National Treasure
It’s been a bad week for the respectable institutions all around the world. Bill Keller, formerly an editor at the New York Times described the child-molestation scandal engulfing the BBC.
Perhaps you’ve had your fill of these sordid accounts — the celebrity gropers, the pedophile priests, the fondling in the locker room shower, the witnesses who look the other way. But Savile’s case is worth mulling, if only because the institution in which his serial child abuse took place is one of the most respected media organizations in the world, a putative shrine to truth and accountability: the BBC. …
To appreciate Jimmy Savile’s place in English culture, imagine a combination of Dick Clark of “American Bandstand” and Jerry Lewis, maestro of the muscular dystrophy telethon. Savile was the longest-serving host of the immensely popular BBC music show “Top of the Pops,” and the star of another long-running show called “Jim’ll Fix It,” in which he pulled strings to grant the wishes of supplicants, mostly children. … He was Sir Jimmy, confidant — or at least photo-op accessory — of royals, prime ministers, even Beatles.
And now Savile turns out to have been a creep.
The BBC ‘national treasure’ died last year. But the aftermath of the exposures revealed the worst of it. Many in the BBC apparently knew all along. Staff are now coming forward to say they entered this dressing room or that closet to find him in flagrante delicto. Despite the hand-wringing, others are now saying it was an open secret. As Esther Rantzen of the Telegraph put it:
As I arrived at an NSPCC conference last week, a taxi pulled up, and the driver shouted to me. “Esther!” I walked over. “Jimmy Savile was in my cab some years back, with two very young girls he said were his nieces. But they weren’t. What he got up to with them in the back of the cab was bad, very bad. I knew it was wrong. But what could I say?”
For decades, nobody said anything, at least not publicly, not officially. Everyone knew – that is, everyone in the television and pop music industries knew. The rumours swirled around him, that he sexually abused young girls. A journalist friend told me in the 1970s about a little girl with a heart defect. Jimmy had helped her to have the defect surgically corrected. A newspaper heard about his generosity and contacted the girl’s family to run the story, but the family refused to talk to them because they were sickened by what they knew he had done to her to make her “earn” the operation.
There are now reports that “a second ‘national treasure’” referred to for now as ‘Uncle Dick’ and who ran a children’s show will prove another child molester that the BBC had nurtured in its bosom. The question now being asked is how many more? And was there a food chain supplying perverts that went God knows how high?
The problem automatically became a national scandal because the BBC is taxpayer funded. Any time you buy a television device in Brtain you have to pay a fee to the BBC — whether you watch it or not. “You need a TV Licence to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on television, irrespective of what channel you’re watching, what device you are using (TV, computer, laptop, mobile phone or any other), and how you receive them (terrestrial, satellite, cable, via the internet or any other way) … We can confirm that we do prosecute people who object to the licence fee in principle.”
Think of it as Big Bird with its own radio DF vans. George Orwell named the infamous Room 101 in 1984 after a conference room in the BBC. They were nothing if not flattered. “When one of the possible original room 101s at the BBC was due to be demolished, a plaster cast was made by artist Rachel Whiteread. The cast was displayed in the cast courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum from November 2003 until June 2004.”
It wasn’t just perversion. It was taxpayer funded perversion.
What shocked many observers — it certainly dismayed Bill Keller — was that the abuse of power had touched the sacred precincts of the fourth estate; it has not been, as heretofore believed, been confined to institutions like football departments or the Catholic Church. There are apparently no exceptions to Lord Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. And the BBC had power — power which in large measure rose from its self-ascribed moral ascendancy.
There are now calls to abolish the license fee. But that is still a long shot. The BBC is too mighty, too entrenched, it’s hold on the taxpayer pocketbook is too tight for it to be pried loose. And yet … how far does it go? Just how high perversion and its enablers go up in the corridors of power was underscored by the infamous Marx Dutroux case in Belgium. The Belgian pedophile kept children chained as prisoners. But who might have come to see them was the bombshell.
There was widespread anger and frustration among Belgians due to police errors, the general slowness of the investigation and Dutroux’s claims that he was part of a sex ring that included high ranking members of the police force and government. This anger culminated when the popular investigative judge in charge of investigating the claims was dismissed on the grounds of having participated in a fund-raising dinner for the girls’ parents. The investigation itself was wound up. His dismissal and end of the investigation resulted in a massive protest march (the “White March”) of 300,000 people on the capital, Brussels, in October 1996, two months after Dutroux’s arrest, in which demands were made for reforms of Belgium’s police and justice system.
On the witness stand, Jean-Marc Connerotte, the original judge of the case, broke down in tears when he described “the bullet-proof vehicles and armed guards needed to protect him against the shadowy figures determined to stop the full truth coming out. Never before in Belgium has an investigating judge at the service of the king been subjected to such pressure. We were told by police that [murder] contracts had been taken out against the magistrates.” Connerotte testified that the investigation was seriously hampered by protection of suspects by people in the government. “Rarely has so much energy been spent opposing an inquiry,” he said. He believed that the Mafia had taken control of the case.
The allegations of a cover-up engineered from high places was never proved. But this is why the BBC case is so disturbing. If institutionally protected pedophilia can exist in a building full of journalists then where is safe? Who guards the guardians?
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Why was ACORN so eager to help underage prostitution? Why has Planned Parenthood repeatedly failed to report statutory rape as required by law?
Why has the Obama/Holder Justice Department been refusing to prosecute “human trafficking” (slavery) cases?
No doubt Savile held correct political viewpoints.
How could it have been otherwise in a building full of “journalists”?
One can argue that the molestations go on, teachers unions psychologically molest students into supporting their pensions and the MSM exposes their bias while pretending that they are giving fair voice to the outrages of the day, and everyday what is good for the masses is no cure for the few.
We live in a world where laws for taxes and codes of conduct are so byzantine that anybody can be rounded up for any offense. All one must do is cross the glitterati and you are done. No equality before the law, no justice, which is precisely what the progressives seek to enforce by denying it to all people but for a deserving few.
“It wasn’t just perversion. It was taxpayer funded perversion.” Yes and the NEA supported Piss Christ, though it is not clear if we borrowed money from China to pay for it.
We will sell government the rope on which to hang us.
“Why has the Obama/Holder Justice Department been refusing to prosecute “human trafficking” (slavery) cases?”
The corruptocrats do not come down on an issue until it is clear what side their donors are advocating.
Mores is now a distasteful word. But in the best sense it means self-policing. It the system whereby people are guided toward certain behavior or dissuaded from exhibiting certain other behavior by community pressure. Public morality works when it does not have to be enforced by the police.
What are the mores in the infotainment industry? What are they in any corridor of power?
What is really interesting the seeming inverse correlation between the official disapproval of pedophilia and its practice. Perhaps it is only a trick of memory but the world seemed much more child safe back in the day when it was less of public obsession. Children went out to play more or less unsupervised until it was time for dinner. They enjoyed a freedom that they do not know today.
Perhaps that absence of fear was merely an ignorance of the facts. Or maybe it is an indicator that the modern preoccupation with pedophila is the flip side of an obsession with the sexuality of children. But something seems to have gone wrong, for as in the case of “Uncle Jimmy” and “Uncle Dick” — and to some extent Jerry Sandusky — it is the protectors themselves who were the predators.
There is probably more protection in a traditional community than in modern atomized urban society. The “village” that Hillary Clinton talks about is now a bureaucratic village, led by guardians like — the BBC.
We must look to ourselves, and that includes the children themselves. It appears that outsourcing the job has its limits.
time for Judge Dredd
It truely saddens and sickens me that these things happen. That good men and women cannot, will not or are afraid to speak out or refuse to act to bring these people to the attention of the authorities. We will all answer for our sins. Whether it be in this lifetime or after our deaths.
Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,” says the Lord.
Romans 12:19
Truely, truely I would rather face justice here, repent, and ask forgiveness of the Lord than face His wrath.
“Children went out to play more or less unsupervised until it was time for dinner.”
And then we went out again. “Come home when the street lamps turn on,” we were told. In high summer that could be 9:30 pm. This was in the 1950s. We did have more freedom and less danger. Far more of the former and far less of the latter. In the summer when I was c. eight years old my brother and I would take the El from Evanston to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs. We were each given $5 for train fare, and a coke and a hotdog. Since all Cubs games were played in the day, our parents knew we would return home at dusk if not sooner. The train cars were filled with unescorted kids like us. And guess what, they were all reasonably well behaved. I tell this to college kids nowadays and they literally do not believe me. The 50s were a golden age for kids, and for kids’ freedom. I loved the 50s, and my family was not well off. It was the happiest of times.
Lord knows nothing like that would ever happen in Hollyweird.
But on another subject (the usual), someone just sent me some pics on parade floats in Germany, well it turns out they are from 2009, but the one pic may be timely again:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/graphics/parade2.jpg
http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/parade.asp
Without diminishing these horrors coming to light at the BBC, we are all the victims of abuse by the Left. Years after Bill Clinton finally opened my eye to the horrors and rancid corruption within the corridors of the Left, I am still detoxing and rethinking other prior assaults on me as an individual.
I think back to the subtle and not so subtle mind-screwing I received at the hands of my teachers for my entire childhood and early adulthood. I am certain that younger people (I am 50) have gotten it even worse. The recent story making the rounds of the girl who was verbally assaulted by her grade school teacher for wearing a Romney shirt is dramatic – she was accused before her class of wearing something akin to a KKK tee shirt … a monstrous and obscene conflation. Leftist indoctrination is relentless in America – through the media, academia, and even by agencies in the US and through local state governments – all of this forms a heinous form of thought control over vulnerable children and young adults and the population at large.
With the EPA, the Dept of Education, FDA, DHS, teacher’s unions, SEIU, and all the other entrenched feeding troughs of the Left, it has reached critical mass. All of these Leftist sinecures must be destroyed. Without a steady stream of taxpayer funds and extorted funds through unions, the breeding rats of the Left would not have feasted and bred to the point of driving our amazing nation to the brink of destruction. They never would have gained critical toeholds to indoctrinate and abuse our children.
I no longer want to see accommodation or compromise with the radical people who have seized the Left – I want to see them destroyed. I want to see their sinecures destroyed. I think that little short of civil war will end the Left’s tyranny – perhaps a hot war is the only way to end their serial abuse – but much else will also be destroyed in eny effort to reclaim America. That is simply a measure of how entrenched, powerful, and relentless the Leftist enemy has become. It is also a measure of the level of destruction they have already wrought.
(Unable to post under my name apparently – I wish PJM would fix whatever is happening…)
My impression is that the Brits have been celebrating decadence and degeneracy for decades. I don’t think the BBC scandals were as “secret” as is now being alleged. I think there was more license and tolerance for this behavior, but modern political correctness, and not genuine moral scruples, finally caught up with these practives. For one thing, and this is not nitpicking, we are talking about “Ephebophilia” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia) as much as about “pedophilia,” and many of these randy old goats rationalized about the former.
Savile is a caricature of the quintessential pervert, leprous and depraved looking in his old age, and just plain bizarre in his younger years. I like to think that this alone would have set of alarms for me if I’d known the man.
I don’t mean to get all bent out of shape over a mere definitional quibble, especially when the subject at hand is so disturbing, so revoltingly ubiquitous and yet so horribly personal for those whom it has affected. And yet it is times like these when the world really does need philosophy, so please indulge me for a moment.
This nugget of Acton’s has been cited so frequently that it has now taken on the mien of a shallow truism. The problem is that, while it is in fact shallow it is certainly not true, and it tends rather to obscure—even to negate—what it is most essential to understand about the nature of corruptible man.
First of all, the context in which Lord Acton first uttered the famous words is itself instructive. Acton, supposedly a good Catholic, was using them to argue against the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which was currently being mooted and which has since been defined as a de fide teaching of the Church. It would be starnge nowadays for anyone of the Catholic mindset to argue that the Pope’s ability to pronounce infallibly on matters of faith and morals has somehow corrupted the Bride of Christ, and yet that is the meaning of Acton’s words if followed to their logical conclusion. It seems like Acton was wrong from the very beginning on this one.
Second, the statement that “power corrupts” is philosophically false. God is all powerful and He is also all good—there is no spot of corruption in Him. Power is an attribute of being, and being is an attribute of God Who is good and unitary; hence power itself is also good, and of itself it has no capacity to effect evil, i.e. to corrupt. Man is corrupted by sin, not by power.
Third, it is also a de fide teaching of the Church that man is born with the stain of Original Sin, and that the concupiscence resulting from this wound remains with him all of his days. That is our “corruption.” Does the mere acquisition of power—in this case a position of social prominence—suddenly give a moral and sexually normal man a taste for young boyflesh? Or is it more likely that the seed of this sin was in him all along, and that he used his social position to gratify it, in fact sought his social position precisely so that he could gratify it?
Therefore, it follows from all that has been said, that power does not corrupt. What it does is allow already corrupted men to flee from meeting with the justice they deserve, to cloak their sins, and to commit them more lavishly. Lord Acton’s dictum is at best an heuristic for the more complex statement, but since it is an heuristic which runs counter to the main thrust of the truth, it ought to be dropped. The failure to drop it eventually leads us to conclude that power—which is among the most lordly and worshipful of the divine attributes—is in fact no good at all. The playing out of the same theme in the political and social realms eventually leads to universal enfranchisement, the embrace of “equality,” and the end of merit-based rule, the terrifying results of which are beginning to metastasise all around us.
One of the entities that I think gave impetus to the birth of the counterculture of the 60′s was the Beat Generation — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and even Lenny Bruce. Outside of their writing talents, they were marginalized by polite society. Helping to spawn the counterculture provided them with a huge buffer between them and the normal world that gave them space to indulge themselves with a whole new flock of practitioners, who also had the virtue of being young, stupid, naive, and attractive.
Roughcoat 7:
Yes, I recall those days. And an old friend of mine related how when he was a child in a small town in eastern Washington he and a friend would take a WWII surplus M1 Carbine that had a plugged barrel and run all over town playing Army. He now lives in a small very rural town in Calif and added to the story, in wonder, “But today if we lost sight of our kids for five minutes we would panic.”
And today, the news that two children were running loose with an actual firearm, barrel plugged or not, would probably activate not only the local police but the state Child Protective Services Dept and the Dept of Homeland Security as well.
It was strange, we often heard sonic booms as F-102′s practiced intercepting enemy nuclear armed bombers. People built bomb shelters and each State Fair had displays and phamplets on how to do so, whether permanent and under the backyard or emergency ones in the basement. The radios had markings to show where the Conelrad stations were on the dial. They tested the air raid sirens each Saturday at noon. TV and radio stations tested the EBS.
But even while we were preparing to blow up the world the kids ran free, alongside unleashed dogs.
Make you wonder, maybe the crooks and pedophiles thought we were tougher people then. If we were willing to vaporize Moscow, how much chance would a molester have of getting loose? Or of even getting to court?
Roughcoat, I was a kid in the early 60′s in Southern California and it was like that for us kids back then as well. “Be home before the street lights come on.” Violate the rule and you went to bed with no dinner. Halloween night we went out unsupervised and the only rule we had was that we had to be home by 10pm. I remember Mom dropping my brother and I many times off at the local theatre with a buck apiece to see the Saturday matinée (and still have enough left over to get popcorn and a coke) and us standing at the corner afterwards waiting for her to pick us up. No cell phone, no GPS tracker, no nothing. Of course, we were repeatedly told not to talk to strangers and never ever under any circumstances get into a stranger’s car. Never once I was afraid for my safety back then. The reason it was safer back then? The perverts were swiftly and ruthlessly dealt with, no excuses made for them, no mercy shown them. I vote we go back to those “rules”.
On Marx Dutroux and the Belgian mentality:
This may be both unfair and sweeping, but the people of Flanders and their close cousins in Holland have a truly creepy undertone to their worldview and social mores. While ordinary Belgians were genuinely shocked at the whole Dutroux affair, it is the sterile and amoral behaviors that are tolerated there and in the Netherlands that made it possible for a pedophile murder ring to have high-level protection. Remember that the Belgians and Dutch are fine with outright killing old people to save on healthcare costs. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness condemned depraved Belgian behavior of a previous century.
I think there was more license and tolerance for this behavior, but modern political correctness, and not genuine moral scruples, finally caught up with these practives.
In the talk-show postmortems of the Jimmy Savile scandal there is frequent reference to the “attitudes of the times” — meaning the 60s and 70s were the “bad old days”. It’s interesting how the culture of the Left evolved from the “free love” ethos of the 1960s to the hyper-defensive Womyns culture of today where if you look at someone wrong you can be charged with sexual harassment or rape or cause mass fainting as the President of Harvard did when he mentioned math grades among women.
It’s looped around in other areas too. People wanted to be “free” in the 1960s. And now they want to license and regulate everything. In the UK you need proof of identity to buy a hunting magazine because the sight of bolt action rifles in those periodicals is somehow deemed obscene. And in case anyone thinks the Brits have gone loco, remember that in New York they’ve banned big gulp softdrinks.
“Children’s ice cream, Mandrake. Children’s ice cream.”
It’s like schizophrenia on a mass scale. Today news anchors tell us with a straight face that the President has apologized to Muslims who are attacking US diplomatic facilities because they’ve been offended by videos depicting them as violent. It is straight out Dr. Strangelove. “You can’t fight here. This is the War Room.”
And then the President says he never said it and Candy Crowley of CNN backs him up and nobody even blinks!
Sometimes I think the only thing left to do is wait for everything to melt down. But somehow the world staggers on. Funny place, this vale of tears.
Roughcoat:
In my childhood I used to ride my bicycle to different villages in the part of N. Italy where my father was stationed. We did have a lot of freedom while being subjected to greater discipline at home and at school than is now the case. Child-rearing is all backwards now on this.
Back in the day I came home from grade school to see people sloshing blood off the sidewalk with buckets of water. Curious I asked what had happened. Apparently one of our neighbors was an enlisted US Marine hand to hand combat instructor (so it was explained to me). He came home to find a local man molesting his daughter. So the instructor took him out into the street and beat him to a pulp.
Now the entire neighborhood was Filipino. And they just gathered round and watched him do it. Nobody called the cops or intervened. Nobody did anything but watch. Then they washed down the sidewalk afterward, picked up what was left of the molester and took him to the hospital.
It seemed a normal thing to do at the time.
Gramscian damage.
#14 Tarnsman:
Excellent post. I have the same memories you describe: sonic booms, Conelrad, playing army in the local forest preserve (or park, or vacant lot, or construction site), walking around with and shooting BB guns and air rifles, air raid alerts (Tuesday at 10:30 am), etc. Boys’ Life magazine carried ads for Daisy air rifles (“It’s A Daisy!”) and for Savage .22 rifles, the latter showing a pic of a dad with his arm around his son’s shoulder, the son proudly holding his first rifle, taking a big step on the path to manhood. I learned to shoot at my local YMCA summer camp for boys (it was NOT coed!).
Every neighborhood had a couple of “weirdos” who were well known–and whose behavior was informally monitored (and policed) by our tough-guy dads, World War II veterans who were still young themselves. Really bad guys weren’t around for long, disappearing without a trace.
If you mouthed off to the local beat cop he might tune you
up a bit for it (not bad, just a bit) and when you told your dad how you got your fat lip he said, good for him, I hope next time he throws you in jail.
And in the summer we wandered around all day, played baseball, rode bikes, flirted with girls, went swimming in the lake, played kick the can in the alleys, etc., etc. No adults. Total freedom.
The scums at the Smoking Gun have put out a new Public Service Announcement – something about sex in front of kids or whatever they’re on about.
You might say they “saved or prevented” crime from happening. Or they are wantonly smearing our culture, enraging people with heart problems, and earning a fine living at it.
Keep wanting headlines about reporters arrested for fraud. Hope someday.
13. RWE
And today, the news that two children were running loose with an actual firearm, barrel plugged or not, would probably activate not only the local police but the state Child Protective Services Dept and the Dept of Homeland Security as well.
I used to bring along a Wehrmacht helmet and belt that my dad had brought back from Europe as war souvenirs when the kids on my block played Army (which automatically meant World War II). Nobody in the neighborhood thought anything of kids playing with enemy war equipment. I can only imagine the ruckus if that happened today.
And yes, I walked or rode my bike all over my home town– sometimes even shortly after dark (bike had a headlight). Apart from the usual warnings about talking to strangers, my parents were more concerned that I knew the rules about traffic safety than about the possibility that a perv lived down the street.
You have to wonder how many victims the Kinder Gentler approach has claimed.
In the late 1930′s, in Columbia SC, a couple of hardened convicts with a new young prisoner managed to take the Warden at the State prison hostage in his own office. They threatened to kill the warden unless they were given a car and allowed to escape. This became a huge issue, attracting the attention of even the Governor.
My grandfather explained what they had to do to the Governor. “See this Governor? It’s a Thompson Submachine Gun. We’ll surround the office with men with Thompsons, and when conditions are right we will open fire, fill the place with lead. The Warden is trained. He’ll know what to do and hit the floor. We’ll kill the convicts before they can kill him.”
The Governor thought this was a horribly brutal plan. The Warden might be killed as well and besides, that one young convict at least might yet be saved. He refused to approve my grandfather’s plan.
Eventually the convicts killed the Warden. Only then did the Thompsons go to work. And everyone in that office died.
If we had nuked Afghanistan in Sept 2001 and threatened to do the same thing to Iraq and Iran. If Jerry Sandusky’s fellow team members had arranged for a tragic accident while he was lifting weights and gelded him. If Sir Jimmy had been a hit and run victim. If Uncle Dick had been mugged and left an invalid.
But that would have been too brutal. Like nuking Moscow in 30 min or less.
7. Roughcoat
For us kids the 1950′s in London England were equivalent to your description of Chicago. There may have been funny looking geezers in long raincoats about sometimes, but perpetually drummed in parental warnings and a watchful population who would punch weirdos out in a heartbeat made for a pretty safe environment.
Concur with the general sentiments. Dad’s were tough and mommy didn’t have sex with teenagers or gleefully kill babies. “Wait until your father gets home” took on ominous meanings.
In the 60’s I was rough housing around in elementary school and got pulled into the principal’s office with some of my jackass friends, he grabbed me by my chin and pushed me up against the wall and, not too hard, sucker punched me in the stomach. I had older brothers so took this as a cue to start crying. (that usually stop further escalation). The principal asked me if I wanted him to call my dad. “No sir!” was my tearful response. I spent a half hour in the principal’s office every day for a week or two making sure that I didn’t slide into more or worse aberrant behavior. I was new to the school and he didn’t want me to fall in with the wrong crowd. I did anyhow but he made an earnest effort to try to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can’t imagine how that would all play out nowadays. No I don’t think things have improve markedly at all.
I have to ditto the comments made by everyone else. I remember being part of a huge mob of kids playing out on the streets unsupervised and engaging in all sorts of mischief. Even in third grade, we would ride to school unsupervised on bicycles. I’m sure the pedophiles were out there but no one heard about them (I never did). I suspect the pedophiles were like grizzly bears during a salmon run grabbing the random unfortunate child. The crime is so ugly that one would talk about it. One suspects that when a pedophile was caught, summary justice quickly followed.
Same same growing up in western NY in the 50′s and 60′s. We played baseball or football until dark ,then kick the can or hide and seek until we went home. Hardly ever locked the door, everybody knew everybody. Perve free zone.
Only known cure for pedophila: A nine gram injection behind the left ear.
Yes thats evil.
All these replies bring back some good memories for me as well growing up in the 1970′s. We would go on bike rides for the entire day and travel across the county and back. Alone to the movies, nearby town festivals, city pool, and YMCA. Parents may have dropped off and picked up but they didn’t chaperone unless it was a family night at the movies or some such. Doors unlocked. Be home by dark.
The really sad thing on how hollowed out our culture and civilization has become is that I and a heck of a lot of people I talk to not only don’t trust many of our neighbors to do the right thing but we don’t even trust the police either at this point. It is truly “Lord of the Flies” out there.
Very gratifying to read that so many others, in so many different places (including London!), had similar experiences growing up in the 50s and 60s. Our civilization has certainly gotten worse in many ways since those times. As well, the black neighborhoods were in much better shape back then. I lived about four blocks from the street that very sharply divided my neighborhood from the black neighborhood. There was certainly segregation but the black neighborhood was mostly respectable. There was a middle class. There were stable families. Most of the black kids I knew (from playing sports) had fathers who lived with and supported their families. Blacks mainly had their sh*t together, which is why the civil rights movement succeeded. The gangbangers who live in the inner city today could not have sustained much less organized the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
Sure, there were dangerous black neighborhoods. There were also dangerous Polish and Irish neighborhoods. The craziest, scariest, toughest kids I ever knew were from my own neighborhood and they were Irish and Polish. Also there were greasers, they were scary too, but they kept to themselves.
Oh, man, playing with captured German equipment–wearing German helmets around the neighborhood! And dogs running loose. Yes!
Saturday morning, summer, dad says to my brother and me: “Stop watching cartoons, you two. Go outside, blow the stink offa you. Don’t come back until dinner.”
Okay, dad. That’s what we did. What are dad and mom doing while were gone? Don’t know, don’t care.
Nine months later, my little brother is born.
Good times, good times. For dad and mom especially.
It is a sad commentary here that the freedom and joys we knew as children has vanished for our kids and grandkids. What happened? Better yet, who let this happen? Perhaps that is the discussion our wannabe candidates for President should be having, not who can hand out more goodies that we can’t afford. How do we restore the lost freedoms? How do we restore a healthy and joyful environment for our children and grandchildren to thrive and grow up in? To me the winning campaign theme would be “Back to the Future”; stressing the need to return to time-tested American values that allows children to grow up free and our nation to prosper. We have tried the other way for 40 plus years now and the results are all around us to see. “And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?”
Alll the oldsters posting memories of glorious childhoods, take heart. My childhood in the late ’70s and early ’80s was just the same: be home before dark, don’t talk to strangers, never get in the car, and otherwise solve your problems youself. I think that’s key to raising a functional adult: let the children work through their own difficulties. We did lock our doors, and when I was under ten I had a sharply delineated range of the neighborhood (three blocks in any direction from the house, transgressions punished severely) but I never wore a bicycle helmet, or “checked in,” or heaven forfend went home to tell my daddy.
I raised my three children the same way in the ’90s and oughts, two girls and a boy, and never had the slightest problem.
There is not an upsurge of pedophiles, but our news cycle highlights them to create fear among the populace, and there are a lack of men willing to stomp a mudhole in them now. I also think a great number of feminized parents who were once children of boomers are mortified at the lack of supervision they received and are overcompensating, much as the greatest generation coddled their children as a direct reaction to the deprivation they suffered during the great depression. These things are cyclical, and self correct.
W@16: ”And then the President says he never said it and Candy Crowley of CNN backs him up and nobody even blinks!”
The ‘undecided’ might not have blinked, but they certainly did applaud.
My childhood was very similar to most of those described here, even when I was living in East LA. I had wide latitude to travel as far as my bike could carry me (though I once got grounded for wandering into one of the nascent war zones) and played a variety of war games with very realistic toys mockups.
My mother, however, grew up in an even tougher neighborhood as a latch key kid. Kids there sometimes disappeared and if you believe my grandmother, not a whole lot of effort went into finding them… they were part of the lumpen. My mom and uncle lived under rules pretty close to what kids live under today.
As I wrote in an earlier post, things started changing in the early 70′s. In the old neighborhood, the first of what we would now call a drive-by happened in ’73, if my memory serves. In the new neighborhood, kids were staggering around stoned either on hard drugs or ritalin and other drugs prescribed for “hyperactivity.”
It really was a sea-change — like a squall hitting. Hard-working blue collar neighborhoods became the ‘hood. Suburbs became the ‘burbs. By ’77, some parents in the new neighborhood were giving their kids pot to “keep them off the hard stuff.” In the old neighborhood, gangs were selling the hard stuff and killing other gangs to protect their revenue.
Matt@11: Well, when you meetyour maker, you can ask him about it.
Here in meatspace, however, Lord Acton’s dictum is a good heuristic.
Guggenbuhl-Craig writes somewhere that borderline pedophiles make good teachers, being a type that can sustain an interest in what the child is saying beyond normal adult capability. Probably kids’ shows are the same deal.
Which is to say that that’s no conspiracy is necessary, just a large enough population.
Child sexual abuse incidentally didn’t exist before the 70s, and child abuse didn’t exist before the 60s, when their entertainment and audience rating legs were discovered. Ian Hacking has a 1991 essay on the surprising history.
Until the 1970′s rape was a capital offense, and very hard to prove. If a child molester was killed the DA wouldn’t prosecute and if he did then no jury would convict. If a pedophile did get sent to prison then their life expectancy could be measured in hours. The resident murderers and other felons had Standards.
I went to high school with someone who turned out to be a baby snuffing, baby selling, eugenics black slave breeding, forced sterilization and gaying of young women for fun and profit, and child sexually-abusing worm. He calls himself an outsider “genius” and recently linked to an article about psychopathy having an upside in society. He claims to have made mega hundred millions selling stolen eggs from a successful model he snuck gutted via a corrupt gynecologist in collusion with his black market conspiracy.
He’s a lawyer in good standing in Texas. Go figure. Won’t be standing for long, though, I hear.
What is really interesting the seeming inverse correlation between the official disapproval of pedophilia and its practice.
Well, the greatest protection a youth has against being molested is having several adults he or she knows can be trusted. Predators try to isolate kids, tell them nobody will believe them if they tell, or convince them that they – the kids – will be in big trouble if they tell. Then they go ahead and do their deeds in private (or, in the case of the made men like Saville, with the protection of their lackys).
So today, our “mandatory reporting” society with eight thousand rules and hypervigilant busybodies, never sees the molestation done in the shadows. But it does drive away the decent adults who might otherwise build a trusting relationship with the youths, but instead keep themselves at a distance to avoid the sideways glances, whispers, and secret allegations.
The result is that kids have no one to turn to when an Uncle Jimmy starts his sick game with them. Our misguided elite’s preoccupation with pedophilia actually enables it.
He says he recently bought a yacht and plane and lots of bling and offshore accounts, even an island, with the money he made off of sterilizing and selling the ova of the model, (without her knowing b/c she trusted the gyno recommended to her by a new acquaintance in her life after a violent miscarriage for which the fine upstanding Texas lawyer takes responsibility via a “dosage” in her drink one night).
She has not had a period since then and doesn’t understand why. She just turned 25.
He thinks he has a lid on the Feds, but a pocket of uncorrupted agents at national and Interpol are looking into the international trafficking rings, unkosher financials and cyber hacking he and cabal are involved in.
The murdered and abused children are merely an afterthought, actually.
I used to walk to school down cow paths, through farms. I’d come out for recess and look through the barbed wire fence at the longhorns looking back at me. All that happened in Dallas, and I mean within the city limits. You’d need a medium range missle to hit a farm from my old homeplace now. My how times have changed. Where I live now parents have to get permission and sign papers to allow their kids walk to school, otherwise they have to take the bus. They lock the school doors after the kids are admitted, and it takes a parent to get a tardy kid to class. There’s no provision for a kid who walks to school by himself and winds up tardy. It’s simply not thought of. Not in the design of things. Causes consternation and a flurry of phone calls on the rare occasions when it happens.
And pick-up ball games? Forget about it. If parents don’t enroll their kids in an organized league, they aren’t playing ball. I’ve never seen a pickup game of stickball, maybe a handful of touch football games, and more often (but rare) game of basketball. And I live right in front of the playgrounds. During the summers, we used to get on our bikes in the morning and be gone all day, maybe swarming some unlucky housemom for lunch, and ride back home for dinner. That’s unheard of anymore.
Here’s an interesting piece that maps how the roaming area of children has shrunk over a few generations: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
The whole trend is unnatural and unhealthy if you ask me.
And, as a middle aged man, I am even more perplexed by the likes of pederasts and other sexual fetishists than I ever have been. Frankly, getting to my age has been a great relief in a sense, because thankfully my hormone drive has abated to a degree. That great overpowering libido that caused me so much trouble as a young buck has thankfully slackened, and this is a blessing. (Also, harrowing – you mean so much of that angst was mere hormones? Really?) These guys like Sandusky and Jimmy Savile, why do they never stop? They are not under the pall of any kind of normal sex drive. They’ve been sucked down into the demonhood of psychosis.
When all you Boomers are done reminiscing about your idyllic childhoods, perhaps you could explain to this GenXer how, with such freedom and wholesomeness as the backbone of your formation, you let the world fall apart on your watch.
I’ll be cleaning up the mess you left for the rest of my life, so I’d kind of like to know.
Matt, that rapid change I describe in Dallas happened incredibly fast. The Dallas of my first grade year was long gone already by the time I was a freshman in high school. Plano, TX had a population of 4k in the ’60s, today it’s 269k.
GenXer’s are named after a book, _Generation X_, by Douglass Coupland describing his own generation. He was born in 1961. I’m a bit younger, but I’m a GenXer. Barack Obama is also a GenXer, born in 1961 like Coupland. Mitt Romney, btw, is a Boomer (b. 1947).
But, I suspect you already know the answer to the question you pose. If not, my answer is this: you never get out of high school, really. Ever.
Matt 11, thank you for your very perceptive comments. I had always accepted Lord Acton’s dictum without much reflection, but now that you unpack it, I see where it falls short.
A question for slightly older BCers: what was it about c.1960 highbrow culture that was so friendly to pederasty? If you look at Ginsburg, Nabokov, Salinger (one can find others), the theme of child sexual abuse is prevalent. What was it about the Eisenhower-Kennedy era that found this so fitting a subject for serious literature? Really I am baffled by this.
Right now trying to raise my kids as free-range as possible. The state opposes us at every turn.
44. Matt
Actually the world fell apart in the 1930s and the 1940s. Remember the Great Depression and World War II? As a Boomer I can tell you this: we didn’t lose the war in Vietnam, our parents’ generation (i.e., the Greatest Generation) lost it for us, the grunts who fought it, a largely draftee military that won all of its battles, something even the Greatest Generation couldn’t accomplish. That Greatest Generation lost the first war in American history, a war that Boomer soldiers had won repeatedly on the battlefield, but I don’t hold this against them the way you and your precious generation hold the flaws of my generation against us. And when we Boomers finally came of age in the 1980s we were the motive force for the most prosperous era in American history. Certainly we had our flaws, e.g., we gave birth your worthless, whining, self-pitying cohort. No, just kidding, sort of. The point being that one can find many ways of interpreting history; but one of the stupidest ways is to assign blame or credit to entire generations. But you’re not unfamiliar with stupid ways of interpretation, are you, sport.
As for the high brow culture of the early 1960s: we Boomers wouldn’t know about that. The oldest of us were only teenagers. That culture was a product of the 1930s “Notch Babies” and, yes, the Greatest Generation. Don’t ask us. And don’t blame us for it either.
s @ 46: A question for slightly older BCers: what was it about c.1960 highbrow culture that was so friendly to pederasty? If you look at Ginsburg, Nabokov, Salinger (one can find others), the theme of child sexual abuse is prevalent.
Well, to play dime-store psychiatrist, it must be because they were themselves abused and were trying to see their way back to freedom and normalcy. Remember also Dr. Spock, B. F. Skinner, and Captain Kangaroo.
Roughcoat,
I think this may have come up before, but it seems we were contemporaries and neighbors. I grew up in the same era, but next door to you, in Wheaton.
Jamie Irons
49. Jamie
Very cool! BTW, I live in La Grange Park now. And I worked for many years at the First Division Museum at Cantigny.
Re 34 Lostin Austin: Boomers weren’t coddled. Have you not been reading what Boomers here have written about their childhood? What is that you don’t understand? Our parents kicked us out of the house and made us fend for ourselves; they were too busy working hard to provide for their families to indulge in coddling. I submit that, if any generation has been coddled, it’s Gen-X and its successors. As a result, and as any Boomer who has hired you and had to work with you can attest, so many of you suffer from TMSE (“Too Much Self-Esteem”).
Oh, just kidding, again … sort of. Turnabout is fair play, what.
And in Hollywood: there’s this.
>>Former child star Corey Feldman has said that the entertainment industry’s No. 1 problem is pedophilia.
“I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia,” Feldman, a survivor of child sexual abuse himself, told ABC’s Nightline in August. “That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry… It’s the big secret.”
“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurred former ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ’80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.”
Arngrim was referring to Corey Feldman and his ‘Lost Boys’ costar Corey Haim.
“I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,’” Arngrim said. “The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”<<
And there's more: Corey talks about being surrounded by homosexual pedophiles in H’wood when he was just 14.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
Judy Garland later recalled waiting in the car (she was under 12) while her mother went into casting offices and screwed the casting directors to get her daughter into the movies. Also that she herself lost her virginity when she was just 14: statutory rape, commonplace in that cesspool.
The news from the Beeb doesn't surprise me. I have to say, I don't understand why the English, Scots, and Welsh so tamely accept their government's extortionate practises. They used to know how to fight.
Google has decided the sky isn’t blue, but flesh-colored and erotically shaped: Google logo
Jerry Falwell had a point about freedom, even if he is a secret subversive advancing the stuff he demagogues. (Though if he were real I would also hold no love for him, the weird geezer.)
This world is a waste. I believe only a revolution in culture can save America, making it almost as great as China was in the mid-1970s. Therefore I have decided to vote for Obama. Don’t talk me out of it.
Another Free-Range Boomer here! grew up in the South in the 50s and 60s. No pedophiles (I honestly don’t think they’re that common outside of big cities). Homosexuality was considered a creepy disgrace, at best, so maybe those who would prey on little boys were sneakier about it and less inclined to transgress? I don’t know: we never heard of such things.
When I was 12, I asked my Atlanta cousin what the F-word meant: she gave me a pretty funny, not entirely accurate description that neither of us could wholly believe.
And Lostin Austin, honey, I feel for you, having a three-block leash! Was a girl with a bike and unlimited range: would ride for miles. Also spent hours exploring the excellent woods bordering our neighborhood, with an earthen dam, a stream with clay banks, swinging vines, varied trees and understory growth, vines, kid and dog trails, snakes and what-have-you. We would walk through the woods and cross the creek on a slippery fallen log, the only “bridge,” to go to school, which was about a mile away.
My sister asked our mom how they let all the kids roam so freely, and she gave her part of the secret: the moms were all at home (yes, ALL), and they watched the roving brat pack (see “The Little Rascals” to get the idea) through their windows. So the moms always knew where we were, mostly. But the coolest part was they never let us know. … And they’d tan your hide and send you to bed without supper if you didn’t obey the Rules.
Golden days.
Now? my old Girl Scout camp closed last year, after 70 years, because the current generation of “Scouts” refuses to do without their electronic “soma” fix. They don’t want to be out in the woods in a platform tent with their girlfriends, cooking over a campfire, or climbing the mountain nearby: they want to watch TV, surf the net, text each other obsessively; and they have to have AC or they’ll just die.
They’ll never experience the glorious thrill of pitting themselves against the challenges of Nature; listening to bears in the dark; seeing the mist on a lake before the dawn when the silence is so deep; climbing a hill with moss so deep your feet sink in it; looking out to the horizon of forever. Poor fools.
Like Richard, while I’m ordinarily disgusted with Savile for his action, I’m more broadly interested in the institutional cover-up. Statistically, we can talk about categories of people that are more or less likely to commit crimes, but individually, no type of person is beyond suspicion. I worked in a prosecutor’s office for several years and dealt with cases where the defendants in sordid and low-class petty crimes were veteran judges, police supervisors, and successful businessmen.
Penn State, Catholic Church … I’m also reminded of the Horace Mann controversy where pedophilic teachers were rumored or even known among students and tolerated (or worse) by the administrators. I don’t think it’s a political thing. It’s a social psychology thing. There just seems to be something about the culture of respected institutions that induces fear of challenging authority and rocking the boat.
The only thing that surprises me is that the antics of Savile and Sandusky became a big deal. Perhaps the powers to be sense that there is still enough of a vestige of Christian morality left in the culture for them to safely abandon the public gasp of horror and hand wringing. Roman Polanski still wins awards in Europe.
The only remaining boundary in the glorious march of sexual liberation are the children. Contraception, abortion, divorce and homosexuality proved to be but bumps in the road, Pederasty shall soon enough become “utilized for the purpose of coming-of-age rituals, the acquisition of virility and manly virtue, education, and development of military skill and ethics.” Wikipedia
And since gender discrimination of any kind is inherently evil, young girls shall not be denied the opportunity to participate in these coming-of-age rituals.
A dollar to a doughnut that 10 will be the “age of consent” within 10 years.
The Culture of Death demands it. In Ontario, Canada it will soon become illegal (as in go to jail) for Catholic schools to teach that abortion and homosexuality are an offense to human dignity and morally repugnant. Moloch will brook no opposition.
Matt, I’m sure you know about Pope Leo XIII and his famous vision. As an early boomer, former new-age style atheist and recent convert, I think that probably offers the best explanation.
If you’re looking for vectors for how the evil has disseminated, then I meant what I wrote earlier about the early communists and their psyops program. They, Gamsci in particular, realized early on that Christianity and the family were their primary enemies and needed to be targeted. The assault on the arts, on adult authority over youthful impulses, and on judeo-Christian mores was deliberate and planned. They even considered weird things like putting bad art in public parks to erode the distinction between what is beautiful and ugly.
How idiots like Margaret Sanger got “recruited” to promote eugenics and, eventually, “population control” is open to debate, but it looks to me like it was all about wanting to be free to act out sexually, without the restraints imposed by tradition.
As for Roughcoats comment, I have to disagree. The deterioration during the late ’60s was abrupt and catastrophic. We are just now getting around to picking up the pieces, and it will take a generation or two to do so.
How the best and the brightest got – and many remain – sucked into such stupidity as it’s really a good thing to kill babies. Well, that was really the result of decades of the Gramscian march.
What can’t really be denied is that the U.S. has been slowly cannibalized by a variant of communism that we are just now getting around to fighting again, having been lulled to sleep, interestingly, by the success of the Reagan Revolution.
And the abuse and murder of children is part and parcel of the broader agenda that’s prowled the world seeking the ruin of souls for the last century.
BTW, the epicenter of the American cultural earthquake can be pinpointed, with only a modicum of dramatic license, to January of 1967. That’s when the world changed.
I’ve read for years about officials (mayors, police chiefs, ministers) in the EU and its constituent states, primarily Belgium and France, being pedophiles. These news stories are usually one-day stories or ridicule the anti-pedophiles as a anti-government conspiracy. I’m sure this is as true as those stories, and as little will be done about them.
Matt:
What happened?
It was the Civil Rights Movement. It did not know when to stop.
It developed that there were so many advantages to being an Aggrieved Minority that all kinds of people decided to get in on the action. Including bums, grifters, and crooks. Including fascists. Including our enemies.
It did not know when to stop. Call yourself a minority and demand special compensation for your condition. The Lawsuit Crisis was one result. It is progressed to the point that today we have convicts in prison creating religions that require them to eat steak every day and suing to enable them to follow their religious beliefs.
A key element of the Civil Rights Movement was uncoupling our society from its moral foundations. If there were accepted elements of society that allowed racism then, well, all elements of said society must be bad. Anything goes. If it feels good, do it.
As Myron Magnet has pointed out in his book, “The Dream and the Nightmare,” this philosophy was bad enough for the children of the affluent or even the middle class, but it was utterly disastrous for those who did not have their family’s Design Margin to fall back on.
And as Wretchard has said, people coming from other societies, ones that are far less egalitarian than ours, saw right away the chink in the amour. Put on black uniforms and swastikas and go on the march demanding things and you can expect some P-47’s to show up and make you the focal point of a firepower demonstration. Call yourself an aggrieved minority and you’ll get a police escort.
That includes pedophilia. I recall a few years back on the Dr. Laura radio show she announced that a Psychologists association had determined that sex between children and adults was Okay and “had many benefits for the child.” So rather than the neighborhood fathers lynching the guy and quietly burying the remains in the south 40, we are now supposed to regard him as providing a valuable public service.
Whether you are talking Boomers or The Greatest Generation, it takes but a few crooks or crazies to screw things up for everyone.
Have y’all heard about the Blitz company? They were the major maker of plastic gas cans in the U.S., had been around since before WWII. “Were.” Every year they had a few lawsuits from people claiming damage from their product. Then some idiot took one of their gascans and turned it upside down over an open fire. The results were predictable; he was badly burned. And when he won that lawsuit, 7 lawyers immediately filed a total of 42 lawsuits against the company for similar incidents. The company went out of business, the workers lost their jobs, and I guess we will be buying our gascans from China.
So idiots that pour gasoline on a fire are now regarded as members of an aggrieved minority. They don’t know when to stop.
#59—
”It was the Civil Rights Movement. It did not know when to stop.
It developed that there were so many advantages to being an Aggrieved Minority that all kinds of people decided to get in on the action. Including bums, grifters, and crooks. Including fascists. Including our enemies.”
Not to mention vandalism, storming the dean’s office, outrageous public behavior, and any in-your-face acts that could possibly enrage and horrify ordinary middle-class folks.
Pretty soon it got to be ordinary, outrage replaced by a resigned shrug.
Roughcoat @ 47 Here! Here! Finally a defense of the Boomers. You are so right about ‘Nam. The exalted Greatest Generation chose to lose that War. The seeds of “Lead from Behind” were all there in the LBJ/McNamara ideas for fighting that war.
The Greatest Generation, whose war time soldiers were treated with the greatest of respect and were granted unprecedented favors and privileges when they returned home, treated the Boomers in “Nam like cannon fodder and spat on them then they came home. Almost all the important cultural figures of the sixties who pushed the nihilist/Gramscian denigration of civil society were pre-Boomers.
The Gramscian march to exalting pedophillia and other vices started long before the Boomers, and gathered steam with each new generation. Those who want to blame all of our society’s ills on the Boomers just don’t know history.
Matt #44 What RWE #59 and Gordon #60 said. Also, “Don’t be so judgmental!” (= Don’t criticize me for making an ass of myself) became a rallying cry.
Bum:
Not to insult anyone.
Wretchard says: It’s been a bad week for the respectable institutions all around the world.
Add the Boy Scouts to the list:
“Confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on men they suspected of child sex abuse are set to be released after a two-year-long court battle.
The anticipated release of the files on Thursday by Portland attorney Kelly Clark will reveal 20,000 pages of documents the Scouts kept on men inside — and in some cases outside — the organization believed to have committed acts of abuse. . . .
The Scouts began keeping the files shortly after their creation in 1910, when pedophilia was largely a crime dealt with privately.
The organization argues that the files helped them track offenders and protect children. But some of the files released in 1991, detailing cases from 1971 to 1991, showed repeated instances of Scouts leaders failing to disclose sex abuse to authorities, even when they had a confession.
A lawsuit culminated in April 2010 with the jury ruling the BSA had failed to protect the plaintiff from a pedophile assistant Scoutmaster in the 1980s, even though that man had previously admitted molesting Scouts. The jury awarded $20 million to the plaintiff.
Files kept before 1971 remained secret, until a judge ruled — and the Oregon Supreme Court agreed — that they should be released.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/18/perversion-files-maintained-by-boy-scouts-for-decades-set-to-be-released-after/?test=latestnews
Matt @11 – fascinating explanation. I have copied it and may use it myself (citing you).
If y’all can take a break from the pedophilia, I got your national treasure right here: Jimmy Kimmel.
Who won the first lady debate last night?
I’d like to thank everyone for their generous explanations. If the S really does HTF, I think a lot of people will be wondering how we got to where we are. If the pain is especially acute, you can expect many attempts to assign blame and punish the offenders, and this will drive the politics and scholarship of the next few decades. The self-interpretation of those who lived through the transition will be scrutinized very closely by those who come after.
Julia: I’m glad you could use that explanation and I’m flattered that you would cite me. But do you want to know a secret, my dear lady? It’s all just basic Catholic theology, the kind that an earlier generation of schoolchildren would have learned from the Baltimore Catechism! I think (with absolutely no offense to you personally) that there is a widespread unfamiliarity with these classical sources of truth, such that it causes people to marvel when the come across them for the first time. If you are not a Catholic, I think you would enjoy reading a book like the Baltimore Catechism. There you will find many similar gems, presented with great simplicity and beauty, concerning God and His Church. Bless you and good luck.
maineman @ 57: “January of 1967. That’s when the world changed”
I’m gonna need some help with that one. The Apollo fire? The Golden Gate Park Be-In? What?
SoCal in the 70s,riding my skateboard to all of the empty backyard pools (drought you know) and we knew where All the fruit trees were.
I let my kids roam a bit in the 90s and 00s, however I took them roaming in our nearby Mts. also ,so they got a good grasp of the wild, turned out O.K. too.
OTOH My quite large family happens to have a Pedo in our midst,not blood so I can’t kill him, but that’s the real problem.I would go to prison for “Correcting” a mistake in my own family,and all we can do is Name and Shame him every chance we get,
Bob
BTW I’m 49
The biggest irony is that Bill Clinton never touched Monica (or whoever that was). Somebody wanted Americans cynically mad and hating themselves, and he was happy to play along with the operation. Sort of an early “Smoking Gun” story.
“Back in the day I came home from grade school to see people sloshing blood off the sidewalk with buckets of water. Curious I asked what had happened. Apparently one of our neighbors was an enlisted US Marine hand to hand combat instructor (so it was explained to me). He came home to find a local man molesting his daughter. So the instructor took him out into the street and beat him to a pulp.”
Also known as lynching. Very popular in the South.
Slightly off topic but scary, refer to:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-18/are-neo-nazis-aiding-greek-cops-diy-law-enforcement
The Greek economy choked and died after decades of free government cheese. Now with the economy dead, Greek society is imploding. What the linked article describes is a reincarnation of the Freikorps that operated in Germany shortly after WW-I. The Freikorps was the prototype for the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) that established its political credibility by slugging it out with Communists on the streets of Germany. Greece is going through nearly the same failure mode that Germany went through in the later days of the Weimar Republic. The Greek Neo-nazis will fight it out against the local anarchists/Communists until all the moderate people have been scared away or killed in the cross fire. Then the Neo-nazis will go for a knock-out punch against the Communists and either kill them outright or haul them off to concentration camps for later execution.
Handing out free cheese is such a noble and progressive thing to do until you find yourself in a situation like Greece or the Weimar Republic. There is no free lunch.
Another scary link is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalmar_Schacht
Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (funny name) was the economist/banker who enabled the political rise of the Nazis. Schacht was a brilliant financier and not an evil man. Unfortunately, he unwisely thought the Nazis could be controlled from within. Schacht was the guy who figured out how to control the hyperinflation that plagued the Weimar Republic economy and also invented the concept of building autobahns to manage German unemployment. Read about the “Rentenmark” which was Schacht’s cure for hyperinflation (the guy was a genius). The Weimar Republic was doing similar economic stunts to what Bernanke is currently doing to our economy before it blew up in their faces and spiraled into hyperinflation. The economic situation was out of control until Schacht did a fairly good imitation of Superman and saved the day.
I can not believe that we (the United States) are walking down the same path as the Weimar Republic. Haven’t the idiots who run our country read any history?
#72. Eggplant:
Vanderleun had this at his site linking to a siimilar movement in France. Admittedly what they have to say is very seductive, as they voice many of the same complaints that we might here. But when you keep listening, you realize that they are creeping up to the precipice:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/something_wonderful_a_dec.php
72. Eggplant
I can not believe that we (the United States) are walking down the same path as the Weimar Republic. Haven’t the idiots who run our country read any history?
Of course they have. The problem is, they view it as a “how-to” manual, only this time they’ll do things right and avoid the mistakes that their predecessors made.
Others have tried to warn us, even decades ago, e.g. by Leonard Peikoff (Jun 1, 1983):
The Ominous Parallels: A Brilliant Study of America Today – and the ‘ominous parallels’ with the chaos of pre-Hitler Germany
But as Simon and Garfunkel noted in their song “The Boxer”: “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…” … “lie la lie, lie la lie, lie, lie, lie, lie lie…”
51. beverly
…I don’t understand why the English, Scots, and Welsh so tamely accept their government’s extortionate practises. They used to know how to fight.
Just as speculation, perhaps a huge, critical percentage of their male populations with the requisite “fighting” DNA were culled from the breeding pool in WW I and WW II. Nearly a century of subsequent breeding with the remaining “beta stock” has produced the current appropriately malleable and docile populace for the purposes of the new management.
19. maineman & 56. maineman
Gramscian damage.
I read through the entire thread and there was much good thought and apropos commentary, but yours I think succinctly distills the essence of the matter: Gramsci’s “Long March” is near completion. The very idea that evil men long ago could conceive evil, long-range plans and then seriously get on with implementing them is just so alien to our native, common-sense American understanding of how the world is supposed to work that it just slid, by golly, right under our noses… /g
With its cadre of supporting players, e.g. the Fabians, the Frankfort School/John Dewey educrats, the Post-Modernists, Planned Parenthood, Cloward-Piven, the plethora of multi-national NGO’s, Foundations, etc, etc., etc., all of whom have labored for decades “helping” one group of us or another (with us footing the bill, of course), how could we have failed to arrive at “this best of all possible worlds”? (With apologies to Voltaire)
What changed from the ’50s to today?
The sexual revolution, fostered and underpinned by the popularization of Alfred Kinsey’s “research,” and his notion that children are “sexual from birth.”
Kinsey’s landmark “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” contained “data” about “child orgasms” from babies as young as 3 months old…ideas have consequences.
Dr. Judith Reisman explains further:
http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2011/08/sexual_anarchy.html
http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2011/08/theyre_mainstre.html
Eggplant #72:
I read recently where in area of Oregon, funding shortages has forced a cutback in the sheriff’s dept. So private citizens have stepped up, and with guns and cable ties for handcuffs, patrol the area the deputies can’t get to cover.
I think this is fine. But obviously it would tend to lead to “frontier justice.” Which is fine too; maybe if more criminals just mysteriously disappeared the rest would be rather more subdued.
But it could lead to excesses as well. Will these guys develop into a Ku Klux Klan analog? After all that was the original justification for the Klan, meting out justice in a South that was flat on its back. Of course, the Klan was racist from the git go and developed further in that direction as its original purpose went away.
#72 Eggplant
You bring back memories with mention of the Rentenmark. It was one of the inspirations for a paper I did back in the late 1980′s as an entry for the Furth Ruble Prize. Short form, under Peristroika the Russians wanted to sort out a way to make the fiat Ruble into a real currency backed by something of value. The Russian-American Foundation, the Soviet Government, and the Furth Foundation of Esalen, California put together a contest with real money as the reward. Given the sponsors, it is not surprising that in the end nothing was done.
The stated goal was a method of transition from fiat to real currency for the Ruble. I heard about the contest, and it triggered a memory. At the beginning of the French Revolution, the value of non-specie currency plummeted with massive inflation. Although the French National Assembly in many things was as functional as a football bat; they got the currency fix right.
The French National Assembly had seized all Church property and declared them biens nationaux [“national goods”]. Certificates ["Assignat"] were issued based on the seized property; and while they were meant as bonds to retire the national debt, they soon began to circulate as currency. And were accepted as such both domestically and in international trade.
They did inflate away to worthlessness eventually, but they held the economy together until the introduction of the Napoleonic franc.
My plan involved using title to specified areas of a marked off chunk of farmable steppe as backing for the “Transitional Ruble” en-route to a “New Ruble”. More complex than it sounds. A long paper, and I had to furnish, I think, 5 copies each in English and Russian. Getting the Russian copies involved having it translated and typed in Russian. In the days before modern PC’s and the internet, that involved finding someone to do it who was fluent in Russian and had a Cyrillic typewriter.
Back in those days I was involved in talk radio. One of my listeners was a history professor at a nearby university who was born in Ekaterinburg [Sverdlovsk under the Communists], taken as a forced laborer by the Nazis, met her husband in a slave labor camp, and they both made it to the American Zone of Occupation when the Russians overran their camp.
He had been an 11 year old Cadet in the Czarist Army who fought with the White Army all the way to their eventual defeat, including the Great Siberian Ice March across Lake Baikal. After a time living with the Chinese population of Shanghai, working in a tannery; he made it back to Europe after a series of “events” and became an officer in the new Royal Yugoslav Army. When Yugoslavia was conquered by the Germans, he ended up in the same slave labor camp as his wife.
They worked at menial jobs for the American Occupation Forces, until they could do better. Eventually they got to the US, and became citizens. He became an engineer [had just retired when I met him] and she was a history professor.
The discussions with them over tea and cakes were themselves worth all the effort of doing the paper. They did the translation for me, though, and I submitted it. I made the top 12, but not the finals.
Given the inevitable result of our fiscal suicide; the assignat, the rentenmark, and the concept of basing currency on tangible real property instead of fiat or PM is something we are going to need to remember. My paper is packed away in storage, and I think I am going to have to dig it out.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai Bahadur @ 79,
It’s a given that the our economy will eventually crash-and-burn probably through hyperinflation. At some point, the American analog to Hjalmar Schacht will appear and propose a renten-dollar. Basing a renten-dollar on gold is not an option because our economy is bigger than all the gold on the planet. My guess is the renten-dollar will be based upon the federal government’s real estate holdings, e.g. national parks and forests.
For me, the appearance and acceptance of the renten-dollar following collapse of the socialist/fiat-money system will be the signal that we have hit bottom (basic learning has occurred) and are prepared to rebuild our economy. I should emphasize that this is far in the future since our current President is so clueless that he actually thinks socialism is a good idea. Socialism, Keynesianism, etc. needs to go into history’s trashcan before rebuilding can begin.
cultural streams, such as in the 50′s, are unstable in the presence of rapidly changing prosperity.
It is ironic that socialist tendencies can only exist in an environment of increased wealth. Marxism never existed until he had leisure time.
The impulse to Jihad is greatly enhanced by oil wealth.
The problem for society is to accept prosperity.
It seems to me that there will be another wave of decline before that happens.
Hopefully, the cultural stream that Wretchard has established will help that to happen.
Saville was also active at Haut de la Garenne children’s home on Jersey which is a “Crown Dependency”. There were numerous allegations of a coverup by the freemasons who run the island. Dutroux was also alleged to have visited Jersey.
“Jersey has an almost self-contained government of its own, but the Queen remains at the top of its power structure and wherever the ‘Crown’ holds sway, so does Satanism and child abuse.
The infamous Satanist, Edward Paisnel, who was dubbed ‘The Beast of Jersey’ after being jailed for 30 years for the rape of boys and girls, used to play Father Christmas at Haut de la Garenne during the 1960s. You get the picture.
A high-profile police investigation began in 2008 into historic long-term abuse at the home and, unfortunately for those involved, a decent, honest copper was in control of the investigation. This was Lenny Harper, a States of Jersey police detective who led a three-year child abuse inquiry that genuinely tried to expose what happened.
Genuine police officers and detectives who sought the truth in the Marc Dutroux child abuse and murder scandal in Belgium in the 1990s found that refusing to cover up the facts is not a good career move for law enforcement personnel if the truth is leading to rich, famous and powerful people and their networks. So it proved again with the Jersey investigation.
Both sets of genuine investigators were removed from these cases and any credible ‘investigation’ went with them. Lenny Harper, like his counterpart in the Belgian inquiry, was accused of ‘misconduct’ as a blatant excuse to get rid of him – the allegations were later proved false. Harper’s boss, Jersey police chief Graham Power, was also outrageously suspended and neutralised as part of this.
More than a hundred people came forward claiming to have been sexually and violently abused at the Jersey home and Lenny Harper has confirmed that Jimmy Savile’s name came up early in his investigation but with not enough evidence to charge him at the time. Savile denied any knowledge of ever being at the home, but a picture emerged of him at the home to show that he was lying.”
This Saville scandal is a small glimpse into the hideous hidden truths behind the ruling elites.
The problem with rough justice and vigilanteism is that sometimes they get it wrong. I seem to remember a newspaper story from a few years back, about a doctor (with no whiff of scandal to his name) having his house torched when the local Neanderthals found out he was a paediatrician.