"Barack Obama’s parting gift to the Democratic Party."

Dick Morris' prediction for Nov 6. I think he's right.

"Sorry, dealer's all out of race cards "

Kathleen Parker:

Predictable as rain, the race card has surfaced just in time to stir up electoral passions, justify outcomes and explain away inconvenient truths.

Just days from Election Day, the zeitgeist belched up one of its least attractive — and least defensible — memes. (Was it the weather?)

Preemptive theories, in no particular order, include: Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama because they are both black (according to Romney surrogate John Sununu); if Obama loses Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, all of which voted for him in 2008, the old Confederacy will be restored (Daily Beast commentator Andrew Sullivan); Americans still harbor racial bias even if they don’t know it (recent online poll, Associated Press).

Anyone reading headlines related to the poll might infer that white Americans are biased against black Americans. Extrapolating, given the current election season, it follows that if some voters prefer Romney, it is because Obama is African American.

But a review of the poll reveals something not quite so definitive or sinister. Overall, the findings suggest that most Americans are moderate, fair-minded and, for the most part, don’t see things one way or the other based on race.

Some of the questions themselves, on the other hand, were unnecessarily provocative and biased. That is, their design was based on an assumption of racial bias.

For example, the AP poll asked people whether they agree or disagree with the following statements: “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.”

What kind of question is this? Who doesn’t believe that everyone should work his or her way up? The underlying assumption is blatantly racist, implying as it does that blacks don’t work and do expect special favors.

It is heartening that the majority, perhaps perceiving the trap, neither strongly agreed nor disagreed.

Another statement read: “It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could just be as well off as whites.”

Why not just ask people when they stopped beating their children?...

[E]ven the netherworld of politics should have standards. To preemptively label people racist for favoring a candidate who happens to be white, and otherwise advancing a narrative that will create only racial animus should Obama lose, is implicitly biased, unfair and a breach of good faith. Stop it.

The bizarre allegations of racism against people who don't support Obama-- a president who was elected because of his race (what were his other qualifications?)-- are a measure of the desperation and amorality of the Democrat Left. They are willing to incite racial violence, which is a real possiblity if Obama loses, just to advance their political agenda.


Democrats change constituencies, but not tactics.

Al Gore: 'You'all got this hurricane 'cause ya' didn't listen to Al Gore'

We have to listen better, if we're gonna control the weather.

Future undecided voter

She's tired of them both...

John Quincy Adams on Islam

President John Quincy Adams in 1830, on Islam:

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust, by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.

Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him... [capitals in original].

The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.

The fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, is the extirpation of hatred from the human heart. It forbids the exercise of it, even towards enemies. There is no denomination of Christians, which denies or misunderstands this doctrine. All understand it alike—all acknowledge its obligations; and however imperfectly, in the purposes of Divine Providence, its efficacy has been shown in the practice of Christians, it has not been wholly inoperative upon them. Its effect has been upon the manners of nations. It has mitigated the horrors of war—it has softened the features of slavery—it has humanized the intercourse of social life. The unqualified acknowledgement of a duty does not, indeed, suffice to insure its performance. Hatred is yet a passion, but too powerful upon the hearts of Christians. Yet they cannot indulge it, except by the sacrifice of their principles, and the conscious violation of their duties. No state paper from a Christian hand, could, without trampling the precepts of its Lord and Master, have commenced by an open proclamation of hatred to any portion of the human race. The Ottoman lays it down as the foundation of his discourse.

Islam is based, historically and theologically, on hatred and violence. It has spread only by war, and is today the source-- from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Darfur to Gaza to Syria to Afghanistan to Iran-- of a disproportionate share of human misery, exceeded only by National Socialism (of which Islam was an enthusiastic ally) and State Atheism in the modern world.

We need to speak truthfully about Islam, just as we need to speak truthfully about the horror of Nazism and atheism in power. The fervent struggle by Muslims to muzzle freedom of speech and freedom of religion is evidence that they understand the vulnerability of their ideology in the free exchange of ideas among free men.

Liberal Logic...

From Liberal Logic 101.

Victor Hansen on the pathologies of Islam, and us.

Victor Hanson has a superb essay on the Middle East and on our response to Islamic violence and failure.

Excerpt:

The world obsesses over Israel and the Palestinians because of the neurotic Middle East. The issue is not really the principle of a divided capital — or Nicosia would be daily news. Nor is the concern over refugees per se, since well over 500,000 Jews were religiously cleansed from the major Arab capitals following the 1948 and 1967 wars. No one cares where they went or how they have fared in the decades since. Is the global worry really over occupied territories? Hardly. Lately it seems that every desolate island between China and Japan is equally contested. Are there special envoys to the Falklands, and do the islanders receive international aid? Will there be a U.N. session devoted to the Kuril Islands? Does Gdansk/Danzig merit summits? We are told ad nauseam that the Arab minority in Israel suffers — would that the ignored Coptic minority in Egypt had similar protections and freedoms. 

The oil-rich Middle East is just different from other regions. We don’t expect another Cal Tech to sprout in Cairo in the way it might in either Bombay or Beijing. Nor do we assume that a cure for prostate cancer could ever emerge from Tripoli as it might from Tel Aviv. The world will not be flooded by Syrian-made low-cost, durable products that make our lives better — comparable to what comes from South Korea. There will be not a Saudi or Algerian version of a Kia. High-speed machine lathes will not be exported from Pakistan as they are from Germany. I doubt that engineers in Afghanistan or Yemen will replace our iPads. The Middle East’s efforts in the production of biofuels will not rival Brazil’s. Libya will not send archaeologists to the American Southwest to help investigate Native American sites. 

In other words, in politically incorrect terms, the world tacitly gives exemptions to the Middle East — and expects very little in return. It assumes that the rules that apply elsewhere of civility, tolerance, and nonviolence are inoperative there — and perhaps have reason to so be. Money is made in the Middle East either by pumping out oil that others have found and developed or, less frequently these days, by catering for tourists who wish to see the remains of what others built centuries earlier. Few foreigners decide to spend a relaxing week in Egypt, or to sunbathe on the beaches of Gaza, or to enjoy the wine and cheese of Libya, or to snorkel in the waters off Syria, or to study engineering in Algiers. How many tourists choose to mountaineer in Afghanistan or visit Persepolis or unwind in Pakistan? 

The world also assumes a sort of Middle Eastern parasitism: Daily its millions use mobile phones, take antibiotics, hit the Internet, fire RPGs, and play video games, and yet they not only do not create these products that they rely upon, but largely have antipathy for those who do. 

Asymmetry is, of course, assumed. One expects to be detained for having a Bible in one’s baggage at Riyadh, whereas a Koran in a tote bag is of no importance at the Toronto airport. The Egyptian immigrant in San Francisco, or the Pakistani who moves to London, expects to be allowed to demonstrate against the freewheeling protocols of his hosts, while a Westerner protesting against life under sharia in the streets of Karachi or Gaza would earn a death sentence...

The latest round of radical Islam arose — in the manner of Nazism in the 1930s, Communism in the 1940s, and Baathism and pan-Arabism in the 1960s — not to address the self-inflicted causes of such failure, but to indict others: Jews, Western democracies and Western capitalists, non-Arabs and heretics, and, above all, powerful Americans...

What can be done?... In the short term, reciprocity would be wise. If violence should continue against American personnel and facilities, we can gradually trim foreign aid, advise Americans not to visit Egypt or Libya, put holds on visas for students from Middle Eastern countries that do not protect Americans or that contribute to terrorism, recall our ambassadors and expel theirs. Reopening our embassy in Damascus and dubbing Bashar Assad a “reformer” did not improve relations with Syria or temper Syrian extremism. A reduced security profile in Libya did not create good will for our ambassador. Two billion dollars in aid to Egypt did not win hearts and minds. The Palestinians are not fond of us, despite millions of dollars in annual aid. 

Having Mr. Morsi on the USC campus did not bank good will for the future, any more than, long ago, Sayyid Qutb’s subsidized travel throughout America earned us a soft spot in the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood. I don’t see how welcoming in Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy and giving her airtime on CNN and MSNBC has enriched the United States by providing us a keener understanding of Egypt — not when she uses spray paint to deface public posters that she personally finds objectionable. 

To sum up, the West should just say, “No.”

Hanson's essay is too good to excerpt justly-- please read the whole thing.

We need to respond to radical Islam with defiance. We should strangle it economically, culturally, academically, and militarily. Radical Islam's strength is ephemeral-- it is a primitive theocratic cult with no inherent skill or productivity. It's only real export is violence.

Radical Islam is parasitical on the Christian West, and we need to cut it off.

The war on women...

"...Oh, and you might want to put some ice on that."

From Liberal Logic 101.

She's indignant...

From Liberal Logic 101.

Noted expert on Republican gynecology declares that Republicans and Democrats "switched sides" after 1964.

Andrew Sullivan on the Big Switch:

I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.

 No. The parties didn't "switch" after 1964.

Republicans (and some Democrats) passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act against Democrat resistance (just as Republicans passed civil rights legislation twice during Eisenhower's administration, against fierce Democrat opposition).

Over the next decade or two, segregation receded as a major factor in politics in the South (the South voted for Jimmy Carter-- no racist he-- in 1976.) As race became less of an issue, and social policy and economic policy came to the forefront, southerners (with a big influx of population from the North) became more Republican, as the party fit their views on non-racial matters better than the Democrats did.

What remained the same after 1964 was race-baiting. The Democrat party for most of its history was fervently anti-black. Slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, segregation, lynching were all Democrat policies. But it would be wrong, I think, to describe the essence of Democrat racial policy as anti-black, although that was certainly the form it took for most of the Party's history.

What the Democrat Party is and always have been is race-baiters. Democrats use racial hate and fear for political purposes. It is what links Nathan Bedford Forrest and the KKK and George Wallace and Lester Maddox and Bull Connor with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. They use race to advance Democrat politics. Democrats have had no hesitation to stir racial animosity-- even violence, which could happen if Obama loses-- if it serves the interests of the Democrat Party.

You can add Andrew Sullivan to that list of race-baiters. 

Oldie but goodie

Came across this great cartoon, about abortion-loving Dem. Senator Dick Durbin's comparison of American soldiers to Nazis.

Progressive eugenics

Ross Douthat has a great essay on the intimate link between progressive politics and eugenics.

Excerpt:

... eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction. “They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers,” Conniff writes of Fisher and his peers, “but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men.” From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about “race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement. 

... we know what the elites of a bygone era would have done with [modern genetic science]: they would have empowered the state (and the medical establishment) to determine which fetal lives should be carried to term, and which should be culled for the good of the population as a whole.

That scenario is all but unimaginable in today’s political climate. But given our society’s track record with prenatal testing for Down syndrome, we also have a pretty good idea of what individuals and couples will do with comprehensive information about their unborn child’s potential prospects. In 90 percent of cases, a positive test for Down syndrome leads to an abortion. It is hard to imagine that more expansive knowledge won’t lead to similar forms of prenatal selection on an ever-more-significant scale. 

Is this sort of “liberal eugenics,” in which the agents of reproductive selection are parents rather than the state, entirely different from the eugenics of the [past], which forced sterilization on unwilling men and women? Like so many of our debates about reproductive ethics, that question hinges on what one thinks about the moral status of the fetus. 

From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights. 

But this is a convenient perspective for our civilization to take. Having left behind pseudoscientific racial theories, it’s easy for us to look back and pass judgment on yesterday’s eugenicists. It’s harder to acknowledge what we have in common with them. 

First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn. And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what ends our mastery is turned.

It's important to remember that eugenics was and is a throughly progressive project. It is a natural, really almost inescapable, consequence of the Darwinian understanding of man. If man is evolved by a struggle for survival, modern civilization's compassion for the weak is a recipe to degrade the human race. Eugenics, from a Darwinian standpoint, is not cruel, but necessary, in order to allow civilization to coddle the losers in the evolutionary struggle without degrading the human species (don't you love Darwin-talk!).

The fervor to apply "scientific" Darwinian principles to human reproduction enthralled progressives (i.e. liberals) of the 20th century, and eugenics was a focus of the progressive project. It was opposed passionately by conservatives, including conservative protestant churches and the Catholic Church.

It's worth noting that the Christian denominations that embraced eugenics in the first half of the 20th century are the same liberal "Christian-lite" denominations that embrace Evolution Sunday (a.k.a. Darwin Day) today. Liberals hew to form.

The turning point in the eugenic movement was the campaign by eugenic leader Fredrick Osborne in the 1950's to turn away from coercive negative eugenics and to entice the public to carry out "voluntary unconscious selection" (his words).

Osborne strove to make the unfit want to limit their reproduction. The slogan he suggested was brilliant: "Every child a wanted child".

"Every child a wanted child" is now Planned Parenthood's trademark.

What to wear on halloween?

Jay Leno has a suggestion:

A question about modern day segregation in the Democrat Party

Anonymous and I have had a bit of a back-and-forth about the observation that majority white districts are more likely to elect black representatives to Congress if the white district is Republican than if it is Democrat.

Please see the post and comment string here for the details of the discussion.


But this raises a fascinating observation.

There are similar numbers of black Congressmen elected from majority white Republican districts and majority white Democrat districts.

Yet many fewer blacks self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats. So naturally there are fewer total Republican blacks in Congress than Democrat blacks in Congress (most black Democrat congressmen are elected from black districts).

The relative paucity of blacks in the Republican Party does not prove racism, of course, because blacks have identified with the Democrat Party in very large numbers ever since 1936, including decades of intense Democrat segregation and racism coinciding with decades of intense Republican opposition to segregation and racism.

Republicans, who have a much lower black party affiliation, have roughly the same number of black congressmen elected from white districts as do Democrats. But this raises a very interesting question: with the vast majority of blacks in this country being Democrats, why are relatively few black representatives (compared to the total of black Democrat representatives) elected in majority white Democrat districts?
Why?

Artificial intelligence... isn't

(The Verge)

I never thought of it this way...

:) 

The Children of the Corn support Obama. Who knew?

Obama reelection video made by a San Francisco ad team.



Creepy.

What if schools recited Buddhist prayers?

An interesting perspective on school prayer from Gary Christenot at World Net Daily.

Excerpt:

... we were quite excited to be able to attend our first football game at Wahiawa High School [in Hawaii]. Upon our arrival at the stadium it seemed like so many other high school athletic events we had been to in many other places. The teams were warming up, the band was gathering, the ROTC was preparing to raise the colors – a pretty typical fall ritual.


Coming from a fairly traditional Southern upbringing, I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer. But to our extreme dismay, the clergyman who took the microphone and began to pray was not a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest, but a Buddhist priest who proceeded to offer up prayers and intonations to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan.


We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

... I would say in love to my Christian brothers and sisters, before you yearn for the imposition of prayer and similar rituals in your public schools, you might consider attending a football game at Wahiawa High School. Because unless you’re ready to endure the unwilling exposure of yourself and your children to those beliefs and practices that your own faith forswears, you have no right to insist that others sit in silence and complicity while you do the same to them. I, for one, slept better at night knowing that because Judeo-Christian prayers were not being offered at my children’s schools, I didn’t have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive.

Christenot raises an important point about the school prayer controversy. But the issues are more subtle than he seems to believe.

First, his discomfort with pagan prayer is not a Constitutional issue. The folks at Wahiawa High School have every right to say whatever prayer they want at their football games. Differences of opinion can be sorted out by the civics of school board procedures, etc. Federal judges have no place in such issues. In fact, the Establishment Clause prohibits federal interference in religion. If Christenot doesn't like pagan prayers, he can remain silent, sit down, pray a quiet Christian prayer to himself, or leave. It's a free country.

I wouldn't take offense at a Buddhist prayer (or a Jewish or Muslim prayer or whatever). I like free expression, and I don't mind hearing other people's beliefs. I don't call the police when I hear something I disagree with. I would just pray silently, giving thanks to Christ for all of His blessings. Other people's prayers don't bother me. I like it when people are free to speak and pray.

This is the salient point about the ban on school prayer. Christians don't need banal invocations during  football games to prosper. We Christians survived and even flourished under Nero and Mohammed and Henry VIII and Stalin and Hitler. We'll survive Engle v. Vitale.

The school prayer issue isn't about Christianity. The school prayer issue is an fight about freedom. It is a battle to preserve our Constitutional rights, and it is a battle against censorship. As Americans, and as Christians working for His kingdom, we should work for freedom and for the preservation of our unalienable rights.

At stake in the school prayer issue is our freedom as guaranteed by the Constitution and our unalienable right to shape our civic culture without government censorship. The fight is not ultimately about Christianity. The Lord's kingdom will prevail, bigoted court rulings, like the gates of Hell, notwithstanding.


HT: commentor Modusoperandi

Andrea Mitchell is such a jerk

Mitchell says a bunch of stupid things about the security measures Israel is forced to take to protect her citizens from Palestinian terrorists, and she gets schooled.

I can't help but think that the bizarre abject "stupidity" that people like Mitchell have about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has anti-Semitism at its base. No intelligent well-meaning person could blame Jews for protecting themselves from these savage acts.

To blame Jews for protecting themselves is to assert that Jews qua Jews have less right to self-defense than other people.

“Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

That what Joe Biden asked the parents of Tyrone Woods, who was a former Navy SEAL killed during the video-motivated terrorist attack in Benghazi.

Biden asked Wood's parents that question during the ceremony when his son's body returned home.

The MSM is silent about it.

...

November 6. 

Another Lena Dunham parody video!

This is too easy. 

"Practice safe politics!"

From Ed Morrissey and Instapundit:

The "Sneaky Hate Spiral"

Sometimes I have days like this.

(H.T. Timothy Sandefur)

Nobel laureate sues ungrateful science deniers

Nobel Peace Prize Certificate that Mann displays in his office.
The certificate is not from the Nobel Peace Committee. 

It seems that global warming fraud Michael ('hide the decline') Mann is suing folks who told the truth about the global warming hoax and Mann's central role in it.

Mann's press release:

Lawsuit filed against The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute 

10/22/12 

Today, the case of Dr. Michael E. Mann vs. The National Review and The Competitive Enterprise Institute was filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Dr. Mann, a Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has instituted this lawsuit against the two organizations, along with two of their authors, based upon their false and defamatory statements accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, Jerry Sandusky. Dr. Mann is being represented by John B. Williams of the law firm of Cozen O'Connor in Washington, D.C. (http://www.cozen.com/attorney_detail.asp?d=1&atid=1406).

Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming."...

Hmmm... so Mann, who claims that his science is honest, claims to be a Nobel Laureate.

Fact checkers at examiner.com emailed the Nobel committee to verify:

Geir Lundestad, Director, Professor, of The Norwegian Nobel Institute emailed me back with the following:

1) Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

2) He did not receive any personal certificate. He has taken the diploma awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and to Al Gore) and made his own text underneath this authentic-looking diploma. 

3) The text underneath the diploma is entirely his own. We issued only the diploma to the IPCC as such. No individuals on the IPCC side received anything in 2007. 

Lundestad goes on to say that, “Unfortunately we often experience that members of organizations that have indeed been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize issue various forms of personal diplomas to indicate that they personally have received the Nobel Peace Prize. They have not.” 

So it would appear that not only did Mann not get awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but that the “text underneath the diploma is entirely his own.” This calls into further questions of what else may not be factual in the legal suit over the highly publicized hockey-stick graph and defamation suit.

So Dr. Mann fabricates a claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize in his press release announcing a lawsuit against people who claim that he fabricates things.

Should be an interesting discovery process. Finally, we'll get to read all of the emails.

"Why don't white liberals vote for black politicians"

Ann Coulter has a great essay.

Excerpt:

... if it’s conservatives and “the white working class in the South” who are burning with racial hatred, why don’t white liberals ever vote for black representatives in their own congressional districts? 

Black Democrats apparently can get elected to Congress only from majority black districts, whereas black Republicans are always elected from majority white districts: Gary Franks, J.C. Watts, Tim Scott, Allen West and (we hope!) Mia Love. 

How come white liberals won’t vote for a black representative? Why can’t a black person represent Nita Lowey’s district? 

Democrats do nothing for black Americans except mine them for votes, ginning them up with tall tales about racist Republicans.

Excellent point. Republicans elect black representatives from majority white districts.

Democrats never elect black representatives from majority white districts. Black Democrat representatives are only elected in black districts.

After two centuries of discrimination and segregation, white Liberal Democrats still can't bring themselves to elect black representatives.

Pen and Teller on global warming b.s.

Penn and Teller show what real skepticism is all about.

The language is a little rough, but hey, the truth isn't pretty.


(N.B.: Penn is wrong at 26:08, but nobody's perfect)

"... more free crap..."

Steven Crowder's parody of the Lena Dunham video. Pretty funny.

Freedom fighters and terrorists...

From Liberal Logic 101.

Robert Spencer on New Left Fascists

Spencer:

This contempt for the freedom of speech is rapidly becoming commonplace on the Left. Washington Square News is the student newspaper of New York University, but it is editorially and financially independent from the university, and has a circulation of about 60,000 in lower Manhattan — one of the nation’s foremost epicenters of the far Left. An indication of how quickly the restriction of the freedom of speech has become a fashionable opinion among the Leftist intelligentsia at universities and elsewhere came last Wednesday, when the News ran a piece calling for restrictions on the First Amendment.

Referring to the AFDI ads, author Faria Mardhani wrote: “The decision that the United States must now make is whether hate speech like this should be legal. Do values of free speech override the values of equality and of preventing profound personal offense to any singular group? Was the First Amendment passed with the intention of grouping very diverse people into one entity and then vilifying them?”

In the 1930s, when the Nazis were taking power in Germany, brownshirt storm troopers regularly terrorized Hitler’s foes, shouting them down when they spoke, vandalizing their messages, and even physically threatening them. We are rapidly approaching the same situation, not due to a resurgence in “right-wing extremism,” but because of the Left’s increasingly positive attitude toward thuggery. Hundreds of people have hailed Eltahawy on Twitter and elsewhere as a hero, and many have echoed the calls from Aslan and Abraham to imitate her vandalism. When Geller or I or any other speaker who opposes jihad terror and Islamic supremacism speaks on a college campus, it’s a scene that could easily have taken place in 1934 in Berlin or Munich: we have to go with bodyguards and prepare to be shouted down by self-righteous thugs.

Spencer should have noted that the 20th century fascists in Germany and in Italy got their strongest support from universities and from the young. No segment in German society was more pro-Hitler than university students.

If you aren't chilled by the Left's embrace of censorship and force, you aren't paying attention.

Liberal Logic

From Liberal Logic 101.

"... why would it write a book?"

A letter to the editor in the New York Times Book Review regarding Sam Harris' silly book "Free Will", in which Harris argues that libertarian free will is an illusion. (from the 7/29/12 print version-- I don't have the link)

To the Editor: 

I am puzzled by Sam Harris's argumet. If we are not the authors of our actions, who (or what) wrote Harris's book? The book says that all human action is produced by purely physical processes and causes, even the writing of the book itself. How can the physical produce such an insight, and why would it write a book? How can physical processes produce a work that says that the physical is the basis for all human thought and action? These physical workings certainly seem to be a good simulation of a conscious being. And the most puzzling question of all is why it would find the need to write a book to tell us of its hegemony.

Lawerence A. Berger
Carmel, New York
The writer is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School.

[Emphasis mine] 

Heh.

To deny free will is to affirm free will. If the opinion that free will doesn't exist is determined by the physical, then the opinion that free will doesn't exist has no truth value. It's just meat drippings.

Materialism is such crap.  

"the Leftist creep..."

Jeff Jacoby nails it on recently deceased Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm:

Hobsbawm... was a lifelong Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party from his teens until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Long after it was evident to even true believers that the Bolshevik Revolution had unleashed a nightmare of blood, Hobsbawm went on defending, minimizing, and excusing the crimes of communism.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1994 – five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – he was asked whether he would have shunned the Communist Party had he known in 1934 that Stalin was butchering innocent human beings by the millions. "Probably not," he answered – after all, at the time he believed he was signing up for world revolution. Taken aback by such indifference to carnage, the interviewer pressed the point. Was Hobsbawm saying that if a communist paradise had actually been created, "the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm's answer: "Yes."

Imagine that Hobsbawm had fallen in love with Nazism as a youth and spent the rest of his career whitewashing Hitler's atrocities. Suppose he'd refused for decades to let his Nazi Party membership lapse, and argued that the Holocaust would have been an acceptable price to pay for the realization of a true Thousand-Year Reich. It is inconceivable that he would have been hailed as a brilliant thinker or basked in public acclaim; no self-respecting university would have hired him to teach; politicians and pundits would not have lined up to shower him with accolades during his life and tributes after his death.

Yet Hobsbawm was fawned over, lionized in the media, made a tenured professor at a prestigious university, invited to lecture around the world. He was heaped with glories, including the Order of the Companions of Honour – one of Britain's highest civilian awards – and the lucrative Balzan Prize, worth 1 million Swiss francs. His death was given huge play in the British media – the BBC aired an hour-long tribute and the Guardian led its front page with the news – and political leaders waxed fulsome. Former prime minister Tony Blair called him "a giant … a tireless agitator for a better world."

Such adoration is sickening. Unrepentant communists merit repugnance, not reverence.

There has never been a proper accounting for the fellow-travelers and outright communists who caused and excused the immense crime against humanity that was state atheism in the 20th century, and who still oppress millions in North Korea and elsewhere. Countless intellectuals used their gifts to advance and defend raw evil. More often than not, communist killers and their press agents are lionized.

The accounting will come, for each in his own time, as it has now come for Hobsbawm.

"Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody..."

Democrats are so respectful of women.

Pick out the real racists...

From Liberal Logic 101.

Alan Dershowitz on statehood for Palestinians

Alan Dershowitz has a fine essay on Palestinian statehood. I disagree with Dershowitz on many things, but he's consistently right on Islamism (and on freedom of speech).

Excerpt:

Palestinian terrorism has a decades-long pedigree that far predates Israel's nationhood. In 1929, Haj Amin al Husseini--the grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the official leader of the Palestinian people--ordered his followers to murder hundreds of elderly Jews in Hebron and other cities and towns where Jews had lived for millennia.

During World War II, Husseini moved to Berlin where he met with Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. At Eichmann's trial for war crimes in 1961, it came out that Husseini had personally prevented nearly 1,000 Hungarian-Jewish children from being sent to neutral countries. Instead he insisted that they be sent to Auschwitz, where they died.

In 1948, Palestinians refused to accept the compromise two-state solution proposed by the U.N., and instead they engaged in the Arab states' genocidal war in which 1% of Israel's population, including many civilians, were killed.

In 1968, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, educated to hate anything associated with Jews or Israel, assassinated New York Sen. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Five years later, Palestine Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat arranged to have three American diplomats kidnapped and offered in exchange for Kennedy's assassin. When the U.S. refused to release Sirhan, Arafat personally ordered the torture and murder of the Americans.

In 1972, Arafat ordered the terrorist attack on the Olympics in which several Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered. There followed decades of airplane hijackings, synagogue bombings and other attacks that attracted the attention of the world. These attacks continue, the most recent being this week's killing of Egyptian soldiers near the border with Israel, apparently carried out with the complicity of Palestinian terrorists from Gaza.

Rather than condemn this pervasive violence, the U.N. has done everything in its power to reward it, including devoting special agencies entirely to Palestinians and their cause...

The Palestinian political movement is a terrorist cabal. Under no circumstances should this sick culture get statehood-- Palestinians have never been a state (even under the Ottoman Empire for centuries), and to reward the pioneers in 20th century terror and anti-semitism with nationhood would be an error on a par with the Munich accords with Hitler.

It's noteworthy, as Dershowitz points out, that the modern Palestinian movement passed through the Wolf's Lair.  

Segregation was liberal policy

Big Government, circa 1920.

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Leftist politics, words switch meanings without warning and without justification. But not without purposes.

One of the most bizarre switches has been the switch of Liberal/Progressive to mean "supporter of civil rights". Nothing could be further from the truth. Progressivism, which was what Liberalism was called and now is called since "Liberalism" went into the witness protection program, has been since its inception a program of massive government-enforced racial engineering. In other words, Progressivism was the intellectual framework for segregation in the first half of the 20th century.

The first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was a cold racist, who resegregated the military and the federal civil service. That's right-- re-segregated them.

Republicans, who held the White House for most of the era after Reconstruction, had desegregated the military and federal civil service. Wilson, the avatar of Liberalism/Progressivism, re-segregated them.

Malcolm Kline of Accuracy in Academia observes:

The ultimate irony is that Wilson’s attitudes on race... mesh nicely with the “progressivism”... and clash with the conservatism and libertarian impulses they eschew. After all, slavery and segregation are the ultimate form of government regulation.

Segregation was a natural part of Progressivism, as it was practiced in the South, and in fact the Progressive ideology-- the view that massive government intervention in the private lives of citizens for their own betterment is necessary--  was the primary rationale for segregation laws. Segregation was a massive government program 'for their own good'. Progressives used big government force to engineer the "beneficial" segregated racial composition of communities, schools, businesses, etc.

Damon Root at Reason:

For starters, the original progressives most certainly did not “promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.” In the Jim Crow South, as historian David Southern has documented, disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, and lynching all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Economist John R. Commons, a leading progressive academic and close adviser to high-profile progressive politicians—including “Fighting” Bob Lafollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—authored a 1907 book entitled Races and Immigrants in America, where he called African Americans “indolent and fickle” and endorsed protectionist labor laws since "competition has no respect for the superior races."

Progressives were also rabid eugenicists. Eugenics was basically the science policy of the Progressive movement. As Christine Rosen observed in her masterful Preaching Eugenics, eugenics was a mainstay of the Progressive movement not only in progressive politics but in progressive religion. In contrast, eugenics was opposed tenaciously by conservative orthodox Protestants and especially by the Catholic Church. In 1930-- at the peak of the Progressive/Liberal eugenics program-- Pope Pius XI reiterated the Church's implacable opposition to compulsory sterilization and to eugenics in all its form, and declared participation in eugenics to be a grave sin and anathema for Catholics.

Root observes:

As Princeton University economist Tim Leonard has chronicled, "eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy." Despite the fact that this monograph favorably cites progressive hero Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for his famous dissent in the economic liberty case Lochner v. New York(1905), the authors make no mention of Holmes’ notorious majority decision in Buck v. Bell, where Holmes and his colleagues (including Louis Brandeis) upheld the forced sterilization of those who “sap the strength of the State.”

Even the Dixiecrats in the 1950's and 1960's were mostly conventional liberals-- many opposed the Vietnam war, all supported massive big-government programs, and all supported forced social engineering and the usual host of Liberal/Progressive causes. They were "conservatives" in only one sense: they wanted to conserve Progressive racial social engineering.

Segregation is Liberalism/Progressivism-- big-government social engineering-- as it developed in the racist American South. And Liberals never abandoned their passion to engineer race relations. When Liberals switched in the 1960's from supporting segregation to supporting forced busing and affirmative action, they were actually selling voters the same product-- government race-sifting-- but merely appealing to different siftees.

There is one thing that Liberals/Progressives/Democrats have never supported: a color-blind society.

Fascinating story

The maths that made Voyager possible

Must-read story about the mathematics grad student who solved the three body problem for spacecraft exploring the outer planets, making such voyages possible.

(And why do our Brit friends always call math "maths"?) 

Heh. This isn't even a parody.

D'oh: Obama ads boost enthusiasm for Romney 

A new survey of presidential campaign ads reveals that those from Mitt Romney and President Obama jazz Republicans, pushing GOP enthusiasm 42 percent higher than it was in 2008 for Sen. John McCain. 

"Democratic ads are goosing Republican enthusiasm," said poll analyst Adam Schaeffer of Evolving Strategies, a public opinion research firm. "That in turn will boost Republican turnout," he added. 

Evolving Strategies and Qualtrics teamed to study reactions of 2,384 voters to seven political ads. They found that Obama ads helped the president increase his vote by 15 percent and pushed down Romney's vote by 18 percent. 

Romney's ads, meanwhile, did little to push the vote of Republicans or Democrats. "They are just plain ineffective," he said. 

But more importantly, Schaeffer said that ads from both campaigns were jolting Republican enthusiasm. He told Secrets that the Obama ads especially irk GOP voters. As a result, the Romney and Obama ads have supercharged the enthusiasm of 2008 McCain voters, a huge boost for Romney. 

"Romney and Obama ads increase the highest level of voter enthusiasm of '08 McCain voters by 13 points--a 42 percent surge in the number of McCain '08 voters who are extremely enthusiastic to vote this year," said Schaeffer. What's more, he said, Obama's ads did not boost Democratic enthusiasm for the president...

Pretty funny. Just seeing Obama ads makes Republican voters want to crawl over glass shards to vote against the guy.

The enthusiasm gap in this election will be what decides it. The pundits don't realize how passionate sane people are about getting Obama out. 

"Those bandits in white coats gave up too quickly because they wanted an organ donor,"

Yikes.

Denmark shocked by story of brain-dead donor’s recovery

The world of organ donation in Denmark is in turmoil. A documentary was aired earlier this month which showed family members reacting in anguish to the news that their 19-year-old daughter was brain dead after a car accident, agreeing to donate her organs and allowing doctors to turn off her respirator. About 1.7 million viewers tuned in to the heart-rending drama.

But Carina Melchior did not die after her respirator was removed. She is now undergoing rehabilitation and may make a full recovery. About 500 people immediately removed their names from Denmark’s organ donor register.

Doctors at Aarhus University Hospital were embarrassed by the incident. “We are overjoyed that the young woman survived and that she is moving on after the accident,” Claus Thomsen, the hospital’s chief medical officer, said. "But we made a mistake underway and made the family believe that their daughter and sister would die.”

The hospital acknowledged that the question of organ donation should not have been raised as there were no unambiguous signs that brain death would occur.

This is very serious business. It is absolutely essential that the integrity and accuracy of the process used to determine brain death be impeccable. Removal of organs from a person who is not yet dead is homicide.

Organ donation is a wonderful thing and has saved countless lives, but organs may only be harvested from dead people and with consent. I have participated in this process hundreds of times, and we are very careful to make sure the diagnosis of brain death is accurate and that the family is fully informed of the situation so that they can make an informed decision.

This egregious and very public error will seriously harm efforts to obtain organs for people who need them, and it almost cost this young lady her life.

Please pray for her speedy recovery, and please pray for wisdom and prudence for our doctors and for all who participate in the life-saving organ donation process.

They're not done yet...

From Legal Insurrection:

I need this bumper sticker.

Frank Pastore on Free Will

Theologian Frank Pastore has some fine common sense on the issue of free will.



The denial of free will is perhaps the most bizarre delusion of materialists. That's saying something, I realize. But to deny that we are agents who choose, and to assert that all of the agency that causes our acts and thoughts is chemical and electrophysiological, etc., is just madness. Not only does such a view make nonsense of our culture and laws and moral sense. It is self-refuting. If free will is an illusion, then the assertion that free will is an illusion is a mere chemical reaction, with no more truth value than salt dissolving in water can be "true" or "false".

But materialists cannot admit that we have souls, and they are willing to speak nonsense rather than admit the error of their silly ideology.

Scientists: "If you don't take our advice on global warming, it'll kill even more people than the last time you took our advice."

 

(Dissociated Press) Scientists today in Copenhagen issued a grave warning to the public: if we don't act to stop global warming, it will kill even more people than have been killed by the other apocalyptic scientific hoaxes of the last half-century. 

Speaking at the run..Run...RUN!!! 2012 Consensus Conference on Global Warming in the beautiful Danish capital, Dr. Wilhelm Hoaxe, director of the Carson Institute for Toxicological Hyperbole in Brussels, warned sternly:

"We are facing a climate apocalypse of unprecedented proportions. Estimates of the dead over the next decade are difficult, because our computer models keep breaking down emotionally. We think the the global warming deaths may approach 60 million people, mostly poor women and children, equal in number to the people who were killed by malaria because of our hysterical war on DDT. It could be that bad."

Dr. Florence Nutter, director of the Population Control for People We Don't Want Too Many Of Institute in Berlin, disagreed with Hoaxe. She believes that global warming will be an even more terrifying catastrophe.

"My calculation is that global warming will kill even more people than we population control hysterics have killed in China, which is at least a couple hundred million aborted and abandoned babies, mostly girls." Contemplating the enormity of the risk we face from climate instability, Nutter noted  "The fact that we've already killed countless millions of innocents with our junk science helps to bring home the enormity of the risk we face from the overheating earth."

The only bright side to the looming climate catastrophe, Dr. Nutter noted, is that global warming won't sterilize millions of people against their will, as the population control and eugenic gendarmes did in the past century and continue to do in China.

 Dr. Philip Deja-vu, scientific director of the Conference, drew a parallel.

"If you think that the millions of deaths from unstable scientists was bad, imagine the carnage we face from an unstable climate."

My challenge to P.Z. Myers: should secularists support the "right" to abortion?

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula posts this video of a debate between an abortion "rights" supporter and opponent at the Texas Freethought Convention. Kudos to the Freethoughters for raising the issue and debating it fairly in public. There is a small but laudable history of respect for life in the atheist community, exemplified by Nat Hentoff, a man of uncommon integrity.



Here's my challenge to Myers: I challenge you to a blog debate on abortion, from a secular perspective. The topic is:

Should secularists support the "right" to abortion?

No mention of God's Image or ensoulment, just secular science and ethics. We debate the same question asked at the Texas Freethought Convention, in reciprocal blog posts. I present my side, you present yours, and we rebut.

I bet Myers won't take the bait. Let's see.

Don't ask Allen West stupid questions about Islam

A C.A.I.R. hack tries to ambush Allen West at a talk.

West took him to school madrassa.

There's an idiot smarminess about defenders of the Religion of Peace™. There is indeed much to defend in Islam-- it has genuine goodness (e.g. a strong community, acts of charity, recognition of a higher power), as well as evil. But as Pope Benedict noted in his Regensburg Address, the good qualities of Islam are common to all mature faiths.

That which is unique to Islam is evil. Islam was born and flourished in violence. It identifies worship of God with obedience to the State. It condones killing to an extent unknown to other modern faiths. Apostates are put to death. It is spread only by violence and maintains its influence almost wholly by violence. It is the antithesis of a Religion of Peace™.

That is not to say that Muslims are violent as individuals. Most Muslims are peace-loving people, just like most Christians and Jews and Sikhs and atheists are peace-loving people.

But Islam is violent, and anyone who argues otherwise shouldn't say it in front of Alan West.

Dora, The Movie

I thought it was because of... spit!

Looks like the spit-brain theorists were wrong.

Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains

Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower. That's because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So the evolution of the human brain depended on... cooking. Wouldn't it take quite a bit of brainpower to cook in the first place? As my wife will attest, I still struggle to boil water.

 Does this mean that we will evolve smaller brains because we order take-out?

Oops!

In regard to my recent post politely ridiculing two Obama supporters for wearing T-shirts saying "FOWARD", Commentor Anonymous directs us to a link with this picture:

Looks like, on close inspection, that the O has a little arrow, pointing to the prodigal R, in "Re-elect Obama".

So I retract my ridicule about Obama supporters misspelling "FOWARD", with apologies to the ladies.

 All the other ridicule stands as is.

Fred Phelps has a long history of political activism. Guess which party...

No wonder the news media never refers to Phelp's political affiliation...

Phelps has run in various Kansas Democratic Party primaries five times, but has never won. These included races for governor in 1990, 1994, and 1998, receiving about 15 percent of the vote in 1998.[33] In the 1992 Democratic Party primary for U.S. Senate, Phelps received 31 percent of the vote.[34] Phelps ran for mayor of Topeka in 1993[35][36] and 1997.[37]

If Phelps were a Republican, his name in the press would be "Republican Fred Phelps".

He's a Democrat, however, so he's called a 'conservative' by the press, although he's really a radical Democrat nutcase.

You never hear of his party affiliation, except for modest little blogs...

From Liberal Logic 101.

” That Obama didn't feel the need to devote even a lame half-a-sentence to it in the 270 minutes of free airtime he has gotten shows what a remarkable fall..."

Last Night's Presidential Debate Proves That Al Gore's Life Has Been In Vain

Sometimes silence can reveal more than words. And the complete silence of both candidates during last night’s (and previous nights’) presidential debate on climate change speaks volumes about just how dead the issue now is. Indeed, this is the first time in 24 years that neither candidate thought it fit to mention what Al Gore has billed the biggest threat ever to “human civilization as we know it.” That Obama didn't feel the need to devote even a lame half-a-sentence to it in the 270 minutes of free airtime he has gotten shows what a remarkable fall this defining challenge of our generation has enjoyed. Laments Evan Lehman of Environment & Energy:

This is the first time since 1988 that climate hasn't been mentioned in the presidential debate cycle, Johnson of Climate Silence said in a post that provides partial transcripts to the contests. Back then, Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle said, "the greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue."...

Everybody knows it's a fraud.

John Guy's new book on St. Thomas Becket

John Guy has a fine new book on St. Thomas Becket, who was martyred by agents of Henry II in 1170. Becket is a martyr to the ages-long struggle between the absolute power of the state and the rights of the Church and of the faithful.

Excerpt from Samuel Gregg's review of the book:

The significance of religious liberty—and, more particularly, libertas ecclesiae—for freedom more generally has been well-understood for centuries. The famous words recorded in the Gospel of Luke, “render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar—and to God what belongs to God” (Lk. 20:25), were revolutionary in their implications for how the West subsequently understood the nature of government. No longer could the state claim the divine characteristics with which it was invested by the pre-Christian pagan world. Instead the state—and its rulers—were now, like everyone else, sub Deus. Moreover, the Greek phrase for church, ekklesia, comes from combining the word kaleo (to call) with the prefix ek (out). This particular aspect of Christianity irked the Roman authorities so much that they accused the early Christians of atheism. Why? Because to belong to the Christian church meant that you were a member of a community which respected the state’s authority but did not practice the religion of the state.

With the paganization of American society (we even worship our own Molech), we Christians need to stand up against the state and refuse to do evil. The pressure to acquiesce to our current iteration of state religion is mounting rapidly, and Guy's biography of St. Thomas Becket reminds us of our responsibility to defy the paganism of unjust state power.

The book looks like a great read. I just bought it on kindle. 

The truth about Mitt Romney in high school...

I knew this would come out just before the election...

Environmentalists are really smart...

From Liberal Logic 101.

Geert Wilders' new book on Islam

Diana West has a review of Geert Wilders' new book on Islam titled "Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me".

Excerpt:

... Wilders, for eight years a political prisoner of Islam requiring round-the-clock security to avoid assassination, quotes from the anti-Islamic writings of our presidents John Quincy Adams and Teddy Roosevelt. Both men warned against the dangers that Islam poses to liberty and Christianity. These writings will jolt the postmodern reader, alerting us that we are reading something society outlaws as taboo: criticism of Islam. 

In 1916, [Theodore] Roosevelt observed: "Wherever the Mohammedans have had a complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared" (ditto Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism ...). Roosevelt rejected as "naive" the notion that "all religions are the same." Some religions, he explained, "give a higher value to each human life, and some religions and belief systems give a lower value." Our "social values," including equality before the law, exist "only because the Christians of Europe (did) what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do -- that is, to beat back the Moslem invader." 

John Quincy Adams wrote that Muhammad "poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST; TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE." 

The capital letters are Adams', by the way, and the source Wilders draws from is "The American Annual Register of 1827-28-29," where Adams published unsigned essays in 1830 (listed in Lynn H. Parsons' annotated bibliography of Adams' works) in between his tenure as president and his return to Congress...

Today, however, with liberty shrinking in direct proportion to Islam's rising influence in the West, Wilders' voice is one of few to make itself heard. Why? Wilders points to the entrenchment of cultural relativism, an ideology that rises from the ashes of Judeo-Christian-humanism to promote, as interchangeable, all other cultures, religions, creeds, over our own.

Wilders has... ummm... balls. He has courageously spoken the truth about the threat Islam poses to the West.  Those of us in the Dar-al-Harb need to understand the violent totalitarian nature of militant Islam. We need to put aside political correctness (which is just cowardice) and tell the truth about Islam and the West.

Wilders' book is going to be a must-read. It is written by a man with real courage who puts his own life on line to tell the truth.