Assorted

1. It's Really Happening.

When I posted this tirade, a number of readers wrote to ask if I was really certain that a purge of Christianity from the military was in progress. I made a point of asking friends and acquaintances in the services what they had observed, and received what you might call "qualified confirmations:" there were intimations of a growing distaste for open Christianity, especially in the Air Force, but so far little in the way of overt action against open Christians. I've been wondering when something a little more definite would come around on the carousel.

Well, wonder no more:

A controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers teaches that "healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian" men hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail about a so-called "White Male Club."

“Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual created by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI).

The manual, which was obtained by Fox News, also instructs troops to “support the leadership of people of color. Do this consistently, but not uncritically,” the manual states.

The Equal Opportunity Advisor Student Guide is the textbook used during a three month DEOMI course taught at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Individuals who attend the training lead Equal Opportunity briefings on military installations around the nation.

The 637-page manual covers a wide range of issues from racism and religious diversity to cultural awareness, extremism and white privilege....

DEOMI instructors were also responsible for briefings at bases around the country that falsely labeled evangelical Christians, Catholics and a number of high-profile Christian ministries as domestic hate groups.

It's not bad enough that we should be white, you see. That, conceivably, could be forgiven as an accident of genetics...though my parents, at least, would have recoiled at the suggestion that my conception was an accident. But to adopt the Christian faith is a choice -- and in the views of the PC evangelists currently riding high in the Defense Department, a choice to ally oneself with oppressors and oppression.

I've been struggling against the impulse to hate...to condemn. Crap like the above makes it harder. Much, much harder.

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2. The Lies Continue.

At this point, all three of the "Big Three Lies:"

1. "I love you."
2. "The check is in the mail."
3. "Honestly, dear, it's only a cold sore."

...are in danger of losing their pre-eminence to this one:

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

No one believes it any longer, yet we continue to be shocked! shocked! by the "progressive" revelations of how thoroughly we've been deceived:

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney attempted to minimize the disruption issue, arguing that it only affected people who buy insurance on their own. “That’s the universe we’re talking about, 5 percent of the population,” said Carney. “In some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days, you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population.” (5 percent of the population happens to be 15 million people, no small number, but let’s leave that aside.)...

But Carney’s dismissal of the media’s concerns was wrong, on several fronts. Contrary to the reporting of NBC, the administration’s commentary in the Federal Register did not only refer to the individual market, but also the market for employer-sponsored health insurance.

Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.

The requirements to be laid upon all medical insurance coverage are so broad -- and so absurd -- that only a you're-covered-for-everything-without-exclusions plan is guaranteed to pass through the Affordable Care Act's "grandfathering" allowance. Thus:

• Plans that don't cover men for maternity care;
• Plans that don't cover women in their sixties and beyond for maternity care;
• Plans that don't cover drug abuse rehabilitation;
• Plans that don't cover contraceptive drugs;

...will, along with many others, be disqualified under the ACA. Employers will thus face a choice of "upgrading" their offerings to comply with the Act and imposing greatly elevated costs either on their stockholders or their employees, or being fined as they release their employees to the tender mercies of the ObamaCare Exchanges.

Say, does the ACA require that a qualified plan cover gender-reassignment surgery, or will Barack Hussein Obama have to pay for that himself once he's left the White House? Given how many Americans "have a hard-on for him" -- no, not in a good way -- he's going to need it. That or the largest and most vigilant Secret Service detail in history...assuming there are any Secret Servicemen who'll accept the assignment rather than resign on the spot.

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3. Book Notes.

Congratulations to my Esteemed Co-Conspirator Patrice Stanton on the release of Oh Hell, her first full-length novel. It's no small thing to turn out a novel; as Lawrence Block put it, "You've run a marathon and finished on your feet." That's an achievement all by itself -- and Patrice's book offers many pleasures. However, it's not for the politically correct, nor for those who reflexively dismiss matters of faith and the spirit. That's all the explanation required for why Patrice couldn't secure conventional publication.

Another long-awaited book, Tom Kratman's Come And Take Them, has become available as well. Tom's "Carreraverse" novels depict a disturbingly plausible future in which contemporary "postmodern transnational progressivism" has reduced Old Earth to a state of exhaustion of the sort that only a thoroughgoing tyranny can achieve. However, on Terra Nova, Patrick Hennessy di Carrera functions as the new world's George Washington, with one giant exception: whereas Washington had the backing of the colonial governments, Carrera has had to create a government for the Republic of Balboa, pretty much from scratch.

The alert reader will note many similarities in overarching philosophy to that of Robert A. Heinlein's iconic Starship Troopers, though in the Carreraverse the enemies are humans rather than aliens. But the big payoff, as always in a Kratman novel, is the unceasing, ever-crescendoing action.

Finally, for those who've written to ask: Yes, Freedom's Fury, the conclusion to the Spooner Federation saga begun in Which Art In Hope and continued in Freedom's Scion, is still on track for an early-2014 release. I hope it lives up to your expectations. (After sixteen years of imagining, plotting, critiquing, discarding, and rewriting, it had damned well better!)