Cassy Fiano has an excellent – though depressing – article which discusses the dismay some feminist women have over the fact that their daughters, raised according to feminist ideology, are turning out to be sexually submissive to the wishes of men (in olden days, we would say they were being sluts, but we try to be polite). The feminist mothers are shocked and angered – they really don’t understand how this could happen.

To which all of us who are not feminists – and, more broadly, not liberals – answer: Ummm…they’re just doing what you told them to do. In a world where there is no censorship of what is broadcast on radio and television; in a world where sexual overtones in advertisement to children is pervasive; in a world where kids at ever younger ages are taught the mechanics of the most absurd sexual practices, this is what you’re going to get…kids just having sex without much concern. As is the case of all children rising to adulthood, they are what we made them.

Now, once in to adulthood, things might change – at least some of these poor girls will wake up to what has been done to them and change their lives. But as they go from about 12 to 20, they are really just whatever we tell them to be. If the daughters of feminism are sluts, it is because their mothers and society as a whole instructed them that being a slut is the right thing to do. We taught them that their bodies and their urges were the most important things in their lives – we have enslaved them to their physical bodies and their lusts.

And now, like good little slaves, they put out to their Master whatever is demanded. That some boys and men are taking advantage of this is no surprise – because they, too, have been enslaved. It just works out to the greater advantage (in the very short term sense) for men because it allows them to sample a wide variety of sexual experiences without having to commit to anything. What Hefner dreamed in the 50’s has become a reality today.

If the truth shall set you free (and it shall) then it is, naturally, the lie which will enslave you. A lie was broadcast – starting very early in the 20th century but not really catching on until the late 50’s – that sex was just a thing to do; a physical act of no particular moral importance. This lie was embroidered endlessly – that a healthy person needed a regular dose of sexual activity; that sexual fantasies were mentally healthy; that any sort of sexual release was as licit as any other; that masturbation is not just acceptable, but commendable; etc, etc, etc. The lie has become fastened tightly upon us – to the point, now, where even the barriers against sexual activity for children are being taken down (and I mean children – like 12 year olds, and you can bet that it’ll soon be even younger).

We have to recover the truth – because only by truth can we be freed from slavery. Our bodies are not our most important possession. Sexual activity is not necessary for a healthy, happy life. Sex must be confined only to the bonds of matrimony. Children must not engage in sexual activity – these a host of other truths about sex must be restored, because if we don’t then we will destroy ourselves. A riot of sexuality leads inevitably to social decay – we can already see it around us in divorce rates, illegitimacy rates, rampant pornography, declining birth rates, etc. We keep on this path, and we’ll just die out.

Needless to say, the riot of sexuality will have to fall to the restoration of Judeo-Christian truth about matters sexual. The Christian conception of sex as a sacred union; the concept that women are to be held in awed respect as mothers of children (as opposed to mere conveniences for male sexual appetites); the understanding that love is not best expressed in sexual activity but in faithful devotion. The lie has enslaved us, the truth will set us free – but have we the courage to both see the truth and act upon it? Or has the rot gone so far that we’re now afraid to even fight against slavery?

Time will tell – but I am hopeful, as always.

UPDATE: The over-sexualization of our culture as a by-product of feminism. And, yes, once again the feminists are all shocked and sad about this.

A former bank regulator – William Black – makes the accusation; from Mish’s:

AAron Task: Should we be surprise there are not more bank failures?

William Black: Not Surprised,we should be upset there are not more bank failures. The industry has used its political muscle to get Congress to extort the financial accounting standards board to gimmick the accounting rules so that banks do not have to recognize their losses.

Aarron Task: In practical terms, what does the gutting of that rule mean for the banks?

William Black: Capital is defined as assets minus liabilities. If I get to keep my assets at inflated bubble values that have nothing to do with their real value, then my reported capital will be greatly inflated. When I am insolvent I still report that I have lots of capital.

Aaron Task: You are saying the FDIC is intentionally keeping foreclosures down because it knows it does not have enough money to pay off depositors who are insured by the FDIC?

William Black: That is correct and that is going to make ultimate losses grow. It also means we are following a Japanese type strategy of hiding the losses and we know what that produces – a lost decade, which is now two lost decades. Your listeners and viewers if they are stock types, look at the Nikkei. It lost 75% in nominal terms and has stayed that way for 20 years. I real terms it lost 85% of its value. This is a really stupid strategy. And it’s ours…

This is what I’ve suspected all along – but even so, there is no actual proof of it. But 109 banks have failed in 2010 and we’re on track for many more failures than we had in 2009. Furthermore, it is known that FDIC is out of money.

This “extend and pretend” tactic allows FDIC to not go running to Congress for a bail out, which would be politically horrific just in front of the mid-terms. It also lulls less informed investors in to thinking that our financial system is sound, thus helping to keep stock prices up. Finally, it allows Barack Obama and his Democrats to pretend we’re not in a Depression.

But it can’t be sustained – eventually, the books do have to balance. Tomorrow; next week, next month; next year…one of these days, the complete collapse will arrive and it will be far worse than it had to be because we allowed banksters, bureaucrats and grafting politicians to pull this nonsense.

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/main.swf

UPDATE: Reviewing the video, I have this to add – Albion does not need to reinvent itself; it needs to start making the things it used to make. Whatever it was which caused the factories to shut down needs to be undone. I don’t like the idea of a town or region trying to be something it didn’t organically become – it smacks too much of grafting politicians who want to turn hard working down town areas in to gentrified, yuppie enclaves…all with kickbacks from the developers who, of course, are given the property of poor people to build on.

What we need to do is get back to work – and to do that, we need to get rid of all the things we’ve placed in the way of doing just that.

From Fox News:

While a majority of American voters think the Muslim group that wants to put a mosque near ground zero has the right to build it there, most think it would be wrong to do so.

A Fox News poll released Friday found that 61 percent of voters think the Muslim group has the right to build a mosque in lower Manhattan.

However, 64 percent think it would be wrong to put a mosque there…

Which is exactly correct in both instances – under our system of government, you don’t just stop someone from building a house of worship “just because”…but in this case, the place should not be built just because it is being built by Moslems.

This is, in a very real sense, unfair – not all Moslems are terrorists and most people who will do business in the mosque will be inoffensive people. But while it is unfair to single out Islam like this, it must be singled out and denied the ability to build the Mosque.

The reason for holding this view is merely from an understanding of why it is being built in that particular spot – denials aside, the purpose of building it is to celebrate the 19 Moslems who murdered 3,000 Americans. It is to celebrate the great Islamist victory over the United States. It is to plant the flag of Islam and have New York City forever more considered by the Islamists as part of the Moslem world. If 9/11 was a gigantic slap in America’s face, this mosque is an act of spitting in it.

At some future date, once Islam becomes fully civilized and allows a Christian Church to be built in Mecca, we can revisit this issue and be far less concerned about where a mosque is to be built. Until that happy, future time, however, we must be stern – Islam is a conquering, intolerant and uncivilized religion and our treatment of it cannot necessarily track with our normal treatment of religion. An exception must be made – the mosque must not be built.

There are mechanisms in the US Constitution which can ensure that this mosque does not get built – perhaps by framing a law where a new house of worship cannot be built within two miles or so of a national monument (it would be sufficient to just measure out how far this mosque will be from the 9/11 memorial and then add an inch to the exclusion zone). However we do it, it must be done – until Islam changes, we have to deal with it as it is, not as we might wish it to be.

UPDATE: Obama was lauded for backing the Mosque…now someone in the political shop has pointed out that this is akin to being in favor of clubbing baby seals to death: might appeal to a narrow constituency, doesn’t play well with most people. So, Obama is now backtracking.

Change we can believe in:

President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians…

The whole “transparency” thing was never more than a dodge, anyway – but it is still very revealing that Obama is not even pretending anymore. The arrogance of power seems to have completely over taken him. It might be that he really doesn’t understand just how unpopular he has become – convinced of his own righteousness, he’s just going to blunder ahead to complete destruction.

Over the past few days I did a bit of driving around. The Mrs wanted to pick up some things at some pretty widely separated locations – so, off on the road we went. First down to Los Angeles, then turning around and up to St George, Utah. It was an instructive trip on the state of our nation.

Los Angeles was dirtier than I remember. I hadn’t been there in a couple years. The roads – including Interstate 10 – were in bad shape. The streets of the city were filthy. Graffiti, which has always been bad in Los Angeles, is much worse and has spread to outlying areas. It appears that no one is even making an attempt at cleaning it up. Lots of empty store fronts. Our particular destination in Los Angeles was the shopping district known as Santee Alley.

Santee Alley, for those who have never been, has always been a rather flea market sort of place – just about everything for sale at rock bottom prices. It, at least, seems to have been recently refurbished – but also just as swiftly allowed to become quite dirty. There were far fewer vendors than a I recall – and whereas you once could barely move in the alley, it was at best only about half filled with shoppers.

It is almost entirely immigrants who make up the store owners – and I only qualify that on the theory there may be a native-born American running a store there, but I’ve never seen one. Hard working and trying to get ahead, these are the good people we want in our nation. In spite of all the hoopla about Arizona’s immigration law, I only saw one sign advocating a boycott of Arizona – and it wasn’t in the Alley, proper, but in one of the higher-end stores on the main street…I suspect that in there I might find an American-born proprietor.

But one could not help but notice the lack of spirit – the fact that things are far from well. As I said, the place was quite dirty – and not just the sort of dirt one is used to in a large city, but the sort of dirt which accumulates when the people running the place simply don’t care that some of their citizens are wallowing in squalor. The place was also quite worn down – outside of the recently refurbished Alley, the streets and sidewalks are crumbling.

I was witnessing the death of a city – and the death of a State. An American city is becoming a Third World backwater. A place where the poor attempt to scratch out an ever more difficult living, while everyone who can leave has already left. California is bankrupt – and the little people are being left behind in a crumbling, filthy sewer…of course, the governing class is still taking care of itself, as we can see in the intense fights the public sector unions are putting up against any attempt to bring economic sense to government.

Ah, but isn’t this all just the economy? You know – things are bad all around and so its bound to get a bit worn down. It isn’t indifference – its just the hard reality. But then I drove to St George, Utah.

The first thing you notice when you get to St George is that its all very clean. Even the construction sites are tidy. Vacant lots are not left to become overgrown, but are carefully cleared and kept in order. No graffiti. The streets and sidewalks are in good repair – and the whole place exudes the sense that those who live there have secured for themselves a government which figures its job is to make life as good as possible for the people.

Over in Los Angeles, you’ve got departments for Aging, Housing, Cultural Affairs, El Pueblo (whatever that is, exactly), Disability, Environmental Affairs, Information Technology, Neighborhood Empowerment, Community Development, Community Re-Development (in case Development doesn’t work out, I guess), Cultural Affairs…none of which, I guess, can be spared to provide some money to clean up graffiti and repair the side walks. Meanwhile, St George seems to get by with far fewer departments – but the sidewalks are in good shape, and the city is tidy as a parade ground.

Of course, Los Angeles is a lot bigger than St George – but it also, then, has vastly more people to do actual work, as well as far more funds for getting the work done. Running a city – or, indeed, any government – isn’t rocket science. All it takes is a reasonable degree of public involvement and this creates the sort of political class who will sit down and decide that its time to get those sidewalks fixed…in Los Angeles, you have public apathy leading to an entrenched class of political looters who see no upside in actually taking care of the city.

To fix what is wrong with America will take direct action on the part of the American people to clear out the current Ruling Class. The people who have run Los Angeles, California and, to a large extent, America in to the ground must be replaced by the sort of people who have kept St George in good shape even in a down economy. Our first step in this task comes in November – but it is only a first step. From top to bottom, government must be overturned – the corrupt Ruling Class must give way to new men and women who will do the right thing, and they must in their turn be watched by an aroused people, who will not let things slip again.

I was depressed by what I saw in Los Angeles (as I have been by what I’ve seen increasingly in Las Vegas which mirrors Los Angeles’ destruction), but encouraged by what I saw in St George. We can fix this – we can restore our nation. All we have to do is make the effort.

If you’re going to be a fanatic, I guess you might as well go all the way:

…He doesn’t even want his ruling — which ignores Supreme Court precedent and imposes gay marriage against the expressed wishes of the electorate — appealed to the Ninth Circuit. Walker feels that only the state politicians who were against Proposition 8 have standing to appeal, while the over 7 million California voters who supported Proposition 8 shouldn’t be able to even present their position to a higher court. It’s outrageous. The people are supposed to be sovereign, not the politicians. This stay order will be appealed to the Ninth Circuit and if necessary to Justice Anthony Kennedy, and I think it is a tactical mistake on Judge Walker’s part to display his injudicious zeal — once again — before Kennedy’s eyes.

It seems that Walker prefers to be the hero of the gay rights movement to being a judge – it is the only way to read this: he wants gay marriage and is determined to impose it on his own hook. He doesn’t care about the risk of over-turn on appeal – he’s got his fame among his ideological friends, and that is what he values more than anything else.

While the 9th circuit will probably flub its task – staying Walker’s ruling is the only rational course of action – it does seem that the Supreme Court, even if it wants to impose gay marriage, will not be pleased at the way Walker is going about his business.

UPDATE: How Glenn Beck gets it wrong on gay marriage.

UPDATE II: From Time, of all places – Walker might have sabotaged his own agenda:

And to add another twist, at least one constitutional-law scholar in California is suggesting that by trumpeting the issue of standing, Walker has opened a hornet’s nest he may have been better off leaving undisturbed. “If the proponents don’t have standing to appeal, then it’s entirely plausible that the courts will rule that they did not properly have standing to go to trial,” Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, told TIME Thursday evening. “This is an issue he glossed over when he allowed them to intervene in the trial.”

Amar says that if the Ninth Circuit agrees with Walker that the proponents don’t have standing to appeal, the judges may well decide they shouldn’t have been allowed to intervene in the case at all. If they do, he says, they could decide to vacate the trial entirely, sending it back to Walker to start over. The governor and attorney general would be unlikely to intervene — but on the other hand, come November, voters will choose new candidates for both of those offices…

It was flat out wrong for CA AG Brown to not go in to the case – for that, alone, he should have been removed from office in California (if you’re AG, you defend the laws – even if you don’t like them. Period.). Walker wanted a “legal” ruling so he allowed standing to a group of people, and then said they didn’t have standing because he knows darned well his ruling will be over turned on appeal…but if they don’t have standing now, then they didn’t have standing then. Can’t have it both ways, “judge”.

This just points out even more strongly the nature of this trial and ruling – what was wanted was a certain ruling, and Walker was determined to get it. Impeachment is a necessity – simply to defend the judicial system of the United States.

From the AP:

The $700 billion U.S. bailout program launched in response to the global economic meltdown had a far greater impact overseas than other countries’ financial rescue plans did on the U.S., according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.

Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department’s program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday…

Bail outs are never a good idea – and this is just a strong bit of proof of that. They never work as intended and will always benefit groups and institutions no one in their right mind would intend to benefit.

It was bad enough that we even did the bail outs, but if we had a government run by people with any sense at all – even if not enough sense to understand that bail outs are stupid – then we would have at least ensured that every penny went to Americans, alone. But that wasn’t the point – what was intended was a vast sum of money to be expended by Democrats to secure power and wealth for themselves – and that is precisely what we got – all that we got, and all we ever would get, while they are in charge.

November is coming!

Rep. Paul Ryan, on the scene of the melt down, reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, tells National Review Online that Democrats are entering a “panic mode” as November approaches. “They are beginning to get a little unhinged,” Ryan says.

“The Left sees their agenda being rebuked by the voters this fall,” Ryan tells us. As their electoral worries mount, he says, Democrats are scurrying to “nullify any notion that there is an alternative path for America. They want to delegitimize an alternative plan and win the argument by default, making the case that there is no other path for America than what progressives have mapped out for the country, and that any other talk, of any other idea, is just fanciful.”

“That’s what’s troubling,” Ryan says. “They are trying to deny the debate that must happen if we are going to get out of the mess that we’re in.”…

The dream of decades is dying – they thought that McGovern would do it; but he lost. They thought that Carter might pull it off; but he was defeated for re-election. They thought that Clinton would ram it on through; but he betrayed them and tacked to the center to ensure his own political survival. Now comes Obama – and the left was sure they had it in the bag.

And to a certain extent, they did – a hard left ideologue was elected along with a Congress led by the furthest left part of the Democrat party. And President and Congress did start to work – but then something happened the left never expected: the people immediately reacted against it. And then it just got worse and worse – the people started to spontaneously organize and began to exert populist pressure on the GOP to shift towards the people. Capping it all off, the liberal prescription for the economy – which all liberals were convinced would work – crashed and burned.

Now they are facing a complete rejection – not just the normal mid-term losses, but the risk of the sort of losses you spend 20 years recovering from. 20 years in which, of course, the other side can repeal and replace everything you’ve done. Faced with this stark fact, they are getting in a panic – not knowing what to do, they are running around trying one expedient after another to survive.

It won’t work – its too late in the game…

Matching his worst poll result to date:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-six percent (46%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22…

And an overall total of 56% disapprove of the President’s job performance – small wonder Obama is going to be scarce on the campaign trail this fall.