I'm not alone

in sensing that Barry Hussein O sounds a lot like Jimmy the Dhimmi. Who, by the way, would be a strong contender in my Worst President In History contest.

Is that so wroaaang?

Welcome to the Brave New World.

Is it wrong of me to roll my eyes and snicker?

Would that stop me anyway?

HT to Mark Steyn

Evviva Verona

Oriana Fallaci Square in place of the mosque

VERONA — Goodbye mosque. In its place, Oriana Fallaci Square.


This decision was taken by the committee of Oppeano (Verona), where yesterday morning a building used by Muslims for prayer was bulldozed. In its place, the Municipality will create a public square named after the writer of The Rage and the Pride, which promoted a bitter campaign against Islam.

The decision to raze the structure, which had been opened by a non-profit charity “For the success of Muslims”, was made by the municipal administration, which acquired the area for €70,000 in order to transform it into an open area for parking and green space.

“My citizens did not want this takeover,” explained the mayor, Alessandro Montagnoli, deputy of the Lega Nord, “above all because it could create problems of practicability and cohabitation with the residents.”

Thanks to Gates of Vienna

Universal particularity

An article pointing out that while Americans may imagine that electing Barry Hussein O as President will somehow "redeem" us, the rest of the world continues quite happily and --outside the postChristian West-- wholly unrepentantly our long traditions of racial and ethnic hatred.

The irony of liberal Americans' global consciousness being a result of their national solipsism,
of believing that everyone is like us.

Here's a thought.

We are all of us, homo sapiens, a single species: Americans, Muslims, Chinese, you name it. One human race, regardless of skin color, language, religion, etc.

Not rocket science, but biological science.

But it is characteristic of this species to organize itself into tribal or tribe-like units and to struggle against other humans so-organized. This may not be a flaw, but a condition of our survival.

Part of our common humanity is our withholding of recognition of the full humanity of other human groups. They are our enemies and they are often our neighbors. As painful as this can be, I wonder if the situations this creates makes us viable as a species.

Lions only exist as prides, territorially based and hostile to all other prides. Is it so impossible to imagine that we as a species only have existed by the same intra-species hostility?

Just sayin'.

WTF?

After a recent Supreme Court death penalty case, Barry Hussein O said he would nominate justices who shared "one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy."

WTF?

How about "one's bullshit rhetorical pap"?

You knew it was coming

I have to rethink my direction on this blog, just for my own self-respect. It's becoming a bit like a commentary on a circus freak show. (And I suppose someone will find that phrase offensive).

Case in point: A government-sponsored bioethics committee in Switzerland has now decided that plants have rights. I thought this was a joke, but found an English version of the original report.

Cows, who are, in PETA's worldview, our slaves in a holocaust, are apparently now, in the Swiss ethicists' eyes, genocidal mass murderers....to say nothing of all their methane attacking the atmosphere.

Is there no end to the cycle of crime? The only way to respect life, I fear, is to end the lives of all living things.

More BBC fun

With a hat-tip to Stephen Hicks, this story about an "artist" who had an artificial ear grown from cartilege inplanted in his forearm. Idiotic and creepy.

What provoked this post was the note in the article that some people were "offended" by this...people who had ear damage and who either had or needed artificial ears and who found the ear-in-arm "insensitive".

WTF?

It's got nothing to do with you!!

God, the Western world is full of whiny babies.

EG. A friend told me of a middle-aged colleague he knows who lamented to him that her life would have been very different and richer if only there had been an arts and music program in the Catholic grammar school she attended. When he pointed out that she had been an independent agent since the age of eighteen, which was quite a while ago, and that the world was full of arts and music programs, she was insulted and indignant.

How dare he rob her of her whiny victim status! (what he would call "being a big baby").

Liberalism in a nutshell

I came across a cranky website recently which had a lot of darkly humorous material, something like a Devil's Dictionary. I'd credit it, but I can't remember it. Age has its downside: bad knees and a slowing brain.

Anyway, definition of a liberal: "someone who upholds a woman's right to kill her unborn child, but not with a gun."

Ouch.

Speaking of guns, some recent discussion of gun-banning leads me to describe why I gave up on being a liberal. Liberals are anti-gun. Guns hurt people. People shouldn't have them. The SF city council tried to ban them here, although the courts overturned their plan. And the Toronto city council just voted the same kind of opinion.

But here's my problem. All the law-abiding people are gunless. Do we now suppose that only the police and the military have them? Of course not. Criminal have them. Gangs, thugs, etc. have them because by definition, they do not give a shit about your gun-laws and your moral musings on violence. So liberalism creates a situation where nice people make themselves defenseless in the face of violent criminals, in order to uphold a high-minded vision of how nice things would be if everyone were to behave themselves.

And of course when the criminals do use their guns to wreak havoc on nice people, liberals are the ones excusing them! And always blaming the police for being brutal and trigger-happy. And of course the military is warmongering. It's nuts. So the only protection that nice people have against underprivileged criminals is the state-sanctioned paramilitary that cannot be trusted.

Sometimes I see liberalism as one long tantrum.

The point is that we do not live on a protected island where we can create a multicultural, woman-centered, economically sharing, transnational, nonviolent, post-religious, eco-green society. Neither locally nor globally. Because the only way such a society can survive is if every other society and every other group is the same.

And they are not.

If, on the other hand, some societies turn themselves into the above-described model...Europe, for example, or Canada...they find themselves practically unable to deal with the rest of the world, which is emphatically and unapologetically not like that.

Europe and Canada, for instance, have no military significance anymore, by their own design.
America protects them, and is roundly despised for it by these very people. Reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked down from my totally untested moral highground on the business/corporate life of the man who made my life possible, my hardworking father.

And Europe and Canada find themselves dealing with massive immigration of Muslims, who care not one whit for the niceties of a dying Western culture and indeed are happy to facilitate.

The world is largely run by the Crips and the Bloods. Always has been. Always will be. You can call them kings or commisars or Dictators for Life or whatever. And they, and the people who regularly line up to serve them, will prey on the HighMinded Liberal societies when given a chance.

One of the terrible phrases from the Sixties is Robert Kennedy's hubristic "Some look around and ask why. I look around and ask why not"...or something like it*. I'll tell you why not!

Because of the nature of the planet and the nature of the species. This, it seems to me, is something that liberals either known nothing or want to know nothing of. As was said, far too generously, of communism's classless utopian ideology: great idea, wrong species.

RFK's musing and the apparent inability of liberalism to see what is and has always been the case makes for its passing from my life.

*It's up there with Marx's “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” . Yeah, and what a great improvement that was.

Ick

Because of what I do for a living, I tend to watch for unusual behavior around the edges, so to speak. The BBC...and you can guess what I think of the BBC in general...just posted a freaky story about a young male seal apparently trying to copulate with a (male) penguin.

What makes the story freaky is the attitude of the reporter and the language in his story. It reads like the tale of a rape perpetrated by a human on another human. The title says, "Sex Pest Seal Attacks Penguin", the texts calls the incident an "assault" and calls the seal "brazen", while setting it in a context of "sexual coercion".

And none of this is tongue-in-cheek. PC discourse now attributed to animals. Creepy.

W :)

Via Associated Press. President Bush poked fun at his potential successors Saturday night, expressing surprise that none of them were in the audience at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner.

"Senator McCain's not here," Bush said of GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain. "He probably wanted to distance himself from me a little bit. You know, he's not alone. Jenna's moving out too."

Bush then referred to scandals that have dogged the campaigns of the two remaining Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, in explaining their absence: "Hillary Clinton couldn't get in because of sniper fire and Senator Obama's at church."