Are You, or Have You ever been a Muslim?

Look at those stooges protesting “Islamophobia.” Russell Simmons is the king stooge. He should try taking his booty shaking brand of music to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. They also don’t like Buddhists there. I’d like to hear his view of Islam after being clubbed and jailed by religious police.

There is no islamophobia in America. Phobia implies “irrational fear.” First, we are not afraid, we are concerned, and the concern is a rational one.

I wish one reporter would have asked the dingbats in the crowd where Molly Norris is. She’s the American in hiding here in America because bug-eyed head cutters are threatening to kill her in the name of the religion of peace. All because of some cartoons.

It is telling that lefties turn out for prefab agitprop like this
They need something to justify their pathetic, empty little lives. Yeah, Simmons is a millionaire, but he’s a poor excuse for a human being.  He was able to attract only 200 nobodies who need to justify their worth by attaching themselves to someone famous while speaking out against “injustice,” “hate,” “homophobia,” whatever the politburo propagandists tell them is the issue of the day.

What They Won't Protest

It is also telling that you don’t see these people protesting a rotten education system that churns out illiterate and unemployable graduates, disproportionately minorities. They won’t protest the crime-infested sewers so many of our poor people are condemned to, and they contribute to the moral rot with their popular “culture” of bling, objectifying women, and glorifying violence, drugs, criminality and irresponsibility.

You won’t find these sanctimonious herd-mentality simpletons speaking out against female genital mutilation, honor killings or the stoning of women. Hell, they won’t even speak out about human trafficking, sex slavery, hunger or poverty. No, those issues are too pedestrian, no opportunity to let your freak flag fly and bash good Americans.

The rally was full of empty feel-good comments like this from a dhimmi rabbi…

“American Muslims are as fully American as any other faith community,’’

Who has said otherwise? Lefties love attacking those strawmen. Keith Ellison, America’s first Muslim congressman exemplifies how Muslims mischaracterize the issue:

“To say we’re going to investigate a religious minority, and a particular one, I think is the wrong course of action to take,’’

Rep King is not “investigating a religious minority,” and Islam is not on trial. The hearings are to investigate foreign influences radicalizing American Muslims. Muslims should welcome this as an effort to purge the violent and hateful elements that are a stain upon their religion. I know I would welcome any investigation into foreign elements attempting to infiltrate and subvert Christianity, especially if I thought my kids were vulnerable to it.


1% of the Population, 81% of the Terrorists

Representative Keith Ellison (Muslim-Minnesota) blubbered and wailed through his testimony Thursday.  He should have left aside the histrionic agitprop and instead wept over these Justice Department statistics:

more than 80% of all convictions tied to international terrorist groups and homegrown terrorism since 9/11 involve defendants driven by a radical Islamist agenda. Though Muslims represent less than 1% of the American population, they constitute defendants in 186 of the 228 cases the Justice Department lists. (NY Daily News)

It is a failure and a tragedy when an American citizen is enticed to murderous sedition against his country. Good people of all faiths should want to find the root cause so we could stop it. Looks to me like too many would rather keep their heads in the sand.

Asra Nomani – In Defense of Peter King’s Hearings
USA Today – Muslim Hearing Could Harm Us All!
Boston.com - Rally
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2011/02/10/on-capitol-hill-muslim-public-affairs-council-seeks-to-whitewash-terror-threat/
NY Daily News – Muslim Hysteria
John Hayward - The King Hearings

No War! No Logic. No God? No Women...

George Will makes an excellent case of staying the hell out of Libya

Some interventionists are Republicans, whose skepticism about government's abilities to achieve intended effects ends at the water's edge.

The world would be better without Gaddafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so? A month ago, no one thought it was.

Libya is a tribal society. What concerning our Iraq and Afghanistan experiences justifies confidence that we understand Libyan dynamics?  (George Will - On Libya, Too Many Questions)

It's a brilliant article.  Every neocon should read it.  Beware those beating war drums who have never been to war.

Growing list of waivers an indictment against Obamacare

1400 waivers, over 2 million people exempted. This is an indictment against Obamacare. If it’s so great, why the exemptions? This was supposed to be manna from heaven!

Another indictment is the tortured logic put forth to justify government power to force everyone to buy a product. (The Hill – Health Care Waivers)

Eradicate Religion? A Fool’s Errand

David Warren explains…

“every human society, from the most primitive to the most outwardly sophisticated, accepts a doctrinal order, and a cosmology to explain it.”

Progressivism:  A Religion of Nothing

...we have an upside-down religion, in which there is no God, but that "Not God" commands an obedience more absolute than God ever required, stipulating everything from the sanctity of antinomian sexual behaviour, down to how we should sort our garbage.

It rides upon an inexhaustible series of mildly fluctuating, but invariably self-contradictory moral and epistemological premises (or more precisely, conceits); and because everything is "relative," nothing may be challenged. It is, as the lively Ann Coulter has suggested, a religion for which an extremely arid Darwinist materialism provides the founding cosmological myth. And abortion is its principal sacrament. (David Warren – We have an Upside Down Religion)

One More thing to worry about...

Niall Ferguson has written a well-documented and worrisome article about an overabundance of men in Asia, thanks to one-child policies, sex selection, and the devaluation of girls...

According to the United Nations, there are far more men than women on the planet. The gender gap is especially pronounced in Asia, where there are 100 million more guys than girls.

According to the German scholar Gunnar Heinsohn, European imperial expansion after 1500 was the result of a male “youth bulge.” Japan’s imperial expansion after 1914 was the result of a similar youth bulge, Heinsohn argues. During the Cold War, it was youth-bulge countries—Algeria, El Salvador, and Lebanon—that saw the worst civil wars and revolutions. Heinsohn has also linked the recent rise of Islamist extremism in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to an Islamic youth bulge.  (Newsweek – Men Without Women)

Too many men and not enough men always ends in trouble...

Now get off the computer and go enjoy the weekend!

Progressive Mistrust of The People

President Barack Obama’s budget willinclude $10.7 billion to build a nationwide wireless network foremergency workers and $5 billion to help Americans get mobileaccess to high-speed Internet service. (Bloomberg)

Like all progressive schemes, it sounds good, but there's a rat in there somewhere...

“High-speed Internet allows small businesses to reachmarkets beyond the one that they’re in, in the next town, in thenext state or even in a different country,” FederalCommunications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said in aFeb. 8 interview. “We need to take that as seriously as we tookelectricity and telephone service in the 20th century.”

They declare the internet a public utility and they now own and control it. Their other angle is to put the internet on “the public airwaves” via WiMax, and the FCC now has a clear case for jurisdiction and control.

Also, businesses have discovered and leveraged the power of the internet all on their own.  They don't need Obama's Kommisars "helping" them.

This displays the fundamental fallacy of progressivism:  If government doesn't do it, it won't get done.

John Stossell quickly punctures this BS balloon, by explaining spontaneous order...

“Another way to understand spontaneous order is to think about the simple pencil. Leonard Read, who established the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote an essay titled, "I, Pencil," which began, "(N)o single person on the face of this earth knows how to make (a pencil)."

That sounds absurd -- but think about it. No one person can make a pencil. Vast numbers of people participate in making the materials that become a pencil: the wood, the brass, the graphite, the rubber for the eraser, the paint and so on. 

Then go back another step, to the people who make the saws and machinery that are used to make the materials that go into a pencil. And before that, people mine iron to make the steel that makes the machines that make the materials that go into a pencil. It's all without central direction, without these people even knowing they are all working ultimately to make pencils. 

Thousands of people mining, melting, cutting, assembling, packing, selling, shipping -- and yet you can buy pencils for a few pennies each.”  (Stossel – Spontaneous Order)

This is how the world works, and no single entity acts as a controller.  It is spontaneous order brought about by millions of self-interested people.  Not only does it work, it has worked to bring the price down on every consumer good imaginable.  Our homes are filled with luxuries our parents and grandparents only dreamed of.

I recommend you go read Leonard Read's little essay.  It only takes five minutes.  Better yet, have your kids read it as well.  I'll leave you with an excerpt:

Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. 

Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!  (I, Pencil – Leonard Read)

Bonus question.  Why does domestically-produced milk cost more per gallon that gasoline that is pumped out of the ground as crude overseas, shipped around the world, refined and shipped again to gas stations all across the nation?

Progressive Fascination with Choo Choo Trains

George Will explains why our progressive overlords are so obsessed with high speed rail: It’s about modifying our behavior.

OK, I get that...

What I don’t understand is how the rank and file (including fellow bloggers in Left Blogistan) can simply gobble up this nonsense and regurgitate it.

High speed rail, global warming, electric cars and a plethora of unproven theories taken as gospel belie a lack of thinking and critical analysis on their part. I’m not calling them dumb, just naïve and incredibly credulous. Even in densely-packed Europe, where rail travel is popular, it cannot make a profit and must be subsidized by government.

Back to George Will. He’s right. It’s about social engineering…

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make. (George Will)

Further reading:
Robert Samuelson – High Speed Rail Folly
Ronald Utt – High Speed Rail Financial Disaster

Streets of Fire

"The financial crisis in 2008 didn't stop the practice of economic management by printing money. Burning streets will.”

Andy Xie of Rosetta Stone Advisors, has written a particularly pessimistic piece of what the near economic future holds. He starts by making the case that North Africa unrest that has spilled over into the Middle East was touched off by economic issues like unemployment and rising prices. He ends by saying it could spread to Europe and the US.

In 2009, 14.3 percent Americans lived in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. Including ones that have given up on looking for a job, one sixth of American workers are underemployed or unemployed.

A huge chunk of American people have no cushion against massive increases in the cost of food and energy. In addition, the prices of imported consumer goods that low income Americans depend on are rising and are likely to rise much more, later in the year. Fifty million Americans are not so different from Egyptians in their economic plight. Riots could come to American cities.  (Hot Money, Fast Riots)

Here's a good explanation of the effects of inflation...

Inflation is redistributive, usually unfairly. First, low income people tend not to have debt, because they are usually not qualified to borrow from banks. When inflation surges, as it is happening now, their bank deposits erode in real value. Where do their losses go? The people who have debt and real assets like property speculators gain the same amount. Inflation essentially robs the poor and gives to the rich.

Second, low income people tend to have insecure jobs and cannot bargain wages up along with inflation, especially when inflation surges like now. The reduced purchasing power for their wages pushes them into an unsustainable situation. They simply cannot make ends meet. (Hot Money, Fast Riots)

Paul B. Farrell, pessimistic liberal investor, wonders when the revolution will start...

Only a revolution will stop Wall Street’s self-destructive capitalism. And watching the people revolt against dictators like Mubarak and Gadhafi reminds us of the spirit that sparked America’s revolution in 1776.

Economist Peter Morici: “Capitalism is broken, America’s government is two bankrupt political parties bankrupting the country.”

BusinessWeek recently asked analyst Mary Meeker to run the numbers. How bad is it? America really is bankrupt, with a “net worth of a negative $44 trillion.” Bankrupt. (Paul B. Farrell)

Farrell laments that it is too late to frog march the Wall Street banksters off to the slammer.  Our corrupt political class lacks the will (and credibility) to do it anyway; they were co-conspirators. But he lists four factors that could cause a revolutionary explosion right here in the US of A:

Wealth gap, Wall Street immorality, Wars, World Population Explosion

The NY-DC Axis of Evil is raping and robbing us.  When will we have enough?

Why the Attacks on the Koch Brothers?

Why the Attacks on the Koch Brothers?

The simple answer is, pop your head up and you’re going to get hammered. The right has been going after international billionaire megalomanic and currency crasher George Soros, so the left had to find someone on the right to do the same to.

As usual, the left's aim is cockeyed...
The Koch brothers are not on the “right.” They are pro-gay rights, anti-drug war, anti-war, anti-Patriot Act libertarians. They’ve even gone so far as to fund suspect activities like the ACLU and ballet! For more information on these patriotic Americans, go here, and here. For a particularly funny and (and true) take on the lefty attacks, go read epistemicfail’s righteous rant. It will take you less than five minutes, you’ll learn something, and you’ll split your sides laughing.

The “Anonymous” attacks on the Koch’s belies the fact that these shadowy WikiLeaks confreres of the internet are not info-anarchists, but just lefty nihilists wanting to burn it all down, man.

American Left:  Unhinged, Unbalanced, Unencumbered by Reality

The attacks on these men are not surprising. Modern-day progressivism is an incoherent, personality-based movement of various caliginous interests and agitation groups, loosely gathered, each to protect his or her own particular ideological or financial turf.

They shout “science!” and talk about free thinking, but demand we all bow down when Reverend Al Gore, International Church of Gaia, declares the earth will catch fire if we (not he) don’t all start driving electric cars and living in Gilligan’s Island huts. They demand we perform the very unscientific act of accepting their self-serving models and theories as dogma, lest they anathematize us as stupid hicks not worthy of even debating.

This is why the Koch's Threaten the Left:

Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want. (Why Koch Industries is Speaking Out)

The Koch brothers have become the latest villain in the progressive narrative

The most effective lefty attacks are those that point out that the Koch brothers fund conservative causes. Although they are libertarian, they’ve got to plant the flag somewhere, and conservatism holds the firmest, highest ground right now. Would these critics expect libertarians to make common cause with politically correct, doctrinaire progressives who cheer the growth of the state?

Conservatives are not such a bad fit, since they share the goal of rolling back the size of the federal government. Yes, Democrats share Koch values on gay marriage, but the left’s belief in the supremacy of the state blows the whole deal. No, conservatives are a better, but not perfect fit. They want to roll back government power and restore personal liberty. And by the way, states continue to decide the gay marriage question on their own, abortion is still legal, and more and more republicans are blowing on their burned fingers, vowing to avoid touching the hot stove of foreign intervention again.

Libertarianism is an existential threat to Progressivism

Going after the Koch’s is stabbing at the heart of the anti-government beast. Modern-day conservatism is hard to defend and wholly complicit in bringing about our current fiscal calamity; libertarianism is not. It has a cachet right now borne of it’s inherent logic. It resonates with our founding principles and it is just the jolt conservatism needed to shock it back into some semblance of logical coherence and consistency.

Libertarianism has contributed greatly to the intellectual ferment on the right. Paloecons battle neocons, with moderates preaching a middle way while fiscal conservatives call for a truce on moral issues. Many religious conservatives don’t like libertarians, but it’s all in play, which is why the conservative cause is attracting interest (and votes) from those in the middle. For this reason I say the right will continue to surge, and the left will continue it embarrassing shrivel.

The Koch Brothers' Agenda is Clear--The Left's is Not

We know what the Koch brothers stand for because they state it clearly in person and through the organizations they openly fund, like CATO and Reason. The Koch’s stand for liberty and personal responsibility. For this reason they oppose an ever more overweening state that leaves the US Constitution getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.

What does Soros and the left want? What are their guiding principles? What is their end-game?

Muslims in America

Rep Peter King (R-NY) will convene hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. 

Some good may come of this. Getting the issues out in the open, starting a dialog and hearing from Muslims themselves could be a good thing.

Misperceptions abound on both sides.  Here's a common complaint:

“There is a generalized sense of Islamophobia floating around, and the hearings are not doing anything to assuage Muslim fears.” (CNN - Islam Hearings)

Wrong!

America is clearly not in the grip of Islamophobia (unless you count the press voluntarily bowing to Islamic pressure groups).  "Phobia" is an irrational fear of something.  Our concerns are quite rational.  Americans look at the Muslim world and we don't like what we see.  

More importantly, we don't want the misogynistic dysfunction and violent religious agitation freakshow setting up its tents here.  Sharia is not compatible with our constitutional republicanism.  We don't stone adulteresses (or even call them that), and we don't execute blasphemers.  We like out beer, boobs and bratwurst barbecue, and we like our violence to be random and non-religious.

Here's another reason we need hearings:

The efforts come a little more than six months after many Muslims were blindsided by a wave of national opposition to a proposed Islamic cultural center near New York’s ground zero last summer.

The fact that they were "blindsided" by the national outcry against planting a mosque anywhere near the site where Muslims killed 3000 people show just how out of touch (or arrogant) the authors of this idea are.

Still, they are joining King's debate.  CAIR and other organizations plan to “start offering facts about American Muslims and their role in helping prevent attacks on our nation,” ahead of King’s hearings, says Corey Saylor, the group’s national legislative director...

If nothing else, I hope these hearings deflate the false charges of "hate" and "Anti-Muslim" that is constantly hurled at good Americans.  Speaking out against a religion or denigrating it's culture or values is not hate.  Christians put up with it every day.

Religious Hate Crimes?  Ask a Jew

Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 8.4 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias. (FBI)

So I look forward to these hearings.  I want to hear good Muslim-Americans stand up and proudly talk about how they are fighting the religious intolerance and bigotry that spills out from the horrible countries they have fled.  I want to hear them talk about how our constitution trumps religious-based laws.

America's track record is pretty clear.  We are a tolerant people.  We have welcomed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and will continue to do so as long as they recognize the primacy of the constitution, respect the God-given rights of others, and refrain from honor killings and decapitations.

Further Reading:
Mark Steyn - Muslims in Europe 
USA Today - Rally to Protest