'Oprah's Excellent Elitism'

South-Africa, The Zeitgeist

“Oprah can protest all she wants, but, like Jefferson, her actions bespeak a belief in ‘a natural aristocracy among men,’ which Jefferson considered ‘the most precious gift of nature.’ In an 1813 letter to John Adams, he described this natural aristocracy as distinguished by ‘virtue and talents,’ and disavowed ‘an artificial aristocracy … without either virtue or talents.’ Jefferson would have thus approved of the way Oprah separated the wheat from the chaff for her school, selecting each girl for her grades and grit. The 152 girls were chosen for qualities rare everywhere (and certainly among American school kids).”

The excerpt is from “Oprah’s Excellent Elitism,” my new WND column, which also leads the Commentary Page today.

Some bonus material that didn’t make its way into the column:

Rapper Jay-Z, who recently acquainted himself with conditions in Africa, said he would no longer be referring to the relatively poor neighborhood in which he grew up as the “hood.” “Struck by the sight of children playing near open sewers in an African slum,” he said, “this is the hood.”

In other words, Jay-Z thinks African-Americans have no idea what the “hood” really is.

‘Oprah’s Excellent Elitism’

South-Africa, The Zeitgeist

“Oprah can protest all she wants, but, like Jefferson, her actions bespeak a belief in ‘a natural aristocracy among men,’ which Jefferson considered ‘the most precious gift of nature.’ In an 1813 letter to John Adams, he described this natural aristocracy as distinguished by ‘virtue and talents,’ and disavowed ‘an artificial aristocracy … without either virtue or talents.’ Jefferson would have thus approved of the way Oprah separated the wheat from the chaff for her school, selecting each girl for her grades and grit. The 152 girls were chosen for qualities rare everywhere (and certainly among American school kids).”

The excerpt is from “Oprah’s Excellent Elitism,” my new WND column, which also leads the Commentary Page today.

Some bonus material that didn’t make its way into the column:

Rapper Jay-Z, who recently acquainted himself with conditions in Africa, said he would no longer be referring to the relatively poor neighborhood in which he grew up as the “hood.” “Struck by the sight of children playing near open sewers in an African slum,” he said, “this is the hood.”

In other words, Jay-Z thinks African-Americans have no idea what the “hood” really is.

Bush Babbles About Government Job Creation

Bush, Economy, Government

From last Night:

The Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

Question: The Iraqi government has its own money? $10 billion of it?

In any event, government job creation schemes are predicated on government taxing, borrowing or inflating the money supply. Such programs are politically popular because they are visible. However, for every job “created” by government, an unidentifiable job will, tit-for-tat, be destroyed in the private sector.

Fox News, keen to hype this good-news story, may broadcast images of earnest Iraqi men and women put to work by Nuri Kamal al-Maliki (read the American taxpayer). Invisible will be those thrown out of work because private economic activity has been crowded out by taxing or borrowing to finance these job programs. Government borrowing (and Iraq is all about borrowing: American borrowing) serves to reduce capital available to the private sector (Iraqi, American—your choice, whoever you believe is really funding this latest scheme). A further diminution of assets occurs when government expands the money supply and causes inflation in order to finance job creation schemes.

Creating good, long-lasting employment lies in producing goods or services for which there is a legitimate consumer demand. A rise in consumer demand for a product, reflected in relative higher prices, galvanizes business to hire more workers and produce more of the commodity. Hence jobs in the private sector are real jobs because they are sustained by consumer preferences. Unsustainable government make-work schemes merely usurp the wishes and needs of consumers, and substitute them with the fancies of bureaucrats, who, in turn, are beholden to their political masters.

Sustainable jobs in Iraq will be created by the private sector. For that, ordinary Iraqis require peace and the rule of law. These preconditions are unlikely in the chaos of a civil war, created by Bush’s adventure in the region.

Bush remains oblivious to an immutable principle, once understood by conservatives: Top-down central planning—economic or political—is doomed to fail.

On Dr. Szasz And Coercive Psychiatry

Psychiatry

By Leonard Roy Frank

Thank you, Ilana Mercer, for performing a valuable public service by publishing Thomas Szasz’s extraordinary essay, “Coercion as Cure“! For 50 years now Dr. Szasz has courageously challenged the ideology and practice of coercive psychiatry. In the revised edition (1974) of his landmark work “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1961), he stated some of the major principles underlying his critique. They are worth repeating here:
-“Disease or illness can affect only the body; hence, there can be no mental illness.
-‘Mental illness’ is a metaphor. Minds can be ‘ sick’ only in the sense that jokes are ‘sick’ or economics are ‘ sick.’
-Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels, phrased to resemble medical diagnoses and applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others….
-If there is no mental illness there can be no hospitalization, treatment, or cure for it….
The introduction of psychiatric considerations into the administration of the criminal law — for example, the insanity plea and verdict, diagnoses of mental incompetence to stand trial, and so forth — corrupt the law and victimize the subject on whose behalf they are ostensibly employed….
There is no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.”
That the psychiatric profession and society at large have mostly ignored Dr. Szasz’s critique helps explain the deplorable state of the current “mental health system.” More and more people are being labeled with psychiatric “diseases” as more and more diagnoses are being conjured up. Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), the “father of modern psychiatry,” had only four categories of what was then called “insanity,” but in 1952 the American Psychiatric Association described about 106 “mental illness” categories in its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” and its 4th edition published in 1994 had 374 such categories.
As was true on a smaller scale in Pinel’s time, psychiatric violence, coercion and deception are today standard operating procedures: e.g., “mental patients” who refuse psychiatry’s powerful drugs, called “medications,” are held down and forcibly injected. These drugs, especially in large doses, are frightening in their effect but the bottom line is that sooner or later they make the individual feel mentally, emotionally and physically wasted. Moreover, the longer the drugs are taken, the more likely they are to cause permanent brain damage and other, sometimes life-threatening and life-shortening, medical problems. And even when consented to, the consent is likely to be fraudulent because psychiatrists seldom supply accurate and full information about the risks involved in taking these drugs.
In addition to the many millions of adults being subjected to this kind of abuse, psychiatrists and other physicians, in a practice almost unheard of a generation ago, are “prescribing” a variety of psychiatric drugs to an estimated 5-10 million children and adolescents. The drugs will cause many of these youngsters to become habitual psychiatric- and street-drug users and eventually “chronic mental patients.”
There has also been a resurgence in the use of electroshock (electroconvulsive treatment, ECT). Since 1940 more than 6 million people in this country alone have undergone this brainwashing, brain-damaging, and memory-destroying procedure. Even today, more than 100,000 Americans are being electroshocked every year.
Coercive psychiatry may be defined as the use of psychiatric methods by means of outright force and intimidation or in the absence of genuine informed consent to “treat” non-existent “diseases,” diseases for which there are no proven physical markers.
There is no way to calculate the amount of suffering coercive psychiatry has caused and continues to cause those individuals directly affected. Nor is there any way to assess the degree to which coercive psychiatry has undermined and continues to undermine the values and moral standing of every society in which it operates.
In “The Second Sin” (1973), Dr. Szasz anticipated the coming of “the Therapeutic State” in which “the principal requirement for the position of Big Brother may be an M.D. degree.” In such a state, the prevailing creed of “therapeutism” will justify “proclaiming undying love for those we hate, and inflicting merciless punishment on them in the name of treating them for diseases whose principal symptoms are their refusal to submit to our domination.”
Two questions need to be asked: 1) How close are we to “the Therapeutic State” which would necessarily result in the loss of our freedom, and 2) What are we, the people, going to do to prevent its establishment?

—Leonard Roy Frank, Editor, The Random House Webster’s Quotationary