This headline from an L.A. Times piece gave me pause: “Can we be too healthy and live too long?”

I wouldn’t quite accuse Mr. Rodriguez of preparing us to accept death panels and medical care rationing. I’m sure he’s just trying to be provacative without really thinking about what he’s writing. But his citing of the Japanese experience bears comment.

Japan is one picture of what a society looks like that radically embraces birth control. The Japanese population is not reproducing itself and may shrink by 50 million within a few decades. It has so many lonely, depressed older people NOT simply because of its excellent diet and health care, but because those older people have fewer children and grandkids to interact with. For some time now, Japanese toy companies have been selling “grandchildren dolls” to lonely elders.

But there’s a larger issue of spiritual crisis here. Japan is an almost completely materialist society that sees and presents no higher good than a materially comfortable life. Rodriguez’ closing question is disingenuous or ignorant: “But if Japan, where ancestors are revered, is plagued with unhappy seniors, what does it bode for us?”

Do the Japanese really “revere” their ancestors as they once did? Apparently not, if you read the stories about abandoned and neglected elders in Japanese society. Once you embrace selfishness toward the next generation (i.e., abortion and birth control), it’s hard not to adopt it towards preceding generations as well.

I usually disagree with Paul Krugman, but by all means let the SEC go after Goldman and other dishonest brokerages. Conservatives and Republicans generally need to be much more vocal about the financial abuses and ways to stop them in the future. What Goldman and other firms did had nothing to do with free markets. They were engaging in con games that depended on asymmetric information, which inhibits free markets.

But note one point in this Krugman editorial, as he speculates about what measures during the Bush years might have stopped the fraud:

“For one thing, an independent consumer protection bureau could have helped limit predatory lending. Another provision in the proposed Senate bill, requiring that lenders retain 5 percent of the value of loans they make, would have limited the practice of making bad loans and quickly selling them off to unwary investors.”

As I recall, when banks refrained from what Krugman now calls “predatory lending,” they were accused of “redlining” and discrimination against minorities, and were bullied by congressional committees.

It’s hard to sort out victims when everyone was on board for the bubble.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the editorial in the NYT supporting Hastings College’s anti-religious bigotry. But it’s worth noting the unembarrased, seemingly unaware way it abandons classically liberal principles for the goal of suppressing Christianity.

According to this illiberal view, every student group must embrace and admit every viewpoint. By this same logic, a strict Christian who believe in heterosexual monogamy and restricting marriage to a man and a women should also be allowed to join a homosexual club. (Think that will ever happen, or that Hastings–or the NYT–would support the Christian student if it did?)

“To qualify for official recognition, and receive money from a publicly financed university, groups at Hastings are required to adhere to the school’s nondiscrimination policy, which says that official student groups cannot refuse membership on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or other prohibited factors.”

More important, this tyrannical campus view turns “diversity” into an undifferentiated mush. If every club and society and club accommodates every viewpoint, they all become the same.  There’s no “diversity” at all, merely gray  conformity.

For “diversity” to be meaningful, it must exist at the level of the organization, as it does in the larger society from which nanny-campuses like Hastings are trying so strenuously to shield their tender charges. In other words, the important thing is not that each club should accommodate every viewpoint, as that every viewpoint should be represented in a club.The student is well served if she or he has a choice to join a homosexual club, a socialist club, the Young Republications or a strict Christian club. Students should be the best judge of who they want or don’t want to associate with.

The editorial’s claim that students are free to form unofficial student groups is disingenuous. Indeed, it makes the point that groups that receive funding are being given an official imprimatur–in other words, the college administration is NOT “viewpoint neutral.”

For those of you who have read our blog and have wondered where we have been–the major stresses of life have been upon us for the last 8 months. We hope to get back in the saddle again.Today’s health care vote is that occasion. What a sorrowful day in the history of the country, for democracy and for the electorate. What we have is a government dominating the weak and because of this healthcare bill, that is what will happen to unborn children. We have a divided, angry, possibly even wrathful country. We have a cultural and political civil war. And all of this could have been avoided with incremental, rational health care and medical insurance reforms. I fear for my children; I fear for the elderly, the handicapped, the profoundly ill.

Reuters headline (in NYT): “Nordic Countries Top Gender Equality List.”

Great! Let’s see how much gender equality there is in a hundred years, when Muslims have replaced Swedes and other Scandinavians due to low birthrates.

One reason to have a bloated budget: it makes hiding pork easier, especially pork that might raise questions. (Scroll down after “War On Coal”).

Read all of this thoughtful post from the Belmont Club (commenting and expanding on a Chicago Boyz post by Shannon Love) on how the arrogance and contempt of the Left in Britain, and recent revelations about how cynical the Labor Party’s immigration policy really was, have driven a fifth of the British electorate into approval of the British National Party, which is not really a conservative party as the U.S. understands it, but truly fascist.

Among the shrewd observations here:

“What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed.”

“Just as Global Warming can be understood at one level as an attempt to bring nature into the purview of politics, it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.”

The central point of this post is that once the individual has been desacralized and the state exalted as the supreme authority with no recourse to transcendent values, it’s a very short step from the kind of oppressive nanny-state Britons (and many European countries) now enjoy to a straight-up fascist state. Very little in the actual machinery of the government will have to change.

In today’s NYT, Roger Cohen urges Israel to becomes more like an “ordinary” country by abandoning “Israeli exceptionalism.”

“The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. ‘Never again’ is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world,” says Cohen. Even though he acknowledges that “some of Israel’s enemies contest its very existence,” he argues that most of Israel’s neighbors seek come kind of more or less rational accommodation of interests, and Israel can join them if only it stops thinking of itself as exceptional.

On a purely empirical level, one could point out that Israel (and Jewish) exceptionalism is at least understandable as the result of the exceptional nature of anti-Semitism itself, which stands out like a mountain among the foothills or ordinary group and tribal prejudices. Polls have revealed widespread anti-Semitism in Malaysia and Indonesia, which have almost no Jews, and even a degree of it in Japan, which also has a negligible number.

But to give up exceptionalism would be to give up the idea of Jewish chosenness, the identity that has kept this people together when other, more numerous peoples, some sharing some characteristics of the Jews,  have dissolved or been absorbed by conquerors. Even when Jews tried to escape their identity and merge into the surrounding society, as Spain’s conversos tried to do, the surrounding society ultimately wouldn’t let them. Of course, some of the conversions were real; but they didn’t “erase” Jewish identity, even if in some cases it took generations for that identity to be rediscovered.

At a non-empirical level, Christians and Jews alike recognize that the Jews are not held together by their own efforts or identity alone. “Chosenness” makes no sense as a secular concept, and atheist Jews are capable of puzzling endlessly over what makes Jews so special if there is no God.

There is no answer to this question, of course: only the persistence of an exceptionalism that cannot be explained by any secular means.

The latest from Phyllis Chesler. Read to the bottom and you’ll see that even Canada is considering banning the niqab (a full-body-covering garment like the burka)–based on the statement of Sheik Tantawi, head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, considered Sunni Islam’s leading theological center, that it is already forbidden in Mecca(!).

What a difference 9 months make? France not the US is the hard line democracy taking on Iran. Sarkozy is now the adult in the UN and in the world while US citizens become more and more frustrated with a government which is determined to dictate a far left agenda to a modern right population. It’s going to be a long 3 1/2 years. We all need to pray and work against such an agenda through constructive activism.