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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The Peace Process is the Process of Blaming Israel

By On April 30, 2014
Big lies don't always start out big. They don't even always start out as lies. They only grow big in the cover-up when the truth has to be beaten off with a stick made out of even bigger lies.

A brief read of the daily newspapers, a quick flick through the cable news networks and an ear
cocked to the drive time news minute might give you the idea that Israel is isolated and besieged. Israel is indeed a small country. It's always been isolated in a Muslim region that is willing to kill even fellow Arab Christians and fellow Arab Shiites over differences of religion.

But contrary to the Peace Lobby sloganeering, Israel isn't morally bankrupt, the intellectual premises of Zionism aren't shattered and it's not a failed state on the verge of destruction.

It's the Peace Lobby that is frantically struggling to keep its big lie together. Its attacks on Israel are not a show of strength, but a desperate cover-up. From the high chambers where John Kerry suggests Israel is going to be an Apartheid State to the low chambers of failed boycotts against academics and soda companies, the purveyors of the big lie are coming apart at the seams.

The big peace lie started out small. Both sides would shake hands and make peace. And white doves would fly from Jerusalem to Ramallah. To some it wasn't even a lie; just blind idealism and wishful thinking. It was only when the lie was tried and failed that it truly became a lie and then there were no more idealists, only desperate liars covering up one lie with another.

The entire peace process rested on the lie that the PLO wanted to make peace. Israel had successfully reached peace agreements, including territorial compromises, with its enemies. Its credibility was never in question. The PLO's credibility was the big question mark and when its willingness to make peace was put to the test and it failed, again and again, the big lie began.

Israel can’t do anything right in the peace process and the PLO can’t do anything wrong. When Abbas blatantly violated existing agreements by going to the UN, Secretary of State John Kerry took a seat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and blamed Israel.

Then Abbas made a unity deal with Hamas, which is committed to destroying Israel, and Kerry told the Trilateral Commission that Israel was on the path to becoming an Apartheid state.

Kerry may be notorious for his terrorist sympathies, but he was following the grand tradition of his predecessors and of the entire Peace Lobby by blaming the peace partner with the most credibility instead of the one with the least credibility because the credibility of the peace process depends on its weakest link. And that is the Palestinian Authority’s Abbas and his PLO terrorists.

If you were trying to negotiate the sale of a home from a seller acting in good faith to a buyer acting in bad faith, you would blame the seller because once you admit that the buyer is acting in bad faith, the credibility of the sale vanishes into thin air. The smart thing for the seller to do is to walk away, but unfortunately Israeli leaders have become convinced that they can prove their good faith by eagerly showing up to negotiate.

What they don't understand is that blaming Israel is a structural part of the peace process.

If the Peace Lobby admits that the PLO is not credible, that Abbas is a manipulative crook, that his henchmen are waiting for his death to begin offing each other, not to continue the great struggle for the nationhood of a nation that never existed, but for the chance to dip their golden buckets in the river of foreign aid that flows from Brussels, Washington and Tokyo, the peace process would collapse.

The only way to keep the peace process going is to blame Israel. The Jewish State can never prove its good faith and the PLO can never demonstrate its bad faith. It took almost a decade of peace terrorism to discredit Arafat. The cagier Abbas has yet to be discredited despite eliminating elections, engaging in terrorism and lining his own pockets just like Arafat. And if Abbas is finally discredited, another figure will step into his place and the dance will begin all over again.

Arafat and Abbas as individuals may be sacrificed for the sake of the peace process, but the Peace Lobby will never turn its back on fighting for the credibility of the PLO. And since Arafat and Abbas represent the consensus of the PLO, rather than that of the voters, the cycle can never end.

The worse the PLO behaves, the harsher the Peace Lobby attacks on Israel become.

If Abbas goes to the UN, Kerry bashes Israel in the Senate. If Abbas goes to Hamas, Kerry calls Israel an Apartheid State. In the Peace Lobby's version of The Untouchables, if Abbas brings a knife, Kerry shoots Israel in the head.

It makes no moral sense, but it's an entirely pragmatic response if you're covering up a big lie by escalating its size and scope. Kerry isn't a peace negotiator; he's Peacegate's cover-up man.

The big lie was that the PLO was willing to make peace. When it became clear that it wasn't, then the big lie became that Israel was the obstacle to the peace process. The more the PLO sabotages any prospect of peace, the louder the peace liars have to yell that Israel is the real problem to divert attention from the rotten terrorist core of their peace apple.

The tragedy of the Peace Lobby is that by tying peace to the PLO, they made peace impossible. Among all the other obstacles that made the peace process unworkable, the big lie became the most decisive. When the PLO realized that it couldn't lose and Israel couldn't win, it escalated its demands.

The more the Peace Lobby covered up for the PLO, the more the PLO felt free to act in ways that made the cover-ups necessary and peace impossible. The big liars escalated the problem they were lying about with their lies. The more they lied to protect the peace process, the more the peace process drew out of reach. Their own lies about the PLO in support of the peace process killed peace.

Now all that's left is the dirty business of the cover-up. And the cover-up of the biggest Western diplomatic failure of the last two decades may still destroy Israel.

Too many governments and public figures have invested too much in the big lie. Like so many other big lies, the big peace lie has become too big to fail. Lying about the PLO and Israel is the only way to salvage the reputations of everyone involved.

If politicians from around the world and across the political spectrum were to admit that they trusted a terrorist group to reform only to see the whole thing blow up in their faces, they would look like idiots. Like John Kerry and Miley Cyrus, they can't stop. The whole thing has gone on for too long and the longer it goes on, the worse admitting the truth would make them look.

And so the big lie keeps gaining momentum. Its dimensions are swiftly becoming universal as the Peace Lobby claims that all the terrorism in the world and all the instability in the Middle East will be put to rest once the peace process is completed. Before too long, the peace process will offer the cure to cancer, lost socks and global warming. Like every bubble, the only way to prevent it from bursting is by blowing it up even bigger. And when it does burst, it will take a lot more with it.

Israel can't escape being the fall guy for the failure, but it can exit on its own terms or go on tearing itself apart trying to prove its willingness to make peace to a Peace Lobby whose reputations would be destroyed by that proof.

You can't prove your innocence to a politician trying to frame you for his own misdeeds or a corporate executive trying to finger you for his own embezzlement. All you can do is tell the truth and walk away.

The truth is that the PLO doesn't want to make peace, can't afford to make peace and has been given no reason to make peace by the Peace Lobby which never holds it accountable for anything. The Peace Lobby allowed the PLO to take the peace process hostage and once that happened any hope for peace became hopeless.

The big peace lie killed the peace it was lying about. And now all that's left is protecting the lie, no longer for the sake of peace, but for the sake of the liars.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Never Again

By On April 28, 2014
Never again. To Jews it means a refusal to give genocidal bigots another go at them. To Obama, it means refusing to ever again have to listen to an Israeli leader explain why his country cannot commit territorial suicide in order to appease a gang of genocidal bigots.

When the Jews who fought among the crumbling walls of the Warsaw Ghetto finally made it to Israel, they came just in time to load up their guns and fight once again for their people's survival. The survivors of one genocidal ideology bent on making someone pay for its sense of humiliation came just in time to fight off another version of the same thing.

After 2000 years of running, an indigenous minority that had been kicked around by emperors and caliphs finally made its stand around a handful of farming towns and in alleyways lined by the golden stone of Jerusalem. Men and women who only a few years earlier hid in their homes from Muslim pogroms, covering their children's ears at the cries of "Ibtach Al Yahood", "Kill the Jews", took up arms. They stood alongside the settlers who had drained the swamps, the refugees fleeing Muslim terror in Egypt and Syria and the remains of the original indigenous Jewish population which had survived the conquests of seven empires. They stood and fought for their lives against an ideology that said they had no right to be free because of their religion and the blood in their veins.

Like their Nazi allies, Muslim violence was driven by a need to reverse the humiliations of World War I which dismantled the Ottoman Empire and gave regional minorities like the Jews a chance at rebuilding their own independent countries. But going back to 1914 was only the beginning. Some wanted to go back to 1492 and the fall of Granada. Others in the Saudi desert were dreaming of a return to the 6th century. But what they all had in common was a refusal to tolerate an independent non-Muslim state in their midst.

And even though Allied troops were still within sight of the rubble, ruined tanks and barbed wire camps remaining behind from the last time that their countries had chosen to appease this sort of thing with a slice of Czechoslovakia, they still chose appeasement. Again.

President Wilson had idealistically envisioned turning over portions of the territories of the Ottoman Empire to peoples like the Jews and Armenians who had struggled for so long under Muslim dominion. But the European willingness to tolerate and appease Muslim violence nearly put an end to both dreams. Turkish armies swarmed over Armenia at the first opportunity and Arab armies did the same in Israel. The lesson was the same. If you wanted to be free to practice your religion, to live under your own laws, not those of the Koran which dictate the inferiority of minorities, you had to stand up and fight for it without counting on the support of the West.

Wilsonian idealism was no match for British empire building, and that was no match for Postmodern globalism. Both British and Globalist empire building desired stability at all costs.

President Wilson had wanted to give the peoples oppressed by Islam a chance to breathe the fresh air of freedom. But the British Empire turned over the largest part of Israel to a Saudi monarchy to rule over as the newly created nation of Jordan. Then the UN partitioned the remainder into a stump with indefensible borders in an attempt to appease the gathering Muslim armies. But the armies of Islam rejected even that partition and chose war instead. Now Barack Hussein Obama and a coterie of European leaders would like Israel to go back to those indefensible borders. Not because it will bring peace, but for the same reason that he retasked NASA from studying stars, to pander to the genocidal fragility of Muslim self-esteem.

The West has sold out Israel, the way that it once sold out Czechoslovakia, and with the same results. Muslims are no more satiated with the prospect of an ethnically cleansed Palestine, than Nazi Germany was with a Volksdeutsche Sudetenland. Their vision of a "Pure Arab-Muslim Palestine" inevitably swallows Israel, as it already does on their maps, and then aspires to join with a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Cairo to Damascus and beyond.

Just as the Sudetenland was only the first bite out of Czechoslovakia, then Eastern Europe and then Europe... and then the world. So too Palestine is the first bite, followed by the overthrow of secular regimes in Egypt, Algeria and Turkey, the conquest of multi-religious African states, like Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire, and then Drang Nach Osten, into Europe, and finally civil war in Thailand, India and China. This is what World War III looks like. And it is happening before our very eyes.

Never Again has become an empty phrase. Something that angry world leaders shout when the victims aren't eager enough to appease the Third Reich or the Seventh Caliphate. Leaders who are committed to the false narrative that the violence in the Middle-East is caused by insufficient territorial concessions by the region's only Non-Muslim minority to its Sunni Muslim majority, rather than the unwillingness of the Sunni Muslim majority to practice tolerance in their own countries, throughout the region or the world.

Jews cannot allow Never Again to become an empty catchphrase or a universalized call for tolerance that fails to hold Islam accountable for its promotion of bigotry, violence and genocide. While Jewish leaders occupy themselves with empty calls for interfaith brotherhood, Jewish farms and villages once again fall under siege. Farmers sleep with guns by their beds, children are taught to race to bomb shelters and Jewish store windows are smashed in the cities of Europe. Armies of soldiers, terrorists and diplomats gather once again to carve up Jerusalem. To ethnically cleanse half the city of Jews and turn it into a platform for terror.

This is what going back to 1948 means. It means going back to a religious civil war and a stump state with indefensible borders. This is the vision of international diplomats who hope that feeding a big enough piece of Israel to the crocodile will put it to sleep. It is also the vision of a leftist elite in Israel which wants to turn the Gush Dan region into a cramped tech-happy Singapore, and let Jerusalem and the farmlands fall into enemy hands, in the hope that they will be left alone to sip coffee in their cafes and launch their IPO's in peace. But it is nothing more than the Warsaw Ghetto with an internet cafe. And even they are only a few years away from discovering that.

Shimon Peres' vision of Tel Aviv as the Warsaw Ghetto with an internet cafe and a nanotech research lab, is colliding with the Muslim vision of the fall of Israel as the first of many victories over the Kufar, and the vision of world leaders of Israel dissolving away to make room for a Muslim Middle-East. Only one of those visions can survive or none of them. Either Israel falls to the first wave of a Jihad that will engulf the world, or it once again makes a stand.

The Europeans and Obama competing to offer Israel the best 'alternative' before the UN recognizes Palestine is nothing but empty theater. There is no compromise that will settle the issue. Nor can Israel ever convince the world compromisers of that. So long as the world community accepts the inevitability of Islamic dominance, then Israel will always be the goat. The sacrifice to appease the beast.

If Never Again means anything at all, it is a refusal to be the sacrifice, to be placed on the altar of appeasement for a Holocaust, a burnt offering, to the Muslim Moloch of insatiable rage and genocidal fanaticism.

Jews say, "Never Again" for the same reason that rape victims say, "No, Means No." We have been there. We are not going to allow it to happen again. No matter what words are used to justify it. No matter how the perpetrators turn the world around so that they are right and we are wrong, so that their violence is just and our self-defense isn't. No matter how many ways they find to blame us for their actions. World leaders may try to carve us up, but we will never consent to it. Not orally and not silently. We will resist.

We have said Never Again so many times that we have forgotten what the words mean. They have lost their edge. Worse, they have lost their purpose. It's time to stop just saying , "Never Again". It's time to mean it.


(Spanish Language Translation at Reflexiones Medio Sobre Y Oriente)

Sunday, April 27, 2014

It's Hard to See Racism When You're a Liberal

By On April 27, 2014
A few years ago, Newsweek's glossy cover asked "Is Your Baby Racist?" The baby looking back at supermarket shoppers, airline passengers waiting for their flight and patients in the dental office had blue eyes.

The labeling of racists as white has itself become a racial stereotype. And it's not an accidental stereotype.

Behind the left's support for affirmative action is the belief that white racism is the only kind of racism that exists. Black racism they insist is really called "reverse racism" and is a myth made up by white people.

It's not that the left believes that affirmative action isn't racist. It's that it believes that there is no such thing as racism against white people. Like the Knockout Game or white students who qualify on merit but can't get into college because of racial diversity quotas; it’s an invalid category. A myth.

And if it's a myth, then there's nothing wrong with a little racial violence or a few racial preferences. 

Our system isn't immune to bouts of niche insanity. A sizable portion of Hollywood believes that their souls originated on another planet and that they will eventually gain superpowers. Much of Washington D.C. believes that money can be printed infinitely with infinite economic benefits. And the academic and non-profit establishment believes that anti-white racism doesn't exist.

The left is delusional, but it isn't completely insane. It doesn't deny that black hate crimes can take place. It won't even deny the occasional act of institutional discrimination. And that is where sanity parts ways with insanity because the left does not recognize racism except as a collective phenomenon.

The debate over affirmative action is about the collective and the individual.

"It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike," Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Schuette v. BAMN decision that permits a ban on racial affirmative action discrimination in Michigan. But that's the exact premise that the left operates under. Or rather it doesn't care whether members of a race think alike. It still chooses to address them as a group or not at all.

Racism, to the left, exists systemically. It exists institutionally. It exists collectively, but not individually.

All white people are racist. All black people are victims of racism. Any events to the contrary are exceptions to the rule. Racism can only exist one way between the majority and the minority.

Anything else is a mythical 'reverse racism'. 

Conservatives view people as individuals. Leftists view them as parts of a system. To a conservative, racism is something that happens between individuals. To a leftist, it's the attribute of a system. Trying to convince a leftist that black racism exists or that affirmative action is racist is like trying to convince him that some of the cells in his body are plotting against him.

He doesn't see individuals, he sees a system.

The debate over affirmative action is really the debate over whether we see people as individuals or cells, whether the white and black students who want to be seen as individuals will prevail, or whether the totalitarian left with its insistence on viewing them as differently colored marbles in a single system will continue to get its way.

Similarly in politics, conservatives reach out to people who agree with their policies, regardless of race, leading to less diverse, but more intellectually robust groups, while liberals form racial coalitions. Liberals accuse conservatives of racism because they assume that they are not a coalition of individuals, but a racial collective, just like them. The lack of individual conservative racism occasionally registers, but is not processed because only the system matters.

And yet racial healing hasn't happened in America on a collective level. We haven't been readjusted as a system. We have changed individually.

That is what the left, with its obsession with systems, cannot see and cannot cope with it. The Great Society failed miserably because we were a great society all along. We weren't a great society because we were perfect, but because we were constantly striving to better ourselves as individuals.

And it is this trait which affirmative action and the left's collectivist view undermines.

Systems don't reject racism. Individuals do.

It is this fundamental truth that Newsweek's obsession with baby racism and the indoctrination of white privilege are meant to combat. Their collective message is that individuals are products of the system, puppets of their biology, forever damned by an original sin of racism that so thoroughly pervades every part of their being and mental state that they can never escape it.

Not unless the system changes.

That was the left's defeatist totalitarian response to class. The failure of its systems of economic management and the success of capitalism destroyed its credibility on class. The idea that the working class can never escape poverty under private enterprise has been buried as thoroughly as the statues of Marx and Lenin.

But instead of rethinking its paradigm, the left substituted race for class. The working class could succeed under private enterprise , but only as long as it was white.

And that's still wrong.

Race, like class, is not a systemic problem. It's not a problem of the system, but of the individual. There is no single collective solution, only the solutions that individuals find for themselves. We are not a nation divided between black and white, or between the even more absurd formulation of the colorless whites and the 'people of color'.

We are individuals. We always were.

Affirmative action denies that race is an individual experience. It denies that race is not the sum of the individual. It denies the suffering of those who are caught between the gears of the system because they are members of the 'wrong race.'

It denies the individual. It denies his identity, his worth and his agency. It puts the system above the individual and takes away the rights of everyone, of all races, genders and assorted identities.

The left is obsessed with the 'whiteness' of the system. Its obsession is not only racist, but it replaces an open system in which people can change and are changing... with a closed system under which they cannot. This totalitarian aspect of the system has been hidden under a sham of empowerment and the rituals of victimization that reward those who play the race card over those who try to do their best.

The system doesn't reward aspiration, it rewards only outrage. It is interested only in promoting the collective force that keeps its wheels turning, not the individual counter-clockwise rotation of dissent.

The white experience of black racism is illegitimate because it turns 'against' the system. And so it's a conversation that has to be shut down and an experience that has to be delegitimized with accusations of white privilege. White privilege is an artifact of systemic thinking that does not recognize individuals. It's an attack by the political immune system of an ideology that has absolutely no room for non-conforming experiences.

What will determine the outcome of the affirmative action debate and the larger debates over race and class is whether we approach them as individuals or as parts of a system. Americans resist being treated like interchangeable parts of a system, but the individual narratives that the left uses so effectively are cover for systemic approaches and systemic solutions.

The left has responded to institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism until it became the very racist institution that it was once fighting against. Institutions don't fight racism, they create it. The most compelling argument against the left's collective racial policies has always been the individual.

Organizations can create hate, but only individuals can replace it with love.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Introducing the Envia Discord 2015

By On April 26, 2014
PRESS RELEASE

These days every car company claims that their latest model is environmentally friendly no matter how much it pollutes the planet and makes Indians standing by the side of a road cry bitter tears.

But what does environmentally friendly really mean? At Envia Motors, we set out to make a car without concessions to speed, performance or handling because we put the environment first.

Fueled by a dream and two billion dollars in government grant money, we challenged ourselves to see whether four community organizers with no technical knowledge or skill could create a car that would become a compulsory driving experience.

And with the Envia Discord 2015, we succeeded beyond your wildest mandated imagination.

The Discord isn't just a car. It's a political experience. It speaks to our yearnings and aspirations. And it has plastic skis permanently attached to the roof so it looks like you're always heading to a ski weekend even when you're going off to pretend to work at a non-profit to help inner city children.

Envia is all about choice. That's why the Discord 2015 comes in every color from Avocado Green to Plantain Green so that you can have your Green Car... just the way you like it. 

But the Discord isn't just environmentally friendly. Its commitment to social justice begins with steering wheels at every seat so everyone can drive. Studies show that even in multiracial families, white males are most likely to be the drivers and the Discord uses engineered disruption to sabotage the patriarchy.

Like the progressive movement, the Discord has no brakes. Because once we're moving Forward, there's never a reason to stop.

The Envia Discord 2015 also has no seat belts or airbags because... check your privilege. Most people of color around the world lack these things and it's only your sense of entitlement that leads you to expect that a car company should value your life more than that of a person of color.

Some might say that the Discord is missing something, but we prefer to think of it as the meaningful absence that the Discord brings into your life. We didn't just leave out things that every other car has to save money. With a sticker price of $395,000, that obviously was never an issue. Instead we did it as part of our mutual commitment to changing how we envision what a car is.

Car companies have encouraged consumers to see their vehicles as property to protect against the economically challenged. Envia Motors disrupts the capitalist system of property and theft by taking all the locks off the doors, the trunk and the ignition.

Anyone can enter and drive a Discord once they undergo a privilege check that connects the driver by remote satellite link to an organic public intellectual with a PhD in Social Justice. And to make it even easier, the Discord automatically advertises its location on Craigslist at every stop and encourages the oppressed urban workers and peasants to make off with it.

Despite Envia's best efforts no member of an oppressed group has chosen to redistribute a Discord, that is why we are committed to spending more money on outreach to traditionally oppressed groups.

While the Envia Discord 2015 may not have brakes, seat belts, airbags, locks or a windshield (check your privilege), the money that could have gone to those entitled safety features was instead spent on turning its bumper into an HD screen that automatically pulls the latest social justice hashtags from Twitter and displays them as bumper stickers.

The Discord 2015 is inclusive. Its seat cushions, woven out of fair trade whole grain fibers by Yamadu Indians in Bolivia, accommodate a variety of sizes and shapes. Its cup holder can blend wheatgrain smoothies and can perform emergency sex change operations for those who want to give up their cisgender privilege.

Envia Motors has also reached out to the Muslim community by programming the Discord 2015 to explode when it hears the words, "Jihad", "Allahu Akbar" or "Shiite." It will also explode when its internal CPU, which is always monitoring your conversations, hears anything racist, homophobic, transphobic, cisgender, heteronormative or any other thoughtcrimes from a list that is constantly being updated through the cloud.

Sometimes the Discord 2015 will just explode for no reason. Check your privilege.

Unlike consumer cars, the Discord has no manual. Instead it has a six year graduate course that takes you through the intricacies of Western capitalism and invites you to understand your complicity in the oppression of others.

If you refuse to educate yourself, it's your own fault.

There is also no help line. The expectation that white people should have unlimited access to the time of trans bisexual people of color is an insidious form of privilege. And our help line, which doesn't take calls, is entirely manned by trans bisexual people of color.

Check your privilege.

Everyone knows electric cars have a higher carbon footprint than ordinary petrol death machines. That's why the Discord isn't an electric car. You can put in any number of sustainable environmentally correct fuels into its tank from seaweed smoothies to Iranian Uranium... but it still won't run.

That's because the Discord is powered by people power. Literally.

To make the Discord move forward, just rope a dozen members of the bourgeois middle class to its fair trade tenterhooks. Then crack a sustainable fair trade whip over their heads until they begin moving forward at a brisk trot taking you to a conference on income inequality or to your executive offices at the Department of Health and Human Service... just in time for your four hour lunch break.

We won't lie to you. People have died in the making of the Discord 2015. And they will go on dying as Discords driven by multiple drivers with no brakes careen through urban environments leaving a trail of death in their wake. But people have always died fighting for social justice.

The Discord isn't just another car, it's a vehicle for social justice, and the blood on its grill, dashboard and tires demonstrates Envia's commitment to a better world at any cost.

At any cost.

The deaths of your loved ones at the hands of the Envia Discord 2015 invite you to check your privilege. Automobile accidents are a First World problem. In most of the world, no one can even afford to be hit by a car. The life expectancy of a child in Africa is less than 5 minutes. The gasoline that fuels ordinary petrol death machines is made out of the congealed blood of Iraqi children.

Before you join that heteronormative transphobic class action lawsuit against Envia Motors, check your privilege and ask yourself, "How much am I willing to sacrifice for social justice?"

The Discord 2015. Coming soon to California and parts of Rhode Island.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Common Practice

By On April 25, 2014



NOW RUNNING AMERICA


Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary performed at Occupy Wall Street rallies, Anti-War rallies, John Kerry’s wedding and in Ho Chi Minh City to apologize for the Vietnam War.

“Now, I’m here with that history and came to Vietnam ready to get down on my knees as one American and say, ‘Please forgive us.’

No word on whether Yarrow held a concert to apologize to the 14 year old girl he raped.

Jimmy Carter gave him a presidential pardon for it… Lefties are very forgiving when Party Members rape kids. Or as Peter Yarrow put it…

“You know, you make mistakes,” he says. “You feel terrible about it, make your amends. In that time, it was common practice.”

NYC School Plan to Honor Anti-War Activist/Pedophile Leads to Student Uprising





Note to Subscribers - I have received a number of emails lately from people who say they haven't been receiving the daily emails. If you're having that problem, please email me to let me know.



UNIVERSAL SOLDIERS

If Muslims fighting Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are the victims of non-Muslims, what are we to make of Muslims fighting other Muslims in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq? Religious civil wars make it hard to believe that Muslims are the victims of other religions instead of the authors of their own violence.

Religions have a long history of not getting along with one another, but there is only one religion that has never gotten along with any other religion, is engaging in a religious war with every religion that exists, with atheists who have no religion, and even with its own co-religionists.

Is all this violence someone else’s fault? Or is it Islam’s fault?

Islam’s Religious War with Everyone




Obama Praises Muslims in Easter Message


Taliban Accidentally Blow Themselves Up w/Own Bomb… in Mosque


Dem Politician Appointed by Obama Defends Muslim Airline that Bans Israeli Jews




I HAVE NOTHING TO ADD

Several of the 9/11 family members speculated that the Obama administration is intentionally seeking to derail the hearings in a bid to bring them into federal court stateside.

“So I asked [Mohammed’s lead defense attorney David] Nevin why does he do what he does. ‘Because I enjoy my job,’” Nevin responded.

“So I asked [Nevin], ‘What’s it like to sit next to a guy and defend a guy who sawed off [reporter] Danny Pearl’s head? How does that make you feel? He wouldn’t answer the question, how he felt on a human level, how it feels to sit next to a cold blooded murder who sawed off a journalist’s head,” Arias recalled. “He wouldn’t answer. He started spouting Constitution and all this other stuff.

“Take them out to the Bronx Zoo,” Clyne proposed, referring to the detainees as “parasites.” “No, I’m serious. Feed them to the lions, and this way we’ll turn them back into the streaming piles of steaming shit that they have always been.”

9/11 Family Members: Feed Gitmo Terrorists to Bronx Zoo Lions




Harry Reid Wanted $600K Bribe to Make Federal Investigation Go Away




A CHANGING WIND

Democracy is downright destructive in a political landscape in which Islamic political forces compete. Instead Blair’s new doctrine replaces democracy with religious freedom.

That position, Blair continues, leads him to support the Egyptian uprising against the Muslim Brotherhood and even interim Assad rule until a final agreement is concluded.

While that may not seem like much, imagine the last 15 years if the obsession with using democracy to replace dictatorships had instead been turned to promoting religious freedom at the expense of Islamic rule. Imagine if we made tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities into the defining line instead of the meaningless one of holding majority rule Muslim elections.

The Blair Doctrine




FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL

Incidentally that means that some 1% of Muslims in Gaza are Africans, in part or in whole, and are fairly recent arrivals, rather than any kind of native residents of the land.

10,000 Black Palestinians Struggle with Racism in Gaza




HE DIDN'T HAVE TO LONG, LONG

“I light the bomb in the middle of the crowd, I press the button” Cuspert sings. “Right in the city centre or in the subway, press the button, al-Jannah, al-Jannah”

Cuspert repeatedly sings: “I long for for death and can not wait for it.”

Denis Mamadou Cuspert, who rapped under the name Deso Dogg, was a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and was killed in a double suicide bombing carried out by Al-Nusra Front, a rival jihadist group that is Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate.
 Hilariously after spending so much time rapping about wanting to suicide bomb infidels, he got suicide bombed by his own Al Qaeda.

Muslim Rapper Who Sang About Wanting to Suicide Bomb, Gets Suicide Bombed




Saudi Foreign Exchange Student in Virginia Caught Fleeing Country After Raping Autistic 17-Year-Old



ON BUNDY AND ON US

I'm not going to spend time parsing what he said. There are a lot of people who have been the victims of injustice by the government. There are a lot of people who have lost property and even been sent to jail who would love a fraction of the attention Bundy has gotten.

If you get to the point where you attract a lot of people to put their reputations and, in some cases, lives on the line, to protect your property, then the least you can do is to avoid doing anything to undermine them.

I don't doubt that some of those people reached out to Bundy after his first comments and asked him to stop talking about race. He didn't listen. And there's a basic lack of respect in that.

As a private citizen, you can say anything you like. But once you get people invested in your cause, you have an obligation to them. Not just to yourself. And failing to recognize that is selfish behavior.

I wrote last week that there was no reason to expect Bundy to be perfect. The key players in the Boston Massacre certainly weren't. But if you're going to play a role in a movement, you have to be willing to think about the consequences of your actions to the people who support you.

It means that as a conservative politician, you shouldn't commit adultery no matter how bad your marriage is, because aside from the moral issue, you are also undermining a cause that you have gotten people to invest in based on your character. 

And if you find yourself in a position where you have become the image of a particular cause, stick to that cause instead of venting your thoughts on other issues because the media landscape is polarized any there are teams searching through everything you say and have said to spot one sentence they can blow up into a scandal.

Talk show hosts have gone through that ring of fire and know how to handle it, though they still make mistakes. A random person doesn't. If the issue is property rights, don't talk about race. Let someone like Ben Carson do it.

Sudden fame can be a heady drug and reporters are always eager for quotes. Resist the urge to talk about your views on life. Reporters are not your friends. They're not interested in you because they respect you, but because they know that a damning quote can make their career.

And this goes for all of us.

The human ego is easily inflated. The media, on that end, plays expertly on egos. Its sends emails and letters eager to "tell your story". Never fall for it. If you find yourself in that role, think like a PR pro. Stick to the talking points that contain the message you want to put out. Don't wander all over the place and don't randomly begin giving them opinions on controversial side issues.

If you do that, you're doing the enemy's work for them.

The Bundy case couldn't have collapsed any better if the left had scripted it. And who is to say they didn't.



FARTHER BACK THAN YOU THINK

The Committee on Human Reproduction was established around that time through the National Research Council Division of Medical Sciences which coordinated with Planned Parenthood. Its grants came through the Federal Security Agency, which was FDR’s creepy Socialist office that covered everything from Social Security to the CCC to the Department of Education to bio warfare research.

Planned Parenthood Founder: European Women Should Stop Having Babies for 10 Years





TO UNDERSTAND OBESITY, WE HAVE TO BEGIN WITH FORT SUMTER

MSNBC has become a strange cult. To join it, you just keep comparing everything to slavery.

Like oil, which is just like slavery. Every time Chris Hayes gets driven to MSNBC in a limo, it’s like he owns 400 slaves. And the only solution is to bring back slavery. Or something.

Hayes begins at Fort Sumter because if you’re pretending to be a progressive public intellectual, every policy critique begins there. Charter schools? Fort Sumter. Fat shaming? Fort Sumter. Common Core? FORT SUMTER.

Oil is Just Like Racism, So MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wants to Bring Back Slavery




Indian Tribe Successfully Restores Pacific Salmon Using Science, Environmentalists Outraged




THE PUNCHLINE IS A REAL KILLER

Manhattan’s oldest and most venerable comedy club on Turtle Bay approaches its 70th anniversary. Admission is free, but there’s nothing to drink and everyone keeps screaming the jokes in foreign languages.

Unfortunately they’re all old jokes. Elect Saudi Arabia to a commission on women. Elect Sudan to a commission on genocide. Elect Iran to an arms control commission. Elect North Korea to a commission on democracy.

Considering the billions we spend on this comedy club, they could at least get better jokes.

Iran Elected to UN Commission on the Status of Women




U of California Holds Conference on Islamophobia by Anti-Semite




IN OBAMA'S AMERICA...

In December, Preet Bharara, who puts out more press releases than most spammers, announced that the government was suing a building for discriminating “against a disabled tenant” by “failing to permit a reasonable accommodation of the tenant’s psychiatric disability.”
Let’s summarize. Woman lives in building that bans pets. Woman picks up stray dog. Woman is told to get rid of dog. Woman gets shrink to write a note claiming that the dog helps with her depression. Building ignores silly nonsense and tells her to follow the rules.

And neighbors complained that Aaron’s dog was a dangerous animal.

Instead of everyone laughing and moving on, the worst US Attorney in history sued the building instead.
...from the comments

DVult •
Robbing banks helps me with my major depression over lack of money.


DogmaelJones1  •
And, by God! You should be able to rob banks at will, but only when you're cash-strapped and feeling blue! Besides, isn't robbing a bank enabling you to be social, like telling people to lie on the floor, and taking their money? And you should be indemnified against all criminal and civil charges, too.


truebearing   •

What if he needs huge piles of medical cocaine to fight his depression? That will require frequent hold-ups.


Larry Larkin   •
We'll never win the war against robbing banks, let's just make it legal.

objectivefactsmatter •

Right. Laws? Way too hard to enforce, man.





D’Souza Prosecutor Sues Building for Not Allowing Crazy Woman to Keep Dangerous Dog




SO MUCH FOR THAT CAUSE...

Kamal Al-Labwani: True, but the Arabs had also come and conquered this land. Such is history. People never stay put. The Armenians came, the Circassians, came, the Turks left, and the Ottoman Turks came, and now the Safavids are coming… “The land belongs to Allah, and He gives it to whoever He wills of his servants.” Nobody has a historical right to a piece of land. Historical right is a Nazi, racist, French, German concept, which has caused problems all over the world.

No Historical Right to Territory in Islam




911, WHAT IS YOUR EMERGENCY

“Kat uses gender neutral pronouns to define themselves and their identity. Those pronouns look like: they, them, their, themselves, etc. Please hold this in your consciousness while you are reading this document to avoid confusion.”

Less than two weeks after moving in, Ryan informed Kat that it was not okay for Kat to use gender-neutral pronouns because “Kat is not trans” implying that only trans people are “allowed” to use gender-neutral pronouns, he also consistently refused to address Kat with the pronouns they use.

Ryan indicated on several occasions that people involved are “lucky” that he didn’t call the police. Ryan has been using this incident ever since to justify repeated attempts to make Kat houseless from other living spaces, to delegitimize Kat as an organizer, housemate and person, and promote his narrative that privileges his own “safety.”

Meet the Craziest Anti-Israel Boycotter




THE ROUNDUP

Two videos of Israel's statehood from the newly opened British Pathe collection.






A LETTER TO THE RED BARONESS

 Joshuapundit's letter to Baroness Ashton has already gone viral.

You refer to Gush Etzion as a 'settlement' when after all, it's an established Jewish community that dates back to 1924 on land legally purchased by Jews from Arab landowners. Jews continually inhabited it and worked the land except for a 19-year period between 1948 and 1967. And when you speak about vulnerable civilians, may I remind you of how the residents were ethnically cleansed in 1948 by Jordan's Arab Legion, and that almost 200 able bodied Jewish males were executed in cold blood after they surrendered and were guaranteed safe conduct to the Israeli lines with their women and children? May we recall who commanded the troops who committed that atrocity and who oversaw the ethnic cleansing of all the communities in Judea and Samaria as well as East Jerusalem? It was British officers, Lady Ashton, under your own Colonel John Glubb,

Then you say you particularly deplore what you refer to as "confiscation of EU Humanitarian Assistance provided to vulnerable civilians in the Jabal Al Baba community in the E1 area." That 'community', as you call it, refers to a handful of Arab squatters living for a matter of a few weeks in EU-funded caravans in a contested vacant hillside within the city limits of the Israeli city of Maale Adumim, a city that Israel isn't going to give up in any peace agreement. And as we both know, E-1 is necessary to Israeli security needs in order to connect Maale Adumim to the rest of the Jerusalem area, so it doesn't become surrounded on all sides by those extraordinarily peaceful Arabs whom call themselves Palestinians.

So in your world, Gush Etzion is a 'settlement' after decades of existence on legally purchased land, while a few caravans parked illegally for a matter of weeks on Israeli land with the EU's connivance that you give the name of 'Jabal Al Baba' is a 'community'?
And Israeli Jews building houses is a settlement. Arab Israelis building houses isn't.




A STEVENS SAGA

Edward Cline writes about Justice Stevens' pathetic return to the spotlight. Meanwhile Stevens invalidates his own argument in one reply.

"I do think that was what was originally intended, because there was a fear among the original framers that the federal government would be so strong that they might destroy the state militias."

Well they would have wanted to do it, but they knew it was a bad idea because of people like me.

Not terribly compelling.

Cline writes,

Stevens's amendment makes no sense at all. The right to bear arms as a private citizen either is or isn't "infringed." If it is infringed upon, then the only time you can exercise your "right" is when you're working for the government enforcing the government's will at gunpoint (lawfully or unlawfully). Then, when the task is completed, you would hand the weapon you used back to the armorer. You may "bear" the arms, but not own it. 

If it isn't infringed upon, then you may own and "bear arms," certainly without leave of the authorities, and without having to serve in any government policing or military force. Period.

The National Guard cut the throat of this entire line of gun control argument and lefties, like headless chickens, keep turning around in a circle.

Either citizen's militias make a comeback or there can be no gun control. Since they hate both outcomes, they have to somehow argue to invalidate both based on government power.

It's as if the government nationalized newspapers and then insisted that Freedom of Speech should only apply to newspapers and was never meant to apply to individuals.




A MODERN IMPERIAL WORLD

Brad Ford comments on one of my articles at The Right Side.

Ironically, the future will look more like our barbaric past than people want to acknowledge.  Empires will reestablish themselves with a vengeance.  Family-based oligarchies will make a comeback.  America and Europe will lose moral compass, drown in pop culture, steadily undermine their own identity, and NATO will become impotent.  Russia and China have already abandoned Communism, but they will thrive in the same way that thuggish empires of the past did, but remain militarily ruthless.

Greenfield doesn’t say so directly, but Christianity has already thrown in the towel.  He regrets that only Islam will see itself as an ideological force in a future that seems more dominated by survival-of-the-fittest mechanisms beyond conscious control.  He describes Islam, grudgingly as a Jew, as having a staying power for all the wrong reasons:  “It is an ideology and post-ideological powers who believe in very little are poorly adapted to fighting it. Instead many of their elites secretly admire its dedication.”

There is nothing to admire about Islam. I compared it earlier to a gang religion. It's what remains when a civilization collapses. It's a reversion to barbarism.



CRIME IS JUSTICE

Teri O'Brien comments on Obama's newest amnesty.

So, repeating, what exactly do they mean by “nonviolent, low level drug activity,” the phrase Holder used last August when he announced that his department would not pursue mandatory minimum sentences? Are we supposed to believe that people are incarcerated because they were singing too loud in church? Aren’t all drug offenses inherently violent? If people didn’t buy hamburgers, we wouldn’t need slaughterhouses, and if the murdering scum who shoot each other over drug territory had no customers for their poison, there wouldn’t be more murders in Chicago than there are in Iraq, which is why Barack Obama’s adopted home town has earned the nickname “Chiraq.”




Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Environmental Apocalypse

By On April 23, 2014
Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and finally printing out a receipt.

The interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the homeless man who is barely holding it together... and the machine is a stark contrast between what the new smart clean green economy pretends to be and what it actually is.

The machine, like so much else that we design, is impressive, but its existence depends on someone digging through the trash with their hands for much less than minimum wage to extract a generally useless item.

The entire bottle economy, which has more than a passing resemblance to the trash sorting operations in the Third World carried out by despised and persecuted minorities, like the Zabbaleen in Egypt, is artificial. The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.

The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of marginalized people digging through the trash.

Every time politicians celebrate a recycling target met and show off some shiny new machine, hiding behind the curtain are the dirty weary people dragging through the streets at the crack of dawn, donning rubber gloves and tearing apart trash bags. They are the unglamorous low-tech reality of environmentalism.

These are the Green Jobs that aren't much talked about. They pay below minimum wage and have no workplace safety regulations. They are the Third World reality behind the First World ecology tripe. It's not that the people who plan and run the system don't know about them. But they don't like to talk about them because they come too close to revealing the unsavory truth about where environmentalism is really going.

Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It's the exact opposite. It's every bit as modern and progressive as those sacks of cans being hauled by hand through the streets to the machine.

Prince Charles, that avid idiot and environmentalist, visited a Mumbai slum a few years ago and said that it had some lessons to teach the West.

“When you enter what looks from the outside like an immense mound of plastic and rubbish, you immediately come upon an intricate network of streets with miniature shops, houses and workshops, each one made out of any material that comes to hand,” Prince Charles wrote in his book, Harmony.

The Prince of Wales is quite the author. In addition to Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, he has written Shelter: Human Habitats from Around the World, The Prince's Speech: On the Future of Food and The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them.

One might be forgiven for assuming that the royal brain twitching behind those watery eyes is preparing for some sort of apocalypse. And it is. The apocalypse is environmentalism. Or from the point of view of the environmentalists, who spare some time from their public appearances and their mansions to pen tomes on the future of food and how to choose chickens, the apocalypse is prosperity.

People of that sort think that instead of getting the slum dwellers of Mumbai into apartments, we ought to be figuring out how to build shelters out of random garbage. Think of it as the recycling can solution as applied to your entire life.

“The people of Dharavi manage to separate all their waste at home and it gets recycled without any official collection facilities at all," a marveling Charles, who probably never took out the trash once in his life, wrote. It's easy to get people to recycle without any mandates or collection facilities at all. All it takes is grinding poverty so miserable that you either make the most of every last thing you can get your hands on or you die.

That is the sort of lifestyle that environmentalists think of as sustainable. Or as Hobbes put it, "In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth... no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society." That is the natural state to which environmentalists would return us to.

More recently another deep thinker, Peter Buffett, Warren Buffett's son, took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to denounce Third World philanthropy.

"Microlending and financial literacy — what is this really about?" Buffett asks. "People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?"

To the slum dwellers, the beast isn't capitalism, it's that gnawing feeling in your stomach when you haven't eaten for a day. But Peter Buffett, who lives a life almost as privileged as Prince Charles, bemoans the idea of getting people to the point where they aren't worried about where their next meal is coming from because it just turns them into capitalists and consumers. And before you know it, they're buying big screen televisions and writing op-eds in the New York Times on the futility of philanthropy.

"There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff)," Peter Buffett wrote, probably unaware that he was sniffing down the same trail that a thousand communes had gone. But the experimental farm is old hat. The new model is the Third World.

Instead of helping the Third World live like us, the perverse children of the rich dream of making us live like the Third World.

Those working hard to make our society function like Charlie's favorite slum aren't moving to their own collective farms. Instead they are transforming our society into the collective farm while pretending that their calculated destruction of our prosperity is smart and modern.

The Soviet Union pretended that its plans for the country were a modern step forward. In reality, the Commissars took the farmers back to feudalism and then turned much of the country into peasants, coping with harvest labor problems by forcing urban populations to come and pick the crops. And those were the good times. In the bad times, highways and other large projects were built through mass slave labor no different than the way that ancient Egypt built the pyramids.

Communist modernism was a Potemkin village, a cheap tacky curtain and behind it, the sweating slave and the stench of Babylon. The modernism of the progressive is the same facade covered in sociology textbooks, New York Times op-eds and teleprompter speeches. Behind it lie the ruins of Detroit, tribal violence in the slums of every major city and an economy in which there is no more room for the middle class except as clerks in the government bureaucracy. And it doesn't end there.

The elderly Chinese woman picking through the trash in search of empty beer bottles isn't the past. She's the future. Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It's just one example of an artificial economy and it's small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.

The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can't sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.

The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power over every man, woman and child on earth.

"I strongly believe that the West has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organize themselves as communities," Prince Charles said.

It goes without saying that the Prince of Wales is not about to take personal advantage of these infinite spiritual riches of living in a house made of garbage, drinking contaminated water and dying before thirty. What he is saying is that while he personally is a little too attached to his lifestyle, he thinks that we as a society would be better off giving up on the materialism of living on more than two dollars a day and embracing the infinite social and spiritual riches that rich people imagine are accessible only to impoverished Third Worlders.

Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn't even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable.

The liberal billionaire who clamors about sustainability likes progress. What he dislikes is the middle class with its mass produced cars and homes, cheap restaurants full of fatty foods and television sets and daily deliveries of cardboard boxes full of stuff and shopping malls. He thinks, in all sincerity, that they would be happier and more spiritually fulfilled as peasants. It's not an original idea.

The Industrial Revolution had hardly begun revolving when the 'Back to Nature' crowd began insisting that it was time to learn a more harmonious way of life by going back to the farm. Centuries later the only new idea that they have come up with is threatening an environmental apocalypse if the middle class doesn't change its mass producing ways. Even its adoration of the Noble Savage is older than the American Revolution.

The modern environmentalism jettisons the idea of moving to a dilapidated farmhouse to spend time being bored while trying to make artisanal rocking chairs to sell to someone, It's done its time searching for the noble savage within through drugs and degradation decades ago. Now it's our turn to tap into the infinity of spiritual riches that comes from just barely getting by.

The sustainable logic of the slum that makes us better people by making us more miserable.

The Soviet idea of progress was feudalism dressed up in Socialist red. Environmentalism dresses up feudalism in Green. It seeks to reverse all the progress that we have made in the name of progress. Environmentalism is as sophisticated as a Soviet collective farm, as modern as the homeless people dragging bags of cans along on sticks to feed the machine and as smart as a slum made of trash.

Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery.

Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people. 

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Wrong is the New Right

By On April 20, 2014
Others have already pointed out the absurdity that gay marriage is becoming a right in places where plastic bags and large sodas are becoming against the law. This sort of next wave civil rights step is only an expansion of freedom if you aren't paying attention.

All the arguments over the differences between civil unions and marriage are largely meaningless. Once gay marriage is recognized, then marriage becomes nothing more than a civil union. The real casualty is the destruction of the word "marriage", but the left is adept as destroying language and replacing meaningful words with meaningless words.

There was no word in Newspeak for freedom. We can look forward to an English language in which there is no word for marriage. And what does freedom mean anyway in a country where most things are banned, but we are constantly throwing holidays to celebrate how free we are?

But if marriage is no longer refers to a natural social institution, but now means a civil union recognized by the state, then why stop at two? Gay rights advocates insist that there is some magic difference between polygamy and gay marriage. There isn't any difference except the number. And if we're not going to be bound by any antiquated notion that marriage is an organic institution between man and woman, then why should we be bound by mere number?

Surely in our enlightened age and time, it can be possible for large groups of consenting adults to tie their confusing knots together in any number from 2 to 2,000.

True marriage equality would completely open up the concept. But it's not actually equality that we're talking about. It's someone's idea of the social good. And the social good is served by gay marriage, but not by polygamy.

The question is whose social good is it?

Equality and justice are words that the left uses to cloud the question of who advocates the causes and who benefits from them. Who decides that the cause of justice and equality is served by limiting marriage to two gay men, rather than four gay men, three bisexual men, two women and a giraffe?

The rhetoric of equality asserts a just cause while overlooking the social good. Rights are demanded. The demand is absolute and the logic for it remains left behind in a desk drawer on the wrong side of the table. Instead there are calls for empathy. "If you only knew a gay couple." Hysterical condemnations. "I'm pretty sure you're the devil", one recent email to me began. And a whole lot of vague promises about the good things that will follow once we're all paying for it.

We aren't truly moving toward anarchy or some libertarian order, but a calculated form of repression in which shrill demands substitute for legal guidelines and those who scream the loudest get the most rights.

The new freedoms are largely random and chaotic. Donate enough money to the right people while helping out the left and a special addition to the marriage split-level house will be carved out for you. Why? Because there will be a lot of yelling. Naturally. And if the polygamists yell loudly enough and donate enough money, they'll get their own marriage expansion as well because that is how things work now.

There is no longer a fixed notion of rights. The trappings of equality and angry causes are hollow. The legal doctrine on which courts make their decisions are targets in search of arrows, emotions hunting around for precedents to wrap them in. These decisions are not rational, but rather rationalizations. Their only anchor is a new role for government in protecting any group that is officially marginalized.

The old Bill of Rights extended rights irrespective of group membership. The new one wipes out universal rights and replaces them with particular privileges. Entire amendments may sink beneath the waves, but a few groups get comfortable deck chairs on the Titanic.

Why is one group protected rather than another? Why do gay activists get a government-bonded right, complete with Federal enforcement, while polygamy is outlawed? The only answers are rationalizations. With morality sinking fast and few common values that the people in charge will accept, there is no longer a common value system to rely on.

Progressive morality is constantly being reshaped in tune to the whims of the left. It can't be relied upon, because it isn't there. The only thing fixed about it is the need to fight for the oppressed, which not coincidentally at all is also the shaky civil rights era legal doctrine on which the whole modern house of cards rests.

Since the nature of oppression and the identification of oppressed groups is open for debate, the legal doctrine means nothing. Every Democratic presidential candidate was against gay marriage in 2008 and for it now. What changed? Nothing, except the money changing hands and sitcoms about gay couples. And the latter is what it comes down to. Instead of church and state, we are stuck with sitcom and state where the existence of a television comedy is a reflection of national values.

And what happens when one of the burgeoning shows about polygamous marriages becomes a big hit? Then we'll have no choice but to ratify polygamous marriage equality because that's the new national values system and the television ratings prove that everyone is clearly down with it.

Once fixed rights made way for identity politics, we traded legal guarantees of freedom for government oversight of a confusing caste system in which some people have more rights than others based on the amount of rights they claim not to have, but everyone has fewer rights than they did before because rights are now arbitrary and the arbitrators work for the government.

Identity politics made rights competitive. The only way to win is to play. And the only way to play is to claim oppression. And if you don't do a good job of it, good luck getting a good spot in the diversity quotas for college, business and government. But it has also made rights meaningless.

The new slogan is that gun control should be enacted because the former Congresswoman Giffords "deserves a vote". Giffords already has a vote. So do millions of gun owners. That's how it works. But votes are no longer weighed equally. The oppressed, even by a random shooting spree, get more votes than others, so long as their oppression is officially recognized and endorsed. The Giffords Vote is supposed to not only trump millions of actual votes, but also the Second Amendment.

And why not? Gay marriage lost in multiple referendums, but those results were set aside by Federal judges for being oppressive. The same thing happened with illegal aliens. Now everyone is evolving on those issues. After all, no one wants to be the bad mean oppressor. And so the actual votes are trumped by the vote of the oppressed and actual rights make way for special privileges.

The grants of new rights are oppressive because there are no longer any fixed boundaries of rights. Instead gay rights compels wedding photographers, cake shops and even churches to cater to gay weddings regardless of their own moral values. Religious freedom, which is in the Constitution, has to take a seat at the back of the bus to the new rights, which aren't.

There is no system for keeping rights from colliding with or overrunning one another. The only
governing legal mandate is preventing oppression and that means government arbitrators deciding who is screaming, "Help, help, I'm being repressed!" the loudest and with the most sincerity.

A system in which the authorities grant rights based on who can best make the case to them that their rights have been taken away is a bad idea. It's an especially bad idea in a system like ours which is rapidly sliding in a direction in which the authorities are the sole arbiters of who should have any rights at all.

If your oppressed status depends on your oppressors determining whether you are truly oppressed, then the only people who will have rights are those people whose rights the oppressors have not taken away by certifying them as oppressed.

It would be a dreadful simplification to call this lunatic state of affairs Orwellian or even Machiavellian. It makes even Kafka's worlds seem positively stodgy by comparison. It is a trial where the only people to be found not guilty are those who already been convicted. It's a system that favors the people who claim to be dispossessed by the system. It is an absurd self-negation that exists as a mathematical impossibility and a living satire.

Not With a Bang

By On April 20, 2014
General Brighton waited quietly by the sofa while the President of the United States swiped the screen of his iPad and began another game of Angry Birds. Bright colors and loud noises drifted up from the screen which had completely absorbed the attention of the Commander in Chief.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had not been asked to sit down and he had learned early on that Obama was very sensitive about members of the military usurping his authority. The last time he did it, he had been asked if it was "a racial thing."

Instead he remained standing while a fly slowly circled his head like an orbiting satellite.

"So we're on for the conference," Obama said, without taking his eyes off the iPad. His legs were curled up behind him on the sofa and his neck was craned over as if he were trying to physically project his body into the game.

It was a stance that Brighton often saw on his teenage boys.

"Completely." Valerie Jarrett drifted in from somewhere. Brighton had gotten used to her appearing out of nowhere with the covert skills of a Special Forces team.

"I shake the Iranian guy's hand and then I make a speech. Damn." Obama winced as unhappy sputtering noises rose from the game. Something had gone wrong.

Valerie affectionately patted his head. "You'll get it right next time."

The Commander in Chief of the United States shook her hand away. "I know I'll get it right next time," he said, without looking up. "I don't need you to tell me that."

"Of course you don't. You're too smart for that."

"I know I am," he mumbled, swiping again.

General Brighton's face paled. He had thought it was a bad idea when the White House first suggested it. Modernization was good and these were changing times, but there was too much that could go wrong. Still Valerie had insisted and she had gotten her way.

The general had served in Vietnam, but his stomach had never churned as much acid as when his boss had gotten an iPad because next to a dozen Angry Birds apps was one app defined by a bright red button labeled NUCLEAR BUTTON. One wrong tap could reduce the world to a cinder.

Obama paused with his finger in mid-air. "What about the military preparations?"

"Well we have one carrier in the region in case anything goes wrong," General Brighton said. "We would have had two if not for the cutbacks."

His boss frowned in that look which meant that he thought his failure to understand the answer was someone else's fault. "Why do you need two aircraft carriers for a gay wedding? Are the two grooms going to come in on separate aircraft carriers that are going to dock together?"

"What gay wedding," General Brighton said, and cursed inwardly a moment too late. Maybe he could have gotten the budget for the second carrier restored.

Obama sighed with patient impatience. "We talked about this. Didn't we talk about this Valerie?"

Valerie seemed to materialize in front of Brighton out of thin air glaring angrily up at him with the air of a poodle pretending that it's a bulldog. "Every branch of the service is supposed to hold a gay wedding. Barack thinks it's of the highest priority."

"My apologies, Ma'am," General Brighton said wearily. "I thought he might have been referring to Iran."

Valerie Jarrett's hand slapped his face, or the air underneath it, which was as close as she could reach. "There are no military preparations for Iran. None whatsoever! This is a peace conference! Have those Jews gotten to you?"

"I'm a Lutheran," Brighton said. This wasn't strictly true as he had stopped believing in any higher power after his first visit to the White House and then he had started believing again after the first dozen times that his Commander in Chief had managed to not blow up the world using his iPad and then lapsed again after being made to supervise his third gay wedding.

"Wait a minute," Obama said, absently raising one hand without taking his eyes off the screen. "What if we bring two carriers together to have a gay wedding in Iran at the peace conference?"

General Brighton began to pray. He was no longer sure for what. It might have been a bolt of lightning. Or a premature retirement to somewhere safe. Maybe Mars.

"Sweetie." Valerie was all sweetness and light again as she rushed over to him. "I don't think that would be a good idea."

"Why not?" Obama demanded petulantly. "Just because I came up with it? You never want to do anything I say."

"Tell him General," Valerie demanded.

"Uh well," General Brighton stammered. "The Iranian regime isn't too terribly fond of gay marriage."

Obama shook his head. "Where did you get that idea? I'm disappointed. I thought we got all those Islamophobic trainers out of the military."

"They hang them," Brighton said desperately. "They lock them up and hang them."

"Is this a racial issue?" Obama demanded, frowning at his iPad. "It's always a racial issue with you guys."

"It's what is," Brighton said weakly. He didn't ask what race had to do with it. He had learned better.

"That's enough," Valerie snapped. "The President doesn't want to hear from you anymore."

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wasn't paying attention to her anymore. The fly was no longer circling his head. It was preparing to land on the iPad on the sensitive capacitive screen of the mobile device right over the red button.

"Sir," he began.

"What?" Obama snapped, finally looking up at him.

"If you could just play another game of Angry Birds. Right now," General Brighton said, sweat beading on his forehead.

"Is that vital to national security?" Obama asked.

"You have no idea how much, sir."

"Don't say I don't ever do anything for the military." Obama shrugged and tapped the Angry Birds app just as the fly landed.

General Brighton mopped his forehead. It had been another close one. He didn't know how many more of these he could take.



*


Osama bin Laden woke up staring at the ceiling of his council house in Tower Hamlets. Through the wall he could hear his three wives making their morning preparations in the next room over, which consisted of them hitting each other while cursing in the name of the Prophet.

They were on the waiting list for something larger, but the Islamophobic local authorities were delaying. As far as the authorities were concerned, Osama's name was Mohammed Hamid Rahman Abu Mamza with a few random Abduls, Mahmouds and Abus thrown in there for good measure. These days though he suspected that he could come out of the closet and get the new council house even faster.

Next to him lay the Pakistani boy who had been a parting gift from the Taliban and their Pakistani intelligence masters in exchange for putting as many kilometers as possible between him and them. By then the Egyptians had been running the whole operation and had squeezed him out of his own organization.

"Egyptians," Osama bin Laden mumbled to the cracked ceiling. "Every one of them claims to be a doctor. You can't find a falafel vendor in Cairo who isn't a doctor of something. Snakes all of them. They're as bad as Syrians."

It was no use. No one was listening. No one cared.

He thought sometimes of setting up a website. Videos on news networks were so old. Tariq talked of something called Twitter. He could make an account. Get his message of a world Caliphate out. Get back to the way it had been before the Egyptians had taken over.

But he knew it wouldn't work.

The Americans had killed that double of his whom the Pakistanis had set up as a decoy. It had gotten their man reelected for another term in the White House. If he ruined all that, he wasn't worried about Scotland Yard, but Pakistan's ISI had made it clear that they would do things to him that he couldn't even imagine. And with his ties to the Saudi royals, he didn't have to imagine very hard.

He shook Tariq awake. "Come on. We've got to get to St. Paul's early if we're going to sell t-shirts to the tourists."

The t-shirts said, "My friend went to London and all I got was this lousy shirt." It wasn't Al Qaeda. But it kept his wives in ugly jewelery. And it was something to do.


*



"Three bombs," General Bakseesh said. He knew it already, but he liked repeating it anyway. "We only need one for the peace conference."

"And one for Tel Aviv and one for New York," General Hosseini added. "And that's just the beginning."

There were a lot of generals in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. More generals than men, especially after the latest debacle in Syria.

"The Americans think we're still three months away. The Israelis think we're a week away," General Bakseesh said. "This achievement is a tribute to our intelligence and our dedicated patriotic workers."

The workers were mainly political prisoners who died after a week's exposure to radiation and were buried in mass graves. When their numbers ran out, they imported Bangladeshi workers. There had been some noise over the killing of so many Muslims, who hadn't even been found guilty of anything under Sharia law, but four other generals had pointed out that Iran was at least giving the Bangladeshi migrant workers a quick death.

That was more than Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Qatar gave them.

Working without anything resembling safety precautions had allowed the Iranian nuclear program to advance by tremendous leaps and bounds. Or it would have if Iranian Revolutionary Guard generals hadn't been slowing it down with lucrative contracts.

General Bakseesh and his father-in-law owned two-thirds of a concrete company that had caused at least one nuclear disaster due to shoddy construction. It hadn't been entirely deliberate, but it had doubled their take. He knew that General Hosseini and his three son-in-laws controlled mining interests and had taken extensive bribes from Chinese business interests.

Meanwhile General Mohammedi had taken to outright sending Revolutionary Guardsmen to smash up nuclear equipment for his company to replace while blaming it on the Zionists. It was so blatant that at some point he would have to be dealt with. As soon as he could convince Hosseini to come in with him on taking over Mohammedi's company.

"Do you know some of those infidels say that the Islamic way of life is harsh," General Bakseesh said, shaking his head. He couldn't see it himself.

With his three Porsches and illegal satellite TV that allowed him to catch up on the best episodes of the Shahs of Sunset, his four mistresses, eighteen companies and ability to have any ordinary person killed, he didn't understand why everyone wasn't a Muslim.


*


Brett Kennedy sweated as he looked at the screen of his Macbook Air. The famous Hope poster of Obama hung just behind his head, next to one of Ron Paul and another of Edward Snowden. His hard drive was packed with misspelled bomb manuals, even though he lacked the manual dexterity to screw in a lightbulb, and child pornography, even though it held no interest for him, to send him to prison despite his distant, eight times removed, relationship to the Kennedy family, or his father's job as Undersecretary of Diversity Planning at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The scrawny teenager, officially Breton Kennedy IV, had been desperately trying to rebel against his family. He wasn't very good at it though his family of wealthy anti-war activists turned bureaucrats did their best to encourage him, even hiring a Natural Rebellion Adviser for six hundred bucks an hour.

That had infuriated him even more. The Adviser, kept quoting Noam Chomsky and talking about the Zeitgeist. Brett had told him to go to hell and the elderly hippie had told him he was on the right track.

His Twitter account, automatically retweeting the latest Anon news, had a Guy Fawkes mask, but he hadn't even managed to hack his father's WiFi password. He suspected there wouldn't even be anything interesting there anyway.

At this rate, he would never be anonymously famous.

He had finally managed to piggyback onto his father's Federal cell network access and troll for files, but there were just smiling photos of government employees at cocktail parties looking smug and self-satisfied. A bunch of HUD executives were flashing gang signs in Georgetown while balancing plates of shrimp. It was just too much.

Brett was just about to give up when he came across an iTunes account POTUS2008.

"No way," he said. "It can't be."

Despite having the hacking skills of one of those Georgetown shrimp, he had found programs that would do nearly all the work for him. One of those brought up the contents of the target's iPad on his screen.

Brett rolled his eyes. "Angry Birds, Angry Birds, Angry Birds. Stupid capitalist scum." Then he spotted one that looked interesting. It was probably just a game. It had to be.

NUCLEAR BUTTON.

His finger hovered over the trackpad as he hunted feverishly through his own iTunes account for the right gangsta rap to play while destroying the world.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obamatanic

By On April 18, 2014


FRAZIER GLENN MILLER AND MAX BLUMENTHAL

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which spent a great deal of time monitoring Miller, would never have thought to watch an institute whose board of trustees include a former New York Times editor, a music industry executive and a president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

When Miller ranted about “Bush and his Zionist bosses” or “The Zionist Jews and their gentile prostitute government managers”; his hate meshed with the hateful material that Blumenthal was putting out.

Blumenthal is mentioned over 300 times at VNN; mostly for his attacks on Jews and Israel. VNN members eagerly ate up Blumenthal’s conspiracy theories about Israel and every bit of negative reporting about Jews. One Blumenthal video even suggested that Rabbis were plotting to kill non-Jewish children.

The Nation Institute’s book arm, in partnership with the Perseus Book Group, published Goliath; Blumenthal’s furious attack on the Jewish State. The book, with chapters such as “How To Kill Goyim And Influence People” and “The Concentration Camp” was described by The Nation’s own reviewer as “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook” and a potential selection of the “Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

Anti-Semitic Violence, Neo-Nazis and the Anti-Israel Left




A POST-AMERICAN MEDIS

CBS does not want Middle America to watch. Chasing away older and conservative viewers by picking Colbert is not a bug, it’s a feature. CBS would like Colbert to ‘upscale’ its brand by turning its dying late night show into a low rated program watched by wealthy liberal urbanites whom advertisers will pay much more, per person, to reach.

Television networks aren’t being foolish by driving away older viewers. They’re working closely with ad agencies that want the same thing.

The Olympics multicultural Coca Cola ad and the gay rights cereal ads have courted controversy as an advertising strategy. That used to be something that marginal dot com brands did by firing a gerbil out of a cannon during the Super Bowl.

Now deliberately setting out to offend mainstream audiences is something that established brands do in a desperate race to show how youthful, how postmodern and how liberal they are.

Like CBS, they are increasing their brand value by demonstrating their contempt for Middle America.

CBS, Colbert and Contempt for America

The article speaks only partially to the larger problem that while conservatives are increasingly able to compete on content, the left, even in its more deranged and poisonous outlets, can pick up mainstream advertising that the right can't get. It's a structural problem and it really is time that someone in the conservative media world wrote about what has happened to the ad world.

...from the comments...

truebearing •

Advertising has been weaponized.

Having been around ad agency types during a period in my life, I can say without hesitation that they are some of the most arrogant, narcissistic, and unethical people I have ever met. They are more interested in winning awards than serving the needs of clients, and the clients are stupid enough to keep hiring them. What an independent writer or artist charges $2000.00 for, the agency that hired them charges their client one hundred times that amount. There is very little real accountablity when it comes to measurable results from most ad campaigns. Big budgets, nebulous results. Sounds like the guy living in that big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

These are children who never grew up, and never will.


 pennant8 •

I am in the geezer demographic. I remember how happy I was when I got my flat screen TV and Verizon FIOS. I was looking forward to watching all those great informative shows on A&E and the Science Channel in HD. I'm thinking, this is going to be great. Then I discovered that the only thing these so-called education channels carry nowadays is is a steady stream of Duck Dynasty and Duck Dynasty wannabe shows. As for regular network TV, fuggetaboudit. I can't even stand to watch my local news program. I usually put it on MUTE until the weather comes on.

In response I have collected a sizable library of DVD movies. It has become somewhat of a hobby searching flea markets and discount stores for some of the great old films. These TV marketing geniuses don't need me, I don't need them either.



Jonathan Cohen •

On some issues all elements of the economically powerful agree. In those cases it is very difficult to get change. Affirmative action is extremely unpopular, not because people are bigots but because it is unfair and counter-productive to all concerned, minorities included. Yet virtually every main stream media outlet, university faculty, main stream religious leaders and most political figures including Republicans support it. To put it in crude Marxist terms, "affirmative action is the policy of the ruling class."

The last twenty years has given rise to a new powerful class of entrepreneurs in the entertainment, computer and media world. Whereas in the past, the left critiques of the culture were that the creators of information were owned by the rich through interlocking Boards of Directors, social institutions such as country clubs and as dominating the Boards of Trustees of universities. The economic titans of the past made their money from manufacturing, producing products that were used by all. Today's new rich make their money directly through the production and control of information and entertainment. They make decisions as this article points out, by what builds the bottom line. And you can be sure that their trendy politics is supporting the bottom line.


Steeloak •

The networks may "Win" the "Demo" but lose the war. Viewership is rapidly dwindling on all TV networks. The three major networks have lost over half their viewership since 1980 and are still declining. The internet has made them redundant.

People today are watching only the content they want on the device of their choice. Entertainment markets are micro-segmenting and delivering specific content to specific market slices. It is now easy to find the content you want and to ignore what you don't want - this is the future of entertainment. The number of content providers is expanding exponentially to serve the segmenting markets.

 laura r •
i was an advertising/ communication major close to 50yrs ago. studied storyboards (commericials), copywriting, concepts for selling, some graphic design, sociologoly, etc. studied w/the top people in NYC who were head hochos @ ad agencies. they would come in one 1/2 day a week to give assignments, critique our work. things how changed drasically! ben shapiro spoke about this in relation to hollywood movies. advertising is the same. in the old days, the client was boss. he would meet w/the acct executive, talk about the demographic for the product. based upon that, the creative team would comeup w/a campaign. the bottom line was always the $$$ always the sales. social engineering was only used to enhance the bottom line: sales. for example if they were selling a bra or cigarettes, they may have used a womens "lib" slogan. things have reversed, now the creative team has the power. so tell us, what happened to the bottom line?




THE DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN


Sheikh Omar Subedar of the Imam, Islamic Society of Peel in Canada, signed the White Ribbon pledge to: “never commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women and girls.”

But the White Ribbon folks should have explored his definition of “violence” a bit more closely.

At the Canadian Council of Muslim Theologians, the Imam writes, “Strike them: If the problem still does not get resolved then as a final resort Allah has permitted the husband to discipline his wife by striking her, however this does not imply that Allah is promoting domestic violence. The Prophet (P.B.U.H.) has made it very clear that the beating should not be agonizing in any shape or form.”

Muslim Imam Claims Beating Women Isn’t Domestic Violence if it’s Not Agonizing




Muslim Refugee Raped 4’11 Woman Behind “I Love NY” Pizzeria




BUT THEY HAVE A CLUB!

Sexism in Britain is more widespread than in any other country due to a “boys’ club culture”, a United Nations official has concluded.

Ms Manjoo shared her preliminary findings on the UK and said: “Have I seen this level of sexist culture in other countries? It hasn’t been so in your face in other countries. I haven’t seen that so pervasively in other countries. I’m sure it exists but it wasn’t so much and so pervasive.”

It is estimated that over 50% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported.

But… but there’s an old boys' club in the UK. And they meet and have drinks and play polo while wearing plaid.

Muslim UN Expert from World Rape Capital Claims UK Most Sexist Country in the World




Bill de Blasio Shuts Down Muslim Terrorism Monitoring on Anniversary of Boston Bombing





THE CHOIR INVISIBLE OF INSPECTORS

Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

“I don’t know what your perception is of our reputation, and mine, the name Bloomberg around the country,” he said. But every place he goes, he added, “You’re a rock star. People yelling out of cabs, ‘Hey, way to go!’ ”

Bloomberg: “I Have Earned My Place in Heaven




Racial Income Inequality Worse in Liberal Cities - Don’t let the sun set on you in Madison, Wisconsin.



Taxpayer Funded College to Pay Paul Krugman $225K to Promote Income Inequality




REALITY IS POLITICALLY CORRECT

Speaking at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention on Friday in New York City, President Barack Obama revealed that he believes voter fraud does not exist, everyone who wants to should be able to vote, even if they cannot provide identifying documentation, and Republicans are plotting to take the franchise away from minorities.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, keynote speaker at Thursday’s rally to kick-off the campaign for an Ohio Voters’ Bill of Rights Ohio Constitutional amendment, hugged Melowese Richardson.

Melowese voted twice for herself in 2012 and three times for her comatose sister. She admitted to sending an absentee ballot in for her granddaughter, who subsequently voted in person on election day. Three additional absentee ballots were also generated from Richardson’s home address, and all bore similar handwriting.

Obama says Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist at Event Run by Man Who Embraced Fraudster Who Voted for Him Nine Times




BUNDY AND BOSTON

Washington’s virtue may have been straightforward enough, but could the same have been said of the stories of the civilian participants in the Boston Massacre? The punditry could easily have dissected the stories of Henry Knox or Edward Garrick just as unfavorably as those of Cliven Bundy.

Did it in the long run matter? Not really.

The power of the Boston Massacre was in the way that it framed the larger story of British oppression. The story that was told fit into a larger theme even if the individual facts did not quite hold up.

And while that’s not ideal, it is entirely real.

Bundy’s Bona Fides and the Boston Massacre




Women Like Wendy Davis Even Less Than Men



WOOF

“Furthermore, it’s simplistic to reduce the career of a capable public servant and longtime senator to being a ‘lapdog for the Arabs’ when the Secretary has also been a lapdog for the Viet Cong, the Sandinistas, the Iranians and really anyone who would have him.”

“John Kerry is just naturally attracted to lying down in the laps of terrorists, Communists and any totalitarian movement while making a low purring sound.”

“If you’re a tyrant, John Kerry will come down and lie in your lap if you want him to. And if you don’t, he’ll wait outside your country, occasionally scratching at the door while making a high whining noise.”

Kerry Spokeswoman Protests Israeli Claim that he is a “Lapdog of the Arabs”




US Gave $232,000 to Group Providing “Non-Violence” Training to Hamas




HARA KIRI

Japan’s finance ministry seems to take a perverse delight in pointing out the world’s worst debt optics: gross central government borrowings equivalent to 24 years of tax receipts, or about $80,000 for every man, woman and child.

Government ministers and the ruling coalition adopted the 95.88 trillion yen ($921 billion) budget proposal for the fiscal year starting April 1 at a meeting yesterday in Tokyo, Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters.

Japan went big on foreign aid in the 80s, ranking behind the United States. It’s still handing out billions of dollars a year that it can’t afford. It claims to be the third biggest donor to the Palestinian Authority after the US and EU dispensing $1.35 billion.

That’s not a title worth contending for considering that Japan has a higher percentage of population below poverty level than many Muslim countries, including Morocco, Jordan and Indonesia.

Country with World’s Biggest Debt Burden Pledges $200 Million to Palestinian Authority

...from the comments

truebearing •

All good debt counselors will tell you that if you're hopelessly in debt, give huge sums of money to Muslim terrorists. It's fool proof...


It works for Obama.




CULTURE OF LAWLESSNESS

Senate Democrats are rallying to Attorney General Eric Holder’s defense.

“I guess they don’t like anybody who disagrees with them,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “He’s a strong and smart advocate for a different point of view.”

Should the Attorney General be an “Advocate for a Different Point of View.”




THE OLD IS STILL NEW

2. The Jewish community in Russia and Russian controlled territories, like every major religious community, is under the control of the government. Its leaders will make those statements approved of by the security services. This is nearly as true now as it was under the USSR. Its lay leaders tend to have government connections and its religious leaders depend on the government to be able to work.

Especially if they come from outside the country.

Jews who intend to live in Place X are largely concerned about not offending whoever remains in charge of that place when the dust settles. Their statements will reflect that.

Jews and the Ukraine




Kerry: Our Goal is Not Eliminating Iranian Nuclear Capability



HE'S FOR SOMETHING ALRIGHT

“I am not for containment in Iran. Let me repeat that, since no one seems to be listening closely: I am unequivocally not for containing Iran.

“I am also not for announcing that the United States should never contain Iran.”

These are his actual opening words.

,,,

Paul has probably studied Obama, but he’s beginning to sound like him.

He has written an entire op-ed in which he argues that he’s tough, but nuanced and ambiguous. And in which you’re left with no actual content after having read through the whole thing except the author’s perception of his own intelligence.

Rand Paul Wants to Clarify That His Position on Containing Iran is a Secret




SWEETENING THE POT

Aside from the usual union donors, SEIU, teachers’ unions and the Association of Postal Workers, there’s American Crystal Sugar.

American Crystal Sugar, a beet sugar agricultural cooperative, ranks as his fourth top donor. And what does the sugar beet group want?

Sugar subsidies.

Socialist Bernie Sanders’ Beet Sugar Money

...from the comments

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his beets?"



THE ROUNDUP

Mark Steyn makes a very important point in his article on the culture of speech suppression.

Nick Lowles defined the ‘No Platform’ philosophy as ‘the position where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal political parties’. But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Free speech, wrote the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson last week, ‘buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success, to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our larger concept of freedom.’

Just so. A fortnight ago I was in Quebec for a provincial election in which the ruling separatist party went down to its worst defeat in almost half a century. This was a democratic contest fought between parties that don’t even agree on what country they’re in. In Ottawa for most of the 1990s the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was a chap who barely acknowledged either the head of state or the state she’s head of. Which is as it should be. Because, if a Quebec separatist or an Australian republican can’t challenge the constitutional order through public advocacy, the only alternative is to put on a black ski-mask and skulk around after dark blowing stuff up.

The tricky part of this is that while you shouldn't recognize the political rights of those who want to kill you, refusing to recognize the political rights of anyone who disagrees with you leads them to want to kill you.

The left is building totalitarian states without remembering how they turn out. Totalitarianism leads to an opposite reaction. More force is needed to suppress it which spills over into internecine warfare and the usual round of domestic purges. We're already seeing that in miniature in the various social justice wars being leftist factions on Twitter and Tumblr.



from Gerard at American Digest

Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.

With the advent of the "Palestinian cause" becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles -- driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies. It is now actually a badge of pride in many Western circles to appear at various events wearing gold-plated buboes inset with multi-faceted Kaposi's sarcoma that contain the virus at their core. Many now believe this intellectual adornment to actually be beautiful.

In a recent mutation, the virus has shown that it can leap the blood/brain barrier and actually infect Jews -- if they feel safe within their "advanced" society. The current term for this mutation is "Juicebox Mafia" in which self-styled "intellectuals" of Jewish lineage actually feel it is "intelligent" to call for a world in which it is easier for Arabs and other Islamic groups to kill Jews wholesale. This sort of strange host to the virus is replacing the previous host termed "the self-hating Jew."

The virus, because it is an ancient and clever virus, can lie dormant for years, and like HIV, can mutate around a lot of therapies designed to destroy it.

On the Most Ancient Virus to Infect the Soul

I think the term self-hating Jew is one of the bigger misnomers. There are indeed self-hating Jews around, but the latest wave most prominent in the media are narcissists.

Lefty narcissism leads to contempt for one's nation and culture... and even obsessive attempts to destroy it. That's true of Jews and non-Jews.




ON BRANDEIS AND ALI

What the Left’s intolerance reflects is that despite its moral relativism — a world without objective truths in which there is no such thing as good and evil — the Left believes there are judgments to be made, that certain values and ideas are superior: its own.

What separates the devils from the angels is simply whether or not you agree with them.

Hirsi Ali embodies everything the Left claims to champion: she’s an immigrant, minority, atheist, female, who was subjected to physical abuse, and speaks out for women’s rights. Yet she is silenced by the Left for the unspeakable offense of criticizing Islam.

To truly challenge the status quo, to truly fight for the underdog, to truly stand for something, would be for the Left to amplify the voices of those who oppose the prevailing ideological dogmas from campuses to coffeehouses across the country — to apply the standards of tolerance and diversity the Left purports to uphold equally, and indiscriminately.

That comes from Benjamin Weingarten at The Blaze. Meanwhile Robert Avrech clarifies the "Jewish" part.

No better example of this PC insanity can be found but at Brandeis University, an allegedly Jewish school—Yeshiva University is Jewish, Ner Yisroel is Jewish, Brandeis is a Democrat plantation

I've never considered Brandeis anything other than a legacy Jewish institution. It's as Jewish as a Jewish hospital, which is to say, funded by Jewish donors and meant as a contribution to the country.

It's not a Jewish institution. No more than a park bench paid for by a Jewish donor.



A SOVIET DIET

Oleg Atbashian of The People's Cube comments on Carney's Soviet propaganda posters.

If that were so, the meals in Carney’s kitchen would also probably match the menu of the place and time of the posters. His family would be living on a diet of beets, gruel, occasional rat, and thinly sliced boiled jackboots, which is what many Soviets ate at the time these posters were produced.

One poster was made in 1918, calling men to join the Red Army in the civil war against the anti-communist opposition, while the country lay in ruins due to the economic mismanagement as much as due to  intense fighting. The other poster was made during WWII, calling women to replace men at the factories, as the country lay in ruins, once again, due to intense fighting as much as due to the economic mismanagement.

The diet of the Carney family, however, does not include any of the food that the impoverished and starving Soviet people ate during the above wars. They eat more like the members of the Soviet Politburo and even better than that. They feast on fresh organic produce, succulent meat, delicious seafood, and tropical fruit delivered to the United States from all over the world. And as they enjoy the abundance of the American way of life in their kitchen, the Carneys like to stare at the two propaganda posters made for starving people. It never fails to improve their feeling of self-worth and digestion.

Of course in the USSR, the Carneys would have found themselves deep in the Party at the time. But Stalin would have sent one or both of them to the Gulags and they would have returned years later, paler and sicker, but still worshiping him and believing in the Communist future.

While the masses ate horse and even human meat in Stalingrad, Party members enjoyed a much finer standard of cuisine including rum pastries made right in the besieged city.

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