Blog — September, 2008

From Economist Predicts Worst is Just Ahead (via):

This is not just a subprime mortgage crisis; this is the crisis of an entire subprime financial system: losses are spreading from subprime to near prime and prime mortgages; to commercial real estate; to unsecured consumer credit (credit cards, student loans, auto loans); to leveraged loans that financed reckless debt-laden LBOs; to muni bonds that will go bust as hundred of municipalities will go bust; to industrial and commercial loans; to corporate bonds whose default rate will jump from close to 0% to over 10%; to CDSs where $62 trillion of nominal protection sits on top an outstanding stock of only $6 trillion of bonds and where counterparty risk—and the collapse of many counterparties—will lead to a systemic collapse of this market.

This will be the most severe U.S. recession in decades with the U.S. consumer being on the ropes and faltering big time as soon as the temporary effect of the tax rebates will fade out by mid-summer (July). This U.S. consumer is shopped out, saving less, debt burdened and being hammered by falling home prices, falling equity prices, falling jobs and incomes, rising inflation and rising oil and energy prices. This will be a long, ugly and nasty U-shaped recession lasting 12 to 18 months, not the mild 6 month V-shaped recession that the delusional consensus expects....

The rest of the world will not decouple from the US recession and from the US financial meltdown; it will re-couple big time. Already 12 major economies are on the way to a recessionary hard landing; while the rest of the world will experience a severe growth slowdown only one step removed from a global recession.

Also: Gloom, Boom, and Doom. And Ron Paul's The Crisis is Upon Us. And Karl Rove—Architect Of The Minority Mortgage Meltdown. And, Confronting a Mendacious Bully.

Oh, and Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. And Bill Clinton Blames Dems for Financial Collapse. And Family Told Obama NOT To Wear Soldier Son's Bracelet... Where is Media? And Obama Is Stoking Racial Antagonism.

Who'd have ever thought I'd end up agreeing with Rush Limbaugh? Or siding with the conservatives in their accusations of a (blatant) liberal bias in the American media, which has treated Sarah Palin with such contempt, condescension and misogyny, well out of proportion to her inexperience and merely average intelligence, while so obviously giving Obama and his plagiarist-in-chief a free ride. The times, they are a-changin'....

Of course, Palin accepted gifts of flowers and salmon from her constituents ... which is just about as bad as Obama's Chicago-terrorist connections, and his slimy, truly un-American attempts at suppressing the negative ads against him, isn't it?

Imagine four long years of that—of "Chicago politics" and BHO playing the race card every time he doesn't get his way, like a spoiled little child, but with an entire country having to kow-tow to it if they want to keep the peace. And when he actually has to deal with terrorist activities both beyond and within America's borders, what do you think his limp-wristed, metrosexual response is going to be? Maybe invite them over for a chat over tea and scones ... I mean, fried chicken and watermelon?

Yet, if you don't vote for Obama ... the racists will have won, won't they? Plus, if he loses in November ... well, let's just say that I'm partway through a book on the political culture of Washington, DC, under the utterly corrupt mayor Marion Barry. It basically boiled down to a system of extortion, where the blacks in the city were getting paid not to riot.

From Phyllis Chesler's How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam:

[T]he Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonized. My relatives said: "Not even the British could occupy us." Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes—and that such "colourful tribal customs" are absolutely, not relatively, evil....

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonized me as a reactionary and racist "Islamophobe" for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West.

You know where else was never colonized, but they're still in shit up to their eyeballs? Ethiopia. Go figure, huh?

P.S. More Obama gangland tactics: Signs banned at Virginia rally today. And, Kissinger repudiates Obama.

The Ant and The Grasshopper, 2008 Edition.

In less happy news:

Three men have been arrested in north London on suspicion of terrorism....

It is thought that the men were suspected of attempting to set fire to a publishers in Islington, north London, the BBC understands.

The publisher who took on The Jewel of Medina when Random House dropped it, that is.

And, Seven in ten marriages 'forced':

More than seven in ten [Muslim] marriages involving an English citizen and a spouse born in Asia could have an element of "force or coercion" about them....

P.S. Don't even think of laughing in Canada. Das ist verboten! And, How dangerous is Obama? And, Say You Have Two Cows.......... And, on the Canadian election: Lights, Camera, Action!

Could well be true (even with the demographic differences between Canada and the U.S.), though it's more complex than Richardson indicates.

Richardson later said he regretted his remarks. (link)

Well, yes. And there's good reason for him to feel sincere regret: He's just thrown his political career away.

In other news, 53% of the adults in Los Angeles (including 84% in heavily Hispanic south L.A.) are functionally illiterate.

Not that that's gonna correlate with them committing violent crimes, or nothin'....

From Founding Brothers:

New evidence strongly suggests that Barack Obama has been less than forthcoming about the role that unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers may have played in choosing him to lead the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)....

In particular, the Obama campaign's claim that Deborah Leff and Patricia Graham may have put forward Obama's nomination can no longer be taken as the last word on the subject. The Rolling letter strongly suggests that Obama and his allies are not being fully forthcoming on this issue, quite possibly in an attempt to disguise the fact the Bill Ayers had a substantial role in elevating Barack Obama to the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. More generally, in the immediate wake of my attempt to gain access to the CAC records, Rolling appears to have been maneuvering, both to block my access, and to make sure that the full story of who chose Obama as CAC head would not come out.

P.S. The Post-Autistic Economics Movement. And a fascinating exposition of the Japanese economy: Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism.

...or maybe I'll just stay home on election night and read instead, since there's no tolerance in Canada for thinking politicians.

Anyway, Robert Spencer, on the recent "anti-fascist" vs. anti-Islamism conflict in Germany ... which, for some reason, never even got mentioned on LGF:

If any of the anti-Islamization protesters in Cologne really were neo-Nazis, and at this point I have no way of finding out for sure, that would be unfortunate, but it doesn't make the problem of Islamization go away. In a sane and healthy Europe interested in protecting and preserving European civilization, the huge numbers of counter-protesters would actually have been protesting against Islamization, and the mainstream parties of Europe would have been represented at the rally. Anti-jihadists in Europe should work to avoid all taint of neofascism and race supremacism—and this is particularly in Europe, where fascism and race supremacism led to the mass murder of millions within recent memory. But to label all and any opposition to Islamization as "Nazism" and "racism," as the Cologne authorities and counter-protesters seem to be doing, is simply a ticket to national and civilizational suicide. If anyone here is behaving like a fascist, it is not the anti-Islamization demonstrators, but the city authorities who are violently clamping down on debate and dissent....

La Yijad en Eurabia ... has an illuminating set of pictures establishing the strong pro-jihad, anti-Israel, hard-Left (hammer-and-sickle, Che Guevara, etc.) character of the groups protesting against the anti-Islamization group.

The thing is, contra LGF's position, if/when it comes to the point that we're holding Freedom of Speech rallies in Canada, I'll end up marching there shoulder-to-shoulder with gay-hating Christians, global-warming skeptics, Life-of-Brian-banning Catholics, and Jew-hating Holocaust-deniers who would silence their enemies (including me) in a moment if they only had the power to get away with it. Likewise, if you favor strong restrictions on immigration to North America, you'll find, to your horror, that you've got Pat Buchanan on your side. Oh, and the white-racist group Stormfront.org donated to Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign.

Trying to remain "ideologically pure" in anything political just isn't possible, regardless of whether you're on the right or the left. D'uh.

Separately, from Obama, Hillary and Palin's Disinvite:

Hillary's pull out had nothing to do with Palin. It was an implicit hit at Obama. Hillary did not want to be the one to represent Obama. Obama's position on Iran is sophomoric, idiotic and dangerous. Hillary has been more responsible and she was not going to clean up his mess.

And from Obama's Foreign Donors: The media averts its eyes:

I have been researching, documenting and studying thousands upon thousands of Obama's campaign donations for the past month. Egregious abuse was immediately evident and I published the results of my ongoing investigation. Each subsequent post built a more damning case against Obama's illegal contribution activity....

If McCain had been involved with something so dark and nefarious, taking money from Islamic jihad, his candidacy would never withstand the media blowback.

But it was the son of hope, the agent of change, the one we have been waiting for, so the media yawned....

Half a million dollars had been donated from overseas by unidentified people "not employed."

Then, Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools:

Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC [Chicago Annenberg Challenge] archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....

The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

Ayers had quite the effect on the ladies, too.

And in case you missed Charles Krauthammer a while back, on Charlie Gibson's Gaffe:

[W]hen the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It's not. It's the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine....

It's lost on the semi-integral idiot Sam Harris, of course. Victor Davis Hanson comes at it from the opposite direction.

Christopher Hitchens has also written a relevant piece: Is Obama Another Dukakis? Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless? From which:

[W]hat I suspect in his case is that [Obama] had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Look at the record, and at Obama's replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I'll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton's economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?

Ah, but then there are Sarah Palin's witchcraft associations:

The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witch hunt against a Kenyan woman whom he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

Not that there wouldn't likely be a few witch-doctors buzzing in and around Obama's family tree, too. It's still all the rage in Darkest Africa, y'know....

Finally, from The double standards of American Jews:

[American Jews tend to think that] Christians only support Israel because they believe it will bring about the end of days and the return of Christ to earth, at which point the Jews will all convert to Christianity.

Okay, so at least I got that right, from the family gatherings. Don't ask me how the hell my old Mennonite buddies are anti-Israel then, though....

From A New State of Mind:

Evolution essentially bootstrapped our penchant for intellectual concepts to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites.... By representing everything in terms of neuron firing rates, the human brain is able to choose the abstract thought over the visceral reward, as long as the abstraction excites our cells more than apple juice [as a pleasurable reward]. That's what makes ideas so powerful: No matter how esoteric or ethereal they get, they are ultimately fed back into the same system that makes us want sex and sugar.

And from Beauty and the Brain:

In the 1920s neurologist Heinrich Klüver documented the hallucinations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline, using four categories: grids, zigzags, spirals, and curves. Noting their similarity to the hallucinations experienced in various conditions, such as migraine, sensory deprivation, and the hypnagogic state that occurs in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, he named them "form constants." These motifs do indeed seem to be constant—they recur throughout history and across cultures, and can be seen, for example, in prehistoric cave paintings, in the girih patterns of the tile mosaics decorating medieval mosques, and in the repeating tessellations of M.C. Escher's impossible figures or the rectangular forms of Mondrian's Compositions. Underlying those patterns, at least in part, are the intrinsic properties of the visual nervous system.

And from Prime Numbers Get Hitched:

[T]he important role played by the number 42 has recently persuaded even the deepest skeptics that the subatomic world might hold the key to one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics....

[In 1972, Freeman Dyson and number theorist Hugh Montgomery] discovered that if you compare a strip of zeros [i.e., prime numbers] from Riemann's critical line to the experimentally recorded energy levels in the nucleus of a large atom like erbium, the 68th atom in the periodic table of elements, the two are uncannily similar....

There is an important sequence of numbers called "the moments of the Riemann zeta function." Although we know abstractly how to define it, mathematicians have had great difficulty explicitly calculating the numbers in the sequence. We have known since the 1920s that the first two numbers are 1 and 2, but it wasn't until a few years ago that mathematicians conjectured that the third number in the sequence may be 42—a figure greatly significant to those well-versed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

And, Suspending Life. And, No Longer a Mind of Our Own. And Sue Blackmore vs. Peter Gabriel.

P.S. Sad days for Germany, too. All the more reason to like this plan.

Students in universities like Columbia, Duke, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Kansas, and the University of Buffalo can visit "stress-free zones" or attend "stress buster" workshops that include activities and palliatives once limited to young children or mental patients. Wisconsin offers anxious undergraduates a safe space during finals where they can partake in a "napping event," get a backrub, or draw pictures with a box of crayolas. (p. 18-9)

We didn't have crayons and nap-time where I went to university....

In 1995, when the Department of Education released the dismaying results of its National History Assessment, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine, spoke of the low scores as a "coroner's report." Students, he said, are in a "state of mortal danger." He noted, "More than 50 percent of all high school seniors were unaware of the Cold War. Nearly six in ten were bereft of even a primitive understanding of where America came from." (p. 40)

Well, they're still doing better than the Zimbabweans:

[Post-traumatic stress disorder or mixed anxiety or depression] were not the problems that the Zimbabweans claimed to have [as victims of a civil war]. Instead, they spoke of bad behavior in children, failure to marry, illness, floods, and crop failure—crises they attributed to the fact that their murdered ancestors had not received a proper burial. (p. 168)

Yep, for them primitive animists, it's always the spirits of the ancestors what's to blame. "Every day is Halloween."

P.S. TANCREDO REALLY GETS IT: Introduces anti-Sharia "Jihad Prevention Act". Bravo!!

From Political views "all in the mind":

[P]eople who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda.

Those who perceived less danger in a series of images and sounds were more inclined to support liberal policies....

[S]ubjects who were more easily startled tended to have political views that would be classified as more right wing, being more in favour of capital punishment and higher defence spending, but opposed to abortion rights.

The scientists explained that these political positions were protective of the volunteers' social groups.

"We focused primarily on things that we call 'protecting the social unit'," said John Hibbing from the University of Nebraska.

"So the idea is we have this unit—maybe it's the US—and we want to protect this from outsiders; so we might be opposed to immigration, we might advocate patriotism, and we like leaders who are strong and clear who are able to protect us from those outsiders.

"We might even be opposed to pornography or any kind of corrosive element that we see threatening the social unit.

"On the other hand, you have people who are more supportive of pacifism and who advocate gun control—and there are lots of areas where people who are less sensitive to threat would project those kinds of feelings into the political arena."

In the spiritual/religious arena, the logical extension of the "strong and clear leader" maps to an omnipotent God, while the Outsider we need to be protected from is Satan. Conversely, the ultimate extension of a universe in which there is nothing to be afraid of would be a Kosmos with no boundaries, in which All Is One. Hence, the predominance of Bible-thumping conservatives, and liberals who find a natural affinity with Eastern ideas of enlightenment and spiritual growth in the expansion of consciousness.

Seeing much danger in the world, and threat from others, would further lead one to be wary of the motives of other people, while seeing less of it makes it much easier to believe in the supposed inherent goodness of human nature.

Specifically, Christian theology, in the doctrine of the Fall of Man and our corresponding inherent sinfulness, actually gives its adherents a "leg up" on understanding and accepting the nasty and brutish, animal-derived nature of our species. For all of its biblical foolishness, the resulting worldview (in that one aspect, at least) is closer to reality—even if misattributing the problem to Satan rather than our animal past and present—than is the idea that we can "all get along" in a multicultural world, and value each other for our differences rather than feeling threatened by them.

The need for protection of the social (e.g., national) unit is also going to result in fairly well-defined criteria for membership in that in-group, and a keen sensitivity to deviation from that membership-in-good-standing. Hence, it will produce a greater degree of social conformity (and resistance to change) among the more-fearful conservatives, and a corresponding non-conformity on the easygoing liberal side.

Both of those positions can easily go too far, into conservative witch-hunts on the one side ... and into liberals being unable to recognize a threat-to-society (e.g., welfare abuse, or Islamic soft jihad) which actually exists, on the other.

And, when the (real or perceived) threat to the national unit goes up, the most sensitive-to-danger liberals will now see as much danger as the center-right conservatives were already seeing before, and thus fall into line with respect to patriotism and the need for protection, even to the point of voting conservative if the threat persists. ("Emile Durkheim famously noted that group cohesion tightens during times of communal threat"—Hoff Sommers and Satel, One Nation Under Therapy, p. 210.)

If the social unit is smaller, and the threat from outside that group is perceived to be high enough, even the most liberal of people can be driven to "conservative" behaviors—conformity, reliance on the Great Leader, blind support for the cause on which the unit was founded, hatred of anything that threatens the well-being of the unit (up to the point of shunning, excommunicating, or killing disloyal members), and an inability to leave the in-group to mix with the Evil Other, even if living on the inside is making you miserable.

It's called a cult. Or a "sanctuary."

In evolutionary terms, of course, it is well-known that it is better (from a survival perspective) to be hypersensitive to potential threats, than hyposensitive: If a rustling in a bush turns out to be a tiger, the paleolithic man or woman who reacted to the warning as signaling a potential predator was more likely to survive (and pass his/her genes on to offspring) than was the one who dismissed it as just a play of the wind.

Finally, from 2/3 to 3/4 of the population in both the U.S. and in Canada want stricter controls on immigration than we currently have, and there are very good economic reasons for desiring that. So, by itself, that's not a strongly partisan issue with a left/right split, even though it's probable that conservatives would have a stronger preference for immigration restrictions even in the absence of any economic considerations.

From the Mesopotamia West blog:

[A] democratic national government is crucial in channeling the expression of natural allegiances in reasonable directions. Without democratic government and constitutionally protected freedom, we devolve into gangs and cliques and tyrannize smaller and weaker groups.

Or to put that another way, multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster; it will create or promote tribes which will then begin (as in Lebanon or Bosnia) killing each other. So nationalism, in a democracy, is a good thing as it enforces a supra-tribal allegiance.

That's a big point in my almost-published next book, which meshes exactly with the dynamics in the classic Robbers Cave study.

P.S. Heere Bigynneth the Tale of the Asse-Hatte. And Clockwork O-Rage as Obama Urges Supporters to Stomp Home Message of Hope. And Ibn Warraq, Extraordinary Apostate:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

And Gates of Vienna. And with the latter, time for another aspirin....

From Gandhi's Love Letters to Hitler (via FFF):

The pacifist-Nazi axis dates to the 1930s. None other than the worldwide spokesman for non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, wrote letters to Adolph Hitler that were deferential in their tone and abhorrent in their implications. A 1939 letter was apologetically described by Gandhi as a "mere impertinence" and included the following signoff: "I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you. I remain, Your sincere friend, Sd. M. MK Gandhi."

In a letter dated December 24, 1940, Gandhi assured Hitler that he had no doubt of "your bravery or devotion to your fatherland." Zionist appeals for Gandhi to support a national home for the Jewish people, meanwhile, fell on deaf ears, as he insisted that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs." Not only did Gandhi reject the cause of a Jewish state but he effectively echoed Nazi propaganda, as with his warning that "this cry for the national home affords a colorable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews."

Even more supportive of Hitler were the Mennonites. In a letter dated September 10, 1933, the Conference of East and West Prussian Mennonites from the German city-state of Danzig wrote to the Fuhrer to express its "deep gratitude for the powerful revival that God has given our nation through your energy" and wished Hitler a "joyful cooperation in the up building of our Fatherland through the power of the Gospel." If its enthusiasm for hosting Ahmadinejad is any guide, the Mennonite Church has learned little from this dark chapter in its past. On the contrary, the church's alliance with the Iranian leader is an extension of its hard-line anti-Israel politics, which find expression in its funding of books advocating the so-called "right-of-return" for Palestinian Arabs—a policy that, if implemented, would mean the destruction of Israel.

Yikes. My own ethnic background is Mennonite. I've never identified with that group at all, being quite happily ignorant of the details of their world-view (which is why their anti-Israel slant had embarrassingly whooshed right past me); but yikes regardless. I vaguely recall the early (very conservative, fundamentalist) Mennonite support for Hitler coming up at family gatherings, but as the 1933 date above indicates, that must have been given well before the full extent of his plans became known.

Politics gives me a stomach ache, it really does.

[W]hen Gandhi's wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy....)

Despising consistency and never checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence for twenty-five years.

Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater confidence in his abilities as a "nature doctor," prescribing obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really loved he gave enemas....

Gandhi (Sergeant Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria's coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling's Gunga Din, wanted nothing much as to be a Soldier of the Queen....

The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent....

The film leads the audience to believe that Gandhi's first "fast unto death," for example, was in protest against an act of barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this "ultimate weapon" of his to interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a "separate electorate" in the Indian national legislature—in effect a kind of affirmative-action program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block affirmative action for Untouchables....

As soon as the oppressive British were gone ... the Indians—gentle, tolerant people that they are—gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting.... Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people.... Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians....

Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them. "Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds"....

Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. Until well into his fifties, however, he accepted the caste system in toto as the "natural order of society," promoting control and discipline and sanctioned by his religion. Later, in bursts of zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he stuck by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus the Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a man's position and occupation should be determined essentially by birth....

Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of the land....

I should not be surprised if Gandhi's greatest real humanitarian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables—an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind the British, who abolished suttee over ferocious Hindu opposition—in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, only "usual."

And that's the same "wise saint" who, when asked what he thought about Western civilization, responded that he thought it would be "a good idea"!

I need a drink ... and an aspirin.

P.S. If you hadn't heard about the effects of the "religion of peace" on Brussels and Sweden, the news is not good.

Oy vey:

We find yet another interesting diversity issue in the case of Toronto's now-defunct zero-tolerance policy on crimes in schools. Students were committing so much robbery, drug dealing, sexual assault, and weapons violations that in 2000 the province passed the Safe Schools Act, requiring that any student guilty of these offences be expelled or suspended. Just four years later the province had to drop the policy. Why? Non-whites were being expelled and suspended all out of proportion to their numbers. More than 1,000 children under the age of seven had been suspended—for things like robbery, weapons possession and drug dealing—and the majority were black. So Toronto had to junk the zero-tolerance policy.

This story illuminates two things: First, we learn that non-whites were the major source of the problem; you did not have a rash of crimes like this when the schools were overwhelmingly white. Second, a sensible, non-discriminatory solution had to be ditched because non-whites were getting more of their share of the punishment. Here, racial diversity both caused the problem and made it impossible to apply an obvious solution.

P.S. Non-specific immune response due to intentional attribution error. And UCLA Bureaucrats Subvert Anti-Quota Law. But Where Is GOP?.

I generally don't bother with voting, for a variety of reasons, which include the fact that both of our major parties are corrupt and incompetent, the "third wheel" (NDP) party is well-meaning but incompetent, Toronto is a Liberal stronghold anyway, etc. And, after this posting, I figured that position was as good as any other.

But then I saw this, on Kathy Shaidle's site. And it finally hit me that if our Liberals can't see that it's already the "persecuted minorities" (esp. Muslims) who are suppressing and oppressing the majority, they'll truly never figure it out until it's much too late.

So now I've gotta get well-and-good liquored up, hold my nose ... and vote for the "least-bad lizard(s)." You know, the ones that would love to take away all of our other (gay, women's, etc.) rights in favor of "family values," but who at least have some comprehension of the importance of free speech and meritocratic rewards.

P.S. This and this are the kind of things that scare me about Obama and Biden. And this is the kind of thing that scares me about Palin and, um, what's-his-name. And this sort of thing scares me about the mainstream media, and its biases. (Contra Wilber's hare-brained notions, though, those biases have nothing to do with the same MSM supposedly not being credulous enough about spiritual fairy tales.)

I'm so worried about what's happenin' today, in the Middle East, you know.
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.

—Monty Python, "I'm So Worried"

I'm also worried about Catholic death-threats against the Unbelievers.

• Britain's Sharia Courts

• The archbishop gets his wish

Depressing news, indeed.

Interesting comment on Steve Sailer's blog:

...stonewall the Dems on raising the minimum wage, bust unions, etc. The Mexicans will start going home.

You get it precisely backward. The way to reduce the need for illegal labor is to slow the growth in the need for unskilled labor—that means raising its price. Raising the minimum wage and increasing the number of unionized workers would do that, as would encouraging investment in capital equipment.

That's why we should actually want illegal workers to unionize. We should want them to be able to sue for unpaid overtime. We should want them to qualify for workmen's comp (though probably not unemployment). Anything making it more expensive to employ them reduces the advantage businesses gain by employing them.

Look at the current situation. CIS estimates that the illegal population has shrunk by over 1 million in the past year. While they maintain that increased enforcement is primarily responsible, the slowing economy has certainly helped.

If we lowered the minimum wage to a dollar an hour there'd be all sorts of jobs created that businesses would "need" to fill but that no Americans would even be available—let lone willing—to do.

While I've traditionally been a free market kind of guy, and still basically am, until the mass immigration problem is dealt with I have emphatically become pro-union and pro-minimum wage. If they had an initiative in my state raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour I'd vote for it, even though it wouldn't benefit me.

The biggest non-sequitur in the arguments of groups like he Chamber of Commerce is that on the one hand they argue that they need millions of immigrants because the rate of job growth is (was) so high that there aren't enough Americans to fill all the new jobs; on the other they argue that higher minimum wages will slow job growth. Well if job growth is already higher than it needs to be, then why would slower job growth be a worry?

Another non sequitur: on one hand they believe that when demand rises for products (for homes, gasoline, etc.) that prices should be allowed to rise. On the other, they think that the price for labor should never rise; that when it does they should be able to import foreign labor rather than pay better wages.

So how to reduce the presence of illegals and the demand for "guest" workers? 3 simple steps:

1) Raise the cost of labor, slowing job growth.
2) Raise the legal/financial risk to those who hire.
3) Eliminate all government-provided or -allowed benefits, like driver's licenses, public education, in-state tuition, vehicle registrations, bank accounts, etc.

Of course, if you're raising the cost of labor via unions and high minimum wages (step #1), then after you've pressured all the unskilled immigrants out of the USA and back to their original countries of citizenship, you'll then have to deal with a "land of the free" in which even the native dropouts are making $20+ per hour, with no corresponding increase in wages for skilled labor (but a big increase in the price of goods). So there's really not much incentive to get an education, or excel at anything: Unless you love doing intellectual work so much that you'd do it for free, why bust your ass in scientific research when you can score a unionized-vegetating job for more or less the same money? (I actually have [very smart] musician friends who work in the mailroom of a unionized "essential service," and make more per hour there than I did at my last full-time job as a programmer. Imagine that being widespread, and ask yourself which "profession" you'd go into, if all you wanted was a good-paying job.) So, say goodbye to a lot of technological progress—and with it, a lot of economic growth—etc.

Not so clear that that's really a better solution than simply building a wall at the border, and summarily deporting all the wetbacks (except those with Fourteenth Amendment "anchor babies," unfortunately), eh? Or do you really think it would be easy to dismantle the Unionized Paradise you've created to fix one problem, when it's inadvertently created possibly even a bigger one? Because, until you change the immigration laws, or at least start enforcing (step #2) the existing ones properly, if you ever try and remove the union/high-minimum-wage constraints which have driven the dumbfuck immigrants out, the illegals will flood right back in: nothing will have changed. So, you'll be stuck indefinitely with an economy in which even needed Ph.D.'s will be making only 2-3 times what entry-level high-school dropouts make.

Interesting fact: 99% of the adult males in Mexico are high-school dropouts. But still "macho," though, as befits their low-IQ, dumbfuck nature....

P.S. Creationism Gaining Strength in Britain. And immigration (H-1B) related videos from the Programmer's Guild.

I didn't even know we had a guild....

From The Trouble with Religious Hatred Laws (via FFF):

There is, in fact, little historical basis to the claim that the Weimar Republic was a bastion of free speech, tragically overwhelmed by unfettered Nazi agitation. Paragraph 166 of the Weimar Criminal Code stated "whoever publicly insults one of the Christian churches or another existing religious society with rights of corporation in the federal jurisdiction, its institutions, or customs … will be punished with a prison term of up to three years" (emphasis added). This included hate speech against Jews, and there were plenty of such convictions under Paragraph 166 and other provisions. For example, the oft-prosecuted Nazi publisher Julius Streicher (author of the anti-Semitic weekly newspaper Der Sturmer and a contemptible and marginal individual widely hated by his own party colleagues), was handed a two-month prison sentence in 1929 for "libelling the Jewish religion under Paragraph 166 of the Weimar Penal Code." As a result of the jail sentence, "Streicher's racial views received more publicity than if Der Sturmer had been allowed to publish unchallenged … within weeks of the verdict, the Nazi Party tripled its 1927 vote in the Thuringian Landtag elections"—an outcome that should give pause to any aspiring censors....

Accepting the logical template of those who advocate prohibitions on "hate speech," and given the abominable record of the Khmer Rouge and countless other movements and regimes of a similar ideological hue, including some within the West itself, one could equally make a case for banning all statements that are likely to incite hatred or envy on the basis of class or ownership of private property. To do otherwise is to effectively tolerate violence against a section of society. Indeed, just as the Belgian Supreme Court banned the popular Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Blok, in 2004, we could go further by declaring all radical egalitarian movements to be outside the range of legally permissible political positions. Or do anti-discrimination activists consider the incitement of hatred as defensible and even laudable so long as the intended victims are bourgeois?....

Few anti-hate-speech activists have drawn the lesson here that political vilification has been an equally prevalent "cause" of violence—the French Revolution and contemporary Zimbabwe being particularly brutal examples—and should logically warrant the same legal penalties as any other form of vilification. The other lesson is that of the countless societies that have been rent by different kinds of hatred over the years, only those that have allowed the government to assume unlimited or unaccountable powers, or that have downgraded or failed to protect individual rights (such as free speech, the right to property, and the right to self-defense) at the whim of the mob have gone on to produce the systematic collectivist violence that can lead to mass murder....

Based on the very arguments of those who support anti-hate laws, there are, in fact, no logical or moral grounds not to abolish all the special "racial" and "religious" provisions of these laws, leaving only a universal anti-hate law that prohibits all state­­ments that are deemed to incite "hatred," "contempt," or "ridicule" against anyone , for any reason, with no unprincipled exemptions whatsoever....

[I]f we truly wish to ban religious hatred, we will have to ban religion itself. To do otherwise creates two classes of people: members of one may incite hatred and even violence against anyone they wish with legal impunity; members of the other must grit their teeth and say nothing in return for fear of being arrested by the hate-speech police. Ideally, of course, we should ban neither class from speaking their mind. People should exercise personal responsibility and restraint in a world where others do not necessarily care for or "respect" their personal beliefs, especially ones that have no empirical basis. Yet we are reaching a point where not only are certain groups demand­ing and receiving the special right not to be "insulted" by others, but also that belief systems themselves are now reaching for this very right on the pretext that to insult ideas is to insult those that hold them. Thus ideas (including defamatory and dehumanizing notions) may now be granted rights that are simultaneously denied to whole classes of human beings.

And from the same author, On the Right to Give Offence:

Referring directly to any possibility that the offending [Danish] cartoons could be published in Australia, [the President of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, Dr Ameer] Ali called on "Governments [to] enact legislation to stop this kind of irresponsible and outrageous behaviour in our society." In addition, Ali flatly asserted that "no one [has] the right to offend anyone in the media," an astonishing statement that could easily lend support to the prohibition of practically anything, so long as somebody, somewhere, claims to be "offended."

From the Sex in Christ site:

There has been an ongoing debate in the Christian community about whether or not Christians can engage in BDSM (Bondage & Discipline/Dominant – submissive/Sadomasochism) practices without sinning. Although BDSM can involve literal bondage (being hand-cuffed, tied up, etc.) and discipline (such as verbal chastisement or corporal punishment), it is best understood as a metaphorical relationship between husband and wife and in terms of spiritual submission, which is an important theme in the New Testament.

And to think I barely managed to stay awake in Sunday school. Gimme that ol' time religion!

A BDSM relationship between a dominant husband and submissive wife is actually the ideal of marriage set out in Ephesians 5:22-26 taken to its logical conclusion!

Yeah, those Ephesians, they sure knew how to have a good time. But you gotta be careful when you start taking fairy tales to their "logical conclusions," y'know....

Anyway, lots of other good stuff there—biblical sanctions for oral sex, anal fisting, Christian porn, and for women shaving their, um, "intimate areas." (God approves! But then, what Guy wouldn't?) And for "Threesomes Within a Christian Marriage."

I'm guessing that whoever remembered to bring a spare sheet gets to role-play being the Holy Ghost....

Are you saving yourself for your wedding night? The Devil wants you to fail, that's why he puts stumbling blocks in your way. But God wants you to succeed, and that's why he has given us an alternative to intercourse before marriage: anal sex. Through anal sex, you can satisfy your body's needs, while you avoid the risk of unwanted pregnancy and still keep yourself pure for marriage.

"To everything, there is a season/position." Ecclesiastes something-something.

P.S. Immigration must be an election issue.

• Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain

• Cheney Waits Until Last Minute Again To Buy Sept. 11 Gifts

Steve Sailer: Obama As Community Organizer—Organizing Blacks Against Whites To His Own Benefit.

Tammy Bruce: A feminist's argument for McCain's VP.

And: Huge: 20-point shift towards McCain among white women since last month in new ABC poll. From which:

ABC doesn't break down white women by political affiliation, but the 20-point swing is split almost evenly between Obama losing points (nine) and McCain gaining (11). Can't be only conservative white women who are responsible for that.

To what or whom do we owe this happy reversal, I wonder. The left has been telling us for 10 days how insulted women are by Maverick's very cynical pick of our token yokel with two X chromosomes, so it surely can't be her. Hmmm.

From The Death of Meritocracy:

[University] Admissions is a zero-sum game. Because of quotas for underrepresented minorities, approximately 50 Asians and whites [in a class of 191] were denied admission to the UCLA Medical School. Their places were taken by 50 less-qualified blacks and Hispanics.

University entrance requirements are deliberately biased not just for such visible minorities, but specifically for women too (at least in the sciences).

So, what's the effect of having a quarter of your medical students be people who weren't really good enough to get into med school, but who got in there anyway just for the color of their skin, or for their ethnic background? That "competence differential" is going to result in additional misdiagnoses, botched operations ... and preventable deaths, over and above what would have occurred if the most competent people had all gotten in.

"Guns don't kill people. Affirmative action kills people."

Or, as one of Barack Obama's former classmates put it:

[H]as America really been unfair to minorities? No it hasn't. It was unfair to me. A white butcher's kid, whose father had no money, but nobody gave me a break. And do I have a chip on my shoulder? You're damn right I do. And I represent millions and millions of poor people in this country who weren't lucky enough to be poor and black, they were unlucky enough to be poor and white, and they can't get into Harvard. So maybe that country Barack's fighting for, he's got the wrong country here. He's been just fine in this country. The rest of us need someone to defend them....

Anyway my point is, for those of us in America who want to fight for talent being the determiner of who's successful or not, I'm your representative. Obama's the wrong representative. And for those who disagree, I say: I'm for affirmative action—I think the NBA should be 80 percent white.

P. Diddy speaks out about Sarah Palin: Diddy on Palin (translation).

A commenter observes:

I struggled with, and still to this day struggle with, the study of Obanomics. It tough to grasp the blend of Ebonics, economics, comics and tonics.

Jeez, just when you think fundamentalist Islam can't get any more vile: The most evil, filthy things.

And in case you missed it: Alaskan Governor's child may be her daughter's? The plot thickens ... and thins again.

And then a curveball....

P.S. The Idiossey. And why not all "police brutality" is what it appears to be on the 11 o'clock news:

The "crack" you hear is not the sound of his baton on her skull, but rather that of her pink plastic bullhorn hitting the pavement and all its batteries falling out.

Aw, that's a shame....

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