Story of the Year

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 19 E-mail the writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.

Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.

In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.

That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)

It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. And felt. Six million Americans with private insurance have just lost it. And that’s just the beginning. By the Department of Health and Human Services’ own estimates, about 75 million Americans would have plans that their employers would have the right to cancel. And millions of middle-class workers who will migrate to the exchanges and don’t qualify for government subsidies will see their premiums, deductibles and co-pays go up.

It gets worse. The dislocation extends to losing one’s doctor and drug coverage, as insurance companies narrow availability to compensate for the huge costs imposed on them by the extended coverage and “free” services the new law mandates.

But it’s not just individuals seeing their medical care turned upside down. The insurance providers, the backbone of the system, are being utterly transformed. They are rapidly becoming mere extensions of the federal government.

Look what happened just last week. Health and Human Services unilaterally and without warning changed coverage deadlines and guidelines. It asked insurers to start covering people on Jan. 1 even if they signed up as late as the day before and even if they hadn’t paid their premiums. And is “strongly encouraging” them to pay during the transition for doctor visits and medicines not covered in their current plans (if covered in the patient’s previous — canceled — plan).

On what authority does a Cabinet secretary tell private companies to pay for services not in their plans and cover people not on their rolls? Where in Obamacare’s 2,500 pages are such high-handed dictates authorized? Does anyone even ask? The bill itself is simply taken as a kind of blanket warrant for HHS to run, regulate and control the whole insurance system.

Remember the uproar over forcing religious institutions to provide contraception coverage? The president’s “fix” was a new regulation ordering insurers to provide these services for free. Apart from the fact that this transparent ruse does nothing to resolve the underlying issue of conscience — God sees — by what right does the government order private companies to provide free services for anyone?

Three years ago I predicted that Obamacare would turn insurers into the lapdog equivalent of utility companies. I undershot. They are being treated as wholly owned subsidiaries. Take the phrase “strongly encouraging.” Sweet persuasion? In reality, these are offers insurers can’t refuse. Disappoint your federal master and he has the power to kick you off the federal exchanges, where the health insurance business of the future is supposed to be conducted.

Moreover, if adverse selection drives insurers into a financial death spiral — too few healthy young people to offset more costly, sicker, older folks — their only recourse will be a government bailout. Do they really want to get on the wrong side of the White House, their only lifeline when facing insolvency?

I don’t care a whit for the insurance companies. They deserve what they get. They collaborated with the White House in concocting this scheme and are now being swallowed by it. But I do care about the citizenry and its access to a functioning, flourishing, choice-driven medical system.

Obamacare posed as a free-market alternative to a British-style single-payer system. Then, during congressional debate, the White House ostentatiously rejected the so-called “public option.” But that’s irrelevant. The whole damn thing is the public option. The federal government now runs the insurance market, dictating deadlines, procedures, rates, risk assessments and coverage requirements. It’s gotten so cocky it’s now telling insurers to cover the claims that, by law, they are not required to.

Welcome 2014, our first taste of nationalized health care.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

George F. Will: Obama ignores separation of powers

Charles Krauthammer: Why liberals are panicked about Obamacare

Michael Gerson: What Obamacare has cost Democrats

Charles Krauthammer: Obamacare laid bare

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The noise around Obamacare

Why Ritalin Still Rules

The allure of psychotropic drugs is about more than better grades for kids. 

By Mary Eberstadt

http://www.nationalreview.com

December 17, 2013

Almost 14 years ago, the inaugural issue of Policy Review under newly appointed editor Tod Lindberg ran an essay of mine called “Why Ritalin Rules.” It observed that American children were taking psychotropic drugs at (then-) record rates; that some doctors and other experts believed methylphenidate (the generic name for Ritalin) was being over-prescribed; that the disorder for which it and related stimulants were given — Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — included a uniquely protean symptoms checklist; and that the line between science and advocacy was hard to find in the bustling pediatric zone of the psychotropic universe.

Alongside praise, the piece also drew flak — lots of it. Brickbats crossed the political aisle. From left to right, some readers hated it. At the time, that reaction seemed surprising. After all, unlike many pieces penned in those days about children and psychiatric drugs, “Why Ritalin Rules” rounded up some ten years’ worth of medical and other specialized literature. It wasn’t written to inflame, but to try and understand a potent and obvious development. Regardless, the conclusion drawn from all the emotional static was that the moment to have a reasonable conversation hadn’t yet arrived.

That was then. What a difference a decade-plus and millions more prescriptions can make.

Sunday, on the front and center of page one of the New York Times, author Alan Schwarz thoroughly if inadvertently ratifies the argument of “Why Ritalin Rules” in a long and absorbing story called “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder: The Number of Diagnoses Soared Amid a 20-Year Drug Marketing Campaign.”

A few highlights from his report: Prescriptions for stimulant drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall have more than quadrupled in the past ten years. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, “ADHD is now the second most frequent long-term diagnosis in children, narrowly trailing asthma.” Citing the same CDC, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University named Dr. Keith Conners — for 50 years a leader in the effort to medicate children exhibiting the symptoms of ADHD — is emblematic of the specialists now having second thoughts. The rising rate of diagnosis, he recently told an assembly of fellow experts, is “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

Apparently, these are now legitimate subjects for discussion. In fact much of what Schwarz relays, like Dr. Conner’s quote, is more alarming than anything in my earlier Policy Review piece. The Times story also does something else done first in “Why Ritalin Rules”: It administers a standard “Could you have ADHD?” quiz to a number of subjects. Just as uncanny, it reaches the same results that appeared in my more limited experiment back in 1999. Some half of those canvassed by such a quiz, in 1999 and today, appeared likely to have ADD/ADHD, i.e., they would probably qualify for stimulant drugs.

“The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder” isn’t the only revisionist or probing look at psychotropic drugs since the explosion of the 1990s. In 2001, a cover story in Time magazine by Nancy Gibbs on “The Age of Ritalin” emphasized the social complexity of the medications. Other essays here and there have mapped related human ground. There’s also the fact that “prescription drug abuse continues to be the nation’s fastest growing drug problem,” as a 2013 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration puts it; about 1 million out of 6 million “nonmedical users,” it’s estimated (somehow) in that document, are users of stimulants. And the moral hazard assumed by college kids and others who sell their own pills to people who end up in emergency rooms has barely been touched.

All of which raises a question that might finally get a fair hearing now: Given these and other questions related to the prescription explosion, why do psychotropics still rule?

Some people who study drugs make the commonsensical point that every age has its chemical remedies of choice. And so one answer might be that just as Valium was the it-pill for mothers and doctors in an era when many women were at home with plenty of kids while their husbands were away working, so do today’s pediatric medications seem to help a different group of women: those who aren’t home all day, who are working outside the home, and who often don’t have husbands. A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, for instance, found that divorce essentially doubles the likelihood that a given child will be prescribed stimulants.

And yet — to sound a note often missing that also demands a listen here — divorced and never-married households aren’t the only ones choking for air. Even moms who aren’t single are making similar frantic rounds: mother and wife and breadwinner, housekeeper and laundress, chef and volunteer, and the rest. They, too, have smaller margins for domestic error than they did before. So many women perceive, and frequently report.

Forget the debate about having it all. The ideological idol of “equality” has trickled down to mean that many women are expected to be doing it all. They’re feeling it. And the drug companies feel their pain. Consider this note from the Times piece: When federal guidelines changed in the late 1990s such that direct marketing became possible, writes Schwarz, “pharmaceutical companies began targeting perhaps the most impressionable consumers of all: parents, especially mothers.”

The widest lens on the pediatric psychotropic explosion may be this: It’s in part another consequence of the rotten deal that many women, single and married, have gotten out of the sexual revolution. Not all of them, obviously enough, but many. In ways that aren’t widely acknowledged yet, and someday will be, the “family changes” of the post-revolutionary world have stretched certain members of humanity to the breaking point — starting with, but not limited to, some children.

Thus, school under the new family regimen becomes longer than ever before (before- and after-care programs have exploded in tandem with stimulant use). Districts overburdened by their role as parent substitutes respond by reining in whatever they can (recess and exercise hours have been cut back in tandem with stimulant use). Legislatures all over consider shortening or abolishing summer vacation — because in an age without family backup, “vacation” is just an annual headache of more child-care bills.

And so goes the continuing and mostly unseen squeeze on childhood. Today’s kids are now institutionalized for more hours than their parents were, with less time to jump and run and move muscles and bones than their parents had. Many are also without fathers, as everyone knows. Is it any wonder that the advertising wizards have come up with the message that at least something will help Mommy out: taking your medicine?

“Better test scores at school, more chores done at home, an independence I try to encourage, a smile I can always count on,” as one ad reported in the Times had one Mommy say. In another ad for another drug, the caption ran, “There’s a great kid in there.” The child pictured was taking off his mask. Wearing a monster suit.

It’s not the whole story. But it’s not okay.

Many people thank God and their doctors for what performance-enhancing drugs have done for their own children and families. No one doubts it. But what’s gone missing from the discussion is this underlying reality: In an age when families from high to low are imploding, the pressure on everyone to toe the line is enormous — especially kids. The family that once protected children in all kinds of ways, including by adopting a more forgiving and less institutional standard for their behavior, is now weakened and defensive as never before. It leaves a vacuum that only institutions can fill — and they do, sometimes aided by drugs to help kids behave according to institutional demands. This aspect of the gravitational pull toward the psychotropic universe deserves to be part of the conversation, too, and mostly hasn’t been.

As Dr. Lawrence Diller — who was already voicing heretical thoughts about the stimulant explosion back when I quoted from his book Running on Ritalin in 1999 — now tells the Times, in a striking metaphor: “Pharma pushed as far as they could, but you can’t just blame the virus. You have to have a susceptible host for the epidemic to take hold. There’s something they know about us that they utilize and exploit.”

Exactly. And what Pharma knows better than most is that the happy talk about how kids today are doing fine, thank you very much, is a story we tell ourselves to avoid the obvious. Some of their moms aren’t all right, either, another fact that doesn’t get nearly the attention it should. And some of those fathers are suffering from the fallout too, whether self-inflicted or not. In the ashes of the sexual revolution, someone has found a gold mine.

— Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author most recently of Adam and Eve after the Pill and How the West Really Lost God.

Book Review: 'American Betrayal' by Diana West

Red herrings

A review of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character by Diana West

by Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.newcriterion.com

December 2013

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945.

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.

To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

So, was al Qaeda a Frankenstein’s monster of America’s own making? Government officials bristled at the suggestion—just as West’s detractors erupt at the suggestion of a Soviet tyranny stamped “Made in the USA.” Indignation, however, is not an answer. The answers that I did finally elicit, through clenched teeth, were the stuff of fable: We only helped the “good” Afghan fundamentalist Muslims, you see; the “bad” fundamentalists—mostly Arabs who flocked to the jihad—were really ne’er-do-wells who barely left their tents during the fighting. When this did not wash, the officials got down to brass tacks: “Look, once the decision to fight the Soviets covertly was made, the battlefield reality required arming jihadists.”

Read more:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Red-herrings-7774

Penn State tries to extend winning volleyball legacy

By Chuck Curti 
http://triblive.com/sports
Published: Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013, 10:33 p.m.

Katie Slay (16) spikes the ball through Michigan State players during the fifth set of the women’s volleyball game at Rec Hall on Friday, September 27, 2013. The Nittany Lions lost to the Spartans 2-3. (Jessica Paholsky/The Daily Collegian)

In most collegiate settings, rock-star status generally is reserved for the football and basketball teams. But around University Park, the Penn State women's volleyball team has achieved a significant level of celebrity.

A decade of multiple national titles and near-uninterrupted reign atop the Big Ten will do that.

Senior middle blocker Katie Slay was out buying groceries Monday when she was approached by several people who congratulated her on the team's most recent accomplishment.

The Nittany Lions advanced to the Final Four and will face Washington on Thursday night in Seattle. Top-seeded Texas and Wisconsin are the other semifinalists.

Under coach Russ Rose, Penn State has become one of the pre-eminent women's volleyball programs in the country, winning four straight national titles from 2007-2010. It's a legacy the current players want to extend.

“All the alumni who have come before us have worked so hard to put us in this position,” said Slay, a freshman on the 2010 national title team, “so I think it's important that we embrace that reputation and really try to even better it and leave the program better than when we came in.”

Slay and the other holdovers from 2010 learned quickly how tough the road to a title can be. In 2011, the Nittany Lions saw their run of eight straight Big Ten championships stopped and were ousted in the Sweet 16.

“I didn't understand how much work goes into even getting to the Final Four, getting to the tournament, even winning the Big Ten,” said senior Deja McClendon, who as a freshman, was named most outstanding player in the Final Four. “So the next year when we didn't win the Big Ten and we lost in the Sweet 16, I was like, wow. Because the girls before us at Penn State made it look so easy.”

This year's group has made things look relatively easy in going 32-2. But it took a loss to start the Nittany Lions on the way to winning.

The watershed moment came Sept. 27 when Penn State fell 3-2 to Michigan State. Slay said the loss showed the team that it needed to close out matches when given the opportunity.

Since then, Penn State has won 23 straight, including a 3-1 victory at what Slay called “an intimidating facility” in Lincoln, Neb., where the Cornhuskers were backed by 9,000 red-clad fans. They also survived a five-set thriller with Stanford in the regional final.

Those are the experiences the Nittany Lions will lean on in Seattle.

“It's important to trust the body of work that you've built and know that you still have to compete hard,” said Slay. “Washington is a really good team … but we don't have to reinvent the light bulb. We just have to play our game and take care of our side of the court like we have all season.”

For seniors like Slay and McClendon, bookending their Penn State careers with national titles would be the ultimate achievement. But they also recognize that their duty extends beyond the present. They must ensure that the program's lofty standard — and lofty profile around University Park — is perpetuated.

“The biggest thing I learned from the girls who were seniors when I was a freshman is you create the culture of your team,” said McClendon. “We decide how hard we're going to work. And we ultimately decide how far we go.

“I think the seniors (in 2010) were trying to teach that to me … and they did a wonderful job of creating a culture that isn't satisfied. And I think that's what success is. Never being satisfied.”

Chuck Curti is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. Reach him at ccurti@tribweb.com.

Read more: http://triblive.com/sports/college/district/5264081-74/state-slay-penn#ixzz2nqCBbQ00
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A Sad Day for the Academy: The ASA Vote to Boycott Israel

Posted By Ron Radosh On December 17, 2013 @ 10:38 am In Uncategorized | 16 Comments

http://pjmedia.com

Former Black Panther party member, Angela Davis 

Yesterday, the American Studies Association voted to approve ^[1] the National Council’s resolution to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. In yesterday’s vote, 66.05% of voters endorsed the resolution, while 30.5% of voters voted no and 3.43% abstained. The relatively small 5000 member academic group is largely composed of leftist or left-leaning academics, and I am not surprised that the small amount who actually voted–1252 out of the entire membership–voted in favor.

The reason that the vote has received so much publicity is because the ASA has become the second American group to join its European counterparts in calling for such boycotts. The even smaller Association for Asian American Studies passed a similar resolution last April, without much publicity.

Yes, as many have pointed out, the vote is largely symbolic. Yet the board members who rammed the vote through without fully announcing its campaign do not seem to even slightly comprehend their hypocrisy. Scores of regimes throughout the world — including Iran, North Korea, Communist China, Castro’s Communist Cuba, Assad’s Syria, and many others — lack any rudiment of real academic freedom. Dissenting scholars are simply not hired or, if exposed by informers for the regime, are immediately fired. Yet the ASA has picked on the Middle East’s only existing democracy to protest and call for an academic boycott.

Indeed, Israel has many left-wing scholars who regularly in the press and in their academic works, especially in history and the humanities, freely criticize the government and society in which they live. Hasn’t the ASA ever heard of the group long ago dubbed “the New Historians,” whose works challenge Israel’s very legitimacy? Actually, the ASA position is even opposed by the Palestinian Authority’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas. An advisor and spokesman for Abbas, Majdi Khalidi, told the Times ^[2]: “We are neighbors with Israel, we have agreements with Israel, we recognize Israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.” It’s pretty extreme to be to the left of the very Palestinians the ASA claims to be defending. (I leave it for another time to question Khalidi’s claim that they “recognize Israel.”)

If you go to the list of supporters, directly after the report of the membership vote, you will see the second name. It is none other than the former Communist Party, U.S.A leader Angela Y. Davis. In her statement attached to her name, Davis says:

The similarities between historical Jim Crow practices and contemporary regimes of segregation in Occupied Palestine make this resolution an ethical imperative for the ASA. If we have learned the most important lesson promulgated by Dr. Martin Luther King—that justice is always indivisible—it should be clear that a mass movement in solidarity with Palestinian freedom is long overdue.

Davis also was a member of the Black Panther Party and lover of the black terrorist George Jackson, who died in a prison shootout. His younger brother Jonathan took a judge hostage and was killed in a courtroom, using guns he had taken from Davis’ home, for which she was put on trial. The Black Panther Party, which called itself Marxist-Leninist, believed that the heart of the Middle East conflict, as Stephen Norwood reports in an important new book ^[3], “was a war between heroic Palestinian guerrillas and ‘Israeli pigs.’” The BPP believed that Jews had no claims whatsoever to Palestine. Ancient Hebrews only lived there for 100 years, while the Arab Palestinians had a “continuous residence in Palestine until they were expelled by the Zionists in 1948.”

It is not surprising that in 1970, the American Jewish Committee charged ^[4] “that the activities and statements of the Black Panthers had been so consistently anti-Zionist and anti-Israel that it was almost impossible to make the distinction between that attitude and anti-Semitism.” Its minister of information at the time, Eldridge Cleaver, said in a December 1969 interview, “Zionists, wherever they may be, are our enemies. We totally support the armed struggle of the Palestinian people against the watchdogs of imperialism.”

As for Davis, she excelled in her long career as a leading defender of and apologist for all left-wing tyrannies. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Davis supported the invasion, and condemned Czech dissidents as traitors who deserved arrest and imprisonment. Her spokesman and comrade, Communist leader Charlene Mitchell, explained ^[5] that,

those who were jailed in Eastern Europe were trying to undermine their governments and that those who went into political exile were attacking their own countries and therefore undeserving of her support.

It is most revealing of the mentality of those few who voted for the ASA resolution they they come from the background of left-wing defenders of totalitarianism. Simply go down the list of comments from other signers who voted in favor, and you will quickly find that my description of where they are coming from is on target.

As for Davis’ reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., the late American civil rights leader was a forthright defender of the state of Israel, and an opponent of those who criticized it. Davis insults the memory of King by seeking to invoke him in trying to create a movement against Israel. That the ASA board, which presented the resolution, would proudly list Davis’ statement in favor of the resolution reveals its own far leftist mindset. But I shouldn’t be surprised: It turns out the ASA has “An Angela Y. Davis Award ^[6]” for “Public Scholarship!” You can’t make this stuff up, and if you did, no one would believe you.

Now we will see a demand that other professional organizations in the humanities join the ASA in seeking to call for an academic boycott of Israel. Next will be an effort to convince the members of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association to join with them. The first is largely composed of left-wing scholars, and I would not be surprised if this group — to which I used to belong but long ago quit — will join the ASA.

The ASA vote is a sad day for those who believe in academic integrity and real academic freedom.

---

Article printed from Ron Radosh: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/12/17/a-sad-day-for-the-academy-the-asa-vote-to-boycott-israel/

URLs in this post:

[1] voted to approve: http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/asa_members_vote_to_endorse_academic_boycott/

[2] Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/education/scholars-group-endorses-an-academic-boycott-of-israel.html?_r=0&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1387299660-pC6h46O6veWqJTX7mUBM1w

[3] book: http://www.amazon.com/Antisemitism-American-Left-Stephen-Norwood-ebook/dp/B00D5RJEXE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387303360&sr=1-1&keywords=Stephen+Norwood

[4] charged: http://www.jta.org/1970/02/17/archive/aj-committee-charges-black-panthers-anti-zionist-statements-close-to-anti-semitism

[5] explained: http://www.unz.org/Pub/NewPolitics-1972q1-00072

[6] An Angela Y. Davis Award: http://www.theasa.net/prizes_and_grants/awards_and_prizes/#Davis

A Manufactured Epidemic

The overdiagnosis of ADHD is " national disaster of dangerous proportions,” says one M.D. 

By Rich Lowry

http://www.nationalreview.com/

December 16, 2013

If at any time while reading this article your attention wanders, you may have ADHD. If you pause to check your e-mail sometime during the next three paragraphs, you should consult a doctor. If you fail to read this article all the way to the end, you should get on Adderall, Ritalin, or some other drug to treat your condition as soon as possible. 

This isn’t quite the standard for diagnosing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, but it’s close. The New York Times ran a long exposé on how the drug industry has stoked the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. The exposé contained a revelatory quote from Keith Conners, a doctor who has long advocated for the recognition of the disorder.

Conners called the overdiagnosis of ADHD “a national disaster of dangerous proportions,” telling the Times that the rising number of cases “is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.” This isn’t bomb-throwing from an outsider, but a critique from the namesake of the Conners ratings scale widely used to evaluate kids for ADHD. 

There is no doubt that ADHD is a legitimate neurological condition that makes kids (and those around them) miserable, that blights their potential, and that can be alleviated by prescription stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. There also is no doubt that diagnosis and treatment of the disorder has run wildly out of control on the promise of an easy pharmaceutical fix to the natural rambunctiousness of childhood.

The six-year-old boy notoriously suspended from a Colorado elementary school on charges of sexual harassment for the offense of kissing a girl’s hand summarized the matter nicely: “I just have a lot of energy! I mean six-year-olds — they have a lot of energy!” No kidding. Our increasing unwillingness to distinguish between run-of-the-mill childishness — which, by definition, is heedless and frustrating at times — and a condition requiring pharmaceutical treatment is at the root of the ADHD epidemic. 

According to the forthcoming book The ADHD Explosion, 19 percent of high-school-aged males have received a diagnosis. The numbers differ from state to state. In North Carolina, an astounding 30 percent of boys over age nine are supposedly suffering from ADHD. Overall, 6 percent of children and adolescents in the United States are on drugs to treat ADHD.

It’s a wonder more kids aren’t diagnosed with it, given the overlap between the description of the disorder and failings to which we are all prone. The New York Times points out that the American Psychiatric Association criteria for ADHD include “often has difficulty waiting his or her turn” and “makes careless mistakes,” hardly rare childhood behaviors. Lowering the bar further, drug companies sponsor online quizzes telling people they may have ADHD if they have trouble with things like “remembering appointments” or “getting things in order.” 

The drug companies — for whom ADHD is a $9 billion-a-year business — target mothers with alluring ads suggesting their children will become little angels through the wonders of risk-free stimulants. Their kids will get better grades, spend more quality time with the family, remember to take out the trash, and shower everyone around them with good cheer. Who wouldn’t want their child thus magically transformed? According to the Times report, the Food and Drug Administration has constantly rebuked the companies for going beyond the evidence in selling visions of childhood Valhalla secured through the right drug.

Undertrained primary-care physicians and worried parents default much too often to the diagnosis of ADHD and to the answer of a prescription. The next frontier is adult ADHD, with the promise of a vast new pharmaceutical market made up of people deprived of ADHD diagnoses when they were children. Some of these diagnoses will be warranted and life-changing, but others will be overreach prompted by vague and dubious symptoms, like inattentive op-ed reading. 

Sure, you got to the end of this article. But how about the next one?

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail:comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2013 King Features Syndicate

Why Christians need Flannery O'Connor

Opinion by Russell D. Moore, special to CNN

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com

December 15, 2013

(CNN) – On my Christmas list of gifts to buy my evangelical friends, there's a little book of prayers.

This is less predictable than it may seem, since the prayers aren't from a celebrity evangelical preacher, but from a morbid, quirky Catholic who spent her short life with pet peacocks and wooden-leg-stealing Bible salesman stories.

But I think Flannery O'Connor's newly published "Prayer Journal" is exactly what Christians need, maybe especially at Christmas.

The book, recently discovered in the writer's papers in Georgia and now published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reproduces the handwritten notebook prayers scribbled down by O'Connor during her years as a student at the University of Iowa.

The prayers are jarring because they are so personal and raw, clearly not written to "edify the saints" in a published manuscript. They are, well, just prayers.

Part of the rawness and authenticity of the prayers come with the way O'Connor refuses to sentimentalize her personal relationship with Jesus (thought it's clear she has one). She is here constantly aware of her own fallenness and of the seeming silence of the God to whom she pours out these little notes.

O'Connor notes that her attention is "fugitive" in prayer. She confesses that hell seems more "feasible" in her mind than heaven because, "I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God."

She is constantly second-guessing whether her prayers for success as a writer are egocentric, or a genuine striving to use the gifts God has given her.

Moreover, O'Connor is constantly aware that she is a sinner, and she can't get around that. Perhaps the most widely publicized sentence in the book is her confession that she "proved myself a glutton, for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There's nothing left to say of me."

Even when she's confessing sin, she seems aware of her sinfulness in doing that. She says of sin, "You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited," but, she immediately concludes, "perhaps that is too literary a statement; this mustn't get insincere."

O'Connor's prayers are hardly "inspirational," in the sense that many American Christians want: a model of the "victorious Christian life" where "prayer changes things" and we've got "joy, joy, joy, down in our hearts, to stay." That's why we need them.

American evangelicalism, my own tradition, rightly emphasizes the biblical truth that the gospel is good news, that our sins are forgiven in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We rightly emphasize that the believer now has a personal connection to God, accessible in prayer through the priesthood of Jesus himself.

But sometimes we forget how hard that is in this time between the times.

Some of our worship services are so clean and antiseptic, led by grinning preachers and praise bands, talking about how happy Jesus makes us, that we forget that the Spirit prompts us to "groan" at our sin and the suffering all around us (Romans 8:22-23). This is especially true at Christmas, with so many evangelicals forgoing the dark longing of Advent to go straight to the tinsel-decked rejoicing of Christmas.

Some Christians, then, can wonder if something's wrong with them when they feel as though God seems distant, or when, despite all the smiles at church, they still feel guilty for the way their hearts don't seem to match up with their hymns.

But the good news isn't that we are all put together. The good news is that though we're wrecked and fallen and freakish, Jesus loves us anyway and has made peace for us with God and with each other. That's not something we always feel. We see it by faith.

O'Connor, elsewhere in her letters, writes of what it means to agonize over one's sin, to wonder "if your confessions have been adequate and if you are compounding sin on sin." She concludes that this agony "drives some folks nuts and some folks to the Baptists," while noting, "I feel sure that it will drive me nuts and not to the Baptists."

Those of us who were "driven to the Baptists" can benefit from a book of prayers that remind us that the Christian life is exactly what Jesus promised it would be - the carrying of a cross.

We can be reminded in prayers such as these to remind ourselves that between now and resurrection we will never be, in ourselves, anything other than sinners. That's why we need a Christ.

It's only when we grapple with the darkness of a fallen cosmos, only when we're honest about the fact that all our efforts look more like Herod's throne than Bethlehem's stable, that we can sing "Joy to the World." Flannery O'Connor wasn't an evangelical Protestant, but we need her.

We need her, especially perhaps, as we pray for peace on earth, goodwill to men, for Christmas in a Christ-haunted world.

Russell D. Moore is President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns. The views expressed in this column belong to Moore alone. 

Film Review:' The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'

Can we really appreciate what's at stake if there's no risk involved?

Jackson Cuidon

http://www.christianitytoday.com

December 13, 2013

The strangest thing about Peter Jackson's first Hobbit installation, subtitled An Unexpected Journey, was that it seemed like the kind of movie someone would make 15 to 20 years before making The Lord of the Rings.

All the ingredients from LOTR were there—the CGI, the epic battle sequences, the camera work, the epic plots—but where The Lord of the Rings was mature, focused, and straightforward, An Unexpected Journey was silly, immature, and meandering. It felt like the paper of a reasonably skilled college freshman in an English 101 class: full of potential and promise, but sloppily executed.

Martin Freeman in 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'

Which makes it so much weirder that An Unexpected Journey was made almost 11 years after the first Lord of the Rings movie was released. Fans of Lord of the Rings who disliked The Hobbit weren't angry that director Peter Jackson was failing to deliver on "the potential he'd shown earlier"—the Lord of the Ringsfilms had delivered that potential.

All of this meant that expectations for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (which I'm calling Desolation for the rest of this review, both for length reasons and because it sounds cool) were, at best, confused. On the one hand, audiences were excited to see it because of course we want more Hobbit; we were, frankly, willing to take whatever small taste of Middle Earth we could get, whether or not it was as good as the first three times around.

But, on the other, the failures of An Unexpected Journey made people's guesses about how goodDesolation would be to dip sharply. I don't think anyone expected this movie to be taut, a quality the Lord of the Rings movies had in spades. Maybe the biggest achievement of the Rings movies was that (except maybe for the first one) you were never conscious that you were watching a three (three!)-hour movie.

Desolation, for better or worse, is somewhere between the Rings films and An Unexpected Journey; it's an incremental improvement, but still leans more towards the Hobbit 1 side of things than the other.

Read more:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/december-web-only/hobbit-desolation-of-smaug.html

Jihad in Wichita

Posted By Robert Spencer On December 16, 2013 @ 12:57 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Terry Lee Loewen


If an Islamic jihadist in Kansas had gotten his way, jihad would have struck again in America on Friday. Instead, Terry Lee Loewen, an avionics technician at Wichita’s Mid-Continent Airport, was arrested that morning as he tried to drive a van that he thought was full of high explosives onto the tarmac at that airport, where he was planning to trigger it, causing what he hoped would be (as he put it in a letter to his wife) “maximum carnage + death.”

Loewen wanted this to be yet another jihad mass murder attack on American soil, in which he would be, as he wrote in the same letter, “martyred in the path of Allah.” In this and other statements, Loewen made his motivations absolutely clear.

He said that he wanted to “commit an act of violent jihad on behalf of al Qaeda” against the United States, even though he himself is an American: like many other converts to Islam who turn to jihad, his conversion signaled his rejection of his nation and people as Infidel, and his loyalty given instead to the supranational Islamic umma.

Loewen also freely acknowledged that he would be classified as an Islamic “extremist”: “Let me preface the bottom line by saying I have become ‘radicalized’ in the strongest sense of the word, and I don’t feel Allah wants me any other way.”

In the same vein, he expressed frustration with Muslims who didn’t see the jihad imperative as he did: “I don’t understand how you can read the Qur’an and the sunnah of the Prophet (saw) and not understand that jihad and the implementation of Sharia is absolutely demanded of all the Muslim Ummah. I feel so guilt-ridden sometimes for knowing what’s required of me but yet doing little or nothing to make it happen. I love my Muslim brothers and sisters, whether they agree with me or not, it’s just hard to deal with the denial that some of them appear to be going through.”

Some of his statements suggested that he had come into some conflict with those “Muslim brothers and sisters”: “As time goes on I care less and less about what other people think of me, or my views on Islam. I have been studying subjects like jihad, martyrdom operations, and Sharia Law… I believe the Muslim who is labeled ‘a radical fundamentalist’ is closer to Allah … than the ones labeled ‘moderates’. Just my opinion; if I’m off base, please set me straight.”

Apparently, no one did. He continued looking for “someone who is active in jihad and could use an occasional influx of ‘help’ … I just hate the kaffar government and those who are following it to the Hellfire, and the sooner it and its followers get there, the better.”

Yet amid all these absolutely clear statements there are some curious anomalies. The Wall Street Journal reported that Terry Loewen’s adult son, Damien, “said he didn’t know about any turn toward Islam by his father.” But the Wichita Eagle, in a story on the would-be jihadi’s ex-wife, Sarah Loewen, says that “Damien told her that his dad had become a Muslim.” Is this just a reporting error by the Journal or the Eagle, or is Damien Loewen or someone else trying to cover for Terry Loewen, or for some other person?

In any case, in that Wichita Eagle story Sarah Loewen says that Terry was a gentle, happy guy, a good father who had loving parents and a normal childhood. “I would have never ever thought he would do anything this horrible,” Sarah Loewen says, and the story sheds little light on what on earth could have happened to Terry Loewen to move him to try to do this horrible thing. While his conversion to Islam is mentioned, the idea that Islamic teaching could have had something to do with his turn to violence and terror is never entertained; to think such thoughts would be the modern-day thoughtcrime known as “Islamophobia.”

Indeed, law enforcement officials seemed anxious to dispel any impression that Loewen’s attempt at mass murder and mayhem had anything remotely to do with anything genuinely Islamic. Kansas U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom said that there was “no indication that the defendant was involved or working with any member of any religious community in Wichita.”

Hussam Madi, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Wichita, confirmed this: “We don’t even know who he is at all. We haven’t seen him here. This is the first time that we’ve heard of him.” He said that he had asked around at other Wichita-area mosques and no one knew of him in the others, either – leaving the lingering unanswered question of who were the moderate “Muslim brothers and sisters” with whom Loewen had expressed frustration.

Having thus excused the local Muslim community from any connection to or responsibility for Loewen’s actions, Madi added: “We haven’t had any backlash. Hopefully, we don’t.” He thus deftly shifted the focus to the Muslim community of Wichita as potential victims of “Islamophobic” attacks, and avoided having to answer any potentially uncomfortable questions about where Loewen got his ideas about jihad.

But the larger question remains: where did Loewen get his views of Islam (“the Internet,” we’re told), and what is the relation of his understanding of Islam to what we’re told is the genuine article? Why do so many Muslims continue to misunderstand Islam in this way? What is the imam of the Wichita mosque, or any mosque, doing to make sure that no more Muslims come under the sway of this lethal understanding of Islam that he ostensibly rejects?

These questions will not be answered. Instead, the familiar obfuscation and denial is already obscuring them. The Wichita Eagle noted in an editorial Sunday that Grissom “and FBI Special Agent in Charge Mike Kaste made the important point that Loewen’s alleged actions in no way should reflect on any religious group. Too many continue to forget that those who plan or carry out terrorist acts in the name of Islam have twisted that faith to unrecognizable extremes.”

How do Grissom and Kaste know that Islamic jihadists have twisted Islam? They almost certainly don’t know that in any direct way: it is unlikely that either has ever opened a Qur’an, or taken any time to study Islam. They just know that Islam’s fundamentally peaceful nature is unquestionable government dogma.

But their assertion raises more questions than it answers. Why does Islam so easily lend itself to this kind of “twisting,” so that there are armed Islamic jihad groups waging jihad warfare in the name of Islam in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere? Why do all these armed Islamic groups claim that they are following Islam authentically? Why do they all cite the canonical sources of Islamic faith, the Qur’an and Sunnah, to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims?

And again, what are Islamic groups in Wichita or anywhere else doing to prevent their faith from being “twisted” to “unrecognizable extremes”? What programs do mosques in the U.S. have in place to keep people like Terry Loewen from misunderstanding Islam as having something to do with causing “maximum carnage” among unbelievers?

These questions cannot even be asked in today’s politically correct culture. Even to raise them would be “Islamophobic.” Because of that, one lesson is clear from Terry Loewen’s attempted mass murder: there will be more Terry Loewens.

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