Friday, June 29. 2007
Some excellent sarcasm re the immigration debacle, from Ace: "Talk Radio is Running America" Believe me, if Talk Radio and Centrist blogs like Maggie's ran the world, people would still bitch and moan. It's human nature.
With apologies to George 
Pickett, one can only hope
that this most recent
campaign to pass so-called comprehensive immigration reform represents the closest Bush, Kennedy McCain and the rest will likely come to achieving their goal of completely dismantling the borders of the USA. After years of strategic moves to ensure that amnesty supporters were inserted in key positions - remember Bush's campaign for Arlen Specter during his primary challenge, and his subsequent elevation to chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee? Or Mel Martinez' appointment to lead the RNC? Or the appointment of Chertoff, who seems to care more about the price of lettuce than the enforcement of immigration law? - the momentum was all on the side of the amnesty crowd. This latest push seemed to have a strong chance of succeeding, but at the very moment when passage of the legislation was so close and defeat seemed so near, the tide was turned and the bill was beaten back. The bodies of the injured and fallen are scattered across the field of battle: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Sam Brownback, and not least of all the seriously wounded President Bush, who invested every last remaining resource at his disposal to advance a bill that was massively unpopular among just about every voting group. The civil war here was truly one fought between and among conservatives, with the Democrats as pleased bystanders, happy to profit either through the bill's passage (12 million new Democratic voters) or simply through the political carnage Bush wrought on his own party by pushing it. Will the victors seize the moment by pushing back and finally fighting the war on their own terms?
Thursday, June 28. 2007
 With the collapse of what I call the Bush-Kennedy Immigration Bill, it has been dramatically demonstrated the people of America have spoken loudly enough to be heard.
Every single phone call helped defeat this bill, which had all the power in the world behind it - The Repub leadership, the President, the Dem leadership, business, labor, MSM, newspapers, etc etc. All the power in the world, except for the power of the common sense of the American people. The message is this, I believe: We citizens put up with a lot of crap from the arrogant Bozos in Washington (mainly because we are too busy being independent and working hard and running our lives and driving kids around and paying bills and taxes) to speak out all of the time. But, when it seems critical, we speak loud: We are a sovereign nation, and our country is precious to us. Prevent invasion, secure our borders, enforce existing laws - and then let's discuss what legal immigration policies we want and need. But first, if you agree with our view on the issue, celebrate the death of a terrible idea which would have been a costly disaster. Raise a glass or three of Veuve Clicquot today with us at Maggie's Farm, where we happily employ our legal Mexicans friends, give them advice, help them learn English, and generally help them get established - but we will not employ illegals. Addendum: A quote from Sen. Bob Corker (R, TN), in today's piece by Kesler: ”Americans feel that they are losing their country ... to a government that has seemed to not have the competence or the ability to carry out the things that it says it will do.''
Michael Yon. The Iraqi police sound like the Italian police: All hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.
A propos of yesterday's piece on Thought Crime, I see Canada is proposing adding women to the list of those one may not disparage. There go 60% of the jokes in the world. It is interesting how quickly the irrational and insidious notion of "hate crimes," invented to provide gays with special legal protection from gay-bashing thugs, has evolved into crimes of speech itself - without any violent crime at all. The world has gone nuts. Mass resistance to the entire notion of thought crime is the only solution: people need to continue speaking, even if it's rude, stupid, obnoxious, hateful, or just plain sick. We cannot permit bad manners to become a crime: it would create millions of new, innocent criminals. On second thought, I do think that talking with food in one's mouth should be a Class 2 Misdemeanor, at least.
Wednesday, June 27. 2007
Orwell: "Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."  Speech crime, from Brussels Journal: "Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for “Volksverhetzung” (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust." Read the rest.
More thought crime: "Belgian homosexual activists have brought charges against Mgr André-Mutien Léonard, the Roman-Catholic bishop of Namur, for homophobia, a criminal offence in Belgium according to the country’s 2003 Anti-Discrimination Act. In an interview last April in the Walloon weekly Télé Moustique, the bishop is said to have described homosexuals as “abnormal” people." Whole thing also at Brussels Journal Euroland is going crazy with inventing speech crimes. It's sounding like the Soviet Union. Apparently Europeans don't mind being stripped of their freedoms, because I see no rebellion and no defiance - all I see is passive submission to the creeping, incremental tyranny of bureaucrats and politicians. One day, the honest among them will wake up and realize "I am afraid to think, to write, and to speak." Flares quoted Roman historian Sallust today in a piece titled The Road to Serfdom: "Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master." A quote: It occurs to me that there are two standard mechanisms by which our liberties are gradually removed, one for each party. Either they must be removed in the name of National Security or they must be removed in the name of Doing Good (aka Helping Poor People, Ending Poverty, Stopping Global Warming, Serving Gaia, etc.). It has famously been stated that "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels", but I would submit that it is holier-than-thou do-gooderism which is the last refuge of mountebanks.
Amen to that.
We don't call the Repubs "The Stupid Party" for no reason. Hot Air audio of Voinovich on Sean Hannity radio this afternoon, re the immigration bill. There is no cure for stupid.
Stuck in Reagan with the Memphis blues again, with a delayed flight to Boston. We have written about the notion of "good intentions" by people with power on this blog, but I cannot find the piece. Found this quoted at Driscoll: Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well": Hitler
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
Ahmedinejad I'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day! The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well. In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well. Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.
Read the whole piece. As CS Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
My life experience, and common sense, tell me that clear cultural and subcultural structures are necessary foundations for dependable and predictable human interaction. People associate tribally for good reasons - they don't know what the deal is with other tribes, nor are they powerfully curious about finding out (which cannot really be done non-superficially anyway, since inculcation into a culture requires the time from birth to around age 18). Multiculturalism throws a bomb at those grounding, life-sustaining structures, which is why I consider it to be a nihilistic political movement. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is seemingly scared by the non-PC, non-multicult results of his new diversity research. He has reason to be scared: The PC Speech Control Enforcers can be ruthless: recall the academic fury towards Charles Murray's Bell Curve, the Larry Summers massacre, etc. John Leo's piece about Putnam, Bowling with our Own at City Journal, begins thus: Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties. Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer.
Read Leo's whole piece about Putnam. We like John Leo - he is an expert birder and birders are a good, if a bit eccentric, crew. Interesting comments on Leo's piece from, among others, our friends Rick Moran and Dr. Sanity, Addendum: Here's our archive piece on Trust Cues and Tribalism
The News Junkie wonders why we are admitting Iraqi refugees below. Fact is, we are not just bringing over any old Iraqis, but the ones who, through their actions, have been our best allies and who have become targets through providing aid and assistance to the American occupation. The problem with this is that these are the very people we need to stay in Iraq to work for ... well, whatever it is we are trying to work for over there. Not to mention the fact that by admitting Christian Iraqis as permanent refugees were are in a sense assisting the Muslim majority in ethnically cleansing the country of its ancient Christian communities. As a side note, the refugee program has nothing do to with the needs of refugees anyways, and is profoundly corrupt: the government sets an annual quota to be met regardless of need, then hires contractors (often religious organizations) to scour the world for anyone they can plausibly depict as a refugee, then provides money to ship them over to what is usually a small, poor Northeastern or Midwestern town. After the initial funding runs out, the town is stuck with the bill for taking care of the newcomers whether it wanted them or not.
 From Harvard physicist Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame. It's about saturation effects, which are well-known to anyone who has taken basic chemistry. (Danger: Contains science.)
Photo: Palm tree which sprung up in my CT backyard this spring. Nice. Addendum: Related topic: Sea-level expert Scientist accuses UN of fraud about sea level rise. He means deliberate fraud. Don't expect to hear that story on your MSM. (thanks, Buddy)
Stossel on Hamilton and David Brooks. Excellent and to-the-point. A quote: Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way (that is, with education). He continues, "Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation." Excuse me, but why is that the market's fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition.
How the heck did the New York Times get this handsome photo of me on the front porch of my comfortable Maggie's Farm sharecropper home? Moonbattery. And no, obviously Maggie's Farm does not offer dental insurance. Worse yet, Maggie makes us mow our own lawns with push mowers: all of the illegals are too busy working at jobs Americans won't do.
Tuesday, June 26. 2007
An Iraq update from Australian LTC David Kilcullen, who advises Petraeus. Crittenden says it's a must-read, and I agree. Understanding Current Operations, in Small Wars Journal
Casting terrorists as defenders of the Constitution. JR Dunn in American Thinker. It begins thus: The American legal system is the latest of our institutions to collapse in the face of terrorism. Cherished pillars of our society and polity have dropped, one after the other. In most cases, it was only to be expected. The media lasted a matter of days, the academy not even that long. The Democrats slid early, through a combination of cynicism, opportunism, and ideology. The Republicans are tottering, never having actually grasped what it meant to act as a "war party". The CIA, the State Department, and much of the federal bureaucracy have, as always, proven themselves masterly at looking out for their own interests. But there was always some hope for the law. The legal system, with its deep sense of tradition, its intellectual resources, its clear concept of mission, and its simple, stolid inertia (sometimes as much as virtue as a failing), its refusal to be hurried concerning matters of import, had plenty of anchors to keep it from slipping the same way that more ephemeral sectors had. That hope is now gone. With a series of decisions made over the past few weeks, the American legal establishment - both civil and military -- has met and surpassed the lowest expectations of its critics.
An Inflatable Jesus, of course - stored in the trunk of the limo, ready to pull out and inflate when needed.
Monday, June 25. 2007
Almost everyone wants this bill killed except the politicians. A quote from the NRO piece Kill the Bill: The bill is unpopular, but powerful forces — businesses, journalists, officials in both parties, and racial pressure groups — are determined to push it through. They do not mind if a few senators vote against the bill for the cameras while greasing the track for it when it counts.
Abdullah Azzam and the death cult. The guy makes death sound much preferable to life. I have no doubt that it is more peaceful, if possibly dull and lacking in broadband access. But I have to wonder this: did Azzam blow himself up, or just preach it? Flopping Aces. Readers know that our theory has always been that a mistranslation of the Koran lead to the notion of 72 virgins. The correct translation, we believed, was "one 72 year-old virgin." However, we have been corrected by our friend Theo Spark: 
It's the sun. American Scientist. (It's a lengthy scientific report)
Are the things going on in the ME now mere bullying, or for internal consumption for political purposes - or true threats of war? From Winds of War by Muravchik in Opinion Journal: Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states--Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others--is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.
Read the whole thing.
What rights do bugs have for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Moonbattery
Sunday, June 24. 2007
This is my idea of America. A moving Video from Afghanistan.
 The stupidity of the Beautiful People. The Shelf. A quote:
There is no doubt that entertainment effects the development of the younger generation. I see it everywhere when I'm out and about and as my children get a day older every 24 hours I get more and more worried about this influence on them. It is important that we play a large role in the lives of our children. They need to learn about life and it's mysteries from us, not Sheryl Crow or Rosie O'Donnell. Values are timeless, yet pop culture changes their interpretation every decade or so. The popular consensus of what is good and bad, right and wrong are changed slightly every so often by that dirty tactic of "pushing the envelope". Where did the envelope come from and who said we wanted it pushed? The values that were taught to my father and his father are the values I should teach my children. Right and wrong does not change, so why do the Hollywood elite feel the need to mask it as if it does?
Photo: Sean Penn, a "Beautiful Person"
Saturday, June 23. 2007
Excellent video summary of what's most grievously wrong with the bill, from Lou Dobbs. What bothered me the most is that it provides for the taxpayer to pay the bills of the illegals' immigration lawyers. (Thanks, Reader)
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