BUT FIRST A LITTLE NEWS

I have been asked to run the Freedom Center's blog "The Point" at Front Page Magazine. You can see the latest stories from "The Point" to the right of you. Hopefully you'll click on some of them for a closer look.

"The Point" will be something like the roundups, but it will have more of a point to it and there will be plenty of overlaps. And Be'ezrat Hashem it will be a way of getting some of the materials you see here out to a larger audience. If you have any suggestions for the future of the Roundup or the Point, the comments are open.

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For by Thee I run upon a troop; and by my God do I scale a wall. (Psalms 18:30)



THE MACHINE

The most impressive thing about RNC 2012 was the smoothness of the entire thing. If the 2008 RNC stumbled, but ran on enthusiasm, the 2012 edition was a polished frictionless machine, except for one awkward moment with Eastwood, and even that seemed geared to give the critics something petty to pick apart that would not reflect badly on Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.

Mitt Romney is a machine politician, but not a politician of the political machine. He appears to excel at building a smoothly running machine around him. It's not high praise and yet it's not counter to the impression that he gives. It reflects his message that he takes charge and builds things that work.

Behind all the speeches and showpieces, RNC 2012 is a reflection of Romney's whole campaign, it is the precisely calculated work of people who know what they are doing, who don't always get it right, but have ability, ambition and even some guts.

Romney's people went into this understanding that Obama and his allies would run on destroying him as a man, on making him into an ugly caricature, a running joke, a bad human being. And they worked to make that pitch as hard as possible to sell. They knew that the Democrats would focus on the white female vote, so they beat them to it. It's not a new game, Reagan played it too, but it's gone up to a new level.

Some wanted this event to hit Obama much harder. But it hit him hard enough. What it really did was make Romney much harder to hit. Romney's people understand that common sense is on their side and that their mission is to defang the negative attacks from the media that will make people feel bad or guilty about following their common sense. And they did a pretty good job of that tonight.

And the guts kicked in when they picked their battles. It would have made sense for Romney to dodge Bain and for Ryan to avoid Medicare, instead they turned around, picked up both issues and ran on them, and rammed them back into Obama's teeth. It's gutsy, but there's also a common sense element to it. If you're going to get attacked remorselessly on an issue, then you might as well own the issue and use it to send a message to your opponent that the attacks will hurt him as much as you.

That's what RNC 2012 did.

Romney ran in the primaries as the most electable candidate, not by virtue of any special ability, but on determination and competence. RNC 2012 reflected that. It's the work of people who are determined to win and who play hard. That may not be enough, but it's a harder run for his money than Obama got last time around.





THE TROUBLE WITH TUNISIAN VALUES

Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist mayor of Paris, condemned the attack as the work of an "extremist minority" in contradiction to "Tunisian values." "The Tunisian people I know," he said, "are committed to tolerance, democracy, pluralism and human rights."

Secretary-General Jean-Francois Cope, of the conservative UMP opposition, agreed that the Tunisian people were not to blame. The perpetrators, he said, only "pretend to be animated by religious convictions," and dubbed them fanatics and extremists who "do not represent the people of Tunisia."

The peculiar phenomenon of Bertrand Delanoe and Jean-Francois Cope telling the Tunisian people what their values are is not limited to Gallic shores. As the tides follow the moon, Muslim terrorist attacks are followed by Western leaders asserting that the terrorists do not represent Islam and its tolerant values.

My Gatestone column, The Trouble with Tunisian Values, explores this recurring absurdity of Western apologists telling Muslims what their values are while Muslims elect Islamists to show what their real values are.



LEGITIMATE RAPE

Brought to you by Michael Moore, George Galloway, Naomi Wolf and the President of Ecuador.

Michael Moore, discussing the case where Assange raped a sleeping woman, told the BBC that the assault was only a “so-called crime” and suggested that it “wouldn’t actually be a crime if it was committed in Britain.” Moore has shown his faith in Assange’s legitimate rape by donating $20,000 to Assange’s defense fund.

Keith Olbermann went even further than Moore, retweeting a link from Bianca Jagger to an article written by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier that named Assange’s victims and accused them of working for the CIA. UK Left-wing activist Craig Murray named one of the victims, prefacing his statement by saying, “Let us look at the conduct of these women.”

George Galloway, who became a hero to the American left for his defense of Saddam Hussein, said that even if the two women were telling the truth, the only thing that Assange was really guilty of was “bad sexual etiquette.” Galloway is currently a part-time Muslim and it is hard to say whether his notion that rape is just “bad sexual etiquette” is rooted in him being a bad human being or in the pages of the Koran.

from my Front Page column, "The Left's Version of Legitimate Rape"




A RATINGS ADVISORY

Ignore the news stories unfavorably comparing the current RNC ratings to previous conventions. It's one of those true but false stories. You might as well compare the number of listeners to a radio address from today and 1956. If you watched any part of the convention online, you already know why those numbers don't hold up.

Of the most-watched television events, almost all of them took place before the dominance of the internet. No Super Bowl that took place since the mid 90′s has scored anywhere near the same ratings.

Compare Super Bowl XLII in 2008 at 48.66 million with Super Bowl XlVI with 50.15 million in 1983. You can see the same difference with television finales. The newer a broadcast is, the lower its ratings are by comparison. This doesn’t mean that it’s unpopular, it just means that the way we watch things has changed.

But the media will dishonestly try to squeeze every ounce of negativity out of every story.



GULFIE FEMINISM

Hey you know what media outlet is best qualified to criticize Paul Ryan's feminist credentials? That's right, Al Jazeera, an outlet run by the Qatari tyranny where women are considered subhuman.

The State Department’s Human Rights report stated that, “the application of Sharia denied women equal status in certain civil proceedings such as marriage, divorce, and witness testimony. In such instances, a women’s testimony was equal to half of a man’s.”

EGYPT'S LAST SYNAGOGUE DIES

For the first time in 2,000 years, this year there will be no Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services at the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria.

The synagogue was the last ‘working’ synagogue in Egypt. The Egyptian authorities have banned High Holiday services for ‘security’ reasons.

Levana Zamir, who heads the International Association of Egyptian Jews in Israel, comments: “It seems this is really the end of Jewish life in Egypt. The authorities have found a way to take over the last Jewish bastion, since all the remaining synagogues are already archaeological and tourist sites. It is very sad.”

I provide a little more context on Egypt's treatment of its Jewish population at The Point.



COMPETING WITH CHINA

Obama keeps telling us that we need to get our Socialism on to be able to better compete with China. But is that really a wise idea?

China’s economic ills are far more deeply rooted: an overbearing state squandering capital and squeezing out the private sector, systemic inefficiency and lack of innovation, a rapacious ruling elite interested solely in self-enrichment and the perpetuation of its privileges

It's almost as if we're a little too much like China already under Obama.

 Han Zhiguo, an economist with more than 2.5 million followers on Sina Weibo, offered a sarcastic tweet calling the whole matter a "Chinese miracle:"

    1. The bridge was slated to be built in three years but was actually finished in 18 months. Such progress can be called a “Chinese miracle.”

    2. The bridge collapsed after it has been opened to traffic for 8 months. Such quality of construction can be called a “Chinese miracle.”

Can you think of any Obama miracles?




THE IMAM AND THE FORTY THIEVES

Like a lot of Muslim convert Jihadis, Imam Abu Taubah is one of the most colorful terrorist characters around. Formerly known as Marcus Dwayne Robertson, he was a leader of a Muslim gang of Brooklyn bank robbers known as the Forty Thieves.

The “Forty Thieves” robbed more than 10 banks, private homes, and post offices at gun point, and members shot three police officers, attacking one officer after he was shot with an improvised explosive device constructed from PVC.

These days Imam Marcus is into Jihad.




HURRICANE CHICAGO

10 people were wounded in shootings across Chicago last night. 28 more have been wounded. Over the weekend, 9 people were killed in Chicago and 37 were wounded.

More Americans were shot this weekend in Chicago than in Afghanistan. That makes Obama’s hometown an official war zone. Hurricane Isaac has not killed any Americans. The same can’t be said for Hurricane Chicago

...from Celebrating While Black People Are Dying




THE LAST CAR YOU WILL EVER BUY

Planning to buy a car? Forget about it

.The Obama administration has finalized new fuel economy rules that will require the fleet-wide average of new cars and trucks sold in the U.S. to double over the next 13 years. The average fuel economy must reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from 28.6 mpg at the end of last year.

That bonus will raise the price of a car by 15 thousand dollars.

When Romney spoke out against the move, Obama said, "“Maybe the steam engine is more his speed”

At this rate steam powered cars will be the only cars we can drive.




THAT SHOULD GO WELL WITH HIS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The White House Press Office announced today that President Obama will soon be inducted into the Special Forces Association and receive an honorary Green Beret.

Come on. That tank photo op has to come any day now. Maybe he'll drive up in it to the Convention under a Mission Accomplished banner.




THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS #71

The U.S. Justice Department says it has reached a settlement with the Sacramento Public Library over a trial program that lets patrons borrow Barnes and Noble NOOK e-book readers.

DOJ and the National Federation of the Blind objected to the program on grounds that blind people could not use the NOOK e-readers for technological reasons.

I had to Google this to be sure it wasn't a parody. It's not. Holder's DOJ shook down a library to get them to stop using e-readers because the blind can't use them.

The Justice Department said the settlement is aimed at stopping discrimination: “Emerging technologies like e-readers are changing the way we interact with the world around us and we need to ensure that people with disabilities are not excluded from the programs where these devices are used,” said Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez in a news release.

I guess they'll have to go back to plain old books. Oh wait, the blind can't read those either.

Can you remember when we used to laugh at the USSR?




WELL THAT'S A CHEERFUL THOUGHT

Speaking at a rally marking 9/11, Anjem Choudary bragged that a birth explosion would let followers of Islam take control of the country.

The mob bayed and cheered as he said: “About 500 people in Britain become Muslim every day.

“The Home Office say there are 1.5million Muslims but there were 1.5million ten years ago. Since then our brothers in Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and other places have had eight or nine children each. Eight children here, ten children, 15 children. There must be at least six million people.

“It may be by pure conversion that Britain will become an Islamic state. We may never need to conquer it from the outside.” 

Well they may not understand how birth control works, but neither do they understand how the calendar works.

He's not that great with math either.





FEROCIOUS DIGESTION METAPHOR

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking Thursday at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit host by his country, called Israelis “ferocious Zionist wolves who digest the Palestinian people.”

Well I'm sure it sounded better in the original Persian or German.




UN-REALLY RELATIVE

Solutions to all these woes seem to elude us because the proximate causes vary widely from issue to issue. But all can in fact be traced back to a common source; a massive shift in worldview. Western civilization is rapidly rejecting transcendent truths. And when everything is relative, nothing is real anymore.

...from Surreality



GAMECHANGER?

I've learned to take stories about Israel becoming an energy superpower with a grain of salt, but this one comes from the Financial Times, which gives it somewhat better pedigree.

The two fields, together with a string of smaller discoveries, will cover Israel’s domestic demand for gas for at least the next 25 years, and still leave hundreds of billions of cubic feet for sale abroad. Should these estimates be confirmed through discoveries in the years ahead, Israel’s natural gas reserves would count among the 25 largest in the world, on a par with the proven reserves of Libya and ahead of those of India and The Netherlands.

The recent discoveries are so large, and have come so swiftly, that some Israelis are having difficulty adjusting to the new reality. Even hardened energy executives speak of a “miracle” when discussing Israel’s natural gas story; others have resorted to the heavens to explain the new-found wealth. No less a figure than Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, recently compared the discoveries to “manna from heaven” – the mystical food that sustained the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert.

As miracles go, this one is very timely, considering global affairs, and I don't mean Iran. The circle is tightening around Israel.

But this is really good news for the left. Just think they will finally be able to claim that the US alliance with Israel is all about oil... well natural gas. But close enough.

I look forward to Code Pinkers chanting "No Blood for Natural Gas" at the next really.

With the next four years at stake, the only topic of conversation is the Race Card. The left plays the Race Card and then accuses the right of playing the Race Card. There are dogwhistles in the air that only white middle-aged pundits can hear and arguments over whose diverse lineup truly represents the philosophy of the future and whose is just shameless tokenism.

The media madhouse insists that a half-black man who went from the Illinois State Senate to the White House in 5 years is proof that we are a racist country and that Southern Europeans whose ancestors moved to this continent are an oppressed racial minority. Arguing with this insanity is a sure way to get called a racist. Ignoring this insanity means being charged with privilege. Privilege being the ungodly power to ignore someone else's assertion that privilege through victimization should begin and end every single discussion on every topic, up to and including the moon landing. 

The Democratic Party and its media affiliates have become a party of trolls who only know how to hijack every discussion with an obsessive insistence that every issue can be boiled down to race and that the difference between the two parties is that one of them is racist and the other has good taste in fonts.

It's hard to know what the Democratic Party stands for anymore. All we know is that it is against racism. Never before has an entire election been run around a single negative issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual challenges facing the country. Instead we have the national spectacle of members of minority groups being pitted against each other by two parties to prove which of them is less racist.

There is no precedent for a country facing two major crises, an economic depression and a war at the same time, holding an election that is somehow about race. If we're going to make the 2012 election about race, then we might as well also make it about childhood obesity, green energy and all the other idiocies of a failed administration that can't tie its shoes without a bailout.

For the last three years, the left has responded to every criticism of their candidate, their party and their incompetence by bleating about racism, as if having a black candidate and a large share of the black vote makes them honorary minorities. And as if their bleating had anything to do with real issues like the unsustainable national debt and an economy that still can't get back on its feet.

The left imagines that it is somehow better than the lunatics of the Westboro Baptist Church who randomly show up at funerals screaming about homosexuality. It's not. Not when its members show up randomly brandishing nooses or dressing up as body parts and screaming about racism or sexism. There's no hint of responsible leadership in tactics like that. It's the behavior of a debating club loser who has memorized only one winning point and will shout it no matter what the issue is.

Everyone wants to prove that their ideology, whether it's showing up in the country with 50 cents and becoming successful by building a business or showing up in the country with 50 cents and becoming successful by getting a Ford Foundation grant to community organize the hell out of a local group, is universal and can apply to everyone regardless of skin color, gender, religion or fashion sense. And once we've done that, it still falls to us to deal with problems that depend on math, not race.

The real issue at stake here is whether the working class will end up being squeezed out by the government class. It's an issue that affects the rich, poor and middle class alike, and the Republicans are coming dangerously close to articulating it in between applause breaks. The Democrats would like to avoid this line of conservation as much as possible, because once the debate is fully underway, Americans will start assessing their individual economic stakes in the fight, instead of assuming that their economic interest is joined at the hip to their racial identity, gender or choice of bed partners.

Race is a distraction, but it's more than that. A false argument is like a mask. You can put it on, but after a while you can't take it off. The more time that the left spends immersed in the grammar of racial grievance, the less able it is to speak any other language. The Democrats aren't just cynical, they are also becoming illiterate and unable to articulate ideas that don't revolve around a great split between races, genders or two groups, one oppressed and one oppressing.

The Democratic Party's poverty of ideas is self-inflicted. Snide progressives may sneer at Rand, but what exactly are they packing besides TED talks and trendy books that exist to make their owners feel smart for not reading them? Democrats rarely talk about guiding philosophies now because they don't exist. They have no grand plan to make the country better. Even Alinsky is nothing but a blueprint for consolidating power in a spurt of postmodern multicultural Machiavellianism.

Progressives can rage and sneer, roar grievances and pose as the oppressed, but what do they actually believe in except the evil of their opposite numbers on the right? The Republican Party is no towering wall of ideas, but the Democratic Party has forgotten everything but bigotry. If it has to speak without relying on its racism props, then it mumbles something about marching together to the future, throws in something about families, children, technology, clean energy, environmental challenges and soaks up the applause of its captive audience.

Ask Obama why he should be reelected and he tells you that it's to "finish what we started." Not "he". For once the great ego who uses "I" like the letter is about to be removed from the alphabet resorts to "we", because he is already passing the blame to someone else. What is it that we started? No one knows. There's something about health care reform, the auto industry and killing Bin Laden. Not to mention holding Wall Street accountable in between Wall Street fundraisers and of course, protecting our values, whatever those are.

With the passing of time it becomes difficult to figure out what, if anything, the latest Democrat actually stands for. From JFK onward, there was no longer a legacy, just a strange disastrous mix of incompatible policies and spiraling destruction. The incoherence has only grown worse with time. Bill Clinton was the deregulating draft dodging radical who would occasionally bomb things when the mood suited him. John Kerry was the anti-military military man volunteering for duty to keep our country safe from military solutions. Obama is here to lead us into some vague future with lower tides, drones strikes and racism for everyone.

Obama is running on a program of bank bailouts and bank accountability, an end to wars while winning all the wars, including those he started, and including those he lost. He's running to cut our dependency on foreign oil by killing domestic drilling and make us all better people by confusing the hell out of us. This rigamarole wouldn't have gotten past Stage One in the Democratic Party two generations ago. It's barely passing muster now, only because no one is paying attention, and to make sure no one pays attention, the usual suspects troll everyone by dealing out some race cards.

There is no area of his governance that could survive a detailed 5-minute discussion with anyone who isn't a halfwit. All that's left is trolling the Republicans to cover up the basic weaknesses in an agenda so incoherent that even few of his own supporters would sign on to it. And this isn't new, it's just more shameless than ever.

Progressives have become intellectual illiterates, they have memorized reams of political diagrams and are experts on the sufferings of obscure people in obscure places. They pride themselves on thinking that they know all the secret sufferings of the waitress who brings them their check, but this tawdry New Age empathy does not translate into an ability to help her or to help anyone else. They are forever priding themselves on their willingness to help people and using that pride to justify their own wealth and power. They are always on the verge of helping someone, but they never get done helping anyone except themselves.

Race atones for this sin and for all sins. It answers all objections, it fills in the giant gaps in their knowledge and competence. It is a disguise that they once put on, but can no longer take off. It has become their reason for being. It is the one subject that is so simple and elemental that they can thoroughly control it. Poverty is complicated. So are jobs and wars. Race however is simple. There are bad people and there are good people. The oppressed and the oppressors. And that paradigm, that one talking point that they store up and unleash at every occasion is the sum total of their contribution to every debate under the sun.

Their race card is as big as America now. It is America. There is no longer an America for them, just a collection of race cards that they shuffle and deal and shuffle again, playing solitaire with themselves until the economy goes down. In their America it is always 1963 in Birmingham. It will always be Birmingham, 1963, even for those who have never been to Birmingham and who did not even exist on this planet in 1963.

Birmingham, 1963, is a myth to them. A story that they want to be part of. It is their version of the Warrior's Tale. The one that isn't true, but that inspires the younger members of the tribe to be like the mythical warrior. It is the story that they tell us incessantly because they don't really know who they are or we are anymore. All they know is that the story makes them better than us. They don't know where they are going or where they have been, only that they are marching forward to some bright future. And that the very act of marching forward means that they are progressive and makes them into the children of the future.

And the economy? Who cares about that.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” Philip K. Dick said, when asked to define what reality is. Dick was a Science Fiction writer and that seems appropriate enough we are living in a Science Fiction world where there is no reality anymore, because the real goes away, but the unreal does not.

Virtual reality, it turned out, was not some complicated gizmo that made you look like a blind skier and allowed you to enter into another world, instead it was an unreal world being comprehensively overlaid on top of our own. The lines between the real and the unreal haven't blurred because the unreal has gotten so much more sophisticated. The unreal is more fake than ever, but discerning that has become more difficult now that the real has gone away.

As we watch the news covering a story, what we are actually watching is the media making up a story and then telling that story incessantly and embedding it in every nook and cranny of their coverage. This blurring of the lines between the real and the fake is not happening thanks to the magic of technology, but the prosaic methods of complete insincerity.

The fake is being overlaid on the real, like men fighting on top of a board with a movie of a train passing by in the background to give the impression that they are fighting on top of it. Such cheap trickery defines our media environment where reporters barge into events and badger the participants into playing along with their movie. Or they just play the clip of actual events and frame them so that everyone hears their version of what is going on.

There's Godzilla and we know he's real because we can see Tokyo in the background. There's the latest media narrative and we know it's real, because we can see Tampa in the background as some blow-dried buffoon does breathing exercises before commencing to tell us that the Republican Party, which supports things that would have made Ike and Ron have coronaries, has gone so far to the right that it might as well be a Godzilla of reactionary running dog capitalism.

This is our shoddy virtual reality with a CNN or MSNBC logo planted on top. There is you still sitting on your same old couch, watching Chris Matthews yelling himself hoarse about racism, because racism is our virtual reality. It is the world that we are supposed to live in and Chris' job, for which he receives some 5 million a year, is to convince us that we are living in it.

"Racism," Chris yells at the screen, like the idiot shaman of some stone age tribe, and those dull-witted enough to believe him nod knowingly, because it makes them feel as if they know something. And in a world where nothing is real, knowing something makes them feel a little less confused. They don't understand why the prices are suddenly so high and the bank won't give them a loan-- but they can understand that Republicans are bad people and somehow responsible for it.

Some 70 percent of Barack Obama's Twitter followers may be fake, but why quibble at such numbers. The people who decided to make Obama popular did so through constant repetition that translated into the peer pressure of the trend. Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along because in an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader.

Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it's also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. The purveyors of fakeness have demonstrated their ability to transform the unreal into the real through  manufactured consensus. By insisting that something unpopular was popular often enough, they made it popular. And by insisting that something popular is really unpopular, they did the opposite.

The Solomon Asch study showed that people will change their correct answers to conform with the wrong answers that are being given by others. The false consensus has operated on that same paradigm, convincing people of two lies; that the wrong answer is the right answer and that everyone else has already agreed that the wrong answer is correct. 

Doing all that is impossible unless people lose touch with the real. The wraparound nature of the media has made it so that the unreal never goes away. The unreal is so pervasive because it has so many outlets and we are all wired into one or more of them. If the unreal doesn't get into your head one way, it will do it another way. The viral virus adapts because its designers are intelligent. And most of all they are persistent. They aren't just malicious or in it for the money, though both those things are also true, they believe. They are missionaries and their goal is to convert you into fodder for their malicious money machine.

Reality hasn't gone away, but we have gone away from it. Enough of us have gone down into the dream, grasped a thread of the story and allowed it to sweep us away. Given a choice between the red pill and the blue pill, they have unconsciously chosen the blue pill without ever being aware that they had a choice. And they are cushioned in this virtual world by a government that promises to take care of them and their children and their children's children until the end of time.

It's a lie, but knowing a lie for what it is requires either being able to do the math or have the common sense to know it for what it is. And common sense is derived from rough and tumble contact with reality. And reality has gotten harder to find these days. It requires unplugging all the belief channels, stepping out into the fresh air and trying to see what still remains when all the things that the belief trends told you to believe in have gone away.

There is a very specific category of people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and for the most part these are the people who have ongoing forcible contact with realities that don't go away when the talking head begins jabbering, the memes begin spewing and the trending topics trend. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble, who know that external safety nets are unreliable and that they are always on the edge of something... even if they don't always know what.

It isn't wealth that is the determinant. Many of the wealthy occupy a wholly unreal world. A world where things happen because they want them to. It's what makes the technocracy of the last three administrations so seductive to powerful men and women who begin to think that they truly can move the world. It's the edge that matters, the sharp sense of pain that reminds you that there is a sharp reality here that isn't going away.

In a world where the fake seems real, the real seems fake. Obama seems more real than Romney and Ryan because he has mastered the art of the unreal. Television reality is not the same thing as reality, but it can seem more real, that is until you see how fake television makeup appears in real life. But there is no more real life in that sense. Not anymore.

Television is no longer a thing into which people step into and then step out of again. It no longer has that sense of being a passing moment where an appearance is insubstantial because it is temporary. Now television is permanent. It doesn't turn off late at night, the eagle doesn't fly above a painted backdrop while the anthem plays. It is everywhere because video is everywhere. Everything is being captured on video through the eyes of surveillance cameras, teenagers pointing cell phones at each other and men sitting in their room and declaiming at a webcam. The real and the fake have merged to spawn something that is real enough to be properly fake and fake enough to pass for real. It is a collective creative act, our final artform whose title is simply, "Life", as envisioned by those who no longer know what life is.

Obama feels real because he has that same unreal quality, that sense of always being onstage, of an actor who is never out of character because he is always performing. It is an artificial reality that seems super-real, because like video it has that intensity and immediacy that exists to satiate the attention deficit disorder with a surfeit of stimulation. It seems real, only because we no longer know what real is.

When a disaster happens, people reach for an instant baseline of comparison in a movie. Real tragedy seems unreal because it seems cinematic. The story of Obama is equally cinematic, it is real because it is like a movie. Except it isn't a movie, and yet it is, because we experience it in two ways, through the real connection with the economic consequences of his policies, and through the unreal display of his teleprompter fed blatherings, the easy grin that he practices in a mirror and the eyes that never quite look at anything because they are their own reflection.

Obama is a real disaster that seems cinematic. We have all seen this movie, but we have seen two versions of the movie. In one version, a bad unfit man climbs to power and ruthlessly abuses power to achieve his ends. In the other version, a good saintly man is elected and fights desperately to keep the bad men from abusing power. Which of those movies you think you are watching depends on a variety of factors. But the problem is that reality isn't a movie. And it doesn't go away when you change the channel.

When all the bubbles of rhetoric pop, there are still the hard unpleasant realities to deal with. Bailouts and money pits can only bury them for so long. Governments sending money to banks and swapping worthless commodities that only exist in the theory of a theory only work for as long as people believe in them.

Even an unreal economy reported on by an unreal media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls, the magicians scramble off the stage with rabbits and doves tucked into their pants, and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream is over and we realize that we are entering a world where the stories no longer matter and history is about to begin.

(As Daniel Greenfield was otherwise occupied today, we instead present this editorial from 'The Independent" by renowned English poet and human rights activist Tim Paulin)

I have seen many news reports about the murder of a settler family by an unknown intruder, but none of these reports have made note of the real tragedy in this case. That of the knife. Jewish children are a dime a dozen. One can hardly walk through Jerusalem without being able to throw a stone in the direction of half a dozen of them. But knives are a vital part of Palestinian culture. A good throat slitting knife may be handed down through the generations.

When I visited Gaza in July, I met a brave fighter who showed me a knife which his grandfather used to slit the throat of a Jew in Hebron in 1933, and his father used in a raid on a farmhouse in 1962 and which he hopes to use one day as well.

There is both romance and practical necessity in this. The criminal Israeli siege of Gaza allows through food and clothing, but not knives.

Many Gazans must make do with a single knife for the entire family. Only one of them is able to use the knife at a time. If the grandmother of a large family wants to slice bread while her grandson breaks into a settlement to slit a baby's throat-- she has no choice but to starve.

That is the real tragedy here.

The blood of children is hazardous to knives. So the Sheikh of Wadi Al-Zebel, a picturesque village nestled at the foot of an ammo dump, told me once. The blood of children is more acidic than that of adults and etches the blade. Each time a brave Palestinian fighter sinks his knife into a Jewish child, he damages the knife. It is an act of great self-sacrifice and some knives have been lost that way.

In London, the local Zionists are complaining that the intruder slit the throats of children. As if he could have done anything else. When the Israeli authorities in Tel Aviv have tanks, rocket ships, missile pistols and jet fighters, what other choice does the Palestinian have? Is he meant to attack a tank with a knife? He couldn't possibly succeed and it would not be a fair fight. But a Jewish baby against a Palestinian militant is a good fair fight.

I firmly believe that all human beings are brothers under the skin, but there is still no sympathy whatsoever in my pen for that Zionist settler family. They chose to live where they did. To be part of the occupation. They could have moved someplace safer such as Birmingham, Malmo or Paris. Places where Muslims kill Jews with far less frequency. There is nothing to be done about it. Such is the great humane legacy of its Empire of Faith. An empire that we are fortunate enough to have land on our shores. To disparage the occasional murder of infidels is to display a remarkable ingratitude to the culture which gave us reverse algebra, the hyacinth clock, the mercury sail and the inventively medieval poetry of Ibtach Al-Okhty. We would be immeasurably poorer without these things.

To understand the knife is to understand Islam. Both are sharp objects passed down through the generations and intended primarily for killing purposes. The flat of a knife's blade may seem dull and harmless, like the growing number of mosques you pass on your way to work. It is only when it turns that you see the edge and understand the danger. And by then it is often too late. A good knife wielder distracts you with the flat and then flips it around and sinks the sharp end of the blade into your guts. As you bleed out, you come to the realization that the hyacinth clocks and medieval poetry were all there to distract you from the inevitability of that final moment. That Islam is a knife and it is meant to be used on you.

The great tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they have been denied the use of their knives. As the proper course of history should have run, the British mandate would have withdrawn and the joyful populations of Jordan, Egypt and Syria would have fallen on the non-Muslim inhabitants and slaughtered them wholesale. A few survivors would have gone on tending their churches and synagogues, made humble and submissive by the knowledge that their Muslim lords and masters could slaughter them at any moment. So had it been since the days when the great Prophet Mohammed roared out of the caravans with an army of knives and swords in tow.

But here history broke. Instead of doing the slaughtering, the horde was put to flight. The Nakba, the creation of Israel, is almost as great a tragedy in the annals of Muslim civilization, as the Gates of Vienna or the loss of Al-Andalus. It was an unaccountable reversal that was simply not supposed to happen. The damage it did to the Muslim soul is incalculable. The knife had turned in their hands. Worse yet it was broken. They had lost faith in the knife. And without the knife, they had nothing left to believe in.

For 65 years they have sat in refugee camps, knives in hand, waiting for the day when they can return and put them to use. In 1992, only a small handful was permitted to return and immediately put their knives to good use. This was a period of such tremendous creative Islamic ferment. The suicide bomber, the IED and the female suicide bomber were added to the airline hijacking, the embassy takeover and the bus hijacking. With even this limited victory the great Muslim awakening had begun. But what of the millions who still sit, knives in hand, waiting to return? Who pass down their knives through the generations, sharpening them and awaiting the great day when they will no longer be failed refugees, but successful murderers.

The Zionist regime's resistance to the day of the knife is misguided and criminal. They have no right to the land. They lost that right when the Muslims conquered them. Tel Aviv's rulers preside over a reactionary state machinery of terror that represses the natural rights of the conquerors to reclaim the land they once stole in an orgy of blood and death. To use the knives passed down to them through the ages, as their prophet intended them to. And then create a secular democratic state that will protect the rights of all the region's Muslim male inhabitants.

The settlers squatting on their hilltops are impeding the progress of negotiations that will turn over enough land to make the defeat of Israel possible. Their obstinacy curdles the prospects for peace. Their messianic fanaticism is maddening as their towns and outposts stand in the way of history. If the horde faltered at the Gates of Vienna, that was at least a city. Think of how humiliating it is for the inheritors of Saladin, the grandsons of Caliphs and Sheikhs to stand frustrated by a few Jewish villagers. That terrible humiliation only feeds their rage. Murders are inevitable.

To lose to the American army is somewhat respectable. But to lose to a thousand villagers in Ithamar, to shepherds and cheesemakers, is intolerable. The diplomats and politicians are almost ready to give in, but the cheesemakers and herders refuse. Outrageous! So something is done. Murder a family of them and perhaps the cheesemakers and shepherds will leave. And the day of the knife will draw closer. The day when the humiliation of the Nakba will be lifted from the descendants of Mohammed.

But still the shepherds and the cheesemakers stand in their way. Humiliatingly they go on making cheese and tending sheep while the refugees polish their knives and pray. As all people of good will know there is only one possible resolution. The occupation of the cheesemakers and shepherds must end so that the day of the knife may come.

Tim Paulin is a world-renowned poet, Oxford don and traveled to Gaza to bring expired humanitarian supplies to the starving people of Hamas. He boycotts Israel and wears a Keffiyah at every possible social occasion where he expects to have a picture taken of him. And he dreams of a world in which we all learn to love one another.

There are two types of societies, production societies and rationing societies. The production society is concerned with taking more territory, exploiting that territory to the best of its ability and then discovering new techniques for producing even more. The rationing society is concerned with consolidating control over all existing resources and rationing them out to the people.

The production society values innovation because it is the only means of sustaining its forward momentum. If the production society ceases to be innovative, it will collapse and default to a rationing society. The rationing society however is threatened by innovation because innovation threatens its control over production.

Socialist or capitalist monopolies lead to rationing societies where production is restrained and innovation is discouraged. The difference between the two is that a capitalist monopoly can be overcome. A socialist monopoly however is insurmountable because it carries with it the full weight of the authorities and the ideology that is inculcated into every man, woman and child in the country.

We have become a rationing society. Our industries and our people are literally starving in the midst of plenty. Farmers are kept from farming, factories are kept from producing and businessmen are kept from creating new companies and jobs. This is done in the name of a variety of moral arguments, ranging from caring for the less fortunate to saving the planet. But rhetoric is only the lubricant of power. The real goal of power is always power. Consolidating production allows for total control through the moral argument of rationing, whether through resource redistribution or cap and trade.

The politicians of a rationing society may blather on endlessly about increasing production, but it's so much noise, whether it's a Soviet Five Year Plan or an Obama State of the Union Address. When they talk about innovation and production, what they mean is the planned production and innovation that they have decided should happen on their schedule. And that never works.

You can ration production, but that's just another word for poverty. You can't ration innovation, which is why the aggressive attempts to put low mileage cars on the road have failed. As the Soviet Union discovered, you can have rationing or innovation, but you can't have both at the same time. The total control exerted by a monolithic entity, whether governmental or commercial, does not mix well with innovation.

The rationing society is a poverty generator because not only does it discourage growth, its rationing mechanisms impoverish existing production with massive overhead. The process of rationing existing production requires a bureaucracy for planning, collecting and distributing that production that begins at a ratio of the production and then increases without regard to the limitations of that production.

Paradoxically the rationing infrastructure increases in direct proportion to the falloff of production as lower production requires even greater rationing. This is what we are seeing now in the United States, in a weak economy, there is greater justification for the expansion of rationing mechanisms. And the worse the economy becomes, the bigger government will become to "compensate" for the problems of the economy.

In a production society, the role of government is to expand the territories of exploitation and to protect those territories. In a rationing society, the role of government is to control the available quantities of production with a view to distributing them fairly. Naturally, the rationers, as always, get the best rations. In a production society, government is a means of protecting everyone's ability to produce. In a rationing society, government prevents the bigger from grabbing the rations of the smaller and protects everyone from grabbing all the rations at once and starving to death.

The sort of society we have is fit for passengers adrift at sea on a lifeboat parceling out their last crackers. It is an emergency society for the lost and the starving. And perversely we are starving amidst plenty.

The rationing society discourages people from farming and encourages them to peer in each other's mouths to see who is eating more than his fair share. In the rationing society everyone is certain that they are not getting their fair share and eager to sign on to initiatives to get their group's fair share. In a rationing society everyone is an informer because everyone's livelihood depends on informing on others.

In a production society, people compete for production. In a rationing society, people compete for entitlements. Everyone is always bitter and suspicious in a rationing society, and when they aren't, they're resigned and phlegmatic. They either accept that life is unfair or they rave against it. They are either jealous or give up on material things entirely making their society into a comprehensive failure.

I met a man once who told me that his greatest dream was to be feasting at a full table while outside hungry people pass by and look longingly through the window. This is the type of mindset that a rationing society produces. Its denizens instinctively absorb the idea that resources are finite and their competitiveness takes place at a zero sum level that is incomprehensible in any open society.

In a rationing society, people are certain that if another has something, then he came by it unfairly. And every group has an exaggerated sense of the material prosperity of other groups. This is not a bug, it is a feature. The rationing society deliberately cultivates a sense of unfairness to make it clear that individual efforts are meaningless and the only thing that matters is one's connections to the rationers and the degree of mutual support from the group for the rationers and the rationers for the group.

Individual initiative is discouraged by a web of bureaucracy to make it difficult for individuals to act outside the plan. In a monopolistic system, rules and permits make it difficult for the individual to move forward. The permit regime also promotes corruption which makes honest enterprise almost impossible. Through these means the system restrains the micro, which is ordinarily too small to be properly controlled, while focusing on the macro.

The rationing of present day America, which has the resources, the wealth and the techniques to produce, is being managed in political terms. The politicians still talk in terms of innovation and production, even while enacting policies meant to discourage both. The dominant political class has been dedicated to one form of rationing or another throughout the 20th Century. The only difference between them is the degree of radicalism and their understanding that the rationing is a transition, rather than a safety net or an emergency measure.

When you listen to the larger message of the left, it is one of finity. We have a finite amount of planetary resources and domestic wealth. This finity represents a global and national crisis that has to be tackled with rationing mechanisms. We are all on a lifeboat and some of us are gobbling up more than their fair share of rations. Unless the rationers step forward, seize everyone's rations and pass out limited rations, then we are all doomed.

The essential 21st Century conflict is between the rationers and the producers. This is not a class conflict, that is the fallacy that the left has fallen into for over a century. It is a conflict between a system of bureaucratic collectivism and a society of individuals. It is not a conflict between the rich and the poor, the majority of the rationers are either rich or close enough to it. Their charges may be poor, but the representatives of their victim groups invariably become rich. The rationer camp is funded by some of the wealthiest men and companies in America who agree with its premise that we need to ration everything from children to jobs to food to carbon emissions.

This is a fundamental philosophical conflict between those who believe in a free society and those who believe in a managed society. It is not simply a conflict between capitalism and socialism, many of the capitalists are on the side of the rationers because they agree with them or profit from the rationing. It is a conflict that predates the American Revolution, a conflict that became inevitable with the rise of the supercity and the closing of the frontier.

This is a struggle between those who believe that people should be managed and those who believe that people should manage themselves. Our institutions now depend on a class of managers who fill the ranks of the institutions of the public and private sector, who produce little, but whose goal is to make production completely predictable. And we are, in short, being managed to death.

Scientific management, rather than predicting human variables, has done its best to make everything predictable, and a perfectly predictable thing is static. It has no ability to move forward. The drive to make the behavior of people predictable has led to the institutionalism of every aspect of life. And that has led to rationing programs that depend on predictability, and when that predictability fails,respond with greater efforts at control.

A production society defines achievement in terms of production. A rationing society defines it in terms of control. In a rationing society, it is possible to starve amidst plenty because the rationers would rather see people starve, than lose control over them.

The death of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, takes place in the shadow of the death of the space program. Last year Armstrong had called the dismantling of the space program under Obama, leaving behind a shadow space agency: "embarrassing and unacceptable".

Armstrong had proposed not only future investments, but along with other astronauts had sensibly proposed retaining the space shuttle program until they were ready, instead of scrapping the shuttle program and distributing viable shuttles to museums. Armstrong was critical of the Bolden regime at NASA that had stripped the space agency of its best people and its ability to conduct manned space exploration or even reach the International Space Station without begging passage on Soviet Soyuz tubs.

"The reality that there is no flight requirement for a NASA pilot-astronaut for the foreseeable future is obvious and painful to all who have, justifiably, taken great pride in NASA’s wondrous space flight achievements during the past half century," Armstrong concluded his testimony. "In space fight, we are in the process of exhausting alternatives. I am hopeful that, in the near future, we will be doing the right thing."

If we ever do get around to doing the right thing, in space or on the ground, Neil Armstrong will not be around to see it. The famously reclusive astronaut passed away after being drawn out to make a final bid at reviving the space program. His final contribution may be that he joined the many voices warning of the decline of America. His final legacy may be determined by whether the American people choose to listen to some of his final words.

Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, the year that a young researcher watching the sky over Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered Pluto. By 2006, it was decided that Pluto was no longer a planet. By 2016 we may decided that Neil Armstrong never really walked on the moon and that walking on the moon is an assault on the lunar ecology. 

Two years ago, Charles Bolden, the incompetent Obama appointee who has implemented his mission of killing America's space program, declared that the agency's chief goal was outreach to the Muslim world. This was not his original idea.

While visiting Egypt, Bolden told Al-Jazeera that Obama had given him three missions. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering,"

Space exploration was not on the list for a reason. Michael Griffin, Bolden's predecessor, who had done much to rebuild NASA, only to have his work ruined by Obama's affirmative action appointees, Charles Bolden and Lori Garver, said of those comments, "NASA ... represents the best of America. Its purpose is not to inspire Muslims or any other cultural entity. If by doing great things, people are inspired, well then that's wonderful. If you get it in the wrong order ... it becomes an empty shell... That is exactly what is in danger of happening."

NASA, like the rest of American exceptionalism, has become that empty shell in the throes of Obama's Post-American national order. It exists to make Muslim boys feel good about imaginary Muslim inventions and to provide jobs to Russian engineers. In the last week NASA premiered a new song from one of Obama's favorite musicians, will.i.am and demonstrated a new "green" alternative to existing rocket fuels.

In a memo for NASA's OEOD, Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, Charles Bolden declared that, "Diversity and inclusion are integral to mission success at  NASA". Because how can we possibly reach the stars unless there are mandated diversity targets among the launch crews and the conflict management specialists?

"As NASA's Diversity and Inclusion Champion," Bolden wrote,"I belicve it is incumbent on every member of the NASA community to advocate for  promote, and most importantly, practice the principles of diversity and inclusion in everything that we do."

To be properly diverse and inclusive, NASA would have to launch some rockets that would work and some that wouldn't. Some of its personnel would have to be qualified and some completely illiterate. For total inclusion, it has to stop focusing on space and focus on other priorities, like convincing everyone to constantly advocate inclusiveness, while the space program goes to seed.

Neil Armstrong would probably never have made it into NASA. But then he would have had little place in Obama's NASA, where the goal isn't to reach the sky, but to score diversity credits. To that end, OEOD's Endeavor magazine announced an eLearning institute to provide the NASA family with "real-time education and awareness opportunities on various aspects of EO (equal opportunity), diversity and inclusion... that will allow all NASA employees to add to their SATERN learning history with valuable credits in diversity and EO."

Forget the stars, the new frontier is right here in the latest regulation on transgender rights in the workplace, located on Page 4 of the newest issue of Endeavor. But that's not all. Don't speak English? NASA may not have a space program anymore, but under Obama Executive Order 13166, “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency,” it has developed a "Language Access Plan" for people who don't speak English.

As guided by Executive Order 13166, "Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency," NASA's commitment to equal opportunity includes the Agency's efforts to ensure that all members of the public who wish to participate in Agency-conducted programs and activities have an equal opportunity to do so," Charles Bolden writes. "Whether patrons of our Visitors' Centers, participants in guided tours of our Centers, or students being inspired by our Astronaut corps to become a part of the next generation of explorers, we welcome all."

Not speaking English doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to become part of the next generation of explorers boarding broken-down Soviet capsules to travel to a conference on inclusive workplace policies on a space station built by transgender Muslims who immediately honor-killed themselves after its completion.

The mission to create a NASA that is "reflective of the nation that it represents" really means creating a NASA that is as useless and dysfunctional as every government agency and exists only to promote politically correct programs and make diverse people feel equally good about themselves in exactly equal amounts of diversity.

"A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain," Neil Armstrong warned Congress. That is true in all areas, not just in space exploration.Leading requires achievement and achievement is exceptional, not diverse. It is based on the achievements of individuals who pull others forward with them. It is driven by the restless, the innovative and the perfectionists who are not willing to accept the diverse standard of the lowest common denominator.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," JFK said in his famous speech. After the safe return of Apollo 13, Nixon said, "From the beginning, man's ventures into space have been accompanied by danger. Apollo 13 reminds us how real those dangers are. It reminds us of the special qualities of the men who dare to brave the perils of space."

We are no longer concerned with doing hard things and finding the men with the special qualities to do them. It is the easy things that concern us now. The political pandering of diversity and the search for "Green" solutions to problems that don't exist. We no longer look to the stars, instead we hang our heads in shame because our diverse green elites tell us that we should.

The American lead has not been lost so much as thrown away by an ideology that does not believe in leading, except in the number of foreign language Muslim transgender engineers bundling up a Space Shuttle that could still fly as a relic to a well-connected museum that will use the money from the spurt of admissions to add on a program about the influence of Islamic art on the space program. We can still do the great and difficult things, but we are being barred from doing them by a system that is threatened by greatness and exceptionalism that is not framed in terms of group collectivism.

"I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats and I don't intend to waste any of mine," Neil Armstrong has been quoted as saying. Now Armstrong has died at 82 of complications after heart surgery. Nations, like men, also have finite numbers of heartbeats. It is best that we remember not to waste ours.

THE ISRAELI GEORGE ZIMMERMAN VS THE MUSLIM TRAYVON MARTIN



If only there were fewer guns around, tragedies like this might have been averted.



RELEASE THE BACON-SNIFFING HOUNDS

Turn on CNN or MSNBC and the topic of choice will either be how Paul Ryan intends to turn America into Afghanistan (which would be swell because Afghanistan is run by the Religion of Peace and is a very tolerant place) or how four trillion Muslims were killed by Islamophobia last year.

The latest tragic case of Islamophobia that should make us all hang our heads in shame, before hanging ourselves in the attic, is the case of bacon bits found on a football field that Muslims had occupied for Ramadan. (We are the 1 percent. Jihad! Allahoo Ak-bar!)

The Islamophobia witch hunts are the topic of my latest article this week...

Muslims arriving at the New Dorp football field, a few blocks away from the New Dorp High School, discovered some bacon lying on the ground. The field is usually home to the New Dorp Central Cougars and the Staten Island Tech Seagulls, but that day instead of boys and girls running around joyfully in the sun, robed men had come to attend a Ramadan event. The media and police were quickly summoned and now the NYPD is investigating the bacon as a hate crime.

The Ramadan event had been organized by a local chapter of the Muslim American Society. The Muslim American Society is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of its chapters have called for the murder of Jews. Calling for the murder of Jews however falls under freedom of speech. Unlike bacon which is a hate crime.

But the case of the dropped bacon isn't the most ridiculous of the hysterical Islamophobia witch hunts that New York has seen and my article, "Bacon Hate Crimes and Islamophobia Witch Hunts" lists some of them.



THE AKIN FOLLIES

What I have to say isn't so much about Akin specifically, but in general terms how to react to cases like this. Much of the public takes its general impression of whether there is a problem by how the people who are running things react to it. If they react with hysteria, apologies, condemnations and a circular firing squad... they assume that there is a problem and that it is a very serious problem and that it indicates a basic failure of leadership.

Paradoxically the more Republicans eat their own, the more the public blames them for whatever it is they are trying to disassociate themselves from. This is a corollary to Rule 1. The more you talk about a problem, the worse it gets.

That doesn't mean that Akin shouldn't be forced off the ticket, but loud condemnations don't really disassociate Republicans from him,they associate Republicans with him. They make Republicans look like they got caught with their pants down, which is the impression that the Democrats want to create.

When ABC screened a video showing Obama's pastor and mentor screaming "GOD DAMN AMERICA" after September 11, the Democrats pretended there was no problem. They talked about it as little as possible. When they had to talk about it, Obama want on TV and turned it into a discussion about racism. General racism. When Wright became too much of a burden, he was quietly dumped.

Media bias makes this more feasible for Democrats than Republicans, but there are still lessons to learn here. Republicans are operating with old-fashioned values that call for taking responsibility and apologizing. These values are unfortunately a political liability. Politicians who brazen it out have a much better chance of winning. Politicians who refuse to discuss a scandal and mean it, have a much better chance of surviving. A party that allows itself to the sidelined by distractions like these will not be competitive.

Blog articles telling Akin to bow out will not get him to leave. Radio chatters telling Akin to leave will not make him leave. This is local politics and it is going to have to be dealt with locally. And the more this is talked about, the more it helps the left set the narrative.




TERRORIST SUPPORTING OIL STATES BUYING UP AIRPORTS

... in other things you need not worry about, unless you're flying out of Heathrow or in a building that might be a target for motivated believers in demon-virgin paradise, there is this...

Al-Jazeera, the Al-Thani clan’s pet propaganda network, has been the destination of choice for Bin Laden videos. Bin Laden’s first statement, five days after September 11, was broadcast by Al-Jazeera, indicating a fairly quick turnaround time. The Bin Laden tapes gave Al-Jazeera a great deal of prominence even as the network was overseen by Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, Qatar’s Minister of Information.

In light of all that, Qatar’s buy of a fifth of BAA which controls Heathrow Airport, along with five other airports and which formerly managed four American airports, including Baltimore-Washington International Airport  and Logan International Airport, which was the departure point of choice for two of the 9/11 planes, giving it extensive inside knowledge of their operations, is extremely troubling. Qatar does not yet have a majority stake, but it has bought a sizable portion of the majority shareholder’s stake in BAA, which, if previous patterns hold, it will likely expand on.

But the Qataris aren’t the only Muslim monarchy sniffing around London airports. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has taken a stake in London’s Gatwick Airport, London’s second-largest international airport and the UK’s second busiest.  The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has also attempted to buy 50 percent of the Manchester Airports Group, the UK’s largest remaining native airport operator.

...that's an except from my article on the Gulfies buying up airports and transportation networks.



MILLION DOG MARCH

The Muslim proscription against “unclean” animals received state-enforced validation last Saturday in Toronto at the annual Al-Quds Day rally held in the city’s Queen’s Park. 47-year-old Allan Einstoss, who was accosted by a Muslim demonstrator while walking among the crowd with his dog, is considering legal action after being held by the police after the assault, while the man who attacked him was not even questioned.

Police on the scene reportedly chastised Einstoss for being “insensitive” to the Muslim protestors with the presence of his canine companion in the public park. A Facebook event has been launched inviting people to walk their dogs outside an east-end mosque during Islamic prayer sessions.

 



THE TRUE COST OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

The ugliest aspect of Obama’s amnesty is that the American workers who are hardest hit will be in the states with the highest unemployment rates. Ground zero for amnesty will also be ground zero for unemployment.

California, which has the nation’s highest population of illegal immigrants, also suffers from the third-worst unemployment rate in the country. Less than half of California’s population holds down a job and illegal immigrants will be entering those sectors of the job market — construction and manufacturing — which are already bleeding jobs.

Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the country and is one of ten states with six-figure illegal alien populations. New York has the sixth highest unemployment rate and the third largest illegal alien population in the country.  New Jersey has the fourth highest unemployment rate and the eight highest illegal alien population. Georgia and North Carolina have the sixth and seventh highest unemployment rates and the seventh and ninth highest illegal alien populations.

Of the ten states with the highest unemployment rates, half also top the list for illegal immigrant populations. Conversely the states with the lowest unemployment rates, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont, also have illegal alien populations of less than 2,500 each.

Of the ten states with the highest illegal immigrant populations, seven also had the highest poverty rates in the country. California is number one in both. Texas is number two in both. New York is number three in both. Illinois is number four in illegal aliens and number five in poverty rates. Florida is number four in poverty rates and number five in illegal aliens.

...that's an excerpt from my article, "Obama's Nuclear Strike on American Workers", which looks at the effect of his amnesty and deals with the links between poverty, unemployment and illegal aliens.



JOBS, NEW YORK DON'T NEED NO STINKING JOBS

Gun manufacturer Remington is threatening to leave New York if the state passes a microstamping law, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning argued that saving lives is more important than saving jobs.

Remington employs more than 1,000 Ilion, N.Y. residents, but has threatened to relocate its operations should New York State pass a law mandating microstamping on some bullet casings.

HE SAID IT, I DIDN'T

Last week I wrote about a demented left-wing anti-Israel group that had been harassing a synagogue for a decade. The leader of it denounced me as a Canadian yellow journalist for comparing his group to the Westboro Baptist Church. But from his own quotes, it seems he rather fancies the comparison.

"Last fall we reported on a visit to Central Michigan University campus to hear Shirley Phelps-Roper speak about Westboro Baptist Church, and their reliance on the Constitution’s First Amendment to have their views heard. And though their issues and those of Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends are different, there is a commonality between the two groups."

I couldn't have said it better myself. I hate to disappoint Henry Herskowitz, but his hate group didn't make the "international news". It made it into the roundup of a blog.




THE DEFINITION OF CHUTZPAH

... in the mailbox from the National Jewish Democratic Council

The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) today expressed deep disappointment -- but not surprise -- at the announcement that the Republican Party will be honoring anti-Israel Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) at the Republican National Convention

"Paying tribute to this man who disparaged the U.S.-Israel relationship on Iranian television and empathized with Iran's nuclear weapons program -- on top of the history of his hate-filled newsletters -- is a national disgrace. Romney and the RNC should cancel the tribute and end this dangerous strategic partnership once and for all."

...Now let's see who the DNC honored by giving him a slot at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

This guy.

"The riots were the product of anti-Semites taking advantage of the tragic death of a child to justify inflicting their violence on innocent people -- the Jewish community of Crown Heights -- and murdering Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jew from Australia, amid the cries of 'Kill the Jew!'"

Yes this guy

“White folks was in the caves while we was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

Oh yes this guy.

Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”

When you had a man who led a race riot against Jews speak at your convention, then you had better shut the hell up about being disappointed as to who's speaking at the GOP convention. Ron Paul is a nasty piece of work and his supporters are often worse, but last time I checked they didn't run a pogrom through a Jewish neighborhood. They didn't torch a Jewish business to get rid of the "white interloper" either.

In a truly surreal moment, MSNBC asked Sharpton, who washed the Jewish blood off his hands long enough to get an anchor job there, about Ron Paul's anti-semitism. That's like asking Charles Manson to comment on Ted Bundy.

Sharpton's response at the time summarizes his hypocrisy and that of the anti-Semitic liberal establishment which embraced this violent bigot.

“Well, I think when you read the statements in his name, the problem is that you’re not dealing with someone that has dealt with in a forthright manner what happened.You can say something and later say, ‘I shouldn’t have said it, I apologize.’ You can say something and say I was a misunderstood.  All of us have gone through that, But you can’t say something and then turn around and act as though you didn’t know it was said; you don’t know you benefited from it.

Sharpton certainly benefited from it. One of the more repulsive things about all this is that when Koch came back to Obama, he did it with a statement on Sharpton's show.

Finis.



THAT MUSLIM VOTE

In Mitt Romney's home state of Michigan, about 1.5 percent of the population is Arab-American. In 2008, President Obama beat opponent John McCain by 49 percentage points in Wayne County which claims to have the largest Arab-American population in the country.

MUSLIM PAEDOS ON WHEELS

In a triumph for disabled child molesters everywhere, Muslim paralympic athletes have shown the courage that is a true testament to the Olympic spirit by molesting a bunch of girls while training in Ireland.

The king of Jordan is taking a personal interest in the case of three members of his country’s Paralympic team accused of sex offences during pre-Games training in Northern Ireland, a court heard today. . . .

Two wheelchair-using power-lifters – one a bronze medal winner at the Beijing Games – and a trainer have been accused of a series of charges, including sexual assault and voyeurism, following complaints by two girls and two women in Antrim. 

Seems they thought they deserved their virgins without actually going to the trouble of blowing themselves up.

Who wants to bet Jordan and local diplomats make this go away and the perps are back in Amman getting a victory parade thrown for them by Islamists while they tell horror stories of jailers trying to force them to eat pork and deny Mohammed.

That's how these things usually go.




CASINOS FOR KIDS

Rahm on Casino: "I Want it For Our Kids"

Emanuel said Thursday that he doesn't want the revenue a casino would bring for city coffers, but would rather divert it to schools.

"As I've said before and I'll say it again, if we were to get a casino, I'd like to direct all the resources to school modernization and school improvement so our kids will be in modern school buildings with a full school day and full school year," Emanuel said.

So schools aren't paid for out of city coffers? Does city coffers just refer to the money that gets spent on bribes and heroin?

Casino + Chicago political machine sounds like a winning combination. And it's for the kids.

When Chicago runs really low on money for our kids, maybe it can legalize heroin to pay for more inner city schools filled with children whose fathers are on heroin.

See it's ideas like these that can really fix America.




RABBIS FOR HAMAS IS BACK

There have been a number of columns taking on the Rabbis for Obama, whose previous incarnation I described as Rabbis for Hamas. But here's a name that pops up repeatedly. Rabbi Rachel Cowan.

Rachel Cowan is not Jewish. Her former husband, now deceased, was. She is also a member of J Street's Rabbinic cabinet and is rabidly against the State of Israel.

This is her background.

As a teenager in Wellesley Massachusetts, I was inspired by my Quaker summer camp and my Unitarian Church youth movement  - as well as my parents’ New England Protestant values – to become a social justice activist, civil rights worker, Peace Corps volunteer, feminist, birdwatcher.  A good person.

But more was called for from me.  I had the great fortune to meet Paul Cowan – to be entranced when he told me he worked for civil rights because he was a Jew – and to marry him.  Over the course of the next 15 years, raising two children, and making a home on the Upper West Side, we were drawn into Jewish life, and I to converting. 

I met Paul Cowan and he was indeed a good man. He was also a leftist who was drawn back to his roots and began seeing things from a Jewish perspective. There is no telling who he might have become if he had not died prematurely. Unfortunately Paul died, and for our sins, we were saddled with Rabbi Rachel Cowan, who would in the normal course of events would have been teaching a class of tenth wave third world feminism as applied to the deconstruction of otherness. Instead...

When Rachel Cowan was a young girl growing up in a secular Unitarian family in Wellesley in the 1950s, she never dreamed she would return to the area an ordained rabbi.

"How was it that I got from Wellesley to here?" she asked students yesterday in the third installment of the Limud Clali lecture series at the Gann Academy in Waltham. "The idea that I would be Jewish, religious and a rabbi living in a co-op in Manhattan, who could possibly have imagined that?" 

And who can imagine Rachel Cowan going back to a secular Unitarian family in Wellesley and leaving us alone? Or maybe the Peace Corps? Or following her natural progression and converting to Islam? Then there would be one less Rabbi for Obama.

Here's her post-September 11 comments.

"It was an epitome of success to be up there in the Twin Towers, a dream of a career ladder, a life in which one worked extremely hard and enjoyed the fruits," says Rabbi Rachel Cowan of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. "People now have to say, What is the dream and what is the point? I've heard a lot of people asking that question."

The article is titled "Deliver Us From Evil". I would add. Deliver us from Rachel Cowan.




CULTURE OF HATE

If you are unfortunate enough to read the English language Israeli press or coverage of Israel from the usual media outlets, you've probably seen the hysterical meltdown over a fight between Israeli and Muslim teenagers. (Common depictions call it a lynch.)

The New York Times offers us this classic quote.

But on Channel 1 news Monday night, Nimrod Aloni, the head of the Institute for Educational Thought at a Tel Aviv teachers college, said, “this cannot just be an expression of something he has heard at home.”

“This is directly tied to national fundamentalism that is the same as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, Taliban and K.K.K.,” Mr. Aloni said. “This comes from an entire culture that has been escalating toward an open and blunt language based on us being the chosen people who are allowed to do whatever we like.”

Yisrael Medad gives the quote some context, but let's take Mr. Aloni and the other concerned folk at their word.

Clearly an attack can only come from national fundamentalism and a culture that views itself as the chosen people, whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from the neo-Nazis, the Taliban, the KKK and NAMBLA.

That is the best explanation that I have for this...

Israeli vehicle attacked and hit with rocks at Adam junction in the Benjamin Region causing damage. Israeli driver came from the direction of Itamar towards Bet Faruk and reported to IDF that Arabs were preparing to throw Molotov cocktails at him.  He continued to drive.

Israeli vehicle attacked near Bet Faruk by Arabs with Molotov cocktails. IDF is following up the investigation of the attack.

Israeli driver reported that Arabs attacked him with rocks north-west of Ramallah between Rantis and Bet Arieh.  IDF in control of the investigation.

and

Arab arrested in the Shechem region following investigation into the poisoning of a family in Ra'anana when the terrorist broke into the family home and put poison into a beverage that was in the house.  As a result the father of the family was critically injured, the mother, grandmother, toddler and a policeman were moderately injured from the poison.

I look forward to Mr. Aloni and the press tackling the culture of hate and national fundamentalism that is behind this.



I HAVE A DREAM

The latest nightmare entertained me with the idea that Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who held that office from 1933 to 1944, was being influenced by a deputy chief of staff by the name of Karl Fynn Abercrombie. The nightmare wasn't that specific. It came and went in a flash, too quickly to contemplate in any detail. But some of the faces were familiar, as well as the style of dress of the 1940's, and I recall peering into a dimly lit House of Representatives. In the dream, investigations were indeed initiated, and Congress and America learned to their collective dismay that Karl Flynn Abercrombie was none other than Karl Kluge, a Nazi spy, and that Hull knew it. As did FDR.

FUN, FUN, FUN

The following day will be an all day Islamic Cultural and Fun Fest which will include discussions on the topics of Islamaphobia, Anti-Shariah, Middle Eastern Crisis, Patriot Act, National Defense Authorization Act and more

I don't know about you, but that sounds like my idea of a fun time.






A FULL AND THOROUGH INVESTIGATION

Obama's man in Jerusalem, Dan Shapiro has met with the parents of pro-Hamas activist Rachel Corrie on their endless quest to prove that an Israeli bulldozer operator was part of a vast government conspiracy not to see their idiot daughter dancing around in front of a bulldozer.

Israel’s investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie was not satisfactory, and wasn’t as thorough, credible or transparent as it should have been, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told the Corrie family this week.

Sen. John Kerry asked Shapiro what steps the embassy, under his administration, would take that would be in keeping with the remarks of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. On June 30, 2010 Crowley had said, “We continue to stress to the government of Israel at the highest levels, to continue a thorough, transparent and credible investigation of the circumstances concerning [Corrie’s] death.”

Shapiro responded: “For seven years, we have pressed the government of Israel at the highest levels to conduct a thorough, transparent and credible investigation of the circumstances of her death. The government of Israel has responded that it considers this case closed and does not plan on reinvestigating the incident.” 

Next time anyone tells you that Kerry is pro-Israel, feel free to laugh in his face. But let's complete that credible and transparent investigation into why a terrorist loving hippie got squashed by a bulldozer.

1. Do not play next to a bulldozer

2. If you do, the bulldozer may squash you because patchouli does not repel steel.

3. Bulldozer drivers don't make it their goal to squash people. If they did, there would be many more bulldozer martyrs in paradise besides Rachel Corrie. They also are not trained to operate heavy machinery around idiot terror-loving protesters.

There. That's a full and thorough and transparent investigation. Investigation now closed.

Now can anyone investigate why a lobbyist from Timmons and Company is in this position at all.




KOCH ENDORSES OBAMA... AND PUTIN

Koch is a lot like a stopped clock. He's right around twice a day and when that happens, he makes a heroic impact that is completely unexpected because he's been on the wrong side until now and no one expected him to suddenly switch gears.

 Now in one of his loonier columns, Koch hasn't just gotten behind Obama, but behind Putin.

At a time when the Iranian nuclear threat grows by the day and we are fighting Islamic extremists around the world, we should be seeking to enlist President Putin to join the West in our effort to prevent the Islamist fanatics from achieving their goal of destroying Western civilization, not making him the enemy 

Koch may not be aware of this, but Putin is the one backing the Islamist fanatics in Iran. But you can tell that Koch is still a Democrat because...

I would assume that many supporters would take a different position, and rightly so, if here in the U.S. a black church were invaded and three men or women engaged in comparable conduct insulting holy places 

So hating Putin is like racism. Can Democrats stop using racism as a metaphor to describe why something is wrong? Do they even know that a thing can be wrong without resorting to racebaiting?

Is there even a right or wrong for liberals beyond race?





THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER

At Legal Insurrection, Professor Jacobson wonders if noting Islamic anti-semitism in Malmo will get him condemned as a hate group by the SPLC, along with me, Pamela Geller and Casa D'Ice signs.

The thing about the SPLC is that their attention span is limited and they look for filler material.

A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor.  I agree that it is, but I take issue with others about what is to be done.  When I look at the entire history of the SPLC, I don't think the recent trend of inflate the hate is as much about political correctness run completely amok in the age of Obama as it is about the greed and self-aggrandizement of the founder of the SPLC and the gullibility of the donor base.

...there's a decent rundown here by Rosslyn Smith of what a scam the SPLC really is.

Speaking as someone who was declared a hate group by the SPLC, this is why I would like Morris to keep doing what he's doing. The SPLC is sloppy because it's a gang of scam artists. They're ugly, but they're not doing much more than promoting themselves. If all that money were going into the coffers of genuinely dedicated leftists, things would be a lot uglier.

The ADL is marginally better than the SPLC as some of the people working for it seem to care, but that's not the attitude at the top. These are money mills dedicated to shaking down the elderly on a promise to make America better by banishing bigotry to the dark dungeons of the past.




BUREAUCRACY IMPOSSIBLE

one of the main characteristics of the Soviet economy is the impossibility of reconciling the needs of planning, of optimizing economic growth with the material self-interest of the bureaucracy

... substitute Soviet for American and then think about that sentence.




THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

The US does hold the record for the fastest military aircraft, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, flying at just over 2,193 mph. But that record was set while Gerald Ford was president, in an airplane built when President Obama was still in pull-ups.

The fastest passenger ship is American too, the SS United States, with a top speed of 38 knots. On July 7, 1952, it won the Atlantic crossing “Blue Riband,” beating the fourteen-year-old record held by the RMS Queen Mary by ten hours and two minutes. Today the United States sits derelict and rusting at a dock in Philadelphia.

The largest passenger ships in service are Royal Caribbean’s Oasis Class trips-to-nowhere cruise vessels, built in Finland. The largest container ships, floating testimonies to the decline in American manufacturing, are launched in Denmark. The largest supertankers, with their proclamation of continuing dependence on nineteenth-century energy technology, are made in South Korea.

P.J. O'Rourke, via American Digest

Where did all that greatness go? It went from innovation into bureaucracy. We make different things now. We don't make products. We make government.

This is what we make now.

The Reuters said State Veterinarian Taylor Woods told them they could get a free permit to exempt them from the law and allow them to be a garbage-feeding swine operation. The permit process would include several inspections of the farm each year. The Reuters said Woods told them he would send a government veterinarian to their farm to inspect the property and clear them for the permit.

U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian Dane Henry and state Department of Agriculture veterinarian Kent Haden arrived at Chert Hollow Farm with bad news. Woods had decided not to issue the farm a permit.

“When those two vets came out, they told us that Woods had changed his mind and was no longer going to issue any permits for any kind of garbage-feeding whatsoever,

Build massive supertankers? Hell we can barely run farms anymore. If the American colonists had disembarked to this kind of nightmare, there would be no America. All of America would be Croatoa.

When you need a permit to feed your own vegetables to your own pigs and you can't get that permit, how in the world are you going to build a supersonic plane?

We have inventions sitting around that could change the world. We have working technologies that can never be deployed. We have supercompounds that could revolutionize everything but we aren't going to use them to do anything bigger than make a newer and better smartphone and that will be done in Asia, even if the design is carried out here.

We could do great things, but we are not in the great things business. We are in the big government business. And this isn't just a Federal phenomeon, it exists at every level from the county on up.

We don't make ships or planes, we make inspectors and government buildings and rules and committees that debate the new third quarter 2013 rules that will go in effect and require the hiring of 10,000 more inspectors nationwide to enforce the new rules and trainers to train the inspectors and human resources people to manage the trainers and new buildings to house all that morass of parasites.

And then a politician will get up, put his hand on his heart, stand next to the flag and tell us that we need to sink another trillion into the whole system if we want to ever be able to compete with China.

Because folks how are we ever going to compete with China if people aren't going into debt to graduate from college to get jobs in human resources to take care of workplace disputes involving the managers of the inspectors who make sure that no one feeds vegetables to a pig?