You may be right, cleek, but your evidence is not any good: I asked which important RightLand people say there was no NADC. Something written more than ten years ago by a grad student doesn't count.

But how is "Native American demographic collapse" a leftist opinion? I was under the impression that is was "current historical consensus" opinion ... Another way of putting it is, who (important in RightLand) is saying that there *wasn't* a NADC, or that it wasn't mostly due to disease? This meme must be coming from *somewhere*.

I maybe haven't been reading every comment as carefully as I should, because I'm really confused about why we seem to be talking about AN epidemic, regardless of mortality rate. Diseases introduced to the New World 1493+ include but are not limited to: smallpox measles influenzas (various) malaria yellow fever chicken pox diphtheria whooping cough viral dysenteries (various) bacteria dysenteries (various) amoebic dysenteries (various) I honestly don't understand (again: possibly due to not reading carefully enough) what McTX is objecting to in the idea that Native American populations crashed after 1492. In many cases the crash was *before* there was significant face-to-face European contact, because introduced diseases outran European explorers. For historically-significant instance, when the Mayflower landed in 1620, they found the countryside --including recently-cultivated fields -- empty, not because of the Native's "lifestyle", but because of an epidemic that had killed most of the population in 1616-19. A recent article suggests that the disease may have been leptospirosis, which isn't even on the list I gave above.

johnw is IMO on the right track about sugar and slavery, and the rest of you have mostly hared off in a different, less relevant direction. Pre-Columbian North America is of basically zero relevance for New World race slavery, because massive importation of African slaves occurred well before the future US was explored by Europeans. Instead, the first enslaved Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere came to the Caribbean and Brazil. The real question I'm going after, and I hoped one of you would know something about, is, what Islamic, race-based "slave codes" is Dah Abeid talking about? And under what circumstances were they developed?

For a virtual potluck, where I don't have to do any work, I'll pull out all the stops and make Julia Child's Los Gatos Gateau, a fabulously elaborate apricot dacquoise. It's even gluten-free! Normally I make it no more than once a year, for New Year's Eve. I got the recipe from my parents, who got it from Julia Child and Company, and over the years I made one crucial alteration: bake the meringue layers on non-stick baking mats. With those, I rarely crack a layer or have the other problems Julia describes. It is astonishingly delicious.

My first, gut reaction to the news about the death of Kim's uncle: "That counts as natural causes." It's not really a communist thing, this would be completely unsurprising if you were reading it in any history of Europe, the Ottomans (or any of their predecessors), China, etc. etc. This is just Standard Operating Procedure for any hereditary rulership. The details of the accusation don't really matter, the substance is always the same: no-one is more dangerous to the young potentate than a family member with an similar claim to rulership but with longer-established connections.

McKinneyTX: you said: no one on Team Obama is saying one way or the other, but if BC and morning after were the end of the story and if abortion wasn't on the undisclosed horizon, then the easy and smart thing to do would be to pre-empt: to tell everyone, mainly Catholics, that no-way, no-how is abortion ever going to be on the table. No one is doing that. Ergo, the reasonable inference is that once this current round survives judicial scrutiny and once the dust settles, abortion is next. I am gobsmacked. No, this is *not* a reasonable inference. I can't speak directly for people in the White House, but this is *not* what pro-choice activists are telling each, this is *not* what we're all thinking. Maybe Obama hasn't said that abortion won't be on the table because IT'S NOT ON THE TABLE, because THAT'S NOT WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT. IUDs and Plan B aren't the slippery slope to abortion, they're how we PREVENT abortion. The problem is that the anti-choice side has re-defined abortion, to include things that happen before there is a pregnancy. To quote from the amicus brief, again:Abortificient has a precise meaning in the medical and scientific community and it refers to the termination of a pregnancy. Contraceptives that prevent fertilization from occurring, or even prevent implantation, are simply not abortifacients regardless of an individual’s personal or religious beliefs or mores.The slippery slope runs in the other direction, toward increased control by other people over women's bodies and lives. You need to realize that your reasoning here is the very essence of paranoia. Because Obama isn't making an extra effort to deny a plot that exists only in your head, you conclude that you've uncovered HIS CUNNING PLAN. Or, you know, *my* cunning plan -- I haven't exactly made a secret of my backing for Planned Parenthood, among others. Your logic -- that since Obama isn't disavowing making abortion covered by mandated insurance, it must be what he's planning -- would lead to me, for instance, saying that anyone (you, the Greens, whoever) who claims to be opposed to the contraceptive mandate has to ritually deny agreeing with Limbaugh about Sandra Fluke, or I'll assume that you do, in fact, believe that women just want it so we can be sluts and prostitutes. The difference is that Rush Limbaugh's statements are not a figment of my imagination.

Brett said: If somebody who's pro-choice is put in charge of regulating abortions, and they end up rather spectacularly NOT being regulated, I'd assume this was what they'd set out to do. I don't know for a fact that all the lawyers you cited call themselves "pro-choice"; do you? My assumption has been that they didn't regulate Gosnell because his clients were poor, nonwhite, and included many poorly- or un-documented immigrants, and that they just. didn't. care. I *do* know that governmental regulation of abortion clinics is a political football that attracts all kinds of grandstanding, so it's quite possible that the regulators in question played Hot Potato with any abortion clinic problems that came up, and devoted their time (which they doubtless didn't have enough of) to tasks they might complete without getting into a media circus. Because government regulation is so politicized, decent abortion providers have their own organization, the National Abortion Federation. Gosnell applied for membership and was turned down for being not up to standard, but since they don't have any legal force behind them, they couldn't close him down. The grand jury report says:Many organizations that perform safe abortion procedures do their own monitoring and adhere to strict, self-imposed standards of quality. But the excellent safety records and the quality of care that these independently monitored clinics deliver to patients are no thanks to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. And not all women seeking abortion find their way to these high-quality facilities; some end up in a filthy, dangerous clinic such as Gosnell’s.

Brett: Women often give birth to children at an earlier stage of development than pro-choicers persist in using terms like "zygote". Huh? When I, at least, say "zygote" I mean zygote, a single cell. I am objecting to the people who call that cell a "baby" or a "person". In the Hobby Lobby case, the issues are about the moral status of the first week of development, the stages *before* pregnancy. Calling a zygote, morula, or blastula a "person" whose rights need to be balanced against those of the mother is IMO obscene, and the fact that the woman is often not even mentioned just emphasizes the obscenity. I imagine that what you're talking about is use of the word fetus:An unborn offspring, from the embryo stage (the end of the eighth week after conception, when the major structures have formed) until birth.Sorry, dude, that's what it's *called*. There is no standard medical term for "a fetus developed enough that maybe, if you're lucky, it can survive birth."

Brett: I honestly don't understand what you think you're proving by bringing up Gosnell. Here's an overview of how I understand the case. From the pro-choice POV, Gosnell is emblematic of what we're trying to *prevent*. He was the back-alley abortionist, the *opposite* of Planned Parenthood. Women came to Gosnell because the pro-life movement was *successful*: successful at restricting access to abortion, successful at making abortion more expensive, successful at putting delays into the process of getting an abortion (and every delay increases the danger and expense of the operation), successful at making women afraid to admit that they might need one, and successful at shaming them when they went to decent clinics like Planned Parenthood. It's actually an anti-choice activist who wrote that a woman "wants" an abortion Not like she wants a Porsche or an ice cream cone. Like an animal caught in a trap, trying to gnaw off its own leg, a woman who seeks abortion is trying to escape a desperate situation. This gets quoted by pro-choice activists a lot, because it really does evoke the desperation an unwanted pregnancy can cause, and how the fear can be like (and can actually *be*) the fear of death or captivity. The women who went to Gosnell were *desperate*, driven to the last extreme. They felt -- and possibly they *knew* -- they had no other choice, because so-called "pro-life"rs had made sure they didn't.

russell: you asked If this is so, then I withdraw my earlier statement to the effect that I'm sympathetic to the Green's position. The petition states:After learning about the contraceptive-coverage requirement, Hobby Lobby “re-examined its insurance policies,” discovered that they already covered certain FDA-approved contraceptives to which the Greens objected, and proceeded to exclude those contraceptives from the Hobby Lobby plan.

I'm so sorry for your loss, LJ. This is a wonderful tribute. Speaking of coincidences -- from the timeline, it looks as though my parents were meeting at UW grad school at the same time your parents were meeting. Tangent trajectories. Another tangent is that my mother's elder sister's first husband was a Nisei, born in Hilo. He and his brother were living in southern California in December 1941, but they weren't interned -- they were in the early group who "volunteered" to move to cities in the interior of the US, in a kind of internal exile. In their case, it was to Chicago, which is where they eventually met my aunt, a free-spirited Wisconsin girl. My mother was also there, going to the University of Chicago while the others were at the Art Institute, and they were part of a co-op to share food and cooking. Because of this experience, I grew up eating a lot of rice and soy sauce -- my mother, being of German/Swedish descent, had already peeled a *lot* of potatoes before my uncle taught her to cook rice. From things the family has said over the years, I know that it could be extremely rough to have a marriage between a Japanese-American man and a white woman in the 1950s. You'd think that the Wisconsin of Joe McCarthy would be especially bad, but I do know that my grandfather -- as stalwart a Rockefeller Republican as you can imagine -- backed his daughter and son-in-law 100%, even when it led to things like being refused service or even friendship.

Speaking of both franc-tireurs and mass opinion, current historical thinking is that the German massacres in Belgium in the first weeks of WWI were essentially due to a meme among the soldiers, not any kind of plan by the generals. The meme was the belief that the German lines could expect to be attacked by horrible, bloodthirsty franc-tireurs as they marched through the low countries, and that any sigh of acquiescence on the part of the populace was just a ruse. This meme was spread by the experienced soldiers in the ranks, and agitated the mass of green troops to the point where they were twitching at every cow. And so every instance of fighting back on the part of the Belgian army, or of friendly fire, was attributed to "franc-tireurs", and they retaliated on the populace to "teach them a lesson". They basically frightened themselves into atrocities.

What evidence is there that collaboration was tolerated by either side during any of these conflicts? What Judt says is that it wasn't on the legal books as a *crime*, and that in order to punish collaborators after 1945 they had to go through various legal and extra-legal shenanigans. Treason of course was already a crime, but its legal scope was limited to higher-ups and the military. Also, in France (at least) women who had slept with Nazi were socially shamed for horizontal collaboration, which I don't recall of hearing about after other wars. In earlier eras, "loose women" might be shamed, but IIRC sleeping with the invader didn't involve much *extra* shame, it was pretty much expected.

What was Steinberg's conclusion, dr ngo?

joel: I wrote a little about The Lost Boys in one of my 2011 OSC posts:When OSC's novel Lost Boys was published (1992), I was initially impressed. "Whoa," thought I, "a Mormon who writes something about the Lost Boys of polygamy, the ones who get tossed out to keep the sex ratio weighted toward women! That takes a lot of guts." I thought too soon. It's actually a very slow-moving horror story about a Mormon family and the horrible outsiders they encounter, most terribly a serial killer who targets boys (though there's also a *different* man who's a pedophile targeting girls). For a Mormon with a polygamous family tree, this smells to me of projection: we don't have Lost Boys, no sirree! That's a problem that comes from the outside! And yet, the serial killer's victims turn out to be buried *under the house* (I haven't read the book, I'm going by the plot summary on Wikipedia -- and I hope for OSC's sake that the summary is making the ending sound more treacley than it actually is), and the killer turns out to be the owner's *father*, IMHO because OSC's Muse and his unconscious keep making sure that we know there's a danger in the house/in the home/in the traditional family, and it wears a fatherly face.Does that analysis sound right to you?

Sorry guys, but "i am no one" and bc are illustrating the point I'm making in the next Obamacare post. When you compare the US to all the other First World countries, our health care spending has been going up *much* faster, for decades. In all the other countries, individuals do *not* have to make the kind of decisions about health care that you-all claim will lead to lower costs. And yet, they have lower costs. The US "free market" is the problem, not the solution. Yes, it's a constrained market, not completely free. But to say "30 other countries have been getting better results then we have for 40 years, but obviously we'd be ruined if we tried to do what they do" is to make an idol of American exceptionalism. And this idol requires *human sacrifice* -- at least 20,000 Americans a year die for lack of health insurance. And that's not even counting the human misery from nonfatal conditions that are left untreated, for lack of coverage.

Hartmut, etc.: Did you Germans find that when you first read Schiller it seemed "full of cliches", full of phrases you knew but hadn't realized where they came from? A reader has just informed me that they've heard French speakers say it happens for them with Molière. If it doesn't happen with German (except for the Bible), I wonder if it's because none of the iconic literature is *old* enough, it hasn't had as many centuries as Molière or Shakespeare to seep all the way into the language.

No question the KJV has had as much of an influence as Shakespeare, or more. But I don't recall having that "it's full of clichés!" feeling reading it -- probably because so much of the Bible had been presented to me as the Bible, from earliest youth. I never got the "so *that's* where that comes from!" feeling, because people quoting the Bible almost always signal that they're doing so and that it's important. For Shakespeare in general and "Hamlet" in particular, what was startling was reading something for the first time that felt already familiar. We're currently doing a family read-aloud of The Lord of the Rings, the first one since Sprog the Younger was 6 or so. She says she keeps being startled by how many phrases or sayings the rest of us repeat all the time turn out to come from LOTR. "Hamlet" for me was the same thing, only an order of magnitude more so.

Thanks, dr! I hoped you would weigh in. Is Kim Van Kieu the kind of thing that everybody (who goes) reads in secondary school? It's fascinating to read the wikipedia entry and realize that this is a "national epic" that's about a woman. And not just about her, the entry makes it sound like a (complex and sophisticated) romance novel, because so much of it seems to revolve around sex and/or love. No wonder a lot of male critics thought it had to be a political allegory.

And here that graph is at the WSJ. But that brief article doesn't say anything at all about the *reasons* for the divergence.

AJA is considered radical-untouchable by most people on the American right. Local papers in my observation have more reporting and less ideology than your true RWM. CNN probably belongs in the center, but personally I consider it just embarrassing.

Laura: The real problem is that so many of the people who believe the lies slam the door on their capacity for rational thought by claiming that all other sources are invalid. I think you're not blaming the correct party, here. For Fox News, in particular, emphasizes over and over that "we tell you what the rest of the media is afraid to", that *only* Fox News (etc.) can be trusted. In this particular Hannity segment, for instance, he says "These are the stories that the media refuses to cover". The message viewers keep getting, over and over, is that *we* are different, *we* aren't "the media", we're on your side, we understand and agree with *you*. Their viewers don't seal themselves off of their own volition, but because the RWM devotes a lot of effort to getting them to do it. And they're not "gullible" as a character trait, they're *loyal*. But being loyal to leaders and to their ingroup means they're much more vulnerable to affinity fraud.

A "conservative" healthcare market would be promoted on FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal. That's it. The ACA is a fundamentally conservative approach to health care reform, because it relies so much on private insurance companies. Obamacare was basically developed by conservatives, it was their baby. But conservatives (really "conservatives, these days -- most are much more reactionary than conservatives) are owned by the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is owned by FoxNews. FoxNews doesn't want policy agreements and negotiations, because they make for bad TV. FoxNews wants the fire of battle, stalwart opposition and heroic fights, failure is not an option! -- Because that makes for exciting TV. FoxNews' ratings (and profits) have never been higher. You have always been at war with Obamacare.

In support of fiddler's argument: Here is a painting of Catherine the Great with many of the Russian state regalia. Here is what many of the items look like now.