You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
Free democratic systems, moreover, are based on notions of liberty, private property, and equality. In stark contrast, many Islamic traditions reject freedom of conscience, freedom to make law that countermands sharia, economic freedom, equality for Muslims and non-Muslims, and equality for men and women, to name just a few key divergences. But even if none of this were so, mightn't Occam's razor have reared its head by now? After fourteen centuries, there is no secular democratic tradition in Islamic society. Given that secular democracy is the best guarantor of liberty and prosperity, is it not self-evident that some precinct of the umma would have adopted it by now, without any help from us, if Islamic society were innately receptive?This hints at my number one complaint about how we are conducting our "war on terror": we persist in this deranged idea that we can successfully convert nations into Western-style representative republics, when they have no historical interest in any such thing, when, in fact, their dominant belief-system strongly militates against such a conversion. It is a fool's errand.
Ordinary people do not obsess over societal "progress." For the vast majority of us, the personal is not the political. Our attention and passion are reserved for our families, friends, neighborhoods, jobs, and avocations--for living life, not for prescribing how life should be lived. Ordinary people don't eat, sleep, and breathe societal engineering.
The ad "expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan.Care to take a crack at how many protected freedoms this violates?
"It's a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement," Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. "There are no exemptions to that."
Haynes said the unnamed 31-year-old woman’s case was turned over to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Depending on the outcome of the case, she said, the woman could face several hundreds of dollars in fines and “fair housing training so it doesn’t happen again.”
Harold Core, director of public affairs with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, told the Grand Rapids Press that the Fair Housing Act prevents people from publishing an advertisement stating their preference of religion, race or handicap with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling.
[snip]
...Haynes said officials plan on pursuing the matter.
"We want to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said.
In the trade war between the mercantilist countries and the U.S., China and the other mercantilists intervene in our markets by manipulating the price of the dollar, as compared to their currencies, so that our goods are overpriced and their goods are underpriced in world markets. In the meantime they keep our products out of their markets through various tariff and non-tariff barriers.I don't think the writer has it exactly right here, but he makes the fundamental point, one that I have been making over and over again since I first began to read about this issue:
There are three positions on trade when a country is being punched-out by mercantilists:
1. Unilateral Free Trade. This is the Republican establishment's pacifist strategy of just taking the punches to afford an example to the rest of the world. This has been U.S. policy for three decades.
2. Protectionism. This is liberal Democrats' "industrial policy" strategy of protecting government-preferred industries with tariffs and subsidies. Pres. GW Bush did it with respect to steel and was forced by the WTO to back down. Pres. Obama did it with respect to tires produced in China and succeeded in enforcing it.
3. Balanced Trade. This is the conservative pro-free-market strategy of balancing exports with imports in order to defeat the mercantilist strategy of maximizing exports and minimizing imports. It takes advantage of a special WTO rule that lets trade deficit countries impose import duties or limitations in order to bring trade into reasonable balance. China, the largest of the mercantilist countries, only lets its people buy 27¢ of American products for every $1 we buy from them. They use a variety of tariff and non-tariff barriers to keep out American products, forcing American companies to locate their factories in China in order to sell to the growing Chinese market.
For its part, the Tea Party, which began as a movement named after a historical American event, has the potential to morph into a political organization that eclipses the Republican Party. A GOP that aims to mollify Tea Party supporters with the ol' Beltway shuffle, followed by cocktails with political adversaries at the Club, may eventually find itself walking amidst the ghosts of the whigs....mmmmmm. Could be, maybe. All I know is this: I'm gonna be in Oklahoma City four times this week. Oklahoma City is home to Sgt. Grit's. I will probably make it a point to stop by and pick up one of these. If I can keep myself from feeling guilty over dropping a twenty on a t-shirt that I don't actually need.
Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.Anyone who knows me that I have no great love for the Republican Party per se. To me, it is merely an instrument through which I hope to get the most conservative candidates possible elected, and too often, it fails me. I have serious doubts as to whether much of the leadership has any real clue what conservatism actually is. God knows--God knows!--some of the folks running on the Republican ticket this year could be replaced with better people. But be that as it may...
[snip]
This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship.
Chile stands out as an example of achievements only possible when people commit to freedom and free markets.Now, not that George Bush was so hot, he wasn't, God knows, but do you remember what happened when he noted the obvious, that Social Security was on the ropes, and proposed to privatize a little, just a little, of the system? Do you remember how he was demonized for that? Do you remember how that tiny bit of privatization was denounced as a "risky scheme?"
It boasts the highest per capita GDP in South America and the third highest in the Western Hemisphere. Last December it became the first South American country to be invited to join the exclusive club of the world’s top industrialized nations, the OECD – Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But back just a little less than 40 years ago, Chile was a typical, poor South American nation, with intrusive government and sluggish growth.
How was it transformed?
Read a short essay called “How the Power of Ideas Can Transform a Country,” by one of the leaders that made it happen – Jose Pinera.
He relates how, in the mid- 1950s, the Catholic University of Chile signed a cooperation agreement with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago, then home to the world’s top free market economists, including the legendary Milton Friedman.
Thus began the education of a generation of young Chileans in the wisdom of economic freedom. Beginning in the late 1970s, these young leaders, with newly minted PhDs, helped implement new economic reforms in Chile protecting private property and promoting free trade.
A graph showing annual economic growth in Chile over the last hundred years looks like a hockey stick. From the early part of the twentieth century until 1980, the line is flat, averaging less than one percent growth per year. But beginning 1980, growth takes off in a vertical surge, averaging over 4% per year.
One of the most sweeping reforms, done by Jose Pinera, then Chile’s Minister of Social Security, was the transformation of Chile’s government Social Security system, identical to what we now have in the U.S., to a system of individually owned private retirement accounts. Chile’s payroll tax based government system was broken and bankrupt, as ours is today.
The reform, enacted in November 1980, restored the solvency of Chile’s retirement system and brought personal ownership and wealth to Chilean workers. After 30 years, these personal accounts have averaged annual returns of 9.2% above inflation.
The confusion arises from the different methods of reading the Constitution. Spitzer is relying, as most lawyers and politicians do, on case law ruled on by myriad judges and justices taking into account precedent and stare decisis. Loesch is relying on a literal reading of the same document where clear sections have been litigated out of use. In this case, the part of the First Amendment which reads: "...or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Tea Partiers, like Loesch, see that for what it is, an administrative omission, a tactical obliteration without taking the necessary steps to amend the amendment.I've an old post on the subject, in need of a little revision, that I've been meaning to put up again. I suppose I shall have to get 'round to it sometime soon. For now, suffice to say that it is absurd to think that the Congress that framed the First Amendment had any intention of establishing a sort of atheism-by-default approach to government. Their passage of the Northwest Ordinance, alone, is sufficient proof of that, even without taking into account multitudinous other proofs.
"Prohibiting the free exercise thereof," would seem to mean exactly that. Due to the fact that this phrase comes after the non-establishment clause, it would seem to clarify the meaning. In essence, since the federal government cannot establish a religion, it also does not prohibit the free exercise thereof. The federal government cannot hinder one's free exercise of their religion, i.e. not in the classroom, the jury box, the bench, or the museum for that matter. In fact, it would seem that such places in government are expressly prohibited from limiting that freedom, whereas some private organization might indeed prohibit religious expression.
The part of the amendment that Spitzer is focusing on is the non-establishment clause, but it has not been made clear what "establishment" means. To a literalist, like Loesch, establishment means to create a Church of the United States, just as there was a Church of England, in which taxes were raised to provide a budget for the church. Theoretically, a citizen could be made to attend, contribute and even pray. Freedom from the Church of England was a motivating factor in the development of America, so it is quite clear to the average intellect that the founding fathers would not like to create the same monster on the new shore. Far from trying to exclude religion from government, even a cursory reading of the works of George Washington or Benjamin Franklin would lead one to believe that specifically the Christian religion was integral to the soul of the new union, not banished from it as Spitzer apparently believes.
This is not to say Islamists are failing to prioritize the Islamicization of Western society. Like Abdel Rahman's theory, under which violent jihad proceeds on two tracks, Sheikh Qaradawi has a plan for Islamicizing Western societies on a macro level while the micro-work of gradual sharia implementation proceeds. That plan is the establishment of autonomous Muslim enclaves, parallel societies adherent to sharia law. It is a gambit analysts have aptly labeled "voluntary apartheid."Now, again, knowing that part of the deliberate strategy of quite a large hunk of Dar al Islam is emigrate to Western nations, form enclaves, demand (or just unilaterally implement) parts of sharia law, gradually expand the enclaves and adherence to sharia, and that the deliberate use of fear, intimidation, and violence are not off the table, just how far are you willing to go in your quest for cultural tolerance? Are you willing to extend tolerance to an ideology that demands the extinction of yours?
That it is a Trojan-horse cannot be seriously doubted. Qaradawi is candid: "Were we to convince Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith--ideologically, legislatively, and ethically--without imposing our views or inflicting harm upon them, we would have traversed an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state." Notice, again, the mindset: without inflicting harm upon them. One might think it difficult to fathom anything more harmful to individual liberty than the establishment of an Islamic state. Yet, that's not how we think. Qaradawi adroitly reads the West's temperament: We're tunnel-focused on terrorism, concerned only about forcible damage to life, limb, and property. As long as we're told there will be no harm he rightly figures we'll assume he means no terrorism. If terrorism is not in the equation,we go back to sleep--amenable to all manner of accommodation, even to sowing the seeds of our own destruction at the behest of people who tell us, flat-out, that their goal is conquest. In our suicidal dispostion, "democracy" somehow requires this of us.
The enclave strategy has already been implemented to great effect in Europe. Qaradawi made it sound unthreatening enough. In early 2005, at a session of his European Council for Fatwa and Research, he encouraged the continent's sizable Muslim population--which is still a minority, for now--to integrate into European society. There was just one caveat: the integration must be done "without violating the rules of sharia." There is only one way such an integration can happen on Qaradawi's terms: Muslims must capitalize on their unity and growing strength to pressure Europe into adopting sharia, bit by bit.
Obviously, the strategy is working. The eminent Bernard Lewis stunned Western readers when he predicted that Europe will be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century, but, judging from the whirlwind pace of things, he may be several decades behind the curve. Already, the landscape in Europe, as well as Australia, is dotted by "no-go" zones: Muslim neighborhoods where police no longer patrol, sovereignty having been effectively surrendered to the local imams, shura councils, and Muslim gangs. In France, for example, police estimate that some eight million people (12 percent of the population--and climbing) live in the country's 751 zones urbaines sensibles, sensitive urban areas.
And when French police do make arrests, an ever greater percentage of the offenders is Islamic, with Muslims now constituting 60 percent of the national prison population. In 2005, an effort to arrest two Muslim teenagers, who electrocuted themselves trying to hide in a power station, touched off three weeks of mass rioting, arson, and vandalism. Over 8000 cars were torched and nearly 3000 people arrested. Rioting has broken out sporadically ever since. Press coverage, though, is muted: The authorities have encouraged the media to suppress the story for fear of reigniting the rampages of what journalists euphemestically call "youths" of "South Asian" heritage.
The United Kingdom may be in even greater crisis. There, the Islamic ascendancy dovetails with the Labour government's transnational progressivism in a campaign against cultural Britishness. As the columnist Leo McKinstry observes: "England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population." Sharia has become a key element of that campaign.
Exploiting the feature of British law that permits parties, on consent, to bring their legal disputes to "voluntary arbitration tribunals" rather than law courts, a Muslim commercial-law barrister named Faisal Aqtab Siddiqi shrewdly established a sharia court as the "Muslim Arbitration Council." Quipping that "these are early days," the brilliant writer John O'Sullivan notes tht the British sharia court "so far only handles civil cases such as divorces and inheritance disputes, since British society isn't ready for such innovations as public floggings and hand-choppings."
Still, the present caseload is plenty alarming. English police officers are enforcing sharia judgments on domestic violence complaints--meaning there have been instances of investigations dropped after the Islamic authority sides with accused husbands, in deference to the Koranic endorsement of spousal abuse. There has also been at least one decision awarding an estate's male heirs twice as much as the female heir.
And by granting extra welfare benefits to men with multiple families, England, like much of Europe, is giving tacit approval to Islamic polygamy (Muslim men may marry up to four women; women, you'll no doubt be stunned to hear, are restricted to one husband). Similarly, thanks to Muslim activists and feckless bureaucrats, the British welfare state--honoring a decree from the European Court of Human Rights--forces taxpayers to subsidize suspected foreign terrorists whom the government seeks to monitor under anti-terror laws but cannot deport because of Britain's alien-coddling immigration laws.
Simultaneously, "hate speech" laws have been interpreted by police and bureaucrats in Britain's immigrant Muslim hubs to bar such exhibitions of "racism" as the raising of the Union Jack (or wearing clothes that bear its likeness)--a stigma also being attached to national flags in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and other European countries. Meanwhile, writing in the Brussels Journal, the commentator Fjordman recounts instances of Britons being banned from swimming at a popular sports club in London during "Muslim men only" sessions; assaults on Christian clerics in London; and a police threat to Christian preachers in Birmingham: Desist handing out gospel leaflets lest you be arrested for committing a "hate crime"--or, worse, beaten by local Muslims without intervention by the police (after all, you've been warned).
Then there is the matter of violent crime, particularly rape, by Muslim immigrants. Rape, the unspoken epidemic of Western Europe, is as much and more about psychological domination as it is about physical gratification. As a violent jihadist tactic, it has long been an infamous weapon in the Sudanese Islamist regime's genocidal arsenal, used first against Christians and Animists in the south in the early Nineties and, more recently, in western Sudan against the Muslims of Darfur, whom Islamists judge to be insufficiently Islamic. Now, with the tide of immigration, jihad by rape has been imported to Europe, where indignation by the politically correct press is predictably reserved not for the perpetrators but for the few journalists willing to report on it.
Consistent with Sheikh Qaradawi's aforementioned view that the rape victim is to blame for her plight if she has failed to adhere to fundamentalist protocols for women's attire, Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped (an admonition also given voice by Sheik Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia). Not surprisingly given such encouragement, Fjordman painstakingly documents that it has become a commonplace for young Muslim men to participate in sexual assaults and absolve themselves from culpability. As a psychologist working in the prison system, the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple witnessed the six-fold spike in Britain's Muslim inmate population between 1990 and 2005. He bluntly notes that "thanks to their cultural inheritance, [the Muslims'] abuse of women is systematic rather than unsystematic as it is with" white and black inmates. Robert Spencer elaborates:The Islamic legal manual Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: "When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman's previous marriage is immediately annulled." Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur'an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: "Forbidden to you are...married women, except those whom you own as slaves" (sura 4:23-24).As atrocious as rape is on its own, the Sudanese experience demonstrates that it is even more harrowing as a component in a broader intimidation campaign. Writing in Frontpage Magazine, the former Australian army officer Sharon Lapkin has recounted (my italics):Retired Australian detective Tim Priest warned in 2004 that the Lebanese gangs, which emerged in Sydney in the 1990s--when the police were asleep--had morphed out of control. "The Lebanese groups," he said, "were ruthless, extremely violent, and they intimidated not only innocent witnesses, but even the police that attempted to arrest them" Priest describes how in 2001, in a Muslim dominated area of Sydney two policement stopped a car containing three well-known Middle Eastern men to search for stolen property. As the police carried out their search they were physcially threatened and the three men claimed they were going to track them down, kill them and then rape their girlfriends..... As the Sydney police called for backup the three men used their mobile phones to call their associates, and within minutes, 20 Middle Eastern men arrived on the scene. They punched and pushed the police and damaged state vehicles. The police retreated and the gang followed them to the police station where they intimidated staff, damaged property and held the police station hostage. Eventually the gang left, the police licked their wounds, and not one of them took action against the Middle Eastern men. Priest claims, "In the minds of the local population, the police are cowards and the message was, 'Lebanese [Muslim gangs] rule the streets.'"The situation, Lapkin learned, was the same in Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, where police concede that they are no longer in control. Muslim immigrant gangs rule the streets. To make their dominion emphatic, even ambulance personnel are routinely attacked and abused. They won't go into many neighborhoods without police protection, and the police, in turn, will not enter without additional back-up.
Islamists are taking the measure of the West and finding it to be a shallow, self-loathing husk.
[snip]
Sharia creep, moreover, does not stop at the Atlantic's eastern shores--far from it. Witness, for example, a 2005 proposal by Ontario's former attorney general to incorporate sharia in the Canadian legal code. Like emerging British sharia, the scheme would have approved the use of Muslim law to settle such domestic relations matters as divorce and child custody involving the province's estimated 600, 000 Muslims.
[snip]
As for the American dawa front, Zeyno Baran offers this assessment:Qaradawi...has repeatedly advised Muslims living in the West to create their own "Muslim ghettos" to avoid cultural assimilation. If American Muslims start forming parallel societies, it will be much easier for the Ikhwan to push for the introduction of sharia in these societies. While this may seem far-fetched, it cannot be so easily dismissed given how close the Islamists came to introducing sharia for Canadian Muslims. And since most of the American Muslim organizations are in the hands of Islamists, who enjoy seemingly unlimited money, media attention, and political influence, few non-Islamists would be able to fight back.
Islam's apologist legions counter-factually assure you that Muslims overwhelmingly reject terror. They intimate that violence is the only issue and that nothing "radical" is afoot as long as terrorism is not in the mix. Abdur-rahman Wahid, a globally renowned Muslim moderate whom we'll discuss momentarily, estimates--without offering any supporting data--that radicalism, or what he calls the "virulent ideology," holds sway over only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims. He cheerily posits that the remaining "85% to 90%" is comprised of the "traditional and sufi leadership and masses, who are not yet radicalized" (and notice the word yet, which tells you everything you need to know about which way even he knows the wind is blowing). Even if he were right about the comparatively paltry "radical" population, we'd still be talking about nearly 200 million people. But the problem is that Wahid is not right. As bracing as that huge number may be, he is low-balling. The actual numbers are closer to the opposite of the lopsided preponderance of ur-tolerant moderates he portrays.Now, really: just how comfortable are you really with large, concentrated numbers of Muslims--say, in Detroit--when you know that probably about a third of them think that "killing in the name of religion is at least sometimes justifiable?" I mean, really, let's just suppose that the situation is no more complex than hinted here, and that two-thirds of Muslims--that would be the perpetually-invoked "most Muslims," wouldn't it?--do not agree with that statement. Let's say that it's just forty percent of Muslims who want to see their country adopt Sharia law, and sixty percent don't.
In 2007, the University of Maryland joined with the pollster World Public Opinion to survey Islamic views. The poll included Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa to Southeast Asia, Arab and non-Arab. The results were jarring. Nearly two-thirds, 65.5 percent, said they would endorse the requirement of "a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country." In fact, they said they would like to see all Muslim countries unified under a single caliphate, a position shared even by half of Indonesian Muslims. As we shall see, Islam in Indonesia is thought, with justification, to be among the moderate brands on the planet. Yet even there fundamentalism is on the rise, particularly in Aceh, where sharia rules and where the provincial parliament last year enacted the time-honored penalty of stoning to death for adultery. As the intrepid writer Sadanand Dhume observed, homosexuals and those who engage in premarital sex "drew a lighter rebuke...100 strokes of a rattan cane."
The 2007 poll figures match up with what related global polling suggests. In 2008, for example, 40 percent of British Muslims (i.e., close to a million people, including many British-born converts to Islam) favored the implementation of sharia in Britain--with 32 percent holding that killing in the name of religion is at least sometimes justifiable, 40 percent favoring a prohibition against mingling between the sexes, and 33 percent endorsing a global Islamic caliphate. In Pakistan, a plenary Muslim country of 175 million people, four in five favor strict enforcement of sharia (over half "strongly" so). Not surprisingly, in a 2007 poll, Pakistanis by a five-to-one margin preferred Osama bin Laden (at 46 percent approval) to then-President George W. Bush (9 percent)--bin Laden also easily topped Pakistan's then president Pervez Musharraf (38 percent).
It is vital to bear in mind that the president is an Alinskyite, so steeped in the ideology of the seminal community organizer that he became a top instructor in Alinskyite tactics for other up-and-coming radicals. Alinskyites are fifth-columnists. They have, in substance, the same goals as open revolutionaries: overthrowing the existing free-market republic and replacing it with a radical's utopia. That is why Obama could befriend such unrepentant former terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright, a black-liberation theologist.The more closely you look at Palpatine's background, history,and associations, the more impossible it becomes to believe that he is just an economically naive, run-of-the-mill Democrat. He really did teach Alinskyite tactics, and Saul Alinsky really did teach his students to do just as Mr. McCarthy describes.
Alinskyites, though, are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, taking on the appearance and argot of the heartland. Their single, animating goal is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc. Everything else--including the cultivation of like-minded Islamists--is negotiable. They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven't worked out in great detail...except that it will be perfect, communal, equal, and just.
This shallow nihilism makes alliances easy to strike...and, when necessary, to shove allies under the bus. If Islam needed pushing aside for a time to secure power, Islam would be pushed aside. Yet the president's Islamic heritage is deeply rooted. As we shall see, to the extent Obama had a religious faith in his formative years, it was Islam. That doesn't make him a Muslim, much less the Muslim "Manchurian Candidate" of anti-Obama paranoia. There is no record of his ever having professed Islam as an adult (profession of the faith being the first pillar of Islam). While much about Obama remains a mystery--despite the 850 pages' worth of autobiography and policy prescriptions he had published by the age of forty-five--the religion he publicly professes is Christianity, and there is no reason to doubt him on that score.
No reason because his formal religion is nearly irrelevant. The faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism. It is a leftism of the most insidious kind: secular and uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois values, but feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down the existing order, under the banner of its all-purpose rally-cry: "social justice."
Neocommunists need not adhere to a formal religion. Instead, they tend to infuse causes like environmentalism, privacy, and secularism with religious fervor. For most leftists, though, religion is a useful tool. It is never a straitjacket because neocommunists consider themselves no more bound by the strictures of creed than by the constraints of tradition.
Thus is Obama the Christian the most uncompromisingly pro-abortion president ever to hold the office, just as he was the senate's most vigorous supporter of abortion rights--and, before that, while serving in the Illinois legislature, an apologist for infanticide as the remedy for botched abortions in which the baby inconveniently survived. In America, where it has become declasse to question, much less examine, a person's fidelity to his avowed religious creed, formal religion is endlessly malleable. This is a tremendous asset for the necocommunist. Formal religion lends a patina of transcendence to his attack on the existing order. And any religion will do if its principles can be marshaled--however faithlessly--into a rationale for dissolving American constitutional democracy.
This explains how Obama can purport to have found Christ through the baleful Jeremiah Wright. It explains how he could sit comfortably for twenty years in Rev. Wright's Trinity Church in Chicago, soaking up the fiery pastor's Black Liberation Theology, a pseudo-Christian Marxism colored in anti-Semitic hues, defined most clearly by its anti-Americanism. Sure, when Wright became an electoral issue for Obama, the candidate cast him aside, much as he had cast his Islamic heritage aside, pretending to have been absent or wearing earplugs during the Rev's more bombastic Sundays. But the truth was always there for anyone willing to see it: The grievance-mongering, race-obsessed Obama had imbibed enough to find in Wright the inspiration for his second bestselling me-book, The Audacity of Hope, and to parrot such standard Wright tropes as: "White folks' greed runs a world in need." It should have surprised no one when Obama staffed his White House with race-baiting Marxists, including "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones, an admitted communist who, when not claiming 9/11 was somehow both America's just desert and an inside job, brooded about "white polluters" conspiring to "steer poison into the people of color communities."
Neocommunism is leftism liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many naively believed the Soviet demise would be a cautionary tale for the left, a warning against the hubris of big-government schemes to perfect man and society. The opposite, instead, is the case. David Horowitz, today's most eloquent and incisive observer of the revolutionary left, the movement in which he was raised and on which he turned so fiercely, offers a perfect diagnosis:Far from instilling humility in progressives..., the collapse of socialism has revived their self-righteousness and renergized their assault on the democratic West. The disappearance of the Soviet block has had only one consequence of note. It has lifted the burden of having to defend...an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.Nihilism is the key. Today's hard left is defined by what it is against: the United States, free-market capitalism, and any foreign policy premised on defending American interests or promoting individual liberty. Only this part of the agenda is concrete, leaving neocommunism elastic enough to strike alliances with any movement that shares it. What neocommunists are for, by contrast, is a set of abstractions--"social justice," "equality," "redistributive rights," the "rule of law," and, of course, "our values." The details of those can be worked out later, once the more pressing imperative of undoing the existing order has been realized.
This explains Obama's ruinous spending, the trillions in debt, far surpassing in just a few months the total debt accumulated since the nation's founding. Not content with that accomplishment, the president is rushing headlong to bankrupt the treasury permanently with additional trillions for nationalized healthcare and crushing tax increases--which experience assures us will reduce total revenues available for redistribution--including a "cap and trade" energy scheme that will nullify industry's capacity to generate value. Critics from the right and what used to be the mainstream left are dumbfounded, wondering aloud whether the new administration is in over its head. This drastically underestimates Obama. Quite the opposite of overwhelmed, he has methodically done exactly what was predicted by those who took the time, during the 2008 campaign, to study his radical background: exploiting the new administration's wind-at-its-back period to crush the capitalist system under an enormous commitment of future dollars, a commitment that will be nigh impossible to roll back once the public is finally roused from its slumbers. This "change" is not designed to create a new system. Its purpose is to destroy the old one. What comes next is negotiable.
... rare earth elements...have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles.Now, given that:
Despite their name, most rare earths are not particularly rare.What could possibly be the problem? Surely we can just go out and mine our own? Hah! More fool you!
...new mines are likely to take three to five years to reach full production, according to industry executives...How did we wind up in this situation, you ask, where
China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements...How did we wind up letting A HOSTILE NATION control our supply of stuff that, for the most part, we can mine ourselves?
...lower costs and weak environmental enforcement...the industry moved over there!
In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of terrorists sent by Abu Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of the four shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she'd ever see. Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, bashed in the four-year-old's skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle. Hours later, upon finally being "rescued" from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead--accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the terrorists searched for more Jews to kill.You know, if you just put Jihad Watch in your Google Reader list, you know that this is not as unusual as some people would have you think. The quantity of material flowing through Jihad Watch is almost mind-numbing. There is no way I can find time to read it all. The headlines--all about Muslims all over the world up to no good, the overwhelming majority of the material being drawn from legitimate news accounts--change with upsetting regularity. There is absolutely no way anyone who bothers to do even a little reading on this subject can ignore the plain and obvious facts that Muslims who take the Qu'ran and the hadiths at face value are, at the least, supportive of violence against non-Muslims, and that they are on the increase.
The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. For years, however, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release, lionizing this monster as a "brave leader" and "model warrior." In 2007, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers. Kuntar was welcomed to the West Bank as a conquering hero. The Palestinian Authority granted him and another released terrorist honorary citizenship "as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic suffering in the occupation's prisons."
A time came when the only people who had ever been free began to ask: What is freedom?It does occur to me that some readers may not understand what Mr. Garrett means by:
Who wrote its articles--the strong or the weak?
Was it an absolute good?
Could there be such a thing as unconditional freedom, short of anarchy?
Given the answer to be no, then was freedom an eternal truth or a political formula?
Since it was clear to reason that freedom must be conditioned, as by self-discipline, individual responsibility and many necessary laws of restraint; and since there was never in the world an absolute good, why should people not be free to say they would have less freedom in order to have more of some other good?
What other good?
Security.
What else?
Stability.
And beyond that?
Beyond the sympathies of we, and all men as brothers, instead of the willful I, as if each man were a sovereign, self-regarding individual?
Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free. You shall not be forbidden to interrogate the faith of your fathers. Better that, indeed, than to take it entirely for granted.
So long as doubts such as these were wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation, perhaps only because it is a foundation, no great damage was done. But when they began to be massed as a creed, then they became sharp cutting tools, wickely set in the jaws of the flood. That was the work of a disaffected intellectual cult, mysteriously rising in the academic world; and from the same source came the violent winds of Marxian propaganda that raised the waves higher and made them angry.
Even so, the damage to the foundations might have been much slower and not beyond simple repair if it had not happened that in 1932 a bund of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party, seized control of government.
After that it was the voice of government saying to the people there had been too much freedom. That was their trouble. Freedom was for the strong. The few had used it to exploit the many. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, boom and bust, depression and unemployment, economic insecurity, want in the midst of plenty, property rights above human rights, taking it always out of the hide of labor in bad times--all of that was what came of rugged individualism, of free prices, free markets, free enterprise and freedom of contract. Let that be the price of freedom, and who would not say it was too dear?
So, instead of this willful private freedom, trust the government to administer freedom, for all the people alike, especially the weak. To begin with, the government would redistribute the national wealth in an equitable manner. Then its planners would plan production and distribution in perfect balance, and thus no more boom and bust; the government then would see to it that everybody had always enough money to buy a decent living, and beyond that it would provide for the widows and orphans, the sick and disabled, the indigent and the old.
To perform these miracles it would require more freedom for itself--that is, freedom to intervene in the lives of people for their own good, freedom from old Constitutional restraints that belonged to our horse-and-buggy days, and freedom to do as it would with the public purse. And if it should be said that this increase in the government's own sphere of freedom meant a curtailment of the individual's freedom, it came to this--that the individual was asked to surrender only the freedom to starve and what he received in return was freedom from want. Was that not a good bargain?
What the people did in fact surrender was control of government.
They did not intend to do that. For a long time they did not realize they had done it, and when at last it came to them they were already deeply infected with a virus that devours the copy book virtues, creates habits of dependence and destroys the valiant love of self-responsibility.
The crisis was moral.
Happily for their designs, the New Deal physicians found the patient in a state of economic pain, extreme but not fatal, and proceeded to administer imported narcotics, all habit forming, such as:
(1) Repudiation of the United States Treasury's promises to pay.
(2) Confiscation of the people's gold by trickery.
(3) Debasement of the currency.
(4) Deliberate inflation.
(5) Spoilation of the savers, whose little rainy day hoards melted away.
(6) Deficit spending to create buying power by conjury.
(7) Monetization of debt.
(8) The doctrine of a planned economy.
(9) A scheme of taxation, class subsidies and Federal grants-in-aid designed ostensibly to redistribute the national wealth for social justice, but calculated in fact to reduce millions of citizens to subservience, to bring forty-eight sovereign states to the status of provinces and to create in the executive principle a supreme government with extensive new powers, including the power to make its own laws by simply publishing from its bureaus rules and regulations having the force of law, disobedience punishable by fine or imprisonment.
These physicians kept saying to the patient, "Now aren't you feeling better?" Many, very many, were feeling immediately better, and because they were feeling better and because the government offered to provide them all with economic security forever, they were easily persuaded to exchange freedom for benefits, until at last they had surrendered, almost unawares, the most elementary freedom of all, namely, the right to receive in your pay envelope the full reward for your labor and do with it what you will.
Thus the Welfare State was built. The facade was magnificent; the cornerstone rested on quicksand; the moral cost of it may be reckoned in terms such as these:
If the great Government of the United States were a private corporation no bank would take its name on a piece of paper, because it has cynically repudiated the words engraved upon its bonds.
The dollar, which was long the most honored piece of money in the world, became an irredeemable scrap of paper, with no certain value.
The executive power of government was exalted to be the paramount power, uncontrollable, and the exquisite Constitutional mechanism of three co-equal powers--the Congress to make the laws, the President to execute the laws and the Supreme Court to interpret the laws--no longer functioned.
The symbol of Executive Government is the President. Actually, Executive Government became a vast system of bureaus and commissions writing 90 per cent of our laws, touching our everyday lives to the quick.
The purse and the sword were in one hand, which is solemnly forbidden by the constitution. In fact this was so. True, Congress still appropriated the money, but it could no longer pretend to understand the budgets that came from the White House and bitterly complained that it could not appropriate money intelligently. And as for the sword, the State Department, speaking for Executive Government, held that to be an obsolete provision of the Constitution which says only the Congress hsall have the power to declare war. The President alone could make war, as he did in Korea.
In these twenty years a revolution took place in the relationship between government and people. Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.
This change was silently geared to the popular idea of Social Security, for which the money was to come from a law of compulsory thrift imposed upon the individual and a pay roll tax imposed upon employers, all to be managed by a paternal Federal government. But this Social Security is delusive. In the first place, you have no surety that the money the government takes currently out of your income or your wage envelope as a social security tax will be worth as much when you get it back as it was when the government took it. Indeed, it is now worth only half as much as it was when the government began to take it a few years ago. With one hand it held out the apple; with the other hand it introduced the worm that was going to devour it. The worm was inflation. Secondly, as fast as the government receives those social security taxes it spends the money and puts in place of it a paper promise to pay you when you are entitled to receive it back, so that the only security behind all this Social Security scheme is more government debt. The right way would be to meet the cost of Social Security currently by an annual tax on the national income.
Nor is that all.
As the religious apostate seems to pass under a kind of emotional necessity to revile the symbols and images of his abandoned faith, so in the last twenty years the popular meaning of old American words has undergone enormities of semantic change and are scourged accordingly. The word freedom itself has come to be regarded as a reactionary word, if you use it to mean, freedom from the coercions and compulsions of government, even when they might be benign. Individualism is a word that will class you with the greedy few who wish to exploit the many for profit. The honorable word capitalism is anathema. Likewise nationalism and sovereignty. And the mere thought of America first, associated as that term is with isolationism, has become a liability so extreme that politicians feel obliged to deny ever having entertained it. But if you use the word freedom to mean freedom for mankind, that is all right.
...the power to make its own laws by simply publishing from its bureaus rules and regulations having the force of law, disobedience punishable by fine or imprisonment.and
...Executive Government became a vast system of bureaus and commissions writing 90 per cent of our laws, touching our everyday lives to the quick.It is not so hard to understand. Think about our government and our country today.
...Dutch prosecutors announced in January 2009 that Wilders would go to trial for "insulting" Muslims and "inciting" hatred against them...Note carefully the italicized and bolded statement from the Dutch prosecutor: the fact that what Wilders said is true is no defense!
What we know now we knew then: that this trial presented a watershed moment. Wilders, leader of a growing democratic movement to save his Western nation from Islamization, risks one year in prison for speaking out about the facts and consequences of Islamization. Such speech is prohibited not by the Western tradition of free speech Wilders upholds, but rather by the Islamic laws against free speech that he rejects. Wilders' plight demonstrates the extent to which the West has already been Islamized.
"It is irrelevant whether Wilder's witnesses might prove Wilders' observations to be correct," the public prosecutor stated back at the beginning. "What's relevant is that his observations are illegal." Since when are observations "illegal"? Under communist dictatorships is one answer. Under Sharia is another.
[snip]
Topping the OIC wish list is its effort to criminalize criticism of Islam in the non-Muslim world. And this is what makes the Wilders case is so significant. It's one thing if Islamic street thugs mount assassination attempts in Western nations against violators of Islamic law (i.e., elderly Danish cartoonists), or Muslim ambassadors to Western nations lobby them to punish such violations (the free press), or OIC representatives introduce similar Sharia resolutions at the United Nations. It would be something else again if a Western government were itself to convict a democratically elected leader for violating the Sharia ban on criticizing Islam. That's not war anymore; that's conquest.
Why should men cook?Well, there y'go.
1. Women think men who cook are sexy.
2. It involves fire, sharp instruments, and meat.
3. Women think men who cook are sexy, and it involves fire, sharp instruments, and meat.
They tell us that obedience to Christ comes in the form of high taxes on the wealthy to fund social programs for the poor. Even if these programs weren't as miserably ineffective as what they are, look at what they foster: envy, greed, bitterness and resentment. Not exactly the motivations of love and altruism that Jesus said were to be at the heart of our goodwill.In my experience, the way this argument usually unfolds involves blatant equivocation, although the person making the argument doesn't realize that that's what he's done. People say things like this: "But MOTW, don't you agree that we need to help the helpless?"
In truth, there is not one recorded instance of Christ advocating government confiscation and redistribution of wealth in the name of charity.
Jesus did say: "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' (Matthew 25:40)
Jesus did not say: "The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you forcibly took from the masses through taxation in the name of these brothers of mine, you did for me."
Jesus did say: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21)
Jesus did not say: "If you want to be perfect, go, get elected to high office and then use the law to confiscate the property of those who have, and give to those you deem more worthy of it. Then claim you are following me."
You get the point. Barack Obama's social gospel of government sponsored theft is a flat contradiction to what Jesus taught.
“The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”Two thoughts, if you're willing to put up with them long enough to read them:
These searing words about Depression-era welfare are from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 State of the Union Address. FDR feared this self-reliant people might come to depend permanently upon government for the necessities of their daily lives. Like narcotics, such a dependency would destroy the fiber and spirit of the nation.
What brings his words to mind is news that 41.8 million Americans are on food stamps, and the White House estimates 43 million will soon be getting food stamps every month. A seventh of the nation cannot even feed itself.
...a Food Stamp Act was signed into law by LBJ appropriating $75 million for 350,000 individuals in 40 counties and three U.S. cities.
[snip]
Yet when Richard Nixon took office, 3 million Americans were receiving food stamps at a cost of $270 million.
[snip]
By the time he left office in 1974, the food stamp program was feeding 16 million Americans at an annual cost of $4 billion.
Fast forward to 2009. The cost to taxpayers of the U.S. food stamp program hit $56 billion. The number of recipients and cost of the program exploded again last year.
Among the reasons is family disintegration. Forty percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent. Among African-Americans, it is 71 percent.
Food stamps are feeding children abandoned by their own fathers. Taxpayers are taking up the slack for America’s deadbeat dads.
[snip]
Obesity rates have soared. Forty percent of all the kids in city public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade are overweight or obese.
Among poor kids, whose families depend on food stamps, the percentages are far higher. Mothers of poor kids use food stamps to buy them sugar-heavy soda pop, candy and junk food.
[snip]
The Department of Agriculture in 2004 denied a request by Minnesota that would have disallowed food stamp recipients from using them for junk food. To grant the request, said the department, would “perpetuate the myth” that food stamps users make poor shopping decisions.
But is that a myth or an inconvenient truth?
[snip]
What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society — fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.
We Americans are not only not the people our parents were, we are not the people we were. FDR was right about what would happen to the country if we did not get off the narcotic of welfare.
Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.
Why should Americans, 65 years after World War II, be defending rich Europeans from a Soviet Union that has been dead for 20 years, so those same Europeans can cut their defense budgets to protect their social safety nets?
President Eisenhower told JFK to bring the troops home from Europe, or the Europeans would wind up as permanent wards.
Was Ike a closet isolationist?
Almost $14 trillion in debt today, we borrow from Europe to defend Europe, borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from the Gulf Arabs to defend the Gulf Arabs. And we borrow from Beijing to send foreign aid to African regimes whose U.N. delegations laughed and applauded as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. Have we lost all sense of self-respect?
In his 1969 “Silent Majority” address, Richard Nixon said that, after Vietnam, America would provide Asian allies with weapons and assistance in defending their freedom. But Americans would no longer do the fighting.
Why are U.S. soldiers still on the DMZ, 57 years after the Korean War? Why are Marines still on Okinawa, 65 years after Gen. MacArthur took the surrender? Cannot Korea and Japan, prosperous and populous, conscript the soldiers for their own defense?
National security, yes. Empire security we can no longer afford.
In America, the House has already passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act S.510 bill and only the Senate is left to pass their version and commingle them into a unified monstrosity. The bill is designed to destroy the small farmer in America, the very caste of people who is the most likely opposition to the control of the moneyed elites.This is one of the ways it's done, folks, that is, this is one of the ways large corporations get rid of the small fry. For more details on this sort of thing, you can read Crunchy Cons; Mr. Dreher has a fairly lengthy discussion of this stuff.
Though the American small farmer is a dieing breed, with hundreds of thousands of families throwing in the towel over the past decade, he is not dieing out fast enough.
[snip]
The paperwork restrictions on farmers, the amount of effort to put in perfectly filled out copies or to face $500,000 fines on the first infraction, will guarantee that only the large agro giants are left standing in rather short order. On top of this the FDA will have full authority to dictate each and every detail of how food should be grown and under what conditions to the American farmer.
A fortnight ago, a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese patrol boat in the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan but also claimed by China. Tokyo released the ship and crew, but held the captain.That is only part of what's going on. Don't get me started about machine tools, and machinists, and tool-and-die makers. You don't wanna know.
His immediate return was demanded by Beijing.
Japan refused. China instantly escalated the minor incident into a major confrontation, threatening a cut off of Japan’s supply of “rare-earth” materials, essential to the production of missiles, batteries and computers. Through predatory trading, China had killed its U.S. competitor in rare-earth materials, establishing almost a global monopoly.
[snip]
The Chinese tiger is all grown up, and it’s not cuddly anymore.
And with Beijing’s threat to use its monopoly of rare-earth materials to bend nations to its will, how does the Milton Friedmanite free-trade ideology of the Republican Party, which fed Beijing $2 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over two decades, look now?
How do all those lockstep Republican votes for Most Favored Nation status for Beijing, ushering her into the World Trade Organization and looking the other way as China dumped into our markets, thieved our technology and carted off our factories look today?
The self-sufficient republic that could stand alone in the world is more dependent than Japan on China for rare-earth elements vital to our industries, for the necessities of our daily life, and for the loans to finance our massive trade and budget deficits.
How does the interdependence of nations in a global economy look now, compared to the independence American patriots from Alexander Hamilton to Calvin Coolidge guaranteed to us, that enabled us to win World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years?
