Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human beings on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them.

I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It is rather a very old one. Islamophobia, like Red-Baiting, is a political term that serves the function of cutting off any discussion of the subject. It precludes any listing of the facts or debates on the issue, by declaring it to be off-limits. To raise the issue is to expose yourself as a bad person whose ideas are unacceptable for public distribution.

When George Orwell was struggling to find a publisher for Animal Farm, he was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that the book would offend the Soviet Union. One publisher wrote to Orwell that he had been dissuaded from publishing the book by an important official in the Ministry of Information (an agency that would become the Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984) who had told him that publishing such a book would be ill-advised at this time. That official was, incidentally, a Soviet spy.

The publisher went on to say that the book might be acceptable if it applied generally to dictators, but not specifically to the USSR. Finally the publisher added, "It would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are."

Change around a few names and this is exactly the rejection letters that courageous books critical of Islam have received. It's fine to make general criticisms of religious fanaticism, so long as those criticisms are universally applied, and do not offend those touchy people who religious fanaticism occasionally expresses itself in dangerous ways.

In a generally deleted preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote, "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact."

There are quite a few sensational facts and news items that are kept out or minimized in our own media because it would not do to mention them. There are rarely any government officials dictating this censorship, certainly in the United States there are no legal codes that make it mandatory, but this censorship is voluntary. It consists of people censoring themselves, of publications censoring people out of fear of violence, of publishers who feel that this is an ill-advised time to stir up tensions and of a larger body of liberal thinkers who feel that we should sympathize with Islam and ignore any of its violent and supremacist activities.

"At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable," Orwell wrote in his Animal Farm preface titled, Freedom of the Press.

"Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill...  throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference... So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld."

So too we still have freedom of the speech. We are encouraged to attack our own government, though not the liberal wings of it, but it is still a safer thing to do, so long as the prestige of Islam is not involved. Only when Islam is offended, does the principle of free speech come apart.

It was always safe to attack Bush, but an attack, even on Bin Laden, was considered tacky at best. And an attack on more "moderate" figures, like Tariq Ramadan, was borderline unprintable. While it was ridiculously easy to publish an essay depicting Bush as a war-crazed chimp invading Iraq for oil, Haliburton and Christian fundamentalism, the cultural elites insisted that doing so was an act of great political courage. Meanwhile publishing an essay critical of Islamic figures was next to impossible and dangerously perilous. And those same elites treated it as a despicable abuse of freedom of speech.

The poisonous vein here goes deeper. With the rise of the Bolsheviks there was a vigorous debate over whether or not to recognize the Soviet Union. Two administrations, Wilson and Hoover, chose not to do so. Their reasoning was fairly straightforward and is best expressed in the words of Bainbridge Colby, the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.

Colby was a liberal who had co-founded Roosevelt's Progressive Party and befriended Mark Twain, nevertheless he laid out a clear rationale for extending no diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik terrorists. "We cannot recognize, hold official relations with or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them."

That policy persisted under two administrations, including that of President Hoover, who had personal experience with the Soviet Union during the Russian relief effort which bailed out the Communists at a crucial time. It was the FDR Administration which was stuffed full of Communists that abrogated it. FDR became the first American president to directly communicate with a Soviet leader and in his first year of office he invited the Soviet Foreign Minister to Washington D.C. and recognized the Soviet Union.

To achieve that recognition, the Soviet Union pledged not to promote or harbor any groups with the aim of "the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of, or bringing about by force of, a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States, its territories or possessions." This agreement was never honored in any way, shape or form.

Colby went on defending his policy until his death in 1950 as the right thing to do. And the pace of events only proved him right. The USSR used diplomatic recognition to extract aid, plant saboteurs and conduct espionage. It kept agreements only for so long as they suited it.

The pro-recognition lobby backed of diplomats, businessmen and politicians exploiting argued that only engagement would reform the Soviet Union. That same argument was still being made during the Reagan Administration which was berated for its warmongering obstructionism every time it refused to give in to Soviet demands.

We are back to that same debate today between engaging our enemies or accepting their hostility as a fact. The modern diplomatic corps is full of advocates of engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. There isn't anyone they won't engage with so long as they hate the United States and seek to destroy it.

Four years of Obama has shown once again that engagement does not work. Not only doesn't it work, it actually emboldens the enemy and allows the enemy to infiltrate deep within our societies and to corrupt our institutions. That very engagement leads to censorship in the name of friendship. It leads to news articles and books that cannot be printed because they might sabotage the chances for peace.

The hope for peace is the greatest force of censorship there is. Once engagement is passed off as a fairy that you must believe in lest she will die, then censorship becomes absolutely mandatory to keep peace alive. If a book critical of Communism might offend the USSR then it is best not to print it or to water it down. If Muslims riot over cartoons of Mohammed, then it is a civic duty not to print them in the name of peace and understanding.

When we marvel at the Dhimmism in modern cultural life, at the extent to which Islamic viewpoints are presented unchallenged as the establishment devotes its fullest efforts to inveighing against any opposing views, this too has its red precedents.

"The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding," Orwell wrote. "On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency."

Modern day examples of this surround us on all sides and as a doctor of totalitarianism, Orwell aptly diagnosed the corruption of the elites and their descent into totalitarian expediency.

"If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth... It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

"The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency."

That principle is now the primary one on the left. This totalitarian cowardice that Orwell inveighed against has been elevated to an unchallenged moral standard. Animal Farm is widely reprinted, but without Orwell's preface. Like 1984, a book whose composition effectively killed him, it has been treated according to the original plan of that publisher, stripping away most acknowledgements that it is a vicious satire of Soviet Communism, rather than a generic commentary on tyranny.

Orwell's preface, so rarely published, concludes with his motivation for writing it, "It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect."

Over two centuries ago a group of British colonists huddling amid the forests and rivers of a new continent decided what they could and could not say by killing enough soldiers and mercenaries that the people who had been in charge of their speech decided they should try their luck somewhere where the regulating was easier.

This state of affairs in which the country that those colonists formed became and remains one of the very few places in the world, even among Western democracies, where freedom of speech is absolute, came about through stirring speeches, deeply felt debates, classical ideas and a passionate political culture-- but most of all it came about because large numbers of people were willing to kill over it.

Currently large numbers of people are willing to kill over the idea that Islam is the supreme religion, that Mohammed is a deity whom all mankind should respect and that the infidels living in the suburban sprawl of a thoroughly explored continent should accept that or die. Our government calls those people a tiny minority of extremists. Our unofficial name for them is, "Muslims."

Laws are decided by many things, but sweep away all the lawbooks, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and final law is still the law of force. The law begins with the power to impose its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.

Law either has force behind it or it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.

Islam has made laws that it expects all of mankind to abide by. These laws are not backed by novel legal theories or by petitions, though its practitioners are willing to offer both, they are backed by the naked practice of force. And the imposition of these laws can only be defended against by force.

We are no longer led by revolutionary believers in the freedom of man, but by revolutionary believers in the submission of man to the higher principles that make their utopian sandcastles possible. They cannot honestly draw a red line on freedom, not when they have crossed it so many times themselves for their own agendas. They believe in a variety of rights, but all of those rights involve imposing their ideas and beliefs on others, and that is something they have in common with the Muslim lawyers waving guns and black flags over our burning embassies. They might contemplate killing and dying for gay marriage or the right to put tobacco warnings on cigarettes, but not for the pure idea that anyone should be able to say anything that they want without regard to ideological alliances.

The lawyers who run all our national affairs have chosen to respond to the Islamic legal briefs of bombs and bullets with the equivocation with which they meet all difficult questions. They will not abandon the principle of freedom of speech, but they will lock up the filmmaker whose imprisonment the murderous Muslim legalists called for. They will not censor YouTube, but they will encourage YouTube to censor itself. They will not ban speech that offends Islam, but they will strongly condemn and discourage it.

These equivocators offer to abandon the practice of freedom so long as they are allowed to retain the theory of freedom. The Bill of Rights will not change, but as in the Soviet Union it will not apply. The authorities will pay lip service to the freedoms that we only think we have until we actually try to use them and then we will discover that we don't actually have any of these freedoms left in stock.

In theory America will be an independent country, in practice it will be a vassal state of the Muslim world whose displays of outrage will be our law telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot think, and what we can and cannot do.

This is the typical kind of bargain that decadent empires make with the barbarous warlords on their doorstep. The empire will keep its splendor and its titles, while the barbarians will tell the empire what to do. Eventually the warlords will rule the empire, but that will only come as a shock to the citizenry who were too dazzled by the pageantry of power to realize that power is not defined by its display, but by its usage. Power is law and where there is no power, there is also no law, and those who have the power also make the laws.

What is the difference between American law and Muslim law? There are a great many differences, but the only one that matters is the difference between Constantinople and Istanbul. The only reason that we do not have Muslim law is that Muslims have not yet succeeded in forcing it on us, as they have already done to a sizable percent of the peoples and cultures of the world. That difference will be eliminated the moment that they succeed in doing so.

Law is not some mystical or technical affair. At its most basic it is the school bully demanding a cut of your lunch money in perpetuity. It is the ability to force someone to do something for some reason. Law can be high-minded, it can be moral or it can be a mob demanding that you imprison anyone who offends Mohammed. This is school bully law and it is as valid as any other kind because the distinctions that legal theorists make have no relevance in the face of the law of force. 

A demand for a code of conduct backed by violence is law. It is not our law, it is not the law of the civilized man, but it is the law that we are slowly adopting. It is the law of the decadents appeasing the savages. Its only real content warns against offending the savage on the grounds that this will have negative consequences for our soldiers, our billboards, our image in the world and our embassies. And that is the law of the savage mediated by all the fine useless intellectualization of the decadent.

Under this code, Muslim violence dictates our permissible forms of speech. To know whether a thing may be said, drawn or filmed, we must first determine how Muslims will react to it. If they will react with violence, as they do to a sizable percentage of things, then it becomes incitement, retroactively, that must be punished and condemned.

Muslim violence has become our law. It is the law of action which determines our laws of speech. To understand what we can say, we first have to decide what Muslims will do about it. A long long time ago, perhaps less than twenty years ago, our government would meet their action with an action of its own, it would meet force with force. The British government did not do that with Salman Rushdie, instead it got him to read a statement apologizing for his book, but perhaps ours would have done better. Probably not.

When we were revolutionaries, our government saw force as a way of dealing with other countries who wanted to tell Americans what to do. But since then our government has really gotten used to telling us what to do. Occasionally it invades other countries in the name of some global consensus that claims to be able to treat countries the way that our government treats us and tell them what to do.

Lately that consensus, which we can call the United Nations, the International Community or an International Disease of Corrupt Bureaucrats and Power Mad Utopians, has been telling our government that it needs to tell us what we can and cannot say. And our government has no response except to mumble something about the First Amendment, which it doesn't really believe in anymore, but since it's had no luck getting rid of the Second Amendment, it isn't about to try with the First, and urges the consensus and the murderous mobs to work with us to arrive at an agreement that we can all live with. And by "we", I don't mean us.

In a world where jet planes rapidly crisscross the planet and bombs can be embedded in anything, where companies and non-profits both lust for immigrants and unstable Third World societies export their instability to First World societies as immigration, where corporations have offices everywhere and national interest is just a fancy way of saying international trade relationships, the primary law becomes maintaining the stability of a broken system and containing its inherent violence.

The lawyers running the system will not defend national interests because they don't believe in them, they won't defend freedom because they don't believe in it, they will defend the system because it is the only thing that they do believe in. And they will defend it at the point where it is easiest to defend, not from the attacking Muslims, but from the natives who appear to be making them angry.

Would you rather fight a billion violent madmen or arrest a filmmaker? The answer is very simple. Forget Theodore Roosevelt's "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead". The Obama motto is "It's okay if Perdicaris is dead, so long as Raisuli isn't too mad at us."

Forget the Bill of Rights, a document thrown together by agrarian utopianists worried about central government. Our new breed of lawyer-kings is composed of urban utopianists ruling through central government. To them the Bill of Rights is a piece of incomprehensible lunacy that prevents them from getting anything done. They are not concerned with rural government trespasses, they are worried about bombs and riots in their cities and they are terrified of their global goals being sabotaged by some movie trailer.

They are making Muslim violence into our new law, just as they made urban violence into our new law, just as they have made their own bureaucratic mandates backed by SWAT teams and prisons into our new law.

The age when laws were made by men, rather than machines of social progress composed of lawyers and activists, bureaucrats and think-tanks, lobbyists and judges, is long since gone. There is no law in our laws, but the law of force. The Constitution sits on a dusty shelf while the judges bang their gavels and practice the law that mandates something because those in power want it that way.

And now our utopian lawyer-kings, our armies of bleeding-heart social justice activist, our legions of bureaucrats stamping their papers over our skulls, our grinning black-robed activist judges wielding their gavels like swords, are cringing in terror before a Muslim mob. The bullies who have bullied us for so long have proven to be cowards. While they dismantle our army to sell it for scraps so that the EPA and HUD and the cowboy poetry festivals can get their billions, they order us to fall on our knees before the Army of Allah.

The liberal bullies who bullied us for so long have been successfully bullied and have handed us over to the bully's bully. But bullies, of the liberal or Muslim kind, are cowards. Their bullying only works until they are successfully bullied and without their threat of force, their laws wither and blow away on the wind.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR TERROR

As they ran past a Japanese tourist, she said, one of the men fired into the woman’s face from a range of about 15 inches.

“They made us get down on our knees,” Ms Dousse said. “And then they started shooting. A man who was very heavy fell on me and the lady behind me also covered me … They shot me in the arm and leg, and then they started again shooting those who were still alive in the head.

The gunmen “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain,” Dousse said.

“It went on for a long time, an hour or an hour and a half. The terrorists came back again and again; they danced and sang,” she said.

Among the horrors, the marauders cut off the ears and noses of several of their victims. A note praising Islam was found inside one disemboweled body.

The foreign dead included 31 Swiss, 10 Japanese, five Germans, four Britons one a child a Bulgarian, a Colombian and a French citizen. The Japanese victims were four newlywed couples and an elderly couple on their second honeymoon.

The man who ordered that atrocity, Mustafa Hamza was just pardoned by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt.


THE LEFTY RICH GET RICHER

In 2008, before a certain Chicago community organizer completed the left’s long march into the institutions of national power, a former Nazi collaborator named George Soros had a mere 11 billion dollars and was a mere 28th on the Forbes 400 list.

Now after a few years of Obama, millions of Americans are out of work, the economy is toast, and George Soros has moved up to No. 15 on the Forbes 400 with a total of 19 billion dollars.

Soros made twice as much under Obama as he did under Bush. He made more money during one term of Obama than his entire net worth in 2004 under Bush.

Soros' 1 million kick-in to a pro-Obama PAC? That's going to net him astronomical returns.



ONE WITH THE TIGER

In the Bronx Zoo, David Villalobos was rescued from a tiger den after leaping inside to, in his own words, "Be one with the tiger."

British, French and German leaders did not hop into tiger enclosures in the London Zoo, the Parc Zoologique de Paris and the Berlin Zoological Garden. Instead they turned these cities into open air safaris where the natives were encouraged to mingle with the tigers. The multicultural safari has not been going well, with the tigers mangling the natives, burning their cars and chewing on their police officers. The European Union zookeepers have been wondering loudly what they can do to fix their oneness integration project, while releasing still more tigers into the streets of London, Paris and Berlin.

The United States did not jump into a tiger den in the Bronx Zoo. That would have been fairly sane compared to its leap into Libya. With the Arab Spring, the tigers were freed and men like Christopher Stevens jumped inside. The bloody marks on the walls of the Benghazi consulate are a grim reminder of what tigers eventually do to the men who move into their dens.

...you can see my full article, "US and Europe's "Oneness" Integration Project" here.



RACING AWAY FROM JUSTICE

New York State’s radical Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, who during the election promised to give Al Sharpton his own office, has been restructuring the drug laws to produce racially equal outcomes. Schneiderman had waged war on the Rockefeller Drug Laws that cracked down on street drugs and pushed aggressively for drug laws that target white offenders by criminalizing prescription drugs.

As a Senator, Obama was one of the sponsors of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act. That name may not ring a bell, but it’s how cold and allergy medicines became criminalized, why you need photo identification to buy them and why buying more than a 30 day supply can bring a SWAT team to your door if you show up on the cold medicine registry.

A year after the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act was passed; Tim Naveau was arrested in Illinois for buying the Claritin-D tablets that his son needed to take along with him to church camp. The arrest and humiliation of a man for buying slightly more allergy medication than the legal limit was another victory for the new racially redistributive war on drugs.

...that's an excerpt from my article, "The New Racial Justice System"



WHY, OH WHY DO THEY HATE US?

Like gawky teenagers, Americans are far too obsessed with what people thousands of miles away think of them. The first reaction of the ordinary man in the street on December 7, 1941, was not to wonder why the Japanese hated him. It was not even his tenth reaction because at that point he was much too busy hating the Japanese to care why they hated him.

FDR was unconcerned with Japanese emotions, let alone their hearts, minds and livers; because he knew that the conflict did not come down to emotions but to a power struggle between a Japanese empire in the Pacific and the only Western country with a view of the Pacific capable of standing up to the land of the rising sun.

The study of Muslim rage, its wellsprings and tides, is as worthless as the study of Japanese rage in the dying days of the 1930s. Despite the showy displays of violence in the last week by inflamed Chinese mobs attacking Japanese properties and Muslim mobs attacking American properties, the conflicts do not revolve around the axis of emotion, but of power and territory.

From my article of the same name, Why Do They Hate Us? (Hint: It's not a movie trailer.)



AND THE QUESTION FEW ARE ASKING

Was the planned attack on the Benghazi consulate truly unknown ahead of time or was it a known element that was not taken seriously enough and allowed to go forward for political reasons?

If things had not gone wrong in Benghazi, then the attacks would have humiliated the United States but caused no physical harm. Obama would have benefited from the crisis and did benefit from it through the “Rally ‘Round the Flag” effect that bumps up the poll numbers of White House occupants when a foreign military crisis takes place. From our perspective the attacks showed Obama’s weakness, but his poll ratings actually rose due in part to the attacks.

During the Iran Hostage Crisis, Jimmy Carter’s approval ratings rose from 32 to 58 percent. Obama’s campaign-oriented administration was likely hoping for at least a modest bump from the riots. What they did not expect was that the attacks would go beyond limited assaults on embassies and lead to an actual slaughter in Benghazi.

Did Obama Know the Embassy Attacks Were Coming?



AND NOW ANYTHING BUT THE NEWS

Did you know that racist chair lynching is America's fastest growing hit game show?

The real problem here is the color of the chair. Offhand the chair appears to be metallic gray, rather than black or brown, but this may have been Bud Johnson’s fiendishly racist way of disguising the true race of the chair.

Also we don’t know the national origin of the chair. It probably did not come from Africa. The White House claims it was manufactured in Hawaii, but there are no ownership details to establish that. Some speculate that it’s actually a Manchurian chair from China.

MTA will now only run ads that Muslims aren't likely to vandalize

If Muslims declare that they will react violently to something. If they demonstrate that they will behave violently in response to something, that thing can now be treated as inciting and provoking violence. Muslim violence, once again, becomes the determinant of what can and cannot be said in this country.

Dead voters aren't enough for the NAACP. Now they want felon votes too.

Integration disintegration is really going well in the UK.

They also reveal that one young white girl, known by social services to have been sexually abused by Asian men from the age of 12, was offered language lessons in Urdu and Punjabi by Rotherham council.

On that note, J.K. Rowling's next book is a left-wing screed tackling class warfare and racism.


ADIOS CALIFORNIA

If California were a country, its debt would actually be the 25th largest in the world, right behind South Korea and ahead of Brazil. Despite only having a population of 37 million, California’s debt is bigger than those of much larger and poorer countries like Brazil, with a population of nearly 200 million, India, with a population of 1.2 billion and Pakistan, with around 176 million people. It’s half the debt of China.

Give it a little time and California will be China, minus the productivity, but plastic grocery bags will be punished by public steamrollering.


GUESS THE SPEAKER

“My statement to the United Nations would have been, “The future does not belong to those who attack our Embassies and Consulates and kill our Ambassadors. The Angel of Death in the form of an American Bald Eagle will visit you and wreak havoc and destruction upon your existence”

Allen West or Barack Obama?


MEANWHILE

Meanwhile, Obama shuts down Radio Liberty and Six Million Jews must die for a Palestinian State. France has its own Atlas Shrugs and our national defense is in the best of hands.

This bad news is sponsored by ObamaPhone (available only at The People's Cube)



AND NOW THE NEWS

the U.S. Marine Corps has suffered its worst air squadron catastrophe since Vietnam, and its prized VMA-211 squadron has taken its worst hit since its defense of Wake Island in World War II.

It happened on September 14, 2012, northwest of the city of Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan. A team of fewer than two dozen Taliban fighters attacked the USMC's massive Camp Bastion base there, killing VMA-211 squadron commander Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and destroying or permanently disabling eight of the ten top-of-the-line Harrier AV-8B attack aircraft stationed under him. Out of production for more than a decade, these aircraft can never be replaced.

By the time the smoke cleared, roughly 7% of the total harrier fleet operated by the USMC had been wiped out on a single day by a small force of ground combatants whose most potent weapon was the suicide vest, one of which was used to breach the camp's perimeter fence.

Under Obama, the U.S. has taken 1,491 casualties in Afghanistan, over 70% of the total 2,121 casualties sustained since the fighting there began. Helmland Province, where Camp Bastion is located, has been the grounds for the lion's share of them, twice as many as any other region of the country. Things have gotten so bad that, in the wake of the attack on Camp Bastion, the International Security Assistance Force, which trains Afghan citizens to defend their country against the Islamic fanatics of the Taliban, suspended operations.

...the really bad news that is.

After Gulf War I, the media kept trying to find ways to make a victory look like a defeat. CBS strained so hard that it put out a 5 Years Later special that couldn't really make the case, but did its best to put on its gloomiest tones.

Now the media is trying to turn a defeat in Afghanistan into a victory.



THE FUTURE BELONGS TO MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS WHO REFRAIN FROM OFFENDING MUSLIMS

Sorry, old chap, but the future belongs to me, a slanderer, mocker, blasphemer, and critic of Muslims and Islam and its pedophilic icon, Big Mo. What's the government going to do about it? Ask Huma Abedin to send some ski-masked jihadist thugs to beat me up? Give me the Daniel Pearl treatment? Or perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will request that a joint DHS/TSA Swat team swoop down on me and take me in for questioning. 

The criminalization of speech about Islam is a proposed exercise in people management and Platonic guardianship by elitists ensconced in the ivory tower of indemnified statism. It is supposed to combat violence and bridge the gap between Western and Islamic civilizations. But Islam isn't a "civilization"; it is an ideology hell-bent on conquest.

...that's part of Edward Cline's commentary on that freedom of speech thing we've been taking for granted...

...and see his Howls of Anger commentary as well

There you are, having been brought into the station to be "interviewed" by the thought police for having "offended" Muslims by "defaming," "denigrating," "mocking," "dis-respecting" Islam. They've not arrested you – they want you to understand that, and you're free to go any time you wish, except that the interrogation room door is locked and there are cops in riot gear guarding it outside – they've only manhandled you into the police car and driven you to the station so you can offer your point of view so they can better understand "where you're coming from." They wouldn't have done that if they hadn't received complaints and warnings from the offended parties that you are hovering close to "inciting violence" by bad-mouthing Islam.

The world-weary, jaded-looking guys just want you to admit responsibility for having caused recent riots. They want to go home and get some sleep, even though they have roused you from a deep sleep at 1 a.m. They commiserate with you about exhaustion and working odd hours. Then you can go, once you recant and sign a lengthy letter of apology to the rioters and to the dead and maimed the rioters have caused and to all Muslims for having "insulted" their faith. They want you to distance yourself from other "offenders." They want you to repudiate your convictions. After all, what's a conviction worth. You can't eat one, or deposit it in the bank. What are you, obsessed or something? Get with the program.

The offended parties wish to see justice done. They keep shouting that they "don’t get no respect," except they're not trying to be funny like Rodney Dangerfield and wouldn't emulate him if they could, because Dangerfield was Jewish. They want "respect" and they want restitution. They wish to silence you on the matter of Islam while not restricting your First Amendment rights. You'll be allowed to denigrate Jews and Christians and atheists and Buddhists and other non-believers to your heart's content, as they do. Muslims are a protected "minority" and have been granted dispensation and a variety of legal indulgences. But the offended parties have warned the authorities that they cannot calm their collect for too much longer, as their outrage is real and cannot be contained indefinitely. They might begin to riot and harm the police sent to preserve the peace, and it'll be all your fault. 

A GENERAL MALINVESTMENT

If that is too technical, let me simplify. Money represents work. A dollar in the hand is worth more than a dollar to you tomorrow, and the difference between a dollar in the hand and a hypothetical dollar tomorrow is interest. When people have a lot of money to lend and spend, the law of supply and demand drives the interest rate, the price of money, down. When the people have little money to lend and spend, the interest rate goes up.

When the state interferes with the credit cycle, it creates a low interest rate by fiat. This is like the state commanding you to sell some good or service at a rate or wage lower than it is naturally worth. Business can borrow money from the bank, which is where are the workingmen store their money, to start a business or erect a factory, hire men, make widgets. When it comes time to find customers, however, it turns out there that is not a lot of money to lend and spend after all. The businessman was given a false signal: the red light of the economy was made to flash green, telling him it was safe to go.

Well, not just one or two unwise businessmen are affected by this state-mandated traffic wreck, all businesses that borrow money or sell goods. The whole economy is affected. It is fashionable to blame greedy businessmen, but a moment’s reflection should show that the businessmen are just as greedy before and after a bust, and that if it were caused by unwise investment, the industries where the investment was more cautious would not be effected. No, scientifically speaking, the cause must be proportional to the effect. Only the government has the ability to create malinvestments across all sectors of the economy at once.

From John C. Wright's Journal



GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ

In spite of our promises to the Awakening Movement, the Sunni tribesmen who fought al Qaeda with us, Iraq's Sunnis have been marginalized and treated as secodn class citizens by the newly ascendent Shi'ites, who are in th eprocess of turning Iraq into an Iranian Shi'ite satellite.

The last election, which was essentially stolen by Maliki and the Shi'ite bloc with the aid of Iranian proxy Moqtada al-Sadr, Sunnis in the military and police have largely been disarmed and dismissed from service, and the Sunni Vice President of Iraq, th ehighestr ranking Sunni in Iraq has fled the country and is under a death sentence by the Maliki regime on trumped up charges

Al-Qaeda's resurgence in Iraq is no accident. They are gearing up for a renewed civil war. 

But don't worry, according to Obama we left behind a stable Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.



GOOD NEWS FROM IRAN

The Obama administration has done everything they can do to keep the pressure on Israel by not supporting the green movement in Iran and not stopping the carnage in Syria. Why?

Both Iran and Syria, along with their stooges, the Palestinian authority, Hezbollah and Hamas, are the pressure points on Israel. This pressure  that  Mr. Obama needs to force the creation of the Palestinian State during his watch as US President. Mr. Obama has done everything to make Israel feel that they are on the defense, as anyone with a brain knows they have been since May 15th, 1948 to this very day. 

...from an article at Right Truth by CBPO Jon A. Underwood, CBP, (Ret.)





ASSORTED TREATS

Joe Biden is Rex Kramer

Bosch Fawstin gets down to the Islamic bottom line

via American Digest

"Liberals fought us by taking over our media. We fought back by watching their programs. Liberals fought us by taking over our schools. We fought back by sending them our children...."

My article Muslim Multiculturalism and Western Post-Nationalism has been nominated by the Watcher's Council.

A review of Bruce Bawer's new book on Victimology.

Free ObamaPhones are a human right.

Pride and Prejudice in Saudi Arabia.

“When a girl reaches 30 in Saudi Arabia, she is automatically considered a spinster and that is when she accepts marrying a man that would only give her part of his time rather than not marry at all.”

According to Anzi, polygamy not only solves the problem of spinsterhood, but also curb sexual relations outside the institution of marriage.

They just expand the institution of marriage until it's the size of an actual institution.

And finally a history note from Phyllis Chesler.

Thousands of years ago, the first Jewish King, Saul, choose to fall on his sword rather than be captured alive by his enemies, the “Plishtim.” They be-headed his corpse and hung his body (and head) on the city wall of Bet Shean for all to see. Valiant soldiers from Jabesh-Gilead risked death in order to retrieve his corpse which they then burned—after which they buried King Saul’s bones under a tamarisk tree and mourned for him for seven days.

One commentator says that although cremation was and is not a Jewish custom, nevertheless, “the (decomposed) flesh had to be burnt as it was considered an affront to the dead to bury them in that state.” Another source suggests that Kings and their possessions were to be burned.

In my view, the valiant men of Jabesh-Gilead burned his corpse because they did not want the Plishtim to dig it up and display it again or to mutilate King Saul’s corpse any further.

Nothing has changed in the region. Barbarism still reigns. Israel is an island under siege.

The most important thing that any leader needs to know about war is that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That includes a plan of fighting bloodless wars using drones and droning speeches.

The brilliant plan that Barack Hussein Obama and some of his more useless advisers cooked up for defeating Islamic terrorism was to isolate the "extreme" violent Islamists who want to kill people from the "moderate" political Islamists who are willing to take over entire countries in elections.

The Islamist terrorists would be deprived of a meaningful reason to kill people in the name of implementing Islamic law if their political brethren got to take over entire countries and implement Islamic law. Once the Muslim Brotherhood took over a few countries, then Al Qaeda would be marginalized and irrelevant. Its operatives would soon have to drop the terrorism and get jobs teaching about LGBT rights or building solar panels.

Whoever came up with this plan probably had a grandfather in the State Department who said in 1919 that the Communists would become less dangerous to Western Europe now that they had all of Russia to use for their economic experiments because stupidity doesn't go away. The same old ideas that cost millions of lives a few generations ago are repackaged with some artful worldplay and are parroted by the smart set as the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone.

Islamism, now joins Communism and Nazis on the shelf of things that we don't really have to worry about once we've appeased them enough, at least until they stop taking off fingers and start biting off hands and then suddenly we have to start worrying all over again.

The problem with Obama's split Islamists maneuver is that Al Qaeda had spent more time attacking Saudi Arabia, the most Islamist Sunni country on earth, than any other Muslim country. Turning Egypt and Syria Islamist was not going to dissuade or isolate Al Qaeda. For Islamists, there is an endless well of "extremes" so that the rise of one Islamist government is just an excuse for more Islamists to arrive and denounce them as fakes and puppets of America and Israel.

Islamist governments have a traditional way of occupying the attention of their angrier Islamist brethren. They buy them flight lessons and maps of American landmarks. That's how the House of Saud largely solved its Islamist terror problem and that is how our "moderate" friends in Egypt are hard at work solving their Islamist terrorist problem by pointing them at Israel and using their attacks as an excuse to militarize the Sinai.

In Libya, the Benghazi consulate was being guarded from other Islamist militias by the Muslim Brotherhood militia. The ways in which plan failed are a microcosm of the larger failure of the entire plan to buy peace by selling out our allies to the Muslim Brotherhood and hoping that the Islamists we backed will be more moderate than the ones bombing us.

Much as the Saudis had been doing for years, the Muslim Brotherhood just sold out the consulate to Al Qaeda and then sent out a condolence message while warning that unless we accept the Islamic definition of un-free speech, attacks like this will keep on happening. And they will regardless of how many Mohammed movies get made or don't get made.

The only way that anyone in the region knows how to stop terrorism is either by massacres or by handing the terrorists a giant bag of money and pointing them at a new target. The Brotherhood is not about to start fighting other Salafists over American foreign aid and they couldn't even if they wanted to, without empowering the army, which in their part of the world quickly becomes a government. Instead they will do what the Saudis have been doing, talk out of both sides of their mouths, telling the terrorists to hit America and telling America that if we don't support them, the terrorists will win.

This is an old game and it works really well. We send a Muslim country money and weapons. It hands 10 percent of them to the terrorists in exchange for attacking us some more. Then it asks us for more money and weapons to stop the terrorists. Unlike most investments, this one is stable and pays out really well as long as Washington DC is full of so many chumps that it ought to have more card sharps and pool sharks than any other place in the country.

All this is bad news for Obama who was trying to run on the one accomplishment that took place during his administration-- the death of the superannuated leader of what used to be Al Qaeda, before Al Qaeda developed more franchise opportunities than Pizza Hut. But Obama was not the only one worried about his image. Al Qaeda does not like looking weak and incompetence any more than the Son of Hussein does. While Al Qaeda does not have elections, it does have donors, and the sheiks and princes are not sending it checks so its members can hang around strip clubs and do coke while fantasizing about the return of the Caliphate.

The more Obama bragged about killing Bin Laden and defeating Al Qaeda, the more Al Qaeda decided to make a point of showing that it had not been defeated just because its Sheik-Emeritus had taken a few bullets to the beard. A terrorist attack against America would take too much time and was a high risk job that could easily fall apart, but local attacks were easy and could be done on short notice-- especially with all the extra weapons lying around Libya from Obama's last war.

Obama had bragged about defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, a place that it had mostly gotten out of while O was still a State Senator trying to figure out how to fall asleep with his eyes open. All the while he kept ignoring the places where Al Qaeda actually was, like Libya. That was a situation ripe for a 3 AM wake up call that Obama slept through.

All the clever soft power games, the notion that your enemies could be split into cooperative and uncooperative segments had completely left everyone in the White House unprepared for the reality of what happens when you humiliate people that you don't have the guts to fight.

Obama fights and wins image wars through media propaganda. Al Qaeda does it by killing people. And unlike Mitt Romney, Al Qaeda isn't going to be thrown off track when the Washington Post fact checkers start accusing it of gaffes or trot out fake polls to demonstrate its unpopularity. Al Qaeda becomes popular the old-fashioned way. Its image comes from its body count and in a region where life is cheap, it can throw a few hundred grand to recruit any number of the fighters-for-pay it needs to score some bloody footage.

The worst possible way to go into a fight is to have no fallback plan and Obama, like most ideologues, never has fallback plans. He throws everything into Green Energy and Stimulus Plans and never expects failure and has no plan to cope with failure. He commits to a Surge in Afghanistan and then has no fallback plan for failure except to fire some generals.

Obama picks the option with the smoothest patter, the one that seems it can't fail because it's just so brilliant and perfect. And then when it fails, he ignores it because he has no other response to failure. Having a man like this in charge of strategy is a recipe for disaster, which is exactly what we have. Wars require men who go in knowing that setbacks are a risk and that the enemy gets a vote. Instead we have a technocrat who believes that that a plan that seems well reasoned will work because life follows ideology.

The State Senator from Illinois by way of Indonesia with his Muslim father and stepfather has made a bigger mess than the Peanut President and the mess if mostly unacknowledged because while the media often knows better than him, it knows of no substitute for him. So it will go on pretending that we didn't lose Afghanistan and that the Benghazi attack was about a video, no matter what common sense or a minor figure like the President of Libya says about it.

Al Qaeda has not been defeated because you can't defeat random militias with guns who can draw recruits from every third son of a Muslim theocrat from here to Pakistan, not without either doing severe damage to their host societies or completely discrediting their political aspirations, instead of encouraging them by empowering Islamists.

Instead Obama's end zone dance in Abbottabad ended with a black eye from Al Qaeda and a reminder that if you are going to claim victory over an enemy, then you had better have a bigger kill count than can be gotten from a few drone strikes.

Some nights ago I sat in an emergency room while a 19-year-old heroin addict was brought in. It was after midnight, the witching hour, on a weekend when the zombies and ghosts of the city's party circuit begin drifting in dressed in their best clothes, escorted by police officers, clutching bloodied rags to their faces or lying on stretchers and always at their articulate best.

The girl came from a wealthy background and was articulate enough to hurriedly assemble her story. An addict since her teenage years, she had been clean for a while and never used anything but heroin, except occasionally cocaine. The drug use was just a single slip, one mistake, and then she would be clean again.

Anyone who hasn't worked with addicts doesn't know how charming and persuasive they can be. The addict is the distilled ego focused on a single burning need. All the cleverness and intelligence of the human being, the attributes that we would ordinarily use to work, create, befriend and empathize, become tools for protecting the addiction and the supply.

Addicts are intense because they are among the few people in this world who know exactly what they want. They can be charming, but their routines are mechanical. They retain only enough of their humanity to charm us into giving them more of what they want. It is their only reason for interacting with us. The addict is pure ego and the drug is the only focus of their ego. The addict needs so badly that he or she becomes an incarnation of need. Their humanity is slowly or rapidly burned away leaving behind nothing but the animal need, their outer characteristics consumed by their ego and then their ego consumed by the id.

The girl was no friend or family member of mine. I had seen many like her and as our civilization unwinds into its own night of the soul, there will be many more like her. Having all the advantages of life, she was desperately unhappy and like so much of the modern world that tunes in to Oprah for tips on how to be happy, that browses self-help sections on a desperate quest for happiness, she was still trying to be happy. Her cry was the cry of a country addicted to emptiness and losing its soul.

I do not come to judge or to moralize about how people live their lives. Even the best of us are flawed and even the worst of us have their moments of redemption. Many are addicts of one kind or another, becoming tethered to the thing that assures us happiness, even as it seems to drain us of something vital. Many such addictions can be harmless, but when an addiction becomes unsustainable, then it becomes a death sentence. A death of the soul followed by the death of the body.

While I sat there, trying to ignore the noises, the shrieks of pain, the pleas for help and the mumbles, the Republican Convention was beginning to recede. My fingers tapped out the essay on a 3'5 inch screen that would become, "How to Write About the Republican Convention." Ahead of me lay the Democratic Convention, the addicts convention, the festival of that corner of America that was not so slowly losing its soul.

I did not, I could not anticipate the full insane spectacle of it at the time. No one could have. But I sensed that it would sound a lot like the heroin addict in the bed, shrieking at her parents, changing emotional pitches in a moment from hysteria to sweetness, turning on the momentary charm with the nurses, innocently assuring the staff that she was not a user. And it did. It was a lunatic addict festival with designs by LSD and math by cocaine addicts fresh from Wall Street and social programs from potheads.

All that outrage over Mitt Romney's 47 percent hits home because we are all users. Some of that usage is more legitimate. Some of us are using money that we put in there as insurance and some of us are using money that we didn't. But that's not the real story. The real story is that our social safety net was supposed to be like one of those, "Take a Penny, Leave a Penny" tills that depend on the honor and neighborliness of a community. And we don't have that community. What we have is a fragmented mess of givers and takers who are not the same people.

This isn't about wealth or class. Some of the wealthiest men in this country, like Warren Buffett, are parasites who feed off taxpayer money. Some of the poorest men and women work hard for a living and put back more than they take out.

It's not entirely about race, though partly it is because the black community and some other minority groups, have become addicted to something more toxic than heroin or cocaine, and they feel entitled to take and take because some of their ancestors were once slaves and because there was once segregation in the South and because they feel certain that white people look down on them. It's not about gender, though the collapse of the family has put more of the burden on women and tried to fill that gap with social services.

It's about community. It's about who we are as a country. It's about the America of the people who feel ashamed when they aren't doing their best to work and the America of the people who feel ashamed when they don't take the system for every penny they can. It's about who feels that they owe and who feels that they are owed.

The left talks about community a great deal, but their vision of community is a giant till where everyone is forced to put their money and their bureaucracy decides how many people get to keep what percent of their money and how many get to keep other people's money. There is none of the individual responsibility that makes a community work, only the obligation to follow orders all the time for the greater good. There is no community, only ranks of addicts waiting to be taken care of.

The essence of a community is that its individual members feel a sense of responsibility toward one another. Without that sense of responsibility, we all become takers, tuning in to listen to the latest government announcement to learn how much we can expert to make and how much we will lose. We become experts at wheedling government officials, we all become lobbyists and a lobbyist is a paid representative for someone else's addiction.

It is the ego that defines the addict, that terrible sense of need that becomes the mirror of the self, and for all the talk of community, it is that need and that accompanying fear that the need will be cut off, that defined the Democratic National Convention, with its special pitches to the most addicted groups, promising that unlike the Republicans, we will never cut off your supply. At least not until we start running low and all the apartments of the people with money are broken into and then we'll have to start deciding who gets the good stuff and who gets a death panel.

Liberalism has defined entire groups by their need, their addiction to the supply of government, and taught them to feel an angry entitlement to their welfare checks. It has taught them that they are good people for wanting to take other people's money and that anyone who doesn't want to give them what they want is a bad person. This is addict moralizing, the spectrum of moral behavior in which the only thing that exists is the need and the barriers to meeting that need.

Addiction goes by different names now. Racism is one of them, but there are many names and they all mean the same thing. "I want," the koan of addiction, the incantation that becomes the identity of the addict as the one who needs. "I scream, you scream, we all scream for more, more and more." The rhetoric, the talk of privilege, the academic papers, are only the complex rationalizations of addicts, their mechanical arguments for doing what they want and taking what they want.

This kind of addiction is unsustainable. It is personally unsustainable, it is communally unsustainable and it is nationally unsustainable. A nation where takers begin to outnumber givers cannot endure. It has no future and barely has a present. A nation run by a 'former' cocaine user who is forever tossing out schemes for fixing everything that have all the substance of an addicts' plans to get clean is in deep trouble.

Addicts do not get by on results, they get by on personal charm and schemes. They get by on tricking people into meeting their needs. And that convinces them that, like all criminals, they are very clever. The more suckers they lure in, the more convinced they become that they are unstoppable, that they will go on flying forever beyond the sunset on their drug of choice.

Money is our current drug of choice and like all drugs it appears infinite. We are buying our own debt and selling it back to ourselves and lending ourselves the money to buy our own debt in a spiral that seems beautiful and sensible to an addict, but is a complete disaster to anyone still functioning in the real world.

Obama's solution to all problems is to shoot up more money. Billions, trillions, it doesn't matter because the money is unreal and therefore infinite. It works because we believe in it and he's in office because he convinced people to believe in him. To him, money, like his persona, is an act of faith and all he has to do is convince everyone to go on believing. And if we ever stop believing, then like a certain coyote with his own improbable schemes, we will crash down to the ground.

The addict seeks the unreal state because it makes him happy. It is the real world that depresses him. Enough Americans chose to shoot up Obama and a smaller number are still committed to their hope drug because he makes them happy. And fooling them makes Obama happy. All the money is just a counter that everyone trades back and forth in exchange for happiness. Trillion dollar deficits are how we know we're getting high.

The addict cannot cope with the knowledge that the unreal world he has built for his own pleasure is finite. He lashes out violently and angrily at the intrusion of the real world into his sphere, he tries to keep the lie going a little longer, manipulating those around him while inside him the growing frantic sense that the whole thing is about to collapse builds and builds. He rationalizes and makes excuses and promises to fix everything if he can just get the money to pay for what he owes and one last hit. Just one last hit.

America can have a social safety net, but it has to be one based on the responsibility that we all feel toward one another, not on empty cynical rhetoric about "giving back" to people who feel no sense of responsibility for anyone outside their own group. That's just a nation of enablers propping up a nation of addicts until the addicts outnumber them and the country collapses into one big Detroit. It cannot be based on the empty promises and lies, that sound no different whether they are coming from Obama or a 19-year-old heroin addict. It cannot be based on charm or ignorance of the truth.

Whatever social safety net we have must be communal, it must be open and transparent, and it can only be maintained by a nation of honorable people, by people who feel guilty about taking a penny and feel good about leaving a penny. Anything else is just one more hit.

As the great anchor of the election hits bottom, plummeting past feeder fish, political plankton and eyeless creatures that lurk in the depths of MSNBC and Current TV to rise during election season to lecture us on how angry we should be, the theme of the season is that the choice between Romney and Obama is the choice between big corporations and big government.

Most people have already been primed by decades of songs and shows to pick the right answer to this one. We know that corporate boardrooms are full of menacing characters who are always laundering money, dumping toxic waste on children's playgrounds and plotting to blot out the sun. And then they temporarily step out to work in government for a few years before returning to do their sun-blotting duties.

A choice between big corporations and big government is a choice of choices and no choice at all. There isn't much good that can be said about corporations, just as there isn't much good that can be said about any branch of the government. The difference is that you have a choice whether to deal with a corporation or not. Unless the government mandates that you buy health insurance from one of them; because most cases where people are forced to do business with a corporation is due to government regulations.

Imagine a big corporation. A really big corporation that monopolizes as much as it can and compels you to buy its low quality overpriced services and imprisons you if you refuse to pay for them whether you use them or not.

Now imagine a CEO who has no accountability, who cannot be put on trial for his actions while serving in that position, who picks and chooses which laws to follow, who breaks the law, causes thousands of deaths, lies repeatedly and wants to spend another four years doing it all over again.

We are all shareholders of the corporation of government. A corporation whose board and CEO we can vote for, but the corporation also has a variety of undemocratic governing mechanisms that make those votes much less meaningful. And the biggest problem is that many of the shareholders are part of blocs that make money from the current unsustainable practices of the corporation and vote in bad boards that rob us blind so they can make more money.

Once upon a time, Americans were shareholders of government. Today Americans are consumers of government.

The current incarnation of the American Republic (is it the Fourth or the Fifth incarnation? At least the Europeans have the good grace to tack on those numbers) is primarily a provider of domestic services and international defense. This is a striking contrast from the older American Republic where the government provided domestic defense and not much else.

It's simplest to think of a thing in terms of its function. With the majority of Federal spending going to Social Security and Medicare, our government is essentially an insurance company, taking a percentage of salaries and "investing" that money to provide a social safety net. Except the money isn't invested, it's squandered, and much of it goes to people who are not paying into the system.

As insurance companies go, our government is completely financially unreliable and untrustworthy, its payouts are poor, its customer service is terrible and the people running it would be in a jail cell if they were serving on corporate boards.

To understand what our government is, imagine a wasteful non-profit obsessed with Third World children, merged with some kind of domestic poverty charity, merged with an insurance company, attached to a bunch of umbrella trade and regulatory groups for entire industry with a huge military arm that exists to stabilize troubled regions for the business community and occasionally does pro bono genocide interventions.

This Frankenstein America monster is what the current Republic looks like and the people running it insist that this unwieldy beast, its bulky body that can hardly walk in a straight line and its deviant brain, are a massive step forward into the future. Well Dr. Frankenstein thought the same thing and whether it's the Tea Party or OWS, there are no shortage of peasants with pitchforks out there.

Our national government is essentially an insurance company attached to a bunch of national and international trade and regulatory groups. And that might be fine enough, if it actually worked. If it did work then senior citizens would never have to worry about their Social Security and local jobs would be protected against foreign competition. And when Islamists began destabilizing a country that we do business with, our Dutch East India Company with nukes would bomb them and their villages to oblivion, on a budget, before flying home for a celebratory dinner.

Beyond all the moral and political problems, there is the practical problem that the monster can't do any of these things. It performs its functions like Frankenstein trying to take a flower from a girl's hand. The flower gets crumpled and Frankenstein stomps off to smash things.

It can't handle the insurance business, because it can't control the temptation to spend all those piles of cash coming in. It can't pay out the money again, because it is determined to spend giant chunks of it on social services to people who did not pay into it. And it can't deliver any services in an efficient manner because its departments exist to employ incompetents who are bound by the rules to be even more incompetent than their actual inclinations, so that the system will be forced to hire even more incompetents on an annual basis.

As for national defense, forget about it. Frankenstein can react to threats after they happen. Mostly the military is lent out on a pro bono basis to humanitarian projects maintained by NATO, which like an international buggy whip manufacturer, exists with no purpose, and has instead decided to go into the business of preventing trendy genocides and is absolutely terrible at that as well. The whole thing is rolled into the United Nations, which is like one of those dot com companies that are supposed to be the next big thing, but never becomes the next big thing, but keeps raking in piles of money from investors while promising to one day revolutionize absolutely everything.

The big conflict with our grand corporation is conflict of interest.

First, the corporation is far more beholden to its suppliers of services than its consumers of services. This is a significant problem because it means that the cost of providing those services is constantly becoming more expensive and the corporation keeps nodding its head at the inflated product and labor figures presented by its suppliers.

Between the internal inefficiency and the unwillingness of the corporation to hold the line with its suppliers, the financials are impossible, and the corporation is currently running an annual trillion dollar deficit. It keeps raising its compulsory prices, but there is no reason to think that it can function within any conceivable budget because its boards, its executives and its suppliers simply adjusting their spending to match the available funds and then go twenty or thirty percent higher.

More money doesn't mean better or even workable government. It means the corporations and unions who are on the inside will take more money home and next year there will be an bigger deficit, because like a dumb beast, the system will eat as much as you give it. It will not stop, because there is no profit motive for the individuals running things to stop. They can only make money by spending money and they don't have to make money to spend money because they control the cash flow..

On paper, the corporation exists to provide services to customers. In practice it exists to provide wealth to its boards, its suppliers and its employees. It is a non-profit, in the worst sense of the word, because its finances are unsustainable, it keeps going only by compulsively lying to everyone it owes money to, promising debtors that they will be repaid and customers that they will be served, while its insiders stuff their pockets full of stolen money.

This state of affairs is not unprecedented among corporations. It's a familiar form of corruption being practiced on a truly epic scale.

Conflict of interest is completely natural. It is human nature for people to look after themselves and their friends first. It is also completely natural for a system to serve itself and to build its governance mechanisms in such a way that everyone on the inside gets paid and almost everyone on the outside gets screwed. It's all natural, but so is murdering your neighbor for his camels and his wife.

Governments are set up to restrain the sort of natural abuses that flow out of human nature. The American variety of it was an experiment that tossed out a ridiculously corrupt system dependent on access and birth, and replaced it with one that depended as little on government as possible. It was still corrupt from the first, because it was still human, but it was much less corrupt than all the other alternative systems to it because everyone had limited veto power over it and unlimited immunity from it in many areas.

Since then we have gone from a system that limited its own power to a system whose ideologues cry for unlimited power and spin us the wonders of universal college education and green energy that they will produce for us if only we let them do whatever the hell they want. But at least it's not one of those horrible big corporations. Then we might actually have a choice whether to do business with it or not.

According to the media, the Romney campaign is struggling to recover from a terrible week after an even worse week and the man himself has no hope of winning the election. Also according to the media, the murderers running wild in the streets belong to a religion of peace and the world is in grave imminent danger of destruction from cow farts.

The three-fold process by which the noise machine inflicts its idiocy on us works like this. First the narrative is invented, then endless streams of experts are brought in to comment on and reinforce the narrative, and finally there is a hysterical denunciation of those who reject the narrative as ignorant vermin barely worth of being clubbed on the head on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the real world, Romney is still running neck and neck with Obama among registered voters, the non-stop gaffe express exists only in the minds of the media, which manufactures stories that fit the narrative, then reports on the narrative and discusses the narrative to death until enough people confuse it with reality.

The Romney campaign is not flailing and it is not guilty of missteps; what it is, is under constant attack by a massive leftist bloc composed of think-tanks, campaign operatives and the media who then use their own attacks to manufacture a narrative of incompetence. Each attack is then called a "gaffe" and used as evidence that the campaign is flailing.

This isn't a new technique, what is the new is the complete and shameless integration of the media into the spin corps and attack poodle ranks of a political campaign so that there is hardly any difference between an anchorman, a reporter and a campaign spokesman. What is new is the level of intense coordination that allows one campaign total airtime and allows the other campaign a chance to pay for ads and be attacked all the rest of the time.

This has nothing to do with Romney, just as it had nothing to do with McCain; the same exact treatment would have been meted out to any human being who chose to run against Obama. The media's treatment of Romney is as impersonally vicious as the behavior of students when faced with a new substitute teacher. It isn't about Romney, it isn't even about Obama anymore, it's about power.

Obama is an actual failure. The only way to run a campaign against a man who has been out of public life for a bit and who has no obvious failures, is to turn his campaign into a failure, a constant failure where everything seems to be going wrong on a daily basis. The only way for the media to avoid the public's inevitable judgement on the competence of a man who has failed them economically is to make his rival seem even more incompetent.

The narrative has certain advantages. It depresses voter turnout and contributions to the Romney campaign and it makes voter fraud safer by creating the perception going into the election that Obama is bound to win. Voter fraud in Russia and Iran met with such violent protests because the results were clearly at odds with public sentiment. In the United States, Mahmoud and Vladimir's pal is making sure that his control of the media can sell him as an inevitable winner which will make truly obscene levels of voter fraud possible and plausible under the cover of universal popularity..

The larger effect of the narrative is to spread doubt and uncertainty on the Republican side as disgruntled campaign operatives pop out of the ground to agree that the Romney campaign is a disaster. That begins a circular firing squad, as campaign operatives call for a halt and begin reevaluating what they are doing wrong, sacrificing momentum and fragmenting their strategy, and then defeat becomes a self-fulling prophecy as the operatives begin preparing to shift the blame for the defeat on each other long before the defeat has actually happened.

The good news is that this does not appear to be happening in the ranks of the Romney Campaign, which is still moving steadily forward, despite the narrative. Its greatest challenge may be retaining that constancy of purpose and refusing to be affected by the constant barrage of attacks and the media's poisonous insistence on predicting doom for the campaign. This is not an atmosphere that anyone but a handful of great and charismatic speakers could begin to shift and Romney is no Reagan.

Some have advised that Romney needs to run against the media, but that would be a mistake and it would play into the great noise machine's agenda by making him seem bogged down in pettiness. It's the kind of campaign that Gingrich might have been able to run, but Romney is also no Gingrich, and such a campaign, even with a great deal of force behind it, might have proven to be self-defeating.

The truly important thing to understand about the media is that it is a distraction, a noise machine that spins constantly to block the message. It is a filter between Romney and the public. Rather than fighting the filter, it is best to ignore it as much as possible. That seems counterintuitive until you start thinking of the media as some very expensive and highly paid trolls affiliated with Obama 2012 who are in substance no different than hecklers who follow candidates around hoping to get them to slip up.

Trolls have to be ignored because their only purpose is to divert and distract you from your message. The only way to beat a troll is to starve a troll. When you engage with trolls, the trolls win because the trolls are not there to honestly debate an issue, any issue, they are there only as a diversion.What they do is amusing and rewarding for them while ending any meaningful dialogue.

The great noise machine with its countless speakers and spokesmen, its talking heads and its teleprompters, its instant updates and live-from-the-scene narratives, is only a distraction. It is there to block the issues that we should be talking about by talking about what does not matter and about what it wants us to do. The more attention is paid to it, the more, like all trolls, it is able to drive the narrative, rather than be driven by it.

The election will be decided on economic confidence, not on tax returns, race or any of the other non-stop nonsense coming out of the noise machine. The noise machine's job is to make the election about anything and everything except economic confidence. But the public confidence levels in the media are even lower than their confidence levels in politicians. The noise machine's only hope of making this work is by compelling the Romney campaign to engage with its narrative, to reply to it and to reinforce it instead of focusing on the issues that people genuinely care about.

Romney's path to winning this is to keep calm and carry on, to laugh off the media's predictions of doom and to keep talking about ObamaCare's taxes and their impact on medicine, about what the national debt will mean to our grandchildren, about how an entire generation is lost without work, about how the economy has to be regenerated by giving it some breathing room instead of trying to control it and about how it's time for a change. And he has to do it all despite every distraction that the media throws at him and there will be many more before the election is through.

The consistent message has to be that things can keep on going the way they have or they can get better and the ability to move that message to enough people will determine whether Romney wins or loses. And he will have to do that while running not against the media, but despite the media, around the media and beyond the media. He will have to talk to the people even when he's talking to the media.

This isn't easy, but what it really requires is not perfection but perseverance. Romney will make mistakes and the media will play off them. He will not make mistakes and the media will claim he did. It does not really matter what Romney does, because the media will still tell the same story anyway. And once he understands that, and perhaps he already does and has for a long time, he will feel liberated because the media will not matter anymore.

Media leverage came from its conditional coverage, but when its coverage is unconditionally hostile then what the media makes of a given thing no longer matters. A completely predictable media is also a completely boring media. It is a media that fewer and fewer people bother with anymore. The media's power is the power of a troll, the power of a noise machine, the power of being paid attention to. The more people stop paying attention to it, the more it dies.

The media can only determine the outcome of an election if you play its game and give it power. Deny its power and the game is yours to win or lose.

Responding to the Sydney Mohammed riots featuring bloodied police officers and Muslim children holding beheading signs, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, "What we saw in Sydney on the weekend wasn't multiculturalism but extremism."

Muslim extremism is multicultural. It is the essence of their approach to multiculturalism. Only through, what Gillard calls extremism, do an Egyptian, a Pakistani and a Malay have anything at all in common with one another.

Immigrants from different nations can move to a nation and accept a new national identity. Hundreds of millions of Americans and Australians are the result of such an arrangement. The immigrants can meet up at folk culture festivals where they partake of each other's national foods or they can stick to their own foods-- it doesn't make that much of a difference except for when politicians running for office gain 40 pounds eating bratwurst, pizza and bagels and drinking Guinness at campaign events.

When there is a strong national identity, either former or present, there is rarely a conflict between religious identity and national identity. Those conflicts have usually been settled in the past in some uneasy, but final way, that allows everyone to believe what they want to believe without turning that belief into the defining form of national identity. That way one can be a good Englishman without being a member of the Church of England or a good Frenchmen without being a member of the Catholic Church. Arriving at that point was not easy, but it ended the religious wars of Europe.

Muslims do not have a strong national identity. Their nations are a hodgepodge of military dictators, colonial leftovers and tribal alliances. Their societies are "multicultural" in the sense that they are composed of numerous hostile ethnic groups, tribes and families who are united only by a common religion. This unity is fragile, but it is the most common form of unity that they have and they value it far more than national identity.

To the Muslim, his nation is a fleeting thing, a historical accident by a colonial mapmaker digging up ancient names and drawing lines that cut across the lines of ethnic and tribal migrations, but his religion, though he understands very little of it, is a fine and great thing that has long preceded the nation and means far more to him than the nation does.

Even Muslims in moderate countries poll as identifying more with Islam than with a political faction or national identity. That is why what happened when Muslim democracy was unleashed on the Muslim World was completely inevitable. Muslims chose the one form of identity that they could agree on. It was an identity that excluded Christians, but democracy draws a circle around the largest number of people and outside Lebanon and Israel, those people are all Muslims.

Muslims bridge multiculturalism through religion and they do not accept any form of national identity that is not based on religious unity. That is what the Arab Spring really meant.

Syria, the big sticking point in the Arab Spring, is the place where Islamic unity was impossible because of a split between Sunnis and Shiites, leading to a religious civil war. A similar civil war has been burning in Iraq for ages, occasionally suppressed, before flaring to life again. The successes of the Arab Spring were in countries like Egypt, where Sunni Islamists could count on the support of a majority of the population.

Now when those Muslims are shipped to Europe, America, Canada or Australia, they are expected to become Englishmen, Americans or Australians. But they can't become any of those things because they were never really Pakistanis, Moroccans or Egyptians.

The Pakistani immigrant is a Muslim speaking one of Pakistan's 80 languages and belonging to one of its major ethnic groups (unless he's a descendant of the country's African slaves). The facade of his national identity are just that. On the order of things that he loves or will die for, his country ranks well below his family, his ethnic group and his religion. This does not change when he moves to the UK, especially as Britain is several steps below Pakistan in his estimation, and his estimation of that country was already rather poor.

The Muslim immigrant does not trade one national identity for another. What he does is bring along his local ethnic identity and his global religious identity, and unpacks them both in Sydney or London where he is a member of an ethnic community and a religious community. On top of that he may be an Australian, but he is an Australian in the same way that Sunnis and Shiites are Iraqis or Syrians. All that means is that he will pay taxes, fill out forms and curse the local government officials for being incompetent blockheads, instead of the ones back home. And when his religious identity is at odds with his national obligations, he will do exactly what Sunnis in Syria or Shiites in Iraq have done. He will choose religious identity over national identity.

This concept should not be a particularly foreign one to Gillard. It is likely that she feels a similar identification with fellow progressives in Europe and America, that Hassan feels for his fellow Muslims. Like Islam, progressive politics provides a shared transnational identity based on common goals for an ordered world ruled by an ideal system. Gillard may even feel a greater identification with European Socialists than with more conservative Australians.

This state of affairs is a symptom of the decline of nations. Gillard and Hassan are both consequences of post-nationalism, as are Obama and Morsi, or Hollande and Ahmed in the banlieue. These leaders pay lip service to national identity, but imagine a world without national borders and divisions. That is something they have in common with Muslims, who see nations or borders as abstract entities in the same way that their leftist enablers do.

Gillard subscribes to a post-national identity, and Hassan to a pre-national identity. This is only a technical difference that matters as much as the location of the endpoint of a circle, but in the practical sense they are members of dramatically different identity groups with their own incompatible forms of multiculturalism.

The left's post-national identity is based on a secular political multiculturalism. Islam's post-national identity is based on a religious theocratic multiculturalism. The left has heresies that it prosecutes as hate crimes and Islam has heresies that it prosecutes as blasphemy. Gillard would understand, though condemn, a riot based on some offense to gay rights or aboriginal rights, as an offense against her brand of multiculturalism. The Mohammed riots may be more understandable to her as an offense against Muslim multiculturalism.

The problem with going post-national is that it turns out to be pre-national. Destroy the national identity and you revert to the religious identity, and before you know it, you have a holy war and a theocracy on your hands.

Progressives have been always too stupid to understand that the consequences of their progressivism in undermining the current, more advanced, phase of human society is the restoration of reactionary social and political systems. In Russia, the Bolsheviks toppled an intermediary government and restored a Czar named Stalin and feudalism under the name of collectivism, to the proud cheers of the world's leftists at the progress they were making. In the Arab Spring, they brought back Islamism and they have brought it back in London and Sydney, and Paris and New York as well.

The left destroyed Western national identity and brought back the holy war, but due to Christian and Jewish secularism and Muslim immigration, instead of Catholics and Protestants fighting each other in Paris and London, it's Muslims rioting in the streets and demanding an Islamic theocracy to rule them. And why not? If rule no longer derives from the people or the nation, but panels of judges and rooms of bureaucrats, then the Islamic version is as legitimate as the Socialist version.

Western government that deny both democracy and nationalism are acting as leftist Mullahs, enforcing their beliefs on everyone else. This is their multiculturalism and it is just as backward, reactionary and corrupt as the Islamic version. And why shouldn't Muslims demand that if they are going to be ruled by a philosophy of the way things should be, then it might as well be their own? The only counterargument that can be offered to is that they are foreigners, but it is not an argument that the progressive left can make after championing immigration and the death of nations.

The West was made post-national and then filled with pre-national peoples. Those pre-national peoples are competing to carve it up into tribal fiefdoms and into a theocracy. What Muslims are doing is extremism, in the same way that advocates of a united Italy or Germany were extremist. They are trying to assemble the tribal fiefdoms into a common Muslim multicultural identity in the same way that they tried to do across the Middle East, Asia and parts of Europe.

Extremism is not the issue. Not unless Gillard were to admit that transforming Australia into a Caliphate where women and non-Muslims have no rights is moderate when done politically, but extreme when done by force. The issue, as in so many conflicts, is identity and organization.

The multicultural Muslim world has imported its own competing form of multiculturalism to Europe, Australia, America and Canada. So far its multiculturalism appears to be more potent than the local secular variety because despite being a third-rate bastardized version of Christianity and Judaism, with some tribal customs and pagan elements mixed in, it's still more vital than the thin gruel that the progressives feed their people to keep them occupied while they dig deeper into positions of power.

Most people, Muslim or non-Muslim, do not find an identity based on celebrating every possible identity particularly meaningful or rewarding. Western multiculturalism is a tourist identity that has no content of its own. It is self-nullifying void, the jaded palate of a decadent society constantly searching for novel experiences and exotic flavors. The native elites find touring cultures and sexual identities to be a rewarding experience, but the immigrants are not so bored and jaded, so decadent and comfortable, that they want to play tourist. What they want is a multiculturalism that is based on one similarity and Islam gives them that.

The West can return to national identity or it can fight a holy war between Islamist Multiculturalism and Progressive Multiculturalism. What it cannot do is avoid the conflict. That is a lesson that Gillard and all the Gillards of the West still haven't learned and by the time they do realize it, it may be too late.