Some of the worst recent Polish atrocities included the mutilation of several Germans. The Polish public was urged not to regard their German minority as helpless hostages who could be butchered with impunity.[37]
Rudolf Wiesner, who was the most prominent of the German minority leaders in Poland, spoke of a disaster “of inconceivable magnitude” since the early months of 1939. Wiesner claimed that the last Germans had been dismissed from their jobs without the benefit of unemployment relief, and that hunger and privation were stamped on the faces of the Germans in Poland. German welfare agencies, cooperatives and trade associations had been closed by Polish authorities. Exceptional martial-law conditions of the earlier frontier zone had been extended to include more than one-third of the territory of Poland. The mass arrests, deportations, mutilations and beatings of the last few weeks in Poland surpassed anything that had happened before. Wiesner insisted that the German minority leaders merely desired the restoration of peace, the banishment of the specter of war, and the right to live and work in peace. Wiesner was arrested by the Poles on August 16, 1939 on suspicion of conducting espionage for Germany in Poland.[38]
The German press devoted increasing space to detailed accounts of atrocities against the Germans in Poland. The Völkischer Beobachter reported that more than 80,000 German refugees from Poland had succeeded in reaching German territory by August 20, 1939. The German Foreign Office had received a huge file of specific reports of excesses against national and ethnic Germans in Poland. More than 1,500 documented reports had been received since March 1939, and more than 10 detailed reports were arriving in the German Foreign Office each day. The reports presented a staggering picture of brutality and human misery.[39]
W. L. White, an American journalist, later recalled that there was no doubt among well-informed people by this time that horrible atrocities were being inflicted every day on the Germans of Poland.[40]
Donald Day, a Chicago Tribune correspondent, reported on the atrocious treatment the Poles had meted out to the ethnic Germans in Poland:
…I traveled up to the Polish corridor where the German authorities permitted me to interview the German refugees from many Polish cities and towns. The story was the same. Mass arrests and long marches along roads toward the interior of Poland. The railroads were crowded with troop movements. Those who fell by the wayside were shot. The Polish authorities seemed to have gone mad. I have been questioning people all my life and I think I know how to make deductions from the exaggerated stories told by people who have passed through harrowing personal experiences. But even with generous allowance, the situation was plenty bad. To me the war seemed only a question of hours.[41]
British Ambassador Nevile Henderson in Berlin was concentrating on obtaining recognition from Halifax of the cruel fate of the German minority in Poland. Henderson emphatically warned Halifax on August 24, 1939, that German complaints about the treatment of the German minority in Poland were fully supported by the facts. Henderson knew that the Germans were prepared to negotiate, and he stated to Halifax that war between Poland and Germany was inevitable unless negotiations were resumed between the two countries. Henderson pleaded with Halifax that it would be contrary to Polish interests to attempt a full military occupation of Danzig, and he added a scathingly effective denunciation of Polish policy. What Henderson failed to realize is that Halifax was pursuing war for its own sake as an instrument of policy. Halifax desired the complete destruction of Germany.[42]
On August 25, 1939, Ambassador Henderson reported to Halifax the latest Polish atrocity at Bielitz, Upper Silesia. Henderson never relied on official German statements concerning these incidents, but instead based his reports on information he received from neutral sources. The Poles continued to forcibly deport the Germans of that area, and compelled them to march into the interior of Poland. Eight Germans were murdered and many more were injured during one of these actions.
Hitler was faced with a terrible dilemma. If Hitler did nothing, the Germans of Poland and Danzig would be abandoned to the cruelty and violence of a hostile Poland. If Hitler took effective action against the Poles, the British and French might declare war against Germany. Henderson feared that the Bielitz atrocity would be the final straw to prompt Hitler to invade Poland. Henderson, who strongly desired peace with Germany, deplored the failure of the British government to exercise restraint over the Polish authorities.[43]
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. This non-aggression pact contained a secret protocol which recognized a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. German recognition of this Soviet sphere of influence would not apply in the event of a diplomatic settlement of the German-Polish dispute. Hitler had hoped to recover the diplomatic initiative through the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. However, Chamberlain warned Hitler in a letter dated August 23, 1939, that Great Britain would support Poland with military force regardless of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. Józef Beck also continued to refuse to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Germany.[44]
Germany made a new offer to Poland on August 29, 1939, for a last diplomatic campaign to settle the German-Polish dispute. The terms of a new German plan for a settlement, the so-called Marienwerder proposals, were less important than the offer to negotiate as such. The terms of the Marienwerder proposals were intended as nothing more than a tentative German plan for a possible settlement. The German government emphasized that these terms were formulated to offer a basis for unimpeded negotiations between equals rather than constituting a series of demands which Poland would be required to accept. There was nothing to prevent the Poles from offering an entirely new set of proposals of their own.
The Germans, in offering to negotiate with Poland, were indicating that they favored a diplomatic settlement over war with Poland. The willingness of the Poles to negotiate would not in any way have implied a Polish retreat or their readiness to recognize the German annexation of Danzig. The Poles could have justified their acceptance to negotiate with the announcement that Germany, and not Poland, had found it necessary to request new negotiations. In refusing to negotiate, the Poles were announcing that they favored war. The refusal of British Foreign Secretary Halifax to encourage the Poles to negotiate indicated that he also favored war.[45]
French Prime Minister Daladier and British Prime Minister Chamberlain were both privately critical of the Polish government. Daladier in private denounced the “criminal folly” of the Poles. Chamberlain admitted to Ambassador Joseph Kennedy that it was the Poles, and not the Germans, who were unreasonable. Kennedy reported to President Roosevelt, “frankly he [Chamberlain] is more worried about getting the Poles to be reasonable than the Germans.” However, neither Daladier nor Chamberlain made any effort to influence the Poles to negotiate with the Germans.[46]
On August 29, 1939, the Polish government decided upon the general mobilization of its army. The Polish military plans stipulated that general mobilization would be ordered only in the event of Poland’s decision for war. Henderson informed Halifax of some of the verified Polish violations prior to the war. The Poles blew up the Dirschau (Tczew) bridge across the Vistula River even though the eastern approach to the bridge was in German territory (East Prussia). The Poles also occupied a number of Danzig installations and engaged in fighting with the citizens of Danzig on the same day. Henderson reported that Hitler was not insisting on the total military defeat of Poland. Hitler was prepared to terminate hostilities if the Poles indicated that they were willing to negotiate a satisfactory settlement.[47]
Germany decided to invade Poland on September 1, 1939. All of the British leaders claimed that the entire responsibility for starting the war was Hitler’s. Prime Minister Chamberlain broadcast that evening on British radio that “the responsibility for this terrible catastrophe (war in Poland) lies on the shoulders of one man, the German Chancellor.” Chamberlain claimed that Hitler had ordered Poland to come to Berlin with the unconditional obligation of accepting without discussion the exact German terms. Chamberlain denied that Germany had invited the Poles to engage in normal negotiations. Chamberlain’s statements were unvarnished lies, but the Polish case was so weak that it was impossible to defend it with the truth.
Halifax also delivered a cleverly hypocritical speech to the House of Lords on the evening of September 1, 1939. Halifax claimed that the best proof of the British will to peace was to have Chamberlain, the great appeasement leader, carry Great Britain into war. Halifax concealed the fact that he had taken over the direction of British foreign policy from Chamberlain in October 1938, and that Great Britain would probably not be moving into war had this not happened. He assured his audience that Hitler, before the bar of history, would have to assume full responsibility for starting the war. Halifax insisted that the English conscience was clear, and that, in looking back, he did not wish to change a thing as far as British policy was concerned.[48]
On September 2, 1939, Italy and Germany agreed to hold a mediation conference among themselves and Great Britain, France and Poland. Halifax attempted to destroy the conference plan by insisting that Germany withdraw her forces from Poland and Danzig before Great Britain and France would consider attending the mediation conference. French Foreign Minister Bonnet knew that no nation would accept such treatment, and that the attitude of Halifax was unreasonable and unrealistic.
Ultimately, the mediation effort collapsed, and both Great Britain and France declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939. When Hitler read the British declaration of war against Germany, he paused and asked of no one in particular: “What now?”[49]
Germany was now in an unnecessary war with three European nations.
Similar to the other British leaders, Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany, later claimed that the entire responsibility for starting the war was Hitler’s. Henderson wrote in his memoirs in 1940: “If Hitler wanted peace he knew how to insure it; if he wanted war, he knew equally well what would bring it about. The choice lay with him, and in the end the entire responsibility for war was his.”[50] Henderson forgot in this passage that he had repeatedly warned Halifax that the Polish atrocities against the German minority in Poland were extreme. Hitler invaded Poland in order to end these atrocities.
Polish Atrocities Continue against German Minority
The Germans in Poland continued to experience an atmosphere of terror in the early part of September 1939. Throughout the country the Germans had been told, “If war comes to Poland you will all be hanged.” This prophecy was later fulfilled in many cases.
The famous Bloody Sunday in Toruń on September 3, 1939, was accompanied by similar massacres elsewhere in Poland. These massacres brought a tragic end to the long suffering of many ethnic Germans. This catastrophe had been anticipated by the Germans before the outbreak of war, as reflected by the flight, or attempted escape, of large numbers of Germans from Poland. The feelings of these Germans were revealed by the desperate slogan, “Away from this hell, and back to the Reich!”[51]
Dr. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas writes concerning the ethnic Germans in Poland:
The first victims of the war were Volksdeutsche, ethnic German civilians resident in and citizens of Poland. Using lists prepared years earlier, in part by lower administrative offices, Poland immediately deported 15,000 Germans to Eastern Poland. Fear and rage at the quick German victories led to hysteria. German “spies” were seen everywhere, suspected of forming a fifth column. More than 5,000 German civilians were murdered in the first days of the war. They were hostages and scapegoats at the same time. Gruesome scenes were played out in Bromberg on September 3, as well as in several other places throughout the province of Posen, in Pommerellen, wherever German minorities resided.[52]
Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans have been documented in the book Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland. Most of the outside world dismissed this book as nothing more than propaganda used to justify Hitler’s invasion of Poland. However, skeptics failed to notice that forensic pathologists from the International Red Cross and medical and legal observers from the United States verified the findings of these investigations of Polish war crimes. These investigations were also conducted by German police and civil administrations, and not the National Socialist Party or the German military. Moreover, both anti-German and other university-trained researchers have acknowledged that the charges in the book are based entirely on factual evidence.[53]
The book Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland stated:
When the first edition of this collection of documents went to press on November 17, 1939, 5,437 cases of murder committed by soldiers of the Polish army and by Polish civilians against men, women and children of the German minority had been definitely ascertained. It was known that the total when fully ascertained would be very much higher. Between that date and February 1, 1940, the number of identified victims mounted to 12,857. At the present stage investigations disclose that in addition to these 12,857, more than 45,000 persons are still missing. Since there is no trace of them, they must also be considered victims of the Polish terror. Even the figure 58,000 is not final. There can be no doubt that the inquiries now being carried out will result in the disclosure of additional thousands dead and missing.[54]
Medical examinations of the dead showed that Germans of all ages, from four months to 82 years of age, were murdered. The report concluded:
It was shown that the murders were committed with the greatest brutality and that in many cases they were purely sadistic acts—that gouging of eyes was established and that other forms of mutilation, as supported by the depositions of witnesses, may be considered as true.
The method by which the individual murders were committed in many cases reveals studied physical and mental torture; in this connection several cases of killing extended over many hours and of slow death due to neglect had to be mentioned.
By far the most important finding seems to be the proof that murder by such chance weapons as clubs or knives was the exception, and that as a rule modern, highly-effective army rifles and pistols were available to the murderers. It must be emphasized further that it was possible to show, down to the minutest detail, that there could have been no possibility of execution [under military law].[55]
The Polish atrocities were not acts of personal revenge, professional jealously or class hatred; instead, they were a concerted political action. They were organized mass murders caused by a psychosis of political animosity. The hate-inspired urge to destroy everything German was driven by the Polish press, radio, school and government propaganda. Britain’s blank check of support had encouraged Poland to conduct inhuman atrocities against its German minority.[56]
The book Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland explained why the Polish government encouraged such atrocities:
The guarantee of assistance given Poland by the British Government was the agent which lent impetus to Britain’s policy of encirclement. It was designed to exploit the problem of Danzig and the Corridor to begin a war, desired and long-prepared by England, for the annihilation of Greater Germany. In Warsaw moderation was no longer considered necessary, and the opinion held was that matters could be safely brought to a head. England was backing this diabolical game, having guaranteed the “integrity” of the Polish state. The British assurance of assistance meant that Poland was to be the battering ram of Germany’s enemies. Henceforth Poland neglected no form of provocation of Germany and, in its blindness, dreamt of “victorious battle at Berlin’s gates.” Had it not been for the encouragement of the English war clique, which was stiffening Poland’s attitude toward the Reich and whose promises led Warsaw to feel safe, the Polish Government would hardly have let matters develop to the point where Polish soldiers and civilians would eventually interpret the slogan to extirpate all German influence as an incitement to the murder and bestial mutilation of human beings.[57]
Endnotes
[1] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961, p. 207.
[2] DeConde, Alexander, A History of American Foreign Policy, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971, p. 576.
[3] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, pp. 25, 312.
[4] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961, p. 209.
[5] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, p. 50.
[6] Ibid., pp. 49-60.
[7] Ibid., pp. 328-329.
[8] Ibid., pp. 145-146.
[9] Ibid., p. 21.
[10] Ibid., pp. 21, 256-257.
[11] Ibid., p. 323.
[12] Barnett, Correlli, The Collapse of British Power, New York: William Morrow, 1972, p. 560; see also Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961, p. 211.
[13] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, pp. 333, 340.
[14] Denman, Roy, Missed Chances: Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century, London: Indigo, 1997, p. 121.
[15] Ferguson, Niall, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, New York: Penguin Press, 2006, p. 377.
[16] Hart, B. H. Liddell, History of the Second World War, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970, p. 11.
[17] Watt, Richard M., Bitter Glory: Poland and Its Fate 1918 to 1939, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 379.
[18] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, p. 342.
[19] Ibid., p. 391.
[20] Ibid., pp. 260-262.
[21] Ibid., pp. 311-312.
[22] Ibid., pp. 355, 357.
[23] Ibid., pp. 381, 383.
[24] Ibid., pp. 384, 387.
[25] Ibid., p. 387.
[26] Ibid., pp. 388-389.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., pp. 392-393.
[29] Ibid., pp. 405-406.
[30] Ibid., p. 412.
[31] Ibid. p. 413.
[32] Ibid., pp. 413-415.
[33] Ibid. p. 419. In a footnote, the author notes that a report of the same matters appeared in the New York Times for August 8, 1939.
[34] Ibid., p. 419.
[35] Ibid., p. 414.
[36] Ibid., p. 417.
[37] Ibid., pp. 452-453.
[38] Ibid., p. 463.
[39] Ibid., p. 479.
[40] Ibid., p. 554.
[41] Day, Donald, Onward Christian Soldiers, Newport Beach, Cal.: The Noontide Press, 2002, p. 56.
[42] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, pp. 500-501, 550.
[43] Ibid., p. 509
[44] Ibid., pp. 470, 483, 538.
[45] Ibid., pp. 513-514.
[46] Ibid., pp. 441, 549.
[47] Ibid., pp. 537, 577.
[48] Ibid., pp. 578-579.
[49] Ibid., pp. 586, 593, 598.
[50] Henderson, Nevile, Failure of a Mission, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940, p. 227.
[51] Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, p. 390.
[52] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 27.
[53] Roland, Marc, “Poland’s Censored Holocaust,” The Barnes Review in Review: 2008-2010, pp. 132-133.
[54] Shadewalt, Hans, Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland, Berlin and New York: German Library of Information, 2nd edition, 1940, p. 19.
[55] Ibid., pp. 257-258.
[56] Ibid., pp. 88-89.
[57] Ibid., pp. 75-76.
Check?
Skirt?
A polish pilot is going in for a landing when he realizes the runway is not long enough. After putting on the emergency breaks he screeches to a halt, missing the airport with the nose of the plane by mere feet.
The enraged pilot told the reporters later on "This is an obvious design flaw in American airports, why the hell would they make the landing strips so short? Or so unbelievably wide!?"
*.*
A salesman was travelling along a lonely stretch of rural road as the day was getting late and a storm was beginning. He saw a farm house up a head a bit and decided to see if he could spend the night there.
He pulls up in front of the house and knocks on the door. The farmer answers and the salesman asks if he can stay the night.
"Sure", says the farmer, "but you'll have to sleep with my son".
"Oops", replies the salesman, "I must be in the wrong joke".
*.*
U.S.—A fascinating new study released today from a very reliable source confirmed that all your opinions are correct, there are no flaws in your worldview, beliefs, or hot takes, and that everything you say is more or less absolutely correct.
The study researched everything you believe and found that it is true, all of it. From your opinions on religion to your takes on politics, the extremely reputable study found that you are 100% correct both in your high-level assertions and in all the supporting details of your claims.
"Based on this new information, we definitely recommend never examining your beliefs to see if there are weaknesses, never challenging your own assumptions to see if they hold water, and never adjusting your thinking to align with truth," said one expert. "We also recommend not doubting this study itself. Share its results immediately so you can show everyone on your social media feeds that you are, indeed, right."
The study also researched everything you disagree with and found that it is deeply flawed, inherently opposed to logic and reason, and totally destructive to human progress. The only logical conclusion, therefore, is to hate people who disagree with you, and maybe punch them.
*.*
A Soviet soldier and a Polish soldier on border patrol near Brest get to talking things over. “It’s a hard life, comrade,” complains the Soviet soldier.
“A hard life indeed,” the Pole replies.
“They treating you okay?” the Soviet wants to know.
“Not so bad,” the Pole replies. “And you?”
“Okay,” the Soviet answers. “You got warm clothes this freezing winter?”
“Yeah, we got new coats this winter, so it’s not so bad. How about you?”
“Well, I’m warm enough,” says the Soviet. “And boots?”
“Not the best, but they keep my feet warm. We were issued new boots this winter, and they are holding up. How about you?”
“They are not the best either, but my feet will survive until spring. You eating okay?”
“I’m okay on food,” says the Pole. “We get our 3,000 calories a day.”
“Comrade,” replies the startled Soviet, “do not make up stories. No man can eat 40 pounds of potatoes in one day!”
*.*
Whoever said that money can't buy friends obviously never brought donuts to the office.
Quote of the Times;
"It's around three years of the Trump apocalypse. How bad has it been thus far? Pretty good, right?" – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://funnyjunk.com/
Issue of the Times;
Muslim Migrants Start Brawl Over Short Skirt by Robert Spencer
The principle is always and everywhere the same: in Muslim countries, one must conform one’s behavior to suit Islamic sensibilities. And in non-Muslim countries, one must conform one’s behavior to suit Islamic sensibilities. This was proven true again last Thursday in Duisberg, Germany, where a Muslim migrant thought a German woman’s skirt was too short, and started a brawl.
According to the German publication Waz, “Different views on the length of a skirt worn by a woman led to a fight between two groups in Duisburg. The police report a dispute over cultural differences, which began verbally and ended in a fistfight, in which a participant dislocated his shoulder.”
No establishment media source will ever dare to say what was really behind this kind of incident: not simply “cultural differences,” but religious beliefs.
A police spokeswoman, Jacqueline Grahl, explained: “The revealing style of clothing of a 50-year-old met with incomprehension in a 20-year-old.” Waz added: “According to information from our editorial team, the man who insulted the unknown woman and asked her why she had to present her legs in such a way is a Duisburger with Turkish roots. He was together with three other Duisburgers with Turkish roots in the Rheinpark.”
The German woman was not inclined to accept all this passively. Grahl continued: “The 50-year-old woman, in turn, also disagreed with the cultural habits of the 20-year-old and his acquaintances.” According to Waz, “She is said to have wondered loudly about his friends, why women and men in the other group were sitting separately.” Concluded Grahl: “The mutual lack of understanding about cultural differences escalated until it ended in a brawl.”
This incident vividly illustrates the dangers of admitting tens of thousands of Muslim migrants from nations that implement Sharia or are dominated by it into Western societies. Even before the mass influx of Muslim migrants, while on a speaking tour in Germany in 2011, I was told by the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the event organizers that she was routinely harassed on the way to school: Muslims on the commuter trains would call her a “whore” and a “slut” because her hair and arms were not covered. This happened, she said, every day.
Some Muslims in Germany believe that “whores” or “sluts” are there for the taking. Another German-language news site, Philosophia Perennis, reported Friday that “in Munich, a group of Afghans insulted several people, violently attacked them with kicks and punches, and kicked a nurse who did not want to have sex with one of the Afghans. After their arrest, they were abusive toward the police.” The incident involved a 20-year-old Muslim migrant and a 32-year-old German woman: “The unnamed companion of the 20-year-old sat down to the left of the 32-year-old and told her that he needed a wife. He touched the 32-year-old on the thigh. The 32-year-old got up right after the contact and said she would call the police. From the left side, the 20-year-old walked towards the woman and kicked her abruptly with his right foot against the left side of her face.”
Muslim migrants in Germany have also been responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in the land of Merkel committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. Yet hardly anything is being said about this. In the summer of 2016, Krystyna Pawłowicz, a member of the Polish parliament, charged German authorities with attempting to “cover up the crimes of their Arab guests, or even shift the blame upon themselves.”
This cover-up apparently proceeded from a fear that non-Muslims would begin to have negative views of Islam. Yet the sexual assaults did have to do with Islam. The Qur’an dictates that a Muslim man may have sexual relations with the “captives of the right hand,” that is, captured non-Muslim women (4:3; 4:24; 23:1-6; 33:50; 70:30). The Qur’an also says that women should veil themselves so that they may not be molested (33:59), with the implication being that if they are not veiled, they may indeed be molested.
The Qur’an provides an Islamic justification for these mass rapes and assaults that has never been discussed in the establishment media, or at any governmental level in any country. Such a discussion could have important implications for how to persuade the migrants to stop behaving in this manner, and how easy it will be to do so, but this discussion cannot be had: it’s “Islamophobic.” Feminists have been completely indifferent, even though what women face in Europe is far more serious than the plight of women in the U.S. today. Fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe” apparently trumps even feminism’s core concerns.
American and European liberals who are concerned about “Islamophobia” should consider the implications of that for their own daughters. But they won’t. The international Left decries the rise of the nationalist right wing, but it is their baby. They created it. Had it not been for their tendency to smear any opposition to their migration schemes as racist and neo-Nazi, the concerns of those who see Europe descending into chaos and civil war could have been addressed within the existing system. Instead, Germany and the entire European Union is now in deep crisis, and the whole continent could quite conceivably erupt into another war. All because of “Islamophobia.”
The enraged pilot told the reporters later on "This is an obvious design flaw in American airports, why the hell would they make the landing strips so short? Or so unbelievably wide!?"
*.*
A salesman was travelling along a lonely stretch of rural road as the day was getting late and a storm was beginning. He saw a farm house up a head a bit and decided to see if he could spend the night there.
He pulls up in front of the house and knocks on the door. The farmer answers and the salesman asks if he can stay the night.
"Sure", says the farmer, "but you'll have to sleep with my son".
"Oops", replies the salesman, "I must be in the wrong joke".
*.*
U.S.—A fascinating new study released today from a very reliable source confirmed that all your opinions are correct, there are no flaws in your worldview, beliefs, or hot takes, and that everything you say is more or less absolutely correct.
The study researched everything you believe and found that it is true, all of it. From your opinions on religion to your takes on politics, the extremely reputable study found that you are 100% correct both in your high-level assertions and in all the supporting details of your claims.
"Based on this new information, we definitely recommend never examining your beliefs to see if there are weaknesses, never challenging your own assumptions to see if they hold water, and never adjusting your thinking to align with truth," said one expert. "We also recommend not doubting this study itself. Share its results immediately so you can show everyone on your social media feeds that you are, indeed, right."
The study also researched everything you disagree with and found that it is deeply flawed, inherently opposed to logic and reason, and totally destructive to human progress. The only logical conclusion, therefore, is to hate people who disagree with you, and maybe punch them.
*.*
A Soviet soldier and a Polish soldier on border patrol near Brest get to talking things over. “It’s a hard life, comrade,” complains the Soviet soldier.
“A hard life indeed,” the Pole replies.
“They treating you okay?” the Soviet wants to know.
“Not so bad,” the Pole replies. “And you?”
“Okay,” the Soviet answers. “You got warm clothes this freezing winter?”
“Yeah, we got new coats this winter, so it’s not so bad. How about you?”
“Well, I’m warm enough,” says the Soviet. “And boots?”
“Not the best, but they keep my feet warm. We were issued new boots this winter, and they are holding up. How about you?”
“They are not the best either, but my feet will survive until spring. You eating okay?”
“I’m okay on food,” says the Pole. “We get our 3,000 calories a day.”
“Comrade,” replies the startled Soviet, “do not make up stories. No man can eat 40 pounds of potatoes in one day!”
*.*
Whoever said that money can't buy friends obviously never brought donuts to the office.
Quote of the Times;
"It's around three years of the Trump apocalypse. How bad has it been thus far? Pretty good, right?" – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://funnyjunk.com/
Issue of the Times;
Muslim Migrants Start Brawl Over Short Skirt by Robert Spencer
The principle is always and everywhere the same: in Muslim countries, one must conform one’s behavior to suit Islamic sensibilities. And in non-Muslim countries, one must conform one’s behavior to suit Islamic sensibilities. This was proven true again last Thursday in Duisberg, Germany, where a Muslim migrant thought a German woman’s skirt was too short, and started a brawl.
According to the German publication Waz, “Different views on the length of a skirt worn by a woman led to a fight between two groups in Duisburg. The police report a dispute over cultural differences, which began verbally and ended in a fistfight, in which a participant dislocated his shoulder.”
No establishment media source will ever dare to say what was really behind this kind of incident: not simply “cultural differences,” but religious beliefs.
A police spokeswoman, Jacqueline Grahl, explained: “The revealing style of clothing of a 50-year-old met with incomprehension in a 20-year-old.” Waz added: “According to information from our editorial team, the man who insulted the unknown woman and asked her why she had to present her legs in such a way is a Duisburger with Turkish roots. He was together with three other Duisburgers with Turkish roots in the Rheinpark.”
The German woman was not inclined to accept all this passively. Grahl continued: “The 50-year-old woman, in turn, also disagreed with the cultural habits of the 20-year-old and his acquaintances.” According to Waz, “She is said to have wondered loudly about his friends, why women and men in the other group were sitting separately.” Concluded Grahl: “The mutual lack of understanding about cultural differences escalated until it ended in a brawl.”
This incident vividly illustrates the dangers of admitting tens of thousands of Muslim migrants from nations that implement Sharia or are dominated by it into Western societies. Even before the mass influx of Muslim migrants, while on a speaking tour in Germany in 2011, I was told by the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the event organizers that she was routinely harassed on the way to school: Muslims on the commuter trains would call her a “whore” and a “slut” because her hair and arms were not covered. This happened, she said, every day.
Some Muslims in Germany believe that “whores” or “sluts” are there for the taking. Another German-language news site, Philosophia Perennis, reported Friday that “in Munich, a group of Afghans insulted several people, violently attacked them with kicks and punches, and kicked a nurse who did not want to have sex with one of the Afghans. After their arrest, they were abusive toward the police.” The incident involved a 20-year-old Muslim migrant and a 32-year-old German woman: “The unnamed companion of the 20-year-old sat down to the left of the 32-year-old and told her that he needed a wife. He touched the 32-year-old on the thigh. The 32-year-old got up right after the contact and said she would call the police. From the left side, the 20-year-old walked towards the woman and kicked her abruptly with his right foot against the left side of her face.”
Muslim migrants in Germany have also been responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in the land of Merkel committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. Yet hardly anything is being said about this. In the summer of 2016, Krystyna Pawłowicz, a member of the Polish parliament, charged German authorities with attempting to “cover up the crimes of their Arab guests, or even shift the blame upon themselves.”
This cover-up apparently proceeded from a fear that non-Muslims would begin to have negative views of Islam. Yet the sexual assaults did have to do with Islam. The Qur’an dictates that a Muslim man may have sexual relations with the “captives of the right hand,” that is, captured non-Muslim women (4:3; 4:24; 23:1-6; 33:50; 70:30). The Qur’an also says that women should veil themselves so that they may not be molested (33:59), with the implication being that if they are not veiled, they may indeed be molested.
The Qur’an provides an Islamic justification for these mass rapes and assaults that has never been discussed in the establishment media, or at any governmental level in any country. Such a discussion could have important implications for how to persuade the migrants to stop behaving in this manner, and how easy it will be to do so, but this discussion cannot be had: it’s “Islamophobic.” Feminists have been completely indifferent, even though what women face in Europe is far more serious than the plight of women in the U.S. today. Fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe” apparently trumps even feminism’s core concerns.
American and European liberals who are concerned about “Islamophobia” should consider the implications of that for their own daughters. But they won’t. The international Left decries the rise of the nationalist right wing, but it is their baby. They created it. Had it not been for their tendency to smear any opposition to their migration schemes as racist and neo-Nazi, the concerns of those who see Europe descending into chaos and civil war could have been addressed within the existing system. Instead, Germany and the entire European Union is now in deep crisis, and the whole continent could quite conceivably erupt into another war. All because of “Islamophobia.”
Amazon?
My wife and I were watching a track and field (athletics) meet recently.
As the women's pole vault was being shown, my wife turned to me, and in
her best voice of disapproval, said, "Their outfits are way too
revealing, don't you think?"
"Their outfits? You mean the outfits of the athletic young women who,
using large poles, thrust themselves into the air only to acrobatically
land on their backs with their legs in the air? Hadn't noticed them."
*.*
Realizing that I'd put on a pound or two, I lamented to my husband, "I'm fat."
And right on cue he said what all good husbands must: "You're not fat." To support his position, he added, "Just look around you at others, and you will see that you are not fat."
But our daughter, a high schooler, saw through it: "Mom, he's grading you on the curve!"
*.*
SANTA CRUZ, CA - Mandatory Tolerance, LLC is a Santa Cruz-based internet company that manufacturers bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other merchandise for the left, offering their goods and services on the free market in exchange for money in order to end capitalism.
Their latest product is a magnetic, reusable bumper sticker that you can flip over between the slogans "Coexist" and "Resist!" depending on who the president is.
"If a liberal is in office, all is well - therefore, it's time to use the Coexist sticker to remind people that we can all get along despite our differences," said Lou Panderson, CEO of Mandatory Tolerance. "Once a Republican gets into office, it's on: flip that baby over to RESIST! to show people you will not stop screaming at the sky until peace and order is restored in our land."
Panderson says the company is also developing a "LOVE WINS" sticker that automatically detects if a Christian is behind you so it can switch to "DIE, BIGOT!"
*.*
Magazine Top Tips
Avoid cutting yourself while clumsily slicing vegetables by getting someone
else to hold them while you chop away.
Housewives: When nipping out to the shops, remember to carry a stiff broom
in the boot of your car. Use it to sweep the broken glass to the side of
the road every time you have a minor accident.
Keep the seat next to you on the train vacant by smiling and nodding at
people as they walk up the aisle.
Increase blind people's electricity bills by switching all their lights on
when their guide dog isn't looking.
Don't buy expensive 'ribbed' condoms, just buy an ordinary one and slip a
handful of frozen peas inside it before you put it on.
“Save money on expensive personalised car number plates by simply changing
your name to match your existing plate.” - Mr. KVL 741Y.
Don't waste money buying expensive binoculars. Simply stand closer to the
object you wish to view.
Putting just the right amount of gin in your goldfish bowl makes the fishes'
eyes bulge and cause them to swim in an amusing manner.
Thicken up runny low-fat yoghurt by stirring in a spoonful of lard.
Hijackers: Avoid a long stressful siege and the risk of arrest, imprisonment
or death by simply making sure you book a flight to your intended
destination in the first place.
An empty aluminum cigar tube filled with angry wasps makes an inexpensive
vibrator.
Men: Avoid arguments with the missus about lifting the loo seat by simply pissing
in the sink.
*.*
Mary had a little lamb
Her father shot it dead.
Now it goes to school with her,
between two chunks of bread.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
her clothes all tattered and torn.
It wasn't the spider that crept beside her,
But Little Boy Blue and his horn.
Mary had a little lamb
It ran into a pylon.
10,000 volts went up its ass
and turned it's wool to nylon
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
to have a little fun.
Jill, that dill
Forgot her pill
and now they have a son.
Little Boy Blew.
Hey. He needed the Money.
Quote of the Times;
“By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.” - DeLarge
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/08/26/rick-manning-trump-isolates-china-by-making-deals-with-the-rest-of-the-world/
Issue of the Times;
The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric by Matt Ridley
Moralizing on social media from footballers, actors and politicians is doing harm
Cristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese expert on forests who also plays soccer, so when he shared a picture online of a recent forest fire in the Amazon, it went viral. Perhaps he was in a rush that day to get out of the laboratory to training, because it later transpired that the photograph was actually taken in 2013, not this year, and in southern Brazil, nowhere near the Amazon.
But at least his picture was only six years old. Emmanuel Macron, another forest ecologist who moonlights as president of France, claimed that ‘the Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’ alongside a picture that was 20 years old. A third bioscientist, who goes under the name of Madonna and sings, capped both their achievements by sharing a 30-year-old picture.
Now imagine if some celebrity — Donald Trump, say, or Nigel Lawson — had shared a picture of a pristine tropical forest with the caption ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine!’ and it had turned out to be decades old or from the wrong area. The ‘fact-checkers’ would have been all over it, seizing the opportunity to mock, censor and ostracize.
In fact, ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine’ is a lot closer to the truth than ‘Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’. The forest is not on fire. The vast majority of this year’s fires are on farmland or already cleared areas, and the claim that the Amazon forest produces 20 percent of the oxygen in the air is either nonsensical or wrong depending on how you interpret it (in any case, lungs don’t produce oxygen). The Amazon, like every ecosystem, consumes about as much oxygen through respiration as it produces through photosynthesis so there is no net contribution; and even on a gross basis, the Amazon comprises less than 6 percent of oxygen production, most of which happens in the ocean.
But it is the outdated nature of the pictures shared by celebrities that is most revealing, because the number of fires in Brazil this year is more than last year, but about the same as in 2016 and less than in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2012. For most of those years, Brazil’s president was a socialist, not a right-wing populist, so in BBC-world those fires did not count. More significantly, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon basin is down by 70 percent since 2004.
It is probably true that President Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has encouraged those who want to resume logging and clearing forest and contributed to this year’s uptick in fires in the country. But was it really necessary to claim global catastrophe to make this point, and was it counterproductive? ‘Macron’s tweet had the same impact on Bolsonaro’s base as Hillary calling Trump’s base deplorable,’ says one Brazilian commentator.
I sometimes wonder if the line wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, ‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’, is now taken as an instruction by environmental pressure groups. They operate in a viciously competitive market for media attention and donations, and those who scream loudest do best, even if it later turns out they were telling fibs.
Around the world, wild fires are generally declining, according to Nasa. Deforestation, too, is happening less and less. The United Nations’ ‘state of the world’s forests’ report concluded last year that ‘the net loss of forest area continues to slow, from 0.18 percent [a year] in the 1990s to 0.08 percent over the last five-year period’. A study in Nature last year by scientists from the University of Maryland concluded that even this is too pessimistic: ‘We show that — contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally — tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1 percent relative to the 1982 level).’
This net increase is driven by rapid reforestation in cool, rich countries outweighing slower net deforestation in warm, poor countries. But more and more nations are now reaching the sort of income levels at which they stop deforesting and start reforesting. Bangladesh, for example, has been increasing its forest cover for several years. Costa Rica has doubled its tree cover in 40 years. Brazil is poised to join the reforesters soon.
Possibly the biggest driver of this encouraging trend is the rising productivity of agriculture. The more yields increase, the less land we need to steal from nature to feed ourselves. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has calculated that the world needs only 35 percent as much land to produce a given quantity of food as 50 years ago. That has spared wild land on a massive scale.
Likewise, getting people on to fossil fuels and away from burning wood for fuel spares trees. It is in the poorest countries, mainly in Africa, that men and women still gather firewood for cooking and bushmeat for food, instead of using electricity or gas and farmed meat.
The trouble with the apocalyptic rhetoric is that it can seem to justify drastic but dangerous solutions. The obsession with climate change has slowed the decline of deforestation. An estimated 700,000 hectares of forest has been felled in South-East Asia to grow palm oil to add to supposedly green ‘bio-diesel’ fuel in Europe, while the world is feeding 5 percent of its grain crop to motor cars rather than people, which means 5 percent of cultivated land that could be released for forest. Britain imports timber from wild forests in the Americas to burn for electricity at Drax in North Yorkshire, depriving beetles and woodpeckers of their lunch.
The temptation to moralize on social media is so strong among soccer players, actors and politicians alike that it is actually doing harm. Get the economic incentives right and the world will save its forests. Preach and preen and prevaricate, and you’ll probably end up inadvertently depriving more toucans and tapirs of their rainforest habitat.
As the women's pole vault was being shown, my wife turned to me, and in
her best voice of disapproval, said, "Their outfits are way too
revealing, don't you think?"
"Their outfits? You mean the outfits of the athletic young women who,
using large poles, thrust themselves into the air only to acrobatically
land on their backs with their legs in the air? Hadn't noticed them."
*.*
Realizing that I'd put on a pound or two, I lamented to my husband, "I'm fat."
And right on cue he said what all good husbands must: "You're not fat." To support his position, he added, "Just look around you at others, and you will see that you are not fat."
But our daughter, a high schooler, saw through it: "Mom, he's grading you on the curve!"
*.*
SANTA CRUZ, CA - Mandatory Tolerance, LLC is a Santa Cruz-based internet company that manufacturers bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other merchandise for the left, offering their goods and services on the free market in exchange for money in order to end capitalism.
Their latest product is a magnetic, reusable bumper sticker that you can flip over between the slogans "Coexist" and "Resist!" depending on who the president is.
"If a liberal is in office, all is well - therefore, it's time to use the Coexist sticker to remind people that we can all get along despite our differences," said Lou Panderson, CEO of Mandatory Tolerance. "Once a Republican gets into office, it's on: flip that baby over to RESIST! to show people you will not stop screaming at the sky until peace and order is restored in our land."
Panderson says the company is also developing a "LOVE WINS" sticker that automatically detects if a Christian is behind you so it can switch to "DIE, BIGOT!"
*.*
Magazine Top Tips
Avoid cutting yourself while clumsily slicing vegetables by getting someone
else to hold them while you chop away.
Housewives: When nipping out to the shops, remember to carry a stiff broom
in the boot of your car. Use it to sweep the broken glass to the side of
the road every time you have a minor accident.
Keep the seat next to you on the train vacant by smiling and nodding at
people as they walk up the aisle.
Increase blind people's electricity bills by switching all their lights on
when their guide dog isn't looking.
Don't buy expensive 'ribbed' condoms, just buy an ordinary one and slip a
handful of frozen peas inside it before you put it on.
“Save money on expensive personalised car number plates by simply changing
your name to match your existing plate.” - Mr. KVL 741Y.
Don't waste money buying expensive binoculars. Simply stand closer to the
object you wish to view.
Putting just the right amount of gin in your goldfish bowl makes the fishes'
eyes bulge and cause them to swim in an amusing manner.
Thicken up runny low-fat yoghurt by stirring in a spoonful of lard.
Hijackers: Avoid a long stressful siege and the risk of arrest, imprisonment
or death by simply making sure you book a flight to your intended
destination in the first place.
An empty aluminum cigar tube filled with angry wasps makes an inexpensive
vibrator.
Men: Avoid arguments with the missus about lifting the loo seat by simply pissing
in the sink.
*.*
Mary had a little lamb
Her father shot it dead.
Now it goes to school with her,
between two chunks of bread.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
her clothes all tattered and torn.
It wasn't the spider that crept beside her,
But Little Boy Blue and his horn.
Mary had a little lamb
It ran into a pylon.
10,000 volts went up its ass
and turned it's wool to nylon
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
to have a little fun.
Jill, that dill
Forgot her pill
and now they have a son.
Little Boy Blew.
Hey. He needed the Money.
Quote of the Times;
“By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.” - DeLarge
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/08/26/rick-manning-trump-isolates-china-by-making-deals-with-the-rest-of-the-world/
Issue of the Times;
The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric by Matt Ridley
Moralizing on social media from footballers, actors and politicians is doing harm
Cristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese expert on forests who also plays soccer, so when he shared a picture online of a recent forest fire in the Amazon, it went viral. Perhaps he was in a rush that day to get out of the laboratory to training, because it later transpired that the photograph was actually taken in 2013, not this year, and in southern Brazil, nowhere near the Amazon.
But at least his picture was only six years old. Emmanuel Macron, another forest ecologist who moonlights as president of France, claimed that ‘the Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’ alongside a picture that was 20 years old. A third bioscientist, who goes under the name of Madonna and sings, capped both their achievements by sharing a 30-year-old picture.
Now imagine if some celebrity — Donald Trump, say, or Nigel Lawson — had shared a picture of a pristine tropical forest with the caption ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine!’ and it had turned out to be decades old or from the wrong area. The ‘fact-checkers’ would have been all over it, seizing the opportunity to mock, censor and ostracize.
In fact, ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine’ is a lot closer to the truth than ‘Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’. The forest is not on fire. The vast majority of this year’s fires are on farmland or already cleared areas, and the claim that the Amazon forest produces 20 percent of the oxygen in the air is either nonsensical or wrong depending on how you interpret it (in any case, lungs don’t produce oxygen). The Amazon, like every ecosystem, consumes about as much oxygen through respiration as it produces through photosynthesis so there is no net contribution; and even on a gross basis, the Amazon comprises less than 6 percent of oxygen production, most of which happens in the ocean.
But it is the outdated nature of the pictures shared by celebrities that is most revealing, because the number of fires in Brazil this year is more than last year, but about the same as in 2016 and less than in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2012. For most of those years, Brazil’s president was a socialist, not a right-wing populist, so in BBC-world those fires did not count. More significantly, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon basin is down by 70 percent since 2004.
It is probably true that President Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has encouraged those who want to resume logging and clearing forest and contributed to this year’s uptick in fires in the country. But was it really necessary to claim global catastrophe to make this point, and was it counterproductive? ‘Macron’s tweet had the same impact on Bolsonaro’s base as Hillary calling Trump’s base deplorable,’ says one Brazilian commentator.
I sometimes wonder if the line wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, ‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’, is now taken as an instruction by environmental pressure groups. They operate in a viciously competitive market for media attention and donations, and those who scream loudest do best, even if it later turns out they were telling fibs.
Around the world, wild fires are generally declining, according to Nasa. Deforestation, too, is happening less and less. The United Nations’ ‘state of the world’s forests’ report concluded last year that ‘the net loss of forest area continues to slow, from 0.18 percent [a year] in the 1990s to 0.08 percent over the last five-year period’. A study in Nature last year by scientists from the University of Maryland concluded that even this is too pessimistic: ‘We show that — contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally — tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1 percent relative to the 1982 level).’
This net increase is driven by rapid reforestation in cool, rich countries outweighing slower net deforestation in warm, poor countries. But more and more nations are now reaching the sort of income levels at which they stop deforesting and start reforesting. Bangladesh, for example, has been increasing its forest cover for several years. Costa Rica has doubled its tree cover in 40 years. Brazil is poised to join the reforesters soon.
Possibly the biggest driver of this encouraging trend is the rising productivity of agriculture. The more yields increase, the less land we need to steal from nature to feed ourselves. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has calculated that the world needs only 35 percent as much land to produce a given quantity of food as 50 years ago. That has spared wild land on a massive scale.
Likewise, getting people on to fossil fuels and away from burning wood for fuel spares trees. It is in the poorest countries, mainly in Africa, that men and women still gather firewood for cooking and bushmeat for food, instead of using electricity or gas and farmed meat.
The trouble with the apocalyptic rhetoric is that it can seem to justify drastic but dangerous solutions. The obsession with climate change has slowed the decline of deforestation. An estimated 700,000 hectares of forest has been felled in South-East Asia to grow palm oil to add to supposedly green ‘bio-diesel’ fuel in Europe, while the world is feeding 5 percent of its grain crop to motor cars rather than people, which means 5 percent of cultivated land that could be released for forest. Britain imports timber from wild forests in the Americas to burn for electricity at Drax in North Yorkshire, depriving beetles and woodpeckers of their lunch.
The temptation to moralize on social media is so strong among soccer players, actors and politicians alike that it is actually doing harm. Get the economic incentives right and the world will save its forests. Preach and preen and prevaricate, and you’ll probably end up inadvertently depriving more toucans and tapirs of their rainforest habitat.
Decided?
A hockey fan met a fairy who granted him one wish. "I want to live forever,"
he said.
"Sorry," said the fairy, "but I am not allowed to grant that type of wish."
"Fine,” said the man, "Then I want to die when Toronto wins the Stanley Cup."
*.*
A motorcycle patrolman was rushed to the hospital with an inflamed appendix.
The doctors operated and advised him that all was well. However, the patrolman kept feeling something pulling at the hairs in his crotch.
Worried that it might be a second surgery the doctors hadn't told him about, he finally got enough energy to pull his hospital gown up enough so he could look at what was making him so uncomfortable.
Taped firmly across his pubic hair were three wide strips of adhesive tape, the kind that doesn't come off easily.
Written in large black letters was the sentence.....
"Get well soon.....
From the nurse in the jeep you pulled over last week…..
Take care and all the best….."
*.*
I checked into a hotel on a business trip and was a bit
lonely so I thought I'd get me one of those girls you see
advertised in phone booths when your calling for a cab.
I grabbed a card on my way in. It was an ad for a girl
calling herself Erogonique, a lovely girl, bending over in the
photo. She had all the right curves in all the right places,
beautiful long wavy hair, long graceful legs all the way up. You
know the kind. So I'm in my room and figure, what the heck, I'll
give her a call.
"Hello?" the woman says. Wow! she sounded sexy.
"Hi, I hear you give a great massage and I'd like you to
come to my room and give me one. No, wait, I should be straight
with you. I'm in town all alone and what I really want is sex. I
want it hard, I want it hot, and I want it now. I'm talking kinky
the whole night long. You name it, we'll do it. Bring implements,
toys, everything you've got in your bag of tricks. We'll go hot and
heavy all night; Tie me up, wear a strap on, cover me in chocolate
syrup and whip cream, anything you want baby. Now, how does that
sound?"
She says,
"That sounds fantastic, but for an outside line you need to press 9."
*.*
On stormy days, I like to snuggle with my girlfriend on the bearskin rug by the fireplace with a bottle of really expensive sherry.
But only if my neighbor's out of town for the weekend, 'cause he's kind of touchy about his stuff.
*.*
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America.
The rest cheat in Europe.
Quote of the Times;
How can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. He that is not with me is against me. - Matthew 19:30
Link of the Times;
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/p/best-of.html
Issue of the Times;
Why My Wife And I Decided To Abort Our Unborn Gay Son by Stephen Lavedas
Even Richard Dawkins tweeted it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. I’m sure we’re on solid ground here. My girlfriend and I recently found out she is pregnant. I told her I’d support her and the baby, and secretly started saving for an engagement ring. She said she thought I would have wanted her to get an abortion. I didn’t—at least at first.
She was excited and started planning the nursery. It took me two months to save up, but I finally got on one knee and popped the question. She cried and said yes. I’m still scared about being a dad, but I’ve got a good job and so does she. We’ll make a great family, just the three of us.
Last week, though, she went in for a checkup. We decided to get full fetal blood work done. Everyone’s doing it; the doctor said there is little risk to the fetus, and better safe than sorry, right? I’m sure everything will be fine, and we’ll learn the sex. I really hope it’s a boy.
Oh, and we decided to make everything official with a trip to the courthouse. We are married now! Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now.
I’m a really tolerant person, but this has made me think hard. I don’t know how I feel about trying to raise a gay son. Will I be able to relate to him? Won’t his life be super hard? I know things are getting better for gay people, but it seems to me that being gay is really hard in the South, where we live. Gay people aren’t really accepted here like in other parts of the country yet.
This really started to weigh on my mind, so I did some research. Suicide attempts are significantly higher among gay teens—five times more likely. Gay kids are five times more likely than a heterosexual youth to end up hospitalized as a result. More than 70 percent of calls to Trevor Lifeline, a targeted suicide prevention hotline, come from the South and central regions of the country, right where I live. Another study found that any kind of victimization at school leads to much higher risks of substance abuse. Studies in progressive states like Vermont and Massachusetts found that for gay and bisexual boys, rates of victimization were nearly five times that of straight kids. More disturbingly, that victimization coincides with a host of risky behaviors, from cigarette and alcohol abuse all the way up to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Gay kids are way more likely to do all of these things than similarly persecuted straight kids.
On top of that, in every studied risk factor but cigarette use, gay and bisexual boys are at a much greater risk than girls. What kind of life will my gay son have? How could I justify subjecting him to such horrible experiences for his entire life?
I can’t imagine what things here in the South must be like. I remember being accused of being gay in school. It was awful. I don’t know if we could send our child to public schools. We would need to find and pay for a progressive private school. If we couldn’t afford it, I guess we could homeschool.
But this is not at all how we wanted our future to be. We both have good jobs we love, but I don’t see how we can afford private schools—and which one of us would give up our job to homeschool our son?
So my wife and I talked, and we’ve decided we aren’t ready to raise a gay child. It isn’t fair to raise a gay child in our area. It would be so hard for our son to live here. And I don’t think either of us could handle it if he killed himself.
Moving elsewhere just to have this baby would be totally unfair to us. We are going to get an abortion, both for the child’s sake and for ours. It’s the best thing for all of us. I’m really glad we found out before it’s too late. I’ve never been more thankful for a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body.
My wife told one of her friends that we are going to have an abortion because we don’t feel equipped to deal with raising a gay child. Apparently it got around to some of our gay friends from college. I’ve been getting emails, texts, and IMs all day from them asking me why I’m a homophobe, and why I hate gay people.
I don’t hate gay people! I just can’t bring a child into the world who would have such a hard time. I mean, we’d do the same thing if the fetus had Down syndrome, and so would about 67 percent of others if they found themselves in that situation. Even Richard Dawkins tweeted that it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. Many people believe it’s immoral to bring a child into the world who is just going to suffer. Ending the pregnancy is just better for everyone. It seems so obvious.
I don’t understand. It’s my wife’s body. It’s her choice, and I agree with it. It’s our choice of what to do with our pregnancy. How can anyone else tell my wife what to do with her body?
Tomorrow is the day we are supposed to go in for the abortion, but we’ve had to switch clinics twice due to the threats. We actually ended up crossing state lines to go to a clinic, four hours from home. Thankfully the federal law allowing abortion makes that possible. I was exhausted, but it’s our choice. No one else can tell us what my wife is allowed to do with her body.
We got to the clinic almost an hour early. They made us sit in the waiting room for a while and finally called us back, but instead of walking us into a table with stirrups like we expected, they escorted us into an office. A man in a lab coat was waiting at a desk.
“I recognize you,” he said, after looking at us sternly for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My wife didn’t speak either. “What you are doing should be a hate crime, and I won’t have any part in it,” the man said, looking angry.
“But it’s my body,” my wife said, sounding defiant, but like a little girl too. “It’s my right.”
“It’s hateful,” the doctor responds. “You are terminating this pregnancy because you don’t want a gay child. Are gay children less valuable than straight children?” He sounded like a teacher trying to impart a lesson to a very slow student.
“No, but—” my wife started to say.
“A gay child has just as much value as a straight child. In fact, you are lucky! Gay children are very rare. Census numbers put the number of homosexuals in America at around 3 percent. It wouldn’t take many more people like you,” he nearly spits the words, “to eliminate homosexuality in America. That’s genocide, and I won’t have that on my conscience!”
With that, we were ushered out. My wife cried all the way home. When we got there, we found that someone had firebombed our rented townhouse and wrote “Bigotry Doesn’t Belong Here!” and “Love Wins!” in spray paint on the sidewalk. I guess some fetuses are more equal than others, but I can’t understand it. I just followed all the arguments I’ve heard from our society to their logical conclusions.
he said.
"Sorry," said the fairy, "but I am not allowed to grant that type of wish."
"Fine,” said the man, "Then I want to die when Toronto wins the Stanley Cup."
*.*
A motorcycle patrolman was rushed to the hospital with an inflamed appendix.
The doctors operated and advised him that all was well. However, the patrolman kept feeling something pulling at the hairs in his crotch.
Worried that it might be a second surgery the doctors hadn't told him about, he finally got enough energy to pull his hospital gown up enough so he could look at what was making him so uncomfortable.
Taped firmly across his pubic hair were three wide strips of adhesive tape, the kind that doesn't come off easily.
Written in large black letters was the sentence.....
"Get well soon.....
From the nurse in the jeep you pulled over last week…..
Take care and all the best….."
*.*
I checked into a hotel on a business trip and was a bit
lonely so I thought I'd get me one of those girls you see
advertised in phone booths when your calling for a cab.
I grabbed a card on my way in. It was an ad for a girl
calling herself Erogonique, a lovely girl, bending over in the
photo. She had all the right curves in all the right places,
beautiful long wavy hair, long graceful legs all the way up. You
know the kind. So I'm in my room and figure, what the heck, I'll
give her a call.
"Hello?" the woman says. Wow! she sounded sexy.
"Hi, I hear you give a great massage and I'd like you to
come to my room and give me one. No, wait, I should be straight
with you. I'm in town all alone and what I really want is sex. I
want it hard, I want it hot, and I want it now. I'm talking kinky
the whole night long. You name it, we'll do it. Bring implements,
toys, everything you've got in your bag of tricks. We'll go hot and
heavy all night; Tie me up, wear a strap on, cover me in chocolate
syrup and whip cream, anything you want baby. Now, how does that
sound?"
She says,
"That sounds fantastic, but for an outside line you need to press 9."
*.*
On stormy days, I like to snuggle with my girlfriend on the bearskin rug by the fireplace with a bottle of really expensive sherry.
But only if my neighbor's out of town for the weekend, 'cause he's kind of touchy about his stuff.
*.*
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America.
The rest cheat in Europe.
Quote of the Times;
How can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. He that is not with me is against me. - Matthew 19:30
Link of the Times;
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/p/best-of.html
Issue of the Times;
Why My Wife And I Decided To Abort Our Unborn Gay Son by Stephen Lavedas
Even Richard Dawkins tweeted it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. I’m sure we’re on solid ground here. My girlfriend and I recently found out she is pregnant. I told her I’d support her and the baby, and secretly started saving for an engagement ring. She said she thought I would have wanted her to get an abortion. I didn’t—at least at first.
She was excited and started planning the nursery. It took me two months to save up, but I finally got on one knee and popped the question. She cried and said yes. I’m still scared about being a dad, but I’ve got a good job and so does she. We’ll make a great family, just the three of us.
Last week, though, she went in for a checkup. We decided to get full fetal blood work done. Everyone’s doing it; the doctor said there is little risk to the fetus, and better safe than sorry, right? I’m sure everything will be fine, and we’ll learn the sex. I really hope it’s a boy.
Oh, and we decided to make everything official with a trip to the courthouse. We are married now! Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now.
I’m a really tolerant person, but this has made me think hard. I don’t know how I feel about trying to raise a gay son. Will I be able to relate to him? Won’t his life be super hard? I know things are getting better for gay people, but it seems to me that being gay is really hard in the South, where we live. Gay people aren’t really accepted here like in other parts of the country yet.
This really started to weigh on my mind, so I did some research. Suicide attempts are significantly higher among gay teens—five times more likely. Gay kids are five times more likely than a heterosexual youth to end up hospitalized as a result. More than 70 percent of calls to Trevor Lifeline, a targeted suicide prevention hotline, come from the South and central regions of the country, right where I live. Another study found that any kind of victimization at school leads to much higher risks of substance abuse. Studies in progressive states like Vermont and Massachusetts found that for gay and bisexual boys, rates of victimization were nearly five times that of straight kids. More disturbingly, that victimization coincides with a host of risky behaviors, from cigarette and alcohol abuse all the way up to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Gay kids are way more likely to do all of these things than similarly persecuted straight kids.
On top of that, in every studied risk factor but cigarette use, gay and bisexual boys are at a much greater risk than girls. What kind of life will my gay son have? How could I justify subjecting him to such horrible experiences for his entire life?
I can’t imagine what things here in the South must be like. I remember being accused of being gay in school. It was awful. I don’t know if we could send our child to public schools. We would need to find and pay for a progressive private school. If we couldn’t afford it, I guess we could homeschool.
But this is not at all how we wanted our future to be. We both have good jobs we love, but I don’t see how we can afford private schools—and which one of us would give up our job to homeschool our son?
So my wife and I talked, and we’ve decided we aren’t ready to raise a gay child. It isn’t fair to raise a gay child in our area. It would be so hard for our son to live here. And I don’t think either of us could handle it if he killed himself.
Moving elsewhere just to have this baby would be totally unfair to us. We are going to get an abortion, both for the child’s sake and for ours. It’s the best thing for all of us. I’m really glad we found out before it’s too late. I’ve never been more thankful for a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body.
My wife told one of her friends that we are going to have an abortion because we don’t feel equipped to deal with raising a gay child. Apparently it got around to some of our gay friends from college. I’ve been getting emails, texts, and IMs all day from them asking me why I’m a homophobe, and why I hate gay people.
I don’t hate gay people! I just can’t bring a child into the world who would have such a hard time. I mean, we’d do the same thing if the fetus had Down syndrome, and so would about 67 percent of others if they found themselves in that situation. Even Richard Dawkins tweeted that it would be immoral to have a child who would suffer because of his genetics. Many people believe it’s immoral to bring a child into the world who is just going to suffer. Ending the pregnancy is just better for everyone. It seems so obvious.
I don’t understand. It’s my wife’s body. It’s her choice, and I agree with it. It’s our choice of what to do with our pregnancy. How can anyone else tell my wife what to do with her body?
Tomorrow is the day we are supposed to go in for the abortion, but we’ve had to switch clinics twice due to the threats. We actually ended up crossing state lines to go to a clinic, four hours from home. Thankfully the federal law allowing abortion makes that possible. I was exhausted, but it’s our choice. No one else can tell us what my wife is allowed to do with her body.
We got to the clinic almost an hour early. They made us sit in the waiting room for a while and finally called us back, but instead of walking us into a table with stirrups like we expected, they escorted us into an office. A man in a lab coat was waiting at a desk.
“I recognize you,” he said, after looking at us sternly for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My wife didn’t speak either. “What you are doing should be a hate crime, and I won’t have any part in it,” the man said, looking angry.
“But it’s my body,” my wife said, sounding defiant, but like a little girl too. “It’s my right.”
“It’s hateful,” the doctor responds. “You are terminating this pregnancy because you don’t want a gay child. Are gay children less valuable than straight children?” He sounded like a teacher trying to impart a lesson to a very slow student.
“No, but—” my wife started to say.
“A gay child has just as much value as a straight child. In fact, you are lucky! Gay children are very rare. Census numbers put the number of homosexuals in America at around 3 percent. It wouldn’t take many more people like you,” he nearly spits the words, “to eliminate homosexuality in America. That’s genocide, and I won’t have that on my conscience!”
With that, we were ushered out. My wife cried all the way home. When we got there, we found that someone had firebombed our rented townhouse and wrote “Bigotry Doesn’t Belong Here!” and “Love Wins!” in spray paint on the sidewalk. I guess some fetuses are more equal than others, but I can’t understand it. I just followed all the arguments I’ve heard from our society to their logical conclusions.
Founded?
A nursery school teacher was delivering a station wagon full of kids home one day when a fire truck zoomed past.
Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog.
The children started to discuss the dog's duties.
"They use him to keep crowds back," said one youngster.
"No," said another, "he's just for good luck."
Then a third child brought the argument to a close...
"They use the dog," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrant."
*.*
While on maternity leave, a woman from our office brought in her new bundle of joy. She also had her seven-year- old son with her. Everyone gathered around the baby, and the little boy asked, "Mommy, can I have some money to buy a soda?"
"What do you say?" she asked.
Respectfully, the boy replied, "You're thin and beautiful."
The woman reached in her purse and gave her son the money.
*.*
KABUL — Young Afghan hipster Hesh Gul is making a name for himself in Kabul with his locally-sourced artisan bombs.
“Those big Pakistani bomb factories use their mass-produced fireworks to try to put the little guys like me out of business,” Gul commented as he rolled out a fresh batch of homemade explosives. “They may have started small like we did here at Improvised Explosive Delights, but they’ve really sold out. Their bombs have no heart.”
The IED facilities are located in a newly-gentrified section of Hesh’s village next to a Hole Foods outside of Kabul.
“I don’t deliver by goat because it’s faster,” Gul said, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.“I do it because it’s better.”
Mo Jahani, Gul’s assistant, says what they do is really about social justice. “Did you know that ninety-nine percent of Afghanistan’s bombs are owned by one percent of the population?” Jahani sneered, sipping a glass of fair-trade chai. “Sounds like a system rigged to blow at any time if you ask me.”
Gul, an unassuming figure in his skinny jeans and ironic Osama bin Laden t-shirt from Turban Outfitters, casts a big shadow in his community. When he’s not running operations at his shop, his sister says he lives green and is an outspoken feminist.
“Hesh was zero-emission before those Taliban posers destroyed all the roads and infrastructure,” his sister claims. “Hesh also supports equal employment for women in jobs like law enforcement. When I am killed for speaking with you because you are not my husband, Hesh will insist that more women and less men do the stoning.”
Hesh shook his head. “Fewer men,” he corrected as he put on a vinyl record of Arcade Fire.
“And ignore that bag of industrial-grade fertilizer,” Gul remarked. “It’s strictly for making bombs. I wouldn’t be caught dead eating anything grown with that poison.”
USAID administrator Gayle Smith predicts that boutique, socially-conscious businesses like Gul’s will lead to a more prosperous Afghanistan. “Hesh’s business uses over fifty percent reclaimed materials, such as landmines and mortar shells left behind by the Soviets,” says Smith. “And the shop’s bombs are so ineffective, they leave hardly any carbon footprint.”
In addition, Smith noted, using cruelty-free ingredients ensures that no animals are harmed in the production of the bombs.
*.*
A study says people suffering from acne may live longer. If you were looking for the key to longevity, that's zit.
Always follow your dreams. The odds are likely that they'll lead you to the restroom.
I saw this on a readerboard the other day - "I'm not superstitious. Just a little stitious."
A poll says 29% of Americans trust the media's fact checking of candidates. But only .3% actually believe that poll.
Ferrari has already sold out all 200 of their new $2.2-million supercars. They come complete with a turbo engine, leather interior and sixteen speeding tickets.
A study by the University of Nebraska says that telemarketers are more likely to permanently lose their voices. Of course, the big question: when?
Ford has announced they're bringing back the Bronco. They didn't need to announce that a former football player will not be the spokesperson.
Is denial on the rise in the United States?
Former USC and Raiders quarterback Todd Marinovich is being charged in connection with a nude break-in attempt of a home in Irvine, California. I’m just afraid to ask where he was carrying his I.D.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a pair of socks meant to be worn with sandals from 2,000 years ago. They figured the guy was married because they were found on the floor.
*.*
A guy applies to the welfare office. They ask why he needs financial assistance.
"I'm having trouble with my eyes," the man says.
"I can't see myself going to work."
Quote of the Times;
A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation. – Unz
Link of the Times;
http://ace.mu.nu/
Issue of the Times;
What’s Exceptional About American Exceptionalism? By Allen C. Guelzo
The nation was founded on natural law and natural right, not myth or tribal legend.
Americans like to believe that they are an exceptional people. We speak of ourselves as a nation lifting our light beside the golden door, a people who “more than self their country loved and mercy more than life,” in the words of “America the Beautiful.” The first person to apply the term “exceptional” to Americans was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his prophetic survey of American life in the 1830s, Democracy in America. But the germ of the idea had been around even longer, and it has never lost its grip on our imagination. Rallying Americans to his program for a new “Morning in America,” Ronald Reagan described America in almost mystical terms as a “shining city on a hill.” The light it shone with was like none that lighted any other nation. “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way,” Reagan said in 1983, “that there was some divine plan that placed the two great continents here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a deep love for freedom.” In his 2012 presidential bid, Mitt Romney hailed America as “an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world.” By contrast, the man who defeated Romney pointedly spoke of America in unexceptional terms, explaining to the Financial Times that if America was exceptional, it was only in the same sense that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” American exceptionalism has almost become a modern political litmus test.
But what is “American exceptionalism”—and what is exceptional about it? Reagan’s invocation of the “shining city on a hill” echoed what many commentators have assumed is the basic statement of American exceptionalism: John Winthrop’s layman’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he delivered to the colonists he was leading to find refuge for English Puritans in Massachusetts in 1629. But none of the British North American colonies—not even Winthrop’s Massachusetts—saw itself as an exception to the basic European assumptions about how a society should be organized. All the colonies, in varying measures, believed that societies were organized as hierarchies—pyramids, if you will—with the king at the top, the lords and nobility beneath, and the common folk on the bottom. Like all good pyramids, the colonial one was supposed to be static; each layer was to work reciprocally with the others, not in competition. The idea that people could start small and poor and work their way up to the top was considered dangerous. Those who did make it to the top did so, not through work but through the patronage of those already there. There would remain differences between England and its colonies—as native-born Englishmen would remind their colonial brethren—but those distinctions existed within the same recognizable European hierarchy of kings, lords, and commons.
That might have been the way America developed, too, if not for two events. The first was the Enlightenment, which proposed a radically exceptional way of reconceiving human societies. The Enlightenment began as a scientific movement, and especially as a rebellion by scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton, against the medieval interpretation of the physical world. Medieval thinkers viewed the physical universe as no less a hierarchy than the political world, with Earth at the bottom, and ascending in levels of perfection through the moon, the planets, the stars, and finally, the heavens. This structure had already begun to come apart in the 1500s, when Niklaus Copernicus insisted that viewing the solar system in this way was contradicted by observing the motion of the planets themselves. But it took its greatest blow from Galileo, who trained the newfangled telescope on the moon and observed that nothing about it looked like the next step up in a hierarchy from Earth. It remained for Isaac Newton to show us that the various parts of the physical world were not related by order or rank but by natural laws and forces, like gravity, which were uniform and equal in the operation.
Eventually, people wondered whether the new rules that described the operations of the physical world might have some application to the political world, too. Taking their cue from the revolution in the physical sciences, philosophers sought to describe a natural political order, free of artificial hierarchies such as kings, lords, and commons. They dared to talk about equality rather than pyramids, about universal natural rights rather than inherited status, about commerce rather than patronage, and to question why some half-wit should get to wear a crown, just because his father had done so. But all the Enlightenment’s political philosophers could offer as alternatives were thought experiments about desert islands or ideal commonwealths, and the kings continued to sit undisturbed on their thrones.
The second event was the one that really gave birth to American exceptionalism: the American Revolution. For in one stupendous burst of energy, Americans overturned the entire structure—political, constitutional, legal, and social—of hierarchy and applied the Enlightenment’s thought experiments about equality and natural rights to practical politics.
The confidence that Americans displayed in the existence of a natural political order based on natural rights and natural law was so profound that Thomas Jefferson could describe the most basic of these rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as “self-evident.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights—another product of the year 1776—explained that “all men . . . have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Americans did not merely demand a corrected version of British common law or Britain’s hierarchical society; they proclaimed that they were creating a novus ordo seclorum. Their voice, said Frederick Douglass, “was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. . . . It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Creating a new politics in America that broke decisively with the past proved surprisingly easier than we might have expected. Whatever lip service they had paid to the old theories of hierarchy during the century and a half before 1776, the colonists, in everyday practice, had developed their own consent-based civil society, created ad hoc legislatures, written their own laws, and spread landownership so broadly across the North Atlantic seaboard that, by the time of the Revolution, 90 percent of the colonists were landowners. Benjamin Franklin remembered that his father, a tallow chandler in Boston, had no particular education, “but his great Excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs. . . . I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he was also . . . frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.” Americans like Franklin’s father were, in effect, already desert islands and ideal commonwealths; the political philosophy of the Enlightenment gave them a theory that matched the realities they had been living.
The American mix of Enlightenment theory and practical experience in government produced a result that was seen from the first as—there is no other word for it—exceptional. In revolutionary America, reveled Tom Paine, Americans are about “to begin the world over again. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.” That “portion of freedom” would be a political order with no ranks, no prelates, no hierarchy; a government that limited itself, and confined itself by a written Constitution; and an identity based not on race or blood or soil or ancestry or even language but on a single proposition as relentlessly logical as it was frighteningly brief, that “all men are created equal.”
In European eyes, this was folly. The American decision to license equal citizens to govern themselves invited anarchy. Too many areas of public life, argued Otto von Bismarck in 1870, required an authoritative government to intervene and direct, and the more that authority was based on hierarchy and monarchy, the better. “Believe me,” prophesied Bismarck, “one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”
Americans compensated for whatever vacuum was made by limiting government through the invention of private, voluntary associations, “little communities by themselves,” as Pennsylvania leader George Bryan called them, to manage their affairs, without the need for a swollen imperial bureaucracy 3,000 miles away. And so they did: in Philadelphia alone, newly independent Americans created the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes, the Guardians of the Poor of the City of Philadelphia, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, the Hibernian Society, the Magdalen Society for the Shelter and Reformation of Fallen Women, the Society of the Free Instruction of Female Children, the Philadelphia Society for the Free Instruction of Indigent Boys, the Indigent Widows and Single Women’s Society—all without government sanction. Americans took association to the level of an art. Tocqueville surveyed the proliferation of American self-help groups and concluded that “the extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power” in America was offset by the multiplicity of “religious, moral . . . commercial and industrial associations” that substituted themselves for European lords and chancellors.
Thus, American exceptionalism began as a new kind of politics. Americans had not merely done something different; they had captured in living form a natural order that made the old political systems of Europe look as artificial and irrational as fully as Newton’s laws had made medieval physics irrelevant. “We Americans are the peculiar chosen people,” wrote Herman Melville, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
But establishing a novel political framework was to create only the first leg of what became a three-legged stool of American exceptionalism. If it was not inherited rank and titles that gave authority in society, then it was up to the free initiative of citizens to make of themselves what they wanted, and with government itself so deliberately self-limited, their energies would run instead in the direction of commerce. They would create not only a new politics but also a new economy—the second leg.
“What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked transplanted Frenchman Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “He is an American,” Crèvecoeur replied, who has stopped doing what others tell him he must do. He has escaped “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” and has “passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” Inside the stiff boundaries of hierarchy, Europeans looked down upon labor as slavery and trade as the unsavory pursuit of the small-minded bourgeoisie—in America, there was almost nothing except a bourgeoisie, and it gloried in labor and commerce. British novelist Frances Trollope was appalled to listen to Americans “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home,” who never seemed to talk “without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.” But other Europeans were enchanted by the liberty of American commerce. J. C. Loudoun’s Encyclopaedia of Agriculture recommended that its British readers emigrate to America, since the American “form of government” guaranteed that “property is secure, and personal liberty greater there than anywhere else . . . and both maintained at less expense than under any government in the world.” In America, wrote the French evangelical pastor Georges Fisch, in 1863, “There is no restraint whatever on the liberty of business transactions.” Nor did it matter much who succeeded on a given day and who didn’t, because the next day those who were down were likely to be up.
Abraham Lincoln captured this dynamic when he said that in America, “every man can make himself.” There would always be extremes of wealth and inequalities of enterprise. What mitigated those inequalities was an incessant tumbling-up and tumbling-down, so that one man’s wealth achieved at one moment could pass into the hands of others at another. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,” Lincoln said in 1859 (with his own history in mind), “labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” This, Lincoln believed, represented a “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Not all would prosper, but that was no argument against the “system” as a whole.
Significantly, the energy with which Americans threw themselves into unfettered commercial exchange was soon seen as a primary obstacle in the path of a newer enemy of hierarchy—socialism—which emerged out of the self-inflicted wreckage of nineteenth-century aristocracies. Socialism’s great architect, Karl Marx, believed that every society would move out of the old world of hierarchy into capitalism; inevitably, capitalism would yield to socialism; hence, the more advanced a nation becomes in capitalism, the closer it must be to embracing socialism—and eventually Communism.
But Marx was baffled by how the United States defied this rule. No nation seemed more fully imbued with capitalism, yet no nation showed less interest in becoming socialist. This became one of the unresolved puzzles of socialist theory, and it gave rise to frustrated socialists (like Werner Sombart) who struggled with the question: Why is there no socialism in America? Sombart blamed it on the drug of material abundance: socialism, he complained, had foundered in America “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” But another socialist, Leon Samson, had seen better than Sombart that the real enemy of socialism was exceptionalism itself, because Americans give “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism.”
Actually, Marx and Sombart were wrong. There had been an American socialism; they were reluctant to recognize it as such because it came not in the form of a workers’ rebellion against capital but in the emergence of a plantation oligarchy in the slaveholding South. This “feudal socialism,” based on race, called into question all the premises of American exceptionalism, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Nor were slavery’s apologists shy about linking this oligarchy to European socialism, since, as George Fitzhugh asserted in 1854, “Slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.” What was extraordinary about this vast step away from American exceptionalism was the titanic effort that Americans made, in the Civil War, to correct it. That struggle—a civil war that (as Lincoln said) understood the American republic to be “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and aimed at the completion of the project of political equality for all its people—may be the most exceptional moment in all of American history, for there is no record of any other conflict quite like the war that Americans waged among themselves, to “die to make men free.” And everyone, down to the slaves themselves, knew that freedom and equality were means toward social mobility and economic self-transformation, not a frozen egalitarianism. “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave—one who nevertheless believed that American opportunity was without a copy anywhere else. “America is not only the exception to the general rule, but the social wonder of the world.”
The third leg of the exceptionalist stool was the attitude and relationship that the United States was to adopt toward the rest of the world, where hierarchy still ruled. This has proved a wobbly leg—it divides even exceptionalists—if only because Americans’ notions of what exceptionalism dictates in terms of policy toward other nations have changed since the Founding.
The novelty of exceptionalism’s first two legs—politics and economics—was so great that it was hard for Americans not to see them as part of a deliberate plan. Even before the Revolution, Jonathan Edwards, the architect of American religious revivals, had viewed America as the linchpin of a scheme of divine redemption for the world. “We may well look upon the discovery of so great a part of the world as America, and bringing the gospel into it,” he wrote, “as one thing by which divine Providence is preparing the way for the future glorious times of the church.” Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, took to poetry to translate these expectations about America’s role in redeeming Earth from Satan into a sacred mission to proclaim an American political gospel:
As the day-spring unbounded, thy splendor shall flow,
And earth’s little kingdoms before thee shall bow;
While the ensigns of union, in triumph unfurl’d,
Hush the tumult of war, and give peace to the world.
But if God did have a special role for America, it was one that America was strictly charged to keep safe on its own shores; its role would be passive and self-protective. Far from any desire to share their nation’s redemptive culture, Americans tended to regard the rest of the world as a potential threat, eager to strangle the American experiment by the reimposition of empire or by association with more unstable attempts at revolution—as in France. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” promised John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” So when the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth came to America in 1852 to drum up support for his rebellion against the Austrian Empire, Lincoln spoke of him cordially, based on “our continued devotion to the principles of our free institutions.” But Lincoln made it plain that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.”
We were not, however, always consistent in this. The outsize influence of Southern slaveholding interests in American politics in the 1840s helped drag us into a war with Mexico, for no better reason than to acquire large stretches of territory that Southerners hoped to convert into slave states. We half-blundered into the Spanish-American War in 1898 and found ourselves with a colonial empire on our hands, in the form of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and, for all practical purposes, Cuba. And in 1917, we thrust ourselves into World War I behind President Woodrow Wilson’s notion that American democracy ought to be exported to Europe. These attempts to convert American exceptionalism into a missionary endeavor nearly always met with sabotage by other nations, which resented our claims to some unique political virtue; and they met with serious criticism by other Americans—even outright rejection, as when America declined to join the League of Nations.
But even those criticisms disappeared after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which not only thrust us again into a worldwide conflict but also presented the question of how we could prevent such world crises from erupting. It had been demonstrated one too many times to American policymakers that the European states, left to themselves, were incapable of establishing a peaceful continental order; so we have found ourselves, ever since, forced into the role of savior of civilization, whether through the Marshall Plan, NATO, NAFTA, the Security Council, or sometimes through simple unilateralism.
We have accepted this role since World War II, often because we believed we had little choice. But this role has had an adverse effect on American exceptionalism by repeatedly involving the United States in foreign-policy projects that do not yield easily to American solutions—and that then raise doubts about the exceptionalist assumptions behind those solutions. When we have turned to multilateral or multinational solutions, we find ourselves yoked to European and other allies, which, even if they have long since shucked the mantle of aristocracy and inherited hierarchy, have often replaced it with vast social bureaucracies that serve much the same purpose. If we act unilaterally, we find ourselves hounded by international condemnations of American claims of arrogance based on exceptionalism. If we fail to act, we are accused of isolationism.
The third leg is not the only one to suffer the wobbles. We are, for one thing, becoming less reliant on voluntary associations to accomplish the tasks of American society. We often see this illustrated in statistics showing how millennials have staged an unprecedented withdrawal from American churches, so that the share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. But this is only part of a larger American withdrawal from a broad range of voluntary associations, from the PTA to bowling leagues. Between 1973 and 1995, the number of Americans who reported attending “a public meeting on town or school affairs” fell by more than a third; PTA membership fell from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982. Even mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, have suffered declines since the 1970s. In the most general sense, Americans’ trust in one another has declined from a peak in the mid-1960s (when 56 percent of survey respondents affirmed that “most people can be trusted”) to a low today, in which only one in three Americans believes that “most people can be trusted.” Among millennials, it’s as low as one in five.
In the place of voluntary association, we have come to rely on state agencies and administrative law. This development has roots leading back to the Progressivism of the past century, which believed that American society had become too complex to be left to ordinary citizens, who lack the expertise to make government work efficiently. The same conviction animates modern progressives, as illustrated by the notorious 2012 campaign video The Life of Julia, which casts the life of one American as an utterly unexceptional progress through one European-style bureaucracy after another.
We have also seen the rise of identity politics, which has made us shy of asserting the old exceptionalism because every identity is now considered exceptional in itself. One’s identity as an American fades—even becomes optional—beside one’s identity as part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural minority. This moves us a world away from Lincoln’s belief that the proposition set out in the Declaration trumped all other identities. We’re no longer even sure that the Declaration has persuasive power. We are, writes Peter Beinart, “products of an educational system that, more than in the past, emphasizes inclusion and diversity, which may breed a discontent with claims that America is better than other nations.” Even conservative jurists like the late William Rehnquist allowed that U.S. courts should “begin looking to the decisions of other [nations’] constitutional courts to aid in their deliberative process.”
But nothing in our national life has so undermined confidence in American exceptionalism as the erosion of economic mobility. From the time we began measuring gross domestic product in the 1940s until 1970, American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent; from 1970 to 1994, it slid to a growth rate of only 1.54 percent, recovered briefly to 2.26 percent, and then began sliding to its pre-Trump level of 1.21 percent. From 1948 until 1972, Americans in the lower 90 percent of income-earners saw their incomes rise by 2.65 percent annually—almost twice the income growth experienced by the same group between 1917 and 1948. Since 1972, though, the growth rate for the 90 percent has collapsed—in fact, turned negative—and middle-class workers who began their careers in the center of the earnings curve have seen their fortunes decline by 20 percent since 1980. The United States has become as economically immobile as the United Kingdom, where the top 10 percent calcify into a self-perpetuating aristocracy that sees itself as part of global networks of communications and exchange and feels little sympathy for those left behind.
Is American exceptionalism merely an artifact of an earlier, more confident time in our history, which should now yield to the blandishments of globalization and conformity to multinational expectations? Only, I think, if we regard the ideas of the American Founders as being mere historical artifacts, too. What made the American experiment exceptional was precisely that it was not founded (like other national identities) on some myth or tribal legend but on the discovery of natural laws and natural rights as unarguable as gravity and born from the same intellectual source. Unhappily, natural law philosophy has been bumped from its place as the American philosophy by the pragmatism of William James and his heirs, and even more by the values pluralism of John Rawls and literary postmodernism. These approaches were supposed to liberate the mind from the restraint of fictitious narratives of honor, truth, and law—but overthrowing these principles merely became a platform for egotism and unfettered lust for power.
To discount American exceptionalism is to suggest that the American political order itself was only a figment of one nation’s imagination, at one time. If there is no such natural law, then, yes, let us discard exceptionalism; but let us then say that neither the old hierarchy nor the new bureaucracy is wrong, either, and accept that all politics is merely an arena in which power, rather than law or right, determines our future. I believe that the American experiment, based on the Declaration and embodied in the Constitution, belongs to an exceptional moment in human history, and remains exceptional. I believe that the U.S. economy is flexible enough to recover its mobility and astonish the world with its capacity to disrupt artificial barriers. And I believe that we can repair the deviations we have sustained from an overconfident mission-mentality without needing to accommodate ourselves to the mores of globalization. Globalization, after all, has been no great success; its main accomplishment, as Christopher Lasch reminded us in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites, has not been international peace or prosperity but “the cosmopolitanism of the favored few . . . uninformed by the practice of citizenship.”
The task of restoring confidence in our exceptionalism will nevertheless be a daunting one. Exceptionalism will have to become what Lincoln called a “civil religion,” to be “breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap . . . taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges . . . written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs . . . preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” The task will require a determined pushback against progressive unexceptionalism and the idea that only government can ensure efficiency and happiness. It will involve the revival of the rule of law (rather than agencies), the rejuvenation of our voluntary associations, and the celebration of their role in our public life. And it will force us to lift the burden of economic sclerosis, not merely with the aim of producing simple material abundance but also with the goal of promoting a national empathy, in which, as Georges Fisch saw in 1863, Americans rise and fall, and rise and fall again, without the stigma that consigns half the nation to a basket of deplorables.
Can this, realistically, be done? Can we disentangle our public life from the grasp of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats and, overseas, pull back from foreign-policy crusades? Can we, in short, recur successfully to our first principles?
Well, we did it once before.
Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog.
The children started to discuss the dog's duties.
"They use him to keep crowds back," said one youngster.
"No," said another, "he's just for good luck."
Then a third child brought the argument to a close...
"They use the dog," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrant."
*.*
While on maternity leave, a woman from our office brought in her new bundle of joy. She also had her seven-year- old son with her. Everyone gathered around the baby, and the little boy asked, "Mommy, can I have some money to buy a soda?"
"What do you say?" she asked.
Respectfully, the boy replied, "You're thin and beautiful."
The woman reached in her purse and gave her son the money.
*.*
KABUL — Young Afghan hipster Hesh Gul is making a name for himself in Kabul with his locally-sourced artisan bombs.
“Those big Pakistani bomb factories use their mass-produced fireworks to try to put the little guys like me out of business,” Gul commented as he rolled out a fresh batch of homemade explosives. “They may have started small like we did here at Improvised Explosive Delights, but they’ve really sold out. Their bombs have no heart.”
The IED facilities are located in a newly-gentrified section of Hesh’s village next to a Hole Foods outside of Kabul.
“I don’t deliver by goat because it’s faster,” Gul said, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.“I do it because it’s better.”
Mo Jahani, Gul’s assistant, says what they do is really about social justice. “Did you know that ninety-nine percent of Afghanistan’s bombs are owned by one percent of the population?” Jahani sneered, sipping a glass of fair-trade chai. “Sounds like a system rigged to blow at any time if you ask me.”
Gul, an unassuming figure in his skinny jeans and ironic Osama bin Laden t-shirt from Turban Outfitters, casts a big shadow in his community. When he’s not running operations at his shop, his sister says he lives green and is an outspoken feminist.
“Hesh was zero-emission before those Taliban posers destroyed all the roads and infrastructure,” his sister claims. “Hesh also supports equal employment for women in jobs like law enforcement. When I am killed for speaking with you because you are not my husband, Hesh will insist that more women and less men do the stoning.”
Hesh shook his head. “Fewer men,” he corrected as he put on a vinyl record of Arcade Fire.
“And ignore that bag of industrial-grade fertilizer,” Gul remarked. “It’s strictly for making bombs. I wouldn’t be caught dead eating anything grown with that poison.”
USAID administrator Gayle Smith predicts that boutique, socially-conscious businesses like Gul’s will lead to a more prosperous Afghanistan. “Hesh’s business uses over fifty percent reclaimed materials, such as landmines and mortar shells left behind by the Soviets,” says Smith. “And the shop’s bombs are so ineffective, they leave hardly any carbon footprint.”
In addition, Smith noted, using cruelty-free ingredients ensures that no animals are harmed in the production of the bombs.
*.*
A study says people suffering from acne may live longer. If you were looking for the key to longevity, that's zit.
Always follow your dreams. The odds are likely that they'll lead you to the restroom.
I saw this on a readerboard the other day - "I'm not superstitious. Just a little stitious."
A poll says 29% of Americans trust the media's fact checking of candidates. But only .3% actually believe that poll.
Ferrari has already sold out all 200 of their new $2.2-million supercars. They come complete with a turbo engine, leather interior and sixteen speeding tickets.
A study by the University of Nebraska says that telemarketers are more likely to permanently lose their voices. Of course, the big question: when?
Ford has announced they're bringing back the Bronco. They didn't need to announce that a former football player will not be the spokesperson.
Is denial on the rise in the United States?
Former USC and Raiders quarterback Todd Marinovich is being charged in connection with a nude break-in attempt of a home in Irvine, California. I’m just afraid to ask where he was carrying his I.D.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a pair of socks meant to be worn with sandals from 2,000 years ago. They figured the guy was married because they were found on the floor.
*.*
A guy applies to the welfare office. They ask why he needs financial assistance.
"I'm having trouble with my eyes," the man says.
"I can't see myself going to work."
Quote of the Times;
A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation. – Unz
Link of the Times;
http://ace.mu.nu/
Issue of the Times;
What’s Exceptional About American Exceptionalism? By Allen C. Guelzo
The nation was founded on natural law and natural right, not myth or tribal legend.
Americans like to believe that they are an exceptional people. We speak of ourselves as a nation lifting our light beside the golden door, a people who “more than self their country loved and mercy more than life,” in the words of “America the Beautiful.” The first person to apply the term “exceptional” to Americans was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his prophetic survey of American life in the 1830s, Democracy in America. But the germ of the idea had been around even longer, and it has never lost its grip on our imagination. Rallying Americans to his program for a new “Morning in America,” Ronald Reagan described America in almost mystical terms as a “shining city on a hill.” The light it shone with was like none that lighted any other nation. “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way,” Reagan said in 1983, “that there was some divine plan that placed the two great continents here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a deep love for freedom.” In his 2012 presidential bid, Mitt Romney hailed America as “an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world.” By contrast, the man who defeated Romney pointedly spoke of America in unexceptional terms, explaining to the Financial Times that if America was exceptional, it was only in the same sense that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” American exceptionalism has almost become a modern political litmus test.
But what is “American exceptionalism”—and what is exceptional about it? Reagan’s invocation of the “shining city on a hill” echoed what many commentators have assumed is the basic statement of American exceptionalism: John Winthrop’s layman’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he delivered to the colonists he was leading to find refuge for English Puritans in Massachusetts in 1629. But none of the British North American colonies—not even Winthrop’s Massachusetts—saw itself as an exception to the basic European assumptions about how a society should be organized. All the colonies, in varying measures, believed that societies were organized as hierarchies—pyramids, if you will—with the king at the top, the lords and nobility beneath, and the common folk on the bottom. Like all good pyramids, the colonial one was supposed to be static; each layer was to work reciprocally with the others, not in competition. The idea that people could start small and poor and work their way up to the top was considered dangerous. Those who did make it to the top did so, not through work but through the patronage of those already there. There would remain differences between England and its colonies—as native-born Englishmen would remind their colonial brethren—but those distinctions existed within the same recognizable European hierarchy of kings, lords, and commons.
That might have been the way America developed, too, if not for two events. The first was the Enlightenment, which proposed a radically exceptional way of reconceiving human societies. The Enlightenment began as a scientific movement, and especially as a rebellion by scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton, against the medieval interpretation of the physical world. Medieval thinkers viewed the physical universe as no less a hierarchy than the political world, with Earth at the bottom, and ascending in levels of perfection through the moon, the planets, the stars, and finally, the heavens. This structure had already begun to come apart in the 1500s, when Niklaus Copernicus insisted that viewing the solar system in this way was contradicted by observing the motion of the planets themselves. But it took its greatest blow from Galileo, who trained the newfangled telescope on the moon and observed that nothing about it looked like the next step up in a hierarchy from Earth. It remained for Isaac Newton to show us that the various parts of the physical world were not related by order or rank but by natural laws and forces, like gravity, which were uniform and equal in the operation.
Eventually, people wondered whether the new rules that described the operations of the physical world might have some application to the political world, too. Taking their cue from the revolution in the physical sciences, philosophers sought to describe a natural political order, free of artificial hierarchies such as kings, lords, and commons. They dared to talk about equality rather than pyramids, about universal natural rights rather than inherited status, about commerce rather than patronage, and to question why some half-wit should get to wear a crown, just because his father had done so. But all the Enlightenment’s political philosophers could offer as alternatives were thought experiments about desert islands or ideal commonwealths, and the kings continued to sit undisturbed on their thrones.
The second event was the one that really gave birth to American exceptionalism: the American Revolution. For in one stupendous burst of energy, Americans overturned the entire structure—political, constitutional, legal, and social—of hierarchy and applied the Enlightenment’s thought experiments about equality and natural rights to practical politics.
The confidence that Americans displayed in the existence of a natural political order based on natural rights and natural law was so profound that Thomas Jefferson could describe the most basic of these rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as “self-evident.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights—another product of the year 1776—explained that “all men . . . have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Americans did not merely demand a corrected version of British common law or Britain’s hierarchical society; they proclaimed that they were creating a novus ordo seclorum. Their voice, said Frederick Douglass, “was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. . . . It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Creating a new politics in America that broke decisively with the past proved surprisingly easier than we might have expected. Whatever lip service they had paid to the old theories of hierarchy during the century and a half before 1776, the colonists, in everyday practice, had developed their own consent-based civil society, created ad hoc legislatures, written their own laws, and spread landownership so broadly across the North Atlantic seaboard that, by the time of the Revolution, 90 percent of the colonists were landowners. Benjamin Franklin remembered that his father, a tallow chandler in Boston, had no particular education, “but his great Excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs. . . . I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he was also . . . frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.” Americans like Franklin’s father were, in effect, already desert islands and ideal commonwealths; the political philosophy of the Enlightenment gave them a theory that matched the realities they had been living.
The American mix of Enlightenment theory and practical experience in government produced a result that was seen from the first as—there is no other word for it—exceptional. In revolutionary America, reveled Tom Paine, Americans are about “to begin the world over again. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.” That “portion of freedom” would be a political order with no ranks, no prelates, no hierarchy; a government that limited itself, and confined itself by a written Constitution; and an identity based not on race or blood or soil or ancestry or even language but on a single proposition as relentlessly logical as it was frighteningly brief, that “all men are created equal.”
In European eyes, this was folly. The American decision to license equal citizens to govern themselves invited anarchy. Too many areas of public life, argued Otto von Bismarck in 1870, required an authoritative government to intervene and direct, and the more that authority was based on hierarchy and monarchy, the better. “Believe me,” prophesied Bismarck, “one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”
Americans compensated for whatever vacuum was made by limiting government through the invention of private, voluntary associations, “little communities by themselves,” as Pennsylvania leader George Bryan called them, to manage their affairs, without the need for a swollen imperial bureaucracy 3,000 miles away. And so they did: in Philadelphia alone, newly independent Americans created the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes, the Guardians of the Poor of the City of Philadelphia, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, the Hibernian Society, the Magdalen Society for the Shelter and Reformation of Fallen Women, the Society of the Free Instruction of Female Children, the Philadelphia Society for the Free Instruction of Indigent Boys, the Indigent Widows and Single Women’s Society—all without government sanction. Americans took association to the level of an art. Tocqueville surveyed the proliferation of American self-help groups and concluded that “the extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power” in America was offset by the multiplicity of “religious, moral . . . commercial and industrial associations” that substituted themselves for European lords and chancellors.
Thus, American exceptionalism began as a new kind of politics. Americans had not merely done something different; they had captured in living form a natural order that made the old political systems of Europe look as artificial and irrational as fully as Newton’s laws had made medieval physics irrelevant. “We Americans are the peculiar chosen people,” wrote Herman Melville, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
But establishing a novel political framework was to create only the first leg of what became a three-legged stool of American exceptionalism. If it was not inherited rank and titles that gave authority in society, then it was up to the free initiative of citizens to make of themselves what they wanted, and with government itself so deliberately self-limited, their energies would run instead in the direction of commerce. They would create not only a new politics but also a new economy—the second leg.
“What, then, is the American, this new man?” asked transplanted Frenchman Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “He is an American,” Crèvecoeur replied, who has stopped doing what others tell him he must do. He has escaped “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour” and has “passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” Inside the stiff boundaries of hierarchy, Europeans looked down upon labor as slavery and trade as the unsavory pursuit of the small-minded bourgeoisie—in America, there was almost nothing except a bourgeoisie, and it gloried in labor and commerce. British novelist Frances Trollope was appalled to listen to Americans “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home,” who never seemed to talk “without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.” But other Europeans were enchanted by the liberty of American commerce. J. C. Loudoun’s Encyclopaedia of Agriculture recommended that its British readers emigrate to America, since the American “form of government” guaranteed that “property is secure, and personal liberty greater there than anywhere else . . . and both maintained at less expense than under any government in the world.” In America, wrote the French evangelical pastor Georges Fisch, in 1863, “There is no restraint whatever on the liberty of business transactions.” Nor did it matter much who succeeded on a given day and who didn’t, because the next day those who were down were likely to be up.
Abraham Lincoln captured this dynamic when he said that in America, “every man can make himself.” There would always be extremes of wealth and inequalities of enterprise. What mitigated those inequalities was an incessant tumbling-up and tumbling-down, so that one man’s wealth achieved at one moment could pass into the hands of others at another. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,” Lincoln said in 1859 (with his own history in mind), “labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” This, Lincoln believed, represented a “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Not all would prosper, but that was no argument against the “system” as a whole.
Significantly, the energy with which Americans threw themselves into unfettered commercial exchange was soon seen as a primary obstacle in the path of a newer enemy of hierarchy—socialism—which emerged out of the self-inflicted wreckage of nineteenth-century aristocracies. Socialism’s great architect, Karl Marx, believed that every society would move out of the old world of hierarchy into capitalism; inevitably, capitalism would yield to socialism; hence, the more advanced a nation becomes in capitalism, the closer it must be to embracing socialism—and eventually Communism.
But Marx was baffled by how the United States defied this rule. No nation seemed more fully imbued with capitalism, yet no nation showed less interest in becoming socialist. This became one of the unresolved puzzles of socialist theory, and it gave rise to frustrated socialists (like Werner Sombart) who struggled with the question: Why is there no socialism in America? Sombart blamed it on the drug of material abundance: socialism, he complained, had foundered in America “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” But another socialist, Leon Samson, had seen better than Sombart that the real enemy of socialism was exceptionalism itself, because Americans give “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism.”
Actually, Marx and Sombart were wrong. There had been an American socialism; they were reluctant to recognize it as such because it came not in the form of a workers’ rebellion against capital but in the emergence of a plantation oligarchy in the slaveholding South. This “feudal socialism,” based on race, called into question all the premises of American exceptionalism, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Nor were slavery’s apologists shy about linking this oligarchy to European socialism, since, as George Fitzhugh asserted in 1854, “Slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.” What was extraordinary about this vast step away from American exceptionalism was the titanic effort that Americans made, in the Civil War, to correct it. That struggle—a civil war that (as Lincoln said) understood the American republic to be “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and aimed at the completion of the project of political equality for all its people—may be the most exceptional moment in all of American history, for there is no record of any other conflict quite like the war that Americans waged among themselves, to “die to make men free.” And everyone, down to the slaves themselves, knew that freedom and equality were means toward social mobility and economic self-transformation, not a frozen egalitarianism. “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave—one who nevertheless believed that American opportunity was without a copy anywhere else. “America is not only the exception to the general rule, but the social wonder of the world.”
The third leg of the exceptionalist stool was the attitude and relationship that the United States was to adopt toward the rest of the world, where hierarchy still ruled. This has proved a wobbly leg—it divides even exceptionalists—if only because Americans’ notions of what exceptionalism dictates in terms of policy toward other nations have changed since the Founding.
The novelty of exceptionalism’s first two legs—politics and economics—was so great that it was hard for Americans not to see them as part of a deliberate plan. Even before the Revolution, Jonathan Edwards, the architect of American religious revivals, had viewed America as the linchpin of a scheme of divine redemption for the world. “We may well look upon the discovery of so great a part of the world as America, and bringing the gospel into it,” he wrote, “as one thing by which divine Providence is preparing the way for the future glorious times of the church.” Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, took to poetry to translate these expectations about America’s role in redeeming Earth from Satan into a sacred mission to proclaim an American political gospel:
As the day-spring unbounded, thy splendor shall flow,
And earth’s little kingdoms before thee shall bow;
While the ensigns of union, in triumph unfurl’d,
Hush the tumult of war, and give peace to the world.
But if God did have a special role for America, it was one that America was strictly charged to keep safe on its own shores; its role would be passive and self-protective. Far from any desire to share their nation’s redemptive culture, Americans tended to regard the rest of the world as a potential threat, eager to strangle the American experiment by the reimposition of empire or by association with more unstable attempts at revolution—as in France. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” promised John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” So when the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth came to America in 1852 to drum up support for his rebellion against the Austrian Empire, Lincoln spoke of him cordially, based on “our continued devotion to the principles of our free institutions.” But Lincoln made it plain that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.”
We were not, however, always consistent in this. The outsize influence of Southern slaveholding interests in American politics in the 1840s helped drag us into a war with Mexico, for no better reason than to acquire large stretches of territory that Southerners hoped to convert into slave states. We half-blundered into the Spanish-American War in 1898 and found ourselves with a colonial empire on our hands, in the form of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and, for all practical purposes, Cuba. And in 1917, we thrust ourselves into World War I behind President Woodrow Wilson’s notion that American democracy ought to be exported to Europe. These attempts to convert American exceptionalism into a missionary endeavor nearly always met with sabotage by other nations, which resented our claims to some unique political virtue; and they met with serious criticism by other Americans—even outright rejection, as when America declined to join the League of Nations.
But even those criticisms disappeared after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which not only thrust us again into a worldwide conflict but also presented the question of how we could prevent such world crises from erupting. It had been demonstrated one too many times to American policymakers that the European states, left to themselves, were incapable of establishing a peaceful continental order; so we have found ourselves, ever since, forced into the role of savior of civilization, whether through the Marshall Plan, NATO, NAFTA, the Security Council, or sometimes through simple unilateralism.
We have accepted this role since World War II, often because we believed we had little choice. But this role has had an adverse effect on American exceptionalism by repeatedly involving the United States in foreign-policy projects that do not yield easily to American solutions—and that then raise doubts about the exceptionalist assumptions behind those solutions. When we have turned to multilateral or multinational solutions, we find ourselves yoked to European and other allies, which, even if they have long since shucked the mantle of aristocracy and inherited hierarchy, have often replaced it with vast social bureaucracies that serve much the same purpose. If we act unilaterally, we find ourselves hounded by international condemnations of American claims of arrogance based on exceptionalism. If we fail to act, we are accused of isolationism.
The third leg is not the only one to suffer the wobbles. We are, for one thing, becoming less reliant on voluntary associations to accomplish the tasks of American society. We often see this illustrated in statistics showing how millennials have staged an unprecedented withdrawal from American churches, so that the share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. But this is only part of a larger American withdrawal from a broad range of voluntary associations, from the PTA to bowling leagues. Between 1973 and 1995, the number of Americans who reported attending “a public meeting on town or school affairs” fell by more than a third; PTA membership fell from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982. Even mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, have suffered declines since the 1970s. In the most general sense, Americans’ trust in one another has declined from a peak in the mid-1960s (when 56 percent of survey respondents affirmed that “most people can be trusted”) to a low today, in which only one in three Americans believes that “most people can be trusted.” Among millennials, it’s as low as one in five.
In the place of voluntary association, we have come to rely on state agencies and administrative law. This development has roots leading back to the Progressivism of the past century, which believed that American society had become too complex to be left to ordinary citizens, who lack the expertise to make government work efficiently. The same conviction animates modern progressives, as illustrated by the notorious 2012 campaign video The Life of Julia, which casts the life of one American as an utterly unexceptional progress through one European-style bureaucracy after another.
We have also seen the rise of identity politics, which has made us shy of asserting the old exceptionalism because every identity is now considered exceptional in itself. One’s identity as an American fades—even becomes optional—beside one’s identity as part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural minority. This moves us a world away from Lincoln’s belief that the proposition set out in the Declaration trumped all other identities. We’re no longer even sure that the Declaration has persuasive power. We are, writes Peter Beinart, “products of an educational system that, more than in the past, emphasizes inclusion and diversity, which may breed a discontent with claims that America is better than other nations.” Even conservative jurists like the late William Rehnquist allowed that U.S. courts should “begin looking to the decisions of other [nations’] constitutional courts to aid in their deliberative process.”
But nothing in our national life has so undermined confidence in American exceptionalism as the erosion of economic mobility. From the time we began measuring gross domestic product in the 1940s until 1970, American GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent; from 1970 to 1994, it slid to a growth rate of only 1.54 percent, recovered briefly to 2.26 percent, and then began sliding to its pre-Trump level of 1.21 percent. From 1948 until 1972, Americans in the lower 90 percent of income-earners saw their incomes rise by 2.65 percent annually—almost twice the income growth experienced by the same group between 1917 and 1948. Since 1972, though, the growth rate for the 90 percent has collapsed—in fact, turned negative—and middle-class workers who began their careers in the center of the earnings curve have seen their fortunes decline by 20 percent since 1980. The United States has become as economically immobile as the United Kingdom, where the top 10 percent calcify into a self-perpetuating aristocracy that sees itself as part of global networks of communications and exchange and feels little sympathy for those left behind.
Is American exceptionalism merely an artifact of an earlier, more confident time in our history, which should now yield to the blandishments of globalization and conformity to multinational expectations? Only, I think, if we regard the ideas of the American Founders as being mere historical artifacts, too. What made the American experiment exceptional was precisely that it was not founded (like other national identities) on some myth or tribal legend but on the discovery of natural laws and natural rights as unarguable as gravity and born from the same intellectual source. Unhappily, natural law philosophy has been bumped from its place as the American philosophy by the pragmatism of William James and his heirs, and even more by the values pluralism of John Rawls and literary postmodernism. These approaches were supposed to liberate the mind from the restraint of fictitious narratives of honor, truth, and law—but overthrowing these principles merely became a platform for egotism and unfettered lust for power.
To discount American exceptionalism is to suggest that the American political order itself was only a figment of one nation’s imagination, at one time. If there is no such natural law, then, yes, let us discard exceptionalism; but let us then say that neither the old hierarchy nor the new bureaucracy is wrong, either, and accept that all politics is merely an arena in which power, rather than law or right, determines our future. I believe that the American experiment, based on the Declaration and embodied in the Constitution, belongs to an exceptional moment in human history, and remains exceptional. I believe that the U.S. economy is flexible enough to recover its mobility and astonish the world with its capacity to disrupt artificial barriers. And I believe that we can repair the deviations we have sustained from an overconfident mission-mentality without needing to accommodate ourselves to the mores of globalization. Globalization, after all, has been no great success; its main accomplishment, as Christopher Lasch reminded us in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites, has not been international peace or prosperity but “the cosmopolitanism of the favored few . . . uninformed by the practice of citizenship.”
The task of restoring confidence in our exceptionalism will nevertheless be a daunting one. Exceptionalism will have to become what Lincoln called a “civil religion,” to be “breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap . . . taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges . . . written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs . . . preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” The task will require a determined pushback against progressive unexceptionalism and the idea that only government can ensure efficiency and happiness. It will involve the revival of the rule of law (rather than agencies), the rejuvenation of our voluntary associations, and the celebration of their role in our public life. And it will force us to lift the burden of economic sclerosis, not merely with the aim of producing simple material abundance but also with the goal of promoting a national empathy, in which, as Georges Fisch saw in 1863, Americans rise and fall, and rise and fall again, without the stigma that consigns half the nation to a basket of deplorables.
Can this, realistically, be done? Can we disentangle our public life from the grasp of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats and, overseas, pull back from foreign-policy crusades? Can we, in short, recur successfully to our first principles?
Well, we did it once before.
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.