I often criticize parsimonious explanations of things, because I think they are so often wrong. But here’s a parsimonious explanation I like.
Lydia McGrew, with whom I have had strong but civil disagreements about Sarah Palin, writes:
You may think I do not criticize Sarah Palin, but the first thought that came to my mind when I read your exchange about the other interpretation of Palin’s speech was this: Palin will never, ever be credible as the leader of a movement by conservatives to take over the GOP and “return to basics” as long as she fails to disassociate herself from John McCain. And she won’t. So she won’t be credible. Her position on this or that issue might change (this or that federal program, for example), but as long as she campaigns for McCain and ties herself to him, she will never lead the party to become more conservative, but rather the opposite. And she herself will be less likely to rethink any issues in a rightward direction as long as she is pulling for McCain. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:37 AM
Harry Horse, a physician, writes:
Our old friend from the African-American Medical School! Remember his smiling, professional picture? Ouch, might want to reconsider administering general anesthesia meds for insomnia.
According to the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, Murray “did unlawfully, and without malice, kill Michael Joseph Jackson…”Read the article and see the number of different prescription drugs that were loaded into Jackson’s body, by Dr. Conrad and by other doctors. Which leads to the following reflections.Subsequent statements from investigators indicated that Murray had injected Jackson with the anesthetic agent propofol earlier that day, apparently to help Jackson sleep.
Not only did Michael Jackson by artificial means create a weird, artificial family, and not only did he by artificial means transform his external physical appearance into something freakish, but by artificial means he transformed his inner biochemistry as well. The man wasn’t, to use a well-known if reductive description of our species, a two-legged animal; he was a two-legged pharmacy.
Some people wonder why this scary looking individual with his surgically altered and deformed face was treated by our society as an icon, instead of an object of repulsion. The answer is that modern society is gnostic. Gnosticism means the replacement of the divine and natural order by an artificial, man-created order which worships itself. Jackson, the ultimate self-re-created human, was a kind of ultimate gnostic, and thus a god of our culture.
John Hagan points me to a photo of Obama when he was a senator bowing to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko during a visit to Ukraine.
Bowing to a white man! And the leader of an all-white (and Christian) country! We’ll have to come up with a new, or at least revised, theory of Obowmism.
Richard W. writes:
The American Thinker’s take on Palin’s speech is quite different from yours. They see it as a rousing repudiation of Bush era milk-warm conservatism and a back-to-basics movement that supports the Constitution. I found the difference interesting. (The comments are also interesting). MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:57 PM
Sarah Durand writing at Pajamas Media describes the deeply alarming projects of Obama’s Education Department. Under a program called “Race to the Top,” billions of federal dollars are awarded to school districts based on their adoption of federal curriculum and other guidelines. Repeat: the more of the leftist curricula designed in Washington each school district adopts, the more money it gets.
Does Sarah Palin have a problem with this? As she made clear in the vice presidential debate in fall 2008, she (like George W. Bush, and unlike almost all conservatives) believes in the expansion of federal expenditures on education. At the same time, she presents herself as the people’s tribune against an out-of-touch, oppressive, left-wing federal government. Apparently it hasn’t occurred to Palin that to increase federal spending on education inevitably increases the power of the out-of-touch, oppressive, left-wing federal government over education.
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In an amusing article at Maclean’s, “Credibility is what’s really melting,” Mark Steyn quotes the grief-stricken reaction of Berkeley professor Orville Schell to the predicted melting away of the Himalayan glaciers by the year 2035:
Take the Himalayan glaciers. They’re supposed to be entirely melted by 2035. The evidence is totally disproportionate, man. No wonder professor Orville Schell of Berkeley is so upset about it: “Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change-induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya,” he wrote. “Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited.” I’ll say. Professor Schell continued: “If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you—the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:54 PM
Note (Feb 3, 11:30 a.m.): As several readers have informed me, after this entry was posted last night, in which I said that National Review Online had had no articles on the Wilders trial, NRO posted a symposium on the Wilders trial. This VFR entry was posted at 2:12 a.m. The NRO symposium was posted at 4 a.m. Is VFR on the cutting edge of societal evolution, or what?
Update: However, since, as A. Zarkov points out below, the NRO symposium adds nothing new to the debate on the Islam problem but just repeats the usual complaints about Islamization with no idea of what to do about it, it appears that in this instance VFR was on the cutting edge of societal statis.
Apart from the anti-Islamization websites, which are of course intensely interested in the Wilders trial, how has the trial been covered by the establishment conservative magazines? I did some Googling to find out. The results are stunning.
Below each magazine I show the search parameters I used for that search.
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(Note: It turns out that the court decision, posted at GoV on February 3, included, along with other information, the announcement that the trial would be postponed, but no one writing about the trial noticed this or mentioned it until now.)
Finally, on the evening of February 6, one of the “establishment” anti-Islamization websites, Atlas Shrugs, has published the news that the Geert Wilders trial, on the same day that it began, February 3, was adjourned for as much as nine months.
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If you want to dive into it for a couple of minutes, here it is.
I have posted further thoughts about Sarah Palin’s demand that Rahm Emanuel be fired for saying to a group of liberal activists in a private meeting that they were being “f**king retarded” for giving President Obama a hard time, a comment which Palin took as a slur on all people with mental disabilities.
With one exception, no VFR readers who are Palin supporters have replied to the question I posed to them: what does her statement tell us about her intelligence and her politics? Perhaps it is because they agree that the statement is damaging to her, but don’t want to say so publicly.
Jed B. writes:
I submit to you that if a Palin supporter found his way to VFR, he wouldn’t remain a Palin supporter for very long. VFR has a tendency to eliminate any such flaws in your reader’s thinking in a rapid, forceful, and thorough manner. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:52 PM
Lydia McGrew writes:
I heartily second Tom Tancredo’s remarks to the effect that we should thank God that McCain lost. The image of Obama’s turning the heat up on the frogs was spot-on.I hope that I can take your strong agreement with Tancredo on the folly of on-going conservative support for increasingly liberal Republican candidates to mean that you will oppose continued conservative excitement about Scott Brown, now that Brown has played what you see as his role in history. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:06 PM
DP writes:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls on Americans to fight for the human rights of Muslim women.Exactly what you predicted years ago. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:24 AM
I saw Sarah P.’s address to the Tea Party convention tonight. As always, my starting point with Palin is that I instinctively like her. But boy did the charm wear off quickly. After a few minutes of that voice, that shrieky voice (haven’t any of her many advisors advised her to have some sessions with a voice teacher?), all I wanted was to escape. And the cliches! The interminable, make-conservative-hearts-race cliches without let-up! Both in the speech and the question period, which were supposedly about a new politics, she said not a single substantive, specific thing.
For example, regarding terrorism, she declared that her policy was Reaganite: “They lose, we win.” Fine. But what does that mean?
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For years, I have criticized Niall Ferguson, the fashionable “conservative” British historian transplanted to Harvard, in terms such as these:
The ever-stylish historian Niall Ferguson’s latest specious argument designed to demoralize AmericaIn that piece, I showed that Ferguson will adopt any argument about World War II, so long as it delegitimizes America and the West; that he opposes any restrictions on immigration, favoring the worldwide free flow of labor; and that he regards the Islamization of Europe as “inevitable.” I have also called him a “dhimmi careerist historian,” and have discussed his novel Darwinian argument in support of PC race blindness, that natural selection makes us believe (falsely) that race matters.
During the same period, I have shown how Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-Dutch politician with the fashion-model looks transplanted to the American Enterprise Institute, was—notwithstanding the fact that Muslims sought to kill her, and notwithstanding the fact that many American conservatives revered her as an anti-Islamist heroine—no friend to the West, that she called for immigration restrictionist parties to be outlawed; equated Catholicism with Nazism; signed a manifesto with European leftists that treated Islam and Christianity as equally dangerous forms of “theocracy”; and, instead of seeking to defend the West from Islam, wanted to use the West to empower Muslim women and spread “the open society,” a borderless field of radically liberated individuals. (See my articles on Ali listed here.)
That’s a set-up for the news in the Sunday Mail: that Ferguson has left his wife of 16 years, with whom he has three children, to live with Ali, with whom he’s been having an affair:
The internationally celebrated historian and TV presenter Niall Ferguson has broken up with his wife of 16 years after a string of adulterous affairs.The 45-year-old Harvard professor has left former newspaper editor Susan Douglas, with whom he has three children, for his mistress, the Somalian-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ms Hirsi Ali, 40, is a lawyer and former Dutch MP who wrote the script for a controversial film that criticised Islam and resulted in the assassination of its director. She is currently living under police protection in America. Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:36 AM
A touching anecdote about Ronald Reagan on his 99th birthday.
Here are VFR’s reflections on Reagan at the time of his passing in 2004. Among them is “Reagan’s spiritual apprehension of Communism.”
In his speech at the opening of the Tea Party convention on Thursday night, Tom Tancredo said what I said all through 2008 and 2009. Here is the speech, from Tancredo’s website (I wonder if the speech began with a bang like this, or if there was more that he left out of the posted text):
Thank God John McCain Lost! Here’s why:Ever since FDR and with the brief break between 1980 and 1988, which we call the Reagan era, this country has been moving inexorably to the left. Whether a Republican or a Democrat was in office, or in control of Congress the march was always toward bigger government and less individual freedom.
It seemed as though we were doomed to experience the political equivalent of the proverbial frog in the water syndrome. Every year, the liberal Dems and RINO Republicans turned the temp up ever so slightly till it seemed we would all be boiled to death in the cauldron of the nanny state. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 03:56 PM
I got a letter—I got a note today from one of my staff—they forwarded it to me—from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.This goes beyond Obama’s familiar cosmic narcissism; it’s just plain creepy. As Byron York puts it, “this is not about the woman and her choice … but about the president’s choosing to tell the story himself.”
The next think you know, Obama will start encouraging people who, like this woman, face death as the putative result of the absence of nationalized medical insurance, to follow the woman’s example and have themselves buried wearing an Obama T-shirt. He’ll call this group of martyrs “the Obama Corpses.”
(Anyone who doesn’t get the reference should read this.)
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Fjordman writing at The Brussels Journal compares the trial of Geert Wilders to the trial of Galileo, and finds that modern secular Europe’s treatment of Wilders is, in key respects, significantly more oppressive to the defendant and more threatening to civilization than the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo.
Meanwhile, outside of this website and that of the Dutch blogger Snouck Hurgronje, none of the pro-Wilders websites that I linked here, including Wilders’s own website, which is supposed to be the main source of information on the Wilders trial, have mentioned the fact that the trial, which began with fanfare on February 3, was on that same day immediately adjourned for as much as nine months. I am at a complete loss to understand why the pro-Wilders sites, after building up the trial to such a dramatic pitch, do not feel that this crucial information should be shared with Wilders’s supporters and the reading public generally. The trial has been stopped for an indefinite period of time, and (except for Snouck and me) none of the people writing about the trial have published this important fact.
It’s unreal. If find it unsettling.
At Drudge:
Historic snowstorm rages on…It’s called winter.
Paralyzing nation’s capital…
Severe Winter Storm Striking Mid-Atlantic…
Watches/Warnings…
RADAR…
Last night on local New York TV, I actually heard them describe temperatures in the 20s as “extreme cold.” What would they call temperatures in the teens? The end of civilization as know it?
And, by the way, the article which Drudge links with the apocalyptic headline, “Historic snowstorm rages on,” says nothing of the kind. It speaks of a “punishing winter storm.”
The orchestrated hysteria over every little thing, and the demand for ever bigger government to take care of us (see discussion in previous entry of Sarah Palin’s various demands for big government), are two sides of the same coin.
How did my father and his brothers, coming from a very “unprivileged” background, have successful businesses, marry, buy homes, raise families, have decent lives, without any involvement of the federal government in their lives? How was that possible?
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Regarding the Tea Party convention going on in Nashville, if this movement is genuinely about reducing the scope of federal power over American life, and about reducing the size of the federal teat from which millions derive their (frequently unearned and ill-gotten) sustenance, I’m all for it. But one wonders how Sarah Palin, who is giving the keynote speech at the convention, fits into such a movement. She wants to create or expand federal programs to take care of mentally disabled people (indeed she said that her being the mother of a mentally challenged child meant that she has the vocation of crusading for such federal help). She is a passionate advocate of Title IX, the federal statute barring “discrimination” against females in education which, in Atlas Shrugged manner, by requiring that there be an equal number of girls’ and boys’ sports teams in each school, has forced hundreds of schools around the country to discontinue boys’ sports teams. And she supports an expansion of federal aid to education—the very essence of the big government, socialist mindset! Ok, so Palin is against Obamacare. Good. But if the Tea Party is to be a meaningful and sustainable movement, it must represent an opposition to big government that goes beyond opposing Obama’s specific big government agenda. And I don’t see Palin as an anti-big government person as such. She opposes specific federal programs. But everyone opposes some federal programs. The Tea Party must stand for something larger than that.
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Between the election of Scott Brown and the aftermath of Obama’s State of the Union address about a week later, I was paying intense attention to the Democrats’ various statements on the health care bill, trying to figure out if it was dead or still had a chance to be revived. I repeatedly came to the conclusion that it was effectively dead. But then more statements by Democrats would keep appearing indicating that they had not given up, and even saying that they had agreed on a path forward. But each new Democratic angle that came out contradicted the others and it became impossible to derive a coherent picture of what was going on; in any case it was more work than it was worth. So, starting at the beginning of the week, I gave up trying to make sense of the issue and left it aside for a while.
But here’s something new that’s worth reporting. On Thursday evening Obama said:
And it may be that … if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. [emphasis added.]After a year of stating with absolute certainty that the bill would pass, now he’s conceding the likelihood of defeat. MORE…
(Comments begin here.)
The question concerns Sarah Palin’s call for President Obama to fire White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel because of a remark the latter made at a meeting with left-wing activists.
The fracas began with a January 26 story in the Wall Street Journal about the friction between liberal (i.e., leftist) groups and the White House over what the liberal groups perceived as Obama’s failure to be sufficiently liberal as president:
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In an editorial, the Washington Times reports:
On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sent a five-page letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, detailing his rationale for treating purported Christmas Day bomber [Abdul Mutallab] as a criminal suspect rather than a terrorist detainee. The attorney general’s defense betrays significant misreading of how the United States has dealt with terrorism in recent decades.Let me be more blunt. At every step, Holder shows that his wrong and leftist ideas about how to deal with terrorism are fed by an Alice in Wonderland version of reality. Holder is simply too ignorant and stupid to occupy the position he occupies. But his ignorance and stupidity, while profound, are not the ultimate cause of the problem. His ignorance and stupidity are fed by his (at worst) hostility or (at best) indifference to the United States. And, in turn, driving such hostility or indifference to the United States, is, I believe, the fact that as a black convinced that America is a racist and guilty country, he cannot identify with the United States or see the world from an American perspective. MORE…
Paul C. writes:
Brown and Palin are campaigning for McCain. Business as usual.LA replies:
Ok. But it’s been clear from the start that Brown is not a conservative. Not only is he pro Roe v. Wade, he has no problem with homosexual “marriage.” And when we remember how he and his wife let their daughters dress at his victory speech, it’s clear that this is not a conservative family.But being a conservative is not his role in history. His role in history was to get elected and by his election to stun the left and very possibly to save America from socialism. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:44 PM
Paul K. writes:
At a recent prayer breakfast, the alien-in-chief honored Navy Corpsman Christian Brossard, twice pronouncing corpsman “corpse-man.”LA replies:Video here.
This is what happens when we elect as president someone who has never watched a John Wayne movie.
You’ve got to be kidding.I know you’re not, but I had to say it, just to show that even I would not have imagined that Obama is that much of an alien. I mean, it’s inconceivable. Surely he doesn’t call the Marine Corps “the Marine Corpse.” However, maybe the mispronunciation is not from ignorance, but is deliberate, like his bowing to non-Western leaders, his disrespectful treatment of the British PM and the Queen, and many other things. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:32 PM
Former Bush and currently Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—supports open admission of homosexuals into the armed forces.
Software Croesus Bill Gates—has a billion dollar scholarship fund that explicitly excludes whites.
Harvard Black Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates—last heard from when hysterically calling a white police officer a racist for investigating a reported burglary. And now …
Karl D. writes:
It appears Henry Louis Gates has a show ready to air on PBS called “Faces of America” which seems to be a deconstruction of whiteness in America through the guise of DNA. We learn for example how mulatto woman Elizabeth Alexander can trace her DNA back to Charlemagne. See? There is no such thing as being truly white or European or anything else for that matter. All cultures are null and void and belong to everyone everywhere. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:50 PM
Paul Belien writes:
You may have seen this, but Pat Condell has an interesting video on the Wilders trial. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:30 PM
Carol Iannone writes:
Looking over recent photographs, I see that Michelle Obama is wearing more outfits with sleeves. She hasn’t abadoned sleeveless entirely but there are definitely more dresses with sleeves. At the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this week she even had a black silk leotard-type top under the same sleeveless dress she wore at last year’s January speech to both Houses, when she was the only sleeveless woman in the chamber. I think this is a good sign, a sign of increasing humility, a sign of being more sober. It could also mean that she’s tired of being cold in all these big drafty places. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:16 PM
The Dutch blogger Snouck Hurgronje (the name of a famous Dutch Islam scholar of the early 20th century) writes:
You wrote:“Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any news on any proceedings in the Geert Wilders trial for today, February 4, neither at Gates of Vienna, nor at the Wilders on Trial website.”
The court has requested Mr. Geert Wilders to provide verhinderdata (can’t-make-it-dates) from the three witnesses whom he’s been permitted to call. The trial will resume in June if I am not mistaken. My notes say three to four months from now.
See how considerate and reasonable those who-have-been-appointed-over-us are, you cowboys? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:29 AM
The administration is preparing for the possibility that both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens may soon retire from the U.S. Supreme Court. Too bad for Obama. Instead of conservatives retiring whom he could replace with leftists and thus shift the Court dramatically to the left, the leftists are retiring (previously it was Souter), allowing him only to appoint leftists in their place. After all, who could Obama pick who would be more damaging to the United States than Stevens and Ginsburg? I’ve got it. The top lawyer for Hugo Chavez and the top lawyer for Robert Mugabe could be brought to the United States, naturalized as U.S. citizens in a speeded up process, then named to the Court. That those gentlemen know nothing and care less about the Constitution and laws of the United States is besides the point; does Attorney General Holder? Also, Senate approval should be no problema. A Senate Democratic majority that was willing to pass a blatantly unconstitutional bill nationalizing America’s health care industry, and was willing to contemplate passing it via a reconciliation process that is normally intended only for making changes in budget legislation that has already been passed; a Senate Democratic majority that, moreover, wants to give legal permanent residency to up to 20 million illegal aliens, should have no objection to placing Third-World Communist attorneys on the U.S. Supreme Court. Also, if either Chavez’s lawyer or Mugabe’s lawyer is not available, there’s always the top lawyer for the president of Iran. Finally, if none of those are available, or if the Senate balks at approving them, there is always the ultimate dream duo: Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano. (I’m not kidding: Napolitano was on the short list for the seat that ultimately went to Sonya Sotomayor.)
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Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any news on any proceedings in the Geert Wilders trial for today, February 4, neither at Gates of Vienna, nor at the Wilders on Trial website.
(Update: reader Ron L. reminds me that the Lancet in 2006 published a study that found that an additional 650,000 people died in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. At the time I disagreed with Randall Parker of Parapundit and his fellow paleocon commenters, all of whom gave the study complete credence and some of whom attacked me for saying that the 650,000 figure was self-evidently absurd and probably politically motivated. I was criticized for my audacity in doubting the truth and probity of a study published in a peer-reviewed journal. Who was I to question, let alone show total skepticism toward, a scientific study? Scientific studies are the ultimate truth! Later it turned out that the study had been funded by George Soros and that its data were false. Though I sent Parker the news story on the provenance of the Lancet article, he never admitted that, in his readiness to embrace the worst possible conclusions—no matter how ridiculous they were—about President Bush and his neocon advisors, he had allowed himself to be conned by this supposedly scientific study, which in reality was a piece of left-wing propaganda.)
The uber-prestigious British medical journal Lancet has perpetrated a major medical fraud that has cost lives. As explained by Dr. Elizabeth Whelan in a must-read column in today’s New York Post, Lancet in 1998 published a supposedly scientific, peer-reviewed paper which claimed that standard childhood vaccines cause autism. Even though the paper was contested by other scientists, many parents were influenced by it not to give their children vaccines, and a number of children have died as a result. Now, 12 years later, Lancet’s editor finally admits the article was junk science and has retracted it. He has not, however, resigned or been fired. I guess he’s the Eric Holder of medical scholarship.
Our age could be called the Age of Rebellion against Truth. Ideological zealotry—an attitude that often combines material greed with the spiritual kind—has now infected science and medicine as well as other, softer fields. In this instance, it appears that an ideology of “anti-vaccinism” got started somehow, and, in pursuit of it, truth and science and human well-being got thrown out the window.
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Madmax, the Randian commenter, continues in his intense ambivalence on the subject of yours truly. On one hand, he calls me a “vicious racist crackpot,” says that I represent the ultimate danger to society, and adds for good measure that he despises me. On the other hand, he keeps posting comments, such as this one (on the subject of what to do about Islam), in which he fairly and correctly describes key positions of mine and indicates, with regret, that he has no answer to them.
How will he resolve this contradiction?
Even though Madmax detests me and everything I stand for, I’ll give him a piece of helpful advice: Check your premises. You’ll find that one of them is wrong.
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If you’ve been wondering what happened with the seating of Scott Brown as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, the Washington Times provides the unedifying lowdown. Even though the Democrats in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s victory backed off their thuggish talk of delaying his certification and swearing-in so as to push through the health care bill, they did in fact delay his seating as long as they possibly could under the law—15 days. They used that window of opportunity, among other things, to pass a huge increase in the debt ceiling in order to allow Obama his huge expansion of the deficit. Yesterday, February 3, was the 15th day since Brown’s election, and now, finally, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts has no choice but to certify the election and allow Brown to join the U.S. Senate as its 41st Republican member.
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Rich Trzupek writing at FrontPage Magazine says that notwithstanding the severe loss of credibility suffered by the AGW orthodoxy in recent months, warming skeptics should not think that the battle is over, not by a long shot, since various anti-warming initiatives are already in place at the state and regional level in the U.S. that will cause significant economic damage in the years to come.
Melanie Phillips writes:
A few days ago, Analysis on BBC Radio Four featured a programme about environmentalism by Justin Rowlatt which concluded that the green movement was using climate change as a cover to smuggle in other agendas such as poverty or equality. No! You don’t say. It was a timid, tentative thesis; the fact is that from the start environmentalism has self-evidently been all about changing the nature of society rather than changing society’s views about nature. And of course Rowlatt’s concern was that these hidden agendas might only confirm people’s scepticism about the science of anthropogenic global warming, which as we all know is Settled and an Unchallengeable Consensus, amen.Yes, that does represent something of a credibility problem for Warmists, doesn’t it? I think I asked a few months ago, has there ever been a case in which a true scientific idea was motivated by hidden political agendas, advanced through systematic lies, and enforced by personal smears, social exclusion, and the loss of employment?
Geert Galileo
(From the Gates of Vienna website)
To be more precise, it is a persecutorial trial being conducted by the Church of Liberalism on behalf of the Worldwide Islamic Community.
PRESCOTT, Ariz.(Fox News)—Self-help guru James Arthur Ray, organizer of last year’s fatal sweat lodge incident in which three people died, has been arrested on manslaughter charges.Makes sense. The news reports about that “sweat lodge” and what was going on inside it (see this and this) sure sounded criminal to me.
This incident can be understood as an extreme manifestation of the Vitalist stage of Nihilism, as described by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, whose simple yet profound account takes us into the heart of so much of modern culture. Rejecting any notion of a transcendent moral truth, the Vitalist type of Nihilist seeks an expansion of “life” and “self-realization” through ever intenser excitement and marginal experiences. In this case, James Ray, the Vitalist prophet/guru/self-help technician, put his clients in plainly life-threatening conditions, based on the idea that the more extreme their experience, the greater their chance of a breakthrough to a new level of self-realization and power. The quest for ever greater “life” in the absence of a recognition of moral truth, and of the self-restraint that comes from that recognition, leads, over and over, to death.
Many interesting readers’ comments have come in today on a variety of topics. Regrettably, I will not be able to post them today. They will be posted tomorrow.
In today’s New York Post Dana Perino and Bill Burke bring out an amazing thing that many of us probably noticed at the time but may not have had time to think about: the bizarre statements Alien General Eric Holder made to the effect that there was no way that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would not be convicted. On one hand, Holder was sticking KSM into a criminal court where he manifestly did not belong; on the other hand, Holder, to justify this insane decision, was acting as though the criminal trial was not a criminal trial but a show trial. He wanted to subject lower Manhattan to hell for the sake of a show trial. But what was being shown? Why did it matter so much to put KSM in a civilian court?
It mattered because the left believes in equality. All people must be treated equally. For a nation to punish an enemy as an enemy is an assertion of the power of that nation over the enemy; it is a sign of inequality. Also, to treat enemies by a different set of procedures, with fewer rights for the defendant, than the procedures with which ordinary criminals are treated, is a sign of inequality. To turn this unequal situation on its head and treat enemy combatants as ordinary criminals is thus a prime symbolization of the leftist world view. That’s what the show trial was about showing. And that’s why it didn’t matter to Holder and Obama how much the trial would damage America’s national security, how much it would damage New York City, how much it would cost, how traumatizing it would be. Everything took second place to the symbolization of equality, the deconstruction of America as a nation that has the power to punish its enemies..
Yet, at the same time, because KSM is actually a known enemy of the U.S. and not a mere criminal whose innocence must be presumed, Holder needed to keep the substance of a military tribunal as it would be in the case of such a known and confessed enemy as KSM, namely the certainty that KSM would not be found innocent because of a technicality that has no bearing on the actual facts and released to resume waging war on the United States. And this led Holder to make statements about the inevitability of KSM’s guilty verdict, statements which by well established legal standards preclude a fair criminal trial and thus assure that a criminal trial will never take place. Rarely have liberal ideology, plus indifference and contempt for the basic institutions of this country, plus hostility to the United States as a country, plus sheer stupidity and thoughtlessness, been put into such a potent combination as in in the person of Eric Holder.
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An editorial in today’s New York Post picks up the theme of my entry yesterday, “Another leftist paradise exposed.” As though Divine Providence had a sense of humor and were coming to our assistance, right in the middle of the left’s revolutionary attempt to put the entire U.S. health care industry under the control of the federal government, a top official of the country to our north, the country that is the beau ideal of all progressives, the country that the whole right (i.e. left)-thinking world tells us we must emulate when it comes to health care if we want to stop being cavemen, has chosen, when it comes to HIS OWN health care, to seek heart surgery in the Neanderthal U.S. of A.
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That was the decision to arrest of Abdul Mutallab as a criminal defendant with Miranda rights, a decision of which all the top U.S. intelligence and homeland security official have told the Congress under oath that they were not informed.
Thomas Joscelyn writes in The Weekly Standard:
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President Clinton and his gang were, excuse the expression, the scummiest liars anyone had ever seen in this country; certainly they represented a phenomenon without precedent in American national politics. But, when it comes to outrageous lying, the Obama gang have left the Clintonites in the dust. Read Byron York’s article in the Washington Examiner on how the administration has reversed its story about Abdul Mutallab. Earlier they had said that he spoke freely to FBI agents for 50 minutes after his arrest, but, when given his Miranda rights, went silent. Now they’re suddenly telling us that Mutallab has continued to supply all kinds of information about al Qaeda! Obviously, the change of story is motivated by the extreme heat the administration has taken from both parties for having treated Mutallab like an ordinary criminal defendant with the right to remain silent. But if the revised version is true, why did the administration previously state a false story that was so damaging to themselves? This president and this administration lie to our faces, knowing that we know that they’re lying.
Think of Obama last summer continuing to state that the health care plan would not result in anyone’s losing his present doctor or insurance policy, even after that statement had been universally shown to be false, and even after his constant repeitition of that false statement had contributed to a major loss of political support both for him and for his Precious. Obama doesn’t care. He’s at war with reality, and at war with us.
Kristor writes:
More word trivia. I learned a couple months ago where we got “so long.” It’s a corruption of “salaam,” picked up by the British Navy in Indonesia. Shalom. Cool, no? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:41 PM
Here is the video of the Act for America meeting in New York City on January 25 (discussed briefly here) where Andrew Bieszad and I spoke about the Islam problem and what to do about it.
In an e-mail sending the video link to Act members, Barbara Zimmerman, the head of the local Act chapter and organizer of the meeting, writes:
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I preface this by noting that no story of a sensational nature that comes from WorldNetDaily, as this story does, should be accepted as true until additional sources are found.
MI5 hunting breast implants of death
Authorities alarmed by possibility of surgically placed bombsLONDON—Agents for Britain’s MI5 intelligence service have discovered that Muslim doctors trained at some of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals have returned to their own countries to fit surgical implants filled with explosives, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery. The lethal explosives—usually PETN (pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate)—are inserted during the operation inside the plastic shapes. The breast is then sewn up. [Text of WND article continues below.]
Coming to a shopping mall or airport near you?
Suicide bomber Iat Alacharas, 18
Carried bomb in her purse
MORE…Ain’t she sweet?
See her walking down the street.
Yes, I ask you very confidentially,
Ain’t she sweet?Ain’t she nice?
Look her over once or twice.
Yes I ask you very confidentially,
Ain’t she nice?
Just cast an eye in her direction,
Oh me oh my,
Ain’t that perfection?
I repeat,
Don’t you think that’s kinda neat?
So I ask you very confidentially,
Ain’t she sweet?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:45 PM
(Note: see commenter who says that as a result of the Court’s refusal to let him present information vital to his defense, Wilders should refuse to defend himself, thus depriving the Court of the false appearance of fairness and legality and letting the true nature of this trial be revealed.)
Paul Belien sends this e-mail:
Short session. The court ruled that it is competent to deal with the case. It restricted the list of 18 witnesses which Wilders had asked to be heard to only three people: the Dutch Arabists Jansen and Admiraal, plus Wafa Sultan.Are Leon de Winter and the editors of the Wall Street Journal relieved now of the anxiety that had beset them? Since the court has radically reduced the number of witnesses Wilders can call and thus radically reduced his ability to show the truth of his own statements about Islam for which he is being charged with incitement of hatred and discrimination, there is no longer any danger that the trial will be about the teachings of the religion and political ideology that Wilders is threatened with imprisonment for having criticized. It was the fear that the trial would be about the nature of Islam rather than about Wilders’s acts of incitement to discrimination against Muslims that led de Winter and the WSJ to call for the trial to be stopped.
Update (4:30 p.m): Just wondering: has any American newspaper ever denounced the hate speech laws that prevail in every country in Western Europe?
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It is now 2:30 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States, meaning that in a couple of hours the trial of Geert Wilders will start in the Netherlands. Other than “straight” news stories (meaning stories that uncritically reflect the prevailing left-liberal assumptions) from the wire services, there has been virtually no coverage of this historic event in the U.S. mainstream media. The biggest, perhaps the only, opinion article in any mainstream publication was a clever piece of liberal propaganda in the Wall Street Journal. Written by Dutch writer Leon de Winter, the column at first glance appeared to be pro-Wilders, because it was calling for the trial to be stopped; but it was actually anti-Wilders and pro-Islam. As I demonstrated, de Winter is against the trial, not because it is an act of tyranny against Wilders and in principle against all Westerners who would defend their civilization and their freedom from the slavery of Islam, but because the trial will bring out true facts about Islam that will be damaging to Islam and thus to Islam-West comity. In the borderless-capitalist-world mindset of the WSJ, this is only permissible basis on which to oppose the Wilders trial.
In general, the U.S. media regard events in Europe as significant only insofar as they directly affect the United States. How strange it is, that even as the media advance a multicultural, “anti-racist” ideology that must, if followed consistently, lead to the disappearance of the U.S. as a historically distinct nation and its merging into the rest of the world, the same media are so relentlessly provincial in the news they cover! Perhaps this is what is meant by thinking globally, acting locally.
In the coming days, the best source for information on the Wilders trial will be the Gates of Vienna blog, the premier American site for information on anti-Islamization efforts in Europe, especially as it provides English translations of European documents and articles. Other sites to check out regularly will be the website of the International Free Press Society, Diana West’s blog, The Brussels Journal, and Jihad Watch. For perspective, see my article, “The real question of the Wilders trial.”
Update: Wilders has created an English-language website to report on the trial.
As discussed by Rob Sanchez at the Vdare blog, the $1 billion Gates Millennium Scholarship fund is off limits for Caucasians. In order to apply for the scholarship, a person must be a citizen or permanent legal resident of the United States, and must be “African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander American, or Hispanic American.” Off hand, does anyone know the legality of that? Are there federal laws prohibiting racial discrimination in private scholarships?
The reader who told me about the Gates story says that “white people should not use Microsoft products. MS Office can be replaced by Open Office. PCs running Windows can be replaced by machines running Unix and Mac OS X which are superior to Windows.” First of all, the Gates Foundation is an entirely separate entity from Microsoft. Second, those other companies and operating systems are also left wing and anti-white. The most popular Linux operating system at present is Ubuntu, a name that conveys a message that is about white-friendly as Kwanzaa. And is there any company in America more politically correct than Apple, with its ubiquitous logo a half-eaten piece of food that symbolizes man’s rebellion against God? When Eric Voegelin wrote in 1952 that gnosticism is not just a trend in our civilization, but the very nature of modernity, he knew what he was talking about.
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What is the single thing about our neighbor to the north of which its citizens are most proud, and which, in their minds, most sets it off from our own backward and benighted country? National Health.
It is reported today that the Premier of Newfoundland, Danny Williams, is going to have heart surgery, and that the surgery is going to be performed in our backward and benighted country. Could the fact that Williams believes that he can get better care in the U.S. than in Canada have something to do with the fact that the U.S. does not enjoy the blessings of National Health?
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Given (a) the continuing disintegration of Global Warmism, and (b) the continuing distintegration of Barack Obamism (combined, paradoxically, with the simultaneous hypertrophy of Barack Obamism), a brief blog entry from June 2008, “Republicans keep careening toward a disaster they are unwilling to avoid,” should be of interest. The initial entry deals with candidate McCain’s embrace of Global Warmism, and how this took away a key issue from the conservatives who supported him. Then there is a comment by Terry Morris about Obama’s gnostic (to use the term we’ve been emphasizing lately) re-creation of the universe, that same re-creation that is now falling apart before our eyes. I’m copying the comment here:
Terry Morris wrote:
You wrote: “…as he threateningly pledged last week, to ‘remake’ America.”To which I replied:You’ve obviously taken Obama’s pledge all wrong. A god-like figure such as Obama does not “threateningly” pledge to do anything. Consider:
And Obama said, Let there be an expansion in the midst of America, and let it divide America from America.And Obama made the expansion, and divided America which was before the expansion from America that was after the expansion: and it was so.
And Obama called the expansion Heaven.
And Obama said, Let the America which was before the expansion be gathered together unto one deplorable racist earth-destroying history, and let the purged land appear, and it was so.
And Obama called the purged land New America; and the gathering of its unfulfilled principles to their proper places called he righteousness. And Obama saw that it was very good.
I was stopped a little at first by “expansion” instead of “expanse,” for “firmament.” But it makes sense. The liberals are always expanding America—more cultures, more inclusion, more diversity, etc. But this very expansion changes American identity radically, cuts America off from what it used to be. So “expansion” really works well. Instead of an “expanse,” or firmament, dividing the waters that are below the expanse from the waters that are above the expanse, there is an “expansion,” which divides the America which was before the expansion from the America which came after the expansion.Also, a third recent development that makes the June ‘08 entry relevant is the death of the evil Howard Zinn, the man who literally re-wrote American history, in Terry Morris’s words, into “one deplorable racist earth-destroying history.”
And I just want to add: Terry’s parody on the Bible is brilliant. “Let it divide America from America.” That’s perfect. That’s exactly what the left does.
A while back at VFR I wrote :
People are shaped by their society, their schools, to be a certain way. Young men today are shaped to be shapeless, demoralized sacks, and young women today are shaped to be self-assured, self-esteeming goddesses. The women are proud, the men are recessive. This is a deliberate product of the ideology that rules our society.At The Thinking Housewife, a commenter tells Laura Wood about her daughter, who is very successful and constantly praised in school, and about her son, who is increasingly discouraged and discounted, and asks for Laura’s advice. It makes for gripping reading about a fundamental—but totally unacknowledged—crisis of our society. It is unacknowledged because it has been caused by our society’s reigning belief system, egalitarianism.
Blogs are reporting a possible reason why Obama bowed to Pam Iorio, the mayor of Tampa, Florida:
“By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor of the city of Tampa, I do hereby proclaim November 15, 2008, as ‘Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Day’ in the city of Tampa, Florida.”—Mayor Pam Iorio.I saw this quote at a few blogs, but none of them pointed to any news media source for the quote. Bloggers regularly post sensational (and not so sensational) items that they have picked up from other blogs, but that are not cited or linked to any legitimate source. Such information is not to be credited. So I did a search of the Tampa government site, tampagov.net. There was nothing there on this award or on CAIR. There wasn’t even anything on “Muslims” or “Islam” to speak of. At that point I was about to blog that I thought this proclamation was a hoax, probably intended to draw conservatives into making fools of themselves.
But then I found via Google a news story at the website of WMNF radio, dated November 17, 2008. It begins:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held its 6th annual banquet Saturday at the Tampa Convention Center. Speakers included Georgetown University professor John Esposito and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress.And it ends:
A civil rights award was presented to the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and WMNF received a community service award. Maritza Betancourt is the city of Tampa’s Human Rights Investigator in the Division of Community Affairs. She read a proclamation from Mayor Pam Iorio.Now that we know that Mayor Iorio did issue this proclamation honoring the Muslim Brotherhood front group CAIR, the next question is, could this be the reason Obama bowed to her? In the absence of any other explanation, it would have to be treated as a reasonable possibility.“By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor of the city of Tampa, I do hereby proclaim November 15, 2008, as ‘Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Day’ in the city of Tampa, Florida.”
I’ve saved the WMNF web page to my computer just in case something happens to the original web page.
Here is the entire story:
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Apparently the pun has been around for a while (Google it and you’ll see), but I just encountered it for the first time in a Mark Steyn entry at the Corner and it made me laugh out loud.
So, what are the latest Warmergate revelations? Well, it seems Mitchell told Magruder to ask Erlichman to tell Krogh to destroy the tree-ring data … whoops, realities are colliding here.…
Seriously, the climate warming scandal is really heating up … whoops, I’ll bet that one’s been used a thousand times. But seriously, as Steyn notes: “Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of ‘settled science’ is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts.” It seems warming honcho Philip Jones of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and a Chinese-American colleague wrote a paper which discounted an alternative explanation—the “urban heat island effect”—for higher temperature readings, but when asked by climate skeptics for their original data, they no longer had them. Not the first time that original data on which basic warming claims were based were put in the paper shredder, or were thrown out by accident, or were lost, or whatever.
It’s quite incredible. Not only does the “science” of determining past global temperatures and predicting future global temperatures involve so many variables as to make its status as a science at least somewhat questionable even in the best of circumstances, but, on top of that, the leading scientists in the field are as sloppy and inattentive with their data as Obama’s counterterrorism agencies were in “connecting the dots” (or rather in not connecting the dots) on would-be Christmas Day bomber Abdul Mutallab. Everywhere we look today, gnostic fantasy worlds are collapsing before our eyes.
So why the bow?
I’m not the only one wondering. The New York Daily News quotes a blogger at Red State:
The mayor of Tampa isn’t a Third World potentate, totalitarian dictator, or terrorist leader so I can’t understand why Obama would be in full-bow mode. Is bowing now the standard way the President greets people these days?I’ve got it. Obama, as a result of his recent humiliating defeats, is going through a HAL-like breakdown, in which his various sub-programs, including his bowing sub-program, start playing spontaneously on their own, regardless of external circumstances.
But that’s not quite correct. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL’s programs begin playing on their own when his memory modules are in the process of being removed by Dave, the spaceship’s captain. Prior to that scene, HAL, preemptively defending himself from precisely that fate, engages in behaviors far worse than reciting nursery rhymes—or bowing—at inappropriate moments. Let’s hope our fallen narcissist-in-chief, on realizing that he is at risk of a similarly decisive loss of power and importance, doesn’t exhibit a similar reaction.
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In response to the previous entry, “The [Obama] spell is broken,” A. Zarkov writes:
Let’s not get over confident. Obama and the Democrats will still continue to push for the Trifecta—the comprehensive bills on health care, immigration, and climate change—because they know the window of opportunity will close after the 2010 Congressional elections. I’m convinced that they will still go all out for their program to transform America. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:14 PM
Here is the latest entry in the rapidly expanding literature on the death of Obamism, by Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal. I have been extremely critical of Ajami in recent years, as a result of his changing from an interesting intellectual into a robotic exponent of neocon fantasies. But here he does a good job of dissecting the fantasy world of Obamism, its rise and fall.
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In an exchange in 2006, a reader said that Christianity is dead, America is dead, and that it was foolish for conservatives like me to keep trying to hold on to them; and I replied.
The discussion, and others like it, is continuingly relevant, because people are constantly telling us in the most conclusive terms and all-knowing tones that “it’s over,” and, over and over, it turns out not to be true. Consider our current amazing circumstance. Just a few months ago, it was widely believed that the passage of nationalized health care with its body blow to American liberty was a foregone conclusion, and it turned out not to be true. The world, said Nietzsche, is filled with many healths and hidden isles of life. Don’t give up.
(I like to use Nietzsche in defense of Christianity and tradition; it drives the Nietzscheans nuts.)
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But, under currently established liberal understandings that even conservatives don’t challenge, are the Muslims wrong to complain?
The story is in the Los Angeles Times:
Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris drew criticism from a leading Muslim group today after saying in his annual State of the City address that the high desert town was “growing a Christian community.”“We’re growing a Christian community, and don’t let anybody shy away from that,” Parris told the audience of ministers gathered for his address.
“I need [Lancaster residents] standing up and saying we’re a Christian community, and we’re proud of that,” the mayor said.
The Greater Los Angeles area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced the statement and said it plans to file a complaint about the mayor’s remarks with the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:55 PM
In the early 1980s I read The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell’s well-written, graphic account of what a nuclear war would be like, and I found it compelling reading. Until, that is, I got to the end and realized that Schell’s point was that the only way to prevent nuclear war was for the U.S. to stop opposing Soviet Communism and join with the Soviet Union in a global government. Leftists wear their leftist heart on their sleeve. They are so obvious.
I thought of The Fate of the Earth because I just came upon another article by Schell, now a writer at The Nation, about a subject that is bound to strike as much existential panic into the leftist heart as the prospect of thermonuclear war—Scott Brown:
Is the world as we know it coming to an end because Scott Brown, a Republican, won the special election in Massachusetts for the Senate seat of Edward Kennedy? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:40 AM
Scott Brown as candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts took particularly strong stands on three issues: opposition to the comprehensive health care bill; opposition to the legalization of illegal aliens (though he is not good on legal immigration); and opposition to treating Muslim terrorists as ordinary criminals with Miranda rights instead of as enemy combatants.
In the twelve days since Brown won the election (he has not yet taken his seat), the following has occurred:
(1) The president’s chief of staff has said that there will be no further efforts to pass the health care bill for a few months while the White House focuses on unemployment and other issues. In practical terms this means that health care reform is very likely dead for this Congress, and, given expected Democratic losses in November, probably for this presidential term as well.
(2) Even though the president had pledged to Hispanics that comprehensive immigration reform, the centerpiece of which is the legalization of all illegal aliens, a.k.a. amnesty, would be a major legislative effort for 2010, the president in his State of the Union address did not even mention the legalization of illegals. This suggests that he is so politically exhausted by the defeat of the health care bill that he doesn’t even want to try to pass amnesty, no matter how much the lack of action will hurt him with his Hispanic base.
(3) The White House has reversed its decision to put the terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in federal court in New York City and has indicated that it may try him before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay.
Thus three major radical-leftist thrusts of the Obama presidency—government takeover of health care, legalization of illegals, and treating acts of war against the United States as ordinary crimes—have all been abandoned or reversed since the election of Scott Brown twelve days ago.
I’m not trying to build Brown, who seems like a modest and unassuming fellow (and who is not a social conservative), into a hero, and of course there were other factors at work in these developments than Brown’s election. But still, this is the stuff of which songs and legends are made.
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A VFR reader came up with the phrase, “the Obama Trifecta,” to describe Obama’s announced intention to transform America fundamentally. The third leg of the Trifecta, after Comprehensive Health Care Reform and Comprehensive Global Climate Change Reform, was Comprehensive Immigration Reform. But Obama’s mention of immigration in the State of the Union address was shockingly minimalistic:
We should continue to work at fixing our broken immigration system to secure our borders and enforce our laws and ensure that everyone who plays by rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.To which Mark Krikorian replies at the Corner:
That’s it? I was figuring at least three sentences, or maybe two. As Roy Beck put it:
But the President couldn’t bring himself to utter the words “comprehensive immigration reform” or “path to citizenship” or “legalization” or “more immigration” in his State of the Union Address.If they have any sense, La Raza et al. are kicking themselves for not backing McCain. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:02 AM
I’ve never read Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star before. This is a good article on the meaning of Obama’s first year in office and the State of the Union and the state of Obama. He cuts through to some basic points about his subject. He sounds like a journalist from a previous generation, parachuted into this one. He sounds like a mature man, talking about an immature one.
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In the entry, “The WSJ calls on the Netherlands to stop the trial of Geert Wilders—but guess why?” the question arose whether Islam should be understood as evil. Thucydides wrote:
Islam is not a “religion of peace,” but one which calls on its followers to do evil, i.e., to do morally unjustified harm unto others.To which I replied:
I’ve never seen this point stated as succinctly and persuasively. And I say that as someone who has refrained from calling Islam “evil,” because I don’t feel comfortable characterizing the religion of a billion people as evil; I describe it as tyrannical and as mortally dangerous to non-Muslims .Thinking further about that exchange, I agree that there is a sense in which it is correct to say that Islam calls on its followers to do evil, and therefore Islam itself is evil. Many people describe Islam or Islamic extremism or Islamic jihadism as “evil” or equivalent words. At the same time, however, we must remember that what we think of as the evil of Islamic jihadism is only evil from a point of view external to Islam. From the point of view of Islam itself, Islamic jihadism is not evil but good, or, rather, it is Islamically correct, in conformity with the will of Allah. If our main way of understanding Islamic extremism is that it represents a moral flaw, we will fail to understand how Muslims see themselves, and we will arrive at tragically misguided solutions to the Islam problem. MORE…
A college in Ohio is in full-scale alert mode over a message that was found scrawled on a bathroom wall saying that blacks at the school would be killed on February 2. Naturally neither the college nor the AP story makes any reference to the innumerable “white racist hate messages” in recent years that turned out to be concocted by blacks.
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This weekend I heard from a source who had spoken to a person who is involved in the immigration control issue and knows Scott Brown. The person said that Brown is good on immigration, at least on illegal immigration. He is strongly against amnesty.
As for Brown’s hiring of Edward Kennedy’s chief immigration advisor, the person said that this was done to maintain open lines to the other side. Brown does not share the Kennedy view of illegal immigration, amnesty, etc.
Of course, Brown himself has said that he wants to streamline legal immigration, which sounds like increasing it. But the main pointhere—because it’s an issue that may be coming up this year—is that we can expect Brown to be solidly anti-amnesty.
(Note: in this entry, A. Zarkov explains that Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was due primarily to a big gender gap.)
Sen. Tom (“Tom Joad”) Harkin, Iowa Democrat, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, says that a deal on a final health care bill was reached by the Senate, the House, and the White House on January 14 and sent to the Congressional Budget Office for rating, but that before the bill came back from the CBO and could be voted on, the Massachusetts Event (thank God) intervened and their labors came to nothing.
It’s an intriguing story adding luster to the Scott Brown miracle. But the miracle is great enough without being overstated. And I think Harkin is overstating the significance of the January 14 deal.
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My brain is running out of the neurotransmitters that transmit amazement. The Wall Street Journal has an article this week that calls on the Netherlands to cancel the trial of Geert Wilders—but not because it is wrong to put a man on trial for stating opinions; and not because it is totalitarian to send a man to prison for criticizing Islam. In fact, the author, Leon de Winter, does not actually find fault with the Netherlands’ “hate-speech” laws under which Wilders is being tried, and his strongest criticism of the effort by Dutch prosecutors to put Wilders in prison for his opinions that it is “preposterous.” He does not call it tyrannical
Why, then, does de Winter want the trial to be stopped? Because the trial will expose the violent, hate-filled teachings of Islam, and that must be prevented at all costs. As he writes: “On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam.”
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Here’s something doubly amazing, both the news itself, and the fact that while I’ve been reading the Web off and on during the day, including accessing my usual sources of news such as Lucianne.com, which is normally on top of any important news stories, I had seen nothing about it—how could such a story not be all over the Web?—until this evening when I opened the print copy of today’s New York Post. There I found out that Obama-Holder have not just decided to move the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial away from New York City; they’re thinking of junking the whole idea of trying KSM and the others as civilians and instead trying them before a military commission at Guantanamo. It appears to be a total retreat by the administration from one of the worst decisions any humans ever made. Further, it wouldn’t just mean that the 9/11 jihadists get military trials, it would mean dropping the policy of closing the Guantanamo prison, the first decision Obama made as president and the one closest his heart.
Below are three items from today’s Post that cover this development: the lead news story, the lead editorial, and a column by Richard Lowry:
The news article:
Bay what? Guantanamo eyed for 9/11 trial
By JOHN DOYLE and DAVID SEIFMAN in NY and CHARLES HURT in DC
Last Updated: 8:43 PM, January 30, 2010
Posted: 2:37 AM, January 30, 2010The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won’t be held in lower Manhattan and could take place in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, sources said last night.
Administration officials said that no final decision had been made but that officials of the Department of Justice and the White House were working feverishly to find a venue that would be less expensive and less of a security risk than New York City.
The back-to-the-future Gitmo option was reported yesterday by Fox News and was not disputed by White House officials. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:34 PM
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of conservatives’ least favorite senators, gave the GOP talk today on national security (video and transcript here). The subject was the administration’s mind-bending decision to arrest Abdul Mutallab as a criminal with Miranda rights instead of treating him as an enemy combatant waging war on the United States. I found it a bit hard to take Collins’s laborious, “low IQ kindergarten teacher” way of talking, but when she got to near the end (at about 4:00), it was powerful, both the words and the delivery. Her earnestness invested these words with conviction and high indignation:
The Obama administration appears to have a blind spot when it comes to the War on Terrorism.MORE…And, because of that blindness, this administration cannot see a foreign terrorist even when he stands right in front of them, fresh from an attempt to blow a plane out of the sky on Christmas Day.
There’s no other way to explain the irresponsible, indeed dangerous, decision on Abdulmutallab’s interrogation. There’s no other way to explain the inconceivable treatment of him as if he were a common criminal.
This charade must stop. Foreign terrorists are enemy combatants and they must be treated as such. The safety of the American people depends on it.
Can’t we all get along?
A recently released New Jersey prisoner was yanked off an Amtrak train in Colorado after fellow passengers heard him mention Al Qaeda and make threatening comments, authorities said.Ojore Nuru Lutalo, 64, was free on $30,000 bond Friday after his arrest earlier this week at a Colorado train station. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:05 PM
Ten years ago, Omar Hammami was the president of the sophomore class of his high school in Daphne, Alabama and a popular boy. As Andrea Elliott tells it in the New York Times Magazine:
Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”There have of course been several well-publicized cases in which American-born children of Muslim immigrants have turned into jihadists. It is therefore a predictable phenomenon. But Andrea Elliot calls the transformation of the American teenager Omar Hammami into a jihad warrior “unimaginable.” Being a liberal means never having to say you got it.A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.
A story in today’s New York Times tells how the city’s officialdom, including an influential downtown community board, switched from supporting the Obama plan to try the 9/11 terrorists in the city to opposing it. It was when Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently spelled out the details and costs of the security measures that would have to be in place in lower Manhattan, perhaps for years. In my view, the story does not speak well of these people, almost all of whom are Democrats. It means that they supported the horrible Holder-Obama decision for over two months, right up to the moment when the full physical and economic costs of it were explained to them, and only at that point did they realize that it went “too far” and they balked. And that goes most of all for Mayor Bloomberg, who fully embraced the plan from the start, even though, as we learn in this article, he was not consulted by Attorney General Holder prior to the decision’s being made. To me it’s incredible that Holder and Obama took such an audacious step without getting the mayor’s prior approval, but they seem to have known their man, since, when Holder, just a couple of hours before he made the public announcement on November 13, told Bloomberg about the decision, Bloomberg, instead of saying, “How dare you take this step that affects New York City in such a momentous way without first consulting me?”, wagged his tail like a poodle.
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In remarks that contradict published media reports, Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republican whip, told Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that the Democrats have decided—though they have not formally announced it—to try to pass the health care bill via reconciliation. Oddly, Kyl’s information has not been widely written up. The transcript of the key part of the interview is here; the transcript of the full ten minute interview is here; the audio can be heard here. The plan as described by Kyle seems different from the one reported by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann earlier in the week. The latter involves the House passing the Senate bill, after the Senate Democrats have promised the House Democrats that they will then pass certain changes in the bill through reconciliation. The process as Kyl sees it would start with the Senate passing the desired changes via reconciliation.
Kyl’s information, which was posted at Hewitt’s site late Thursday afternoon, contradicts the stories from the AP and the New York Times on Friday morning in which the top congressional Democrats and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel indicated that they were unable to move the health care bill forward and were leaving it aside for an indefinite period while they attended to other issues. I and others took this as meaning that the bill was practically speaking dead. Also, as Kyl himself notes, even if the House and Senate leadership has decided on the reconciliation path, they would still have to win over House members who absolutely object to certain features of the Senate bill, an obstacle that the Democrats faced even before Scott Brown’s election 11 days ago.