What’s Socialism, Dad?

Venezuela provides a lesson to anyone tempted to feel the Bern.

The Big Brothers are watching in Caracas, Venezuela. PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

BRET STEPHENS

http://www.wsj.com/

May 16, 2016

Noah, my 10-year-old son, was reading over my shoulder a powerful story about the state of medicine in Venezuela by Nick Casey in Sunday’s New York Times. We scrolled through images of filthy operating rooms, broken incubators and desperate patients lying in pools of blood, dying for lack of such basics as antibiotics.

“Dad, why are the hospitals like this?”

“Socialism.”

“What’s socialism?”

I told him it’s an economic system in which the government seizes and runs industries, sets prices for goods, and otherwise dictates what you can and cannot do with your money, and therefore your life. He received my answer with the abstracted interest you’d expect if I had been describing atmospheric conditions on Uranus.

Here’s what I wish I had said: Socialism is a mental poison that leads to human misery of the sort you see in these wrenching pictures.

The lesson seems all the more necessary when discredited ideologies are finding new champions in high places. When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in 2013, an obscure U.K. parliamentarian tweeted, “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”

The parliamentarian was Jeremy Corbyn, now leader of the Labour Party.

Let’s not stop with Mr. Corbyn. In its day, Chavismo found champions, apologists and useful idiots among influential political figures and supposed thought leaders. In Massachusetts there were Joseph P. Kennedy and Rep. Bill Delahunt, who arranged a propaganda coup for the strongman by agreeing to purchase discounted Venezuelan heating oil for U.S. consumers. The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel extolled Chávez for defying the Bush administration and offering “an innovative four-point program to renew and reform the U.N.”

Up north, Naomi Klein, Canada’s second-most unpleasant export, treated Chávez as heroically leading the resistance to the forces of dreaded neoliberalism. Jimmy Carter mourned Chávez for “his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments and for his formidable communication skills and personal connection with supporters in his country and abroad to whom he gave hope and empowerment.”

There are lesser names to add to this roll call of dishonor— Michael Moore, Sean Penn—but you get the point: “Democratic socialism” had no shortage of prominent Western cheerleaders as it set Venezuela on its road to hyperinflation, hyper-criminality, water shortages, beer shortages, electricity blackouts, political repression and national collapse. Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, gained prestige and legitimacy from these paladins of the left. They are complicit in Venezuela’s agony.

And so to the U.S. election, specifically the resolutely undead presidential candidacy of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders campaign is no stranger to accusations that its brand of leftism is cut from the same cloth that produced Chavismo.

“Yesterday, one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent Super PACs attacked our campaign pretty viciously,” Mr. Sanders complained in September, noting that they “tried to link me to a dead communist dictator.”

The senator protests too much. As mayor of Burlington, Vt., in the 1980s, he boasted of conducting his own foreign policy, including sister-city relations with Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua and Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union. On a 1985 trip to Nicaragua, he lavished praise on Daniel Ortega’s communist regime—Chavismo’s older cousin.

“In terms of health care, in terms of education, in terms of land reform . . . nobody denies they [the Sandinistas] are making significant progress in those areas,” then-Mayor Sanders told one interviewer in 1985. “And I think people understand that and I think the people of Nicaragua, the poor people, respect that.”

If Mr. Sanders ever rethought or recanted those views, I’m not aware of it.

But the point isn’t what Mr. Sanders may have thought of the Sandinistas in the 1980s or the Chavistas in the past decade. It’s that the type of socialism that the senator espouses—$18 trillion in additional government spending over the next decade, accusations that Wall Street is a criminal enterprise and the continuous demonization of “millionaires and billionaires”—is not all that different from its South American cousins.

Democratic socialism—whether Chavez’s or Sanders’s—is legalized theft in the name of the people against the vilified few. It is a battle against income inequality by means of collective immiseration. It is the subjugation of private enterprise and personal autonomy to government power. Mr. Sanders promises to pursue his aims on the Scandinavian model, as if that was a success, and as if Americans are Scandinavians. It wasn’t. We aren’t. Bernie’s Way paves the same road to serfdom that socialism does everywhere.

That’s a fact Americans might have learned after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. We didn’t. Take the time to tell your kids what socialism is, and does, before they too feel the Bern.

Write bstephens@wsj.com.

Today's Tune: Bob Dylan - Melancholy Mood

Bob Dylan returns to the Great American Songbook in 'Fallen Angels'

Randy Lewis
May 18, 2016
http://www.latimes.com/

Bob Dylan performs in Los Angeles in Jan. 2012.

The songs collectively known as the Great American Songbook apparently are like those famous potato chips, in that singers who start sampling them quickly discover you can’t stop at just one.

Bob Dylan has joined the long roster of esteemed musicians who have turned initial explorations of the works of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Sammy Cahn, and their peers from the first half of the 20th century into extended visits so they can delve more deeply into some of the most exquisitely crafted songs ever written.

Dylan began in earnest last year with “Shadows in the Night." Now he’s back with a second deeply felt, imaginatively reworked batch on “Fallen Angels,” set for release on Friday.

To the pigeonhole-minded who shorthanded “Shadows in the Night” as a “covers record,” Dylan smartly responded, “I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter of fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”

That remains the guiding principle here, as he interprets such pre-rock cornerstones as Johnny Richards and Carolyn Leigh’s “Young at Heart,” Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar’s “Nevertheless (I’m In Love With You).” There's also a number of less well-known compositions, including Rube Bloom and Sammy Gallop’s “Maybe You’ll Be There” and Peter DeRose and Billy Hill’s “On a Little Street in Singapore.”

Once again, most — though not all — are closely associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer whose glistening tenor in his prime is, superficially at least, as far from Dylan’s folk-rock rasp as one might imagine.

Yet the connective thread is their shared dive into deep emotion. Dylan is engaging in emotional, more than musical, archaeology, He's “uncovering” the works of composers and lyricists whose style of writing was virtually shoved aside when he came along a half-century ago with his highly literate, folk-rooted songwriting style — one that was, rightly or wrongly, widely interpreted as largely autobiographical.

A big part of the freshness instilled in such oft-sung and recorded songs as “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “It Had to Be You” comes from the way he and his adroit roots-minded band have arranged them.

Dylan, who also produced under his pseudonym Jack Frost, immediately liberates songs from the big band/big orchestra world from which they emerged, and in which they are most frequently revisited. Donnie Herron’s anguished steel guitar sits front and center in most, Dylan’s closely miked voice otherwise sparsely surrounded by acoustic and electric guitar and bass, with drums tastefully added to a few.

As he did on “Shadows in the Night,” Dylan reaches to the blues at the core of many of these songs. Thus, they elicit the ache of romantic yearning and loss that often gets subsumed by swelling orchestral forces, background choirs or by singers who are more focused on crafting elegant vocals than finding emotional resonance.

Dylan quoted Sam Cooke during his much-cited speech last year when he was being honored as the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person of the Year. “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice,” Dylan told the audience. “He said, ‘Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth’."

That remains the guiding principle here, as he interprets such pre-rock cornerstones as Johnny Richards and Carolyn Leigh’s “Young at Heart,” Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar’s “Nevertheless (I’m In Love With You).” There's also a number of less well-known compositions, including Rube Bloom and Sammy Gallop’s “Maybe You’ll Be There” and Peter DeRose and Billy Hill’s “On a Little Street in Singapore.”

Once again, most — though not all — are closely associated with Frank Sinatra, a singer whose glistening tenor in his prime is, superficially at least, as far from Dylan’s folk-rock rasp as one might imagine.

Yet the connective thread is their shared dive into deep emotion. Dylan is engaging in emotional, more than musical, archaeology, He's “uncovering” the works of composers and lyricists whose style of writing was virtually shoved aside when he came along a half-century ago with his highly literate, folk-rooted songwriting style — one that was, rightly or wrongly, widely interpreted as largely autobiographical.

A big part of the freshness instilled in such oft-sung and recorded songs as “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “It Had to Be You” comes from the way he and his adroit roots-minded band have arranged them.

Dylan, who also produced under his pseudonym Jack Frost, immediately liberates songs from the big band/big orchestra world from which they emerged, and in which they are most frequently revisited. Donnie Herron’s anguished steel guitar sits front and center in most, Dylan’s closely miked voice otherwise sparsely surrounded by acoustic and electric guitar and bass, with drums tastefully added to a few.

As he did on “Shadows in the Night,” Dylan reaches to the blues at the core of many of these songs. Thus, they elicit the ache of romantic yearning and loss that often gets subsumed by swelling orchestral forces, background choirs or by singers who are more focused on crafting elegant vocals than finding emotional resonance.

Dylan quoted Sam Cooke during his much-cited speech last year when he was being honored as the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person of the Year. “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice,” Dylan told the audience. “He said, ‘Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth’."

Today's Tune: The Monkees - You Bring The Summer

The Monkees celebrate 50th anniversary by teaming with modern pop luminaries for a new album

Randy Lewis

May 20, 2016

http://www.latimes.com/

The Monkees: Davy Jones,left, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith. (Rhino Entertainment)

When the TV series “The Monkees” premiered on Sept. 12, 1966, by all rights it should have been nothing more than a effervescent bubble on the face of pop culture —something to be enjoyed now, because surely it would burst and quickly vanish.

Half a century later, many key players in that strictly-of-the-moment enterprise are as amazed as anyone that the Monkees, once derisively nicknamed “The Pre-Fab Four,” live on in 2016.

On May 27, the first Monkees album with new material in 20 years will be released by Rhino Records. Called “Good Times!,” the album bridges the group’s five-decade lifespan with newly completed tracks from the Monkees’ original heyday along with songs recently written and recorded expressly for the 50th anniversary.

Two of the group’s three surviving members — Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork — launched a still-expanding world tour on Wednesday in Fort Myers, Fla., and the band returns to Los Angeles for a homecoming show Sept. 16 at the Pantages Theatre.

“It’s stunning to be part of a project that 50 years later is having a significant resurgence,” Tork, 74, recently said from his home in Connecticut.

“I don’t know how significant it will turn out to be, but it’s certainly the biggest tour we’ve been on in the last 10 years, including the times Davy [Jones] was still with us.”

Although Jones died in 2012 at age 66 of coronary artery disease, he is represented on the new album in “Love to Love,” a song written by Neil Diamond. Period recordings from 1966 and ’67 were recently updated with “a little color here and there,” Tork said.

In a demonstration of the Monkees’ influence on subsequent generations, the album also includes songs written for them by a number of modern rock favorites, including Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard and the album’s producer, Fountains of Wayne bassist-songwriter Adam Schlesinger.

“Everyone knows at this point that the Monkees had some of the greatest songwriters in the world writing for them,” said Schlesinger, 48, who was born the year the TV show began its second and final season. “Personally, it’s an honor to be on that list.

“We got amazing submissions from a lot of great writers. It was hard to even choose which ones to go with. I think everybody likes the idea of writing for the Monkees. It’s a very freeing assignment in a way, because it’s just about writing something catchy and fun.”

The then-and-now idea for the new album came from conversations between Dolenz and their manager and tour producer of recent years, Andrew Sandoval.

Having looked together through unfinished material in the vaults — “not a few, but literally dozens of tracks,” Sandoval said — they chose several they thought represented the best unreleased songs to finish.

When Schlesinger came aboard to produce, “fortunately he pretty much agreed with the ones we liked.”

For all the fun the participants had working on the new album (“It was a blast,” Schlesinger said, “probably the most fun I’ve ever had making a record”), Dolenz, 71, conceded to being emotionally overwhelmed while working on the title track, which was written by Harry Nilsson, the songwriter whose own career was launched by the Monkees’ decision to record his song “Cuddly Toy.”

Working on a newly created duet that includes the voice of his friend, who died at age 52 in 1994, “I had to stop and take a break a couple of times,” said Dolenz at a West Los Angeles television studio where he’d just taped a morning show appearance. “Hearing his voice in the headphones and singing with him all these years later, it really got to me.”

The new version is built on the original demo recording that Nilsson made in 1967.

Later, he and Dolenz became particularly close, and were notorious Hollywood partygoers. In the 2010 documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?,” Dolenz recalls Nilsson showing up at his house, inviting him to lunch, “and three days later I’d wake up and we would be in some massage parlor in Phoenix.”

To further commemorate the band’s anniversary, a newly remastered edition of the Monkees’ two-season prime-time run will be released on Blu-ray in June.

For a network situation comedy, “The Monkees” generated a lot of ripples through pop culture.

Show creators Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson also cooked up unconventional techniques for shooting the show’s obligatory musical numbers. They were invigorated with quick cuts, off-kilter camera angles and general absurdity, which proved influential when music videos began to flood the airwaves with the birth of MTV.

Part of the ongoing appeal of the show, from Dolenz’s perspective, is that “We were never an American version of the Beatles,” as the Monkees were often described at the time. “We were four guys who wanted to be the Beatles.”

Rafelson, who went on to direct and produce such counterculture classics as “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces,” bristled over the years at suggestions that “The Monkees” was inspired by the Beatles and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

“This was a show I had written six years before the Beatles existed, and the pilot was based on my own life as an itinerant musician when I was 17 years old,” Rafelson told The Times in 2012, shortly after Jones’ death.

“What the Beatles did was to create a kind of permission for any rock ’n’ roll to be a popular subject for television.”

Likewise, Dolenz pointed out that in 1965, when screen tests were underway to find cast members for the show that would become “The Monkees,” “I shot four pilots that year, all music projects. One was about a folk trio modeled on Peter, Paul and Mary, one was about a surf band like the Beach Boys, the other was about a big folk group like the New Christy Minstrels.”

But when the Beatles arrived, “They just swamped pop culture,” Tork said, and thus the pilot hewing closest to the Beatles blueprint was the one green-lighted for production.

The show — and its songs — were hits almost immediately. The Monkees’ debut single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” shot to No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was quickly followed by another chart-topper, “I’m a Believer.” The group scored seven more top 20 hits over the next 18 months and sold more albums and singles in 1967 than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

But the Monkees felt wrath from some quarters of the rock music world that treated the whole enterprise as some sort of con game, a subterfuge that undermined notions of musical integrity.

“Some people are very serious about their rock music,” Dolenz said, adopting an Eastern European accent. “There vill be no joking around!”

Band member Michael Nesmith led a rebellion against music impresario Don Kirshner, who oversaw their early recordings and kept his hand on the pipeline of pop songs flowing to the Monkees from then-little-known writers including Nilsson, Diamond and, most frequently, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.

Over the years, “the smart Monkee” has emphasized that he wasn’t objecting to either the quality of songs or the level of musical support they got from the studio pros, but to the illusion the show’s creators tried to maintain by crediting only Jones, Dolenz, Tork and himself on the album covers.

His showdown with Kirshner — during which he put his fist through a wall in the office building they were in — led to the quartet’s being granted autonomy, and their third album, “Headquarters,” was the product of just the four Monkees.

It was a virtually unprecedented display of artistic independence, yet one that still hasn’t earned the Monkees sufficient respect, in the eyes of some, to win them a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And to the members of the group, it seemed a strange, and unnecessarily divisive, subject.

“People would ask us about the band, and I always said, ‘What band?’ It’s a TV show!” Dolenz said. “I was an actor, and I was hired to play a role, and that’s what I did. Now I’m getting ready to play that role again, and I’m delighted to do it — like a revival of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ or ‘Oklahoma!’”

Nesmith, who carved out a successful solo career in the 1970s and ’80s and became a pioneering video producer and entrepreneur, won’t be joining his old bandmates, at least not on a regular basis.

He last toured with them in 2014 but currently iswrapped up writing a book. On his Facebook page, he has wished his on-and-off bandmates well, suggesting he might join them on selected tour stops.

Said Dolenz with a smile, “We’ll see what happens. It’s kind of like waiting on our Neil Young. We’ll have him represented in the show because of all the film footage we use. And that lets us have Davy in it as well.”

And what do the Monkees represent long after they proudly sang “We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say”?

“I think everybody has a soft spot for the Monkees,” said Schlesinger. “They’re not specific to one generation, which is why this record had a nice aura around it from the beginning. For me, it’s really the music. Not that the show doesn’t hold up, but the music really holds up. It’s a cliché, but it really is a band for all ages.”

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Twitter: @RandyLewis2

Who's the Conservative Heretic?

By Patrick Buchanan
http://townhall.com/
May 20, 2016



In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative "principles" of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade.

But when did free trade become dogma in the Party of Lincoln?

As early as 1832, young Abe declared, "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank ... and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles."

Campaigning in 1844, Lincoln declared, "Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth."

Abe's openness to a protective tariff in 1860 enabled him to carry Pennsylvania and the nation. As I wrote in "The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy" in 1998:

"The Great Emancipator was the Great Protectionist."

During his presidency, Congress passed and Abe signed 10 tariff bills. Lincoln inaugurated the Republican Party tradition of economic nationalism.

Vermont's Justin Morrill, who shepherded GOP tariff bills through Congress from 1860 to 1898, declared, "I am for ruling America, for the benefit, first, of Americans, and for the 'rest of mankind' afterwards."

In 1890, Republicans enacted the McKinley Tariff that bore the name of that chairman of ways and means and future president.

"Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor," warned Cong. William McKinley, "will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages."

Too few Republicans of McKinley's mindset sat in Congress when NAFTA and MFN for China were being enacted.

In the 1895 "History of the Republican Party," the authors declare, "the Republican Party ... is the party of protection ... that carries the banner of protection proudly."

Under protectionist policies from 1865 to 1900, U.S. debt was cut by two-thirds. Customs duties provided 58 percent of revenue. Save for President Cleveland's 2 percent tax, which was declared unconstitutional, there was no income tax. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. Real wages, despite a doubling of the population, rose 53 percent. Growth in GDP averaged over 4 percent a year. Industrial production rose almost 5 percent a year.

The U.S. began the era with half of Britain's production, and ended it with twice Britain's production.

In McKinley's first term, the economy grew 7 percent a year. After his assassination, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took over. His reaction to Ryan's free-trade ideology? In a word, disgust.

"Pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre," wrote the Rough Rider, "I thank God I am not a free trader."

When the GOP returned to power after President Wilson, they enacted the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. For the next five years, the economy grew 7 percent a year.

While the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, signed eight months after the Crash of '29, was blamed for the Depression, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman ferreted out the real perp, the Federal Reserve.

Every Republican platform from 1884 to 1944 professed the party's faith in protection. Free trade was introduced by the party of Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Our modern free-trade era began with the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Among the eight no votes in the Senate were Barry Goldwater and Prescott Bush.

Even in recent crises, Republican presidents have gone back to the economic nationalism of their Grand Old Party. With the Brits coming for our gold and Japanese imports piling up, President Nixon in 1971 closed the gold window and imposed a 10 percent tariff on Japanese goods.

Ronald Reagan slapped a 50 percent tariff on Japanese motorcycles being dumped here to kill HarleyDavidson, then put quotas on Japanese auto imports, and on steel and machine tools.

Reagan was a conservative of the heart. Though a free trader, he always put America first.

What, then, does history teach?

The economic nationalism and protectionism of Hamilton, Madison, Jackson, and Henry Clay, and the Party of Lincoln, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Coolidge, of all four presidents on Mount Rushmore, made America the greatest and most self-sufficient republic in history.

And the free-trade, one-worldism of Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama enabled Communist China to shoulder us aside us and become the world's No. 1 manufacturing power.

Like Britain, after free-trade was adopted in the mid-19th century, when scribblers like David Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, and evangelists like Richard Cobden dazzled political elites with their visions of the future, America has been in a long steady decline.

If we look more and more like the British Empire in its twilight years, it is because we were converted to the same free-trade faith that was dismissed as utopian folly by the men who made America.

Where in the history of great nations -- Britain before 1850, the USA, Bismarck's Germany, postwar Japan and China today -- has nationalism not been the determinant factor in economic policy?

Speaker Ryan should read more history and less Ayn Rand

Pope Francis' Jihad on Christianity

Disturbing pronouncements on the faith from the Vicar of Christ.

Raymond Ibrahim

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 20. 2016

Pope Francis performs the foot-washing ritual at the Castelnuovo di Porto refugee center near Rome on Holy Thursday. (Osservatore Romano/AFP via Getty)

The man known as the “Catholic Pope” and the “Vicar of Christ”—but who in light of what follows is probably best referred to by his real name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio—recently gave an interview demonstrating why “so many people think he is the anti-Christ.”

The more salient features follow:

Christ as Warmonger

In classic relativistic fashion, Jorge claims that:

It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.

Only someone who is either very ignorant or hostile to Christianity can make such a claim.  To state the obvious: Yes, both Christianity and Islam seek to win converts.  However, Jesus’ call to his disciples to “go forth and make disciples of all nations” in Matthew’s Gospel was understood and practiced peacefully.  Disciples preached, people converted.  No violence, no coercion.  In fact, it was Christians—chief among them disciples and evangelists—who were persecuted and killed simply for preaching Christ, first by the pagan Roman empire, later (and still) by Islam.

Conversely, Muhammad said, “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped—Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my commandments (The Al Qaeda Reader, p.12).”  The Koran is replete with commands to do violence on those who refuse to submit to Islam—and yes, in ways that far transcend comparison with Old Testament violence.

Unlike the spread of Christianity, Islam spread through the sword.  This is a simple, historic fact, acknowledged bymore sober European leaders: the overwhelming majority of territory that today constitutes the “Muslim world” was seized from non-Muslims by great violence and bloodshed.  Two-thirds of Christendom—the Mideast and North Africa—was to be swallowed up by Islam a century after its founding.  

The making of martyrs is the only similarity that Christianity and Islam share when it comes to how they spread: while Christians were martyred for their faith, Muslims martyred whoever refused their faith.  

Dislike for “Christian Roots” of Europe (or Dislike for Truth)

According to Jorge, “when I hear talk of the Christian roots of Europe, I sometimes dread the tone, which can seem triumphalist or even vengeful. It then takes on colonialist overtones.”

One expects such ahistorical multicultural drivel from a clueless atheist—not the “pope.”  A quick education for Jorge: the “Christian roots of Europe” is a fact.  For centuries, after the aforementioned Islamic conquests of the Middle East, the original heartland of Christianity, Europe became the heart and standard bearer of the Christian faith.  That’s why it was called “Christendom.”  How can the supposed vicar, or representative, of Christ, “dread” this fact, denouncing it as “triumphalist or even vengeful”? 

Christianity as a Welcome Doormat

Apparently for Jorge, Europeans may express their Christian roots and faith—but only by being “welcome” doormats:

Yes, Europe has Christian roots and it is Christianity’s responsibility to water those roots. But this must be done in a spirit of service as in the washing of the feet. Christianity’s duty to Europe is one of service….  Christianity’s contribution to a culture is that of Christ in the washing of the feet.

So according to the head of the Catholic church, the entire purpose and message of Christianity is the “washing of feet”—or, in this context, taking in millions of Muslim migrants, many of whom are openly hostile to Christianity.  

Yes, Christ served and washed his disciples’ feet and preached mercy and compassion—but that was hardily the sole or even primary purpose of his mission.  He offered an entire worldview founded on profound theological assertions.  When people erred by profaning the temple, he didn’t “turn the other cheek” (let alone wash their feet).  He whipped them.  He didn’t preach naivety—open your doors to those who have a long history of and still seek to subjugate you—but to be “wise as serpents.”    He spoke of everlasting hell and torments—indeed, more so than anyone else in the entire Bible.  That’s why all Christian denominations have traditionally held that being Christian far transcends “the washing of feet.”  

But for Jorge, the only aspects of Christianity worth expressing are those that benefit Muslim migrants, some of whom hate and persecute Christians in Europe.

The Muslim World’s Problems: Our Fault and Responsibility

When asked if Europe has the capacity to continue accepting so many migrants, Jorge said: “[T]he deeper question is why there are so many migrants now.”  Like a true apologist for Islam, he went on to cite anything and everything—arms manufacturers, hunger, and, parroting the Obama administration, unemployment—as causes for upheavals in the Middle East, while ignoring the elephant in the room: Islamic culture, which engenders dysfunctional, intolerant, violent, authoritarian, and tribal societies.  Simply look to the birthplace of Islam, where Islamic law is strictly upheld: Saudi Arabia is wealthier than most Western nations and has none of the problems cited by Jorge; yet it too is barbaric, corrupt, and hostile to all who do not profess Islam.  Why?

In the same Gospel of Matthew that Jorge cited to conflate the mission of Jesus’ disciples with the mission of Muhammad’s jihadis, Christ declares “Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.”

If ever there was a person whom this admonition seems to pertain to—a man who holds the authoritative office of “representative of Christ,” but who empowers the historic (and ongoing) enemy of Christianity, while urging Europeans to suppress their Christian heritage and express their faith exclusively by the “washing of feet,” or, laying down before Muslims—surely Jorge Mario Bergoglio fits the bill.   

 Tags: Christianity, Islam, Pope Francis

The Party of Scientism, Not Science

The gruesome history of left-wing scientific fakery.

Bruce Thornton

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 19, 2016

Karl Marx

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans:

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from.

Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This prejudice is false about both conservatives and progressives. Most of what many progressives think is science is, in fact, scientism: the application of the methods, techniques, and jargon of genuine science to subjects for which they are inappropriate.

Indeed, leftism was born in scientism. Karl Marx believed that his ideas about the historical development, economics, and human nature comprised “scientific socialism,” as true as the laws of natural science. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” Of course Marxism is no such thing. It is a reductive view of human nature and action, based on selective evidence, unexamined assumptions, and jargon modeled on real science.

As we now know, Marxism is in fact a political religion based on faith more than reason. It identifies the good (the proletariat and the intellectual left) and the evil (capitalists and petty bourgeois); promises an earthly paradise (a society of equality and justice without private property); and provides a totalizing narrative that explains everything (historical progress driven by the struggle for control of the means of production). And despite its bloody failure, a Marxism dressed up as “democratic socialism” still attracts leftists like Bernie Sanders who fancy themselves thinkers of cool reason and empirical evidence.

Or take eugenics, an expression of progressivist ideology that dominated American social policy from around 1900 until the Second World War. The most prestigious universities and professors in the country preached eugenics and the “scientific racism” on which it was based. Its authority came from Darwinism and its theory that natural selection favored the fit, including humans. As Darwin said in The Descent of Man, “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Calling on Darwinian ideas, Margaret Sanger created Planned Parenthood in part to keep the “less fit” races from overbreeding and hence overwhelming the “more fit” Anglo-Saxon and Nordic races.  For the same reason, state governments passed forced sterilization laws upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell. Of course it was all scientism, fake science based on biased observation, the confusion of culture with nature, and quantitative silliness like measuring skulls.

Yet eugenics was the “settled science” of its time, and as such justified illiberal and cruel policies like forced sterilization, race- and ethnic-based immigration restrictions, and Jim Crow segregation. It took the horrors of the Holocaust to discredit, at least publicly, these ideas. But we still see remnants of the logic of eugenics, like the idea that abortion reduces crime rates. This idea surfaced in 1972 and was popularized by the 2010 best-sellerFreakonomics. We heard its echo in Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s comment that thanks to Roe v. Wade, we can eliminate “populations we don’t want to have too many of.”

Then there’s Freudian psychology, discredited as a science only after real science began discovering the biochemical causes of many neuroses and mental disorders. Sigmund Freud also thought he was a scientist who had discovered the material bases of mental phenomena. The ideas that came from this claim, such as “repression” and the Oedipus Complex, were received as scientific discoveries akin to the heliocentric planetary system and Newton’s law of gravity. That prestige facilitated the incredible influence Freudian thought held, and still holds, over a Western culture that had abandoned traditional religion yet still yearned for a substitute to make sense of people’s lives. But Freud’s “discoveries” are not the fruit of science. They are quasi-mythic ideas made up by Freud and buttressed with his subjective observations of his patients. Freud was a culture critic, not a scientist, promoting an explanatory narrative about human behavior, and liberation from the old religious taboos and superstitions that create our unhappiness.

There are other abuses of science, however, that are just as mischievous. Science that strays beyond the limits of what it has established as scientifically true can resemble pseudo-science. Much of the breathless reporting of popular science about how the mind works basically makes mountains of certainty out of molehills of research that uses fMRI scans to measure blood flow in the brain. More careful scientists call this the “higher phrenology.” The fad of identifying a gene as the determiner of behaviors like drinking, promiscuity, and even shopping only began to fade after further research showed that genes interact in much more complex and intricate combinations.

But there is no greater example of this bad habit than the claims that global warming is caused by human-produced atmospheric CO2. The crude causal link between CO2 and increased warming, a hypothesis over a hundred years old, is too simplistic to account for global climate change unfolding over millions of years. It cannot explain contrary evidence, such as the now two-decades-old pause in warming that has been going on even as people continue to add billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Gaps in understanding are filled by computer simulations compromised by the self-interested need of researchers to generate the results that confirm their lucrative climate model Yet despite these problems, governments all over the world continue to speak of “settled science” and a “scientific consensus,” two phrases that cut against the skeptical grain of real science.

So what do all these examples have in common? They have been embraced to a greater or lesser degree by most progressives and liberals, the people like Obama who pride themselves on their belief in “facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science,” as he told the cheering audience at Rutgers. Progressives argue they are more fit to rule because they rely on these habits of thinking when they make “policy.” Thus they display the misplaced progressive faith in technocratic elites who armed with knowledge from the new “human sciences,” will avoid the self-interest, superstition, religious dogma, and fossilized traditions that conservatives supposedly base their policies on.

But this faith in “techno-politics” in the end serves un-scientific ideology, self-interest, ambition, and the power to boss other people around and run their lives, all dressed up in the prestige and authority of real science. Nothing exposes this progressive sham more than the current attempt by Democrat Congressmen and state Attorneys General to use government and judicial power to investigate and punish writers and researchers who exercise their freedom to question “scientific” claims about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That is, these proponents of reason and science want to attack the public skepticism upon which modern science is founded. Such illiberal obscurantism is the hallmark of scientism.

To paraphrase British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, science is to scientism what a gentleman is to a gent. As the gruesome history of communism, eugenics, and other pseudo-scientific ideologies teach, we should never confuse a pretender with the real thing.

 Tags: Left, Marxism, Progressive, science

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens

A touching memoir of Hitch’s last crusade.

David Horowitz

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 18, 2016

When he died in 2011, at the age of 62, Christopher Hitchens was the most famous atheist alive. He was also one of the nastiest, having risen to these heights of fame with an international best-seller alternately mocking and excoriating believers under the title: God Is Not Great - How religion poisons everything. (A less venomous, more credible prospectus for a book would have been “How deceitful and corrupt human beings poison religion.”) Christopher Hitchens was also a man of contradictory impulses, and this same polemical malevolence co-existed in him with a graciousness that he could direct – not always but not infrequently - towards ideological enemies, allowing him to form relationships, and even friendships, with the most unlikely bedfellows. (Full disclosure, I am an agnostic and former radical who has also written a memoir of Christopher, a man I knew intermittently for fifty years, and as a friend for the last decade of his life.)

Larry Taunton is the author of a new and deeply appreciative memoir called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens:The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Taunton is a well-known evangelical Christian whose Fixed Point Foundation organized some of Christopher’s debates with religious adversaries during the final crusade he undertook to slay the dragons of religion, and to refute defenders of the idea that belief in a divinity can open the door to a redeeming faith.

Did Hitchens himself have a faith, as the title of Taunton’s book suggests? Of course he did. An Oscar Wilde mot that Taunton cites and that Hitchens was exceptionally fond of was that a map of the world without Utopia on it was not worth consulting. Like other romantics, Hitchens was inspired for most of his life by a revolutionary faith in a future transformation of the world as we know it. When his faith in the socialist future waned, he replaced it with a faith that reason could be the foundation of a more rationale and humane world order. Hence the crusade against what he regarded as superstitious, reactionary belief.

Because Taunton’s foundation organized some of Hitchens’ debates, the two spent precious time alone together during the long drives from Hitchens’ home in Washington to the venues in Alabama and Montana where the intellectual contests took place. Because the two men were intensely interested in ideas and in each other, the trips resulted in long and intimate conversations about themselves, atheism and Christian belief. Because Hitchens was a man of catholic interests who kept “double books” – which is the way he described his inner contradictions and paradoxical engagements - he allowed Taunton to lead him in a bible study of the New Testament. The result is a remarkable, closely observed memoir of their intellectual encounters, which anyone who has been enchanted or enraged by Hitchens – or both – will not want to miss.

Taunton is an unusually sensitive man and an unusually honest and diligent writer, points that need emphasis because the God debate has aroused such ideological passions that even this circumspectly observed memoir has been dragged into the maelstrom to its detriment. “Of all that can transpire in a bedroom,” begins the New York Times review of Taunton’s book, “nothing can be as titillating to the religious, or those of us who write about them, as a dying man’s conversion. Oscar Wilde’s deathbed baptism remains a coup for the Roman Catholic Church 116 years later, and an embarrassment for those who cherish his legacy of hedonism….The latest controversy about a late-in-life religious turn involves Christopher Hitchens, one of the world’s most prominent atheists. Unsurprisingly, evangelicals have celebrated the book, while some of Mr. Hitchens’s secular friends have winced.”

One of those secular friends cited by the Times is the Marxist editor and literary agent, Steve Wasserman, who is also an executor of Hitchens’s estate. Wasserman, who had not even read the book when interviewed, described Taunton’s work as “a shabby business” in which “unverifiable conversations” are made to “contradict everything Christopher Hitchens ever said or stood for.” This is shameless invention to grind an ideological ax – nothing could be further from the truth. Along with the Times’s innuendos Wasserman’s statement performs a great disservice not only to this remarkable little book, but to fans of Hitchens who might be discouraged from reading it.

The author of The Faith of Christopher Hitchens never for a moment believed that Hitchens, whom he affectionately refers to as “Christopher,” converted. He wanted Christopher to convert because he loved him as a friend and because as a Christian he believed that if Christopher did not convert he would be lost forever and the two of them could never be reunited. But he never once concludes that Christopher did convert. This is the way Taunton ends his book: “For me, the debates, the late-night discussions, and the Bible studies conducted in the front seat of my car were never about winning or losing an argument. Let the bloggers and the people in online forums fight that out … I didn’t need Christopher’s conversion to feel good about myself or to reinforce a flagging faith in the claims of Jesus Christ. I have never doubted them. No, for me it was always about the struggle for his soul because I believe this verse: ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’” 

The rich rewards readers of Taunton’s memoir will reap are an affectionate portrait of a remarkable man at the end of his life, drawn by a religious adversary with an open heart; an informed examination of Christopher’s relationships with his conservative father and liberal mother, and with his atheist-turned-Christian and radical-turned-conservative brother, Peter, along with thoughtful reflections on the way they each influenced Christopher and illuminate his complexities. Finally it is a testament of one man’s religious creed, and his view that grace is the core belief of a Christian faith. Each and all of these elements serve to make Taunton’s book a literary gem, which no honest reader could mistake for an ideological tract.

 Tags: Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, Left