Is Your 50-50 Relationship Ruining Your Marriage? - By Suzanne Venker

Despite the gains women have made economically, most don’t want to be providers and protectors. And men don’t want to be dependent on their wives.

Attitudes may have changed since the days husbands brought home the bacon and wives stayed home with the kids. But according to new research, deviating from conventional gender roles makes both men and women miserable. Despite the gains women have made economically, most don’t want to be providers and protectors. And men don’t want to be dependent on their wives.

Researchers Karen Kramer and Sunjin Pak at the University of Illinois examined data on nearly 1,500 men and 1,800 women between the ages of 52 and 60 and found that the more women’s paychecks increased, the more women reported symptoms of depression. But the opposite effect was found in men: their psychological well-being was highest when they were the primary wage-earners.

“The results supported the overarching hypothesis: well-being was lower for mothers and fathers who violated gendered expectations about the division of paid labor, and higher for parents who conformed to these expectations,” said Kramer.

This was true even for couples who took a more egalitarian view of gender roles. Modern views notwithstanding, men’s health took a hit when their earnings shrank, suggesting the traditional role of primary earner is still very important to men.

Pretending Sex Interchangeability Makes People Unhappy

The cultural answer to such findings is always the same: societal expectations regarding gender roles have been too slow to evolve. If it were considered acceptable for men to take care of the kids while women brought home the paycheck, there would be no issue. Thus, no depression.

Americans are forever being told that gender equality— defined today not as equal opportunity for women but as male and female interchangeability—is the road to a happy, fulfilled life. But study after study after study after study proves otherwise.

“Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose,” concedes Meghan O’Rourke at Slate. “Progressive married women—who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that [Betty] Freidan lobbied for—are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed.”

So why is that? Why do women feel depressed as breadwinners while men in the same role feel empowered? Why do women not suffer mentally by leaving their jobs to become at-home mothers while men who take on that same role do? The answer isn’t rocket science. But nor is it politically correct. Hence it goes unsaid.

Here’s the Truth We’re Afraid to Say

Men and women are not the same; thus, they are not interchangeable. A man’s identity, or self-worth, is inextricably linked to his job—a woman’s is linked to her children. That this does not hold true for every woman and every man doesn’t change the fact that what drives most women is different from what drives most men. They may both be capable of being breadwinners and full-time parents, but that doesn’t mean they want to perform these tasks with equal fervor. And it doesn’t mean they’ll be happy if they do.

Childbirth changes everything. It becomes a woman’s unparalleled accomplishment. Her first instinct is to provide for that child physically and emotionally. A man’s first instinct is to protect and to provide for that child. That’s his unparalleled accomplishment. Thus, it is natural for a woman to want to depend on her man to take care of financial matters. It is not natural for a man to depend on a woman in this way.

Social expectations, in other words, are not the culprit. Human nature is the culprit.

That’s not to say no married couple can successfully navigate a role reversal. It is only to say that it’s rare. Even today, approximately 30 percent of married women with children choose not to be employed, and in families where both parents are employed, “70% consist of fathers who earn more than mothers.”

This approach to marriage swims with the tide, rather than against it. That is why couples who embrace tradition tend to be happier. They even have better sex! Anytime we do something that’s natural, we’re going to have an easier time of time of it. Conversely, when we try to hold back the mountain, or fit a square peg into a round hole, we’re going to be miserable.

The larger question is this: Now that women are positioning themselves to become the dominant sex, how can they ever hope to be happy?

Suzanne Venker is an author and cultural critic who writes about relationships, marriage and work-family issues. She has been married to her husband for 18 years, and they have two children. Her fifth book, "The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: How Love Works," will be published in February 2017. Her website is www.suzannevenker.com.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/09/28/50-50-relationship-ruining-marriage/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=79d654a9fb-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-79d654a9fb-83795033

Vietnam Déjà Vu - By Eric Margolis

Much of America, including yours truly, has been watching the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, ‘Vietnam.’  Instead of clarifying that confusing conflict, the series has ignited fiery controversy and a lot of long-repressed anger by soft-soaping Washington’s motives.

This march to folly in Vietnam is particularly painful for me since I enlisted in the US army at the height of the war.  Gripped by youthful patriotism, I strongly supported the war.  In fact, the TV series even showed a pro-war march down New York’s Fifth Avenue that I had joined.  Talk about déjà vu.

At the time, 1967, the Cold War was at full force.  We really believed that if the US did not make a stand in Vietnam the Soviets and Chinese would overrun all of South Asia.

No one in Washington seemed to know that China and the Soviet Union had split and become bitter enemies.  As ever, our foreign human intelligence was lousy. We didn’t understand that Vietnam deserved independence after a century of French colonialism.  Or that what happened in Vietnam was of little importance to the rest of the world.

Three American presidents blundered into this war or prolonged it, then could not back out lest they lose face and risk humiliation.  I don’t for a moment believe that the ‘saintly’ President John Kennedy planned to end the war but was assassinated by dark, rightwing forces, as is claimed.  This is a charming legend.  Richard Nixon, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all feared that a withdrawal from Vietnam would lose them the next election.   Republicans were still snarling over ‘who lost China’. American Raj: America ...Eric MargolisBest Price: $14.93Buy New $85.26(as of 01:54 EDT - Details)

The current 17-year old US war in Afghanistan has uncanny resemblances to the Vietnam War.  In Kabul and Saigon, the US installed puppet governments that command no loyalty except from minority groups. They were steeped in drugs and corruption, and kept in power by intensive use of American air power.   As in Vietnam, the US military and civilian effort in Afghanistan is led by a toxic mixture of deep ignorance and imperial arrogance.

The US military understands it has long ago lost the Afghan War but cannot bear the humiliation of admitting it was defeated by lightly-armed mountain tribesmen fighting for their independence.  In Vietnam, Washington could not admit that young Vietnamese guerillas and regulars had bested the US armed forces thanks to their indomitable courage and intelligent tactics. No one outside Vietnam cared about the 2-3 million civilians killed in the conflict.

Unfortunately, the PBS program fails to convey this imperial arrogance and the ignorance that impelled Washington into the war – the same foolhardy behavior that sent US forces into Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps may do so in a second Korean War.  The imperial spirit still burns hot in Washington among those who don’t know or understand the outside world.  The lessons of all these past conflicts have been forgotten:  Washington’s collective memory is only three years long.

Vietnam was not a ‘tragedy,’ as the PBS series asserts, but the product of imperial geopolitics.  The same holds true for today’s Mideast wars.   To paraphrase a famous slogan from Vietnam, we destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to make them safe for ‘freedom.’

One of the craziest things about the Vietnam War has rarely been acknowledged:  even at peak deployment, the 550,000 US soldiers in Vietnam were outnumbered by North Vietnamese fighting units.

That’s because the huge US military had only about 50,000 real combat troops in the field. The other half million were support troops performing logistical and administrative functions behind the lines:  a vast army of typists, cooks, truck drivers, psychologists, and pizza-makers.

Too much tail to teeth, as the army calls it. For Thanksgiving, everyone got turkey dinner with cranberry sauce, choppered into the remotest outposts. But there were simply not enough riflemen to take on the Viet Cong and tough North Vietnamese Army whose Soviet M1954 130mm howitzer with a 27 km range were far superior to the US Army’s outdated WWII artillery.

Poor generalship, mediocre officers, and lack of discipline ensured that the US war effort in Vietnam would become and remain a mess.  Stupid, pointless attacks against heavily defended hills inflicted huge casualties on US troops and eroded morale.

The monumentally stupid war mismanagement of Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, a know-it-all who knew nothing, turned the war into a macabre joke.  This was the dumbest command decision since Louis XV put his girlfriend Madame de Pompadour in charge of his armies.

We soldiers, both in Vietnam and Stateside, scorned the war and mocked our officers. It didn’t help that much of the US force in ‘Nam’ were often stoned and rebellious.

The January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive put the kibosh on US plans to pursue the war – and even take it into south-west China.  Tet was a military victory of sorts for the US (and why not, with thousands of warplanes and B-52 heavy bombers) but a huge political/psychological victory for the Communists in spite of their heavy losses. War at the Top of the ...Eric Margolis, Eric S....Best Price: $1.99Buy New $22.99(as of 06:30 EDT - Details)

I vividly recall standing with a group of GI’s reading a typed report on our company barracks advising that the Special Forces camp in the Central Highlands to which many of our company had been assigned for immediate duty had been overrun at Tet, and all its defenders killed.  After that, the US Army’s motto was ‘stay alive, avoid combat, and smoke another reefer.’

The war became aimless and often surreal.  We soldiers all knew our senior officers and political leaders were lying.  Many soldiers were at the edge of mutiny, like the French Army in 1917.  Back in those ancient days, we had expected our political leaders to be men of rectitude who told us the truth.  Thanks to Vietnam, the politicians were exposed as liars and heartless cynics with no honor.

This same dark cloud hangs over our political landscape today.  We have destroyed large parts of the Mideast, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan without a second thought – yet wonder why peoples from these ravaged nations hate us.  Now, North Korea seems next.

Showing defiance to Washington brought B-52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange defoliants and endless storms of napalm and white phosphorus that would burn through one’s body until it hit bone.

In spite of all, our imperial impulse till throbs.  The nightmare Vietnam War in which over 58,000 American soldiers died for nothing has been largely forgotten.   So we can now repeat the same fatal errors again without shame, remorse or understanding.

The Best of Eric Margolis

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

Copyright © 2017 Eric Margolis

Previous article by Eric Margolis: Genghis Trump

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09/eric-margolis/vietnam-deja-vu/

Vox Popoli: Too clever for love

This, in a nutshell, illustrates why pushing women into higher education is a waste of human talent, a net producer of human misery, and unnatural selection for a less intelligent population:

We're just too clever to find a boyfriend! It may sound insufferably smug, but these women say their high intellect means they struggle to meet someone. Natasha Hooper, 22, says men do not know how to deal with educated women. She is worried about not finding love because of a shortage of educated men. Becca Porter, 23, says a man factory worker turned her down for being too clever. She says the sense of achievement derived from learning is alien to most men. Andrea Gould, 41, believes her intellect has prevented her from finding love. ‘I get the impression they’d rather date a girl without a degree, said Andrea.

The issue, she explains, is the calibre of men she attracts. ‘I’m not claiming to be Albert Einstein, but I can’t seem to meet a man I find intellectually stimulating,’ she says. Nor is she the only well-educated young woman who says she is too clever to find love. Indeed, she is one of a growing breed of women who fear — perhaps with good reason — they will be left on the proverbial shelf because of a shortage of educated men.

Recent figures from the university admissions service UCAS showed that 30,000 more women than men are starting degree courses in the UK. On A-level results day last month, 133,280 British women aged 18 secured a university place compared with 103,800 men of the same age. The effects of this carry over into the workplace, where women aged from 22 to 29 typically now earn £1,111 more a year than their male peers.

This is what happens when Man attempts to outwit Mother Nature. Speaking as a man who is, statistically speaking, more intelligent than 99.9 percent of the species, I can attest that I don't particularly value female intelligence. The cognitive differences between a normal smart girl and an average girl is virtually undetectable to me, and the most noticeable difference is that the former tends to behave in a much more challenging manner, which is the real reason that men "would rather date a girl without a degree".

It's not about about the intelligence, the cleverness, or the credentials, but rather, the attitude that tends to come with it. Men know perfectly well how to deal with educated women: they avoid them. They do so because they want an attractive and pleasant companion, not an argumentative opponent trained by her professors to regard every conversational interaction as a formal debate.

The essential problem is that the combination of female solipsism with female hypergamy means that too many women now desire the logically impossible and the statistically improbable. Women are attracted to men who possess qualities of size, earning potential, education, and, yes, intelligence, that are superior to their own. That's fine, but the problem is when they believe that men are attracted to the same thing.

And it's a damn good thing we're not, because if we were, no couple would ever pair off and get together, because if X > Y for Z, then Y !> X for Z. Mutual attraction would be logically impossible. These women, both young and not-so-young, have subscribed to a false and incoherent philosophy of romance that quite literally cannot exist and has rendered both their intelligences and their educations moot. Furthermore, as believe I was the first to point out more than a decade ago, the rising F/M ratio of women at institutions of higher learning mean that at least one-third of all college graduates cannot ever marry a man with equivalent or better academic credentials.

So, it should come as no surprise that these intelligent, educated women have found neither romance nor love, have not married, and most likely, have inadvertently removed themselves from the gene pool.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/09/too-clever-for-love.html?m=1

'The Strange Death Of Europe' Says Europe's Decline Is A Choice - By Michael Rosen

Douglas Murray's new polemic, 'The Strange Death of Europe,' ably explains the consequences of Europe's immigration challenges, but like most other books in the Euro-decline genre, it's short on solutions.

According to the European Commission’s official compendium of migration statistics, as of January 1, 2016, more than 35 million residents of the two-dozen-plus countries constituting the European Union were born outside of the EU. These foreign-born residents composed more than 8 percent of the populations of Germany, Britain, Spain, France, and the Netherlands, and nearly 12 percent of the populations of Northern European countries like Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia.

As Douglas Murray demonstrates in his startling, well-argued polemic, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, those numbers continue to swell. The explosion of humanitarian crises in the Levant and Central Asia, along with the already disproportionate migration to the continent from Islamic countries, threatens to disfigure European states and the Western values to which they’re ostensibly devoted.

A Suicidal Continent

Murray begins on a bold enough note: “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.” Well, then. To clear the underbrush for this trenchant thesis, Murray takes a hatchet to the flawed justifications Europeans have posited for indulging immigration, such as goosing the economic engine, enhancing cultural diversity, and revitalizing an aging population.

In fact, he argues, “the economic benefits of immigration accrue almost solely to the migrant,” the problems presented by incomplete integration dwarf the benefits of diversity, and, far from importing young people, European governments should first “work out whether there are policies that could encourage more procreation among their existing populations.”

To be sure, Murray acknowledges that Europe has throughout its history presented “a grand and uncommon receptiveness to foreign ideas and influence.” But that “receptivity was prodigious; it was not, however, boundless.”

Uncontent merely to observe from a distance, Murray surveys refugees up close and personal in way-stations like the Italian islet of Lampedusa and the Greek isle of Lesbos, where he encounters harried, bewildered souls, most of whom are working-age men, eager to risk life and limb at sea for the opportunity, however unlikely, to upgrade the depressing economic station they experienced in their native countries, be they Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, or North Africa. Amidst bureaucratic haggling, many of these migrants are simply stalled on these gateway islands, whose resources their swelling numbers quickly overwhelm.

Murray paints a highly sympathetic portrait of the despondent, hopeful itinerants he interviews, who include Afghans tortured by the Taliban and frightfully impoverished teenagers from the Horn of Africa. But sympathy is not a policy, and Murray insists upon an unsentimental, objective analysis of immigration policy despite the “tyranny of guilt” that so often infects otherwise clear-eyed European officials.

Crisis of Confidence

It’s not just the massive population influx that’s threatening Europe’s integrity but also a continent-wide crisis of confidence. Indeed, Murray believes, “even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact that…Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy.” As elements of Sharia crept into the legal framework of various European countries, a trend implicitly recognized even by the archbishop of Canterbury, “it suddenly seemed as though some of the absolute bases of Western civilization were being offered up for negotiation.”

The physical toll of European Islamization has also become all too evident in recent years. It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of continental Muslims are peaceful, but it only takes a small number of radical Islamists—some homegrown, some immigrants—to inflict unspeakable carnage on civilians in Paris, Nice, Barcelona, Cologne, Manchester, and Brussels.

How, then, can European society overcome what the Germans call geschichtsmude, or that peculiar mix of exhaustion, fatigue, and ennui afflicting Western civilization? Can a continent that has survived centuries of religious and nationalist war, including two calamities in the first half of the twentieth century, Nazism, Communism, and everything in between, truly be incapable of mounting a defense to the latest challenge?

One prominent response has, of course, been the rise of immigrant-resistant nationalist parties across Western and Central Europe. Yet these factions, rife as many are with hostility to traditional Western liberal values like free trade, individual liberties, and human rights, seek merely to replace one illness with another. In any event, their tide receded across multiple elections this past summer.

Another possible solution, as Murray recounts, lies in the solemn recognition by European governments that they must fundamentally rework the equation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this year appeared to acknowledge that her unbridled optimism over the intake and integration of hundreds of thousands of migrants was too much. Last year, she notably proclaimed that her famous catchphrase for addressing immigration challenges—“We can do it!”—was “a simple slogan, almost an empty formula.”

But only if leaders like Merkel manage to devise an authentic, Aristotelian balance between justice and mercy, in Murray’s formulation, can the crisis be truly resolved. Measures ranging from temporary asylum to mass deportation offer promise but suffer from their own attendant problems. Thus, ultimately, Murray reluctantly concludes that there are “no decent answers to the future.”

A Slippery World

The Strange Death of Europe is somewhat poorly organized, and much of it, perhaps by necessity, retreads well-worn ground.

Murray’s book shares many of the characteristics of other books of its Euro-decline genre, such as Bruce Bawer’s 2006 controversial masterpiece While Europe Slept, Mark Steyn’s demographic polemic of the same year America Alone, or Jamie Kirchick’s excellent The End of Europe from earlier this year: it’s dark and foreboding, not especially optimistic, and long on meticulous description but short on plausible prescription.

But these books must nevertheless be read and understood as widely as possible if Western civilization is to maintain its relevance, let alone its purchase in an increasingly slippery world.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reach him at michaelmrosen@yahoo.com.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/09/29/strange-death-europe-says-europes-decline-choice/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=d4532bda83-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-d4532bda83-83795033

The Quiet Islamic Conquest of Spain - by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11046/spain-islamic-conquest

§  "Evicted five centuries ago by crusading Christians, the Arabs are back in Spain, using their oil dollars to buy land that was seized from their ancestors by the sword". — James M. Markham, The New York Times, 1981.

§  The Madrid daily ABC wrote that 800 mosques in Spain are out of control. The Spanish daily La Razon charged that Gulf donors, such as Qatar, were a source of Spain's Islamization. The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Córdoba TV, as did Iran.

§  They dream of, and work to, regain the "lost Caliphate" of Spain. Some Islamists do it with bombs and car-ramming attacks. Others, more surreptitiously, do it with money and dawa, Islamic propaganda. The second way may be even more effective than the first.

The ceremony in 2003 was announced with bombastic headlines: "After a wait of more than 500 years, Spanish Muslims, have finally succeeded in building a mosque of their own in the shadow of the Alhambra, once the symbol of Islamic power in Europe". A troupe from al Jazeera was sent to follow the event: a muezzin climbed to the minaret of the Great Mosque of Granada to call the faithful to prayer for the first time in five centuries.

From Osama bin Laden to the self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, all the leaders of the global jihad -- including the terror cell that killed 17 people in Barcelona -- have mentioned Spain among the lands to be conquered by Islam. There is, however, not only jihad. There is also "the quiet conquest", as it has been dubbed by the French magazine, Valeurs Actuelles. The quiet conquest is a sinuous attempt to re-Islamize Spain through cultural centers, mega-mosques, proselytizing, conversions and financial investments. This pacific attempt to elicit submission has been underway for some time and has been backed by a flow of money from countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. According to a former commander of British forces in Iraq, General Jonathan Shaw, these two countries in particular have ignited a "time bomb" by funding the global spread of radical Islam.

The New York Times first detailed in 1981 that, "evicted five centuries ago by crusading Christians, the Arabs are back in Spain, using their oil dollars to buy land that was seized from their ancestors by the sword". Spain back then did not even recognize the State of Israel, and the Spanish monarchy regularly visited Saudi Prince Fahd while he was relaxing in the south of Spain. After that, it was Kuwait's turn: "During the late 1980's, when Spain was booming, Kuwait came shopping for corporations and investments".

Since then, the Arab monarchies have targeted Spain with huge investments. Some emblematic buildings in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​not to mention the Costa del Sol, are now owned by Arab investment groups, from the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid to the W Hotel in Barcelona. In Marbella, just a few meters away from the King Fahd Mosque, there is the Alanda Hotel, which offers halal food and services to meet the demands of the Muslim clients. In 2011, the International Petroleum Investment Company, controlled by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, purchased Cepsa, the second-largest Spanish company in the oil sector.

Last January, Spain's King Felipe VI visited Saudi Arabia and announced that Spain would boost economic, trade and investment relations with the Islamic kingdom. Before that, in 2012, Saudi Aramco awarded Spanish companies projects worth $700 million. Spain and Qatar are now discussing the formation a $1 billion joint investment fund that would help the Gulf state invest in Latin America. The Arab Emirates' mediacalled Spain "a hotspot for investment from the Arab world". After Qatar, it was the Oman's turn to invest in the Spanish market: Oman just agreed to invest up to $120 million in a uranium mine in Spain, to be used for Omani nuclear energy plants.

Demographically, Muslims are witnessing a shocking population increase in Spain. In 1990, Muslims in the country numbered 100,000. By 2010, the number had increased to 1.5 million. In 2017, the number was nearly two million. It is a growth of 1,900% in 27 years.

Today there are 1,400 mosques in Spain. According to the Observatory of Religious Pluralism in Spain (an initiative of the Ministry of Justice), "this figure represents 21% of all places of worship for all religions present in Spain".

The most prolific funder of mosques in Spain is Saudi Arabia. In 1985, using only its own money, the Saudi kingdom opened the Islamic Cultural Center in Madrid, Europe's largest mosque, followed by the Islamic Center of Malaga, which the Saudis financed with 22 million euros (today the ​​Madrid area has 112 mosquesand Islamic cultural centers). As Gatestone's Soeren Kern detailed, the Saudis have built mosques everywhere, from Marbella to Fuengirola.

Islamic rogue regimes, such as Iran, have also been able to infiltrate Spanish political parties. According to an investigation, Tehran gave money to Podemos, the leftist party which emerged as a new contender in the Spanish political arena.

The Madrid daily ABC wrote that 800 mosques in Spain are out of control. The Spanish daily La Razoncharged that Gulf donors, such as Qatar, were a source of Spain's Islamization. The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Córdoba TV, as did Iran.

The details of this religious proliferation are detailed The Spain of Allah, a book by Ignacio Cembrero. While the number of Catholic churches in Spain has not undergone much variation for many years, Muslim mosques have been growing at a rate of 20% percent annually. Qatar's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani has also offered to buy La Monumental Arena in Barcelona to turn it into Europe's biggest mosque. The United Arab Emirates funded the construction of the Great Mosque of Granada.

Qatar's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani has offered to buy La Monumental Arena in Barcelona, with its nearly 20,000 seats, to turn it into Europe's biggest mosque. (Image source: Sergi Larripa/Wikimedia Commons)

They dream of, and work to, regain the "lost Caliphate" of Spain. Some Islamists do it with bombs and car-ramming attacks. Others, more surreptitiously, do it with money and dawa, Islamic propaganda. The second way may be even more effective than the first.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

America in the Middle East - bionic mosquito

America's Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, by Hugh Wilford

Wilford continues the story with the Americans moving into Cairo; there was a need to coordinate Lend-Lease activities in the region.  It turns out that Lend-Lease was useful for purposes other than sending Jeeps to Europe.  From the time of his transfer from the State Department to the OSS in April 1944…

…Kim [Roosevelt] was a key player in Project SOPHIA, a secret program for spreading OSS officers throughout the region under cover of [Lend-Lease.]

Bill Donovan had been looking into setting up a Cairo office for the OSS as early as 1942; the office was established in May 1943.  With this now in place, the office would be charged with collecting intelligence, spreading propaganda, and conduct a massive campaign of political warfare.

The Americans were blessed with a unique asset – the tremendous goodwill developed and earned by American Missionaries and educators in the decades prior.  While the British and French were looked at with suspicion and even despised for their colonial attitudes in the region, the Americans were seen, rightly until this point, as benevolent.  This goodwill was the currency that the Americans would exploit to gain their advantage. 

Stephen Penrose, Jr. was the first American assigned to the Cairo office.  He was the son of the president of Whitman College, a small college in Washington founded by New England missionaries.  He would spend time teaching at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he would later return as president.

This background brought him connections in the Arab world; he brought in several former colleagues from AUB to staff the Cairo office – including David Dodge, the great-grandson of AUB founder Daniel Bliss.  Penrose leveraged his contacts on several missionary boards, obtaining street maps and other detailed information of the various cities and locales in the region. 

Kim Roosevelt would travel to Allied-occupied Iran, under cover of the Lend-Lease program.  He would meet with Joseph Upton, a Harvard-educated expert on Persian antiquities, apparently in Tehran overseeing the archeological work by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He was, in reality, an OSS field agent.

Another agent in Tehran was specialist in Persian language and history at Princeton University; a third majored in art and archeology at Princeton before pursuing a scholarly career.

By this time, Kim’s cousin Archie had returned to the Middle East, and they met upon Kim’s return to Cairo.  Tours of Palestine and Lebanon would follow, including meetings with Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.  But still, this was a time for Arabists, not Zionists, in the United States government.

When Kim departed and with the war over, he wrote in his final report that the entire US effort in the Middle East was a waste of time and money.  Archie remained in the region, now in Iraq.  Despite being married, Archie found the happiest moments of his life when assigned to the Middle East. 

The end of the war brought on the Cold War and the continuation of the Great Game – with Britain hanging on but with visible signs of the transition to America in taking the lead Anglo role.  Communists were to be found in every corner; the Soviets were assumed to be behind every antagonistic action aimed at the colonialist British.

Archie was in an interesting spot – several years earlier he had learned that communists were involved in running the American Youth Congress (AYC), a national youth group prominently supported by his cousin, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  He would publicly criticize her for this role.

Conclusion

At the end of the war, Archie returned home for a short time; to his wife’s disappointment, he quickly took an assignment to Iran.

Iran – long a plaything in the Great Game between Great Britain and Russia; soon to be the plaything of the United States and the Soviet Union.  And soon to be home for the first – and perhaps most well-known – major CIA intervention in the region.

https://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2017/09/america-in-middle-east.html

Judge Moore - By Patrick J. Buchanan

When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it.

Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was suspended — to become famous as “The Ten Commandments Judge.”

Roy Moore is now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Alabama, having routed Sen. Luther Strange, whom President Trump endorsed and campaigned for.

Moore’s primary win is a fire bell in the night for GOP senators in 2018. And should he defeat his Democratic opponent, the judge will be coming to Capitol Hill, gunning for Mitch McConnell.

Yet it is the moral convictions of the candidate that make this an interesting race for all Americans. For Moore is a social conservative of a species that is almost extinct in Washington.

He believes that man-made law must conform to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as written in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

If a law contradicts God’s law, it is invalid, nonbinding. In some cases, civil disobedience, deliberate violation of such a law, may be the moral duty of a Christian.

Moore believes God’s Law is even above the Constitution, at least as interpreted by recent Supreme Courts. Nixonu2019s White Hous...Patrick J. BuchananBest Price: $10.74Buy New $13.85(as of 02:30 EDT - Details)

Homosexuality, an abomination in the Old Testament, Moore sees as “an inherent evil.” When the high court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, discovered a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Moore, back on the Alabama court, defied the decision, was suspended again, and resigned.

Postmodern America may see the judge as a refugee from the Neolithic period. Yet, his convictions, and how he has stood by them, are going to attract folks beyond Alabama. And the judge’s views on God, man and law are not without a distinguished paternity.

In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King wrote: “(T)here are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’…

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

In his Declaration, Jefferson wrote that all men are endowed by their “Creator” with inalienable rights, and among these is the right to life. The Greatest Comeback:...Patrick J. BuchananBest Price: $3.99Buy New $9.00(as of 07:42 EDT - Details)

Many Christians believe that what the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade — declare an unborn child’s right to life contingent upon whether its mother wishes to end it — violates God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Throughout our history, people acting upon such beliefs have defied laws, and are today celebrated for it.

Abolitionists, in violation of laws they believed immoral, set up the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape to freedom. King believed that laws imposing racial segregation violated the American “creed” that “all men are created equal” and acted on that belief.

Thomas More is considered by Catholics to be a saint and moral hero for defying Henry VIII’s demand, among others, that he endorse a lie, that the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was not adultery.

Early Christians accepted martyrdom rather than obey laws of the Caesars and burn incense to the gods of Rome. Churchill, Hitler, and...Patrick J. BuchananBest Price: $6.10Buy New $13.21(as of 05:06 EDT - Details)

After Hitler took power in 1933, he authorized the eradication of “useless eaters” in the Third Reich. Those who condemned these laws as violations of God’s law, and even attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, are today regarded as moral heroes.

Moore, should he win, is going to become an object of fascination in The Secular City. Yet his questions and concerns are those of the silent millions on the losing side of America’s culture war.

Is the USA still a good and Godly country when 55 million abortions have been performed with the sanction of law in 45 years?

Do court decisions that force Christians to act against their religious beliefs have to be obeyed? What is the duty of Christians in a paganized and perverted society?

What is taking place today is a growing alienation of one-half of the country from the other, a growing belief of millions of Americans that our society has become morally sick.

Christianity and the moral truths it has taught for 2,000 years have been deposed from the pre-eminent position they held until after World War II, and are now rejected as a source of law. They have been replaced by the tenets of a secular humanism that is the prevailing orthodoxy of our new cultural, social and intellectual elites.

If elected, Judge Moore, one imagines, will not be rendering respectfully unto the new Caesar.

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Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.

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