Friday Afternoon Roundup - One Leader, Three Branches of Government

PETE SEEGER FULFILLS LIFELONG DREAM OF MEETING STALIN - Unfortunately Stalin hates the banjo




HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO

Strip away the year and it’s hard for the listener to tell whether he’s listening to a cut from the 2008, 2011 or 2014 SOTU album. Clip all the static about competing with China by building bridges so that babies with Asthma can attend free pre-K with Google and you catch snippets of the new stuff.

The Justin Bieber of politics cannot change and before long he’s back to threatening a unilateral campaign against the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and invoking Marx’s hoary old specter of class warfare sleeping under a bench in Zuccotti Park after a long day of wandering ominously around Wall Street.

Michelle Obama’s starvation lunches for schools and jazzercise tour have lowered obesity levels, according to her husband, and ObamaCare is a huge success, according to the guy it’s named after.

Afghanistan is a success. The economy is a success. Unemployment is a success. Democrats loyally clap sweaty palms at how wonderful everything is, but for some reason much of the country is out of work.

Obama’s Tired Song and Dance




THE SOTU OBAMA REALLY WANTED TO GIVE




The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander-in-chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption, and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. “The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: He’s Mussolini.”





Pakistan Used Anti-Terrorism Cash to Sacrifice Goats - The four sacrificial goats, plus butchery costs, were listed as “stabbing charges”




JUSTICE IS BLIND, DEAF, DUMB AND RETARDED

The “The Port Hills Groper” who cannot speak English put the offending down to a “cultural” misunderstanding, saying he was trying to be “friendly” around Christmas time.

On one occasion he called out to a woman jogging on the Rapaki Track and, when she slowed down to listen, grabbed her buttocks and said “lovely lovely”.

The Middle Eastern refugee who grabbed, groped and licked female joggers on a popular running route in Christchurch has today avoided jail and been granted permanent name suppression. The family of the man accused of being  fears he’ll be ostracised by their Muslim community if his identity is revealed.

Muslim Refugee Gropes Women, Blames Cultural Differences, Avoids Jail




If You Loved All-American Muslim, Get Ready for Beverly Hills Muslims




EMPLOYEES NOT WANTED

The United States has been taking in a million immigrants a year since 2004. Are a million immigrants a year really inadequate for the needs of businesses in a country with less than one hundred million private sector employees and over ninety million people out of the workforce?

Black and Latino unemployment rates are already far higher than white unemployment rates. The Mexican-American unemployment rate is between 10 and 12 percent. If American companies can’t employ the millions of Mexican-Americans already in this country, why do they insist on displacing minority workers born in this country, including Mexican-Americans, by legalizing 12 million more?

From 2000 to 2009, nearly 2 million Mexican immigrants obtained permanent legal status in the United States. 

Where are the 12 million jobs supposed to come from for the suddenly legal illegals whose employers never wanted to hire legal workers?

Amnesty Ends the American Dream




MICHAEL MOORE HARDEST HIT

In the bleak grey skyscraper towering precariously over Eight Avenue, the filing cabinets bulge with back issues of the New York Times full of optimistic speculations about the future. But now the Old Grey Lady hardly mentions the Arab Spring except when she’s talking about insurgencies and riot casualty counts.

Only a few years ago, she fell head over heels for the bad boys of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, despite the best efforts of her procurers of Islamism like David Kilpatrick and Robert Mackey, she has stopped taking their phone calls and has settled down to placidly chronicling the daily urban disorders of Egypt.

The old argument that the region was unstable and that we were hated because of the dictators no longer holds water. The United States pushed out the dictators; their own people brought them back.

The Arab Spring Killed the Left’s Foreign Policy




Employee Who Denied Extra Security to Benghazi Mission Promoted to Regional Security Officer





EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT OBAMA, I LEARNED IN GRAD SCHOOL

“I actually think there’s a subset of black women who really do get off on white women being prostrate,” Cooper says. Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor at Rutgers, is one of the black women who participated in #Femfuture.

Sarah Milstein, co-author of a guide to Twitter, published a piece on the Huffington Post titled “5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism.”

At one point, Milstein argued that if a person of color says something that makes you uncomfortable, “assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person.” After Rule No. 3, “Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you’re not.”

Also if he’s hitting you, assume that it’s something you did wrong. Look for things you did wrong, not things you do right. This is the pathetic disgusting mess that feminism has become in the grubby hands of the race-obsessed left.

Feminism’s Insane Leftist Race War

...from the comments

Tina Trent 

Feminist theory is sado-masochism, with white women policing themselves to vigorously enjoy the pummeling black and hispanic and asian (and all those East Asian Brahmin exchange students with their own servants back home playing oppressed-grrl here) love to deliver. It's a world so sick that it has birthed naught but generations of white women hellbent on inventing ornate proxy sexualities in order to climb up to the position of piling on whitey via alleged sexuality oppression.

It is also a great lesson in the current politics.

I once offered a perfectly ordinary critique of an impressively awful poem by a famous black-lesbian-handicapped poetess who subsequently died (of unrelated causes). The class held an enraged moment of silence, and as we sat there, the whitest woman in the room glared at me with uncontrollable anger. She told me afterwards that she couldn't stand being in the same room with me as they memorialized the dead poet. She felt I should leave the class because my mere presence was repulsive to her. She felt utterly justified saying this.

Everything I needed to know about Obama I learned in grad school.

Sheila Jackson Lee: “American People Crying Out for… Climate Change”




NO, NO, NO

"1. For $26 billion more a year, we could provide a basic education to every child in the world by 2015."

26 billion dollars is roughly the education budget for New York City alone. New York has 8 million people. The world has 7 billion people.

"2. For $990, a farmer can get training in dairy production and four milk-producing animals.

In most parts of the world where these animals are sent, between 50 and 95 percent of the population can’t drink milk due to lactose intolerance.

A Liberal and Someone Else’s Money are Swiftly Parted




The Kerry Plan: Mandatory Global Warming Plan for US in 2015




HISTORY ISN'T HISTORY

Samantha Power, who once discussed invading Israel, decided to use the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to link it to the Syrian Civil War.

“In 1945, Russian soldiers liberated Auschwitz. Sixty-nine year later, if the United Nations is to live up to the noble purposes for which it was founded, the world again needs Russia to use its influence, this time, to ensure that food reaches the desperate and starving people imprisoned in besieged Homs, Yarmouk, the Damascus suburbs, and elsewhere,” she added.

The Red Army did indeed take Auschwitz, but the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany had helped make Auschwitz possible.

What Samantha Power Forgot About the Soviet Role in the Holocaust






DON'T TELL ME WORDS DON'T MATTER

The GOP insists on borrowing leftist rhetoric. No one is punishing the kids of illegal aliens by not legalizing them. They’re just not eligible for it. To become eligible, they would have to move back home and apply to immigrate like everyone else.

Not giving them a freebie is not a “punishment”. They’re not being punished because their parents came here illegally. But they’re not being rewarded for it either.

GOP House Principles: “National and Economic Security Depends on Illegal Alien Amnesty”

Senator Jeff Sessions summarizes it neatly.

Once again, we have the same recycled talking points—crafted, it would appear, with the help of the same consultants and special interests. Each time, the talking points are followed by legislation that fails to match the promises—legislation that, at bottom, ensures only the amnesty and not the enforcement. The leadership talking points look like an attempted repackaging of the tired Gang-of-Eight-style formula that has been proposed, rejected, and re-proposed for years.

Is it not time we pushed aside the stale proposals stitched together in concert with the same lobbyists, and asked what is in the best interests of the hardworking American citizen—and the nation?

What a crazy idea. Maybe then we could even win a presidential election.





Income Inequality: ObamaCare Call Center Workers Sue Over Unpaid Wages




CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Waxman helped craft ObamaCare and now he retires to spend time with his money, a big chunk of which happens to be invested in health care industries.

Congress Waxman spent a horrifying 40 years in Congress and another six years in the California legislature. Now he can move on to a productive career of frightening small children at state fairs.

ObamaCare Architect Retires After 40 Years in Congress to Spend More Time W/his Health Care Investments




Paul Krugman is Wrong About Jobs and Income Inequality





WE MUST HELP DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT

Officially there are no more terrorist attacks, just man-caused disasters brought about by offensive YouTube videos. Also there are no more terrorists. Just Violent Extremists. And there’s no more counter-terrorism, just experts on Countering Violent Extremism.

At the CFR’s Foreign Affairs, McCants joined together with two others to argue that Ahrar al-Sham is, and I quote, “an al Qaeda–Linked Group Worth Befriending.”

With the collapse of the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front is now the only game in town for the people who insist that we should counter Al Qaeda by supporting Al Qaeda.

State Department Adviser on Extremism Urges US to “Befriend” Al Qaeda





THAT'S RACIST!

I’m not sure how this is racist, but once Chris Matthews, Melissa Harris-Perry and the other good people at MSNBC put their brain cell together, they’ll figure out the answer to that.

This week Gibson has announced the “Government Series” of guitars, to celebrate the end of its tussle with the eager enforcers of the U.S. Customs Department.

The body is painted in a custom color the company has named “Government Tan”–suitably drab–a nod to the joyless reality of living under the heavy thumb of stifling bureaucracy.

Wait… government tan. That’s racist!

Gibson Commemorates Obama’s Raid with Government Series Guitars




THE LEFT GETS LEFTIER

Dean said the United States has not placed enough emphasis on human rights issues in its talks with Iran… and added that if Tehran walked away from a deal due to pressure over human rights issues, then the regime is “most likely going to kill the negotiations as soon as they get out of the economic problems their sanctions are causing them.”

“We need to stand up to the mullahs,” said Dean. “These are not people we ought to be negotiating with.”

Howard Dean Now More Right-Wing on Iran than Obama




DAMOCLES SIGHS in RELIEF

During the election, Obama kept claiming that all the bridges are falling down. Last year he kept claiming that all the bridges are so old that “they are ready for Medicare.” That was bad news for the senior citizen bridges, because ObamaCare cuts Medicare.

In the last State of the Union address, there were more falling bridges. 70,000 of them. Then the number grew to 100,000 bridges.

In 2012, Obama wanted to invest 50 billion dollars into crumbling bridges. In 2013, he wanted to invest 40 billion dollars into crumbling bridges.

Obama’s Bridges Have Finally Stopped Falling Down




IMAGINE

Imagine French academics boycotting US History professors over the Iraq War and you get a taste of how ridiculous the whole thing is. And not just because the godfather of BDS is a foreigner who studies in an Israeli university that he wants everyone else to boycott.

And then there’s SodaStream. Its CEO is liberal, his rationale for keeping the factory going is helping Muslim workers, he claims, and it likely is true, that everyone in the company opposes the “occupation”.

Again, picture Europeans trying to get back at the Tea Party by boycotting a Warren Buffett owned company.

SodaStream and the Absurdity of BDS




STUDY FINDS POLAR BEARS GET STRESSED BY BEING HUNTED AND KILLED

Last year, a team reported that fluctuations in climate and ice cover are closely related to stress among polar bears in East Greenland as indicated by levels of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples.

For the collaboration with Thea Bechshøft of Aarhus University and colleagues, Meyer’s lab received blind hair samples from 88 polar bears legally killed between 1988 and 2009 in Greenland by indigenous people who have an arrangement with researchers to provide biological samples.

Is it at all possible that the polar bears were stressed because they were being killed, rather than because of Global Warming?

Warmist Researchers Claim Dead Polar Bears Upset over Global Warming




HOWARD ZINN DIDN'T WRITE ANY HISTORY BOOKS

Finally, the American Temperance movement was often associated with a liberal strain of reform, particularly in New England. Some of these people did have a weakness for agrarian utopianism, but that was a general problem for the left until fairly recently when it decided to abandon rural areas and entrench in the cities.

The people most likely to push temperance were exactly the kind of liberal reformers who today go to work as community organizers.

They weren’t the rural gun-clinging Tea Partiers that Charles Schumer imagines them to be. They were anti-slavery, anti-Catholic, pro-Negro, social reformers who fought urban political bosses with vigor, were wealthy, lived in cities, would eventually favor Socialist schemes, opposed immigration and were ahead of their time in gender roles and had a tendency to believe in communication with spirits and the coming of a new age of transcendence.

Schumer is Ignorant and Wrong About the Temperance Movement




TOTALITARIANISM 101

Stealth censorship. It's all of a piece in the name of domestic tranquility. Its feasibility must be "studied." The nation must be made "safe" from provocative words.  If that means shutting up anyone who offends with his words, and preventing projected or hypothetical or imaginary violence, so be it.

It won’t be called "censorship." It will be called the enforcement of "responsible speech." "Irresponsible" speech must be codified into the criminal law and punished.

It is uncommon knowledge – I say uncommon because not everyone is anchored to reality – that when the government begins to "study" a problem, it usually leads to legislation to control or eradicate the problem. The government studied the meat-packing industry, and wound up regulating it. The government studied farm prices, and decided they needed to be "stabilized" with subsidies. The government studied cars, and wound up regulating them. The government studied smoking, and wound up regulating it. The government studied nutrition, and wound up regulating it. The government has studied climate change, and wishes it could regulate it. The government studied birds, bees, trees, and rocks, and wound up regulating or at least protecting them.

from Edward Cline at Rule of Reason




SAME OLD STORY

According to Israel Radio... diplomats and foreign officers have warned against this trend. According to officials based in foreign missions, the Israeli government is increasingly being viewed as fanning the flames among American Jews by encouraging them to promote the official government position while making no room for opposing viewpoints.
 
Not only does the hypocritical charge of "no room for opposing viewpoints" sound all too familiar, but this "revelation" is likely a foreshadowing of things to come. How long until we are forced to revisit widespread accusations of dual loyalty, poisoned wells and such from the Obama,Walt & Mearsheimer Post-American Left™ ?

from Boker Tov Boulder




UNDOCUMENTED SANITATION ENGINEERS

We’ve written before about how open-borders supporters carefully and successfully manipulated our language by branding long-standing terms such as “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” racist even though the terms are race-neutral.

This paragraph has an interesting title: Individuals Living Outside the Rule of Law

And you thought “undocumented immigrant” was too politically correct? The GOP will jump even higher.

That's from Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. It's more than PC though. The lobbyist caucus is carefully framing the issue as being a problem of individuals living outside the law so that the logical solution is to... legalize them.

Progressives Without Progress

There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to redistribute everything.

The progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.

There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living. Both the quest and the way of living become as unchallengeable as any theological utopia founded not on bad economics and political parochialism, but on a deeply spiritual faith.

The progress of progressives is not a rocket to the stars, but a slow elevator climbing up a constricted shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive in the same sense that a television channel that moves from one show to the next within the confines of its programming is. It's programmed progress, not the progress of exploring infinitely expanding possibilities.

The left is actually deeply conservative. It is difficult for people in countries being contested by the left to see this because they observe the left as revolutionary and destructive. But every attempted conquest is accompanied by violent disruptions. The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war; not because it seeks an open society of perpetual creative ferment.

Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward. There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and North Korea were not producing compelling new cultural products for export the way that their sympathizers in Hollywood did and do. It's the same reason that they don't keep having revolutions.

The creative energies harnessed by the left are a revolutionary tool for achieving an ideal society. Once that miserably ideal society is achieved, everything is regimented and unplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned. Science and culture are forcibly slowed down. Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces mediocrity in all fields. Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.

Americans had trouble believing that the left of the counterculture had much in common with the conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley Weird, is not revolutionary. It's traditionalist.

Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the way that they used to be.

On the opposite coast, the old radical artists and poets complain that the East Village isn't what it used to be and landmark everything in sight. Men and women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every bar liquor license with the outraged spleen of suburbanites threatened with a landfill.

The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that weird then just becomes another tradition and another proprietarian cultural impulse to avert a changing world by clinging to the way things used to be when you were young and everything made sense. It's not really keeping things weird, it's keeping the weird things that come from a changing outside world, out.

Utopians always carry that narrow-minded fragility with them. Their perfect society is always doomed by the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men. The more they try to hold on to it, the more it breaks apart right in front of their eyes. The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.

Progress is confidence in human capabilities. The progressive movement however is tragic. It depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism; but it firmly believes that only the collective can make society work. And only the collective can lock it in.

Progressive utopians project their sense of fragility onto all material things. Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need. And that includes any and all human activities which might cause the warming of the planet.

Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth finite (except when they're spending it) but so is everything from education to employment.

The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a static society in which everything is "fair", rather than a rapidly progressing society society that is unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating, rather than sharing, and produces more for all.

Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of progress is achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never come, utopia becomes an economic police state.

The progressive idea of progress is a sack race with a hundred feet in one sack. Progress must be communal. It must meet the needs of all stakeholders. It must comply with every detail of the plan. And so it is no wonder that we hardly build big things anymore or dream great dreams. Vision is individual and it's deeply disruptive. It changes the way that everyone lives.

Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is achieved, there is no more room for vision. Visions, like viruses, are competitive creatures. When a Vision achieves a static order by killing all other visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains with its dead hand on the wheel of history.

The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a tradition of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one lockbox before the sky falls. The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.

Utopia believes the worst of everyone and everything. It fears its own mortality and scents the taste of death on everything. It is convinced that the sky will fall, that everyone will starve and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.

Progressives lock everyone into their narrow regimented and regulated idea of progress because they distrust people and they even distrust the universe. They are children certain that everything they love is about to be taken away from them and closet fascists obsessed with their moment of heroism when they rush out of the phone booth, biodegradable cape blowing in the wind, and save humanity from itself through a benevolent police state that extends into absolutely every area of human activity.

There is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of progress. Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.

Progressives view every element of the world, from the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute intersections of human society as too fragile and limited for unregulated progress. Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.

The only way to resume progress is to fight the progressive movement.

The Universalist Holocaust

There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your insecure feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world that you live in.

The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories; Never Again and Teach Tolerance. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.

There were Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a transformative event, but the responses to it came from old debates. The pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense, between the Universalists and the Nationalists, between the left and the right. The current debates about Israel by Jews and non-Jews revisit those old arguments.

To the Nationalists, the Holocaust was not an unexpected event and Nationalist leaders like Jabotinsky had warned that it was coming. To the Universalists, it was an inexplicable event that challenged the entire progressive understanding of history as a march toward enlightenment.

Violent bigotry was supposed to be the opposite of modernity. History moved forward, not backward. Unlike Czarist Russia, Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany were too modern for mass murder. And then they weren't.

The Holocaust was a mugging in broad daylight on the biggest street of the biggest city in the world. Its message was that human beings had not magically become better people because Berlin had a subway and phone calls could be made across the Atlantic. The Nationalists attributed it to human nature, while the Socialists blamed reactionary nationalism. The Universalists insisted that true progress would come with world unity while the Nationalists went off to build their own castle.

The Holocaust deepened the divide between the Universalists and the Nationalists. The Universalists thought the Holocaust made it more urgent for us to work toward a better world while the Nationalists saw history as a cycle of civilizations that had to be survived, rather than a utopian harbor where strife would end and the fighting would stop.

What the Universalists had always hated about Israel was what a Jewish State symbolized; a turning away from the great dream of the Brotherhood of Man for another reactionary state. Zionism had been rejected by much of the left for its abandonment of universalism. Luminaries of the left from Lenin to H.G. Wells denounced Zionism as a reactionary roadblock to world unity. The answer to the Jewish problem was assimilation, not conglomeration. And to many liberals, Israel's existence is still so pernicious because it lures Jews away from the dream of a better world.

The schism on the left over Zionism is slowly being won by the Anti-Zionists whose visceral hatred is for the Jewish State as a reactionary entity, a retreat from the borderless world. They do not criticize Israel for human rights violations. They find or invent human rights violations because they have labeled Israel as a reactionary entity and in their worldview all reactionary entities oppress and only reactionary entities oppress. The Soviet Union was progressive and therefore not oppressive. Israel is reactionary and therefore oppressive.

The Universalists interpreted the Holocaust as a Nationalist phenomenon and through that warped logic, Israel as a Nationalist response to the Holocaust is just like Nazi Germany. By wanting their own country, their own flag and their own army, the Jews became just like the Nazis. Instead of adopting the Universalist response of national suicide to mass murder, the Jewish people decided to live. And that is a crime that the left can never forgive them for.

Jewish Universalists have always been vaguely ashamed of Israel. They used to understand the need for it in their guts, even as their ideological minds struggled against it, but over time that feeling faded because the things that you feel but do not say are hard to pass down to future generations.

Holocaust museums were built, books were written and tours conducted into Anne Frank's attic, but the understanding of what these things meant was not passed down. The only lesson was to make the world a better place by teaching everyone to be tolerant so that history would not repeat itself. As if any amount of courses and slides on tolerance could stop history from repeating itself.

There are nice Jewish boys and girls who have read Anne Frank's diary, visited Auschwitz and come away anti-semities. They don't call themselves that because their Universalist ignorance is so profound that they don't even know what they are. Instead they call themselves human rights activists, they boycott Israeli products, smash Jewish store windows, hug terrorists and rationalize suicide bombers.

And what else were they supposed to do when the lessons that they drew from the Holocaust are that the underdog is always right, that people in uniforms are bad and that you always have to stand up for minorities.

That is the Holocaust in its universalized form. Never Again made the Holocaust a teachable moment for Jews. Teach Tolerance made it a teachable moment for all mankind. The Nationalist and the Universalist drew two opposite lessons from the Holocaust. The Nationalists focused on resistance while the Universalists focused on persecution. The Nationalist aspires to be a ghetto fighter while the Universalist aspires to be a good German.

The Universalist lesson of the Holocaust is that we must all aspire to be good Germans because our governments, at least the non-progressive ones, are embryonic Third Reichs that are only one flag-waving leader away from opening concentration camps. The Universalists believe that the only way to stop another Holocaust is to destroy nationalism, patriotism and the modern state.

This is what they believed before the Holocaust. And it isn't the Holocaust that motivates them. The Holocaust has been hijacked and distorted as another teaching tool for the left. Its history is one where the Jews happen to stand in for Native Americans, African-Americans or any other victim group, but have no identity, motives or interests of their own. The dead Jews are empty symbols with no tangible claims on the past or on the future. They died to teach us to be better people.

And so the boys and girls, Jewish and non-Jewish, smash Jewish store windows and throw stones at Jewish soldiers out of a desire to be good Germans. Their method of avoiding a repetition of the Holocaust is to perpetuate it by persecuting Jews by being good Germans. If they manage to destroy Israel and all its Jews, then they'll be the best Germans of them all.

This Universalist doctrine does not mention the English boys, who were being good Germans before the time when those words meant anything, by gathering at anti-war rallies. It does not mention the leftist intellectuals who insisted that the Allies were no better than the Nazis or the Communist Universalists of the Soviet Union who allied with Nazi Germany.

The debate over Israel is only one of many such fights between Universalists and Nationalists of every creed and from every nation. It is a struggle between those who believe that nations, religions and cultures have innate worth, and those who believe that they are obstacles to the great jello bowl of togetherness.

The Nazi Holocaust failed, but the Universalist Holocaust is still ongoing. Every time a leftist gets up to denounce Israel and to look forward to the day when it disappears, the Universalist Holocaust grinds on. And they have no shortage of Jewish assistants who are eager to complete the task, believing that a humanitarian utopia waits on the other side of the gas chamber door.

The Jewish Universalists lost faith in G-d, but they did not lose faith in humanity. They still believe with all their hearts that if they strum the guitar loud enough and sing, "Imagine", that a better world will appear behind that door. Disbelieving in history, they have forgotten that the last time that door was opened in Russia, there was barbed wire and bitter cold on the other side.

Jewish Nationalists understood what was coming last time. They understand what is coming this time. Yet no matter how many times they are proven right, the beautiful dreamers refuse to listen to the history which proves them wrong. They're still waiting for the dead hand of history to let go and the better world to be born out of the ashes of the old.

History is the road map that charts where the past lives that made ours possible have gone and shows us where the lives that we make possible may go. The Universalist Holocaust would burn those maps and kill our future for their better world.

Hollywood's Muslim Lies

In real life, terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything but. America's fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than Muslim terrorists.

Before September 11 broke up the party, 24's Jack Bauer was fighting the international menace of Serbian terrorism. Serbian terrorists also showed up in 1999's Diplomatic Siege when their "Serbian Liberation Front" took over a US embassy and in 1997's The Peacemaker with George Clooney rushing to stop a Serb from detonating a nuke in New York City.

The United States has remained unscathed by Serbian terrorism, though the same can't be said for Peter Weller, the star of Diplomatic Siege, and Mimi Leder, the director of The Peacemaker, but not by Muslim terrorist attacks. Despite September 11, the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings, Hollywood has however resolutely kept its eye on the real threat.

Serbian terrorism.

This weekend, Ride Along, which features Ice "F___ the Police" Cube playing a cop, knocked Lone Survivor out of the top spot at the box office, and once again takes on the terrible threat of… Serbian terrorism.

When the Serbs aren't available, the North Koreans have to step in. Red Dawn had to switch its army of invaders who conquer America from the Chinese to the North Koreans. North Korea, unlike China, doesn't pay Hollywood studios money for the movies it imports. But to be on the safe side, when North Koreans attacked the White House in Olympus Has Fallen, the movie specified that they were extremists. Hollywood wouldn't want to imply that North Korea's moderate government might be attacking America.

Only the Serbs do that.

North Korea however responded by warning that if it did attack the United States, the outcome would be even worse than anything in a movie.

When the Serbs are too busy shoveling snow and the North Koreans are too busy watching Dennis Rodman act like an idiot, there are always the Russians. The Russians are more likely to show up as villains after the fall of the Soviet Union than during the Communist era. It's as if the end of Soviet Communism finally set Hollywood free to join in the fun of Boris and Natasha villains without any of the guilt about red-baiting.

When Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit featured a terrorist cell in Dearborn, even though Muslim settlers dominate the area, the villains were shown operating out of a Russian Orthodox church and getting their cues from a priest reading the bible while the terrorists cried out, “Slava Bogu" or "Praise God."

It would have been so very unrealistic to show them praising Allah instead.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the latest attempt at making a Tom Clancy movie without the Tom Clancy part. Sum of All Fears, one of the first movies about terrorism to come out after September 11, jettisoned Clancy's Muslim villains and replaced them with neo-fascists out to turn Europe into a "united fascist superstate".

While this wasn't true to the Clancy novel, it was the first time that a major motion picture unintentionally portrayed the European Union as a villain even though it had already been around for a decade. Around the time Sum of All Fears came out, Europeans were already on a single currency. But that obviously wasn't what anyone in the production had in mind.

Its writer Dan Pyne dismissed Islamic terrorism as a "cliche"; even though a plot can’t be a cliche when it never appears in movies, only in real life. Pyne however found a more realistic villain. "I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be universal."

Nothing is more universal than the threat of neo-nationalists in Holland. Dutch neo-nationalism is an enduring world menace that everyone can relate to.

The neo-nationalists of the Netherlands that Pyne had discovered in a used copy of the LA Times were probably Pim Fortuyn's party. Fortuyn was a gay Sociology professor and former Marxist who favored drug legalization, gay marriage and less Muslim immigration. The neo-nationalist threat of the Netherlands did not prove lasting when around the time that Sum of All Fears was playing in theaters; Fortuyn was murdered by a leftist who, like Pyne, worried about the plight of the Muslims.

In an even bigger cliche, Theo van Gogh, who had just finished directing May 6th, a movie about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco who told the victim's mother that he could have no empathy for her because she was a non-Muslim.

It was the sort of ridiculous cliche that Dan Pyne would never have put into a script.

Instead Dan Pyne went on to write a remake of the Manchurian Candidate in which Communist China was replaced by the "Manchurian Corporation". He's currently working on a movie featuring a Syrian rescue worker who gets mistaken for a terrorist while trying to save lives during Hurricane Katrina.

It's a cliche, but it's the kind of cliche that Hollywood likes.

If a movie is made about September 11 a decade from, now, the villains will probably be Serbian nationalists. Or perhaps a villainous "September 11 Corporation". It would be a cliche to have 19 Muslim hijackers murder 3,000 people. And then the camera will linger meaningfully on a Muslim rescuer wrongly taken into custody by a bigoted NYPD cop who is overlooking the real Serbian/Dutch neo-nationalist corporate villains.

But the Serbians, Russians, North Koreans and the Neo-Nationalists of the Netherlands are only the understudies who get called in when the usual villains, right-wing extremists who want to false flag America into a war with the Muslims are on vacation.

After 24 got done with the Serbian terror threat, it defaulted to the real threat of government warmongers trying to fake a Muslim terror threat. After 9/11, 24's second season’s story was about an evil government conspiracy to fake a Muslim terrorist attack. Anything else would have been a cliche. And to avoid cliches, the series used variations of the same plot in three seasons.

When the Serbs went on strike last year, White House Down brought in a villainous Speaker of the House with a Jewish last name to assassinate a black president in order to sabotage his treaty with Iran. The movie lost so much money that Sony blamed its quarterly $197 million loss on it.

Serbian terrorism had struck again.

When a straightforward presentation flops, Hollywood finds ways of embedding the same old message into more fantastic fare. Last summer, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness and the Lone Ranger all had minor variations of the same story about false flag attacks that were orchestrated by governments or powerful interests connected to them. This Trutherism explosion was just another case of Hollywood carefully avoiding cliches.

Nowhere in all these tales of evil corporations and governments is there a movie about an entertainment industry so intertwined with government that it not only helped pick the country’s current leader, but it constantly releases propaganda films attempting to revise reality according to his worldview. That would be a cliché; much like the idea of that industry filming false flag movies depicting the favorite villains of the Clinton Administration carrying out ridiculously implausible acts of terror to retroactively justify its focus on the Serbs instead of Al Qaeda.

Hollywood stands as firmly against depicting Muslim terrorism as Hollywood Communists after the Hitler-Stalin pact did against anti-Nazi films. If they had been positioned further up the ladder back then, instead of mainly being relegated to writing scripts, we would no doubt have a catalog of movies featuring Yankee warmongers plotting to stage fake Nazi attacks on America.

Hollywood's ideological hostility to reality however has not proven to be very profitable.

The Peacemaker, a movie written and co-produced by the Cockburns, whose politics are slightly to the left of Stalin and who wrote a book blaming Israel for everything wrong with the world beginning with the death of the dinosaurs, was the inaugural feature from the failed Spielberg-Geffen-Katzenberg Dreamworks studio and disappointed critics and audiences. The Cockburns would never try their hand at film fiction again unless you count American Casino, their "documentary" about the financial collapse, which had a financial collapse of its own with an opening weekend of $1,397.

Sum of All Fears, the movie inspired by the Netherlands neo-nationalist threat, was the weakest performer of the Tom Clancy movies when accounting for ticket price inflation and full budget. And it still had a much better opening weekend than Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

But failure hasn't stopped Hollywood from churning out anti-war movies and it won't stop it from alerting the nation to the terrorist threat lurking in Orthodox Churches or the Dutch neo-nationalists trying to nuke our cities. Hollywood’s  handpicked leaders were the ones who made the country vulnerable to Islamic terrorism and their industry has gone on covering up for them with movies in which the villains can be anyone and everyone except the real killers.

The Ghost Rat Cannibal Ship Will Enrich the UK

In the last century, the United Kingdom has become an astounding tapestry of cultures hanging on a multicultural loom in a lunatic's attic filled with an array of astoundingly diverse garbage. Every year people from around the world arrive in the UK and many of them move to Tower Hamlets and begin threatening to behead all the other cultures for being much too multi.

But it's nothing that can't be handled with an uncomfortable visit to a mosque by a few government officials, some online courses about fighting extremism and a new Muslim character on EastEnders.

The ghost rat cannibal ship approaching the shores of the United Kingdom is no different. Yes it is a ghost ship and it may be full of cannibal rats who have been eating each other for so long that they have food critics (Hank was just too dry), foodie blogs and an ethical cannibalism movement to eat only locally sourced rats, but that is no reason to allow ourselves to be panicked by it or by them.

Each culture brings with it its own practices and its own way of life that contributes to enriching our own. From the Kebab shops to the other Kebab shops, from that loud music those people who moved in next door play to the muezzin waking up the roosters every morning, we are richer for it in the sense that we have less money, but a deeper spiritual awareness that the world is a very strange place.

While the cannibal rat ghost ship may seem threatening at first, we should remember that each new set of arrivals was viewed similarly with suspicion. The Celts and the Saxons did not get along and no one liked the Normans. And when the Saracens overran London, everyone was really unhappy. But then the media kept talking about how the Saracens are contributing to the culture and their neighbors learned to overlook the honor killings, the beheadings and the Asian sex grooming gangs.

The cannibal rats will be no different. At their first arrival there may be moments of unpleasantness. The rats have been eating each other for so long, when they arrive in London and claim refugee status because they fear being eaten if they return home, will they then begin eating us? We don't know, but it would be nothing less than a sordid betrayal of our values if we were to turn the cannibal rats away out of fear that they will begin gnawing on our tender flesh the very first chance that they get.

It will be vital that we find common ground between our values and those of the cannibal rats. There is no doubt that the cannibal rats will have a great deal to teach us and we mustn't let their horrid appearance or their cannibalism customs interfere with the learning process. The sensationalist tabloid press has emphasized the cannibalism angle so much that it has entirely blinded us to their other virtues, to their close family connections, their rich cultural heritage and their love of music.

Like so many refugees, the ghost ship cannibal rats come to us from a troubled part of the world. We who are privileged to live in safety and comfort cannot even begin to imagine the traumas that have marked them and so we must be understanding if they occasionally forget themselves and bite us. The minor pain we suffer is nothing compared to the agony which these poor souls have endured.

Averting further violence must begin with us. It is our responsibility to show them that there is a better way. And we shall do so by defusing the situation from the start by taking their side.

Animals and people lash out when they feel isolated and oppressed. We shall stand with the cannibal rats and for the cannibal rats to show them that they are truly at home here. If the cannibal rats move into a village and are given a dirty look, we shall have a BBC camera crew there in five minutes and a Guardian blog on it shortly thereafter. These will become the foundation of a documentary that will begin with the arrival of the cannibal rats and end triumphantly with their acceptance by the surviving villagers who have learned the true meaning of community and rabies from these strangers.

The plight of the ghost cannibal rats echoes that of the world's billions fleeing instability, climate change and teeth. Through our acceptance of them and their condition, we accept upon ourselves the condition of the world and fulfill our function as citizens of the world.

While it is easy to look down on the cannibal rats for their cannibalism, isn't cannibalism also the base state of capitalism? Economic competition urges us on to cannibalize each other's jobs and possessions and globally, as we compete for spare resources, we are cannibalizing entire cultures so that we may have the material trinkets that make our meaningless lives worthwhile. If we look closely at the ghost ship of cannibal rats, we will see our own reflection mirrored in their dilemma.

By examining the degeneration of their condition, we can draw meaningful conclusions about our own way of life. For example would a genuinely Socialist economy reduce rats to cannibalism? It might, but the cannibalism would be carefully structured in a way that would serve the greater good rather than merely serving the appetites of the rich and the powerful.

It may be that the cannibal rats did indeed achieve an arrangement that was not rat-eat-rat, but that balanced the appetites of the many against the flesh of the few and that arranged for the working class rat hordes to be fed without regard to gender, class or degree of sexual orientation. It may be that in the throes of their cannibalistic orgies of flesh redistribution, these rats achieved a social structure that can advance us forward by a thousand years.

Like the cannibal rats, that is not an opportunity that we can afford to turn our backs on.

Finally there are the ugly expressions of bigotry. Many citizens who have urged the government to blow up the ghost ship filled with hordes of hungry cannibal rats on sight have referred to them, and I quote, as "vermin",  "a disgusting horrible pestilence" and "the worst thing to hit these shores since Gwyneth Paltrow."

The ugly undertones are not difficult to spot in such defamatory language whose privileged speakers presuppose that their lives are worth more than those of cannibal rats. By accepting the ghost ship of cannibal rats into our bosom, we will win a victory over bigotry and demonstrate that we are a society of acceptance, not of rejection, and for this reason alone, if for no other reason, we should accept the ghost ship, grant its cannibal rats asylum and educate them about the importance of voting Labour.

The future begins with each of us. We must lower our walls, open our doors and welcome our new neighbours to our shores. And one day, as we pass our neighbour, the cannibal rat now running a shop specializing in cannibal rat meat, and the cannibal rat's son who now works in the NHS and the cannibal rat's four grandsons who are all on the dole and his other son who is gnawing on the leg of a dead British soldier, we can be proud of ourselves, our ethics and our humanism.

In this way, the stranger, the cannibal rat, will become our friend, the cannibal rat.

Each step forward that we take, each cannibal rat with a peerage, each cannibal rat who wins a singing competition and each cannibal rat in the school that our sons and daughters attend, is a triumph for our deepest values and ideals. They remind us that our civilization, our cultural heritage and our lives are worth nothing if they are not put at the service of our fellow men and our fellow cannibal rats.

Today a cannibal rat applies for refugee status. Tomorrow a cannibal rat will be Prime Minister.

The Solution is the Problem

The problem with our problems is usually their solution. If we were to take a closer look at many of our problems, it would turn out that many of them are actually solutions that were meant to solve those very problems. Our War on Poverty has spread poverty. Our attempts at fighting racism have perpetuated it. Our campaigns for energy efficiency invariably waste more energy than they save.

We tried promoting populism to solve terrorism in the Middle East and got even more terrorism for our troubles. The more resources we put into education, the more the educational system runs backward. Every attempt at creating jobs seems to vaporize more jobs than it creates.

Solving problems isn't a bad thing, but the place to start is at the problem, not the solution.

Listen to enough celebrities at fundraisers, politicians thumping podiums with manicured fingernails and thought leaders spinning their little grey wheels and you notice that they assume that the solution is obvious, self-evident and will work. And that's where problems come from.

The more problems we have, the more addicted to solutions we become. But progressives forget what the pre-moderns knew, that many problems have no solutions. Other problems can be ameliorated, but not solved. Life is still tragic. Bad things will happen to good people. Sometimes we can wipe a disease off the map, but more often our solutions trade simple problems for more complex ones.

Human nature, unlike a virus, has no solution. It's hard enough to keep up with a mutating cellular organism, but trying to outpace shifting human motivations is a totalitarian loser's game. It's why social problems have the fewest solutions except distributing more time, more wealth and more resources wholesale through a general step forward and waiting for people to make use of them.

Social solutions are all about social engineering masses of people on the assumption that they will behave in a predictable way over extended periods of time even when they are aware of what is being done to them and even when the conditions of the experiment come apart as your $600 million website not only doesn't lure in the cool kids to sign up, but works about as well as a plugging your toaster into hope and change and waiting for it to magically do something.

None of these gimmicks work really well which is why most aspiring progressive social engineers settle down to a humbler rackets of six-figure salaries at a non-profit that's there to solve a problem that won't be solved or a consulting gig manipulating billionaires who want to solve a social problem like gun violence or obesity before they die and think that it can be done by manipulating the masses.

For sincere problem solvers, the place to start is by examining the problem. That means setting aside the claims that science has already proven X, Y and Z. Science actually proves surprisingly few things outside of an episode of CSI. What science does is tie together working assumptions into a productive workflow. This is much more useful when it comes to producing a smartphone using science, than using a bunch of unduplicated studies with more statistical gimmickry than a political consultant's poll to tackle overeating, drug abuse or risky behavior by teenagers.

Bacteria is a lot less self-aware and less complex than teenagers. It isn't going to change its worldview tomorrow because of a new trend sweeping the nation. It also isn't going to be primed to give the answers that get you the grant by your research assistant who never learned to spell ethics.

Some problems are unsolvable. Others shouldn't be solved. Think about that bookcase you want to move to the other side of the room. What are the odds that the thin pasteboard is finally going to give way and spill all those medical journals all over your rug if you try to do it? A lot of problems are like that. Tackling them sounds good at a fundraiser, but then it breaks your furniture.

Tackling the social problems of low income families broke up those families and made them much more dependent on the social tacklers. A few generations later, the broken family and dependency had made all the original problems even worse and much more unsolvable. It shouldn't have been that surprising an outcome. Taking animals out of the wild and breaking their chain of life strategy transmission leaves them unable to survive. It works that way with people too.

Solving problems generates new problems. People are complex and their complexity generates problems. Even actual solutions create new problems. What makes these solutions actual is that the new problems are several degrees of severity less than the original problem. Plentiful food means childhood obesity. Cures for diseases lead to increased longevity and strain on the social system.

Thinking ahead can head off solution problems. The problem is that solutioneers rarely like to think of problems. They like to skip ahead to practicing their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches.

The progressive mindset treats solutions as a matter of faith. If you assume that society is always on an upward track like a roller coaster that never stops climbing into the sky, then you don't worry that your solutions will generate future problems. Thinking that way is blasphemy against progress. And if you aren't a 1920s progressive with shiny hair and a great deal of confidence in a future where radio pills are an entire meal and a vast government bureaucracy will end poverty for good, but a 1970s progressive with a necklace of Made in China tribal beads and a misplaced confidence that the only reason that problems don't get solved is that people don't care enough to solve them, then you can't even process the idea that hugging a problem to death might not be the solution that is needed.

The 1920s progressive was the product of a rational culture. His modern descendants confuse being rational with being obtuse, snarky, outraged and any of the other phases of the progressive moon. That leaves them completely unable to solve anything and utterly unaware of their own inability to do anything more complex than edit a Republican politician's Wikipedia entry to reflect a gaffe distributed by a Think Progress' mailing list and call it a day for the progressive movement.

Instead of solving anything, they declare social problems solved. Then when the social problems have gotten so bad that the voters turn to a Republican to solve them, the progressives begin churning out articles, books and documentaries about how the Republican deregulation of whatever messy system they set up to solve old problems by creating more of them wrecked everything.

Crime was solved, until the Republicans came in and began fighting it. Poverty was solved, until Reagan got in. Race relations were great, until Nixon. Every disease was cured until Bush failed to increase NHS funding in line with the growth curve of the economy. This comforting hateful nonsense frees progressives from ever questioning the progress that they have made.

Progressives are forever fixing things and conservatives are forever breaking them because they hate progress. The only way to make progress is by eliminating all opposition. It worked in the USSR where the authorities spent three generations blaming every one of their failures on a vast army of saboteurs working for Great Britain, Leon Trotsky and the remnants of the Czarist regime.

Ask a modern progressive to name what his politicians did wrong and the usual answer is that they weren't radical enough. ObamaCare was bad because it wasn't Single Payer. If it had been Single Payer, it would have been bad because of medical tourism. If a giant barbed wire fence had been set up and all the doctors rounded up into it, the complaint would be that the fence wasn't electrified.

Like the guy trying to fix a television set with a hammer and twelve beers, the progressive review board's conclusion is always that he didn't hit the broken pieces of the television hard enough.

This same solutionist mindset doomed the USSR to wallowing in its own economic filth because it could rarely work its way backward from its latest mess. Instead it found a few scapegoats to shoot and went on marching forward over a cliff until everyone got tired of the whole thing and decided to go back to an oligarchy with fewer rules and better movies.

Those who believe in the solution can never accept that they are the problem. That they aren't smart enough to outsmart the rest of the population and that they should stop trying before they make their problematic solutions unsolvable. The solution is more than just something they do, it's an act of faith in a rational future. But there is nothing rational about problem solving as a progressive act of faith.

Solutions and problems aren't polar opposites like heaven and hell or Beethoven and the sound a broken fax machine makes when you try to call it; they're entangled bits of each other like a Rubik's Cube. The solution is present in a problem and the problem in a solution. That is all the truer when the problem is people, rather than the alignment of colored squares.

Solving a human problem isn't a transformation, but a realignment, and there is rarely more than a thin line between the problem state and the solution state. We are never far from the problems of the last century or the last millennium. Like yesterday's hunger pangs, we may have forgotten the raw experience of living that way, but there is very little objectively that separates the solutions we live from the problems that they solved. It is best to remember that the problems of human nature today were the problems of human nature yesterday and will be the problems of human nature tomorrow.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Snowed In

from IOwntheWorld

THE PRICE OF DIPLOMACY

An autopsy report found that he had been starved and had suffered multiple lethal injuries that could have caused his death.  The skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated.

Fred Hof, a diplomat who had been a friend of the murdered man, said, “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death. If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.”

“The State Department, not the Defense Department, had the lead. That meant diplomacy, not military might. It meant no retribution, no retaliation, no rescue,” Robin L. Higgins, his wife, wrote.

American Blood on Iranian Hands





OBAMA'S NUMBERS

Obama began his first term with an approval rating of 68 percent; a figure unmatched since JFK. No Republican had enjoyed a starting approval rating above 60 percent in 60 years, indicating how much more willing Republicans were to give the other guy a fair shot than their Democratic counterparts. At 12 percent, his disapproval ratings were also much lower than those of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

If his current approval rating of 40 percent pro and 51 percent con can be put down to anything, it isn’t race. When Obama began his first term in office, he had the approval of 41 percent of Republicans. By the time the year was out, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

At the beginning of Obama’s first term, 69 percent of blacks said that Martin Luther King Jr’s vision had been fulfilled. Two years later, only 54 percent of blacks agreed and 45 percent disagreed.  By 2013, only 32 percent of blacks would even agree that a lot of progress had been made in fulfilling the dream.

From Martin Luther King to Obama





ALL THE WORLD A STAGE

Kerry never truly sees the world that he traverses at taxpayer expense, only the awards and plaudits waiting for him once he resolves all of its problems. All his life, he has been a player on his own stage, posturing in a small variety of roles, from Vietnam veteran, to peace crusader, back to Vietnam veteran and then back to peace crusader, from medal hurler to Nobel winner in the theater of his own mind.

Diplomacy for Kerry, like statesmanship and legislating, is a performance. Not only doesn’t he know how to do it, but he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know how to do it. The same misplaced confidence that got him from telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States military was as bad as the armies of Genghis Khan to sitting on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is moving him around the world with a furrowed brow full of Botox and nothing inside it but a Tom Collins and visions of an elderly Norwegian handing him the Peace Prize that he believes has been rightfully his since 1971.

John Kerry’s Flying Circus





THE 396TH AMENDMENT

The liberal Constitution is a very strange place. There’s no Freedom of Religion in it, but there is a Constitutional right to sex change operations.

Robert Kosilek was a psycho transvestite who strangled his wife to death so severely that he nearly cut off her head. Then he dumped her naked body in a mall parking lot.

Cheryl McCaul had met Robert Kosilek and felt sorry for him. And she paid for it with her life. The cowardly Kosilek tried to claim that he had murdered his wife in self-defense after she caught him trying on her clothes.

2 Obama Judges Say Constitution Entitles Wife-Killer to Sex Change Operation




EU Dumps Green Energy Mandates, Embraces Fracking





FAMILY TIES

Yameen is the half-brother of former autocratic ruler Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

At a victory rally following the presidential run-off vote last November, Yameen said his coalition had received a mandate “to save the Maldivian nation, to protect the sacred religion of Islam.”

Maldives President Rejects Law Banning Husbands from Raping Divorced Wives to Infect them with AIDS as “UnIslamic”



Jimmy Carter Warns Against Sanctions on Iran




PRIGS

A continuation of the story about rising demand for pigs reared in the open on page 19 of the paper got the same treatment, with the faces of two adult pigs blacked out.

“From last time also we do this. If there is picture of nudes or like this we will cover. This is a Muslim country,” the spokesman said when asked why the faces of the pigs had been censored.

New York Times Censors Pig Photos to Avoid Offending Muslims





EU Dumps Green Energy Mandates, Embraces Fracking - Obama is now more left-wing and reactionary on energy productivity than the European Union.





PAKISTANIS ARE THE MURDERERS OF PROPHETS

"The additional sessions judge had also constituted a medical board to evaluate his mental health and the board had said that he was not insane and in perfect health."

Sure. A guy claiming to be a prophet in a country that kills prophets is sane. The psychiatrist who treated Mohammed (again the latter day Mohammed, though the original Mohammed would have benefited from some anti-psychotics) disagrees.

But what does she know? She’s a woman and an infidel.

Insane Scottish Prophet Mohammed Gets Death Sentence in Pakistan





Michelle Obama Considers Hanoi Jane a “Role Model”





THE LAST TAXPAYER TO GIVE A DOLLAR FOR A MISTAKE

The Department of Health and Human Services is spending $2,797,979 on a study that brings television to more than a dozen remote villages in Vietnam to study its impact on their culture and reproductive behavior.

You would think that once we were out of Vietnam, we could stop spending money on Vietnam.

Obama Spending $2.7 Mil to Broadcast Communist Propaganda to Vietnam




Iraqi Muslim Rapes Blind German Senior Citizen, Gets Parole and $4800 Fine



GLASS BALLOT

Forgotten in the reality distortion field surrounding Ready for Hillary is the simply fact that Hillary has never actually won a competitive election. Hillary’s senate seat in New York was handed to her after Giuliani came down with cancer. If he hadn’t gotten sick, Hillary Clinton would have tried to be the senator from her native Illinois instead and might have prevented Obama from ever getting started.

Hillary Clinton was so incredibly popular that her otherwise unknown Democratic primary opponent in 2000 managed to take a fifth of the vote.

Can anyone beat Hillary? Why not. In 2000 and 2006, she took down weak and obscure opponents with charges of sexism and racism. When she had to face off against Obama, she lost.

The only ticket she’s running on is “First female president.” If the Republicans were to put up a female candidate, Hillary would literally have no platform, no slogan, no anything.

Can Anyone Stop Hillary? Why Not? Hillary has Never Won a Competitive Election





13 Dems Propose Bill to Study Hate Speech on the Internet “Outside Zone of First Amendment Protection”



BOO!

“This is a ghost gun,” de Leon begins, holding an unloaded rifle in his hands. “This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”

Kevin de Leon, a former English as a Second Language teacher and NEA crony, couldn’t be expected to know any of this. He’s only been pushing gun control for the last six years.

How was he supposed to find the time to learn what a caliber is in only six years?

State Sen. Kevin de Leon defended himself Tuesday against allegations he helped transfer $25,000 to a nonprofit controlled by Sen. Ron Calderon’s brother, Thomas.

California Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said Tuesday that “it is clear” Sen. Kevin de León will be the next leader of the state Senate.

California’s Dumbest Senate Democrat Warns ‘Ghost Guns’ Will Shoot All Their Calibers At You




Congressman has Wacky Theory That Kim Philby Might be a Russian Spy





ATTENTION SAN FRANCISCO; LARRY BRINKIN WEEK HAS BEEN CANCELED

It wasn’t that long ago, that San Francisco was declaring Larry Brinkin Week recognizing his work as the “co—founder of Bay Area Gay Liberation and the Lesbian/Gay Labor Alliance”.

The resolution also mentioned “his ‘key role in laying the foundation for marriage equality for same-sex couples by filing the first lawsuit to challenge an employers denial of domestic-partner benefits thus helping San Francisco to develop the Domestic Partnership Ordinance.”

And then two years later, Larry Brinkin Week came to an abrupt end when the father of gay marriage was charged with being a monster.

Father of Gay Marriage Guilty of Child Porn Will Keep San Fran City Pension




Israel Breaks Up Al Qaeda Plot to Bomb US Embassy - While Obama and Kerry were pressuring Israel to free terrorists to keep the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority at the negotiations, Israel was breaking up a terrorist plot targeting the US embassy in Tel Aviv.




THE ABORTION TROLLS

The left keeps trolling opponents with the rape and incest argument because it keeps getting away with it, especially when it ambushes not especially bright politicians with this question.

Whether or not abortion should be legal cannot and should not be defined by an extreme scenario. Just as we wouldn’t argue the legality of convenience store robberies in general based around that “child starving to death” exception. Or the legality or marijuana based on medical marijuana. Those are outliers.

It’s always possible to create an extreme scenario in which an otherwise unacceptable act becomes acceptable to many people because of extenuating circumstances, but that’s a sophomoric argument unworthy of being taken seriously.

Why Abortion in Case of Rape is a Non-Argument




Marvel Creates Muslim Superheroine, Muslims Complain She Doesn’t Wear Burka





HER HIGHNESS IS GOING FREE MARKET

“It’s quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks’ time rather than having to wait for a year,” privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio on Friday. “It’s terrible that I, as a young person, don’t feel I can trust the health care system to take care of me.”

Princess Madeleine and her husband Christopher O’Neil have decided that their child will be born in the US, the Swedish Royal Court has announced.

“After careful consideration and in consultation with the King and Queen, Princess Madeleine and Mr. Christopher O’Neill have decided that their child will be born in New York,” Svante Lindqvist at the Royal Court wrote in a statement.

Swedes Flee Socialized Medicine After Year-Long Waiting Lists

Ron Lewenberg •

Nothing new. When my grandfather had lung cancer in 1981, he had to come to America to be treated. The Swedes offered a hospice. He lived another 22 years before being involuntarily euthanized in Sweden.
#socializedmedicine

....from the comments




Tokyo Court Allows Religious Profiling of Muslim Terrorists






Muslim MK Who Claimed House Doesn’t Have Electricity Because of Israel, Has Satellite Dish




INSIDE MAN

The insider attacks in which Afghani soldiers and police officers suddenly turn and begin killing Americans is one of the more mysterious elements of the War in Afghanistan. Various explanations are given from secret Taliban loyalties to unexpected violations of mores, but none of those explanations really show why these attacks began to dramatically increase in 2009.

Did an Obama Attempt to Remove Karzai Lead to Afghan “Insider Attacks”




President of Indonesia Claims Allah Saved Him from Assassination by Black Cloud



LIAR, LIAR

Weinstein’s future slate includes Kill Bill 3, Halloween 3 and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. All these are notoriously ultraviolent movies.

Harvey Weinstein did leave himself plenty of wriggle room when he said, “I’m not going to make some crazy action movie just to blow up people and exploit people just for the sake of making it.”

The reason why Harvey Weinstein is lying about not making more violent movies can be expressed in one word: Dimension. After the Weinsteins sold Miramax and Harvey Weinstein made a comeback with the Weinstein Company, Dimension’s lower grade properties pay the bills.

Harvey Weinstein Lies About Not Making Any More Violent Movies




Obama Treasury Secretary Warned Financial Firm of “Govenment Response” to Credit Rating Downgrade




MAGIC BULLY

“The script dealt w/ issues of adultery, conflicts within the movement, and King’s spiritual transformation into a higher, more radical being,” Stone tweeted.

“I’m told the estate & the ‘respectable’ black community that guard King’s reputation won’t approve it. They suffocate the man & the truth,” Stone tweeted.

The Martin Luther King estate should probably be grateful that he didn’t depict MLK killing JFK.

Martin Luther King Estate Boots Oliver Stone from Biopic Over Adultery Scene




THE ROUNDUP

For the crime of giving humanity parliamentary democracy, night after night, latter-day gods bind London’s Tower Hamlets to a rock for fallen angel Lutfur Rahman to gorge himself silly on a young civilization’s liver while applauded by a chorus of blind and ecstatic cultural diversificationists. Thus do the gods wantonly sport with our venerable heritage?

A recent report in a national newspaper once again brought to light one of Rahman’s artful dodges, this time the sale of Old Poplar Town Hall at a knockdown price to his business associates and electoral advisors. The report concluded with the dismal conjecture that there was no little or no prospect of bringing Rahman to account for fear of being labelled race-mongers. 

... J.P. from Gates of Vienna




WHAT IS LOST

But.... but... something persists in me from a book read long, long ago concerning the Death Camps during the Holocaust. I read this history more than forty years ago as a teenager and have not read it since. I read it so long ago that I cannot remember the title but retain trace memories the photographs of Dachau in the center that shocked me out of childhood. I also remembere one particular passage. I find it strange that, given my youth at the time, and the thousands and thousands of books since, that this passage should stay with me.

I cannot quote it but its import went something like this:

The person being interviewed was a female concentration camp survivor. She survived by being 'of use' to the camp. This use was to take the unborn, the aborted, the babies, the infants and the small children (dead or alive, I'm no longer sure), and throw their bodies into the ovens. At the end of this passage she reflected (in paraphrase): "Were we throwing another Mozart or Moses into the flames? We'll never know." And that not knowing was her enduring hell.

from Gerard's meditation on Row vs Wade at American Digest




MODERN MCCARTHYISM

Patricia Heaton from  the 2004 movie “Rated R:  Republicans in Hollywood”:  “When the Everybody Loves Raymond star said she was voting for Bush, the conversation turned to awkward silence.  As she put it, ‘You’d think I’d crapped in the middle of the table,’ and consequently she was no longer a part of the upcoming production.”

Dwight Schultz, from Ben Shapiro’s book Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV:  “The late Bruce Paltrow knew that Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: “There’s not going to be a Reagan a**hole on this show!” The part went to Howie Mandel.”

Orson Bean, From “A Hostile Work Environment” by Andrew Breitbart, LA Times Sept. 2007:  “My father-in-law Orson  Bean,  an author,  comedian  and  actor, was once  blacklisted as a Communist back in the ’50s.  Ed Sullivan called him to say he could no longer book him on the show. Fifty years later, and after a sharp  ideological metamorphosis, Orson says it’s harder now to be an open conservative on a Hollywood set than it was back then to be a Communist.”

...from Ann Marie-Murrell at Politichicks.tv

And I think even leftists who are the most hostile to McCarthy will agree that inflicting Howie Mandel on the country was much worse than anything McCarthy did.

We can blame Gwyneth Paltrow's father for that.



A 99 PERCENT WORLD

For Obama, America abroad is analogous to the 1 percent at home. We need not squabble over the reasons why the wealthiest Americans enjoy unequal access to the things money can buy, or why America, of all nations, finds itself with unmatched global clout and influence. The concern is only that such privilege exists; that it is unfair; that it has led to injustice for the majority; and that it must be changed.

Obama, of course, cannot issue a global tax aimed at the United States. He cannot easily expand U.S. foreign aid as a sort of reparations. And he cannot craft the international equivalent of Obamacare. But he does seek the same sort of redistributive readjustment to America’s presence abroad that he does to some Americans at home — in the interests of fairness, equality, and social justice.

Just as the United States would be a lot better place if a few million were not so rich, so too the world would be better off if the United States — and to a lesser extent Europe — were not so powerful and interventionist.

That section from Victor Davis Hanson's essay neatly sums matters up. The left's goal is the extinguishing of the old order in every sense of the word. American power is the mainspring of that order. The Pax Americana aborted the inevitable world revolution of the left. It has to be usurped for the revolution to happen and the world to become a "just" and "peaceful" place.



ANNIVERSARY

The Jawa Report celebrated its 10th anniversary. In a way this is a look back at a different blogsphere of a different time when the Iraq War had just begun and we felt like we were part of a rising tide.

By the Obama era, many former colleagues and friends had defected, some rather prominently, like C.J, others whose voices were articulate and clever, slowly switched sides of dropped away. It's a good thing that the Jawa Report is still here and fighting the good fight.

People used to email me constantly demanding -- DEMANDING!!111!! -- that I take this or that down. Don't you know you might offend someone? But they didn't get it, I wanted them to react that way. I wanted them to be offended.

For me, in the midsts of two shooting wars, you don't worry about offending the sensibilities of your enemies. Previous generations understood this. Have you ever watched the old Looney Tunes cartoons from WWII? They didn't pull any punches. In fact, many of these cartoons are now considered so offensive that Warner Bros. didn't renew the copyright on them and doesn't include them in their usual syndication deals. They're "banned" for being too offensive.

As one of my historian colleagues reminded me sometime in 2004: we didn't fight Nazis, we fought the Germans. There was no Nazi Army, there was only a German Army. It was only after WWII was over that we started talking about good "Germans" vs bad "Nazis". It was historical revisionism within a few years of the actual war. I do not mean to say there weren't a lot of Germans who opposed Hitler, only that it didn't matter. A guy with a gun pointed at your head who is a Nazi is no different at that moment than a guy with a gun pointed at your head who is really sorry to be killing you, but you know, orders.

So, we fought Germany and Germans were the bad guys. Call it a casualty of war, but dehumanizing your enemies is a necessary evil. It's hard to pull the trigger when you think of the guy at the end of the barrel as no different than your buddy next to you.