Angelo Codevilla is a conservative whom I had respected, though superficially and from a distance, for his informed and intelligent book defending Switzerland’s self-interested conduct during World War II in its successful effort to preserve its independence from Nazi Germany, and for his tough minded realism on how to deal with dangerous Islamic countries, namely by destroying their regimes and then leaving without trying to democratize them. But now, in most hideous fashion, Codevilla has cast aside his realism and his belief in sovereign nationhood, and revealed himself as—I use these words deliberately—a demented traitor.
What madness, what alienation, what detachment from reality and from his own country, could bring a man to say the kinds of things Codevilla says in his long American Spectator article “Pro-Mexico,” where he urges—and indeed he declares it to be a historical inevitability—that the United States merge itself with Mexico? Allan Wall at Vdare has gone through Codevilla’s article and shown some of the worst of it. But there is so much that is bad in it, and the bad is so bad, that there is a lot more to say. We live in a world of negative superlatives, but I must say that at this moment the piece strikes me as one of the most evil, hateful articles I have ever read.
Below I have copied most of the article, with my commentary in brackets.
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Readers have sent me an article in the Mail about a study saying that Britain is the most violent country in Europe. Having followed events in the Clockwork Orange Kingdom so closely, I’m certainly prepared to believe that. But something about this report is off-base and I don’t trust it. For example:
But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.Britain has four times more violent crimes per 100,000 people than the U.S.? That’s absurd. MORE…In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.
The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609.
The Mail reports:
When a $2.5billion international venture is being planned you might expect there to be hours of debate over what to call it.Yet branding is not the forte of some companies, it seems.
Russian Energy giant Gazprom has inadvertently walked into a racism row with the announcement of its joint venture in Nigeria—Nigaz. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:09 PM
Karl Malden has passed away at the surprisingly advanced age of 97. With his unique combination of unpretentious, common-man stolidity and sinister intensity, he was a rock of mid-twentieth century American cinema. He had many memorable roles, in top-notch movies such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. But his role that made the biggest impact on me was the superbly treasonous “Dad” Longworth in Marlon Brando’s brilliant One-Eyed Jacks. I loved that movie when I was in my teens and twenties, and only realized recently, on seeing it for the first time in decades, how obnoxiously liberal it is, with its standard (or what became the standard) dishonest set-up of the sensitive, unbearably narcissistic hero (Brando) arrayed against a wicked father figure (Malden) and a corrupt, racially prejudiced society. Actually I viewed it with a friend who spoiled it for me by relentlessly pointing out its liberal features. But I can’t resent this. What’s true is true.
This past March The American Conservative had a cover article on Mark Sanford that included this:
He was unsurprised by the party’s quick betrayal of conservative ideals: “A lot of people walked in not clear about what they were about philosophically. And if you aren’t totally clear walking in, you’re going to end up very fuzzy in a very short period of time.”That’s my kind of guy. In TAC’s treatment, Sanford, while lacking in polish, seems like an intellectually serious conservative/libertarian and a plausible contender for ‘12. So his public self-immolation over “Maria! I’ll never stop saying Maria!” is a real loss to conservatism. It’s not as though our side has such a deep bench.
Gintas writes:
Glass jaw. One look from an Argentinian woman and he goes down for the count in a heap. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:52 AM
Maria!! … Say it loud and there’s music playing … Say it soft and it’s almost like praying … Maria … I’ll never stop saying Maria!That’s the response of a commenter (quoting the musical West Side Story) to the New York Daily News article about the audio tapes of Gov. Sanford’s AP interview (see discussion here):
In addition to detailing his past lusts and loves, however, the tapes revealed Sanford to be a big ol’ crybaby.“Though we both know how impossible our distances are, how different our lives are, all those different things we know in my professional work, my family, all those different things,” a clearly emotional Sanford told The AP, “I will be able to die knowing … “
Here the governor broke into heaving sobs before stammering ” … that I had met my soul mate.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:09 AM
Check out the expanded entry on the Orlando, Florida toddler that was strangled by a “pet” python. which now includes an informative article from an Orlando website. We’ve learned that the python was owned by The Boyfriend of the dead child’s Mother. Meaning we have hear another case of The Boyfriend indifferent to welfare of his Girlfriend’s children. And here’s another detail that stands out, Prior to the fatal incident on Wednesday morning, the python had escaped from its enclosure earlier Wednesday morning. And its owner, the Boyfriend of the toddler’s Mother, had apparently done nothing to secure the animal better. Then later Wednesday morning, around 10 a.m., the python escaped again and killed the child.
I recommend our commenters’ responses to Gov. Sanford’s public statement that his Argentinian girl friend Maria Chapur is his “soul mate.”
Laura Wood (Laura W.) at The Thinking Housewife discusses a Pennsylvania state legislator who says that “in the many dozens of conversations he has had with supporters of traditional marriage, he has never once heard a ‘rational’ argument for keeping marriage as it is.”
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It’s a non-binding resolution, and, as the New York Times explains, the decision is up to the Mayor, who is in charge of the city schools and strongly opposes the idea. However, leaders of the city’s Muslim community are threatening to withhold their votes from him:
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.This Abdur-Rashid dude is evidently an African-American malcontent turned Muslim. Now, how many African-American Muslims would have been voting for Bloomberg prior to this controversy? Like, maybe, zero? Also, I doubt that there are 600,000 Muslims in New York City.(But I could be wrong—see note.)
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg should reconsider
his opposition to the school holidays. “It’s an election year,” he said.
Here’s the article:
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(Note: In a comment, Brandon F. says, “As regards the gun slingers in church I am a little disappointed in your praise of such stupidity,” and I reply.)
Last week I came upon an intriguing article in the New York Times, “Pastor Urges His Flock to Bring Guns to Church.” It is about Kenneth Pagano, pastor of the New Bethel Church in Louisville Kentucky, who is promoting responsible gun ownership and support of gun rights and was going to hold an “open carry celebration” at his church. I wanted to know about this Christian leader who was combining Christianity with gun ownership, but the Times reporter, Katharine Seelye, was only using Pagano as a hook for an article that was mainly about the spread of gun ownership and support for gun rights throughout the country. Seelye never go around to explaining what Pagano was about. Was he seeking to make gun ownership a part of the Christian worship of his church (which is what it sounded like when she wrote that Pagano “is inviting his congregation of 150 and others to wear or carry their firearms into the sanctuary”)? Was he inviting people to bring guns to church as defense against possible church invasions? Or was he merely seeking to promote gun ownership in addition to Christianity? Seelye didn’t get into any of that.
So I looked up New Bethel Church on the Web. The open carry celebration, which was open to anyone who supports gun rights, whether gun owners or non-gun owners, occurred Saturday June 27, so it’s too late to fly out to Louisville to participate. But Pagano has a statement at the Church website explaining the open carry celebration that I like very much. I’ve been holding off on posting it because I wanted to write a commentary showing all the good things about it, how it properly balances Christianity with this-worldly concerns, which, I’ve often argued, is exactly what our civilization needs to do if it is to survive. In this instance, the this-worldly concerns are individual and collective self-defense and the defense of liberty. However, I haven’t had time to write the commentary, and I would like readers to see Pagano’s excellent statement. So I’m posting it now, and will add the commentary later.
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Philip M. writes from England:
Twinkle, twinkle VFR,
How I wonder what you are,
Shining on the farthest right,
Of the Internet’s political night.
Showing rights of whites and liberal wrongs,
Through the medium of Dylan songs.
… who assured that their offspring didn’t survive. From Fox News:
A 2-year-old Florida child died after being strangled by a pet python, police said.Stop! Did they say a pet python?
Gintas writes:
Why keep a python as a “pet”? That’s no pet, it’s a dangerous animal. Let’s bring deadly animals into the house, and call them pets! Why, that’s not much different from bringing dangerous peoples into the country and calling it diversity. Is there a Darwin award for countries?Hannon writes:
That is simply awesome on so many levels. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.Here’s the article:
A 2-year-old Florida child died after being strangled by a pet python, police said. Sumter County Sheriff’s Lt. Bobby Caruthers said detectives are investigating the toddler’s death, but it appeared that the child was strangled by the snake.The tragedy occurred at a house near the city of Oxford, Fla., shortly before 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, local media reported. Officers were at the scene, according to MyFOXOrlando.com.
Pythons are a nonnative species to Florida, according to the Florida Wildlife Commission. But many people own Burmese pythons, which can grow more than 15 feet long and weigh more than 150 pounds.
Florida wildlife officials also have reported multiple sightings of Burmese pythons in the wild. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:43 PM
In a lengthy interview with the AP, the South Carolina governor says that his Argentinian mistress is his “soul mate” (he will die “knowing that I had met my soul mate”), while he also says that he wants to reconcile with his wife. But having declared before the world that he loves another woman and will love her until death, how does he imagine that a reconciliation with his wife is possible?
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Since America’s military involvement in Iraq officially ended yesterday, six years and three months after it began, and with over 4,000 U.S. servicemen dead and I don’t know how many permanently injured, this might be a good time to post my collection of VFR entries and articles on the Iraq invasion, occupation, and democratization policy. The below comes from the Word document “VFR articles arranged by topic,” which is posted on the sidebar, as this entry will also be. It is not complete, but simply represents what I happen to have collected so far.
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(Note: In another thread, a commenter questions the statement I approvingly quoted, “God hates America,” and I explain what I mean.)
Regarding the election of the nasty, ugly, left-wing “comedian” Al Franken to the U.S. Senate, an L-dotter says it all:
Reply 33—Posted by: intrepid, 7/1/2009 7:56:48 AMWhich makes me recall how, when I was traveling in Minnesota about four years ago I saw a number of white, middle-class people who were hugely fat, shaped like blimps. It was an unreal sight. I’ll bet they all voted for Franken.Minnesota, the land of 10,000 flakes.
Here’s another comment from the same Lucianne thread that also says it all. Can two entirely different statements each say it all? Well, today they can.
Reply 35—Posted by: Di Guy, 7/1/2009 8:01:21 AMGod hates America. He hates America enough to give us what we want. And now we have it. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:17 AM
I said back in March that Bernard Madoff should get the death penalty for what he had done (a couple of months earlier, a commenter had made the same point). I didn’t mean that literally, of course, since under our laws financial fraud, no matter how large it is and how much damage it causes, is obviously not a capital offense. I was speaking of pure justice, of what Madoff deserves for the vast evil he did to thousands of people whose wealth he destroyed and futures he blighted.
In federal district court in Manhattan on Monday, a judge came as close to that “true” sentence as possible, sentencing Madoff to 150 years in prison, 137 years more than his life expectancy of 13 years. Madoff’s victims cheered, having all asked for the maximum possible sentence. Some observers disagreed:
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This is from a website called TMZ.
Jackson/Rowe Not the Biological Parents
Posted Jun 30th 2009 12:00PM by TMZ StaffWe’ve learned Michael Jackson was not the biological father of any of his children. And Debbie Rowe is not the biological mother of the two kids she bore for Michael. All three children were conceived in vitro—outside the womb. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:06 AM
After a hiatus of a couple of days, the discussion on Sarah Palin continues. But I still owe a reply to Lydia McGrew re the Palin-Letterman feud, by now relegated to ancient history by the death of Michael Jackson.
Hugh Brady writing in Wall Street Journal Europe treats with utter contempt the concerns of the British people about the EU. So dishonest is Brady that he describes the Lisbon Treaty, an EU constitution in all but name, as “not so much a Brussels power grab as a long overdue reform of the EU’s rules and institutions.”
Let’s put the picture together. The Wall Street Journal believes in a world of free markets and open borders. Therefore it denigrates the sovereign nation-state, which stands in the way of free markets and open borders. Therefore it supports the submergence of the nations of Europe in the EU, a transnational, bureaucratic, undemocratic entity run by an unaccountable elite. Meaning that in the name of freedom, the Journal supports the extinction of freedom. Meaning that the ultimate object of libertarianism or “economic conservatism” as represented by the Wall Street Journal is the subjugation of humanity under Leviathan.
In the larger sense, all ideologies that reduce the world to a single principle—whether that principle is individual freedom, or economic freedom, or sexual and expressive freedom, or equality of rights, or equality of wealth, or equality of cultures, or the supremacy of a culture or race, or Darwinian evolution, or material causation, or reason, or utility, or atheism, or God—must end as tyranny.
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Ben W. writes:
I thought we had gone into Iraq for THEIR freedom. Check out these quotes. We are the invaders who caused Iraq to lose its freedom?
“I feel the same way as any Iraqi feels—I will feel my freedom and liberation when I don’t see an American stopping an Iraqi on the street,” said Awatef Jwad of Baghdad.While many Iraqis publicly said they are glad to see Americans out of their neighborhoods…
Tuesday marked the deadline for American troops to pull out of Iraq’s towns and cities—a long-anticipated date that has been met by street festivals in Baghdad. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:52 PM
Steven Warshawsky writes:
Just a few observations, after reading the Ricci decision last night: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:35 PM
President Sarkozy’s astonishing (and as far as I can recall, unprecedented) behavior toward Prime Minister Netanyahu reminds us of two realities: that in the eyes of the entire (left-liberal) world, Israel is a uniquely illegitimate country; and that France is an ally of the Moslem world against Israel.
The story is in Ha’aretz:
Sarkozy urges Netanyahu: Get rid of Lieberman
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz CorrespondentFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “get rid” of hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Channel Two reported on Monday.
The Foreign Ministry responded to the report by lambasting the French leader for his “intolerable intervention in internal Israeli affairs.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:30 PM
In her speech to the Danish Free Press society in the Danish Parliament building in Copenhagen on June 14, Diana West does not just talk about the general phenomenon of the U.S. media’s avoidance of bad stories about Islam and avoidance of the word “Islam.” She talks about how conservatives avoid the word “Islam.” She points out how Charles Krauthammer, whom she surprisingly calls “probably the leading conservative columnist in America” (see note), immediately after stating that Western papers declined to publish the Muhammad cartoons out of “simple fear,” said that Theo van Gogh’s killer was killed by a knife “with an Islamist manifesto” attached.
In other words, the very “conservatives” who keep pounding their chests and self-importantly calling on everyone to cast aside political correctness and call a spade a spade are the same people who keep cowardly and dishonestly calling Muslims “Islamists.”
West then says that instead of waging a war against terror or Islamization, we’ve been waging a war against alienating Islam, a war to avoid blaming Islam. And thus we have had ever increasing restrictions on speech about Islam. All that is good, and makes up the main body of the speech. But West, as good as she is, still doesn’t get to the bottom of the issue. Why are we set on not offending Islam? What are the principles that make us believe that we must not offend Islam? West does not say. Better than any other writer in the mainstream media, she knows that Islam is the problem. But she still lacks a theory to explain why Western intellectuals keep covering up this fact. The answer, as I see it, is that both the right-liberal (i.e. “conservative”) belief in a single universal humanity and the left-liberal (i.e. “liberal”) belief in the equality of all cultures means that we must never negatively judge or discriminate against any group. To say that a religion composing a fifth of humanity is inherently incompatible with our civilization and poses a mortal danger to our freedoms and our entire way of life is the height of such prohibited discrimination. Conservatives will not be able effectively to oppose politically correct restrictions on speech about Islam, until they identity and challenge the underlying liberal world view that requires such restrictions.
Here is West’s speech:
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James N. writes:
I’m too old to be a Michael Jackson fan, and so many readers have provided so much erudite commentary on the music that I won’t even try.I DO find it remarkable, though, that the death of another skeletal drug addict is such, SUCH a big event in Europe. Everything MJ, all the time. It still dominates the front pages of all the papers, there are public demonstrations of grief, the London dailies are publishing every minute detail of his disgusting and perverted life for readers to pore over. What accounts for this extraordinary Euro-attention?
I think MJ was on the path that they would have the West take—asexual, aracial, nonreligious, nonreproducing, noningesting (food), all the way down to death—while at the same time steeped in hedonism of the most perverse kind.
A man for his times. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:35 AM
Tonight two more readers offer their evaluations of Michael Jackson’s work, one negative, the other positive (until 1991).
Also, here is part one of a two part article by J. Randy Taraborrelli, Michael Jackson’s life-long friend and biographer.
In an hour long video documentary, “A Conversation about Race,” Craig Bodeker asks people in the Denver area for their thoughts about racism, and exposes the emptiness of this supposed scourge of our society.
Bodeker explains what gave him the idea of making the video:
I started to become aware of some of the “disconnects” and “double-standards” that seem to cloud any genuine discussion in America on the subjects of race and “racism.” I began to notice, that according to many, the only people truly guilty of the crime of “racism,” are Caucasian white people! MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:22 AM
The Dutch blogger “Snouck Hurgronje” writes:
Development we have been waiting for. Dutch Muslims feel that the popularity of Geert Wilders makes the Netherlands less attractive as a place of residence according to a poll published today.Here is Snouk’s blog entry about this: MORE…
I’ve been looking with great interest at a bunch of photos of Michael Jackson from over the decades in a special Michael Jackson section in yesterday’s New York Post. Commenter Markus is indeed correct and I have to modify my remark in yesterday’s entry that Jackson’s freakish appearance was inseparable from his superstardom. In 1982-1984, the period that includes his greatest success, Thriller, there had obviously been some major cosmetic work done: his nose was not the very wide African nose he started life with, it’s narrower and straighter, and there was probably some other plastic surgery work there as well. But the nose was not excessively reduced, and his skin was still a normal medium Negro pigment. So, while his appearance in 1984 was somewhat artificial, it was ok overall. He wasn’t freakish looking, as he came to be later.
Yet millions of fans continued to idolize him, notwithstanding the freakishness that made others, including me, instinctively recoil from the sight of him.
I said earlier today Michael Jackson two oldest children, while tan of color and clearly of mixed race (correction: possibly of mixed race), are not dark enough to be Jackson’s biological children, even through their mother, Debbie Rowe, is white and fair. The children of a white woman and a black man would be darker than these kids and would have some Negro features, an approximate example of such a mixture being Barack Obama. Then just now I happened to come upon this at yesterday’s New York Post:
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America really has tuned out Iraq. In two days, all combat functions by U.S. forces will have ended and U.S. forces will be officially gone from Iraqi population centers, a change that has involved the dismantling of 85 percent of U.S. bases in that country over a period of a few months, even as inconceivably horrible terrorist bombings proceed apace, and the U.S. media are barely registering any of it. Out of 40 political links on the main page of Real Clear Politics today, there are two about Iraq, by Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News and Trudy Rubin in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Neither says anything you couldn’t have thought of yourself. Will it go south, becoming of necessarily Obama’s war? Goodwin thinks that’s more likely. Rubin thinks Iraq will “limp along, making slow progress,” perhaps ending with “another Saddam who is a little better.” Meanwhile, Iraq is supposed to have a referendum next month on whether all U.S. presence should end by the end of 2011.
LA to Jeff in England:
So, after the huge upheaval and trauma over the expenses scandal, where do things stand now? Did it change British politics as much as it was thought it was going to do a few weeks ago? Is it still going on? Has it petered out?It does seem that Gordon the Undead has survived. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:58 PM
Sage McLaughlin writes:
It seems Sotomayor has been reversed 5-4 by the Supreme Court in the New Haven firefighters case. It’s a sort of victory, but not much of one. The Court ruled along a 5-4 split, and it found that the respondents’ case foundered on some narrow, arcane, impossibly subjective point about the likelihood of New Haven’s exposure to liability under Title VII of the Civil rights Act if it had promoted the top scorers in the test. (New Haven’s position of course is that that avoiding such liability was its reason for ignoring the test results.) Here is the decision. It strikes me as hopelessly turgid and complex. Tell me if you can find anywhere in it an affirmation that it is wrong to deny the firefighters a promotion on the basis that they were (mostly!) white. Instead we get endless bloviations like this: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:14 PM
Karen writes from England:
An article in the Mail says sharia courts are gaining more teeth.The Civitas study said the Islamic courts should no longer be recognised under British law. Its director Dr David Green said: “The reality is that for many Muslims, sharia courts are in practice part of an institutionalised atmosphere of intimidation, backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat.”
So this menace continues to grow whilst the useless politicians and deluded clergymen sit on the sidelines encouraging it.
(Note: see my discussion of before and after photos of Jackson, below.)
Yesterday I wrote about Michael Jackson:
[H]is transformation of himself, via horrifying plastic surgery and skin treatments, from a black male into a white Peter Pan, with a nose that looked like a fragile chicken bone about to break off from his face … left Jackson disintegrating physically and emotionally during his last 15 years .… the decline that led inevitably to his death …When I wrote that, I had not performed an autopsy on Michael Jackson nor read any autopsy report, and I knew less about Jackson than just about anyone in America. Yet the leaked official autopsy report, quoted in today’s New York Post, exactly echoes what I said yesterday:
[T]he disfigurement caused by years of plastic surgery show he’d been in terminal decline for some years.Meaning, the plastic surgery itself was so drastic, it so degraded his body, that it doomed him to an early death, just as I said. Even the autopsy’s phrasing, “[T]he disfigurement caused by years of plastic surgery show he’d been in terminal decline for some years,” precisely echoes mine: “His transformation of himself, via horrifying plastic surgery … left Jackson disintegrating physically and emotionally during his last 15 years … the decline that led inevitably to his death…”
Here’s the Post’s article:
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Last September, in the midst of the heated Palin debate, Gintas put together this charming and unharmful image of Sarah Palin as Diana, goddess of the hunt. Some Palin supporters were offended, but I think they came to realize there was no reason to feel that way.
She’s the magnetic lodestone, the soothing priestess, the
maternal guardian, the pulsing heart, the chiding chieftess
of our nation. We might as well fall into her arms.
— Laura W., VFR, September 3, 2008
Daniel Pipes writes at his blog:
Iranians bravely take the streets by the hundreds of thousands, confronting the police, the Pasdaran, and the basiji thugs of the Islamic republic—and what, other than words, does the Obama administration actually do to respond to these momentous events?It disinvites Iranian diplomats from the July 4 festivities to be held at U.S. embassies, consulates, and missions. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:36 PM
Welcome to the New England that has been created by the race- and ethnicity-blind belief system that is still passionately defended by that great conservative, Peter Hitchens. The story is from the BBC.
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(Note: in this entry, a commenter says that it’s not true that the British never talk about the racial aspect of violent crime, and I reply.)
Gintas writes (June 24):
Five comments mentioning race or groups have slipped by the censors at the Telegraph in the comments section following George Pilcher’s article. They are hardly at the level of the original deleted comment (or your follow-up). This low level apparently is acceptable: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:27 PM
Dorothy Rabinowitz has a piece at the WSJ, “What Sanford Should Have Said.” The piece as a whole is quite poor and I don’t recommend it, but the opening captures a truth:
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(Note: the part of the initial entry dealing with the culture’s responsibility for Jackson’s deterioration and death is overstated, as commenter Markus points out below and as also I discuss in a later entry.)
Ian Halperin has a stunning article in the Mail about Michael Jackson’s decline and death. Jackson fans will see it as the sad story of a sensitive and talented man done in by his handlers and hangers-on. But what I get from the harrowing tale is that the things that went wrong with Jackson were the very things that made up his stardom and success—namely his transformation of himself, via horrifying plastic surgery and skin treatments, from a black male into a white Peter Pan, with a nose that looked like a fragile chicken bone about to break off from his face. The artificially created freakiness that left Jackson disintegrating physically and emotionally during his last 15 years had been intrinsic to his persona and to his phenomenal popularity in his heyday. Meaning that the decline that led inevitably to his death is not just a judgment on him and his conduct of his life. It is a judgment on his fans. It is a judgment on the culture that saw this freak—which was what he was, no matter how sweet his personality or inspired his dancing—as something wonderful and admirable. Such a culture is indeed a culture of death.
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Paul G. writes:
Have you seen this? Excellent stuff on CA’s budget Armageddon. Just spot on. California seems to be in the process of becoming the society of Atlas Shrugged. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:04 PM
(Note: a reader from Britain has further information on this, below.)
Something unheard of in the Dead Island: a mainstream newspaper—the leftwing Independent yet, in a piece by a black African immigrant writer—talking about violent crime in race specific terms, and using (gasp!) numbers. In the land where even strong, brave white men are mealy mouthed cowards when it comes to the racial realities of crime, only nonwhites are allowed to—or even want to—get anywhere near the truth about race.
There were 85 gang rapes reported in London in 2008. In 29 cases that the author examined in which 92 young people were convicted of involvement in gang rape between 2006 and 2009, 66 of the convicted were black or mixed race, 13 were white, and the rest were from Muslim countries.
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From today’s New York Times, with the headline and subheadlines covering the entire top half of the front page:
House Passes Historic BillAn absurd and irresponsible parody? But if it is the case, as many scientists say, that recent warming of the earth (which already seems to have reversed) has been due to a natural cyclical increase of sun spot activity, then the tax on industries of $13 for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit, combined with a staggeringly complicated scheme by which businesses can increase their quota of carbon emissions by trading their quota with companies emitting less carbon, as detailed in a thousand-page long bill passed by the House yesterday, will be about as useful in reducing global warming as a tax on sun spots.Taxing Sun Spots
Businesses Must Pay for Each Increase in Sun Spot Activity Proportional to Amount of Earth’s Surface Owned by Each Company
Environmentalists, European Leaders Congratulate U.S. for Finally Joining Enlightened Humanity’s Efforts to Control the Cosmos
Goal Is to Reduce Sun Spot Activity by 83 Percent by 2050 or Cripple Industry and Induce Worldwide Depression in the Attempt
Obama Declares: “This Is the Moment We Have Reclaimed America’s Future.”
Says He Will Stand on the Ocean Until It Starts Sinking
Here’s the story, in today’s New York Times.
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The New York Daily News reports:
Not long before Michael Jackson died under his doctor’s watch, the pop icon insisted his personal physician become a 24-hour caretaker and accompany him on his wildly-anticipated London concert series, the Daily News learned yesterday.
Dr. Conrad Murray in 2006 opens the Acres Homes Cardiovascular Center
at the Tidwell Professional Building, in Houston .
Also, Murray is not a product of affirmative action: he went to a historically black medical school:Dr. Murray comes from, and has an office, in Acres Homes in North Houston, Texas.Anyone familiar with Acres Homes will surely know that this little piece of Hell on Earth is not the place a ‘noted Cardiologist’ hangs out his shingle.
Crime ridden and 99% minority neighborhood. Cops never go there alone.
Conrad Murray went to medical school at Meharry Medical College School of Medicine and graduate in 1989. The Meharry Medical College is located in Tennessee and is “the largest private, historically black institution for educating health professionals and scientists in the United States.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:30 AM
even as multiple, vast terrorist attacks are occurring throughout the country, and the Iraq prime minister calls the withdrawal a “victory” for Iraq over the occupier who has been “repulsed.”
Be sure to read in its entirety this unbelievable, momentous story from yesterdays’s New York Times.
Premier Casting U.S. Withdrawal as Iraq Victory
BAGHDAD—Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has taken to calling the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq’s cities by next Tuesday a “great victory,” a repulsion of foreign occupiers he compares to the rebellion against British troops in 1920. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:45 AM
Phil M. (not Philip M. from England) writes:
I read from your site every day and have gained much understanding from the wisdom and informative discussions imparted there. Thank you for the time and effort devoted to the search for truth. But, I had one question. Why, when the U.S. House of Representatives has just passed the most far reaching negative legislation on so-called human caused global warming, now changed to “climate change” (since more and more the public realizes humans have had nothing to do with affecting the climate) under the title of “Cap and Trade,” with dire implications for our nation’s energy supply, business in general, cost of living and especially personal taxes, focus on the Michael Jackson death? I consider this act of Congress on par with the worst legislation ever enacted even exceeding the immigration-amnesty sham supported by Busheron which was thankfully put down by the public outcry. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 09:30 AM
In an earlier entry, Mark A. noted that Michael Jackson’s cardiologist, who was personally attending on him at the time of his fatal attack, is black, and wondered whether affirmative action was a factor in Jackson’s death.
At 10:55 tonight John Hagan wrote:
If you listen to the 911 call from Michael Jackson’s house, you can hear the caller telling the 911 operator that this black doctor is trying to administer CPR to Jackson on the bed! The 911 operator tells them to move Jackson to the firm surface of the floor. Any high school kid knows that CPR needs to be administered on a firm surface. Certainly a cardiologist should know this. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:50 AM
I never took the slightest interest in Michael Jackson, other than to be instinctively repelled by him or just indifferent; I actually don’t remember which. According to what people are saying about him, he was one of the outstanding creative figures of our time, even a cultural titan on the level of Mozart. I remember about 1990 having a conversation with a daughter of friends of my parents, who had just driven down from Boston to New York to see a Jackson concert. The enthusiasm this woman—who was in her mid to late 30s at the time, no longer a kid—was expressing for this figure whom I saw as a bizarre freak seemed so overwrought and silly that it made me suspect that the Jackson phenomenon was specious to its core. But that was merely an intuition from a distance, not knowledge. If there are readers who do have a sense of Jackson, who knew his music and watched his performances at their best, it would be interesting to hear their thoughts. I can’t contribute to the discussion, having no impressions of him beyond what I have already said.
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Mark A. writes:
I wonder if affirmative action helped kill Michael Jackson? (note photo):
AP Source: Jackson suffered a heart attackMORE…LOS ANGELES—Michael Jackson, who was with a cardiologist when he collapsed at his rented home in Los Angeles, appeared to have suffered a heart attack, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press.
Dr. Conrad Murray
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:27 PM
Kristor writes:
I have been reading the sites of science fiction writers Mike Flynn and John C. Wright, both Christians, both deeply interested in the same nexus of issues that have engaged VFR. I just cribbed this from Flynn:
1. The universe is matter without any intrinsic meaning.This pretty much says it, no? I recommend these guys; very smart, good writers, very well educated. MORE…2. The human mind is simply an attribute of matter.
3. The human mind creates meaning.
How anyone can believe all three is a puzzlement. If the mind is an attribute of a wad of gray matter packed in a bone box, then it is part of the universe. If the universe is meaningless, there is no way that a inconsequential sliver of it can create meaning.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 03:13 PM
Ben W. writes:
Subject: History’s Two StreamsOne part of humanity—the liberal, Darwinian stream—did descend from the first European Cro-Magnon man (the African Negro). The rest of us have a divine descent…hehehe. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:38 PM
Paul Mulshine’s June 21 column has some hilarious and also devastating commentary on Sarah Palin, especially this:
The joke [that David Letterman told about Palin’s daughter] may have been tasteless. But taste is not Palin’s strength. She first came to prominence parading her pregnant daughter and the daughter’s soon-to-be-ex-fiance around the national Republican convention.When I read this my head exploded at the rightness of Mulshine’s point. And I wondered how I could have failed to make the connection myself, given my fierce condemnation last September of Sarah Palin and John McCain for displaying the pregnant Bristol and her boyfriend together at the GOP convention, thus legitimizing out of wedlock pregnancy at the highest level of our national life and essentially destroying social conservatism. Compared to the cultural and moral damage that Palin wreaked then, Letterman’s joke was nothing. How dare Palin and her “conservative” champions complain about Letterman’s joke, when what they did and approved was infinitely worse—and, in fact, set the stage for Letterman’s joke? Letterman joked about a girl getting knocked up; but Palin put her knocked-up daughter on stage before the eyes of the world.
And here’s another thing. When Letterman apologized, he specifically apologized for not having realized that the daughter accompanying Palin at Yankee stadium that day was her second daughter, the 14 year old Willow. He had been under the impression that it was Bristol who was with Palin that day. So he apologized for joking inadvertently about a 14 year old girl getting knocked up.
But what happened next was that the “conservatives” redoubled their attack on Letterman, because he had ONLY apologized for the inadvertent joke about Willow, NOT for the knocked-up-daughter joke in itself. Meaning that the “conservatives” thought that the joke would have been equally offensive even if Bristol had been the daughter in question. Meaning that they regarded a joke about Bristol getting knocked up—after Palin herself put the unmarried pregnant Bristol and boyfriend stage center at the GOP convention, an act that the “conservatives” ecstatically greeted and celebrated—as a grave insult, an intolerable outrage, etc.
All of which shows even further how the “conservatives” are hopelessly out to lunch.
Here is Mulshine’s column.
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The chaos created by Britain’s asylum system is not not a mistake, writes Leo McKinstry in the Express. It is a deliberate policy aimed at transforming Britain.
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At the blog Accidental Dissent the unnamed blogger writes:
One form of leftist secular religion—shared by too many who consider themselves “right”—is the belief in the promise of “mixtopia”—the perfect society that will emerge after the races have melded into one. Signs abound that it will be anything but perfect but believers ignore them. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:03 AM
At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael, the narrator, speaks of the discontented feelings he has from time to time that drive him to go to sea as a sailor:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.That passage has been running through my head a lot recently, especially Melville’s wonderfully apt phrase about the “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” because the almost nonstop rain and unseasonable coolness we’ve had over the last month has made it seem like the damp, drizzly June of my soul. But today the weather finally lifted, and summer has arrived. MORE…
Ben W. writes:
I keep seeing this phrase appear in article after article—”that’s they way they evolved.” Humans, birds, horses, etc.Question: why do humans feel compelled to tag any form of life with this phrase—”that’s the way it evolved?”
Putting aside the arguments of creation versus evolution, why this need to utter this phrase ad infinitum? When looking at a horse, why this need to label it as “that’s the way it evolved?” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:36 PM
Be sure to see A. Zarkov’s revealing insights about the homeless girl admitted to Harvard. For one thing, he points out that if, as reported, she was exceptionally smart (at least for her background) from a very young age and consistently pursued her studies despite her terrible environment, what that proves is that smart people will do well, regardless of their physical and cultural environment. The message is thus the exact opposite of what the liberals want us to believe it is, that socio-economically deprived blacks are generally capable of becoming Ivy League material, if only they work hard enough and get enough help from society. Khadijah’s success is the success of inborn intelligence (plus drive and conscientiousness), not of liberal amelioration. No inborn smarts, no Ivy League Khadijah.
After Mr. Z.’s comment, the discussion moves to the subject of how Harvard, though its substantive beliefs have changed radically since Colonial times, nevertheless still has the same function today that it had then: to train people to be ministers of the state religion. In the past that religion was Congregationalism; today it is liberalism.
A Belgian-born Turkish Muslim woman, Mahinur Ozdemir, who wears the hijab head covering, has been elected to the Belgian parliament and declares that she will continue to wear the hijab in parliament despite all opposition, of which there is a considerable amount. The story is reported in the English language edition of Asharq Alawset, an Arabic international daily.
Mahinur Ozdemir
Paul Belien writes from Belgium:
She was elected to the Brussels regional parliament, not the Belgian (federal) parliament. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:01 PM
Dennis Mangan posted an entry yesterday quoting the anti-Semite Tanstaafl’s comment about me that I had posted and giving his own angle on the issue. He gave me a heads up about the post and said he was not going to let in the crazies to comment. But apparently the post generated so much e-mail of the Jew-hating variety that Mr. Mangan didn’t want to deal with it and took down the entry. Understandable.
Gintas then sent me a comment he had been about to post at Mangan’s when the thread was removed. Here it is:
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Ran M. writes:
The best approximation of his name that I’ve heard (and what I say in my mind whenever I read his name) is: I’m-in-a-jihad.
(Note: This entry turns into a discussion of Harvard, liberalism, liberalism as a secularized form of Christianity, the liberal sense of “election,” and why Christianity is the most dangerous religion.)
El Ingles writes:
I felt prompted to ask what exactly was so terrible about Khadijah Williams getting into Harvard. I mean, she sounds like a pretty capable person, and she appears to have got in purely on merit. Am I missing some reference to affirmative action in the article that is more obvious to an American reader? MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:15 AM
The New York Times says that while Gov. Sanford’s admission of an affair has ended “the mystery surrounding his disappearance over Father’s Day weekend … his confession and apology, in a rambling, nationally televised news conference, left other mysteries unsolved, like whether he had lied to his staff members as late as Monday about his whereabouts, whether the affair had definitively ended, whether he would resign from the governorship and whether he would even have acknowledged the affair had he not been met at the airport in Atlanta by a reporter upon his return.”
The Times has left out the biggest mystery:
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Jed W. writes :
Thanks for reiterating a few of Dubya’s choice dhimmi statements on Islam. He was probably one of the most disastrous presidents we have ever had and he certainly paved the way for our current nightmare. Here are just a few of the milestones: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:52 AM
Anthony Damata writes:
I came across this article about Buzz Aldrin teaming up with porn Star, “Gangsta” rapper, gang Lifestyle aficionado/ former Cripps gangmember, suspected murderer, and all-around Black Thug, “Snoop Dog” to do a song to mark the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing.
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Diana West writes at her website:
Below is the text of statement attributed to Mousavi. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 06:58 PM
Those who say we would be blamed, or that we would alienate the Iranian people by supporting them at a time they’re being slaughtered in the streets for the “crime” of demanding their freedom, say that because they don’t believe in America, not because they care about the future of the Iranians. [Michael Ledeen, The Corner.]For Ledeen, America is not a country, it is a project to help free people in other countries. If you don’t believe in that project, of even if you have doubts about the best way to carry it out, you don’t believe in America. MORE…
An L-dotter asks:
Was she a “wise Latina woman”?The question not answered yet is, didn’t he realize that the moment he returned he would have to give an accounting of himself? Meaning, didn’t he realize, from the moment he took off, and during the four days he was with his lady friend, that he would have to tell the whole world about it? How then could he have enjoyed himself or “unwinded,” as he said it was his purpose to do?
Update: That turns out to be the case. A website quoted this from his press conference today (it’s not in the transcript, but the New York Times also reports it):
“What I did was wrong, period,” he said. “I spent the last five days crying in Argentina.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 06:07 PM
Howard Sutherland writes:
In the entry, “How the American ‘conservative’ establishment have become shills for hard-line Muslims,” you ask why Bret Stephens and The Wall Street Journal polish the apple of Mohsen Kadivar while despising Geert Wilders. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:09 PM
(Note: See Ken Hechtman’s further information on the MEK, below.)
That’s the organization that Daniel (“moderate Islam is the solution”) Pipes supports as the main opposition group to the Iranian regime. Pipes didn’t mention that the U.S. government has officially designated the Mujahedeen as a terrorist organization. Why is King Dan (see my Dylan take-off about him) hanging out with these people? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Iran-Interlink, formed for the purpose of exposing and opposing the Mujahedeen, has many articles. Here is general background on the Mujahedeen. Here is information on the group’s founder, whom Iran-Interlink calls a cult leader, and his daughter and successor, whom Pipes heard speak in Paris and praised for giving a speech “blessedly free” of anti-U.S. and anti-Israel statements, clearly suggesting that this is not the way she normally speaks. And here is the speech that so excited Pipes.
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A few months ago, David Frum wrote a cover article for the leftist magazine Newsweek smearing the most prominent conservative in America, Rush Limbaugh, as some kind of sinister McCarthyite hater who should “shut up.” The message was that conservatives should shut up and surrender to liberalism. Now Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor of National Review, has followed in Frum’s footsteps, writing an op-ed for the leftist New York Times in which he attacks conservatives as hypocrites for supporting the plaintiffs in the Ricci anti-white discrimination case. Here’s his reasoning:
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Critics of any U.S. intervention in the Iran crisis have repeatedly pointed out that the protesters are also true-believing Shi’ite Muslims, who, if they came to power, would not change anything essential about Iran from our point of view.
Now get this. Guess what is the name of “the largest and best organized Iranian opposition group,” as Daniel Pipes describes it. Guess.
Mujahedeen-e Khalq. The People’s Mujahedeen of Iran.
Mujahedeen. Holy Warriors.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s interfere in internal Iranian affairs so as to facilitate the transfer of power from the mullahs to the mujahedeen. Let’s put all our eggs in that basket.
And, indeed, Daniel (“moderate Islam is the solution”) Pipes himself is a strong supporter of the People’s Holy Warriors of Iran, having repeatedly attended their annual conferences in Paris, the most recent one of which took place last Saturday.
Pipes says that the group is moderate, is against the export of terror, and wants the U.S. to exert pressure on the mullahs to get them to stop developing nuclear weapons. He also points out that the speech by its leader, a woman named Maryam Rajavi, at the Paris conference was “blessedly clear of attacks on the United States or Israel.” But to say that the speech was “blessedly clear” of such attacks clearly implies that the speech was different in this regard from her previous speeches. Otherwise, instead of saying that Rajavi’s speech last weekend was blessedly clear of attacks on the U.S. and Israel, Pipes would have simply said that the organization as such does not attack the U.S. and Israel.
But, really, all that’s beside the point. What kind of Islamic moderates would call themselves mujahedeen? It doesn’t pass the laugh test.
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Last night I came upon this entry, from Sept. ‘07, and it made me laugh:
I stopped by a Barnes & Noble on Wednesday and looked up Hamas in the index of Norman Podhoretz’s new book, World War IV. I wanted to see if Podhoretz discussed the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories and what that event said about his hopes for Muslim democracy. In fact, Podhoretz did mention (on p. 211) the electoral victories of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. By way of reply to the idea that these developments disprove his own belief in the salvific power of democracy, he quoted one of his two all-purpose authorities on things Islamic, Amir Taheri. Podhoretz’s other all-purpose authority on things Islamic is Fouad Ajami, a once-engaging intellectual whose brains have been fried by smoking too much “Dubya.” In fact, there is an entire sub-culture in America populated by once-talented individuals who have destroyed their brains the same way—it’s the Desolation Row of the neocons. MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:39 AM
Diana West is on a tear against the American elite’s belief that the Iranian protesters represent some kind of liberalizing, pro-democracy force. Must reading is her devastating article on Mohsen Kadivar, an Iranian Shi’ite imam currently teaching at Duke, and a leading figure among the anti-regime forces. Kadivar has been touted by Wall Street Journal Pod Person Bret Stephens as a great liberal, when, in reality, he is anything but.
West clearly shows what Kadivar is, and demonstrates that Stephens has fallen for him, but she doesn’t ask why he has fallen for him. At the end of her article, below, I address that question.
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This evening I wasted ten minutes reading a column by the neocons’ favorite Iranian Iran expert, Amir Taheri in the New York Post. The man knows a lot about Iranian politics, but he can’t write to save his life. Most of his columns, like this one, are eye-wateringly dense collections of bulleted points (whether he uses actual bullets or not, it’s the same) that touch on multiple aspects of Iranian politics but fail to conjoin into any intelligible theme or come to any coherent conclusion, leaving the reader feeling confused and jangled. The man’s unreadable. How, then is he allowed to kill, I mean fill, a half page in the New York Post twice a week? The answer, of course, is that being a part of the neocons’ universe (Taheri has had major articles in Commentary—heavily rewritten by the editors—promoting the Bush democracy project, and was treated as an all-purpose authority on things Islamic by Norman Podhoretz in his seminal work, The Fortieth World War) will take a man a long way in this world.
On the Iran question, however, I want to say this.
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(Note: a reader is aghast at my use of a term that medicalizes crime.)
And the government and media use flowery socio-babble to cover up who is actually committing the rapes.
Tiberge writes at Galliawatch:
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JJM writes:
While I obviously consider him every bit as evil and stupid as you do, I feel like I have to take issue with your constant use of the nickname “Johnnie” for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to an earlier post, you started using this moniker because you apparently consider his real name to be “absurd” and “obtrusively foreign” as well as “onerous to speak and write.” MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:07 PM
I’m sorry to hear that Ed McMahon has passed away.
If a secular thing can be timeless, then on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, and Doc Sevrenson created something timeless, an archetype of our popular culture. The ritualistically repeated yet ever-new and upbeat quality of the show’s opening and of Carson’s monologue lifted you out of mundane time into a secular equivalent of sacred time. (See Mircea Eliade’s discussion of sacred time in Cosmos and History.) I never got tired of hearing McMahon’s “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!”
I loved these guys. When Carson retired in 1992, something good went out of America. It signified the end of the great American popular culture of the mid twentieth century and its replacement by post-modern loutishness and resentment.
Carson and McMahon are still doing their act,
on that great Tonight Show in the sky
From the New York Times’s description of the crash, it’s remarkable that far more people were not killed and injured:
In the accident, a train on the Metro system’s heavily used Red Line barreled at what passengers said was considerable speed into another train, which was stopped between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations about 5 p.m. Monday. The rear train ended up atop the stopped train in a mangled mass of metal and glass.Here is the article: MORE…The driver of the rear train, Jeanice McMillan, 42, of Springfield Va., was among those killed, officials said. She was hired in 2007 and began operating trains last December.…
The oncoming train had approached with such speed that much of its floor was sheared off by the force of the impact as it wedged itself on top of the stopped train. One car was crushed into a quarter of its original size.
Jeanice McMillan
Were standards lowered to hire her?
The comment at the Telegraph by “American reader” about the racial nature of violent street crime in London, which I copied last night when I prepared this entry, has been removed from the Telegraph. See discussion below.
George Pilcher in the Telegraph (“Prince William needs to be tougher than Diana”) takes exception to Prince William’s compassionate approach to street thugs. What is needed to stop crimes like the murder of Ben Kinsella, continues Pilcher, is strong men with guns, not royal social workers with a case of noblesse oblige. But as the discussion continues in the comments section, both sides of the issue—the compassionate and the tough-minded—equally ignore the elephant in the room, race (as does Pilcher), until an American commenter injects some reality into the proceedings:
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Because, Alan Roebuck explains, in a society totally dominated by liberal modes of thought, being a serious conservative means being a radical.
Mr. Roebuck writes:
A couple of recent items at VFR (e.g., here) have discussed the failure of conservatives to deliver the goods. This reminds me of my American Thinker article, “Seeker-Sensitive Conservatism,” in which I make an analogy between a certain type of liberal pastor and typical conservative pundits: Both groups give people a popular message that they want to hear rather than a challenging true message that will anger and frighten the audience. Some excerpts: MORE…
Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:30 AM
The appearance of this site can be made more vivid and the typeface more legible by enlarging the view. In Firefox, press Ctrl+(+) (without the Shift key) to enlarge by ten percent; press Ctrl+(-) to make smaller. It can be done easily with one hand: cross your left hand over to the right side of the keyboard and hold down Ctrl with the thumb while tapping (+) with the forefinger. In Opera, you can go to View, Zoom, and choose from several sizes. Internet Explorer is more limited in the options it gives. Lately I look at VFR in 120 percent zoom and I prefer it that way.
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There is a sophisticated interactive map at the New York Times showing all homicides in New York City from 2003 to the present. There were 3,407 homicides, and evidently there is a dot on the map for each homicide, though it doesn’t seem to me that there are nearly that many. If you point at any dot a box appears with the race and age of the victim and perpetrator, the motive, and the weapon. You can adjust the zoom in and out and move the map sideways by dragging it. You can also jump to any zip code. You can adjust for race/ethnicity of perpetrator or victim and the dots will take on color to reflect that information. You can move a slide and see just the murders for any one year.
So, for example, I was able to determine that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bounded by 59th Street, 110th Street, Central Park, and the Hudson River, 26 persons were murdered between 2003 and the present, including five whites (four dots, one double murder), eight Hispanics, and 13 blacks.
Occasionally the victim’s name is given. For example, there is dot for the psychotherapist Kathryn Faughey, murdered by a patient in her office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in February 2008.
A reader writes from somewhere in the Middle East:
”[T]he now widespread stereotyping of Islam as medieval and inherently violent and intolerant ensures eternal war.”
—Camille Paglia, Salon, June 10, 2009Camille “Blame the Victim” Paglia badly needs to walk in my shoes for a few months. Muslims may not all be predisposed towards violence and/or “intolerance,” but take it from me—nearly all the Muslims and Arab Muslims I’ve spent significant time with during my travels throughout the Middle East are uneducated (no, memorizing the Koran and then getting a third-rate engineering degree from a third-rate Arab university doesn’t cut it as “education”), racist, supremacist, reflexively intolerant, superstitious, rabidly anti-Semitic and just plain ignorant. And the vast majority of them treat non-Arabs, and especially non-Arab non-Muslims, like absolute s__t. Oh, and did you know they habitually marry first cousins? (Does absolute wonders for the gene pool!)
Hey, what’s so bad about “eternal war” with Arab Muslims? Sure beats even the slightest submission to their crazy, cowardly, woman-hating, misogynistic notions!
Best regards from the land of The Deceivers,
PS—if you’d like to post this, do so without my name attached to it. I kind of dig the fact that my head is firmly attached to my neck!
Bruce Thornton writes at FrontPage Magazine:
There are many reasons for this [anti-Western] double standard, not the least being the fatal self-loathing of Western elites. But this hatred of the West itself depends on an ignorance of history on display in many of Obama’s speeches. And that ignorance in turn reflects the corruption of history over the last forty years, which has seen a once-noble discipline turned from the record of what has happened into a melodrama of grievance used to advance political ideology. The next few years will show us how large a price we will pay for ignoring historical truth, as our acceptance of this skewed history saps our will to resist an enemy passionately convinced of his righteousness.
In today’s New York Times is the most anti-Israel op-ed I have ever read in that newspaper, by the transplanted British leftist Jew and Patrick Buchanan’s favorite Israel expert, the supposed historian Tony (“One State Solution”) Judt. Focused on the putative illegality of literally any Jewish presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the piece is so one-sided against Israel, so false in its assertions, and so set on delegitimizing the Jewish state, that it might as well have been written by, oh, Charles W. Freeman or Scott McConnell. I recommend reading Judt’s amazingly tendentious article in order to get a sense of how even Israel’s supposedly more rational enemies see her.
Then I recommend a good antidote to Judt, a long article written by Hillel Halkin in the Wall Street Journal in 2002, which I re-read today. First, Halkin demonstrates the falsity of the “illegal occupation” charge, which is based on a gross misreading of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. He then shows how reluctant the Israelis were, in the years after the 1967 war, to allow significant settlement in the West Bank, since their hope was to trade land for peace, until continued Arab rejectionism ultimately left them no reasonable alternative to settlement.
What might an alternative to settlement have been? Halkin presents a thought experiment:
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