Showing posts from December, 2014

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December 31, 1912

(The posting of this article has become an annual tradition of historical proportion at this blog.) The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours. In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate. While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past. December 31, 1912. The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. The word gay is employed with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, on

The Two Empires We Must Defeat

There is a thread that connects many of our conflicts, whether it's the one against terrorism or the one between the Republican establishment and its conservative insurgency. To win a war, we have to understand the nature of the conflict and how we got there. And that's often the missing piece. The left blames imperialism for our conflict with terrorists. And it's right. Just not in the way that it thinks. Empires may be expansionist, but they're also tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since out of their initial phase they have to enlist the cooperation and services of subjects from a variety of cultures and religions. An empire may initially be fueled by the talents and skills of a core nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins sacrificing their interests to the larger structure of empire. The argument between the establishments of the right and the left is over two different kinds of empires. The Republican establishment in America and its va

Every Christmas Now Comes With Muslim Terrorism

Muslim Terrorism has become as much of a Christmas tradition for Christians in the West, as it already was for Christians in the Muslim world, where Somali Muslim gunmen attacked a Christmas party at an African Union base. A Somali Muslim attempted to bring terrorism into the United States by bombing a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland in 2010. Mohamed Osman Mohamud (twice the Mohammed for twice the mayhem) had a simple goal, "I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave dead or injured." Mohamed Mohamud was just following up on the work of Christmas Day flight bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab over from Nigeria who stuffed his underwear full of plastic explosives and tried to detonate it on Flight 253. Meanwhile this year we've been tried to race riots in which Muslim organizers have played a leading role and two attacks on New York police officers carried out by Black Muslims. The last attack by Ismayil Abdullah Brinsley robbed two familie

The Light of Chanukah

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs. Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee. And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained ar

Saving Comrade Castro

The Soviet Union did not have to fall. If Carter had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him, the Communist dictatorship might have received the outside help it needed to survive. And we would still be living under the shadow of the Cold War. Carter couldn’t save the Soviet Union, but he did his best to save Castro, visiting Fidel and Raul in Cuba where the second worst president in American history described his meeting with Castro as a greeting among “old friends”. Raul Castro called Carter “the best of all U.S. presidents”. Obama’s dirty deal with Raul will make the worst president in American history, Castro’s new best friend. Carter couldn’t save Castro, but Obama did. This was not a prisoner exchange. This was a Communist bailout. Obama boasted that he would increase the flow of money to Cuba from businesses, from bank accounts and from trade. When he said, “We’re significantly increasing the amount of money that can be sent to Cuba”, that was his real mission

A Dangerous Holiday

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are. Many of those celebrating Chanukah celebrate a holiday that does nothing more than celebrate 'celebration', the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don't remember and a little family fun. Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama's war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus's war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness. The great irony of Chanukah is that those likeliest to strip away its historical and religious meaning would have been fighting against the Macabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture that the left attacks. Today's struggle for Jerusalem, for Judaism, for freedom of religion and a mean

Life in Post-Truth America

Next month Americans will experience the fifteenth anniversary of the time that the President of the United States shook his finger at the country and informed it, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.” Bill Clinton was lying. But the lie was more significant than the thing that he was lying about. When the lie came crashing down, Clinton and his defenders deconstructed the English language, questioning the meaning of every word in his sentence rather than admit that the lie was a lie. Given a choice between telling the truth or challenging the definitions of such words as “sex” and “is”, they decided to burn their dictionary. Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters

Leftist Lynch Mobs from Ferguson to Rolling Stone

Did you bury a teenage girl alive after shooting her? Are you on death row after a string of crimes too gruesome to describe? Or you just a member of Al Qaeda dedicated to destroying America?  If so progressives will fight for you. Just dial 1-800-IAM-VICTIM and the left waiting to take your call will insist on your presumption of innocence. Its activists, reporters and lawyers will exploit every pretext to get you off the hook and they will call that justice. The judicial process, they will say, matters more than public safety, public outrage or the victims. When the crime wave set loose by their own activism flooded the country they clung to Blackstone’s formulation of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” As murders, rapes and robberies rose, the value of that formulation went up from ten to ten thousand. But it had to be the right ten thousand. Leftist lynch mobs rioting in Ferguson, marching through Manhattan and screaming in Oakla

Fat Class Warfare

There was a time when fat was in and thin was out. Obesity was the privilege of wealth and being thin meant being poor. In simpler societies, before slumming became a romantic pose, there was nothing attractive about not having enough to eat. To be fat was to be part of the leisure class. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming. Then agriculture was revolutionized and the values flipped. No one in the West was starving to death and the poorest man could still grow fat. By the time the social programs kicked in, weight no longer meant leisure. With packaged foods widely available and jobs shifting from the factory to the desk, it was entirely possible to work hard and get fat. On the other side of the aisle, exercise meant leisure time. The standard was set by movie stars who struggled to meet unrealistic standards because they had the time and disposable income

Black Lives Don't Matter

The slogan of the wave of Ferguson protests is “Black Lives Matter”. But progressives are far more interested in toting around the corpse of Michael Brown to their protests than in the living man he was. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and countless others like them grew up in broken families, their lives haunted by fathers and stepfathers with gang ties. The only masculine culture they had was that of the thug and that culture eventually killed them. Criminal culture is even more fatal to criminals than it is to their victims. If you attack enough people, eventually one of them will fight back. Eventually one of them will kill you. It wasn’t Darren Wilson who decided that black lives don’t matter. Michael Brown did. He did not grow up with a sense that his life was worth anything more than violent posturing could make of it. Just like Martin, that violent posturing eventually killed him. Rappers recorded a tribute song to Michael Brown titled, “Don’t Shoot”. But Brown’s own song