Blog — October, 2008

Camille Paglia:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor?....

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism—the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary....

Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment....

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism.

And Mark Steyn:

I think this is really the worrying thing, that old media, which is on the ropes in terms of its market share, if they can drag their guy [i.e., Obama] across the finish line, and it took them some effort in the primary season, if they can drag their guy across the finish line, I think you're going to see a lot of attempts by the Pelosi-Obama left-wing government to regulate the internet and talk radio and all kinds of other things.

P.S. ACORN Files Voting Rights Suit on Behalf of Imaginary-Americans.

From Focus, People:

Barack Obama isn't just inexperienced. It isn't naiveté that drives him. I take him at his word. He and his vice-presidential candidate believe in "talk, talk, talk" regardless of the hourglass or the stakes or the intentions of the person across the table. No amount of learning on the job is going to change their way of thinking. Approving the use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a Rubicon they will not cross—before civilization as we know it comes to an end.

Yes, like I said: Palin is smart enough to learn basic economics and foreign policy on the job, and already knows how to pull the trigger (e.g., on Iran) when that needs to be done. But Barack "Present" Obama isn't smart enough to unlearn all of the wrong-headed notions he's been swimming in over the years, about what works in academia (e.g., dialog, and allowing terrorists like Bill Ayers into tenured positions of respect and responsibility) and in community-organizing—i.e., agitating for handouts from a Big-Government Daddy with Deep Pockets—versus what works in the real, non-affirmative-action world. And from his perch in the White Black House he's going to try and run an entire country in the same way, in a time of financial uncertainty, soft jihad, and violent terrorist threats to the Western way of life.

And in doing that, he'll be lucky if he doesn't set race relations in the States back by forty or fifty years. How ironic, that America has finally become "ready" for a black president, at a time when it can least afford all of the black-racist (Jeremiah Wright, etc.) baggage and victimization/reparations ideology which are inherently part of the same deal. Don't be surprised if, a few years from now, global warming (which is probably real and human-made, but also likely too late for us to do anything about except "ride it out") is the least of our worries.

He's good with the nuances (and straw men), though: Obama's Disingenuous Statement on William Ayers.

P.S. Insulting Muslim Jokes:

A Muslim in a London street doused himself with gasoline, set fire to himself and burnt to death.

They're having a collection for his family.

So far, they've got 20 gallons.

A Muslim walks into a welfare office with a filthy parrot on his shoulder. The parrot's feathers are falling off, its beak is broken, and it looks to have been horribly injured.

The social worker looks in disgust and asks, "Oh my God, where did you get that ugly thing?"

The parrot replies, "Pakistan."

[T]he country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

—Thomas Sowell, on Barack Obama

And Steal This Vote. And Don't Need a Weatherman: The clouded mind of Bill Ayers:

What Ayers does not mention is that the bomb that killed his friends was an antipersonnel bomb meant for an army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had it exploded at its chosen target, thousands of soldiers and their dates would have been killed. "Terrorists destroy randomly," he writes, "while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate." Somehow, the GIs his comrades aimed to kill—or the policemen he might have murdered had a bomb he planted in a Chicago station gone off—do not count. And the GIs' dates, and the civilians working at the police station, also do not count. Their deaths would simply have been a way of educating people—as Bill Ayers continues to educate them at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

10 questions for Steven Pinker. And for Charles Murray.

And how are things going in South Africa these days?

Die, the beloved country.

And speaking of our violent past and present:

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that Neanderthals were covered with a heavy coat of fur, and that Homo erectus, their ancestor, was as hairy as the modern chimpanzee. A naked Neanderthal could never have made it through the Ice Age. Sure, he had fire, but a blazing hearth couldn't keep him from freezing when he was out on a hunt. Nor could a deerskin slung over his shoulders, and there is no evidence that Neanderthals could sew. They lived mostly on game, so they had to go out to hunt often, no matter how rotten the weather. And the game didn't hang around conveniently close to the entrance to their cozy cave.

The Neanderthals disappeared when Homo sapiens, who by then had learned the art of sewing, took over Europe and Asia. This new species, descended from a southern branch of Homo erectus, was unique among primates in being hairless. In their view, anything with fur on it could be classified as "animal"—or, to put it more bluntly, game. Neanderthal disappeared in Europe for the same reason the woolly mammoth disappeared there: the ancestors of the modern Europeans ate them. In Africa today, hungry humans eat the meat of chimpanzees and gorillas.

With or without that, we're still the descendents of cannibals. Some civilized societies, though, stopped doing that before, say, the 1960s....

P.S. Obama and Ayers: tenuous, schmenuous -- McCain camp missing the point. And Obama chief advisor calls for a military invasion of Israel. And Ayers Was on Woods Fund Board with Obama When He Stepped on Flag in 2001. And Associated Press Hits Bottom, Digs.

Yep, four years of media-assisted race-card-playing to trump any criticism of Obama, while he does his best to transform an entire country into handout-seeking, ghetto Chicago. Can't wait to see it.

Not a joke. Really not a joke:

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

So much for depth perception. Still, I love it when a woman shows a little bit of iris. Cor!

I'd also like to see that Obsession DVD (torrent). If it's upsetting the dhimmis and the seventh-century goat-fucking savages, it can't be all bad.

P.S. Islam, the religion of peace, and Terrorism. And, The Ruins of Detroit. Different cause, same effects.

"Goodbye, Western civilization; hello Camp Obama."

Vlaams Belang allies with British National Party

And then there's our own social-democratic NDP, the party that I grew up voting for:

Having lived 30 years in Pakistan and 10 in Saudi Arabia, [Tarek] Fatah knows intimately what constitutes "soft jihad" when he sees it. He expressed his sorrow, as a lifetime social democrat that after 17 years of engaged support for the NDP, he could no longer be affiliated with that party. He saw the doors opening to Islamists under Alexa McDonough and now, under Layton, he has seen them "flood" into the party....

[T]he NDP ... has shamelessly courted and integrated into its inner circles Islamist Muslims with views that are antithetical and even dangerous to the continued health of Canadian values. Fatah has watched in frustration as Islamists in the NDP pursue a relentless campaign to instill a sense of victimhood in Muslim youth....

[Federal NDP leader] Jack Layton ... "has gone to bed with Islamists." He is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law, which, all the panelists made clear is the litmus test for dividing real moderate Muslims from Islamists. Fatah also expressed his contempt for the Ontario Human Rights Commission which, he asserted is "infiltrated by Islamists": There are commissioners in the OHCR closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canada-Arab federation, both of which, according to Fatah, have "contempt for Canadian values." Anyone, he says, "who brings religion into politics should be suspect" because they "are a threat to western civilization." The NDP's failure to interrogate their Muslim supporters for fear of revealing their Islamism is the "racism of lower expectations"....

As for feminists, where are they? Also pandering. They have not spoken up about the Talibanist woman in Mississauga who teaches the virtues of polygamy to her female students, nor have they criticized a cleric who openly admits to performing polygamous marriages. Feminists seem to have lower expectations for Muslim women than for themselves: what Tarek Fatah calls "left wing racism." Ms Raza is, according to an Islamist website, #5 of the "most hated Muslims in the world." "My aim," she chuckles, "is to become #1."

I'm really interesting in seeing David Zucker's (Airplane, etc.) new movie, An American Carol; but it doesn't seem to be playing anywhere in Toronto yet? Surprised me to see that Leslie Nielsen's got a small part in it; but then, given that his late brother Erik used to be the deputy prime minister of Canada back when Mulroney was PM....

P.S. Sarah Biden. And, the Newfies are offended. Boo-hoo-hoo.

Hmmm:

It's not just Osama it's the whole Muslim movement we need to fear. You need look no further that the severe brutality of the koran to see what a danger they pose to everyone. All of these bleeding heart Liberals need to wake up and realize they want to ahniallate (sic) western civilization. They consider all of us the great Satan, and rightly so. Muslim society looks to us and sees a land of thieves, murderers, sexual deviants a culture obsessed with the material world.

I do not agree with your belief that AlQaeda poses no danger to our people. 9/11 and the recent subway bombings in Spain were not an act in my imagination or yours. I take very seriously any threat from terror groups and so should you. MinorityReport was right when he stated, it's the whole Muslim movement we need to fear. We need to protect ourselves by not allowing nationalities from terrorist sponsored countries into Canada and by enacting racial profiling to protect our citizens.

In Canada, that right there is "hate speech."

And then there's this whole motherlode of articles on Obama's scary attitudes toward government programs for all, reparations, Universal Voluntary Public Service, etc.

And yes (sigh), Palin. One commenter kind of sums up my take on the subject:

So I guess I will still vote McCain/Palin because I sure can't vote Obama, and hope that Obama will win and screw things up royally [this is a very good bet] and thus both the Democrats and Republicans will implode and be replaced by new parties, ones which we are not ashamed to be affiliated with. Or else civilization will collapse, in which case we'll be too busy acting like Mad Max to care about politics any more.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, our present Tory government is running a "campaign about nothing":

Dryden gave no quarter Wednesday, accusing Harper of running a directionless "Seinfeld" campaign with no vision for Canada.

Well, Prime Minister Harper is "master of his domain." And what a domain/Dominion it is, even without free speech:

It's not the first time [Richard] Warman's use of the law to curb hate speech has produced unintended consequences. Far from the polemics surrounding the Lemire case, he has been locked in a battle that has pitted him against the British author David Icke and—somewhat improbably—against Canadian public libraries. That Icke happens to be one of the great wing nuts of the modern age makes the dispute all the harder to fathom. In a series of delusional tomes, the sportscaster-turned-visionary maintains that humanity is controlled by a circle of influential Jews known as the "Illuminati," who are in turn descended from fourth-dimensional, lizard-like creatures from outer space. He accuses numerous world leaders of engaging in ritual sacrifice of children, including the Queen and former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Well, I for one welcome our new fourth-dimensional, lizard-like overlords....

Ronson ... was struck by Warman's blindness to the bigger picture. "I remember we were sitting in a hotel room at one point and he was joking about getting Icke's books seized and incinerated," he says. "He joked about having me arrested for bringing one of Icke's books through customs. I mean, book-burning carries a lot of baggage, doesn't it?"

P.S. Iowahawk, Filed In Triplicate. Absolutely fucking brilliant.

I like pirates:

And I like tattoos:

:

No pictures of (female) pirates with tattoos, unfortunately.

Still, Happy (belated) Talk Like A Pirate Day (Sept. 19)!

And:

• 13 Myths of Sarah Palin

• Chris Rock is an Idiot

• Spike Lee is a racist idiot

• More Offensive Muslim Jokes

A Russian, a Cuban, an Englishman and a Pakistani are on a train.

The Russian takes out a bottle of his best vodka, drinks a bit and throws the rest off the train and says, "There's plenty more of that where I come from."

Everyone is impressed. The Cuban takes out one of the finest Havana cigars, takes one puff and throws it off the train and says, "There's plenty more of those where I come from."

Again everyone is rather impressed. So the Englishman stands up and throws the Pakistani off the train.

P.S. Who's Sleeping More Deeply—Europe or America?

[W]ill the next president of the U.S. be someone who is every bit as eager to appease Islam as the archbishop of Canterbury, resulting in a strong transatlantic alliance devoted not to the joint preservation of freedom but to the joint pursuit of dhimmitude? I'm sorry to say that a year or so ago, when it looked as if the major-party presidential candidates would be Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton—the former of whom obviously gets it, and the latter of whom, I suspect, does so as well—I was considerably more hopeful on this score than I am now.

P.P.S. Every so often, an article escapes from The Onion into the "real news." Like this.

If you've ever wondered just how backward the Muslim world really is:

When in 1761 [Carsten] Niebuhr came to Alexandria, that ancient center of learning, a Turkish merchant asked him for permission to look through his so-called astrol[a]be—a sort of astronomical telescope—and was much surprised to see a tower in the city upside down. This led to a rumor that the Danish expedition had come to Alexandria to turn the entire city upside down, and it was even talked about in the governor's house.

When one of Carsten Niebuhr's companions successfully predicted a solar eclipse on 18 October 1762, everybody thought that he must be a great medical doctor and came running to him with all sorts of ailments.

The emir in the city of Luhayyah in Yemen was given a watch by his European guests but did not know what it was used for, and a local Christian merchant had to come by every day to wind it up.

The Yemenites thought that the expedition's botanist went out to study flowers and plants in order to collect some substance used to produce gold.

Most Arabs believed that Europe must be to the south of Yemen because the ships carrying Europeans always came from that direction. This was, of course, before the construction of the Suez Canal. Even learned men encountered by the expedition had never seen a map....

The Oriental underdevelopment observed by Niebuhr cannot be explained by something done by outsiders, such as European imperialists. The first modern European army came to Egypt in 1798, when Napoleon landed in the Delta.

So the Orient's economic, political, cultural and philosophical backwardness—which is striking compared to the civilization that flourished in these parts five to six hundred years prior to Niebuhr's visit—must have endogenous causes. It must have to do with some fatal flaw in the culture itself.

And that surprises you?

Interesting window into the pre-scientific worldview, though.... And, for those who keep trying to present Christianity and its values as being in some way a fertile soil for Western scientific advancement:

The pioneers of the European Scientific Revolution did not evade their share of condemnation, even though many of its leading lights considered themselves devout Christians who had absolutely no intention of undermining church doctrine. This was certainly the case with Galileo and Newton. René Descartes even worked hard to prove God's existence.

The scientists' good intentions towards the established church were not reciprocated. In 1616—73 years after his death—the Catholic church condemned Copernicus' heliocentric world picture as heretical. In 1633 the church basically crushed Mediterranean science by forcing Galileo to retract his contention that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Not that it made any difference in the real world—except that the Catholic Church drove serious science out of Italy and the Mediterranean lands and thereby handed the scientific and soon after the economic, political and philosophical lead to countries in Northern and Western Europe....

What distinguishes Europe—and later European societies across the seas—from the Islamic World is the fact that religious orthodoxy could not survive the onslaught of free thought and free expression. By the time Carsten Niebuhr and his colleagues set out for Arabia in 1761, no educated man in Europe doubted that the world was heliocentric. Nor did any educated man question the value of reason and experiment as methods to obtain true knowledge of nature and man's place in it.

Just like I said. If it was up to the Christians, for all their good (and bad) intentions, we'd still be deferring to the Holy Ghost for our knowledge of how the world works.

All of which reminds me that I really need to get back to writing that book about the paleolithic origins of religion. It's just that that project's going to take me a year to complete, and I keep getting distracted from that by the rest of the world falling apart, and with bloodthirsty, hopelessly ignorant cult-follower savages trying to take away my freedom of speech. Not to mention them trying to destroy the rest of what we recognize as civilization, in the name of their Imaginary Friend in the Sky and his pedophilic Prophet.

At the same time as the Arabs were afraid that Niebuhr and his companions were planning to turn their cities upside down by means of a strange looking glass, the Scotsman James Watt was busy developing the steam engine. James Hargreaves' revolutionary spinning machine, the Spinning Jenny, was patented in 1770.

These technical advances—and the economic progress they gave rise to—led to the development of the modern class system of capitalists and wage earners, which in turn paved the way for the breakthrough of political freedom, democracy, equality before the law, emancipation of the poor and downtrodden (including women), the elimination of traditional modes of government and sources of authority and not least for the abolition of slavery in the Western World.

Let me emphasize that this entire development could not have taken place without critics who insisted on their right to free speech and more precisely without the hard-won freedom to criticize religion, including the right to express opinions that someone would find blasphemous. Let us recall—once again—that every major step of social progress—the abolition of royal absolutism and the prerogatives of the nobility and the religious hierarchy, the freeing of the peasants, voting rights for workers, equality for women, the abolition of slavery and apartheid, prohibition against beating servants and children etc.—has invariably been opposed by reactionaries and holy men as offensive to the god-given order. So there is no progress in human society without a relentless struggle against the very concept of blasphemy....

Evil is what others do to you. Contemptible is what you do to yourself—such as refraining from saying what ought to be said for fear of being ostracized....

In the era of globalization, freedom must either advance or it must give way to the forces of darkness. And to those who cannot believe that a civilization as mighty as the Western and European civilization can simply collapse and humanity regress to some state of semi-barbarity—who cannot imagine that we can loose our technical accomplishments, our knowledge, our science, our humanism, that we can go back to hunger, illness and early death—just look at what happened to the Roman Empire.

And the first harbinger of imminent collapse will be the curtailment of free speech.

P.S. The Difference between Muslims and RattleSnakes:

[W]ould anyone say that Jews who feared Nazis were bigots or racists or Naziphobes? No, because their fear was completely justified. Well, what about before 1939, before the Final Solution was put into effect, before there was a premeditated plan for genocide? Would we still call any Jew a bigot who warned that Nazis were dangerous before the mass killings started?

[Matt] Groening was born on February 15, 1954 in Portland, Oregon USA. He grew up in Portland, the middle child of five children. His mother, Margaret Wiggum, was once a teacher, and his father, Homer Philip Groening, was a filmmaker, advertiser, writer and cartoonist. Homer, born in Main Centre, Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in a Mennonite, Plattdeutsch-speaking family. Matt's grandfather Abram Groening was a professor at Tabor College, a Mennonite Brethren liberal arts college in Hillsboro, Kansas before moving to Albany College (now known as Lewis and Clark College) in Oregon in 1930. (Wikipedia)

"Plattdeutsch" is also known as "low German." A university-professor friend of my family compiled the first low-German dictionary, just a few decades ago. He was also an "old flame" of my mother's, from before her marriage, back in Manitoba.

About a year after I moved to Toronto, I was having dinner with a women here. Turned out that she had been on some kind of German scholarship at the U of Winnipeg before she moved (back?) here, and had taken a class with the same prof.

And here's where it gets interesting. Because, during that same class-taking, the prof in question had invited her out on what she took to be a "field trip" to a local restaurant, but which ended up with him finagling her back to his apartment, talking about how his ex-wife had been a "bitch" for not having an abortion when he wanted her to, and overall trying to seduce her.

Small world, huh?

Last I heard, he's retired and living on a goat farm in southern Manitoba.

So it's just as well that things never went beyond "dinner and a movie" with me and that girl ... or with that prof and my mom ... or with that prof and the girl. There was a whole Woody Allen movie (or life) waiting to happen, there.

There's just all kinds of stuff you don't know about me. :)

But it ain't nothin' compared to what you don't know about Barack Obama:

What exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes—and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

... or about his bullying (via) campaign tactics:

I'm now a lot more worried than I was a month ago about how Obama will deal with criticism from the right should he be elected, because they ain't going away.

Obama says he will change Washington. That he will govern in a bipartisan way and get Congress unstuck. I want to believe him. But I think that this current wave of criticism is practice for the years ahead, and I am not encouraged by the Obama campaign's instinct to dump a pile of bricks on anyone who won't engage them on their terms.

Just like I was sayin', huh? Or did you think I was overreacting? Curious George has been an utter fuck-up over his eight years in office. But just a few months of Barack "57 States" Obama, properly reported by our gutless mainstream media, would make us all nostalgic for the good old days of the "honest, reasonable, tolerant" Shrub. (I say that as someone who still thinks that the Dixie Chicks were absolutely right to voice their embarrassment at Bush being from the same state as they are, in the run-up to the Iraq War.)

And, Subversives for Obama:

Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unrepentant former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters—oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it's a fair bet they wouldn't let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US! If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated—let alone what we now know about Obama's key role in Ayers's CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organizations modeled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.

And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions.

Ah, and about the subprime crisis:

"[The $700 billion figure is] not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Hey, that's how I do my budget, too!

P.S. Geert Wilders, America as the last man standing.

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