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  1. Listening to a video recently that featured numerous stills of deer, deer crossing signs, and of cars dented or mangled by close encounters between reckless drivers and bounding deer, I had an epiphany: I finally grasped, for all time and for all mankind, how statist economists and society managers thought. A new sun rose, and I heard trumpets and a heavenly chorus singing "Hallelujah!" I didn't quite experience "rapture," but it was very close that state of exaltation. The revelation was this: Statists old and new, freshly minted and long retired, think like the lady who called into a radio talk show to complain about deer crossing signs. Not about the deer, but about the location of the signs. Her reasoning, if it can be called such, was that if the signs were placed at local roads and highways with low traffic volume, there would be fewer deer casualties and fewer crumpled cars. It made no sense to her to place those signs at high-volume traffic locations. Wasn’t that obvious? The host of radio Y94, in Fargo, North Dakota, listened patiently to Donna – that was her name – and refrained from audible smirks and guffaws while he explained in very simple terms the purpose of the signs. He was a paragon of courtesy and tolerance and public civility. Now why, I asked myself, would any rational person come to the conclusion that the location of a deer crossing sign would have any effect on, well, deer? Or, rather, the proper question to ask was: How would any rational person come to such a conclusion? Well, no rational person would establish a causal connection between the signs and deer. No rational person would ascribe to deer the ability to read signs, or even grasp the silhouettes on them of leaping deer. Perhaps not even the caller. We must allow Donna that much – in spite of evidence to the contrary – for she does drive a car, and it has physically encountered deer a number of times, much to the cost of her bank balance and insurance premiums. She did not say that she had tired of exchanging insurance company information with the offending deer, or had had mutual cuss-out incidents with any one of them. Or so she claims. But she was clearly fed up. No, the explanation for this lady's reasoning must be that the signs impart some kind of existential power over the deer. The deer are like metal shavings, or filings, so to speak, and the signs are super magnets. Deer magically gravitate towards these signs. Move the magnet and watch the filings move. Move the signs, and watch the deer move. That part of academia studying the metaphysics and epistemology of deer hasn’t quite nailed down why deer follow deer crossing signs, just as scientists haven’t quite nailed down what gravity is – is it undetectable gravity waves, volitional quarks, or what? – although gravity certainly works. So should deer crossing signs. They are preparing a major experiment on the power of deer crossing signs to manipulate the impenetrable predisposition of deer to cross roads and highways. But deer want to cross the road, just like chickens, raccoons, possums, squirrels, and other groundlings that are regularly squashed. The deer don’t necessarily take note of the signs. They just show up near them, collectively or by their lonesome. Photographs prove this. Of course, a deer can have the quirky habit of outrunning a car and deliberately crossing in front it. It appears to be in a rush to play chicken with a driver. Or perhaps its day just isn't made without a brush with metal and risking death or maiming by a two-ton entity. Perhaps it is vain and wishes to show the noisy entity just how nimble and agile it is. Deer anthropologists claim there are "show-offy" deer. Such a deer is determined to cross the road ahead of the vehicle. Its self-esteem must depend on it. Or something. Anyway, back to the complaining lady. She was sincere in her reasoning. Or perhaps she was pulling the legs of the show's two hosts. But she sounded sincere. Let us grant her a state of genuine perturbation. You see, your average economist and your average politician and your average teacher and your average voter all think the same way as Donna. Never accuse of them of harboring a dichotomy between cause and effect. Donna has a unique epistemology; it established for her the causal metaphysical connections between deer and deer crossing signs. Our group of averages is also imbued with a similar epistemology. But Donna could never validate that knowledge, because, well, she couldn’t. Just as the undetectable powers of Ouija boards and the miraculous powers of pyramid hats can't be validated. One can't validate what can't be detected, what isn't open to sensory perception. Or what isn't and never was there. Donna has reached her end game. Her epistemology and metaphysics are the stuff of Road Runner cartoons. And Groucho Marx's seven-cent nickel. And global warmng. Paul Krugman, champion of inflation and government interference and moving the country in a different direction, shares Donna's epistemology and metaphysics. He believes that if the Fed moves the deer crossing signs, the public will follow and cross the road where he and Bernard Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner have designated the true and proper point to cross. Or rather, where the public should follow, but too often does not, thus throwing a monkey wrench into their best laid deer crossing plans. Millions of metal filings fly in every direction but in the direction forecast by the planners, usually as far away from the magnet or sign as possible. They haven’t quite validated their metaphysics. Because their epistemology hasn’t quite worked yet. They haven’t quite figured out the composition of those countless metal filings. They seem to have minds of their own. Now, take your average socialist. You know, the one who wants to just "spread the wealth around a little." Or a lot. One you will find in a stinking, vermin-infested sleeping bag with Occupy Wall Street; the other you will find in the meticulously clean White House, bacteria- smoke-, and class-free. They together possess in common a cornucopia of deer crossing signs, in many sizes and colors and styles. All property is theft, you see – they both agree with John Reed, who was an acolyte of socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who worked out his own deer crossing sign hypothesis before Karl Marx did (Karl stole it from him, that was only fair) – so the OWSer and the White House guy share the credit. The OWS fellow wants to maneuver the deer with baseball bats and curtain rods and pooper-scoopers in the manner of Indian tiger-beaters and herd them in a direction that will stampede them off a cliff. Just as those other Indians used to do to buffalo herds, resulting in piles of dead buffalo at the bottom of a precipice, from which Indians managed to carve out some edible buffalo meat and the makings of a teepee and a wrap-around coat before the whole pile putrefied. The average OSWer doesn’t believe there ought to be any roads for any deer to cross, not until he first has had everything provided to him for free, including a vehicle in which to play "dodge the deer." Then he will deign to use the roads, as long as they are always torn up by contractors and municipalities being paid with stimulus money to repave those roads and confuse the deer who might want to cross it. Of course, once the property is seized and redistributed and consumed, that is the end of it. There is no more, not unless deer living beyond the range of an OWSer's deer crossing signs decide to volunteer for the experiment and provide the OWSer with freshly stolen property. To the Donnas of OWS, all property is also static, but that's just a theory which doesn’t bear close examination, so they don’t talk about it much. After all, there was the Soviet Union, and that experiment in deer crossing signs finally collapsed much to the embarrassment of sign planners and deer manipulators, and that section of the road was taken over by a champion tiger beater by the name of Putin. The fellow in the White House wishes to maneuver the deer with executive directives and mandatory health insurance and subsidized solar energy companies and an auto company that produces cars that deer do not want to tangle with. He has the same deer management philosophy as the OWS fellow, but has infinitely more power to experiment with his policies, and a nasty army of tiger-beaters, as well. His rule of thumb is simple and easily understood by the graduates of Sesame Street: If you change the deer crossing signs, the deer will come. Just like in that fabulous Kevin Costner movie about baseball fields and deceased baseball stars. If you pour millions into a solar panel company or two or three, the sun will come and so will the deer. And if the deer don't come, then the molecular composition of the crossing signs must be awry and not friendly to deer vibes. Or something. The guys in the lab are working on it, following John Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism: If you build it, and it doesn’t work, try something else at random, such as putting deer into a super-microwave oven and setting it at full blast to see exactly when they explode. If you force banks to accept billions in imaginary money and credit, prosperity and full employment and economic solvency will come. All that money, causing the machines at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to hover close to over-heating and breakdown, and all that credit, are the deer crossing signs. But now the deer crossing signs are so numerous and thick that they form a barrier that deer cannot cross. They remain across the road because they cannot penetrate through the signs, and exhaust the foliage and begin to starve. Deer crossing signs were urgently needed in the Mideast. Dozens were erected at all the designated crossings in hopes of altering the deer's social environment. The species of deer that inhabit the Mideast, however, is particularly destructive, even carnivorous, and have pulled down and trampled on all the signs, and have staged mass attacks on passing traffic, such as cars full of female journalists and Coptic Christians and ambassadors. These deer look like normal, peace-loving, plant-munching deer, but the workers who attempt to erect the signs and befriend the deer with handfuls of foliage have had their hands bitten off and their torsos gored. These aggressive deer have taken over whole sections of the highway, and the sweltering pavement is littered with human road kill as far as the eye can see. This species of deer is infected with an incurable strain of rabies. The Donnas of deer crossing sign policy implementation refuse to send in professional hunters to cull the herd or perhaps even eradicate the whole lot. Rabies is not, by Donna's thinking, a disease, but just a different way of looking at things. There is room on this earth for all classes of deer, even ones that froth at the mouth and whose coats are thick with tics and chiggers and other viral bugs. So, there it is. The Donna principle of people management and deer crossing sign guidelines. Don’t everyone get up and applaud me for the discovery. After all, I didn't build it. I must give credit to deeper thinkers than I, such as Plato and Augustine and Kant and Comte and Proudhon and Marx and Dewey and all those other guys. The metaphysics is: Reality is malleable, movable, and flexible. It can be anything one wishes. The consequent epistemology is: Deer will cross wherever you erect a sign. Automatically. Without fail. Except when they don’t and you must take a fistful of filings and do it yourself with your back turned to the audience, or the electorate. That's cheating, of course, but with artful sleights of hand, no one will notice. But whether or not it works or is cheating, is irrelevant, because it accomplishes the desired end. Deer or filings wind up in the right place, where they belong. Will someone please gag that guy in the front row who did notice? Link to Original
  2. The end of freedom of speech began with the invention of "hate crimes" as a means to deter and punish crimes committed against an individual or members of a designated or protected "minority." Hate crimes had their conspicuous genesis under the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which criminalized actions against individuals because of their race, color, gender, or national origin. This was the first major step away from treating individuals as individuals, and not as members of groups or tribes, and away from objectively defined crime. Following it was passage of the Federal Hate Crime Law of 1969 (18 U.S.C. § 245((2)) which, among other things, clarified or buttressed the definition of resistance to law enforcement officers, including preventing individuals from voting or the like because of their race, color, gender, and so on. It was followed by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which increased the penalties for "hate crimes." This in turn was complemented with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. (Incidentally, this law was a rider to the controversial National Defense Authorization Act for 2010.) The Act's name refers to two individuals, one a homosexual tortured to death in Wyoming, and a black man who was tied to the back of a truck in Texas and then decapitated. In neither state existed a hate crime law relevant to their groups, and the perpetrators of both crimes were tried under normal capital crime law. The formal name of the Act was a gratuitous sop to special interest groups for political advantage. The problem with the idea of a "hate crime" is that it appends an irrelevant motive to an action that would otherwise be treated as a felony, and makes the motive a felony, as well. Further, "hate crimes" are complemented by another invalid concept, "hate speech," also elevated to the status of a felony, that is, a crime. While criminal actions cannot be divorced from motives, up until recently motives were not punishable as state-defined and state-enforced crimes, only the fact of a criminal action. That is, a criminal action would be the initiation of force against an individual. The end or purpose of the initiation is irrelevant. It could be robbery, rape, or simply the malicious infliction of pain in revenge or as a means of visceral restitution. This dangerous and totalitarian idea of "hate crime" has naturally migrated into the realm of speech. Now the act of expressing a "negative" stance on Muslims, homosexuals, and other "protected" groups is treated as a "hate crime" compounded by the crime of "hate speech." Both notions seek to punish the contents of an individual's mind. However, no matter how repellant those contents, they can never be objectively known, not even when a defendant describes them. To make the contents of one's mind a legal liability, is a form of thought control. There is a double standard in force, however. Rappers can denigrate women freely with as many obscenities as are in their vocabulary. Muslims can call for the death of anyone who "denigrates" Islam or Mohammad. Rappers are defended by the First Amendment. Muslims screamers and sign carriers are also protected by the First Amendment, regardless of how outrageously homicidal or offensive or intimidating their rhetoric, but exempted from being charged with "hate speech" because they are now a special "protected" class who are merely expressing their "pain" and "offended feelings." Muslims are even excused from actual crimes such as physical assault with wrist-slaps, even though they may have employed "hate speech" in the commission of a provable crime. But Bryan Jennings, who got into an argument with a Muslim cab driver, and who expressed his feelings about the cab driver, was treated as a felon. He was fortunate that a judge ruled on the matter on a technicality created by a clueless and victimhood-seeking Muslim. Muslim organizations such as CAIR and its numerous ideological affiliates such as ICNA (allied with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC) wish to convert the First Amendment from a guarantee of freedom of speech to a punishable "freedom from speech" tool to silence criticism, whether that criticism takes the form of scholarly disquisitions or crude cartoons or just plain from-the-gut expressions of dislike or fear of Islam and Muslims. The concepts of "hate crime" and "hate speech," together or separately, are a form of totalitarian gangrene spreading throughout America's judicial system. Does anyone else see where this is leading? The notion of Orwellian "thought crime," once regarded as an impossibility in this country, has in fact taken root, doubtless fueled by political correctness and politically correct speech and group warfare, with the consequence that more and more Americans – dare we say it? – are afraid to think. Because to think is to court disaster and put oneself in a potential state of double jeopardy. This is dependent on whether or not they even know there is an issue. So, why bother to think? Dark Ages do not just suddenly happen. They begin when men begin turning off the lights of their minds. There is only one duty an individual is obliged to fulfill, and that is to think, and that is for his self-preservation. Neglect that duty, or abdicate it, and one's life may or may not be preserved at the whim of another. However, let's run down a short list of various notions of criminal law and how restrictions on freedom of speech can be rationalized and imposed by the state using criminal law at the behest of Muslims, their Islamic mouthpieces, and their "civil rights" advocates. Insofar as Islam is concerned, "hate speech" or a "hate crime" can be anything from satirizing Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims in a cartoon or video, to burning a copy of the Koran, to telling a Muslim to "go back where he came from," to innocuous jests, to writing a learned and critical treatise on Islam. Vicarious liability: This concept places the "public interest" above "private interest" and is concerned with the actions of an employer's employees. If I happen to be employed, and write something that offends Muslims but wrote it outside my employer's office and on my own time, it is possible that a court could hold the employer responsible for not having imposed any number of speech-deterring or preventative incentives to still my pen. Whether or not I had any criminal intent, would be irrelevant. Nor would my intent to educate or entertain others be relevant. Whether or not my employer had any right to impose those incentives would be irrelevant. The "public interest" would be construed as an absence of rioting Muslims. My speech "incited" rioting. The rioters would be held blameless. Ergo, the employer must be punished. If my speech violated Congressionally- or federally-imposed restrictions on speech (say, at the behest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the OIC through United Nations resolution 16/18), my employer's innocence in the matter would also be irrelevant. He would be held responsible for my actions, whether or not he had knowledge of them. Conspiracy: A conspiracy requires at least two persons to plot to take a criminal action, or an action defined by a government to be criminal. If criticism of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims is deemed a criminal offense, then Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Steve Emerson, Raymond Ibrahim, Nonie Darwish, Daniel Greenfield, Caroline Glick, and a host of other critics of Islam could be charged with conspiracy to "harm" Muslims, or hurt their "feelings," or violate their "sensitivities," acting in formal or informal compact, independently, or all together or in pairs or threes. The criminal action would be defined as a "plot" to hurt the feelings and sensitivities of Muslims with criticism of their religion, even though the criticism would be limited to the content of Islam's primary documents, such as the Koran, the Hadith and The Reliance of the Traveler, in order to highlight in those documents the numerous Islamic imperatives to initiate force against non-Muslims. Suppose, by some miracle of oversight, the government treated criticism of Islam as a "legal" end, but deemed a certain quality, tone or form of criticism "illegal," "irresponsible," and beyond the pale of civil inquiry or discourse. If CAIR or some other Muslim organization decided to file suit based on a perceived illegal form of criticism, the resolution of the case would depend entirely on a judge's or court's arbitrary and subjective interpretation of the offense. It may find for or against the plaintiff. The purpose of such a suit would not be justice, but vengeance for having spoken one's mind, and to exhaust the defendant's financial resources through attorney and court costs. Several states have passed laws invalidating "libel tourism," that is, suits brought against individuals in this country by Muslims in another country, particularly in Britain. Assault and/or Battery: Criminal or aggravated assault entails the physical initiation of force against another individual, with or without a weapon, with the intent to inflict bodily harm, compounded or not in the commission of another crime, such as robbery, rape, or simply harassment or intimidation. Battery is the unsolicited contact of another person, such as "buttonholing" him, jabbing a finger on his chest, grabbing his shirtsleeve, with no intent to inflict bodily harm. It is usually construed as unlawful detention if the victim did not wish to be "detained" by the aggressor and had no recourse but to "get physical" with the perpetrator, if he so chose. The notorious Rutgers case, which involved no physical contact at all between the defendant and the "injured" but the use of a webcam, saw the coining of another euphemism for "hate crime": bias intimidation. Muslims and their spokesmen repeatedly claim that Islam, Muslims, Mohammad, the Koran are under "assault" by their critics and that their "defamation" constitutes nearly literal physical assault, when in fact, all that can result from written, verbal or visual criticism of Islam in any form is "emotional cruelty" experienced by Muslims. But just as a man can ignore an insult and walk away, Muslims are free to do the same thing. Instead, practically all criticism of Islam is regarded as "hurtful" and an "insult," and Muslims and their advocates continually seek "justice" or restitution of or compensation for their lost "dignity" in courts. All a Muslim need do is assert some form of (unprovable) anguish (or a diminution of his mental and/or emotional well-being) as a result of the "inhuman" treatment of legitimate criticism, and is regarded as a virtual physical assault. There are irreconcilable differences between American law and Sharia, but Sharia, because it is a "religious" code, is frequently countenanced as a legitimate moral code that must not be amended or adulterated by secular law. After all, secular or man-made law is an abomination in Islam. See "Three " at minute 3:58 for an explanation of this crucial facet of Islamic activism. One would imagine, and with ample justification, that the purpose of these suits is to "divorce" Muslims from secular law, and to accord them "separate but equal" status. But there can be no feasible "separate but equal" relationship between a country's secular law and Sharia. One or the other must sooner or later dominate. That is the inevitable nature of compromise. Any compromise would be secular law's, not Islam's, for Islamic doctrine forbidscompromise. Islamists are working assiduously to ensure that Sharia dominates, and if successful, they will with blaring trumpets and calls from the minarets announce the end of freedom of speech and the reign of "freedom from speech." Libel and Slander: These are two favorite terms employed by Islamist supremacists when charging critics of Islam with "hate speech" or "insensitivity." One might "libel" or "defame" Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims by writing, broadcasting, or otherwise publishing in words or in recordings statements or images critical of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims, yet "perceived" by Islamic authorities or lawyers as malicious or false or defamatory in nature, resulting in a loss of one of those overrated intangibles, "respect" or "esteem" or "dignity." One might "slander" them by verbally making "false" or "malicious" statements. In both instances, the statements must be addressed to persons other than the subjects. But the champions of Islam hunt for offense and insult, and are perfidious eavesdroppers, as well. They always manage to find something "hurtful." Islam is alleged to be an efficacious and powerful creed, yet it seems to be so sensitive to criticism as to be an ideological hypochondriac, always complaining about something. One expects it to succumb any day now. Mohammad, if he actually existed, has been dead 1,400 years, and so is beyond libel or slander. In point of fact, his personal and private life is a goldmine of supermarket tabloid gossip, much of it recorded telltale in the Koran and Hadith, sordidly reminiscent of the private lives of the Kennedy clan and Bill Clinton but far, far worse. The things revealed in Islamic documents about this "role model" constitute a rap sheet of serious felonies a mile long. He is a perfect subject to be ridiculed, mocked, or caricatured, as much as Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. Or Barack Obama. Such a figure deserves contempt and hilarity, not "respect." As for Muslims, Mohammad is their icon and "prophet," and if they revere his alleged "wisdom" (if not his image, for that is forbidden), neither are they deserving of respect. You stay away from people whom you learn idolize Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde as paragons of virtue and goodness. You give the cold shoulder to people whom you know idolize a mass murderer, mass rapist, genocidal maniac, and slitter of throats and tongues and who threaten mayhem if you take his name in vain. "Hate crimes" and "hate speech" are the weapons employed by Islamists and secular statists to silence their critics. They are the shipworms of objective law, burrowing randomly but determinedly through its timbers oblivious to the time when the judicial structure of law, weakened by a maze of rotting tunnels and gaping caverns, must someday collapse into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. The champions of "hate crime" and "hate speech" know this. This is why freedom of speech must be upheld and defended with our utmost energy and dedication. For our own self-preservation, we must oppose turning the First Amendment into a felony offense. Link to Original
  3. Reading Seyyid Qutb's Milestones to pen a serious, informative, and critical review was an intellectual and literary chore I expected to be a cinch. Having finished reading this short, 160-page encomium for Islam, it is not so much a cinch as an exercise in nausea. Imagine assigning oneself the task of comparing a set of amusement park horror houses and awarding them points on how realistic their artificial ogres, witches, and ghouls were and how successfully they caused people to scream, cringe, or have strokes. That is, how does one go about discussing with a straight face the pathological meanderings of a very disturbed and malevolent man, knowing that his meanderings have served as an intellectual sanction for terrorism, death, destruction, and the ongoing Islamic jihad against the West? What makes it so nauseous a chore is not the English translation of Qutb's screed. I do not think the quality of the translation matters, because there is no way any translator could do the work justice other than just translating it straight from the Arabic. There are no elusive nuances to catch and objectify, there is no "poetry" or literary value to be found and captured in the work. It is the subject matter itself that is nauseous. Milestones is the Islamic equivalent of the mental ravings of psychotic murderers such as Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Ted Kaczynski. Milestones, published in 1964* (Ma'alim fi al-Tariq), purports to adhere to and advance the cause and spread of a moral code that will "save" mankind. The book is actually a manifesto for nihilism that guarantees man's enslavement and the eradication of any and all who refuse to submit to Islam. I have been writing for years saying that Islam is fundamentally a nihilist ideology (and that President Barack Obama is a practicing nihilist, as well, thus his symbiosis with Islam). Nihilism is an ideology that recognizes the good and acts to destroy the good, because it is the good. Qua nihilism, the destruction of the good is not haphazard or accidental. It is conscious and deliberate. Instances of Islam's core nihilism are legion. At the moment, I can think of no better example of it than Lara Logan's description of her ordeal in Tahir Square, Cairo, on February 11, 2011. As she describes it, her attackers, all Muslims (whether they were government goons or anti-Mubarak celebrants, is irrelevant), sought to literally pull her to pieces and to make it as painful as possible, and in the end destroy her. Nihilism is a system of negation; her attackers wished to extinguish her existence. Seyyid Qutb would have approved. To learn why, read these two accounts of his experiences in the United States here and here. Who was Seyyid Qutb? Qutb was a selfless little man, a "moderate" Muslim, who came out of Egypt to absorb Western methods of education, and returned to Egypt convinced that the West needed to be educated about the true nature of Islam, even if that pedagogy meant killing, maiming, and enslaving non-believers. He developed a special animus for the United States, for that is where he went to learn about Western education. Long before any mullah deemed America the "Great Satan," Qutb's observations of the country during his two-year sojourn here (1948-1950) caused him to mark it for jihad and its cultural and/or violent conversion to Islam. That is, he marked it for death. For that is all Islam is – a nihilist state of existence for Muslim zombies and their looted and subservient non-believers. Qutb, born in Egypt in 1906, was an Islamic "geek" from his teen years to his death in 1966. While an adolescent, he memorized the Koran and became a kind of neighborhood savant on its content and meanings. After his formal education in Cairo, he went into Egypt's education bureaucracy. Upon his return to Egypt from America, he resigned from it and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan Al-Banna in 1928. He rose to its highest position, a seat on its Shura or "guidance" council that set the means and goals of that organization's campaign for a Mideast caliphate, and eventually for a global one. Becoming embroiled in Egypt's political turmoil, he spent two terms in jail for being a member of the outlawed Brotherhood, which was at odds with the secular nationalists. He was hanged in 1966 after a show trial. He was a "martyr" without having ever strapped on a suicide vest or learned how to pilot a plane into a skyscraper. His "bomb" was an articulated, unswerving dedication to the Koran and its commands to wage jihad against the secularization of the Mideast and against the West. The Koran, he emphasized, was not just a book to consult for "culture and information." It was a command for action, a blueprint for purification and conquest. Osama bin Laden, author of 9/11, was a devoted follower of Qutb. He accused other Islamists, including the Brotherhood, of deviating from Qutb's principles of conquest and subjugation. Although how one could deviate from the Brotherhood's fundamentalist credo, beggars the imagination. Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader. Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations. "Death for the sake of Allah" here does not mean death from natural causes, old age, or by accident. It means throwing one's life at the "enemy" with the intention of causing his death and one's own. Compare that with the official Nazi oath of loyalty required to be taken by all officers and ranks of the Wehrmacht in August 1934: "I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath." The comparison is legitimate. Hitler found Islam a symbiotic ideology; the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini, found Nazism symbiotic. Modern Islamist leaders, spokesmen, and paramilitary armies emulate the histrionics, tactics, and even salutes of the Nazis. Hitler's written "struggle, or "striving" (otherwise known as jihad)" Mein Kampf, is a popular book in countries ruled by Sharia or countries yearning to be Islamist. Dutch politician Geert Wilders suggested it was the Nazi Koran. In terms of the Nazi oath, one could argue that Hitler was the objective, as well as the leader, that aggression was the Nazi way, and that death for the Fuhrer was the highest aspiration a German soldier could entertain. Qutb could just as well have written one expression of the Brotherhood's means and ends: Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims' efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is. Dr. Mohsen El-Guindy on October 9th published a long apologetic about Islam (nearly half as long as Milestones) together with a call for censorship of critics and mockers of Islam and Mohammad, which included an attack on Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. It echoes Qutb's theme: The purpose of life is to know Allah, to believe in Him and to worship Him according to how He wants to be worshipped, this includes that we live our lives according to His commands. In the Koran, Allah tells us that since the Messages of all prophets before the Prophet Muhammad have been distorted, none of these objectives could be achieved correctly except through His last and final Message, and therefore He will judge people on the Day of Judgment based on whether they believed and followed Islam. Rather laughably, among other non-sequiturs, El-Guindy advises that a Muslim should "use his logic, reasoning and intellect. Allah in the Quran stresses the importance for people to think, to reason and to use their mind and intellect," when Islam requires the surrender of logic, reason, and intellect – in short, of men's minds – in favor of blind, submissive faith. In essence, Islam does not want men who think. It wants men who obey without thought. Qutb's Milestones is a document that reveals an obsession with Islam as a political as well as a religious system. The Koran, Qutb writes, is a mandate for action, not merely a book of verse and virtues dictated to Mohammad for Muslims to hear and recite every Friday. "…If they had read the Qur'an only for the sake of discussion, learning and information, these doors [to action, or jihad] would not have opened. Moreover, action became easy, the weight of responsibilities became light, and the Qur'an became a part of their personalities, mingling with their lives and characters so that they became living examples of faith – a faith not hidden in intellects or books, but expressing itself in a dynamic movement which changed conditions and events and the course of life. (p. 18) Translation: The true, devout, genuine Muslim is one who does not merely answer the muezzin's call to prayers, but answers the call to action. Which means: Waging war on the infidel, to slay, convert, or enslave. Until all the earth is ruled by Islam, not just Egypt, or Iran, or Indonesia, or Britain or France. There is also a great difference in the idea that Islam is a Divinely-ordained way of life and in the idea that it is a geographically-bounded system. According to the first idea, Islam came into the world to establish God's rule on God's earth, to invite all people toward the worship of God, and to make a concrete reality of its message in the form of a Muslim community in which individuals are free from servitude to men [that is, free from man-made laws and governments] and have gathered together under servitude to God and follow only the Shari'ah of God. This Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path so that it may address human reason [!] and intuition with no interference and opposition from political systems….(p. 74) Further: Indeed, Islam has the right to take the initiative. Islam is not a heritage of any particular race or country; this is God's religion and it is for the whole world. It has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions which limit man's freedom of choice [the sole choice being limited to submitting to Islam]…It is the right of Islam to release mankind from servitude to human beings so that they may serve God alone, to give practical meaning to its declaration that God is the true Lord of all and that all men are free under Him….(p. 75) The Islamic notion of "freedom" is the freedom to submit to Allah, so that all men are "free" to worship him. It is a pseudo-volitional Hobson's Choice, that is, no choice at all. And Islam has taken the "initiative," that is, it is waging an aggressive campaign to subvert and conquer Western civilization. No political system or material power should put hindrances in the way of preaching Islam [dawa]. It should leave every individual free to accept or reject it, and if someone wants to accept it, it should not prevent him or fight against him. If someone does this, then it is the duty of Islam to fight him until either he is killed or until he declares his submission. (p. 57) The irrational, dualist nature of Islamic doctrine, in which things can be A and non-A at the same time (just as the latter verses in the Koran abrogate the earlier ones, which, however, are not to be removed or contradicted) is explained by Qutb: When writers with defeatist and apologetic mentalities write about "jihad in Islam," trying to remove this "blot" from Islam, then they are mixing up two things: first, that this religion forbids the imposition of its belief by force, as is clear from the verse, "There is no compulsion in religion (2:256), while on the other hand it tries to annihilate all those political and material powers which stand between people and Islam, which force one people to bow before another people and prevent them from accepting the sovereignty of God. These two principles have no relation to one another nor is there room to mix them. (p. 57, Italics mine.) What a formula for ideological schizophrenia! Or a very serious bipolar condition. See the "Three Things You (probably) Did Not Know About Islam" at minute 1:50 for a brief description of the significance of the contradictory verses. Qutb employs a term throughout Milestones to designate "the state of ignorance of the guidance of God," jahiliyyah. A society governed by jahiliyyah is described as jahili is outside the bounds of Islam, and is fair game for conquest and forced submission. The jahili society is any society other than the Muslim society…a society that does not dedicate itself to submission to God alone, in its beliefs and ideas, in its observances of worship, and in its legal regulations. (p. 80) Qutb inveighs against Communism as a form of jahiliyyah, claiming that "the communst ideology and the communist system reduces [sic] the human being to the level of an animal or even to the level of a machine." (p. 81) What does he say Islam does to men? Nothing. But Islam creates and values a human being who has sunk to the level of an animal by having surrendered his mind and self-identity to blind, unquestioning, unthinking faith in Allah. Qutb, and countless Islamic spokesmen, emphasize that a good Muslim is just such a creature, but instead claims he is enlightened and deserving of "respect." Islam, he claims, unlike Communism, is for all people, is classless, and does not appeal to economic or social groups. Yet its doctrinal proponents boast that it will indeed create an upper class of "superior" Muslims who will be accorded preferential status in politics and economics, and a lower class of umble, deferential, jizya-paying dhimmis. This is Qutb's notion of a just society. Nihilism in any form must be fought by calling it what it is, an ideological pathogen, and not pussy-foot delicately around its essence because it is disguised as a "religion" or a means to "save mankind." Islam, like communism, socialism, fascism, or any other collectivist ideology that seeks power over men, must be treated as essentially anti-man and anti-life. That is the only way it can be defeated and sent back beneath the rocks where it resides. Evil, after all, never admits it is evil. Its real and potential victims must be brave and perspicuous enough to call it out. Otherwise, it will never be defeated. Seyyid Qutb was a selfless, sexless, empty little man, a mad and maddened creature who annihilated himself and advocated the annihilation of anyone or anything that had an identity. A desolate world of ruins and corpses and bowing figures is the only world such a creature could feel comfortable in. *Milestones, by Seyyid Qutb. Dar Al-Ilm, Damascus, Syria. No copyright date (or copyright page) or actual publisher name or any other information is to be found in the copy I purchased. Amazon Books notes its ISBN numbers, ISBN-10: 0934905142 and ISBN-13: 978-0934905145, published by Kazi Publications in 2007, but this information is absent from the copy. Link to Original
  4. Anyone who remembers his American history courses in grade and high school – when American history was still being taught, because very little of it is today – will also remember all the glowing, adulatory accounts in standard textbooks of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. One encountered nary a disparaging word about them. They "saved the world," were "forward looking," or "ahead of their time," and "served selflessly" the cause of "democracy" and "social justice." These particular presidents appeared in those textbooks as squeaky clean, literal saints, and were held up as models of political and national leadership. They could do no wrong, and if these real-life Dudley Do-Rights failed in their missions to reorient the electorate to be more easily led to moral adventures, the New Frontier, and Great Societies, it was all the fault of greedy obstructionists and other Snidely Whiplash villains in Congress or the Supreme Court. Worse still, it was implied ever so subtly that we the people didn't deserve to have them as leaders. They were too good for us. We'd be punished for not living up to their expectations, for eschewing the need for "leaders." And we have been punished: We got Barack Obama. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy were not totalitarians, but their basic political agendas, at first interventionist and regulatory, are the groundwork for eventual total government. It was not for lack of trying. A statist principal cannot be applied only half-way, not in the long term. Sooner or later, if not checked and repudiated, it must be fully applied, across the board and over everyone and everything. As statist policies are implemented incrementally, the electorate must be made incrementally receptive to them, surrendering their liberties piecemeal over time in exchange for ever-dwindling but more expensive messes of pottage. School textbook portrayals of historical persons are based on what respected historians have written about them. What students have read in textbooks about the forenamed presidents is but a thin gruel distilled from approving weighty biographical tomes and sycophantic histories of movers and shakers. And of destroyers. Recently, Eric Hobsbawm, a respected British historian, died and received glowing obituaries in British and American newspapers. Eric who? When I first read the surname in a Daily Mail article, I immediately presumed it was either a name borrowed by J.R.R. Tolkien for a character in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or one invented by J.K. Rowling for a character in her Harry Potter series. Then, to my surprise and dismay, I learned he was an actual person, that he was an unrepentant Communist, that he taught history from the Marxist perspective in the best British schools, and that he wrote a number of histories from an unapologetic Communist standpoint. Then I saw the Daily Mail's photograph of him. I immediately nicknamed him The Horrible Hobgoblin of History. As he was revered, so were his books. At least they were in Britain. The New York Times ran a long article on him, while The Washington Post ran two, one an extended obituary, another a fond retrospective of his work. A.N. Wilson, writing for The Daily Mail, enlightened me about Hobsbawm and just how revered he was: On Monday evening, the BBC altered its program schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg. The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary. You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out of their way to pay tribute, that the nation was in mourning. Yet I do not believe that more than one in 10,000 people in this country had so much as heard of Eric Hobsbawm, the fashionable Hampstead Marxist who was the cause of all this attention. He had, after all, been open in his disdain for ordinary mortals. Yet the nation was not in mourning. Wilson suggests that most Britons were left scratching their heads trying to recollect just who this person was and why well-known persons such as Blair and Miliband were shedding tears over his passing. Unlike Wilson at The Daily Mail, William Grimes of The New York Times penned a nonjudgmental, praising article about Hobsbawm, subtly implying that if Americans hadn't heard of him until now, then they ought to have, because he was a very important person. Eric J. Hobsbawm, whose three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism established him as Britain’s pre-eminent Marxist historian, died on Monday in London. He was 95….Mr. Hobsbawm, the leading light in a group of historians within the British Communist Party that included Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, helped recast the traditional understanding of history as a series of great events orchestrated by great men. Instead, he focused on labor movements in the 19th century and what he called the “pre-political” resistance of bandits, millenarians and urban rioters in early capitalist societies. Grimes thought it apropos to quote an admiring professor of history from 2008: “Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history,” Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University, wrote in an e-mail in 2008, two years before he died. “On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.” To judge by Hobsbawm's political prejudices, had he not been a lifelong Communist, he might not have been an historian at all. Where's the fun in reporting and narrating facts? In discussing real causes and real effects? No, the Communist philosophy of history is to fit it all into a cockamamie ideology, and to dispense with facts if they won't cooperate. Very much the philosophy of Nazi history, and Islamic history, as well. Christopher Hitchens, in a 2003 book review of Hobsbawm's autobiography, neatly distilled the author's life as others did or would not: Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones. No, it is unlikely Hobsbawm would have survived Japanese captivity. He was an intellectual snob who would have been an abrasive fellow prisoner-of-war. As Wilson writes: Hobsbawm came to Britain as a refugee from Hitler’s Europe before the war, but, as he said himself, he wished only to mix with intellectuals. ‘I refused all contact with the suburban petit bourgeoisie which I naturally regarded with contempt.’ Naturally. Naturally, but not so inevitably. Hobsbawm must have witnessed the turmoil in Berlin and the street battles between the Communists, Nazis and other political groups vying for power in the expiring Weimar Republic. Spartacus, a self-educational blogsite connected with the left-wing Guardian, noted: When Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, what was left of Hobsbawn's [sic] family moved to London. He later recalled: "In Germany there wasn't any alternative left. Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed." It must have been hard choosing sides in Germany then, one gang of thugs battling another gang of thugs, both gangs fighting for the right to impose their brand of totalitarianism on a whole nation. Hobsbawm must have tossed a mental coin and it came up tails: Communism. After all, the Nazis allowed businesses and industries to keep their property, if only to have it serve Nazi purposes. The Communists were more thorough in such an expropriation; they took it all. Douglas Murray, writing for Gatestone, is just as scathing as A.N. Wilson in his appraisal of Hobsbawm: A writer in the Times recalled the dead Communist to have been – "a man of deep intellect, humility and charm" – on his only meeting with him; going on to claim that the talent the man had shown had "superseded" the ideology. I do not see how this could be so. This man's career was spent whitewashing, minimizing, excusing and stooging for some of the worst crimes in human history. Having been given ample years to recant his views, he resisted the call, instead holding them to the end. The system he supported prevented many people reaching even a quarter of the age he was fortunate enough to live to. But for him human life always took an – at best – secondary importance. The really crucial thing was communist ideology – surely, along with Nazism, the most bankrupt and destructive ideology the world has ever seen? Asked in a BBC television interview in 1994 whether the creation of a communist utopia would be worth the loss of "15, 20 million people," he replied clearly, "Yes." But Nazism, or fascism, lost the coin toss. Communism lost it, too, at least in Russia. Murray hypothesizes: Had he joined the Hitler youth voluntarily in 1933 and stayed inside fascist movements until his death; had he denied the Holocaust and said that the death of six million Jews and many millions of others would have been worth it for the achievement of the ideal Nazi state he would have died in ignominy. He would not have been celebrated in his life and he would not have been celebrated after death. Irrespective of any consideration of his works he would not have had plaudits from politicians of any stripe, let alone the leaders of political parties of the right. Formal Communism is certainly dead. China has a "communist" ruling elite, which is more fascist than communist. Britain is nominally "socialist," but is governed by a kind of watered-down, kid-gloves brand of fascism subscribed to and disguised by both major parties. The United States has been creeping unopposed, yet ever so cautiously, in the direction of fascism ever since FDR's first term in the White House. The current occupant has deliberately albeit pragmatically accelerated America towards a full national socialist polity. But, in the end, it matters little which brand of totalitarianism governs men, because the results are always the same: slavery and death and destruction. Historians like Eric Hobsbawm – and there are more of his ilk in academia, pale pinks and flagrant reds and retiring grays – give short-shrift to that slavery and death and destruction. They claim it's all part of a price to pay to shepherd the survivors – the meek, the humble, the morally lame and the halt – in the direction of that collectivist City on the Hill that is actually a prison built to save mankind. Hobsbawm preferred one style of totalitarian architecture; Howard Zinn another. Link to Original
  5. Daniel Greenfield's "Imagine if Mohammed Had Never Existed" (FrontPage, 29 September) is an invitation to explore some alternative "what might have been" history. It is tempting, for example, to imagine recent history and the state of America had President Barack Obama never existed – if, say, Stanley Ann Dunham had decided to try out for the Dallas Cheerleaders, or pursued a degree in physics, instead of trying to prove her "tolerance" with a sham marriage with a Kenyan Muslim and making whoopee in Hawaii with a black Communist on the FBI's watch list while pursuing degrees in anthropology and micro-financing – and so have never been born and sparing the country of his brand of super-sized community organizing. But, that would be too easy. We should go for the grand vista. Of course, it would be instructive, if not entertaining, to imagine what the world would have been like had not Karl Marx, or Thomas Jefferson, or Immanuel Kant, or Martin Luther ever existed, or none of the other prominent thinkers and movers. In their absence, however, other ideas would have filled the hypothetical vacuum. What they might have been, it is impossible to project. We can extrapolate ad infinitum, and really add nothing to the argument. Greenfield's article was prompted by the announcement on YNET News that, in the midst of all the Muslim rioting, flag-burning, embassy- and consulate-storming ostensibly over the trailer for Innocence of Muslims, a bargain-basement-produced film about the scurrilous and controlled-substance-assisted life of Mohammad, several Arab and Muslim outfits are going to produce their own films, about Islam, and especially about Mohammad. Meanwhile, Egypt's second-largest political movement, the Salafist al-Nur party, said it will produce a movie about the life of Mohammed, titled "what would the world look like without Mohammed." Or, "What an Allah-less Life." Or, It's a Sharia Life." Too obviously, members of the al-Nur Party have been copping a feel of decadent Western culture, admitting that they have been inspired by Frank Capra's hoary old altruist chestnut, It's a Wonderful Life. I can't think of a better film to rip off for Islamic themes and material, not to mention for secular collectivist themes and material. It's all about the Ummah of Bedford Falls exercising its claim on the life of hapless George Bailey, so that he may continue to sacrifice for the sake of the "community." Recall the famous scene on the bridge when he contemplates suicide, and is rescued by the angel Clarence. At one point he wishes that he had never been born. So Clarence shows him what his town would have been like if he hadn’t. Capra's film depicts a town that has succumbed to the alleged depredations of capitalism, in the form of Mr. Potter, that mean, heartless, conniving, garrulous old banker and nemesis of George Bailey. Al-Nur's financed filmmakers will have the angel Gabriel to show him the way. But we will not be shown Mohammad. That's against the law. Gabriel will doubtless be shown whispering sweet-nothings into – if we're lucky – an ear, in the dead of night, or amongst the dead by Mohammad's hand. Or as he shivers in a cave. Or perhaps they will adopt the "I am a camera" device, with a visible Gabriel showing an unseen Mohammad the world had he not been born, and we see it through Mohammad's eyes. That device has been used with limited success in other films. But one wonders if there is a prohibition of it in some past version of the Koran. More effort will be put into Gabriel's costume and makeup than into Mohammad's. Not a finger or a sandaled toe of Mohammad can be shown. In fact, the filmmakers needn't cast anyone for the role. Technically, if the filmmakers begin at the year of Mohammad's birth, 570 A.D., there is really nothing they could show of the world. Mohammad won't be there to see it, unless they adopt the George Bailey-Clarence the Angel device. There's no record that Mohammad ever left the Arabian Peninsula or knew that trees grew in what would in the future become Brooklyn. All we would see is baking desert, a few oases, perhaps a dusty town or two, camel caravans, and men who were old by the age of forty. There's no evidence that he had any knowledge of Rome or even of Constantinople, or of the Atlantic Ocean. Another task for the producer and director of "The Life of Mohammad" or "The World Without the Prophet" would be to somehow account for the lives of Mohammad's twenty-four predecessors, all revered "prophets" in Islamic lore. To not mention them would be a snub of the gravest import. But, then, Mohammad is regarded as the last in that line of monotheists. His immediate predecessor is ‘Īsá, or Jesus Christ. "Real" revelation began with Mohammad, not with that puffed-up Christian imposter, according to Islamic lore, and not with his predecessors. So, it is okay to burn Bibles that include Christ's name. So, you can bet on it. Al-Nur's movie about "the prophet" will not be a musical, Muḥammad ibn `Abd Allā, Superstar. Mohammad is regarded the end-all and be-all of all those prophets. And, for some unfathomable reason, while it is permissible to publish imagined likenesses of Nūḥ, Hūd, Ibrāhīm, Ayyūb, Mūsá, Zakariyyā, Yaḥyá, ‘Īsá, and all the others, it is not permissible under pain of death to portray Mohammad. Go figure. Every one of them preceded Mohammad by centuries and has doppelgangers in Judeo-Christian lore. Every one of them needed barbering, too. But they were first, all the way back to Adam. By the accepted year of Mohammad's birth, Eastern Emperor Justinian had been dead for five years, and the Roman Empire he had sought to resurrect in the West had fallen apart. There were empires, kingdoms, and dynasties elsewhere in the globe, some reaching the apex of their power, others enfeebled by age and stasis, still others besieged by barbarians. A tenuous commerce existed in a world made desolate by warring tyrants and the conquest by barbarians. In the previous century, the Huns had battled the Vandals and the Visigoths over the scattered carcass of the Roman Empire. Justinian had reclaimed some of it, but it disintegrated almost immediately on his death. In Mohammad's time, Europe was a chaos of rival Germanic and Frankish tribes. Chronologically, the Dark Ages began with the accession of a Germanic barbarian, Flavius Odoacer,in 476, when he deposed Romulus Augustus, to a literal kingship over Rome and Italy. It is interesting to note here that Odoacer was an Arian Christian. Arianism rejects the Trinity of the mainstream Christianity, that is, it denies the divinity of Christ. So does Islam. Because Islam is very likely a patchwork religion deriving its essential doctrine, texts, and iconography from Christianity, Judaism, and a variety of contemporary pagan religions (see Robert Spencer's Did Mohammad Exist?), one may credibly argue that Islam also borrowed the Arianist view of Christ to better inflate Mohammad's stature of the One and Only True Prophet. Islam didn't exist at that time, and Arianism was to Christianity what Scientology is to Methodism today. It was known and novel. Why not "borrow" some of its doctrine? Who's going to stop Mohammad? Whose "prophet"? Allah's. But, then, Mohammad cadged from a pagan religion and adopted its moon god, Allah. It could just as well have been Kilroy. Or Kill Joy. Or Joe Shmoe. Mohammad turned him into a very scary creature. The world would have looked dark and desolate with or without Mohammad for roughly the next one thousand years. It was truly a world "lit only by fire," and certainly not by the fire of the intellect, not until the 14th century humanist Petrarch first made the distinction between his time and the centuries before him. The Arabian Peninsula – Mohammad's world – would have remained as it actually remained without him, a place of warring tribes of various creeds, devoted to plunder, rapine, slaughter and stagnation. Islam, as a call to conquest, did not begin making inroads in the known world until well into the seventh century, after Mohammad's death in 632. The "Moors" of that time were not necessarily "Muslims," but rather a generic appellation for tribes that lived in North Africa. Shakespeare's Othello, "The Moor of Venice," was certainly not a Muslim. There really would not have been much difference. Religions of all stripes were the reigning moral codes, even for barbarians. It is hard to imagine what al-Nur's filmmakers will concoct, unless one can project what committed ideologues can create assisted by amphetamines. Daniel Greenfield unleashed his imagination to project a world without Mohammad. It is a Mideast unrecognizable today. It is a center of learning, technology, civil societies, and genuine human progress and happiness. And not a single mosque, minaret, or mass arse-lifting in submission to a rock in sight. Not a single OPEC sheik, not a single Uzi-bearing terrorist or "freedom fighter" extant, either. But I'm more realistic and argue that not much would have changed at all, had Mohammad not existed. If the Islamic world has anything of value at all, it is by grace of the free West. This includes all their bomb-making materials and rocketry. For 1,400 years, it has preferred stagnation and submission and unfreedom. It is the only way it can rule. And unless Muslims repudiate their faith, that is all they're going to inherit. All else is fantasy. Link to Original
  6. Slate joined the tut-tut mob of dhimmified American pundits and commentators by endorsing the abridgement of the First Amendment, at the behest of thin-skinned, super-sensitive Muslims, in its September 25th article, "The Vile Anti-Muslim Video Shows That the U.S. Overvalues Free Speech." Slate is proof that the Internet isn't wholly a refuge from the Mainstream Media. It has its complement of liberal, leftist and myopic sites that range from banal to bizarre to outlandishly vitriolic. It isn't immediately apparent in the Slate article, written by Editor Eric Posner, that it denigrates not only the First Amendment, but anyone upholding its sanctity, because it took him ten paragraphs of irrelevant commentary to reach the conclusion that the First Amendment is ready for a tweaking and perhaps even a rewrite that would favor Muslims and Islam. Robert Spencer zeroed in on the key statement in the Slate article in his Jihad Watch article of September 26th, and dismisses it with brevity. He quotes from Slate first: "That’s because the First Amendment protects verbal attacks on groups as well as speech that causes violence (except direct incitement: the old cry of “Fire!” in a crowded theater). And so combining the liberal view that government should not interfere with political discourse, and the conservative view that government should not interfere with commerce, we end up with the bizarre principle that U.S. foreign policy interests cannot justify any restrictions on speech whatsoever. Instead, only the profit-maximizing interests of a private American corporation can. Try explaining that to the protesters in Cairo or Islamabad." (Bold emphasis is Spencer's) Spencer: "In other words, surrender before they hit us again." That's all that need be said. Spencer handily runs other publication over the coals in his Jihad Watch/Atlas Shrugs article, "The Suicide of the Free Press," on how and why other publications are picketing against the First Amendment. Citing the example of the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed by Sarah Chayes, a career do-gooder currently with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Spencer asks: But the larger question is, why is the Los Angeles Times coming down on the side of restrictions on the freedom of speech in the first place? Are they not aware that such restrictions, if implemented, can and probably will be used against them? While the Los Angeles Times editors are no doubt serene in their certainty that they will never print anything that will insult Islam or Muslims, there could all too easily come a time when a governing authority deems something they have published to be “hateful” or even“deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk,” and – if free speech by then has been restricted – that will be the end of the Times as an outpost of the free press. Further, there is Posner's "profit-maximizing" qualifier coupled with the "interests of a private American corporation" that reveals Slate's anti-capitalist leanings. We'll leave that alone for the time being, although it would be interesting to know why Posner thought it necessary to say that and not something to the effect, "Only the speech of private individuals can be restricted or interfered with in political discourse," because it boils down to the same thing: restrictions à la carte. And what has "commerce" to do with the issue? I don’t think Posner agrees with Ayn Rand that freedom of speech is dependent on the status of private property. So, one can only scratch one's head in trying to comprehend the legal universe Posner occupies and speaks from. President Barack Obama said at the U.N. that "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." Or criticize him? Or resort to Charlie Hebdo level cartoons? Or to awful video trailers whose Muslim funding is just now coming to light? (See Wade Shoebat's revelations here; apparently the "Innocence of Muslims" has a not-so-innocent pedigree.) One might be tempted to say, "Nor should the future belong to those who slander Jesus. Or Ayn Rand. Or any one of H.L. Mencken's dead gods." But that would be conceding the premise that speech about these figures ought to be "restricted." Sorry, old chap, but the future belongs to me, a slanderer, mocker, blasphemer, and critic of Muslims and Islam and its pedophilic icon, Big Mo. What's the government going to do about it? Ask Huma Abedin to send some ski-masked jihadist thugs to beat me up? Give me the Daniel Pearl treatment? Or perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will request that a joint DHS/TSA Swat team swoop down on me and take me in for questioning. Posner opined that Obama's speech contained "a strong defense of the First Amendment." In fact, it was one of the most tepid but insidious "defenses" of an American freedom on record. Why? Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He ought to have noted the quid pro quo which Obama had no business offering the United Nations, the OIC, the world that doesn’t like our First Amendment, and Muslims: You stop slandering Jesus, we'll stop slandering Mohammad. That's tantamount to agreeing to give the school yard bully your money and your lunch, and he agrees to stop giving you a black eye and dunking your head in a commode. Muslims won't stop slandering other creeds' icons – try and stop them– but how does Posner propose to stop the slandering, libeling, or mockery of Mohammad, except by applauding the criminalization of speech at the behest of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the United Nations, Hillary Clinton, and anyone else who doesn’t like the First Amendment? The criminalization of speech about Islam is a proposed exercise in people management and Platonic guardianship by elitists ensconced in the ivory tower of indemnified statism. It is supposed to combat violence and bridge the gap between Western and Islamic civilizations. But Islam isn't a "civilization"; it is an ideology hell-bent on conquest. But as Daniel Greenfield points out in his essay, "Muslim Multiculturalism and Western Post-Nationalism" notes: The left's post-national identity is based on a secular political multiculturalism. Islam's post-national identity is based on a religious theocratic multiculturalism. The left has heresies that it prosecutes as hate crimes and Islam has heresies that it prosecutes as blasphemy. Progressives have been always too stupid to understand that the consequences of their progressivism in undermining the current, more advanced, phase of human society is the restoration of reactionary social and political systems. In Russia, the Bolsheviks toppled an intermediary government and restored a Czar named Stalin and feudalism under the name of collectivism, to the proud cheers of the world's leftists at the progress they were making. In the Arab Spring, they brought back Islamism and they have brought it back in London and Sydney, and Paris and New York as well. My advice to Eric Posner: Think about what you're asking for. You just might have your way. But, you may regret your not being able to say what you wish to say about anything. Criminalizing speech about Islam doubtless will set a poison pill precedent to criminalize speech about anything the state deems protected, sacrosanct, and not open to discussion. You may someday need to shout "Fire!" and won’t, because you've surrendered your right to. To you, it won’t seem practical. Or right. You've "progressed" to a more "mature" standard of speech. Besides, it would be against the law. Shouting "Fire!" might provoke someone to throw a Molotov cocktail. You would be hard-pressed to prove to the authorities that it wasn’t your intention to provoke the thrower of the Molotov cocktail. You would protest: That was his action, not yours. You were merely trying to save lives. He was trying to take lives. How awful! Still, your action "triggered" his action. You would be held responsible. The law would say so. Hands behind your back, please. These are plastic cuffs, and won’t hurt a bit. Link to Original
  7. It's the classic routine of Good Cop, Bad Cop. And Bad Cop. Their names are President Barack Obama, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. There you are, having been brought into the station to be "interviewed" by the thought police for having "offended" Muslims by "defaming," "denigrating," "mocking," "dis-respecting" Islam. They've not arrested you – they want you to understand that, and you're free to go any time you wish, except that the interrogation room door is locked and there are cops in riot gear guarding it outside – they've only manhandled you into the police car and driven you to the station so you can offer your point of view so they can better understand "where you're coming from." They wouldn't have done that if they hadn't received complaints and warnings from the offended parties that you are hovering close to "inciting violence" by bad-mouthing Islam. The world-weary, jaded-looking guys just want you to admit responsibility for having caused recent riots. They want to go home and get some sleep, even though they have roused you from a deep sleep at 1 a.m. They commiserate with you about exhaustion and working odd hours. Then you can go, once you recant and sign a lengthy letter of apology to the rioters and to the dead and maimed the rioters have caused and to all Muslims for having "insulted" their faith. They want you to distance yourself from other "offenders." They want you to repudiate your convictions. After all, what's a conviction worth. You can't eat one, or deposit it in the bank. What are you, obsessed or something? Get with the program. The offended parties wish to see justice done. They keep shouting that they "don’t get no respect," except they're not trying to be funny like Rodney Dangerfield and wouldn't emulate him if they could, because Dangerfield was Jewish. They want "respect" and they want restitution. They wish to silence you on the matter of Islam while not restricting your First Amendment rights. You'll be allowed to denigrate Jews and Christians and atheists and Buddhists and other non-believers to your heart's content, as they do. Muslims are a protected "minority" and have been granted dispensation and a variety of legal indulgences. But the offended parties have warned the authorities that they cannot calm their collect for too much longer, as their outrage is real and cannot be contained indefinitely. They might begin to riot and harm the police sent to preserve the peace, and it'll be all your fault. You are informally accused of being an "extremist," "hate-monger," "racist," and "bigot." But just understand that you're not under arrest, you're only being charged off-the-record, you have every right to be any one or all of those things. Understand that the umbrella term for all those things is "Islamophobia," and that you have the Constituitonal right to be a pariah, which is all you can be by criticizing Islam in any form whatsoever. It's the law, you see. It's your choice, we're not here to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, this is a free country. Your crime? You might have posted a scurrilous cartoon of Mohammad on the Internet, showing him in a tutu performing an intimate act on a goat. Or you might have depicted Mohammad on his knees, worshipping a statue of the original "Allah," a pagan moon god, with the caption, "I wonder if they'd mind if I stole you." You might have had the audacity to direct and post on the Internet an awfully amateurish satiric video on the life of Mohammad with phony backdrops and a third-rate cast and dialogue that would make a third-grader blush. You might have developed an extensive knowledge of Islam and all its key documents and wrote for various Internet publications that these documents call for the enslavement of all non-Muslims if not their conversion to Islam, and if not their enslavement or conversion, then their violent extinction. In other columns, you have underscored the fact that 99% of the murders and bombings and attacks on the West over the last several decades have been committed by Muslims, and posed the question: Is there a coincidence? Does anyone see a "pattern" here? You might have been satirically poetic and posted a comment similar to: "The handful of wilted daisies and tulips that Muslims claim constitutes irrefutable proof of Islam's desire for peace and tolerance and goodwill is intended to disguise a mound of stinking, putrid mulch garnered from the psychotic mental meanderings of an iconic thug a millennium and a half ago, and treated as the last and only word in nurturing and preserving a society of humble and uncomplaining gimps." Of course, neither the cartoon, nor the video, nor the scholarly essay, nor the poetic license was ever intended for Muslim eyes, but for the amusement or edification of like-minded individuals who are wondering why darkness is enveloping their world. You can't tell Muslims not to look at any of it – it's a free country, isn't it? – but they do, and are predictably incensed, and warn that if nothing is done about it, they will do something about it. You are being "interviewed" in order to answer for the flagrant abuse of your First Amendment right to freedom of speech. You are suspected of "falsely shouting 'fire'" across the street from where a real fire was consuming the lives of thousands, none of whom were warned that their theater was about to go up in flames with all the exit doors locked. You were not in that theater; therefore, you had no right to shout "fire!" After you say nothing in answer to all their beseechments – you know better than to volunteer information to the cops – Good Cop delivers an impassioned speech about Muslims having been persecuted and discriminated against for centuries, and that while their violent reactions to that persecution and discrimination are inexcusable, you've got to understand that their deepest convictions have been questioned and examined and shown to be lacking in any desire for peace, tolerance, and goodwill, except for other Muslims. The Good Cop declaims, with dramatic gesticulations and the appropriate facial expressions: So let us remember that this is a season of progress. For the first time in decades, Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans voted for new leaders in elections that were credible, competitive and fair. Your mind utters a silent "Huh?" They elected dictators, and theocratic purists. It was "one man, one vote, once and for all, forever and ever." End of 'democracy.'" Does this guy know what he's talking about? Let us remember that Muslims have suffered the most at the hands of extremism. On the same day our civilians were killed in Benghazi, a Turkish police officer was murdered in Istanbul only days before his wedding, more than 10 Yemenis were killed in a car bomb in Sana'a, several Afghan children were mourned by their parents just days after they were killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul. Your mind makes a face. A handful of Muslims murdered by Muslims is supposed to balance the 3,000 murdered on 9/11, as a declaration of war by the states that sponsored the attack, and the uncounted thousands murdered by Muslims over 1,400 years? Give me a break. The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt. It must be claimed by those in Tahir Square who chanted, ``Muslims, Christians, we are one.'' The future must not belong to those who bully women. It must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. You can't remember the first time Good Cop ever said anything before now about the Copts. And all that stuff about Tahir Square? Doesn’t he know that the Muslims are running the Copts out of town? And that Tahir Square is the last place a female Western journalist ought to think of collecting the news, except inside a Bradley Fighting Vehicle? The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied. Sorry, old chap, you mentally say to Good Cop, but you can't have it both ways. It isn't going to happen. As a specially protected and patronized and suffering minority – at least in this country – Muslims will damn well say what they wish about anyone else's religious icon, and claim First Amendment rights, too. They are allowed to offend, insult, and denigrate anyone. And if you reply to it, it will be called "hate speech." You see, they don’t spew "hate speech." Good Cop scrutinizes you for a moment, surprised that you haven’t objected or responded to anything he's said. Ostensively disappointed, he sighs and leaves the room and you are alone with Bad Cop. Bad Cop circles you like a hungry wolf. He stands behind you for a moment, breathing heavily, to let you wonder what he's going to do next. Then he stands across the table from you and begins pounding it and shaking his fist at you and pacing like a tormented tiger. He kicks the legs of the table so hard that the unused ashtray and can of Coke Good Cop was kind enough to buy for you fall to the floor. He sounds a little like Laurence Olivier in Richard the Third, Act One, Scene One, "rudely stamped" and not "shaped for sportive tricks," but with none of Olivier's sense of timing or elocution. He simply rants on, hoping his raw anger will make you slump in your chair from sheer funk, a sure sign of admitted guilt, or at least of complicity. "Those Zionists!" he barks, "their days are numbered!" That statement, you realize, is only tangentially connected to the freedom of speech issue. Then he mentions Salman Rushdie and the fear he was living in as a result of abusing his First Amendment privileges with his blasphemous novel. "If he is in the U.S., you should not broadcast it for his own safety." You blink in astonishment. Rushdie was not a U.S. citizen, but a British citizen, and so his freedom of speech was not protected by the First Amendment. But, then, neither is that of other British citizens. Anymore. Bad Cop careens wildly back and forth over other issues. You lose interest. You have not slumped in your chair. This man is either a bad actor, or genuinely crackers. Iran has been around for the last seven, 10 thousand years. They (the Israelis) have been occupying those territories for the last 60 to 70 years, with the support and force of the Westerners. They have no roots there in history. We do believe that they have found themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end. Iran will not be damaged with foreign bombs. Bad Cop finally concludes by "hewing himself out with a bloody axe" and stomping out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The door opens again almost immediately and instead of Good Cop, a short, scruffy-looking man in a suit comes in whom you recognize as a convicted felon but who is now the head of an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood working closely with the authorities to preserve the peace. He does not introduce himself, but glares at you and launches into a tirade about "responsible speech." "We must acknowledge the importance of freedom of expression. We must also recognize that such freedom comes with responsibilities, especially when it comes with serious implications for international peace and stability." He ends with, "You, infidel, are the primary guarantor of that peace and stability by not offending Islam and taking liberties with your tongue with our honored Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. If there is chaos and bloodshed and misery, it will happen because you have failed." You want to respond, but you know that the room is wired for sound. You settle for flicking the fingers of your right hand under your chin in his direction. It's an offensive Italian salute, but you can always say you had to scratch an itch. By 5 a.m. more attempts by Good Cop, Bad Cop, Scruffy Man, and some pious members of the Interfaith Dialogue Barbershop Quartet have failed to get you to open up and cry your heart out that you didn't mean for any bad things to happen. You are escorted out of the station and given a ride home. You merely nod thanks to the friendly driver in blue. You have said nothing. You have confessed nothing, admitted nothing. You've defeated their system. You may as well have been deaf and dumb. It's 6 a.m. and you're just in time to watch the morning news. A nicely groomed anchorwoman begins by announcing that a bipartisan House committee will introduce legislation criminalizing not only deprecatory speech about Islam, but also any criticism of White House policies and programs. "The move is seen as a means to curb reckless, irresponsible speech that contributes to the turmoil that is disturbing national security and delaying economic recovery," says the blonde. "The bill is expected to pass the Senate without much amendment, and be signed by the President." You shut the TV off and go to your study. You discover that your laptop computer is gone, as well as the external backup drive, all your thumbnail files, and your filing cabinet with your hard-copy research has been rifled and half its contents missing. A hand-written note is taped to your empty computer desk. It reads: "It's for your own good. BPUH." It's then that you realize that it's all over but the jail time. Link to Original
  8. Everything done by the Obama administration since its inauguration in January 2009, every word, every gesture, every silence, every dog-and-pony show, has been to preserve the peace – of the state. In this endeavor, the public peace – or, as our Founders might have called it, the public "general welfare," that is, the non-coercive, civilized trade between civilized men – has been largely secondary in consideration by this administration, and often at mortal odds with its primary task of preserving the state. The state must not only retain its power over the people, over the economy, over the actions of its citizens, but expand its powers in order to perpetuate its powers. In too many instances, those actions have had a distinctive, signature nihilistic intent. What is the state? A state is to be distinguished from a nation. A nation is a geographically identified patch of the earth populated by citizens of a particular political suasion and culture. A nation's government may have some control over its citizens' actions. Good fortune would have the state exercise its monopoly on force to retaliate only against those who initiate force against any of its citizens, and against foreign aggressors and aggression. The stewards of the state, with good fortune, would know that their task was to preserve the public peace in that fashion, and not to preserve the state for the sake of the state alone. They would know that to violate that understanding would be to behave as criminals and foreign aggressors behaved. The stewards would abhor any suggestion that they act otherwise, and oppose with vehemence any proposal that they act contrary to their mandate. A state acting on the converse premise would take any action necessary to preserve itself and expand its powers. A state exists for its own sake and a state that does so must necessarily act against the "general welfare" or peace of the nation. A state moved by such a premise cannot remain in stasis, that is, as a state arrested at a certain point in growth. It must move and act to justify its existence, to the populace, to itself, even to other states or nations. No state founded on such a premise says to itself or to its citizens: thus far and no farther. For if it did, questions would arise about the powers it has appropriated to itself. Such a policy would serve to undermine its alleged legitimacy. Hitler did not mean it when he repeated that he had made his last "territorial demand." He was compelled, by the nature of his rule, to invade and seize the lands and resources of Germany's neighbors. After Mohammad's death in the 7th century, his successors were compelled, by the nature of Islam's ideology, to conquer as much of the Mideast as possible. The state, however, must advance in an environment of peace, that is, without significant internal opposition, encountering no controversies, no stumbling blocks, no distracting issues. All constitutional, civil, and social roadblocks must be removed. This is what happened in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Mussolini's Italy, and Chavez's Venezuela. At the same time, it must have an enemy, a nemesis, or something that threatens its existence, a reason to solicit or require the support of the citizens, whose livelihoods or existence are alleged to be in peril were the state jeopardized or attacked. One key element of statism is to make citizens dependent on the state for their sustenance, and to convince the citizenry that they are the state, and that any proposal to nullify a state's power over them imperils them, as well. After all, they are the state. It would be annoyingly pedantic, not to say redundant, to itemize every action taken by the Obama administration these last four years. Such a list would go on for pages, perhaps for as many pages as the text of Obamacare. Most significant of late has been the government's official response to the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the Hillary Clinton echoed the embassy message to "deplore" free speech. Clinton said: "Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind." This is speaking with a forked tongue. The administration agrees with Muslim Brotherhood, which does not speak with a forked tongue. Its spokesmen are quite forthright: Reuters reported that Mursi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood," asked the Egyptian embassy in Washington to take legal action in the United States against makers of a film attacking the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, the official state news agency said on Wednesday." "Mursi had requested the mission take 'all legal measures,' the MENA agency said, without giving further details on what that might involve," Reuters added. The Wall Street Journal reported, without realizing it, that Obama repeated President George W. Bush's policy on Islam, that the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi were the work of "extremists" and "killers," not the result of a viral ideology: I have directed my Administration to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe. While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants. Yes, the violence was "senseless," but "senseless in the context of it not having been necessary. All the Egyptians and Yemenis and Libyans and Afghanis and Australian Muslims needed to do is put those "Islam Will Dominate" signs and American flags and Zippo lighters away and wait for the administration to implement the United Nations ban on all criticism of Islam and erase the First Amendment. Ambassador Chris Stevens became a "martyr" in the war against freedom of speech. That is all. The official government line ever since 9/11/2001 has been that Islam is a "religion of peace," no threat to anyone not a Muslim, and that it has been "hijacked" by "extremists," "radicals," "fundamentalists," and "misunderstanders." If Barack Obama is going to blame Bush for anything, it is this fallacious policy of closing one's eyes to the true, totalitarian nature of Islam. He perpetuates it every time he opens his mouth about Islam and the Mideast. But Obama has a totalitarian, nihilist streak in him as wide as the Mississippi. Some observers had claimed that he is not a Marxist ideologue. Perhaps he isn't. Then all one call him is a Marxist pragmatist, because his domestic policies are colored pink throughout. He won’t nationalize the car industry, but let it limp on with massive bailouts that don’t save the industry. His chairman of the Federal Reserve, Bernard Bernanke, recently announced another "bailout" of the economy which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have scarred and slashed with their fiscal policies worse than the Cat Woman's steel claws. The Business Spectator wrote: As part of the open ended nature of the bond purchases, the Fed has committed to buying $40 billion of mortgage backed securities per month. In a Fed first, and this is the highlight of the Fed statement, “if the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases and employ its other policy tools as appropriate”. However, the taking of the lives of public servants is horrendous. The taking of the personal lives daily in Egypt, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, merits no comment or consideration. Agents of the state were brutally murdered. The state is blind or indifferent to the brutal murders of thousands of people who are not public servants. This slaughter has been going on for the last 1,400 years. As soon as a totalitarian has consolidated his power and won the approval of the citizenry, freedom of speech is the first casualty. When Hitler ascended the dais of power, all newspapers were gagged and it was made a crime to criticize the state. Any paper not towing the Party line was raided, its presses smashed, its editors and journalists arrested and sent to concentration camps. This has been the drill in every nation that has traded its freedoms for the "security" of the state. There is Obama's state to preserve, and the Islamic state to spread. Between them, for the moment, there is a symbiosis in ends and means. Daniel Greenfield noted in his brilliant if plaintive column, "The Price of a Koran," that today's policymakers are not the stuff that made the American Revolution possible: Muslims are equally willing to pay the price in blood for slavery, their own slavery and ours, for a book of slavery, written by an owner and abuser of slaves, who created a religion of slaves, where the optimal position was to stand on as many people as possible while reaching for heaven. The men who fought to make us free placed value on their lives. The men who fight to enslave us place little value on their own. Whatever material pleasures they enjoy in this life, little girls, hashish and wealth, will be vastly improved upon in the afterlife. And they buy their way into that afterlife by killing us, as they have been doing for over a thousand years. Each of their murders imposes their religion on us. They impose their notion of what is important and what isn't important. Twenty years ago no one would have cared a fig for a burned Koran or a cartoon of Mo. Today either one earns you an accusation of endangering the lives of American soldiers and inciting violence. Dress up as Zombie Mohammed and Judge Mark Martin will tell you that in a Muslim country you would get the death penalty. That's not the way it works here. Yet. What difference should it make to Americans that the material pleasures enjoyed by our wannabe censors are free jet planes to fly to Europe and Martha's Vineyard and reelection rallies and interminable rounds of golf and rubbing shoulders and getting "jiggy" with rap artists and singers who can't sing? A new term is entering the coinage of politically correct speech: "responsible speech." It is employed by the administration and by the Islamic advocates of selective censorship. Cyrus McGoldrick, an official of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said last Sunday on Iranian TV that, Few protestors likely even saw the video, said McGoldrick, civil rights director for CAIR's New York chapter. "And I don't think it's about the film at all, really, I think that people are tired. People have had enough of what is seen by them, what looks to them like America's war on Islam. And this is one of the symptoms of that."…. Americans enjoy "allegedly a freedom of speech, a freedom of expression –political expression and religious expression," he explained. "And of course, that comes with it some rights, but also, of course, some responsibilities." Obama's goal is to preserve the peace – of the state. His state, too, needs Lebensraum. It needs the mandate of the citizens in whose name he wishes to expand the powers of the state. It can't expand if citizens are objecting to his endless demands for more space and powers. He must convince the electorate that their peace of mind and sustenance and well-being depend on his actions. To that end he must silence those who demand in turn to be left alone to pursue their own peace of mind, sustenance, and well-being. It is hoped that come November, enough Americans will say in the voting booths: thus far, and no farther, and then they'll begin reclaiming America from the state. Link to Original
  9. It's much like the alignment of the planets to produce some catastrophic force, or the convergence of two storm systems: The U.S. remembers 9/11. On 9/11/2012, Muslims mobs assault the U.S. embassy in Cairo, hauling down the U.S. flag and raising the black flag of jihad. In Benghazi, Libya, hours later, another mob launches a military-style attack on the U.S. consulate, killing the U.S. ambassador and staff members, including two Marines, and burning the place to the ground. Over what? A satiric movie about Mohammad and the poisonous fraud of Islam that few Americans even knew about? Or was it about the death by drone of a Libyan Al-Qada leader? Who knows? Who cares? This is Islam at its best. This is Islam and Muslims shining through. Muslims don’t need an excuse. The Koran tells them so. Trying to sift through the multifaceted motives for the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi is as pointless as sorting through the ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11, 2001 searching for the identities of the plane hijackers. Once it was known who supported, funded, recruited, and triggered the attacks, why waste any time trying to identify the expendable "martyrs"? It was the ideology that launched the attacks, in 2001 and in 2012. It was the ideology that has launched such attacks ever since the plane hijackings of the 1970's. It was behind the Munich massacre and every casualty-strewn bombing and murder spree committed in the name of Islam for the last five decades. Can anyone with a handful of scruples buy the phony piety and condolences of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton? The New York Times quotes them both: “These four Americans stood up for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Obama said in a televised statement from the White House Rose Garden, where he stood with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Make no mistake: we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.” The Washington Post reports: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attack “in the strongest terms,” adding that while the United States “deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others … there is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.” Wednesday morning, Obama released his own statement condemning “the outrageous attack.” During the protest in Cairo but hours before the attacks in Libya, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo issued a statement saying that it condemns “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” An administration official later told ABC News that “no one in Washington approved that statement before it was released and it doesn’t reflect the views of the U.S. government.” The statement still appears on the embassy website, but not on the homepage. ( Italics mine) Come again? What else has been the U.S. government's view since 2008 but to excoriate and threaten anyone with the courage to brand Islam as a murderous, looting, pedophilic, misogynist, slave-thirsty ideology? On the other hand, the New York Times mulls over this explanation: About 24 hours before the consulate attack, however, Al Qaeda posted to militant forums on the Web a video in which its leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, acknowledged the death in an American drone strike in June of his Libyan deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and called on Libyans to avenge the death. Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood member who knows the Islamic supremacist mind intimately, dismisses the movie as the chief reason for the Cairo attack. He pins the motive to a consolidation of power by Egyptian Salafist activists. Citing communications between the Nour Party and other Party members, he concludes: It had no reference to the current movie, which means that they simply searched for anything to use as an excuse. They could find nothing major except a satirical video. Of course, you have daily satires in the United States about Muhammad that technically should be considered far worse. So, the cause was immaterial. This was just Islam doing what it does best: killing and destroying. The movie, "Innocence of Muslims," was shown once, the Associated Press reports, in Hollywood to a mostly empty theater. It was cited as the reason that Muslims attacked the embassy in Cairo and launched a military type assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Or it might have been about the Danish cartoons. Still, "Innocence of Muslims" is the kind of film that has not been produced by Hollywood ever since 9/11. Sam Bacile, an Israeli filmmaker, has shown more courage than any multi-millionaire director, producer, or actor. Hollywood has churned out many films judgmental of the U.S. and not of its enemies. Bacile remains undaunted by the outrages committed in Cairo and Benghazi. The Washington Post reported an Associated Press interview of Bacile. However, the Washington Post and the Associated Press took down that full-length article. Most of it can be found here: The California-based property developer said to be responsible for the film "Innocence of Muslims," Sam Bacile, insists that his 2-hour movie is an accurate portrayal of the life and values of the prophet Muhammad. “Islam is a cancer," Bacile was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. It is obvious to everyone but State Department wonks, The New York Times, and every other venue of the MSM that the twin attacks were intended as a middle finger shoved up the U.S.'s nose. There was nothing spontaneous about either attack. They were planned. Planned and known to the Islamic supremacist governments of Egypt and Libya, both of which the Obama administration had a direct hand in establishing, in the name of "democracy." So, who tipped off the savages about a movie no one had even heard of? Is it beyond credibility that members of the Nour Party and their counterparts in Libya were offered the movie as bait? By whom? We've seen the duplicity of the Obama administration at work before. More importantly than any of these ruminations about how and why the attacks occurred, is how the stress on Bacile's movie comports perfectly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's hand-holding with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's campaign to globalize the criminalization of any and all forms of criticism of Islam. Many observers, columnists and pundits have been wondering for months just what the Obama administration was planning as a reelection-salvaging event. Most hypothesized that it would a Syrian intervention. Surprise. It is a doubling down on the "necessity" of censorship to prevent more "violence." Pamela Geller reported in 2011 in American Thinker: Today the Islamized State Department will be meeting with the Islamic supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss strategies and develop action plans in which to impose the restriction of free speech (or blasphemy, as truthful speech about Islam is considered in Islamic law) under the Sharia here in America. Geller quotes Clinton on the occasion of the State Department hosting an OIC conference on how to silence critics of Islam: "We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don't feel that they have the support to do what we abhor." Geller notes: "Peer pressure and shaming." That is exactly what these useful idiots try to do with anyone and everyone who tells the truth about Islam and jihad: me, Robert Spencer, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and more. The Cairo and Benghazi attacks, pegged to the excuse of the Danish Mohammad cartoons and the Bacile movie, comprise a part of that strategy and action plan. The Eurasia Review reports on a recent meeting of the OIC. They would also be deliberating on challenges faced by 1.5 billion Muslims; more importantly lack of unity among the Muslim States, Islam phobia campaign and linking terrorism with Islam, disturbances in some Muslim states and other unpalatable problems facing the Muslim ummah (nation) on political, social, economic, educational and development fronts. ( Italics mine) The 57-member Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) headquarters in Jeddah has announced that it will hold the 4th “extraordinary” two-day session of the Islamic Summit Conference in Makkah from August 14 (26th Ramadan) called for by King Abdullah “to examine the situation in many countries of the Islamic world, intensify efforts to confront this situation, address the sources of discord and division therein, reunify the Islamic Ummah and promote Islamic solidarity.” I would not call Clinton et al. "useful idiots." That is a generous assessment of her character and the willingly dhimmi behavior of the State Department and of the Obama administration. That estimate implies that Clinton especially is utterly clueless about the nature of Islam. She knows. Obama knows. Our greatest "Islamic" enemy is not any Muslim, but our own leaders. So, I say to Hillary, and Huma Abedin, and General Dempsey, and all the other compromisers and haters of freedom of speech: Bring it on. Come and get it. Just try to muzzle me. You'll have a fight you never counted on, and I won't be alone. I will mock, criticize, and condemn Islam to my heart's content. Just try shutting me up. I'm calling you out. Link to Original
  10. In my last column, "The Islamic Vigilantes of Speech," I discussed how Islamic activists oppose freedom of speech which either criticizes Islam by word or image, or which violates Islamic moral dicta, such as the one prohibiting the depiction of uncovered women. But Islamists are not the only ones who wish to stifle freedom of speech. We have our own genuinely home-grown secular censors who subscribe to the same repressive totalitarian ideology, one sans a deity or a prophet. Ruth Marcus's column on the Opinion Page of the Washington Post on September 4th, "Plan B on Citizens United?" broached a subject that has not seen much press recently. I cannot recall any. That could not be because the Mainstream Media has been preoccupied with the Republican and Democratic conventions. It is likely rather because it is not a subject that the Democrats wish to raise at this point in the Obama administration, with the country being only a month and a fraction away from the probable demise of the Hope and Change era. Unless Washington or Syria or Iran generates powerful aftershocks that disturb the ocean, we have seen the last ripples of the Marxist tsunami of hopelessness and political stasis lap the scattered debris on the shores of this country. Marcus writes that the Obama administration and its coterie of political jugglers and finaglers have been discussing hush-hush the chance of a Constitutional amendment that would contradict and overturn the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling on Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (558 U.S. 50 (2010), in which the court found that arbitrarily imposed limits on how much corporations and nonprofit corporations and unions could contribute to political action committees that funded campaign ads were in violation of the First Amendment of protected political speech. The ruling did not annul the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act or "BCRA"), only that part of it covering indirect contributions. It let stand the ban of direct corporate or union contributions to candidates' campaigns or their political parties. The SCOTUS site for the ruling features this preamble: Holding: Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast. Marcus quotes Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, and his senior advisor, David Axelrod, on the subject of a constitutional amendment. Obama advisors have been edging up to this for months. In February, urging donors to open their checkbooks to Obama-supporting super PACs, campaign manager Jim Messina said that “the president favors action — by constitutional amendment, if necessary — to place reasonable limits on all such spending.” Marcus then cites Axelrod on the quasi-issue: Senior adviser David Axelrod took it a step further in June. “What the Supreme Court did with the Citizens United ruling, opening the door to this unlimited spending . . . is taking us back to the Gilded Age. We’re back to the robber barons trying to take over the government,” Axelrod said. “I hope that one of the things we can do when we win this election is use whatever tools are available, up to and including a constitutional amendment, to turn this back.” You must hand it to Axelrod. He never lets go of that Marxist-Leninist patois. Robber barons. The Gilded Age. "Running dog lackeys of capitalism" is always on the tip of his tongue, but he manages to repress the deprecation. But, never mind his mouth. When it comes to political campaign spending, the Democrats have never had any qualms about spending too much. They like being government robber barons, entrenched in their own Gilded Age of tax and spend and regulate. This, neither Axelrod nor his compadres in the White House would ever breathe a suggestion of, and woe to the person who even hints at the hypocrisy. Marcus continues: Then came Obama himself. In the midst of the Republican convention, in a question-and-answer session with the Web site Reddit that received more notice for his promise to unveil the White House recipe for honey ale, the president was asked what he thought should be done about the avalanche of unlimited donations. “Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds-barred flow of seven- and eight-figure checks, most undisclosed, into super PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens,” he wrote….“Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it),” he wrote. “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight on the super PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.” A change that would not be "processed" until he had won a second term in the White House. And this is the thrust of Marcus's article: Without those super PACs, the Democrats would need to rely on a zillion two-dollar donations from hoi polloi supporters willing to waste the price of a canister of salt or a stick of butter or half a gallon of gas. The Democrats can't fault the Republicans for exploiting super-PAC loopholes in McCain-Feingold, because the Democrats do it every day, as well. Thus the quietude on the issue this season. It explains why the MSM doesn’t dwell on the issue, either. Marcus has reservations about a further whittling away of the First Amendment. As a philosophical matter, I don’t like the notion of tinkering with the Constitution; the fundamental problem is not the First Amendment but an interpretation of it that frustrates any effective rules on campaign spending. As a practical matter, I worry that starting down the long road to a constitutional amendment would detract attention from more achievable options, such as the Disclose Act. The Disclose Act would require that all campaign donors above an arbitrarily determined amount be publically revealed, and presumably and subsequently pilloried by the Left. The Disclose Act's official site insults one's intelligence right at the very beginning: Corporations and special interests are trying to buy our elections with secret donations. We need the DISCLOSE Act to force them to reveal their political spending -- and cut down on the unlimited special-interest influence. Americans deserve to know the funders behind the TV ads flooding our airwaves. Corporations and special interests bought Obama the election in 2008. Some of these donors were the beneficiaries of TARP and bailouts and "green energy" subsidies. Who are they kidding? Take a look at the list of leftist luminaries who support the Disclose Act, and also at the list of "special interest" PACs and organizations that paid for the site. Very revealing, indeed. Ruth Marcus was not the only columnist to observe the Three-Card-Monte shell game on the issue of campaign finance. Robert Schlesinger of US News & World Report on May 9th gnawed his own fingernails over the credibility of the Democrats in "Democrats Soft Pedaling Super PAC, Citizens United Opposition": Democrats may not like Citizens United or "super PACs," but they're not nearly as vocal about it as they used to be. One little noticed piece of evidence that they're soft pedaling the issue can be found (or not) on the Democratic National Committee's website, which has quietly dropped the topics from its list of "Issues" it touts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the tonal shift comes as Democrats are trying to kick their super PAC efforts into gear. Schlesinger reported that the drop-down menu that ranted on about campaign finance and the unfairness of Citizens United-sanctioned super PACs under the topic of "Fair Elections" disappeared in July. When I reached out to DNC Press Secretary Melanie Roussell on why Citizens United/Super PACs are no longer touted issues, she E-mailed back that, "We shuffled things around as part of our site update but it is still on the site: http://democrats.org/issues/fair_elections. We're as committed to fair elections and mitigating the corrosive effects of the Citizen United decision as we've ever been, despite Republicans standing in the way of sensible efforts like the Disclose Act." Yes, we are still "committed" to "fair elections" but not just this moment, please. We're trying our best to steal this one. When it's all over, then we'll "disclose" the accessories to the felon. Schlesinger concludes: Not unreasonably Team Obama decided that rather than unilaterally disarming super PACs, they too needed a super PAC to match the fundraising behemoths that have sprouted up on the GOP side. Enter Priorities USA Action. One supposes that it's kind of hard to rail against super PAC contributors as clamoring special interests who drown out the voices of ordinary Americans and then turn around and ask them for money. The Hill's Blog Briefing Room on September 2nd featured another luminary with credibility and moussed hair problems, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who defended the use of super PACs just this one time: The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) defended President Obama on Thursday for his decision to support contributions to a top Democratic super-PAC. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said Democrats have to work within the system, blaming Republicans for taking advantage of the rules. "We cannot unilaterally disarm" in the current campaign climate, she said on CNN. "The Republicans have several million dollars in super-PAC money." Well, so have the Democrats. This is news? The system is so rotten, we can't help ourselves. They bring knives to the fight. We bring knives. They bring zip guns. We bring zip guns. Or screw drivers. Or .357 pistols with hollow-point ammo magazines. So agrees David Axelrod in the same article: "This doesn't mean that we believe this is the best way for the system to function," David Axelrod, a top Obama campaign strategist, said Tuesday on MSNBC. "The president's going to continue to fight for ways to reform that system in the future, but that's not going to happen in this campaign, and we have to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be." And when it's all over, we'll ban weapons of any kind, especially if they cost a lot of money. In fact, we might ban fights. We'll get a constitutional amendment passed. And the world will be as we want it to be. Quieted down. Obedient. In lock-step on the way to the Marxist City on the Hill. Which brings us to the idea of a constitutional amendment. Ruth Marcus may not like the idea of tinkering with the Constitution. But the idea isn't as abhorrent to her as it might be to anyone with more than her ounce of political sense. The Constitution has been tinkered with. It needs a number of amendments, but not one that complements the legislative abridgement of the First Amendment or freedom of speech. Repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment would be good for starters, just as repeal of the Eighteenth was enacted by the states and Congress with the Twenty-First Amendment and helped Americans brace themselves for hard times without being penalized. (That repeal, however, was accompanied by the establishment of the welfare state in 1933, as a kind of trade-off.) Half of the presidential cabinet departments need to be made redundant, or declared unconstitutional. About ninety-nine percent of the legalized locust-infestation of Congressional regulatory legislation should be repealed as unconstitutional, and we would need to go as far back as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and even back to various earlier banking legislation that gave the U.S. government a monopoly on "legal tender." An amendment returning the U.S to the gold standard would be welcome, for it would harness the government to a régime of accountable and controllable spending. That is why FDR wanted to abandon the gold standard. A gold standard would have prohibited the establishment of a welfare state. Once it was out of the way, the sky was the limit. Or, rather, the bottomless pit of deficit spending and budgets anchored on social and "reform" programs. Soon after taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt declared a nationwide bank moratorium in order to prevent a run on the banks by consumers lacking confidence in the economy. He also forbade banks to pay out gold or to export it. According to Keynesian economic theory, one of the best ways to fight off an economic downturn is to inflate the money supply. And increasing the amount of gold held by the Federal Reserve would in turn increase its power to inflate the money supply. Facing similar pressures, Britain had dropped the gold standard in 1931, and Roosevelt had taken note. Read the rest of the sorry story here. It's quite frank and honest about the reasons FDR and Congress wanted to expropriate private wealth. It was legalized theft from the very beginning. But the more important reason why a constitutional amendment is a bad idea now, especially one that would automatically taint one's freedom of speech if one's words, images and arguments were paid for by "robber barons," is that our current stock of politicians and their advisors aren't intellectually or morally up to it. Every man Jack of them is a welfare statist of one stripe or another, regardless of the political party. A constitutional amendment is further beyond their ken than that of the authors of the Eighteenth and Twenty-First. An amendment that placed limits on who could pay for political speech and by how much would be just that, and nothing more. One couldn't expect more than that from our "leaders." They all think in terms of their "duty" to manage the country and its electorate. Couple that absence of intellectual fortitude with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's work with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to ban specifically all criticism of Islam, and the picture becomes clearer of what precisely the Democrats have in mind when it comes to the First Amendment. Link to Original
  11. David J. Rusin of the Middle East Forum recently published an article on Islamist Watch about the vandalizing of "anti-Islamic" ads. He reveals just how pervasive the phenomenon is worldwide. When Cyrus McGoldrick, advocacy director for the New York office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations ( CAIR), logged into Facebook on August 12 to hint at his desire to vandalize anti-jihad ads that may soon run on city buses, he did not simply underline CAIR's troubling attitude toward free expression. McGoldrick's words — and the subsequent actions of others — have illuminated an overlooked aspect of the Islamist assault on Western speech: the defacement, if not obliteration, of political and commercial messages. Of particular interest is the destruction of print or commercial ads of scantily clad women. I find this interesting because of the near psychotic or pathological mindset about women that Islam inculcates in Muslim men. This phenomenon has been especially prevalent in the UK. A Times of London article revealed in 2005 that Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD) had launched a website with instructions on how to vandalize ads and which ones to select. "There is no longer any need to cringe as you walk past a sleazy poster," the group declared. "We'll improve it." Many answered the call, as ads pitching bras, beauty products, and even television programs were trashed. "Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the offending body parts painted over or ripped off," the Times observed. In a telling example, thugs destroyed images of scantily clad women on an East London billboard promoting the series Desperate Housewives, but fully clothed characters were untouched. Responding to the controversy, leading British Islamist Ahmed Sheikh argued that "freedom of speech should end when you offend others." Cultural jihad, or the de facto imposition of Sharia law on Western non-Muslims, is insidiously accumulative. In Britain it begins with such things as complaining about images or figures of pigs that Muslims might see in a bank or a shop. They are removed so that Muslims are not offended. Next will come a complaint about halal food not being served in restaurants and schools. Non-Muslims will be served it, as well, with or without their knowledge. Next will be a complaint that one must have some place to pray five times a day, and if an employer does not provide such a space, the street outside will do just as well, and damn the traffic jam caused by hundreds of Muslims mooning non-Muslims as they express their obeisance to a rock thousands of miles away. Language must also be altered to preempt potential offense. Muslim criminal suspects are called "Asians." Polygamy is taboo among non-Muslims, but Muslim men collecting welfare and enjoying subsidized housing may have several dependent wives and a dozen dependent children. The taxes collected to pay for their special welfare is a form of jizya, or a tax levied on conquered infidels. Muslims may demonstrate en masse, displaying signs that damn freedom of speech, sneer at British culture, warn of violence if non-Muslims resist, and predict the Islamization of Britain, and not be charged with hate speech. Any other group behaving in such an obnoxious manner would see its members hauled into court. Criticism of Islam is forbidden and regarded as "defamation," "bigotry," or "racism." Muslim activists are aggressive in this respect, going after not only titillating ads but serious discussions of Islam. Rusin writes: Islamists also have adapted to the information age, recognizing that much of the Western speech they despise now exists online. Al-Azhar University scholars, representatives of the highest religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, even crafted a fatwa in 2008 that sanctions hacking for the purposes of jihad. Therefore, those who criticize Islam or otherwise offend its followers often find that their freedom of expression is no safer on the internet than it is on a Tower Hamlets billboard. Arab News sympathetically profiled one such hacker, a Saudi native, in 2011. "An Alkhobar woman studying in the United States is taking credit for destroying 23 Danish websites that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad," the piece begins, relaying material originally published by an Arabic-language source. "Nouf Rashid told the Arabic newspaper she was hacking into Danish websites having references to cartoons of the Prophet along with other sites that had questionable content in her view," including pornographic ones. The focus here, however, is the pseudo-ironic and psychotic symbiosis between a creed/ideology that finds bare female anatomy offensive, yet is lured to it in spite of the proscriptions against it. There is a link between such vandalizing and the rape and often disfigurement of non-Muslim women in Europe by Muslims, the "sex slave" rings recently exposed in Britain, and the honor-killings of Muslim-born women and girls who break Islamic rules and "go Western." This has everything to do with the Muslim dictum compelling women to cover themselves up as much as possible in burqas, veils or some other form of self-effacing garb, depending on the Islamic sect. The phenomenon swings wildly, like bipolar dysfunction, between the vigilante censorship described by Rusin and incidents such as the rape of Lara Logan in Cairo, in which her clothes were ripped from her and even part of her hair torn out during the assault. That was not the only such incident endured by Western women in Cairo, but it is the most notorious. Her attackers wished to extinguish Logan, to wipe her out of existence. This is the behavior of nihilists. However, these incidents are all connected to the same criminal psychosis (or pathology) that is part and parcel of strict and even "moderate" Islamic upbringing. It is a concerted ideology that wishes to blank out women's existence, to negate it, to obliterate it. On the surface, this "gendercidal" wish seems based on the Islamic perception of men as uncontrollable demons who lose all reason and restraint at the sight of a bare ankle or arm or coiffed or perfumed hair or inviting lips or seductive eyes. Hide these things, and the libidos of Muslim men will not be triggered to launch criminal assaults. If they are not hidden, a Muslim man cannot be held responsible for his criminal actions. If a woman is attacked, it is her fault, because her "immodesty" is regarded as the invitation of a whore or prostitute. Unveiled or uncovered women are just "meat" to be consumed by sex-starved Muslim maniacs. They can't help it, and so are forgiven. So goes the anti-reasoning. For an overview of the incidence of rape by Muslims of infidel women, see Jamie Glasov's Front Page article from a year ago in which he discusses the attitude of a Muslim rapist in Australia. To compound this pathology, a notion has developed within the system of gender apartheid in which Muslims like “MSK” have grown up: the idea that a woman who does not veil herself is somehow responsible for any sexual or physical harm done to her. In the psychopathic mental gymnastics that occur in the perpetrators’ minds, the unveiled woman must be sexually punished for violating the “modesty” code. Indeed, such assaults are not treated as crimes by Islam. Muslim criminals regularly claim the "right" to "teach" women not to tempt them by raping, humiliating, and even disfiguring them. The alternative for women is to make themselves non-values, to themselves or to anyone else, to erase their own identities, to de-sexualize themselves in public. To become baby-bearing, servile ciphers. Infidel women who do not cover themselves up are regarded by Muslims as itinerant concubines, as "meat" for consumption. Whether or not they are married or legally underage, is irrelevant. One "reformist" Islamic site, "Light of Life," attempts to explain away this epistemology. Islam admits that man has the right to possess concubines along with his wife, or wives, to fulfill his sexual needs. Islam presents a number of women that a Muslim man cannot marry, but it excludes "the ones under the control of one's right hand" from this list: "Forbidden to you [in marriage] are your mothers and [own] daughters, your sisters, your aunts paternal and maternal, your brother's daughters, your sister's ... and [already] wedded women, save what your right hands own. So God prescribes for you. Lawful for you, beyond all that, is that you may seek, using your wealth, in wedlock and not in license. Such wives as you enjoy thereby, give them their wages apportionate; it is no fault in you in your agreeing together, after the due apportionate. God is All-knowing, All-wise" (Sura al-Nisa´ 4:23, 24). The Koran and other Islamic texts caution that it is wrong for Muslim men to have sex with captured enemy married women. This problem was solved by Mohammad and his followers by slaying their husbands. That has been the Islamic way from the beginning. The "Light of Life" site wistfully remarks, wanting his Koranic cake and eat it, too: The Qur´an itself, however, is in desperate need of reform in this regard owing to the great progress humanity has made in equality between the sexes. This is the problem of the Muslim jurist or thinker today. As a Muslim he thinks that his holy Book was brought down (unzila) from Heaven and is authored by Allah. Therefore he cannot afford to admit any fault or failure in it; he is rather obliged to defend it against what people call "the insult to woman". But the Koran cannot be edited, abridged, or altered. That is forbidden under pain of death. That is just as bad as burning it, or letting an infidel handle a Koran without gloves. The excision of its texts would be an act of repudiation of Allah's word. And if Allah's words cannot be taken literally, of what use are his words? This question eludes "reformists." "Reformists" go through what Glasov calls "mental gymnastics" in attempts to reconcile the dicta of a primitive creed with the modern world. It cannot be done with any credibility. The Islamic perception of Muslim men is not that they are demons. In Islamic dogma Muslim men are regarded as "metaphysically" superior to women (and to infidels of either gender of various suasions, with Jews on the lowest rung) simply on Allah's say-so, or for some other invalid, rationalistic reason, and so their "rights" and whims and Islamic-bestowed privileges take precedence over everyone and everything. One could hypothesize that when Islam was being knocked together as a religion and as an ideology in the 7th and 8th centuries (and Robert Spencer has done us a great service in this respect in his latest book, Did Muhammad Exist?), it borrowed much from the Christian view of women as recounted in the story of Adam and Eve, when Eve offers Adam the "forbidden fruit of knowledge" – and presumably that included carnal knowledge and any and all things in connection with sex. Christianity, however, retained the "anti-sex" mantra and reserved it for both genders. That mantra lingers on in especially American conservative circles, which largely assert that life begins at conception and that the only purpose of sex is procreation. The recent scandal surrounding Representative Todd Akin's remarks about abortion not being justified by rape underscores that poisonous and immoral idea. So, the misogyny didn't begin with Islam. Islam merely took it to its logical application. The segue was comparatively effortless. Granting the truth of Robert Spencer's argument, because Judaism and Christianity predate the founding of Islam by centuries, then Christians especially have no one to blame but their doctrinal forefathers for the horrendous and brutal misogyny of Islam. Islam, as Robert Spencer has demonstrated in his book, cadged chiefly from early Christian and Judaic texts. It picked up chiefly the Christian view of women as temptresses from the Bible's account of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden (the earthly or heavenly version), and Eve inviting Adam to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, encouraged by the devil. One Catholic site has an interesting account of Adam and Eve. Are we being simply told that his earthly ancestry stretches far back in time, as we read in the genealogy of Jesus Christ, where his line is traced back to 'Adam, the son of God'? (Luke 3:38) But even this is no answer! Who is this Adam? Obviously the reference says that he was the "Son of God", but elsewhere in the Bible this title is only used to refer to Christ and Melchizedek. Clearly then, this phrase does not tell the whole story, but it does indicate that Adam was not a "normal" historical man. Adam was a 'son of God', a spiritual being, not simply a part of God's Physical Creation. To confirm that detail we must read Genesis 5: 1-2 which says: " In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created." Islam did not burden Muslim men with an Adam and Eve-caused "original sin," as Christianity did. All the blame falls on Eve. And at the same time, Islam would have rejected the hermaphrotic nature of the original Adam, as explained on the same Catholic site. So, if the early Mohometan crusaders were searching for a rationalistic creed that would be copasetic with their habits of war, raids, conquest, pillaging, raping, enslaving, looting, and slaughtering, the early Christian doctrinal bias against women as the prizes of war and as the inferior sex would fit perfectly into their belligerent agenda. Islamic doctrine alleges that the Koran was dictated verbatim by Allah to Mohammad. Given the patchwork nature of Islam from so many preexisting Christian, Judaic and even pagan creeds (Allah was a pagan moon god, appropriated by Mohammad), that would make Allah the premier plagiarist and Mohammad his culpable dupe and accessory. Of course, if Allah were all-powerful and responsible for everything that happened, it means that he also created Judaism and Christianity. Then, centuries later, he introduced Islam, and counseled Mohammad and his successors to steal and adapt from preexisting creeds. Yet these unbelieving creeds were evil because they were not the word of Allah. Go figure. Omniscience and omnipotence are wondrous and contradictory things. It could be taken a step further to link the vandalizing of the AFDI ads, in which Muslim vandals wish to eradicate any knowledge of arguments against Islam. It isn't just a matter of Muslims being "offended" by either the AFDI ads or the commercial ads. Combining the alleged "offending" excuses and the kernel misogynist policy of Islam, this is the behavior of a totalitarian ideology in action, sanctioned by its high-ranking ideologues (either the principals at CAIR or the ISNA or the ICNA et al., or by imams and mullahs) and carried out by rank-and-file "foot soldiers," although it is doubtful that Ibrahim Hooper, Cyrus McGoldrck and their cohorts would deign to personally deface a billboard or bus ad or devote their own energies to sabotaging an anti-jihad website. They merely have to slip their more ardent followers the hint, such as McGoldrick did on his Facebook page, and it will happen. Frankly speaking, I cut Islam and Muslims no slack; I do not grant them the benefit of the doubt. Islam cannot be "reformed" as many "moderate" Muslims claim it can be so that it would not conflict with American liberties and in particular with freedom of speech. To date, they have not said just how that reconciliation can be accomplished. And I suspect that the ideologues know it can't be "reformed" without killing Islam. It is the ideologues who are more consistent vis-à-vis Islamic ethos and practice. In this respect they have the momentum and the initiative. They want total control over men's minds, and the only way to accomplish that control is to eradicate knowledge that this is what they seek to accomplish. Otherwise, no one with a fillip of self-respect would submit to it. No bikinis for Muslims. No argumentation or debate or renderings of Mohammad, either. It is only fair. If Muslims must shut down their minds or avert their eyes or blank out existence, then everyone must pull the plug on their vision and their knowledge. To do otherwise would be blasphemy, or discrimination, or victimization of Muslims. Respect Islam and Muslims, and you won’t be hurt or killed or censored. Or your mind and mouth merely gagged or your pen stilled. Or have your face scarred with acid. Or your throat slit. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  12. "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred." –Ayn Rand If American astronaut Neil Armstrong's first step upon the face of the lunar surface can be counted alongside the first steps of other men with unborrowed visions, we can take comfort in knowing that the response that Armstrong received was not hatred. Indifference, yes, to the larger goal of human space travel, for once the euphoria from the Apollo 11 moon shot wore, government funding to the architects of Armstrong's triumph would be reduced to a pale shadow of its former glory in the name of the supposedly more important priorities of welfare statism. Nevertheless, the quiet and reserved Armstrong himself would rightly live out his days as a revered national hero. And with Armstrong's death this weekend, I happily recall the profound reverence that I felt for the man and his achievement, especially as a child, where one forms their estimate of the world. For me, I remember countless hours as a young boy in the 1970s transfixed by the dog-eared copies of Life Magazine chronicling the exploits of the Apollo astronauts. "We Reach the Moon" said the cover of one, as if the achievement of successfully piloting a controlled explosion to the moon and back was somehow a collective achievement—but therein lays the roots of the American birthright. As I sat among the pages, I felt with unconscious confidence that I too could be a Neil Armstrong, pioneering wherever I may wish to go. Who would say otherwise? Who would have the power to deny me? Why, upon this Earth—or the Moon—would I ever let them? It was not lost upon me, even at that young age, that as Armstrong and other Americans walked upon the moon, no Soviet was able to match the feat, this despite it being the stern intention of their leaders. I thought to myself then that perhaps the Soviets were not able to successfully copy the American originals necessary to complete the task in the face of their oft-repeated habit of expropriating the work of others for their own ends. But how could they? Stealing, even successfully, can only take one so far, for even the most cunning blood-sucker remains dependent upon its victim for any success that it may enjoy. The simple fact was that the Soviets were not free and we were. In my young estimate, this distinction made all the difference. Of course, I now know that the American space program was not the completely free enterprise that it ought to have been. Yet notice that while the government's space program languishes in comparison to its previous splendor, the world nonetheless enjoys a constellation of satellites that improve our lives on a daily basis. Men do not create under compulsion, and these satellites are plainly the product of free and uncoerced minds. So while putting international space stations in orbit or rovers on Mars may continue to be the province of governments for the near term, the real innovation that I expect we shall see will be the province of an unfettered enterprise—motivated by profit and the desire to take a first step towards an unborrowed vision. I would be remiss not to point out that the freedom necessary for such future achievement is in question, this being the era of "you didn't build that." In that light, let us remember the life and achievement of Neil Armstrong. Tens of thousands built the Apollo rocket. Three men climbed into it. Two successfully piloted the craft to the surface of the moon. But only one could take that first brave step upon its surface. So I say that this first step was a giant step for a man—and a giant leap for mankind. And I think that the day when new pioneers are able to take their first steps and are met with nothing less than pure admiration, we will see an even greater leap for mankind. I thank Neil Armstrong for helping to give me reason to believe that such a day is in our reach. Today, I look back upon the 43 years of my existence and can say that I feel as young as I did when as a boy I looked at the pages accounting Neil Armstrong's adventures with nothing less than marvel and awe. Thank you, Mr. Armstrong, for the gift of such an inspirational life. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  13. It is difficult to imagine just how low the United States has sunk when one is confronted with the prospect of a Secretary of State employing, with her full knowledge, someone whose ideology calls for the replacement of the Constitution with a barbaric code of law, the suspension of individual rights, and the submission of the country to actual or de facto Islamic rule. This is in addition to its submission to socialist tyranny. One asks oneself: They're allies now, but what will happen if and when one of them wins? Will the winner turn on the other? Too likely. Either Leftists will begin thumbing their noses at Muslims, or Muslims will begin chopping off Leftist noses. I had a nightmare the other night. My nightmares usually make little sense. They are fueled by too much coffee and other stimulants that put one's autonomous system and subconscious on steroids. Nightmares are vivid, fleeting grab-bags of disparate worries and concerns that migrate to another corner of one's mind and suddenly, from out of nowhere and triggered by some anxiety, collide and merge into bizarre montages of German Expressionist film images and sounds. My own nightmares take the form of newspaper columns, dispassionately narrated by a voice that is a blend of Orson Welles's foreboding cynicism, Jean Shepherd's spritely naturalism, and the funereal voice of Garrison Keillor. Last month a group of five House representatives, headlined by Michele "gangster government" Bachmann of Minnesota, called for a multi-agency investigation into the backgrounds of numerous Muslims now employed in various capacities in federal agencies and departments. Andrew McCarthy estimates there are thousands. One of those letters went to deputy inspector general of the State Department, and one of the persons named in the letter was Huma Abedin, Secretary Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff. That Hillary Clinton is a welfare statist to the core is not entirely irrelevant to the issue. But her own ambition and hope to change America, thwarted on the domestic scene – President Bill stole all the headlines, and HillaryCare was not to be – conform perfectly with President Barack Obama's ambition and hope to reduce America to being just another bankrupt member of the global village, instead of it being the last best hope of Western civilization. The latest nightmare entertained me with the idea that Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who held that office from 1933 to 1944, was being influenced by a deputy chief of staff by the name of Karl Fynn Abercrombie. The nightmare wasn't that specific. It came and went in a flash, too quickly to contemplate in any detail. But some of the faces were familiar, as well as the style of dress of the 1940's, and I recall peering into a dimly lit House of Representatives. In the dream, investigations were indeed initiated, and Congress and America learned to their collective dismay that Karl Flynn Abercrombie was none other than Karl Kluge, a Nazi spy, and that Hull knew it. As did FDR. I do not know where the names Karl Flynn Abercrombie and Kluge came from. I cannot account for them, but I distinctly remember them. I knew Hillary's history, and Cordell Hull's, and so that knowledge, together with a lurking, unformed parallel of events in my subconscious, contributed to the nightmare. The last thing I can recall from the nightmare was a New York Times headline: "Kluge Unmasked as German Agent," and the narrator beginning to read the story. But that is when I woke up. So I have decided to flesh out the nightmare. The investigation into Karl Kluge, alias Karl Flynn Abercrombie, revealed that he had been Cordell Hull's chief foreign policy advisor since late 1935, when he was suddenly pushed forward by State Department underlings as a candidate to be Hull's advisor when Hull's original aide died in a car accident. His background was checked by the FBI, and a file on him was sent to Hull and to the White House. The FBI had found some highly incriminating information on Kluge – none of which was made public until the scandal broke – but both Hull and FDR considered the man properly and thoroughly vetted to hold such a sensitive office as Hull's primary advisor. Kluge was indeed an American citizen, having been born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1910, of parents of German-Swedish origin, who had arrived in the country in the last century. In 1920 they moved to Munich, Germany, after the turmoil there had abated. Both parents were teachers. After a while, the father, Albert Kluge, started a newspaper, Die Trompete von Leutenor, or, The People's Trumpet, while his wife, Silke, acted as editor. The paper promoted the ideas and politics of the National Socialist German Workers Party. It was firebombed twice by Communists, and Albert Kluge was frequently beaten up by them. But the paper survived, thanks to a subsidy from a German pharmaceutical company whose owner was a fervent Nazi. In 1929 the paper was merged with the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Berlin, Der Angriff ("The Attack"), founded by Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. Albert and Silke were retained to write pro-Nazi articles under a variety of pseudonyms. Young Karl Kluge, freshly graduated from the University of Munich, also worked for the paper as a manager and then as a writer. He was quite brilliant and became a favorite of Goebbels, who taught him how to write stirring speeches. Occasionally he edited some of Goebbels's editorials. He added this paragraph to his employer's report on the Nazi victory in the Reichstag election of September 1930. Those in the center know our goals: the National Socialist movement has no desire to join the bourgeois party bosses. We have no intention of ducking responsibility. We are not purveyors of pathos, as the newspapers like to say about us. We will accept responsibility only when we can justify it to the people and the nation. We do not think holy what the Republic thinks untouchable. The National Socialist movement wants a transformation of things as they are. We have not come to prop up that which is collapsing, but rather to topple it. Then it was discovered, during casual conversation, that young Karl was an American citizen. Goebbels conferred with Hitler and other high ranking Nazis. Plans were made for young Karl. He was to be tapped for a very special mission, that of keeping the United States out of a war that was sure to come, and to persuade America to keep its nose out of German affairs. Karl's last task before he left for America was the preliminary editing of a collection of Goebbels's editorials for a book, Der Angriff-Aufsaetze Aus Der Kampfzeit, or The Attack - Essays for the Struggle Period. The book was subsequently published in 1935 by the Angriff Press, a wholly owned Nazi publishing house. Karl Kluge's name was mentioned on the copyright page. He was quite proud of that. About the same time, Karl's father, Albert, died of a stroke. His mother, Silke, continued on at Der Angriff, and formed Die Deutsche Frauenfront, or the German Women's Front, which campaigned to convince women to become homebodies and baby factories. In mid-1934 Karl Flynn Abercrombie turned up in America as a German translator for the State Department. During a period of loneliness combined with an excess of schnapps, he met and married an American hootchy kootchy saloon dancer named Alice Winer in 1935, about the time his name was put forward as a candidate to become Cordell Hull's chief of staff. The incriminating evidence in Karl's FBI file included his and parents' work for Der Angriff. On his application for employment with the State Department, Karl had explained his departure from Nazi Germany by claiming that he had become disenchanted with the Party and feared for his own life because of his jokes about Hitler being Austrian and not a real German, and also about his ridiculous moustache, which he had heard other Party members scoffing was not much of a disguise. He also claimed that violent disagreements with his parents over Nazi ideology had made his life miserable. While the FBI agent in charge of checking on Karl's background commended Karl for his honesty and forthrightness, he nevertheless viewed Karl as a security risk and did not recommend him for promotion to Hull's office, citing the possibility of extortionate pressure being put on him to spy on the Secretary or otherwise act against the interests of the United States. Kluge also explained that he had adopted the name "Karl Flynn Abercrombie" to avoid any anti-German bias or prejudice in government and outside the venue of the State Department. In Kluge's file was also the note that on two separate occasions, in late 1934, some months after his arrival in the U.S., he had met in secret, in Buffalo, New York, Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German immigrant member of the pro-Nazi Friends of The New Germany and future Bundesführer of the German American Bund. Creation of Friends of The New Germany had been assisted by the German Consulate in New York. The Nazi Party in Germany later withdrew its endorsement of this organization (its antisemitism and violence against Jewish businesses were considered an embarrassment and counter-productive by the German Nazis), and later sanctioned the formation of the Bund, officially approving Kuhn as its head. The FBI could not say what had transpired between Kuhn and Kluge; Kuhn, a vocal and acerbic member of the Friends, had been under FBI scrutiny for some time. Neither the Secretary of State nor the White House voiced any reservations about Kluge's record. Hull insisted that Kluge retain the alias of "Karl Flynn Abercrombie." In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York claimed that the German Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews. In March 1937, he warned of the perils posed by the Nazi regime. The Nazi government organ, Der Angriff, claimed that he had been bribed by Jewish and Communist agents and was a criminal dupe of the Jews. Secretary of State Hull apologized to the Nazi government for the Mayor having offended it, but said nothing critical about the German Nazis' libelous statements about LaGuardia. It came to light that Alice Kluge, while her husband was away with the Secretary of State on official business, had been secretly appearing as a striptease artist in disreputable clubs in Washington, Baltimore, and northern Virginia, and forming liaisons with various criminal characters. The discovery caused a small scandal and Kluge's name for the first time was prominently featured in news articles. Kluge and his wife apologized for the indiscretions and promised that their marriage would weather the scandal. Alice Kluge eventually became a shut-in alcoholic. Members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938, had, among its other concerns, compiled a record of the doings of the Friends of The New Germany and later of the German American Bund. Members of the Committee were not happy with Cordell Hull's conduct of American policy, especially that connected with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. Early in 1941, HUAC sent a report to Congress that hypothesized Kluge's influence on Hull's policies. It suggested that Hull, and, by implication, the President, was more concerned about establishing friendly trade relations with Japan than it was about Japan's barbaric behavior in Manchuria. It alleged that Hull had, in 1939, refused entry as tourists into the U.S. and Cuba of some nine hundred European Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis because they did not have return addresses, and that, anyway, it was Cuba's problem, not his Department's. Many of the refugees were welcomed into Britain, but others were forced to return to Europe, where they likely perished in the Holocaust. It alleged that in 1940 Hull had repeatedly instructed the State Department to delay sending money overseas to help Romanian Jews escape the Nazis. It alleged that Kruge persuaded Hull to look favorably on the Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France, and to denigrate the forces of the Free French. It alleged that Kluge had the ear of Hull and that of the White House when, in November 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes proposed using the territory of Alaska as a sanctuary for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews were being subjected to persecution and murder. The president insisted that Jews consist of no more than ten percent of such a resettlement. The proposal died. The report based its allegations of antisemitism on the part of Kluge by citing portions of The Attack - Essays for the Struggle Period, which Kluge had edited. One editorial, one of several entered into the report, was from a September 1930 issue of Der Angriff: Who are the Jews? They are an alien race spawned by Satan to corrupt the German people, to lead them astray with their cheap goods and cheap prices. Jews are not the brothers of Germans. Jewish hirelings and Jewish gangs prey on German women and children to sully them with their hands and lusts. Jewish shop owners and Jewish capitalists swindle our people over their filthy counters and in their larcenous banks. But the day is coming when German manhood with take up the scythe and with great sweeping arcs decapitate the heads of the Jews. The German people will not be denied the right of retribution for the suffering they have endured by Jewish hands. The Reichstag election results guarantee us that justice. The HUAC report recommended that all immigrant Germans now employed in various federal agencies be re-investigated to better determine their loyalty to the United States. It stated that many of these individuals still had family and relatives in countries already conquered by the Nazis, and that these persons could be pressured to act against the country's interests to preserve the well-being of their captive family and relatives. Such an action, read the report, was not intended to impugn the character or question the loyalty of said persons, however, it was wiser to conduct such an investigation and remove said persons from access to sensitive information than it would be to avoid offending their sensibilities. Kluge's antisemitism and Nazi background were demonstrable. The report recommended that he be relieved of his post forthwith in the State Department. The HUAC report not quite accused Hull and Roosevelt of antisemitism. A copy of the report was purloined and sent to the White House. Excerpts of it appeared in The New York Times and other pro-Roosevelt newspapers. Prominent senators immediately came to Kluge's defense, calling him a "fine patriot" and a "loyal American of the best kind." Hull and Roosevelt said nothing, but let their allies in Congress and in the press carry on the dispute. The Speaker of the House called Karl Kluge a man of "sterling character" and warned that the report's "accusations bordered on libel and defamation." The authors replied that it did not accuse anyone of anything, but was intended to call for investigations that would better ensure the country's security. The representatives were pressured to repudiate the HUAC report. Three of the authors disassociated themselves from it. The issue "went away." That is my fleshed-out dream. Or nightmare. I could have gone on and related how in 1944 Kluge managed to photograph copies of the plans for D-Day – which Cordell Hull would have been privy to – and give them to a German courier who boarded a Nazi submarine that briefly surfaced off the Outer Banks in North Carolina, plans which allowed the Germans to accelerate the completion of their defenses at Normandy, thus ensuring a disastrous failure on June 6th. But that would have been stretching the story. There is no stretching this real-life story, no need to dwell on the parallels. I hope the point is made that anyone remotely connected with the Muslim Brotherhood – and that would include any Muslims – through a familial connection or otherwise, should not be employed in any federal agency or department. But, then, most of the people now employed in those agencies and who are not Muslims should also be deemed security risks, beginning with the current Secretary of State. The issue of Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff and "body woman," likewise "went away." When one scans the State Department's list of high ranking employees, her name is nowhere to be found. Which is a very curious thing, indeed. Islam is at war with us. It means to conquer us or destroy us. Our leadership is apparently on the side of the enemy. That has been proven over the last four nightmarish years. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  14. Objectivist Round Up: The Final Edition: After *five years* of managing the Objectivist Round Up, Rational Jenn has decided to retire the Round Up. Many thanks to Jenn for all her work, and here's the link to the last edition. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  15. A Clash of Supremacies over Obamacare: Before Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (on one hand, denying its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause, but, on the other, sanctioning the individual mandate as a tax Congress has the power to impose), otherwise known as Obamacare (ADA), several states had announced that they would refuse to implement the law or conform to its specific provisions. At last count there were four, from the original twenty-seven, led by Florida. Such opposition may move Congress to repeal Obamacare in part or in its entirety, instead of fighting the states (provided Republicans retain control the House and win control of the Senate); it may cause it to "replace" Obamacare with something less onerous (but no less unconstitutional); or it may cause another Constitutional crisis in which the states invoke the Tenth Amendment and are answered by the federal government overriding the states' supposed right to resort to that strategy. The last major defiance of federal policy by the states on the basis of states' rights precipitated the Civil War. The questions are: Can the states successfully resist the federal government on this issue? Can they unite in their opposition? Would the federal government back off, or offer a compromise, such as was reached during the Nullification Crisis of the 1830's? Can the federal government override their opposition? Will the federal government threaten to punish states that refuse to comply with Obamacare, e.g., by withholding federal highway funds or Medicaid funds, or by devising another strategy to induce compliance? And if the states champion noncompliance with any facet of Obamacare, on what moral grounds? Three features of the Constitution will come into play in this pending conflict: The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people. The Supremacy Clause of Article VI, Section 2, which states that the Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…shall be the supreme Law of the Land. This clause applies solely to the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, and to no other laws, assumed or imagined. This clause by inference also exempts the federal government from complying with state laws. The Necessary and Proper Clauseof Article I, Section 8, which reads: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. This is the last of eighteen enumerated powers. The Tenth Amendment, or the "states' rights or sovereignty" Amendment, has a dubious history. It has been invoked by states in the past to impose or legitimate the denial of individual rights to blacks or to sanction the statist mischief or criminal behavior of a state legislature. The Amendment has never been invoked to protect individual rights. Furthermore, in the 20th century, the argument from state sovereignty or from "reserved rights" lost credibility when states began to accept federal money for various highway, welfare, and other federal programs. By accepting those funds, the states lost a great portion of their vaunted sovereignty. They could claim arm-twisting by the federal government, but once they submitted, the wind went out of their claims to state sovereignty. They became addicted to and dependent on the subsidies in terms of their own budgets and expenditures. They complemented the growth of federal power with the growth of their own powers. It may be too late to reassert their sovereignty now. States maintain that they can pick and choose which powers they reserve (in the name of "the people"). This they might do, but the federal government has in many instances adopted a policy of "benign neglect" in respect to allowing states to assert their own prerogatives. The Supremacy Clause has been virtually ignored by Congress, because Congress has passed thousands of laws not enumerated in the Constitution ("implied" powers), but whose enactment has been rationalized by Article I, Section 8, whose first clause reads, The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. The Necessary and Proper Clause has been as troublesome as the first clause, because it corrals together both legitimate and illegitimate functions of the federal government, in addition to all those "implied" or unenumerated powers. The first three clauses, together with the fifth, sixth and seventh, grant Congress powers it should never have been granted, and which have allowed the inevitable expansion of federal power. Proponents of the ADA based much of their sanctioning on the Commerce clause ("among the several States"), interpreting the term regulate to suit their own agenda, and ignoring its original meaning, which was to impose some kind of legal structure on the chaos in trade and commerce between states. The term did not sanction statist controls over commerce. (No kidding, Nancy!) Naturally, statists counter with, "That was then. This is now. We are not as narrow-minded as the Founders and Framers. We have a broader and superior understanding of the term. Conditions have changed. Society is more complex. We are more enlightened. We have responsibilities the Framers never dreamed of." Oh, they dreamed of them, all right. Or rather, had nightmares about such powers, which most of them never wanted to delegate or bestow. Those dreams and nightmares are discussed in The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers. The states cannot oppose Obamcare with a straight face. Their own tax-and-spend-and-regulate programs lift chump change from their citizens' pockets, while Obamacare and other federal programs raid whole bank accounts across the country in what could be called the federal "interstate commerce" in robbery, fraud, and extortion. The states cannot cock a snook at the Supremacy Clause because it contains all the vices and villainy they practice, as well. Virtually the only things the states cannot emulate is to print their own money and run their own postal service. The aforesaid powers are, from the perspective of recognizing and upholding individual rights, improper and wholly unnecessary. If the states wish to nullify Obamacare, they should understand that their own statist powers ought to be nullified, as well. The states cannot challenge the Necessary and Proper Claus, either, because they have adopted their own unenumerated powers. For virtually every mammoth federal bureaucracy, in every state there is a Mini Me clone. The states are the pot proposing to call gang-leader Kate "Ma" Barker black. One could view the conundrum from this perspective: The federal government is Ma Barker, obese, sly, and accustomed to having fancy and expensive things got through her sons' criminal activities; the states are her dependent, obedient, fiscally-challenged offspring. This criminal association creates an image it will be hard for the states to shake, or reconcile with their "principled" opposition to Obamacare, or even deny. You can bet that the federals will remind them of this and their friends in the mainstream will make a lot of noise about it. The leftist mainstream media have served the federal government for decades now in a triple role: press agent, shill, and graffiti artist. You can count on the MSM to contribute their own confusion, ignorance, and collectivist biases to the fight the conservative governors and legislatures are spoiling for. Forgotten, however, in all the chatter, lawsuits, and braggadocio over which governments claim prerogative supremacy over clashing legislation – the federal or the states – is the supremacy of the individual who owns his own life and the necessary and proper primacy of his liberty. Denied the recognition that he owns his own life, and seeing the primacy of his liberty negotiated away or simply erased from law, man becomes a part-time or full-time indentured serf. There is not a single state in the Union that has not enacted its own à la carte nullification of freedom. So, on what grounds can the state credibly oppose the lavish, cannibalistic banquet of Obamacare? All the states can do, in opposition to Obamacare, is clam first "rights" to impose their own statist imperatives. Put another way: Whose supremacy is it, anyway? Whose supremacy ought to be the issue – the State's, or the individual's? Original entry: See link at top of this post
  16. The Supreme Court's "Declaratory Act": Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. Obamacare will compel, under penalty of a monetary payment, all Americans to purchase health insurance. This monetary penalty was never intended by the authors of the ACA to be a revenue-raising impost. It was never intended to be a tax, either, although the Internal Revenue Service was appointed the enforcer of the law and collector of the penalty. Further, proponents of Obamacare argued that Congress had the power to enforce compliance with the law under the Commerce clause of the Constitution, which bestows on Congress the power to "regulate interstate commerce." Opponents of the law have argued that Congress does not have the power to force individuals to engage in such commerce. During initial arguments before the Court, the Court rebutted this argument to some extent, dismissing the Solicitor General's position that an absence from such commerce is no excuse for not complying with the mandates of Obamacare. The "individual mandate" – or the feature of force – became the bête noir of Obamacare. Chief Justice Roberts, however, side-stepped the whole issue and, as some commentators have observed, "rewrote" the punitive feature of the individual mandate and called it a "tax," arguing that such a tax is not outside the bounds of Congressional power. In that single act, Chief Justice Roberts, in an act of evasion and moral cowardice, conferred upon Congress the power and authority to tax every human action and commodity. Violating the Aristotelian law that a thing cannot be A and non-A at the same time, Roberts wrote that the punitive penalty can be treated as a tax. Worse, the Constitution can limit Congress's powers, and expand them at the same time, as well. He did not recognize the Commerce clause argument advocating compulsory engagement in the commerce of insurance. He recognized, however, Congress's power to enslave and destroy. The Affordable Care Act is constitutional in part and unconstitutional in part. The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it. In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax. (p. 58) But many pages before Roberts' lop-sided logic, he begins with this reductio ad absurdum gem. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. (p. 3, Italics mine) So, rather than undermine the principle behind the Commerce Clause (which does not grant Congress the power to "regulate" business in terms of controlling it, but rather to bring objective law to chaos), Roberts elects to undermine the principle of limited and enumerated powers that constrain Congress. This opinion is unprecedented in the Court's annals, because it does and does not uphold Obamacare. In his opinion, Roberts wrote, with the pouting, moral fervor of a scold, "It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." Charles Krauthammer wrote in his Washington Post column, "Why Roberts did it": How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress. Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the commerce clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the commerce clause fig leaf. Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed. I do not think the advocates and supporters of Obamacare will much mind that Roberts, with the flick of his pen and a leap in logic, dubbed the penalty a tax. After all, the penalty and the tax will accomplish the same results. Let us not say that Roberts's actions are, in a political context, unprecedented. There are historical precedents. We must go back to the pre-Revolutionary period to find them. The Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Declaratory Act of 1766. The Proclamation of 1763, on occasion of Britain's victory in defeating the French for possession of North America, was issued under the name of George III. It forbad all British colonials from escaping the mercantilist, regulatory and taxing authority of the Crown by crossing into the transmontane, or the Western wilderness beyond the mountain range from the settled colonies on the Eastern seaboard, and establishing new settlements. That was the overture. In 1765, to defray the costs of the French and Indian War, and to fund the costs of maintaining a standing army in the colonies as well as maritime courts and a civilian bureaucracy to enforce Crown law, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax, payable in Crown silver only, on most court and legal documents, newspapers, playing cards, and even university degrees. The pseudo-Solons of the Crown had observed two things: That colonials were insatiable readers, and the most litigious subjects in the Empire. The colonials revolted against the Stamp Tax. Without going into details, except for a paltry amount collected in Georgia, the Stamp tax was a famous failure, the Crown not collecting a penny of the tax, and seeing its Stamp Tax collectors hounded from their royally appointed sinecures. The turmoil caused Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act exactly one year later, in 1766, rather than allow it to stand and exacerbate hostility towards the mother country. The American colonials celebrated their victory. Most did not pay attention to the companion legislation that accompanied repeal, The Declaratory Act, which was: AN ACT for the better securing the dependency of his Majesty's dominions in America upon the crown and parliament of Great Britain. WHEREAS several of the houses of representatives in his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America, have of late, against law, claimed to themselves, or to the general assemblies of the same, the sole and exclusive right of imposing duties and taxes upon his Majesty's subjects in the said colonies and plantations; and have, in pursuance of such claim, passed certain votes, resolutions, and orders, derogatory to the legislative authority of parliament, and inconsistent with the dependency of the said colonies and plantations upon the crown of Great Britain: ... be it declared ..., That the said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be. subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain; and that the King's majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever…. Note the stress on dependency. Congress wishes Americans to become dependent on it for every conceivable human action and relationship, in "all cases whatsoever" – by edict and fiat. There is no difference between Parliament's intentions and Congress's. I have noted in past columns that Mitt Romney, the de facto Republican candidate for President, is no antidote to either Obama, Obamacare, or statism. He is a statist. Chief Justice Roberts (likely under some threat from the White House) has sanctioned the humongous expansion of federal power, aside from upholding the ACA. Romney is no friend of freedom, either. He signed MassachusettsCare into law, after all, and that was a miniature template for Obamacare. Either way, Americans have just been put on notice that they are wards of the state. Two things should alarm Americans: Roberts's apparent last minute switch from a majority that would have struck down Obamacare (obviously a sign of White House arm-twisting, or Capone-style persuasion), and the expansion of federal tax-and-punish powers. Remember, the "tax" that's not a "tax" feature of the ACA is not a revenue-raising one, but a punitive one. That is the hallmark of "conservatives" – to seek a "middle ground" that seems apolitical and non-partisan. That is, to uphold no principles at all, except that of "me-too." After all, we would not want to challenge the altruist nature of Obamacare, would we? We're nice guys at heart, just like the collectivists. And if it turns out to be a pernicious law, well, you people asked for it. It's not for a Chief Justice to judge. Well, no we didn't ask for it. It was passed over the raucous and highly visible and exacerbated hostility of the Americans on whom the burden would fall. The Court has never consistently upheld the Constitution, not in its entire history. The role of the Chief Justice, however, is not to evade judgment of an outrageous, looting, confiscatory law and blame the electorate for voting for the creatures who passed it. He and his colleagues are supposed to say: "This is evil, this violates individual rights, this is villainous and tyrannical, and we're declaring it unconstitutional." We are not paying the Chief Justice to collect a sumptuous salary and enjoy perks we can't afford. (Remember, ALL federal employees are exempted from ALL features and stipulations of Obamacare, as well as ALL members of Congress.) We are paying him to pass judgment on legislation. Sure, he can blame some of the electorate for voting the creatures from the Black Lagoon into office, but that is not his job, to place blame (except perhaps in an aside or a footnote to an opinion) and pass the buck. That feature of Roberts's opinion is, I think, unprecedented in the Court's annals. How low can you get? Republicans, as "conservatives," consciously wish to “conserve” the status quo, which can mean any state of affairs in any point in time, as long as it means the welfare state, entitlements, subsidies, tens of thousands of regulations, all kinds of taxes and tariffs, central banking, and so on. Perhaps the correct term should be “preserve.” Now, that would make an appropriate designation of most Republicans: the Preservatives. Seriously, however, the Conservatives cannot challenge the Left in any fundamental way, because they share the same morality, which is altruism. All they can say to the Democrats and Progressives, with the indignation of a priggish scold, “Not so fast!” The Right and the Left agree on the ends; the means and speed are open to bipartisan negotiation. That has been the history of Congress and the Executive Branch since the late 19th century. Parliament meant what it said when it affirmed legislative and taxing authority over the American colonies. Beginning in 1764, Parliament passed over two dozen Acts to make the colonies dependent on Britain for its trade and sustenance. It made no finicky distinctions between taxes and penalties, between commerce and non-commerce. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats meant what they said when they asserted legislative authority over Americans' lives, health and fortunes. They rammed Obamacare through Congress, blithely indifferent to or ignorant of Congress's enumerated powers. Little could they know that Chief Justice John Roberts would affirm their tyranny with his own Declaratory Act. And we all know what the original Declaratory Act led to. Well, not all. Congress is oblivious. And so is Chief Justice John Roberts. It can happen again. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  17. The Bedlam of Statism: Is statism bipolar? Schizophrenic? Autistic? Obsessive-compulsive? Multi-phobic? Inherently dysfunctional? Psychotically antisocial? A form of dementia? A narcissistic personality disorder? A kind of panic or anxiety disorder? Just plain maladaptive? Or all of the preceding? This column will enter the mad house of statism and explore its various wards. John David Lewis, in his masterpiece about the means and ends of war, Nothing Less Than Victory, cites both Ludwig von MIses and Ayn Rand on etatism and statism or fascism. In Omnipotent Government, von Mises notes that etatism denotes those political systems that "have a common goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion." (Lewis, p. 44) Quoting from Rand's column, "The Fascist New Frontier," Lewis cites Rand: The dictionary definition of fascism is: “a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.), emphasizing an aggressive nationalism . . .” [ The American College Dictionary, New York: Random House, 1957.] Of statism, she also wrote: If the term “statism” designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history. Lewis continues: Statism applies to any government with such power, whether a primitive tribal ruler, a theocratic council, or a communist or fascist dictatorship – including a democracy unrestrained by fundamental laws – each of which swallows the lives and fortunes of individuals without regard for their rights. The identification of such governments as statist is relatively new, but the practice is of enormous antiquity (as Lewis demonstrates in his chapter on the Theban Wars against the Spartan slave state). But the subject here is that wherever statism in any of its forms has been established and tried, it has failed, causing economic dislocations and eventual collapse, the impoverishment of its most productive citizenry, their incremental or outright slavery, and an excuse to war on more prosperous and freer neighbors. The history of statism is riddled with these disasters, and at no time has it ever been successful on its own terms, nor will it ever be. Even with a willing and compliant citizenry, it is destined to fail. If Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia seemed to be "successful," it was only by grace of the inertia of the semi-free past and a proximity to freer nations, which they immediately began to conquer. The longevity of statism is illusory. Today mixed economies are endemic and seem to thrive only because of the shrinking quantum of liberty and capitalism that may exist in any one nation, and on which statist governments depend for revenue (or loot). Governments produce nothing, not even the desks and chairs and pencils and grosses of paper and ink used by bureaucratic chiefs and their staffs. Remember that even in the U.S., there are no such things as government-owned and run gun or tank factories, only private companies contracted to produce weaponry or the instruments of force (such as Tasers, electronic cattle prods, protective gear, etc.). The only government-owned and managed "enterprises" by tyrannies have been the charnel houses of concentration camps and Gulags. The exceptions to this rule are communist nations in which the government owns and runs everything and everyone. Even in such overtly totalitarian countries, however, their governments are thieves and parasites preying on the achievements of freer nations. The phenomenon has been amply recorded by many observers, such as Werner Keller and Anthony C. Sutton. Look at Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or "capitalist" China: these are countries that thrive on the products of freedom, while outlawing it for their own populaces. And their longevity is sustained only by the ignorance of those who help them survive, such as Western policymakers, pragmatic businessmen, and tourists. So, if statism, whatever its form or scope, has a consistent record of tragic and costly failure whenever and wherever it has been tried, what is its appeal? Why do men keep advocating it and imposing it in the face of the incalculable destruction, death and misery it has caused? It must be madness. A form of mental illness in politicians, leaders, and their followers. It's easier to champion than are rational self interest, individualism, and no-strings-no-fetters freedom. Collectivism appeals to politicians because it guarantees votes and power. It appeals to voters because it proposes to share the misery of having one's wealth and that of one's neighbor expropriated for the greater good of an anonymous, amorphous whole, that omnivorous monster called "society." The joke is that sacrificing for the "greater good" is not a virtue, but a vice resting on delusions, obsessions, unreasoning malice, or unexamined fears. Altruism, the morality that underlies collectivism and statism, is a form of madness. It asks a person to value ice cream by never tasting it, or to sacrifice it after one has tasted it. It asks one to value life by not living. It demands that one surrender one's liberty in exchange for an entitlement. It requires that one not know that one's rights and freedom originate in the requirements of living as an independent individual, but to believe that one's rights originate with society or the state to be granted or withdrawn when the state deems it politick. Daniel Greenfield made this observation: The Clash of Civilizations is all-encompassing. It doesn't just cover the big thing, like ramming planes into skyscrapers, but also the little things…. For Mayor Bloomberg, it's banning large sodas….When there is no limit to government infringement on rights, then the law is a collection of bugbears and control mechanisms…. It's senseless, but so is fighting obesity by banning people from buying large sodas. When the obsession of a few men is turned into law, then the result is equally contemptuous of the individual as a rotting sack of vile habits which he has to be forced to abandon by the majority of the law. Once you abandon the rights of the individual to the fiat of activists, judges and politicians-- then laws can be made by anyone who wants them badly enough. The same process of judicial activism, hysteria, violent attacks, and pressure groups that created gay marriage can one day lock up the happy couples. It's only a matter of who is making the laws. Statism is legalized, institutional irrationality, criminality elevated to the status of duty and "public service." The irrational, by itself, operating in a social vacuum, is self-destructive. Operating unchecked or unchallenged among men, is destructive of them and of their values. Walter Williams, in his article, "Immoral Beyond Redemption," poses the question: …[D]oes an act that's clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people. The moral question is whether it's right to take what belongs to one person to give to another to whom it does not belong. From science fiction, statism can be characterized by a variety of malevolent, inimical creatures. In our public education systems (including universities), children and young people are mandated to sit in front of Alien pod teachers from which leap parasites that cling fast to their minds to plant the seeds of multiculturalism, volunteerism, self-sacrifice, and deference to the state. In economics, we are all attacked by The Blob of taxes, controls, and prohibitions that eat us alive. Predators identify and hunt down anyone who defends himself word or deed against government force. From the horror genre, the intelligentsia and its cohorts in academe may be represented by Hannibal Lecter, a charming, articulate killer who will promise men the moon while plotting to prepare a meal of them for himself. Let's say that statism is bipolar. A bipolar government takes action, such as imposing confiscatory taxes that skew, reduce, or redirect private spending for the sake of raising revenue to support sometimes legitimate but too often illegitimate imperatives and programs. The decades-old campaign against smoking is salutary. Politicians, heeding the demands of anti-smoking lobbies and activists, impose higher taxes and more controls on cigarettes and other tobacco products, theoretically reducing smoking rates among the population ( a state-designated "public good"), and allowing anti-smokers and the asthma-stricken and sensitivity feigners to frolic in businesses, restaurants, and bars they don't really own. At the same time, however, government depends on cigarette taxes for revenue, and when the revenue falls, it raises the taxes on cigarettes higher, or finds another taxable product – say, gasoline, or capital gains, or bottles of imported Bailey's Irish Cream – to make up for a shortfall that becomes increasingly bottomless. (And incidentally creates an "illegal" or underground market for the targeted goods, from smuggled, untaxed cigarettes to outlawed light bulbs to profits deposited in offshore banks, which in turn causes to the government to create more agencies and hire more employees to "police" said market, which in turn requires more taxes and revenue to pay for enforcement.) A statist or command economy is therefore a Sisyphean nightmare that grows worse with each new echelon of salaried mediocrities put in charge of regulating the latest "public concern." Statists declare society blighted and proceed to impose eminent domain on neighborhoods, choices, habits, and everyone. This has been the incremental history of Progressivism, which has never had to look far for a "social ill" to cure and regulate. Any human action may be deemed a "social ill" and a candidate for taxation, regulation, or prohibition, from consuming milkshakes to stock or commodity speculation. The purpose of the taxes, regulations, and prohibitions is to impose the "social justice" clamored for by various social engineering groups that wish to punish, control, or extinguish other groups. Governments – federal, state and local – wish to have enough revenue to either balance their budgets, or at least stave off bigger than usual deficits, while at the same time heeding the social justice brigades' demands for smoke-free air or reduced car emissions or nutritional information on food products or a "fairer" redistribution of earned income. This compels government policymakers to seek a median, which only ratchets up costs all around. It is a no-win episode of bipolarism for everyone, two steps forward, one step back. It is disguised as "social progress" by the pronouncements of activists, politicians, and public interest groups. What it is in reality is an insidious conditioning of men so that they become inured to slavery. Some of those activists, politicians, and public interest groups know exactly what it is all progressing to – socialism, fascism, a straightjacket state – but most don't know, and think that once the tax, regulation, or prohibition is legislated, their work is done. They've done their good deed, and remain on the sidelines or become spectators while other activists, politicians, and public interest groups take their turn at "democracy." It is all a prescription for bedlam, of groups fighting each other for controls over each other, a "democratic" anarchy that can only result in the stasis of totalitarian rule. Choose your dementia from the group of statist disorders which introduced this column. As with personal, clinically defined mental illnesses, each is founded on some species of the irrational. When are Americans going to stop believing in the miracle nostrums of statism, and seek out and heed the advice of those who prescribe the steps to take toward the sanity of freedom? Original entry: See link at top of this post
  18. Review: Nothing Less Than Victory: The last engaging book I read on the means and ends of warfare before John Lewis's was a 2009 abridged version of Winston Churchill's The River War, originally published in 1899. Its original, full title included An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. The term "reconquest" was misleading, because the Sudan had never before been "conquered" by the British, but was under the jurisdiction of Egypt, then a protectorate of Britain. Egypt was unable to deal militarily with the Dervish forces that meant to conquer it. It fell to Britain extinguish the Mahdist or Islamic threat, which, unchecked, could well have spread from Egypt to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East. General Herbert Kitchener was tasked with that formidable project. Churchill describes the meticulous and determined campaign he waged, which was not just a matter of sending an army into the desert wastes to fight fanatical tribesmen. It meant reforming the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian government, rebuilding the Egyptian army and its Sudanese levies, building a railroad into enemy territory, and mastering the stupendous logistics of supplies and men. The stated objective was to erase the Mahdist regime as a military and political threat in the whole region. The climax of the campaign was the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, in which the Dervish army was utterly decimated and routed. In the end, over a year later, the successor of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, Abdallah ibn Muhammad, was killed and the remnants of his forces routed at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat. The Sudan Campaign had clear military and political objectives. The British government then had the will to take the necessary actions to destroy an enemy and discredit the ideology that moved it. Churchill noted in The River War that, " The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men." In short, Islam, like the Nazi, Fascist, and Shinto ideologies which compelled Germany, Italy, and Japan to invade other countries, must be repudiated by the aggressor and cease to be regarded by its adherents and converts as a feasible and desired ideology that fosters "peace." This comports with the main theme of John David Lewis's seminal work on the efficacious "warfighting" policies of the past, Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton University Press, 2010). That "great power" comes in many disguises. Lewis tackles some of them. Lewis, however, does not immediately discuss 20th century conflicts, but wars of antiquity, using them as overtures to his discussions of the Civil War and World Wars One and Two, underscoring the need, in warfare, of a government to have the will to identify an enemy and his morality or ideology, and then the will to fight the war on its own terms, and not those of the enemy. What is more, the attacked nation must be willing to eviscerate the enemy's will to fight on to foreshorten the conflict and possibly establish a peace beneficial to the former opponents. In each of the conflicts that he illustrates, Lewis economically dwells on military strategies of opponents, but places far more importance on the moral force, or lack of it, that guides one side to victory and the other to defeat. In his Introduction to Nothing Less Than Victory, Lewis states: Those who wage war to enslave a continent – or to impose their dictatorships over a neighboring state – are seeking an end that is deeply immoral and must not be judged morally equal to those defending against such attacks. Further on he notes: Certainly the tactics of Roman foot soldiers cannot be applied to tank divisions today, but the Romans might be able to tell us something about the motivations of a stateless enemy that is subverting a world power….The goal of war is the subjugation of the hostile will, which echoes Carl von Clausewitz's identification that war is 'an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.' This is Lewis's only indirect reference to Islamic jihad. Today, Islam is the "stateless enemy" subverting a world power (the U.S.), but the U.S. lacks to will to identify that enemy and take the necessary steps to vanquish it. (Lewis does not discuss the Islamic jihad, but all the points he makes about other wars may be applied to that species of aggression.) There is an eerie parallel between the current situation and Lewis's Chapter Six, "The Balm of a Guilty Conscience," which details the evasions, fallacious soul-searching, and moral disintegration of British diplomacy in the face of the evolving and maturing nemesis of Nazi Germany before the onset of World War Two. As Lewis demonstrates in that chapter, British and Allied concessions to Hitler abetted the maturation of Hitler's régime to the point that Hitler could confidently plan and embark on his conquests. Lewis demonstrates novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand's observation that Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions. In a brilliant dissection of the causes of the rise of Nazism, Lewis pinpoints those "feelings" stemming from the Versailles Treaty of 1919, in which the victors laid blame for World War One squarely on Germany's aggressions, but which German politicians and moralists interpreted as an unjust victimization of Germany. It is in this chapter that Lewis best explicates the differences between an aggressor nation's surrender and its defeat. Germany, he writes, surrendered without admitting defeat. Over time, British and Allied governments were persuaded – or persuaded themselves – that German feelings and assertions of victimization and humiliation were justified, and incrementally, in a succession of concessions, allowed Hitler to cement his power over Germany, and later waived all moral judgment for his takeovers of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, not to mention his determined rearmament in violation of the Treaty's terms. Craven British diplomatic maneuvering and peace-hankering newspapers pressured France into making conciliations. France, devastated by the German invasion and depredations in the first war, and which stood the most to lose if Germany rearmed, initially took steps to enforce the Treaty's terms, but was browbeaten into submission by "public opinion" and the Allies virtual abandonment of the Treaty. After the invasions of Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, France was the next country targeted by the wrath of Germany's vengeful feelings. I guarantee that anyone who reads Chapter Six will emerge with an enriched and refocused understanding of the causes of World War Two. Complementing that chapter is "Gifts from Heaven," in which he discusses how and why the Shinto/Bushido culture of Imperial Japan had to be gutted from top to bottom, beginning with the Emperor clear down through Japanese politics to the schoolroom, as an integral element of the American defeat of Japan to ensure that it would never again formulate a design for conquest. It was necessary for Japan not only to surrender, but to admit to the world and to its citizens the ignominious defeat of its philosophy of existence, which was essentially a philosophy of death. Grant Jones, in his 2010 review of Lewis's book in Michigan War Studies Review, reprises Lewis's comparison of the strategies adopted by Civil War Generals George McClellan and William T. Sherman in Chapter Five, "The Hard Hand of War." McClellan, notes Lewis, was a superb administrator but a poor strategist, hamstrung by an ambivalent attitude towards his own troops and absent a clear goal. Lewis shows that Sherman was cut from different cloth, not by focusing on his famous Marches, but by examining the moral force behind his ruthless strategy to destroy the Southern planter class. In looking at Sherman's correspondence with John Bell Hood, Lewis discerns the elements that together made Sherman's strategy so effective: properly assigning war guilt, developing an understanding of both one's own society and the enemy's, identifying the enemy's vital center, and defining victory. Lewis sums up Sherman's famous "War is cruelty" response to Confederate entreaties that he moderate his policies: "These familiar passages cut to the heart of Sherman's attitude toward an enemy that had started a war that his command now charged him to end: he accepted no guilt for a war that was not of his making. This sense of rightness allowed him to prosecute the war to its conclusion quickly, with his force directed at the true source of southern power rather than merely at military positions dependent upon that power. Lewis briefly discusses the failed war policy of Vietnam, and further rebuts the many and varied arguments that the U.S. should not have used atomic bombs on Japan. He concludes his rebuttals with: All weapons – from bowie knives to hydrogen bombs – are designed to kill, and there is a scale of destructiveness on which they fall….To break the Japanese leadership out of their ideological blunders and end the war, American leaders needed to kill a lot of Japanese in a visibly shocking way. The resulting shock led to an immediate end to the war. The alternative, as described in detail by Lewis, was a massive invasion of Japan whose population was being exhorted to fight the Americans to the death with sticks and stones, thus prolonging the war and resulting in incalculable American casualties. Compare America's warfighting philosophy then with that which has governed our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, governed by "just war theory" which deliberately, at the cost of American lives and treasure, spares enemy populations of the consequences of their active or passive support of their masters. Lewis's book is not a cobbled-together collection of arbitrary, hindsight anecdotes, but one that takes the rare examples of proper warfighting policy adopted by aggressed-upon nations, and drives home the principles behind his thesis. The logical progression of his examples is enlightening and indisputable. Lewis, a classical studies scholar, is the author of two previous books on the politics and judicial thought of antiquity, Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens (Duckworth Publishers, 2008), and Early Greek Lawgivers (Duckworth Publishers, 2007). So it is not coincidence that he chose to illustrate his thesis in the first four chapters of Nothing Less Than Victory, covering the Greco-Persian Wars, the Theban war against Sparta, the Second Punic War, and Roman Emperor Aurelian's campaigns to prevent the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In each of these chapters he illustrates the efficacy of the policy of taking the war to the aggressor enemy's land for the sole purpose of deflating the aggressor's moral motivation. Lewis concludes his nonpareil survey with this advisement: Sic vis pacem, para bellum . Or – If you want peace, prepare for war. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  19. Objectivist Round Up - May 31, 2012: Welcome to the May 31, 2012 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. "About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix. So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up: John Drake presents 3 Keys to Picking a Career posted at Try Reason!, saying, "After giving students advice on picking careers for many years, I have discovered there are three key things to picking one that captures your passions but is also profitable. Values, strengths, and opportunities. Read more..." Roberto B Sarrionandia presents Tories vs The Enlightenment posted at Roberto Sarrionandia, saying, "Why a British exam question on Judaism is not racist, and what is revealed about the premises of the government officials who think it is." Diana Hsieh presents Defecting to North Korea posted at Philosophy in Action, saying, "The horrifying story of a man who convinced his family to defect to -- yes, to -- North Korea." Rational Jenn presents The One About ATLOSCon 2012 posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "All about my ATLOSCon 2012 experience! What can I say? It was wonderful and fulfilling!" Paul Hsieh presents Scherz and Fogoros on USPSTF posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "Two nice discussions on why the government wants to clamp down on preventive medicine." C.W. presents The Immediate Important Lesson From Europe posted at Krazy Economy, saying, "We can learn from Europe what not to do first to move toward capitalism." Darius Cooper presents To teach posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "To teach is to step into another man's thought,..." Peter Cresswell presents A conclusive experiment with a crucial lesson for Christchurch [updated] posted at Not PC, saying, "NZ's earthquake-ridden city of Christchurch has been treated by government as a welfare case instead of opened up as an enterprise opportunity. The experience of two US cities after tornado damage helps illustrate how wrong this approach has been." *** That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  20. Watch What You Say: A Guide for Dhimmis: Feeling a need to humor myself, and casting about for a way to cock a snook at the Department of Homeland Security and The Transportation Security Administration (in German, Die Abteilung der Heimatland-Sicherheit, and Die Transport-Sicherheitsverwaltung, one click of the heels and raised right arm, palm down, required for pronunciation, if you can manage it) and strike a blow for freedom of speech and the First and Fourth Amendments, the DHS provided me with a salubrious vehicle. Cowboy Byte and other blog sites reported the grudging release by the DHS of its 39-page Analyst's Desktop Binder (2011) containing words employed anywhere on the Internet that should cause red flags and whistles and bells to awaken the glaze-eyed human monitors and alert over-heating computers to open that Binder and follow its instructions. The list is pseudo-comprehensive, including obvious terms that would slap a monitor on the back of his head when they pop up, and numerous terms used millions of times every day by Internet users, so that one wonders why they were included, unless the monitors and computers are programmed to look for suspicious combinations of two or more of them in sneaky repetitions or recurrences. The DHS may as well have programmed the whole Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Complete Works of Shakespeare. "The keywords are included…in the Binder," notes Cowboy Byte, "which also instructs analysts to hunt down media reports that reflect poorly on the department." And they're not even in alphabetical order. Very, very sly. Makes it difficult to follow. "It doesn't include the keyword list used by Obama's gang of plumbers who troll the Net for negative stories, or the NSA, which represents a whole different set of eyes that are watching you." Well, let's give that a try, and reflect" poorly on our very own We Never Sleep Detective Agency, and imagine the critical infrastructure of the average DHS monitor's mind when he's on the job. Words in italics are push-their-button terms, except for book titles and the like. But, then, you never know. The lexicon reputedly is incomplete. As a new hire, our man probably went through several weeks of orientation with other recruits, and he might have innocently asked his instructor why the Koran was not listed the Desktop Binder. The guide hemmed and hawed in his best professorial manner, claiming that Islam was never considered an enemy, all the evidence to the contrary, but the question was secretly logged into the new hire's personnel file under "Possible Islamophobic Tendencies and Symptoms." Not an auspicious start of a career of snooping. The guide's answer was also secretly entered into his own personnel file. After a brief review of his record by a permanent and anonymous committee of employee evaluation, he was subsequently and regretfully furloughed, and his security clearance rescinded. One of his new hire charges happened to have been working for Internal Affairs, a department charged with the task of policing trainers and training classes and just about everyone who worked for the DHS. Except for Internal Affairs personnel. In the subterranean consciousness of rank-and-file snoops, Internal Affairs had a nickname, the Mutaween, or The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Crimethink, modeled, some said, after the Saudi Arabian religious police, although no one dared investigate and confirm the parallel, nor could they, for all references to Islam, Muslims, mosques, beards and burkas had been excised from DHS literature. "Rhymes with Halloween," whispered the lowly amongst themselves. Our new monitor learned later that any blunt but incautious reference to Islam and Muslims within the confines of his job – and even during chitchat at the water cooler or in the break room or at the Starbucks down the street – was considered hazmat jibber-jabber and evidence of a radioactive mindset that would be closely monitored by his supervisor. He would come to realize that if he did not wish to be considered toxic by his colleagues, he'd better put his mind in permanent lockdown. The pay was too good and the benefits too fabulous for him to risk losing them over a slip of the tongue or an impulsive fillip of independent thought. How often had the orientation instructor emphasized that certain words were verboten, because they could cause episodes of intellectual contamination, acting as bacteria that could metastasize into a plague of epistemological Ebola, and render the DHS impotent to detect and counter terrorists of anonymous and un-named allegiances? "Not to worry, however," the instructor had droned on. "The Center for Disease Control has had added to its purview a new task, per executive order, that of managing mental mitigation among the populace. It works closely with the Department of Education to reduce human-to-human ideational infections." One day, after a week on the job, the new hire was taken to lunch at a very expensive restaurant on K Street, the Tuscany Bar and Grille, by a veteran analyst, ostensibly to compliment him on his alertness and the number of alarms the novice had sent his way with the click of a button and the swish of a mouse. After Trish, the comely waitress had taken their orders and served them glasses of Chianti, the analyst smiled and said, "That last referral of yours I had to share with my colleagues upstairs. It was worth a chuckle. The dirty bombe was merely a dessert recipe a lady in New Haven had sent to a friend in Cannes, consisting of strawberry mousse and ice cream packed into a pound cake coated with dark chocolate Godiva sprinkles." The analyst laughed. "Hardly the ingredients for an explosion, except to one's waistline, But she called it her 'Bombe Sale,' or Dirty Bombe,' and we had her investigated anyway. There was nothing cryptic in her communication. Our computers also analyzed the text and found nothing threatening in it, and gave the email a pass." "Sorry about that," said the novice, humbled, and forgetting to smile at the analyst's funny. "No, no," assured the analyst. "Don't be sorry. It showed you know the drill." He paused. "By the way, I heard that the lobby scanners confiscated a few books you brought to work the other day. What was that one? Atlas Shrugged?" The veteran clucked his tongue and shook his head. "At your age, reading such subversive trash!" The novice looked perplexed. "Know your enemy," he ventured. "That's been my motto." "Well, there's a difference between knowing one's enemy, and denying he is one. Our job is to detect and foil terrorists of all stripes, especially intellectual terrorists, such as the author of that badly penned novel. Leave enemy designations to your superiors. Don't go wandering off on your own. There is a point where initiative becomes a vice." "Sorry," answered the novice. "Then there was that other book the screeners took," said the analyst, furling his brow. "The Satiric Verses?" "Satanic Verses, sir," corrected the novice with a tone of polite deference. "Yes, yes," acknowledged the analyst. "By that odd fellow, what is his name? Salmonella?" "Salman Rushdie," said the novice. "Oh, yes. Well, that show-offy writer offended our Muslim friends with that one. Brought it upon himself. No sympathy for him. I've heard it's a lousy novel, anyway." The analyst recited a list of books the novice was advised never to bring to his job. "That new one by Gertie Wildman, that Dutch fellow, or whatever his name is, Marked for Death. The man is a dangerous paranoid. Lives in an armored car, I've heard. The Federalist Papers. Anything by Jefferson, Madison, Adams, that ilk. You don't want people to think you're going high-hat on us. Leave that old stuff to the courts and eggheads. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- irredeemably subversive. Cool Hand Luke, that Pearce novel, and the movie, too. Claims to be an allegory on modern American society, according to our authorities here, just chock full of anti-government speeches and the like." The analyst studied the novice's stupefied expression. "Tell you what, son. I'll draw up a list of no-no's and send it down to you. The whole grid of things to stay away from. All you have to do is abstain from reading or watching any of it. You wouldn't want any of those things to spill over into your work, would you? People might think you were in some secret militia spying on us." "Thank you," said the new hire. "No problem. Always glad to help the new boy find his way through the labyrinth. Ah! Here are our Panini Supremes!" the analyst exclaimed as the waitress appeared with their orders. Our novice monitor, over the following weeks, gained confidence in his snooping and detection skills, learning how to filter innocuously used terms and forward the emails containing them to specific analysts, who specialized in various usages. A little quadrant of his gray cells, however, did wonder why, when most of the news concerning terrorist attacks invariably involved Muslims – he did, after all, watch TV news and read "safe" newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post – the terms "Muslim," "mosque," "Iran," "Afghanistan," "Pakistan," "Saudi Arabia," "iman," "mullah," "Syria," "CAIR," "MPAC," "MSA," "ISNA," "ICNA," and many other Islam-associated terms were not to be found in the Binder of All Knowledge and Threat Level Usages. But he cordoned off that quadrant of curiosity, refusing to allow it to cloud his performance or breach his commitment to national preparedness and domestic security. Homeland security trumped all definitions of common sense and required the most stringent enforcement. He took special pride in forwarding to his analyst friend an email sent by a university medical researcher to a neurologist in private practice complaining that FDA regulations and delays inhibited pharmaceutical development of drugs that would not become treatment resistant in countless patients, and that when Obamacare went into full effect, medical and pharmaceutical research would come to a halt. It was obviously an undisguised criticism of government policies, and the email suggested to the monitor the existence of a cabal of such people in all medical professions, a veritable conspiracy to incite a coordinated black out of medical services across the country. He learned a week later that the purloined email led to the arrest by a special military SWAT team of the researcher and neurologist, who were incarcerated without charge indefinitely by the authority of a law passed by Congress a year before. Thus the monitor's first commendation was entered into his personnel file. Over lunch one day again at the Tuscany Bar and Grille with the analyst, after they had ordered, he queried: "Was there a conspiracy?" "Probably," answered the analyst, "Whether or not there is or was, is irrelevant. We cannot tolerate resistance in any form. Not any kind of organized crime. Extraordinary threats justify extraordinary powers, to protect the Homeland, which, in the final analysis, is us. You and me, and all our colleagues. The Homeland isn't just the country, you see. It includes the state. You mustn't distinguish between them." "I'm learning not to," answered the monitor eagerly. Still, a little comma of memory tickled the cordoned-off quadrant of his mind. He seemed to remember – and quite reluctantly – reading about historical figures who had uttered words similar to what the analyst had just explained: Bismarck, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and others. But that reading was done long, long ago in grade school. He hoped his mother had gotten rid of those books, they were an embarrassment and possibly a liability. "I'm learning to get my mind right," he added, not realizing that submitting to authority was a subject of Cool Hand Luke, the book and the movie, because he had not read the book, nor watched the movie. But the analyst, who had done both as part of his own training, and had tasted much more of the forbidden culture than he would ever confess to his protégé, smiled mysteriously and said, "Admirable effort, my friend. I see that you are trying not to remain a hostage to your youthful expectations." Just then the waiter appeared with the analyst's Chicken Verduta Flatbread and the monitor's Risotta and Insalata. He gracelessly set the plates in front of the customers. The analyst frowned and looked up at the waiter, a large, bearded fellow with a swarthy complexion and an inscrutable visage. His white tunic seemed about to burst from his weight. "Say," ventured the annoyed analyst, "where's Trish, our usual server? Is she off today?" The waiter smiled. "She is off. She had an accident with a box cutter. She is resting in the kitchen, with all the others." Then he reached inside his tunic, and, as he pressed a button, shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" Only then did the analyst and his protégé notice that all the waiters were in the crowded, elegantly appointed dining room, standing erect among all the occupied tables, and were all reaching inside their tunics and shouting the unfamiliar malediction in chorus with the analyst's server. The analyst had just enough time to turn and see another waiter in the outdoor café, before he and his friend were blinded by a flash that turned them both into something resembling cooked calamari and tomato sauce. The Washington Post, the next day, however, blamed the unfortunate incident, which claimed seventy-five lives (mostly federal employees, not counting the restaurant staff of fifteen), on a dispute between the restaurant owner, the Service Employees International Union, and a renegade splinter group of Occupy Wall Street. End of story. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  21. Sticks and Stones: Sticks and stones may break my bones, goes the adage, but names will never hurt me. The new adage, tailored for our age, goes: Sticks and stones may break my bones, and names, insults, derogatory remarks, denigrations, defamations, "hate" crimes, "bias intimidations," rude or indecent gestures, mockery, satire in textual print or imagery, disrespect, lifestyle harassment, bullying, and other verbal, visual, and non-violent actions, attempts at passive victimization and gross insensitivities that tend or are calculated to hurt, depress, humiliate, or shame me, and otherwise offend my self-esteem and rightful dignity, compromise my privacy, and diminish my standing in the eyes of my fellow creatures – may be grounds for civil and/or criminal suits. Sticks and stones may be used in the commission of an actual felony, as well as guns, knives, one's fists, or any other physical object. But an evolving complement of new chargeable felonies, often appended to legitimate ones, is growing, and if not challenged, will reach a "critical mass" in law that will stifle all realms of speech. These new "felonies" are "hate crimes." A new subset of them is "bias intimidation." In "The Peril of 'Hate Crimes'" I noted: …[T]he why of a crime is increasingly treated as though it were a weapon, such as a gun, a knife, or a club. In standard criminal cases, however, it has never been the instrument of crime that was on trial, but the defendant and his actions. Proponents of hate crime have attempted to find a compromise between objectivity in criminal law and the notion that a felon should also be punished for what caused him to commit the crime. But no such compromise is feasible if objective law is to be preserved and justice served. The irrational element – that is, making thought, however irrational or ugly it may be, a crime – has suborned the rational. No compromise between good and evil is lasting or practical. Evil will always come out the victor. It did not take long for the corrupting notion of hate crimes to degenerate into thought crime. This is what happens when reason is declared irrelevant or is abandoned or diluted by the irrational. It used to be that a criminal was sentenced for his crime, and if the crime was committed from some form of prejudice, the court's and jury's afterthought was usually: And, by the way, your motives are contemptible and despicable. Appended now to a guilty verdict for the murder of an individual because of his race, gender "orientation," religion, or political affiliation, is another verdict: You had no right to think that way, so we are adding five years to your sentence and adding X amount to your monetary penalty. "Bias intimidation" played a role in the conviction and sentencing of Dharun Ravi, the Rutgers freshman whose webcam spying allegedly drove roommate Tyler Clementi to commit suicide. The New York Times reported in March; The jury in the trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of invading his roommate’s privacy by using a webcam to watch him in an intimate encounter began deliberations on Wednesday and asked the judge to define two crucial terms. Jurors asked Judge Glenn Berman of Superior Court in Middlesex County to restate the definition of “intimidate,” as well as of the word “purpose,” as it related to the bias intimidation count. The judge ruled that the defendant, Dharun Ravi, could be found guilty of bias intimidation only if he was also found guilty of the first charge, invasion of privacy. And he told the jury that the roommate, Tyler Clementi, would have been the victim of bias intimidation if he had been made to feel fear. [italics mine.] “A person is guilty of the crime of bias intimidation,” Judge Berman said, “if he commits an offense with the purpose to intimidate an individual because of sexual orientation.” Mr. Ravi is charged with 15 counts, including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and tampering with evidence. Prosecutors say he encouraged friends to view a feed from his webcam that showed Mr. Clementi with another man. Mr. Clementi committed suicide shortly afterward, in September 2010. And the denouement of this drama on May 21st, as reported by the Times: The jury found that he did not intend to intimidate Mr. Clementi the first night he turned on the webcam to watch. But the jury concluded that Mr. Clementi had reason to believe he had been targeted because he was gay, and in one charge, the jury found that Mr. Ravi had known Mr. Clementi would feel intimidated by his actions. On May 21, Mr. Ravi was sentenced to a 30-day jail term. He had faced up to 10 years in prison. He was also was sentenced to three years’ probation, 300 hours of community service, counseling about cyberbullying and alternate lifestyles and a $10,000 probation fee. USA Today provided a few more details of the sentencing by Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman: While Ravi wasn't charged in connection with his death, he was convicted of 15 counts, including two second-degree bias intimidation charges that carry a presumption of jail time. Ravi also was convicted of a second-degree hindering charge. Judge Glenn Berman ordered Ravi, 20, to report to the Middlesex County Adult Correction Center on May 31. Ravi must pay a fine and costs of more than $11,000 -- $10,000 of which will go to an agency that assists victims of bias crimes. Berman also ordered three years probation and 300 hours of community service.[ Italics mine.] USA Today included an important update, a point of Ravi's defense which the jury apparently ignored: Ravi's defense team is making the case for an acquittal of the charges, saying Ravi did not know the effect his behavior would have on Clementi. The unstated premise behind the whole trial was that Ravi had driven Clementi to commit suicide. And it is doubtful, highly doubtful, that Ravi's intentions were more than just exposing Clementi to adolescent ridicule. As a new college roommate, he barely knew Clementi. He could not know how "sensitive" he might have been to exposure, mockery, or to an invasion of his privacy. Ravi, then 18 years old, could not have known, even had he been 50 years old with a lifetime of experience behind him, what Clementi might have done as a result of his webcam spying which he shared with others. Notice that the term bias intimidation is synonymous with bias crime. Whatever it is called, in New Jersey, the "crime" garners a presumption of jail time. The larger picture is the introduction of the notion, not only of "hate crime," but of an appended but invalid felony charge that may accompany the charge of a validly defined felony. The question is – and it may be a moot question by this time – is how soon mere bias intimidation will be treated as synonymous with hate crime? How soon will individuals be taken to court and charged with it alone, without the excuse of having committed an actual felony? Salman Rushdie, who surely knows something about the consequences of "defaming" a religion and its central icon, as well as having "insulted" or "offended" the feelings of Muslims, wrote in The New Yorker: The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free. Dharun Ravi is not a writer, or an artist. But if a writer or artist experiences the fear of what might happen if he allowed his creativity full rein, then he will not create anything but what has been approved by the million censors of protected classes, who could just as easily file suit against him and see him sentenced to a new Gulag, or just financially ruined. Fear of censorship shuts down the mind and sends it on the main traveled roads of the average, the unexceptional, the bland, the expected. Fear of censorship smothers thought, and makes freedom of expression of all but the mediocre impossible and a cruel taunt. Let's examine the court's, the jury's, and the law's a priori assumptions, assumptions on which they acted. An a priori assumption is one that is knowable without further need to prove or experience. It just "is." . Clementi was gay. Ergo, Ravi's actions were anti-gay, or biased against gays, or in this instance, against Tyler Clementi because he was gay. First, note that gays are now becoming a new "protected class," as surely as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the ICNA, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and other Hamas-linked "civil rights" groups are working to make Muslims and Islam a protected class, and with some success, especially in our judiciary, and most importantly in regards to what one may say about Muslims and Islam. . As there is a legitimate distinction between premeditated and aggravated assault – premeditated meaning that a defendant meant to assault the victim, and his motive not being on trial, and aggravated meaning that the victim expected or apprehended physical assault or battery – will our courts now accept as a legitimate charge premeditated bias intimidation? Will a defendant be arraigned and indicted for aggravated bias intimidation? If a legitimately defined felony can be deemed an action taken with malice aforethought, will writing satirically (or even seriously) about Islam, or gays, or badly dressed people, or obese people, or even about the disabled, be some day treated as malicious and biased intimidation, because the feelings of the subjects were hurt, or because the words instilled unprovable but asserted fear in them? The emotional states of a felon and his victim are essentially immaterial when judging a crime. The contents of their thoughts are likewise not proper subjects for criminal justice. I could sit here and plot how to rob my bank, especially because I didn’t like the way a teller treated me the other day, but I could not be charged with any crime unless I acted on my thoughts (or my piqued sense of hurt and mistreatment). It is the action that would count, not my motive. Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman, in her article "Is There a Legal Problem with “Hate Crimes?” emphasizes this point: The definition of "hate crime" is one of those overkill legislative initiatives with unforeseen consequences. It is noble to recognize that some people commit crimes out of hate, but a murder is a murder, and this should be enough. How can we possibly know a criminal's inner thoughts (his hatred for his victim); furthermore, even if we can know this for certain, what difference does it make to the victim? The hatred of the murderer should only reflect upon the ultimate sentencing: premeditated and aggravated murder. While a defendant's emotional or even considered "bias" or "hate" may be demonstrated and proven, it should have nothing to do with the criminal charge at hand. It is the criminal action that should be the subject, and the defendant punished for having taken the action. Murder is murder. Assault is assault. Robbery is robbery. The reason why a person commits a crime, or rather his motive, should not be "punishable" and within the aegis of criminal law. The law can decree that men stop thinking, or emoting, or forming opinions, but cannot enforce the decree. It is only fear of government and/or mob reprisals that may cause their minds to sputter to a halt, and die. Little horrors, such as Judge Glenn Berman putting Dharun Ravi on probation for his "bias crime," have a way of trickling up to greater realms of human action because they remain unchallenged. There are many forces at work in this country to obviate the substance and meaning of the First Amendment. These range from the outright thuggery of an OWS-linked assault on restaurant patrons, to the concerted campaign by Islamic supremacists to outlaw criticism of Islam, to a confused judiciary that is losing sight of individual rights and replacing them with collective rights. Salman Rushdie has to date escaped the sticks and stones of the Iranian fatwa on his life, but is certainly right about the miasma of fear and political correctness that stifles and smothers freedom of expression. Little horrors like "bias intimidation" can and will contribute to a greater, incremental, and totalitarian horror. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  22. Facebook Founder Flees Fleecing: The subheading would read: Globalist Senators in Hot Pursuit. One look at the arrogant, sneering expression on the face of Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) and one glance at what he had to say about Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's renunciation of his U.S. citizenship in favor of living in Singapore, and I felt an immediate and compulsive urge to, well, slap Schumer silly. Instead, I must leave him with worse than a stung cheek and a cleaned clock. But then I'd go to jail, because it's a capital offense to strike any member of Congress. Congressmen, however, may assault us with taxes, regulations and countless Bronx cheers and sneers from the safety of their aerie of indemnification, and walk away with impunity. Schumer said Saverin's actions were "an outrage," adding Saverin "wants to de-friend the United States of America just to avoid paying taxes. We aren't going to let him get away with it." He said Saverin "turned his back on the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him and helped him become a billionaire." So, I must settle for characterizing Schumer and his colleagues in Congress as a slimy, collective, real-life Jabba the Hutt, the crime lord from Star Wars. They are the less-than-one-percent filthy rich that OWS isn't concerned about, an elite bevy of senators and congressmen who usually retire from "public service" (that is, from serving the public sunny side up) to multiple homes, continuing fringe benefits, sumptuous taxpayer paid health plans excluded from Obamacare, and cushy university appointments or a lucrative lecture circuit. I call them "filthy rich" because their wealth is largely ill-gotten through connections with lobbyists and special interests and crony capitalists and each other. I grimace every time I read of a Senate or House ethics committee grilling a victim or plying a leftist activist ringer with leading questions (e.g., Sandra Fluke), when the only ethics Congress is noted for practicing is that of a thug wielding the club of a subpoena. The Party is immaterial. As a rule, Congress lets its own malefactors off the hook with a verbal slap on the wrist. See the careers of Charles Rangel and John Kerry. They can lie through their teeth and juggle the books, but they're still there, untouched. To return to Eduardo Saverin – here is a man who helped to create a means for uncounted millions to find friends, make connections, and communicate with the rest of the world without spending anything more than their own time. Saverin and his former partner Mark Zuckerberg (now worth $17.5 billion) deserve every penny of profit from their efforts. I do not use Facebook much myself, and there are aspects to it I don’t particularly like, although I have a page which I use primarily to alert "friends" (and enemies) to my columns and writing projects. Facebook went "public" with an Initial Public Offering that dazzled some investors, others less so. Why did Brazil-born Saverin renounce his U.S. citizenship, which he did in September 2011 and paid the extortionate "exit tax"? “My decision to expatriate was based solely on my interest in working and living in Singapore, where I have been since 2009,” Saverin, 30, said in a statement released to ABC News. “I am obligated to and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to the United States government. I have paid and will continue to pay any taxes due on everything I earned while a U.S. citizen.” Saverin, who helped Mark Zuckerberg develop the social network as Harvard students, is expected to save millions of dollars by not paying capital gains taxes on his shares of Facebook, which is expected to have the largest technology IPO ever on Friday. Saverin paid a standard “exit” tax, which included approximately 15 percent of the pre-IPO value of his shares. Saverin is likely saving millions of dollars because he will not pay capital gains taxes while he lives in Singapore. “As a native of Brazil who immigrated to the United States, I am very grateful to the U.S. for everything it has given me,” Saverin said. “In 2004, I invested my life’s savings into a start-up company that initially was run out of a college dorm room. Since then the company has expanded dramatically, has created thousands of jobs in the United States and elsewhere, and spawned countless new companies across the United States and other countries.” All those jobs and new companies are nothing to Jabba the Hutt, nor is the fact that Saverin has already been fleeced by the Treasury Department per Congress's own rules for departing citizens. The performance of Facebook stock is not the subject here. It opened at $45 a share on the 18th and closed at $38. Whether it will become another Microsoft or Apple stock, or fade away as a flash-in-the-pan, remains to be seen. Some financial observers are wild about it. Some aren't. Senators, Representatives, and Presidents, however, do not announce IPO's. They make offers Americans can't refuse. Or rather they delegate the tasks to vast, impersonal bureaucracies, which implement the ethics of gangland extortion, shake-downs, and protection rackets. Project, if you will, life in these United States as one enormous TSA airport checkpoint. As Forbes notes: (3) It is unimaginable that U.S. taxes were not a huge part of his decision, since “taxpatriations” are now all the rage. See Celebrity Leavings: Bidding Stars Adieu. And that is perfectly legal. Tax avoidance intent when expatriating used to trigger tougher tax rules, but that changed in 2008. Tax motivation is no longer even relevant to the tax treatment of citizens or permanent residents who permanently depart the U.S. See Ten Facts About Tax Expatriation. Inevitably there are tax issues on the way out. U.S. citizens or long-term residents who expatriate after June 16, 2008.are treated as having sold all their worldwide property for its fair market value the day before leaving the U.S. Although taxed as a capital gain, this “exit tax” is unforgiving. See Rich Americans Voting with their Feet to Escape Obama Tax Oppression. Senator Schumer and his grim-faced co-author of the "Ex-Patriot Act" bill, Pennsylvania Democrat, Senator Bob Casey, are "globalists." That is, they wish to pursue "tax dodgers" beyond American shores with the full power of the Treasury Department to snare expatriate money squirreled away by its owners to protect it from evangelical thieves like Schumer and Casey and their ilk in Congress and the various Washington satrapies. The government has done this before with the same sanctimonious ballyhoo. In 2008, a hearing by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, estimated that at least 19,000 US citizens were hiding “undeclared accounts” with the help of UBS bankers. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the committee chairman, stated that these accounts held "$18 billion dollars in assets that have been kept secret from the IRS." At the time, UBS was also being investigated by the IRS, the FBI, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. UBS stated that "undeclared" accounts would no longer be provided as a "service" and that they were planning to weed out those existing accounts; suggesting that they would reveal such account holders to authorities…Last year, The Swiss bank agreed to give U.S. tax authorities the records for more than 4,450 American clients. [Ernest] Vogliana is just one of the seven people that were charged by the U.S Attorney’s office last year. [80 years old, sentenced to two years' probation and fined $900,000 in penalties for depositing $4 million with UBS.] Saverin's public statement about his citizenship was ill-advised. He should have simply vanished and have had nothing to say after Schumer's hue and cry. His renunciation was likely leaked to the MSM, which promptly took up its pitchforks and torches, led by Schumer and Company. They wish to bring an end to the Frankenstein monster of an evader of the capital gains tax. Schumer wishes to make an example of Saverin – as a warning to other Americans who want to escape servitude and the malignant psychosis of envy that governs the actions of creatures such as Schumer, Casey and their ilk. He has admitted as much. Schumer called Saverin's decision "outrageous" and labeled his tactics a "scheme." "Saverin has turned his back on the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him, and helped him become a billionaire," Schumer said. "This is a great American success story gone horribly wrong." The only thing wrong with that "success story" is that the country did not keep Saverin safe, did not educate him, and did not help him become a billionaire. But then, according to Schumer's metaphysics, all good things pour from the cornucopia of federal largesse and legislation. No one could exist or save a dime unless Washington, like God or Allah, made it happen. My point here is that Schumer and his ilk wish to cut off all escape for those who wish to protect their wealth by placing it in off-shore bank accounts. They wave the flag of "paying one's fair share" of taxes when they know damned well that if all the billionaires in America were tomorrow stripped of their wealth and saw all their physical and financial assets seized, and were reduced to sleeping in Zuccotti Park with the OWS, it would result in only a miniscule ding in the national debt while it continues to mount, thanks to legislation passed by Congress. A spitball launched from a slingshot will not pierce the hide of a rhinoceros. Perhaps that's an insult to rhinoceroses. Again, think instead of Jabba the Hutt and the spitball embedded in his revolting epidermis. I do not underestimate Senator Schumer's intelligence. He knows that this administration's economic and "social" policies have cooked this country. He knows that it's riding for a fall. He wants to make sure that no one escapes its fate. Schumer is a "humanitarian." A "progressive." A socialist. He doesn't want to die, but if he must die, he wants to ensure that his moral betters do not continue living. Whatever Eduardo Saverin's virtues or flaws, he produced something that Schumer et al. could never even imagine. Looters are not creators, except in the many ways to penalize success, such as the "exit tax" for anyone who renounces his U.S. citizenship. Again, as Kelly Phillips Erb of Forbes explains it: The expatriation laws are a bit tricky. The basic rule is that, for purposes of the tax, any assets that you leave the country with are treated as though you had sold them on the date before you leave. Any gain which would have occurred had you actually sold those assets are subject to tax (with some exceptions). So Saverin doesn’t get a free pass. His assets are still subject to tax. Lucky for Saverin, however, the value of his assets pre-IPO are [ sic] still considerably less than the value of his assets post-IPO. And by lucky, I mean absolutely planned. …Saverin’s advisors are pretty savvy: Singapore is a terrific choice because it does not have a capital gains tax. It’s also no stranger to expats from all over the world because of its favorable tax laws. Saverin, age 30, was also moved to renounce his citizenship because Singapore does not recognize dual citizenship beyond the age of 21. Also important to note is that the U.S. is now violating the sovereignty of other nations by conducting raids on those countries' banks and financial institutions in pursuit of wealth that will not ameliorate the government's debt. These are vendetta raids moved by a malice for the "rich" that knows no bounds – except when it comes to speculating on the net worth of individual Congressmen and federal executives and other czars, and then the drawbridges of privacy are raised to block invasive inquiries. Schumer's press conference was a vote-garnering public relations ploy to assuage the fictive envy of an imaginary citizenry whom he and Congress presume wishes to send the rich to an auditor's guillotine. The New York Times reported in 2011: The penalty [on foreign banks] stems from the violation of a rule known as Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, or Fbar(pronounced EF-bar), that requires American taxpayers with overseas bank accounts and foreign assets to file a special disclosure with the Treasury Department each year. The top penalty for failing to file the disclosure is 50 percent of the account balance for each year of violation, a level that can leave tax evaders owing multiples of what their accounts hold. Now the Justice Department, which is conducting a broadening inquiry into Swiss and Swiss-style banks, including Credit Suisse and HSBC, according to court papers and statements by the banks, is exploring how and whether it could apply the penalty to the banks, should it find that they violated American tax laws, according to two persons briefed on the matter. The persons, one in government and the other in private legal practice, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The malice does not end with punishing U.S. citizens. The Treasury and Justice Departments also penalize those foreign banks for "abetting" tax evasion. This is intended to frighten and discourage foreign banks from offering succor and security to American depositors. Of course, the MSM applauds that move, as well. But the federal government throwing its weight around is not nearly the eye-candy of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Imagine now Jabba the Hutt doing the Twist with one of his slave girls. Complementing the spectacle of the federal government going on pillaging Easter egg hunts overseas, is the proposed surrender of U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations in a bewildering array of concessions to that looters' club of dictatorships, theocracies, tyrannies, and one-man régimes. Call it a kind of political schizophrenia. Only when the U.N. and the European Union impinge on Congressional power will one hear Congressmen cry foul. However, if the power violates the sovereignty of individual Americans and subjects them to the ukases, mercies and injustices of foreign politicians and bureaucrats, that is only fair and proper for the greater good of global amity. Canada Free Press reports: Last week, the Senate gave…a clear and unmistakable illustration of why we need to sack all the Democrats, and a bunch of the RINOs, too. They voted down not one, not two, but five budget bills, four of which would actually have done America some good. This comes as we move into the fourth year that the Senate has failed to do its duty by passing a budget, leaving the country economically adrift. That great patriot and Swift Boat Hero from his four whole months in Vietnam, John Kerry (R-MA), has vowed to get them onto the Senate floor for votes as soon, he hopes, as this summer. They include: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS or LOST, “Law of the Sea), which cedes control of all the world’s oceans and their contents, including our territorial waters, to the U.N.; The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, aka, Small Arms Treaty, that would virtually outlaw privately owned firearms or ammunition of any sort; he United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which takes away parental rights to raise their children as they choose, and gives them to the U.N.; The International Criminal Court, which allows foreigners to have Americans arrested and tried in kangaroo “international” courts, using foreign law; The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which destroys, among many other things, marriage; And a host of outrageous environmental treaties that would doom most of the world’s people to Third-World level poverty in a world-wide police state. Our omnivorous (and carnivorous) Congress wishes to nail American taxpayers coming and going, and even when they stay put, susceptible to arrest by the U.N., the OIC, and the European Union. Who could have guessed a hundred years ago that Congress would make the surrender of the sovereignty of one's own life to both the parasites of the welfare state here and abroad a measure of one's "patriotism"? November cannot come too soon. It may be too late for Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, but Senator Schumer and his looting gang must be shown the door as finally as Jabba the Hutt met his end before they do more damage to America. Perhaps, for starters, a charge of treason for not abiding to their oaths of office to preserve and protect would be entirely and legally appropriate. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  23. Alias Marx and Alinsky: Calling socialists liberals is as deceptive as calling goose gizzards foie gras. It fools no one but the epistemologically blinkered. The term liberal allows liberals to pose as concerned, generous and forward-thinking individuals and to act under what was once an honorable term for anyone who advocated or endorsed liberty. And as any well-read American knows, liberals do not advocate liberty. Quite the opposite. The subject here is the devolution of the term liberal, not its evolution. Even out-and-out communists are called liberals. President Barack Obama is called a "liberal." The late Senator Ted Kennedy was called a "liberal." Barney Frank is a liberal. Obama's cabinet is largely staffed by liberals (unless outed, as self-confessed communist Van Jones was). Communism and socialism still carry a bad reputation, so everyone, including the Main Stream Media, and even well-intentioned pundits and commentators friendly to liberty, use the term liberal. The MSM, however, does it to dodge the reputation. Others use it from habit or ignorance, or because calling liberals socialists or communists in drag might open a can of worms they couldn't handle. This is courtesy carried to a fault. Underlying the fault is a fear of the inevitable clash between those who advocate freedom, and those who do not. Obama's campaign slogan, "Forward," is simply a Progressive marching order. "Forward" to what? To socialism. To communism. To a command economy and a slave state, one half governed by bureaucrats, the other half by an alliance of Islam and quivering religionists of various stripes, willing to pay jizya to Islam in order to be granted their "religious freedom." The Washington Post trumpeted "Forward" with no reservations or even curiosity about its Communist and Nazi origins. But then the Washington Post has been in the Saul Alinsky camp for over a generation. One Alinsky benefactor was Wall Street investment banker Eugene Meyer, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933. Meyer and his wife Agnes co-owned The Washington Post. They used their newspaper to promote Alinsky. Agnes Meyer personally wrote a six-part series in 1945, praising Alinsky's work in Chicago slums. Her series, called "The Orderly Revolution," made Alinsky famous. President Truman ordered 100 reprints of it. In 1989, The New York Times waxed poetic about Alinsky's powerful friends, and also provided some important information in the course of a review of a biography of Alinsky by Sanford D. Horwitt: By the end of World War II Alinsky had won a measure of national renown. His ''Reveille for Radicals'' (1945) hit the best-seller list, and he secured the fervent support of important liberals like Agnes E. Meyer of The Washington Post and the retail magnate Marshall Field 3d. Though it undercuts his larger portrait, Mr. Horwitt shows that much of Alinsky's acclaim rested upon his promise that social reform and a democratic revival could take place through what Meyer called an ''orderly revolution,'' which would bypass the new power of the unions and reject the growth of an intrusive New Deal state. Thus ''Reveille for Radicals,'' which ostensibly celebrated social conflict, was panned by most of the left but acclaimed by Time, The New York Times and other mass circulation publications. Neither Time, nor the Washington Post, nor the New York Times has changed its tune. If anything, they have grown more shrill from the standpoint of endorsing not just Alinsky but socialism. But they repress that term socialism, and deny they are of the Left. They'll admit only that they're "progressive" because, you see, they're "humanitarians." Well, so were Pol Pot, and Mao, and Stalin, and Lenin, and Hitler. So are Robert Mugabe, and Hugo Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, and all the Kings of Saudi Arabia. But, what are uncountable millions of dead of humanitarianism, when "progress" has been made, and man has been nudged "forward" into impoverished, straight-jacketed societies? Let's set the record straight. Liberals are fundamentally collectivists. Specifically, either socialists or communists. Their policies and programs are demonstrably socialist or communist, whether one is speaking of Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and innumerable regulatory and confiscatory programs and policies, practically every bit of legislation that has been entered into The Congressional Record and The Federal Register for the last one hundred years. The term liberal should be retired, put out to pasture, and substituted with the appropriate and correct terms. Here is a sampling of definitions of the term liberal: 1. Having, expressing, or following political views or policies that favor civil liberties, democratic reforms, and the use of government power to promote social progress…. 3. Of, designating, or belonging to a political party that advocates liberal social or political views, esp. in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company) 1985. (This is the first definition. Root meanings connected with generosity, open-mindedness, tolerance, etc., follow it. This is a significant order.) 6a. Of, favoring, or based on the principles of liberalism. 6b. Of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; esp. of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideas of individual esp. economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reform designed to secure those objectives. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (G. & C. Merriam Company) 1967. (Meanings connected with generosity, tolerance, etc. precede the political meanings.) II. 1. Any person who advocates liberty of thought, speech, or action; one who is opposed to conservatism: distinguished from radical. 2. Liberal Party, a party in English politics formed by the coalition of the Whigs and Radicals about 1830: opposed to Tory. The Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language (Funk & Wagnalls Company) 1939. (Meanings connected with generosity, etc. precede the political ones.) And finally: 3. (Polit.) Favorable to democratic reform and individual liberty, (moderately) progressive (the Liberal Party). The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Sixth Edition, 1976. (Here, too, meanings connected with generosity, etc., precede the political definition. This is an acceptable condensation of the term from the two-volume Compact edition of the OED, 1971, whose entry is about half a foot in length in very tiny print, most of whose information is not relevant to my purpose here.) Notice that the older the dictionary, the more liberty-linked the definition is. The American Heritage definition marks the end of the road for the term liberal, stressing the use of government power to promote social progress. Social progress is a catch-all euphemism for the collectivization of society and the assumption of more and more power by the government. It does not mean the liberation of men from other men's alleged needs or claimed "rights," but the forced or legislated chaining of all men to each other's alleged needs or alleged, government sanctioned "entitlements." It is the devious and misleading byword for incremental socialism, or Progressivism. You will never hear Brian Williams of NBC or Bob Schieffer of CBS counter George Will or Charles Krauthammer with a statement, "But, we the Left don't think that's a good policy…." You will never hear them admit that they are of and for the Left. That would be "telling," as a con artist's " " is a warning that he's about to scam you. One could say that today's liberals are the true conservatives, that is, those who wish to preserve the status quo of the welfare state and government power over individuals and their property, and any and all socialist programs and policies now in force. And what do the designated "conservatives," or the "right wing," stand for today, that is, those who identify themselves as Republicans? Nothing, except for a watered-down version of what Progressives, socialists and communists have created over the course of a century, most often accompanied by an appeal to "tradition" and religious faith. All Progressive legislation is altruist and collectivist in nature. Conservatives have never challenged the moral foundations of Progressivism. They can't, because they subscribe to the same morality. They will never confess that Progressives have elevated the state to take the place of a deity, and that men should live for the secular deity's moral code of self-sacrifice and obedience to the state's commands. Also known as The Ten Thousand Commandments. Social progress implies there are social problems to be solved and overcome. What are the problems? In the beginning, it was a concern – and not an actual problem – of working conditions at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Reformers wailed over the fact that factories employed children and women, neglecting the fact that children and women would otherwise have perished in poverty and disease at the outset of the Revolution, and in fact did perish in the centuries preceding the Revolution. By the millions. The Abolitionist Movement identified slavery as a major social problem. The result was the Civil War. But the "problems" were numerous, and continue to be numerous and otherwise fictive or imaginary. In search of the City on the Hill, or Utopia, or a "just and fair" society, problems are naturally endless. The sole alternatives as the means to correct or ameliorate them have been: voluntarism or force. Progressivism chose force, because too many people thought the problems were not problems at all. Force bypasses volition or voluntary action. Successes were many, beginning with the Interstate Commerce Act (1887), and the Sherman Antitrust Act 1890). Progressives never spoke with one mind and differed sharply over the most effective means to deal with the ills generated by the trusts; some favored an activist approach to trust-busting, others preferred a regulatory approach. A vocal minority supported socialism with government ownership of the means of production. Other progressive reforms followed in the form of a conservation movement, railroad legislation, and food and drug laws. More recent social "problems" led to the endless "war on poverty," and the "war on drugs." Having nearly exhausted the major "social problems," Progressives or socialists are reaching deeper into the bottomless pit of "problems" and coming up with concerns with "wars" on obesity, salt, sugar, smoking, gender inequality in the workplace, in insurance, in the military, on incandescent light bulbs, sexism, ageism, and so on. Name a norm established by men without government supervision or guidance, and Progressives are against it. They immediately wish to abolish the liberty, or subject it to controls, regulation, and licensing. All for the sake of one's "fellow men," in the name of that prettified version of mob rule, "democracy." All this goes on, and has been going on, more obviously, since the late 19th century. But Progressivism, a.k.a. socialism, has been advanced by intellectuals and writers ever since, say, Rousseau and his contemporaries in the 18th century. It has been disparate in means and ends ever since, but during the 19th century coalesced into a behemoth of an ideology posing as a love for the poor and other alleged victims of freedom. It no longer asks men to "love their neighbors"; it commands that they fetter themselves to each other in the name of "social progress." Progressivism inculcates in its minions an obsessive-compulsive psychology. Just as Muslim men are obsessed with sex because Islam, on the one hand, hates women, and on the other, targets them for unrestrained and permissible abuse in the way of ownership, rape, enslavement, beating, and "honor-killing," Progressivism requires that all men answer to and be accountable to the state. The state establishes criteria of what is good and what is bad when addressing men's actions and values. It is a prescription for ownership and enslavement, as well. The key to the success of Progressivism is to ensure that a habit of dependency on statism is bred in men. As the narrator of "If I Wanted America to Fail" notes: … I'd demonize prosperity itself, so that they will not miss what they will never have. But first, demonize individualism, independence, and living one's own life, so that men will not miss what they once had, because submission to government controls is so much easier. This has been, briefly, an account of the devolution of "liberalism." Progressive, liberal or socialist rhetoric is tailored for public consumption, usually innocuous and goose-feather pillow soft, so as not to alarm the public. The title of this column is frankly a parody of that successful TV Western, "Alias Smith & Jones," about a couple of outlaws promised amnesty if they "reformed." I could just as well have parodied the films, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" or "Bonnie and Clyde," for all three "entertainments" portray outlaws as basically nice people who mean well and just happen to commit crimes and who otherwise might have been your next-door neighbors, ready for a barbeque and a round of poker. In a 1971 book called Rules for Radicals, Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits, and infiltrate the system from within. Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties. So, the radicals cut their hair, donned suits, hunkered down to win those Ph.D's, and infiltrated academia, for one thing. And here's the tip-off about the altruist nature of Progressivism and socialism, and their link to government force: In his native Chicago, Alinsky courted power wherever he found it. His alliance with prominent Catholic clerics, such as Bishop Bernard Sheil, gave him respectability. His friendship with crime bosses such as Frank Nitti – Al Capone's second-in-command – gave Alinsky clout on the street. Just as Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky have wielded clout in political thought and in "practical politics." They, too, "meant well" and were otherwise forgettable souls whom one might pass on a street. It's time for liberals to "man up," drop the demure veil, or take off the smiley mask, or come out of the totalitarian closet. It's time for them to stop the charade and confess their collectivist allegiances, and for their opponents to call them what they are. Then we'll see some sparks fly, instead of the dissembling back-and-forth rhetoric between the Republicans and Democrats. Gunfights, anyone? Original entry: See link at top of this post
  24. Objectivist Round Up - May 10, 2012: Welcome to the May 10, 2012 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. "About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix. So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up: Welcome to the May 10, 2012 edition of objectivist round up. Josh Windham presents The Conservative War on Sex | The Undercurrent posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Josh Windham weighs in on one of the profoundly anti-life positions of the religious right." Josh Windham presents Hate Crimes Legislation Unmasks Blind Justice | The Undercurrent posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "An argument in favor of objective law and against the "hate crime" classification." Josh Windham presents All Entrepreneurs are “Social” Entrepreneurs | The Undercurrent posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "An exploration of the newfangled concept "social entrepreneurism."" Edward Cline presents The Peril of "Hate Crimes" posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "A totalitarian anti-concept of "justice" has been gnawing away at objective law without correction or opposition, and making rapid progress in a judicial system that has steadily abandoned reason and the protection of individual rights: hate crime" Paul Hsieh presents Linking Licensure to Mandatory Service posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "A new way for the government to extort "free" labor from lawyers. Will doctors be next?" John Drake presents 5 year goals update posted at Try Reason!, saying, "An update on my 5 year goals. Why should you care? To see intergration in action." Diana Hsieh presents ATLOSCon 2012 posted at Philosophy in Action, saying, "I'm excited to be speaking on "Forgiveness, Redemption, and the Virtue of Justice" at ATLOSCon this year!" Darius Cooper presents The men who caused the Great Recession posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "Look who were supposed to save the world. *** That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  25. The Peril of "Hate Crimes": A totalitarian anti-concept of "justice" has been gnawing away at objective law without correction or opposition, and making rapid progress in a judicial system that has steadily abandoned reason and the protection of individual rights: hate crime. Hate crimes initially were violations of individual rights motivated by the perpetrators' hatred of a victim'srace, gender, religion, or political affiliation. Hatred is an emotion that can be traced to two fundamental evaluations: fear, and malice. One can justifiably hate what one fears, if what one fears jeopardizes a rational value or one's life. Or, one can hate what one fears because it threatens an irrational value, such as blind faith or one's purported racial or cultural superiority. Malice is simply a raw, unreasoning hatred of a good for being the good. But the motivating, emotional element of a demonstrable or provable violation of an individual's right (murder, rape, physical assault) has been factored into the severity of a defendant's crime and in consequent punishment after his conviction and trial. In short, the why of a crime is increasingly treated as though it were a weapon, such as a gun, a knife, or a club. In standard criminal cases, however, it has never been the instrument of crime that was on trial, but the defendant and his actions. Proponents of hate crime have attempted to find a compromise between objectivity in criminal law and the notion that a felon should also be punished for what caused him to commit the crime. But no such compromise is feasible if objective law is to be preserved and justice served. The irrational element – that is, making thought, however irrational or ugly it may be, a crime – has suborned the rational. No compromise between good and evil is lasting or practical. Evil will always come out the victor. It did not take long for the corrupting notion of hate crimes to degenerate into thought crime. This is what happens when reason is declared irrelevant or is abandoned or diluted by the irrational. It used to be that a criminal was sentenced for his crime, and if the crime was committed from some form of prejudice, the court's and jury's afterthought was usually: And, by the way, your motives are contemptible and despicable. Appended now to a guilty verdict for the murder of an individual because of his race, gender "orientation," religion, or political affiliation, is another verdict: You have no right to think that way, so we are adding five years to your sentence and adding X amount to your monetary penalty. A salutary instance of the corruption of justice is the Rutgers University "hate crime" case. The New York Times, in September 2010, reported: It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet. And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide…. The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years. In many states, invasion of privacy is a misdemeanor, not a capital crime. Dharun Ravi was originally charged with invasion of privacy. But the alleged "hate crime" against a gay metastasized into a de facto trial for committing a capital crime, because Clementi committed suicide. Ravi was not charged with Clementi's murder, but it was implied that he was responsible for his suicide. Fast forward to March, 2012. The presiding judge in the case contributed to the confusion; The Times reported: The jury in the trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of invading his roommate’s privacy by using a webcam to watch him in an intimate encounter began deliberations on Wednesday and asked the judge to define two crucial terms. Jurors asked Judge Glenn Berman of Superior Court in Middlesex County to restate the definition of “intimidate,” as well as of the word “purpose,” as it related to the bias intimidation count. The judge ruled that the defendant, Dharun Ravi, could be found guilty of bias intimidation only if he was also found guilty of the first charge, invasion of privacy. And he told the jury that the roommate, Tyler Clementi, would have been the victim of bias intimidation if he had been made to feel fear. [ Italics mine.] “A person is guilty of the crime of bias intimidation,” Judge Berman said, “if he commits an offense with the purpose to intimidate an individual because of sexual orientation.” Mr. Ravi is charged with 15 counts, including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and tampering with evidence. Prosecutors say he encouraged friends to view a feed from his webcam that showed Mr. Clementi with another man. Mr. Clementi committed suicide shortly afterward, in September 2010. There are several things wrong with this. First, Clementi learned of the webcam prank indirectly by reading Ravi's Twitter posts about him (thirty-eight times). Ravi was not attempting to "intimidate Clementi, or "bully" him. Hi-tech back-fence gossip and slander-mongering about another person are not "intimidation." Ravi invited his friends to watch the webcam, not Clementi. Secondly, no one knows why Clementi committed suicide. He left a brief, cryptic suicide note which shed no light on his motive. ABC News reported: Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi was told by police that his text message apology for spying on roommate Tyler Clementi was written within minutes of Clementi's suicide note. In a taped interview with investigators the day after Clementi's suicide Ravi is seen struggling to understand as he is told that his apology to Clementi was received just minutes before Clementi posted a Facebook message saying, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry." "Did he get that text before?" Ravi asked investigators. "That's the way it looks," an officer responded. "So he got mine, and then sent his?" Ravi asked, to which the investigators responded yes. The police, however, appear to have made a mistake. Time stamps on the two messages show that Clementi posted his suicide note at 8:42 p.m. on Sept. 22, 2010. Ravi's apology to Clementi was sent at 8:46 p.m. It's not clear if Clementi ever saw the apology. But, because no one had or could have had access to the contents of the minds of Ravi and Clementi's minds, the jurors, per Judge Berman's instructions and "clarification," were left to resort to second-guessing. To wit: What the jury had to decide…was what Mr. Ravi and Mr. Clementi were thinking. Had Mr. Ravi set up the webcam because he had a pretty good idea that he would see Mr. Clementi in an intimate moment? Had he targeted Mr. Clementi and the man he was with because they were gay? And had Mr. Clementi been in fear? Without Mr. Clementi to speak for himself, that last question was perhaps the most difficult to determine, and jurors struggled with it. “ That was the hardest because you really can’t get into someone’s head,” said one, Bruno Ferreira, as he left the court. The jury deliberated longest — for well more than an hour, he said — on the bias intimidation charge. [ Italics mine] Mr. Ferreira said he ultimately voted guilty on the bias intimidation charge because Mr. Ravi had sent multiple Twitter messages about Mr. Clementi. So, Ferreira overrode his initial doubts about getting into someone's head by substituting a number and translating it into a motive, or "bias intimidation." No one knows why Ravi engaged in his admittedly malicious prank. No one knows if Clementi committed suicide over the webcam incidents or because he was embarrassed or shamed or just in a suicidal mood. Any one of those reasons is more credible than is the "intimidation" charge. But Bruce J. Kaplan, the prosecutor in Middlesex County, applauded the jury for sending a strong message against bias. " They felt the pain of Tyler," he said. No, they were not. The jurors were projecting what they imagined Clementi's emotional state might have been because they were persuaded by the prosecution that Ravi's webcam actions contributed to Clementi's decision to commit suicide. There were no photos of Clementi's anguished state for them to judge, and so no way to even deduce why he was feeling "pain." I am not taking Ravi's side here. I am taking a stand against the whole notion of hate crimes. If you want to see how a jury properly treats a bigot, watch Twelve Angry Men (start here at 1.18.56). In criminal law, and even in Perry Mason TV law, determining a motive is merely a means to determine the reason for a criminal action, whether it is murder or larceny or petty theft. It was never criminalized itself. Motives exist in men's minds and can not be taken out and paraded as evidence. Even if they could be, in the past they would not have counted. It was the criminal action that was actionable in law, not why a crime was committed. That is changing, for the worse. Motives can not hurt anyone; only an action spurred by a motive, just as guns don't (volitionally) kill people; it is people using guns that kill people. The same logic applies to butter knives, rubber bands, spit balls, or rocks. Guns, butter knives, rubber bands, spit balls and rocks are not imbued with magical powers that force people to commit crimes with them. But gun control advocates wish to pretend that guns have magical powers to turn people into criminals. Emotions and motives alone are not physical objects that can harm anyone. Emotions are evaluations, and evaluations are products of thought. To condemn and punish an emotion is to criminalize thought. It's as simple as that. Crime enters the picture only when one acts on the emotion. The action is demonstrable. The guiltiest party in this affair is Judge Glenn Berman, who aided and abetted in the sanctioning of "hate crimes" and "bias intimidation," both of which are anti-reason and anti-rights. A judge ought to know the difference between an actual, proven crime in which action is the evidence of a crime, and the contents of an individual's mind. The contents of the mind are no government's or court's business. A motive or an emotion may help authorities to find clues to a crime or even identify a felon. But it is not a chargeable offense; it is the action stemming from it. The why of a crime is not the crime. It is the action that is the crime. One can deduce, or collect evidence that a person wanted to embezzle his employer's bank accounts, that was his purpose; that is the "why." The crime is the embezzlement, the action, not the motive. The why of a crime may deserve condemnation, but it is not the proper object of criminal justice. But, what has spurred te spread of "hate crime" and "hate speech"? In a word: tribalism. Hate crimes are a direct result of a nation's population scrambling to join tribes based on race, gender, religion, and political affiliation, and these in turn splinter into sub-tribes. Such tribalism is possible in a nation that has abandoned reason and objective law, and a contest ensues in which the various tribes jockey in politics and fiat power to become the dominant and ruling group at the expense of all others. Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand about tribalism: Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed. As the scope of government power grows, so do the number of "tribes" grow to protect themselves from it or to demand a share of it or simply to clamor for a granting of special privileges and status. Today there innumerable tribes locked in constant warfare in response to government power: smokers vs. non- and anti-smokers, gays vs. heterosexuals, blacks vs. whites and/or Asians, Hispanics vs. whites and/or blacks, cyclists vs. motorists, developers vs. conservationists, Christians vs. atheists, and, most prominent of all, Muslims vs. all non-Muslims, and especially Jews. The last category is particularly vicious because Islam is a totalitarian ideology naturally comfortable, in Sharia law, with the notions of "hate speech" and "hate crime," because the growing ubiquity of such notions in U.S. secular law helps to insulate Islam from Western norms while its activists follow an agenda of conquest or stealth jihad. And, the New Black Panthers offered a $10,000 bounty for the "capture" of George Zimmerman, which is in addition to race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson calling Zimmerman's shooting of a black teenager "racist" and fomenting racial strife. (It is noteworthy that neither the government nor courts nor the MSM is willing to charge black activists with "hate speech" or "hate crimes." Vociferous black activists are now a "protected" tribe able to slander, libel, and promote malice with impunity.) As "hate speech" focuses on the written or spoken word (or on "forbidden" images of Mohammad), "hate crime" focuses on thought, whether or not it is spoken or written. You can be sure that the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Islamic front groups will be looking for ways to exploit the Rutgers precedent. And is certain that ambitious censors in government, such as Cass Sunstein, the "Speech Czar," will also be on the alert for opportunities to silence critics of the current administration based on the Rutgers verdict. The Rutgers verdict against Ravi does not auger well for the state of criminal justice. Together with the vile notion of "hate speech," "hate crime" is another assault on man's mind. *"Tribalism," in Philosophy: Who Needs It," p. 42. Original entry: See link at top of this post
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