The Yeshiva world reports:

“Russia’s back-in-office President Vladimir Putin can be sure that he has a steadfast supporter in Rabbi Berel Lazar, the country’s Chief Rabbi and Head Shliach.

With continued criticism against the Kremlin’s growing control and Russian Jewish leadership which doubted “Putin’s commitment to protecting Russia’s Jews,” Lazar stands out.

“There wasn’t a single thing that he was asked to do to benefit Judaism or the Jewish communities that he did not respond to positively,” Rabbi Lazar said about Putin, who has been ruling the country since 1999.

As President and Prime Minister, Putin “constantly took interest in the situation of the Jews in the country, showed care for their needs and has done a lot to eradicate anti-Semitism and returning Jewish buildings that were nationalized,” Rabbi Lazar told the Israeli haredi ‘Hamevaser.’

“We are nearing completion on a Jewish museum which will be one of the largest in the world. President Putin has contributed alot for the advancement of its building and he himself donated one paycheck of his, which led many others to donate as well,” he added.

Putin was inaugurated in lavish ceremony in the Kremlin on 7 May 2012 in front of the inner circles of the Russian establishment. Among the religious leaders attending were Rabbi Lazar and Alexander Boroda, the Chairman of the Board for the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.

“I blessed him in the name of Russian Jewry and told him that the number three in Judaism symbolizes a ‘Chazakah’ (a Halachic term for permanence),” Rabbi Lazar said.”

Comment:

So, here’s a question. If Putin is fighting anti-Semitism

and has the blessings of Russia’s Jewish community, are Chabad Lubavichers  homophobic?

I wonder if  the thick libertarians (if they really want that label, they can keep it!)  can answer the following contextual questions:

1. Is Chabad Lubavich homophobic, because it is supporting Vladimir Putin, who in turn is opposing gay evangelizing of Russian children.

OR

2. Is Vladimir Putin himself a tool of the NWO’s anti-reproduction agenda who is simply masquerading as a defender of traditionalism?

OR

3. Is the US State Dept, in attacking Putin, simply expressing its own hatred of Chabad Lubavichers and right-wing Jews?

In other words, is the enemy of the enemy of anti-Semites a friend of anti-Semites?

The Guardian:

“A former commander of the Swiss Guard, the small force of men whose job it is to protect the pope, has said there is “a network of homosexuals” within the Vatican, the latest in a series of claims about gay priests working at the heart of the Roman Catholic church.

Elmar Mäder, who was commandant of the Guard from 2002 until 2008, said his time at the heart of the Vatican had given him an insight into certain aspects of life there. “I cannot refute the claim that there is a network of homosexuals. My experiences would indicate the existence of such a thing,” he told the Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Sonntag.

Famed for their striking uniforms of blue, red and orange, recruits to the Guard swear to protect the pope and his successors with their lives.

Mäder, 50, from the canton of St Gallen, refused to comment on speculation that he had warned guardsmen about the behaviour of certain priests.

Earlier this month, the same newspaper reported the claims of a former, unnamed member of the Guard that he had been the target of more than 20 “unambiguous sexual requests” from clergy while serving in the force.

Recounting a dinner in a Rome restaurant, the man was quoted as saying: “As the spinach and steak were served, the priest said to me: ‘And you are the dessert’.”

At the time, spokesman Urs Breitenmoser said the rumoured gay network did not pose a problem to the Swiss Guard, whose members he said were motivated by entirely different interests.

Asked about the claims, Mäder reportedly said stories of this kind “obviously lacking in factual basis” were sometimes told. But the facts remained clear, he added. ”

A working environment in which the great majority of men are unmarried is per se a draw for homosexuals, whether they consciously seek it out or unconsciously follow an urge,” he said.

“The Roman Curia [the Vatican’s bureaucracy] is exactly this kind of environment.”

Though it does not condemn gay people, whom it says should be “accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity,” the catechism of the Catholic church teaches that homosexual acts are “objectively disordered” and calls gay people to abstinence.Mäder, while he said he did not have a problem with homosexuality, said he feared that a network or secret society of gay people within the Vatican could pose security problems. He added that he would not have promoted a gay man in the Guard – not because of his sexuality but because “the risk of disloyalty would have been too high”.

Mäder said: “I also learned that many homosexuals are inclined to be more loyal to each other than to other people or institutions,” he said.

“If this loyalty were to go as far as to become a network or even a kind of secret society, I would not tolerate it in my sphere of decision making. Key people in the Vatican now seem to think similarly.”

And Breitbart.com has this:

“When Pope Francis referred to a “gay lobby” in Rome, he was not necessarily just referring to Vatican prelates whose sexual peccadilloes (with men or women or both) made them vulnerable to outside blackmail (though that’s been talked about for a long time as well).

He was also likely referring to reports of a tight network of gay clerics that wields influence within the Vatican and operates largely for its own (often financial) benefit rather than for the good of the Church.

According to some Italian news sources, the extent of this network of corruption came to light during the “Vatileaks” scandal, in which Benedict XVI’s personal butler released confidential documents. The then-pontiff charged three cardinals with conducting an internal investigation, the results of which were passed directly to his successor.

Some believe that the shocking enormity of the problem contributed to Benedict’s decision to resign early this year.”

But the most important part of Pope Francis’ remarks went unremarked – his remarks about Masonic groups in the Vatican.

Daily Kos has this:

“What Pope Francis meant by “Masonic lobbies” is a decades-old conspiracy theory advanced by rightwing Catholics that “behind every Democrat, every liberal, every progressive” are secretive and cunning Masons who want to destroy the Church and rule the world.

Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, alluded to this when he declared that reports questioning Bergoglio’s role during Argentina’s military dictatorship came from “anti-clerical leftwing elements that are used to attacking the Church.”

Pope Francis’ thoughts about “Masonic lobbies” can be inferred because first, based on the interview, he considers that they are a reality, that they are a malevolent influence and that they are important enough to mention. Secondly, Francis has ties to the ultraconservative Communion and Liberation, one of the global Catholic movements which want to “return the Roman Catholic Church to its traditional role of political power.” Those who base their political and cultural ideas on “human values” rather than a belief in Jesus Christ “are considered ‘enemies of CL.’”

Bergoglio thought highly enough of CL’s founder, Fr. Luigi Giussani, that “he distributed his books at literary fairs in Argentina.” In the judgment of “a very close collaborator with Giussani,” CL bishop, Luigi Negri, “there is no question that [Masonic] values designed and conceived within a rationalistic Enlightenment mentality” are “an enemy of the Church.” Not only do Masons want the “destruction of the Church and Christian Civilization,” but also “its replacement with a culture and a society that is substantially atheistic.”

(emphasis mine)Per Negri: “Freemasonry has certainly found its strength in secrecy, in the ability to identify and assimilate the leadership of men who are unconditionally obedient to its directives, as well as its ability to influence ever-wider strata of the culture and leadership of civic and institutional life.”

…..Furthermore, “not only has Freemasonry conquered the revolutionary avant-garde in Europe and in the world but, above all, it has strongly conditioned the regimes that, arising from these Masonic-liberal revolutions, would result in the great totalitarian systems.”

….The CL bishop gives voice to the belief, strongly rooted in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of a greater “identity-orientation” – certainly a very serious and disturbing presence, now widely documented – of many Freemasons with positions of responsibility in the great totalitarian systems.

….To deal with the still-tangled knot of the more or less hidden relations between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Freemasons, we must go back to the relationship between the Church and modernity. “It is not the Church that is anti-modern, but modernity that is anti-Church,” says Bishop Negri.

This is the “Masonic lobbies” to which Francis refers: prelates who secretly embrace the ideals of Freemasonry as defined by rightwing Catholics and are a threat to the Church.”

The real debate: Do you want to be a Free-Range Libertarian?

Or do you want to be a Caged Libertarian?

Everyone must decide…..

Just a little fun at the idiotic state of public debate.

Interestingly, while Mr. Tucker thinks religious opinions about homogeneous communities are “brutal” and need to be eliminated by the kind of “shaming” and “cyber-gulag” that the state already uses (SPLC write-ups, blog death, career death etc.) , take a look at the real brutality dealt out to the rest of the world by the contraceptive imperialists:

Population control, the Kenyan perspective:

“The first birth control clinic was opened in Nairobi, the Kenyan Capital, 44 years ago. The second one opened a year later in 1956 at the Port Town of Mombasa. These two amalgamated into the Family a Planning Association of Kenya (FPAK). In 1963, FPAK was affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, thus becoming the first association in Africa south of the Sahara to join this monster which has nearly destroyed our society. Our nightmare just began.

Following publication of a report on the demographic trends by the Population Council (New York; 1968), which partly talked of still unproven adverse effects of rapid population growth on socio-economic development, the Government of Kenya was coerced to become overtly involved in birth control. Thus a young nation then bustling with enthusiasm, hope and ambition for its people who had endured the yoke of colonialism suddenly offered itself to imperialism like it had never seen before, as we will soon discover.

We were then only 7.9 million people in a vast empty country rich in resources but no people to exploit them. Believe it, we were said to be overpopulated—34 years from then we are only 23 million—in this vast still empty land.

The United States of America has used vast amounts of money over time to destroy the people of Kenya. USAID and other Non-Governmental Organizations funded mainly by the U.S. Government have targeted our people with a ruthlessness that makes one shudder. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council (a subsidiary of the Rockfeller group), Population Action International, and the United Nations through its agencies like WHO and UNFPDA have targeted Kenya for depopulation at the expense of the integral development of its people. Some examples of the stark realities living side by side with the millions of dollars for population control include:

• Our health sector is collapsed. Thousands of the Kenyan people will die of Malaria whose treatment costs a few cents, in health facilities whose stores are stalked to the roof with millions of dollars worth of pills, IUDS, Norplant, Depo-provera, most of which are supplied with American money.
• Some of these contraceptives like Depo-provera cause terrible side-effects to the poor people in Kenya, who do not even have competent medical check-ups before injection. Many are maimed for life. The hypertension, blood clots, heart failure, liver pathology and menstrual disorders cannot be treated due to the poor health services. The American Government seems to want to solve the problem of poverty by reducing the number of the poor.
• Special operation theatres fully serviced and not lacking in instruments are opened in hospitals for sterilization of women and some men. In the same hospitals, emergency surgery cannot be done for lack of basic operating instruments and supplies. Most of the women are sterilized without even knowing it is final. Some with only one child. Some are induced with financial assistance to accept sterilization. Horrified sterilized women now trot from hospital to hospital looking for reversal of the Tubal Ligation. This is breaking marriages especially when the single child or two succumb to the myriad tropical diseases—with easy treatment that is not available.
• Millions of dollars are used daily to deceive, manipulate and misinform the people through the media about the perceived good of a small family—while the infant mortality rate skyrockets. Some of this money is not used to educated people on basic hygiene, proper diet or good farming methods that would be useful development, but it appears that the aim of population controllers is to decimate the Kenyan people.
• I am a practicing gynecologist in Kenya and I would like to share with you facts about some of the patients I see daily:

A mother brought a child to me with pneumonia, but I had not penicillin to give the child. What I have in the stores are cases of contraceptives.

Malaria is epidemic in Kenya. Mothers die from this disease every day because there is no chloroquine, when instead we have huge stockpiles of contraceptives. These mothers come to me and I am helpless.

I see women coming to my clinic daily with swollen legs — the cannot climb stairs. They have been injured by Depo-provera, birth-control pills, and Norplant. I look at them and I am filled with sadness. They have been coerced into using these drugs. Nobody tells them about the side effects, and there are no drugs to treat their complications. In Kenya if you injure, you injure the whole family. Women are the center of the community. The well-being of the family depends on the well-being of the mother.

America has been a blessed country. This nation saved the world three times. During the first World War, the second World War and the Cold War. [Lila: Some would disagree here…]

The American people can still save many in the world from preventable diseases. I do not believe that Americans want their taxes used to hurt other people. Why do you not stop this money being used for contraceptives and use it instead to provide clean water, good prenatal and postnatal care, good farming methods and rural electrification. Do the American people know that the millions of dollars spent for population control are used in the ways I have described? Why does your government not deal directly with our government but instead uses a third party like IPPF, which has no respect for the values of our people and our laws? [Lila: So much for foreign aid…]

It is therefore clear, that contrary to what one is led to believe, American Aid to Kenya is not a reasonable attempt to bring about integral development, rather it is a comprehensive and highly organized campaign to kill off as many of our people as are necessary so that the U.S. and other developed countries can continue exploiting our national resources.

Therefore, for the first world to dominate the third world through contraceptive imperialism under the big stick of withholding development assistance for non-compliance makes us conclude that, not only the so-called Population Assistance to third world countries but even the “development assistance” has been tailored first to serve the interests of the richest of the rich of this world.

USAID is the single biggest supporter and promoter of population control in Kenya. The programs it funds are implemented with an aggressive and elitist ruthlessness. In Kenya the target are always the poor and the illiterate who are pressured and tricked into using dangerous drugs which are often banned in the west, or who are sterilized during childbirth without either their knowledge or consent.

You in the media, those in the White House and many in the United States Congress continue to deny these facts. We in Kenya are a people like you who are entitled to the same human rights and dignity as yourselves, but our right to live a normal human existence is ignored by globalist decision makers. If the funds you use to kill, maim, subjugate, dominate and break us to nothingness were used to cultivate our extraordinary resources, Kenya alone could feed more than half the African continent. Dear Americans, you cannot build your own security on the insecurity and degradation of others. You cannot build your own wealth on the poverty and destitution of people in the least developed nations.”

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation broadcasts false statistics to garner sympathy for its depopulation programs:

“The President’s Finding asserts no fewer than four times (pages 2, 4, 5, and 22) that “world population will double to over 11 billion by 2050.” These repeated assertions that the world’s population will double in a little over a half a century and, presumably, continue to grow after that, lend the Finding a tone of calculated urgency, if not downright stridency. And it is wrong.

The population of the world will never again double. According to all Census Bureau and United Nations median and “most probable” projections, population growth will peak in the next few decades and then begin to decline. United Nations “medium variant” projection has the population of the world peaking at 9.4 billion in the year 2050.6

In fact, according to the UN’s “low variant” population projection, which over the past decade has proven to be the most accurate of the three variants, total world population will never exceed 7.8 billion persons, and will top out between 2030 and 2040 and then sharply decline.“

Internet addiction is real, says the website yourbrainonporn.com.

Not only is prolonged use of the net inducing reversible changes in the frontal lobes of users (my physiologist mother warned me of this many years ago), it is creating long-term psychological effects whose full impact on our lives we might not yet understand.

Is the web driving us mad?

“We may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently told Scientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.”

“……In 2008 Gary Small, the head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, was the first to document changes in the brain as a result of even moderate Internet use. He rounded up 24 people, half of them experienced Web users, half of them newbies, and he passed them each through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Web users displaying fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. But the real surprise was what happened next. The novices went away for a week, and were asked to spend a total of five hours online and then return for another scan. “The naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” he later wrote, musing darkly about what might happen when we spend more time online.”

That means it’s probably a good thing for your brain to just get off the internet completely, every so often, for a good length of time.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve automatically been taking breaks.

But there’s more bad news:

“The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found “abnormal white matter”—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”

What are the changes induced? Impulsiveness is one. But there’s also been a rise in OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), up over 66% in the past decade.

“And don’t kid yourself: the gap between an “Internet addict” and John Q. Public is thin to nonexistent. One of the early flags for addiction was spending more than 38 hours a week online. By that definition, we are all addicts now, many of us by Wednesday afternoon, Tuesday if it’s a busy week.”

That throws an interesting light on last week’s brouhaha over Jeffrey Tucker’s remarks and the volley of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals and threads it spawned. I admit to having actively participated. With some regret. At the end of the week, someone had simply changed the dichotomy “brutalist-humanitarian” to “absolutist-contextualist,” as though this improved the situation much.

What was the point of the argument, I wonder, if the opposite side simply ignores the objections raised and restates the original assertion in a politer form?

It shows that no one actually listened to the critics.

And this piece suggests why.

Bloggers are simply firing away on the net for the sake of the dopamine squirt inside their heads and the high-fives of approval from their own side. No one is actually trying to have an interchange.  Blogging and commenting is – to put it crudely –  group mental masturbation.

The solution is self-evident: disconnect.

Something is not working in the model of the internet as enlightenment.

This week’s web uproar proved it: a nutty assertion coming out of nowhere. A flood of objections. A step-back. And then a reiteration of the original statement, without any acknowledgement of the validity of the criticism.

Web users, in other words, show signs of not functioning optimally.  The article suggests it’s actually much worse than that: people are suffering mental problems because of web usage:

” A recent American study based on data from adolescent Web use in the 1990s found a connection between time online and mood disorders in young adulthood. Chinese researchers have similarly found “a direct effect” between heavy Net use and the development of full-blown depression, while scholars at Case Western Reserve University correlated heavy texting and social-media use with stress, depression, and suicidal thinking.

In response to this work, an article in the journal Pediatrics noted the rise of “a new phenomenon called ‘Facebook depression,’?” and explained that “the intensity of the online world may trigger depression.” Doctors, according to the report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, should work digital usage questions into every annual checkup.”

I can second this. After a bout of intense blogging and commenting, I feel exhausted in a very unpleasant way. Not the happy exhaustion that comes from working in the garden, doing something with your hands, or writing a poem alone.  Web exhaustion is  wearisome and frustrating. It gives you a sense of having wasted precious time and lost touch with reality:

“Children describe mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not there at all. “Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,” she told the American Psychological Association last summer. “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.” She added, “Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.”

Teenagers, whose brains are still being formed, have it worst:

“”With consent of the subjects, Missouri State University tracked the real-time Web habits of 216 kids, 30 percent of whom showed signs of depression. The results, published last month, found that the depressed kids were the most intense Web users, chewing up more hours of email, chat, videogames, and file sharing.”

One student thought of his life as “just another window” he kept open. With that attitude, it’s a wonder that more don’t feel like shutting down the window.

“Recently, scholars have begun to suggest that our digitized world may support even more extreme forms of mental illness. At Stanford, Dr. Aboujaoude is studying whether some digital selves should be counted as a legitimate, pathological “alter of sorts,” like the alter egos documented in cases of multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder in the DSM). To test his idea, he gave one of his patients, Richard, a mild-mannered human-resources executive with a ruthless Web poker habit, the official test for multiple personality disorder. The result was startling. He scored as high as patient zero. “I might as well have been … administering the questionnaire to Sybil Dorsett!” Aboujaoude writes.”

Compellingly, researchers have suggested that life on the Internet mimics life in a city – a big city, like New York.  We all know that big-city living is far more stressful than living in a small town, where people are familiar. Then, imagine the stress of living in a city so big it encompasses the whole globe, stays awake 24 hours a day, non-stop, and lets you wander into hundreds of avenues and by-lanes, simultaneously, with everything in them from pawn-shops to libraries to bungee-jumping, cruises, serial-killer documentaries, historical novels, war movies, and ancient metaphysical texts.

Wouldn’t such a city simply overwhelm you and burn you out?

“The Gold brothers—Joel, a psychiatrist at New York University, and Ian, a philosopher and psychiatrist at McGill University—are investigating technology’s potential to sever people’s ties with reality, fueling hallucinations, delusions, and genuine psychosis, much as it seemed to do in the case of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind “Kony 2012.” The idea is that online life is akin to life in the biggest city, stitched and sutured together by cables and modems, but no less mentally real—and taxing—than New York or Hong Kong. “The data clearly support the view that someone who lives in a big city is at higher risk of psychosis than someone in a small town,” Ian Gold writes via email. “If the Internet is a kind of imaginary city,” he continues. “It might have some of the same psychological impact.”

Crisis Magazine:

” You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else—not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature—not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

Gays versus homosexuals::

“Unmasking militant gays, however, has nothing to do with sexuality, much less with an irrational fear of homosexuals (the true meaning of “homophobia”). On the contrary, if History teaches us something, it is that whenever gays take political control of a country, non-militant homosexuals are the first ones who end up interned in concentration camps. It happened in Nazi Germany, it happened in Castro’s Cuba, it was attempted in Japan,[29] and it will happen here in America if pro-NWO, militant gays are allowed to grab power.

Help your brainwashed homosexual friends to liberate themselves from the gay mental straitjacket. Tell them who their true enemy is.”

Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer, published last year in June, a review of the evidence in favor of  intelligence design, was a smash hit.

Then it was at once  savaged by the intellectual establishment.

But the book, which exposes the holes in the dogmas of the evolutionary establishment, has put the recent l GORILLA-GOD dichotomy in libertarian theory (also known as the brutalist-humanitarian, thin-thick, absolutist-contextualist pseudo-debate) into the proper Sunsteinian context.

[Cass Sunstein, termed Obama’s Information Czar, authored books and papers advocating that groups of anti-government conspiracy theorists be infiltrated to diffuse the most extremist of them with misinformation and division.]

“Darwin’s Doubt” also brought the real gazillion pound gorilla in the room, GOD, into the context.

Now, it becomes easier to understand what was behind the puzzling effort to intimidate  traditionalist voices in the political debate –  the recent attack by the former Mises Institute vice-president on so-called “brutalists.”

Could it be that the cracks opening up in the materialist intellectual establishment are sending reverberations elsewhere?

Science is increasingly undermining the materialist perspective and the accompanying scientistic (as opposed to scientific)  perspective of the social- sciences. This scares some members of the left, whose grip over the intellectual establishment has always relied on its being regarded uncritically as the party of science.

But books like “Darwin’s Doubt” and  new discoveries in particle physics suggest that science is not leftist.

The public debate is changing….and God is no longer the provenance of hicks and charlatans.

God is the context denied both by the absolutists of the evolutionary establishment and the absolutist  neo-Jacobins of the humanitarian-interventionist establishment.

It is that humanitarian-interventionist establishment that Sunstein represents. And it is from its partisans that infiltrators are drawn to muddy and dilute any exposure of the government’s own conspiracies.

That might explain why certain people have gone on a counter-offensive, culminating in the Brutalist trope ..a trope that was received with a tidal wave of derision that apparently has had no effect on the author(s). They’ve simply reiterated their assertions more cleverly, but with the same unwarranted self-righteousness.

This parallels the modus operandi of the leftist reviewers of  “Darwin’s Doubt,” most of whom didn’t actually address any of the arguments made in the book…..but simply launched into ad hominems:

Evolutionnews.org:

“……. you might expect that if your own incivility was the cause of someone’s turning away from a viewpoint you want to advance, then you’d try to win them back by being civil and making a respectful, strictly fact-based appeal. If so, then you’re not Nick Matzke. That’s not how Darwin-defenders think. When confronted with the reality that their style of argument is actually turning people off, Darwin lobbyists often double-down on the nasty rhetoric, evidently thinking the problem was that they weren’t harsh enough to begin with. Thus Matzke wrote in response to Miller:

“If one is already familiar with the science, it’s pretty annoying to see someone like Meyer come in, do a totally hack job which misunderstands or leaves out most of the key data, statistical methods, etc., and then declare that the whole field is bogus. That’s why critics are annoyed. And, it’s annoying to see other conservative evangelicals blindly follow in his footsteps. Sometimes I think an intelligent design person could say that the idea that the moon is made of rock is a Darwinist conspiracy, and you guys would believe him.

So ID proponents are conspiracy theorists who might say the moon isn’t made of rock? And Pastor Miller follows those crazy people? Nick Matzke must think that the best way to bring people over to your side is by demonizing and bullying them –– the more, the better.

Pastor Miller had a fitting response:

“Actually, Nick, I read Meyer, and you’re misrepresenting him through flippant rhetoric rather than simply engaging the facts. You and I both know that he didn’t “declare that the whole field is bogus.” And your insistence on mischaracterizing his work is a sign that you’re not confident that the facts alone discredit him. As opposed to folly, following the motives and methods of debaters gives you real psychological insight on what they’re trying to accomplish, and the scientific enterprise has always prided itself on its objectivity, something we haven’t seen from you.

I have the sense that you are actually a brilliant mind. Balance it with character and humility and you’ll have far more credibility. I personally would be glad to hear what you have to say if I didn’t have to wade through the disrespect.”

This recalls the old saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts aren’t on your side, pound the table.” People know this intuitively. Pastor Miller was discerning enough to see how Nick Matzke’s disrespect and table-pounding showed that Matzke’s viewpoint has a problem with the facts.”

Ann Williamson at LRC blog gives fascinating insight into the situation in Ukraine, explaining how the Bolsheviki in the US State Dept. overplayed their hand in Russia’s historical backyard, why Germany can exit the EU with little loss and isn’t  likely to play along with the neo-con’s fervent desire to resurrect the Cold War, and how Putin can continue to outfox the Bolsheviks by building up the Eurasian zone of former Soviet republics into a true, unhampered, decentralized trade-zone that would end fears of Russian expansionism in the neighboring republics:

“Interestingly, the Financial Times reported that the City’s skittishness in the wake of John Kerry’s idiotic ultimatum to Putin to renounce in advance the results of the referendum in Crimea put ‘half a dozen live deals to fund some of Russia’s biggest companies” in limbo.”  But the FT article highlighted one deal that was not put in limbo: “South Stream announced that it had signed a contract worth about EUR2 billion with Saipem of Italy to build the offshore stretch of the route under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. Construction is scheduled to start in June.”

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller has been quoted as saying that the two projects in combination with the already-existing Belorussian “Beltansgaz” pipe would turn Ukraine’s network of gas pipelines and biggest strategic asset into “scrap.”

In other words, Germany’s verbal support for the west’s initiatives costs Germany exactly nothing.  Any actions beyond the symbolic would cost Germany. Therefore, there will be no EU sanctions of consequence.  Even were Germany on side for a US-decreed suicide mission, twenty-eight nations’ governments are not going to agree to economic policies that will take the cost out of their own hides. In other words, no State Department neo-con princess is going to ‘’F**k the EU.”

With the Nord and South stream projects in hand, Germany, which has prospered mightily from the euro, but whose taxpayers are weary of bankrolling the sinking Mediterranean countries’ loans made by the prosperous north’s banks, has positioned itself remarkably well; in an EU financial pile-up, exiting the EU wouldn’t amount to much more than a fender bender.

Now that west has adopted Bolshevik political tools, the Russians ought to keep turning the tables and counter with what the west advocates only with words, i.e. freedom and economic competition.

An EAU based on free trade in which there are no tariffs, no quotas, and no favoritism by or for any member and which allowed for associate members would put the Soviet boogieman back in the closet.  A free trade pact would allow Russia and the former republics to reap the benefits of the spontaneous order that the world’s people are building daily on the internet without any state’s direction or even much of an awareness of what they are doing.”

Humanitarians from “advanced civilization”  using peaceful “non-coercive,” beautiful, elevating, spiritual, non-brutalist tactics – FEMEN (radical feminist group, probably trained by CIA) in action:

Brutalists from “backward” traditionalist culture, voicing degrading, primitive, oppressive hierarchical  values, according to a leading CATHOLIC scholar and so-called LIBERTARIAN: