Enter your keyword

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Science is for Stupid People

By On September 30, 2014
Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science”.

Science, the magic of the secular age, is their church. But science isn’t anyone’s church. Science is much better at disproving things than at proving them. It’s a useful tool for skeptics, but a dangerous tool for rulers. Like art, science is inherently subversive and like art, when it’s restricted and controlled, it stops being interesting.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s defenders reacted to his basic errors by asserting that even if he had made a mistake, science, collectively, was right. Science is of course neither right nor wrong; its methodology can be used to determine whether something is right or wrong.

In Tyson’s case, science determined long ago that at least one of his claims was wrong. Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t embody science. No individual does. What Tyson embodies is manufactured intelligence. Manufactured intelligence is how we knew that Obama was smart. But manufactured intelligence has the same relationship to intelligence as a painting of the ocean does to the real thing.

The real ocean is complicated and messy. So is real intelligence. Manufactured intelligence is the fashion model playing a genius in a movie. Real intelligence is an awkward man obsessing over a handful of ideas, some of them ridiculously wrong, but one of which will change the world.

Real intelligence isn’t marketable because it doesn’t make an elite feel good about its power.

Biblical fake prophets were often preferred to real prophets because they made rulers feel comfortable about the future. The modern technoprophet assures a secular elite that it can effectively control people and that it even has the obligation to do so. It tells them that “science” is on their side.

The easy way to tell real religion from fake religion is that real religion doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t assure you that everything you’re doing is right and that you ought to keep on doing it.

The same holds true for science. Real science doesn’t make you feel smart. Fake science does.

No matter how smart you think you are, real science will make you feel stupid far more often than it will make you feel smart. Real science not only tells us how much more we don’t know than we know, a state of affairs that will continue for all of human history, but it tells us how fragile the knowledge that we have gained is, how prone we are to making childish mistakes and allowing our biases to think for us.

Science is a rigorous way of making fewer mistakes. It’s not very useful to people who already know everything. Science is for stupid people who know how much they don’t know.

A look back at the march of science doesn’t show an even line of progress led by smooth-talking popularizers who are never wrong. Instead the cabinets of science are full of oddballs, unqualified, jealous, obsessed and eccentric, whose pivotal discoveries sometimes came about by accident. Science, like so much of human accomplishment, often depended on lucky accidents to provide a result that could then be isolated and systematized into a useful understanding of the process.

Modernism is a style that offers a seamless vision of perfection that doesn’t exist. The accomplishments of our age haven’t changed human nature and they have not made us infallible.

Real science tells us that we are basically stupid. A close study of history proves it. And that’s a good thing. Stupid people can learn from their mistakes. Self-assured elites convinced of their own superior intelligence can’t. Everyone makes mistakes. The future belongs to those who recognize them.

The inability of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his defenders to acknowledge that he is wrong is a revealing look at the rotten core of the liberal elite which is incapable of admitting its errors, but sneers and smears its way out of a moral reckoning every time. Its ideology with its assumption of central control over lives and economies is too dependent on its own illusion of genius not to lie about its failures.

It is too big to fail and that makes its failure inevitable.

Tysonism is why ObamaCare suffered a disastrous launch, why the VA reorganization didn’t work and why we’re back in Iraq. Technocrats don’t make mistakes. They can’t. They’re only at the top because they’re smart. If they ever admitted to being stupid, they would lose their right to rule.

Like Lysenkoism, Tysonism uses ideology to determine the outcomes of science. That’s how we keep ending up with Global Warming as settled science no matter how often the actual science contradicts it.

Tysonism appropriates science without understanding it. Its science consists of factoids, some right and some wrong, which simplify and clarify everything. Its manufactured intelligence makes people feel smart without actually giving them the critical tools to question the false assumptions of a Tyson.

What the left calls science is really a hypothesis accepted as a fact without the skepticism. Its intelligence is a conclusion without bothering to determine whether it’s true. Science and intelligence are perpetual processes that are never truly settled. But in law and government, as in all other fields, the left discards the process and asserts an inevitable outcome by virtue of its superiority.

Intelligence as ideology is at the heart of the left. Its Orwellian twist discards the need for using intelligence to question its ideology by asserting that the issue is settled. To be smart is to be left and to be left is to be smart. And only stupid people would question that.

There is no need to think about anything because the smart people have already done all the thinking. You can show you are smart by accepting their conclusions or show your stupidity by questioning them.

Science and skepticism are the tools of stupid people. As Socrates put it, I know that I know nothing. We have the most to fear from the smart people who don’t know and will never admit how little they know.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

A Nigerian Prince Called Islam

By On September 28, 2014
Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money.

Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front just trying to protect the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo’s scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you go on believing that no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe.

Now imagine that Prince Ngobo’s real name is Islam.

That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, whether in Islamic immigration, Islamic democracy or peace with Islam have turned toxic, but dropping those investments is as out of the question as writing off Prince Ngobo as a con artist and walking away feeling like a fool.

Western elites, who fancy themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than the wise men and prophets of every religion, and who base their entire right to rule on that intelligence and enlightenment, are not in the habit of admitting that they have been played for fools.

The Arab Springers who predicted that the Muslim uprisings would bring a new age of secularism, freedom and an end to the violence between Islam and the West; are busy writing up new checks.

It’s not insanity; it’s the term that rhymes with a certain river in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s victory discredited the Arab Spring, which discredits the bid for Arab Democracy, which discredits the compatibility of Islam and the folks on Fifth Avenue. Follow the river back along its course and suddenly the Clash of Civilizations becomes an undeniable fact. It’s easier to give up and let the river of denial carry you further along until, five years from now, you find yourself explaining why Al-Qaeda ruling Libya is actually a good thing for everyone.

In 1993, Israel cut a land-for-peace deal with a greasy Egyptian bloke named Yasser Arafat. The Cairo-born Arafat would turn his gang of terrorists into a government and police force, and rule over an autonomous territory, in exchange for ending the violence. Clinton smiled beatifically as hands were shaken and a new era of peace was upon us.

The era, however, has yet to show up.

Over two decades of terrorism have not shaken the belief of the American or Israeli establishments in the “Two-State Solution”, which has solved absolutely nothing, except perhaps the problem of how to make the Middle East into an even worse place. As the violence increased and the pathways to peace decreased, American Presidents and Israeli Prime Ministers redoubled their concession offers and their faith in the Two-State Solution—now an article of faith in most circles. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt; it also laps at the shores of Tel Aviv, flows out to the English coast and floods cities across Europe.

Ask a Eurocrat for the time of day and he’ll calculate how much to charge you for the subsidies to the artisanal clock farmers that it will take to answer that question. Ask him about Islamic integration and he will instantly tell you that everything is going smoothly and the problems only exist in the minds of a few bigots and the pages of a few sensationalized tabloids.

Muslim integration into Europe is going swimmingly, much like the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the Arab Spring. It’s going like a house on fire, not to mention a bus, a lot of cars and two towers on fire—on the other side of the Atlantic. Whatever problems there are, as with the peace process and the spring process, are undoubtedly the fault of someone who isn’t a Muslim.

The Arab Spring, the Palestinian Peace Process and every similar bid to transform the region  presumed that disempowerment was the cause of Muslim violence and that, conversely, empowerment was the solution.

Give the poor dears some weapons, a country, a ballot box, free and open elections, and they’ll be less likely to blow themselves up while seeking 72 virgins on the downtown express. Instead, empowering people who were violent while disempowered; only made them more violent.

Some of the best minds in two hemispheres are engaged in seeking a solution to this paradox, which isn’t a paradox at all but rather a straight-line projection.

If Abdul is beheading people when all he has to work with is a sword then, if you give him a gun, he will start shooting them instead. If he’s blowing up buses when he only has a terrorist group, he will blow up countries when he has a country.

Empowering Abdul does not diminish his grievances, because his grievances are a function of his capacity for violence. Increasing his capacity will increase his grievances until the entire world is on the wrong end of his empowerment scimitar.

The liberal projection that “Abdul + Power + Money + Bigger Guns = Peace” made as much sense, as Prince Ngobo’s story about his transfer fees being cursed by witches, but, as the song goes, “You gotta have faith.” Some of the things that we have faith in are bigger than us and some are just us. Those who put their faith in Prince Ngobo and in the benign nature of Islam are really putting their faith in their own instincts, trusting that they are right, even while looking into the eye of the wrongness.

We rarely know a thing for what it is. For the most part we know it only for what we want it to be. Our knowledge of the world is inseparable from our worldview which casts the shadows that project our inner world on the outer world. The only way to avoid that trap is by studying consequences, by creating theories based on actual events, rather than manufacturing events based on theories.

Most people project their own desires and motivations on to others. Americans assumed that Muslims just wanted democracy, free enterprise and apple pie. Muslims assume that Americans are conspiring to destroy them through a byzantine series of plots and conspiracies, because that is what they would do in our place… and that is what they are trying to do.

The Eurocrats assume that Muslims wanted to be good multicultural socialists, because that is what they want them to be. They assumed that the Arab Spring was the equivalent of Europe’s own socialist  movements, after having wrongly assumed the same thing about Arab Socialist movements generations earlier. They assumed those things, because just like Prince Ngobo’s business partners trying to figure out how to call up Lagos, they saw in the Other the mirror of their own desires.

The sunk cost of the free world into the illusion that Islam is benign, that it is a positive influence and that it can be coexisted with is enormous. The cultural cost is even greater.

The mechanism of denial is that sunk cost. That faith which our political, cultural and academic superiors have in themselves—in their probity, their insight and their rational tools of scientific governance. Muslims dare not question Islam because they fear Allah. Liberals dare not question Islam because they fear being fools. If they were completely wrong about Islam, then what else were they also wrong about? Pull at one thread and the whole coat of dreams dissolves leaving behind a very naked emperor.

The longer the fraud goes on, the more impossible it is for them to admit that they were wrong. What could have been tossed out after a year is an article of faith after twenty and undeniable after forty. To admit that you made a mistake right away is bearable, but to admit that your policy for generations has been senseless madness is inconceivable.

The trouble with naked emperors is that everyone knows they are naked. Give people permission to point out the obvious and they will commence pointing and laughing. The only way to keep from being made a mockery is by desperately maintaining the consensus that everyone knows the pants are there; even if you can’t see them. Everyone knows that Islam is violent in the deeper parts of their minds, where common sense observations directly gathered from experience go. Give people permission to point out the obvious and they will turn angrily on those who lied to them and manipulated them for decades. Worse still, they will brand them incompetent fools who cannot be trusted with the reins of government.

Most insidiously, the left likes the imaginary world that that it has created. The multicultural utopia with jolly Pakistanis adding spice to London, Saudis putting up little mosques on the Canadian prairie and sassy Shiites bringing diversity to Dearborn, isn’t just propaganda—it’s the imaginary world that they want to live in. The new world order that they have imagined of a friendly multicultural democratic is their idea of the world as it should be-- a utopia created and maintained at our expense, and in the face of all reality and reason.

The illusion of Islam has, like the banking system, become too big to fail. It cannot fail because it would take too much else down with it, leaving behind a harder world. No matter how unintegrated Muslims in Europe are, the Eurocrats must insist that, aside from a few exploding bumps in the road, everything is going according to plan. Any day now a lesbian Imam will be preaching the virtues of secularism in Finsbury Park. It must be that way because the alternative is unthinkable.

In Israel, the Two-State Solution must still be the solution, because the alternative is eternal conflict. In the rest of the region, Arab Democracy must be viable, because otherwise there is nothing left but despair over an irredeemable barbarism.

We gotta have faith, not in any deity, including the chief deity of Islam, but in our leaders. Muslims believe that Allah is infallible, while we are expected to believe that the politicians and professors, the diplomats and journalists, are. That they are right, even when the continuing violence proves that they are wrong.

The people who shape our half of the world have fallen for the Nigerian Prince scam of Islam and they need to believe that they know what they are doing and they need us to believe it too. And when the check from Lagos doesn’t clear, when the bombs go off, the cars burn, the children are murdered in schools and the rockets fly, then they don’t blame Prince Hussein Ngobo, the car bombers, terrorists and throatslitters—they blame us for ruining the illusion by not believing in it too.

It would have all worked if only we had been as willing to be lied to as our gullible masters.





Wednesday, September 24, 2014

It’s Time to Kick ISIS Members Out of America

By On September 24, 2014
Every week brings new reports of Muslims in America flocking to join ISIS. Those who aren’t killed in battle will eventually return to New York, to Los Angeles and to Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

And they will stop being Iraq’s problem and become our problem.

ISIS is more than just another terrorist group. It is now an Islamic State. Its followers and allied militias pledge to obey the Caliph of ISIS and reject all allegiances to other states and entities. Western ISIS recruits burn their passports to show that they are no longer citizens of those countries.

Like most Salafists, ISIS members see our system of law and government as idolatry and heresy.

Fort Hood Jihadist Nidal Hasan, who recently applied to join ISIS, had earlier written that he would “renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend any man made constitution (like the Constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”

“I therefore formally renounce my oath of office as well as any other implicit or explicit oaths I have made in the past … This includes my oath of U.S. citizenship,” Hasan declared.

By his own admission, Nidal Hasan is no longer a United States citizen. He should be promptly denaturalized. So should every ISIS member and anyone who supports the Islamic State.

The oath of citizenship that Hasan was retroactively rejecting states, “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”

ISIS members have pledged their allegiance to a foreign prince and a foreign state. Denaturalizing them should be a mere formality.

Anwar Al-Awlaki, Hasan’s mentor, whose American citizenship became such an issue for the left when he was killed in a drone strike, was clear in his lectures that he was at war with America, that “Muslims in the West should see their stay there as temporary” before leaving to build an Islamic State in the Middle East and that Muslims shouldn’t even vote in America because they would be participating in “a disbelieving system, in a disbelieving country.”

Like Hasan, he did not consider himself an American in any way, shape or form.

In the past the United States had denaturalized Nazis and Communists and even specifically targeted foreign agitators linked to the Nazis and Communists, denaturalized them and then deported them.

Recently Obama Inc. found the time to have two former Guatemalan soldiers accused of committing atrocities against a village linked to Communist guerrillas in the so-called Dos Erres massacre back in the 1980s stripped of their citizenship.

Other denaturalization targets under his administration included two Serbians, an Ethiopian Marxist who took part in the 70s Red Terror and a woman involved in the Rwandan genocide.

None of the denaturalized were Muslim terrorists posing a current national security threat. And yet if we are to have a strategy against ISIS, denaturalizing its members will accomplish more than air strikes.

The modern Jihadist threat had at its core a group of fighters who trained and fought in Afghanistan during and after the Soviet invasion. These fighters went on to lead terrorist groups and stage attacks. But the battlefields of the Arab Spring will produce a new wave of threats on an unprecedented scale. Muslims in the West, especially converts to Islam, who have gone to join ISIS will return with training, battlefield experience and a plan. It’s far more urgent to keep them out than to deport war criminals.

A serious ISIS strategy has to address not the flow of fighters from the United States, as Obama has proposed to do, but the flow of fighters coming into the United States. If ISIS members want to travel to fight in Iraq and Syria, they should be allowed to do so.

By joining the Islamic State, they have disavowed their allegiance to the United States. Their citizenship is now only a passport of convenience that they will burn as soon as they make their way into Syria.

It’s far more important to keep them from coming back than to keep them from leaving.

If the United States can denaturalize foreign soldiers for being part of units linked to war crimes, as it has under Obama, it has the obligation to pursue the denaturalization of anyone who chooses to affiliate with an organization such as ISIS which has committed undeniable war crimes.

While the legal grounds for denaturalization won’t be the same since some of those being denaturalized did not have terrorist histories and may have even been born in the United States, the policy basis is clear. Despite the various dubious Supreme Court attempts to strike down the denaturalization power of Congress, there are still clear standards for denaturalization.

Joseph Lieberman and Scott Brown introduced the Terrorist Expatriation Act back in 2010 which would have added providing material support to terrorists as a basis for denaturalization leading to hysterical reactions on the left and the right. Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann have followed that up with their own bills now.

But such an explicit addition isn’t strictly necessary; particularly in the case of the Islamic State. Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act anyone voluntarily “committing any act of treason”, bearing arms against the United States or plotting to conquer it will lose his citizenship.

While establishing this has proven tricky in the past due to the preponderance of evidence standard, ISIS represents a clear case because its fighters travel voluntarily from the United States for that purpose and because the Islamic State’s creed explicitly repudiates citizenship in anything but the new Caliphate. It is clearly apparent that any American citizen joining ISIS intends to abandon his citizenship. He is not only serving in a foreign army, but he is joining an organization whose very reason for existence is precluded on a rejection of states and manmade documents such as the United States Constitution.

Furthermore if Obama were to admit that the United States is at war with ISIS, its fighters would also be guilty of bearing arms against the United States. However even without this admission, ISIS has made sufficient threats and has now murdered two Americans. There is no serious doubt that we are at war.

Unlike the Taliban, some of whose American members argued that they had not originally been in conflict with the United States, ISIS originated in conflict with the United States and its creed explicitly calls for the perpetuation of conflict not only with the United States, but with the rest of the world.

The Islamic State’s founding declaration urged all the Muslims of the world to gather to it, “So rush O Muslims and gather around your Caliphate, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the earth and knights of war... By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west will submit to you.”

The Muslim fighters rushing to join ISIS hoping to be its “kings of the earth” and “knights of war” and to force the east and west to submit to it are at war with the United States. They have given their allegiance to a foreign power that promises them that they will rule over Americans.

Both attacks on the World Trade Center were carried out by terrorists who should not have been allowed into the United States. It’s time we learned the lessons of those attacks.

ISIS members and supporters like Nidal Hasan are eager to abandon their American citizenship. It’s our own government that is standing in the way.

It’s useless to bomb ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, if we let them march through our airports.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Democratic Party’s White Voter Problem

By On September 23, 2014
Hardly a week goes by without some Democratic Party hack putting finger to iPad and swiping out a screed about the Republican Party’s problem with women or minorities.

This time it was Debbie Wasserman Schultz with “The GOP’s Woman Problem”. Schultz claims that the Republican Party was “rejected again by a bloc of voters that make up more than half of the electorate”. That claim is as real as Schultz’s hair color. The only bloc that rejected Romney was the same bloc that rejected Hillary; the bloc of minority voters who came out in force for Obama.

And unless Hillary Clinton also had a “woman problem” they didn’t do it over gender.

 For example in the South Carolina Democratic primary, Obama beat Hillary among women by 54 to 30. That’s a much bigger split than the one between Obama and Romney among women. While Hillary Clinton beat Obama among white voters, Obama won 78 percent of the black vote.

There was no gender gap. There was a racial gap.

Throughout her campaign, Hillary Clinton consistently won the votes of white women in large numbers and lost the votes of women who said that their gender was not important. Obama won the female vote by his largest margins in southern states because he wasn’t really winning by gender, he was benefiting from a large turnout of black women.

Obama won the female vote in Georgia by 32%, but Hillary won 62% of the white female vote. Obama however had won 87% of the black female vote. In Ohio, Hillary and Obama had nearly the same split, but Hillary won the female vote in Ohio by 16% because the racial makeup of the voters was different.

In 2012, Romney won 53% of the white female vote and 3% of the black female vote in Ohio. He didn’t lose women. He lost the same “bloc of voters” that had rejected Hillary, not over gender, but over race.

The Republican Party doesn’t have a “woman problem”. Romney won the votes of white women in every age group; including young women. And Obama lost white women as he did all white voters.

He lost white voters by 59% to 39%. He lost white voters of every age and gender. His loss among white voters was completely unprecedented for any winner of a presidential election.

The GOP doesn’t have a “woman problem”, but the Democrats have a “white woman problem” and a “white man problem”.

The articles about the GOP’s problem with minority voters blame the Republican Party for alienating minority voters. But shouldn’t the Democratic Party be held accountable for alienating white voters?

This is about more than just numbers.

The Democratic Party’s poor performance among white voters is leading it to engage in some very questionable behavior. If Obama and his party weren’t polling so poorly among white voters, it’s doubtful that the Democrats would be nakedly exploiting racial tensions in Ferguson in the hopes of turning out black voters for the midterm elections.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a New York Times article which describes how the Democrats are hoping to retain control of the Senate “as they urge black voters to channel their anger by voting Democratic in the midterm elections”.

A race riot at the polls isn’t the political strategy of a legitimate party, but the Democrats are legitimately panicking because they have lost white voters.

Obama’s approval rating among young white voters, a group that came out for him in 2008, was at 28 percent. 58 percent of them would like to recall him from office. His approval ratings among the white working class are so catastrophic that he might as well be Walter Mondale.

So Obama is hitting the Rust Belt even while Democrats running for reelection avoid him like the Ebola virus. His fallback strategy is racism and more racism. Everything from Ferguson to the border crisis was set up to push his minority voting base into voting in the midterm elections.

The migrants crowded into gyms and the burned out stores in Ferguson are both the products of a criminally corrupt and racially divisive election strategy. But no amount of race riots or refugee mobs can save the Democratic Party from dealing with its white voter problem.

Instead of the GOP being ordered to change its policies to appeal to minority voters, maybe it’s time that the Democrats changed their policies to appeal to white voters.

It wouldn’t be that hard.

The Democrats have won white voters before. But then they got lazy and decided that it would be easier to depend on racial voting blocs. The blocs worked for Obama, but they didn’t work out too well for them in Congress. Now the Democrats are making a last ditch effort to hold on to the Senate using an insulting and racist campaign that has already cost both black and white lives.

To win over white voters, the Democrats have to stop freeing drug dealers while banning guns. Instead they have to stop fighting the 2nd Amendment and start arresting drug dealers. They have to stop pushing higher taxes and uncontrolled spending and start rebuilding the economy with jobs and tax cuts. They have to let go of ObamaCare and stop pushing socialized medicine and socialized everything.

White voters have less faith in government. They believe that the country is on the wrong track. They aren’t committed Republicans, but they are deeply skeptical of a deeply racist Democratic Party that no longer speaks to their needs and values. The Democratic Party’s response to its loss of support among white voters has been to accuse them of racism. In the same New Yorker interview in which Obama claimed that ISIS was a JV team, he blamed racism for his poor approval ratings among white voters. Both claims were delusional and wrong.

White voters did not belatedly become racist. The Democratic Party stopped listening to them and went down a racist rabbit hole trying to defend an administration where Al Sharpton and Eric Holder are dictating a national conversation on race. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right. One party in 2012 was “rejected again by a bloc of voters that make up more than half of the electorate”.

That party was the Democratic Party.

It’s time to ask whether a party that has lost the support of the majority of the country has any place running the country.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Rationing Society

By On September 21, 2014
There are two types of societies, production societies and rationing societies. The production society is concerned with taking more territory, exploiting that territory to the best of its ability and then discovering new techniques for producing even more. The rationing society is concerned with consolidating control over all existing resources and rationing them out to the people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, September 19, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Islam Begs to Differ

By On September 19, 2014


REALPOLITIK

Poland wasn’t sending troops to Iraq because it was worried about Saddam Hussein. It made the commitment because it wanted to be part of a partnership with the United States that would also provide security in its own backyard.

These days Poland won’t be sending 2,500 men to Iraq. It needs its soldiers back home now that Putin is on the rampage and Obama has shown that he can’t and won’t stop him. The same goes for most of the Eastern European countries that were eager to show that they could contribute to the Pax Americana.

The very insults that the left tossed at Bush, warmonger and cowboy, were the reason he could bring together unlikely countries and get them to contribute boots on the ground. Meanwhile the very attributes that won Obama the Nobel Peace Prize are why the spearhead of his coalition is France.

Obama’s Coalition of the Uncertain




ISLAM BEGS TO DIFFER

“There’s nothing in Islam that condones or suggests people should go out and rape women and sell off young girls or give them as gifts to jihadists and cut people’s heads off and tie people’s hands behind their backs and put them on their knees and shoot them in their backs,” Kerry said.

Islam begs to differ.

“We conquered Khaibar, took the captives, and the booty was collected. Dihya came and said, ‘O Allah’s Prophet! Give me a slave girl from the captives.’ The Prophet said, ‘Go and take any slave girl.’ He took Safiya bint Huyai.  Bukhari: 1:8:367

"The women of Khaybar were distributed among the Muslims." Ishaq:511

Kerry is Wrong, Selling Girls as Sex Slaves is Islam


THE INTERVIEW

I joined Robert Spencer a few days ago for an interview with Ann Marie Murrell of Politichicks. It was an interesting conversation, especially in light of recent events.



Ann, along with two conservative co-authors, also has a new book out, What Women Want.

Muslim Leader in Scotland: No Independence Because Scots are Racist and Illiterate




MASTER RELIGION

A victim of Rotherham’s child sex abuse scandal confronted a man she says groomed her – but was left shocked when she was the one arrested.

A police van came and six male officers piled out. ‘Two of them dragged her away, handcuffed her, put her against a wall and then shoved her into the back of the van.’

A spokesman said: ‘The woman was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order offences.’

I highly doubt that a police van with six officers is dispatched everyone time someone in South Yorkshire is suspected of being drunk. The key there is “Racially”. A Muslim complained and the hounds were released.

The same police who wouldn’t step in when young girls were being raped, are on the go whenever a Muslim’s feelings are hurt.

Rotherham Child-sex Victim Confronts Muslim Abuser, Gets Arrested for Racism




UK PM on Beheading: “They Are Not Muslims. They Are Monsters.”




YES ALL NON-MUSLIMS

It was from their friend, former Kings Cross bouncer and now senior Islamic State commander, Mohammed Baryalei: go out on the streets of Sydney and kill “a random kaffir (non-­believer)”.

Kill a random Kaffir is telling.

It didn’t matter to them which non-Muslim they killed or what his specific views on them were. He could have been a left-wing anti-war radical for all they knew.

It didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that he wasn’t a Muslim. And so he deserved to die.

Australia ISIS Beheading Order: “Kill a Random Kaffir”




COEXIST: Interfaith Marriage Between Muslim Man and Jewish Woman Ends in Bomb Threat




+1
Or as Kerry said in his testimony, “There are more than 50 countries that already have agreed or are now doing something. Not every country will decide that their role is to have some kind of military engagement, but every country can do something.”

Where Bush had managed to assemble a coalition of countries willing to send ground troops, Obama and Kerry have assembled a coalition of countries for a war that won’t actually fight in the war, but will do something.

The 50 number isn’t a coincidence. The “Coalition of the Willing” had 49 members. Obama is trying to show that he can go one country more. Even if unlike the “Coalition of the Willing” its members won’t fight or do much of anything.

Saving Private Kerry




Chicago has 53% Literacy Rate, 2 Schools Named After Obamas




ALSO MURDERING A CHILD

Paramedics who found him dead said at her trial that they were shocked to learn his age. He weighed 36 pounds, about half the weight of a normal 9-year-old.

A pediatrician testified that he had more than 250 injuries, including burns from cigarettes or cigars and scars from ligatures, and that a lack of food made him stop growing.

“There was not an inch on his body that had not been bruised or scarred or injured,” said Dixie Bersano, one of the prosecutors.

But according to her lawyer, it’s because she’s a black lesbian.

“What she’s really guilty of is being a black lesbian,” Stickels said.

Lawyer for Child Murderess: “What She’s Really Guilty of is Being a Black Lesbian.”




Hillary: I Forgave Bill Just Like Blacks Forgave South Africa




BOYCOTTING THE GANDER


The Amcha Initiative put out a list of college faculty who support pro-terrorist boycotts of Israel. Its sources were mostly the boycotters themselves. But now the boycotters, who love playing the victim like they love Made in China keffiyahs, are chanting the name of a dead Irishman.

Corey Robin, a political science professor accused AMCHA Initiative, of “McCarthyism,” and asked that it add his name to the list.

But wait… isn’t adding his name to the list also McCarthyism? Doesn’t that make Corey Robin a McCarthyite?

Apparently it’s not McCarthyism to boycott Jews. It’s only McCarthyism when Jews boycott back.

BDS Boycotters Say Boycotting Them is McCarthyism



Tranny Traitor Bradley Manning has a Plan for Letting ISIS Win



HAVEN

And yet the only remaining options are emigration to the West or setting up a religious majority state.

Israel’s experience shows the perils of the latter course, but there may be no better option. Western Christians have the same demographic weakness as Eastern Christians. France, which attempted to set up Lebanon as a Christian enclave only to see it totter under the impact of Muslim demographics, is now seeing its own cities flooded by Muslim immigrants. France expanded its civic borders to admit too many Muslims and may be as doomed as Lebanon.

However Eastern Christians suffer from fewer illusions about Islam than Western Christians do. With a state or states whose borders offer a solid demographic majority, a competent military could secure their territory in ways that Western Christians with no memory of persecution would instinctively reject.

A Christian Federation in the Middle East

... from the comments

fahamjp  •

I agree that the current borders in the Middle East are artificial based on the decisions made by French and British colonial rulers post WW1. I do see 3 areas where potential Christian nations could be created. There are several Assyrian groups that support the creation of an independent Assyrian Chaldean nation in the region east of the Tigris and bordered by the Tigris and Zab rivers extending to the Turkish border. This area has a population of approximately 1.5 million which is the same population of Christians that were in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. There are also 200,000 Assyrian Christians in northeastern Syria who could move to this new nation. The 2nd Christian nation would consist of the area of Lebanon from Jubayl to Zahlah and extending into Syria to include the city of Damascus and then southwest to include the Golan heights. There are approximately 2.5 million Christians in Syria and the population of Damascus is 1.7 million. This assumes that independent nations for the Druze and Alawites ( north of Jubayl and extending to the Turkish border-their traditional homeland) would also be created. In Egypt, the Coptic Christians are 10% of the population. A Coptic nation could consist of the region of Egypt east of the Nile extending as far north as the area parallel to Zafarana and including the Sinai peninsula. These areas contain approximately 10% of Egypt's population matching the Coptic percentage.



LET US PRAISE LIBERALS OF GENIUS

"When the participants were led to believe that the suspect was white, exposing them to the ape words beforehand made no difference in their judgments about the use of force displayed in the video. However, when participants believed the suspect was black, those who were exposed to the words thought the police officers were more justified in the amount of force they used."

Stanford Prof Who Claimed Police Brutality Caused by Subliminal Monkeys Wins MacArthur “Genius” Grant




POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL


In 2010, Rand Paul went on the Maddow show and defended the legality of segregated businesses that deny service to black customers.

A few years later Rand Paul reinvented himself as the best candidate to reach out to minorities. Rand Paul didn’t actually win any significant number of black votes the one time he ran for office, but he’s being treated as the great hope for the GOP when it comes to minority votes for the usual reason…

… he keeps accusing Republicans of racism.

Sen. Rand Paul on Thursday blasted his own party for making it tougher for minorities to vote.

“So many times, Republicans are seen as this party of, ‘We don’t want black people to vote because they’re voting Democrat, we don’t want Hispanic people to vote because they’re voting Democrat,’” he said.

Will Rand Paul Please Stop Accusing Republicans of Racism




Congressman “Taliban Alan” Grayson Joins Code Pink’s Pro-ISIS Campaign



DO YOU EVEN READ?

This isn’t the biggest issue in the history of NASA, but it’s telling that Neil deGrasse Tyson didn’t seem to know the problem with using pencils in space.

Or that he casually passed on the kind of myth that gets recirculated through chain emails.

Or that none of the people who read his book and knew better took the time to correct his mistake.

It adds up to a self-promoting fraud whom no one calls out because he seems to be for all the right causes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn’t Know Anything About NASA Either




9/11 Commission Member Warns NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Undermining Counterterrorism




A TRAGEDY IN ONE ACT

"And what can I do after the act has been done? Can I wolf down my yoghurt, even though the settlement of Sussia eats up lands that don’t belong to it?"

MK Yossi Sarid once admitted in a radio interview that his mother used to bathe him in the tub until he was 21 years old.

Dumbest Man in Israel Denounces Government Force Feeding Him Jewish Settler Goat Yogurt




Canadian Union Demands Time Off for Grieving “Spirit Friends”




THE GAYS OF IRAN

An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research department is stark in its findings. 17% of the 142,000 students who were surveyed said that they were homosexual.

At 17% Iran would be far gayer than America. Or most places.

While the Middle East does have a higher prevalence of homosexual behavior (which is really not the same as our construct of gay as a permanent genetic identity, itself an unscientific notion) it’s doubtful that these numbers are accurate.


Iranian Parliament Discovers Lots and Lots of Gays in Iran

...from the comments

MarilynA • If these surveys are anonymous and given to students in the lower grades they have little meaning. I remember my son and his best friend laughing about the answers they had marked on one of those surveys when they were in the fifth grade. Kids, especially boys, have an impish, mischievous streak in them and will do things to shock adults, especially if they know they can get away with it. (aka anonymous surveys) My kid's friend said he marked "I have to have a drink every morning before I go to school.


OUR SHAMAN IS BIGGER THAN YOUR SHAMAN

The mess of comments defending Tyson by saying that his mistakes are minor and that they don't disprove "science" (as if any one man is equivalent to science) are elementarily tribal. It's not just that Tyson is functioning as a tribal leader, rallying the troops against the forces of ignorance using quotes that he made up and fake facts that he is too ignorant not to know were fake.

Tyson is the shaman who summons the forces of science. It's not science as method or practice, but cargo cultish science as superstition.

Science functions as a religion in this frame. It embodies a moral code of sorts (be smart, don't listen to stupid people on the right) and therefore makes one superior. It's a mysterious force which you harness by clicking Like on YouTube videos and spreading memes of the tribal leader.

Neil deGrasse Tyson can't be wrong because he embodies science. That makes him a transcendent being of light who may not know what he's talking about, but is innately superior because of a patina of cool plastered over him. It's not really about Tyson, it's about the tribe needing a shaman to show their superiority.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Science as Tribe




TURTLES OF THE LAST BRIGADE

Edward Cline at Rule of Reason summarizes some of the insanity of the debates over immigrationon the libertarian side.

Stossel argues for less restrictive and less onerous legal applications for citizenship and residency, and that’s fine. But, again, he argues from the standpoint of ideal circumstances, in which we lived in an ideally free country and not in the trough of statist controls and in a continuous state of crisis, situations created by political pragmatism and multiculturalism. As with other open border positions, this is surely another argument of gossamer. To ignore these aspects is to indulge in wishful thinking.

 Americans must first extricate themselves from the claws of statism before they can begin to credibly address peripheral issues such as immigration. Otherwise, it’s a matter of the dog chasing its own tail.

I've said something similar that any system or ideology whose policies function as a suicide pact is self-nullifying. It proves itself wrong through the simple fact that if its ideas were implemented it could not survive. Libertarians who argue for open borders are like Jews arguing for more Islamic immigration.






EYES, EARS, ETC...

From a Charles W. Cooke article on Biden's Shylock gaffe...

Reading these words, one can only marvel at how exquisitely thinly Foxman has managed to slice the critique: ensuring with his throat-clearing that his friend would be protected from any serious repercussions, while managing to extract his pound of outrage nonetheless.

Since I'm not Abe Foxman, I'll avoid any outrage, sliced any way, and just note that Cooke has provided a helpful a little reminder of why I avoid the National Review.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Don’t Mention the War

By On September 18, 2014
Bill Clinton was ambiguous about the definition of “sex” and “is”. Barack Obama is uncertain about what the definition of “war” might be.

And wars are central to the duties of the man in the White House.

Whether or not we’re in a war depends on who you ask and on which day of the week you ask him. Secretary of State John Kerry said that bombing ISIS in two countries wasn’t a war. After the White House spokesman said it is a war, Kerry agreed that maybe it might be a war after all.

Forget about finding a strategy, this administration can’t even agree on whether the thing that it needs to find a strategy for is a war.

Democrats don’t like the “W” word. They bomb more countries than Republicans do, but they find a prettier name for it.

One of the first things that Obama did in Iraq was to change the name of the war. It was no longer Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was now Operation New Dawn. Even though there were 50,000 troops in Iraq, the combat mission was officially over. The 50,000 were renamed “Advise and Assist” brigades.

As John and Yoko said, the “W” word really could be over if you wanted it to be. Or pretended it was.

Obama bombed Libya to implement regime change, but no one called it a war. It was just one of those things where we dropped a lot of bombs on another country in coordination with rebels on the ground to help them take over that country. Definitely not a war. Possibly one of those “man-caused disasters”.

At least that was how Obama Inc. tried to rename terrorism in the early heady days of hope and change.

A compulsive need to avoid calling things what they are is an obvious form of denial. But when a politician at the head of a government begins behaving in that shifty way, it’s also deeply dishonest.

Democrats could defend Bill Clinton’s need to lie about what they termed his private life, but even they can’t defend an administration that plays Clintonesque word games with something as big as a war.

We are currently not in a war with the Islamic State, which according to this administration is neither Islamic nor a State, with a strategy of possibly destroying them (unless that doesn’t work out and then we’ll settle for degrading them) and we are backed in this non-war by a coalition of Muslim nations that can’t as of yet be named, but which have possibly pledged to help us with certain undetermined things.

These undetermined things include aiding the Syrian Islamist rebels, some of whom are fighting alongside ISIS, some of whom are fighting ISIS and some of whom switch back and forth based on their mood, the latest shipment of TOW missiles from the CIA and how much the Saudis are paying them.

We don’t know a lot more about the war, which may or may not be a war, than we know about it.

And that’s the problem.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was mocked for talking about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” by people who are too stupid to realize that their ignorance has turned the world around them into “unknown unknowns”.

Obama’s culture of denial, his charm bracelets of Orwellian synonyms for conflict that seem to have been invented by a bureaucrat with no sense of humor, turn everything into unknown unknowns. If we can’t even properly define what we’re doing, how can we do it at all? If we can’t even admit that we’re fighting a war and that ISIS is inspired by Islam, how can we beat an enemy that we can’t fight or name?

For the longest time this administration refused to admit that ISIS was a threat or that it was at war with us. Only when the Jihadists were preparing to knock on the doors of the US embassy in Baghdad, was it finally able, after a delay of some weeks, to use the “W” word.

What you call something is important. Ideologues, like the kind that fill the ranks of Obama Inc, think that changing a name changes reality. It doesn’t. A rose will still be the same plant by any other name and ISIS will still be the same band of Islamic headchoppers even if you insist on referring to them as a junior varsity team of man-caused disasters belonging to no particular faith or religion.

It’s your awareness of reality that changes.

Casinos and credit card companies use substitution to diminish your awareness that you are spending money. Drug companies play soothing music and show pastoral scenes while telling you the lethal side effects. Car salesmen and cable companies avoid giving you the full amount that you’ll be paying.

Obama has a bad habit of using these same tactics. His administration tried to make the illegal war in Libya look good by refusing to call it a war and comparing the cost to the Iraq War using bogus figures. It tried to erase the existence of terrorism by refusing to use the word to describe terrorist attacks that were taking place, whether at Fort Hood or in Benghazi.

His tactics showed that he didn’t believe that the problem was terrorism, but the overreaction of Americans to terrorism. All he had to do whitewash every attack as an isolated incident that had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism and then Americans would cease to be aware of terrorism. If Iraq were to vanish from the evening news, no one would know that Al Qaeda there was getting bigger and bolder.

In the latest leaked private conversations printed in the New York Times, Obama whines and mopes, he blasts critics and denies that his policies have failed. Despite his muscular rhetoric in public, in private he complains that he is being stampeded into bombing ISIS. It’s a revealing conversation because it shows a man who believes that his failures are not the problem. It’s other people becoming aware of those failures that concerns him and forces him into addressing them. ISIS isn’t the problem: America is.

ISIS is to Obama as Monica was to Bill Clinton. They’re both the dirty little secrets of powerful men that they did everything possible to hide. And once that was no longer an option, they quibbled over words.

Denial only works until reality forcibly intrudes. Even with a friendly media, the philandering of the President of the United States couldn’t continue indefinitely. And even with a friendly media, the rise of a new generation of Al Qaeda after the Arab Spring wouldn’t stay buried in the back pages forever.

It was only a matter of time until everyone knew.

Futile exercises like debating the meaning of “War” are delaying tactics. People are not interested in abstractions like the meaning of “Is”, “War”, “Sex” or “You can keep your doctor”. They take words at their common meaning. If bombs are falling, it’s a war. And if it’s a war, then it has to be won.

Democrats don’t believe in wars now because they don’t believe in winning. Instead of wars, they spend a lot of time on “interventions” as if dropping tons of explosives on a country is like telling your drunk cousin to stop drinking. They never win any of these interventions and that’s fine because Americans don’t really care what happens in Yugoslavia, Haiti or Somalia.

But on September 11, thousands were murdered in one day. The Democrats don’t like calling what happened on that day an act of war. Americans however know it’s a war and are determined to win it.

Obama was guiding Americans away from the awareness that we were in a war. In wars, someone wins and someone loses. If he refused to call it a war, maybe we wouldn’t realize that we were losing.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Americans Alone

By On September 16, 2014
For the first time in American statistical history, the majority of American adults are single. 124 million or 50.2% of Americans are single. Some will get married, but increasing numbers never will.

 Demographically a population of single adults means the death of the Republican Party. It eliminates the possibility of libertarian and fiscally conservative policies. It leads inevitably to the welfare state.

Single people are less likely to have a support system that keeps them from becoming a public charge. Children born to single parents perform poorly in school and are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. A nation of single people will inevitably become a welfare state and a police state.

The statistics have always been known and the conclusions to be drawn from them are inescapable.

A lot of attention is being paid to the political consequences of the nation’s changing racial demographics, but it’s not a coincidence that the racial group that Republicans perform worst with is also the least likely to be married. While there are other factors in the mix, Republicans do better with married than unmarried black people.

The same is true of most other racial groups.

The latest Reuters poll shows that 36% of married Hispanics are planning to vote for a Democratic candidate in the upcoming midterm election and 28% are planning to vote for a Republican candidate. Among unmarried Hispanics, those numbers change to 42% Democratic and %15 Republican.

If Republicans want to start getting serious about the Hispanic vote, they might want to spend less time muttering about amnesty and more time thinking about where their strength with married voters lies.

Married white voters lean toward a Republican candidate by 43% to 24%. Among single white voters, Democrats lead 34% to 26%. There are other factors that affect these numbers such as age, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. Growing minority demographics have certainly helped make single Americans a statistical majority, but it’s dangerous to ignore the bigger picture of the post-family demographic trend.

If Republicans insist on running against the nanny state, they will have to replace it with something. That something was traditionally the family. Take away the family and something else has to fill its place.

In the West, government has become the new family. The state is father and occasionally mother. The nanny state is literally a nanny. It may be hated, but it is also needed.

That is why married whites oppose ObamaCare 65% to 34% while single whites also oppose it, but by a narrower margin of 53% to 47%.

ObamaCare’s support base among whites is highest among single white men and women. (Despite Julia and Sandra Fluke, the latest poll numbers show that young single white women oppose ObamaCare by a higher margin than young single white men. Pajama Boy with his hot cocoa is more likely to be a fervent proponent of ObamaCare than Julia. But the margins for both sexes remain narrow.)

It’s unrealistic to expect people to vote against their short term interests. Without family, the individual is vulnerable. A single bad day can leave him homeless and hungry. While the system of social welfare actually intensifies the overall economic conditions that are likely lead to such a state of vulnerability, those who are caught in that cycle will choose to protect themselves from the consequences in the short term without considering the long term causation cost to themselves and everyone else.

That was the logic behind ObamaCare. It’s the logic behind the entire spending spree of the nanny state.

If Republicans are going to start winning based on something other than the public’s frustration with Obama, they will have to address this reality. Republicans have treated family as a reference point, like the United States or the dollar, a verity that would always be there, a word that they could reference to show their singular virtue without having to meaningfully assess and address what was wrong with it.

The American vision of limited government depended on a stable society that could fend for itself. The progressives originally gained power from the collapse of large economic institutions which they used to prove that their intervention was needed. They have gained even more power from the collapse of social institutions.

Without an underlying network of families maintaining a working society, the nanny state grows. And it doesn’t limit its attentions to those who seek it out. Small scale solutions are made possible by the integrity of small institutions. Without the order created by the small institution of the family, the order that teaches children right from wrong, that cares for its elderly parents and supports members of the family, the only alternative becomes the large scale solution of the totalitarian state and its bureaucracy.

Republicans cannot campaign on policies that assume that the family is the dominant institution once it no longer is. If they do not place a fiscally conservative agenda within the larger context of restoring the family, they will become the advocates of policies that hardly anyone except their donor base supports.

Three choices lie ahead.

The Republican Party can fight for the family. It can abandon fiscal conservatism and social conservatism in both word and deed to pursue its real program of trying to make big government work. Or it can look for alternative institutions that can replace both family and government.

Faith-based programs attempted to bypass the social disaster of the lost family without ceding the social territory to big government, but there is only so much that any entity outside the family can do. No amount of programs can fill the gap for a child or an adult. The family is an organic wraparound entity. Replacing it led to a Great Society in which a horde of social workers, teachers, psychologists, parole officers and sociologists struggled to fill the role of a mother and a father.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child except in a failed state and no village can afford to hire an entire other village to raise its children. That, among other things, is what is bringing California to its knees.

Replacing the family, with or without government, is expensive and difficult. Republicans can and should champion private sector alternatives to government takeovers, faith-based or otherwise, but such an approach will only delay the inevitable. There really is no institutional replacement for the family.

The demographic shift taking place is critical because it will determine whether we have a big government or a small government. Republicans can either adapt to a post-family America by becoming the party of the welfare state or they can work toward an America that is once again centered around the institution of the family.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Headchopper Next Door

By On September 14, 2014
Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.

Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a robe and she began wearing a burka.

The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer to kill Christians and Kurds, Turkmen and Shiites, to behead babies and crucify critics, don’t seem like monsters. They loved their parents. They posed for jokey snapshots on Facebook. They had dreams of becoming biologists or boxers. Until they began killing people, they seemed just like the rest of us.

And with one difference, they were.

The forensic examinations of their lives rarely reveal anything of significance. The extensive digging into the lives of the Boston bombers told us nothing about why they would plant a bomb near a little boy.

The answer lay in the topic that the media carefully avoided. As with the other Muslim terrorists, the meaning of their motives was in the little black book of their religion which commanded them to kill.

The Jihadist isn’t a serial killer. While there are some converts attracted to Islam for its violence, the Muslim convert usually doesn’t convert for the killing, he kills because he converted. Likewise the nice Muslim Jihadist next door might well be moderate by inclination and immoderate by faith.

As the Koran says, “Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you. But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you know not.” (Quran 2:216)

Allah knows you have to kill. Even if you think you shouldn’t.

The nice Jihadists flocking to rape Yazidi girls in Mosul are convinced that Allah knows best and his Caliph knows best. The worst of them are acting on impulse. The best of them are acting on faith.

Faith is irrational. Believers believe without understanding and act without thinking. The holy men of our religions acted on faith. So do the holy men of Islam. It’s what they have faith in that is the problem.

Charles Manson’s girls, Jim Jones’ followers and Mohammed’s companions all believed in much the same things. They saw the world as a fundamentally hostile place and they believed that only one man could change the world. And they believed that people had to die for that change to come about.

In a multicultural environment in which we believe that all religions are the same, we don’t like to think about what might have happened if Charles Manson had a million groupies instead of a few elderly women locked up in prison. Nor do we like to think about how we would handle Jim Jones if he were running California, instead of just being closely linked to the political infrastructure of the men like Governor Brown and Harvey Milk who did run it.

It’s easy to dismiss a small enough religion as a cult because its leader sleeps with young girls and its members are willing to kill for him. But when the cult grows big enough, we say it’s a religion of peace and hope that its followers believe the peaceful version of Islam that the infidels preach to them.

And they never do. Why should they?

Mohammed was quite clear about what he wanted. For all the abrogations, the Koran is reasonably clear on what it expects its followers to do. Mohammed’s history was that of a man who tried to convince the Arabs that he had seen an angel by telling them and failed, and who succeeded only when he killed enough of them, not to mention the Jews and any other infidels hanging around the place.

That is the history of Islam.

Germany was not a nation of monsters. It was a nation that behaved monstrously. The average German would not stick his neighbor in an oven in his basement or chain him up as a slave. He would however do these things in Poland because he was contextually contaminated by a monstrous ideology.

As an individual he was a nice man who loved his children, petted his dog and enjoyed street fairs. As a loyal member of a system run by the Nazi Party, he would do monstrous things. And then when the Nazi machine was switched off, he would go home to his wife and children without ever killing anyone else.

He was not a good man. Good men don’t do the things he did. But he wasn’t a budding serial killer. He was just doing what a death cult told him to do.

The problem isn’t “radicalization”. What Western governments call radicalization is the process by which the Muslim becomes aware of the dictates of his faith and their relevance to his life. It’s not the internet preachers with their fatwas. They are just the vectors for that awareness. The problem is Islam.

The current misguided thinking is that we can win a debate between a “good Islam” and a “bad Islam”. The good Islam will tell Muslims to refrain from joining ISIS, to work for social change, to embrace diversity and to champion democracy. But this “good Islam” is just a liberal’s conception of what religion should be. Its only real followers are liberal non-Muslims and it has little to do with what Islam really is.

Within the historical context of Islam and in the words of the Koran, our idea of the good Muslim is actually a very bad Muslim. And our idea of the bad Muslim is the best of all Muslims. When we argue that Islam is a religion of peace, we are pushing against the full weight of over a thousand years of history and religious ideas and counting on Muslims to be too ignorant of them to know any better.

Those who genuinely want to change Islam will not do it by lying to Muslims about their religion. Trying to convince the nice Jihadist next door that Mohammed would have rejected his expedition to rape and pillage non-Muslims in Syria is futile. The nice Jihadist may not be a scholar, but he knows his Koran.

If they want to change his mind, they will have to be honest about what Islam is.

Mohammed would have been as happy rampaging around Iraq and Syria as a pig rolling around in dung. ISIS is Islam. It’s the naked religion. There are no angels or djinns, no revelations, just piles of mutilated corpses and children playing with severed heads while other children are raped in prison cells.

It’s Mohammed, but it’s also Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad and Gaddafi. Islam doesn’t end the cycle of tyranny and oppression. It is the reason that the cycle continues.

“Deradicalizing” the nice ISIS Jihadist by lying to him will fail in the long run. Telling him the truth and offering him a clear choice is the only way.

Americans were brutally honest about the evils of Nazism, but failed to equally condemn Communism. Germany hasn’t had another Fuhrer, but Russia is back to acting a lot like the Soviet Union. And while Nazism is confined to trailer parks, sympathy for the red devil is prevalent among Western elites. ISIS is exposing its own evil to the West in a way that neither the brownshirts nor the flyers of the red flag did. If we destroy ISIS without exposing the ideology behind it, then we will have won a Pyrrhic victory because we will still be fighting the nice Jihadist next door for the next thousand years.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Our Hero

By On September 12, 2014


OUR HERO

September 11 had disrupted the multicultural consensus by raising serious questions about immigration and Islam. It had also thrown away the consensus that the collapse of the USSR had made American military power obsolete. Obama had come to revive these consensuses and as recently as the last election dismissed Romney as a reactionary warmonger who didn’t understand the new world order.

Obama had declared victory over an undefeated enemy. He had passed off a strategic withdrawal as a victory. His wars, victories and withdrawals were a series of blatant lies that are catching up with him.

His administration tried to blame the takeover of Libya by Islamist militias after his disastrous regime change intervention on a YouTube video. But there isn’t a YouTube video big enough to blame ISIS on.

ISIS: Obama’s ‘Al-Qaeda on the Run’




I WILL HAVE TO CONVINCE MYSELF TO MOCK HILLARY CLINTON

I sure hope that Hillary Clinton can talk Hillary Clinton into running. It would be a shame if all those donors to the Clinton Foundation had wasted their cash. Especially the foreign donors.

Hillary Clinton has a full campaign in motion. She has a media operation. She has a campaign biography. She’s selling merchandise. Whom is she kidding here?

“And I will have to be convinced that I have a very clear vision with an agenda of what I think needs to be done,” Clinton said.

Hillary Clinton: “I Will Have to Convince Myself to Run for President”



RESET BUTTON II

“Would she be quicker than President Obama to order kinetic military action? Yes,” the former official said. “Her tendencies are more bellicose than the president. … She is a decisive person. She doesn’t speak with a whole lot of semicolons and commas.”

Hillary Clinton never uses commas. She speaks entirely in exclamation marks with occasional guillemets and sheffer strokes thrown in.

As a bellicose and decisive leader, since last week, she will decisively bomb countries without using any commas. If you bring her coffee without sugar, she will bellicosely and decisively bomb Columbia.

At least until the polls change and then her bellicosity will be confined to throwing shoes at Secret Service agents.

Clintonites: Hillary Will be “Bellicose Interventionist”




THE LAST REFUGE

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”

It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing.

As long as he gets enough applause for doing it.

Obama Will Fight ISIS by Arming ISIS




Now that ISIS is Threatening to Kill Twitter Employees, maybe Twitter will Stop Hosting Terrorist Accounts




CHECK YOUR HYGIENE PRIVILEGE

 Body odour is among 52 criteria that officials at San Diego International Airport use to judge taxi drivers. Cabbies say that smacks of prejudice and discrimination.

It does discriminate between cabbies who smell like an open sewer and those who don’t. It further prejudges what a good smell is.

Check your hygiene privilege. Cabbies who smell badly are probably just oppressed folks who came directly from their terrorist training camp to the airport and didn’t have time to change.

Third World Cabbies Say Expecting Them to Shower is Racist




State Department Proof Most Muslims Reject ISIS Fails So Hard




CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, PRIVILEGE

A study by Rutgers University – Newark claims that minorities are obese because racial microaggressions cause them to eat fast food and avoid exercise.

“When you are exposed to negative stereotypes, you may gravitate more toward unhealthy foods as opposed to healthy foods,” said Luis Rivera, the experimental social psychologist who conducted the study.

Psychologist Says Minority Obesity and Lack of Exercise Caused by Racism

"There were years when I failed the majority of my classes. This was not a matter of my being better suited for the liberal arts than sciences. I was an English minor in college. I failed American Literature, British Literature, Humanities, and (voilà) French… These observations cannot be disconnected from the country I call home, nor from the government to which I swear fealty."

Because it was Uncle Sam who was responsible for Coates’ lack of interest in French. Despite the fact that Coates did manage to graduate high school and attended college.

It wasn’t his fault. It was America’s fault.

The whole country.

Nothing is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fault. Not even his stupid name. If he failed a class, it was because of America.


Ta-Nehisi Coates Sucks at French and it’s Your Fault

...from the Twitter responses after Coates retweeted it..."the existence of Daniel Greenfield ably illustrates the pathologies of white culture"




Terrorist Group Says Kids Soccer Game is “Crime Against Humanity”



COMRADE, REALLY IT'S TOO MUCH

Asked by [Dan] Patrick whether Obama would make the current roster in Los Angeles, [Kobe] Bryant said almost immediately, “yes, he could, actually.” The comment wasn’t a slight against his current Lakers team, which despite promising young talent is comprised mostly of borderline NBA players; Bryant said his belief in Obama is more a testament to the President’s skill:

A 53 year old man who shows no particular facility for sports can just make it in the NBA. Why not? They can just sink the baskets for him. Unfortunately they can’t call players who block his shots racists.

Obama Set for Exciting NBA Career After White House



ENDGAME

We were fighting ISIS until fairly recently. The last Americans were killed fighting in Iraq in 2011. Despite Obama’s multiple withdrawals, American advisors continued to stay behind trying to organize a fight against ISIS.

Did that war ever really end? The Iraq War was a complicated beast. We began it by fighting Saddam and we ended it by fighting Al Qaeda. Except we’re still fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Obama decided that the war was over. Certainly ISIS never considered the war over.

Yes, the 9/11 War Authorization Covers ISIS




Mohammed, Obama’s Caliphate Loving Advisor, is Now Born-Again Republican




GAME ON

The game industry has always wanted to be Hollywood. Now the industry is a warped version of Hollywood with a handful of mega-publishers buying up smaller companies and merging with each other. Its AAA games are hugely expensive gambles which can cost upward of $100 million.

In that environment, nothing can be left to chance. The gaming press is an arm of the gaming industry promoting its products. Its “journalists” and “critics” can be fired if they review a game poorly. The “journalists” compensate by promoting social justice narratives and attacking their own readers.

Anita and Zoe Quinn, whose inappropriate relationship with a game reviewer generated the GamerGate scandal, make useful weapons, and joined the pantheon of “victims as weapons,” but it’s not about misogyny. Game developers and journalists are all largely white men using women as weapons in a power struggle between a flailing industry, its apologist journalists and its disgruntled fans.

Game On: Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate




Founding Editor of International Gay and Lesbian Review Guilty of Internationally Abusing Young Boys




FAT MAN YELLS AT CAMERA


The Roger & Me producer added the following message to POTUS: “Eight years of your life and that’s what people are going to remember. Boy, I got a feeling knowing you that you probably wished you were remembered for a few other things, a few other things you could’ve done. So it is on that level of a big disappointment.”

That’s not much to be remembered for, but it beats being remembered as a novelty fat guy yelling at buildings in carefully edited sequences.

Obama Finally Loses Michael Moore




IRS Commish: “Whenever We Can, We Follow the Law”




RESIDENT SCAM

Why was Burger King taken off the table? Because the Dems don’t want to talk about it because one of their backers is behind it.

That’s an admission that the entire campaign was a scam. The Dems aren’t against inversions. They’re for staying in power and protecting their money supply.

Just as they aren’t for campaign finance reform, they’re for protecting their Democracy Alliance money supply.

Warren Buffett’s Greed Killed Obama’s “Inversion” Campaign




Pro-Hamas Mayor’s Nude Selfies Blamed on Jewish Conspiracy




EVITABLE

Too many Middle Eastern Christians still believe that Arab nationalism can salvage their situation. It clearly cannot. Allying with Hezbollah, a group that puts Shiite Islam ahead of ethnicity, is clear folly.

Sabotaging a conference for persecuted Christians on Hezbollah’s behalf is criminally stupid.

America can save persecuted Christians. Hezbollah will only use them until it no longer has a use for them.

The Unfair and Dishonest Media Attacks on Ted Cruz




Hamas Supporting Yale Chaplain Blames Jewish “Bullying” for Resignation



DENIED

 In 2010, Scott Brown and Joe Lieberman had introduced the Terrorist Expatriation Act. It was similar to Cruz’s bill, but without specifying the voluntary angle. It simply added terrorism as one of the acts already covered by the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

At the time quite a few people on our side attacked them for the bill and it went nowhere. Cruz’s bill reflects a more knowledgeable reading of the law, but it would take a Republican Senate for this to even have a shot and Obama is almost certain to veto it

Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann’s ISIS Denaturalization Bills

Popular

Blog Archive