Growing up, my mother worked and also did a great job parenting three children who, I have to face reality, weren't always angels. She happened to work at the school we attended as soon as her last one was in Kindergarten. Pretty convenient, and it kept her from Marge Simpson syndrome; cleaning for no reason and being cooped up in a house all day.

My mother is a bright woman who grew up in the 1960s and married in the 1970s - not in the counterculture, but rather in a traditional Italian household surrounded by friends and relatives in the same situation. She had her share of rebellion and has enjoyed plenty of nights out with the girls, but to this day, I can see that the values she took from her parents, even if they were a bit strict at times, were gladly passed down to her children. The fact that she's considered "a classic" by my wife and friends is no surprise: she's a great hostess who welcomes people into her home and takes great pride in keeping a clean home; she works hard and still has time to prepare dinner most nights for those remaining in her house; she always wants family around no matter how busy it makes her or no matter how tired she gets.

My wife's mother is much the same way; she did all of the work in raising her children herself and from what I understand was also strict at times. She has run a day care out of her house for decades after working in television and traveling during the 1970s. She's had a full life of hard work and parenting, she just chose not to pursue a career she knew was at odds with parenting once she had children.

To me, this is the working mom. Working moms put family first and worry about career later. Both examples noted above would be considered sacrelig by the modern mentality of "career first, materialism next, kids third."

So it confuses me that much more when I hear complaints about work-life balance from people who choose to delve into careers they know full well will take up most of their waking hours:

Listen to Nicole Russo, the mother of two young girls, and a partner at O’Neill Hospitality and Entertainment, speaking on a recent morning at a volunteer event before starting her day at work, then going home to West Roxbury to do the bath and bedtime routine. “People say, ‘you should do yoga, you should do Pilates, something for yourself for an hour.’ But who has an hour? Who has time for inner peace?"

If there’s one thing that’s harder to take than your own lack of equilibrium, it’s someone else’s success in that realm. To say “I spend time with my kids, and I volunteer, and I’m blessed with a wonderfully flexible job, and my husband and I have date night every Saturday,’’ is akin to boasting “I’ve got firm thighs."

But perhaps the best advice comes from the unbalanced moms themselves. Asked if they had work-life balance, many let out a long “ha ha ha ha.’’ In other words, when all else fails, laugh.

I'm not sure many working mothers can relate to someone who's a partner at an entertainment company. Someone in that position probably has a client-facing job and has to put a smile on for strangers all day, then come home tired to her family. The only difference is, people in roles like that often have the Blackberry buzzing all through dinner, and usually are left wondering what their kids are doing when their kids realize Mom is too busy with her other life to discipline them or keep a watch on them.

Parents end up doing the worst job they possibly can by thinking of themselves first and their kids second. Anyone who has a career or kids can appreciate that sometimes there aren't enough hours in the day. But to stay in a career that gobbles up all your free time, then complaining there isn't enough time afterward, is lost on someone like me. Plenty of mothers choose careers that allow flexible hours, and many of them are just as tired at the end of the day. Trading the fancy title and corner office for, say, a human services job that doesn't pay as well but offers night time hours offers the reward of leaving the job at work and making family first priority when home.

And just so there's no mistaking the motive: the same goes for men. If you find you don't even know your kids as they're in their formative years of school and choosing sports they will play through high school, it might be time to ease back a bit on the business travel or late meetings and make it a point to stay home more. Plenty of men who have jobs that require travel just don't make time for weekend hobbies like golfing which are mutually exclusive with being a Dad on the weekends.

As for me, though the income potential may be higher elsewhere, my current employer offers the type of flexibility that is worth more than a few dollars more in my paycheck every two weeks.

Now that our son is creeping closer to the nine month mark, some new milestones have been reached or will be shortly:

• He now attempts to scoot backward and can slide a few inches (boys tend toward scooting and girls crawling - some babies never crawl or scoot, so the fact he's doing either is nice).
• He can support his body weight up on his arms. When we go into his room in the morning, he can now lift his entire upper body up to greet us with a big smile.
• He's a bit more social now. He'll bury his face in his mother's shoulder if there are people around he doesn't see too often, indicating the typical shy behavior at this age.
• He's become chunky while also being lean and tall for his age, but we expect the calories to burn off as he obtains greater control of his motion and moves around more
• He's rolling over, sitting up for long periods of time, and versus a month ago can sit up and reach for things, then return back to the original sitting position without toppling over.

As we experience these physical milestones, we also realize that it's not enough anymore to rely on walks or observing Daddy doing yard work for socialization. Luckily, I work with and live near some decent people who have younger children, and I'm already hearing the requests to bring him by for play dates.

I hated the very phrase, "play date" when I heard it on TV as my wife was pregnant last year, and did not look forward to hearing it more in the future. But the manner in which the child is socialized is important, and it needs to reflect our values. We look forward to visiting a friend's pool with their nine month old baby, and making sure he gets more face time with his cousins who are a year and four years older than him, respectively. Later on we can worry about types of play dates. We don't have him on a schedule at this point and plan on giving him plenty of alone / imaginative time as well as valuable time learning how to behave with other children around.

The European community (that's right, "community," we already have a shared super government) is yet again raising its eyes on bad-boy Italy. It's Silvio Berlusconi, it's sexism, it's fashion, it's money--and it's fascism. Swedish film maker Erik Gandini is currently fighting out legal battles with Italian lawyers over his latest documentary, Videocracy. While Berlusconi is trying to stop it from going on air, it's worth to take a closer look at what this drama is really all about.

Gandini, for those of you who don't know, is famous for doing radical leftist-oriented documentaries about Che Guevara, America and Gitmo. Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers is a shameless propaganda piece for Cuban Communism. Videocracy follows in many ways the same style, but it's quite well made, and raises very interesting questions that are worth paying attention to.

Videocracy documents the modern Italian television, 90 % of which is owned by Berlusconi himself, and the celebrity culture of fast money, blackmail and corruption surrounding it. Millions of young Italians having ordinary jobs dream of becoming television stars, at which point their lives will be covered in money, sex and glamour. Italian girls strip at malls to compete for 30 seconds of lap dancing next to a tv host, while elder watch and applaude. It's a culture not really parallelled anywhere else in Europe.

The documentary investigates the relationship between media and politics in Italy, and the shameful effects of its operation. It's safe to say that Italy is still a softly fascist nation, only its rulers do no longer control by military force, but by entertainment. Berlusconi, through the eyes of his television networks, appeals to the Italian people as some kind of flashy super star. The sing-a-long propaganda songs in his name are pretty hilarious, and makes the "I pledge" propaganda we saw during the Obama campaign bleak in comparison.

Yet Gandini only observes the effects, he doesn't go into why all of this is ingrained in Italian culture. One only has to look at history to see why. Italy, the market of fashion, easy cash and leader-worship hasn't changed all that much since Mussolini left the stage. Italy's most powerful media manager flashing a fascist tune on his cell phone, fully equipped with swastikas flying around on the picture, is a sign of this. Countless attempts at maintaining a stable Italian government has proven a complete failure again and again.

Yet the otherwise admirable Italian cultural roots smell rotten; more than one dead horse is buried underneath the sea of filth and corruption this documentary highlights. Maybe the resurrection of some things from the past is not always a good idea. There's no doubt that Berlusconi is a well-liked character in Italy for fighting Communists and chaotic political conflicts, just like Putin is among Russians. But the cruel realpolitik of these modern-day autocrats don't as much revive conservative traditions, as use them as slogans to enforce their own private agendas upon their citizens with corrupt corporatism and bought blood. Therefore, maybe unsurprisingly, Italy is likely to remain the fascist pasta spot in continental Europe.

Justice and freedom are 'blind' according to Western tradition. This means that all citizens are guaranteed certain liberties and right to just trials, regardless of their position in society. This is a noble tradition harnessed for thousands of years through several civilizations in "the West." It's therefore not surprising that the series of revolutions we've undergone have begun to undermine this system.

Because we feel the pillars of our society are no longer taken seriously or defended against alien values, we begin to stare ourselves blind at our own basic values. What follows is that we miss the big picture and fail to comprehend how and why they were invented in the first place. This Dutch debate with Geert Wilders illustrate my point:

Wilders' opponent has become blind before justice and freedom. Of course all citizens have equal rights, but that's not the point. If certain groups among those citizens don't share the belief in those rights, or in other ways cause problems that threaten the platform serving those rights, that is a pattern problem. We call it 'pattern problem' because by looking at patterns and trends emerging demographically, socially and economically, you are able to more effectively secure rights for everyone.

Obviously it's very controversial to discern certain patterns. Religion and race are the two most touchy holy cows in Europe right now, and to a certain degree in America as well. Liberals especially feel this way, so they deny these patterns and instead use the Western tradition as a justification for only looking at uniform citizens. It's a rhetorical trick. Justice is blind to citizens, but people are not. We cannot deny certain citizens their rights, but we can adjust policies so that certain groups among them don't threaten the rights of everyone. Social pragmatism, if you will.

In Europe that means limiting and toughening up immigration policies, decreasing the role of bureaucracies regulating individual rights, and refusing to back down before those same Western values liberals say are so important. The only way to do so is to discern patterns in society and being wary of negative, destructive trends. If minorities riot in suburbs and disrespect the law, it's not a blind issue. It's an eye-opening issue, and leaders like Geert Wilders are concerned about what we do about them. Social reality, we call it, and it's here to stay.

Sofia calls Islam a threat for contemporary society. I would clarify this statement by stating that radical forms of diversity is a threat to any established social or cultural order. Liberals disagree and don't think we can get enough diversity before we learn to import and export people like products across continents. Let's pick out some bullshit arguments about Islam and cultural diversity in Europe:

But Islamic shock is not simply a description of differences in flows of people. The claim is that the new wave of immigration has been uniquely disruptive of a European “way of life.” This narrative of pre-Islamic immigration by white Europeans sharing the same values, going to the same churches, and welcoming new immigrants with their good hearts, it turns out, is baloney. Yet even the most knowledgeable of the European-Islamic-threat writers, the journalist Christopher Caldwell in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), describes an undifferentiated Europe now besieged by Muslims. Conveniently forgotten are centuries of religious wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, attacks on Belgian and Italian immigrants to France, and, of course, the events of the early 1940s, in which good French and Dutch people joined good Germans in denouncing and arresting Jews and transporting them to death camps.

For a starter, this doesn't really justify the current problems Europe faces with integrating Muslims into our Western society. It merely describes the real problem of diversity. Further, there's no conflict between the existence of major differences among European cultures to this day, and the unity of these countries on ideas central to a common civilization.

Secondly, and most importantly, this is not a correct historical comparison. Europe's always been torn by religious, economic and political conflicts. Yet each country and State/region believed in and asserted a constitution and set of values that kept it moving. It would be impossible for instance to assert both a Catholic and Protestant church in Sweden after the religious wars in Europe. Today, however, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Sweden demand Islam to become an equal part of Swedish culture as the Christian churches. That's a different situation, one that the writer conveniently leaves out of the picture.

The pertinence of these objections comes from the Burkean core of Caldwell’s complaints, highlighted by his title. People, he argues, should not have to radically change their ways of life. But the massive arrival of Muslims has forced such changes, wrested quiet Europeans from their peaceful ways, and forced them to look at minarets next to their steeples. Yet when about one-third of French people freely admit to being racist, and some Britons on camera casually compare Muslims to cockroaches, the conservative argument loses some of its bite. Perhaps some Europeans need a good jolt to confront the persistent racism that plagues the continent.

That French people are racist, or some British twats get caught on video for saying NILLA, are separate issues from the Islamic problem in Europe. Racism concerns ethnicity and not religion. Furthermore, the argument suggests the real problem lies with intolerance on behalf of the native Europeans. Everyone who has lived in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community knows this simply isn't true. There are other more complex problems underlying the chaos in Paris, London and Copenhagen. Problems like a conflict between Western constitutional principles and Islamic values, begging for some kind of reconciliation. It's that reconciliation we need to discuss, not racism.

Indeed, current laws and policies in most of Western Europe do not promote immigration, but mainly guarantee residents’ legal rights. In Britain this means the right to wear religiously motivated dress to school and eat religiously required foods in the school canteen. In the Netherlands and France it means the right to have state support for religious schools that open their doors to anyone. These rights were won by earlier generations of Catholics and Protestants; they have nothing to do with naïve multiculturalist Islamophilia. While these legal rights are often challenged—by onerous language requirements in the Netherlands, or severe restrictions on family reunification in Italy—in principle, they are assured.

The immigration policies of the European Union render national policy more and more irrelevant. The social policies described are unproblematic for most Christians, since their religion is in tune with European culture and civilization. Non-Westernized interpretations of Islam are not. This is for example why wearing niqab is so controversial even in liberal cultures like Sweden: yes, you are allowed to express your religious freedom, but if your employer is not allowed to shake your hand and cannot see your face expressions, we have a problem. Whenever we avoid this discussion, we are in fact in the hands of "naive multiculturalist Islamophilia."

These arguments suffer from two defects: shallow historical memory and “block thinking.” As Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn remind us in their When Ways of Life Collide (2007), a generation ago those Dutch people who today vaunt their egalitarianism and their toleration of all lifestyles were authoritarian in family life and homophobic in public and in private. A recent study found a rising number of young Dutch men who espouse attitudes of tolerance, but then attack gay men. Nor have Europeans always been gender-equal. Two generations ago, French women were not able to vote and did not have the same rights to property as men, and Muslim women in much of the world had more avenues to gaining divorce than did most European women. Europeans, Africans, and Asians all have been moving gradually toward greater legal recognition of equal rights for women and men, and everywhere it has been a struggle.

The problem with this argument, that really should be posed as a question, as done by Mark Steyn: Then why aren't the Muslim communities and organizations in Europe actively condemning the terrorist and anti-freedom of speech plots committed in Madrid, Bali, London, Paris and Copenhagen? A moderate Islam exists, but if it's weak and silent compared to its more radical friends, then that fact doesn't really matter.

Shallow historical memory may be a vice, but short historical memory is probably worse. Go back a thousand years in European history and you will know why Europeans are wary of Islam. No, wait, you don't even have to go back that long. How about Yugoslavia? How about Kosovo? If you fail to understand the historical significance of Christian Serbs fighting against Muslim invaders to protect their land, and how it relates to the genocide we saw during the Yugoslavian collapse, you're likely not in the position of teaching history.

Perhaps more insidious is block thinking, whereby the diversity of perspectives within a social group is collapsed into a single caricature. Today, in Europe and elsewhere, there is a widespread assumption that all Muslims think one way and all non-Muslims another. True, polls show that in relatively non-religious Europe, Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and suicide. According to a 2009 Gallup survey, in France 78 percent of the general public finds homosexuality morally acceptable, compared to 35 percent of French Muslims. We could also, however, compare Europeans with Americans on this question. A 2009 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Americans find homosexuality to be “morally wrong,” that regular church-going means a greater likelihood of disapproval, and that American Protestants and American Muslims disapprove of homosexuality in equal measure—60 percent. The gap is not between Islam and the West, but between more religious and less religious people.

The gap between religious and non-religious people, America and Europe, is real. Yet both groups agree to preserve and uphold each respective Constitution. The kind of intolerance we're seeing within Islam in Europe is often not only openly defiant of basic Constitutional ideals like free speech--it wants harsh punishments for certain lifestyles. Many conservative Christians may not wish homosexuals to marry in their church. That's intolerant. But when we look at Islamic intolerance in Europe, we're not just talking about if homosexuals can marry in mosques or not. We're talking about civic rights in an open and free society. This is where Islamic intolerance has proven far more radical than any fringe Christian nut movement.

Putting aside the faulty data—France does not even collect demographic data by religion—these arguments have two deficiencies. First, total fertility rates (TFR) are falling in many of the Muslim-majority countries sending people to Europe. During the period 1985-2003, the TFR fell from 3.3 to 2.2 in Turkey and from 4.5 to 2.5 in Morocco, thus approaching European rates—France has a TFR of 2.1. Second, Muslim women born in European countries are doing precisely what demographers predicted: having fewer children. Fertility rates for Muslim women born in European countries are declining quickly, heading toward rates for natives.

Basic math tells us this is irrelevant; natives continue with low birth rates and will never keep up with immigrant birth rates, hence the gap will persist. Additionally, a country like Sweden has taken in and still take in most of its immigrants from places like Iraq and North Africa, where people have high birth rates. The demographic gap, which this writer fails to explain, is and will persist. In fact, it's growing all the time, regardless of small adjustments among certain Muslim groups.

This writer is however correct on one point: there is no turning back. Europe is pluralist today. We have to deal with the situation realistically, and hence adjust policies accordingly, which is what every New Right movement in Europe right now is fighting for. Diversity, strangely pleasing to liberals and leftists considering the complex problems it brings, is currently one of our greatest weaknesses, not strengths. In the end, historically, we have only seen genocide and tyranny rise out of radical diversity. The aftermath legacy of Yugoslavia, and the absolute ignorance of terror displayed by its rulers, should teach us a lesson:

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, has told judges presiding over his genocide trial that the Bosnian wars during the 1990s were "just and holy".

He argued that conflicts resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia were a natural consequence of the struggle for land.

"And even then it was Muslim desire for domination in Bosnia, and the nefarious interference of Western powers, perhaps in particular Germany, which took Bosnia into civil war, and not the acts of the Serbs themselves.

Denial becomes a virtue in a culture divided by conflicting interests. Let's not repeat this mistake again, because if we do, a second, more unsettling question needs to be asked: Would the Americans be willing to bomb our capitals to end another series of genocides?

European media now runs a media war against Left-wing mayor Ilmar Reepalu of Malmö in Sweden. He's accused of downplaying leftist and Muslim attacks on Jews in his city:

"This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now."

Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Unsettling for a Social Democrat like Reepalu, whose Red-Green ties to the Leftist party and their radical fringe of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli-American sentiment now cause trouble for him. Decades of tolerance is finally backlashing against the weaker and smaller groups in society, and this time no one can blame "Swedish racism" or "European intolerance." This is tolerance creating intolerance.

It's pretty simple logic. A multicultural society, or any form of society, cannot build trust and community based upon tolerance for everything and everyone. If we do so, groups will misuse that tolerance principle to please their own self-interests. This is how kids began manipulating their parents in the 70s, how Muslims have forced European leaders to compromise with Western constitutional rights, and how women have created feminist lobby groups to compensate their own individual inertia in the work field with socialist policies.

European leftism hasn't yet understood what Right-leaning leaders have trying to assert for a long time, and what the Danish government already is saying. No, we cannot and should not accept whatever culture takes root in our society. We need certain bedrock beliefs that we uphold above else. Call it cultural superiority if you will, or selective multiculture. We embrace diversity, but only if we stand on a firm platform. This viewpoint is unacceptable in the current European climate, as evidenced by how Right-wing leaders are attacked in the media:

The leading Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (“Today’s News”), has once again targeted the Sweden Democrat Party in its editorial pages. The newspaper commissioned a psychoanalyst, Thomas Böhm, to probe the soul of the only organized group in today’s Sweden that publicly criticizes the Swedish state’s nation-transforming immigration policies and dogmatic commitment to that component of existing Leftwing perversity, which goes by the name of multiculturalism.

Taking a page from Soviet internal policy of the Leonid Brezhnev era, Dagens Nyheter, through Böhm’s poorly written and incompetently reasoned article, accuses the membership of the Sweden Democrat Party of suffering from mental disease.

For the Jews, however, this analysis is simply no longer true. The tables have turned. If liberal-leftism was dominant in protecting and defending the right of Jews after WWII, it's currently constructing conspiracy theories against them and Israel in an attempt to discredit the homeland and allies of the Jewish people. Instead the conservative Right-wing parties in Europe have become pro-Zionist and critical of the Arab-Palestinian movement.

There are partly party political reasons for this, and they can rightly be criticized on their own. The main point, however, remains fundamental: centuries of Judeo-Christian culture has shaped the West and Israel is the only truly Western-oriented nation in the Middle East. There are no obligatory ties, but obvious ties for cultural reasons, and therefore the Right is correct in ceasing this opportunity to expose the liberal-leftist hypocrisy.

Case Malmö is really case multiculti. We've essentially imported cultural conflicts, and since we lack the mojo to uphold our constitutional rights and traditional values, we lose the game, every time, along with any group too weak to defend itself against the crowd. Yes, this is how tolerance for intolerance paves way for decadence. Democracies, who are systematically weak on their own, self-destruct when they become tolerant of groups or ideas critical of their founding principles. This is what Constitutionalists feel about Obama in America and what Sweden Democrats feel about immigration in Sweden. And they're both Right.

We know corruption to mean when elected leaders take bribes to use their power for the briber. We fear corruption because it means instead of doing their jobs, they are using their jobs and their power as a means to an end, which is personal profit.

And the collateral damage is staggering. A politician votes for a new law to protect powerful friends, and they get the equivalent a big power boost -- they're untouchable. A cop takes a bribe to let a drunk driver go home, and that drunk driver then plows through a bus of orphans. A teacher fakes a grade for a new laptop, putting a dumb student ahead of a smart one. The root of injustice is corruption, because we all basically agree on what justice is.

There's another form of corruption, and this occurs at a more basic level. If instead of using ourselves to perceive reality, we change reality to make ourselves look good, this is a kind of corruption. Denying reality and logic is a corrupt practice. When we fake reality to make ourselves appear good, we cause two problems: (a) we get ahead of someone more competent and (b) we start a practice of denying reality.

This virus of denying reality is what undoes societies. First, it is a gateway to corruption. If appearance matters more than reality, which it does if you can use appearance to get ahead of someone who insists on doing things the right way, people stop doing things the right way -- it's uncompetitive. Second, it makes a society of sick lies and an inability to fix them, because the minute you speak up with the truth, some liar who "appears" to be good will come in and claim you're a Stalin Hitler and have you killed.

For this reason, when societies start to decay, it's like a ball rolling downhill, gathering speed. The end comes without announcement but quicker than anyone thinks it will. Even so, it takes centuries or millennia for the first lie to bring about the last lie.

There are people around us who want to get ahead, and don't really care whether their means are honest or not. The active ones are criminals; the passive ones are parasites. The most passive form of parasites are people trying to get ahead of you on the basis of appearance. They invent a fantasy world that's equal parts advertising, politeness, moral judgment and wishful thinking. They tell you this fantasy world is real because you cannot "prove" reality but we can prove that most people would rather interact with this simpler, easier world.

They come up with helpful ideas like the following:

• Even though buying green appliances doesn't fix our environmental problem, the idea of limiting the breeding or home purchases of individuals is bad: definitely classist, probably elitist and sexist, possibly racist. So instead we'll focus on the ineffective activity of buying green products.
• That guy who is trying to rape and kill your sister -- well, you know man, it's most important to be moral. So shout stop, warn him twice, and then subdue him without hurting him. Never mind that you get killed in the process, and your sister anally sodomized and murdered -- you did the right thing. WAT
• Yep, it's true: the cars they sell are garbage. They're garbage because they can get away with it. For every one guy who both knows mechanics and has enough critical thinking skills to discern an oblivious design from a clueful one, there are over ten thousand people who can't tell the difference, don't care, and are buying the vehicle on layaway so to them it's free money anyway.
• Time to vote. We're trying to pick a candidate. On side A is a guy with lots of practical experience who promises no sudden change, but is going to be very workmanlike about slowly improving what exists. On side B is some guy who promises a revolution and that everything will be better right now. For every person who understands history and realizes guy B is most likely to be a shyster tyrant, there are ten thousand people who just want everything fixed now and hey this guy says he'll do it ok.

These dilemmas all arise from a corruption of reality in our own minds. There's multiple factors here: we're using reality as a means rather than an end, we're using ourselves as an end rather than a means, we're going inside our minds to describe the outside, and as a result, we're manipulating ourselves and others with tokens, symbols, gestures and illusions.

But all of them add up to ignoring reality as a whole in favor of "the human reality" that people like to believe in because it's easier and simpler than reality itself. We make our human reality from human feelings, from promises made to others, from personalities and morality, cash flow and social status. We like our reality because it allows us to stay in our own heads, and not test ourselves against the world, where we could end up losing!

This corruption of reality is a bigger threat than political corruption. Political corruption subverts government; corruption of reality subverts everything we do, from religion to science to how you and I think about how we're going to plan our day. Ignoring reality and receding into ourselves makes us blind the consequences of our actions, and fills our heads with insane babbling produced by the neurotic social mind.

Right now the FBI says that corruption threatens the fabric of American life. They mean political corruption, and they're correct. However, if they could get away with it, they would point out that the root of all corruption is something so basic we can't see it, any more than we can see our own contact lenses: a corruption of reality within our own minds.

An opinion piece for the UK newspaper The Times condemns the use of the death penalty. Warning: precariously heightened sense of personal virtue ahead.

A botched execution in Ohio should quicken the end of capital punishment.

"Oh no, an idea we don't like for completely insensible moral reasons has shown it doesn't always work perfectly in reality, even though it never claimed to! I have an idea, let's use this as a strawman against the gun-toting Nazis who support capital punishment!"

When the headline says "botched execution" one imagines a grisly, drawn out and painful sort of execution along the lines of the dry-sponge electric chair at the end of The Green Mile. In reality, all that happened in this case is that after two hours they couldn't find a vein strong enough for the lethal injection, so they sent the convicted murderer-rapist away for another week. If no execution took place, how could it be botched?

Their feeble arguments are put forward in the first paragraph.

America is the only big democracy — apart, occasionally, from Japan — that still carries out capital punishment.

America is X, and is also Y. Unfortunately, X + Y does not = Z, where Z is any kind of logical judgement against the use of capital punishment.

The botched attempted execution in Ohio this week of a murderer should prompt America to join the rest of the developed world in consigning judicial killing to history.

Whoops, I've already done this one. Terrible blogging.

There is inadequate evidence that it acts as a deterrent,

Like prison. But use your brain, what one unavoidable aspect of reality has scared the hell out of mankind since time immemorial? That's right, our deaths. Europe's first piece of literature, The Iliad, dealt with overcoming it. Countless other works of art - that form which expresses our human essence - rely on our innate repulsion towards dying. How could death be any less of a deterrent than prison? But the main strength of capital punishment is not its deterrence but rather its protection, by ridding communities of those dangerous and parasitic individuals who threaten any dignified existence.

it ignores the risk of miscarriages of justice

That's a criticism of any failure within the justice system, not the value of the death penalty. Nevertheless, what's to stop us using the death penalty only in cases where there exists undeniable evidence of guilt?

and allows no room for repentance or correction.

Who cares?

But above all it is a barbarity that stains civilised society.

In your timid and haphazardly formulated opinion.

Well that's The Times' main arguments, let's turn to the comments for further hilarity:

PSF London wrote:
Killing a murderer is eye-for-an-eye justice. Surely then it could apply to other crimes such as rape.

Who would be appointed to rape the rapist? Would you care to nominate someone?

Why should we listen to the morals of a person who picks a completely illogical non-sequitur out of the thinnest of ethers, to use as an argument against something completely unrelated? Who ever stated that capital punishment is only ever justified due to its "eye-for-an-eye" style? No, it's justified for other reasons, including the ones I have mentioned above. All you've done is to pick out one characteristic that no-one was talking about, and extrapolate that characteristic into a scenario that no-one is talking about.

In fact PSF's comment is so hilarious, I will reproduce the rest of it here. LOL's are in bold:

Why is murder the only crime - that I can think of - which so many claim deserves this biblical form of justice? Is it because they find it easy to wash their hands of a killing which is carried out so clinically by the flick of a switch or a nice and hygienically delivered poison? Surely we could have a clinical way of raping someone in the name of justice?

You always get people on these forums saying "I would gladly pull the trigger". I wonder if they would gladly do the raping in this form of retributive justice.

It is nonsense to say that state sanctioned murder is legitimate. It is barbaric and lazy. We are better than the killers and that means we have to stand firm and live with the consequences of being ethically superior.

"The consequences of being ethically superior" - genius. I guess those consequences are having to put up with more murderers, rapists, paedophiles and sadists than everyone else.

There are about a thousand other arguments put forward in the comment section, but they are mainly about claiming the moral high ground so our egos can inhabit a fake sense of justification, so I won't bother with them.

Anyone with a brain-cell and some testicles can rightfully see that capital punishment is not only justified, but also totally awesome!

Kiev, Ukraine - After Elton John was refused adoption of a 14-month old HIV-positive baby on Monday, the Ukrainian agencies have offered him another selection of babies in a new attempt at reconciliation, after he expressed resentment at their decision.

However due to high demand in Ukraine only for young and healthy babies, the new batch of toddlers have all been had to be selected for their varied assortment of crippling diseases. This angered the 62 year old pop-star, who has stated his "disgust" in having to choose between several unhealthy babies.

John said today: "I don't want a baby that will still be bloody dribbling in twenty f***ing years time. They've given me some f***ing downs kids, some polio kids. I said I wanted a kid with HIV, not cancer, not rickets, f***ing aids."

The adoption agency admitted that it had changed its policy to adapt to the singer's request: "We do not believe that Elton would have been a good father figure for a child growing up with HIV, so we've given him other options. After all a baby cannot choose it's parents."

"Maybe if the HIV-positive baby was also homosexual, we might have considered his request," the spokesman said today.

But singer John was not convinced: "This is pure discrimination. They won't give me the aids baby because I don't fit in with their fascist idea of a proper parent. A parent shouldn't have to pick from a bunch of crappy children. I want the HIV one. To be honest, the f***ing kid should be happy with whatever he gets."

In response to his outburst, a spokesman for the UK charity Help the Babies said today: "Elton John is a fat, old, pop-singing poof who only wants to adopt a child to increase his publicity. Anyone who thinks he should be allowed to is alarmingly delirious."

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, considered a "maverick" in the industry by many, keeps his executive salary at $1 per year (a la Steve Jobs), caps other executive's compensation, and despises labor unions for their abuses and market-altering negotiation tactics. He is also a self-described free market libertarian.

On his blog recently, he shared an unedited version of a Wall Street Journal article that captured his feelings on the health care reform buzz, which has stricken this country over the past couple of months.

I fully realize that there are many opinions on the healthcare debate, including inside my own company. As we, as a nation, continue to discuss this, I am hopeful that both sides can do so in a civil manner that will lead to positive change for all concerned. You are welcome to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

On his first point, he tries to make his own customers understand that he, too, is someone with his own opinions about important issues, and as a leader in the business community is asked to write for publications like the Wall Street Journal. While it's important to understand that business leaders need to reflect a fair attitude about things so as to keep up public appearances as a compassionate member of a community, Mackey did a good job trying to head off the mob by indicating he feels we have a long way to go before we simply push the button on "free health care", hence the heated debates. So why did this create such an uproar among his "fans"? Could it be he used that dirty word, socialism, and also pointed out the major flaw in all this - that despite rising income and sales taxes across the nation, our country is still broke and Medicare & Social Security Benefits - health care benefits, mind you - would be borrowed from in order to help fund this, the biggest irony of all?

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”-Margaret Thatcher.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable and they are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and moves us much closer to a complete governmental takeover of our health care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the exact opposite direction-toward less governmental control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:

All of what Mr. Mackey says is true: we're already knee-deep in an economic mess, and since money isn't free, someone has to fund this. Why rush this through, especially as public opinion is ever so slowly swaying toward a more reasonable solution? Also consider that we can't fund health care at the moment, even while President Obama risks his "man of the people" reputation by having to increase taxes.

The fact is, people like big symbols instead of reality, and so supporting "free health care" and a bill no one has even read outside of maybe a few people in Congress takes precedence over reasoned discussion on important topics. Some of the reader comments on Mackey's blog are laughable, where customers promise to never shop at Whole Foods again and even call for Mackey's dismissal by the Whole Foods Board of Directors. These comments are likely all from people who have never even read a Congressional proposal in their lives and have no idea what "free health care" means for the quality of their future medical care, the cost out of pocket to most of us, and how hospitals and procedures might change for better or worse as a result.

In attempting to strip away the layers of social reality and expose solid facts, Mr. Mackey only angered the liberal greenists who like their symbols big and loud. When anything gets in the way, especially reality, they look at the Whole Foods logo with hate and disgust, because they want those logos and the people behind them to do all the work, forgetting that they are a part of society who can help make a difference. "If I just shop at Whole Foods", the logic goes, "I'm doing my part to help make the world better - I'm shelling out my hard earned cash [conveniently, another symbol], so how could I be wrong by doing nothing but directing that money toward a Green business like Whole Foods?" Mackey showed them how, and they didn't like what they saw.

An article over at Amerika.org made me think recently about how important perspective is in parenting. These days, it seems many parents are either leaving their children in the care of others, or when they are in the care of their parents, the parents are hauling the kid around to Mommy and Daddy's activities and trying to force-fit a child's life into the same structure used by parents during their working (read: waking) hours. Brett Stevens explains an important reason for this disconnect that we often disregard:

Humanity has slipped into its own world, a world ruled by social devices and the avoidance of conflict, and as a result, cannot face reality.

Kids see this, because it’s new to them and they’re very afraid of these adult things they see coming down the pipe.

So now adults and kids not only exist in two different realities, but are heading toward different polarized political views, one of which is liberal and one of which is reactionary.

Brett hits the nail on the head. Parenting isn't about social trends or fitting into a lifestyle. It's about your children, and what you do as a parent to help them succeed in life while also giving them critical thinking capabilities so that they can become better versions of you while also having to make tough choices on their own during crucial points in their development into adulthood.

It reminds me of something I was told by an education major when I was in college. He was student teaching and children in his class had to draw their perception of a Japanese classroom after hearing about it from their teachers with no visual aids. One student drew an environment where comformity was king: the students were identical robots and the teachers were more evil, sinister looking robots. The teacher in this class forced the child to erase the drawing and start again, but my friend, the student teacher, gently encouraged him that it was okay to think what he wanted (outside of earshot, of course, to preserve his job).

And therein lies the problem, highlighted by Brett above: even if you raise a child to think critically and absorb the information given to him (important to note as Brett did in his entry that children may have a more honest view of the world around them but it is still centered around them only), independent thinking is not rewarded even in what we like to think are free, liberalized classrooms of "free" thinking teachers and administrators. And we wonder why this generation gap persists?

In the next few years between birth and schooling, my wife and I will think very hard about education options for our child. Home schooling and Montessori both seem preferable to even the "great" education system we have in Massachusetts, but we still have to think of developing those all important social skills, without giving in to egomaniacal trends that run rampant in our society.