GAP has loaded the May 19, 2008 issue of The New Yorker with T- shirt advertisements. The T-shirts have designs created by artists associated with the Whitney Biennial. Twelve T-shirts. All clever and interesting. By twelve "previous Biennial artists". I haven't heard of any one of the artists. I now know who they are, I suppose. But. Who am I? What world do I inhabit? Clearly not the world of fashion.
From Michelle Roberts, this AP story, "Ages of some sect girls in dispute," The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California, May 17, 2008, A4):
"When Texas child welfare authorities released statistics showing nearly 60 percent of the teen girls taken from a polygamist sect's ranch were pregnant or had children, they seemed to prove what was alleged all along: The sect commonly pushed girls into marriage and sex.
"But in the past week, the state has twice been forced to admit 'girls' who gave birth while in state custody are actually adults. One was 22 and claims she showed state officials a Utah birth certificate shortly after she and more than 400 minors were seized from the west Texas ranch in an April raid.
"The state has in custody two dozen other young mothers and others whose ages are in dispute. If most of them also turn out ot be adults, it would be a severe blow to the state's claim of widespread sexual abuse.
"If it turns out the other 24 disputed minors are adults, the number of actual 14- to 17-year-old girls with children could drop to as low as five or six. That would amount to one-fifth of the girls that age found at the ranch--substantially higher than the average rate of teen pregnancies in Texas but a far cry from 60 percent. ..."
How did Texas State get itself into this reprehensible situation?
First, it acted on a fraudulent phone call from a person who misrepresented herself as belonging to the FLDS and as having been abused. It acted without substantiating that claim. It acted, as far as we know, without an investigation inside the community. It acted on the basis of mass prejudice of people who lived in the surrounding area against a shy and retiring community whose social customs, clothing, and grooming were plain and simple. As a spokesman for the FLDS said, "... with their long braided hair, makeup-free faces and pioneer dresses, the women looked very young."
Finally, the Texas Court, denying the Constitutional rights of the accused persons to individual hearings, removed the teens from the compound and from their families in a mass hearing. There were no individual evidentiary hearings. The individual girls did not get to testify. It is not clear whether each one had an attorney, though I remember reading that hundreds of Texas attorneys volunteered to assist them; but it is clear that the proceedings against them happened so quickly that no attorney could have put together a defense of his or her client in the time allowed. The court applied a vague definition of endangerment to the (alleged) children, whereas, as I understand the matter, constitutional cases clearly specify that the state has the right to remove children from their homes only if their lives are in jeopardy. No alleged child's life was threatened. Only after their removal from the community and their incarceration in the state foster home system, scattered around Texas, did some of the women and families manage to get evidence to agents of the State's Child Protective Services about their ages and conditions, with the results that the AP story reports.
It is not simply that Texas State's action against the FLDS is a miscarriage of justice (also here). It is that the miscarriage was persecution of a minority, defended in a public relations campaign with phony "evidence" that amounted to nothing more than bureaucratized prejudice, of a kind that happened in the worst fascist countries of the twentieth century. Think of all the historical photographs you have seen of Jews uprooted from their communities and shipped around Europe. Let those images sink in for a minute. Now match them against images of the Texas police removing people from this community, of the stunned look of the women and children as they were removed, of the shock apparent in the flat tone on their voices, of their helplessness, of the meagre belongings they could carry with them.
Texas should be ashamed of itself.
The sudden onset of heated weather has brought the Jacarandas into bloom. For me, no other flowering tree more expresses the wonderous beauty of Southern California. Nabokov agreed, so he must have been a great observer and writer. [Locate smiley here for self-deprecating humor.]
China and Myanmar have had natural disasters, with tens of thousands of people killed. No doubt, there is terrible suffering where the earthquake and cyclone struck. No doubt, we empathize for the survivors and sympathize with rescue efforts. But what are the grounds on which we, citizens of the USA, are obligated, or should feel obligated, to provide rescue aid?
Well, I suppose that some persons know persons--pen pals, tourists, business associates, friends from college, etc.--in those countries who are suffering. In that case, then there might be a personal basis for them to respond to an appeal to help.
Perhaps they belong to an organization--maybe a church--that has established a contract or social obligation with groups in China or Myanmar, and as a member of that organization they should respond to the organization's effort to fulfill its contract. There might be similar moral contracts of some kind; but in the absence of them, what obligates anyone to assist China or Myanmar?
Any aid would have to be filtered through the political regimes of those countries, or through the political agenda of the UN, or some other NGO--such as the International Red Cross--, or through the aid policies of the US. In such a context, aid would be considered support for both the foreign countries' governments and for the policies and politics of the mediating government or NGO. The old Marxists used to say, melioration merely postpones the revolution, thereby increasing suffering for everyone today and in the future; there is a germ of a moral calculus there. Have you considered it? Do you want to support a communist dictatorship or a military junta dictatorship? Well, then, go ahead and ship your money to them.
Finally, why the obligation to assist in these particular disasters? There are innumerable disasters every day in the world. Cumulatively they add up to more than the suffering in China and Myanmar. If the goodness of your heart is your motivation, why not go to the Ohio River Valley and assist relief efforts in the flooding there, or Oklahoma to help with tornado disasters? Or, anyday of the week in your home town, help the Salvation Army help the homeless, or take in a foster child, or volunteer at a hospital to be a Candy Striper? Or go to some remote Latin American mountain village and help with Winter avalanche relief or the Amazon River villages and help deal with the Spring flood relief? Or go to Africa and help with the fight against HIV/AIDS?
Whatever you do, I suggest that you don't become a political stooge. Don't confuse political indoctrination for moral obligation.
Every morning, I walk Bear about 2.3 miles, in a circuit that brings us to a large park and a nearby elementary school. Usually we arrive at the park and school during the 45 minutes or so that parents arrive to drop off their children or, in a few cases, walk their children to school across the park. For Bear, the arrival of the children is a moment of sacred love. We noticed, shortly after she came to us, an abandoned and found black labrador, that she loved children. Labs are the family friendly dog, but her adoration of pre-teen children exceeds anything we have observed in any other dog.
When one of her groups of adopted children spy her across the park, they begin to call to her, "Bear, Bear". As long as the children are not near a street, I release Bear from her leash. She runs as fast as she can to her group. Upon arrival, she skids onto the ground, whining and whimpering. She throws herself onto her back, spreading her legs to open her tummy to be rubbed. The children gather around her, patting her. More whining. She raises her head to lick a child's face. Then, overcome with excitement, she will jump up and scoot around the children with rear tucked and tail between her legs, her tongue lolling out. When she is exhausted, she will flop herself again amidst the children for more affection.
Earlier this week, on one such occasion, she lay on her side, with her legs open, in a nursing position. When the children fell upon her--literally laying across her--and petted her, she started to pant slowly and her eyes took a dazed look. I could imagine that her endorphins were flooding her brain. She was drunk. Drunk on love. I had a glimpse of her emotional matrix. The children were her lost puppies, her puppies she never had. Here, in this moment of communal feasting on love, she was at last emotionally at home, doing what she was meant to do and can never do.
If Hillary Clinton's West Virginia overwhelming victory over Barack Obama was a "symbolic" victory, and Barack Obama is--obviously--the symbolic candidate, then why doesn't her victory advance her case against him?
In today's Wall Street Journal, Mark Helprin argues that the US is foolishly ignoring China's increasing military strength. China will eventually, as we fail to increase our own capabilities, be our equal. Eventually, China will exert its military strength, initially in Asia and Southeast Asia, to our own detriment. We need greatly to increase our military might. (Mark Helprin, "The Challenge from China," Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2008, A17. Online.)
Obama says that McCain has "lost his bearings", because McCain's campaign points out that Hamas has endorsed Obama. Hmmm. When Obama refers visiting 57 states, has he lost his bearings or exposed them?
Some conservative bloggers have bemoaned McCain's endorsement of stopping global warming and the rise of CO2. It is possible to have a happily cynical view about it. The global warming thesis is, I am confident, about to fall apart. Global mean temperatures have been trending down for a decade, and scientists are now predicting that earth could be in for twenty or thirty years of cooling temperatures (Richard A. Kerr, "Mother Nature Cools the Greenhouse, But Hotter Times Still Lie Ahead," Science 320 [2 May 2008] 595.). Declining temperatures for 30 years will mean that global cooling has had as many years of data as global warming on the basis of which scientists predicted that global warming was an inexorable trend. Further, since warming is largely reponsible for the rise in CO2 (rather than the other way around as GW advocates theorize), according to some scientists, CO2's rise will slow also. These events mean that over the next decade the demand for global regulations and bureaucratization of all human life in order to stop global warming will disintegrate and the hysteria will abate. So Republicans won't, after all, be called upon to abandon their free-market/little government principles (if the party can remember what such principles are) in order to fight global warming. I don't imagine McCain's advisors are savy to the recent revisions of scientific opinion that are beginning to surface, so I don't think they are actually being cynical, just politically cynical in a traditional sense; but, why not? If everybody believes the moon is made of green cheese and will vote for any politician who agrees with them, what harm is there in agreeing with them? Ha!
Revised. May 13, 2008.
Hemet High School (Riverside County, California) recently lost another graduate in Iraq; that death, from a roadside bombing, brings to nine the number of soldiers, who are its graduates, lost in the Iraq War. The community has been in continual grief from military deaths since 2004, and the families of the fallen and of course their mothers especially so. We know there is no final consolation and the ache of grief never goes away. I have tried previously to express why their deaths were meaningful and worthy of our respectful thought. Death in combat is not pointless.
He a trickster, you say? His campaign is a fraud? His new politics, post-racial, post-partisan tag lines are simply nonsense that should fool no one over the age of fourteen years? His idealism is a sham. He won't bring any change at all, except the change in faces, to the Capitol? It'll just be the same old, same old?
Okay, you mean, his letting his campaign handlers label any critics as racist, while he decries race baiting; his lies about not knowing Rev. Wright's message; his resort to clever legal devices to get elected to the Illinois Senate; his coziness with anti-American radicals in a district previously held by a fire-brand; his use of his political power to award contracts to his wife's employer, who generously raises her salary; his campaign officers telling the Canadian counsul to ignore his anti-NAFTA rhetoric in Ohio because its just politics; his Philadelphia speech's idealistic values on race which he abandoned several weeks later; his acceptance of a wealthy donor's gift to buy a house beyond his means; his waffling on whether he would withdraw troops from Iraq; his claims of bipartisanship when he hasn't sponsored a single bipartisan bill and has the most Left wing voting record in the US Senate; his claims to be pro-Israel, while he gathers anti-Israel advisors around him; making back-room deals with the Teamsters to get their endorsement, then announcing his support for legislation they desire.
If this is what you mean, then I am truly relieved. You mean he's just an ordinary pol, not an ideologue, just using the Left to propel his rise and raise funds from the dimwit college kids. If he becomes president, he'll quickly sell out the Left, because all the political power is in the center. He'll sell out his friends and supporters (and as expedient anybody else) as fast as he sold out Rev. Wright to keep himself in power. He'll bend and twist on legislation. He'll adopt any political agenda that advances his chances of re-election in 2012. He'll listen to anyone who enters the Oval Office with promises of money and influence. He'll step off his soap box and stop speechifying when the Republicans begin opposing extremist legislation.
And maybe, just maybe, as he puffs himself up, compromises, twists, lies, bluffs, postures, and otherwise exercises the immense powers of the presidency, he'll learn something about the United States, the American people (all of us, not just his fevered black church community), and about the world. We surely hope he learns something before it's too late, before he damages America badly in his ignorant posturing on the world stage.
But then, I've always been a naive optimist.
In today's Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 10, 2008, A11), Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and co-founder of LibForAll Foundation, and Abdul A'la, associate dean of graduate studies at Sunan Amel Islamic State University in Surabaya, Indonesia, invite the world to join them in wishful thinking:
Palestinians and Israelis need the world's support to create a new reality, in which the highest value of religion and humanity are restored to their proper dignity. We must also help Mulsim populations--not only in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world--to rise to embrace a profoundly spiritual and tolerant understanding of Islam, and a humanistic attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that acknowledges the legacy of suffering on all sides. Such an attitude is a necessary precondition for recognizing Israel's unique history and right to exist, while truly advancing the interests of Palestinians as well.
Alas, there is no magic wand in the world with which so easily to change the minds and attitudes of a large portion of the world's population. What in reality exists are extraordinarily profound economic, social, and political forces that are shifting the tectonic plates of history underneath all of us. These changes are generating the conflict and will go on for a lot longer, certainly for longer than the lifetimes of all of us now living.
The first force is economic globalization. Globalization of markets is bringing all nations into economic competition, creating new prosperity for many, while rearranging traditional distributions of wealth and power. A lot of people are much better off; but many people are losing power. Those people are, at the moment, doing very well in their effort to retain power by using police murder, terrorism, and genocide.
Globalization is powering social modernization. Traditional societies, values, and authority are weakening. Modern society doesn't have much to replace these disintegrating social forms. As a consequence, fundamentalist religious values have rapidly risen to fill the void.
The third force is the weakening of the secular nation-state as the predominant political form of organization around the world. The weakness of the nation-state system is especially apparent in the Middle East and Africa. Unhappily, weak nation-states are especially vulnerable to dictatorship, political corruption, and authoritarianism. We see all these negative qualities in these two large regions. Weak nation-states have not been able to control the tribal forces of terrorism.
What is to replace the corrupted, weak nation-state in the Middle East and Africa? The US is trying to generate democracies, but this plan is proving to be difficult to implement. It is difficult, because the political form of rising fundamentalism is a more attractive vehicle for many people displaced in traditional societies.
The rise of fundamentalism in Islam is not a benign force, because of Islam's (historical) theology, which is violent, expansionist, and totalitarian. Christianity has managed to evolve historically away from its early roots in literalism and to interpret the historical context of its sacred texts. Islam has not. And Islam will not so change any time soon, because the people benefitting from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have little interest in making such an intellectual journey.
For scholars, the paths of modernization have produced several surpises. They expected (largely because of Marxist theory) that the biological family would weaken, even disintegrate, under the force of economic and social individualism. The opposite has happened. Modernization has for 150 years strengthened the family as a social means of adapting to and coping with industrialization, globalization, labor migrations, and so on. In societies where tribes and clans have been basic units of organization of daily life, marriage, and work, the tribal form has also strengthend and reached outward to the West and East. It has been reinvigorated with the money made by tribal members living away from home.
Scholars also thought that religion would fade. Well, religion has certainly changed, but it has not faded. Traditional ecclesiastical forms of Christianity have struggled on, while fundamentalism and pentacostal forms of Christianity have exploded in popularity around the world. Islam has not faded, either; but in this religion, the forces of fundamentalism have gained great strength. In both Christianity and Islam, versions of the religions that organize religious life around the family have become very popular. For instance, both Mormonism and Seventh-Day-Adventism have gained much membership in Latin America, Africa, and Asia in precisely those areas hit hardest by globalization and modernization. Pentacostalism is very popular in South Korea and Southeast Asia.
The forces of change have just begun their work in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The modernization of Europe and North America took over a century; it will take as long or longer for the rest of the world to make the changes that Europe went through, because most of that world doesn't have the historical benefits of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment that do so much to prepare European culture for the changes modernization brought.
Finally, remember the horrifying wars that occurred during this process in Europe? We likely face wars of equal magnitude and destruction as a result of modernization in the rest of the world. The whole nation-state order of the Middle East needs to be remade. Political change in China will be no easier. The communist dictatorship of China will not exist for much longer. What will replace it? Will its transformation be peaceful? Very unlikely. And we have a much longer process of nation building to go through in most of Africa. Brace yourself. Keep your powder dry and your guard up.
Israeli revisionist historian, Benny Morris, argues, in his new book, 1948, that the Arab and Arab/Muslim opposition to the creation of Israel by the UN was rooted in anti-semitism and launched within the context of a general jihad against the West. Israel was seen, not only as a project of the hated and despised Jews, but an encroachment of the non-Muslim West, an echo of the Crusades, in the Muslim lands. Read the excerpt from the book in the Jerusalem Post. How much more evidence do we need that the Muslims will not accept two states, Zionist and Muslim, living side by side as a permanent solution? They are dedicated as a matter of religious theology and zealotry to the destruction of Israel and to the genocide of Jews. We should seek practical solutions within this horrific and deplorable context, created, as Morris demonstrates, by Muslim hate and hostility, that secure Israel and Western interests in the Middle East. The issue is not one of finding justice for all, but of finding solutions that minimize Muslim violence against Israel, Jews, and Westerners, which shall certainly continue; that's all we can really hope for. In the long run of centuries, perhaps Islam will tire of beating its head against facts it cannot deny and cannot defeat, and reform and humanize itself. In the present circumstances, it counts as hopeful optimism that a cold war, secured by American military might, against Islamic totalitarianism should replace the hot war in which we are now engaged; in either case, war will be with us for a long, long time.
Available at Zionist Conspiracy, Commentary, and elsewhere. Well worth reading; based on recently available archival documents.
The seizure of western Beruit by Hezbollah is an unmistakable sign that the paramilitary terror forces of Jihadist Islam will persist in their crusade until they have subdued all Middle Eastern states to Islamic totalitarianism. To fight this cancer of radicalism, the United States needs to increase its military presence in the region. Obtaining victory in Iraq and Afghanistan and strengthening our military bases and forces in both countries is a necessary first step.
Politicians who promise to withdraw from those engagements are dooming the Middle East to a terrible war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons, between Israel and its enemies. At the same time, the totalitarians menace the "moderate" states of the region, such as Jordan and Egypt, as well. It is not out of the question that a coalition of the Palestinians, the Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda would try to take down Jordan's pro-Western monarchy. Fundamentalist Islam is advancing rapidly in Egypt. And Saudi Arabia ... Both Al Qaeda and the Iranians are at war with the Saudi monarchy's administration of Islam's holy land and its shrines.
There are many fuses leading to many caches of dynamite, and radical Islam is interested in igniting all of them. Only fools would think that playing diplomatic kissy-kissy with the ruthless leaders of the forces of chaos and destruction will defuse the situation. A smackdown will eventually be imposed on us; we should get ready for it now.
Update. May 11, 2008. Fighting has now spread to the mountains near the capital. Remember that Hez already owns southern Lebanon. Shortly, it will own the capital and the surrounding region. Syria owns and occupies the eastern valleys bordering it. Soon the only area not controlled by the Hez and Syria will be the enclaves of Druze and Christians. Those beseiged minorities should not expect mercy. Will Israel be forced to intervene to prevent Lebanon and its army (which has refused to enter the current fighting) from being completely controlled by the Hez?
The Feds say so. I never doubted it. But it would nonetheless be interesting to know whether depression and suicidal thoughts followed the use of pot, or the use of pot began in the context of pre-existing mood disorder. The article does not establish this point.
After the Democratic nominating convention, the Democratic candidate, probably Obama, will be making "big tent" appeals to rebuild the Democratic Party coalitions, to return the Clinton constituency to the party, to smooth the tensions between black and brown constituencies, to gloss over his Leftism, to accentuate his moderation, to prove his patriotism.
What will the Republicans be doing? Well, McCain will be doing the equivalent in the Republican Party, trying to rebuild the Republican coalition.
How will conservative Republicans respond? Well, if they keep up their infantile whining about how McCain is really a moderate Democrat, if they continue to demand that the Republican Party align itself solely on conservative principles, they will stay away from the Party on election day. And thereby ensure that Obama is elected, a Democratic Party Congressional supermajority is elected, appeasement and retreat is fulfilled in the Middle East, Left-liberal federal judges and Supreme Court justices are nominated and appointed, and a Left Democratic Socialist agenda is enacted by the next Congress. A "progressive" realignment of America's politics and government will be rapidly put in place that will stand for a generation.
It is difficult to believe that conservative Republicans want such a socialist New Deal. If they don't, they need to grow up and figure out how to prevent the Democratic Party from winning the presidency and/or prevent the election of a Democratic Party Congressonal supermajority. To do this will require coalition building with moderate Republicans and conservative and moderate Democrats; and getting out the vote.
Atlas Shrugs cites an article by Norman Podhoretz to the effect that the Democrats have generated so many new voters for their party and increased the participation rate so high that they have a good possibility of producing enough votes in November, even with defections defections, that they can out-poll McCain and put ultra-Left Obama into the White House. Of course, that's a possibility, given greater probability if Republicans don't turn out to vote. Nonetheless, on the face of it, a November victory by Obama seems unlikely. His three main constituencies (in the Democratic Party, of course) are blacks, the youth vote, and the affluent vote. The majority of the rest of the voters went to Clinton. Since most American blacks live in the Southern states and those states are likely to go Republican, that leaves blue-state voters among blacks, youth, and the affluent vote to gain an Obama victory. Will that be enough? I don't think so. McCain has an opportunity to eat into the Democrats Hispanic constituency, as well as the "Reagan Democrats". There are at least rational reasons (not just wishful thinking by a Republican like me) to doubt Obama can get elected.
Since there is at least a rational basis to doubt a November Obama victory, the Democratic superdelegates must see it, too. So why are the superdelegates so unresponsive to Hillary's argument that she has a better chance to win in the general election than does Obama? We have to find the answer in politicians' self-interest, not in their loyalty to party or to tribe or to machine. Their self-interest is their own election and re-election. In this situation, I think that the politicians see a disconnect between the Congressional elections and the Presidential election. They must assume that an Obama defeat would not endanger their own elections, especially if loyalty to Obama brings some of his money to their campaigns. They probably see the Clintons' as a spent political force, no longer able to strike fear in their enemies hearts, or inspire loyality in, e.g., blacks, or raise enough money to spread it further into the Party. And then, just maybe, some of them are just tired of the Clintons and personally don't want them around any more; but of course political loyalty is different from personal loyalty (there is no friendship in politics). So the superdelegates are willing to let Obama fall, if it comes to that. They win, if he wins; they win, if he loses. And either way, too, they get bragging rights about running the nation's first, serious, black presidential candidate, which prevents the black voters from defecting (which they might if they scuttled Obama for Hillary). That's my theory.
Here, in its entirety, is a business brief from the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, May 6, 2008, B3.
"Iraq Is Buying Planes From Boeing, Bombardier
"Iraq signed two deals valued at $5 billion to buy 40 planes from Boeing Co. and 10 planes from Canada's Bombardier, Inc. to upgrade Iraqi Airways' fleet. The deals were signed by Finance Minister Bayan Jabar in a ceremony attended by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and diplomats from the U.S., U.K. and Canada. The first Boeing plane will be delivered in 2013, Mr. Jabr said, while Bombardier will start delivering later this year. A Boeing spokesman said the firm order was for 30 Boeing 737-800s values at $2.2 billion. He said Boeing and Iraq are still finalizing an order for 10 878s."
The announcement did not pop out of the newspaper; it blended in the Journal's stream of corporate news. But there is. The Iraqi government acting like a normal government, planning its future, modernizing its national airlines. Isn't such normalization progress in itself? Gratifying and encouraging.
It's Israel's sixtieth birthday as a nation. Some are asking whether Israel will survive; Caroline Glick has politely answered them. But it can be said much more crudely.
Will Israel survive into the foreseeable future as a nation-state?
Israel has lots of enemies. 200,000 Palestinians ready to become suicide bombers. Arab enemies surround them. Iran readying nukes. Okay; so what? Here's the answer. Nation-states do what they have to do to survive. They kill their enemies. When necessary, they kill lots and lots of their enemies. Israel has plenty of bullets, plenty of bombs, and plenty of courage--more than enough to kill all its enemies over and over.
Will Israel survive as a Jewish state into the foreseeable future?
Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are supposedly out-breeding Jews (however; see Glick, above). Being a Democratic country, the Israeli Arabs could become a majority and end the country's identity as a Jewish state. Nonsense. Before this happens, Israeli Arabs would be removed from Israel to live with their Palestinian Arab brethren. Nearly three of four Israelis today favor their removal, in part a reaction to the support of Israeli Arabs for the Hezbollah in the recent little police action in Lebanon. Oh, you say, that's awful; Jews expelling Arab citizens to save Israel as a Jewish state. Well, yeh, you got to remember what the existential ground for Israeli Jews is. The Holocaust. They know full well that the minute Israel ceases to be a Jewish state that their lives as Jews are worthless. Arab states expelled Jews when Israel was formed back in 1948. The Palestinians engage in Jewish (and Christian) removal in the West Bank. Israeli Jews understand that they would be eliminated, by expulsion or killing, if Israel ceased to be a Jewish state dedicated to the protection of Jews.
Never underestimate the ability of human beings organized into nation-states to do what they must to keep on living. That goes for Jews. Extreme options in the face of another Holocaust is what is meant by "Never again". Like I say, time for everyone to get real. And a little more reality, and a little less fantasy, would help settle some Middle Eastern issues.
He is; that's the theory of Ed Lasky at American Thinker. Obama's campaign gurus have built a powerful, Internet-based activist and financial support system, based on small donations. Obama has used this mine of gold to support the political campaign of superdelegates (besting Clinton's support, 2 to 1). If he gets the nomination and loses the election to McCain, as he almost certainly will, his super database of donors and activists and superfund of donations will be available to continue to help Democratic politicians loyal to him and to fend off another try by Hillary in 2012. Plaudits to Lasky--the first original analysis I've read in a while about the Obama-Clinton competition.
The Texas State Department of Family and Protective Services and the local DA, or whoever authorized the release of information about the processing and testing of the men, women, and children of the FLDS community, are engaged in an extra-legal public relations campaign for one purpose: to justify their wholesale denial of due process and legal rights to the persons they seized. Yes, seized! All the publicity about the number of under-age women who are pregnant, and the "expulsion" of boys, the strange manners and clothes, the women who talk like zombies (maybe they are just frightened and in shock) ... these stories (for instance, see this story; or just google FLDS) are distractions.
The simple fact is that people were seized without evidence of wrong-doing on the basis of fraudulent phone calls. Evidence is being sought after the fact of the seizure of people to justify their arrest and holding. No one--not a single person seized--has had an individual hearing before a judge, as is their right. Children have been sent into the foster-care system without hearings, and so on.
There is discussion among pundits that the issue at stake is religious freedom versus the interest of the state of Texas in protecting children; that's nonsense. There is no religious issue. The issue is constitutional: the state of Texas is denying an entire community of persons their rights as individual citizens.
Where is the ACLU when you need it? Where is concern that the state's publicity campaign is tainting potential juror pools? Or are liberals unwilling to jump in to protect the rights of these persons, because liberals get a special glee in seeing a fundamentalist religious group being tortured. Surely the discomfort felt by the FLDS members enduring this denial of process rises to the definition of torture that has been used by Lefties and Liberals in the past several years. Don't you think the children who are separated from their families are frightened, traumatized?
According to Jerusalem Post, Mossad has obtained breakthrough intelligence in Iran's nuclear program equal in value and credibility with its breakthrough on Syria's nuke program that led to Israel's destruction of Syria's nuclear plant in September 2007. Israel intends shortly to brief Britain and the US on the intel. Presumably, Israel has obtained reliable evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons; such information would allow the US to revise it's unbelievable and misguided recent reassessment of Iran's program that concluded Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapon program in 2003. Such reassessment would be required prior to any military strike by the US and/or Israel to destroy Iran's weapon's facilities.
Twenty-one 100-yard intervals in 4.6 miles.
Fifteen front-way chin-ups, short range.
Ten back-way chin-ups, intermediate range.
Barack Obama has stated that he is a Christian. The climatic scene of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, is his acceptance of Jesus Christ as his Savior and finding his spiritual home among religious black people at Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity Church. He has also denied ever being a Muslim. His denial is probably a lie; or, generously, it might be a convenient misunderstanding of his Muslim childhood and what it means in Islam to be a Muslim.
Daniel Pipes has discussed this matter several times (most recently; also here ), establishing two facts. First, Barack's father and his family were Muslim. His stepfather was Muslim. When Barack attended school as a child in Indonesia, including Catholic school and public school, he was, archival records show, registered as Muslim. Second, Islam as a matter of religious doctrine does not permit renunciation of the Muslim religion. Apostasy by males must be punished by death. (See also, Robert Spencer in Jihad Watch, 1, 2) The child's religious identity is established by the father; the child does not get to choose another religion when s/he becomes an adult.
In the United States, Obama could drift away or simply forget about his childhood religious identification and take up Christianity as a matter of free conversion. We have religious freedom in this country; the state does not prescribe any particular religion and does not prevent an individual changing religion. In Mohammed's religion, however, there is no freedom of religion, or freedom of religious conscience, or freedom of thought. Whether a publicly admitted apostate is seized and punished is mostly a matter of the state authorities of a Muslim state, such as Saudi Arabia or Iran. We can imagine that they would not seize a visiting President Obama for being an apostate; such action would be a declaration of war. However, Jihadists, already not tied to state authority, would not necessarily feel bound by a refusal of a Muslim government to punish Obama. This leads to the difficult situation that a President Barack Obama would probably be a marked man if he travelled to nations where fundamentalist Muslims were plentiful and where a pool of suicide murderers would be available to attack a visiting president.
Update. May 12, 2008. The New York Times has noticed, on the op-ed page, Obama's Muslim birth and childhood. Though late to the party by a year, since bloggers first pointed out these facts, the NYT's recognition of the obvious is a sign that Obama's Muslim birth and background will be an issue that must be dealt with in the general election.
Don't store the tube of toothpaste in the same drawer as the tube of "Desitin".
I read that he is in therapy for sex addiction. I wonder what the withdrawal symptoms are for sex addiction?
The disagreement between Rev. Wright and Barack Obama can be viewed as a disagreement over the most appropriate political path for African Americans to move into the future. Obama is clearly striving to transcend the black-white racial polarity of previous generations; Wright is striving with traditional black demagoguery to hold onto black domination of America's racial politics. It is not clear to what extent either man understands that the America's racial situation has been transformed since the 1960s.
The racial conversation in America today is not between black and white; and racial politics, no matter whether blacks take the Rev. Wright path or Obama path, cannot be re-established on in exclusive terms of black-white conversation. Blacks are no longer the largest racial minority in the nation (defining "race" in popular, if unscientific, terms of skin color); they are far surpassed in numbers by Latinos, a "brown" race. Latinos are themselves ethnically divided, e.g., Cubans in Florida are different from Mexicans in the Southwest and Southern California. Moreover, in the Eastern cities, especially, blacks are divided between the native African American community and new immigrant black communities from the Caribbean and Africa. The new black communities do not at all see their fate as identical or tied to the native African Americans. And the Asian and American Indian minorities are larger today and far more politically important than they were a generation ago. Meanwhile, new ethnicities has grown and embarked on typical American journeys, such as the Russians and Russian Jews in New York.
There is a conversation about race going on in America today; it has never been absent. The "conversation" takes place in the streets and neighborhoods, as well as in city council chambers and state legislatures. It takes place in city offices that administer business licenses, as well as college recruiting offices. If a politician, Obama or whoever, wishes to take that conversation to a new political level of honesty and realism, s/he must start by acknowledging the racial complexity of the nation today. And the ground of that reality is that American blacks no longer occupy the central racial position they once did.
Update. May 1, 2008. "Newly released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the nation's Hispanic population grew by 1.4 million in 2007 to reach 45.5 million people, or 15.1 percent of the total U.S. population of 301.6 million. African Americans ranked as the second-largest minority group, at 40.7 million." (Howard Witt, "Hispanics top population growth data," The Press-Enterprise [Riverside, CA], May 1, 2008, A12.)
Minority Populations (millions | percent US total), US Census projections
- Hispanic: 45.5 | 15.1%
- African American: 40.7 | 13.5%
- Asian: 15.2 | 5.0%
- American Indians, Alaska Native: 4.5 | 1.5%
- Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders: 1.0 | 0.3%
- (Whites, of single race, not Hispanic: 199.1 | 66.0% )
Revised. May 2, 2008.
There is no way he can satisfactorily respond to the outrageous Rev. Wright; for he sat in Trinity Church for twenty years, absorbing it, either in a stupor of racism or stupidly not knowing what he was hearing. Too entranced or too stupid, either way, for the presidency. Can you imagine him going to talk with America's enemies, the Middle East masters of deceit, or Putin whose power is behind the curtain, or Chavez supporting fascist rebels around Latin America who are corresponding with his, Obama's, Lefty supporters? They would eat him for breakfast and we would all suffer. The question is, is anything worth saving? Is there any goal, since the presidency is now out of reach, for the Obama campaign? I believe so. He could lay the ground work for a future black presidential candidate. For surely, someone will emerge. If his bid declines in the right way, a pattern, a custom, a path will be laid for someone else to succeed who will not have to trod in the racist muck to which Wright has subjected Obama and the rest of us. Do that and he has proved his love for both black people and for America.
Obama's candidacy is now so mired in the mud and corrosion of racial politics, Because Rev. Wright punctured Obama's self-definition as post-racial, that no honest opinion will be given about Obama's candidacy until voters vote in the voting booths. Obama v. Clinton, Obama v. McCain--the probabilities will be meaningless, because voters as a group aren't going to be honest about Obama. Pollsters will have to be a lot more sophisticated in designing opinion polls to ferret out voters' true feelings and thoughts, than they have been in the past, if, indeed, voters even know what they feel and think. My opinion: many, many voters won't know what they feel and think about the Obama candidacy until they confront the ballot and make their marks; then they will vote 'no'.
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