BINGO. Or SHACK, as we fighter pilots say for a direct hit; in our jargon saying “bingo” means “if I don’t head home now I won’t have the gas to get there.” Maybe bingo is an apt description of America’s moral fuel state. HRS

I had a reminder today of what “inclusiveness” means in practice. I walked over to New York’s Grand Central Station to get my lunch. As I was walking back through the main concourse, an enormous hall with a ceiling painted with signs of the Zodiac, a light show was going on accompanied by computer-generated music, very vaguely Christmas-y in sound. I looked up to see blazoned on the ceiling “Happy Holidays from the MTA” in colored light. This piqued my interest; “I’ll bet they don’t mention Christmas!” said I to myself, and kept watching. There on the ceiling I saw appear slogans in Chinese characters, greetings (I guess) in Arabic, Hindi and Hebrew scripts and, at least for as long as I watched, not a word about Christmas. To be fair, I didn’t see anything about Kwanzaa either, but I only watched for a few minutes before going my way.

As I crossed the road, it occurred to me that what I had just seen exemplifies inclusiveness: to be inclusive, we natives have to exclude ourselves. HRS

I can console Howard Sutherland with one thought. Given the MTA’strack record, those signs in foreign languages are probably mispelled to the point of being incoherent.

We are lucky to have a fighter pilot here to keep us nonmilitary geeks from making a spectacle of our ignorance. Of course, we need to recognize how discreet a responsible wielder of such enormous power has to be. Only those that have attended a modern air show can feel in their bones the crowd and the engines and realize just how powerful, violent, brave, and appreciated our pilots are. Every citizen should see an airshow.

What Mr. Sutherland saw at Grand Central Terminal is the culmination of what started there some years back, when the Moslem spokesman Muhammed Mehdi (the one whom WFB often had on Firing Line) made a fuss about the Christmas decorations but no Ramadan decorations at the Terminal, so the authorities, in order to avoid any problemas, just removed all decorations. Now they’ve gone further, making it a secular multicultural observation with no Christmas.

And avowed you-know-what that I am, I still refuse to give in to our local schools’ designation of “Winter Break”. It will always be Christmas Vacation to me.

Paul Cella has a blog entry up (mentioning Evelyn Waugh’s reaction to the Hitler-Stalin pact) which made me think of what’s going on today:

“I persist in believing that Evelyn Waugh penned the epitaph, of sorts, for the 20th century, when he wrote of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 (through the voice of a quasi-autobiographical character in a novel): ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.’ ”

( http://www.cellasreview.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_cellasreview_archive.html#106927734866945822 )

That’s the way I feel: the enemy is in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. Whatever the final outcome, there is a place for me in this battle.

Hey thanks for the plug, Unadorned. Waugh’s epigrammatic remarks are striking for many reasons; among these are is frankness equating Nazis and Communists, and in call the two of them “the Modern Age in arms.”

I can appreciate Unadorned’s point, but I respectfully disagree that the enemy has cast off his disguise; indeed, he excels at the art of disguise and subterfuge.

My apologies. Sentence 2 above should read “among these are HIS frankness equating Nazis and Communists, and in calling the two of them ‘the Modern Age in arms.’”

Mr. Auster writes,

” … [E]ven though American elites (and most non-elites as well) don’t positively want their country to be swamped and transformed by alien immigrants … they would sooner allow these things to happen than appear intolerant.”

Prophetic words. Apparently the first steps are being taken by the Canadian Moslem Community to bring about recognition of Islamic law in that country. Here’s a post signed by “Paul” in Turnabout ( http://jkalb.freeshell.org/tab/archives/001590.php#5224 ):

“A 30-member council of Islamic community leaders in Ontario met last month to establish The Islamic Institute of Civil Justice (Canada). The meeting was described by Law Times as ‘the latest step in a long struggle to have Islamic law recognized in Canada.’ Lawyer Syed Mumtaz Ali — the first Canadian lawyer to swear his oath of allegiance on the Koran — said that formerly, Canada’s Muslims were excused from applying Sharia in legal disputes because no adequate enforcement mechanism existed. But recent amendments to the Arbitrations Act making arbitrators’ decisions final and binding also have the effect of enabling Muslim disputants to have Islamic arbitral decisions enforced by secular Canadian courts: ‘the court has no discretion in the matter.’ “

http://www.lawtimesnews.com/Main5.html

I wonder what the Canadian liberal aristocracy would do if one of the Sharia courts being set up decides to administer an honor killing or the removal of someone’s right hand for theft? It’s always interesting to see liberals twist and spin in order to justify such things under multicultiralist dogma. Penalties are frequently much harsher than those imposed by the old English common law system being dismantled. Perhaps the new Canadian Sharia courts can order that liberal politicians’ hands be cut off for all of the theft via taxation they indulge in. (I knew there had to be a silver lining in there somewhere!)

I’ve written up a brief article on this Canadian Moslem story:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001952.html

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