Posts Tagged ‘Christopher Hitchens’

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LinkSwarm for March 20, 2020

Friday, March 20th, 2020

I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…

  • President Donald Trump invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. “The legislation allows the president to require production and orders from certain industries to prioritize the response to a national emergency.”
  • Not just the flu. “On a scale of 1 to 10, he said, the pain was 15… Imagine your lungs turning solid. It’s like suffocating.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci: You better believe the China travel ban made a difference.
  • Don’t let the MSM revisionism fool you; President Trump was relentlessly slammed by Our Media Betters for that decision:

  • So many dead bodies in Iran that trenches for them can be seen from space.
  • The problem with the CDC isn’t underfunding, it’s refusing to focus on its actual job:

    The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

    The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

    At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

    Snip.

    During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.

    The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.

    In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.

    In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.

    The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)

  • If you calculate Wuhan Coronavirus deaths per capita, America is crushing it.
  • “Beijing Fears COVID-19 Is Turning Point for China, Globalization.” Ya think?

    What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about China’s historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the government’s “effective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.

    Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.

    Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijing’s culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for “making us safer,” a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijing’s influence over the WHO’s purse strings.

    Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that China’s response somehow bought the world “time” to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively China’s propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Party’s governance model, instead of condemn it.

    The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.

    Because of China’s initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijing’s authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in China’s image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.

  • Are Chlorequine or Hydroxychloroquine a cure for the Wuhan Coronavirus? They just got approved for that use so I suspect we’re going to find out. Props to reader Greg Timoney for pointing out this post a few days before the news broke more generally.
  • Debunking Cornavirus lies about the Trump Administration.
  • Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar endorses President Trump’s policies to combat the Wuhan Cornavirus:

    And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • CNN praises Trump’s coronavirus leadership. And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth…
  • “After this, whenever after is, we should never let the relationship with the Chinese state go back to normal.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Pretty good thread on what is and isn’t available in various supermarkets in various parts of the country. This week week at my local HEB, chicken was low but ground beef was available, as well as bread and eggs. Lots of things were picked but usually alternates were available if you were willing to switch brands or sizes. Didn’t check toilet paper.
  • Texas-based used bookstore chain Half Price Books has closed all it’s stores due to the coronavirus.

    I’ve bought a number of books there over the years…

  • List of which Austin-area employeers are letting their employees work from home, and which aren’t. I can well understand semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung and AMD keep running their fabs; an idle fab line can lose up to $1 million an hour, and you’re not going to catch coronavirus in a bunny suit in a cleanroom anyway…
  • Nancy Pelosi tried to slip taxpayer-funded abortions into the coronavirus relief bill, because of course she did.
  • Important data reminder:

  • Another professor caught shilling for China.
  • The Austin City Council has decided that there’s no need to clean up homeless encampments in the present crisis. “In the current situation, however, homeless encampments ought to be the first place you look to shut down transmission of infectious diseases. Instead, those are the one place that will be left completely alone.”
  • “GOP wins three special Pennsylvania [State] House races, including a ‘Hillary district.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Harris County finally settles a lawsuit to provide information on foreign nationals illegally registered to vote.

    After two years of hiding public voter data, the state’s biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.

    This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.

    Snip.

    PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennett’s office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.

  • “Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients.”

  • Production on Saturday Night Live shut down. I’m so old I remember when it was funny…
  • Christopher Hitchens, anti-identitarian:

    Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:

    People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

  • Cancel culture comes for Woody Allen.

    In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Mia’s ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was “satanic and evil,” and that she needed to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Mia’s Connecticut house. But when the child’s accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Mia’s own nanny “quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events.” And Dylan’s brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allen’s memoirs.

    The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.

  • Former Ars Technica writer and Anti-GamerGater Peter Bright found guilty of attempted enticement of a minor for sex.
  • “Trump Says, ‘I Don’t Want Any Americans To Die’, NYT Quotes As ‘I… Want… Americans To Die.'”
  • Funny dog tweet the first:

  • For Dwight:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Robert Conquest, RIP

    Wednesday, August 5th, 2015

    Robert Conquest, one of the leading historians of Soviet genocide, has died at age 98.

    It’s hard to remember now, but for most of the Cold War, western liberals vehemently denied that genocide had occurred in the Soviet Union (or other communist nations) at all. Conquest’s The Great Terror helped crack that facade of willful ignorance, as did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental The Gulag Archipelago.

    I once reviewed The Harvest of Sorrow, his work on the Holodomor, Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine, and it’s a devastating, amazingly well-researched book. “In the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter, in this book.”

    He was also a poet, and dabbled in science fiction as a writer and editor, but it was as a historian he made far and away his greatest impact. Communism was the great evil of the 20th century, and Conquest had a key role in exposing it. “Over all, Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the entire Stalin era at no less than 20 million.”

    Here’s an obituary from The Telegraph. “Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist.”

    Here’s Christopher Hitchens’ essay on Conquest from 2007.

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    Posted in Communism | 1 Comment »

    Camille Paglia Interview Part 2: Media Watch

    Thursday, July 30th, 2015

    And here’s the second part of that Camille Paglia interview. Choice quotes:

  • “‘Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.’ It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents—they’re still sneering at dad in some way.”
  • “All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced.”
  • “The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.”
  • “I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone.”
  • “I don’t demonize Fox News. At what point will liberals wake up to realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long? They controlled the major newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and T.V. networks. It’s no coincidence that all of the great liberal forums have been slowly fading.”
  • “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It’s so simplistic!”
  • “It is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.”

    • Things Paglia is a fan of: Drudge, Salon, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. Not a fan: Christopher Hitchens.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Flashback: Noam Chomsky Attacking Both Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens

    Sunday, December 18th, 2011

    To set the historical record straight, it is necessary from time to time to point out that the majority of “Left Wing Intellectuals” did not spend the Cold War criticizing communist governments for oppressing their people, but rather attacking any attempt by the U.S. government or conservatives to oppose communism. In their eyes, Ronald Reagan was an “insane imperialist warmonger” for calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire and attempting to fight communism throughout the world.

    So in the High Church of the American Left, praising America’s fight against communism was the ultimate sin, right up there with opposing global warming. Even so, some may find it surprising just how viciously that High Church’s uncrowned Pope, Noam Chomsky, attacked Vaclav Havel for the sin of praising America as a “defender of freedom.”

    Sayeth Pope Chomsky to his leftwing pal Alexander Cockburn:

    As a good and loyal friend, I can’t overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel’s embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) — for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists — and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause).

    Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 — Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor’s plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle. I recall remarks by a Fatherland Front leader in a remote village in Vietnam, Palestinian organizers, etc., describing the USSR as the hope for the oppressed and the US government as the brutal oppressor of the human race. If these people had made it to the Supreme Soviet they doubtless would have been greeted with great applause as they delivered this message, and probably some hack in Pravda would have swallowed his disgust and written a ritual ode.

    I don’t mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It’s also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks.

    So: Vaclav Havel, a man who spent most of his adult life fighting communist oppression and imprisonment, was “morally repugnant” and worse than a “Stalinist hack” for saying that the U.S. was ” the defender of freedom.” Oh, and compared to any place America was fighting communism, “East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.” So sayeth Pope Chomsky.

    Havel wasn’t the only formerly left-wing public figure dying this week who attracted Pope Chomsky’s scorn for heresy. Christopher Hitchens also received condemnation for suggesting that Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, demonstrably more evil and culpable in the death of innocents than Bill Clinton. Hitchens, of course, gave at least as well as he got, and also noted the moral bankruptcy of Chomsky’s attack on Havel:

    The last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions. He sought earnestly to convince me that Vaclav Havel, by addressing a joint session of Congress in the fall of 1989, was complicit in the murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador that had occurred not very long before he landed in Washington. In vain did I point out that the timing of Havel’s visit was determined by the November collapse of the Stalinist regime in Prague, and that on his first celebratory visit to the United States he need not necessarily take the opportunity to accuse his hosts of being war criminals. Nothing would do, for Chomsky, but a strict moral equivalence between Havel’s conduct and the mentality of the most depraved Stalinist.

    Less than a year later, Hitchens himself would have enough of his former allies on the left and take leave from the High Church’s oldest organ, The Nation:

    It’s obvious to me that the “antiwar” side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed. All evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda last fall, and now all the proof is in; but I am sent petitions on Iraq by the same people (some of them not so naïve) who still organize protests against the simultaneous cleanup and rescue of Afghanistan, and continue to circulate falsifications about it. The Senate adopted the Iraq Liberation Act without dissent under Clinton; the relevant UN resolutions are old and numerous. I don’t find the saner, Richard Falk-ish view of yet more consultation to be very persuasive, either.

    This is something more than a disagreement of emphasis or tactics. When I began work for The Nation over two decades ago, Victor Navasky described the magazine as a debating ground between liberals and radicals, which was, I thought, well judged. In the past few weeks, though, I have come to realize that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. (I too am resolutely opposed to secret imprisonment and terror-hysteria, but not in the same way as I am opposed to those who initiated the aggression, and who are planning future ones.) In these circumstances it seems to me false to continue the association, which is why I have decided to make this “Minority Report” my last one.

    Condemning Havel, driving out Hitchens; two small examples of just how extensively a reflexive anti-Americanism and hatred of conservatism has warped the judgment of those still filling the pews of the High Church of the American Left.

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy | 15 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 16, 2011

    Friday, December 16th, 2011

    I get the impression that this “Christmas” thing you hear so much about is getting close. I should probably do something about that. In the meantime, some links:

  • Iowahawk channels Stephen G. Bloom on the Hell that is Iowa.
  • Dwight has a good bit on the left’s favorite cop killer. “I believe some people do things so awful to other people that they deserve to die. I believe Ted Bundy deserved to die. I believe Ronald Clark O’Bryan deserved to die. And I think Abu-Jamal deserves to die.”
  • Dwight also mentioned Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters, which I have not read. (In fact, while I have read numerous of Hitchens’ essays, I have not read any of his books, which is a deficiency I should probably correct.) Here’s a very interesting interview with him on the subject. However, if I may rudely quibble with the recently dead (and I suspect Hitchens would insist on doing so in the same situation), I do take partial issue with his assertion that “the right doesn’t have anyone it can come up with from that period who was as prescient as Orwell.” I would argue that Malcolm Muggeridge’s reporting on the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine) would not only qualify, it preceded Orwell’s reporting from Catalonia.
  • Speaking of Hitchens, Michael Totten reprints their entirely-too-exciting exciting exploits in Lebanon together. That’s also reprinted in The Road to Fatima Gate, which i should give off my lazy ass and do a review of before the year is over. (Summary: If you want to know what’s happened in Lebanon over the last decade, you should read it.)
  • Mark Steyn on how America wasted the unipolar moment.
  • More on the Democrats’ white working class problem.
  • A view from across the pond: “The failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its descent into Lord of the Flies-style chaos, and in many instances thuggery and criminality, is emblematic of the dramatic decline of the Left in the United States.” (Yeah, I submitted the Fark story as well.)
  • Dallas vs. Detroit.
  • And just in case you missed it, Texas is still kicking ass on the jobs front.
  • On a completely non-political note: Llamas With Hats.

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats | No Comments »

    Christopher Hitchens, RIP

    Friday, December 16th, 2011

    Not unexpected, but still sad news to report the passing of one of our more interesting writers. And one of the few “public intellectuals” worthy of the term.

    Michael Totten has more.

    Conservative Commune has still more, including a wide variety of links to other tributes.

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    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for Friday, September 9, 2011

    Friday, September 9th, 2011

    After an unusually active week, here’s a LinkSwarm for a lazy Friday, including a few things I meant to link to earlier and didn’t have the time.

  • Christopher Hitchens, a fine writer and a formidable intellect, weighs in on the London riots. In the process Hitchens provide a nod to his brother Peter Hitchens’ analysis of the riots (and link to this fascinating debate between the two on the nature of religion, of which I was previously unaware). I’m not entirely convinced by Hitchens argument that there were “bad” areas no one went into long before the riots. I’m sure there were, but did they consist of people who had never held a job in their lives, and would those denizens in past eras have felt a complete lack of compunction over setting other people’s small businesses on fire?
  • Speaking of Hitchens, here he is on 9/11.
  • Michael Barone wasn’t impressed with Obama’s job speech: “Straw men took a terrible beating.”
  • Turkey to dispatch warships to break the Gaza blockade. What’s the worst that could happen?
  • Interpol issues a notice for Moammar Gadhafi.
  • Also, clashes in the Gadhafi stronghold of Bani Walid.
  • Others say the real objective of the rebel (provisional government?) offensive is the arms caches at the oasis of Jufra.
  • Solayndra is just the tip of Obama’s crony capitalism.
  • Oooo, burn.
  • Chocolate weapons. That is all.
  • Finally, some good news from the Bastrop fire. Couple with horse farm had to flee with horses, but without tackle. The good news is the tackle (including some very expensive saddles) survived the fire. The bad news is it was promptly stolen. The good news is it took all of nine hours to track down the thieves trying to sell the stuff on eBay. Score one for the good guys.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for Friday, August 5, 2011

    Friday, August 5th, 2011

    The last six days of blogging have been pretty packed, so here’s a LinikSwarm for a lazy (and very hot) Friday:

  • Christopher Hitchens on Turkey. He glosses over the fact (maybe he only had so many words) that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk could be quite a murderous bastard himself when it suited his interests…
  • Amazon isn’t the problem in California. “How perverse is it when wanting to keep money that you’ve earned is considered being greedy?”
  • Either I missed this when it was announced, or the MSM didn’t cover it, but Mississippi NAACP executive Lessadolla Sowers was convicted of ten counts of voting fraud in April.
  • Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated story, Democrats continue to oppose Voter ID bills, and even trotted out Bill Clinton to play the race card.
  • Here’s a movie about an an Islamic punk band with female and gay members who drink beer and smoke pot. Sadly, and predictably, it’s completely fictional.
  • Fannie Mae is back to what it does best, i.e. losing taxpayer money.
  • You may remember my previous mention of the new definition of “flash mobs,” i.e. large groups of black youths that gather together to commit crimes and then disperse. Evidently they’re a big enough problem in Cleveland that they passed an ordinance to crack down on the phenomena, which was vetoed. Alas, from the description, the Ohio ACLU is probably correct in calling it “both ineffective and unconstitutional.”
  • Flash mobs also seem to be a problem in Philadelphia.
  • And Chicago.
  • And just last week in Greensboro, NC.
  • In fact, it’s a big enough issue that the National Retail Federation has issued guidelines on how to deal with it.

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Uncategorized | No Comments »

    This Month in Jihad

    Monday, July 11th, 2011

    Well, I’m not really updating it weekly anymore, am I?

    So here are some notable Jihad-related stories from the last month or so:

  • Geert Wilders acquitted.
  • Pakistani generals helped sell nuclear secrets to North Korea. Lovely.
  • Christopher Hitchens, who is probably considerably more pro-Palestinian and skeptical of Israel than I am by a good measure, questions the motives of the “Gaza Flotilla,” noting the many ties of the organizers to Hamas, and of Hamas to Assad’s Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians.”
  • Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will face the death penalty. Good news, but why did it take a year and half to get to this point?
  • Al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri is dead.
  • At least 29 women in Leeds have UK courts to thank for preventing forced marriages.
  • Baby’s first jihad.
  • Robert Spencer on the possible Hindu roots of Islam.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | 2 Comments »

    Still More Bin Laden Fallout

    Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
  • The ever-readable and redoubtable Christopher Hitchens.
  • James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal. Including why we went in with troops rather than B-52s: “The president wanted proof that bin Laden was dead. So he assembled a small death panel, which went to the compound in Pakistan and shot him.” Heh.
  • The White House seems to be unclear on some of the details of the operation. Not a good idea to be handing the “deathers” ammunition this early.
  • Three cheers for Dick Cheney’s assassination squad.
  • Stratfor on al Qaeda’s decentralized nature, and what Bin Laden’s death means for Jihadism.

    • And now, in honor of Bin Laden’s demise, and stolen from Dwight’s pal Borepatch, here’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist:

    Believe it or not, thought I had seen the “I Kill You!” pic, I had actually never seen the video before going to Borepatch’s site. Given that this video has over 133 million hits, I may be a wee little bit behind the curve on this one. Tune in next week when I cover such cutting edge Internet phenomena as Mahir’s website, an animated dancing baby, and cat pictures with funny misspelled captions…

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    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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