Obama veut promouvoir l’inclusion technologique des LGBT et des « queer »

Réunion LGBT à la Maison Blanche pour l’« inclusion » technologique

Alors que la présidence de Barack Obama tire à sa fin, son équipe cherche à mettre à profit ses derniers mois à la Maison-Blanche pour faire avancer un dossier qui a toujours été en tête des priorités du président le plus radicalement à gauche que les États-Unis aient connu. Mardi, plus de 300 leaders LGBT du monde des technologies nouvelles ont participé à une réunion au sommet pour parler de l’« inclusion » technologique de leurs semblables. Obama espère bien réaliser quelques actions d’éclat en leur faveur avant de quitter Washington.

C’était la troisième de ce type, la LGBT Tech and Innovation Briefing, accès à la fois sur la pauvreté, la réforme de la justice, les statistiques fédérales sur les lesbiennes, bi, gay, trans et queer, la question des jeunes, de la santé mentale et même l’environnement et le réchauffement climatique. L’objectif est notamment de permettre à ces personnes de participer à l’ensemble des services publics et à l’élaboration législation par le biais de représentants dûment sélectionnés.

La réunion des LGBT « high tech » à la Maison Blanche

La journée a commencé par une présentation du bilan de l’administration Obama. Mais il a été clairement indiqué que des « avancées » obtenues n’étaient pas suffisantes et il appartient donc à l’industrie « high tech » de l’aider à tirer le plus grand profit possible de ces derniers jours au pouvoir.

Aussi cette prise de contact a notamment mis l’accent sur la coopération avec les très grosses entreprises informatiques et technologiques comme Apple, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook et les autres. Les pourparlers doivent notamment préparer une très grande réunion LGBT à Washington, patronnée par les pouvoirs publics, et programmée pour la semaine suivant l’élection présidentielle.

L’un des principaux sujets abordés au cours de la réunion était la collecte de données sur les personnes LGBT afin de mieux promouvoir leurs droits sans les exposer aux dangers du fichage ou de l’exploitation malveillante.

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Lire la suite: reinformation.tv

“Take advantage of the autonomy and opportunities that college permits by approaching it in the spirit of the 16th century. You'll become capable of a level of precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean.”

How to Think Like Shakespeare

By Scott L. Newstok

Class of 2020, welcome to college. Right about now, your future professors are probably sitting in a faculty meeting, rolling their eyes at their dean’s recitation of the annual Beloit College Mindset List, which catalogs the cultural touchstones of your lives.

But to me, the most momentous event in your intellectual formation was the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which ushered in our disastrous fixation on testing. Your generation is the first to have gone through primary and secondary school knowing no alternative to a national regimen of assessment. And your professors are only now beginning to realize how this unrelenting assessment has stunted your imaginations.

In response to the well-intentioned yet myopic focus on literacy and numeracy, your course offerings in art, drama, music, history, world languages, and the sciences were all too oftenset aside "to create more time for reading and math instruction." Even worse, one of the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing is that it narrowed not only what you were taught but how you were taught. The joy of reading was too often reduced to extracting content without context, the joy of mathematics to arbitrary exercises, without the love of pattern-making that generates conjecture in the first place.

You’ve been cheated of your birthright: a complete education. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (at your age of 18), a "complete education" gives "not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate."

But now your education is in your own hands. And my advice is: Don’t let yourself be cheated anymore, and do not cheat yourself. Take advantage of the autonomy and opportunities that college permits by approaching it in the spirit of the 16th century. You’ll become capable of a level of precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean.

Building a bridge to the 16th century must seem like a perverse prescription for today’s ills. I’m the first to admit that English Renaissance pedagogy was rigid and rightly mocked for itsdomineering pedants. Few of you would be eager to wake up before 6 a.m. to say mandatory prayers, or to be lashed for tardiness, much less translate Latin for hours on end every day of the week. Could there be a system more antithetical to our own contemporary ideals of student-centered, present-focused, and career-oriented education?

Yet this system somehow managed to nurture world-shifting thinkers, including those who launched the Scientific Revolution. This education fostered some of the very habits of mind endorsed by both the National Education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning: critical thinking; clear communication; collaboration; and creativity. (To these "4Cs," I would add "curiosity.") Given that your own education has fallen far short of those laudable goals, I urge you to reconsider Shakespeare’s intellectual formation: that is, not what he purportedly thought — about law or love or leadership — but how he thought. An apparently rigid educational system could, paradoxically, induce liberated thinking.

So how can you think like Shakespeare?

His mind was shaped by rhetoric, a term that you probably associate with empty promises — things politicians say but don’t really mean. But in the Renaissance, rhetoric was nothing less than the fabric of thought itself. Because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for every occasion that requires words. That’s why Tudor students devoted countless hours to examining vivid models, figuring out ways to turn a phrase, exercising elaborate verbal patterning.

Antonio Gramsci described education in this way: "One has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts." You take it for granted that Olympic athletes and professional musicians must practice relentlessly to perfect their craft. Why should you expect the craft of thought to require anything less disciplined? Fierce attention to clear and precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster independent judgment. That is rhetoric.

Renaissance rhetoric achieved precision through a practice that might surprise you:imitation. Like "rhetoric," "imitation" sounds pejorative today: a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy. But Renaissance thinkers — aptly, looking back to the Roman Seneca, who himself looked back to the Greeks — compared the process of imitation to a bee’s gathering nectar from many flowers and then transforming it into honey. As Michel de Montaigne put it:

"The bees steal from this flower and that, but afterward turn their pilferings into honey, which is their own. … So the pupil will transform and fuse together the passages that he borrows from others, to make of them something entirely his own; that is to say, his own judgment. His education, his labor, and his study have no other aim but to form this."

The honey metaphor corrects our naïve notion that being creative entails making something from nothing. Instead, you become a creator by wrestling with the legacy of your authoritative predecessors, standing on the shoulders of giants. In the words of the saxophone genius John Coltrane: "You’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light." Listen to Coltrane fuse experimental jazz, South Asian melodic modes, and the Elizabethan ballad "Greensleeves," and you’ll hear how engaging with the past generates rather than limits.

The most fascinating concept that Shakespeare’s period revived from classical rhetoric wasinventio, which gives us both the word "invention" and the word "inventory." Cartoon imagesof inventors usually involve a light bulb flashing above the head of a solitary genius. Butnothing can come of nothing. And when rhetoricians spoke of inventio, they meant the first step in constructing an argument: an inventory of your mind’s treasury of knowledge — your database of reading, which you can accumulate only through slow, deliberate study.

People on today’s left and right are misguided on this point, making them strange bedfellows.Progressive educators have long been hostile to what they scorn as a "banking concept" of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge in passive students. Neoliberal reformers — the ones who have been assessing you for the past dozen years — act as if cognitive "skills" can somehow be taught in the abstract, independent of content. And some politicians seem eager to get rid of teachers altogether and just have you watch a video. You, having been bornwhen Google was founded, probably take it for granted that you can always look something up online.

But knowledge matters. Cumulatively, it provides the scaffolding for your further inquiry. In the most extreme example, if you knew no words in a language, having a dictionary wouldn’t help you in the least, since every definition would simply list more words you didn’t know. Likewise, without an inventory of knowledge, it’s frustratingly difficult for you to accumulate, much less create, more knowledge. As the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante said, "There is no work … that is not the fruit of tradition."

Tradition derives from the Latin traditio — that which is handed down to you for safekeeping. I think part of our innate skepticism of tradition derives from our good democratic impulses: We don’t want someone else telling us what to do; we want to decide for ourselves. In other words, you rightly reject a thoughtless adherence to tradition, just as you rightly reject (I hope) the thoughtlessness that accompanies authoritarianism. However, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, education "by its very nature … cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition." Educational authority is not the same thing as political authoritarianism.

You simply cannot transform tradition (a creative ideal) without first knowing it (a conserving ideal). Making an inventory must precede making an invention. Just imagine how startling it must have been for Shakespeare, the child of a small-town glove maker, the first time he encountered Seneca’s blood-drenched tragedies, or Lucretius’ treatise on the nature of the material world, or Ovid’s exquisite tales of shape-shifting. Shakespeare’s education furnished him with an inventory of words, concepts, names, and plots that he would reinvent throughout his career. Immersion in distant, difficult texts enlarges your mind and your world, providing for a lifetime of further inquiry. Devote the time in college to develop your growing inventory.

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Read more: www.chronicle.com

When judges are prohibited from speaking publicly about their most deeply held convictions, how long will it be before everyone is?

Dissent Will Not Be Tolerated: What the Case of a Wyoming Judge Means for All of Us
by Jonathan G. Lange


On Wednesday, August 17, the Wyoming Supreme Court heard a case that has huge implications for each and every one of us.

The case involves Judge Ruth Neely, who has served with distinction for twenty-one years as the municipal judge in Pinedale, Wyoming. Since municipalities have no authority either to issue a license or solemnize a marriage, you would think that she’s unaffected by all the hoopla over same-sex marriage. But you would be mistaken. Because of her beliefs about marriage, the Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics (CJCE) wants to remove her from her job and disqualify her for service anywhere in the Wyoming judiciary.

The story began on a cold Saturday morning in December 2014. Shortly after the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals declared Wyoming marriage statutes unconstitutional, a reporter from the Sublette Examiner called Judge Neely to ask if she was “excited” to perform same-sex marriages. It was only because she had accepted a part-time job as a circuit court magistrate that this question had any relevance at all. In that unpaid position, she was authorized, but not obligated, to solemnize marriages. She gave a perfectly reasonable reply. She said that if she were ever asked, she would help the couple find someone to do the job. However, she would “not be able to do” it herself.

Based on this solitary exchange about a hypothetical scenario, the commission has been waging what they call a “holy war” against her for more than a year. They are not content to send her a letter clarifying what she should have done, nor even a letter of reprimand. Instead, they are leveling the greatest possible punishment allowable by law—and the implications of their arguments are chilling.

Sins and Crimes

One central allegation against Judge Neely is the charge of bias. The commission claims that merely by publicly affirming biblical teaching on homosexual acts, she immediately and irrevocably rendered herself unfit to judge fairly or impartially in any matter whatsoever.

The commission makes much of a private letter in which she discussed a number of biblically named sins. The commission was so shocked that she would agree with the Bible that her church (Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod) was called “repugnant” in open court. Moreover, when the Alliance Defending Freedom asked to represent her, the commission filed additional charges against her for “affiliating with a discriminatory organization.”

Let’s think about this for a minute. Note, first, that the idea of “sin” is not a legal category. It is a theological category. Sins are committed against God. Crimes are committed against the state. For centuries Americans have accepted that something may be a sin without being a crime. Drunkenness, adultery, greed, and blasphemy immediately come to mind. This concept is at the heart of the distinction between church and state. For over two centuries, American judges have been applying the law equitably and fairly to people who engage in all kinds of sins without confusing sins with crimes. But now the CJCE wants Wyoming to believe that this particular sin can no longer be called “sin” without threatening the entire judicial system.

If this reasoning is true, then it should apply to every judge who thinks something is a sin that the government has declared legal. Do you believe that drunkenness is a sin? Well, since there’s no law against it, you’re fired! You think that adultery is a sin? You cannot be a judge anywhere in Wyoming. Who will be left to sit on the bench? Only those who have no moral compass beyond the letter of the law?

Is Only Private Speech Free?

A second major point that the commission makes is that Judge Neely, “by announcing her position against marriage equality,” openly spoke against the law of the land. Here is another curious position. Does the commission really mean to say that any public opposition to any law should immediately disqualify a judge from office? The commission might want to think that one through a bit more.

Prior to October 6, 2014, same-sex marriage was against the law in Wyoming. If the commission is right, every judge who spoke in favor of same-sex marriage prior to that date should have been immediately removed from the bench. This would be rather awkward, since Wendy Soto, executive director of the CJCE, was on the board of Wyoming Equality and agitating for same-sex marriage long before it was legal. Even leaving such awkwardness aside, the commission’s position has some rather staggering implications. Should we drive all pro-life judges from the bench because of Roe v. Wade? Should we remove all judges who speak in favor of gun control because of the Second Amendment? While NARAL might favor the first idea and the NRA the second, no person who understands the importance of free speech could seriously want either.

And this brings up a third point that we should consider carefully. The commission goes to great lengths to argue that Judge Neely’s remarks to Ned Donovan were a “public statement.” Presumably, she would not be in trouble if she had said the exact same words in private. Is the commission arguing that Judge Neely has the right to free speech—as long as not too many people hear it? If she had said these things in a Sunday school classroom, would she still be charged with judicial misconduct? What if she had said them in a restaurant while reporter Ned Donovan happened to be sitting in an adjacent booth? What if she had written these remarks down before same-sex marriage became legal and Mr. Donovan published them afterwards? Should she then be hauled before the commission and asked to publicly recant?

This may all seem farfetched, but it is not. In Atlanta, former Fire Chief Kelvin Cochrane was fired for a self-published booklet that he wrote for his men’s Bible study. Is Wyoming going to follow suit?

If all of this sounds like the abridgment of Judge Neely’s free speech, it is. But never fear. The commission confidently asserts that this is permissible under the United States Constitution because it applies only to judges. Judges are prohibited from speaking publicly about their most deeply held convictions, but no one else is. Of course some statements from judges really do call into question their impartiality—for that, see recent comments from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—but as we saw above, Judge Neely’s comments do nothing to undermine her impartiality with respect to judging and enforcingthe law.

Judge Neely’s Day in Court

After a year and a half, this case finally came before the Wyoming Supreme Court on August 17. I traveled to Cheyenne to hear the oral arguments, and I was struck by the implications of what I heard.

Throughout the arguments, Pat Dixon, the counsel for the commission, strove to downplay constitutional questions. He told the justices, “I’m not a constitutional scholar,” and admitted that he had not actually read some of the cases cited in the Commission’s brief. Rather than the Constitution, the commission wanted to focus exclusively on the Code of Judicial Conduct. Judge Neely, by contrast, focused primarily on the US and Wyoming constitutions. So stark was this contrast, that Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Kate Fox prefaced one of her questions to the commission by saying: “I know you don’t want to talk about the Constitution, but we need to.”

Indeed, constitutional questions are at the heart of this case. In addition to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, Article I of the Wyoming Constitution guarantees that “every person may freely speak, write and publish on all subjects.” Not only did the commission have to get around these prohibitions, it also had to deal with the religious dimension of the case. How can you sanction a judge for affirming scriptural doctrines that are central to Christian claims? The First Amendment guarantees not merely freedom of worship, but free exercise of religion. More than that, the Wyoming constitution is clear that “no person shall be rendered incompetent to hold any office . . . because of his opinion on any matter of religious belief whatever.”

The commission sought to get around both of these obstacles by insisting that Judge Neely’s “crime” is neither what she believes nor what she said, but “what she did.” And what did she do? According to Pat Dixon, “She expressed her unwillingness to follow the law, and she demonstrated her bias against certain groups.” But remember, Judge Neely isn’t required by state law to perform marriages. So one justice immediately asked where either Obergefell v. Hodgesor Guzzo v. Mead required that any individual state official must perform a marriage ceremony. Dixon admitted that neither of those cases makes any such law.

Notice, also, that both of her alleged “actions” were done by speaking outside the courtroom, outside business hours, and not to anyone actually before the court. This prompted one justice to ask, “so, if she simply hadn’t performed any same-sex marriages, that’s not a problem. But when she told the world . . .?” To which the commission replied, “That’s right . . . Judges don’t give speeches. That’s what politicians do.”

This exchange caught my attention. What about the dozens of public addresses given by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and scores of judges throughout the years?

The commission cannot credibly deny that Judge Neely’s fundamental constitutional rights are being infringed. The burden is on them to prove that a judge cannot speak about marriage without “manifesting bias or prejudice” toward an individual. They must prove that a judge cannot be an orthodox Christian while still remaining fair and impartial toward those of a different faith. Then, they must prove that the judge has not only been compromised in one particular case from which she could recuse herself, but that she is entirely incompetent to serve on the bench at all.

If they manage to prove all of those things, that would mean that faithful Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Muslims must either cease practicing their faith or be removed from the bench. At the very least, such judges would be forbidden to speak their minds. If, on the other hand, the commission’s proposal fails to pass constitutional muster, the court would do well to reject its entire argument.

Soon the Wyoming Supreme Court will decide whether to keep Judge Neely on the bench or remove her—and everyone who shares her convictions—from Wyoming’s judiciary. They should protect our freedoms to think, speak, and act. If they don’t, it will not be the end of the matter. It will only open the floodgates to a million more questions—and a lot less freedom for all of us.

Jonathan G. Lange is a pastor of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. He has raised his family in Wyoming for two decades, serving parishes in Evanston and Kemmerer. He is active in the public square as a leader of the Wyoming Pastors Network

Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

The connection between the Klan’s history and illegal immigration: votes.

Tim Kaine Proves Rush Limbaugh’s Point

by Jeffrey Lord 

So.

Here’s the Washington Post the other day on Tim Kaine:


Kaine escalates attack on Trump, associating him with ‘Ku Klux Klan values’

Said Hillary’s VP candidate in this Post report:

“Yesterday, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Reno, Nevada, calling out Donald Trump on a lot of things on this equality idea, calling him out on the fact that he has supporters like David Duke, connected with the Ku Klux Klan, who are going around and saying Donald Trump is their candidate because Donald Trump is pushing their values,” said Kaine (D-Va.). “Ku Klux Klan values, David Duke values, Donald Trump values are not American values. They’re not our values.”

And yesterday, on a seemingly unrelated topic, Rush Limbaugh repeated something he has said many times before on the subject of illegal immigration and amnesty. As a matter of fact, Rush said it again to help correct a misimpression I had mistakenly left when I cited Rush’s views on CNN over the weekend when talking to host Jim Sciutto on the subject of Donald Trump and immigration. Here’s the link to Rush’s thoughts and I want to quote some of them directly:


RUSH: Last night Jeff Lord is on with Jim Sciutto, and they are discussing one of my ideas, and I want to play the bite because Jeff gets only one thing a little wrong here that I want to correct, but you will hear what it is.

LORD: Rush Limbaugh had a great suggestion about this to test the willingness of my friend Basil and others. Let them come and give them a path to citizenship, but they can’t vote for 25 years or so. That would be an interesting proposition to see what the reaction is.

SCIUTTO: People come in the country but not have the right to vote?

LORD: Yeah, for 25 years or so. So if they come illegally, they don’t get the right to vote in America for 25 years.

Let it be said, I goofed. Or, as Rush was gracious enough to say, I misspoke. Rush was talking about amnesty, not citizenship. As a regular listener I should have caught my own mistake. Rush elaborated as follows yesterday:


RUSH: I didn’t say grant ‘em citizenship. You can’t grant ‘em citizenship and take away the vote. I said amnesty. I’ve said all along, and nobody has taken me — look, can we all agree that if I came out for the amnesty, it would do a lot to push it over the finish line? I might lose my radio show, but I could push it over the finish line. Right? With one proviso. There are a lot of people that would love to have me supporting it, right? And I’ve offered to.


I’ve told Chuck Schumer, and I’ve told Karl Rove, I’ve told any number, look, I’ll be on your team, I’ll come out and I’ll promote amnesty as a way of solving the problem with one proviso: Those granted amnesty are not granted citizenship for 10 or 15 years, meaning they can’t register to vote 10 or 15 years. And let’s just see, let’s just see what kind of support there is because the whole reason the Democrat Party wants this is they see 11 million new voters. They see a brand-new permanent underclass.

So I wanted to correct this. He didn’t make a mistake; he just misspoke. I would never suggest we grant people citizenship and deny them the right to vote for six months, much less 25 years. It’s amnesty that I was talking about. We just want to forgive them, right? Okay, they’re here. We’re gonna admit that we’re not gonna send them back. That’s amnesty. We’re gonna forgive their crime.

Here’s another thing we could do. We could increase their tax rate as a penalty. Ha-ha-ha. How do you think that would fly? Can’t vote for let’s say 15 years and have to pay the full Medicare tax. Nah, let’s not complicate this. Don’t add their tax rate. Just leave it alone. And I guarantee you I wouldn’t have any takers. You might have some patient Democrats, “You say 10, 15 years, okay, all right, I’ll go for that.” I’m sure some would want to take it, but it would expose what this is all about.

Now. What is it that Senator Tim Kaine — Hillary’s VP nominee — has said that illustrates exactly Rush Limbaugh’s point?

This.

What was the reason for the Ku Klux Klan in the first place? As readers of this column know, we frequently cite Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who says the Klan was created as “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” We also cite University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s description of the Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

There is no need at this point to recount the Klan’s reign of terror. The real question is — why? Why in the world would the Democrats ever even think of employing a bunch of hooded racists in the service of their political party?

The answer can be found in this part of Rush’s monologue from yesterday, bold print supplied by me:

I’ve told Chuck Schumer, and I’ve told Karl Rove, I’ve told any number, look, I’ll be on your team, I’ll come out and I’ll promote amnesty as a way of solving the problem with one proviso: Those granted amnesty are not granted citizenship for 10 or 15 years, meaning they can’t register to vote 10 or 15 years. And let’s just see, let’s just see what kind of support there is because the whole reason the Democrat Party wants this is they see 11 million new voters.”

In other words? In other words the Democrats cheering on the Klan in the day wanted to appeal to people — specifically white people — for votes. All those anti-Lincoln Republican white voters in the Old Confederacy were in essence seen by Democrats of the day as their successors today see illegals: a massive cohort of people who would vote by race. Correspondingly the Dems of the day wanted to forcibly keep black Americans — newly freed slaves — from voting. Which is to say, the Democratic Party — well on record supporting slavery — judging others by skin color — was now going to keep right on with the racist formula that built the Democrats’ party in the first place. Using racism to pass their agenda of the day.

The other week Michelle Obama made some waves when she said of her time in the White House that every day “I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.” What no one wants to admit on the left is that every day Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Democrats wake up in a political party built by slaves — not to mention built by segregationists, lynchers, and the Klan. All of which were thoroughly dedicated to building a political party based on judging others by race. Sadly, they succeeded. As mentioned here often enough, the political formula they use is simple: racism plus progressivism equals political power.

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Read more: spectator.org

Russia’s Armed Forces on the information war front

Download .pdf here: www.osw.waw.pl/

Contents


Executive summary/5

Introduction/7


I Outlinng the problematic - The military dimension of the information space/8

1. strategic duality /8

2. terminological newspeak /10

3. the army as part of the information security system /11


II General discussion on documents/13

1. sources /13

2. Basic problem: social engineering /14

3. the fourth threat /15

4. the civilisational context /16

5. the internal and external addressees of russia’s strategic reflection /18

6. New trends? /20

7. a systemic approach /21


III How the informatios system operates selected case studies/24


1. the objectives of international co-operation in the information space /24

2. the regional level: back to soviet models? /29

3. the national level: military organisation of society /36


IV Conclusion

Iran has tens of thousands of agents in Latin America

Iran Targets Latin America

by Yleem D.S. Poblete


Three years ago, as the Obama Administration began to pave the way for a rapprochement with Iran, the State Department offered soothing reassurances to Congress that the Iranian regime’s influence in the Western Hemisphere was "waning"—reporting that Tehran's efforts in the region had been “undermined” by robust “sanctions” that had been imposed on the Islamic Republic.

This assessment appears to have been premature at best, wishful thinking at worst.

This Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif embarked on a six-nation tour in seemingly far away Latin America “to expand political and economic relations between the two sides”. But, is it so far away given Iran's stated aspirations which seem to be increasingly backed by words and deeds? Just as the foreign minister was arriving in Havana, back home the regime was announcing the establishment of the Shiite Liberation Army under the command of Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Quds Force. Though it's likely the force will be deployed largely in the Arab territories, the announcement took pains to note that Iran was prepared to deploy its forces to distant lands, “Anywhere where there is a fight, we organize and supply the army from the people of these areas.”

Indeed, things appear to be moving along. Last month, the English language edition of Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Iranian intelligence and military efforts to recruit young men in Peru, train them in Iran, and return them to Peru. A Hezbollah movement has now been established in the country.

According to the same report, Peruvian authorities recently arrested several suspects with links to Hezbollah who were “trying to enter the country to execute suspected operations.” This activity was forewarned earlier in March when Admiral Kurt Tidd of the US Southern Command reminded Congress of the symbiotic relationship that exists between Iran and its principal terrorist surrogate, remarking that Hezbollah maintains a substantial network of supporters and sympathizers throughout the hemisphere with the capacity to support and launch terrorist attacks.

The number of Iranian supported operatives in the hemisphere is unknown. However, a 2012 report by the Clarion Project cited a former Iranian official with knowledge of the country’s terror network who claimed that “more than 40,000 of the regime’s security, intelligence and propaganda forces” have been successfully placed in the region. According to another source cited in the article, the Quds Force has established command and control centers in two Latin American countries.

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Read more: www.worldaffairsjournal.org

The left is still mostly at peace with the American Jewish community because the latter is predominantly irreligious, socially liberal, and politically progressive

The Battle for Religious Liberty Will Be Won on the Field of Education

by Peter Berkowitz


A striking correlation exists between the decay of liberal education and the belief that government should push American citizens toward progressivism.

The first clause of the first of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution enshrines religious liberty. The opening words of the Bill of Rights accord this honor to religious liberty because, if government were to establish a state religion or interfere with the free exercise of religion, our other precious liberties would sustain a blow. It is a short step from government’s prescribing beliefs and dictating practices concerning citizens’ fundamental duties and highest hopes to government’s depriving citizens of their property and imprisoning them for deviating from the state’s religious—or irreligious, or anti-religious—orthodoxy.

The First Amendment also underscores the intimate connection between the protection of religious liberty and the exercise ofpolitical liberty by immediately following the prohibitions on governmental establishment and state regulation of religion with guarantees of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition of government.

Any threat to religious liberty in America, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights teaches, endangers all liberties.

In “Who’s Afraid of Religious Liberty?,” Richard Samuelson bracingly argues that the threat to religious liberty today is real and growing. He starts with the threat to Jews: the alarming resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, accompanied by a hugely disproportionate number of hate crimes against Jews in the United States and the “anti-Israel agitation” and “anti-Semitic vilification” that are common on American university campuses but have “leapt beyond the precincts of the academy to infiltrate American political discourse.” And this threat, maintains Samuelson, is compounded by a dangerous transformation of Americans’ conception of liberty in general and of religious liberty and liberty of association in particular. In a misguided quest to use government to eradicate every form of and vestige of discrimination—that is, drawing distinctions among people—progressives, he writes, “isolate, impugn, and penalize dissenting views held by Americans of faith” that undergird “the conduct of their religious lives.”

The campaign to eradicate dissenting opinion through the force of law, Samuelson argues, represents a perversion of the political principles on which America was founded. To secure individual liberty, the Constitution established a limited government. The limits were designed to reflect the distinction between the public sphere, rightly regulated by government, and the private. The latter included a diverse and vigorous civil society in which individuals enjoyed wide-ranging freedom, not least the freedom within broad boundaries to believe, think, speak, and act as they wished and to associate or not with whomever they pleased.

The enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Samuelson writes, marked a turning point. While intended to serve the noble goal of ending government-sanctioned discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin, the act was hijacked by progressive activists. In the name of ending discrimination, they have used it to outlaw private conduct that does not comport with contemporary progressive norms.

Religion is the new front. Legal efforts to compel Christian photographers and Christian bakers to participate, contrary to their religious beliefs, in same-sex weddings when plenty of other photographers and bakers are available are no longer inspired by the entirely proper aim of protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination in the public sphere but rather seek to bring the faithful to heel and show the pious who is boss by circumscribing their exercise of religion and controlling their associations.

One might have hoped that the writings of Robert Conquest, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn about the horrors of Communist totalitarianism would have decisively taught that the ambition to outlaw departures from state-sanctioned opinion through government-imposed uniformity of thought and conduct culminates in tyranny. But the contemporary legal campaign to curb the free exercise of religion in order to establish the left-wing interpretation of liberalism as America’s state religion shows that such hopes are misplaced.

The assault on liberty, Samuelson speculates, may be one cause of the tremors shaking American politics: “In today’s fevered political climate, one cannot help wondering how much of the felt national anger might be traceable to the juridically-abetted effort to force all Americans onto a uniform cultural page.” He concludes that Jews have both a “collective interest” and a “historical responsibility” to help restore “a healthier understanding of liberty,” one that “would be good not only for traditional Jews and Christians but for all Americans.”

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Read more: mosaicmagazine.com

Religious belief and practice have generally flourished, and progressivism was once a small intellectual movement

As America Grows Less Religious, Can the Tocqueville Model Still Work?

by Richard Samuelson

• Can the separation of church and state function for an increasingly unchurched people whose secular passions rely on the exercise of state power?
• The dangers to religious liberty that are facing the Jewish community are inseparable from the dangers facing other believing Americans

I want to thank David E. Bernstein, Wilfred McClay, and Peter Berkowitz for their kind words and thoughtful responses to my essay. In effect, all three suggest that, for American liberals and progressives, anti-discrimination is becoming nothing short of a religion, albeit one that denies it. More: it is becoming an established religion—a “secular theocracy,” in McClay’s words—and an official doctrine enforced by government.

David Bernstein poses three highly pertinent questions: how did we get to where we are today? Are things really so bad, or are there rays of hope? And what does today’s situation mean for America’s Jewish community? My comments will follow his order while drawing freely on the ideas and formulations of all three respondents.

How did we get here?

Wilfred McClay reminds us that, of late, large-scale religious fights seem to be breaking out all around the world. So the question really is whether America will remain an exception—the place where, as he writes with a nod to Tocqueville, “religious belief and practice have generally flourished . . . because they are voluntary and have not had to rely on a religious establishment to protect them.”

Can that model still work as America grows less religious in the traditional sense? To put it slightly differently, can the separation of church and state, which historically worked wonders both for American democracy and for the flourishing of religion, function for an increasingly unchurched people whose secular (though religiously-held) passions are reliant on the active exercise of state power? How will those passions be checked and balanced? For, under one name or another, there will be religion; the question is what sort of religion, and how and by whom American law will be shaped to suit the adherents’ way of life.

Peter Berkowitz’s comments shed light on this issue. The rise of a newly activist understanding of government’s role in shaping society did not begin with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which is where I focused attention in my essay). It actually began in the late-19th and early-20th century with the rise of the Progressive movement. Progressives, Berkowitz writes, “sought to overcome constitutional limits on government by redefining the Constitution as a living organism embodying progressive morals and authorizing activist government by elite-educated, impartial technocrats.”

................


Read more: mosaicmagazine.com

A UK parenting website has to give 'transphobists' a say "Mumsnet by parents for parents"

Go ahead, ban me, but I’ll never say a man is a woman!

by Carolyn Moynihan

A rebellion against transgenderism has broken out on the hugely popular British parenting website Mumsnet after some users were banned for “misgendering” and “transphobia” in referring to certain persons, it seems. Starting Thursday evening UK time the “I am Spartacus” thread has attracted more than 400 posts, all but a handful rejecting the idea of a "transgender woman".

Ringleader “OscarDeLaYenta” asserts:

Men cannot become women, ever. Women cannot become men, ever.

Anna Lee is a man. And I shall refer to him as he.Ada Wells is a man. And I shall refer to him as he.Paris Lees is a man. And I shall refer to him as he.Alex Drummond is a man. And I shall refer to him as he.Danielle Muscato is a man. And I shall refer to him as he.Buck Angel is a woman. And I shall refer to her as she.

(Links added - Ed)

But most contributors to the thread appear to be female. Indeed, the central issue is about recognising biological males as women; there is little about women who want to be men.

* Men can wear what they like and act how they like. Just don't ask me to pretend that I think they are female because they feel it because I don't.

* I refuse to agree that transwomen are women in exactly the same way that I refuse to agree that an anorexic person is obese.

* A person with a penis is not a woman. A penis is not female. And we should be allowed to say this.

* Nothing a man can do can make them a woman.Nothing a woman can do can make them a man. He is a pronoun used to describe male, she a pronoun used to describe female. All of these statements are not transphobic ideology, but fact.

As for pronouns, they are rejecting the term “cis” in droves.

The push-back against Mumsnet’s PC line is fascinating. The site is very influential, with literally millions of users, and it is also very feminist. Feminists have been fighting gender identity and roles for decades. Then along comes trans ideology wanting to make “gender identity” everything. Wanting men posing as females to be included in the women’s agenda. No way, say the feminist mums.

* As a woman with a daughter, I am horrified and terrified at the rapid demolition job being carried out on hard-won women's rights by mysogynistic men, who cannot be criticised because they have decided they are in fact women. And am even more horrified that I'm apparently not allowed to discuss it.

* My 6 year old DD wears trousers and has short hair. She is not trans. She is not gender non-conforming or any of the other b…s… made up labels. She is female, a girl, and uniquely her.

* Gender is a b..s… social construct. I wear pretty dresses and make up, and I like pink. I also do DIY, out-earn my husband and work in a male dominated environment. I am a woman with my own personality, likes and dislikes who refuses to be bound be gender expectations.

These mothers see the trend to “transition” young children as a distinct threat.

* I don't agree in giving children hormones. Or chest binding.

* …when I read a comment today on one of my (formerly) favourite 'bad mommy' blogs that said...'my transgender daughter will be going to kindergarten soon'... I felt a sudden urge to make like Kirk Douglas and say stop the train, stop this s...t, don't let this be inevitable. It's not … inevitable. Intelligent men and women know that THIS IS B.. S...

And fathers:

I am Basil and I am full of sorrow for the young people who will be given hormones which change their voices, body hair levels and muscle mass and have their breasts, testicles, wombs and penises surgically removed when they are too young to understand the long term effects of what they are doing. And full of disgust with the adults who have made this possible by refusing to listen to the still, small voice of reason they surely must have somewhere inside them.

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

President Peña Nieto´s initiative "has been received by us like a terrible stab in the back"

Mexican gvmt in greatest clash with Church since persecution that ignited Cristero War: Mexico City archdiocese

August 25, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The recent initiative of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to impose homosexual “marriage” on the country has led to the greatest confrontation between the government and the Catholic Church since the 1920s and 1930s, warned a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico in a recent interview.

Fr. Hugo Valdemar told Mexico’s Proceso magazine that the president’s attempt to pass a homosexual “marriage” amendment has caused “a cooling of his relationship with the bishops, who are very troubled by his initiative.”

“There hasn’t been a confrontation so strong between the government and the Church since the anticlerical laws of Plutarco Elías Calles were promulgated and since General Lázaro Cárdenas introduced socialist education” in the country, Fr. Valdemar added.

Valdemar is referring to an executive order given by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles in 1926, known as the “Calles Law,” that sought to prevent most Mexican priests from functioning and to prohibit religious education in primary and secondary schools. The law led to the closing of churches and to the Cristero War, or “Cristiada,” that caused an estimated 250,000 deaths before the churches were reopened in 1929. The socialist education program of the 1930s led to a second bloody conflict that claimed many lives as well.

Valdemar told Proceso that Peña Nieto had used his relationship with the Catholic hierarchy for his political advantage by presenting his fiancé to Pope Benedict before his 2012 election and later inviting the pope to visit Mexico, but has now betrayed the same bishops he courted.

“In launching his initiative to legalize marriages between people of the same sex, President Peña Nieto betrayed the Church, because he had promised that the agenda of Pope Francis would be his own,” Valdemar said. “So his initiative has been received by us like a terrible stab in the back.”

The Catholic bishops have jointly called for Mexicans to join massive protests against the proposed amendment that will take place throughout the country on September 10 and in Mexico City on September 24.

A previous round of protests held June 1 led to a retreat by the president’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on the issue. The PRI went on to lose a majority of state governments for the first time since the party’s founding in 1929, a massive electoral defeat that party leadership blamed on the president’s homosexual “marriage” initiative.

Read more: www.lifesitenews.com

Mexique: le coup de poignard dans le dos

Bientôt le retour de Cristeros ?

 José Luis Sánchez del Río

Pour ceux qui connaissent l’histoire du Mexique ou qui la connaisse à travers le film « Cristeros » sachez que la situation entre le Président élu en 2012 et l’Eglise catholique est, selon le Père Valdemar, porte-parole de l’Archidiocèse de Mexico,aussi tendue qu’en 1920.

Le terrible conflit actuel porte sur un amendement légalisant la dénaturation du mariage, alors que le Président avait courtisé l’Eglise et notamment Benoît XVI avant son élection, et qu’il avait promis de suivre « l’Agenda du Pape François ». 

Les Evêques, suivis par tous les fidèles, prennent cet « amendement » pour un coup de poignard dans le dos.

Prochaines étapes : manifestations massives prévues les 10 et 24 septembre.

Le 16 octobre, le pape François canonisera le jeune José Luis Sánchez del Río.

Ses geôliers l'avaient forcé à marcher vers le cimetière après lui avoir coupé la plante des pieds et à marcher dans du sel. Sur ce sentier pierreux maculé du sang des pieds du pauvre José, son bourreau lui promet que s’il crie « mort au Christ Roi », il aura la vie sauve. José Luis répond au contraire par le cri de ralliement des cristeros : « Longue vie au Christ Roi ». Il doit ensuite creuser sa propre tombe. Exaspéré, son bourreau lui décharge son pistolet dans la tête.

Prions pour nos frères mexicains : viva Christo Rey !

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Homosexuality and transgenderism: the science is on our side, but we are far behind in the public debate

Reasoned Analysis vs. Blah, Blah, Sneer, and Blah

By Austin Ruse





Download report here: www.thenewatlantis.com

That is the argument today on the question of homosexuality and transgenderism. On the one side there is reasoned argument, science, social science, analysis. On the other, nothing much more than mockery, slander, laughter, and dismissal. Sure, there are studies on the other side, many of them shoddy and ideological, and others that actually back up our own claims.

But, for the most part, the LGBTs believe they have reached a point in the debate when they do not have to do much more than sneer. The Harvey Mansfield Law says, “You can always tell who’s in charge in a society by who is allowed to get angry” That has been and remains the LGBTs and certainly not the Christians. But I offer Ruse’s Addendum to Mansfield’s Law: “You can always tell who thinks they’ve won the debate by who gets to sneer.”

The LGBTs are in full sneer this week with the release of a major new report from two world-renowned scientists, Drs. Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh. In “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” Mayer and McHugh have reviewed hundreds of studies across half a dozen scientific disciplines and have concluded much of what the public thinks about LGBT issues is simply wrong. Almost everything ideologues say in the academy, the media, government, and the law is simply wrong on the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism.

Much of the LGBT’s sneering response is focused on the credentials of Mayer and McHugh, so let’s look at what they’re sneering about.

This is long but stay with me. It’s important.

Dr. Lawrence Mayer is “a full-time academic involved in all aspects of teaching, research, and professional service.” He is “a biostatistician and epidemiologist” focused on “the design, analysis, and interpretation of experimental and observational data in public health and medicine, particularly when the data are complex in terms of underlying scientific issues.” Mayer is a research physician having been trained in medicine and psychiatry. He has testified in dozens of federal and state legal and regulatory hearings having to do with complex scientific literature. He has held full-time tenured positions at the university level for four decades and has held professional appointments at eight universities, including Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and School of Medicine, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, and the University of Michigan. He has also been professionally connected to the Mayo Clinic.

In his own words, “[I] strongly support equality and oppose discrimination for the LGBT community, and have testified on their behalf as a statistical expert.”

Dr. Paul McHugh is considered among the most influential psychiatrists in the past half century. Educated at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School, for twenty-five years he was the head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has written or edited seven influential books in the field of psychiatry. He is credited with single-handedly debunking the notion of suppressed memories that landed a few dozen child-care workers in prison for supposedly sexually abusing children, charges later proven false.

And what do the sneering LGBTs say about these accomplished and even august men? The anti-Christian $50 million-a-year Human Rights Campaign referred to them as “Anti-Trans All-Stars…” HRC says Mayer and McHugh use “scientific credentials to feign expertise on gender and sexual orientation.” HRC says Mayer and McHugh are “far outside the medical and scientific mainstream” and that McHugh is associated with a “hate-group.” What hate-group? The American College of Pediatricians!

Is there anything in the HRC piece about Mayer or McHugh’s academic or professional credentials? Nope. Not a peep about that. Did they engage the research as Mayer and McHugh did? Nope. Only sneers and name-calling.

Further down the food-chain, but not by much is Right Wing Watch run by the hard-left People for the American Way. Right Wing Watch went after the publisher of the study, The New Atlantis, accusing the journal of not being “peer reviewed.” (More on peer review below.)

Right Wing Watch went after McHugh for his religious beliefs, even though there is not a single mention of scripture or encyclicals or anything religious in the report. McHugh is automatically suspect for being Catholic. They go on to smear the report for being praised by right-wing bogeymen Brian Brown and Ryan Anderson.

Did Right Wing Watch cite Mayer’s or McHugh’s credentials or otherwise engage the research? Nope. Not once. Just sneers and smears.

Still further down the LGBT food-chain are the smelly little blogs. One little-read blog is called Slowly Boiled Frog run by a retired businessman in Florida.

Laced with the de rigueur vulgarity, the blog goes after the supposed Catholicism of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, a partner with The New Atlantis. EPPC is not “Catholic,” by the way. The blog does mention Mayer’s credentials as a biostatistician and epidemiologist but says he is “out of his depth.” One wonders about the depth of the gay fellow running the blog. Does he have the credentials to question Mayer’s?

The blog then smears McHugh’s Catholic faith and then insists everyone involved with the paper is a “Defender of the Faith.” The blog then pivots to Cardinal Ratzinger. A constant and rather boring feature of the blog is its attacks on Christians and most especially Catholics. It is as if they have a key-stroke that produces “Catholic” so they don’t have to type the whole thing out constantly ad nauseum.

The blog does engage the research, sort of, well not really. Rather, in a sentence or two the blog attempts to shoot down the key findings in a Monty Python “that’s-not-argument-that’s contradiction” kind of a way. So again, more sneering and name-calling.

A gay blog called “Deep Something” gave Mayer and McHugh their “Douchebag of the Day” award. Again, no real engagement. A blog called “Michael-in-Norfolk-Coming-Out-Gay” called Mayer and McHugh “Christofascists.” I actually cannot find a reference to Mayer’s faith or lack of faith anywhere. Still, he is a Christofascist.

And that is kind of it. These are their counter-arguments to a 143-page paper with 27 pages of academic footnotes.

What does the report really say? Start with the fact that the report has 27 pages of notes. The authors read and analyzed dozens of studies and reports from the biological, psychological and social sciences.

They were concerned to discover what the most rigorous scientific findings tell us about the “born that way” proposition so they looked at twin studies, genetics, environmental issues, and hormonal factors. They looked at the best existing brain science. They explored issues related to mental health as they are concerned that gays and transgenders experience levels of mental health issues far above the general population. They looked specifically at “stress factors,” that is, homo and transphobia. They analyzed dozens and dozens of studies.

What did they conclude? First, that a number of factors can go into sexual orientation and even that genetics may play a role. If the gays actually read the report, they may have trumpeted that, but they were too busy sneering. Though they would have been unhappy with the conclusion that there is no scientific support for genetics as a single reason.

Mayer and McHugh did repeat what even gay friendly researchers like Dr. Lisa Diamond have also discovered, that it is nearly impossible to determine who is a homosexual, so complex is the issue. They also point out the danger in pushing or even allowing teens and younger to transition in any way to another sex. They say this is dangerous and that the research shows 80 percent of kids who think they are transgender in adolescence turn out normal by their twenties.

Yes, Mayer and McHugh did not produce original research. The LGBTs think that is a damning point. It is an analysis of all the research out there, and a common use of such research. That is what science is about.

And yes, The New Atlantis is not peer-reviewed, though both Mayer and McHugh have published in peer-reviewed journals and in the top-tier, too. One suspects they chose this route because peer review has become so politicized, particularly in the area of LGBT. Why go through the trouble of attempting peer review on such a controversial paper only to be shot down and give the other side that arrow to shoot you with?

There are ample reports out there about how phony peer review has become. How in many cases it is little more than “log-rolling,” you give me a good review and I’ll give you one. Moreover, there are legendary stories out there about how later Nobel Prize papers were repeatedly rejected for peer-review. The peer review argument is a dodge they use to avoid real engagement.

It is unfortunate we have reached a point where such good men as these can be slandered with such ease and that opponents feel free to avoid real engagement and do no more than sneer and call names. It means we are far behind in the public debate. If they thought we were a threat, they would have to engage.

The good news is that today even laymen are being forced to become experts. All of us. It is like with the faith itself. We can no longer rely on the institutional Church for our faith, we must make our faith our very own. Otherwise it is built on sand. In the same way, we can no longer rely on experts in social issues, we must make these issues our own, too.

Every single one of us needs to download the Mayer and McHugh report, read it, and even study the footnotes. Believe me, it is tough sledding, but well worth it. The executive summary is excellent.

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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

The Imaginative Conservative Newsletter - August 27 - Who still speaks for Conservatism ?

Our Latest Essays

Who Still Speaks for Conservatism? by Paul Gottfried Establishment "conservative" pundits and theorists sound more often than not like the cultural and social Left... Freedom and Bondage by Dwight Longenecker "Freedom" has become a meaningless, jingoistic slogan that is used to excuse most anything...  Liberal Education and Conditions of Hope by Glenn Arbery The task of a liberal arts college is to be a clear alternative to the distress that accompanies the loss of the good of the intellect and the growing misery that follows the pursuit of self-gratification... The Fractured Republic by John Horvat No one disputes the fact that the nation is polarized and coming apart. What led to the fractured republic and can we mend it?... Why Is the Media So Liberal? by Stephen Turley How can an institution that claims to be impartial and objective in its reporting turn out to be so blatantly biased?...  Life in the Image-World by George Stanciu Consumers are buying a lifestyle, a way of life defined by images. In the past, capitalism exploited workers, took the fruits of their labor, but in this late phase of capitalism workers are being robbed of their very selves—they become what sells products...  Who Put the West in Western Civilization? by Robert Royal Where did “Western” Civilization come from? Western Civilization cannot be found in some textbook or database. It has no website. It is not a course that you take, and then forget, like so many others... The Social Message of Social Media by Christopher Morrissey If our new technologies, by their very structure and configuration, offer us an instant sensory awareness, then the challenge for the artist in post-modernity is to offer a spiritual vision that is no less comprehensive...  What Constitutes the Common Heritage of America & Europe? by Russell Kirk The growing naïveté, which amounts to an ignorance of the essence of European and American political theory, reflects a wondrous ignorance of human nature and statecraft... Why Stonewall Jackson & Virginia Chose Secession by S.C Gwynne Stonewall Jackson and most Virginians abhorred the idea of secession. What made them want to fight were events much closer to home... The Violent Assault Upon Imagination by Marion Montgomery Conscience has been largely exorcised from man by modern gnosticism, through enticing illusions foisted by liberated imagination... The Death of Community? by Jane Clark Scharl Do we seek happiness through the relentless assertion of self, or through the willing and sacrificial denial of self in communion with a timeless moral tradition?... Should We Move to Mexico? by Bradley J. Birzer and Adam Fuller Has the Constitution failed, and is it inevitable for all governments—whatever their original intentions—to decay into corruption and wanton criminality?...  The Key to John Adams' Political Principles by John Paynter Of all John Adams' published writings, two works provide an especially fruitful resource for an inquiry into his deepest political reflection...  Will the Clinton Foundation Scandal Go Away? by Patrick J. Buchanan By his actions, Bill Clinton is all but conceding that there is a serious conflict of interest between his foundation raking in millions that enhance the family’s prestige and sustain its travel and lifestyle, while providing its big donors with privileged access to the secretary of state... Homelessness and the Progressive Mentality by Bruce Frohnen A society that simply demands economic security through bureaucratic mechanisms, while treating businesses like ornery cows to be milked for money, is not showing compassion... Portrait of a Lady by T.S. Eliot You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel. / You will go on, and when you have prevailed / You can say: At this point many a one has failed... Hail and Farewell, Brother John McLaughlin by Patrick J. Buchanan When John yelled “Wronnng” at me from his center chair of “The McLaughlin Group,” it hit with the same familiar finality I had heard, many times, from Jesuits at the front of the class at Gonzaga... Support The Imaginative Conservative The Imaginative Conservative News