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Friday, May 31, 2013

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Pinch of Salt

By On May 31, 2013


A PINCH OF SALT

There are reports that Mayor Bloomberg received letters that tested positive for Ricin. I'm sure his butler and his butler's butler and his butler's butler's assistant are all very worried about their health.

Not Bloomberg though who is immune to Ricin, the Ebola virus, cholera, nerve gas, u-238, foxglove, typhoid fever and a plague of rabid bats.

Sending Bloomberg barrels of Ricin is absolutely useless. But farmers out on Staten Island say that putting a pinch of salt in front of their doorsteps will keep him away for a week. The salt has to be replaced every time it rains and they say that sea salt works best. Bloomberg hasn't shown his face there in a while so the salt is probably doing its job.

Reports that Bloomberg can be kept away by wearing cloves of garlic are untrue. Bloomberg can stand exposure to garlic and sunlight. However anything with a lot of calories will send him fleeing into the night. If you walk down the street wearing a string of ketchup packets around your neck, no Bloomberg can harm you. If you light up a cigarette while doing it and swig from an open bottle of liquor, you can hear his thin keening cries of pain drifting up or down all the way from 77th Street.

If you find yourself being chased by Bloomberg late at night, instead of trying to run, bend down and erase a bicycle lane. Bloomberg will compulsively redraw it, leaving you free to enjoy your evening.

You can also distract Bloomberg by picking up a soda can and exclaiming, "I bet this is good for me."

If you find yourself backed into a corner, grab a restaurant menu without any calorie information next to the servings and recite over and over again, "It's only a tiny little steak. How many calories could it have." If you truly believe it, then Bloomberg will vanish in a puff of smoke and be reborn as an ashtray.

Other charms and unguents efficacious for deterring Bloomberg include, NRA decals, a dash of water from the Gowanus canal, cars that aren't energy efficient, two ostrich feathers tied together, a photo of Rudy Giuliani, a rare Madagascar blue chicken born at midnight and the United States Constitution.

If your demesne is haunted by Bloomberg, try and lure him into a private jet with a trail of urban reform studies, fly him to Shanghai and hope he adapts to his native habitat in the Communist Party. 




THE FLOWERS OF COPLEY SQUARE

 On John Wilson Street, the flowers lie thick. Men and women walk by leaving bouquets and cards. If not for the balloons and teddy bears with British flags on them, it might be Copley Square near the finish line of the Boston Marathon where the same bouquets lie limply against steel barriers. But there the teddy bears and balloons wear the stars and stripes.

In the middle of May, Prime Minister David Cameron was at Copley Square saying that we will never give in to the terrorists while praising the values of diversity and then two weeks later he was outside 10 Downing Street declaring that we will never give in to the terrorists and praising Islam. The places had changed but the script hadn’t.

Listen long enough and you realize that every politician is working from the same script.

A Memorial Day for Islamic Terror




THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

The trip cost a mere $42.8 million, which would have been enough to feed a sizable chunk of Africa, and featured an entourage that would have shamed Alexander the Great or Jay-Z. It took 1,300 people to make Clinton’s Great African Getaway possible including 205 personnel from the Office of the President, 60 from the State Department, 9 from the Department of Transportation and 1 from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Somehow Fish and Wildlife stayed at home.

In Uganda, Clinton made history by apologizing for the slave trade. Uganda, however, was in East Africa and no slaves had gone to America from there. It was a case of, “I did not engage in slave trade with that part of the continent.”

None of the 1,300 people involved in the Great Apology Safari had bothered to research where the slaves came from because it didn’t matter. Bill Clinton was using Africa as a morality prop, the way that liberals so often use black people as props in their morality plays. In the little picture, he might be immoral for cheating on his wife, but in the big picture he was morally superior because he apologized for slavery.

The Great Race Card Getaway




THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SENATOR AND A BOILED CABBAGE

Senator McCain claimed, “We can identify who these people are. We can help the right people.” And who does he think the right people are?

McCain said he was escorted during his visit on Monday by General Salem Idris, leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, and that he had a long meeting with Idris and a group of his battalion commanders.

Salem Idris, whom he just met with, is on the record as defending the Al Nusra Front. “They are not terrorists,” he said of the Nusra Front.

McCain Knows Less About the Syrian Civil War than You Do





KENTUCKY DEMOCRATS CONTEMPLATE GIVING UP ON THE SENATE THING

Three years after becoming Miss America and marrying the Lt. Governor, Heather French Henry while driving her Lincoln Navigator SUV struck and killed a mother of four riding a bicycle, Karola Stede. Heather French Henry wasn’t injured. Stede’s youngest child was 8.

And that might have been that. Fatal accidents happen all the time. The creepy part came when Heather French Henry, not satisfied with having killed a woman, used her corpse to promote herself by going on Oprah to talk about how badly running over a woman made her feel.

Afterward Heather French Henry became an AAA spokesman, since I guess running someone over qualifies you for the job, and now wants a spot in the United States Senate.

Kentucky Dems to Replace Ashley Judd with Miss America Murderer




KEEPING THE RELIGION OF PEACE

After two Muslim terrorists beheading a British soldier in London, cops arrested an 85-year-old woman for shouting “Go back to your own country” at mosquegoers. Not only did they arrest her, but they even handcuffed her.

Now the police division has responded to criticism of their outrageous behavior with a defensive email, stating, “I am disappointed to read your views of the police response to the tragic event in Woolwich… our officers are trained to respond to any incident they are called to and regularly put themselves at risk to protect the public and keep the peace.”

UK Cops Explain Why they Handcuffed 85-Year-Old British Woman for Offending Muslims




ONE LAND, TWO LAWS

The sponsor of the event is the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee. Special speaker for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee who will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

Killian said Internet postings that violate civil rights are subject to federal jurisdiction. “That’s what everybody needs to understand,” he said.

Tellingly there are never any threats to prosecute Muslims for blatant incitement to violence. The Tsarnaev Boston bombers never had to worry that their enthusiasm for Al Qaeda would land them in front of a Federal judge.

Just as in the UK, the people being seized for incitement, including an 85-year-old British woman who shouted “Go back to your country” at Muslims near a mosque, are British, not Muslim.

The London beheaders never had to worry about being locked up for shouting their venom at rally after rally. It’s only the EDL that’s a threat to the nation.

Federal Prosecutor Warns Anti-Muslim Internet Postings are Subject to Federal Jurisdiction




HE REALLY DOES CARE

You know there are people out there who think that Obama doesn’t care. But that’s not true. Sure Obama doesn’t care whether Americans have jobs or whether Iran gets a nuke.

But Obama does care if Iranians don’t have the latest iPhone.

Obama Loosens Iran Sanctions so Ahmadinejad Can Buy an iPhone




A TRUE PARTNERSHIP

Hussein Fayyad, one of the commanders of the terror group that carried out the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, revealed on Tuesday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had appointed him as one of his advisers.

The attack, which led to the killing of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, was planned and carried out by Abbas’s Fatah faction.

The coastal massacre began with the murder of an American photographer, Gail Rubin. One of the youngest victims was Ilan Hochman, a 3-year-old boy.

Ilan died along with his older brother, 6-year-old Roi and his mother, Rebecca Hochman. Their father lost his legs trying to stop the terrorists on the bus.

The dead included a 2-year-old girl, five year olds and six year olds. They also included Mathilda Askenazy-Daniel, a 68-year-old woman who died in the hospital after being burned over 90 percent of her body.

Obama said that Israel has a “true partner” in President Abbas.

Murderer of 13 Children Appointed Top Adviser to Palestinian Authority President




THE DEVIL WANTS HIS JURY BACK

Hillary Clinton’s new SuperPAC, created while she transitions to “private life” is called Ready for Hillary. That’s supposed to be a nod to two terms of Obama during which the country was ready for a corrupt junior senator with a history of cocaine abuse, but not for Bill Clinton’s wife.

So who is Ready for Hillary anyway?

Susie Tompkins Buell was a sweatshop owner and radical environmentalist. And then there’s Steve Mostyn, a Texas lawyer who cashes in on storm victims, who is also the man behind the Giffords anti-gun campaign.

Hillary SuperPAC Headed by Radical Environmentalist Sweatshop Owner and Hurricane Chasing Giffords Lawyer




CREEPING UP ON YOU

The Forward has spent years frenziedly attacking Orthodox Jews. But now, in its latest issue, Jay Michaelson gets to the point warning of “The Creeping Jewish Fundamentalism in Our Midst.”

“American Jews are actively supporting a demographic trend that threatens the fabric of American Jewish life,” Jay Michaelson writes, apparently going through some kind of rehearsal for a production of Philip Roth’s Eli the Fanatic.

Orthodox Jews are also American Jews. Or perhaps they’re Unamerican Jews? Lefties may mock Dr. Strangelove, but they quickly end up sounding like him when confronting the threat of the creeping Jewish fundamentalist, creeping now down your chimney.

The Forward Warns of the Great Jewish Threat




HITLER IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN GEORGIA

Alice Walker is a really overrated writer. But she’s overrated in all the right circles. Those are the same circles which consider David Icke, a loon who claims that we’re ruled over by space aliens and that we’re living in a hologram which is controlled from an inter-dimensional portal on the moon.

What attracts her to this idea that some people are not really human?

"Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X... What I was remembering was how he called our oppressors “blue eyed devils.” Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke’s book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet."

Walker gives it away by comparing David Icke to Malcolm X. Malcolm X was originally a member of the Nation of Islam, which believes that white people were artificially created and are inherently evil. 

Alice Walker Claims Planet is Controlled by “Blue-Eyed” Reptilian Space Aliens on the Moon




AND ALSO PARTS OF DETROIT

You can sympathize with John Conyers, the longest serving member of the House of Representatives and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who came to hear some inspirational words of wisdom from notoriously inspiring figure Louis Farrakhan, only to discover,  a week later, to his shock and surprise, that the speech he was approvingly nodding to was really racist.

But it’s only natural that Congressman John Conyers would be utterly shocked that Louis Farrakhan would say horrible bigoted things in an appearance that was preceded by him saying on the radio of white people, “Genetically, you are inferior. … We can wipe you off the Earth just cohabiting with you and that’s why your population is going down.”

Congressional Black Caucus Member Shocked to Discover Farrakhan Speech He Was Nodding to was Anti-Semitic and Racist




CLASSROOM, ATE, WOLVES

The Globe and Mail conducts an interview with UKIP’s Nigel Farage as if it can’t quite believe that a man who opposed wolves, still opposes wolves… even after wolves mauled an entire classroom full of children.

“Yes, but you still oppose wolves?”

“Yes.”

“Even after all the children that the wolves ate?”

“Especially.”

“But why?”

“Because wolves… children… classroom… ate.”

From the tone of the interview, you would think that a Muslim immigrant had just cured cancer, instead of two second-generation immigrants who converted to Islam hacking a British soldier to death in broad daylight.

Media Baffled that Anti-Immigration UK Party is Still Anti-Immigration Despite London Murder




MUHAMMAD IBN BATES PBUH

Psycho is the great-grandfather of scores of copycat films of diminishing quality over the decades. It presents Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who runs an out-of-the-way motel and apparently has little contact with the outside world. His alternate persona is governed by his dead mother. "She" comes to life when temptation crosses his path. The voyeuristic sight of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in semi-undress in one of his motel rooms triggers in Norman an urge to kill and eliminate the temptation. A cross-dressed Bates stabs her to death in the shower, then disposes of her body and car in a neighboring swamp. A detective, Arbogast (Martin Balsam), investigating Crane's disappearance is also murdered by Bates-as-Mother, to protect Norman from the consequences of his actions.

The parallels with Islam here are fairly obvious. The Bates Motel is Islamic culture. Islam is Norman Bates who is compelled to kill whatever doesn’t comport with Islam's death-worshipping doctrine (because Allah commands it). Marion Crane is the temptation, the uncovered infidel female. Detective Arbogast is the truth-seeker and truth-teller who criticizes Islam. Call him Salman Rushdie or Kurt Westergaard or Geert Wilders. Or filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was actually stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004.

Islam fosters a special kind of mental illness that can lay latent and fester in any Muslim until it erupts in criminally insane behavior. Like Norman Bates, who on the outside is a nice, congenial, harmless guy, the average Muslim is someone you can't really know.

From Edward Cline's Islam on My Mind. Edward also has a pamphlet on Islam from Voltaire Press coming out this month.




THE DEATH OF COMMON SENSE

Stuart Brown has described younger engineers at advanced research facilities who are "good at filling in bubbles" but don't seem to be able to make a machine work. Senior engineers lament that the next generation overvalues its high test scores and undervalues the things that get the job done. Fine arts teachers tailor assignments to students who want to express simpler ideas with easier tools rather than acquire more open-ended and sophisticated skills.

College instructors in general find they assign less work in both quantity and difficulty than a generation ago, and students do a poorer job on it. If they're getting smarter, why don't they seem smart?

Flynn himself, and other scholars, now think that the first mystery -- higher scores for less capable people -- might actually explain the second mystery of why the Flynn Effect happens. Flynn argues that IQ tests favor abstract categorization over practical application, and that the world has come to rely on abstraction more and application less. For example, if an IQ test asks, "What do dogs have in common with rabbits?" answering with, "They are both animals" will score higher than, "People use dogs to hunt rabbits." Flynn points out that this favors minds that categorize reality over those who work with it.

Flynn's hypothesis fits well with the common perception that academically proficient people can lack common sense.

That's from an article by John Barnes.I do question his conclusion however that gamification can reverse the trend. Isn't gamification basically a more ADD friendly form of test taking in which an abstract set of rules is mastered, rather than finding real world solutions to problems through experience?




REALITY HAS A NOTORIOUS CONSERVATIVE BIAS

Those who were able to stay awake during this confusing, meandering mess were rewarded by a confirmation of what we have known all along. Let me state it simply. Liberals still just don’t get it. They don’t understand the difference between 9/11, as in an existential war against an extremely determined enemy with millions of lunatics willing to die for the cause, and 7/11, as in using law enforcement to find and punish the perp who knocked over the convenience market. Whether it’s Eric “I Recused Myself in My Mind But It Still Counts” Holder, who wanted to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York City court room, or Barack Hussein Obama himself choosing to treat Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a criminal rather than an enemy combatant, the dangerous and naîve mentality is the same.

We’ve tried this approach before, during the 1990’s. Six people were murdered in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The mastermind and ring leader of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison plus 240 years in January 1998, just 7 months before Islamic fanatics would set off bombs at our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We were at war. We just didn’t know it. Eventually, reality would smack us out of our blissful ignorance when two huge airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth in a Pennsylvania field.

From Teri O'Brien... Not 9/11. 7/11. The Obama Administration Still Doesn’t Get It. We Are at War.




J.E. Dyer of the Optimistic Conservative will be appearing at a Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors event in LA.

Critical G who does readings of some of my articles is auctioning off readings of choice on eBay

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna discusses what he does and why he does it




ONE COUNTRY, TWO STANDARDS

A rich, liberal Democrat in favor of more taxation has bought yet another Virginia newspaper, but we’re not hearing anyone complain about how his opinions are going to change the face of journalism in Virginia. Why is that, I wonder? Oh, that’s right. Because he’s a liberal. That’s an acceptable bias, unlike being a conservative.

Buffett has said he will not try to influence editorial policies at the newspapers the company owns. Kroeger, the BH Media CEO, reiterated that message on Thursday.

“We value independently run newspapers,” he said. “Content decisions and editorial decisions are made locally.”

Mm-hm.

via Meryl Yourish's Friday briefs




THE WHITE FLAG OF THE SOUL

To have even a hundredth of those cemeteries in the United States now would be more than we, as a nation, could bear. It would not be so much the dead within it, but the truth that made it happen that would be unbearable. This is, of course, what we are as a nation fiddling about with on this Memorial Day. We count our war dead daily now, but we count mostly on the fingers of one hand, at times on two. Never in numbers now beyond our ability to imagine. This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a "tragic" exception that need not have happened and will -- most likely -- never happen again.

That, at least, is the mind set that I assume when I read how the "War on Terror" is but a bumper strip. In a way, that's preferable to the the mind set that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this "explanation" is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.

Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag -- unlike their souls -- is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation.

That's a great essay on Memorial Day and its implications at American Digest.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Death of a Naked Liberal

By On May 29, 2013
In 2010, Newsweek was sold for a dollar and it has been devalued since. Its corporate owners have called buying it a mistake and a fool's errand. Around the same time last year, Newsweek marked a major milestone. The loss of 2.5 million readers in ten years. Since then it lost another million leaving it with about the reading population of a small city.

Meanwhile MSNBC isn't doing any better. It lost a fifth of its viewers since last year and it still can't decide if it's a network of angry idiots screaming at the camera (Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O'Donnell) or snide aging college kids making wisecracks about Republicans (Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes). Neither format is working all that well and at this rate MSNBC may want to look into bringing Keith Olbermann, who combines both demographics, back for another run.

Newsweek and MSNBC will both attribute their bleeding readership and viewership to the internet, but that doesn't explain why they're both doing badly there as well. MSNBC was caught hiring bots pretending to be young women to pump up hashtags for its hosts and Newsweek's fusion with the Daily Beast didn't save it either. Its final print issue carried a hashtag implying that the web had done it in, but the internet wasn't to blame.

Neither do Newsweek and MSNBC suffer from a surplus of class. Newsweek's desperate covers last year amounted to a formerly respected magazine descending into outright trolling. It was no longer possible to tell the difference between Newsweek covers and Newsweek parody covers. And certainly Tina Brown has never been accused of a surplus of restraint and good taste. On the MSNBC front, no news network which includes Al Sharpton trying to read from a teleprompter can be accused of betting on class.

MSNBC tried to be FOX News for liberals and Newsweek tried to be the Huffington Post with a print edition. They didn't outright fail at the job, but they couldn't succeed well enough either.

The dirty little secret of liberal media is that it doesn't work. Outlets that identify explicitly as liberal usually play to a very marginal audience. Mother Jones begs money from its readers in the same obnoxious way as PBS. NPR relies on donors. The New Republic is flailing. Liberal mags that succeed do it by focusing on a topic that overlaps with a liberal target audience and embeds their articles there.

It works for magazines like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker. Online sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed succeed by filling themselves with so much trash that the politics becomes a sideline. The liberal brand is fine when it's stuffed into culture, elitist or trashy. It doesn't however stand on its own two feet. It can't, because it has no real appeal.

Liberalism remains marginal. Gallup polls invariably show forty percent of Americans describing themselves as conservative and twenty percent or less identifying as liberal. Liberals dumped the liberal brand after conservatives effectively destroyed it back in the Reagan era. They emphasize policies and rhetoric over political identification because a liberal political identity is toxic.

The cultural dominance of the left did not come about because a majority of Americans knowingly identify with it, but because the left has succeeded in breaking up its agendas into tinier and tinier pieces and making them part of the national dialogue using seemingly agnostic media channels. These stealth tactics have been successful because they eschewed open identification. Liberal media doesn't work when it's transparently liberal. That's why even liberals mock NPR's news coverage.

Liberal media influence works when it isn't identified as such. And when it is identified as such then eighty percent of the country switches the channel and cancels its subscription. And then liberals realize that they are preaching to the choir and dump the whole thing as a bad business. MSNBC's overt identification with a liberal agenda allowed viewers to see how little of a difference there was between a liberal news channel and the "objective" mainstream news media.

MSNBC exposed millions of people to what actual media liberals sound like when they take off their disguises and begin talking about their agenda. It allowed a level of honesty that was rare in a media landscape where stealth liberalism is delivered using biased reporting that advocates for an agenda while claiming that there is no advocacy or agenda, only common sense solutions to problems that will never be repeated again.

It's the agenda that has always been the issue. What conservatives understand and most of the country does not, is that the issues being debated are not singular events. It's not just about an individual tax hike or gay marriage or background checks for gun owners. It's about a larger agenda being put into place piece by piece. And that agenda is the ultimate taboo topic. It's the thing we aren't supposed to talk about.

Watch a media report on any issue and there is never any identification or agenda to the left. Liberal activists are just activists. Often they are described as mothers or grandmothers. They don't have a larger plan. They would just like us to ban something dangerous, raise taxes, protect our oceans and make the country more equal. There is no policy platform. No larger set of demands hiding behind the ones being made right now. And most of the country accepts this deceptive coverage at face value.

MSNBC however churned out naked liberalism. It showed career radicals like Melissa Harris-Perry discoursing on just what the agenda is. And that's fine for Mother Jones, but it isn't something that liberals like to see out in the open. And it's not something that even many of them want to spend too much time thinking about because understanding what they have truly climbed on board with can be a troubling and alienating experience.

Naked liberalism makes even liberals uncomfortable. It's why they get uncomfortable hearing the self-righteous voices on NPR. It's too much like looking into a mirror and the things in the mirror are surprisingly unsettling. Hearing a Keith Olbermann or Jon Stewart tear into Republicans was one thing. Opposition is always safe ground. It's when the talk begins to turn to what you stand for that things begin to fall apart.

Newsweek and MSNBC had made the mistake of going "Full Liberal" and not only is there a much smaller liberal audience, but that audience doesn't really like naked liberalism. It would rather see its agenda dressed up in mainstream colors than see it for what it really is. It may occasionally dive into the partisan pool, but then it gets out again.

Conservative media outlets exist as alternatives to a dishonestly liberal media establishment. But what can liberal media outlets exist as alternatives to? All they can do is speak openly about the agenda that their big brothers choose to pass off as mainstream activism and when you already control the dialogue, there's not much of a percentage in sudden bouts of honesty.

The liberal agenda relies on manipulation and deception. It can sell quite well so long as no one knows what they're buying. But label the product with the liberal brand and it stays on the shelves. New media bastions of liberalism camouflage themselves with trash. They talk politics without letting on that they're talking about politics because that admission is the death knell of everything.

Liberalism's disproportionate influence depends on not being identified for what it is. That is why it is so panicked by right wing talk show hosts, not because of their rhetoric, but because they identify a clear political struggle between two political agendas and categorize both sides. And that forces the recognition that there are two sides, disrupting the illusion of anchormen and editors as objective observers and narrators of America.

What media liberals fear most isn't the right, it's being exposed as the left. It's not so much what FOX News says, as its very existence that is threatening, because once viewers become aware that FOX represents the right, then, even if they don't agree with it, they have to come around to the conclusion that there is another side and that the media embodies that other side.

Liberalism is marginal, as is MSNBC's audience. Media outlets like Newsweek and MSNBC that go full liberal die. And that lesson has terrible implications for liberal power as a whole.

A Republican Party That Looks Like America

By On May 29, 2013
Getting an early start on primary season, Rand Paul stopped by New Hampshire and offered some sage advice for winning elections.  According to the article, "Senator Paul Rand urged New Hampshire Republicans to become more diversified."

New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don't know the exact diversity
statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will probably have covered all the statistical bases. 

"We need to grow bigger," Rand Paul said. "If you want to be the party of white people, we're winning all the white votes. We're a diverse nation. We're going to win when we look like America."

Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like California. And despite that, Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire in the last election. 

Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn't the black vote that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly, despite Rand Paul's optimism, Republicans aren't winning all the white votes in New Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.

Rand Paul's Kentucky looks a lot like New Hampshire. It's 88.9% white. And its white Senator, who did not win all the white votes, decided to visit another white state to tell Republicans there that they needed to look more like America or California. Or someplace like that. Because the white vote was all locked down.

In his 2010 Senate election, Rand Paul won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 86% of the black vote. Two years later, in the national election Romney won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 93% of the black vote. Both men scored the exact same percentage of the white vote.

Some might try to find a silver lining in that Rand Paul won 13 percent of the black vote, but he wasn't running against a black candidate. In 2004, Bush won 12 percent of the Kentucky black vote. Nearly the same amount as Rand Paul. More importantly, he won 64 percent of the white vote and 58 percent of the female vote to Rand Paul's 51 percent. The female vote is far more important, if you're going to win elections, than picking up minority votes in New Hampshire or Kentucky.

While Rand Paul tours as some sort of expert on winning the minority vote, he has never actually won the minority vote. Similarly Rubio promises that illegal alien amnesty will turn the Latino tide for the GOP, when he could not win a straight majority of the non-Cuban Latino vote in his Senate election.

The Republican Party is suffering from a surplus of self-appointed experts in winning the minority vote who don't actually win the minority vote. Their advice is stupid and destructive.

Romney did not lose because he lost the Latino vote. That's a myth which has been discredited again and again, but still rises from the dead to push for an illegal alien amnesty, five times bigger than the last disastrous 1986 amnesty, so that next time around Republicans can lose by even bigger margins. But instead of trying to be diverse for the sake of diversity, the GOP might try doing what the other side did, increasing the turnout for its base by actually appealing to them.

The Republican National Convention in 2012 was a study in diversity. It was possibly even more diverse than the Democratic National Convention. It also didn't work.

Diversity is familiar enough to be met with casual contempt. Every company trots out stock photos overflowing with stock minorities so that they can look like America or some part of America. It impresses absolutely no one. "Looking like America" is slang for racial tokenism which is both patronizing and insulting. And it's the least innovative advice that could be imagined.

Common skin color alone does not win elections. If it did, the Republican Party could just push out countless white Democrats in precarious districts by running black candidates against them. The idea that skin color alone is representation is still the law and its emotional resonance is sometimes undeniable, but emotional identification is also based on more than just race. And representation cannot be reduced to racial diversity as a winning strategy.

The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That tops the Democratic Party in the "Looking like California" metrics but doesn't move the political numbers forward.

“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul  said. “We need to look more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to appeal to all segments of the country.”

Let's assume that the Republican Party gets people with hair of all sizes, what then? Talking about appealing to the working class is nice, but Rand Paul lost the under $30,000 vote. He tied for the $30,000 to $49,000 vote. He only broke out with the above $50,000 voters. That was the same thing that happened to Romney. And unlike Romney, race couldn't be blamed for those results. Not when Bush decisively won those same voters in Kentucky in 2004.

Politics does run on reciting truisms, but that only works for winning elections, not for election strategies. Election strategies, unlike elections, require actual solutions. Realistic solutions don't depend on making a play for voters that you rarely get. They depend on shoring up your numbers with the voters that you can get.

In 2004, Bush tied Kerry among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. McCain had lost them by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama's biggest margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median household income is $41,962. That's well below the median household income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.

In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can't win the Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America, by margins almost as bad as the ones that they hope to win the Latino vote by.

Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.

Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low- income white voters. In 2011, Republicans had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012 election is what happened to those numbers?

The amnesty sellout is not really about winning elections. Its odds of accomplishing like that are nil. It's about a larger divide between Nationalist Republicans who believe in America as a country and Transnational Republicans who believe in America as a set of economic and political principles that can be applied equally well anywhere in the world.

The Transnational Republicans backed the Arab Spring because they believed democracy could work anywhere, because it worked here. They support open borders, because they believe that economic freedom, like political freedom, can turn any population into Americans. Americans being defined solely by the ability to sell things without government regulation.

Transnational Republicans are a disaster because they don't really accept the concept of American Exceptionalism. Their foreign policy is a disaster because they think that every country will be better if it runs by American rules. Their domestic policy is a disaster because they believe that the entire world would be American if it just got a chance to move to America.

Transnationalists of the left and the right don't view America as a country, but as a political experiment. The American system may be an experiment, but the country isn't. And confusing the two is destructive and dangerous.

Republican Transnationalists keep trying to marry fiscal conservatism with liberalism on most other fronts, sometimes even including foreign policy. Their liberal social policy prescriptions make the country more liberal, even as their fiscal conservatism alienates those same voters. Amnesty is a perfect example of this stupidity in action, legalizing voters in the name of diversity who will reject them on economic grounds.

The TR's might be defensible if their liberal social policies at least won over voters. They don't. Instead they give us the worst of both worlds. Liberal and Transnational Republicans keep insisting that we should do a better job of reaching out to non-traditional voters. But they never succeed in actually doing it. Instead they blame the "radicalism" of the Republican Party for their failures.

The Republican Party does not need to "look like America." That's a Transnational Republican charade. It needs to actually look at America and start trying to relate to the voters that it used to have. And if it can do that, if it can actually find common ground with low-income voters, then it will find that it has increased its share among minority voters as well. It worked for Reagan. It might just work in 2016.

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Israeli Man's Burden

By On May 27, 2013
New York Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem are expected to set new standards for malicious bias and during his time there, Ethan Bronner was no exception.

A bureau chief anywhere else in the world may be expected to explore the life and color of the city. But in Jerusalem, a New York Times scribe fills the same spot as the bitter goth kid working on the high school paper who is forced to review musicals put on by cheerleaders. What comes out the other end may have a distant resemblance to journalism, but is mostly just gallons of congealed bile.

Ethan Bronner, who has moved up the New York Times totem pole from attacking Israel to attacking America, still visits the old country on occasion and still pens spiteful little pieces about how dumb and shallow the cheerleaders are. The latest Bronner missive sees him attending a wedding and grumbling at how happy everyone seems to be.

At a "raucous wedding", Bronner finds that few people are interested in discussing "the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders". Instead, "everyone was celebrating". And why wouldn't they be celebrating? It is a wedding. And people at weddings generally don't talk about the people trying to kill them. Average weddings in the United States don't involve detailed discussions of terrorism, even when New York Times reporters are in attendance.

But Bronner's thesis is the same as the one put forward by John Kerry. "People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity,” Kerry complained. Israelis are having too many weddings and not suffering enough. The limited autonomy achieved in daily life what the peace process was supposed to.

It's not just about the physical suffering of terrorism. What bothers Bronner is that Israelis aren't conscious of the grievances of their enemies. They don't carry the burden of guilt that comes from knowing that their border controls prevent Hamas from getting the weapons with which they could inflict more death and suffering on Israelis.

The peace process is a myth because its end result was never meant to be peace. Instead it was meant to achieve exactly what it did achieve in the 90s. A state of terror. A way of life that would make every Israeli conscious of the terrorists and their demands all the time. That's not just their plan for Israel. It's their dream for the entire free world. A world liberated from its freedoms.

The left does not set out to solve social problems, but to induce a state of permanent crisis in order to impose a permanent state of insecurity and guilt on the populace. Its solutions always make problems worse because the left views violence as not the problem, but a symptom of the true problem, which is the oppression of the violent by their victims. 

The negotiations and concessions were not supposed to bring peace. They were supposed to make Israelis suffer. And through this ritualistic suffering, the descendants of Holocaust survivors would finally understand their burden of guilt to the descendants of the conquerors who had repressed them and ruled over their land for centuries.

Terrorism is meant to destroy morale. To break down the sense of stability and order on which every system depends and replace it with uncertainty. And that uncertainty makes people doubt their own rights and more easily accept the arguments of their enemies. Like violent interrogations, the process of terror breaks down the morale of the prisoner and makes him more willing to concede the premises of his captor until he finally learns to love Big Brother. Until the victim of terrorism becomes a supporter of terrorism recognizing that he is the one who is guilty, not the terrorists.

The peace process was working when Israelis were dying. And the bar was being moved further down. It stopped working when Israelis stopped dying.

Supporters of the terrorist cause, whether at the New York Times or the State Department, don't want to see happy Israelis. They want to see frightened Israelis, sobbing Israelis, confused Israelis and hysterical Israelis. They will even settle for angry Israelis. But the last thing they want to see is Israelis who seem indifferent to the torture being inflicted on them.

Israelis are by no means as safe and secure as Kerry pretends or as aimlessly cheerful as Bronner describes them, but neither are they the broken shells that they were supposed to be after decades of terror and appeasement. Israelis have taken a beating, but they haven't been beaten.

What infuriates New York Times reporters and State Department trolls alike is that Israelis can go for hours and even days without contemplating the tortures prepared for them. Not only are they not struggling with the question of whether to love or hate Big Terror, they can sing and dance as if Big Terror isn't even in the room. They commit the worst crime that the left can imagine. They disregard it. They escape it. And the only people who fear political escapes are the political jailers of the left.

The left's Oceanian utopias, its inhuman animal farms, depend on indoctrinating total consciousness. If you aren't outraged, then you aren't paying attention. If you aren't part of the problem, then you're part of the solution. If you aren't doing either one, you're exercising white privilege. And it is telling that to the left, the unawareness of its agenda is privilege. If you're one of those people dancing at that wedding under the "glistening chandeliers" and "sky-high ceilings", then your lack of awareness of the plight of everyone who isn't at that wedding is privilege and makes you part of the problem.

The Israeli man is not supposed to be dancing to music until dawn as if he were in a middle-eastern flavored production of Fiddler on the Roof. He is supposed to be weighed down by the burden of all the people he is oppressing. He has no native right to be happy. Having his own country should crush him to the floor with guilt. He should be wearing a red t-shirt and marching around denouncing the government for not doing something, anything, to convince the terrorists to come to the negotiating table. Instead he's dancing all night.

Fear is the gateway to guilt as Stockholm Syndrome devotees know. To induce the guilt that the left craves, there must be fear. A sense of insecurity. A gnawing worry. Without fear, there is no punishment. Without punishment, there is no purpose to progressivism which exists to take property, land and life from one and give it to the other and put things in order the way "they ought to be".

Men and women dancing lightly on their feet have light consciences. They aren't weighed down by all the guilt they ought to be feeling. Instead they are happy and free.

Terrorism was supposed to be the punishment that Israelis needed to experience in order to destroy their sense of rightness. Just as it is meant to fulfill that same role for Americans and Brits and many of the other nations of the First World.

In the calculus of the left, terrorism isn't just violence, it's righteous violence. The more horrific it is, the more it upends your understanding of how the world is supposed to work. The moral order, the code that you grew up with says you that don't plant bombs next to 8-year-olds gets blown away and you are left to either conclude that your enemies are monsters or that they are paying you back for something even worse that you did to them. They are not the ones murdering 8-year-olds. You are.

Faced with someone else's inhumanity, you are told to assert your own. To reach for the moral high ground. To try and understand why this is happening so that you can try to be better than those who did it, only to learn that you are actually much worse.

And it's not that some Israelis haven't caught the disease. It's not that parents of terror victims haven't met with the parents of suicide bombers to understand their pain. It's not that Israeli leaders haven't said that they might have been terrorists if they had been born on the other side. All the sycophantic appeasement and moral degradation is there, but it also goes in one ear and out the other.

Israelis are an impatient people. They have less appetite for endless degradation with no way out.
And that is what the Peace Process was. It would be nice to say that Israelis have seen through it. Mostly they've seen through it about as well as Europeans have seen through immigration or Americans have seen through the politics of racial division. The common sense awareness is there, but it hasn't percolated into widespread political awareness of what's wrong. Instead there is an impatience with the dead letter office of peace where treaties go and never come back.

The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden because they know it's a lie. They were there in '67 when they had to fight, not because of the so-called occupation, but because they were under siege. They were there in '48 when the Jews were ethnically cleansed from East Jerusalem by the invading armies that have kept on claiming that their act of ethnic cleansing made that part of the city theirs.

The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden of guilt for the actions of their enemies. Instead they have chosen to dance.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Savages of Stockholm

By On May 26, 2013
Europe has many fine traditions. Its newest tradition is the burning car. Why burn cars? Because, as George Mallory once said of mountains, they're there. There are lots of cars around and if you're a member of a perpetually unemployed tribe that wandered up north and forages on social services, you might as well do something to pass the time.

Burning houses is a lot of work and house fires spread. Car fires are simpler. In a welfare state
everyone has houses but not everyone has cars. Burning cars is a way to stick it to those who work for a living. It's also a way to drive off the members of the sickly Swedish tribe and claim the area for your own. And it's also fun.

Either you have a plan for buying a car or for burning a car. Considering the Muslim unemployment rates in Sweden, France and everywhere else, it's safe to say the car burners don't have future plans that involve saving up for a car or taking out a loan for a car or finding work. Cars are things that they steal, either the usual way or by defrauding social services. They might get a car by dealing drugs, but those cars are disposable. One day they'll have to burn them anyway.

If you're the product of an industrialized culture, then you think of a car as a product of work. You realize that it's the product of countless raw materials, that the metals had to be dug out of the earth, that the machines that make it had to be assembled and that men had to stand around putting that into place. And you might be one of those men. And if you aren't, then you might know someone who is.

But if you come from a pre-industrial culture which may have factories, PhDs and cars, but no sense of the connection between product, innovation and effort, then why not burn a car or a city? Things fall into the category of that which you and your family own... and that which they do not. Anything in the latter category may be stolen or vandalized because it has no value.

The notion of a painting in a museum or a scientific principle or an eagle soaring over a lake having value is an abstract notion to you. Value to you is your own identity. A painting is valuable if you own it. If it sits in a museum, then you can either steal it or burn down the museum. The principle is worthless unless you can cash in on it. The eagle is worthless unless you can kill it or identify with it.

Some people would call that savagery, but that sort of talk is politically incorrect. And we all know that there are no such things as savages. The true savages are the people who use scientific principles to make cars and then use the money to commission paintings of soaring eagles for museums because they are greedy exploiters of the planet. On the other hand, the noble savages whose herds of sheep and goats turn fertile land into desert, who burned the great libraries of civilization and who believe that the hair of women emits rays that passing airplanes have to be protected from are close to nature.

A car is just a metaphor. You drive it to work because you work somewhere. You drive it on family vacations because you don't get to spend enough time with your family because you and they are all doing things. You're not sitting around your house with your two wives and eleven kids plotting new ways to scam social services. You go places because you're still the product of a culture that likes the idea of new frontiers. Your car isn't exactly Columbus' flagship, but it takes you places. It's a sign of progress. That's why you own a car, instead of burning them.

Civilization is not a product, it's a process. You can't export it. You can ship a bunch of cars to Somalia, but you can't ship the process that makes a culture build a car. You can hand out PhD's to them based on knowledge and test taking skills, but you can't endow them with a respect for ideas. You can set up democratic elections in Afghanistan and Egypt, but you can't export the process that explains why the elections shouldn't be abolished after the side with the most guns wins.

That's just as true of a lot of the second and third generation immigrants who are no more Swedes than the South Africans became Africans or the English settlers of the American Colonies became Indians. They may own iPhones, dye their hair and listen to the same music that you do, but they often don't have the same assumptions. They bought the product, but not the process. They can drive cars and when they get bored, they can burn them, because they aren't their cars. They're your cars.

And the hair dye and the music and the democratic elections aren't theirs either. Those are things they took from you and if they get bored with them, they'll put on Hijabs, ban music and go back to tyranny, because what they have is a product, not a process. They walked into the movie in the middle and they like some of it, but it's confusing and they don't understand why the hero doesn't just shoot the villain in the head, take his woman and then raise a dozen children in his lair.

After the riots die down and the fires are put out, there will be more talk about integrating them, but what are they being integrated into; a culture that doesn't resist when their cars are torched? Why would they want to join a culture that leaves you unable to protect what is yours? Why would anyone join a culture that makes you so weak and impotent that anyone can come and take what belongs to you?

It's a movie that makes sense if you were there back in the 19th, but not if you suddenly walked in around 1965 or 1995. It's the outcome of a historical process that is hard to explain to people who were never part of the process. They know how the story came out, but not why it matters. And even if they could, their priorities are different. They didn't come here to meld into some gelatinous brotherhood of man but to make life better for their clans.

Most people plan for the future, they just do it in different ways. In Sweden, they plan to buy a car. In Iraq or Somalia, they plan to have eight kids. In Sweden, there isn't supposed to be a biological tribe anymore. Everyone is meant to belong to the progressive transnational tribe which lets you have the good things in life so long as you make some kind of vague commitment to pay more and share them with others. But the savages of Stockholm already have a tribe. And their tribe isn't big on sharing and is a lot more useful in a tight spot.

While the Swedes save up for cars, the Iraqis scam social services for their eight kids. And the demographics suggest that eight kids and no cars beats two cars and one child. Keep multiplying those numbers and the future will have fewer Swedes and fewer cars and a lot more bored Iraqi kids running through what used to be genteel suburbs looking for Swedes or cars to burn.

The native multiculturalists are post-tribal, but the multiple cultures settling there aren't. It's a war that can't be discussed except with the usual accusations of xenophobia and oppression. But those are useless crutches of dogma. They don't do much to restore a burned Audi. This is a conflict between cultures that make things and cultures that take them, between cultures that live for the moment and cultures that live for the next thousand years of manifest destiny.

The Western ideal has been reduced to a personal technocratic utopia built on efficiency and it has collided in the night with an Eastern ideal of the clan and a theocratic utopia built on total purity. That is the kind of conflict that the creed of good fences for good neighbors was meant for, but there are no fences tall enough to work it out within a single nation.

Both West and East have their own processes. And both processes are colliding. The Swedes bring their cars and the savages bring their flames. The burning cars are a metaphor for the impact of Muslim immigration on Sweden and the West.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

The Warrior's Tale

By On May 25, 2013
The warrior's tale is a simple enough thing. Strong as steel, but fragile as chance. It is the wind in his soul and the wall we build around ourselves to tell us who we are.

Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones-- the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale.

The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.

It is not only the warriors who need the tale, or those left behind. Future generations learn who they are from this tale. "We are the people who died for this land," is the unseen moral of each tale. "We bled for it. Now it is yours to bleed and die for."

The warrior's tale tells each generation that they stand on the wall against a hostile world. And that the wall is made not of stones, but of their virtues. Their courage, their integrity and their craft.  Theirs is the wall and they are the wall-- and if they should fail, then it will fail. And the land and the people will be swept away.

What happens to a people who forget the warrior's tale and stop telling it around their campfires? Worse , what of a people who are taught to despise the figure of the warrior and what he represents? They will not lose their courage, not all of it. But they will lose the direction of that courage. It will become a sudden unexplained virtue that rises to them out of the depths of danger. And their wall will fail.

It is the warrior's tale that makes walls. That says this is the land that we have fought for, and we will go on fighting for it. It is sacrifice that makes mere possession sacrosanct. It is blood that turns right to duty. It is the seal that is above law, deeper still to heritage. Anyone can hold a thing, but it is sacrifice that elevates it beyond possessiveness. And it is that tale which elevates a people from possessors of a land, to the people of the land.

Universalism discards the warrior's tale as abomination. A division in the family of man. Their tale is of an unselfish world where there are no more divisions or distinctions. Where everyone is the same in their own way. But this tale is a myth, a religious idea perverted into totalitarian politics. It is a promise that cannot be kept and a poison disguised with dollops of sugar. It lures the people into tearing down their wall and driving out their warriors.  And what follows is what always does when there is no wall. The invaders come, the women scream, the children are taken captive and the men sit with folded hands and drugged smiles dreaming of a better world.

The warrior's tale explains why we fight in terms of our own history. The Great Swamp Fight. The Shot Heard Round the World. The Battle of New Orleans. Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Pearl Harbor, Heartbreak Ridge, the Tet Offensive, Kandahar, and Fallujah. Generations of sacrifices must be defended. And those who wage war on us must be made to pay.

Universalism demands that war must answer to universal aims and objectives. That there is a universal law higher than war. But this is a children's story. The laws of men derive from their own interests. Those who can rule by force or coalition make their laws to serve their own ends. This is the way of the world.

Those who pretend to live by universalism will still fall to the law of steel. Rhetoric is no defense against fire and lead, and international codes have no defense against those who will break them. The talk may go on, but it is the warriors who will end it. It is still the warrior's tale to tell, even if all others have forgotten it.

The warrior's tale is no happy thing. It is bitter as bile and dark as death. But it is also a grand and glorious thing. For even in its full naked truth, it is the story of perseverance in the face of every agony and betrayal. It is the tale of how we live and why we die.

Even when all others forget their tale, the warriors remember. Even when they are called peacekeepers and turned into an army of clowns for the satisfaction of their political masters. The armies may decay, but warriors still remain in their cracks, on their edges-- men who are not wanted, but are needed because they are the only ones who can do the grim work and do it well. They may only be a hundredth of an army, or a thousandth. A fraction of a fraction. But without them there is no army, only empty uniforms.

When the warrior's tale is forgotten, then they become shadows. Dangerous men despised and feared. Thought of as killers, dismissed as monsters and stared at like beasts in a cage. But the society cannot deny them. It cannot deny that part of them. When the warrior diminishes, the energy is directed elsewhere. Sport becomes an obsession and matches end in bloody violence. Crime increases. Prisons fill up. So do police forces.

As the external war fades, the internal one begins. Barbarians come from without. Buildings burn, mobs rage and there is a savagery in the air.

No law can protect a society that has forgotten the warrior's tale. It will turn outward, and adopt the warrior tales of outsiders. The samurai will replace the cowboy. The sports star will be an outsider. Its heroes will become foreigners. Men who understand the virtue of violence and will do what their own people have been forbidden. Who have the vital energy that a society without a warrior's tale lacks.

When a people give up their own warrior's tale for that of others, they lose the ability to resist them. For each people's warrior's tale says that we are people, and they are enemies. We are warriors and they are murderers. When a people have no other warrior's tale but that of their enemies, they will come to believe that they are monsters. And that their enemies are brave warriors.

The day will come when they are asked who they are, and they will not know. They will point to their possessions and the names of their streets and cities. They will speak of higher ideals and cringe for not living up to them. They will be asked why they fight, and they will say that they do not want to fight. That all they want is peace at any price.

Even the most powerful of civilizations with the mightiest of cities becomes prey when it forgets the warrior's tale. It takes more than weapons to defend a city, it demands the knowledge of the rightness of their use. It is no use dressing men in uniforms and arming them, if they are not taught the warrior's tale. And it is nearly as little use, sending them off to watch and keep, if the men above them discard the warrior's tale as violent and primitive gibberish.

An army of millions is worth little, without the warrior's tale. Strategy is technique, firepower is capacity, both begin and end with the human mind. "Why do we fight," is the question that the warrior's tale answers far better than any politician could. "We fight because this is ours. It is our honor, our duty and our war. We have been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. This is what makes us who we are."

We are the people, says the warrior's tale. But we are every people, says the universalist's tale. All is one. There is no difference between us and them. And we will prove it by bringing them here. Then the walls fall and it falls to the warriors to make their last stand. To tell another warrior's tale with their lives.

This is the quiet war between the philosopher merchants who want trade and empire, and the warriors who know that they will be called upon to secure the empire, and then die fighting the enemy at home. It is how the long tale that begins with campfires and ends with burning cities goes. The story that begins with cave paintings and ends with YouTube videos. Whose pen is iron, lead and steel. And whose ink is always blood.

We have been here before. Told and retold the old stories. The forest, the swamp, the hill and the valley. And behind them the lie, the maneuver and the betrayal. The war that becomes unreasoning and the people who forget why they fight. And one by one the warriors slip away. Some to the long sleep in the desert. Others to secluded green places. And still others into the forgetfulness of a people's memory. The hole in the heart of a people who forget themselves and become nothing.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Orwell Lives

By On May 24, 2013


ORWELL LIVES

Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case.

“An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers."

Note the "attending the prayers" part. And lest you get too mouthy on social media about it, there's a warning for you.

"A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said, “People should stop and think about what they say on social media before making statements as the consequences could be serious.”



NOT A BLOODY THING

Scholars of Islam like Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson insisted that the gruesome murder of a British soldier by two Muslims shouting “Allah Akbar” and quoting the Koran had nothing to do with Islam.

However Imam Omar Bakri Muhammad, who influenced Mujaheed Adebowale, the London beheader, disagrees saying, “Under Islam this can be justified”,

And what are Imam Omar Bakri Muhammad’s thoughts on the human life of non-Muslim civilians?

“We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.”

Nothing to do with Islam. Not a bloody thing.








THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON ISLAM AND DRUGS

He used the name “Mujahid”, or holy warrior, and handed out radical leaflets in Woolwich High Street. And he began plotting jihad — while selling drugs back in Romford.

“He would say, ‘I’ve got some designer white shirts’ which meant crack cocaine, or ‘I’ve got black T-shirts’, which meant heroin.

 London Beheader Fell in With Muslim Gang, Turned to Drug Dealing and Jihad




10% of Young People in UK are Muslims




ISLAM IS THE PROBLEM

London Mayor Boris Johnson has said the blame for the brutal murder of a soldier in Woolwich lies with the ‘warped mind-set’ of his killers. ‘One obvious point, it is completely wrong to blame this killing on Islam.’

The point that Mayor Johnson deems so obvious that it need not even be backed up with proofs or verifications is that two Muslim terrorists quoting the Koran and carrying out an attack in line with Islamic beliefs had nothing to do with Islam.

Boris Johnson is correct that the ‘warped mind-set’ of his killers is to blame. But that ‘warped mind-set’ has a name. It’s called Islam.

Mayor Boris Johnson used to know that. Here’s what he wrote after the 7/7 bombings.

"That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem."

London Mayor: “It Is Completely Wrong to Blame this Killing on Islam.”




A COMPLETELY NORMAL GUY

 “He Was Just a Completely Normal Guy. He Was Interested in Islam, in Memorising the Koran.”




 THEY REALLY DO GIVE SO MUCH

This was not just an attack on Britain – and on our British way of life. It was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said.

Muslim communities do indeed give so much to the UK, aside from the occasional bombing and beheading, there are the sex grooming gangs, the social welfare fraud and the drug dealing.

It’s astounding really. They give so much and get so little in return. Just free homes and jail sentences.

PM Cameron: “There is Nothing in Islam that Justifies this Truly Dreadful Act.”




THE PURPOSE OF TERROR

This George Jonas article has one of the clearest expressions of what terrorists truly aspire to.

For terror to work scaring people is necessary but not sufficient. Even all-powerful, naked, totalitarian terror requires more than fear to function. For the asymmetric terror of the weak -- Basque, say, or Chechen or Uighur secessionists -- fear serves as kindling to ignite an illusion of sympathy.

No one likes to think of himself as a coward. People resist admitting that they're afraid. Simply scaring them might even get their backs up. People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it's safer or more convenient, but because it's the right thing.

...


Terrorism's great achievement isn't hijacking jetliners, but hijacking the debate. Successful terrorism persuades the terror-stricken that he's conscience-stricken. Once adapted and internalized by its targets, asymmetric terror can be as powerful as totalitarian terror.

Ultimately, terror triumphs when it allows perpetrators to masquerade as victims. It's the intolerant demanding tolerance that bedevils Western civil liberties and anti-defamatory organizations




Amnesty Will Legalize 32 Million + Add 25 Million Guest Workers




KEEP THE LIE ALIVE

The United States was not incapable of using armed force over Benghazi. Obama’s first Libya lie, the one that led to the war, was the claim that Gaddafi forces were about to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. No such massacre had occurred anywhere or was going to occur, but it was enough for Obama to go to war, without ever admitting that he was at war.

Was the military power that was leveraged to defend Benghazi incapable of being leveraged to defend the mission in Benghazi? Was overthrowing Gaddafi really easier than protecting American diplomats and security personnel under siege?

Benghazi was, from beginning to end, a story of appeasement gone bad. The serial lies by a serial liar have covered up the ugly truth that American lives were sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. Four men are dead and a fifth has been locked up to keep the lie alive.

Obama: Serial Liar




THE OTHER'S OTHER

Muslim Countries are The Most Racist in the World




NEUTRAL TO THE REALITY

The British version of gender-neutral, gender-free, replacing gender-fair policy, attempted to ignore gender in military training and resulted in a doubling of injuries for female soldiers. In gender-fair training, women only suffered four times as many injuries as male soldiers. In gender-free training, women suffered nearly ten times as many injuries as male soldiers. An absurd term like gender-free could be coined, but it couldn’t be implemented because no one can be free of their gender. Gender is not open to regulation or deregulation. It is an absolute reality.

There’s nothing gender neutral about that. But gender-neutral really means neutral to the gender. And neutral to the gender is another way of saying that there are two differing standards. The standard changes to accommodate the gender.

A Gender-Neutral Army




THERE'S A REASON THE 9/11 HIJACKERS LIKED IT

Paterson NJ Actually Becomes Paterstine as PLO Flag Rises Over City Hall




IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST GET BLOWN UP IN IT

In a bizarre statement, a month after Muslim terrorists set off bombs at the Boston Marathon that wounded 264 people, Obama claimed that, “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.”

The Boston terrorists only killed 3 people, but injured 264. There were at least 16 amputations of limbs. The original World Trade Center bombing resulted in six deaths and fifteen traumatic injuries. The Boston bombings are in a class with that.


Obama Claims “No Large-Scale Attacks on the United States” Month After Bombs Wound 264




THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL

I tend to think that reposting your own Tweets in articles and blogs is a bad habit, but sometimes arguing in 140 characters condenses an idea to something closer to slogan length. Considering the usual gargantuan length of my articles, it may be worth it in this case.









TO THE MOON, MICHELLE

The graduate of Columbia, Occidental College and Harvard declaring himself an “Honorary Morehouse Man” is already a cynical joke. Obama never would have gone to Morehouse. The odds of him sending one of his offspring to an HBCU is right up there with him sending them to the moon.

Obama’s Cynical Privileged Morehouse College Speech





FASCISM, THE RIGHT THING FOR AMERICA?

England, in many American circles, had come to seem like Israel today, a country that dragged the United States into wars. While Nazi Germany, like the Muslims today, was seen as misunderstood and a victim of history. Kennedy’s observations would not have been unusual even for many liberal visitors older than him.

There was a sizable strain of admiration for fascism in liberal circles extending into the FDR administration. The sense was that fascists were capable of getting things done. 

JFK: “Fascism?’ The right thing for Germany.”




EXCELSIOR!

Secondly, I understand that bringing me on as network anchor of Zimbabwe state television has the stench of the arrogant Western imperialism that both you and I disdain so much. After all, wise man once said, “The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.”

Of course, your Excellency, those words were spoken by you. And I wholeheartedly agree with them. Though it is true on the outside I appear as white as the devil himself, my heart is of a different complexion altogether.

I look forward to hearing from you.

In trust,

Keith Theodore Olbermann

Cornell Class of 1979

Keith Olbermann looks for a job: The secret emails revealed





WITH MINOR EDITS

Apologists for Islam often quote, out of context, a Koranic verse, which says ‘Whosoever killeth a human being… it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind” as proof that Islam is humanitarian.

In fact this is a Talmudic quote that the Koran appropriates and then uses to spew hate against the Jews and Christians as unbelievers. Hasan, like most apologists, amends the quote removing the exception that you may kill as revenge for a killing or “for creating disorder in the land”. Those who create disorder should “be slain or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on alternate sides.”

For a full measure of Mehdi’s perversity, the Koranic verse quoted by the London Beheader advocating an eye for an eye is in Koran 5:46. The one quoted by Mehdi is in 5:33.
Huffington Post UK Director Who Called Non-Muslims Animals, Claims Islam is Not Hateful




VIDEODROME

I appeared on SUN TV briefly to discuss Obama's scandal on Michael Coren's The Arena




And if you would like to hear that in a much better accent, here's Critical G reading some of my articles




ASLIM, TASLIM

Finally here's a great article by Oleg Atbashian on the totalitarian nature of the left.

How is it possible to hold so many mutually exclusive beliefs? To preach tolerance and be so intolerant? To grieve for terror victims and justify terrorism? To stand up for workers and destroy their jobs? To march for peace and defend the militants? To denounce corruption and vote for the corrupt? To espouse non-violence and commit violent acts? To speak of liberties and promote government dictate? To bolster feminism and deride successful women? To cheer gays and aid the gay-bashers in the Middle East? To champion minorities as a group and hold them down as individuals? To care about the children and condemn them to intellectual mutilation? To denounce guns and hire armed bodyguards? To support the troops and side with their murderers? To demand love and be full of hate?

The bad news is that these are not contradictions. Worse yet, sensible people will keep losing ground to those whom they shrug off as bumbling sacks of absurdities, for as long as they don’t understand that the above paradoxical statements aren’t, in fact, oxymorons, but contain a very consistent logic.

In this sense, the best key to unlocking the mystery of the Progressive Chauvinist mind, breaking the leftist code, and discerning their collectivist morality is a statement attributed to Karl Marx, which, regardless of whether he wrote it or not, is perfectly aligned with the moral philosophy of Progressive Chauvinism:

“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism”

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Afghanistan Comes to London

By On May 22, 2013
After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.”

Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.

Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.

In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city. 

Woolwich Common, adjacent to the area where the attack too place, is described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated in that same dreadful decade. 

Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside. 

Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.

The two men who butchered a British soldier are believed to be Somalis. Last year it was reported that dozens of Muslims in the UK were being trained to fight for Al Qaeda in Somalia. There were concerns over what those men would do once they returned to the United Kingdom. 

Al-Shabaab, the local Al Qaeda franchise, subsists on tens of thousands of pounds from the hundreds of thousands of Somali settlers living in the United Kingdom. In 2012, Al-Shabaab terrorists had threatened a terrorist attack against the UK, saying, “The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined.” 

That nightmare still looms. It is the nightmare of the savage wars of the Muslim world being exported to the United Kingdom.

Last year, Shabaaz Hussain was sentenced to five years in jail in Woolwich Crown Court for his fundraising activities on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Five years earlier, Osama bin London and his followers had been sentenced at that same court for the 21/7 plot which attempted to set off bombs in a number of London Underground stations.  The majority of Bin London’s followers were African immigrants. 

Ramzi Mohammed, a Somali, turned to face a young mother with a baby in her stroller before trying to detonate his bomb. 

Muslim fighters have torn Somalia apart. And importing 200,000 of them into the United Kingdom is beginning to have the same effect. There are an estimated 70,000 Somalis in Greater London. That makes London the 12th largest city in Somalia. Nearly 2 percent of Somalia now lives in the UK.
80 percent of Somalis in the UK live in public housing. They have the lowest employment rate of every immigrant group in the country. And within four years, they had managed to rack up over ten thousand arrests. Every effort to integrate them has failed. Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have become little Mogadishus.

The Somalis are not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all these cases. This is a culture of violence.
Islam sanctifies that culture of violence. It takes tribal killings and endows them with the status of a religious duty. Jihad is simply gang warfare, no different than the kind practiced by the Woolwich Manz, given theological meaning. Men have been butchering other men with machetes throughout Africa. But when a Muslim mutilates a British soldier with a machete, then he is engaging in a religious ritual.

This is no clash of civilizations because there is hardly anything resembling civilization on the other side. Islam began with a gang raiding caravans. It now persists in gangs raiding across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. 

What happened near Woolwich Commons would not have been considered extraordinary in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. It is only extraordinary because it has been a long time since rampaging Vikings were disemboweling the locals. It is only extraordinary because the nation is hobbled by the assumptions of civilization. And one of those basic assumptions is that murderers with red hands will not carry out beheadings in your streets.

The United Kingdom has become a civilized place. Unfortunately its practice of importing savages makes that civilization of climbing roses and social progress unsustainable. If you import millions of people who follow a religion that sanctifies tribal violence, then you must expect tribal violence to tear apart what you have built. And if you do not wish that to happen, then you must close the gates on the barbarians.

There is no need to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not when they are already living in London in public housing and screeching diatribes about the coming conquest while treating themselves to all the luxuries of the welfare state. And as their numbers grow, ignoring them will become impossible.

The butchers who perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen. They wanted to break through the media boycott to tell the peoples of the United Kingdom that they were being murdered in the name of Islam. The story is already being met with the usual cognitive dissonance and being swept under the rug, but that just means that the next bunch will try even harder to convey the message that the war is here.

The immediate shift to focus on the backlash that is somehow never nearly as bad as the thing it is lashing back at, the waves of meaningless condemnations from Muslim leaders who say one thing at press conferences and another in their mosques and the deployment of the sickening litany of "tiny minority of extremists" rhetoric are all delaying tactics. But they can only delay for so long.

Every Muslim country is either in a state of oppression or a state of war. Does any European country that populates its cities and towns with Muslims really believe that it can escape the inevitable trajectory of this cultural history? The Arab Spring isn't only a lesson in the futility of trying to combine popular elections with human rights in the Middle East. Ir's a lesson in the hopelessness of expecting those same failures to work any better when cultures that choose tyranny over freedom migrate to the United Kingdom or the United States.

The only thing standing between the United Kingdom and Somalia, Pakistan, Syria and a dozen other charming places like these is another two decades of immigration. And long before the irreversible demographic turning point is reached, life in the new Cool Britain will be flavored with regional events like public beheadings, honor killings and religious bombings.

There is no use in proposing that the United Kingdom withdraw from Afghanistan only to come home to another Afghanistan.

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