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Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller.

Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division, also received an email alongside White House officials that contained confidential information.

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials — including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew — contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

The emails provided to Oversight investigators by the IRS had numerous redactions with the signifier “6103.”

Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.”

Federal employees who illegally disclose confidential taxpayer information could face five years in prison.

(Hat tip, Greg Hill, who I’m sure didn’t mean to ruin my day.)

This Administration is lawless, reckless, corrupt, and probably just plain evil. This is the Abu Ghraib of domestic politics — that wrong thing that goes so far wrong it turns your stomach.

Congress of course has so disgraced itself that the word “impeachment” can’t even be whispered without igniting gales of laughter in half the country and weary shrugs from the other half. Not that Harry Reid’s Senate is any better, and wouldn’t vote to remove a Democrat from office, even if that Democrat got caught on video dismembering kittens and the elderly with a spork. And Reid would have the Mainstream Media fetching the Hefty bags and the bleach.

The thing we can do, I suppose, is get serious about starting a real movement to repeal the 16th Amendment and abolish the IRS. Let Washington live on whatever it can raise with excise taxes — and fuck’em if they can’t.

This morning, Brian Ward and I recorded a podcast with John Ondrasik (Five For Fighting) as our guest. After finishing the podcast, John went for a run in Washington, D.C. He ran down the Mall and stopped long enough to take pictures at some of the monuments, which he put up on his Twitter feed. The administration is still trying to barrycade the WWII memorial, but they aren’t stopping the vets:

The Lincoln Memorial is blocked off with yellow crime scene tape:

John tweeted: “I have a feeling if Mr. Lincoln were President I could walk up these steps.”

He came across this sign…

…and tweeted:

Hmmm…It’s almost like this sign was constructed as a photo op…Love the SHUTDOWN in CAPS.

From there he continued on to the Jefferson Memorial. There was a sign saying the Memorial was closed, but he climbed the stairs anyway, and encountered more yellow tape:

This brought an angry guard out to confront John. Note how John has protected the guard’s identity; I’m not sure, actually, that he deserves anonymity:

The guard gave John the bum’s rush. John tweeted: “This [photo] is where he grabbed my shoulder and started pushing me down the stairs.”

The irony of an American citizen being chased away from a memorial to Thomas Jefferson because, well, you can’t visit monuments when our government is 17% shut down, is almost too much. But consider the significance of the fact that a guard was present. That expense was being incurred, just as if the memorial were open; so why did it need to be closed? The difference was that instead of being there to provide security, the guard’s role was to chase away any visitors who were bold enough to ignore the signs and the yellow tape.

All of which is more evidence that the Obama administration is engaged in a massive charade to hype the damage allegedly done by the partial shutdown. It corroborates the Park Service ranger quoted by the Washington Times who said, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

BARACKALYPSE NOW: Police remove veterans from Vietnam War Memorial. “It takes more manpower and costs the government more money to close down an outdoor wall than to let people walk past it and pay their respects.”

Obama really seems to be going out of his way to piss off veterans, doesn’t he?

SHUTDOWN THEATER UPDATE: Obama Shuts Down Amber Alert Website. “Just 17 percent of the government is shut down, and Friday the Obama administration allowed union representatives to return to work. So, union members could return to work, but the website to alert Americans to missing children had to be taken down?”

They don’t call it shutdown theater for nothing.

JOEL KOTKIN: California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

This is an inevitable outcome of the Blue Model, and yet. . . .

MORE SHUTDOWN THEATER: Feds evict elderly couple from their home, cite shutdown.

National Park Service officials cited the government shutdown as the reason for ordering an elderly Nevada couple out of their home, which sits on federal land.

“Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen,” an NPS spokesman explained to KTNV.

Ralph and Joyce Spencer, aged 80 and 77, respectively, own their home, but the government owns the land on which it sits.

“I had to be sure and get his walker and his scooter that he has to go in,” Joyce Spencer told the local news outlet. “We’re not hurt in any way except it might cost me if I have to go buy more pants.”

Similarly, the NPS forced privately-operated inns on the Blue Ridge Parkway to close during the shut down.

“We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” an unnamed park ranger told the Washington Times. “It’s disgusting.”

Yes, it is. I hope there are many lawsuits and FOIA requests over this.

BLUE MODEL UPDATE: California Teachers Association Members Don’t Have To Pay For The Union’s Political Operations.

The state’s second-largest lobbyist in terms of dollars spent is none other than the California Teachers Association. In the course of a decade, the CTA has spent more than $50 million alone lobbying politicians for legislation aimed at protecting and expanding its interests, usually at students’ and taxpayers’ expense. Few teachers realize, however, that they don’t have to finance the CTA’s political agenda. California may not be a right-to-work state, but most public school teachers have the right to a yearly rebate of $350 to $400 from their union—money that would otherwise line CTA lobbyists’ and political consultants’ pockets. . . .

Republican or conservative teachers are paying the union to support candidates and causes they oppose. For apolitical teachers, the question is why they should pay to support any causes or candidates at all? But teachers can forgo paying the political portion. It bears repeating that several U.S. Supreme Court rulings deny unions the right to force members to subsidize their political agenda. Teachers never hear this message when they join the CTA. They often aren’t aware that “agency-fee payers” (nonunion members) can request a rebate, even though they’re still forced to pay for “chargeable expenses” that are “germane to the union’s representational functions.”

To make teachers aware of their union membership options, the California Teachers Empowerment Network and the California Public Policy Center have launched the California Teacher Freedom Project. Its aim: to inform California teachers that they don’t have to pay for their union’s costly hyper-partisan agenda. The project’s website provides step-by-step information on how teachers can become agency-fee payers, get the yearly rebate, and join nonunion, nonpartisan, professional alternatives.

I’m sure that’s somehow racist or something.

IN BLOOMBERGISTAN, THE POLICE ARE THERE, THEY’RE JUST NOT THERE TO PROTECT YOU: Revealed: FIVE off-duty NYPD officers were among the bikers involved in SUV attack but not one of them intervened to help father as he was viciously beaten.

CENSORSHIP: ACLU: Administration Blocking Book By Fast & Furious Whistleblower. Well, of course. This is who they are; this is what they do.

My bad — apparently somebody has managed to get through ObamaCare’s rollout failures and buy some health insurance.

Did they get their subsidy? Did they get the correct subsidy? How much is this costing the rest of us? What happens to our plans? How many would be left without coverage even if the thing were working?

But the important thing to remember is this.

Unless young people really do sign up for, and pay for, insurance, then premiums for older people will shoot up into the dreaded “death spiral.” That’s why getting the rollout to work smoothly was so important.

So… brace yourselves.

Via Business Insider, some Reddit “colorizers” are doing their thing to Civil War photos. The quality of the photography — and the colorization process — is amazing. Digital is easy, but nothing (yet) can reproduce the results of a big slab of film inside a big box camera. That’s General George Custer there with the dog.

As fine a job as the Redditers are doing, there’s still something missing, because you know the color was added later. For the real deal, check out this collection of rare color photographs from the First World War.

From the WSJ report on the ObamaCare exchange rollout:

The website is troubled by coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system, according to insurance-industry advisers, technical experts and people close to the development of the marketplace.

Among the technical problems thwarting consumers, according to some of those people, is the system to confirm the identities of enrollees. Troubles in the system are causing crashes as users try to create accounts, the first step before they can apply for coverage.

Experian PLC, an information-services firm, holds a federal subcontract to support that system. The company declined to comment.

Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said.

They had three years.

We’re cautioned not to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence — but what about malicious incompetence?

CHAOS UMPIRE SITS: Victor Davis Hanson: Obama As Chaos.

Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama’s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.

By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

When the president blasts the Republicans for trying to subvert the “settled law” of Obamacare, we trust that Obama himself had earlier done precisely that when he unilaterally subverted his own legislation — by quite illegally discarding the employer mandate provision of Obamacare. At least the Republicans tried to revise elements of Obamacare through existing legislative protocols; the president preferred executive fiat to nullify a settled law.

When the president deplores the lack of bipartisanship and the lockstep Republican effort to defund Obamacare, we remember that the president steamrolled the legislation through the Congress without a single Republican vote.

When the president laments the loss of civility and reminds the public that he uses “calm” rhetoric during the impasse, we know he has accused his opponents of being on an “ideological crusade” and of being hostage takers and blackmailers who have “a gun held to the head of the American people,” while his top media adviser Dan Pfeiffer has said that they had “a bomb strapped to their chest.”

When the president insists that the Republican effort to hold up the budget is unprecedented, we automatically deduce that, in fact, the action has many precedents, and on frequent prior occasions was a favored ploy of Democrats to gain leverage over Republican administrations.

In short, whenever the president prefaces a sweeping statement with one of his many emphatics — “make no mistake about it,” “I’m not making this up,” “in point of fact,” “let me be perfectly clear” — we know that the reverse is always true. For Obama, how something is said matters far more than what is said.

Though, if anything, his oratorical skills are even more overrated than his management skills.

One take on the ObamaCare rollout, from USA Today’s Tim Mullaney:

The most important is whether HealthCare.gov meets its fundamental task — creating a marketplace with an array of choices and competitive prices. The other is whether it explains insurance so people understand it — how to buy it, why they should, how the law’s subsidies work, and helps them start grasping which policy works for them.

On those counts, HealthCare.gov is an out-of-the-box success.

Here’s another, from the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow:

Despite the Obama administration touting the Obamacare exchange signup process as a success, members of the media have been unable to find even one person who had completed the process.

The Washington Post blogged on the problem Thursday morning, and included an Image of a unicorn to illustrate how difficult it had been to find even one person who had signed up.

“The federal government has said that somewhere out in this vast country of 313 million people, where 48 million lack insurance coverage, someone has managed to sign up for health insurance on the federally-run marketplaces,” Post reporter Sarah Kliff said. “As of yet, we haven’t tracked this person — or these people — down.”

Out of the box, eh? We’re still trying to find out what’s in the damn box.

One way or another, the debt ceiling will soon be front and center. Perhaps raising the debt limit will be part of a “grand bargain”–for reasons I stated yesterday, I hope not–or a package deal with a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for the next few months. Regardless, it is important to understand that much of the reporting on the debt ceiling is wrong.

It is not true that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by October 17, the U.S. will default on its bond obligations. On the contrary: constitutionally, the government is required to pay its debt obligations as they accrue, and the government would in fact do so until it runs out of money. Other spending might go by the wayside, but the principal and interest on government bonds would be paid in full. When the government would actually become unable to service its debt obligations has not been reported, to my knowledge, but it would be some months subsequent to October 17. So that deadline is in some respects an artificial one.

The debt ceiling, in my view, serves a useful purpose: it highlights the craziness of our government’s borrow-and-spend mentality. President Obama says it is “irresponsible” to bargain for some measure of fiscal sanity in exchange for raising the debt limit. In fact, it is irresponsible to run up $17 trillion in debt. It is good that the Obama administration encounters a speed bump now and then along the road to bankruptcy. Michael Ramirez sums up brilliantly:

HMM: IRS Waives Individual Mandate For Americans Living Abroad. Where does the power for all these waivers and exemptions come from?

HOW’S THAT HURRICANE SEASON GOING? IPCC Backpedals on Extreme Weather Claims.

Embarrassed by the current decade-and-a-half period without any global warming, those calling for worldwide action to halt climate change have shifted focus to worries about extreme weather events. It makes sense, of course, for alarmists to direct attention away from something that isn’t happening — global warming — towards frightening stories about something that could conceivably be occurring. Unfortunately for the alarmists — but fortunately for the rest of us — both independent scientific observations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own latest report (released on Monday) make it clear that a warming of the Earth is not leading to an increase in extreme weather. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

As the newly released “Summary for Policymakers” of the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report indicates, the UN panel seems to be walking back many of its claims, reducing both their estimated effects of global warming and their claims of certainty regarding their predictions.

Predictions are hard. Hype is easy.

IT’S ALL FOR SHOW: Shutdown Fascism In the Smoky Mountains. “It is obvious that the Park Service intends to block access to these trailheads, even though it literally costs them nothing to leave them open and by closing them they actually increase the possibility of serious problems for drivers on the road and hikers still in the park. In fact, it is costing them money they don’t have trying to block access. To block access is thus a deliberate, senseless, and mean-spirited act that demonstrates quite clearly the political goals of the Obama administration during this shutdown.” Yeah, kinda like blocking off the World War II memorial. I’m surprised they didn’t put a bag over the Washington Monument.

It appears that the Obama administration is violating the First Rule of Holes. Yesterday the administration looked awful when it “closed” and barricaded the World War II memorial on the Mall. The memorial is, by its nature, open. There is nothing to close. And the administration knows that every day, tour groups consisting of WWII vets, now mostly in their late 80s or early 90s, come to Washington to visit the memorial. So the administration couldn’t resist closing the WWII memorial by putting up barricades, as part of their effort to dramatize how terrible the government “shutdown” is.

Yesterday, as we noted here, the administration suffered a public relations disaster when a group of elderly vets from Mississippi, aided by one or more Republican Congressmen, pushed the barriers aside and visited the memorial. But the administration was still undeterred: a park service employee threatened to arrest any vets who may try to visit the WWII memorial in the future, while the shutdown is in effect.

The best thing the Obama administration could do is quietly remove the barricades around the memorial and forget the whole thing. But no: it happened again today. Fortunately, PJ Media was on hand to record the action:

The same scene was reenacted again today as two Honor Flights from Missouri and Chicago arrived in prearranged visits. These Honor Flights were met by hundreds of ordinary citizens and about a dozen members of Congress, who once again crashed the barricades to let the veterans into the WW2 Memorial.

After about an hour, about 20 SEIU protesters arrived on the scene chanting “Boehner, get us back to work” and claiming they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown.

WWII veterans visiting the memorial that was erected in their honor vs. paid SEIU protesters: great optics for the Obama administration! But it gets worse. The protesters claimed to be furloughed federal employees:

In the video below these protesters were marching towards the press gaggle and I was asking them to show their federal IDs to prove they were in fact federal workers. No one wore their federal ID and none would provide it to prove their claim.

Then, remarkably, a guy carrying a sign passed by wearing a McDonald’s employee shirt, which I noted. I then began asking them how much they had been paid to protest, at which point the guy wearing the McDonald’s shirt came back and admitted he had been paid $15 to attend the protest.

Here is the video. As you watch it, try to imagine what public relations genius in the Obama administration thought that this would play well for the president and Harry Reid:

You can’t make this stuff up: World War II veterans come to Washington to see their monument, and the Obama administration tries to block them by putting up barricades. When that blunder starts getting media attention, the administration doubles down by paying union members $15 to march around, waving signs and protesting–as though that were a sure-fire way to generate sympathy for the nonessential federal employees who are getting the day off. Is it possible that the Democrats could be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?

And does that perhaps have something to do with Obama’s backing down on his vow not to talk with Congressional Republicans? Obama has now invited Congressional leaders to the White House for talks on ending the spending impasse.

JIM TREACHER: “Remember: The people telling you a government shutdown is a disaster are the same ones who told you 3 weeks ago that we had to invade Syria.”

The rollout of Obamacare — the proximate cause of the of “shutdown” — has become a headline in itself. The touted health care exchanges were experiencing highly publicized difficulties all over the country. A rollout of this size was never going to be easy in the best of circumstances, but in this case many of the problems experienced were the direct consequence of the length of the law and its attendant regulatory complexity.

These regulations are often called “business rules,” and they have to be implemented in software. The Obamacare ruleset is now reportedly eight times the length of the Bible and still growing. This has had unavoidable results. How the IT personnel at Oregon approached the problem, as described by InformationWeek, gives a sense of the hurdle. Chris Murphy writes:

To understand the challenge, I spoke with Aaron Karjala, CIO of Cover Oregon, which runs Oregon’s health insurance marketplace, and Carolyn Lawson, CIO of Oregon Health Authority and Department of Human Services, which started the exchange project before state lawmakers created Cover Oregon. Here’s a look inside some of the challenges facing Oregon’s more than two-year effort.

Presenting a product — an insurance policy — isn’t the hard part. The hard part is figuring out which federal and state programs and tax credits a person or family is eligible for. Getting that part right takes creating an extremely complex rules engine.

About 1,700 individual rules affect eligibility for health insurance subsidies in Oregon. Children might qualify under different rules from their parents, or half-siblings might have different eligibility based on their parents’ income. In Oregon, writing the eligibility rules engine took 12 people nine months. Confirming eligibility requires integration with multiple outside data sources, such as confirming income and citizenship with federal sources, and that process is what separates it from ecommerce sites.

…

“The policies and rules came to us a little at a time,” Karjala says. “It was constantly emerging requirements.” For example, the Federal hub that state exchanges connect to for verifying income and citizenship was completed this summer. That timing helps explain why exchanges are doing so much testing down to the deadline.

The solution, says Lawson, was “ruthless incrementalism. We had to build in an agile fashion and build what we know, and then put the pieces together like Legos.”

And that’s just Oregon. It was a difficult, possibly insuperable job under the best of circumstances, but the problem was compounded by the incompetence described by Scott Gottlieb and Michael Astrue in the Wall Street Journal:

There are two key technological flaws in ObamaCare. First is the “hub” — the software to link servers at the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security and state agencies to verify the income and health-insurance status of enrollees and ensure that they are eligible for subsidies. The other flaw is the “portal” — the federally run IT platform that is supposed to let consumers compare health plans and select one that best suits their needs.

In planning ObamaCare’s IT infrastructure, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) dawdled for more than a year under Administrator Donald Berwick until Marilyn Tavenner took over in December 2011. Even then the agency was slow to outsource key contracts and turned to what insiders say were not top-quality programmers. CMS did not sign a contract for a backstop system to process paper verifications and do paper verifications of online applications until July.

The Health and Human Services Department did not begin testing the chief pieces of this IT system until August. The testing found that states couldn’t consistently link to the federal portal (a problem that persists in some states), and that the hub couldn’t reliably verify if a person is eligible for a subsidy, or accurately calculate how much the applicant is eligible to receive.

But Gottlieb and Astrue mention the biggest problem last — the consequence of the architecture of the system:

The biggest risk involves data security. The Obama administration created unnecessary opportunities for fraud with the White House’s pork-minded insistence on funding favored community groups to employ “navigators” to solicit applicants and help them input their personal information, such as income and Social Security numbers.

IRS SCANDAL PUNISHMENT: Lois Lerner’s Pension Could Be as Much as $102,600/Year, $3.96 Million Lifetime.

Nile Gardiner:

The harsh invective flowing from Washington’s liberal establishment has been nasty, juvenile and petty. This should be a moment for humility for the White House over its hugely unpopular Obamacare reforms, which are opposed by a significant majority of the American people. Ironically President Obama turns the other cheek on the world stage when it comes to challenges to US global power, and has made the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic competitors into a form of art. But he acts in a truly imperial fashion at home, refusing to listen to the slightest hint of criticism domestically. This is a president who happily apologises for his country’s past when he travels abroad, in thoroughly humiliating fashion for the United States, but cannot bring himself to acknowledge that his own policies might be wrong.

Honestly, Nile, they aren’t much better when things are going their way, either.

Any teensy imperfection anywhere in the universe is perceived as a personal slight by your friendly (not really) neighborhood (they wouldn’t be caught dead in your neighborhood) progressive (statist). Because they’re caring like that. Imagine an over-caffeinated Felix Unger in a locked room full of dust bunnies without a vacuum cleaner and you’ll understand the progressive mindset.

STANDING UP TO OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT: You’ll love the ‘trophy’ World War II vets took home from the government shutdown blockade.

Daniel Hannan:

Economic collapse, mass joblessness, uniformed paramilitaries, street violence, political assassinations and, now, a round-up of opposition MPs. Euro-wracked Greece is beginning to feel eerily like Weimar Germany.

The beleaguered Athens government has arrested five deputies and 15 other activists from the fascist party Golden Dawn, including the leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos. The Greek constitution prohibits the outright banning of political parties, but the authorities have got around that by classing Golden Dawn as a criminal organisation and linking it to the murder 11 days ago of a Leftist musician.

Honestly, I’m not going to lose any sleep over Greek fascists unless they demand the return of the Sudetenland.

News that the Boko Haram, yet another brand name of “militant”, attacked a Nigerian college dormitory to massacre at least 50 students in their sleep may still outrage some, but not to the degree you would expect. For it was only last week that the Shabaabs attacked a mall in Kenya. And even more recently some militants” blew up a church in Peshawar, Pakistan killing 85 Christians.

Most of the students killed in Nigeria were actually Muslims, “as is the majority of the college’s student body”. Their crime was attending the agricultural college. جماعة اهل السنة للدعوة والجهاد  or “Boko Haram” literally means ”Western education is forbidden.”

I guess learning to grow spuds and bananas is a Western education.

We have left out the bombings in Iraq or the ongoing killings in Syria, or the burning of Zamboanga. No mention need be made of the threats against the Miss World beauty contest in Indonesia. We leave out those tedious details lest we should be here half the night enumerating them.  At this rate no one will pay much attention to any subsequent attacks — even if they happen at a little league game in Minnesota or a retiree’s bingo party in Florida or the burning of a hospital or two in France.

For outrage news will by then have been so common as to fall into the category of “dog bites man”. Ironically the more people the “militants” kill the less we will notice. This is the effect of attention fratricide.  One headline drives out the other, a process we call the “news cycle”. Since low information voters can only hold one thing in their mental register at a time, one hundred massacres will just blur into a single blob.

This can be called the ‘dense pack’ effect,  after the “strategy was developed under the Reagan administration as a means of safeguarding America’s inventory of MX missiles”. It worked on the idea that Soviet ICBMs would run into each other if they tried to hit MX silos too closely grouped together.

The rationale for this thinking went like this: As the first inbound warhead detonates over its target silo, it would throw a large cloud of debris over the entire missile field. Every other warhead targeted on that missile field would have to travel through that debris cloud to reach its target, and it was theorized that the act of traveling through that debris cloud would “trash” the warhead before it could detonate. Every successful explosion over the missile field would throw more debris up into the air, increasing the chances that each successive warhead would be destroyed before it could trigger.

If you have too much of a bad thing you lose track of one woe with the arrival of the next since the mind can only cope with so much. Crazy as this idea sounds it apparently works. Consider the perception of murder in the city of Chicago. We don’t notice it any more. Kill a 10 kids in a white suburban community and its national news. Shoot a dozen people in Chicago and “so what?”

The same fratricidal effect can be observed in the way we remember — or don’t even recollect — the war in the Congo. It is by far the “the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II”, having killed almost 6 million people if you stop the count in year 2008. It’s was bigger than Korea and Vietnam put together and multiplied by nearly 60. By comparison the 100,000 people who have died in Syria are loose change.

Who doesn’t know about the Six Day War (16,000 dead), yet who the hell has heard about the war in the Congo? Where is the Congo?  Wherever it is it can’t be important or it would have been featured on Oprah. The reason the Congo is forgotten is dense pack. It’s information fratricide.

Overload makes it easier for apologists to keep “militants” invisible or depict their depredations as the work of a few misguided individuals. If there were only a few attacks we would remember them more vividly, they way we never forget Timothy McVeigh. But fortunately there are so many that it is perfectly possible for President Obama to say that the world is more stable than it was 5 years ago.  Few if any of the low information voters will challenge him on that score because by some trick of the human mind we remember tragedies on a human, personal scale more vividly than the slaughter of millions.

This curious psychological fact has been understood for some time. Stalin was supposed to have observed that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” It was a fact he exploited when he proceeded to kill more people than Hitler, which is probably why he and not Hitler is remembered fondly by many to this day.

For the well of tears runs dry. Can one really say, “I’m sorry to hear that that students in Nigeria were slaughtered in their sleep?” when just a few days ago John Kerry was offering his heartfelt condolences for the mall attack in Kenya?  How much heartfelt sorrow does John Kerry have? Soon, if not already, dead Nigerians will be just another day, another Nigerian naira.

“Militants” do more than kill individual people; more, even, than simply murder multitudes. What a truly malignant movement achieves by unending, numbing slaughter is putting to death the very taboos that uphold civilization. We become used to barbarism. We accustom ourselves to regard it as normal. The “militants” destroy our former expectation of decency to the point where we ourselves understand — and accept — that we now only pay lip service to those former norms.

By stages we become transported to the militant’s own world, ostensibly against our will but really by our inaction. We submit, perhaps not consciously but nevertheless we submit to the insistence of savagery until it imposes its will on us by unending harassment. Step by step, headline by diminishing headline we accept and lose interest till we are manifestly prepared to live with the unspeakble in a kind of uneasy coexistence in the same way a man who’s bartered his soul to the devil accepts the growing shadow at the far end of the room.

Boko Haram is not beyond the pale. Jake Tapper asked two months ago why the State Department had not designed the Boko Haram a terrorist organization even after Nigerian Christians petitioned them to do so, and even in the aftermath of an attack on a school dormitory — it was a different school dormitory which we’ve already forgotten.

(CNN) – At least 20 students were killed in northern Nigeria last week when Islamic militants razed their boarding school, prompting British authorities to label the group thought to be responsible, Boko Haram, a terrorist organization.

But the Obama administration has not done the same. …

Possible explanations for reluctance to label the group can be found in a 2012 letter to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Nigeria experts, including John Campbell, the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria under President George Bush.

The letter claims that the foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation would limit the State Department’s ability to shape “long-term” strategy and encourage the Nigerian government to use military action rather than diplomacy.

“We believe that an FTO designation for Boko Haram would limit American policy options to those least likely to work, and would undermine the domestic political conditions necessary in Nigeria for an enduring solution,” said the group in the letter.

The phrase in the letter which claims that the foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation would limit the State Department’s ability to shape “long-term” strategy and encourage the Nigerian government to use military action rather than diplomacy summarizes the core of the problem. The Boko Haram aren’t terrorists. We’ve accepted them already at a deep, doctrinal level. They are our “partners for peace”.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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