Another great take on Evangelii Gaudium

David Harsanyi at The Federalist:

For starters, it’s troubling that the Pope fails to make any genuine distinction between Western poverty (terrible) and the poverty of the Third World (unimaginably terrible). But is it really true that “absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation” are the driving reasons for poverty and inequality? People in places like Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Malawi, or Mozambique live under corrupt authoritarian regimes where crippling poverty has a thousand fathers — none of them named capitalism. The people of Togo do not suffer in destitution because of some derivative scheme on Wall Street or the fallout from a tech IPO.

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially,” the Pope goes on to say, “so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.”

In truth, global inequality has been dropping for years. The World Bank estimatesglobal poverty was halved from 1990 to 2010. In fact, according to the World Bank, the United Nations’ “millennium development goal” of cutting world poverty in half by 2015 came in five years ahead of schedule despite a major global recession. The decline in poverty coincides, not coincidentally, with developing nations embracing more market-based systems.

Moreover, the Pope falls into the trap of conflating inequality and poverty. Some countries enjoy income income parity because most citizens are rich and others because most citizens are poor. Put it this way:  Egypt, Pakistan, and Mongolia all enjoy more economic equality than the United States. The GDP per capita here is $49,800. In a country like Argentina, the Pope’s homeland, a place where wealth is more fairly distributed, it’s $18,200.

And the supposedly Wild-West atmosphere of robust investing that Freedom-Haters love to disparage actually turns out to be a verifiable engine of societal uplift:

For the most part, in fact, the more “unfettered” a nation’s system is the prosperous the population becomes, and consequently the more it spends on charity and safety net programs. When we match up the Cato Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom with the World Bank’s measure of per capita income, we find that the countries with the most unencumbered systems and the most financial “speculation” usually have the least of amount of poverty:
Hong Kong — $51,946
Singapore — $61,803
Australia — $44,598
New Zealand — $32,219
Switzerland — $53,367
Canada — $42,533
Chile — $22,352 (Chile’s score has jumped considerably since unfettered capitalism took over)
Mauritius — $15,649
Denmark — $42,086

Rather than credit those who do their best to balance this imperfect system that lifts millions out of impoverishment, the Pope attacks them for the prevalence of imaginary economic Darwinists who callously keep equality from blooming.  

And Harsanyi closes by reminding us that the Church's tax-exempt status has made for coffers full of capital accumulated in a free market.

It would be pointless, anyway

People are going to the bother and risk of signing up for gummint-grade health insurance, only to hear from some bureaucrat that there is no record of their having done so.

And I sure as hell won't be "seeing what my options are" on the regime's little exchange

You think I'm going to put sensitive information like my address and Social Security number on a site this rickety?

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday.

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week.

"It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. "We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw the implementation of the website, the components used to build the site are compliant with standards set by Federal security authorities.

"The privacy and security of consumers' personal information are a top priority for us. Security testing happens on an ongoing basis using industry best practices to appropriately safeguard consumers' personal information," said the spokesperson.

Another online security expert—who spoke at last week's House hearing and then on CNBC—said the federal Obamacare website needs to be shut down and rebuilt from scratch. Morgan Wright, CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations said: "There's not a plan to fix this that meets the sniff test of being reasonable."

Wright recently also said that there was "a better chance of seeing God" than of fixing the FHer-care website.

It's personal now

I'd been expecting it.  Today I got it.

I've had catastrophic coverage with a fairly high deductible for about four years.  It's been a bit of a stretch to afford it, but it was best suited to my situation and I was pleased, all things being relative.

Today, this came in the mail:  "To ensure that your coverage will include all the new benefits the health care reform law requires in 2014, we'll be discontinuing your current plan on 3/28/2014 nd offering you a new plan."

I'm told that I can "count on a seamless transition," and that I'll "have options," such as taking the plan my company recommends, or going through the bother of seeing what else I might find appealing to any degree.

They offer to "let us guide you."  This whole God-damned thing has been inevitable.  I don't blame my insurance company.  They would not have disrupted our relationship if the God-damned socialist regime had not made it necessary for them to do so.

I was perfectly satisfied with my situation, but the God-damned freedom-hating Democrats have decided I must kick in funding for other citizens' particular situations.

God damn it to hell, this is wrong.

I will fight.  I will fight on a level that goes beyond what I have done by maintaining this blog, or any newspaper columns I have written.  This is a war for the soul of Western civilization.  I am armed and fierce.

How seriously should we take this Air Defense Identification Zone that China has declared?

Pretty seriously, according to Mario Loyola at NRO:

People should be under no illusions. This is a major international incident, arguably the most serious confrontation between China and the U.S. since the attack on a U.S. surveillance plane near Hainan Island in early 2001. And because private parties are now in the middle of it, the resolution will have to be public. That means somebody is going to have to back down. And if the U.S. doesn’t move fast to change its stance, it will be the one who backed down, with repercussions for our alliances and for the vital freedom of movement through international airspace that could be far-reaching and potentially disastrous.

The hubris level of our rivals has been rising along with that of our out-and-out enemies.

The context is essential to consider

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a great roundup of discussions about Pope Francis's latest work, and what it has to say about economic matters.  It includes observations from Ross Douthat, Matt Lewis, Peter Ingmeni, and George Weigel.  The common assessment is that the Pope's overall message is an exhortation for Catholic faith to be visceral, to pertain to the three-dimensional, space-time existence of human beings.

Not having read Evangelii Gaudium, I'm not in a position to speak as conclusively as the above writers, but I thought something was haywire when gloating FHers started posting cherry-picked snippets on Facebook.   I'll keep my eye out for more commentary on it.

A bipartisan assessment to make you gulp a little

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-MI) say the terror threat to the US is greater than it was before September 2001.

"The fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs. Trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever. And there is huge malevolence out there," Feinstein said.

"I think there is a real displaced aggression in this very fundamentalist jihadist Islamic community. That is that the West is responsible for everything that goes wrong and that the only thing that's going to solve this is Islamic sharia law and the concept of the caliphate," Feinstein said. 

Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee agreed, and said terrorists are now focusing on smaller events, making it more difficult for the intelligence community to detect plots against American targets.

"The threat level has never been more diverse than it is today and that's one of the bigger concerns that we have, and why we both would agree that the threat is higher today and we are probably less safe. The more efforts they try, the more perfect you have to be to stop something. That's a huge challenge," Rogers told CNN.

Citing the recent disclosures about the interworking of U.S. intelligence operations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Rogers said it has changed the way al-Qaida operates and communicates, making it even more difficult to detect an attack before it becomes operational.

They sound like they're delivering the unvarnished truth.

It's not about "empowering tomorrow's leaders," it's about leviathan getting its claws into innocent young human skulls

New study by the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt University concludes that preschool doesn't do a thing for kids intellectually or socially.

Even those who inclined to advocate for policies based on other conclusions have to concede that this bodes ill for the bureaucratization of early childhood:

“I see these findings as devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-k programs,” wrote Russ Whitehurst, director of Brookings Institution education studies. “Maybe we should figure out how to deliver effective programs before the federal government funds preschool for all.”

There's a huge push for this stuff in the city where I live.  I've always sensed it was really about the gravy train for a bunch of pointy-heads and ed-school grads, who have a vested interest in raising a generation of cattle-humans, as opposed to making kids ready for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

When destiny calls

Was fortunate enough to see this live.  The replays had been shot from every conceivable angle.  My favorite was from the perspective of the Alabama end zone, so you could see Davis's facial expression of utter certainty.

There's a lesson in there for all of us: have your chops in order for your moment of opportunity.

There is no more electrifying feeling than knowing exactly what to do.

(BTW, the entire weekend was a treasure trove of televised football.  This Auburn - Alabama game was preceded by the state championship of one of the two high schools in the city where I live.  And then this afternoon - in the same stadium where that victory took place -  the Colts beat Tennessee in a game full of passion and dotted by a few moments of genius.)

Krugman smackdown of the day

Nothing like a great Paul Krugman smackdown.  Charles Lipson at The American Thinker delivers:

California now has 6.4 million people eligible to buy on their exchanges, including 1.1 million whose policies were just cancelled. Half of them (over 3 million) are eligible for subsidies. So far, California has signed up 80,000. California's apiration is to sign up 500-700,000. That is about 1/10 of the eligible population and is actually fewer than the number of cancelled policies.  That's the record that made Krugman ecstatic.

(My data comes from economist Veronique de Rugy and was published in National Review Online.) 

Covered California is the best example of Obamacare success Krugman's research assistants could find across America.

Desperation with a veneer of smugness.  That's all he has left.

"Still not smooth sailing"

Are you surprised at this?  It's December 1, the date of the big relaunch, and the FHer-care website is still clunky.

For some of you, it may require some nose-holding, but what is your - anyone's - alternative?

Veteran civil rights activist and Dem stalwart Arnold S. Trebach no doubt had to swallow hard to write this PJ Media piece, but he has done the world a service:

It is difficult for an old liberal Democrat to utter such words as those. Vote Republican and save the country, indeed. Yet that is what I am now saying, and to make it even more emphatic, I am also suggesting that for the next two elections, all good people should consider voting a straight Republican ticket as a protest against the massive political sins of the Democrats. If enough voters did that, in addition to saving the country it might also save the Democratic Party from itself.

My old party has lost its soul and integrity in recent years, especially during the Obama era. It needs a crushing electoral defeat to focus its attention on its dangerous behavior.  Despite the terrible recent record of my old party and of Mr. Obama, they are master politicians and it is quite possible that they will recover and win the next two elections, unless there is a concerted effort by voters of all stripes — Republican, independent, and, yes, Democratic — to make a public commitment in advance that they will vote straight Republican tickets in 2014 and in 2016.

I do not love the Republican Party, but Obama and the Democrats have given me no alternative. I do not recognize my old party. They truly scare me.  As a result, in recent years I have embraced conservative values in my political behavior.

Cites the FHer-care rollout and the acquiescence to Iranian nukes as the two most glaring justifications for his stance.

Memo to the Most Equal Comrade: Immigration is the wrong issue to look to as an escape hatch from your failed signature achievement

The House of Representatives appears to be firm in its resolve to not go to conference on "comprehensive" bill that erodes US immigration law.

But the Most Equal Comrade depicts her as some kind of hero

There seems to be a theme to the stuff I'm running across in my Web-scouring this morning.  Just came across this Cathy Young piece on why Gloria Steinem, who recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, represents the worst of modern feminism.

Read the whole thing - Young does her best to be gracious and acknowledge a basically high intelligence level in Steinem - but, to condense her point, her enumerated reasons for so deeming Steinem are dogmatic denial of sex differences, fixation on male villainy, junk scholarship, misinformation, the vicitmhood cult, contempt for freedom of speech, and knee-jerk partisanship.

How this stuff metastasizes

If you want to know how marginal stuff like the movement discussed in the post below goes mainstream, take a look at the militant determination of these participants in the University of New Mexico Brave New Voices poetry slam.  They ain't accepting anything less than fundamental cultural transformation.

The death rattle of Western civilization

These things always start out at the margins, showing up in stories buried on newspapers' inner pages.  At first, it's easy to wager that it's likely to blow over.  But some don't.  There were the spring 1965 sit-ins and teach-ins that sprang up pretty much instantly upon introduction of US ground troops to South Vietnam, or the founding a year later of the National Organization for Women, or the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970.

So the notion of "genderqueering" might strike one as so unlikely to gain a foothold that the temptation is to read the first paragraph of a story about it and move on.  But my sense is that these people are going to be so insistent about these goofy new pronouns (get ready for "ze," "sie," "e," "ou" and "ve") that we'll all be intimidated into accepting them within a year and "diversity circles" at campus nestled in the heartland, far away from the coasts where these things generally originate, will be held to get "the greater community" acclimated to the new mandatory perspective.

Witness the confusion of even those inclined to be sympathetic toward such a movement.  But, good sports that they are, they are determined to get the hang of it:

As neologisms like “ze” have moved beyond conversation and into students’ academic papers, some professors have expressed annoyance and uncertainty about how to respond, said Lucy Ferriss, writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Connecticut and a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s language blog, Lingua Franca. .

“There is an initial discomfort. I think it’s probably hypocritical to pretend there isn’t, to say, ‘Ok, that’s what they want to do’ and leave it at that,” Ferriss said. “The people I know who teach will say ‘This is weird and it’s cumbersome and it’s not going to last because it’s not organic.’”

At the same time, Ferris thinks it’s a mistake for scholars and grammarians to dismiss the trend without considering whether English and society might be served by less-rigid ideas about gender.

Less rigid ideas about gender.  God damn it, all you have to do is pull somebody's pants down to determine his or her gender.  I'm sorry if you resent the particular kind of genitalia your Creator gave you, but it has determined the hormonal balance coursing through your bloodstream, the pitch of your voice, and the placement of your body hair.  Not to mention whether you tend to be more aggressive and analytical, or more inclined toward nurturing.  This genital-resentment thing is your problem.

I'll say it again.  The Freedom-Hating overlords are perfectly willing to encourage this kind of infantile narcissism because if you have the masses making big deals over utterly trivial and embarrassingly detached-from-reality preoccupations, it's much easier to destroy that which is truly important, namely the actual freedom and dignity of the individual.

When the first pop star comes out as "genderqueered," we will know this has gone "mainstream."  Whee!  You are whatever you say you are!  And the leviathan state is there to shut up anyone who tries to point out that you're full of dog vomit.