Hogging all the Voltaires

Girls born in the Islamic protectorate of Mogadishu these days will be genitally mutilated, if they live long enough. They will be placed in an Islamic arranged marriage and will check the box on the marriage form that says “virgin.” Their parents, and later their spouse, will beat them. They will submit to Allah. Boys will study the Koran. They will be taught to hate Jews and apostates. If they don’t submit they will face Islamic punishment. This, like everything in lawless Somalia, is all about Islam.

Or is it? “This is all about the money,” NY Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman said about Somali piracy. “And I’ve interviewed a number of pirates, and they’ve told me that straightforwardly. They said this isn’t about politics, this isn’t about religion, this isn’t about any ‘beef’ that we have with anybody out there. This is about money. This is a way to earn income in a state where the economy is in complete tatters.”

Keep moving folks, no jihad to see here. Just a few entrepreneurs with AK47s. Let Gettleman explain: “That’s just what you see on the surface. But behind that are pretty sophisticated, pretty intelligent people, that have figured out a way to exploit the anarchic system to make money, and make a lot of money.”

Maybe I’ve become too idealistic in my post-graduate day, but don’t Somalis deserve more than Gettleman’s platitudes? Behind the chaos there are pitifully few sophisticated and intelligent people. Behind the screams there is Islam. By making excuses for Islamist society, Gettleman helps perpetuate it. Somalis don’t need that. The best humanitarian aid we can offer disasters like Somalia is our support for Enlightenment values.

Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, has articulated support for an Islamic Enlightenment, but has been jeered by multiculturalists in Gettleman-esque denial. Hirsi Ali fled an arranged marriage in Somalia, took Dutch citizenship, and became a women’s rights advocate as a Dutch parliamentarian. Most memorably, she co-created a short film in 2004 about the subjugation of women in Islam. A terrorist shot her co-creator off his bike in public, nearly decapitaded him, and stabbed a jihad note in his chest warning Hirsi Ali would be next. She has had to live with bodyguards ever since.

Hirsi Ali’s case against Somalia’s Islamic culture goes beyond its inherent injustices, such as husbands whipping their wives for disobedience. It breeds poverty, she argues. “Allah predestines all, and life on earth is simply a waiting room for the Hereafter. Does that belief have no link to the fatalism that so often reinforces poverty?”

Indeed, it would be a surprise if a society mesmerized by the life of an illiterate warlord who fell in love with his friend’s six year-old daughter would be prosperous. Hirsi Ali calls the Koran – the focus of Somali life – a “historical record, written by humans…And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.” Somalis don’t “exploit” this “system,” as Gettleman puts it. It exploits them.

So what is the alternative? Hirsi Ali is sounds remarkably like Thomas Paine in her support for individual rights, instead of submission to the traditions of the dead or the demands of the eternal. Western society works better because “life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state.” Paine would agree: “Submission is wholly a vassalage term, repugnant to the dignity of freedom, and an echo of the language used at the [Norman] Conquest…And as Government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.”

Those that would deny Somalia the chance for Enlightenment call Hirsi Ali racist and Islamophobic. “Tell me,” she replies, “is freedom then only for white people?” As Paine said, just because one generation is “disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free.”

It’s so easy to spit on Enlightenment values when we’ve come to take them for granted. But how dare we deny them to those living in submission to the tyrannical infallibility of the Prophet? asks Hirsi Ali:

Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don’t deny us the right to have our
Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look how we are all
fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into
buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in
the Dark Ages.

The West broke free from the backward superstitions of the Catholic Church. The Japanese “leapfrogged” the Enlightenment. Is it compassion to deny this to Muslims?

A German soldier taken prisoner in the Revolutionary War told Paine “Ah! America is a fine free country, it is worth the people’s fighting for; I know the difference by knowing my own; in my country, if the prince says eat straw, we eat straw.” Perhaps the fundamental difference between Somalia and America eludes Gettleman, but Hirsi Ali knows it all too well.

Multiculturalism: A DHS-caused disaster

When Luther College celebrated an anti-Iraq War “art” exhibit last year featuring a 6 x 6 foot swastika made up of George W. Bush faces, I asked columnist Mark Steyn for his take. He compared it to the irony of the “9/11 was an inside job” bumper stickers: “If the government is capable of pulling that off, don’t you think they’re capable of killing the guy who had the bumper stickers printed?”

Fatuous bureaucratic agencies struggling to justify their existence should be held to Steyn’s sense-of-proportion test. If the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) really feared that “rightwing extremists” won recruits by preying on the “alienation” and “antigovernment” sentiment of moderate rightwingers, don’t you think it'd be wise not to publish a report on rightwing extremism that alienates moderate rightwingers and builds antigovernment sentiment? And if, in contrast, DHS wasn’t terrified of offending moderate Muslims into radicalization, don’t you think it would just call radical Islamists, “radical Islamists,” as it were?

Irony abounds. DHS’s recent report humiliates the rightwingers it fears are so susceptible to radicalization by including in its definition of extremists “individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” At the same time, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano calls Radical Islam “a man-caused disaster” (fitting DHS’s 2008 push to replace the phrase “Radical Islam” with something unoffensive to Muslims, like “sectarian cult”), testifying to DHS’s fear of the violent rage of offended Muslims.

So now global warming’s hegemony as the great “man-caused disaster” has competition, which might, in a demented turn, anger and alienate the leftwing extremists. As the founder of “Air, Trees, Water, Animals” warned in a 1987 interview:

Why don’t you tell them what’s really going on? Why don’t you tell them the water’s so bad the fish can’t live in it? Why don’t you tell them that the polar caps are melting because they created so much heat with this machine? The truth is, simply, the planet earth is dying.

Such a visionary, that Charles Manson. And recall the record of leftwing extremists in times of economic woes: Perón in Argentina, Castro in Cuba, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, Stalin in Russia, even Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (their totalitarian religiosity puts them on the far left). Indeed, the double punch of the growing enviro-craze and a recession play particularly well to leftwing extremism.

DHS's "rightwing extremists" will find it harder to compete with Radical Islam for notoriety. For when it comes to being radically rightwing, Islamists put in the extra jihad. Your average rightwing misogynist expects his woman to take his last name and stay in the kitchen. Islamists do the same, plus they behead their wives for attempting divorce (see recent beheader Muzzamil Hassan, founder of an understand-Islam-before-you-judge TV program. Uh, yeah, I understand).

Your average rightwing extremist doesn’t believe in evolution. Neither does an Islamist, except when it comes to the Jews descending from monkeys. Your average rightwing extremist is a bigot. The entire Arab world swelters in Islamist bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexist superstition. Moderation in Islamist Somalia is refraining from beating your daughter when she expresses horror at your dictatorial choice of a suitor to marry her and “unsew” what was mutilated and sewn up when the girl was five. Who is naïve enough to say these traditions end at Ellis Island?

Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison, tried to speak at a Fatah-Hamas peace rally last January on the steps of the St. Paul Capitol building, but Hamas ralliers – wildly burning an Israeli flag – brought his speech to an end with boos. An Israeli was in the crowd, but the Hamas chapter leader said “Get the hell out of here you little fa***t.”

I think you get the general tenor of this. It’s anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox. And since I can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing, I’ll toss it back to you.

Er, wait, that was CNN’s response to those “despicable” tea parties, not to the homo-hating, flag-burning, fear-mongering rally in St. Paul.

Surely someone in Minnesota cares that the only American suicide-bomber, young Shirwa Ahmed from Minneapolis, was the worst kind of rightwing extremist: an Islamist. Or that 35 training camps around the US are run by the worst kind of rightwing group: the Islamist Jamaat al-Fuqra, responsible for the Hotel Rajneesh bombing and murder of Danny Pearl. Or that rightwing families in Minneapolis allow girls to play basketball only when the boys aren’t around, in accordance with their interpretation of one of the most powerful guides to rightwing extremism: the Koran.

In Saudi Arabia (talk about “hatred of particular religious groups,” try being Jewish there) women get beaten for walking to the store without a man. And in Somalia (talk about “antigovernment”) there’s no government for girls to turn to when they get raped– it’s their fault for being stupid. Ah, Multiculturalism. Such seductive charm, even the stiffs at DHS fall under its spell.

Guilty As Charged

Yet another rotten fruit of the Bush administration hits the headlines. This little bit from Homeland Security (surely a misnomer) is the most outrageous, totalitarian, festering pile of rubble to be puked out of Washington. I have been meaning to publicly howl about the authoritarian “Fairness Doctrine” but this really tops the list for government over-stepping their bounds.

The Department of Homeland Security, originally created to integrate security efforts when fighting terrorism, has now targeted dissenting political opinions as egregious violations against the will of the state. Their latest report is really quite astounding. I have no problem with the state enforcing the laws among those who perpetrate terror and violence or plan to do so. But apparently in today’s U.S.A., thinking is enough to be a terrorist.

If you oppose the following, you are an enemy of the state: abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, and more restrictive gun laws. The report specifically points out one group as potential threats: not Islamists, not anarchists, but the veterans of the United States military. What has become of this nation? When peacefully opposing political laws along and coming home from war make a man a threat, the DHS ought to be ashamed.

We seem to be developing a pattern of political censorship. It started with “hate speech”. People even as old as I have grown up in a world where simply saying a phrase can get you kicked out of public school. People with legitimate arguments and reasonable opinions have been shouted down. You don’t fancy homosexuality as a lifestyle congruent with your moral tastes? BIGOT! HATER! Find the slaying of the unborn unpalatable? ANTI-CHOICE! These are the refrains I’ve heard my entire life.

Enter the “Fairness Doctrine”, a measure offering the government the power to manipulate and dictate what goes on privately owned radio stations. Apparently the American people aren’t savvy enough to decide what they like on the radio; they need some policy wonk in D.C. to tell you what you like, they’ll decide what’s fair, just trust them, they’ll be honest. Sick to your stomach yet? This is the type of censorship that runs contrary to what makes America, uh, well, American!

The party of free speech and “open-mindedness” seems only to push those measures as far as you walk in stride to their goose-step. And so when it comes to it, they turn out to be remarkably close minded. They’re willing to shout down, humiliate, and ultimately silence any dissent. And just remember, you’re only close minded if you disagree with them.

Now the icing on the cake. According to Janet Napolitano’s little kingdom of overpaid analysts and fear instigators: rational political dissent is enough to suspect the makings of a domestic terrorist. This is the modus operandi of the totalitarian state. It is necessary for the people in power to cast those who dissent as threats. It is the only way to gain the tacit cooperation of otherwise peaceful people.

I don’t want to sound too shrill here. We’re not in “1984”, at least not yet. If we were in such dire circumstances, you wouldn’t be reading this blog. My compatriots and I would on our merry way to the gulag for re-education. But this sickens me. Where does it stop? I’m fed up. I’ve had enough. And if the DHS says political dissent is a crime, I’m guilty as charged.

If our American heritage is doomed to fail; if reason, liberty, and justice aren’t going to fall by the wayside, let’s at least not let them depart with a whisper.

UFC 97: A Marine gets his chance

Here are my UFC predictions for tonight's UFC 97:

Anderson "The Spider" Silva over Thales Leites.

Chuck Liddell over Mauricio Rua

Brian Stann will beat Krzysztof Soszynski

Anderson Silva dominates in the same fashion as GSP. Until he loses-or goes up in weight to fight some heavier beast, it'd be stupid to pick against him, so I won't.

Questions continue to surface about Liddell's retirement plans. If he loses this fight, it may be time to get serious about them. But, I don't see him losing.

Brian Stann, a Silver Star recipient, will return to the octagon tonight after a foot injury kept him out of his original UFC debut. Stann was a Marine infantry officer who trained at the same school I'm at right now. I think he will win this fight if he can keep it a stand up fight. Stann's ground game has not been seen much due to his devistating punching ability. I've been assured by Marines here that have trained with him that his ground game is good too. After destroying a lot of men in the WEC with his striking ability, tonight may be the night we see if his ground game is up for the challenge.

Et tu, Brute?

Betrayal is afoot. The President and his followers are at odds. The people are restless and angry at government. And if we're going to see better days, the opposition needs to step up start providing answers to a hungry and disillusioned public.

Matt Taibbi's column in Rolling Stone along with a piece in The Atlantic, May 2009 by Simon Johnson (former chief economist at the IMF) are prime examples. In their respective articles, Taibbi and Johnson capture the conventional wisdom regarding the bailouts and the cozy relationship between Wall Street and D.C.

Taibbi's column (if you use the term liberally, it was more of a rant) essentially bemoans his observation that Wall Street controls politicians. His fluency in finance jargon like “collateralized debt obligation”, “credit default swaps” and “debt instruments” is notable.

On the other hand, his style reeks of an over-coddled latte-sipper whose rigorous college career was filled with getting baked, too much disc golf, reading gonzo journalism and hyper-erotic, violent novels that pass for literature at modern university. Considering the number of extra-topical shots he takes at frat boys, apparently he hasn't forgiven them for the wedgies and getting the attention of the pretty girls on campus. Johnson's piece is much more respectable, but equally as flawed.

Don't mistake my effort here, as much I love to lambaste and humiliate hapless morons, both articles have some measure of merit. Let's take a look.

To their credit, both writers have no taste for the bailout mentality. They seem equally disgusted as I am at the cozy relationship between high finance execs and the government. I couldn't agree more with the assessments on these issues. Publicizing what should be private losses through handouts is both unjust and it enables future bad decisions. There are deleterious effects to the government getting in bed with business, both sides equally to blame. Well, not entirely; apparently Hank Paulson got pushy and some banks were told they would be accepting government dollars, like it or not.

Their ideas thus far seem to square well with people from both sides of the political spectrum. They don't like government and business getting too friendly, and rightfully so. But the compliments must cease. Both Taibbi and Johnson misdiagnose the symptoms of a sick economy and subsequently write a faulty prescription.

Both writers argue that the cause of our financial woes is greed, lack of regulation, and dishonesty. It is the fault of private enterprise and their perpetual quest for profit that has toppled our economy and thus kicked the proletariat while they were down.

They indict the entire financial industry on counts of writing bad mortgages, leveraging their portfolios, and general carelessness. If those greedy bankers hadn't smugly outmaneuvered government and cared more about social responsibility we wouldn't be in the shape we're in. This, of course, is a pseudo-Marxist fantasy built on the myth that free markets are fundamentally flawed (both morally and economically).

The question that most people seem to be ignoring is: "what gave reason to make bad such decisions?" The easy answer is that the nation’s financiers were greedy and reckless. That certainly played a role in the downfall. However, it truly was the government that enabled, encouraged, and reinforced the bad decisions leading up to the crisis at hand.

We’re all mad at the same thing: the economy is suffering and government is out of touch, unaccountable, reckless, and wasteful. Now, the trick is to remind people that it was the government, not the market that pushed us into this mess in the first place. Even if it was an outright failure of the market, markets correct themselves. Government does not. It’s up to the people to do that. The asinine policies of the government brought us to where we are today, so let’s clean house (the House, that is, and the Senate while we’re at it).

The government cultivated conditions in which I will argue directly lead the economy into its current state of turmoil. I’ll post them up here in a few days; I don’t want this piece to get too long.

Rather, I just want to say that even the Marxist, latte-sipping, tree-hugging crowd is mad as hell at the government. That’s something conservatives and libertarians need to embrace. It’s time we offer a genuine alternative to the “business as usual” Washington, D.C. model. For a long time those who think like myself have been the party “that isn’t as bad as the Democrats”. Both parties have been feeding an overgrown, invasive, corrupt, and defective monster. Now is the time to harvest the anger and frustration and kill the beast.

Obama promised change, tax cuts, pacifism, etc. His hollow promises and subsequent policies to achieve such plans have left the American public incensed. It seems to me that when IMF elites and Rolling Stone berate policies of likely the most socialist president in history, perhaps there’s something people don’t like about socialism.

There has been a betrayal. Obama sold out his followers when he doubled down on the mistakes of the Bush administration. His Treasury is in bed with business, his Fed is handing out easy money, and his budget is outrageous. And in turn his followers will abandon him. I always loved a story of treachery and betrayal.

Maybe there is hope for change I can believe in after all.

Singled Out: Hold your applause

If Iowa’s judiciary had wanted to cut the litigation costs of last week’s four-years-in-the-making gay marriage decision, it might have preempted opening arguments with a few questions and cautions a la DH Lawrence, poet of un-conformist relationship ideals.

“But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?” asks Lawrence’s Ursula point-blank. And later Rupert, who finds the “exclusive alliance” of “hot narrow intimacy between man and wife” most repulsive: “You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal.”

Well when you put it that way...

But government lacks such cost-cutting expertise, so the six gay couples persisted on having their day in court, and now can marry.

Remember, what’s relevant here is not whether you agree politically with gay marriage (I disagree with both gay and straight rent-seeking), but whether Iowa’s Supreme Court correctly interpreted Iowa’s Equal Protection Clause (EPC). For if it has overstepped its bounds, then the Imperial Judiciary lives, and the democratic institutions that bind American society together float on whims that may shift to scourge you next time.

The plaintiffs made two separate arguments for gay marriage: One, gay marriage is a fundamental right –just down-right constitutionally fundamental, you know, like, er, sodomy, according to a 2003 ruling. And two, allowing straight marriage without gay marriage violates the EPC. The court rejected # 1 and took on # 2.

Just like the federal EPC, Iowa’s EPC prohibits discriminating against one class in a situation similar to another given the legitimate purpose of the law. For example, 20-yearolds and 21-yearolds are in different situations under the law when it comes to purchasing alcohol. A bartender can discriminate between them because the legislature found a “rational basis” to legitimize this age discrimination (if we must call denying a 20-yearold Iraq War hero a Premium Light “rational”). However, since 21 and 71-yearolds are in similar situations given the purpose of the law, the bartender must serve both indiscriminately.

In the Iowa case, gay couples see themselves as the 20-yearold Iraq war hero. Typically the burden is on the plaintiff to prove why there was no “rational basis” for the original law (the straight marriage law defends itself as providing a centuries-old stable framework for procreation and childrearing; perhaps it doesn’t persuade me, but a rational person could agree). But Iowa decided that gays are a special case that requires raising the standard from “rational basis” to “intermediate scrutiny.” The gay couples brought in evidence that children raised without both a mother and father would turn out just fine, and…game set!

There are a few precedents to savor here. I am a single man – the forgotten man, to use the phrase of New Deal critic Amity Shlaes – forced to pay for the government-mandated benefits (i.e. tax breaks and state-provided health insurance sharing) of this new block of rent-seekers. And if the court is right in maternally lamenting that “perhaps the ultimate disadvantage expressed in the testimony of the plaintiffs is the inability to obtain for themselves and for their children the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage,” (for what good is the state if it doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves?) then how am I to feel when the state is affirming everyone else’s life choices but not mine?

Furthermore, if the court accepts the plaintiffs’ argument that having both a mother and father figure is unnecessary for child rearing, then what is the state’s rational purpose in blessing gay couples with special benefits, but not single-parent families? Alas, being single is the new gay.

Finally, squint and read one of the court’s ominous side notes to a soliloquy on the powerlessness of gay people: “By one measure—occupation of public office—the political power of racial minorities is unbounded in this country today. This fact was on display January 20, 2009, when Barack H. Obama, the African-American son of a native Kenyan, was inaugurated as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America” (italics mine). I don’t know what the status of affirmative action is in Iowa, but this case certainly puts it on shaky grounds.

So rejoice at the political winds if you must, but singles, blacks, 20-yearold Iraq vets, and lovers of federalism have heard better news.

Star Tribune asleep at the helm

Headline at the New York Time's Web site: "Defying World, North Koreans Launch Rocket."

LA Times: "Obama condemns North Korea's Launch."

Fox News: "Defiant Act"

London Times: "North Korea 'must be punished' after rocket launch"


And today's online Star Tribune headline:

"Obama outlines sweeping goal of nuclear-free world"

The Star Tribune is clearly taking this story from another angle.