Afghanistan Comes to London

After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.”

Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.

Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.

In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city. 

Woolwich Common, adjacent to the area where the attack too place, is described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated in that same dreadful decade. 

Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside. 

Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.

The two men who butchered a British soldier are believed to be Somalis. Last year it was reported that dozens of Muslims in the UK were being trained to fight for Al Qaeda in Somalia. There were concerns over what those men would do once they returned to the United Kingdom. 

Al-Shabaab, the local Al Qaeda franchise, subsists on tens of thousands of pounds from the hundreds of thousands of Somali settlers living in the United Kingdom. In 2012, Al-Shabaab terrorists had threatened a terrorist attack against the UK, saying, “The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined.” 

That nightmare still looms. It is the nightmare of the savage wars of the Muslim world being exported to the United Kingdom.

Last year, Shabaaz Hussain was sentenced to five years in jail in Woolwich Crown Court for his fundraising activities on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Five years earlier, Osama bin London and his followers had been sentenced at that same court for the 21/7 plot which attempted to set off bombs in a number of London Underground stations.  The majority of Bin London’s followers were African immigrants. 

Ramzi Mohammed, a Somali, turned to face a young mother with a baby in her stroller before trying to detonate his bomb. 

Muslim fighters have torn Somalia apart. And importing 200,000 of them into the United Kingdom is beginning to have the same effect. There are an estimated 70,000 Somalis in Greater London. That makes London the 12^th largest city in Somalia. Nearly 2 percent of Somalia now lives in the UK.

80 percent of Somalis in the UK live in public housing. They have the lowest employment rate of every immigrant group in the country. And within four years, they had managed to rack up over ten thousand arrests. Every effort to integrate them has failed. Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have become little Mogadishus.

The Somalis are not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all these cases. This is a culture of violence.

Islam sanctifies that culture of violence. It takes tribal killings and endows them with the status of a religious duty. Jihad is simply gang warfare, no different than the kind practiced by the Woolwich Manz, given theological meaning. Men have been butchering other men with machetes throughout Africa. But when a Muslim mutilates a British soldier with a machete, then he is engaging in a religious ritual.

This is no clash of civilizations because there is hardly anything resembling civilization on the other side. Islam began with a gang raiding caravans. It now persists in gangs raiding across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. 

What happened near Woolwich Commons would not have been considered extraordinary in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. It is only extraordinary because it has been a long time since rampaging Vikings were disemboweling the locals. It is only extraordinary because the nation is hobbled by the assumptions of civilization. And one of those basic assumptions is that murderers with red hands will not carry out beheadings in your streets.

The United Kingdom has become a civilized place. Unfortunately its practice of importing savages makes that civilization of climbing roses and social progress unsustainable. If you import millions of people who follow a religion that sanctifies tribal violence, then you must expect tribal violence to tear apart what you have built. And if you do not wish that to happen, then you must close the gates on the barbarians.

There is no need to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not when they are already living in London in public housing and screeching diatribes about the coming conquest while treating themselves to all the luxuries of the welfare state. And as their numbers grow, ignoring them will become impossible.

The butchers who perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen. They wanted to break through the media boycott to tell the peoples of the United Kingdom that they were being murdered in the name of Islam. The story is already being met with the usual cognitive dissonance and being swept under the rug, but that just means that the next bunch will try even harder to convey the message that the war is here.

The immediate shift to focus on the backlash that is somehow never nearly as bad as the thing it is lashing back at, the waves of meaningless condemnations from Muslim leaders who say one thing at press conferences and another in their mosques and the deployment of the sickening litany of "tiny minority of extremists" rhetoric are all delaying tactics. But they can only delay for so long.

Every Muslim country is either in a state of oppression or a state of war. Does any European country that populates its cities and towns with Muslims really believe that it can escape the inevitable trajectory of this cultural history? The Arab Spring isn't only a lesson in the futility of trying to combine popular elections with human rights in the Middle East. Ir's a lesson in the hopelessness of expecting those same failures to work any better when cultures that choose tyranny over freedom migrate to the United Kingdom or the United States.

The only thing standing between the United Kingdom and Somalia, Pakistan, Syria and a dozen other charming places like these is another two decades of immigration. And long before the irreversible demographic turning point is reached, life in the new Cool Britain will be flavored with regional events like public beheadings, honor killings and religious bombings.

There is no use in proposing that the United Kingdom withdraw from Afghanistan only to come home to another Afghanistan.

Partisan Nation

The use of the IRS to target conservative groups should be the least surprising development in years. Not only does that sort of thing date back to Clinton and JFK, both of whom unleashed the IRS on their enemies, not to mention Nixon who never managed to pull off the things that JFK grinned, did and got away with, but there was no reason for not to do it.

The two reasons not to sic the IRS on your enemies are decency and the law. Is there anything in Obama's career, including his treatment of fellow Democrats, to suggest that he cares for either one?

The man in the White House clawed his way to power by stabbing his mentor in the back, leaking the divorce records of his political opponents and throwing out the votes of Democrats in Florida and Michigan to claim the nomination.

And he was just getting started.

In the last election, Obama urged voters to punish our "enemies". It was a window into the mindset of a man who moans and groans about partisan politics, but talks like Huey Long when he gets in front of the right audience.

But these days the description is fairly apt. Who was the last president that both sides could agree was an okay sort of guy or something less than the devil incarnate? The answer might be George H. W. Bush, who was pilloried for being an out of touch rich guy, but really not all that bad when you think about it. And that means we have to go back two decades to find a president that the other side didn't think should be put on an ice floe and pushed out to sea.

And before Bush I, we would have to go back all the way to the Eisenhower or Truman era. Politics was never nice. It was often very nasty indeed. But this isn't the petty infighting of the political class anymore. We're not talking about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr shooting it out or Eleanor Roosevelt driving a car with a teapot on its roof behind Theodore Roosevelt Jr to keep him away from the job that would eventually go to her husband. This is a partisan politics born out of ideology.

The old politics sought a status quo that could be tweaked to favor one side or interest. The new ideological politics seek a fundamental transformation that will entirely destroy the status quo and eventually tear out every element, overturn every trace of what was and replace it with what should be. Ideological partisanship of this stripe is not concerned with the stability of the system. It is not worried about burning bridges because it believes all the bridges will have to be burned anyway.

There is a limit to what any political movement can do out of greed or personal vendettas in a democracy, but there is no limit to what it can do when it combines these with a political ideology whose ends justify all means. There is nothing that it will not do because it is unconcerned with the long term consequences of its actions, only with the short term results. It has no long term investment in the existing system which it intends to destroy.

Corrupt ideologies treat men with no decency as valuable assets. Their lack of scruples proves their willingness to put ideology over all mores and norms. The more extreme the ideology, the fewer limits it accepts on its freedom of action against its enemies and the more such actions come to seem natural. And then why not punish your enemies by using the full force of government against them?

The practical reason for not using government agencies to repress your opposition in a democracy was that they might do the same thing to you. But the mobilization of the bureaucracy as an arm of the left has made that fear largely irrelevant. Using the IRS to target Democrats would be dangerous business for a Republican. And the same would go for every other Federal agency whose appointees may be loosely conservative, but oversee organizations stuffed full of liberals and union members.

There is no such deterrent on the other side. And the only remaining deterrent, the fear of public exposure was largely nullified by the media. The impression was that Obama Inc. could do anything it pleased and get away with it. And so it did.

A system of checks and balances only works if the participants are bound by some higher code than ideology. Ethics is no longer a defining code. Neither is Americanism or democracy or any of the other things that politicians made speeches about back in the 19th and 20th. The infrastructure of the left has eclipsed all other bonds and connections. It has collective goals and a power structure that runs through public and private organizations mobilized for a common purpose.

That renders the old rules mostly meaningless. Suggestions to be considered, if the various organs, the oversight groups, the bureaucracies and the media are in the mood. And if they are, then they may pay a little attention to the latest abuse of power. If they're not, they won't.

It's easy to compare Obama to Nixon, but the comparison is wrong. Nixon had lost faith in the entire idea of rules. He had floundered in a corrupt system for so long that he had to sacrifice everything he believed in to get ahead only to still be hemmed in on all sides. Obama never believed in rules and never compromised on anything except on a temporary basis. Nixon was angry, but Obama is blithe.

It's not a post-rules world. But it's a world where force determines which rules apply to whom.

Obama will illegally and unilaterally impose rules and laws on others, but he won't follow any rules or laws, even those in the Constitution. It's tyranny, but handled with a post-everything flair as if abuse of power is a dot com thing like not having a business model. Using the IRS to suppress rival political organizations is treated like one of those new data management techniques. Just another clever out-of-the-box tool in a game of everything goes.

And why shouldn't everything go?

Government isn't really an institution anymore, it's a toolset. If you break the tools, they can be replaced. Fire some people, hire consultants to rebrand or rename an entire agency and then you're back in business. History doesn't matter. Neither does the public trust. Everything exists only to fulfill the goals of the moment.

In the old politics, maintaining the institutions of government was the greater goal. In the new politics, government is a means to an end. The end may still be government, but it isn't a thing of institutions, but of ideologues. It doesn't matter whether it's 200 years or 200 minutes old. The 200 minutes old one is more likely to be up on the latest trends in nudging people into the right corners.

Technocrat ideologues don't value existing institutions and the left justifies its existence by destroying whatever exists in the name of reform.

Forward! means that are constantly moving ahead without looking back, except when it comes time to blame some current shortcoming on George W. Bush and his evil regime. It means that we are constantly destroying in the name of building. Everything must go so it can be remade in the more perfect image of the Harvard professors who know just how to do everything even if they have never done a thing in their life.

Obama is not a creature of the old partisan politics of a balance of power. He prefers imbalances. He chooses chaos. By exercising power he destroys and in his ideological sphere, that destruction is creative. Destroying health care will usher in national health care. Destroying public trust in government will usher in an even more oppressive government.

There is nothing American about the new partisan politics. They are purely Post-American, a breath of hot air from the coming system that will have no rules except power and no law except force. And this game is one in which the lack of a binding ideology is fatal.

To assume that your opponents have any decency, as the Republicans habitually do, is to be left behind in Politics 1.0. In Politics 2.0, the utter lack of decency is proof of integrity. To truly believe, you must have no ethics. To truly care about people, the environment, little children in the ghetto, polar bears, recycled rubber shoes, corporate welfare and LGBT workplaces, you must not have any standards when it comes to what you do.

In Partisan Nation, you would use the IRS against your enemies because it's there. And what else is it good for except reminding you that the taxpayers don't have enough money to cover a new light rail system across the country or free bikes for all? In Partisan Nation, trust doesn't matter because the default assumption is that everyone can be lied to non-stop or barraged with so much propaganda that they will do what they are supposed to. In Partisan Nation, America doesn't matter, winning does.

The Obama-Media War

Revolutions are rarely undone from the outside. Mostly they come apart from the inside as the forty thieves descend into petty squabbling over the loot.

The loot comes in different forms, but at its core it is always power. It may be the power to kill or to steal. It may be the power to claim a nice piece of real estate or to send a million people off to their deaths. The scale of it will occupy historians and shock the people of the future who leaf through the history books and walk through the silent museums, but it is all of one piece. The purpose of power, as a fellow in a little book by George Orwell once said, is power.

The quarrel between Obama and the Media is largely a lovers' quarrel, but the love is only there on one side. The media made Obama what he is. But what he is, among many other things, is a control freak spawned by a political ideology that distrusts everyone and consolidates power at all cost.

The media loved Obama, but it discovered early on that he did not love it back. Instead of basking in the adoration of the Candy Crowleys and the Anderson Coopers and the massive corporate machines behind them, the love child of every liberal fantasy shut them out, rigidly controlled their access and ruthlessly punished unauthorized conversations with the press.

The media had made Obama into a tin god, but were constantly suspected of heresy. Instead of being rewarded for their loyalty, they were kept at arm's length.

Obama Inc. knew that their biggest asset was the narrative. A close study of Obama's qualifications or accomplishments would have given no conceivable reason for voting for him. The only thing he brought to the table was race and even in this he was less qualified than most of the black men who had run for president. 

The narrative was the dearest treasure of Obama Inc. It was the one thing that its cronies protected. The economy could tank, wars could be lost and an asteroid could smack into the Pacific Ocean and none of it mattered nearly as much as the golden narrative. They didn't trust anyone with it including the media.

The media these days doesn't have much. Its numbers are bad in every medium from the tube to the inky pages of newsprint to the crackling AM radio waves. It isn't very profitable. Often it's a dead weight. But it wields a great deal of institutional power. The New York Times and CNN may both be dogs when it comes to the balance sheets, but owning either one gives you an impressive amount of heft in the national dialogue; though not as much as working for one of them does.

Power is all that the media has. Its power is projected in a fairly narrow circle. Fewer people are reading, watching and listening to it, so its circle becomes more incestuous. Everyone has learned to act like a member of the D.C. press corps, interpreting events through the lens of old West Wing episodes. The resulting noise reaches fewer people, but helps form the shaky consensus on which the institutional power of the media stands.

In its dying hour, the media used that power to ensure the double coronation of a corrupt Chicago politician with a facility for mimicking speech patterns. And that politician rewarded it by trying to bypass it and set up his own media.

Obama's vision of the proper place of the media isn't just at his feet, but under his control. Instead of dealing with the media, he has tried to cut it out of the loop by putting a larger emphasis on social media and developing narratives through think-tanks and media influencing groups. It was a power struggle that the media was initially baffled by. It had held out an ice cream cone to the little boy, only to have the little boy kick it in the shin, grab the ice cream cone and run away.

For years the media had groused about a lack of transparency, the unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers and the hostile relationship between Obama Inc's minions and many reporters. The grousing was usually understated. It could be mentioned offhand, but not too loudly. When Bob Woodward made the mistake of speaking his mind, he was swiftly punished for it by the avatars of the post-media media, while the old media sat silently and watched the show.

But then Obama pushed its limits by invading the sanctum of the Associated Press. It was one thing when the administration was targeting whistleblowers, but quite another when the media's power became part of the collateral damage.

The week of scandals was the media reminding Obama that his smooth ride had been provided by them and that the ride could get very bumpy if his media ponies decide to take the back road to Benghazigate or drop by the IRS headquarters. It's a bluff, of course. The day may come when the media takes Obama out back and disposes of him so that the new messiah, perhaps in a pantsuit, can ascend the old Camelot throne, but that day isn't here yet.

Scandal week was a game of chicken between Obama and the media to see who would blink first. Would Obama decide to respect the institutional power of the media or would be consider pushing forward until the media blinked. A brief history of Obama Inc. suggests that he will keep pushing on. Obama backs down from Muslim terrorists and Russian government thugs, but not from Americans.

Like most cowards, Obama only attacks those he knows won't fight back. And the only people who won't fight back are either helpless or bound by their politics not to resist the liberal messiah.

Obama knows that the media does not dare harm a hair on the head of the liberal agenda. And he made certain to appoint a Vice President whom no one in their right mind would want to see take over. Until 2016, it's Hussein or the highway. The media has shown that it can hamstring him even when the coverage is only mild. It is quite capable of turning up the temperature to boiling, though not without a civil war with Media Matters, Think Progress and a chunk of the liberal new media.

The media is a prisoner of its own ideology. It can't hit Obama too hard... yet. Not until they're making the case that Hillary will do a better job of governing than this inexperienced tyro did. Having abandoned any professional integrity years ago, it would be too late for most of the media to reclaim it now. Even in the name of its own institutional power.

This is the process by which leftists have collaborated in their own purges. It is why wealthy leftists financed revolutions that would rob them. The media's wealth is in its institutional power and it is being forced to accede to the redistribution of that influence.

Obama is not interested in an independent media, even if it is biased his own way. Leftists are great centralizers. They seize power by consolidating it under their control. The Democratic Party is struggling as Obama's OFA Super PAC loots their fundraising operations. Why does Obama need a Super PAC? Because it gives him another source of personal power while diminishing the power of established institutions. And the news media is just one more established institution for the children of the counterculture to beat to death with its own microphones.

The media is trying to make a statement about boundaries, but it lacks commitment. Even as it halfheartedly, though for the first time, covers actual misconduct by Obama Inc. with that smidgen of outrage which usually only creeps into its own when reporting on the dreaded (R's), it undermines its own show of force by discussing how quickly Obama will be able to get over the hump and back to his agenda. The media's blackmail of the man listening to its phone calls and scanning through its emails lacks conviction.

Obama needs the media, but the media needs him more. It doesn't need him for practical reasons, but for emotional reasons. It needs to believe that its corrupt institutional power has been put at the service of a higher purpose and a higher calling. It needs to believe this all the more as the ratings drop, the papers go unsold and the radio stations fill up with the voices of conservative talk show hosts. That emotional need makes the media the prisoner of this administration.

On his end, Obama has a practical need for the media, but no emotional need. Interviews, even of the softball media kind, challenge his control. They question him and Obama does not like being questioned. While media figures see themselves as serving a meaningful liberalizing institution, he sees them as carriers of a narrative. A narrative that can just as easily be carried anywhere else.

When Obama looks at the media, he doesn't see Walter Cronkite, he sees a bunch of radios, televisions and newspapers; which these days are little more than footnotes for the internet. There is nothing special about that to him or his cronies. Just mediums that distort his message because he doesn't control them. And so Obama chooses to control every medium he uses.

The Obama media war is good clean fun, but it's also a brief skirmish. Neither side can afford to extend the battle for very long. For the media the scandals will vanish as soon as they hear magic words like "Gun Control" or "Illegal Alien Amnesty". And for Obama, the war will end when one side or the other blinks.

Radicals, Moderates and Islamists

The radical-moderate continuum that has defined the dialogue on Islam in the War on Terror is not an authentic perspective, it is an observer perspective.

To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.

These descriptions tell us nothing about Islam or about what Muslims believe, but do tell us a great deal about its observers and what they believe. They turn Islam into inkblots that reveal more about the interpreter than the splotch of ink being interpreted.

Muslims are not radical or moderate. The radical-moderate continuum is how liberal countries rate individuals and countries to decide how well they will harmonize with the national and international consensus. Even if that consensus only exists in their own mind. The label of moderate does not mean a rejection of violence. Otherwise it could hardly be applied to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it means is a willingness to collaborate with Western governments and progressive organizations.

The radical-moderate labels are useful for liberals, but useless for anyone who wants to asses reality. It is tied into a number of false notions that are necessary for maintaining the status quo of liberal democracies. Notions such as the equal moral stature and interchangeability of all religions and peoples are key to running a liberal democracy, but they make it impossible to have a rational conservation about Islam.

In liberal democracies, no one really discusses Islam as a religion. That discussion is preemptively aborted by the defense of the general category of religion. To criticize Islam is to challenge the category of protection for all religions, much as to attack Communism during the Cold War was to attack the First Amendment.

The general category makes it necessary to subdivide the specific religion or ideology into a moderate majority and a tiny minority of extremists. This categorization tells us nothing about Islam and everything about the political and intellectual classes that refuse to rationally discuss it.

Islam is neither moderate nor extreme. It simply is. Extremism and moderate are an observer perspective. That does not mean that Islam is all one thing, an impermeable block. But the one thing that it is not, is liberal.

Liberal Islam is secular Islam, in the same way that liberal Christianity and liberal Judaism are both secularized in their subservience to liberal values. There are indeed secular Muslims out there, but they are a tiny minority of secularists even in the secular West. Their influence is minimal. And it likely would be minimal even if the Saudis weren't spending fortunes in oil money to control the expressions of Islam in the West.

Even these secular Muslims are not necessarily non-violent. What they lack is the broader worldview of Islamic nationalism, that some label Islamism. They will support Arab Nationalist terrorism, which defines peoples by nation, rather than the Islamic Nationalism, which defines them by religion.

Islamic nationalism is not a religion. Nor is it a separate branch of Islam. It is influenced by movements within Islam, but those movements are largely reformist efforts aimed at returning to a more uncompromised Islam. And it is not limited to these movements. The majority of Muslims identify with Islamic nationalism to some degree.

Islamism is simply the political implementation of Islam which is already political. Islamism does not politicize an apolitical religion, it applies a political religion to politics. And most Muslims support that for the simple reason that they are Muslims and Islam is their religion. They may quibble over some of the details and they may be fooled by some smooth talk, but the same may be said of many supporters of National Socialism and Bolshevism. What matters is not whether every single German who thought Hitler had some good ideas supported the concentration camps or whether every single Communist supported the Gulags. Certainly not all did. What matters is that they supported the systems and leaders that made those things possible even when the warning signs were there.

No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.

Western observers may label those who identify with Al Qaeda as extremists and those who identify with the Muslim Brotherhood as moderates, but these are cosmetic differences. Islamist organizations are not a separate religion. They are the practical implementation of the religion. If we are to have a truer continuum, it would run from secular to religious, rather than moderate to extremist.

What makes Islamists dangerous are not their means, such as flying planes into skyscrapers, but their ends, which involve a global theocracy that reduces non-Muslims to enemies and slaves. Whether this end is accomplished through bombs or elections makes little difference. Hitler and Stalin would be no different whether they won elections or seized power by force. Not so long as their ends involved war, mass slavery and genocide.

The trouble with Islamic nationalism is Islam. There is no way of getting around that. Terrorism is an aspect of the problem. But the problem is a violent system that views the lives of non-Muslims and dissenting Muslims as worthless.

When Muslim terrorists set off bombs in Boston, Mumbai, Jerusalem or anywhere else, what they are really communicating is not some passionate grievance, but an ideology that has no regard for the lives of non-Muslims. That same message is communicated by the treatment of Western prisoners in Dubai or the treatment of Western hostages in Nigeria. It is a message rooted in the xenophobia of the Koran and it is a warning of the system that these acts of oppression and terror are intended to build.

The extent to which most Muslims are committed to the final ends of Islamism, including a total war with the rest of the world and its subjugation under Islamic law, may vary, but there is no denying the fact that in open elections, Islamists have won again and again. The Arab Spring conclusively demonstrated that the Islamist agenda is more compelling than any other. Indeed it is hard to find any political movements in ascendency in the Muslim world today except Islamist ones.

The tiny minority of extremists are not the Islamists who have dominated the Arab Spring as thoroughly as they have dominated the Islamic institutions of the West, it is the secularists who still cling to forms of solidarity based on national identity or economic class.

If their moderate Islam, which will have co-ed prayers in mosques, female prayer leaders and gay Imams is the solution, then there is no hope for a solution because it has no trajectory. The forces that forged a liberalized Christianity and Judaism in Europe are in decline. And they could hardly impose their worldview on a religion whose centers of power are out of their reach.

Liberal Islam is not in ascendency anywhere. In much of the world, including the Muslim world and totalitarian nations such as Russia and China, the continuum is not that of the radicals and the moderates, but the government clerics who are not moderate, but lack all conviction, and the Islamists who want to overthrow them.

Government clerics are rarely moderate. They often support terrorism, so long as it is aimed at other nations. The moderate cleric in Egypt supports war with Israel, but not domestic theocracy. The moderate cleric in Russia supports terrorism against New York, but not Moscow. The moderate cleric in Saudi Arabia supports war with Syria but not assassinations at home. There are exceptions, but these exceptions, when they are sincere, are the tiny minority.

Everywhere Islam is weaponized to be used against someone else, just as Carter once believed that he could use the Iranians and the Afghans against the Soviet Union. But it is folly to think that the means of religious violence can be directed toward any other ultimate end than religious supremacy.

Islamism is applied Islam. It is not extreme, only illiberal, but then Islam is an illiberal religion. It is a religion built on war and conquest.

The Islamist only reminds Muslims of what their religion stands for. It is not a separate entity from Islam because it is rooted within Islam. Its solutions are Islamic solutions. It may break in some ways with history, but not with theology.

The pragmatic solution of denying this is so to keep Muslims from embracing Islamist solutions to political problems is doomed. Muslims do not define themselves by Western standards of liberalism and extremism. They do not rely on Western thinkers to determine their religion for them. They are outside the consensus of liberal democracies and the best evidence of that is the triumph of Islamists in the political spheres of the Middle East and the West.

Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.

Islamism is not a sect, it is the Islamic consensus. It is the closest thing that the Muslim world has to match the liberal worldview of the West. The Islamist is not radical to his own. He represents the majority view of the Muslim world that power and politics should derive from Islam and that Muslims should assert a collective power based on their common Islamic nationalism,

Islamism won in the Arab Spring. It won the Western Diaspora. The idea that we can detach Islam from its political application by branding its political application extremist has failed. The two are intertwined. We cannot weaken Islamism except by weakening Islam, economically, militarily and demographically.

The End of Competition

The American Dream does not actually require a red, white and blue flag or a dream. What it requires is a willingness to accept messiness.

Messiness is another word for chaos. And no one likes chaos. Chaos means that in the richest country in the world some people will be illiterate, others will be homeless and some will accidentally set themselves on fire because the fireworks don't come with enough safety warnings.

Those aren't good things. They're not things that governments and the squeaky wheels who make governments what they are think should be tolerated. They're messy.

Messy is all those things that people say someone should do something about, by which they don't mean themselves. What they really mean is that we should be living in a more orderly society. And an orderly society is one where things don't just happen. You have to file eight forms, duck six committees and debate four non-profits to have any chance of getting things done. And even then you probably won't.

Orderly societies have nailed down all the loose ends. There are fewer homeless people, mainly because they are now living in sixty thousand dollar per inmate shelters designed by progressive architects, but there are also fewer errand boys becoming Andrew Carnegie. What is really being lost is social mobility. The ladder up.

Meritocracy requires chaos. An orderly society isn't chaotic, it's stratified. The power has been parceled out to all the people who should have it. And there's only so much to go around. Newness is a threat because new things are unpredictable. They're chaotic. They disrupt the power structure.

The liberal argument is largely an argument for a society consolidated around government in service to progressive ideals. It's a tidy world in which governments and non-profits consume an always increasing share of everything else until there isn't anything else because it's been consolidated. The end result of that process however isn't progressive. It's tribal.

Power naturally consolidates along personal lines, not political lines. A society may begin by consolidating power so that all the non-profits can help the homeless and the people who can't read fireworks instructions, but, in a peculiar phenomenon, the homeless never seem to get helped much and fireworks accidents keep happening.

The phenomenon isn't really peculiar at all. Humanitarian work is a job that exists to eliminate itself. The only way to keep a job dedicated to solving the problem is to perpetuate the problem. Or to redefine the problem on a larger scale. All that is familiar enough from any number of non-profits and government agencies that exist to remind people to care about a problem that they don't care about.

Redefining the problem on a larger scale means more money, more power and more control. Any problem, whether it's homelessness, illiteracy or crime is a social problem and can only be solved by taking a holistic approach to everything. A city, a country and a world become a giant puzzle that can only be solved by manipulating all the pieces into place in the right order. The only way to solve the problems that never get solved is through total control over every human being on earth.

Power can only be consolidated ideologically for so long. Both the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions eventually collapsed into familial profiteering. China's Princes and Russia's KGB clans brought down Communism in both countries and resurrected it as profiteering oligarchies eager to live the good life.

To some measure, Capitalism beat Communism, but more accurately tribalism beat internationalism,  powerful men built systems that lock in privileges for their friends and families while tossing out the lefty ideologies that allowed their grandfathers to get close to those privileges. It's an old story and it's how the progressive experiments in the ideological consolidation of power will end here.

Power is personal. As is wealth. A system that consolidates enough power turns tribal as fathers look to pass on their privileges to their children until, like so many social services agencies, the system exists for the sake of the system.

Tribal systems are not meritocracies. They aren't interested in talent, but in a sense of order that derives from the consolidation of power. Their idea of civilization does not lie in their arts or sciences, only in the orderliness of power. Only when chaos assails them, is talent released out into the wild where unpredictable things happen. But the chaotic period passes and the old patterns assert themselves again strangling the wildness and consolidating it.

Despite the proliferation of wild communications technologies, our society is becoming more medieval. We have guilds, a secular clergy and a population too fragmented for nationalism. Republics are giving way to feudalism as people value being cared for more than opportunity. Even the old religious wars are returning with the special forces as our knights, the skyscrapers as our castles and the dole keeping the peasants on the urban voting farm.

Much of the progressive infrastructure exists to eliminate competition. Jobs and higher education are assigned by race, gender, orientation union membership and political affiliation. Starting a business grows harder each year without political connections. Success has less to do with the marketplace, than with the political picture.

The entire "You Didn't Build That" platform is about the end of competition. Policy statements like that lay out the proper place of the individual. Success doesn't come from competition, but from the decisions made by the government. If the decisions are wise, then competition is unnecessary. If they are unwise, then competition is futile.

The merit in meritocracy doesn't come from individual striving tested against the real world, but from the decision making process of political leaders. Merit is redefined, not in terms relevant to the field, but to the bigger political picture. It's not a matter of the best engineer, businessman or architect, but the engineer, businessman or architect whose identity and vision are harmonious with the big picture.

Holistic think global and act local politics of that nature is very orderly, in that it has no room for the individual. It is too concerned with the forest to care about a tree, let alone the lumberjack or the family that needs an affordable home. And the outcome of that mass dehumanization is a politics in which only the people in the inner circle of power are truly human and truly matter.

China and the Soviet Union killed millions for ideas and then finally for personal power. The end of a system that dehumanizes millions for a collective is a system that dehumanizes millions for the few who run it, the few who really matter and the few whose decisions build everything. Once you reduce the worth of a society to the few philosopher-kings, the commissars of correctness and the technocratic czars, then it becomes very easy to dump all the ideas that got them there and fall back on the old notions that some people are better than others.

Progressivism is about the management of chaos through the impersonal means of government authority. Eliminate enough of the chaos and what remains is a stultifying order that is not based on reason, but on power. The more power is consolidated in the name of something, the more institutions are mobilized to achieve its goals and the more every aspect of life is centralized, the less room there is for the wild creative chaos that moves societies forward through great leaps and bounds.

Civilization is haunted by the old industrial utopian idea that a rational society will be completely managed from the top down. Every progressive goal depends on a rigid system of authority that answers to calls from some civilian non-profits run by community organizers playing the role of the old soviets. The soviets were an illusion. A country was never going to be run by them. It was going to be run by powerful men like Lenin or Stalin who took control of the revolutionary chaos and imposed their own murderous order.

The progressive state is not going to be run by people who want more homeless shelters or more illegal immigration or more abortions. Those people are useful for putting the system into place by giving it the illusion of popular will, but they are unwanted once that has taken place. Once the power has been consolidated, the flimsy coalitions of activists who got it there quickly become a nuisance.

The trouble with all this isn't humanitarianism. It's not wrong to care about others. It is wrong to pass that caring off to an impersonal bureaucracy or to set up a system of mandatory caring or to disrupt the lives of others on a massive scale out of spiteful self-righteousness because they don't care enough. That is why studies show that while conservatives give charity, liberals give government.

A rational view of society begins with accepting an imperfect world. A demand for a rational society however is the irrational belief that government can perfect people. But how can government perfect people when it is made up of imperfect people? Consolidate power under a small number of people and their ranks will grow smaller and they will act no differently than every pharaoh, king and czar throughout history.

Worse than the tyranny is the death of so much of the energy that makes the next step possible. The managed chaos, the thin line between government intervention and anarchy based on a few documents, common sense and a national ethos is what made the American Dream possible. That dream is being strangled by the bureaucratic collectivism of liberal technocrats who imagine that piling one more institution, one more level of regulation and one more set of rules will produce only pros without the cons, product without pollution, wealth without poverty and good without evil.

The progressive consolidation imagines that organization can contain the messier side of man. Mostly it cannot. Instead organizations consolidate power in the hands of men who are worse than average in the name of improving mankind.

The end of competition is the beginning of tyranny.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Take a Penny, Take a Country

From Maksim at the People's Cube

PINING FOR THE OASES

Two years ago, Obama had declared that he was the defender of Benghazi, protecting it against a massacre that was never going to happen. And once Benghazi was liberated to be under Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rule, the man who had sent in the air force to protect Benghazi Islamist militias against Gaddafi, couldn’t be bothered to send in the planes to protect his diplomats against the militias.

There is not one single place where a major Arab Spring transformation has led to a happy ending.

Egypt is a political, social and economic disaster. Obama had been counting on Islamists transforming Egypt into another Turkey on a slow and sensible schedule. But Morsi had a little too much in common with Obama. Like Obama, he couldn’t wait a decade to crush his opponents and enact repressive policies that would fracture the country. He could barely wait a month.

How Syria Killed the “Arab Spring”




WAR ON ERROR

In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”

But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.

In 2011, the year that the Russians were warning America about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole was issuing another kind of warning.

Cole, an Obama recess appointment, said, “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim.  As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.”

How Many Americans Has Obama Killed?




FOR LOVE OF EVIL

A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a “soft-spoken man with a professorial air”. When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg’s release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the University College of London’s “War on Terror Week” by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.

Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden’s driver, they are possessed of a “quick grin” or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a “wry smile”.

The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.

What the Media’s #FreeJihad and #FreeJahar Have in Common




LET THEM EAT ANTS

A new report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization says Western societies should get over their “disgust” at the idea of eating bugs and join in.

So are UN bigwigs eating bugs?

Oddly enough bugs don’t appear on the menu for the United Nations Delegates Dining Room. New Zealand Rack of Lamb, Roasted Loin of Lamb, Crispy Red Snapper with Langoustine and Medallion of Filet Mignon do.

Meanwhile at the 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization summit on food security, delegates ate lobster and foie gras.

UN Bigwigs Eat Filet Mignon and Foie Gras, Tell Everyone Else to Eat Bugs





UNLESS YOU'RE BARACK OBAMA, YOU CAME FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

The latest amnesty gimmick from Obama Inc. is the hashtag “Immigration Nation” and the declaration that, “Unless you’re a Native American, you came from someplace else.”

Technically speaking, American Indians came over the Bering Strait. DNA records show that they came out of Siberia. (That makes them the original Russian immigrants.)

Every Nation is an Immigration Nation




TAKE A PENNY, TAKE A COUNTRY

The Heritage study on the cost of amnesty (6.3 trillion) has gotten predictably tangled in accusations of racism.  And we are now somehow debating IQ.

The social safety net, like the take-a-penny jar, is an honor system. There are all sorts of regulations and policing mechanisms, but the welfare state and the country are too big to police. Those who want to defraud, do. The rapid growth in the disability rolls tell the tale.

There are different motives not to cheat. Personal integrity. A sense of honor. But the largest one is a sense of investment in the country. Patriotism. The belief that we are all in the same boat and that we occasionally even sacrifice for one another.

Large scale entitlements use by a population is a cultural statement of a sense of detachment from the country and its people. You are more likely to take pennies, instead of putting them back, if you don’t identify with the people who put the pennies in.

The Amnesty Issue Isn’t IQ, it’s the Free Ride





IF ONLY THE ALABAMA DEMOCRATIC PARTY COULD PRINT ITS OWN MONEY

Acting state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley lowered her head and slowly shook it side to side when summing up the financial condition of her once powerful party.

“This is my 18th day as chair and thirty minutes after I took over on April 22nd the landlord of the building where our party headquarters are came in and said he wanted us out, that the rent was overdue and was always overdue,” said Worley.

Next came the water company with a message, said Worley: pay up by the next day or we’re cutting off the water. Next came the same warning from Alabama Power. Next came news from banks that party credit cards had been maxed out and were now cancelled.

Alabama Democratic Party Broke, Faces Eviction for Not Paying Rent




IT'S A RACISM PARADOX

Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers.

Academically stronger individuals is the politically correct way of saying, “Teachers who can both read and write.” Their counterparts are the Differently Academically Abled who dominate the Chicago school system.

Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences–particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers.

On nearly all the measures states are considering, from GPAs to licensure-test scores, minority candidates tend to have weaker scores than their white counterparts.

Wait… but we support education… but not racism… but what if our support for getting better teachers for minority students leads to lower rates of minority teachers… it’s a racism paradox.

Hiring Better Teachers May Be Racist, Say Bad Teachers




THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY

The pedophiles’ core issue was to bring down Section 176 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts with children. With the Greens they found for the first time a political force that was willing to entertain this debate. Indeed, in March 1980, the Greens held their second national convention in the southwestern city of Saarbrücken, where they approved a program that opposed “discrimination against sexual outsiders.” The convention established a “pedo-commission” to specifically address the interests of pedophiles.

In 1983, an ad for the Greens ran in the gay newspaper Torso. It featured a drawing of the party’s trademark sunflower and the text: “Sections 174 and 176 should be amended to read that only the application or threat of violence, or the abuse of a dependent relationship in connection with sexual acts should be criminalized!” In plain terms, this meant: Adults could have sex with children, as long as they weren’t their own and they weren’t threatened with violence.

The pedophiles celebrated their greatest success in March 1985 at the Greens’ state manifesto conference in Lüdenscheid, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There, the party approved a position paper that sought to generally allow “non-violent sexuality” between adults and children.

How Green Were the Paedos





REPUBLICANS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS AND COWARDLY LOT

Reporter Bob Woodward, meanwhile, refers to Hillary as “the Jill Wine Volner of the impeachment inquiry committee,” much to her chagrin. Because of this comment, John Doar, who heads the committee, suggests that Hillary ditch her skirts for pants. “From this day forward, she will always wear pantsuits,” says the script.

So we even have a pantsuit origin story. Is Hillary Clinton a superhero? Must her costume have an origin story?

Are You Ready for Hillary Clinton: The Movie?




THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY

You may be wondering what the Newseum is; besides a really stupid portmanteau with a suspicious resemblance to Nauseam. The Newseum is three things. It’s big. It’s ugly. And it’s in D.C.

With The New York Times–Ochs-Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News, the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery and the NBC News Interactive Newsroom… the Newseum exists to honor itself. It’s an example of the corporate media doing its own hagiography. It’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the teleprompter crowd.

Despite costing nearly half-a-billion dollars, most people, who weren’t stuck in D.C. for four hours with no air conditioning and nothing to do, were not aware of the Newseum’s existence.

Newseum Honors Hamas Terrorists Alongside Daniel Pearl




AL GORE WANTS HIS ROUTINE BACK

"As some of you may know, I serve as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the U.S. House of Representatives.  I have teleported here over the Internet.

"Ladies, gentlemen…avatars, thank you for joining me today on the virtual island of Bali created by One Climate in Second Life."

Ed Markey Claims Credit for Inventing Smartphones and Facebook





THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN THREE COMMISSIONS BY MORNING

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

UK Imam Blasts Muslim Racism Behind Sex Abuse of British Girls




ACCOUNTABILITY

The Real Deal is this: The higher-ups in the MSM won’t say much about the abuses they suffer at the hands of the Obama administration because they answer to an extra-political power base. You think the consumer has sway anymore? When the New Media erupted and the Old Media saw their chuck wagon headed over the cliff, they kicked the consumer-based power structure to the curb. They just didn’t tell the consumer. Or their advertisers. They have gladly embraced devils who wield more money and power in just a few hands, rather than put up with the likes of you.

There may be an Invisible Hand in the market place, but the executives of the MSM are  no longer licking that hand. They are not in the losing, exhausting game of brands and marketing. They are now in the game of thrones  unlike any we’ve experienced in our country before. They will NOT cede power or betray allegiances to their source of income. Oh, they’ll allow awful financial reports about their circulatory health to ease Tea Party types into a hollow sense of accomplishment, but even after all that, the neighbors  are still watching the infernal evening news every night.

that's from Joan at Primordial Slack.

I have moved in these circles a tiny bit and I would say that the consumer-based structure in the big media never mattered much, just as it doesn't matter very much in fashion or television or most creative fields.

The difference is that in fields where the consumer does have buying power, consumer rejection is possible. The insulation is there, so that the creatives will keep running the same incestuous garbage that they like up the flagpole, accepting the occasional setback, but plugging onward (How many Iraq Anti-War movies got made? How many made money? How many lost money? The figures are staggering, but they changed very little) in the hopes of eventually scoring one win that will tide them over for a while and let them justify doing the same thing for another 5-10 years. (Gay TV shows are the new Anti-war movies.)

The situation in the news media is much worse because it's a monopoly. Yes, FOX will beat them with the majority of the minority of independent viewers, but they'll swallow up what's left. And their consumers are not the people watching television. Their consumers are media buyers, who are just as left-wing as they are.

Most professions are miniature societies. And the people in them don't work for the approval of the audience, but of the approval of their fellow pros. (How many awards are voted by pros and how many are voted by the public.)

All corners of the profession are largely liberal, from the writers to the on-air talent to the producers all the way up to the top executives and then vertically to the various buyers and branders who want to associate their product with the "seriousness" of their news network or news hour.

The New Media, as Joan mentions, has made it worse. Yes, the internet has cracked the monopoly. But it also unleashed a lefty blogsphere that pushes media coverage to the left and on the pro-side, at places like Think Progress, preps talking points for the media to use, essentially outsourcing their editorial staff to lefty Think Tanks. (Which is one more reason why the editorial side of the media has gone into the toilet.)

The big media business was always largely incestuous. It's now mostly impermeable. Financially it's in bad shape, but that just means it will be around in a reduced form. Its people have figured out how to plug in internet memes in place of their human interest stories and that's enough to keep them going.

There is no longer a big picture vision of Walter Cronkite's America. Just a bunch of guys and girls browsing Reddit and Think Progress and assembling their sites and stories that way. They don't care about getting everyone on board. They care about shaping their part of the fragmented consensus so that you don't just see the same thing on the 2 news networks no one watches but on the 1,000 sites everyone visits or sees in their news feed.




OBAMA OBER ALLES

In the afterglow of the last week I have come to realize that what is deeply wrong with this country is that so far we have neither heard enough nor seen enough of President Obama.

I now think we need to see more. Much more. We need to bask in his warm visage and be lulled with the hum of his valved voice. We need to have a morning message from the President every day on all cable news channel. Indeed, we need to have it broadcast on all TV channels, especially ESPN and other places where citizens dodge their need to know the truth and their duty to look up from their coffee and upon the wonderful latte-tanned visage that is Obama.

We need to see his face with his honeyed message oozing out of his mouth in the lead-in to Good Morning America and Fox and Friends both without fear or favoritism.

Weather Channel too.

We need to have Barack Obama’s message, whatever it might be on whatever day, delivered dripping from his lips to all of us on the front page of whatever newspaper we are still reading online with a video-embed set on autoplay.

More Obama I Say. MORE O!-BA!-MA!




YOU CAN'T STOP GOVERNMENT

WV Senator Joe Manchin has been trying to breathe life back into his background checks bill

Mr. Kercheval said Mr. Manchin’s legislation makes sense, but that the IRS situation doesn’t help the prospects of its reintroduction.

“Sure, it doesn’t help us – heck no,” Mr. Manchin replied. “But the bottom line is, you cant stop government; you can’t stop this great country, you can’t stop the entrepreneurial spirit.”

One of the three doesn't fit. See if you can spot which one.



A BRIEF NOTE

JewishNews.co.uk rolls out today across the pond. They will occasionally be running some of my columns.



THE BIGGER PICTURE

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

This is a bit imprecise. Instagram does software, if you can even call it that. Kodak did hardware. The hardware is still being done, but much less so in the United States.

Kodak didn't make way for Instagram. It made way for an Instagram front end for hardware being made in China. And that's the real story of the destruction of the American middle class.

American brands employing a small number of creatives and slightly larger number of service people are creating the illusion of prosperity while the manufacturing jobs are gone because Asia had the determination to get them and we were making those jobs impossible.

How many Americans was Kodak employing toward the end when it was popping out mediocre cameras with clunky software? Software allows for the illusion that we're buying prime rib, when we're buying an overlay on poorly manufactured hardware that doesn't last and isn't designed to last and creates few American jobs.

The internet has made it much easier than ever to ship jobs overseas. Which is not a problem for the sort of libertarians who insist that the god of the marketplace will rebalance all. But what if the marketplace only works with a certain standard of civilization? The Middle East had marketplaces for a very long time. The marketplace alone doesn't get us to this point. It's culture that does.

The marketplace allows us to buy cheap crap while funding a war machine that shifts the balance of power. And one day we'll have to face that war machine, while using equipment filled with its chips. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll let it take Asia and get an even bigger monopoly. And then all that will be left will be for the worshipers of the marketplace to get jobs working for it and explaining to us why dying at 35 is now a good thing. For the marketplace. Their marketplace.




HOW PEOPLE LOSE THEIR FREEDOM

Seraphic Secret has a close friend who was born and lived in Communist Hungary until he and his family managed to escape to America in 1969.

...

A few days ago, my friend, a mild-mannered accountant who never comments on politics, told me that he fears for America. The Benghazi lies peddled by Obama, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and (until a few days ago) covered up by a pliant press corps, remind him, he said, of the Communist regime he fled.

“America is not that bad,” he allowed, “but the model, the structure of state power supported by a state press, is how people lose their freedom.”

“It can’t happen here,” I quoted with no little irony.

My friend nodded: “That’s what they all say.”

from Seraphic Secret: It Can't Happen Here




IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Here’s Your $40,000 EPA Chief Waterfall Portrait

Or, possibly, Lisa Jackson was actually the embodiment of a nature spirit, who, when she was forced to quit after a fake email scandal, became transformed into a waterfall, and is now flowing somewhere in Virginia.

Socialism Causes Toilet Paper Shortage in Venezuela

Chavez died and reportedly returned to his successor as a little bird. Sadly the Socialist leader did not, while in bird form, warn Maduro, that the country would shortly run out of toilet paper

 Kuwait Arrests 215 Gays and Lesbians in Internet Cafe Roundup

Article 2 of the Kuwaiti Constitution states, “The religion of the State is Islam, and the Islamic Sharia shall be a main source of legislation.” It also says in the Hadiths that “When a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes.”

National Park Service Malfeasance Exposed in Battle Over California’s Last Cannery

But this isn’t really about the real world impact on the harbor seals. In environmentalist theology, animals are always victimized by human presence. Civilization destroys the wilderness and must be destroyed in turn for the wilderness to thrive.




WINNING!

Ruin the educational system in the name of federal compassion for the children, accuse those who give more to charity (namely, the working poor, the middle class, the Christians) of being cold-hearted. Applaud those who give the least to charity (namely, the idle poor, the rich, the Politically Correct) as being compassionate for their willingness to take more money via taxes from us and give it to the idle poor.

Disintegrate the bonds of faith, the standards of decency, the definition of marriage, and heap opprobrium on men of good character, and praise villains and mass murderers and sexual deviants as heroes and martyrs, and you will eventually get a generation that has no character, no faith, no reason, no logic, no courtesy, no honor, and no ability to distinguish true from false, valid from invalid, reality from television but which has but loads and loads of self-esteem and a selfish sense of entitlement. They will have so much self esteem that they will never listen again to a logical argument or a scientific proof, because their self-esteem tells them that no one is smartasticer than are they.

And once you have made a whole generation into selfish, whining, inflated-egoist know-nothings, they will beg for chains, and riot when they do not get them.

...from John C, Wright's excellent blog

I'm reminded of what Frank Capra credited the collapse of his career, post-Wonderful Life, to

 Forgotten among the hue-and criers were the hard-working stiffs that came home too tired to shout or demonstrate in streets ... and prayed they'd have enough left over to keep their kids in college, despite their knowing that some were pot-smoking, parasitic parent-haters.

The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters.... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophilic bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: "Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!".... Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!

HOPE AND CHANGE

Article 2

 Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

This conduct has included one or more of the following:

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

... well that's one place to start.

#FreeJahar and the Media's #FreeJihad

The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

Even if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would have his own Lanzies fan club or a #FreeAdam hashtag. It's not that he killed children. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev murdered Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy. James Holmes murdered Veronica Moser-Sullivan, a 6-year-old girl. Murdering children is not a turnoff for serial killer groupies, but Adam Lanza's drawn gnomish face and bowl haircut would be.

Charles Manson had an entire cult around him. Some members like Squeaky Fromme went on worshiping him and trying to kill in his name even once he was behind bars. If Fromme were a teenage girl today, she would have a Tumblr and #InLoveThereIsNoWrong would be a hashtag.

But let's not pretend that there's much of a difference between New York Times reporters and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's groupies.

The day before the Boston bombings, the New York Times printed an op-ed from one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards complaining how hard it is to be on a hunger strike and the media poured on the sympathy as thickly as any of Dzhokhar’s future groupies.

"It was impossible not to feel a pang of sympathy for Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel," Foreign Policy Magazine wrote. The Guardian described his situation as a "Supreme Injustice". The Daily Beast added that it was a "National Disgrace" and declared "There is no way on earth that you could read the recent Times op-ed by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and not feel abject shame." The Nation called for resuming Gitmo prisoner transfers and releases.

A day before the atrocity that would birth #FreeJahar had taken place; the media was in full #FreeJihad mode.

The difference between #FreeJahar and #FreeJihad is presentation. #FreeJaharists are teenage girls and write sentences without periods and upload GIFs to Instagram. #FreeJihadists have the news and editorial pages of every paper in the world, not to mention the evening news and the cable news networks with million dollar budgets, to hammer home their message.

#FreeJahar is really a poor imitation of #FreeJihad. For over a decade, the media had run itself ragged defending and minimizing the crimes of every Muslim terrorist. The #FreeJihad media had championed the cause of every Gitmo terrorist. The New York Times did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to run a #FreeSamir op-ed. It had been running sympathetic articles and editorials about Islamic terrorists all along. The pace of these propaganda pieces slowed down during the Obama era, but did not stop.

Almost exactly a year before the Boston Marathon bombing, New York Times correspondent David Shipler wrote an editorial claiming that the FBI was breaking up terrorist plots that it had invented. "Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own?" Shipler asked, referring to Muslim attempts to bomb the Pentagon, the US Capitol and a number of synagogues.

A year later, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered the question in the affirmative, but that didn't end the outpouring of sympathy.

The New York Times headlined its feature piece on the murderous duo as "Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In." The paper whitewashed Tamerlan's domestic violence and blamed unfair setbacks to his boxing career for his killing spree. Despite all the extensive background, no mainstream media outlet showed any interest in talking to the ex-girlfriend he slapped around.

The only difference between this type of #FreeJihad journalism and the #FreeJahar Tumblrs was the illusion of professionalism.

The #FreeJahar Tumblrs were only doing what liberal papers and blogs had been doing all along; searching for extenuating circumstances and suggesting that their favorite terrorist had been framed and needed to be set free. Their only mistake was bad timing and worse judgment.

Media outlets knew better than to run op-eds by Osama bin Laden's bodyguard right after September 11. They also limited their claims that Muslim terrorists like the Bronx synagogue bombers or the Portland Christmas Tree bomber, had been set up and should be set free, to cases where the FBI had come in early enough to stop the plot and prevent anyone from being killed.

They were also better at using euphemisms, calling for prisoner transfers back to their homeland, even though a transfer to Saudi Arabia meant a stay at a luxurious terrorist rehab center followed by an inevitable return to terrorism, and at expressing their agendas in someone else's words.

After the Boston bombings, the New York Times doubled down on #FreeJihad, running an article titled, "Despair Drives Guantánamo Detainees to Revolt."  It quoted a Muslim adviser as saying, "Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed to leave."

And there it was. Around the same time that #FreeJahar was getting started, the #FreeJihad media was showing them how it was done.

#FreeJihad journalists, like their #FreeJahar counterparts, showed a troubling tendency to romanticize the murderers they were writing about. 

A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a "soft-spoken man with a professorial air". When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg's release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the University College of London's "War on Terror Week" by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as, how else, “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.

Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, they are possessed of a "quick grin" or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a "wry smile".  They are naturally gifted lawyers who have a knack for pointing out how ridiculous the government's case is.

The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.

The media's ideological hybristophilia is every bit as obscene as the #FreeJahar collages. The teenage girl attracted to a murderer because of what he did has something rotten deep inside. But what does that say about the ideological hybristophilia of a political movement that seeks out killers and mass murderers to worship?

Why waste time talking about the Holmies, when there are Che t-shirts on every campus, and why waste time on teenage girls who turn terrorists into pin-ups when the entire media does the same thing?

The left is in love with violence. It idolizes killers and then justifies their crimes. It denies the undeniable; that the only reason it is interested in them is because they are killers. The Red-Green alliance wouldn't exist if the Green Muslim side of the alliance wasn't explosively violent. The left isn't particularly interested in Buddhists or Hindus for the same reason that it doesn't wear Gandhi shirts or Martin Luther King baseball caps. Its attractions are strictly fatal.

A movement that once thrived on violence has receded into a mass of suburban radicals driving Subarus and working to undermine the system from within. All it has left are the nostalgic memories of terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now involved in the same unromantic business of brainwashing students on campuses and exploiting non-profits for the profit of their agenda. Once upon a time they thought that they were Clyde, but now they are stuck being Bonnie.

Islamic terrorists are the closest they can come to the destructive power that thrills them. The siren
song of their revolutions isn't good government, bike paths and nutritious lunches; it’s murdering their way to power. Working within the system may work, but what truly makes their pulses race and their legs tingle is putting a bullet in the system and replacing it with their own.

The left lives its terror dreams vicariously through the terrorism of Islam. Its fatal attraction to death finds its fulfillment in their murderous arms.

The activists of the left would like you to believe that they defend terrorists despite their violence. That excuse is as thin as the claims by serial killer devotees like the Holmies or the #FreeJaharites that they are in love with their man despite the crimes he is accused of committing. It's not despite the terrorism that they defend terrorists; it is because of the terrorism.

They are not pro-terrorist out of principle. It isn't even the ends that they sympathize with. Few of them really want to live in the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamist oligarchy. It's the means that appeal to them. If they can't be Clyde, bombing police stations and offing the pigs, they'll settle for being Bonnie, hanging on Mohammed's arm while he flies a plane into the World Trade Center or sets off a bomb at the Boston Marathon.

#FreeJahar isn't some horrid aberration. It's a junior version of the liberal approach to the War on Terror. We don't have to ask where the idolization of terrorists comes from.  It is spawned from the same #FreeJihad media that pretends to be outraged by the Holmies and the Jaharites. The Jaharites are the abominable children of an abominable ideology that hybristophilically worships the forces that destroy societies because they are all that allows them to feel powerful and alive.

The Post-Obama Democratic Party

Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together.

Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened.

By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other more than ever.  Obama needed the Clintons on the campaign trail to sell him to more moderate Democrats who remembered that times had been better under Bill. Hillary needed Obama to anoint her as his intended successor.

The awkward dance, complete with an injury, a congressional hearing and a 60 Minutes interview and then the real fireworks began.

Hillary Clinton had turned lemons into lemonade, getting what she could out of Obama. State had looked like a good spot for her because it would insulate her from the backlash over the economy. And she would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for Benghazi. It wasn't quite leaving on a high note, but as bad as Benghazi was, no one in their right mind would want to be associated with what is going to happen in Afghanistan. At least no one who isn't as dumb as Hanoi John who began his career with Viet Cong and Sandinista pandering and will end it watching the Taliban take Kabul.

Benghazi hasn't slowed Hillary Clinton down. And her target is the same old target from 2008. We're back in that 3 A.M. phone call territory. The truce between Obama and Hillary Clinton ended on 60 Minutes. It's not exactly war, but it is politics.

While Obama and his cronies plot out the second term, Hillary Clinton is plotting out her election campaign. These days every presidential campaign begins with the ceremonial burial of your own party's predecessor. It wasn't just McCain who kept a careful distance from Bush, Gore kept a careful distance from Clinton and Bush Sr. kept a careful distance from Reagan. The reinvention invariably involves the ritual jettisoning of some portions of your predecessor's program and personality.

Hillary Clinton isn't betting on being able to ride Obama's coattails. Not only are the coattails short, but the same electorate of younger and minority voters whose turnout he could count on, won't be quite as eager to come out for her. Her people are not betting on Obama's strategy of dismissing mainstream voters and counting on making it up with a passionate base. To win, Hillary Clinton will have to win back some of the same voters that Obama alienated during his two terms.

The script is already written. You can spot it peeking through select mainstream media editorials. Watch for those instances where mainstream media pundits blame Obama's inexperience and his failure to reach out across the aisle for his shortcomings. Those mentions aren't so much an attack on Obama as they are a campaign sign reading, "Hillary 2016." It's subtle for now, but a year from now, those grudging admissions that Obama fell short in some areas will come with the strong suggestion that next time around, someone more experienced and more able to build bridges could do better.

Republicans will rightly wonder on which planet, Hillary Clinton is an experienced bipartisan leader. But compared to Obama, she is, and these days we are grading on one very gentle curve. Clinton had begun building that image for the 2008 election and now her people are taking it out and dusting it off again. The Democratic Party is being given the chance to choose the sensible experienced candidate that it failed to choose last time around. And the fact that the candidate in question is actually neither is one of those things that doesn't really make a difference.

In preparing for a Post-Bush candidacy, Hillary gambled that the public would want someone a little more to the right and so she cultivated an image as a conservative member of the Democratic Party. Not only did she cultivate the image, but she made an occasional effort to vote that way and build those alliances. It was good planning, but a bad bet. Unlike Bill, Hillary was never an instinctual politician. Bill plays it by ear, while Hillary makes long term plans and is caught by surprise.

The strange thing about her 2016 campaign prep is that she appears to be following the same playbook. But on the other hand it might not be so strange at all.

The Democratic Party is uneasily planning its own Post-Obama future and the news isn't particularly good. The Republican Party never became the Party of Bush, but the Democratic Party is the party of Obama. Obama and his cronies have built up a shadow party of the left made up of SuperPACs and think tanks that overlaps with the Democratic Party, but has no real investment in it.

The unveiling of OFA, completes the marginalization of the Democratic Party at the hands of a lefty technocratic infrastructure that looks a lot like the bare bones of a third party. Meanwhile the jackass party has been taking a political beating with no respite. It is doing even worse in the leadership department than the GOP and its party identification numbers are down in an imperial system where the voters care more about Obama's unilateral lawmaking, than about voting the Democratic ticket.

The Democratic Party needs a post-Obama future and the Clintons have the resources and names to tie the organization together and turn it into something more than a way to get names for Obama's private fundraising and mailing list. Hillary Clinton had too much of the wrong history attached to her in 2008, but in 2016, all that history may suddenly be good history. After eight years, everyone is tired of new blood and will settle for some old blood with more modest ambitions.

And that brings us back to Benghazi. State was supposed to be a smooth ride for Hillary Clinton, full of photo ops that suggest experience. No one was counting on her bringing a scandal back with her. But the one thing Hillary Clinton can be relied on to do is find a scandal and bring it back no matter where she is or what she does.

Benghazi intersected dangerously with the presidential ambitions of two candidates. Obama needed to shut down Benghazi in 2012 and Hillary needs to bury it long before the primaries, because if she doesn't, her party rivals will use it to bury her. And that's where things begin wandering into a new territory in which the old political rules no longer apply.

In Term 1, Obama and Clinton were untouchable by the media. As Term 2 winds on, they will become bigger targets for both Republicans and Democrats. And the media will begin bending against them. It's easy to read that as an accretion of disgust, but it's just politics.

The media appeared to turn on Bill Clinton toward the end, but it wasn't fed up with his sleazy ways, instead it was establishing Al Gore as an ethical contrast to Bill. The idea may be ridiculous, but it nearly worked and giving Bill Clinton a kick on the way out helped sell his own VP as an alternative to his own boss. Before too long, it will be Obama's turn to get kicked for Hillary's sake. And it will be both their turns to get kicked for the sake of a preferred alternative to either one of them.

No matter how much the media swooned over Obama, it will feed him to the dogs in a minute if the domestic or international situation gets to the point that it did for Bush toward the end. Any number of events, including a complete health care disaster or a series of Taliban victories in Afghanistan could bring that on. But even if nothing that big happens, the malaise will likely mean that Obama will not get the Great Leader sendoff that some of his supporters imagined he would. The media isn't loyal to Obama. It's loyal to the left and it will destroy Obama for the sake of its bigger goals.

But Obama may have his own agenda. The left succeeded in hijacking the 2008 election. And who is to say that OFA will go away when Obama does? The odds are good that it will not. And that means that a second civil war may be brewing, this time with a much tougher left taking on a weakened Democratic Party stripped of many of its moderate figures.

The Democratic Party may want someone who can heal some of the wounds of ObamaCare and
reassure gun owners that they can come back, but that isn't what the left wants. And if Hillary can't figure out how to sell her candidacy as being all things to all Democrats, the sort of trick that Bill used to be able to easily pull off, then things will get ugly.

All this isn't about what will happen in 2016, but what is already happening now. Clinton's people are planting stories undermining Obama. And what are Obama's people doing? That's the question.

A Republican leadership that is routinely inept suddenly had two breakthroughs; one in Benghazi and one in the IRS. The IRS material is being served up on a silver platter, suggesting that is a distraction. The two scandals cut different ways. Benghazi hurts Obama, but it hurts Clinton more. The IRS is all Obama. It can't be deposited at Clinton's door and its narrative serves her interests.

Benghazi isn't likely to keep Hillary out of the Democratic field in 2016, but after 2008, she is justifiably paranoid. Any appearance of weakness can only embolden another Obama to challenge her and for 2016, as for 2008, her strategy is to be so inevitable that she will never even be challenged. It's not much of a plan, but it's why she needs to see Benghazi dead and buried in every sense of the word.