The United States of America (1787-2013) came to a swift and sudden end last night as the government shut down. The nation which had survived Pearl Harbor, the War of 1812 and Jimmy Carter ceased to exist.

The savage population, which had only been kept in line through a policy of rigorous gun
confiscations, food stamps and Green Energy programs unleashed its pent up rage in a spree of riots, looting and mass murder that had only previously been encountered in Somalia.

"The government shut down! We can do anything we like," shouted Sam Hasbley of Grassley, Iowa, while tearing the tag off a mattress despite an explicit warning label forbidding such a dangerous course of action. "Tear yours off. The government is shut down. It can't stop you."

Eyewitnesses spoke of further horrors. On a quiet street in suburban Massachusetts, a man brought out a set of highly illegal lawn darts. In Maryland, there were allegations that an entire family had begun digging ditches to collect rainwater runoff.

With the fall of the government, citizen activists took it upon themselves to chronicle the culture of lawlessness. Men played Gibson guitars made of wood imported from India, but not finished by Indian workers. Women bought cold medicine without a photo ID. Children went hours without hearing lectures about the environment.

The victims were many. In Chuckolod County, Colorado, a transgender person was denied access to the Ladies Room. Frantic calls to the Justice Department were forwarded to an answering service in Depar, India, instead of Doneparre City, Indiana. In Brooklyn, New York, an overweight Senegalese woman was unable to obtain a sign language interpreter while waiting on line to collect her free Obamaphone. In Olegon Falls, Florida, the National Museum of Native American Yarn was forced to shut down depriving schoolchildren of an educational experience and three hours throwing bits of yarn at each other.

And there was worse to come.

The entire city of Detroit was seized by the Michigan Militia backed by Canadian air power. The village of Frankfurt, Illinois passed several ordinances in explicit violation of Title MXVIII of the Federal Charter of Approved Fruit Naming Ordinances. North Dakota seceded and declared that it was now the nation of Bismarckia, elected a Kaiser and petitioned to join OPEC.

An army of Mongols or possibly local residents dressed in Samurai helmets raided the Federal Dried Peach Reserve in Georgia hauling away thousands of tons of dried fruit and tossed them to waiting crowds. The end of food stamps in Martho, New Jersey led to an outbreak of cannibalism despite efforts by ACORN volunteers to bring order to the proceedings by soliciting volunteers to give up their privilege and be fed to the people.

In Massey Hills, Virginia, a gang of politically incorrect sports mascots entered a workplace and implicitly hurt the feelings of several minorities. Their calls to the Justice Department were forwarded to Eric Holder's private voicemail along with frequent messages from his coke dealer demanding to be paid, like right now, and requests for weapons manuals from several Mexican cartel bosses.

In Madison, Wisconsin, the entire United Organized Educators and Librarians Union attempted to commit mass suicide on the front lawn of the Madison Center of Union History to protest budget cuts and school closings. Their efforts proved in vain when the gasoline they poured on themselves in a failed attempt at self-immolation turned out to be apple juice.

In Caplow City, Maine, President Gerald Ford, long thought dead and believed to have been buried in Michigan, appeared and declared himself to be the nation's new leader. While some suspect him to be an impostor based on the plastic texture of his mask which has a hastily erased message reading "Impeach Nixon" on the side, the city fathers have chosen to embrace the possibilities offered by Emperor Ford and have set him up in style in a presidential palace on the eight floor of the Caplow Arms Hotel.

In the midst of all this chaos, a weary nation's eyes turn to Washington D.C. But since the shutdown, which also shut off all power, water and press releases to the embattled city, no word has reached the outside world of what is taking place there. The last message was a smoke signal dispatched by Elizabeth Warren from the roof of a burning Capitol Building. An expert in Native American smoke signals decoded it to read, "I told you so. Now we're all doomed."

The only surviving member of the national government outside the dead zone is believed to be Vice President Joseph Biden who showed up on a beach in Waddiddi, Florida, where he has spent hours entertaining himself by building an elaborate 1/100 scale model of the White House out of sand. Attempts to inform him that the tide was coming in have fallen on deaf ears.

As the nation descends into chaos, one thing is clear. The government shutdown has once again doomed us all. Just like the last 17 times.

One fine day religion died. Morality shortly followed it. Any values based on some antique prophets or philosophers went into the rubbish bin. The table was cleared and its blankness was the new world, the terra nova, the blank slate of a revolution in human ideas. Unfortunately there was nothing to actually put there. It had all been thrown away.

What followed was a condensation. A Reader's Digest edition of all the moral codes that had come before it. The unnecessary sections were trimmed. The scissors were wielded mercilessly destroying everything... except for one thing.

All that remained was victimology.

Thousands of years of human thought, of civilizations grappling with the inner darkness and the outer light, of the angels and demons of human nature, of thoughts on government, duty and freedom were reduced to one endless reform movement forever battling to save the oppressed from an oppressor.

Often the oppressor didn't exist. Sometimes the oppressor was an intangible notion, like whiteness of skin or the economic system that requires people to work for a living or the idea that nations should have borders. Every system must invariably delve within itself, building up abstractions and arming white knights of ghost and shadows to do battle with ideas of ideas. Victimology was no different.

Victimology was elegantly simple. Its core premise was that we should all be nice to each other. Despite the reams of academese it wreathed itself in, it was absurdly free of content and context. It did not matter, at least initially, who you were or what you believed.

The old arguments over which moral system was right were irrelevant. Religion even more so. All that mattered was being a good person.

And a good person was someone who fought oppression, instead of actively oppressing or passively oppressing by entering a conversation without coming to terms with the conceptions of his own whiteness, his own maleness, his own heteroness or otherwise failing to check his own privilege at the doorway to the restaurant of Victimology where baked guilt was always on the menu.

The old religions had been silly things relying on signs and wonders. The old philosophies with their ponderings and speculations, the old white men talking old white men talk to each other, even sillier. They had all failed to check their privilege and free the slaves, set up abortion clinics and teach gay teenagers that it gets better.

They had, in short, produced nothing worthwhile except for the incessantly privilege-checking civilization they now lived in, its university in debt up to their ivory towered necks to build new campus buildings to house new administrative offices for the office of Transgender Equality, and its governments which were in even more debt to finance the universities and the billions in privileges checked, unchecked and signed away on the dotted line for wealth redistribution matrix.

Victimology was better. Victimology was simple. You were either a good person or a bad person. And it was easy to tell which.

Good people had Equal stickers on their cars. Bad people though equal was a sugar substitute instead of support for gay marriage.

Good people wished they had the time to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Bad people wished that the homeless would stop urinating on their steps.

Good people were broken up about all the suffering in the world. Bad people kept plopping out kids without even knowing about Nestle's depredations in Latin America or the history of the United Fruit Company or the plight of the uninsured.

The best people of all however were victims. Some were survivors. Many were underprivileged. Others were overlooked. Most were unhappy and only privilege, the privilege that they fancied everyone else had and they didn't, could make them more vocally unhappy.

The Western frontier had closed. The frontier of space had never opened. But Victimology had opened a great new frontier and all sorts of folks were coming through its gaping door.

There were men who wanted to marry men and men who wanted to be women. There were men who wanted bakeries to sell them wedding cakes for their marriages to other men and called in the authorities when the bakeries wouldn't comply. Like the Rwandan orphans and the homeless and the migrant workers and the survivors of Disease X and the Somali family living in Maine on food stamps... they too were victims.

Victimology had become theology. It didn't even need to be elaborate like Liberation Theology. It was a stark conflict between the victims and their oppressors. And if the victims sometimes looked like the oppressors and the oppressors like the victims, that was blasphemy and heresy. No one was burned at the stake for it, not counting the occasional tire necklaces in the homeland of one of the new religion's greatest triumphs, but they lost their jobs, their reputations and social standing.

In an ironic twist, the very ideology that had torn down any connections between church and state, that had hunted down every one of Cecil B DeMille's Ten Commandments tablets, that threw conniption fits if somewhere students put their heads down for a moment of silence or a penny of government money was diverted from the vast educational bureaucracies of the public school system to a religious institution, had been instrumental in creating the new State Church of Victimology.

The creed of Victimology had become supreme. Like all state churches, it overturned Freedom of Religion. Catholic and Jewish institutions were required to cover abortions to protect the victim, who was not, contrary to some expectations, the baby being killed. Wedding photographers were forced to participate in gay weddings. There was only one religion now and its prophet was an angry lawyer.

There was to be no morality outside Victimology. There was to be no religion outside Victimology. For many liberal churches and synagogues, the transition was easy. They had already abandoned any of their old creeds for the smooth featureless creed of Victimology whose services were social work, whose prayers were protest chants, whose rites took place at the voting booth and whose holy day was April 15.

(There is also a lesser holiday around the middle of January and Labor Day is a time to slap on a fresh "Unions Gave Us the 5-Day Work Week" bumper stickers on the Prius in your school faculty parking lot.)

The generations raised under the shade of Victimology, like the children born into most religions, saw nothing wrong with any of this. Unlike most religions, Victimology was absurdly simple. It had its contradictions, but it had also mastered a glibness of rhetoric and a simplicity of slogan so that few would ever even notice.

It was the religion of niceness. And wasn't that what all the religions had really been about? What could possibly be wrong with being nice to others... so long as they believed the same things you did or were victims of oppression which gave them license to believe they had the right to cut your head off while shouting Allah Akbar or Down With the White Devil or Tell the Truth About Area 51.

Outwardly Victimology eliminated the context and the context was who got to decide who the oppressed and the oppressors were. Victimologists insisted that it was self-apparent. They wrote voluminous revisionist histories and their media outlets released a terrifying flood of news stories that were little more than Victimological propaganda so that the narrative was everywhere.

And that helped keep Little Victimologists from wondering why the polar bears hadn't all died yet or stormed the California coast or why nothing seemed to ever fix race relations or why people who killed kids were the worst monsters ever... unless they were their mothers.

Religion is in no small part narrative. It is the story of heroes and villains who convey values through their struggles.

Victimology had countless heroes and villains and their narratives always conveyed values. Everything was politicized, which is to say it became religious. Not since the Puritans, had Americans been subject to this much religion in daily life, to this many witch hunts and so many witchfinders expert at identifying the inner struggle between good and evil in every aspect of daily life from breakfast cereal (Do you know what transporting oat flakes from Peru does to the planet?) to clothing (Do you know the company that makes that is against gay marriage) to just about anything (did you check your privilege before entering this trans-safe space?).

America had once again become a religious nation. There was no God involved. But that was no longer needed. God, it turned out, was the collective liberal conscience of the well-to-do fighting to right wrongs while armed with prophetic morality and Vibram sneakers purchased through the local sporting goods co-op.

And the church... was everywhere. There was no need to go to a special building at a special time. The worship services were going on everywhere all the time. They were taking place at work during your sensitivity training, they were there when you turned on the TV to see what was on and they followed you through your conversations, in the newspapers and books you read, on the radio, on the internet, the regulations you followed, your paycheck deduction tithes for wealth redistribution and all the many hypocrisies, fallacies and absurdities whose service you paid lip to.

It was all very convenient, very modern and very American in its cheerful ubiquity. It had at its core that corporate faith in streamlining, in eliminating useless features, whether of toasters or religions, to give consumers only exactly what they wanted at a price that they would think was cheap.

Victimology was what the same industrial processes that had simplified and broken down everything else had done to religion. It had taken the simplest, most practical and most understandable aspect of them, mixed in heavy doses of the Marxism that was popular around the time that modernism became an obsession, and distilled the ultimate modern religion.

First there were the poor. And then there were the identity groups. And finally there was the whole planet groaning under the weight of the capitalism that had liberated the poor.

Modernity had replaced God and it was forced to find a replacement for the devil as well. It had dispensed with the Angel of Death and so it made its own angel, not in the racks of nuclear bombs, but in the spirits of its ideas. Environmentalism was modernity's angel of death, its devil, its final destroyer. The bullet it fired into its own brain to undo itself once and for all.

The Church of Victimology did to modern civilization what environmentalism did to industry. It was the bullet fired recklessly into its own brain.

Victimology was an endless industrial-grade reform movement that never stopped. It was a guillotine with a billion knives that needed victims to keep going. The more victims it found, the bigger it got and the bigger it got, the more victims it needed. And for each victim, it needed oppressors to expose and denounce, to drag before the bar of justice and public opinion, to demean and to destroy.

With its whole moral structure invested in victims, it couldn't be allowed to run out of them. It had to create them, to plant them on protected plantations, ply them with welfare checks and loose morals, or invent them out of whole cloth, drag them out of social movements and the frantic insanity of lunatic perverts. The more insane the whole thing  became, the faster it had to spin the narrative to keep anyone from realizing that, and the more demented its Victimologist followers became.

Victimology ate cities and then states and then entire countries. But what it was really eating was civilization. It was the mad superego of a mad civilization seeking a moral high in its own eventual martyrdom on the altar of the endlessly deferred suicidal principles that would destroy it.

The Church of Victimology had been born by destroying all the ideas that came before. It was only fitting that it would not stop destroying until it had also destroyed everything that had come after it.

The Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, the city with the largest Jewish population in the country, was a strong supporter of a Marxist regime that ethnically cleansed its Jewish population, conducting a reign of terror that included informants, arrests, expulsion and attacks on a synagogue. And he did this not before the truth about Nicaragua was known, but long after it was known.

Bill de Blasio won 38% of the Jewish vote in the New York City Democratic Primary. Despite the liberal reputation of Jewish voters in the Big Apple, these numbers were roughly even with those of other religions and demographics.

The latest Marist poll, which shows de Blasio with a 43% lead, also shows the Jewish vote leaning toward him by only 55%. Republican challenger Joe Lhota scores 36% of the Jewish vote-- his best numbers among any group except White Catholics (41%) and Conservatives (39%).

De Blasio's weak polling may reflect the growing numbers of the New York City's Orthodox Jews who tend toward a natural conservatism, but it may also reflect wariness toward any candidate, who  favors undermining the police and dispensing with the city's needed fiscal reforms.

Bill de Blasio began his career in New York City politics with David Dinkins, whose administration's policies were responsible for the city's first pogrom against the Jewish community of Crown Heights. In the subsequent election, Giuliani won 68% of the Jewish vote while Dinkins took home 32%. In the next election, the very Jewish and very liberal Ruth Messinger had to make do with 27% to Giuliani's 72%.

With Giuliani actively campaigning for Joe Lhota, one of his former deputy mayors and a man with a striking resemblance to his bulldog personality, while Dinkins associate Bill de Blasio holds down the Democratic ticket campaigning on weaker law enforcement and more social welfare, the election looks like a rerun of the 1993 grudge match between Dinkins and Giuliani.

For now Bill de Blasio is pulling in more of the Jewish vote than his old boss did, but that may change once Jewish voters realize what he really stands for.

Bill de Blasio is probably the most radical left-wing Democratic nominee for the office in the history of the city. In a system where Democratic candidates usually keep a wary eye on the working class, he is a typical leftist Park Slope yuppie with an activist past that he parlayed into a profitable class warfare present living in an area where home prices run into the millions.

Not long before Bill de Blasio joined Team Dinkins, he was a member of Team Sandinista. The Sandinistas, or FSLN, a radical Marxist terrorist organization, took over the country and drove out most of Nicaragua's Jewish community. By the time they were done, the ADL blasted Nicaragua as “a country without Jews, but not without anti-Semitism.”

This was the revolution that de Blasio supported while volunteering at the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York. The NSN, staffed by Marxists, served as the mouthpiece for the Sandinista regime funneling its propaganda into the United States and conducting tours celebrating the ruling party and denouncing the opposition.

The New York Times describes Bill de Blasio as one of the first eager subscribers to Barricada, the Sandinista paper. This was the Barricada that denounced the "traditional ‘Jew-style’" of the United States Congress for not immediately providing the money to finance an election in Nicaragua.

“They had a youthful energy and idealism mixed with a human ability and practicality that was really inspirational,” Bill de Blasio said of the Sandinistas. That energy included throwing firebombs at a synagogue during Shabbat services while shouting "Death to the Jews", "Jewish Pigs" and "What Hitler started we will finish."

Bill de Blasio worked as a political organizer for a left-wing group raising money to aid a regime that had deprived the Jews of their property, their homes and even their house of worship. The president of the synagogue that the Sandinistas had attacked was forced to sweep the streets, a scene reminiscent of Nazi behavior in occupied Europe, before being forced to leave the country with the clothes on his back.

The synagogue was seized and transformed into a Sandinista youth center decorated with Anti-Zionist posters. The Jewish community of Nicaragua fled to Miami and Costa Rica.

A few years after Bill de Blasio had moved on from Nicaraguan politics to New York politics, his new boss watched as mobs tore through a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn only a few miles away from where he now lives while shouting, "Death to the Jews."

It would be nice to think of all this as ancient history. But it isn't.

Bill de Blasio has blasted NYPD surveillance of mosques sayings that "all surveillance efforts, and anything that is not based on specific leads should not continue.” Such a policy would prevent the NYPD from engaging in any meaningful information gathering until it was too late.

And this time it isn't the synagogues of Nicaragua that are on the line. It's the synagogues of New York.

In 2009, four Muslim men were arrested by the FBI and charged with, among other things, plotting to blow up synagogues in the Bronx. Their targets included the Riverdale Jewish Center and the Riverdale Temple. One of the Muslims boasted, “With no hes­i­ta­tion, I will kill 10 Yahudis.”

In 2011, two Muslim men were arrested by the NYPD and charged with a plot to blow up Manhattan synagogues. "I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City," one of them said.

What both cases had in common was that they relied on informants drawing out potential terrorists, instead of waiting blindly for them to strike. If Bill de Blasio has his way, that will no longer be something that the NYPD will be able to do. And like the worshipers of Nicaragua's Congregación Israelita, the first that the Jews at Shabbat services will know of the plot will be when they smell the smoke and hear the cry, "Death to the Jews."

But while Bill de Blasio may have his scruples about spying on mosques, his Sandinista friends had recruited informants to gather information about the Jews of Nicaragua to begin a campaign of intimidation that led to the attack on a synagogue, to arrests, threats and ultimately the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Nicaragua. If Bill de Blasio ever criticized his beloved Sandinistas for these crimes, it isn't in the record.

At one of Bill de Blasio's final meetings with the NSN, he spoke of a need to "build alliances with Islam." That red-green alliance has since pervaded Latin America. In 2012, Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praised Saddam Hussein and denounced the US "occupation" of Afghanistan.

Ortega defended Iran's nuclear program while predicting that peace would come to the region if Israel were forced to give up its nuclear weapons.

This was the glorious revolution that Bill de Blasio never gave up on.  “People who had shallow party sympathies with the F.S.L.N. pretty much dropped everything when they lost," one of his old NSN friends said. "Bill wasn’t like that.”

“They gave a new definition to democracy,” Bill de Blasio told the New York Times. And now he risks giving a new definition to democracy in New York City.

Cities and countries are precarious places. That is something that Jews have found out in countless places from Nicaragua to Iran. The Jews of Brooklyn discovered in 1991 how precarious a place New York City could be. The decades of peace since then only became possible because Bill de Blasio's old boss was forced out of office.

If Bill de Blasio moves from Park Slope to Gracie Mansion, his old dreams for Nicaragua could become his new dreams for New York.

ISLAM IS THE MOTIVE

In Westgate, a Kenyan mall oriented toward expats, terrorists separated Muslims from non-Muslims before killing them. The Muslims were allowed to go free if they could recite a Muslim prayer.

“I don’t understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child,” one of the survivors said. But the five-year-old was not a Muslim.

Moments like these put the Clash of Civilizations into bloody context. This isn’t abstract politics. It’s not about economics, the environment or foreign policy. It’s about a worldview in which a five-year-old who can’t recite the Islamic confession of faith deserves to be killed.

 ...

At the Khaybar Massacre and the birth of the battle cry Allahu Akbar, Mohammed’s cousin asked why he meant to massacre the Jews. “Fight with them until they bear testimony to the fact that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Messenger,” he replied.

That message in one form or another permeates Islam. It is the essence of the Jihad.

From my article on the Kenya attack; In the Name of Islam




INDECISION 2008-2016

Obama is dogma-ridden. Where Bush was a pragmatist trying to do what worked; he needs to follow a party line. Like the Chinese rocket scientist consulting Mao’s Little Red Book to decide what to do next; he needs the political guidance of the left to come to a decision on anything.

He can pursue any course as long as he starts with a progressive political program and then does whatever is necessary to put it into action. What he has great difficulty doing is beginning with a necessary action and working backward toward a political program.

Putin, the former KGB man, has to regard the interaction with an American leader whose Socialist inflexibility exceeds that of any Soviet leader with a certain amount of irony.

The Roots of Obama’s Indecision





MARCHING IN THE JIHAD PARADE

The black flag is the war flag and the white flag is the state flag of the Caliphate.

The Al-Liwaa, the Caliphate state flag, and the Al-Liwaa, the war flag, are making a statement that the marchers are with the army of Mohammed and are at war with the non-Muslim Dar Al-Harb. The House of War. America.

These were the flags that were planted on American embassies on September 11 during the attacks. Now they are being carried openly in New York.

New York Muslim Day Parade Marchers Carry Al Qaeda Jihad Flags




QUESTIONS ABOUT ARIZONA'S LITERACY RATE REMAIN

Mr. McCain said it’s a “cop-out” for critics of intervention in Syria to say “we don’t know who they are.”

“The point, I think, that you and others are missing … [is that] Syria is a moderate nation. Syria has the highest literacy rate of any nation in the Middle East. They are not going to submit to a jihadis or al Qaeda group governing them. They will not.”

Assuming you can even trust the literacy rate coming out of Syria, it’s 79 percent.

Iran’s literacy rate is 77 percent. Pakistan claims a literacy rate of 79%. 

McCain Claims Syria Won’t Turn Al Qaeda Because of High Literacy Rate



D.C. Congresswoman Claims City with 8th Highest Murder Rate is Safest in America




WHAT DIFFERENCE?

For about $200,000, Mrs. Clinton will offer pithy reflections and Mitch Albom-style lessons from her time as the nation’s top diplomat. (“Leadership is a team sport.” “You can’t win if you don’t show up.” “A whisper can be louder than a shout.”)

As useful as it is to inform audiences of bored people waiting to get out for some burgers that “Leadership is a team sport” and “You can’t win if you don’t show up” (Hillary did show up and didn’t win), it doesn’t sound like those are really the lessons that Hillary learned while letting four Americans die in Benghazi and handing a misspelled reset button to the Russkis.

How about informing the National Association of Realtors that the real lesson is “What difference does it make”. Sure you sold a home to a nice couple with three kids that’s located on an Indian burial ground/toxic waste dump. But really what difference does it make?

Or how about telling the American Society of Travel Agents that sure you may have suggested Libya as a great resort destination to that elderly couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and now there are pictures of their corpses being paraded around by America’s friendly Islamist allies… but really what difference does it make?

Hillary Speechmaking Tour Shares Valuable Lessons with America




SAND TO SAND

The truth about the Arab Spring is that it never existed. The term was coined by Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor, who had spent years urging engagement with Hamas and championing the role of the Muslim Brotherhood as a “firewall” against Al-Qaeda “radicalism.”

This Arab Spring had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It was a scheme to split the Islamist ranks by turning over the Middle East to political Islamists. It was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Green Belt strategy practiced on a grander scale than Iran.

The traditional Egyptian authorities, the old oligarchy, disliked the Muslim Brotherhood businessmen financed by Qatari cash and propagandized by its Al Jazeera megaphone, even more than Mubarak’s son. They knew that given time, Morsi would take their posts and business monopolies and hand them over to his supporters. The issue for them wasn’t Islam; it was power and money.

They knew that there was no Arab Spring. This was a regime change operation. Washington had decided that its old allies were no longer getting the job done and decided to trade them in for the Brotherhood. And they waited, giving the Brotherhood and Obama enough rope to hang themselves with. 

The Egyptian Pyramid Scheme




GOOD NEWS FROM SYRIA

Al Qaeda’s Two Groups Now Fighting Each Other in Syria

Obama’s $1.3 Billion in Syrian Aid Helping Al Qaeda

Obama Refights Syrian Civil War at UN

Sex Jihadist Catches AIDS Serving Servicing Free Syrian Army Holy Warriors

She wore a Hijab to be more modest and then went on a Sex Jihad. The internal contradictions of Islamic morality never cease. Martyrs get 72 virgins. Female sex Jihadists get martyrdom is dying of AIDS.



DIRTY SOCIALISTS

The prices began to rise from .90 CUC to 1.50 CUC (from about $1 USD to $1.65 USD) for a pack of four rolls. Even still, though the price of toilet paper hit 10 percent of a person’s average monthly wage, women continued to buy it. Now we were edging toward the height of a paroxysm.

Then it happened – the price tripled. There was no conciliation or any other options. Now I had to spend 30 percent of my monthly salary on toilet paper if I wanted to maintain my hygiene.

Venezuela Nationalizes Toilet Paper Factory to Cope with Toilet Paper Shortage



ALL RACISM, ALL THE TIME

White people are racist. All white people all the time. If there’s any case ever of a white person not being racist, it’s probably because he’s racist.

Are you white? Do you pay attention to black murderers? It must be because you’re racist? Wait, you don’t pay attention to black murderers? It’s because you’re racist. Why aren’t you paying attention to black murderers? You racist.

Washington Post Claims White People are Racist for Not Caring About Motives of Black Mass Murderers



NEW MATH

Obama: “Raising the Debt Ceiling… Does Not Increase Our Debt”




MOHAMMED'S TIPS FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Mariam explained that due to her young age she wasn’t capable of meeting the demands of married life.

“I was taken away from my small toys, taken out of my school forcibly and delivered to my husband whom I had only seen once, in front of the judge who officiated my marriage contract,” she added.

Mariam recently ran away from her husband’s house and returned to her father’s, after concluding that she could not bear to stay with her husband.

He dates other women under the excuse that his wife is young and thinks like a child, not living up to the intellect of a man of his age. Mariam’s husband also beats her whenever they have an argument.

“When I told my father about this, he told me, ‘This is normal and most young people are facing such a situation these days’”

1/3 of Gaza Hamas Marriages Involved Underage Girls




COLORFUL LANGUAGE

Sweden’s minister of Finance, Anders Borg is visiting Africa.

Look at all the beautiful colours the women here are wearing. Within ten years this is what it is going to look like all over Europe. Back home it’s so bleak and dreary the colours are devoid of life. When our children grow up there will be between 1.5 to 2 billion people in Africa and we will continue to be 500 million. That is going to have a huge impact on our trends.”

“Europe will become a better place, a more multicultural place,” he continues.

Swedish Minister Looks Forward to Europe Turning into Africa




Ayatollah Khomeini’s Great-Granddaughter gets a Photoshop Modesty Makeover




STONES AND CLUBS

Windmills have been around for over 2000 years. Wind turbines have been around since 1887. They’re not exactly a groundbreaking technology.

Nuclear power plants are a truly modern technology. They’re more modern than solar cells which date back to 1888. Funny how the eco-left seems obsessed with 1880 technology while neglecting the wonders of modern technology. They seem to be the ones in the stone age.

Around the time of World War I, American windmill makers were producing 100,000 farm windmills each year, mostly for water-pumping. By the 1930s, wind generators for electricity were common on farms, mostly in the United States where distribution systems had not yet been installed.

Commercially, solar power made its debut in the late 1800’s.

As production of the solar thermosyphon system prospered during the 1920’s, economics soon made the solar heat irrelevant. With the discovery of large amounts of natural gas in California, the cost to heat water plummeted and solar energy systems could no longer compete for business.

Time for Solar Energy and Wind Farm Supporters to Stop Living in the Stone Age




SPRINGING INTO DEMOCRACY

MP Talal al-Sharif pulled out an AK-47 rifle and shot at fellow MP Qusay Dmisa during a public session of Jordan’s Parliament, but did not manage to wound him.

This is the first time that guns have been fired in Jordan’s Parliament, although earlier this year MP Shadi al-Edwan attempted to pull out a pistol in the building during a bitter dispute over rising fuel prices.

Although Al-Demsi was the shooting target, the ad-hoc investigation committee found him guilty of inciting the action. The MPs said that Al-Sharif resorted to arms only after Al-Demsi slapped him while they were shaking hands in an effort to resolve their dispute.

Al-Sharif was so offended by the slap that he rushed to produce his machine gun from his car and started shooting.

Jordanian Parliament Budget Dispute Ends with AK-47 Shooting





MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FINALLY GETS ITS OWN BIKER GANG

Forget Mad Max and think Mad Mohammed.

Police have discovered pictures of Osama bin Laden at a Gold Coast home linked to a worrying new bikie gang called Soldiers of Islam, whose members include former Iraqi soldiers.

They call themselves MBM – the Muslim Brotherhood Movement – a gang of 600 men who boast they are the toughest and best young street fighters of Middle Eastern descent in Sydney.

But the objectives of MBM – its emblem features two crossed pistols and a hand grenade – and its leadership remain unclear to officers of both the Organised Crime and Gang Squad and Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad.

Soldiers of Islam Biker Gang Terrorizes Australia’s Gold Coast



Something About Mohammed: Egyptian Islamists Can’t Stop Kissing Morsi




NEVER GO FULL VONNEGUT

Forget pivoting to the economy or to Asia. For that matter forget gun control or Syria. Obama has finally found what he needed to be doing all along.

Forcing movie theaters to install technology for the blind.

If we’re going full Kurt Vonnegut here, let’s stop pussyfooting around Instead of trying to make the blind see, why not just blind everyone?

The Justice Department can mandate that all movies be blank and be based entirely on descriptions. Not spoken descriptions because the deaf can’t hear. But not written ones because the blind can’t see. Maybe they’ll be descriptions you have to imagine for yourself while looking at a blank screen. And paying 20 bucks for the privilege.

Obama Inc. Orders Movie Theaters to Install Technology for the Blind




OVERCOMPENSATION

The World Muslimah beauty pageant, despite being meant as an alternative to Miss World, had most of the same ingredients, fake smiles, tacky clothes, dumb contestants and gallons of makeup.

But like most second-rate Muslim imitations of Western things, it compensated by being twice as vocal about Islam.

World Muslim Beauty Contest Ends in Prayer, Tears, But Not Beheading



Meet Amanda Lickers, the Canadian Left-Wing Gay Fake-Indian Who Desecrated a 9/11 Memorial



SEE NO EVIL

In 1992, Al Gore accused President George Bush of “a dangerous blindness to the murderous ambitions of a despot.” Eight years later, the Democratic Party platform proclaimed, “As President, Al Gore will not hesitate to use America’s military might against Iraq.”

Three years later, the Democratic Party, which had initiated the most aggressive military action against Iraq since the Gulf War and whose leading lights had repeatedly pledged to get tough on Saddam, had reinvented themselves as the anti-war party.

In 2002, Gore had told the Council on Foreign Relations that Iraq was “a virulent threat in a class by itself.” A year later he was talking that way about George W. Bush.

But did Iraq stop being a virulent threat in a class by itself because Al Gore changed his mind?

Saddam’s Ticking Time Bomb




MA MLM

I checked with friends this morning to find out if I was alone in my sense that I had fallen asleep in the late 1990s and woken to a world in which I have no idea what schools even do anymore. My friend Stephanie advised me that her back to school night involved a discussion with a teacher about “interfacing with a child’s developmental space,” as well as a reference to “scaffolding text to text connections” in Ramona the Pest.

52 percent of the nation’s 3.3 million public school teachers have a masters’ degree or better.

While the number of MA’s in the classroom doesn’t help kids. It does increase the adoption of gibberish as overeducated teachers put their useless education to use making the system that much more confusing and impenetrable.

Public school teachers are no longer incompetent. They are just strategizing the educational synergies of multiple levels of achievement.

Has the Overeducation of Teachers Turned Public Education into Gibberish?




THIS SEEMS MORE LIKE A JOB FOR PIGMAN

Malmo consists of a 40 percent immigrant population and has the highest percentage of Muslims in Sweden closing in on a quarter of the population.

A superhero is patrolling the streets of Malmö to stop crime, the newspaper City reports.

Dressed in black, with knee and elbow pads, he has a white “V” on his chest, which stands for “Väktaren” or “The Guardian” and a white mask.

Väktaren, a comic book fan, was motivated to become a superhero last month after he was mugged.

Swedish City Overrun by Muslim Crime Turns to Superhero





KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS TODAY, KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS TOMORROW, KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS FOREVER

Very very very white progressives, mostly the kind with advanced degrees in the humanities, or training in leftwing activist journalism or Keynesian economics, provide the intellectual cover for contemporary slavery, which takes the form not of whips and chains and fugitive slave acts, but rather is created with political calculation to form an economic plantation onto which pet minorities are forever herded, kept, fed, subsidized, and dumbed down, with no recourse to escaping failing schools, into permanent clients of the welfare state-Democrat Party vote exchange system.

from Jeff at Protein Wisdom's post




THE NEW SOUTH AND THE NEW EUROMERICA

This was downtown Asheville in the heart of the freshly gentrified, cosmopolitan zone and instead of pick-ups rattling down the streets, Porsches prowled growling in the night outside the rock-climbing gym. This was an armed cultural hamlet in the New South, guarded by down-home decorating parlors ready to give your custom log-cabin that shabby chic lived-in look; where the sentries were hair salons called "The People" with mirrors in front of each station resembling nothing so much as the guillotines that "The People" of France once used so effectively in solving their aristocracy problem.

The difference here was that the new aristocracy of this region was busy admiring themselves in the mirrors of these guillotines with nary a Marat or Robespierre in sight. Instead, downtown Asheville -- or at least some small section at the top of the hills -- was relentlessly promoting our new secular religion of senseless and endless shopping opportunities. 

from American Digest's Grace in the Blue Ridge Mountains



TRANSCENDENCE

Edward Cline has written a piece commenting on my article about Islam as a Gang Religion. His comments about my writing are much too kind, but I did want to highlight this section and comment on it.

Islam has no philosophy that pursues the meaning of life. In it, speculation is prohibited. As such, it can only obsess with the meaning of death, without page-long Kantian paragraphs that explicate its death-worship.

Islam at bottom is imbecilic and it attracts recidivist imbeciles. Passive Muslims are those who religiously go to mosque and question nothing. Activist Muslims are the killer imbeciles who fly planes into skyscrapers, prey on non-Muslim women in Britain and Europe, and invade shopping malls, guns blazing.

Islam's "Golden Age" is based on Greek and Roman texts which invading Arabs might have discovered and preserved, but which they did not originate and which were subsequently disdained as un-Islamic.

But Islam, if it can be called a philosophy, is a philosophy of nihilism and death. Islam, as Greenfield describes it (and too few others critical of Islam), is a manual for conquest, submission and self-immolation cobbled together from other creeds, chiefly from Judaism and Christianity, while Allah was originally a pagan moon god. There is no system or structure to it. It is an arbitrary, unwholesome porridge of assertions, sayings, anecdotes, and dicta, a disparate potpourri of statements of dubious authorship whose central theme is "conquer them, convert them, or kill them." It appeals to psychopaths and sociopaths – the jihadists – and to the morally rootless and selfless rank-and-file Muslims, that "silent majority" of manqués who refuse to think

There is no real possibility of transcendence in such a structure. Islam, as a religion, is embedded in the materialism of its endless war. 

It has nowhere to move forward. It replaces philosophical questions with real demons that it seeks to destroy. It resolves spiritual questions by shooting things. It offers its followers an easy solution through the duality of murder and death.

The peculiar thing about the new iPhone, aside from all the homeless people standing on line for it, is that it is really one of the last drops of a social revolution that began when amateurs started tinkering with kits that have as much relation to a smart phone as the Wright Brothers plane has to an Osprey.

The computer revolution wasn't a accident. A society needs its frontiers and by then one of the few frontiers remaining in America was the abstract conceptual world inside a metal box. It would take decades until that abstract world became concrete and we were all living inside it. Its final revolution was to eliminate the metal box. Or least to make it as portable as possible. But by then the things in the real world that the box was supposed to take you away from were already inside it.

The America of the tinkerers was already narrowing down a great deal. By the nineties, a lot of the people were ready to climb into the box. In the teens or whatever we're calling this decade, everyone is in the box and waiting on line for a slightly improved version of the box. Or hoping that there's a box within the box so that like a set of Russian nesting dolls, we can vanish into an even less understandable universe in our minds before the authorities, political, corporate and cultural get there.

The revolution was really the escapist ending of Brazil with millions of people humming to themselves having won a brief victory over their pursuers, even if the victory is only in their minds.

I don't take the computer lightly. It's an amazing device. But there's a reason that we have it instead of all the things everyone expected the future to bring. Doing some of those things would have meant pushing real frontiers, instead of abstract ones. It would have meant an open society of individuals, instead of a closed society where everyone is trying to be an individual to escape the conformity.

Can you imagine flying cars in a country that outlawed lawn darts and has gun control fits every time a shooting happens? A real space program run by a government that can't get anything done and is out of money? Food pills in a society whose food neurosis now extends into the Oval Office?

The frontier has closed. The tinkerers found a new one in a metal box and for a while the internet was a new frontier. But that was before Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. It was also before Amazon and Google. It was when web pages were randomly thrown together and when the internet looked  like an anarchic bulletin board of entertainment value, but not deep meaning.

You passed by there. But you didn't live there. It added a dimension to life, instead of the overlay that it throws down over your day.

The internet is much more of a loop these days. A series of links leading to the same place. The one story that everyone is talking about. The Google search that focuses on trending topics by default so that when you type in Sudan, the only results will be what happened in Sudan a few hours ago, with the Sudan before it existing only as a lone Wikipedia entry. The sites that track your habits and show you only what you're interested in. Even as it's getting bigger; the internet is contracting.

The contraction of the internet mirrors that of the society. It's gotten dumber as it's gotten bigger. The amazing things on it that you're linked to are less likely to be a thought and more likely to be two dozen randomly plucked photos of Africa presented as linkbait on a site that stole it from twenty other sites. Everything is awesome, amazing, world changing and will totally make you lose it.

Except it won't.

The computer has become distilled down to the internet. Google bet hard on that with Chromebooks. Eventually the different platforms will fall away and the only difference between Macs and PCs will be the color and shininess of the box running the same applications.

The internet stopped being an experiment a while back. It's a finished product. And like television, the product is your time. Getting it is a science. The professional website, like a casino, is expert at the science of wasting your time while giving you as little value as possible. It knows exactly what people will click on and how to get them to keep clicking in the loop that leads to affiliates and the best way to cash in on all that. And yet outside all that noise and clamor, revolution is possible.

Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone what it is. The apps did. To see what the iPhone would have been like today without them, pick up a Windows Phone. It would be a slick device with some decent functions, but no room to grow.

The iPhone is a platform for apps. So is its Android rival. The difference is that Google knows that while Apple still pretends that it has to come out with some new revolutionary product.

The PC was what it is was because it was a platform for programs. Windows has never been more than a means of running programs well or badly. But Microsoft, in a fit of Apple envy, decided to embrace a new vision with Windows 8. It wanted to be Apple. And it did that at the expense of the open desktop. And it's paying the price.

The internet's more revolutionary possibilities involved the escape from control. Some of those possibilities are still there, but they are fading as the abstract becomes concrete and the same forces that eliminated freedom in the old real world are doing the same thing in the new digital world.

The internet was always destined to become a mirror of our societies and that meant that it could never serve as an enduring escape. The rule of the nerds who helped shape it was always going to give way to the corporations looking to monetize it, the governments seeking to exploit it and the masses who just want whatever the corporations and governments tell them to want. But most of all, the same forces that shaped our society would come to shape the internet.

The leverage that it provides to revolutionaries of all kinds is not itself enough to overcome the inertia of those forces. And that is what makes the power struggle uneven. It is the determined blandness of political correctness, the leftward tilt of content creators manifesting in a thousand ways and the limitations of the medium to do anything but win by sinking to the bottom.

That whole teeming world, enclosed in a small plastic rectangle, is our society abstracted, stripped of nuance, of anything but id and rendered down to an easily accessible form, is no longer an escape, it's an unlovely mirror of our failures as a society to find a frontier and make it our own. The technology is revolutionary, but it's a revolution constrained into smaller and smaller boxes, into narrower corners, from operating systems to app stores and from there to what further hub of central control?

The internet does make the world smaller. Sometimes the box is a reflection of the world and sometimes the world seems like a reflection of the box. Both become metaphors for the other. The world starts looking more like the internet and the internet starts looking more like the world. It becomes easier to think of programming people offline the way that they are programmed online and regulating them online the way that they are regulated offline.

Compacting the world into a box did make for revolutionary possibilities. It still does. But the possibilities of control in a simplified world are greater than those for freedom. That is what the revolutionaries never entirely understood. The more the real world could be mapped into the box, the more controllable the box and the world outside it became.

The social media revolution was a giant leap forward in achieving that mapping, in interlinking the worlds inside and outside the box, in defining, pinning and maintaining the citizenship of the web.

Our technocracy is an unholy mashup of liberal social programs and dot com whiz kids learning the joys of bribing public officials. Cass Sunstein's nudge is the perfect government concept for the dot age. It's slick, it's creepy and it's about indiscreetly manipulating people.

These sorts of Freakonomics gimmicks have become the ubiquitous way for the anti-social to
understand people. They are the politician's version of the amateur hypnotist's kit, the rules for making men/women do what you want and the entire social engineering handbook that the nerds were playing with at the same time as they were tinkering with circuit boards.

Government, like the operating system, has ceased to be a means to run programs. Like Windows 8, it imagines that it is the program. Its vision is of putting everything in the cloud, running everything through it, appropriating, redistributing and centrally planning everything. It was that way already when the operating system appeared as green text on a CRT monitor.

And it has gotten only worse since.

The shiny metal box has been incredibly disruptive, but disruption alone is not revolution. And once you climb into a box, it can be hard to climb out again.

Killing non-Muslims is the point of Islam. To the extent that it has any point. That isn't to say that Islam doesn't preach the virtues of charity and love for one's fellow Muslim. It does. But its virtues are not original. Like most of the rest of the framework of it, they are lifted from existing religions.

When the Sahih Muslim's Hadith quotes Mohammed as saying, "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself"; it's a distortion of the Christian Bible. And when Obama quotes the Koran as saying, "If any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of a whole people,” it's an equally shameless plagiarism of the Jewish Talmud.

Like the Soviet Constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion, these are nice sentiments borrowed from other people and then not actually put into practice. The Islam that matters is the one that's put into practice not only at the World Trade Center or the Westgate Mall, but in the everyday lives of people in Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Islamic violence we are told is an aberration. But it isn't. To the extent that Islam is anything, it is violence.

Islam may have become a religion, but it began as a code. Like the Pirate Code or the Thieves Law of Russia, it was a set of rules that allowed a select group of bandits to choose leaders, plan attacks and divide the loot.

The code invested their actions with meaning, it kept order in their ranks and allowed the members to believe that dying for the gang was more than a martial ethos, but also contained a spiritual element. Similar attempts to invest gang life with spirituality can be found in the tattoos, rap songs and graffiti memorials of every street gang in America. 

Imagine the Kingism of the Latin Kings street gang, which has its own prayers, crude theology and philosophy becoming the religion of the gangs ruling over a Post-American civilization. In the 80s, the Chicago gang Blackstone Rangers realized the benefits of becoming a religion and declared itself the El Rukn tribe of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

Despite the elaborate mythology, the Latin Kings is a gang first and a religion second. In time it might become a full religion, stranger things have happened, but it will never be able to escape its origins. It will at its heart always be a gang code with an emphasis on providing a spiritual overlay for gang violence.

And that is the case with Islam.

After over a thousand years, after its own empires and conquests stretching around the world, after endless religious schools, reform movements, theological debates and splinter groups, Islam is not able to leave its gang roots behind. It is still at its core a gang religion. That is why it appeals so well to convicts who recognize that they are interacting with something far more ancient than Kingism.

That is also why Islam, like most street gangs, degenerates so readily into internecine violence. No matter how much its devotees dream of conquering the decadent West and planting the black flag of Islam everywhere, they can't help turning their guns on each other, because gangs are naturally primed to fight amongst themselves. The gang code never suffices to settle disputes among men who live by violence. They may fight to impose Islamic law on the world, but they can't live by it.

Syria is Islam at its most primal with gangs fighting over the ruins of cities, small groups joining up, Shiite and Sunni militias killing each other, Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front gangs fighting over bakeries and pipelines, an endless stream of recruits from around the world rushing to join up in a gang war that has claimed over 100,000 lives.

That is how Islam began. One man and his gang. That man may not be depicted or the gangs of his followers will blow things up. When they aren't blowing up each other. The gang spread around the world. Its Caliphs and Emirs went from thugs and clan leaders to rulers of nations. And then the whole thing collapsed again. Now the gang leaders are trying to get the gang back together again.

Islam was born in the chaos of the implosion of two empires, Byzantium and Persia, tearing at each other until they both gave way and were overrun by Islam. The second coming of Islam took place during the climactic battle between two new empires, America and the Soviet Union, who exhausted each other, and may end up suffering the same fate as the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanids.

The common denominator is that the rise of Islam parallels the collapse of other civilizations. Like the jackal sniffing around the bones of empire, the gangs of Islam step into a vacuum, but can never fill it. The second-hand knowledge that they steal and pass off as their own never leads them anywhere. The Golden Age built on the labor and creative ideas of others passes and there is nothing left except bitter resentment at greatness lost and a future denied.

Islam always reverts back to the gang. It comes out of the desert and returns to the desert. It begins with a handful of men raiding civilized towns and cities. And no matter how much time must pass and how the world turns, it always reverts back there. Over a thousand years later, the climactic struggle of Islam is almost indistinguishable from what it was in the time of Mohammed.

The world has changed dramatically in a thousand years, but a few thousand men are still ambushing each other in the desert in the name of a warlord named Mohammed.

This isn't the ideal Islam. But that is only because the Islamic ideal is killing non-Muslims. Kingism dedicates itself to the fight against the forces of Anti-Kingism. What is Anti-Kingism? It's everything that isn't a Latin King. Islam likewise dedicates itself to fighting the Kuffar. And the Kuffar are those who deny Islam. They are the forces of Anti-Caliphism. They are everyone who isn't a Muslim.

If Islam stands for anything, it's killing non-Muslims. Islam can't really think far beyond that. Its mindset is that of a dime store Alexander who doesn't want to even think about the prospect of not having any more lands to conquer, towns to sack, women to rape, homes to rob and libraries to torch.

The gang can only think of fighting more, killing more and doing the same things it did last week again. It finds meaning in the ethos of the fight and in the comradeship of fellow gang members. That is why Jihad is so central to Islam. It is why women occupy such an inferior position. Jihad is the gang culture of Islam. Its bonding rituals are central to Islam whose original elements derive mainly from the raids of Mohammed and his companions against the more civilized peoples of the region.

Islam finds its meaning from fighting and killing non-Muslims. It is the only meaning that it can ever have. The exercises of its devotees who memorize countless Koranic verses, who debate the fine points of laws and prepare for their pilgrimages to Mecca must inevitably converge on the violent core that gives the whole thing purpose.

The historical dynamic of Islam has never left behind its gang origins. Its future is measured in terms of conquest and more conquest. The manifest destiny of Islam is an eating contest as its holy warriors cram more and more territories and people into an expanding Caliphate that falls apart vomiting up the conquests into chaos. The lessons are never learned. The holy warriors fall to fighting each other.

Islamists proclaim that Islam is the answer. The trouble is that they've forgotten the question.

And the question was how do you keep a band of bandits from stabbing each other over the loot while convincing them that if they die while stealing a goat or raping someone's third wife, they'll go to a magical place full of goats and virginal third wives with skin of the color of bone marrow.

As the holy warriors of the Syrian Civil War killing each other over control of bakeries while fighting to impose the perfection of Islamic Law on everyone can tell you, it's not a very good answer even to that question. It's an even worse answer to any larger social problem that doesn't involve twenty men trying to divide the profits from one raid on an abandoned university.

But when a religion is based on gang violence and because of that inevitably reverts to gang violence, it's an answer that keeps coming up again and again.

The answer of Islam is the answer of violence. It's the answer of uniting the various gangs around killing non-Muslims. Sometimes that answer even works.

Assad's Alawite neo-Shiites were able to work together with the Muslim Brotherhood Salafist Sunnis of Hamas and the Shiite Ayatollahs of Iran and the Super-Salafist Sunnis of Al Qaeda as long as they had a common goal of killing Americans or Israelis or somebody. When that goal broke down, they began killing each other instead.

Islam's answer only works when there is a non-Muslim target within reach and none of the Muslims have time to start envying the other's rifle, sunglasses or country. But then the violence halts and the gang begins dividing up the loot, knives are drawn and another bloody Arab Spring begins.

Every fourth gang hip-hop song is about how hard it is to leave the gang life. The other three are about how everyone else out there is a pretender and not a real gangsta. That is Islam in a nutshell. Islamic civilization can't leave the gang life and insists that every other civilization and even most other Muslims are pretenders and that only the Salafiest of the Salafists are the real Gangstas.

Syria, Kenya, September 11 is how they prove it. We don't have a foreign policy problem with Islam.

We have a global gang violence problem.

We are not a violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends  time wondering what kind of man would murder people. They probably live next door to him. If your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to war criminals all the way from Eastern Europe to Africa.

Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.

It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of liberal social control that the killing sprees imply.

The gun issue is about solving individual evil through central planning in a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing peace signs on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.
Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, some of the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the  security guards at armored cars and banks, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control,  and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.

So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.

But this isn't really about stopping shootings; it's about the belief that the problem isn't evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following government orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop.

It's the central planning solution to evil.

We'll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We'll never know how many were killed by Obama's regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders.

There was no individual agency, just agencies. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it.

Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it's the lack of central planning for shooting people. It's the individual.

A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it's millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.

Moral agency is individual. You can't outsource it to a government and you wouldn't want to.

The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual.

Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies or do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders.

Gun control does not control guns, it gives the illusion of controlling people, and when it fails those in authority are able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.

We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, committed to bringing their perfect state into being through the absolute control over people, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.

People do kill people and the only way to stop that is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything that came before it, but to everyone else, it's just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.

Anyone who really hankers after a world without guns would do well to try the 12th Century which was not a nicer place for lack of guns. The same firepower that makes it possible for one homicidal maniac to kill a dozen unarmed people also makes it that much harder to recreate a world where a single family can rule over millions and one man in armor can terrify hundreds of peasants.

Putting miniature cannons in the hands of every peasant made the American Revolution possible. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would have meant very little without an army of ordinary men armed with weapons that made them a match for the superior organization and numbers of a world power.

Would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have grinned at the playing field being leveled?

But the Democratic Party is no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson. It's the party of King George III.  And it doesn't like the idea of armed peasants, not because an occasional peasants goes on a shooting spree, but because like a certain dead mad king who liked to talk to trees, it believes that government power comes before individual liberty. Like that dead king, it believes that it means this for the benefit of the peasants who will be better off being told what to do.

The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.

Do we want a society run by kings and princes who commit atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with machine guns? The kings can promise us a world without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.

It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of; it's a country where individual agency is still superior to organized control, where the trains don't run on time and orders don't mean anything. It's afraid of individual power.

Evil finds heavy firepower appealing, but the firepower works both ways.

A world where the peasants have assault rifles is a world where peasant no longer means a man without any rights. And while it may also mean the occasional brutal shooting spree, those sprees tend to happen in the outposts of utopia, the gun-free zones with zero tolerance for firearms. An occasional peasant may go on a killing spree, but a society where the peasants are all armed is also far more able to stop such a thing without waiting for the men-at-arms to be dispatched from the castle.

An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control.

Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their kings and princes to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the freedom that left the killer free to kill, instead of the lack of freedom that prevented them from being able to stop him.

"Military Colonist" is a term that has gone out of fashion in this brave new world of "No Human Being is Illegal" and "Every Refugee Deserves to be Resettled."

The university history professor with an office full of fake Indian jewelery and a view of the parking lot will lecture on the military colonies of the Roman period, always careful to emphasize their eventual fate. And he may even get up to the 16th century. But he'll stay away from the present.

But if you are going to take land or seize power, you will need military colonists to hold it. The military colonist may be an ex-soldier, but he's more likely to be someone the empire, present or future, doesn't particularly need or have a use for .The Czars used serfs. The present day military colonist who shows up at JFK or LAX may also be a peasant with even less value to his culture.

Mexico's military colonists are not military. Often they aren't even Mexican. But they have managed to take back California without firing a shot. Unless you count the occasional drive by shooting.

While the United States sent tens of thousands of soldiers to try and hold Iraq and Afghanistan only to fail; Mexico took California with a small army of underpaid handymen who claim entire cities and send back some 20 billion dollars a year. As conquests go, it's not hard to see who did more with less.

In 2009, 417 Mexican migrants died trying to reach America, and 317 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. But Mexico has more to show for it than America does. Every Mexican who settles across the border is a net gain who sends back money and spreads political influence. Meanwhile America is spending trillions on a much smaller army in a country whose land no one actually wants.

In 2009, the year Obama approved a 30,000 man troop surge, 3,195 Afghans received permanent legal status in the United States.

In the decade since the US invaded Afghanistan, 24,710 Afghans successfully invaded the United States and received permanent legal status. That is an occupying force larger than US troop numbers were at any point in time in Afghanistan until the very end of the George W. Bush's second term.

During this same period there were also 19,000 Afghan non-immigrant admissions. As invasions go, the Afghan invasion of America was far more successful than the American invasion of Afghanistan.

That is even more true when you consider birth rates. Military colonists are not a mere invading army. They are generational footholds.

The American birth rate was at 13.5. The Afghan birth rate was at 37.3 at the time. American soldiers go home when their time is up. Sometimes they come home with a Muslim wife after converting to marry her. Afghan immigrants come with a birth rate that is nearly three times that of the country they are invading.

Across the ocean, the Algerian War is still going strong and France is losing badly. There are fewer bombs and bullets. Only men and women showing up and expecting to be taken care of. An army of millions could not have landed in France and begun pillaging the countryside. Not unless they came as immigrants. If you are going to invade a Socialist country, the best way to do it is as a charity case.

Unfortunately that holds true for us as well.

The military colonists flooding our shores are part of an unacknowledged partnership between their political leaders and ours. Their political leaders are fighting a war to redress the wrongs of centuries or millennia. Our political leaders are looking to shift the voting balances in a ward or a district for the next election. When they resettle the next shipment of Afghans in an otherwise conservative area with a view to tilting the electoral balance, they are using them as military colonists for the short term while their homelands use them as military colonists in the long term.  

War is about controlling land, resources and populations. Land just sits there. It's the populations that cause the trouble. The military colonist makes a more enduring occupation possible by settling the land and giving the conquering power a deeper foothold in the enemy territory.

There was a time when American settlers acted as military colonists holding down lands in Florida and Texas. Today America is being colonized by the settlers of other nations and ideologies. And we will find ourselves in the same position as the Spanish did in Florida and the Mexicans did in Texas.

Mexico invited American settlers to move in to Texas on the understanding that they would learn Spanish and otherwise fit in. Instead language and culture proved to be stronger than land and oaths of citizenship. Many of the Texas settlers might not have had much use for the United States at the time, but creed and culture made them American military colonists whether they knew it or not. The same holds true for the present state of affairs there today.

It's more than just cultural or ethnic differences that make one a military colonist. It's a cause. Whether it's Manifest Destiny or the Reconquista or the Caliphate. Underlying it all is that sense of destiny. The power of an exceptionalism that makes it impossible for the settler to sink in and abandon his roots and beliefs to the tidal pull of a new culture when his grudge against it is more than the mere personal dissatisfaction of the new immigrant or his children caught between two worlds.

Integration is hopeless in the face of that  sense of destiny. European nations struggling to defend some notion of secular space misunderstand the problem as one of extremism. Some of the more visible terror attacks may indeed be associated with what can be described as extremism in the sense that its participants are willing to push the envelope harder and further in more violent ways.

But Islamic terrorism is only the foam on the surface. It's the bubbles at the edge of the pot. A minor symptom of a much bigger problem. Ir's simply the most violent expression of a widely shared belief that Islamic law is superior to Western law. Most peoples feel that their ways and customs are best. It doesn't become a problem until they become the majority and won't take no for an answer.

American liberalism and European republicanism have no answers to Islamic terrorism. Their embrace of the Arab Spring was motivated by the need to believe that the Muslim world was ready to "advance" to the same postmodern level of existence eliminating the need to worry about women in Burkas or Al Qaeda. The same misreading of the power of tribe and religion that led to the foolish belief that Saudi Arabia's military colonists could safely be turned into Labour voters led to the Arab Spring's  equally misplaced confidence that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to be just like Europe.


It isn't only a tiny minority of extremists who believe that Islamic values are superior to Western values and who would like the law to recognize that assumption. It's a tiny minority of extremists who try to prove their devoutness by jumping the gun and killing people over it before the full demographic impact of the military colonists would make a Burka ban into the next Syrian Civil War.

Think of two armies maneuvering into position. The extremist is the one who fires before the enemy is fully in range ruining the strategic effect of the surprise attack. Trying to understand the extremist not only misses the point, it misses the whole chain of events in motion. The schemes for integrating the disgruntled youth and countering violent extremism is symptom control.

Terrorism is an early warning in the clash of civilizations and all our leaders can think to do is hold a meeting with the heads of the opposing army asking them to get their hotheads to stop shooting at us  because it's bringing our civilizations into conflict. Our civilizations are in conflict and have been as far back as they have both existed. The occasional plane hijacker is the first snowflake of a winter storm. Instead of preparing for a storm, we're trying to figure out how to stop snowflakes.

The conflict is primal. It isn't about American foreign policy or War X or Country Y or Cause Z. These are all "arguments" that explain the conflict once it's already under way. It's simpler than that. It's about the incompatibility of cultures, religions, political and economic systems. And it's about countries with a lot of oil and not much else trying to buy their way to an empire by using their own impoverished brethren as cannon fodder. And finally it's about what happens when birth rates fall.

Western countries have achieved individual comforts with an unsustainable system. This unsuistainability is both economic and demographic as budgets and children are both lacking. Meanwhile the countries and cultures that have failed have achieved a perfectly sustainable state of misery. They may not have much income, but they also don't have much to eat. They may have high infant mortality rates, but they have even higher childbirth rates.

America of 2013 cannot go on being this way indefinitely. It probably can't even manage another two decades without major changes of some kind. Afghanistan 2013 however can go on being the way it is indefinitely.  And that sustainability is what makes its people effective military colonists. Living the Afghan lifestyle in London or Los Angeles is even sustainable because food and housing are free.

That just leaves large packs of nomadic youths roaming the streets, selling drugs and rioting at the slightest provocation until it's time for them to get married and make more nomadic youths of their own. It's not that different from Afghanistan. It's the tribal life transplanted to the West. It's a culture with no real purpose except to produce young males eager to fight and expand tribal power and a religion with no real purpose except to affirm that as a religious duty.

Islam embodies expansionism. Its directives of male violence and female subjugation have no other end. They protect the tribal imperatives of endogamy and violence, of inbreeding and the feud. It has no ideas except to get bigger and that makes its followers into ideal military colonists.

Dear Corporate America,

I haven't written to you in a while. At least not since my television broke down, my toaster developed a taste for human flesh and my phone company ran away with my phone number to Mexico.

Rachel Maddow says we're both on the right and are really close together. But then again Rachel Maddow also says the Republican Party drinks the blood of small children. So she can be a little factually challenged on occasion.

Still I'm on the right and you're occasionally sort of, but not really, on the right. I support lower taxes. So do you. At least for yourself. I support deregulation. You only support deregulation when it suits your narrow interests, but not when it lets smaller businesses and freelancers compete against you.

What you seem to want is a country with low taxes, your preferred forms of deregulation and the population of Mexico.

These things are not compatible. Mexico is currently governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party; a member of the Socialist International. It has a multi-generational teachers' union whose members pass on their jobs to their children and whose riots have to be put down by armed force.

When it comes to ease of doing business, the United States is ranked 4th, Mexico is ranked 48th, coming in ahead of Kazakhstan. A Comparmex report showed that companies spend 10% of their revenue on bribes.

Is this what you really want for America?

Your lobbies and associations keep pushing for amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens even while your companies keep fleeing California.

If you don't like doing business in California, which is turning into the American version of Mexico, why do you want to turn the rest of America into California?

You keep talking about how we need "immigration reform" to be more globally competitive. Are there superpower rivals desperately trying to import 12 million people whose great dream is to put their entire families on social welfare? Are there Chinese recruiting agents showing up at the border to urge the DREAMERS clambering over the fence to try Shanghai instead?

I understand why you would rather pay a Pakistani or Chinese programmer on an HB-1 visa half of what you would pay a talented American programmer. And that's your choice. And paying fifty bucks for the full version of that programmer's work, instead of ten times as much on your licensed edition based on a program once created by American programmers but reassembled into an update by HB-1 employees until it has more bugs than features, is mine.

That's how the free market works.

But while those H1-B employees will forward all your confidential information back to Chinese intelligence and occasionally set off bombs while shouting Allah Akbar, they don't threaten your ability to do business.

Sure one of your execs might be flying on the plane that goes down in a burst of exploding underwear and next month a bunch of programs that look suspiciously like yours will come flying out of Zhong Guan Cun undercutting your international market share. And the next time you're negotiating with a Chinese company, they'll just happen to have access to all of your corporation's emails.

But you can live with that. Can you really live with full amnesty and the consequences of destroying the Republican Party as little more than a protest vote in a Socialist International America?

You spent the last election whining about how hard it is to do business in America under the Democratic Party. You hate ObamaCare, despite promoting it, and then you do everything in your power to make Democratic Party rule permanent through amnesty.

I'm not a psychiatrist and it would be hard for me to get all of Corporate America onto a couch for a session, but it seems to me that you're suffering from a severe bout of schizophrenia.

You want workers who will take low pay without complaining about working conditions. And you can get that with illegal aliens who don't speak the language and don't know their rights, until they hook up with community organizations backed by the entire Democratic Party and then you're up to your neck in lawsuits and minimum wage bills.

At which point you'll threaten to move to Mexico or China... to escape a problem that you caused.

Maybe I'm misjudging you, but I don't think you really want an open economy where deregulation cuts out the government bureaucracy and makes it possible for both workers and corporations to do business on better terms.

I think that Mexico is exactly what you want. Sometimes in business you have to take yes for an answer. And I think that in this case yes is the answer.

You want a closed system where there is no competition and cronyism is the only way things get done, where the corporate taxes are a bit lower, but the difference is more than made up by bribes, a society sharply divided between the vast armies of the unprotesting poor who are resigned to their fate and a small wealthy elite that enjoys its superiority in ways that it can't on this side of the border.

You don't really want to build things. You want to keep other people from building them while you enjoy a monopoly on the things that someone innovative built twenty years ago before he was forced to leave the country.

Paul Ryan is your boy and few other politicians represent the complete disconnect between the economic and immigration policies of your kind better than him. Ryan wants to cut social benefits and legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. He wants to cut money for the "takers" and add million more takers to the voting rolls to ensure that any legislative changes he makes will vanish in a wink.

So what does Paul Ryan really want? Does he want to cut spending more or does he want amnesty more? He's willing to sacrifice his budgets for amnesty, but not amnesty for his budgets.

Ryan may spout nonsense about how this generation of "family-oriented" illegal aliens will start lots of business and keep social security afloat, and how they, in a complete reversal of history, will be all for cutting social spending and voting Republican. But I doubt that he or McCain or anyone else is stupid enough to believe that nonsense.

Given a choice between America, the Republican Party and Amnesty, they're willing to sacrifice America and the Republican Party, not to mention Conservatism, on the altar of Amnesty.

The real question is why. Not why Ryan is choosing such a course, but why his backers who claim to want legislative reforms and economic freedom are pursuing an aggressive and well-funded course that will ensure that America will never have any more economic freedom than can be bought by a bribe or a family connection? Why are the people who claim to be concerned about our debt and our unsustainable spending determined to take both up to eleven?

Maybe we're all part of the problem. Maybe as a society we're no longer capable of producing leaders capable of thinking in terms of long term consequences. We want what we want and we want it now.

Corporate America has decided that it needs cheap labor now and the tens of millions of unemployed and unskilled Americans don't do. In the long run, amnesty will make America all but impossible to do business in for any company that doesn't have General Electric, Duke Energy or Tesla in its name. But in the long run, the sun may go nova. That's how people like that think.

Maybe it's as simple as pumping and dumping America, cashing in on a few years of cheap labor and then heading somewhere else and profiting from selling the last remnants of the collapsing economy to Qatar or Saudi Arabia. It appears to be happening in Europe. Why not America?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism in the same way that I'm for democracy. As Churchill said, it's the worst possible system except for all the alternatives.

Capitalism, like Democracy or Wikipedia, isn't innately good, it's just better because it's decentralized and that allows people to pursue their own dreams, agendas and anything else they like. The sum total of this crowdsourced wonderland is sometimes good, sometimes bad, often in-between, but on average better than any tyranny of politics, economics or articles on breeds of armadillo would be.

Democracy gave us Barack Obama. Capitalism gave us GE. Wikipedia lists a blue armadillo that doesn't exist in nature. All these flaws remind us that crowdsourcing is imperfect. It doesn't give us good results. It gives us better results.

But dear Corporate America, despite what Rachel Maddow says, I kind of like you. You make decent toasters. Or at least you design decent toasters that China makes. And if you ever decided to dump the Green energy labels, the abstract art and the million dollar donations to gay rights groups and turn into the monstrous cryptofascist conspiracy that liberals claim you are, we might get somewhere.

But we both know that's not going to happen.

You're not conservative. You're certainly not right-wing. There are exceptions, but they're not the rule. Like most of our elites, you're liberal. At best you're occasionally libertarian, but in a limited way. You're all for opening up the borders, but you're all for requiring businesses to get permits if they're in a competing line of work. And you feel guilty, about ice caps, black kids in the inner city and all the other stuff that comes in your mail.

But don't feel too bad, Corporate America. You're not uniquely awful. You're just part of a society whose best and brightest have lost their way and whose proud and prosperous have spent too much time listening to them.

In a decaying society, you have learned to grab what you can without believing that the society and the nation are worth protecting as more than sources of loot. In your comfort zone, the transnational idea has come to seem plausible and the world and its many nations seem infinitely redundant to you. If America doesn't work out, try China or Mexico or Qatar or Singapore.

That comfort zone in which you can thrive on transnational fantasies while still vacationing on Martha's Vineyard is brought to you by a Pax Americana. The peace of the American mercantile empire that your forebears put into place with sailing ships and armed men enables you to sell and buy across the globe, to jump in a jet plane and pop from airport to airport and from luxury hotel to luxury hotel.

All this is not the fulfillment of some Tom Friedmanesque fantasy about the inevitablity of globalism and the flattening of the world. It's not a new era of history. It's the last days of a peaceful empire that  made your wealth and power possible. And that you are destroying the same way that the Romans destroyed theirs.

Yes, for a time you will have your estates in Gaul and compliant barbarians who will clean your floors and look after your kids at cut rate prices. The wine will be plentiful and the circuses shocking. And one day you will wake up and discover that your grandchildren have become barbarians, that the civilization you knew is gone and the virtues that made your way of life possible are gone with it.

I won't preach to you about sacrifice.I'll leave that to Elizabeth Warren and her ilk who will bleed you for every cent you have unless you pay her off first. I will tell you that actions have consequences and not just of the class action lawsuit kind. Power is not the same thing as control. That's not only a lesson that Obama must learn. It's a lesson that you must learn as well.

To build a thing, you must know what it is you are building, you must test the structure, practice with the tools and make it real. Destroying a thing is easier. All you have to do is tear down what works and replace it with a slipshod structure made out of poor materials and tools you don't know how to use as cheaply as possible.

That's what your amnesty push will do to America. And when it's done, when America is California and California is Mexico and organized crime is indistinguishable from government and the only way to do business is with a handful of bribes, then you really will have built that.

On that day, there will be no Tea Party to save you and no Republican Party left to defend you.

You will flee to Singapore or China or Africa, only to realize that you are no longer a wealthy American, but the citizen of a fallen empire without protection in a world where the old rules made by the Pax Americana no longer apply. When the last bribes have been squeezed out of you and your company has been taken over and looted by the son of some government official, perhaps you will finally come to know the worth of the civilization you so foolishly destroyed.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure my DVD player no longer works.

best

Daniel