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Robert McDowell is right about the threat to internet freedom:

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Real time data communications across borders isn’t the invention of the Internet.  Before that we had the telex (see right.)  But think about it: the telex was…

• …the purview of the few.  How many of you remember having one? (No, I’m not trying to be unfair to my younger readers, I’m talking to you, control-freak Boomers.)
• …slow, so slow it travelled over telephone lines with ease.
• …expensive (see bill below from the early 1970’s, then do some inflation calculations.)
• …incapable of graphics or any other binary data transfer and storage.  (You could store the results other than on paper, mostly with paper tape.)

For those of us who had access to such a thing, and the international business and dealings that went with it, it was a broadening experience.  But we were definitely in the minority.

I know I exaggerate somewhat in saying we’ll go back to the telex for international communication and data transfer.  But we’ll be much the poorer if we allow the Internet to be choked by those who seek to control it–and us–above all else.

One more thing: McDowell notes the following:

While precious time ticks away, the U.S. has not named a leader for the treaty negotiation. We must awake from our slumber and engage before it is too late. Not only do these developments have the potential to affect the daily lives of all Americans, they also threaten freedom and prosperity across the globe.

Is this an accident?  Or is this one of those “action through inaction” kind of things?

He may not have thought of that, or perhaps he did…

What Obama describes as the American Dream can seem a spare, fundamental aspiration, tailored for a campaign that looks to be fought over who is best equipped to safeguard the interests of middle-class Americans…

“If you’re willing to put in the work, the idea is that you should be able to raise a family and own a home; not go bankrupt because you got sick, because you’ve got some health insurance that helps you deal with those difficult times; that you can send your kids to college; that you can put some money away for retirement,” Obama said recently in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“That’s all most people want,” he said. “Folks don’t have unrealistic ambitions. They do believe that if they work hard they should be able to achieve that small measure of an American Dream.”

Exposure to the old Soviet Union is something that changed one’s perceptions of things, and that’s certainly the case here.  My Russian rep remarked one time that it was possible to make a reasonable living in the old Soviet system, and that’s what came to mind when I heard about this speech.  Of course, having a small business, to say nothing of a large one, was out of the question…until the system collapsed.

In some ways, the old Soviet system had one advantage.  In the late years, Soviet people said that “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”  In our corporatist system, there won’t be any pretending to work on our part, although there could certainly be a pretending to pay.  That’s where this debt-driven “servile state” (HT to Hillaire Belloc) is going.

The Catholic League is prepared for war:

Catholic leaders are furious and determined to harness the voting power of the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters to stop a provision of President Barack Obama’s new heath car reform bill that will force Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to buy birth control pills, abortion-producing drugs and sterilization coverage for their employees.

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

There’s never been any doubt in my mind that our secularist (yes, secularist) chief executive had something of a “kulturkampf” in mind when he made this decision.  And, yes, it’s the same Catholic Church that Otto von Bismarck launched his against in the wake of the unification of the Reich.  And, finally, it’s pretty much for the same reason: both Obama and von Bismarck wanted to make a show of force against a powerful institution that represented a challenge, implicit or explicit, to their authority.

But that’s where the similarity ends.  One of von Bismarck’s accomplishments was the institution of the comprehensive social safety net that is a hallmark of German society and has been widely admired and imitated elsewhere.  To say, however, that the complex, expensive plan widely called ObamaCare is a worthy successor to what von Bismarck did–and what the Germans do today–is laughable.  What we’ve got is so bad that, as I’ve said before, it makes a single-payer plan look good.  Had Obama adopted that, he wouldn’t be in federal court defending the mandate.

And, of course, Barack Obama, with his due obeisance to his environmentalist fans, would never countenance the development of the wealth-creating industrial base that von Bismarck did (witness the Keystone pipeline fiasco) or for that matter the broad-based (and upward mobility encouraging) educational system, both of which became the envy of the world.

In his day Otto von Bismarck was referred to as the “Iron Chancellor.”  But things have changed.  Maybe what we have now is the “Plastic President.”

As this Shiny Sheet editorial/article (the way it’s placed, it’s hard to tell) illustrates vividly:

It’s unfortunate it took this long for officials at Susan G. Komen for the Cure to reverse last week’s wayward decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood.

It’s unfathomable that it took the charity three days from when the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars became public to restore the funding, which went to breast-cancer screening and other breast-health services. Why did it take the charity giant — which was founded by part-time Palm Beach resident Nancy Brinker — numerous denials, futile explanations and a public-relations firestorm to make an about-face from a decision that shouldn’t have been made in the first place?

One of the things that I’ve always found strange in my wanderings in Evangelical Christianity in this country is the juxtaposition of social conservatism with prosperity teaching.  That’s because, as a product of long-term success and having the historical memory that goes with it, the two in my view mix about as well as oil and water without an emulsifier.  In saying that, I’m making the assumption that prosperity teaching and its related lines of thinking have as their endgame placing at least some of its people at the very top of the society and not just to get their house paid off in time for the next major offering.

But the truth is that, although there are exceptions, on the whole people at the top of our society have attitudes on typical social conservative stances that range from indifference to rabid hostility.  There are a long list of reasons for this, but the central one is simple: people who have resources find it easier to throw money at the problems that result than to either restrict or redirect behaviour.  That’s not an option for people without these resources for events like unplanned pregnancies–unless, of course, there’s a well-funded organisation out there like Planned Parenthood to cover the cost.

In the past, it was fairly simple for a society to have a legal system with all kinds of restrictions for the many while the few took care of the results of such behaviour “on the side.”  But in these times such “on the side” solutions are more difficult to conceal, and so the impulse to remove the restrictions for everyone becomes stronger.  The results of this are a large reason for the social collapse–and subsequent impoverishment–of the lower reaches of our society these past fifty years.  Yet the results of reversing are so distasteful to contemplate for the well-heeled “beneficiaries” of the changes we have experienced that they’ll do what it takes to at least keep things the way they are, and the blowback to Komen’s decision to cut Planned Parenthood loose is a good example of this.

The sooner that Christian leaders wake up to this “cost of discipleship” regarding social issues (and a wide variety of other things) and level with themselves and everyone else, the better.  It would not only revolutionise the church, it would even affect the way we approach our political involvement.  We’ve seen evidence of this in the current presidential nominating campaign and doubtless there’s more to come.

February is Black History Month in the United States.  I have never done a specifically black history piece on this site, although I have from time to time suggested, for example, that Anglicans realise that the “Anglican Communion” is now and should be the “African Communion” with the centre of authority appropriately relocated.

But I also have a major interest in World War I, whose centennial is coming up in a couple of years.  Combining the two makes for an interesting discovery: the real reason the main U.S. land commander in that war, General John Pershing, was referred to as “Black Jack.”  Until recently I always thought, for example, that it was his favourite card game (that gives you an idea of the background I come from!) but the truth is different and much more interesting.

Pershing was born and raised in Laclede, MO.  As a young man he taught a group of African-American children.  That experience must have had an impact on him because, in his subsequent duty, much of his command was over black soldiers, who had served in the Union army during the Civil War.

In 1892 he took command of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the so-called “Buffalo Soldiers,” made up of black soldiers.  He commanded this regiment in Montana, rounding up Cree Indians and deporting them to Canada (that creates a serious politically incorrect problem which is beyond the scope of this post.)  Evidently he was satisfied with his service, but many of his white counterparts were not: as a result of this command, he got the nickname of “N—– Jack,” which was softened to “Black Jack,” probably as his rank rose.

With the Spanish-American War Pershing and the Buffalo Soldiers acquitted themselves with valour on San Juan Hill in Cuba.  In a battle better known for Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, the 10th Cavalry took much of the brunt of the fighting.  It’s interesting to think that Roosevelt, who witnessed the Buffalo Soldiers in action, had that in mind when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House during his presidency.

Pershing and his cavalry parted company, the former serving in the Philippines and latter hunting for Pancho Villa in northern Mexico.  But his most illustrious command was as Commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France.  Pershing would doubtless have been happy to have Buffalo Soldiers (maybe not a cavalry unit, cavalry did poorly in the trenches of Belgium and France) in the AEF.  But President Woodrow Wilson, academic Ivy Leaguer though he was, was still very Southern in his attitude towards black people.  One of Pershing’s standing objectives was to keep American forces together under American command, but in the end black units were peeled off to serve under the French, as had many aviators done already.

And the Europeans had no problem with black soldiers in their military forces.  The French had many who came from their African colonies serving on the front.  And in East Africa, the black troops under German Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck were becoming a military legend that eclipsed the accomplishments of Pershing and the Buffalo Soldiers.  But it would take another war (or two or three) before it became conventional wisdom in the U.S. that all who are willing to take lead for Old Glory deserve their rightful place in the most powerful armed force the world has ever known.

But such are the hard lessons of history.  The nation which can successfully mobilise the God-given talents and abilities of the widest spectrum of its population will achieve its destiny.  In a culture where it’s so easy for one portion of the population to denigrate another, losing sight of that lesson will blunt that goal.  And at this point we cannot afford to throw any portion away, now can we?