9/11 did not change me

Over at PJMedia Lifestyle, Dave Swindle asks how 9/11 changed you. My answer, also to be found in the comments there, is that it didn't:

9/11 did not change me politically. I had long been alternately skeptical of and disgusted with the Western Left, ever since I absorbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago one summer in high school. And I had long followed the dreary litany of Islamic terrorism, bombings and hijackings, from the 70s onwards. When 9/11 happened, I knew before hearing any announcement that it was probably Osama bin Laden, because he was responsible for the attacks on the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I had visited Kenya before, and loved the warm friendly people there, so that attack was doubly atrocious to me. On 9/11, watching Muslims party in the streets, and proggs exclaim “How terrible! But…” simply confirmed me more solidly in my opinions. I will never forget or forgive the jihadists, nor how proggs insinuated--or proclaimed--that America deserved 9/11. I've made it a rule to reject with great force the national security advice of such people in the years since.

DRIVING MRS. SATAN - Never say die - Black sabbath cover

Have you heard an exceptionally lovely acoustic rearrangment of an especially lethal metal song today?  Yes?  Well, this one's better!

02 Take your Hand Out of My Pocket Van Morrison At The Rainbow Theatre

This is what conservatives are saying to Sandra Fluke, and indeed to all proggs.  (Double-posted because I decided I liked Van Morrison's version better.)

Sonny Boy Williamson II Take Your Hands Out Of My Pockets

This is what conservatives are saying to Sandra Fluke.  What she does with her body is of no concern to me, otherwise.

The MEMRI 9/11 Project

Since September 11, 2001, The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been following, and documenting, content from the Middle East and South Asia media on the attacks of that day. Many of the initial reactions in these media – from prominent journalists, academics, politicians, and leading religious figures, as well as from officials in the governments of Arab countries – centered on conspiracy theories implicating the Jews, Israel and/or the Mossad; President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the CIA, the FBI, and/or the National Security Council; Christians and/or the Vatican; the U.K.; white supremacist groups; and others.
To visit the MEMRI 9/11 page, click here.

Voter fraud? Yes, and at their own convention!

"Even though the no's were again as loud if not louder than the aye's on the third vote, Villaraigosa said he had determined that two thirds of those present had voted in favor. Boos filled the arena in response."

Now tell us again how there is no Democrat voter fraud in this country.

Late night ADHD linklets

"The Navy SEAL Foundation says it will not accept any donations generated by the memoir, "No Easy Day," which the Pentagon says likely contains classified information that could put military personnel at risk."

Southern schools dominate list of best colleges for free speech.

Archeologists from the University of Leicester have found the long-lost Church of the Grey Friars – the last known resting place of Richard III.

"Creationism has no predictive ability or qualities, so it is not scientifically useful. Evolution allows us to understand how living things came to be as we see them today and as they were in both the distant and recent past. It allows us to predict the fate and behavior of populations,"

Paleoart: The prehistoric world's most epic predators

Are dinosaurs still cool?

The center of our galaxy has a pigtail.

Christians attacked in Kenya, in India, in Egypt

Did they really discover the Higgs boson?

Random Rock Bloggage

So I see in the entertainment news that Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins is slagging fellow 90s rockers Soundgarden, for hitting the revival road only for the money. I don't know much about 90s rock, I admit. The stuff was mostly one long expectoration to my classic rock ears, at the time. But does Mr. Corgan truly not realize how limited a shelf life most bands have? Or how shallow a creative well? Ancient bands like The Who or The Rolling Stones can still sell out big halls, if not arenas. But probably there's barely one fan in a hundred who came to hear their latest songs. People want to hear music that made impressions on them, at the most impressionable, memorable times of their youths. Time boils all artists down to their essentials, and these endure. Bands that don't have any essentials just effervesce down to nothing. Who listens to The Critters, The Shadows, Black Pearl, Bloodrock, anymore? If a band has achieved something that endures, that deserves to be celebrated--and rewarded.

And what's wrong with money? Is there some rock music rule that you have to spend your career living in a van, with no prospects beyond the next gig or studio date? Rock's promise of eternal youth was exploded long ago--let rockers be adults!

Crony Chronicles: I Want To Be A Crony

Pakistan is "decaying"

This brave article deserves wide exposure. Unfortunately, posting a link on my blog is the best I can do.

A decaying state kills its minorities

Most Muslims hold that violation of some human rights takes place because of the tough living conditions and poverty in the country. The view displays all the collective blind spots about human rights. It presumes certain conditions to exist against objective evidence to the contrary. It talks about the minorities in Pakistan without being aware of their view of how they are being treated. Under the present PPP government a Christian federal minister has been killed by Punjabi Taliban in broad daylight in Islamabad.

Today in 2012, you have TV anchors saying more or less the same thing: Muslims themselves are being maltreated, so the persecution of non-Muslims cannot be blamed on them. Going on a tangent, they allude to the Rohingya Muslims of Burma about whom the rascally foreign-funded NGOs have done nothing. (In Burma, the NGOs protesting Rohingya rights are savagely suppressed by the Burmese ruling junta.) The ominous sign in Pakistan is that the majority Muslim community is completely inured against what the minorities are going through.

Remember, you can go to Google's news aggregator and search keywords Christians Attacked, no quotation marks. A theme will emerge...

Chris Matthews is losing credibility on race

Yes, even in 2012, there is still a lot of hatefulness out there. But, as has been said elseweb, if you're constantly hearing "dog whistles", that chiefly means that you're the dog.

Happy Birthday, Van Morrison!

David Thompson -- His Greatest Hits

Culture and ideas blogger David Thompson, whom you may click through to here or over there in my blogroll, had recently put together a meta tag for some of his best old posts. This was kindly done at my request, at the cost of quite some time. He then informed me of his favorite brand of spirits, to which I reply that he really ought to put this greatest hits link in his list of categories, on his sidebar. :)

Crossroads Generation - "The Poster"

Late night ADHD linklets

This Long-Lost Nintendo Knitting Machine Would Have Let You Make Sweaters With Your NES

She said: 'We got talking about skulls and the next day he turned up with this skull. He said it was Ned Kelly's skull, and told me to "put it in the bottom of your bag and wrap it up".'

Astronomers observe waves of gravity in space-time itself

Genome of mysterious extinct human completed, scientists say

CIA balked at chance to kill bin Laden in ’99, Polish ex-spy says

Taqiyya, Iranian style...

Compare and contrast:

Iran's Khamenei: Nuclear arms use "unforgivable"

UN nuclear agency confirms Iran has shrouded site, says its probe ‘significantly’ hampered

Lying to infidels is permitted under their version of Islam, remember.

Bruce Springsteen is "Howard Zinn with a guitar"

Washington Diarist | The New Republic

Leon Wieseltier labels The Boss thusly in the above-linked article.  This is of course incorrect.  Bruce Springsteen is "Studs Terkel with a guitar."  He was the prominent Chicago journalist and radioman, and prolific compiler of hard luck stories for book publication. For him the year was forever 1930, just as for modern radicals the year is forever 1968, and for Springsteen it is forever the recession year of 1974.

The Booming Business of...Creationism?

Alarmingly, yes!

The New Jersey group behind the website Creation Science Hall of Fame is putting its efforts into opening a brick and mortar creationist attraction along Interstate 75 in northern Kentucky, according to the Courier-Journal.

Progress in Kentucky will be determined by how much and how quickly the group can raise capital through donations. Terry Hurlbut, secretary and treasurer of the group, told the Courier-Journal that they're hoping to raise $2 to $3 million to begin construction. [...]

Answers in Genesis, the group behind the Creation Museum, is planning an equally ambitious exhibit named Ark Encounter, a Bible-themed amusement park complete with a 500-foot by 80-foot depiction of Noah's ark.

Though the Creation Museum saw a dip in attendance last year to 280,000, down from 404,000 visitors when it opened in 2007, the group was still able to obtain $43 million in tax breaks from the state of Kentucky based on projected attendance.

In the same year, nearly $50 million in funding was cut from public education in Kentucky, notes Forbes.

Sookie takes a good gander at the future of science education in America.

Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC

From The Guardian earlier last week...too late to leave a comment at the article, so thought I'd blog it here.

All of that is fine and largely unobjectionable: given Fox's existence, there's no reason Democrats shouldn't have their own television gathering place, for the sake of balance if nothing else.

Eh? The Democrats have every other network, don't they? MSNBC is just more open about it. Collar any journalist at any non-Fox network and ask them: What party did you vote for in the last ten elections? Or if they're too young, ask them what party did their J-school professor vote for? It'll be either the Democrats, or something even further Left. This is of course not to say that there is some liberal conspiracy, or that liberals can't be good journalists. It's just simply to observe the otherwise noncontroversial fact that birds of a feather flock together.

They flock together so much so that perceptions sometimes get warped. Let there be one non-liberal TV news channel (Fox). Let there be one non-liberal national newspaper editorial page (The Wall Street Journal). Let there be one predominantly conservative pre-digital media format (talk radio). What does that mean in the minds of liberals, to have these conservative outposts existing? Why, it means that liberals just can't get their message out! Vilification and de-legitimization of the non-conforming voices must commence, over and above any disagreements over matters of actual fact. And that is an early warning sign of the fabled "totalitarian temptation", when you feel threatened if your opinion isn't held unanimously. In dictatorships, the line must always be unanimous.

Pakistani Christians attacked during a land grab

Pakistani Christians attacked during a land grab

If you search Christians Attacked, no quotation marks, in google's news aggregator, you will almost always come up with a story about Christians being brutalized by Muslims in Pakistan.  This is why I have no patience for American Muslims whining about how oppressed they are in the U.S.  "The tree is known by its fruit."

Creationist groups deletes unbiblical passages from Bible

From the Patheos blog...a super satire by James F. McGrath

At their 2025 annual meeting, a well-known young-earth creationist organization decided to finally take the step of removing Genesis 1-3 from their canon of Scripture.
“It was long overdue,” said the organization’s longstanding president (who changed his name to an unprintable squiggle after discovering that his surname referred to a meat outlawed in the Bible). “We accepted Genesis 1-3 for a long time, emphasizing that it doesn’t mention evolution. But recently, it was drawn to our attention that neither is it as staunchly anti-evolution as we expect from a truly Christian text. Most of our arguments, in fact, are absent from Genesis 1-3. And so we had to draw the conclusion that it was an inadequate depiction that does not deserve to be considered inerrant Scripture – unlike our own writings on this topic.”

When asked for examples, he listed the following: “It never mentions God making the 2nd chromosome in human beings look like it resulted from the fusion of two chromosomes inherited from a primate ancestor, to test our faith. It never mentions God creating starlight en route to Earth 6,000 years ago. It even uses ambiguous language, sounding as though it could be saying that God commanded the Earth and sea to bring forth life, rather than creating them directly. And in Genesis 2:2, the literal wording talks of a day in which God made the heavens and the earth. Being at odds with our literal six-day creationism, we decided to remove it from our Scripture, lest anyone be confused by it or led into error.”

At the same annual meeting, the organization also decided to change the name of their organization to Answers in Genesis 4-50.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children

Who is ever going to undo the damage wrought by creationist science education?  Bill Nye reassures his audience that creationism will fade over time.  But now it seems to be in flood tide, as more and more parents reject science and get their legislators to do so also.  Whatever follows, it probably won't be like creationism was never here.

Help fight the fight by staying up to date at watchdog sites like, for instance, The Panda's Thumb.  Although I notice that there is too much going on for them to keep up with anymore.  You can make a newsfeed for "creationism" with Google's news aggregator, also.

Michael Mann defamation lawsuit against National Review

Being likened to Jerry Sandusky is fightin' words, whether or not it's legally actionable. I've always admired and enjoyed Mark Steyn, but I think he stepped in it this time, as anyone who runs his mouth for a living will inevitably do, occasionally.

Random Rock Bloggage

Sunday Papers - Joe Jackson - Live

Al-Azhar Cleric Hashem Islam Issues Fatwa Allowing the Killing of Anti-M...

Will a peaceful civic society elude the Egyptians forever?

"Louisiana's Loch Ness mythology" | NCSE

"Louisiana's Loch Ness mythology" | NCSE

Dear God, the poor Louisiana children...It's like there's a rebellion against rationality convulsing the country, when it comes to evolution.  Dear fellow Christians:  Think of all the love and blessings and favor you have experienced in your lives.  Do you really think that's all going to just poof and go away, because evolution is true?  Honor the Bible, but don't worship it!  Worship belongs to God only!

Virginia Dare at 425 years old

August 18th is the 425th birthday of Virginia Dare, the first infant born to English parents in North America. She vanished along with the rest of the Roanoke Colony, her fate as unknown as the rest.

If she survived into adulthood, she might have intermarried with the Indians along the coast. Centuries later, her descendants might have intermarried with the runaway slaves, who sought shelter among the Indians in the coastal swamps and forests. So, if she has any descendants in the present day, they would most probably self-identify as black. So, why her name was appropriated by certain white supremacists for their website, I don't know. They probably didn't think it through that far. Seems like a cosmic joke to me, though.

The Internet Hates Progressive Insurance.. But Should It?

Reblogged from The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog.  This guy sound knowledgeable, and so it might be worthwhile to read this and see if there's more to the story than has come out in the blogosphere so far:
The Internet Hates Progressive Insurance.. But Should It?

An email he received from Progressive is here.

Still no answer to why Progressive was litigating against their own customer, though.  Bad, bad, bad visuals, that. I've had to leg-wrestle with my own insurance companies several times, but it was usually due to simple muddle & not malice. Glad I've been spared this scenario...

Dishonorable Disclosures

Loose lips sinking our ships?

Swiss Member of Parliament Has Had Enough!

I'm actually proud that Bill Clinton saved those Yugoslav Muslims from extermination, but other than that this is spot on.

Random Rock Bloggage

I completely missed news of the passing of hard rock keyboardist Jon Lord, a couple of weeks ago.  RIP to him, and thanks to his shade for all the great thrills!  Here's a quote, from guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, about the Deep Purple song "Highway Star":

"Jon Lord worked his part out to mine. Initially, I was going to play my solo over the chords he had planned out.  But I couldn't get off on them, so I made up my own chords and we left the spot for him to write a melody.  The keyboard solo is quite a bit more difficult than mine because of all those 16th notes. Over the years, I've always played that solo note for note--again, one of the few where I've done that--but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whiskey.  Jon would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster and he would get very annoyed about it."
        -- Ritchie Blackmore

Jesse Jackson at Wisconsin Sikh temple?

I was watching CNN this morning, and they were interviewing members of the Sikh temple which was attacked by a white supremacist. In a few shots I saw Jesse Jackson in a black do-rag. Why in the world is the old camera whore crashing in on the Sikh's grief? Other than that he's an old camera whore, I know that much, having observed him photo-bombing various events since the 80s.

Related story here. Still wonder who invited him.

Here are some photos I took of Jackson when he came to town in 1995, to protest Republican electoral victories in Congress.

Viking Pundit: Non-Cherokee Elizabeth Warren lies about policies ...

Eric the Viking Pundit pens one of his rare long-form expositions, and it's an opposite field, upper deck home run:

Viking Pundit: Non-Cherokee Elizabeth Warren lies about policies ...: Non-Cherokee Elizabeth Warren lies about policies too Living in Massachusetts, I'm not accustomed to the barrage of political ads that mus...

The poor Sikhs...

Brutalized by a racist skinhead--his military service is beside the point.

I remember in the weeks after 9/11, bumping into some Sikhs. One was an elderly shopkeeper, who had a big patriotic sign about Sikh-Americans behind his counter. Another was working the deli counter at a boutique grocery. He had an American flag sticker on his food service cap. Just tonight I transacted some business with a Sikh woman--so I surmised from her surname. I should have said something....

Wisconsin Sikh Temple Gunman Was Not A “Crazy Vet”

Wisconsin Gunman Was Not A “Crazy Vet”

Over at ROK Drop, GI Korea fillets the emerging news media narrative.  It's still early, with many details yet to emerge.  But, just as with the Tea Party smear in the Aurora theater shooting, it's vital to keep the journalists honest, no matter how hard certain memes fit their presuppositions.

Random Rock Bloggage

Actual justice needn't wait on cosmic justice

Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard | Jim Newell | The Baffler

In brief, someone profited by committing fraud against Harvard University, and this publication objects to Harvard seeking restitution and punishment.  The author presents what he imagines are hypocrisy-illustrating examples of larger crimes going unpunished.  To which I say, "Everybody does it" is an adolescent's argument.

Olympic Silence

Olympic Silence

"This is a crucial moment where the Olympic committee needs to stand up and prevent its descent into folly. This is not an internal Israeli matter, nor about political posturing or revenge. It is about doing justice to the memory of 11 men who came in peace and went home in coffins. The victims were killed not on the streets of Tel Aviv, nor accidental tourists at Munich. Rather they were members of the Olympic family, murdered inside the Olympic village as participants in the Games. It was an onslaught against the entire Olympic ideal.

"I do not cast the charge of "anti-Semitism" lightly. If the slain athletes had been American, British, or Palestinian for that matter, does anyone doubt that the Olympic Committee would hold a fitting memorial tribute? Why did the opening ceremonies include mentions of the Bosnian War in 1996, and the 2002 Games opened with a minute of silence for victims of 9/11?  Why, when it comes to Israel, does all the talk about "brotherhood" and "unity" seem to fall by the wayside?"

Vouchers for creationism in Louisiana? | NCSE

Vouchers for creationism in Louisiana? | NCSE

Not only this, but Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is cutting state funds for library technology in rural parishes.  Somebody is stuck on stupid in that state!  If he is Romney's veep pick, that will give me serious, serious pause about voting the GOP ticket in November.

Everything I Own - Bread.wmv

A small tribute to the victims of the Aurora theater massacre.  Blinking back tears, just reposting this clip.

Aurora theater victims tribute Sunday morning on CNN

So sad watching the victims' stories on CNN. We are promised eternity, but we are not promised tomorrow...

Ennui

Rick Moran is unsatisfied with the variety and quality of commentary emerging in the aftermath of the Aurora Batman movie theatre shooting. The diagnosis is simple: He's become jaded and desensitized. Our poor powers of expression are overtaxed by events like this. Mute shock dampens the wit. People try to make sense of things, and they fly to what is familiar and what seems true, rather than devising rhetorical novelties. Doesn't make for bracing reading, but maybe punditry isn't the first thing one should look for in times like this, in the first place.

It is not our friends' help that helps us, so much as the confident knowledge that they will help.
-- Epicurus

Aurora Colorado Shooting

Can't really say anything other than how horrible it is. I've been abroad else-web today, sharing sympathy, and snapping back at proggs who tried to pin this on the Tea Party or the NRA. But my heart just goes out to the families who have suffered so much today, and will continue to do so.

You didn't build that!

A fun new Tumblr, thusly themed.

A blogroll at last!

I finally took the time and effort to figure out how to turn on Blogger's blogroll, and added the first couple of dozen blogs I could think of offhand. I'll be adding more later, as I'm sure I'm overlooking some favorites. Thanks to Eric at Viking Pundit for the pointers.

Erasure

Some old offerings of mine elseweb seem to have undergone obliteration by the website proprietor. Well, sic transit gloria mundi... I spent many enjoyable hours there over the course of the Aughties, but I was becoming a bad fit by the time I stopped participating. Just wasn't as P.O.ed as much as many of the others, I guess. Plus I had recently been banned at Little Green Footballs, and didn't feel like sticking around for that scenario to unfold again. Never did make any comment about it, prior to this, just faded away. I'm still pecking away at this blog, but I've been putting my heart into commenting here and there around the web, here and here and here for example. I find that I prefer being the fellow who's too conservative, rather than the one who's not conservative enough, and so I gravitate towards online communities where discussion and disagreement over a broad spectrum of opinion are tolerated. I not infrequently get censored at the proggish sites, but hey! Only n00bs whine about the moderators. And I'm not about to start now.

Creationism amok

Creationism is starting to break out.
Creationists to open free school school in Britain.

British National Trust includes creationist content in welcome center at Giants Causeway.

Erskine College has to defy Presbyterian convention, exclude creationism from curriculum.

Several state Republican platforms endorse creationism.

South Korean creationists force removal of evolution from curriculum.

I haven't seen anything lately, but creationism is rampant in the Islamic world too, especially in Turkey.

What's going on in California?

Never thought I’d see this day: Reflecting on queen’s historic meeting with ex-IRA commander

Never thought I’d see this day: Reflecting on queen’s historic meeting with ex-IRA commander

I very much hope that this is the seal upon which a lasting peace will be made.  Exhaustion, not victory, has been the outcome in Northern Ireland, and it's time to draw a line under The Troubles and move on.

Tuesday ADHD linklets

So Orbitz is steering Mac users to pricier hotel rooms? Or something like that? Maybe I can revive my old Micron PC, when next I go shopping for lodging.

June was the bloodiest month so far, in Boko Haram's jihadist attacks on Nigeria's northern Christians. Damn the evil Saudi wahabbists, who exported this murderous militantism to Islamic communities around the world.

Climate scientists are receiving some ugly harassment these days. Via The Week, who provide a pithy synopsis. You don't have to be a civilization-hating greenie to deplore things like this. I myself accept the prevailing scientific consensus, that global warming is real, artificial, growing, and a menace. I tend to trust the power of aggregate knowledge. When researchers in widely separate fields find evidence pointing to the same phenomenon, that's not to be cried down as a conspiracy, human nature doesn't work that way. The much ballyhooed corrections to this or that observation, which are seized upon as evidence of AGW's falsity? They all come from climate scientists, engaging in normal scientific self-scrutiny--not from deniers. I do mistrust leftists, hoping to gain control of the means of economic production via science, which they couldn't via democracy or revolution. But I'll trust the scientists much more than I will them, or the deniers.

Guadalcanal veteran has lost dog tags returned to him by Aussie soldier. What a nice surprise for an old hero.

Loch Ness Monster used by fundamentalist schools as evidence of creationism. Dear God, please make the shtoopid go away. Person for person, fundies are among the most honest, upright, trustworthy, and patriotic people in the country. If only they could be made to understand that the Bible is not God!.

Activists Take Out Frustration on ... Ronald Reagan

Classless...just like the adolescents in Clinton's White House who vandalized the place in advance of handing off to Bush.
Activists Take Out Frustration on ... Ronald Reagan

Gay marriage

There's an air of inevitability about it now, even though it's being imposed by judicial fiat & not by democracy. We're in uncharted waters. What will the future look like, with the former building block of society and transmitter of civilization being joined by multiple forms of unions, whose primary purpose is to gratify the partners' appetites? It's not such a tremendous leap from where we are now, of course, not in these days where a "family" is simply any group of people who share sweet feelings and a refrigerator. Still, this is going to be very new and different.

Creationism in South Korea

Once again, they copy some of our worst attributes...

"South Korea surrenders to creationist demands: Publishers set to remove examples of evolution from high-school textbooks."

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. [...] Even the nation’s leading science institute — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — has a creation science display on campus. “The exhibition was set up by scientists who believed in creation science back in 1993,” says Gab-duk Jang, a pastor of the campus church. The institute also has a thriving Research Association for Creation Science, run by professors and students, he adds.

Proof that having a thoroughly educated, thoroughly modern, thoroughly First World society is no shield against scientific folly.

China stock market news blocked by Chinese internet censors

Why? Because the results, -64.89, match a search block on Tiananmen Square massacre search terms. 6-4-89...June 4th, 1989. Get it?

Commie tyrants...

Theodore Roosevelt on the incompatibility of Islam and Western values

It is utterly impossible to appreciate social values at all or to discriminate between what is socially good and socially bad unless we appreciate the utterly different social values of different wars. The Greeks who triumphed at Marathon and Salamis did a work without which the world would have been deprived of the social value of Plato and Aristotle, of Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization, because of victories stretching through the centuries from the days of Miltiades and Themistocles to those of Charles Martel in the eighth century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any " social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence and the decaying native Christian churches are concerned. There are such "social values" today in Europe, America, and Australia only because during those thousand years the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do, that is, to beat back the Moslem invader. It is of course worth while for sociologists to discuss the effect of this European militarism on "social values," but only if they first clearly realize and formulate the fact that if the European militarism had not been able to defend itself against and to overcome the militarism of Asia and Africa, there would have been no "social values" of any kind in our world today, and no sociologists to discuss them.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, "Social Values and National Existence", Papers and Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, vols 9-10, 1916

Credit-for-creationism scheme dies in Alabama | NCSE

Credit-for-creationism scheme dies in Alabama | NCSE

The stoopid, it burnnssss....

"If I wanted America to fail"

Life of Julia ad campaign

It's so insipid that The New Yorker likens it to paper dolls, Chutes and Ladders, and gasp inspired by the aesthetics of USA Today. The New Yorker is by no stretch conservative, but they've always had a superior sense of style, and Life Of Julia's style rubs them the wrong way.

Friday ADHD links

Introducing a feature carried over from my Protein Wisdom guest-blogging days, hope you like some of these...

Further disproof of the notion that education deters terrorism: A Maryland honor student pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring to help a Pennsylvania woman known as "Jihad Jane" plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had offended some Muslims.

Black hole observed eating sun-sized star in real-time. Took the astronomers a year to figure out what they were looking at, though. Amazing that we have the capability AND the interest to discover these things.

Zombie communism. The perfect is still the enemy of the good. It's appalling to think that there are still thinkers out there for whom a 100 million body count is not an automatic anathema for a political idea. It's like Richard John Neuhaus of First Things, now edited by J. Bottum, once said, "Socialism is the religion people get when the lose their religion."

Euthanasia without express consent was reported to be on the rise in Belgium last autumn. I just discovered this blog, of the director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

Middle East feminist Mona Eltahawy gives it to female hating Muslims hot and strong here. One of the debate squashers at LoonWatch weighs in with her cloud of squid ink response here.

buurrrpp!!!

African Men. Hollywood Stereotypes. [mamahope.org]

Egyptian Actor Convicted of Slandering Islam

Color me unflabbergasted. This is what that country is made of, away from the relatively westernized Cairo.

Anniversary of death of Richard Nixon, April 22nd 1994

I remember in the early 90s, when Nixon went to Moscow. He met with the Yeltsin government, and then with some former officials he knew from the Soviet era. He was criticized in the Moscow newspapers for doing the latter, and I marveled: Richard Nixon was lambasted in Pravda for hanging around with communists. I could hear the very wheel of history creak.

"Why Marxism?" | An Interview with C. Bradley Thompson

Random Rock Bloggage

RIP Levon Helm, gone to join Rick Danko and Richard Manuel at the Great Gig In The Sky. Farewell to one of the original Roots Rockers. In an era when hippy-dippy freaky-deaky flower-power was ascendant, The Band made some of the most timeless music in rock, by staying down-to-earth and reconnecting with America's rich musical soil. Plenty of rockers played drums; Levon was one of those who played music. He will be missed, and his work will not fade away.

Katie Roiphe in Newsweek on women's sexual fantasies

Is this a trend? Well, a long time ago, I read an interview with the late rocker Gerry Rafferty, in which he used the word "factoid". Nowadays, factoid just means a bit of trivia, but he tried to deploy it with the following meaning: Factoid: n, An event, trend, or set of circumstances which does not exist, except in newsprint. I thought that was a very clever and useful mot, and I'm sorry it never caught on. I suspect it applies in this case, too. But there's no doubt the practices Ms. Roiphe ticks off are real, of course. I don't envy their practitioners. Being a happily and securely married head of a nuclear family, I don't think I'm missing a thing. There's one thing that sexual liberationists don't have that most other people do: A private life. Technical note: I don't know why I can't insert line breaks recently, my apologies for the jammed-up layout.

Israel and the United Nations

Religion in the Modern World

The South

Here's a piece on the Master's newest champion, Gerald Lester Watson Jr., known as Bubba, on (Atlanta-based) CNN. It contains a good-natured trip through common stereotypes of the American South. Usually these things, especially in the NYT, come off like a National Geographic piece, our brave reporter venturing into the terra incognito west of Fort Lee, NJ, east of Anaheim, CA, and south of Washington, DC. But there's nothing like that in this one, so enjoy. Look at popular TV comedies over the past 20 years, and you see one distinguishing mark of Southerners. They are the only group anymore that can both laugh at themselves, and are comfortable with other people doing so as well. But sometimes I wonder: Is there any other place in the country where people move in, start new lives, enjoy the surroundings, and yet feel perfectly free to sneer at the natives?

Diversicrats censor family mural

A 17-year-old paints a mural of a boy growing up into a family man. This is deemed offensive by the school & painted over. Idiots... Via David Thompson

Why Megan McArdle can't get a taxi in DC

Not a problem for me in my suburban commuter-ville, but an interesting analysis nonetheless. We talk of participants in the free market creating prosperous communities by pursuing their own interests, a la Adam Smith. But government also pursues its own self interest, which is to entrench and extend itself, in this case by punishing and deterring private entry into its "turf".

Laws are for everyone

A platitude? Maybe. But something a friend else-web said some time back put it into fresh perspective for me. He knew of someone who took his dog for a walk in the woods, now that hunting was out of season & it was safe to do so. But he decided to let the dog run loose, because leash laws are "stupid". Well, what if there was a hunter in the woods, who thought hunting seasons were stupid, too?

Random Rock Bloggage: BB King, "Better Not Look Down"

"Better not look down, if you want to keep on flying Put the hammer down, keep it full speed ahead Better not look back, or you might just wind up crying You can keep it moving, if you don't look down"

RIP Hilton Kramer, 1928-2012

The art critic, high culture observer, and founder of The New Criterion passed away today. Here's a brief appreciation from The Weekly Standard, from his colleague Roger Kimball. I read and enjoyed his book Twilight of the Intellectuals, years ago. Here's my review of it on my Amazon page:

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An aerial view of the culture war, July 3, 2001 By The Sanity Inspector

In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.

_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.

But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.

His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.

His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.

A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.

Black Motheritis, Black Fatheritis, and the Trayvon Martin shooting case

One narrative emerging out of this terrible event is that black parents have to coach their teens to avoid giving the impression to white people that they are up to no good. This is of course humiliating to have to do, and enraging if it is in fact necessary. Black Motheritis and Black Fatheritis are now abroad as memes, as parents tell of their fears for their children, and of their resentment of having to take such extra precautions that racial majority parents don't.

It is an infuriating condition, this blackmotheritis. There are times when you want to defy it. Go ahead, child; scratch that itch; zip your coat; put your hands wherever you want. To hell with answering someone's prejudicial paranoia. You're free. Be it. But before you say that, you envision a finger pointed at your boy. There's a scream, perhaps. Then the clopping of heavy shoes, as the cops rush in, their nightsticks drawn and perhaps their guns, and flashlights blinding your boy's sweet, brown eyes and suddenly, there's the hard, cold floor in his face and his arms wrenched behind his back and shackled. And all you can think about is how they had better have plenty of room in the jail that day because you, civilized woman, are going to act such a damn fool if they ever do that to your boy.

***********

As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them “suspicious.” That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.

Come to think of it, I may have encountered some black kids who have been coached in this way by their parents. I sometimes have occasion to tell black teens to quit making nuisances of themselves. Some of them come back with what sounds like a very well rehearsed "Yes, sir!" & pipe down. Other times I'll pass kids whom I don't know on the sidewalk and they'll give me an extra cheery "Hello, sir!". I always thought in those instances that they were very well behaved--which I suppose they are--but maybe it was also survival skills taught to them. A shame that it's necessary, if that's what it is. Also: Author of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law says Zimmerman should probably be arrested.

Jewish school killer is holed up in French house, is likely al-Qaeda

Bastard. Hope they bag him soon, if they haven't already. And I hope he gets put on trial and has ample airtime to espouse his foul beliefs, so people can once again see where those beliefs lead the unstable. "How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it." -- R. A. Lafferty The tree is known by its fruit. Also: dueling headlines, plucked from Google News:

French police in standoff with possibly Al Qaeda-linked suspect in school ...Fox News French hunt school killer, suspect neo-Nazi ties ...The Associated Press

Progressive howler of the week

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, in this interview for progressive 'zine In These Times, marvels at the Arab Spring, thus:

The Arab Spring is encouraging. I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime a genuine, old-fashioned revolution with people going on the streets and overthrowing regimes, something like the 1848 revolution, which is actually the origin of the name Arab Spring.

He's obviously developed a mental block about communism, and its victims whom he sided against during his long career. I'm sure he saw the anti-communist revolutions of 1989-91. But just as victims of emotional trauma sometimes lose their memory of disturbing events, so too has he seemed to have blotted out the end of the Cold War, when his side lost. You may recall that Hobsbawm was the one who famously admitted that all those millions of victims of communism would have been worth the sacrifice, if communism had in fact ever come about. Niall Ferguson had this to say about him, in an article in the Telegraph years ago:

"Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice", asks Hobsbawm, "or without those who devote their lives to them?" The tragedy of Communism - and it was a tragedy that cost the lives of tens of millions - was that a man of Eric Hobsbawm's intelligence could not see, and still cannot see, that Communism was the negation of both freedom and justice, for the sake of a spurious and ultimately bogus egalitarianism.

Thomas Sowell: James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)

I've been feeling the need to say some words of appreciation about James Q. Wilson, ever since I heard that he had passed away.  Fortunately for me--and you, dear reader--Thomas Sowell says it better than I could.  Click here:

Thomas Sowell: James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)

I was too young for the 60s, but old enough to grow up in the hangover decades, and old enough to run into plenty of leftover proggs who still felt that "the criminal is the real victim".  So it's great to have Wilson's beneficial and corrective influence widely acknowledged. Ask your favorite progg this, the next time he or she starts blithering about "root causes" of crime: Which causes are rooted in good vs. evil?

Remember Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami, Pt 3

I did find a lot of sensational cellphone video of the disaster itself, but I was equally drawn to the more human side. I sympathized with the Japanese people, and I admired their resilience. From shortly after the disaster: Tsunami survivors announce that they are safe, and ask for info on their families and friends: Exhausted doctor, the only one left, continues caring for survivors in Miyako City: Fiery debris floats down flooded streets, as Kesennuma City burns:

Remembering the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami, Pt 2

I'm reposting some videos from Japan that I found on YouTube and then posted on LiveLeak. I only regret that I didn't keep the original links, to give proper credit. Wires sway, canal sloshes, during earthquake: Doors bang, poles sway, girlfriend giggles, as cellphoner catches earthquake on camera... U.S. Navy choppers food aid in to shelter:

Remembering the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, pt 1

In the weeks immediately following this terrible disaster, I searched YouTube for Japanese citizen journalism videos of the events. As technologically advanced as Japan is, they weren't hard to find. With the aid of Google's translation service, I was able to figure out what was going on in most of the vids, and repost them to my LiveLeak account. Over the next few days, I'd like to share several of them with you. In case the embeds don't work, just double-click on them to go to LiveLeak and watch there. Salvaged photo albums: Tsunami hits Kesennuma Bay: Old Japanese hippie cheers up survivors at shelter:

Rush Limbaugh apologizes to Sandra Fluke, continues to lose advertisers

The market at work, apparently. Anyone who runs his mouth for a living is going to step in it from time to time, law of averages.

I don't go along with the personal slur he cast, of course. But the larger point is valid, at least to this extent: If you're old enough to be sexually active, and you're rich enough to be in graduate school, then you're old enough and rich enough to not have to hit me up for the costs of your contraception. If this notion seems insensitive to anyone, then my sympathies on having gone over so far to the entitlement mentality.

RIP Andrew Breitbart

A stunner, dead at 43. My sympathies to his family. A classy encomium from his former colleague Arianna Huffington is here. My reaction to his work? He was something of an anachronism. Fox News is more than 15 years old, and the internet's dextrosphere isn't much younger. The MSM are not gatekeepers anymore, because the walls are down. As Ken Layne said in the early days, "We can fact-check your ass." Banging on about liberal bias in the media--which of course exists--seemed slightly unnecessary to me, as alternatives are now readily available.

Plus, his penchant for cheap "gotcha" stunts led him to fall for juicy tidbits from the Too Good To Check File, sometimes. Did he ever apologize to Shirley Sherrod, for example, for unjustly ending her career?

But, the shock of having one so young and full of mission pass on is the takeaway here. RIP, and best to his family and friends.

UPDATE: But of course, I was probably too old for him to have the impact he undoubted had on younger conservatives. Here's an absolutely incandescent appreciation of him by a former showbiz type, via Instapundit.

Sharia law in Pennsylvania

Utterly chilling. This will give new life to the efforts to enact anti-sharia laws on the state level--and justly so, if this judge's actions have been reported correctly. The Constitution must trump Islamic law, if we are to have any sort of free future together with large Muslim populations in this country.

UPDATE: Further investigation at Reason magazine clarifies things. Judge is not a Muslim after all, and the purported smoking gun video was not so conclusive. He's still faulted for the sensitivity lecture he gave, though.

Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”

Via the Lonely Conservative comes this story about Nanny State overreach:
Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”
Are you qualified to pack your own child's own lunch? Think again, comrade...

Bombing Attacks - the Dry Bones Blog

Naive Newsman is finally ready for prime time!

Bombing Attacks - the Dry Bones Blog

Black troops mutinied against white officers at Australian base in WWII

"An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942."

A sensational find, if it's true.

RIP Whitney Houston

No details yet, but it looks like her self-destructive ways finally caught up with her. So sad, my sympathies to her family & fans. There was no reason for her to be a modern Billie Holliday, no reason for her to be so self-destructive, no reason to respond to the Blacker Than Thou types with anything other than a flipped bird. It was her life, her career, and no one had a right to push her into a template of what they thought a black entertainer ought to be.

Just sad...

The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows

The self-correcting nature of science at work. From The Guardian:

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall. [...]

The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.

In brief, they had at first been basing calculations on glaciated regions that were easiest to reach, on the lower slopes. Now with this more sophisticated equipment, they can measure the ice fields further up, and factor them in. The scientists hasten to insist that global warming is still happening, and that this new finding is a refinement, not a refutation, of that fact. But don't expect to hear too much of that from blogs which will misrepresent this news.

I just wish I understood the science better, so I could follow along more intelligently.

China, Russia veto Security Council resolution on Syria violence

Makes sense. Neither of the big powers approve of the Arab Spring, with its dangerous example of dictators coming to bad ends. Plus, Russia wants to save a customer for its military hardware. And it is surely the horselaugh of the week, to hear the Russian foreign ministry make noises about using its influence to liberalize the Asad regime. Very cynical

But China's opposition is more troublesome. The present state of things in China may well be the shape of things to come in a post-democratic world order. It gives hope to dictators, to think that they can have totalitarian control over a country that is nevertheless stable and prosperous, as China's communist party does. Doesn't bode well for the future of freedom, for that reason as well as for the failure of democratization in Egypt, so far.

Newt Gingrich and a lunar base? No to both

I'd much rather ditch the manned space program and invest the money and talent in unmanned space exploration instead. Fill the solar system with probes, orbiters, landers, detectors, and peer far back into the universe on every band of the spectrum. Sadly, the public probably wouldn't support NASA if they didn't have live astronauts to cheer for, though. But we may be the last civilization that is rich enough and capable enough and interested enough to solve the secret of the cosmos, so I hope we press on.

As for the Speaker, he's been too resoundingly false in his personal life to earn my public trust. He's obviously the most influential Republican of the past 20 years, brimming with ideas and snappy lines, but I just don't see leadership qualities in him.

Second Jihadi Convicted of Terror .... TODAY

Second Jihadi Convicted of Terror .... TODAY

These creeps are really crawling out of the woodwork these days. Yet proggs have built mental fences of denial in their minds, to preserve their multi-culti illusions.

Muslim Brotherhood wins Egyptian elections

It's a good thing that the multiculturalists have assured us that all people are the same except for holidays, headgear, and cuisine--else having this populous nation governed by the party that spawned the modern Jihad would be worrisome.

Unfair - the Dry Bones Blog

Ha!

Unfair - the Dry Bones Blog

Young boys increasingly being recruited as suicide bombers

Savages...

Young boys increasingly being recruited as suicide bombers

They're baa--aack...

Creationists draw a bead on another school system, this time in Missouri.

House Bill 1227, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 10, 2012, would, if enacted, require "the equal treatment of science instruction regarding evolution and intelligent design," according to the legislature's summary of the bill. The equal treatment provision would apply to both public elementary and secondary schools and to "any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education" in Missouri.

Let's hope the Kitzmiller ruling is still potent enough to ward off this idiocy.

Hostess files for bankruptcy

Not very lamented, to judge from the comments on this NPR thread. Maybe Hostess could market its products to Green consumers, by making Twinkies bio-degradable.

The world needs more pilots, fewer psychiatrists

George Jonas, in The National Post:

What's wrong with this world? The answer I keep coming back to is that we let psychiatrists run it, not pilots.

Why is that a problem, if so? Well, psychiatrists believe that blaming yourself is sick; it's something to cure. Pilots believe blaming yourself before anyone else is healthy; it's something to encourage.

A psychiatrist tries to assure his patient that things aren't his fault; a pilot resists the temptation to exclude anything from being his fault, at least potentially. A shrink wants you to go easy on yourself, including your vices; a flight instructor urges you not to be complacent even about your virtues. [...]

The casual observer may see a psychotherapist and a flight instructor walk side by side, but they live on different planets. The first revolves around Feeling Good; the second, around Doing Well. [...]

A flight instructor doesn't worry about your self-esteem; he just wants you to land in one piece. If we're in a mess today it's because we've been listening too much to therapists and not enough to pilots. Now, with our self-esteem intact, we're falling out of the sky.

First sentence of first post of each month of 2011

A blog meme from leeann, via Joan of Argghh!

January: Farewell to Denis Dutton, the late proprietor of Arts and Letters Daily, one of the pioneering opinion journal portals on the web.

February: Whatever. At this late date, I'm surprised anyone expects a show of patriotism out of San Franciscans anymore anyway. (Cheated to show some context.)

March: 48 hour rule. But if, as rumor has it, this is Isolated Incident Perpetrated By Lone Whacko That Has Nothing To Do With Islam #16,279, then it goes to show (once again) that the front line in this war is everywhere. (See above)

April: The sweetest thing I've seen today is...this video of a Japanese 12 year old & 7 year old playing "All Of Me" at a disaster fundraiser.

May: Very fitting, that the last people he ever saw were SEALs and spooks, come to put a bullet in his eye.

June: Repressing a church is something any old dictatorship can do, the church being a rival center of authority and all.

July: San Francisco becoming a child free zone? So says this NPR segment.

August: The Debt Ceiling Deal Haven't had a chance--and probably won't--to read through it.

September: CDC: Half of Americans will suffer from mental health woes. Wow. Half.

October: Via The Jawa Report: Occupy Wall Street protesters attack police, as seen in the video below.

November: Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.

December: You may recall that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned McDonalds from giving away toys with their Happy Meals.

24 Types of Statist

From Laughing At Politics via Quick Take blog:

Random Rock Bloggage

I think I've just had a stroke of insight. The Paul McCartney and Wings song "Junior's Farm", includes a line:

Olly Hardy should have had more sense
He pulled a chee-chee and he jumped the fence,
All for the sake of a couple of pence.

I'll bet I know what "chee-chee" means. The song was written in 1974, the same year as the movie Godfather II came out. In the film, a hired killer named Willie Cicci turned state's evidence, testifying against Michael Corleone. I'll bet this is what Macca meant in this line of those free-assocative lyrics. I have never seen this hypothesis in any of the music forums, and it is more plausible than the ones I have seen. Any passing Beatles fans, tell me what you think!