“Dance Me To The End Of Love” And Other Things To Reflect Upon

It isn’t always about politics. There are other things that matter, much closer to home.

See Dance Me To The End Of Love.

When you’re done, see Who By Fire, a Cohen classic. This version features the great Sonny Rollins on sax.

Blame The Anchoress. She started it.

Reading Between The Lines And Other Thoughts

“What we have here, is a failure to communicate”.

We want to take a look at linguistics and how language plays a role in how we define the world around us. This is a deadly serious topic. How and why we perceive the threats around us the way we do, determines how we respond to those threats.

To do that, there are a few words you need to know and understand. Simply put, linguistics is defined as the study of language. Semantics is the study of language meaning and sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to its sociocultural context.

There are many other concepts, but we since this is an initial conversation, we’re on the KISS plan.

When we argue with a neighbor over some real or perceived slight, we regard them as our enemy, to be argued with, shunned, gossiped about or even fenced in, once and for all. We hold our ground and won’t be convinced that the relationship between us will change until there is an apology for the slight (real or imagined) and a truce of some kind is entered to. After a while, the reason for the confrontation is forgotten and life resumes.

In fact, that neighbor was never really our enemy. That neighbor was our opponent. An opponent is someone like ourselves, with whom we have a disagreement or who might have offended us, personally.

An enemy is someone with whom we, as individuals and as a community, have fundamental differences. An enemy has values and beliefs, that are very different than out own. An enemy wants to deprive us of our beliefs and values, because that enemy finds our beliefs repulsive or threatening to their own. Enemies will fight to the death, should they choose to engage us or we choose to engage them.

There are people who believe that enemies are opponents- that is, they can reasoned with and rationalized with and common ground can be had. Believing that an enemy can be an opponent is what led much of Europe to appease Hitler, in the beginning. Herr Hitler, it was believed, was after all a European. Surely he could be reasoned with. Surely he would respond to the rational idea that war was catastrophic.

Just as surely, every attempt to appease Hitler and turn a blind eye to his publicly stated goals failed, because Herr Hitler turned himself and his nation into enemies of European and democratic values. There were those on September 1, 1939 who were in shock that Hitler had invaded Poland.

Even with all the technology available to us, it can take us a up to year to prepare for war. It took the Germans years to prepare for the invasion of Poland and Europe- and there were still those that were shocked at the invasion of Poland. The world watched Germany prepare for war- and remained in denial about the obvious German intentions. The Germans could never be enemies, they believed. They might be opponents- but never enemies.

In fact, the differences between radical Islamism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. Both ideologies can be defined with violence, racism and the determined desire to deny people free will. Both Nazism and radical Islamism are similar in that they believe they had the right and blessing of destiny, to impose those ideologies by force if necesary, on a global scale. Both ideologies cannot tolerate dissent.

 ’Moderate’ Muslims are today a carbon copy of the German Volk, hoping against hope that Hitler’s words were mere rhetoric. The lack of outrage and action by the German people against Hitler was to become the cause of ruinious destruction and would tar the German people forever. The same will happen to Muslims.

There are those today, who everyday, plead for us to engage radical Islamists as opponents, as if we could actually come to terms with those whose stated goal is to destroy us. Their intent is admirable. There is no more worthy goal than the pursuit of peace- none. However well intentioned, they are lacking in the understanding of the differences between enemies and opponents. Alexandra, of All Things Beautiful noted,

A lawyer defending al Qaeda-linked suspects standing trial for the 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul told a court that jihad, or holy war, was an obligation for Muslims and his clients should not be prosecuted.

“If you punish them for this, tomorrow, will you punish them for fasting or for praying?” Osman Karahan — a lawyer representing 14 of the 72 suspects — asked during a nearly four-hour speech in which he read religious texts from an encyclopedia of Islam.

The November 2003 blasts targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate and the local headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank, killing 58 people.

“If non-Muslims go into Muslim lands, it is every Muslim’s obligation to fight them,” Karahan said.”

There is a fundamental differences in belief here. Even for one not religious, the reality is that societies and cultures are more often than not influenced by religious beliefs. The differences between radical Islam and the Judeo-Christian ethic are at the moment, so vast, that there is hardly a possibility for reconciliation. While we might be opponents at the dinner table, we are enemies at the most basic and primal levels.

To be clear, that does not mean it is inevitable that we fight each other. Certainly, there is room for ‘peaceful coexistence’, if that choice were to be made. Further, we have evolved culturally as well. Christianity is no longer wears military adventurism or violence on it’s sleeve. ‘Religion’ has now come to embrace the notion that God speaks to us in different ways. John Paul II’s greatest legacy may be that he embraced all mankind, without exception or precondition. Clearly, religion can- and has, changed.

Just as clearly, it is apparent that the choice for ‘peaceful coexistence’ with radical Islam is not an option now. There are those that demand we submit and others insist we abandon our beliefs, political and otherwise- beliefs that are predicated on our values.

We are fighting one war on the battlefield of ideas and ideologies and we are fighting another on the front lines of combat. These wars are very different, yet the enemy’s goal is the same. We, and our values, are a threat and must be eliminated.

We don’t want enemies because enemies require from us a commitment that we don’t want to make. Those enemies that declare war on us must be beaten. They must be forever vanquished, so their evil will not find a even a moments repose, to collect itself, rest and fight another day. Fighting an enemy is a long and dirty business. Fighting an enemy that fights in the name of some bastardized and polluted notion of God’s will make the fight longer and harder.

The Israelis at times, delude themselves into thinking they are fighting an opponent, with whom they are at odds. In reality of course, that is a dangerous illusion. They sit a table to talk peace, even as the Palestinians preach death and destruction from the pulpits and teach hate and murder as a part if their school curriculum. Day and night, their media reinforces that culture of hate- and they applaud themselves in the process.

They could have reached a peace decades ago. Instead, the Palestinians publicly declared that killing the enemy was preferential to living in peace. It mattered little that their populations lived in squalor and degradation, because their populations supported those ideas. Think about that. Even those loving in squalor would reject peace and prosperity in the name of an ideology. Please read Shame, the Arab Psyche and Islam, by Dr Sanity. It is one of the most important articles the enemy we have ever read- and we read a lot of them. It is a clear and concise explanation of what exactly it is we face today.

There are people living in comfort and security, funding the Jihad against us, with little fear of retribution or consequence. Why? Because they know that we are divided and that many of us look at them as opponents, equals, but of a different set of beliefs. Everyday, when they speak in our language, they sound so reasonable. In fact, they laugh at our gullibility. As Abu Hamza, of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London said, “We will use your democracy to destroy you.” He wasn’t kidding.

Our soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and in covert operations, are fighting an enemy, not an opponent. We had better come to fully understand that, and soon. We cannot allow the constitution and the niceties of the rules of war to limit our fight. This war must be fought by ‘serious people’, as The Anchoress once said. If we don’t, we are going to pay an unimaginable price.

Freedom, along with millions of lives, will be lost.

Portions of this post were originally published on 23 January, 2005.

Sigmund Freud Once Said, “I Have A Dream…”

A few days ago, we wrote The Beast That Is Israel, in which we noted a few disparities that make it easy to distinguish the differences between the Israelis and Palestinians.

An essay written by Carolyn Glick that appeared on the Jerusalem Post opinion page (given her presentation of the facts, it is hard to understand why her piece is opinion), that meshed well with our own post. Ms Glick notes that in the State of Palestine- replete with peace loving Palestinians fighting the dysfunctional Israelis- , a full

…88 percent of the public feels insecure. Perhaps the other 12 percent are members of the multitude of regular and irregular militias. For in the State of Palestine the ratio of police/militiamen/men-under-arms to civilians is higher than in any other country on earth.

In the State of Palestine, two-year-olds are killed and no one cares. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques. And no one cares. No international human rights groups publish reports calling for an end to the slaughter. No UN body condemns anyone or sends a fact-finding mission to investigate the murders.

In the State of Palestine, women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and wounded are shot in cold blood. Terrorists enter operating rooms in hospitals and unplug patients from life-support machines.

In the State of Palestine, people are kidnapped from their homes in broad daylight and in front of the television cameras. This is the case because the kidnappers themselves are cameramen. Indeed, their commanders often run television stations. And because terror commanders run television stations in the State of Palestine, it should not be surprising that they bomb the competition’s television stations.

Welcome to the real world of Palestine, where simple racism, bigotry and hate no longer provide enough dysfunction. Whereas once only rabid anti semitism was the only world class achievement in which Palestinian and Arab societies and cultures excelled, it is clear that the Palestinians are now looking for yet another gold medal in dysfunctional behavior.

This time the Palestinians are trying to reach for the stars by ensuring they will never allow a civilized culture or society to take root.

After billions of dollars that were poured into the Palestinian Authority over the decades, the only results of that largesse are non existent- unless corruption and theft are taken into consideration. There are no schools or hospitals that have been built by the PA since Oslo or any other major public works projects. That said, the PA did spend millions to build a now shuttered casino.

The Palestinian obsession with Israel as a moral failure is absurd. If it weren’t for the Israelis, the Palestinians would still be in the dark ages, without heath care, education or even sanitation. One has to ask oneself, what is the obsession with Israel all about? Well, if you say you don’t know, think again. At least be honest with yourself. A transparent sheet is still a sheet. Further, let’s get real about who we are dealing with. The PA, past and present, rival the UN in it’s level of corruption. Arafat squirrerled away billions while Israelis provided health care.

Have you ever wondered why there were never any demonstrations against the building of the now infamous settlements? Can you imagine the PR value of a hundred little school girls, sitting in the road and blocking a bulldozer? The reason for the marked lack of protest against settlement building in the West Bank is because PA ministers own the construction companies that build those settlements. It’s been going on for years and only recently, has the matter been discussed in the Arab press. Sadly, ‘Cementgate,’ as the story was called is no longer on the Arab press agenda. Israeli settlements are being built by Palestinian companies, owned by PA ministers and big wigs. That is another reason the Palestinian at the top are in no rush for a peace deal- the Israelis pay. Arab nations that promise money do not. Besides, other Arabs might make unreasonable demands- such as accountability and transparency.

When it comes to money and aid to the Palestinians, the words of Charles De Gaulle come to mind- ‘We shall stun them with our ingratitude.‘

Wretchard notes in Those Happy Faces, that

The collateral damage inflicted upon the people of the Third World by the Left in pursuit of their fantasies will someday rank with the Slave Trade and the Holocaust in the annals of historical outrage. It is the last form of imperialism. And the worst.

Bullseye.

Sigmund Freud once said, ‘I have a dream…’ In the case of the Palestinians his remarks would clearly refer to nightmares.

The dream of a Palestinian state as an equal participant on the world stage is a mirage, not unlike the nightmare of being on a stage naked in front of a laughing crowd. The Palestinians need to dream about a civilized behaviors and functional, productive society. Without that, they will be unable to establish or maintain a state of any kind.

The left has hitched their wagon to the Palestinian cause, thus ensuring yet more generations of dysfunctional behavior from those they have turned into beasts of burden, carrying the heavy load of failed ideologies, societies and cultures.

Eventually, the Palestinians will get out from under the ether of dysfunctionality and as Wretchard notes, there will be hell to pay.

‘Why Not Chickens’?

The lastest Sanity Squad podcast is up.

This week, we look at the efforts to replace a Holocaust Memorial Day with a more generic ‘Genocide Day,’ an idea enthusiastically endorsed and espoused by many British Muslims, in the hope that Israeli ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians will take center stage.

SC&A think a Genocide Day isn’t such a bad idea. After all, it is clear that the Israelis have come to symbolize failure when it comes to genocide, despite all their world class achievements. On the other hand, the ongoing genocide in Sudan, perpetrated by the Arab Janjaweed has been far more effective at business of killing and rape. The Arab League is no hurry to end the slaughter.

The same can be said for the atrocities and genocide in Algeria, the Philippines, and East Timor. Under Saddam, Kurds and Marsh Arabs were subjected to unspeakable horrors, as were ordinary Iraqis.

So many atrocities, so little time.

A Genocide Day might bring awareness to the use of poison gas in Yemen by the Egyptians, as well as the ongoing slave trade in Mauritania, conducted by Arab slave traders.

We’re all for raising awareness.

As an aside, see this. Puts the whole ‘inclusive’ Holocaust movement in perspective.

Neo, Dr Sanity, Shrinkwrapped and ourselves respond to this latest assault on civilized behavior in scintillating fashion. Join us this week and you’ll be treated to erudite, considered opinions and insightful analysis sans pareil- with a few snide and smart ass observations that hit home.

This weeks podcast is a keeper.

Archived brilliance can be found here.

Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much About Reality

Last year, and the year before, almost 43,000 Americans died on our highways and in traffic accidents (there is good news to report. No drunk senator from any New England state managed to drive off a bridge, resulting in the death of a young woman (some two hours after the accident) and then checked into a motel and ‘forgot to call the police.’ The senator did remember to call his state’s political fixers, lawyers, family and other assorted individuals. We ought to be grateful. Who needs a senator with a faulty memory?).

As a nation, it is clear those 43,000 deaths don’t mean much to us. If we really did care, we’d be up in arms in the same way some people ‘care’ about the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, or ‘care’ about the deaths of Palestinians who chose to initiate violence against Israel that would lead to her destruction(as opposed to seeking a durable peace treaty ).

The war in Iraq has lead to the tragic deaths of over 3,000 Americans, over a few years. The Palestinian Intifadah, has resulted in slightly more deaths, over a longer period of time. Nevertheless, because the the 43,000 deaths per year attributed to drunk driving cannot be attributed to George Bush, neo-cons or people who attend religious services, those deaths are deemed irrelevant. That is no overstatement. When a religious figure is caught up in a scandal, there are those who revel in the bloodletting. When a public school teacher is involved in a similar incident, it is usually ignored. A study was commissioned to look at child abuse in public schools. The conclusion was astounding.

…we believe that sexual misconduct in whatever form it takes is a serious problem in our nation’s schools and one about which parents and taxpayers have a right to be informed. The Department of Education is currently investigating ways to obtain more reliable evidence on the extent of sexual abuse in schools.

Abuse by public school teachers appears to be a far greater issue than abuse by religious school instructors.

the report says the mistreatment of students ranges from sexual comments to rape. In fact, says the study’s author Charol Shakeshaft, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy-abuse scandal that has recently rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

Comparing the incidence of sexual misconduct in schools with the Catholic Church scandal, Shakeshaft notes that a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concluded 10,667 young people were sexually mistreated by priests between 1950 and 2002.

In contrast, she extrapolates from a national survey conducted for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000 that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000.

The figures suggest “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” said Shakeshaft, according to Education Week.

Indeed, more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, says the report.

Stupidity and denial run in all directions.

The idea of registering guns is a good one. Yes, it is. The registering of weapons is not an endorsement of a ban on weapons. In fact, quite the contrary- there should be no issue with responsible citizens owning weapons. The truth is, weapons are registered today, when the application to purchase that weapon is filled out. All a national gun registry would do is submit the state information to a national database, or make state information available to other state law enforcement. Registering a weapon helps law enforcement identify a weapon used in a crime. If that gun was stolen from you and used in the commission of a crime, we want the SOB that took it to do even more time.

Criminals will not be able to register guns- so we endeavor to protect society, when some other SOB buys weapons legally and then resells them, we want his butt in prison as well.

Registering a weapon is not like registering your DNA, so get over it.

Further, there is no earthly reason why anyone should be able to walk out of Walmart or Bubba’s Gun Emporium with a 50 caliber machine gun. If that troubles you, ask yourself why you cannot walk out of Walmart with hand grenades or land mines. If you need a 50 caliber machine gun, for sport, target or anything else, forgive your neighbors if they would seek a bit of peace of mind.

Social Security is in trouble. There are fewer people paying into it and more extracting from it.

When Social Security was initiated, you retired at 65 and were dead by 70. Now, you retire at 67 and with modern medicine, plastic surgery and Viagra, you’re good to go into your nineties. Even the products of todays education systems should be able to get the general idea, if not the specifics.

Something will have to give- and what will have to give is obvious. Lesser benefits, paid later on, and if you’ve made a bundle and have money, well, no Social Security for you.

Before you start bitching in that a stupid, self righteous voice, consider this: What you actually pay into Social Security is a pittance compared to what you will receive. You could receive 3 (even many multiples of that) times what you put in and the end, your children and grandchildren will pay. .

Now, if you want to screw your kids and grandkids, that’s your business. Just don’t go blaming the government (of either party) for your selfishness. Unless and until you demand Social Security reform, you will get exactly what you deserve- a royal screwing. This has nothing to do with partisan politics- it has to do with math and your kids. Even if you can’t do the math, understand you will screw your kids. Not even the current crop of twenty something, self absorbed, self esteemed, well trophied and otherwise complete idiots (for the most part) deserve that.

Look at it this way. Teddy Kennedy is the Senator from Massachusetts- well, he vacations there. He lives in Florida, so he would presumably pay no taxes in his home state. Can you blame him? Jeb Bush and the state of Florida are tax friendly. Now, this is the guy that oversaw the sale of the Chicago Merchandise Mart for almost a billion dollars- and made sure that no taxes would have to paid on that billion dollar windfall. This is the guy that is talking about the ‘little guy’ and taxes and how we have to protect social security. This is the guy that will enjoy a huge pension, paid medical coverage for him and his family for the rest of his life- and this is the guy who is telling you we don’t need to change a thing. Oh yes- this is also the guy who wants the feds to fork over another 8 or 9 billion dollars for the Big Dig project

The Pyramids of Egypt could have been built for less and unlike the Big Dig, they aren’t collapsing. Teddy Kennedy isn’t calling for an investigation into the debacle- that might upset his union buddies.

As to the state of education, well, let’s be serious. Our schools are in trouble, as we noted earlier today. The number of A’s handed out (even to the idiots who needed remedial everything) has gone up. Grading must now be given on the idiot curve. Students (the self esteemed and trophy crowd) are giving out evaluations of professors. See this and have a good laugh. The severity of the problem becomes evident.

In grade school, (where the problems originate) the situation is nowhere near resolving itself. Plagiarism is running rampant and parents are objecting to their kids actually having to write in depth papers. Also, see this- there is a letter in that post worth reading.

All in all, we have a lot to clean up- messes that we ourselves have created or are responsible for. We cannot blame government for all these problems, much as we’d like to pass the buck. By giving successive governments the mandate to ignore these and other issues, we must take responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in. These problems were not created overnight, nor will they be solved quickly.

On Camels, Colleges And Reality

Alice is upset. Of course, you can’t really blame her. She (like Mamacita) has become a more than mildly unwilling worker bee in the vast and dumbed down educational complex.

She quotes Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah:

As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.

Alice is on the front lines. She deals with the students who believe Barney would make a fine UN Secretary General.

…I’m in a gymnasium full of teenage revolutionaries in training and they are all writing exams. Exams that will determine whether or not they advance to higher levels of freedom fighting. High school math.

A girl wearing powder blue pajama pants and pink fuzzy slippers raised her hand and whispered to the supervising teacher, “Um, excuse me, I was just wondering, um, like, when you write a cheque, so you’re the one writing the cheque, um, I’m just not sure, does the money go into your account, or come out of it?” Even without bangs there were no visible lobotomy scars, but then, is it even the front part that gets removed??

Alice notes that ‘the battle for the mind is won and lost on many fronts,‘ and in fact, that battle rages on and extends beyond basic banking skills.

How is it possible that there are people who mightily applaud a onetime presidential candidate who joyfully embraces a hate filled bigot? How is it possible that the leader of Iran and John Kerry seem to share the same values? How is it possible that sharing those anti American values trump the racist, bigoted and hateful values that are publicly embraced by the Iranian regime?

It would appear that those who applaud John Kerry now would have applauded if he embraced Adolph Hitler.

How is it possible that there are people who applaud resistance to an American initiative to bring democracy to a region of the world that has never known that magnificent gift and luxury?

The answers to those questions and other similar questions, is clear. There are those, by reason of a political agenda, that have come to fear the truth. They believe that if they can shut their eyes tightly, cover their ears with their hands and click their heels three times, the truth will go away.

They have been taught that truth and justice are incompatible. They demand justice only for those who share their political ideologies.

The Kurds are a good example. For decades, Kurdish populations wanted free and democratic societies with capitalist economies. They were ignored for no other reason than their oppressors and persecutors (read: butchers) were darlings of the left.

Stalin, Che, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh are a few other examples of the ideologues that caused the death of hundreds of millions. Notwithstanding those truths, the are revered figures of the left, History and truth are rewritten to lionize these leftist ‘heroes.’

Yasser Arafat, the man that caused more war, death and destruction in the Middle East is revered by the left despite the reality that he has been all but forgotten by the Palestinians. Despite the billions of dollars stolen by Arafat that left his ‘people’ wallowing is squalor and poverty, children in this country are taught that he was the beloved ‘father of his people.’

In The Myths That Fuels The Lefts’ Denial, Dr Sanity notes

Psychological denial and the avoidance of an unpleasant reality are certainly not confined to one side of the political spectrum or the other. But what I find endlessly fascinating is how the political left has created and fully integrated specific ideological tools that facilitate ongoing psychological denial…

When it suits their purposes (i.e., when they are losing the argument), they will resort to the claim that reality and truth are merely subjective constructs anyway, and that any evidence you present is only someone’s “opinion” and that their opinions are as good as anyone else’s.

Such a position should logically disqualify their position to begin with, but of course, it doesn’t…

Shrinkwrapped, in speaking of the what are now easily recognized leftist dysfunctionality cogently notes that

The ACLU, people like Ward Churchill, groups like Moveon.org and Human Rights First insist that their motives are pure (while everyone who disagrees with them have motives that are typically corrupt.) They are upholding human rights; the right to be treated with respect; the right to counsel; the right to free speech. As abstractions, these rights are inviolate; as explanations for their behavior (which could appear to be harmful to our nation’s interests) they are superficially plausible; yet, reality always supervenes. To be more attached to abstractions than to the welfare of others in one’s community is a classic signifier of the Narcissist [emp-SC&A]. It is one step removed from the narcissistic disavowal of the other: my beliefs are more important than your life.

Believing in the ‘Can’t we all get along ideology’ is more important than dealing with reality. As long as despots, tyrants and dictators say they wan’t to get along, business as usual is the order of the day. They are given a free pass to continue their well documented dysfunctional behavior and they are more than happy to lionize the ‘useful idiots’ that hand out those free passes.

These dysfunctional beliefs must be taught from an early age. This is no small matter. One of the ways a child learns by learning to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Decision making skills are in fact about being able to distinguish what is real (relevant) and what is not (irrelevant). History has proved that when a child is taught that reality and truth are subjective and in fact, are only relevant when supporting a particular ideology, that child/student/society wil fail- but not before horrific damage is done.

The Nazis, communists and Arab world are examples of truth denying ideologies run wild. Nazi ideology resulted in the deaths of 50 million people. Stalin and Mao painted communism red with the blood of hundreds of millions of now forgotten souls. The Arab nations, led by some of the most dysfunc tional leaders in history, have doomed hundreds of millions of people to generations of failure, with no end in sight.

Of course, the left will point to Augusto Pinochet of Chile, as if he were the embodiment of all right wing evil. That is like pointing to the singular terror act of Baruch Goldstein and concluding that the Israelis are no different than the Palestinians who have made terror a godly expression of their raison d’etre.

There are other ‘inconvenient truths’ besides those promulgated by Al Gore, that remain ignored by the left.

The entire African continent is being exploited by China on an ever escalating scale, with no end in sight. China cares little about Africa or African nations and there is more than ample evidence that they are exploiting resources with little or no regard to environmental concerns. They are also flooding those African nations with low cost goods and thus they are killing the fledgling modernization and manufacturing capabilities of those nations. The left cares little about what China does in Africa or to Africans.

There is another ‘inconvenient truth the left needs to extinguish.

There is not a single example of a regime or tyrant that has been supported by the left that that has resulted in anything but failure, misery and death. Not one- and that is why the left desperately needs to obfuscate reality and the truth.

The emperor has no clothes.

That road to obfuscation starts- and ends- in the schools. Alice dryly notes:

Back in the old days when I was studying business and had big plans to make money, I recall visiting with a B. Ed student who had to write an essay about a dead, white, classical musician as her final project. She said to me:

I’m sooo tired of writing boring old essays, so I think I’m going to tweak the project a bit and make it into a story about a grandmother telling her grandson about his great-great-great grandfather Bach. They can be by a fireplace and he can be holding a teddy bear. Do you think the prof will mind?

At the time, my business mind couldn’t comprehend. Tweaking? Teddy bears? After spending a little time in working on my own B. Ed years later, it all made perfect sense.

To credit the music prof’s integrity, the essay was rejected.

The battle for the mind is won and lost on many fronts.

The question is, who are we fighting?
That is one loaded question, Alice

Mamacita wrote in Mamacita On The PC Of Dumbing Down And Why This May Be The Most Important Post You’ll Read This Year

Our educational system is a national disgrace.

I was forced to dumb down the curriculum and pass failing students along when I was in the public school systems, and now I am dealing with one of the results of that at the college level. And I still maintain that while it is, of course, ultimately, the lazy spoiled self-esteem-laden students’ fault, they were enabled along the way by their ferocious red-shirting parents, who demanded, and generally got, exceptions for any rule, all along the way.

Shame on us for allowing it to happen. Shame on us for catering to the demanding. Shame on us for permitting our kids to be whiny and empty-headed. Shame on us for putting Nascar on a pedestal and basketball on a throne and letting academics fall by the wayside. Shame on us for sanctioning plagiarism, and hiring lawyers to make sure our kids get the grades we want them to get, whether it’s the grades they’ve earned or not. Shame on us for not making students EARN every single grade they get. EARN. It’s a concept many people don’t even understand. Shame on us for become an entitlement culture. Shame on every parent who ever went to school and demanded mercy instead of justice. Or, rather, ‘favors,’ in the name of mercy. Shame on every kid who fudged an assignment and told his parents he was being picked on and THAT’S why his grades are low. And shame on every parent who believed it.

As long as Americans believe they are entitled to good grades and scholarships, and as long as foreigners EARN good grades and scholarships, we’re going to get our asses kicked in academic competition, and we will have EARNED that big bruise and that big “NO” on the admissions form. And once out in the business world, who wants to give their money to a company that can’t even spell the words right on their billboard? Not me, that’s for sure. Misspelling in the business? Count your change very, very carefully. They probably can’t do that, either, unless they’ve hired a foreigner to do it right, for them. I’m sick of it. I’m a loyal American, but I’m not deaf and blind, and we’re going down the tubes, and it all boils down to stupid parents, sissy administrations, ignorant government decisions, feelings of entitlement instead of requirements for hard work, the myth of unearned self-esteem, and excuses instead of expectations.

Think about it.

What Part Of ‘We’re Commanded To Kill’ Needs Further Clarification?

Is there anything here that requires an explanation?

Now, see this. What are we to make of this? How do we deal with deliberately instilled dysfunction, in an age of chemical and biological weapons?

How do we address an ideology that teaches children that the killing of Jews is mandatory obligation? How do we address ideologies that goes to great lengths to ensure the vilification of Jews- and for that matter, the vilification of ‘The Great Satan- is not just a political ideology, but a religious one as well?

Can we sit down and expect to reach an accommodation with people espousing these kind of ideologies? Can we really consider them our moral equals?

The magnitude and implications of the issues at hand are enormous.

Larwynn and Fausta each pointed to Gateway Pundit’s Iranian Child Spiritual Abuse.

The use of children as fodder to bolster a dysfunctional political and religious agenda is beyong tragic- and the profundity of that kind of tragedy cannot be overstated.

As we noted in Religion and Politics,

Religions are not measured by what they destroy, but rather, by what they build. Religions are not measured by how many they kill in God’s name, but rather by how many they save in God’s name. Religions are not measured by who they hate in God’s name, but rather, they are measured by how many they extend their arms in acceptance, in His name.

Religions, like cultures and societies, are also measured by how much they value their children.

Every religion has esoteric and ancient texts, written and meant to be applicable to ancient and more primitive societies, with very different cultural values. Pamela, at Atlas Shrugs, posts on a more recent release of rules written by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Boggles the mind.

The Beast That Is Israel

Israel, a nation the size of New Jersey, can only lay claim to the following achievements:

Israel has more museums per capita than any other country in the world.

Israel has the second highest output of books published per citizen in the world.

Israelis hold more patents per person than do citizens of any other nation.

More than 85% of all solid waste in Israel is treated in an environmentally sound manner.

Israeli companies, Amdocs, Comverse and Nice pioneered voicemail, SMS and other cellular phone services.

Israel has the highest concentration of high tech companies industries in the world, relative to it’s population.

ICQ, the technology that powers AOL Instant Messenger, was developed in 1996 by a team of 4 young Israelis.

Israeli start-up company TransChip developed the first high resolution camera that fits on a single electronic chip, for use in cellular phones.

Israel is one of only eight countries in the world capable of launching their own satellites into space.

Israelis developed the world’s first cellphone at the Motorola research lab in Haifa, that companies largest research center in the world.

Israel ranks third, after the US and Canada, in the number of publicly traded companies on Wall Street.

Israel has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other nation in the world.

American industry giants such as GM, Ford and Lockheed Martin manage their manufacturing facilities using software written by Tecnomatix, an Israeli company.

Israeli company Given Imaging developed a video camera small enough to fit inside of a pill. The camera helps doctors diagnose digestive tract diseases.

Israeli scientists developed the first computerized radiation free diagnostic scanning device for detecting breast cancer.

Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation in the world.

Not bad for the offspring of monkeys and pigs.

To be fair, the Palestinians have the greatest number of suicide bombers per capita, as well as the largest number of openly terrorist organizations in the world.

The Arab world can lay claim to the greatest number of openly anti semites in the world, by any standard of measurement.

According to UN Human Development Report, the Arab world has the lowest standard of education in the world, save for sub Saharan Africa. Given that there are virtually no schools in sub Saharan Africa, that is quite an educational milestone.

For more ‘Cool Facts’ about Israel, see this.

Debating Civilization

The Baron, at Gates of Vienna, has posted some interesting video of a Ken Livingstone-Daniel Pipes debate recently.

Red Ken spoke first, and gave a very urbane speech about the need for multiculturalism and a coming together of different cultures to form a “world civilization”. He referred repeatedly to the defects of the United States, and gave his opinion that the era of America as the premier global power is even now coming to an end.

Mr. Pipes expressed a strong disagreement with the mayor.

“The problem is not so much a clash of civilizations,” he said, “but a clash between civilization and barbarism… The ‘clash of civilizations’ idea fails; it does not fit the facts; it is not a good way to understand the world.” He went on to detail the dangers of the largest and most violent barbarism of all, radical Islam. He singled out Britain, and in particular London, as the world’s principal haven for Islamic terrorists.

The debate is interesting, for any number of reasons- not the least of which is that the debate needed to be held in the first place.

No one has a problem with multiculturalism that results in ethnic identity and pride while at the same time, remains committed to civilized behavior that seeks to empower and better the community at large. That has never been subject to debate.

The issue of multiculturalism becomes volatile when ethnic expression results in violence, intimidation or subjugation. When that happens, there should be no need for debate at all. We have noted,

…in a free society, we don’t care about your beliefs. We do care about your actions and behavior. You are free to integrate and to assimilate into our society in whole or in part. We really don’t care. Do not tell us we need to care about your beliefs and your concerns above all else and above our own beliefs. If you do try to make that assertion, you will soon be surprised at how easily you will be marginalized and resented- not for your beliefs, but rather, for your attempt to jump to the head of line. You are not more important than anyone else. We don’t care if you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. You are free to worship as you believe. In fact, that is the last thing we worry about. America and free nations have long ago dispensed with the notion that what you believe or how you believe is relevant to peaceful existence. Notwithstanding some religious voices from the pulpits and the media, America has learned to live and let live…

You are not free to react violently or threaten those with whom you disagree. Western democracies are just that- free societies- and we do not operate under the ‘laws of the jungle.’ If we did, we we would not take kindly to even the firdt display of barbaric behavior. Your dissent is a right-  but it is also a privilege, contained in the same way a painting is contained in a frame. You are free paint the canvas of your dissent as you please- as long as you stay within the borders of what is deemed accetable behaviot- that is, behavior that non-violent ior destructive.

These truths are not subject to debate. They are and have been the underpinnings of civilized societies. Any ‘debate’ that attempts to obfuscate these truths or serves to justify what is barbaric behavior does not serve democray or civilized society.

See the Baron’s post here. Take a few minutes and view the videos links. The various contexts between the views of Livingstone and Pipes are startling.

“The wrong kind of freedom endangers the West”- Short Essay By Francis Fukayama

“The Demands of Muslims and other religious groups are compromising the principles of liberal democracy, writes Frances Fukayama,” in the Sunday Times of London.

Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism’s silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups.

Hobbes and Locke, for example, argue that human beings possess natural rights as individuals in the state of nature — rights that can be secured only through a social contract that prevents one individual’s pursuit of self-interest from harming others.

Modern liberalism arose in good measure in reaction to the wars of religion that raged in Europe after the Reformation. Liberalism established the principle of religious tolerance: the idea that religious goals could not be pursued in the public sphere in a way that restricted the religious freedom of other sects or churches. (The actual separation of church and state was never fully achieved in many modern European democracies.) But while modern liberalism clearly established the principle that state power should not be used to impose religious belief on individuals, it left unanswered the question of whether individual freedom could conflict with the rights of people to uphold a certain religious tradition.

Freedom, understood not as the freedom of individuals but of cultural or religious or ethnic groups to protect their group identities, was not seen as a central issue by the American founders, perhaps because the new settlers were relatively homogeneous. In the words of John Jay (in the second Federalist Paper): “A people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles.”

Multiculturalism — not just as tolerance of cultural diversity but as the demand for legal recognition of the rights of racial, religious or cultural groups — has now become established in virtually all modern liberal democracies. Politics over the past generation has been consumed with controversies over affirmative action for African Americans, bilingualism and gay marriage, driven by formerly marginalised groups that demand recognition not just of their rights as individuals but also of their rights as members of groups. And the United States’ Lockean tradition of individual rights has meant that these efforts to assert group rights have been tremendously controversial — more so than in modern Europe.

Modern liberal societies in Europe and North America tend to have weak identities; many celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity. Yet the fact is that national identity still exists in all contemporary liberal democracies.

In Europe after the second world war there was a strong commitment to creating a “post-national” European identity. But despite the progress that has been made in forging a strong European Union, the continent’s identity remains something that comes from the head rather than the heart.

But many Europeans also feel ambivalent about national identity. The formative experience for modern European political consciousness is the two world wars, which Europeans tend to blame on nationalism.

Yet Europe’s old national identities continue to linger. People still have a strong sense of what it means to be British or French or Dutch or Italian, even if it is not politically correct to affirm these identities too strongly. And national identities in Europe, compared with those in the Americas, remain more ethnically based.

So while all European countries have the same commitment to formal political citizenship equality as America, it is harder to turn that into felt equality of citizenship because of the continuing force of ethnic allegiance.

The old multicultural model has not been a big success in countries such as the Netherlands and Britain and needs to be replaced by more energetic efforts to integrate non-western populations into a common liberal culture. The old multicultural model was based on group recognition and group rights. Out of a misplaced sense of respect for cultural differences — and imperial guilt — it ceded too much authority to cultural communities to define rules of behaviour for their own members.

Liberalism cannot be based on group rights because not all groups uphold liberal values. The civilisation of the European enlightenment, of which contemporary liberal democracy is the heir, cannot be culturally neutral since liberal societies have their own values regarding the equal worth and dignity of individuals.

Cultures that do not accept these premises do not deserve equal protection in a liberal democracy. Members of immigrant communities and their offspring deserve to be treated equally as individuals, not as members of cultural communities. There is no reason for a Muslim girl to be treated differently under the law from a Christian or Jewish one, whatever the feelings of her relatives.

Multiculturalism, as it was originally conceived in Canada, America and Europe, was in some sense a “game at the end of history”. That is, cultural diversity was seen as a kind of ornament to liberal pluralism that would provide ethnic food, colourful dress and traces of distinctive historical traditions to societies often seen as numbingly conformist and homogeneous. Cultural diversity was something to be practised largely in the private sphere, where it would not lead to any serious violations of individual rights or otherwise challenge the essentially liberal social order.

By contrast, some contemporary Muslim communities (and those of other religions) are making demands for group rights that simply cannot be squared with liberal principles of individual equality. These demands include special exemptions from the family law that applies to everyone else in the society, the right to exclude non-Muslims from certain types of public events, or the right to challenge free speech in the name of religious offence (as with the Danish cartoons incident).

In some more extreme cases Muslim communities have expressed ambitions to challenge the secular character of the political order as a whole. This clearly intrudes on the rights of other individuals in the society and pushes cultural autonomy well beyond the private sphere.

Asking Muslims (and other religions) to give up group rights is much more difficult in Europe than in the United States, however, because many European countries have corporatist traditions that continue to respect communal rights and fail to separate church and state. The existence of state-funded Christian and Jewish schools in many European countries makes it hard to argue in principle against state-supported religious education for Muslims.

In Germany the state collects taxes on behalf of Protestant and Catholic churches and distributes revenues to church-related schools. Even France, with its strong republican tradition, has not been consistent on this issue. After the French revolution’s anti-clerical campaign, Napoleon restored the role of religion in education and used a corporatist approach to manage church-state relations.

These islands of corporatism where European states continue to recognise communal rights were not controversial prior to the arrival of large Muslim communities. Most European societies had become thoroughly secular so these religious holdovers seemed quite harmless. But they are obstacles to the maintenance of a wall of separation between religion and state. If Europe is to establish the liberal principle of a pluralism based on individuals rather than groups, then it must address these corporatist institutions inherited from the past.

The Mighty Wind Of Stupidity

Have you ever wondered how so many people can keep a straight face while behaving so stupidly? Have you wondered how those same people expect you to keep a straight face as well?

Here’s an example.

An Israeli promotional campaign involving balloons caused panic among Lebanese civilians Saturday when the wind carried them over the border into southern Lebanon.

The Lebanese media reported that some civilians were hospitalized after inhaling the gas in the balloons.

However, the photographs published on the Web site of Hezbollah’s TV station Al-Manar show green balloons from a promotional campaign for Ha’ir, a Schocken group newspaper.
Lebanese sources said the balloons reached the southern Lebanese cities of Nabatiyeh and Tyre, and the Lebanese army warned civilians not to touch them. Some were brought to Italian UN troops for examination.

Lebanon’s official news agency claimed that they were “poisoned balloons” dispersed by IDF aircraft.

Now, why would the Israelis disperse gas in balloons- unless of course you add wind and weather to everything else they control.

If the Israelis really wanted to poison Lebanese Arabs, why use neon green balloons so easily identifiable with Hebrew writing on them?

Balloons are highly inefficient as delivery system for poison gas, because in order to release the gas, you have to puncture the balloons.

According to the great minds of Hizbollah, Israeli aircraft released the balloons. That’s right- squadrons of Israeli fighter jets took off with neon green balloons as their payload.

You get the the idea. Is it any wonder Hizbollah and the Arab world have zero credibility?

(We can just imagine the entire Italian contingent of peacekeepers dropping their pasta forks and laughing their asses off.)

Of course, stupidity isn’t just purview of the Arab world (despite so much evidence to the contrary). There are legions opf people in this country and all over the world that are also monuments to two digit IQ’s. The best place to find the purveyors of the mighty wind of stupidity are on Dr Sanity’s Carnival Of The Insanities.

Every week, the Carnival Of The Insanities presents a cyclone of stupidity and a typhoon of torpid thought. Dr Sanity offers up the tools and insight you need to recognize and withstand the blowing debris and foul wind of the world around us.

“Men are like that, you know”

A man wanted to get married. He was having trouble choosing among three likely candidates. He gives each woman a present of $5,000 and watches to see what they do with the money.

The first does a total make over. She goes to a fancy beauty salon gets her hair done, new make up and buys several new outfits and dresses up very nicely for the man. She tells him that she has done this to be more attractive for him because she loves him so much.

The man was impressed.

The second goes shopping to buy the man gifts. She gets him a new set of golf clubs, some new gizmos for his computer, and some expensive clothes. As she presents these gifts, she tells him that she has spent all the money on him because she loves him so much.

Again, the man is impressed.

The third invests the money in the stock market. She earns several times the $5,000. She gives him back his $5,000 and reinvests the remainder in a joint account. She tells him that she wants to save for their future because she loves him so much.

Obviously, the man was impressed.

The man thought for a long time about what each woman had done with the money he’d given her.

Then, he married the one with the biggest boobs.

Men are like that, you know.

Religion And Politics

What is about about religion that scares so many people? The vast majority of people who express their faith, do so quietly and usually within a community of like minded believers. They, like most Americans, hold the concept of ‘live and let live,’ dear. Most Americans do not impose their belief on others nor do they support those who do.Nevertheless, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to lump all believers together, regardless of their affiliation. We talk about the ‘moderate’ right, or the ‘moderate’ left, but when we talk about religious people the word ‘moderate’ is never spoken or implied. Religious people, it is assumed, are, well, religious. Enough said.

Religious people, as we noted, are for the most part, perfectly happy to live life in happy obscurity. Unfortunately, all too often religious people are dragged into political debate, or they are excluded from political debate, simply because they are religious. Faith seems to infuriate some people. The faiths, beliefs and believers that are shared and so familiar to most Americans are often subject to fierce criticism, ridicule and even vicious attack.

Of course, not all not all faiths are treated in the same way. Religious beliefs that are out of the mainstream of those that originate in far away places, or beliefs that are to be regarded as suggestive only, are fine.

Why is there such a disparity in how adherents to different faiths are treated?

The answer lies in the kind of demands and expectations our faith, beliefs and fellow believers make upon us . Real faith demands morality, not just from the individual, but from an entire community as well. Faith demands sacrifice. Friday, Saturday or Sunday prayer instead of Friday, Saturday or Sunday sports or shopping. Real faith demands that charity, given on a regular basis, without the need to be prodded by guilt or by images of disaster.

Religions are not measured by what they destroy, but rather, by what they build. Religions are not measured by how many they kill in God’s name, but rather by how many they save in God’s name. Religions are not measured by who they hate in God’s name, but rather, they are measured by how many they extend their arms in acceptance, in His name.

Those non believers or those who claim to be believers, who profess hatred toward God or others in His name, reject the notion that there is something more important than the self. They reject the notions of responsibilities, accountability and a living up to higher expectations. They reject the notion of a higher self with moral obligations. They want to be free of obligation and expectation.

The confrontation between believers and non believers is really a battle for the soul. That battle is not so much about belief in God as it is about the human conscience. There are plenty of non believers that believe that we are more than just animals, concerned only with our own pleasure and needs and thus understand the significance of human responsibility and accountability.

In fact, the battle for the soul of an individual or a nation is a battle that scares a lot of people, because if there is even the possibility of a soul, everything changes.

The atheist says, “I don’t believe in God.” In truth, people of faith don’t believe in the God the atheists reject, either.

Non believers cringe at the words ‘Fear of God‘ and other similar expressions. They only see fear as a negative expression- the fear of the powerful intimidating the weak. They rightly understand that ‘fear,’ as they understand it, is a negative expression. They use that expression, as a mantra- because without it, the argument weakens.

What many non believers do not admit is that fear is not always a negative human emotion. Often, fear can be a positive expression. For example, when an athlete faces his opponent or a when a public speaker first faces an audience, the nervous fears they experiences can lead to heightened awareness. All his or her senses are at a heightened level. Any and all of the skills and capabilities they have worked so hard to achieve, can be called upon in an instant. In fact, every one of us knows the kind of fear that can brings out the best in us.

The right expression and description of a believer’s relationship with God is ‘Awe.’ When we stand and behold the magnificence of nature, we are in awe. When we gaze upon an artist’s work that talks to us, we are in awe. There is music, sounds created out of thin air, that make us cry or can evoke memories, for decades. That too, inspires awe.

In fact, the awe we experience is a manifestation of human dignity. We see and understand ourselves to be a part of a greater scheme. We understand ourselves to be a part of the masterpiece that is Creation. We- each of us, have a starring role in the play of life- Creation. It is an unfolding drama, comedy and musical- with our best efforts and intentions a part of the script. We are not meant to ad lib our way through life. We are obligated and meant to make Creation an even more magnificent expression that It is, and we each of us have lead role in doing just that.

It is clear that when standing in Awe of God, we recognize what the gift of life means.

When we acknowledge the gift of life, we acknowledge that we have a purpose. We may not understand or even clearly understand our purpose, but we don’t have to, any more than we have to clearly understand nuclear physics or organic chemistry. We know they are there and they impact our lives. That is enough.

It is man’s objective to seek- it is a natural instinct. It is what we look for that to a very large extent, defines us. It is our charge to discover and celebrate, not our basest selves, but rather, that part of us that is as majestic as anything in nature or art. We are charged to take center stage in God’s creation. We seek the majesty that is in each of us- we seek to know our own soul.

It is not easy. It is not easy at all. We must acknowledge that even if we are to take center stage, we share that stage with everyone else- and sometimes, that may go against our very nature. It is then that we must put in that performance of a lifetime. Like the athletes that play beyond their capabilities in that last game, we must reach inside to our souls, to pull from within the very best of ourselves, especially when it seems the odds are stacked against us.

Sometimes, center stage can be a very scary place- and that is why so many people fear having a soul.

All gardens need tending. If we can remove the weeds in life- those things that restrain, contain us and hinder our growth, we will grow. When we refuse distort the reality we know exists so that our selfish needs are sated, and when we choose to remove the doubts and fears that hold us back, we will thrive.

We may indeed, be small in the eyes of history and Creation. That doesn’t mean we can’t be great.

No Face In The Mirror?

 

We wrote

…”The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”

Clearly, within the search for community is also the search for meaning. The search for meaning is also a call for an audit of our attitudes, biases and values. That ‘inner audit’ has to be done in the context of our relationships with others and even our own closely held beliefs. Our existence, as we and others relate to it, is really no more than a manifestation of our inner selves. Virtually every problem we face is the conflict between our ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ or manifested, selves. Reality is the expression on canvas of our ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ selves.

Real self esteem is derived from ‘selfless esteem.’ No matter what great strides we have made in technology and interdependent economies and societies, we must make a difference in the lives of others if we are to make a difference and find meaning in our own lives. Information and technology will not make our world a better place. They can contribute to the effort, but no more.

We want to pick up on that theme, because left unanswered is a simple question: Do our lives really matter? Would the world be a different had we not been born?

On the face of it, we are part of a disposable and dispersible world. Whole populations are killed and are seemingly forgotten. As events around us fly by at the speed of light, there is no real sense that our lives- or anyone else’s for that matter, are of significant or meaningful merit in the great scheme of things.

In fact, we suffer a kind of debilitating malaise- “Nothing I do or say really matters.” There is the belief that whether or not we contribute anything to the the world and those around us, the world would be no different. It is the ‘my vote doesn’t really count’ school of thought. No matter our efforts, nothing will ever really change.

If you truly believe that your efforts and contributions are meaningless, can you really know and have passion? What can you truly look forward to, what will truly excite you? To what can you truly be committed? Will you ever know that ‘fire in the belly’?

Of course, that way of thinking is skewed. You matter because you were born. For those of you that believe in God, man’s destiny is waiting to be written by virtue of your efforts and passions. For those of you that do not believe in God, the power and potential of man is in your hands. This means that your very existence is vital. You are indispensable to mankind.

What notes will you choose to play in the symphony of life? Will you add to the music, or will your efforts be lacking, resulting in a hollowness?

Many people have had the great misfortune of growing up in less than ideal, or even dysfunctional families. There is no question that many of us, in one form or another, carry a certain amount of ‘baggage.’ That truth begs another question: “Is my worth based on whether or not I was valued at home by my immediate family, is it based on my achievements, or, do I matter because I exist?”

The almost universal knee jerk reaction is, “Of course I matter! My family, friends and community value and love me!”

Now, ask yourself again, that initial question- would it make a difference if you were never born? Would those around you be poorer for not knowing you?

In fact, you do matter. Not because of your wealth or looks, or productivity or great ideas. You matter because you were born- and because of the potential contributions you might make in that symphony of life. In fact, there are those notes that only you can play. You are irreplaceable. Just ask those people who love you and care for you. It is incumbent upon you to contribute to their lives and their well being. That in fact, is the greatest of destinies- to transform and make better, those around you. If you can do that, you will have changed lives, forever.

Once you understand those truths, that you know that you and what you contribute are essential to the wellbeing of others, the passion and fire cannot be extinguished.

There is much tragedy and suffering in this world. If every person understood that they matter, their lives matter and the notes they play matter, they would come to understand that they are indispensable and of great value.

People who believe and know they matter are capable of great things.

We quoted someone who understood what was really important:

…said that the home of man is his wife. I’m very sorry that my home is not here. My home had the biggest impact on my life. She always told me: ‘You scientists can write endless articles, but most of them will be forgotten over the years. I influence the education of my children, and I too will be forgotten in another 150 years – but my influence will exist, and dozens and hundreds of children will walk around who were influenced by me…’

You matter a lot more than you think.

Some of this post was published on 21 October, 2005.

The SC&A Valentine’s Day Primer

Valentine’s day is fast approaching. It is with that in mind that we present our Valentines Day Primer. You have a little more than two weeks to avoid disaster. Use this time to prevent yet another romantic catastrophe.

We at the SC&A Institute are pleased to present this short primer that is guaranteed to make Valentine’s Day dinner and subsequent festivities memorable- in a good way.

Most of you understand that Valentine’s Day is a commercial adaption of a meaningful idea, employed in a cynical attempt to extract your hard earned dollars. Flowers and candy are overpriced, restaurants adjust their menus to include higher priced items and wines and because of today, florists will remain in a state of arousal until Mother’s Day.

Nevertheless, some of you will be sucked into the Valentine’s Day vortex, never to escape. It is for you that we offer this advice.

Firstly, unless you have done this before and have learned your lesson, do not seek to cut Valentine’s Day expenses by getting your flowers from a cometary or funeral home. Nothing puts a damper on romance more than an arrangement that is bedecked with a ‘Next Time, Vinny Two-Toes, We Get Your Kids‘ or ‘Off to That Big Saloon in the Sky‘ message, printed in gold, on a black ribbon.

If you insist on funerary arrangements, as a rule, avoid all arrangements that are horseshoe shaped.

If you’re going out for dinner, remember that the experience entails more than just food. Do not park too far away from the restaurant, to save on parking fees. If you are in an area that has high parking fees, chances are you can’t really afford dinner in that neighborhood, either. If your date, by some miracle, is actually accompanying you because she wants to, as opposed to going out with you because you were her last shot at free food, there are a few things you need to consider.

As soon as you close her car door (if that isn’t in your reality, ‘lucky’ is not a world in your vocabulary),  be sure to compliment her entire outfit. Start with your date’s shoes. More than likely your date is wearing sexy shoes. Of course, you don’t really know they are sexy, as all shoes tend to classified in the same way. The proper response is : ‘Yes, those shoes are really great (add points if you say, ‘Perfect!’).  You must say that. Women do not understand that to a man, the primary definition of ‘sexy,’ means underwear- and as long as it’s coming off, it’s really  great underwear.

OK, back to VDay dinner.

If you park too far from the restaurant, her feet will hurt later on. Hurt feet have the same effect as flowers purloined from a funeral home. To repeat: That means you will be reading (or rather, in your case, looking at the pictures) a sports or handyman magazine after you date insists she has a headache that ‘just came on’ after the free food.

Onwards. Assuming you have actually paid for parking and managed to get her and her delicate feet into the restaurant, assume that she expects more than a fine meal and meaningful, loving conversation. She wants you to demonstrate how much you love her and how much she means to you.

This means she wants you to spend money. There is no other way you can prove to her that you love her. It’s about money. Now, she may say she doesn’t want you to spend the money- she may even insist on it, leaving you with the carefully crafted illusion and impression that she means it.

You are being tested. It is imperative that you be smart about it all and adamantly disagree. Make a scene, if you must, but leave her with the impression that your entire existence depends on her allowing you to be extravagant. Like her birthday and Mother’s Day, VDay is going to cost you and hurt you. When you are in pain, she will be happy, because you have demonstrated that you love her (and you have proved that she can indeed outsmart you).

Your date will order something off the menu. Of course, it won’t be anything reasonably priced, but rather a variation of something she likes that she has not tasted before. It is being ordered because ‘it sounds interesting.’ As a rule if food ‘sounds interesting,’ it means one of two things: It is more expensive, or, she hopes to later on chat with friends about her selection of dining fare and will remark on your Neanderthal tastes.

Now, ordering wine is a tricky issue. If she enjoys wine and can keep her clothes on if she has quite a bit to drink, order the cheap bottle. She won’t remember. If she does not drink, bite the bullet and order the expensive bottle, as she will remember that and in the end, that may serve you well, later on.

The worst case scenario is if you order the expensive wine, chugs glass after glass down like a sailor on his first night of leave then attempts to remove her clothes, in the restaurant.

There is no happy ending because by the time you break every speed limit and plow through every red light in town to get home, she will be sober enough to remember what transpired and she will be horrified. In fact, she will too furious to even to pass out (just so you understand, that means you aren’t getting any’) She will lash out at you for any one of a myriad of reasons, selected from that bottomless well that serves as her storage space for the contempt she has for you.

Now, we will assume that you are hanging on by a thread, and that the only thing that separates you from utter frustration (that you have bought and paid for) are a few words.

Here are a few remarks that are entirely inappropriate and must be avoided.

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”- H.L. Mencken

“A man can be happy with any woman, as longf as he does not love her.”- Oscar Wilde

“A woman can be happy with any man, as long as he has money”- P. Santy

“You look like a million dollars, after taxes.- Anonymous

“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”- Alice Hoffman

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food”- George Bernard Shaw

“Think about a woman. Doesn’t know you’re thinking about her. Makes you think about her even more.”- Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman, Northern Exposure, ‘The Bumpy Road To Love,’ 1991

Happy Valentine’s Day and Good Luck.

“Oxygen Of The Soul”

Many of Luxembourg’s Muslims this weekend fled their homes for a hotel after receiving death threats from Christian militants accusing the country’s tiny Muslim community of serving as agents for “global Islam.” The Muslims said they feared for their lives. It was disclosed they had been forced to pay special taxes that Christians imposes on Jews and Muslims in return for protection and security. About 45 Jews left their village in Sa’ada county in Luxembourg after Dawoud Yousuf Mousa, one of the heads of the local Islamic community, was warned Jan. 10 if the Muslims don’t leave within 10 days they would be exposed to killings, abductions and looting. About 45 Muslims left their village in Saint Adaire county in Luxembourg after Dawoud Yousuf Mousa, one of the heads of the local Muslim community, was warned Jan. 10 if the Muslims don’t leave within 10 days they would be exposed to killings, abductions and looting.

Four masked militants approached Mousa and delivered a letter to him warning the Islamic community had been under Christian surveillance.

“After accurate surveillance over the Muslims residing in St Adaire, it has become clear to us that they were doing things which serve mainly global Jihad, which seeks to corrupt the people and distance them from their principles, their values, their morals, and their religion,” the letter stated.

Pretty outrageous, right?

Well, not to worry. Substitute the word ‘Muslim‘ with the word ‘Jew‘ and ‘Luxembourg‘ with ‘Yemen,’ and the real news story emerges.

In Jews of Yemen, Liberals And Modern Kapos, Robert Avrech takes the plunge into reality, a skill held in disrepute by many on the left.

It is worth noting that Osama Bin Laden is from Yemen. It is also worth noting that the most fanatical terrorists in Iraq, those who are slaughtering Iraqi citizens–preferably women and children–are Yemenites. That’s right, not Iraqi “freedom fighters” as the liberals in the west would have you believe. No, the terrorists in Iraq are, for the most part, foreign killers: Yemenites, Saudis, Palestinians (big shock, huh?) Islamic totalitarians, all.

Avrech makes his point- radical Islamism manifests itself beyond Iraq and beyond the Israel-Palestine issue. As Hamas leaders and Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah point out, they view conflict with their adversaries as a kind of religious expression (anti Jewish and anti Christian). Nasrallah has noted that Jews in Israel would ‘save us the trouble of having to round them up.‘

There are many people who extol the virtues of All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten- except when it comes to politics, religion and the Middle East. In those areas, black is white and day is night. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good.

Avrech dryly points to the hypocrisy of those who must follow the fictional script that insulates them from realities even kindergarten age children can discern:

I’ll never forget how the NY Times “journalist” described the burning of the Gaza Synagogues:

“Fires and pillars of smoke climb into the sky.”

In other words, the fires started all by themselves. Spontaneous combustion. G-d forbid he should be accurate, tell the truth: the Arabs immediately set the Synagogues on fire. The “journalist” well knows that this is the action of barbarians — and the N.Y. Times, liberal/progressive, defends barbarians, enables barbarians. Thus, as the Israelis were expelled from their homes in Gaza, as Synagogues were consumed, the Arabs also set up their rocket launchers –

– this is known, children, as cause and effect.

And the rockets were immediately labeled by these same liberal/progressive journalists as: “crude, inaccurate, ineffective.”

This is not only the death of language, but language that defends terrorism and terrorists; language and concepts that enable terrorists to continue their attacks, and language that makes it easy for the terrorists to gradually escalate and improve their killing methodology. Here the bloodless language of murder gradually, seamlessly becomes respectable.

Avrech goes on to note,

…in true Stalin-speak, downgraded, rendered as “just a crude rocket” launched by “militants.” Note that according to the N.Y. Times and their fellow liberal/progressive there are no terrorists any longer on planet earth.

In Paris, they are distilled into “angry youths.” In Pakistan, those who behead are reimaged as, at worst, “shadowy militants.” In Israel, most often, terrorists are defanged into “security forces,” or “angry, unemployed militants.” Indeed, the Palestinians, who invented and perfected modern state Arab terrorism, have been given the gift of Orwellian double-speak on a truly colossal scale.

Here we have language that is complicit in the murder of innocent men, women and children.

Democracy and democratic values have always known forces that were intent on deconstructing or destroying the values and the freedom we have come to represent. There are now entire political and religious ideologies that have been predicated on vilifying us and our belief that freedom serves all of mankind. These has become their primary objectives and obsessions. Oppression has always been the tool of those who would sooner kill millions, if necessary, rather than see their people free.

Americans- and American values- are different. Although we are raised with the conscious understanding that those that came before us were giants, and that we are obligated to defend and build upon those principles and ideals of our Founding Fathers, we understand that we are not better than they. While we are endowed with the privilege of improving the gifts we have been given, we are not meant to reinterpret the essential freedoms that is our destiny, with each successive generation.

The moral genius of freedom is clear. Generations born into freedom with no collective memory of oppression, have been elevated and liberated from the bondage of fear, and as such, are even more beholden to the morals and obligations that bestowed that freedom.

Those who would usurp real freedom by identifying with and supporting those who by their own words, abhor freedom and would deprive entire nations, religions, cultures and societies of freedom (including our own), are of course, free to speak their minds. That said, it is also clear that those people are not deserving of the freedoms they have been blessed with. They are not equal to those who see freedom as universal force for good. They are in fact, like convicted felons who have made their choice to live outside the laws of common decency and the laws that bind our community together and make our community a safe place. They want to see the laws of the jungle imposed so that they can impose their will on others.

We are passionate about real freedom for ourselves and those who are desirous of freedom because freedom is the foundation of our beliefs. Free peoples are free to choose the things they believe in, without fear of violence or repercussion. As we have noted many times, when given the choice, people will always choose freedom over tyranny.

Freedom, real freedom, is the only ideology in the history of mankind, that wants to make the world a better place, a place where each and every one of us can author our own destiny, without stripping others of their rights. In a free society, we are free to exercise free will. We can choose to believe in God or we can exercise that free will and choose not to believe in God. In a free society, God takes care of His affairs. In a society that isn’t free, the tyranny du jour and their adherents and proponents take it upon themselves to handle God’s affairs for Him- usually in a way that serves the tyrants needs.

That is an undeniable truth. Tyranny does not support morality or rightiousness. We have said many times that

When nations that are that are led by or are under the influence of tyrants or dictators, attempt to justify those actions, we can rightly assume that justification is false. Tyrants and dictators do not make moral choices, because moral choices can only lead to the demise of the tyranny.

Anyone that comes to the defense of tyrannical regimes and their leaders, have themselves made a conscious choice to defend and stand by what is immoral. They themselves consciously adopt an immoral posture.

The opposite is true as well.

Freedom makes the world a more civilized and moral place. Notwithstanding the reality that much of the world do not care about those ideals, that truth about freedom is unassailable. Those that resist and resent our involvement in helping to secure freedom for others, may at times, seem to prevail, but in the end, even that is illusory. Evolution, political and otherwise, has always meant that man was empowered and free to reach greater heights, unencumbered by the tyranny of other men asserting their dominion over his freedom, property, ideas or beliefs.

There are really only two ways you can hurt someone. Take away their dignity or take away their hope. When a tyrannical regime oppresses a citizen, they take away dignity. When that oppressed citizen no longer believes that there are free and good people who care about him and others in his predicament, he is left without hope. To the victim of tyranny, hope takes the form of an average American, from an average place.

Of the almost 7 billion people on this planet, only 300 million are Americans. To put that in perspective, less than 5% of the population of this planet are Americans- and yet, the world is obsessed with our existence and what we represent- that freedom liberates not only physical existence, but unleashes limitless human potential and opportunity.

In the course of just over 200 years, we have provided the world with ideas, contributions and realities that are in the consciousness of every human being on the planet. Given our numbers and short history, we should not have had this profound influence on history and mankind- and yet, we have. The secret to our our successes and influence can be attributed to one powerful word: Freedom.

The notion that all men are created equal, is a biblical concept. It took America to make that a reality, in those political ideas called freedom and democracy. “They will beat their swords into plowshares…nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore,” can only come about as the result of freedom and democracy for all mankind. It is folly to believe that anything less will bring about peace. The one thing we have learned is that democracies don’t wage war with each other. They do not take up arms to settle disputes. The same cannot be said of tyrannies, now or in the past.

Avrech is right, of course- ‘the bloodless language of murder gradually, seamlessly becomes respectable.’

Those who offer support to regimes that use oppression and violence as a matter of course and ideologies, do not represent America or American values.

“Freedom Is The Oxygen Of The Soul”- Moshe Dayan

Mamacita: ‘I am not the teacher I once was’

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”- Socrates

From Mamacita:

I know that there are some teachers out there who feel that they are, in some lofty intellectual way, somehow superior to the students they teach…

…I admit that I had thoughts like that, sometimes. I was going to change the world, you see. I was going to inspire all of my students to greatness. I was going to make them all WANT to learn. In my classroom, they would all ENJOY learning. LOVE it. Want more, every day. All of them.

I have seen many horrors in our schools, but truth be told, the horrors were seldom the students…

I am now teaching the parents of students I had in class several years ago. These parents are, most of them, back in school because the only job they’ve ever had in all their lives is gone, and will never return… When I read their essays, and listen to their class participation, I am finding even more understanding about their lives, and many of the snotty, snobby comments I made 26 years ago are coming back to haunt me. I am ashamed of the teacher I once was..

Yesterday, one of my students, a really interesting and nice older lady, told me, as she was gathering her things to leave, that she’d gone back to school for her daughter.

“Oh,” I said. “Is your daughter in school, too?”

“My daughter was killed by a drunk driver eleven years ago…”

I have learned that ivory towers are meant to keep the people OUT, and that is, for a teacher, inexcusable. Our profession is the people, and that means we must learn as much about them as possible, not cloister ourselves away from them lest ‘something’ rub off. Good things can rub off, too.

Teachers are professionals, yes, but we are also service people. We are caregivers. And we deserve respect only when we earn it.

Read it all.

The Left’s State Of Denial And Todays Weather

The State of the Union post game pundits are plowing ahead at full speed, telling us what we heard or didn’t hear, what it all means or doesn’t mean. Each ‘professional’ pundit tells us that he or she are merely reporting that ‘Clearly, the American people‘ are tired of this, or really want that or are ‘sending a message.’

The Democrats want us to pull out of Iraq within 6 months. We can’t win the war, they say. We have placed ourselves in the middle of the civil war they say. The ideas, accusations and remarks are deliberately furious- and in fact, cloud reality. We wrote:

We have no more ‘lost’ the war in Iraq anymore than we ‘lost’ the war against Nazi Germany or Japan.Germany and Japan were devastated by war, but that war was a byproduct of the devastation wrought upon those countries by years of tyranny. When the Second World War ended, those nations chose to arise from the ashes and rebuild themselves into free and democratic societies that have become ‘a lamp unto the nations’ of the world.

If the Iraqis fail to learn from the devastation brought upon them by the tyranny of Saddam and the war that rid them of the hated tyrant, they will have made a very different choice than the Germans or Japanese.

America and the west cannot be held responsible for the moral toxicity that embraces tyranny over freedom.

Yes, there are insurgents- terrorists, really, in Iraq- and they commit deadly, horrific acts of terror. That said, they are not going to usurp the Iraqi people or government or the inevitable birth of democratic states emerging from the failed ‘Utopian’ societies and ‘People’s Paradise.’

The Democrats know we aren’t losing the war in Iraq. In fact, they know we are winning that war and they know the inevitable conclusion that will be reached can in no way be ambiguous. If the war ends in victory, defined by a popularly elected, functioning government in Iraq and the stirrings of democratic movements in the Middle East, the Democrats can kiss their chances of regaining the White House.

When it is all said and done and no matter how hard the left and their enablers, the MSM try, they cannot contain the ever expanding mercury of free markets, free ideas and free governments. The screams of ‘The sky is falling!’ are going to backfire on the left. Once again, for all the world to see, another agenda and ideology and regime of the left will fail- as it has every single time. The Soviet Union has collapsed, the Bader-Meinhof is no more, Arafat is barely remembered and Castro’s greatest legitimate accomplishment has been giving up cigars.

The Democrats have become mired in the quagmire of failure and deceit they have created that came about as the result of frustration. They have lost touch with Middle America and the values espoused by most Americans. No matter the election results, the Democrats know that the majority of Americans will not abandon their faith or espouse Hollywood values as if they were written on stone tablets by God- and Democrats know that. In Why The Democrats Are Finding Religion, we noted the words of Michael Lerner,

…Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that “looking out for number one” has become the common sense of our society, but they want a life that is about something more — a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want their lives to have meaning — and they respond to candidates who seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose…

Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are fundamentally stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist self righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their common humanity with those who voted for the Right…it is this spiritual lesson — that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth- a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived Democratic party. Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted for Bush could never be moved to care about the well being of anyone but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them into serious contenders.

…liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the Right, have been unable to engage these voters in a serious dialogue… the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life… …The hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep, in fact, that when they hear us in Tikkun talking this way they often can’t even hear what we are saying —- so they systematically mis-hear it and say that we are calling for the Left to take up the politics of the Right…

That the Democrats are grudgingly accepting that the vast majority of Americans have very different values than those of the noisy left would have you believe, underlies a certain truth- that they are capable of discerning reality (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had a politically shrewd ‘come to Jesus’ moment).

Sooner or later, the Iraqis will deal with the insurgents on their own and there will be a functioning, stable government in that country. Why? Because as we have noted, given the choice, people will always choose freedon over tyranny.

The war in Iraq is about another kind of Zionism. Not a Jewish Zionism, of course, but a moral one- and that is why the war is so bitterly fought and opposed, because of the truth that Zionism proved- that given the choice, a persecuted people will always choose freedom. It is that truth that the frightens so many people in the region. Given the choice, people will repudiate oppressive regimes. As the Zionists proved, even the most persecuted and tired of peoples, if given the choice, will repudiate regimes that offer nothing less than full freedom.

That is the truth that usurped the left and their fair weather allies in Congress, because with that truth, leftist credibility has been relegated to the dust bin of history.

Like opportunists before them, the left will be repudiated and reviled, because, like Joe McCarthy, they never gave a damn about America or real freedom. It was about their exercise of power- and the exercise to exorcise even nascent freedom from others. The left see only themselves of worthy of freedom. It matters little to them that millions have been been abandoned to the slavery of tyranny, FGM and ongoing genocide. That is the legacy of the left, for all to see, save themselves. They are trying to deny freedom to millions and they are failing

The proof is in the pudding. The citizens of those countries who lived under the Soviet shadow rejected communism and socialism outright. Once more, those who would sell human beings into bondage will be forever scorned.

The mighty ‘political analysts’ and proponents of the leftist ideologies are like 1950′s and 1960′s era weather forecasters, more often wrong than they are right. They have become irrelevant.

Weather forecasting is an inexact science, at best. It is also true that weather forecasting has become more precise over time. Certainly, technology has done much to make weather forecasting more accurate, but in fact, technology and experience have done much to enhance our understanding of weather phenomena.

Now, imagine a weather forecaster that was using 1950′s and 1960′s era technology and 1950′s and 1960′s understanding of weather and weather forecasting, standing in front of chalkboard (yes, that is how they did it back then), drawing, erasing and making smiley faces along the way.

That particular meteorologist would be regarded as an anachronism from the Middle Ages- quaint and funny. He or she might even be regarded with a touch of nostalgic fondness.

None of the ‘great victories for the people’ or prediction of People’s Paradises’ have come to pass. Neither have the predictions of imminent decline and scenarios of the great gloom and doom that were to engulf democratic and capitalist states. None of the political ideologies supported by the left have proved meritorious and none of the world political leaders endorsed by the left have a legacy of anything other than failure- and more often than not, a trail of dead bodies leading right up to their feet.

Nevertheless, the MSM dutifully reports on predictions of those schooled in 1960′s ideologies, today’s failed weather forecasters. Their predictions are given almost religious reverence, as if they were heralding the Second Coming. All this, despite an almost perfect track record of failed predictions.

When they predict rain, break out the tshirts and shorts and plan a BBQ.

As we noted, if the liberal democrat leadership were weather forecasters, they would be unceremoniously booted for incompetence- decades of incompetence- as the New York Times, et al, are at a loss as to why their influence is waning.

Dr Sanity, in The Left’s Last Chance In Iraq,

Actually, it is the political left’s last chance to ensure defeat in Iraq. That is their goal; it has always been their goal; and now they are quite desperate to achieve that goal. That is why all the stops have been pulled out in their reckless criticisms and defeatist rhetoric. Their neurotic glee at every American death is clearly palpable, because each death represents a marvelouos victory for their antiwar hysteria. This has been the case for the entire Iraq war, but the volume has been turned up to max on their voices of doom since they (mistakenly, I believe) appear to think that the results of the midterm elections are proof that America is buying into their agenda.

Of course they did not believe for a moment that America was buying into Bush when he soundly trounced them in the 2004 election–but consistency is not their strong suit.

You see, no matter what, the left MUST make sure that Bush–and America–lose in Iraq. The only catastrophic consequences they can visualise comes about if America–and Bush–are perceived to have succeeded. In that quite horrific scenario, they correctly understand that their ideology will truly be taken out will all the other 20th century trash.

Well, You can’t declare the losing team as winners, no matter how much you want your team to win. Sports fans understand that. Apparently news people have yet to learn that lesson. Until they do, expect the MSM to declare blizzards, even as the sun shines.

It’s About The Palestinians? Really?

So you think the ‘root cause’ of Middle East problems is the Israel Palestinian conflict? Do you believe the Arab world cares deeply about the Palestinians?

Think again.

BAGHDAD — Palestinians living in Iraq have been warned they will be killed by Shi’ite militias unless they leave the country immediately.

Iraqi police say the immigrants, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, are the target of a backlash by hard-line Shi’ites, including members of the Mahdi Army led by Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Yesterday, the United Nations refugee agency said more than two dozen Palestinians were seized by armed men wearing police uniforms in Baghdad. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said 17 Palestinians taken from a Baghdad house rented by the agency have apparently been released, but there were reports that another group of 13 Palestinians were seized in another part of Baghdad.

In the first case, witnesses said men dressed in Iraqi security force uniforms broke into the Palestinians’ apartments in the Hay el Nidal area of Baghdad, smashing doors and windows, UNHCR spokeswoman Astrid Van Genderen Stort said in Geneva.

“It is a very worrisome situation,” Reuters news agency quoted her as saying.

More than 600 Palestinians are believed to have died at the hands of Shi’ite militias since the war began in 2003, including at least 300 from the Baladiat area of Baghdad. Many were tortured with electric drills before they died.

Now the Shi’ite militias are stepping up their campaign to drive out Iraq’s 15,000 remaining Palestinians — less than half the estimated 40,000 living in the country at the start of the war, all of whom were welcomed by Saddam Hussein and provided with housing, money and free education.

Hundreds of Iraqis were forced to leave their homes to make way for the migrants, many of whom joined the ruling Ba’ath Party.

Sheik Mahmoud al-Hassani, a spokesman for the Mahdi Army, said the Palestinians had brought their suffering on themselves. He said Shi’ites believed the Palestinians were in league with Sunni extremists and al Qaeda.

“We are sure that all the Palestinians in Iraq are involved in killing the Shi’ite people and they have to pay the price now,” he said. “They lived off our blood under Saddam. We were hungry with no food and they were comfortable with full bellies. They should leave now, or they will have to pay.”

Kareem Zakia, a 61-year-old Palestinian, said his son, Yeha Ahmed, was kidnapped and killed in the Karada area of Baghdad two weeks ago.

“The kidnappers called me and told me that they had taken my son because he came from Palestine and all the Palestinians support the Sunni terrorists. I found my son’s body the next day with many holes in his belly made by a drill,” he said.

Mr. Zakia told his two other sons to leave with his wife and two daughters, but neighboring Jordan refused to allow them to cross the border — as it has with many Palestinians trying to flee Iraq.

Ahmed Mahmood, 26, a Palestinian in Baladiat, said he had paid a ransom of nearly $6,000 to free his brother, Murad, 38.

The kidnappers in Sadr City, a Shi’ite area of Baghdad, told him where to collect his brother, but he arrived to find his brother had been killed.

“We found him dead with signs of torture on his body,” Mr. Mahmood said. “They called us the next day and said, ‘We killed your brother because all the Palestinians in Iraq love Saddam Hussein and this is what will happen to you and all your families.’ “

Capt. Sary Farhan, a police spokesman, said people had been arrested for the killings but later released.

“All these criminals belong to Shi’ite militias and were released a few days after. They have strong backing in the government,” he said.

The Iraqi interior ministry said 7,700 police officers have been fired for suspected membership in death squads. Of those, 665 are in jail awaiting trial.

Gethin Chamberlain in London contributed to this article.

Learning To Love The Bomb And Other Iranian Cultural Oddities

The latest Sanity Squad podcast is up.

As soon as the transcript is translated into Farsi, the mullahs will go into a state catatonic shock. The kaffir therapists of the Sanity Squad see right through the deceit and dysfunction that have become the hallmarks of the current Iranian regime.

This week, we discuss the much talked about Benny Morris essay, This Holocaust Will be Different, published in the Jerusalem Post.

The Iranian regime that is seeking nuclear weapons is the same regime that has enlisted ‘40,000 trained suicide bombers‘, ready to attack American, British and western interests. It is safe to say that a regime that would encourage, solicit, train and glorify 40,000 suicide bombers to attack civilian targets, among others, would have no trouble justifying the use of nuclear weapons. Like delusional religious fanatics everywhere, the Iranian mullahs believe that they alone are entitled for God.

This week, Dr Sanity, Neo-necon, Shrinkwrapped and ourselves are a bit more somber than usual. Our discussion is serious, thoughtful and relevant.

By way of background, we discussed the matter more fully in our post, Another Perfect Storm.