It's Time We Had a Serious Discussion About Assault Vehicles

Americans are in love with anything on wheels. This is the country of the Corvette and the Hog where driving fast is considered a national birthright despite the toll in lives and pollutants. And most of the rest of us have come to accept that.

We may shake our heads at the billions wasted on gasoline, on air fresheners and dashboard ornaments that could have been used to feed the starving children of the world. But when tragedy strikes it is important for us to set aside the political rhetoric and have a serious discussion about assault vehicles.

Let's talk about motorcycles.

Unlike cars, motorcycles have no practical purpose. No one commutes to work on a motorcycle. No one drives to pick up their children from soccer practice on a motorcycle. But for some people a motorcycle is a symbol of their masculinity and that symbol has become death on wheels.

Americans are in love with motorcycles. 9 percent of Americans own 11 million motorcycles as part of the 18 billion dollar motorcycle industry. Some Americans even own more than one motorcycle, even though one motorcycle is the most that any normal person could possibly need.

Motorcycle deaths have risen sharply in the last ten years and the motorcycle industry is to blame for preventing us from addressing this horrifying epidemic of highway death.

In 1994, there were 2,320 motorcycle deaths. In 2012 that number increased to 4,500 as the assault vehicles greased their wheels with the blood of innocent men, women and children.

1 in 7 US traffic deaths is now caused by the motorcycle. Or what we should properly rename the Assault Cycle. Unfortunately movies like Easy Rider glamorize motorcycle culture and the motorcycle industry preys on the vulnerable male psyche as riders chase after some escapist fantasy of personal autonomy.

Motorcycle culture has always been associated with violence and the escalating death toll now threatens our moral standing as a country. America was once known as a nation that the rest of the world looked up to, but now whenever I visit Lichtenstein or Luxembourg for an environmental conference, one of the first questions that I am asked is when Americans will join the rest of the civilized world in restricting the manufacture and sale of assault cycles. And I can only sadly shake my head while downing another Shirley Temple.

But perhaps tragedy will serve as a wake-up call. In Fairfield, California, an off-duty California Highway Patrolman is killed in a collision with a pickup truck. In Duarte, California, former MLB pitcher Frank Pastore died of injuries resulting from a motorcycle accident.  In Florence, Kentucky, a motorcycle driver lost control of his assault vehicle and collided with a utility pole. In Tarpon Springs, Florida, a woman riding as a passenger on the back of a motorcycle fell off and was run over by a passing vehicle. These are just a few of the deaths caused by assault cycles that have taken place in the last week.

We cannot meet these awful tragedies with apathy. Only immediate unthinking action will suffice. A serious dialogue must begin in which all options are on the table. The politicians who have been in thrall to the motorcycle industry must look at these dead people that I have just mentioned and completely ignore the law and all other considerations to do whatever I want.

No one is talking about completely banning the motorcycle, except for those who are, but we must work together to reach a sensible solution. Motorcycle owners will still be able to keep and even drive their toys, but we must take action against the deadliest overpowered assault cycles with too much horsepower that have no legitimate purpose.

There is no reason for any law-abiding motorcycle owner to own one of the "superbikes" whose accident rate is 30 times higher than that of cars. These insanely overpowered assault vehicles, such as the Suzuki GSXR1000 and the Kawasaki Ninja, are literal killing machines. Although assault cycles only account for 10 percent of the motorcycles on the road, they account for 25 percent of all fatal motorcycle accidents.

200 horsepower is far too much for any legitimate street bike and it's time that our elected officials stood up to the motorcycle industry and said no to the assault cycle. 

And it cannot end there.

As pernicious as motorcycle culture is, car culture is even deadlier. Millions of children will grow up coughing and wheezing from asthma attacks because they live near a highway. And many more will die in the daily car accidents that mar our nation's roads, bridges and tunnels.

Americans are in love with their Assault Sedans and their Murder Hatchbacks.  The U.S. had 246 million registered vehicles for just 209 million drivers in a country of 311 million. There is no better evidence of the power of car culture than the fact that some people actually own more than one car, so that they can perhaps crash their first car into a crowd, and then get into their second car and crash that it into a crowd too to maximize the death toll.

40,000 people die in car crashes a year. That's 400,000 a decade or 4 million over a century. That is the grim ugly face of America's macabre love affair with cars. America leads the world in car ownership, aside from Monaco, and if we are going to take a horrible place like Monaco as our role model, then I no longer want to be an American.

The children, the most innocent among us, are the real victims of America's insane car culture.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children from 2 to 14 years old. An average of 6 children die every day in car crashes... and 700 more are injured. Some of those injuries will cripple them for life.

Any decent person, even a car owner, can't help but look at these statistics and demand immediate unthinking action of some kind. It is up to decent people like us, and even them, to join together and call for that action. It is up to us to capitalize on the deaths of these sweet innocent children for the greater good of all.

No one is talking about banning all cars. Some cars, like those that drive environmental activists to environmental conferences, are strictly necessary. But there is a big difference between legitimate and illegitimate cars. 

There's no reason for a law-abiding driver to own a car that goes faster than 35 miles per hour. Above that speed is when most fatal accidents occur and closing that speed loophole will save millions of lives. Cars that travel faster than 35 miles per hour, let's call them assault vehicles, have no purpose except to cater to a sick car culture that values speed over the lives of innocent children. We owe it to our children to give them a better world. A world where 35 miles per hour isn't just the speed limit in  my gated community, but throughout the entire land.

An assault vehicle ban will also be good for the environment. Many drivers will discover that they can get to work faster by riding a bike than by driving their fume-spewing murder machines.

Speaking of bicycles, there has unfortunately been a sharp rise in cyclist deaths as well. I remember many hours of joy riding my bike up and down the street as a child, and I still put in a few miles on my exercise bike when my schedule allows for it, but these innocent vehicles are being upstaged on the road by killing machines that have very little in common with my 12 inch Huffy and exist only to race and kill.

I have never understood why there must be any bikes with more than 6 speeds. The bike industry, the bike lobby and the bike culture is irresponsibly pushing multi-speed bikes that are completely unnecessary. These Assault Bicycles which have 18 speeds are murder vehicles of death.

It might be best if we put an end to vehicle culture altogether. It might be best if everyone just walked. So long as they walk responsibly.

The number of pedestrian deaths has risen sharply in 2012 and the problem may lie with what I like to call, Assault Walking, or walking too fast, not to mention Assault Running.

To all the paranoid alarmists out there, no one is talking about banning you from going on a light jog or even a brisk walk; so long as you keep it under the speed indicated on your government issued Citizen Pedometer with built-in breathalyzer. If you wish to walk faster than that, you will have to apply for a license, undergo a psychological evaluation, give up your health insurance and then wait six weeks.

America is a great country, but we can be an even greater country if we just banned everything... for the children.

Gun Culture and Gun Control Culture

Hardly had the blood been scrubbed off the floors in Newtown than everyone who was anyone had begun shifting the blame from Adam Lanza to some intangible social failure.

Back in 2002, Michael Moore trundled his bulk over to Colorado to exploit the Columbine massacre for a general rant about gun culture, American foreign policy and how hard it was to find a shop selling bacon grease by the ton at two in the morning.

In his film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, Moore gave his audience what they wanted, lots of scenes of "hicks and hillbillies" buying, selling and giving away guns all over the place to illustrate the murderous ravages of American gun culture. Some of those scenes were staged, but it didn't matter since Moore was catering to an audience that had nothing but contempt for working class Americans and would believe any awful thing about them.

What did gun culture have to do with a plot by two disgruntled dorks upset over being called "Faggots" a few times too many? About as much as gun culture has to do with Adam Lanza, another award winning product of the, "Maybe some people deserve to get beaten up" club.

Your average school shooter is unhappy and angry, irreligious, incapable of fitting into a community and filled with rage that he exercises through violent fantasies. His culture isn’t gun culture. It’s loner culture. Video games do not cause him to kill, but they are how he entertains himself until he can get a taste of the real thing.

Adam Lanza, Dylan Kleibold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, James Holmes, One L. Goh and Jared Loughner had as much in common with what the Michael Moore Fan Club thinks of as "gun culture" as Michael Moore does with the working class. Whatever gun culture they had was not the American Scots-Irish culture of the hunter, the rancher and the militia member, but the urban posse of emasculated men of no worth that brandishes weapons as a way to get respect.

The gun culture of the school shooter is the lobby scene in The Matrix, the frag or be fragged multiplayer gaming culture of Halo and Doom, and the Joker killing his way across Gotham. None of these products of mass entertainment make one a killer, but they are also far more illustrative of the type of gun culture that defines school shooters, than anything that Michael Moore and the MSNBC talking heads mean by gun culture.

For most Americans there is no gun culture, only the ownership of guns. To the extent that any gun culture has developed it was in response to a gun control culture that sought to demonize the ownership of firearms. The traditional and religious culture of the American gun owner has little in common with the power fantasies of the school shooter. To the gun owner, a firearm is a necessary tool. To the school shooter, it is a way to stop feeling powerless, a way to get beyond the ersatz joys of killing bots and avatars, of watching Keanu Reeves spin through the air while filling a mob of policemen full of lead, with the joy of the real kill. 

But that has not stopped anyone and everyone from opining on the great malady of American gun culture. Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse basketball coach, took the time out to blather on about it for ten minutes. A Washington Post writer named Max Fisher claimed that American gun culture was "unique" because Americans own a lot of guns. That is roughly the level of fact-based discourse on gun culture that you can expect from gun-control culture which asserts that ownership is identity.

The Battle Creek Enquirer ran an editorial which asserted that "The gun culture in this country is insane" and then failed to define what that gun culture consisted of except to say that, "The insanity of America’s gun culture is that in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary, the gun lobby successfully peddles the lie that we are safer when we ease access to firearms."

The definition of gun culture insanity then is believing that when a dork who has seen the Matrix or The Dark Knight or blood splatter on his monitor a few times too many comes bearing lead, it is better to be able to defend yourself than to be a target. It's absurd, of course, we are told by gun control culturalists, to believe that ordinary civilians can do anything in such a crisis except wet their pants and hope that the SWAT team doesn't get stuck in traffic.

But in 1966, during the Texas Tower Massacre, a Co-Op manager named Allen Crum grabbed a rifle and accompanied three Austin police officers up into the tower and helped give them cover while they took down the sniper. But that was in 1966. Today Crum would have been shot for picking up the rifle and Officer Martinez, who picked up a shotgun and fired into the shooter's prone body after he had already been severely wounded, would have been dismissed from the force, put on trial and would have spent the next decade dodging civil suits and doing infomercials to raise money.

And that's why we're so much safer today, than we were then, on our Zero Tolerance campuses and in our Gun-Free Zones, where no one is allowed to have so much as a pocket knife and no one can do a thing when a shooter arrives except lie on the floor and hope that the killer picks another victim.

At Salon, which is like Slate, if Slate were a failure, Amanda Marcotte urges that we attack "not the guns themselves, but gun culture". Amanda, mainly known for getting the Duke case wrong and being fired from the Edwards campaign, means that we should ban gun ads in newspapers.

"A lot of liberals aren’t tuned into this, because they live in their own enclaves and absorb media that doesn’t really cater to the gun crowd, but gun advertising is common in many markets," Amanda breathlessly reports to those organic pastry shoppers of San Francisco and the Off-Broadway crowd taking in the latest transsexual cabaret spectacular.  While she never does get around to defining what the dreaded gun culture is, she does mention that, "Americans simply don’t like giving up perceived rights."

If only they spent more time in organic pastry shops and transsexual cabarets they might realize that they are only giving up their perceived Bill of Rights for the real right to free birth control in the best bargain since Esau traded his birthright for a mess of organic free trade pottage.

Finally Jessica Pieklo, writing at a site whose menu is limited to "Animals", "Women", "Politics", "Food", "LGBT" and "Global Development", in that order, informs us that gun culture and rape culture are a product of "white masculinity". An hour ago I just passed a non-white driver whose car had 9MM decals on his windows and was blasting a song where the word "hoes" came up a lot, but there are topics that just can't be discussed even for a site that covers everything from LGBT to Animals.

For all the loose talk about American gun culture, no one really seems to be able to define what it is. Defining gun culture by the entertainment industry drifts too far into Hollywood and Detroit, and away from the rural culture that is the real target of gun control culture. And that just leaves gun controllers grasping at gun ads and gun ownership, and the omnipresent white devil who never stops buying Manhattan for a bottle of whiskey and objectifying things in ways that males of no other race do.

Instead there are a thousand articles written in children's blood crying out, "We can't just do nothing." Something must be done. Now. Last week. If only we ban more weapons, we can be as safe as Norway, home of the worst shooting spree of all, or Connecticut, which already has an assault weapons ban. And after those screeds come calls from politicians to "set aside the rhetoric" and have a serious conversation about taking the Bill of Rights out back and putting a bullet in its head. For the children who had no one to protect them when a gunman came to their school and will still have no one to protect them when gun control culture gets its way.

After these come a torrent of armchair psychology analyses of America's gun culture, which are only slightly more elegant versions of Jessica Pieklo's thesis about Freud and Michael Moore's thesis about rural America. And those are what gun culture is really about. After all how can you be confident of your own superiority unless you have a documentary and a hundred articles affirming it for you by the traditional method of putting down the people at the bottom of the ladder.

What liberals think of as gun culture is really shorthand for rural America. It's what liberals won't say, but it's what they mean. Americans are still sentimental about the village, so, for now, the number of movies that portray the rural community as ideal, rather than a hive of small-minded bigots, is still rather high. But there are backdoor ways of getting at the same topic and talking about gun culture is one of them.

When liberals talk about "gun culture", they mean the same thing that Barack Obama did when he told his San Francisco fundraiser friends about the people out there who still cling to their bibles and their guns. It isn't about the guns really, though gun control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don't share their values and like their independence, it's about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.

The left cannot talk about how much it hates this country. Gun culture is one of its dog whistles. A way to talk about how much it hates America without actually saying it out loud where everyone can hear. Talking about gun culture not only allows the left to publicly vent its hatred for America, gun control, like racism, is another way that the left teaches Americans to hate America.

But the truth about gun culture is that the left has a great deal more in common with Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner. Far more than those shooters had with any phantom conservative gun culture.

The American left, like any high school shooter, is bitter, angry and filled with contempt for the rest of the country. Stuck in a country made of flyover country that thinks of leftists the way Columbine students thought of Klebold and Harris, the left treats Americans to their own Columbine Massacre every time it defends criminals and terrorists, every time it wrecks American manufacturing and laughs all the way to the bank as it bankrupts Americans.

For all the crocodile tears that the left spills, after all the children's blood that it pumps into a syringe and then spill out on paper, the left culturally identifies with the shooters and the shooters culturally identify with the left. They are both odd men out in a place that they don't belong, dressing up their inner ugliness in a false sense of superiority. The shooters believe that they are superior intellects victimized by the mediocre people around them who are unable to appreciate their genius. That is the cursory bio of every leftist who troops down to New York, San Francisco or Portland.

And both the left and the shooters agree that the people you are shooting at should not have guns.

Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn't blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Would you let a lab monkey own a gun? Hell no. Would you let it choose what to eat? Only as an experiment. Would you let it vote for laws in a referendum? Not unless it's trained to push the right button. Would you let it drive a car? Nope. Maybe a bicycle. And if it has to travel a long way, you'll encourage it to use mass transit. Does a monkey have freedom of speech? Only until it annoys you.

You'll take away most of the monkey's bananas, which you're too lazy to go and find for yourself because you have more important things to do than fetch bananas. You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest; as monkeys that they taught in their schools and created jobs for with their stimulus plans for. And the least that the monkeys could do is pay their taxes, because the monkeys didn’t build that. You did.

You do plan to take care of monkey's medical expenses, at least until they get too high, and spay and neuter it with free birth control. You will train it to be the smartest and most well-behaved monkey it can be. And when it gets too sick, you plan to have it mercifully put down so it doesn't hang around spreading diseases and depressing you with its misery.

And what's wrong with any of that? Human beings are just evolved monkeys. It's not as if you're being cruel to the monkey. You're engaged in what you might charitably think of as a symbiotic relationship with the monkey. If the monkey were smart, it might think of you as a parasite. But you have a whole lot of rounds of ammunition stockpiled in case of a Planet of the Apes scenario.

If you assume that there is as much of a substantive difference between the elite and the common man as there is between a man and a monkey, there is nothing particularly inappropriate about such behavior. We herd animals. Liberals herd people. The human being is the livestock of the liberal animal farm.

The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence. There's an obvious paradox in believing that you have the right to enslave and kill people because you care more, but that didn't stop millions of people from joining in with revolutions that led to a century of bloodshed in the name of movements that cared more. 

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy only as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.

Compassion of this sort is outrage fuel. It is hatred toward people masquerading as love. And that hatred is a desire for power masquerading as outrage which in turn is dressed up as a deep love for others and empathy for all living creatures. Peel away the mask of compassion and all that is underneath is a terrible lust for power. And the only way to truly justify the kind of total power summoned by such lusts is by reducing the people you would rule over to the status of non-persons.

The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion, between a self-directed experiment in self-government and an experiment conducted by trained experts on a lab monkey population. And the defining idea of this conflict is accountability.

To understand the left's position on nearly any issue, imagine a 20th Century American and then take away accountability. Assume that the individual is helpless and stupid, has little to no control over his own behavior and is only responding to stimuli and functions in a purely reactive capacity. Then use that data to come up with a response to anything from kids getting fat to a football player shooting his wife to terrorists firing rockets at Israel. The only possible answer to reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.

If you want to fake being a member of the left on any topic and in any setting, master this simple phrase. "But we have to look at the root causes to see who is really responsible." Congratulations, you can now get by anywhere from Caracas to Brussels to Berkeley.

The root cause is a perpetual search for an accountability vested in systems rather than people. That search always ends up with systems and ideologies, rather than mere people, because it justifies the destruction of those systems and ideologies. And destroying systems and ideologies allows them to be replaced by their progressive replacements.

The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character. The right asks, "Why did you kill?" The left asks, "Who let him have a gun?", "Who didn't provide him with a job" and "Who neglected his self-esteem?"

Freedom goes hand in hand with personal moral organization of the individual by the individual. Organized compassion however requires the moral organization of the society as a whole. A shooting is not a failure of the character of one man alone, or even his family and social circle, it is the total failure of our entire society and perhaps even the world, for not leveraging a sufficient level of moral organization that would have made such a crime impossible. No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.

Social accountability on this scale requires the nullification of the personhood and accountability of the individual, just as the moral organization that it mandates requires removing the freedom of choice of the individual, to assure a truly moral society. When compassion and morality are collective, then everyone and no one is moral and compassionate at the same time. And that is the society of the welfare state where compassion is administered by a salaried bureaucracy.

Choice is what makes us moral creatures and collective compassion leaves us less than human. The collective society of mass movements and mass decisions leaves us little better than lab monkeys trying to compose Shakespeare without understanding language, meaning or ideas, or anything more than the rote feel of our fingers hitting the keyboard.

This is the society that the left is creating, a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments, and where no one has any rights because freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.

The Road to Damascus

Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French intelligence services. Racing along with them are carloads of international diplomats urging their governments to give the militias more money and more weapons.

Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian refugees from Aleppo and Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the Syrian army, Iraqi militias that used to plant IEDs in front of American Humvees who have found new work blowing up churches and taking over Syrian bases.

There are international activists from around the world, reporters or citizen-journalists embedded with the rebels, Russian advisers embedded with Syrian units, Qatari trainers turning children into child soldiers with the rebels and Turkish officers trying to get the entire rabble moving in the right direction toward Damascus.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah's militias out of Lebanon are shooting at Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood militias from across the Middle East and even Europe in one of those unique displays of family entertainment that you wish would go on forever, but that won't, because despite the Hasish-fed bravado, supplemented with meth from Iran's top laboratories, the whole shooting match only as long as it takes the side with the weakest bladders to run away, and then both sides brag about their great victory on YouTube and Facebook.

Imagine the Crips and the Bloods, armed to the teeth by every country from Mexico to China, fighting over the ruins of California cities, and you get some idea of the glorious Syrian civil war being fought by the Brave Syrian People, most of whom at this point are about as Syrian as the Palestinians are from Palestine, in a conflict that will determine once and for all who will be ethnically cleansing who this year.
The Syrian rebels are Sunni. The Syrian regime is Alawite, which is close enough to Shiite in a region where most Sunnis hate Shiites. This isn't some heroic battle between the people and the dictator; it's a religious war.  And in a newly Islamist region, religion is the best possible reason that anyone can think of for a war, that will just incidentally happen to realign a strategic piece of territory from the Shiite axis to the Sunni axis. And we, as befits the nation that Obama described as one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, happen to be in the Sunni axis, ensconced somewhere between the fattest child-molesting members of the Saudi and Qatari royals, the most vicious Turkish and Egyptian Islamists, and the Eurocrats looking to score oil deals with the former and arms deals with the latter, and political points with their domestic population of Sunni Islamists who have the unfortunate habit of blowing things up.

On the road to Damascus, the politicians and pundits tell us that we cannot simply sit things out. Someone is bound to remove Assad and we had better be in good with whoever does.

The UK, which dragged Obama into Libya the way an elderly lady drags a poodle into a pub, is frantically urging us to stop just looking the other way while Qatar and Turkey arm the Syrian rebels, and to get into the rebel-arming business ourselves.

Considering how well that worked out in Libya, not to mention a certain obscure part of the world, known as Afghanistan, that we never heard from again, we should probably hurry and start arming the Syrian rebels right now. The sooner we give them weapons, the less likely they are to use them against us. Or so the reasoning of the people who brought you Iran, September 11 and September 11 II: The Mohammed Video Diaries goes. And with a track record like that, how could they be wrong?

If we give the right Syrian rebels the weapons, then they will win, instead of the wrong Syrian rebels. But if we don't, then the wrong Syrian rebels will win, and even the right Syrian rebels will hate us and turn wrong, and before you know it they'll be shooting at us with the weapons we didn't give them.

Telling apart the right Syrian rebels from the wrong Syrian rebels is tricky. The Free Syrian Army, once hailed as a moderate secular organization, has more Al Qaeda in it than the dirt in Tora Bora. The new opposition set up by Obama and Qatar consists of the Muslim Brotherhood and people with fake mustaches pretending not to be the Muslim Brotherhood. As an additional handicap, the head of this moderate secular opposition, Sheikh Mouaz Al-Khatib, who had previously praised Saddam for "terrifying the Jews", objected to the American declaration that the Al-Qaeda militias are terrorists.

"The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider," Al-Khatib said, and it's hard to argue with his logic. The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda is that the Muslim Brotherhood wins an election before shooting people in the streets while Al Qaeda shoots people in the street without waiting for an election. To the Democracy Uber Alles crowd, this makes a big difference, but the people being shot are still dead either way.

No serious thinkers seriously think that not siding with either side is an option. When confronted with Muslim terrorists, they begin searching for moderates in the rubbish bin, and with a working definition of a moderate that includes anyone less extreme than the most extreme of the extreme, they never have a problem finding moderates. And they keep finding moderate Syrian rebels who will be our friends tomorrow for a few RPGs today.

Today we have to support the Muslim Brotherhood for fear that Al Qaeda will take over. Tomorrow we will have to support Al Qaeda for fear that Al-Takfir Wa Al-Hijra will take over. And then we'll have to support the Takfiris for fear that Itbach Al-Kul Ulum will take over. And the day after our leaders will have no choice but to nuke the entire planet for fear that an asteroid will hit it instead. The radiation will be bad, they tell us, but at least nuclear weapons are moderate. Asteroids are extreme. And no one, except skateboarders, wants to be extreme.

It's Black Friday in Syria and just sitting at home, watching the game, sipping a beer and wondering who's going to score in the third quarter, the black flag Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood militias, Hezbollah or a race of demons erupting unexpectedly from the earth to devour all participants, never occurs to the bright boys and girls down in D.C. No, they're dragging us into line at five in the AM in the hopes of scoring a friendly Syria for only 4 billion dollars and maybe only twenty-thousand dead Christians.

The rebels are making their gains, or so the New York Times claims, while Pravda claims that the Syrian government is beating back the rebels. It's hard to know whose pravda to believe when all we have to choose from are propaganda outlets that parrot the talking points of their respective governments. In a Pravda world, you don't read the news to find out what's going, you read the news to find out what the government thinks about what is going and then you try to derive from that what is truly taking place.

In this Plato's Cave version of the news, all that we know is that everyone is racing to Damascus, and that everyone is winning and everyone is losing and everyone is dying at the same time. And we're rushing right along with them, hoping that our guys, who are slightly less murderous than their guys, will defeat them, despite the murderousness gap, with the help of our weapons, our planes and maybe a few of our guys, wearing sneakers and long beards, coordinating operations on the ground.

The Muslim Brotherhood is running torture chambers in Egypt and shooting protesters in the street, but we're still shipping them free F16s and helping them take over Syria. Because if we don't help them, how will we have any influence over them? If the Muslim Brotherhood can't non-violently seize power in Syria through a violent civil war, there is a risk that they will turn to violence again. And that means they'll start trying to violently take over countries without going through the formality of fighting a civil war to take them over first.

Every leader of Al Qaeda was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but since the Muslim Brotherhood, like the New Left, is willing to non-violently take us over through front groups and immigration, rather than flying planes into buildings, they're our idea of the good guys, even if they have the same objectives as Al Qaeda, just a different way of getting there. But then again you could probably say the same thing about the people who were running the USSR in 1932 and the people who are running the United States and the European Union in 2012.

The Muslim Brotherhood isn't satisfied with Egypt. Al Qaeda isn't satisfied with Mali. Iran isn't satisfied with the hypocrisy of agitating for the rights of the Shiite majority in Iraq and Bahrain and the rights of the Shiite majority in Syria.

Obama isn't satisfied with wrecking just Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Russia isn't satisfied with financing 50 years of war in the region even though it's on the verge of bankruptcy. Prime Minister Cameron of the UK and President Hollande of France aren't satisfied with being on the verge of bankruptcy and only wrecking Libya. And like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, they're all on the road to Damascus. Or the road to hell.

And so on we go, all together, rebels and diplomats, throat-slashers and powdered-hair personalities, embedded into a conflict, racing to Damascus, eager to raise the flag, report on the historic moment, negotiate deals and deliver speeches. Obama probably already has his written and it will probably be the same exact speech he delivered when Mubarak fell and Gaddafi got sodomized to death after his convoy came under fire from an American drone. There will be lots of moving sentiments about hope and change, peace and freedom, the choice of the people and the transition to democracy.

This road picture has the usual participants. The Western diplomats who fell in love with the region, its culture and its people. The Western politicians still dreaming that the region is just one more revolution away from peace and stability. There's the fourth son of some upper middle class family who grew his scraggly beard long and now dreams of dying as a martyr for the Caliphate surrounded by white doves and even whiter virgins.

There's the Qatari weapons trainer teaching 13-year-olds how to plant IEDs and the Russian colonel, underpaid and hating the locals more than ever, trying to get the ragtag locals to fight. There's the embedded citizen journalist with fourteen differently colored keffiyahs in his luggage blogging his experiences on Tumblr and the gang of local thugs who alternate between taking potshots at Syrian army positions on behalf of the Free Syrian Army and its Qatari and Turkish paymasters and kidnapping some of the wealthier residents for ransom, which pays even better.

There are Sunni and Shiite militia members from neighboring Lebanon and Syria. There are Pakistanis fresh from Waziristan and Libyans looking for a good brawl. There are Scud missiles and chemical weapons and broken buildings, torn corpses and roads full of refugees fleeing for their lives. There are tanks and jets and fleets. There are armies and militias, truckloads of weapons and bodies, fire behind them and death ahead of them. And they're all hurrying, running and racing to Damascus.

And then the real killing will begin.

Guns, Guns, Guns

If you're the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you're evolutionarily minded, then it's a 'chicken and egg' question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang, it was always here, coded into the DNA. If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the creatures who eat each other's young, and sometimes their own young, there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.

But debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pinhead is largely useless. We are not a particularly violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends a great deal of time wondering what kind of man would murder children. They probably live next door to him. For that matter, if your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to any number of war criminals, all the way from Eastern Europe to Asia to Africa.

The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.

The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.

Mass death isn't the issue. After September 11, the same righteous folks calling for the immediate necessity of gun control were not talking about banning planes or Saudis, they were quoting statistics about how many more people die of car accidents each year than are killed by terrorists. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; three thousand deaths can always be minimized by comparing them to some even larger statistic.

The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.

Mostly it's about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students bringing Tylenol and pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn't happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything.

But evil just can't be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.

Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, not to mention park rangers, ambulance drivers in the ghetto and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.

So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.

But this isn't really about stopping shootings; it's about controlling when they happen. It's about making sure that everyone who has a gun is in some kind of chain of command. It's about the belief that the problem isn't evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop. Or if it doesn't stop, then at least there will be someone higher up in the chain of command to blame. Either way authority is sanctified, control or the illusion of it, maintained.

We'll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We'll never know how many were killed by Obama's regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it's the lack of a controlling authority for all those guns. It's the individual. A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it's millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.

Moral agency is individual. You can't outsource it to a government and you wouldn't want to. The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual. Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies, nor do they even do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders. Organizations are the biggest guns of all, and some men and women who make Lanza look like a man of modestly murderous ambitions have had their fingers on their triggers and still do.

Gun control will not really control guns, but it will give the illusion of controlling people, and even when it fails those in authority will be able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.

We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, whose great faith is that the power to control men and their environment will allow them to shape their perfect state into being, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting, that utopia has its tigers, and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.

The clamor for gun control is the cry of sheltered utopians believing that evil is a substance as finite as guns, and that getting rid of one will also get rid of the other. But evil isn't finite and guns are as finite as drugs or moonshine whiskey, which is to say that they are as finite as the human interest in having them is. And unlike whiskey or heroin, the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun.

People do kill people and the only way to stop people from killing people is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything, but to everyone else, it's just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.

Anyone who really hankers after a world without guns would do well to try the 14th Century, the 1400 years ago or the 3400 years ago variety, which was not a nicer place for lack of guns, and the same firepower that makes it possible for one homicidal maniac to kill a dozen unarmed people, also makes it that much harder to recreate a world where one man in armor can terrify hundreds of peasants in boiled leather armed with sharp sticks.

The longbow was the first weapon to truly begin to level the playing field, putting serious firepower in the hands of a single man. In the Battle of Crecy, a few thousand English and Welsh peasants with longbows slew thousands of French knights and defeated an army of 30,000. Or as the French side described it, "It is a shame that so many French noblemen fell to men of no value." Crecy, incidentally, also saw one of the first uses of cannon.

Putting miniature cannons in the hands of every peasant made the American Revolution possible. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would have meant very little without an army of ordinary men armed with weapons that made them a match for the superior organization and numbers of a world power.

At the Battle of Bunker Hill, 2,400 American rebels faced down superior numbers and lost the hill, but inflicted over a 1,000 casualties, including 100 British commissioned officers killed or wounded, leading to General Clinton's observation, "A few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America."

This was done with muskets, the weapon that gun control advocates assure us was responsible for the Second Amendment because the Founders couldn't imagine all the "truly dangerous" weapons that we have today.

And yet would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have grinned at the playing field being leveled some more?

The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.

Do we want a society run by the flower of chivalry, who commit atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with machine guns? The flower of chivalry can promise us a utopian world without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.

It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of, it's a country where individual agency is still superior to organized control, where things are unpredictable because the trains don't run on time and orders don't mean anything. But chivalry is dead. The longbow and the cannon killed it and no charge of the light brigade can bring it back. And we're better for it.

Evil may find heavy firepower appealing, but the firepower works both ways. A world where the peasants have assault rifles is a world where peasant no longer means a man without any rights. And while it may also mean the occasional brutal shooting spree, those sprees tend to happen in the outposts of utopia, the gun-free zones with zero tolerance for firearms. An occasional peasant may go on a killing spree, but a society where the peasants are all armed is also far more able to stop such a thing without waiting for the men-at-arms to be dispatched from the castle.

An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Only Way to Stop a Gun is With a Gun

THE ONLY WAY TO STOP A MAN WITH A GUN IS WITH A GUN

America now has its second worst mass shooting. And it, as usual, accompanied by calls for gun control. It's no coincidence that we have had quite a few spree killings in such a short time. The lavish coverage of every shooting by the media encourages every shooter to think that he will be famous if he goes out and kills. And that is exactly what happens.

Our shooters are creatures of the media, not the NRA. A media that turns killers into celebrities and then warns that the only way to stop more shootings is by cracking down on firearms.

But no amount of media coverage ever stopped a man with a gun. It only encouraged him. It takes a gun to stop a man with a gun. That is the hard truth of human affairs. It is why we have a Second Amendment, it is why we have armies and police, and it is why people own guns.

There is no going back to a time before people owned guns. There is no going back to a time when violence did not exist. There is only the reality that killers stalk the streets and that we can either defend against them or take comfort in empty outrage.

Guns stop shootings. Not all the time and not every time, but they do. Gun control does not. Media coverage calling for gun control does not.

Gun crime was up 35 percent in the UK which has harsh gun control laws. And Europe has had plenty of its own school massacres.

"Figures showed the number of crimes involving handguns had more than doubled since the post-Dunblane massacre ban on the weapons, from 2,636 in 1997-1998 to 5,871."

Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children in the Dunblane school massacre in 1996 using 4 handguns.

In Germany, in the Winnenden school shooting in 2009, Tim Kretschmer, killed 16 people, including 9 students. In the Erfurt massacre in 2002, Robert Steinhäuser killed 16 people with a handgun and a shotgun.

In Finland, in the Jokela school shooting of 2007, Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed 8 people.In the Kauhajoki school shooting, Matti Juhani Saari killed 10 people.

The media will pretend that this sort of thing only happens in America. It doesn't only happen in America. It happens where killings do.

Gun control isn't about putting an end to horrors, it's about controlling people. And people who are used to being controlled have even less ability to cope with the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable.

Regulators think about the big picture. They don't think about the individual. They think only about how to control people who follow rules. But shooters, by definition, do not follow rules. They are men who have stepped outside the system and care nothing for its rules. They want to kill, and they will find a way. And when they come, the only way to stop a gun is with a gun.





IF YOU NEEDED A REASON TO BE HOPEFUL ABOUT SYRIA...

Obama is inviting Sheikh Mouaz Alkhatib of the Muslim Brotherhood, current head of the Syrian rebels, to Washington, who has expressed pro-Israel opinions in the past, such as writing that one of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s positive legacies was “terrifying the Jews.”

Sheikh Mouaz Akkhatib got his invite a few days after the Sheikh defended Al Qaeda. Because defending Al Qaeda is what it takes to get a Washington invite these days.

“We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime,” said Obama.

But it’s not inclusive enough for Sheikh Mouaz Alkhatib who thinks Obama is a spoilsport for not recognizing Al Qaeda.

“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Al-Khatib told reporters in Marrakesh, Morocco.

What could possibly go wrong? If the Syrian rebels don't win, it will be a real tragedy. For the ghost of Osama bin Laden, currently haunting a Holiday Inn in Marrakesh.




CATHOLICPHOBIA SWEEPING THE NATION

The FBI’s hate crimes statistics actually show a slight decrease in Anti-Muslim hate crimes, but a significant increase in Anti-Catholic hate crimes which jumped from 4.2 percent to 5.2 percent.

Anti-Protestant hate crimes rose from 3.3 percent to 3.7 percent. Hate crimes targeting atheists fell from 0.5 to 0.3.

I wonder what this increase in anti-Catholic attacks could be attributed to? Paging Sandra Fluke.




DICTATORS ALL THE WAY DOWN

On a cold winter’s day, two years later, Obama celebrated the fall of Mubarak by proclaiming that “the people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.” Now one year later, in the teeth of another winter, an Islamist winter, Egypt seems very much the same.

Obama pledged to create a new beginning by ending, in the name of democracy, the old policy of supporting dictators, only to inaugurate a brand new policy of supporting dictators in the name of democracy. The ritual democratic elections led to the same place that they did in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. And now Obama is forced to support a dictatorship in order to support democracy.

The world may not rest on turtles or infinite universes, but the Middle East does rest on dictators and no amount of new beginnings has changed that. Pull back one dictator and another pops up in his place. Hold elections, plan regime change, send in your activists or your warplanes, and when the dust settles and all the democracy dreamers are congratulating themselves on having pulled off a successful election, the new dictator steps out from behind the curtain to give his acceptance speech, impose martial law and begin rounding up dissidents.

...from my article "It's Dictators All The Way Down"




SECOND TERM JAM

Rice has gone down, triangulated by Republicans and Clintonists. Rice got her job by betraying Hillary. Now she lost her dream job because she betrayed Hillary. In D.C. what goes around comes around and with Hillary being tipped for 2016, Rice's career odometer is looking really bad.

But the Rice withdrawal is also beginning to make the second term blues come out early. Second terms is usually when administrations at any executive level begin to jam up and come apart. And there are small signs that Obama Inc. is headed for the second term blahs.




IF IT'S GOOD FOR DETROIT, IT'S GOOD FOR AMERICA

Some public school teachers in the City of Detroit and around the state of Michigan are reportedly taking a vacation or a sick day today to protest right-to-work legislation likely to be approved by the state legislature.

Detroit public-school eighth graders do even worse in math than they do in reading, according to the Department of Education. While only 7 percent scored highly enough on the department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress test in 2011 to be rated “proficient” or better in reading, only 4 percent scored highly enough to be rated “proficient” or better in math.

But come on, that doesn't mean that Detroit teachers should lose their tiny pitiful paychecks, just because only 4 percent of their students can count and only 7 percent of their students can read.

Does it?

So what do Detroit teachers get paid in exchange for a 4 percent and 7 percent success rate?

The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.

Poor bankrupt Detroit pays teachers more than San Fran and NYC, cities that have actual money. The average teacher’s salary in Detroit is $71,031.

 Sadly though Detroit has more teachers than students because there is uh a mass exodus underway.

Detroit Public Schools had 5,029 full-time teachers and 88,774 students in 2009-10, according to the Michigan Department of Education. But DPS officials estimate that there will be 58,517 students enrolled in 2014.

Good news everybody. One day Detroit will finally achieve a one student to one teacher ratio. And if that doesn't get the scores up to 7 and 5 percent, I don't know what will.




MILITANT ISLAMIST LEADER ABANDONS TERRORISM, FOCUSES ON CONSTRUCTION

“Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace: The Saudi businessman who recruited mujahedin now uses them for large-scale building projects in Sudan.

Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high esteem. The Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab fighters back to Sudan from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum has suggested that some of the ‘Afghans’ whom this Saudi entrepreneur flew to Sudan are now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.

Mr Bin Laden is well aware of this. ‘The rubbish of the media and the embassies,’ he calls it. ‘I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t possibly do this job.’

That was from 1993. I wonder how many news stories from 2023 will boggle our minds with their complete willful denial of reality.




LIVING THE LIFE OF MOHAMMAD

Mohammad Safi is a lucky man. Graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan, Safi took in $822,302, or five times more than Governor Jerry Brown, working at a mental hospital.

As California’s top public employee, Mohammad Safi logged so many hours that all the clocks melted, Dali style. In 2006, Safi was making a mere $90,682 starting salary, but not long after he was taking home more than $503,000 in on-call pay for every hour he spent hanging around in a motel somewhere near the hospital.

But we really need to crack down on obscene CEO compensation at taxpayer expense. And Mo isn't a unique overachiever. California is full of dedicated public employees collecting so much overtime that prosperity is just another tax hike and bankruptcy away.

California may be sliding toward bankruptcy, but its state employees have been raking in the gold with nearly 1 billion in overtime.

In Micronesia, Somalia and the British Virgin Islands, 1 billion dollars is their entire GDP. But in California, 1 billion dollars is overtime.

But fortunately there's a solution in sight.

Legislation introduced Tuesday would give about 400,000 undocumented immigrants in California the same rights as citizens to unemployment benefits and various other government services.

Hello Mega-Quake? I think it's time now..




FORGET AL QAEDA, BEWARE OF CHRISTIAN AND BUDDHIST TERRORISTS

The song remains the same. In the year 2030, Islamic terrorism will be over and we'll all be fighting raging armies of Christians and Hindus.

The National Intelligence Council answers to the Director of National Intelligence who was the bright fellow who edited Al Qaeda out of the CIA Benghazi talking points. So it’s no wonder that he’s also managed to edit Islamic terrorism out of the world in 2030. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.

But with Muslim terrorism gone by 2030, the NIC is on top of the next big terror threat.

“Taking a global perspective, future terrorists could come from many different religions, including Christianity and Hinduism. Right-wing and left-wing ideological groups – some of the oldest users of terrorist tactics – also will pose threats.”

Forget Muslim terrorists, it’s time to focus on those Christian and Hindu terrorists. And then the Buddhist and Amish death squads.

Folks, we’re looking at a trend of Chassidic Jewish suicide bombers, Jainists ramming planes into London Bridge and Bahai states working to develop nuclear weapons.

Unitarian bus bombers are a real possibility and we can’t rule out 7th Day Adventist snipers on every roof in Baltimore. And when the Secular Humanist junta takes over Bali and begins implementing secular law, then no woman will be safe.

These are the real threats we need to focus on, instead of wasting time worrying about the mythical problem of Muslim terrorism.

I even hear Osama bin Laden is abandoning terrorism and turning to construction.




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

Head of Obama Jobs Council: “Communism Works”

UN Official Arrested for Aiding Al Qaeda

Muslim Brotherhood Propoganda Event in New York Explodes into Violence

Morsi Coming to Visit Obama in 2013

73% of New Jobs in Last 5 Months are in Government

Food Stamp Use 50% Higher Under Obama Than Under Bush

Obama Training Syrian Rebels to Secure Syrian WMDs

 High School Principal Claims Indians Were Scalped at Thanksgiving

“We must very, very, very, very understanding to our Native Americans, who lost and sacrificed because of the scalping that took place on Thanksgiving. They were invited to a dinner, and then their lives were taken from them.”

Egypt’s Top Judge Wants to Chop Off the Hands of Thieves

The judges have a burning desire to instate shari’a laws regarding Islamic hudud punishments… When shari’a laws are implemented, they leave no room for bargaining. Any country that refrains from implementing these punishments is lacking in many ways. 

Muslim Country With 25% Slave Population Elected VP of UN Human Rights Council

Obama Promises Terrorists That He Will Stop Israeli House Construction

Jordanian King Abdullah II conveyed U.S. assurances to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Washington will not allow a new Israeli settlement plan to pass, a Palestinian official said Thursday.

How the EPA is Making it Harder for You to Afford a Burger


Obama Backed Muslim Takeover of Cote d’Ivoire Leads to Campaign of Violence Against Gays

Victims said they immediately noticed a difference under Ouattara compared to the Gbagbo years, when such abuses were not nearly as extreme or widespread.

Ouattara signed a decree creating the FRCI in March 2011, and it was composed primarily of members of the New Forces rebel group, which used to control Côte d’Ivoire’s predominantly Muslim north.

Victims almost uniformly attribute the attacks to the fact that many soldiers in the new army are Muslim.

During one attack in Abidjan’s Zone 4 district in July, Raissa said a soldier invoked the Quran in justifying the violence.

“He said, “in the Qur’an it says that when you kill a homosexual you go to heaven,’” she recalled.

There are just so many ways for Muslims to go to heaven. But if Muslims ever do succeed in killing all non-Muslims, how will they ever get to heaven?



UNDER THE BOXTHORN TREE

For Muslims the boxthorn tree is their botanical metaphor for the Jews, but for Israelis their own self-chosen botanical metaphor is the prickly pear. Both are thorny plants at home in the desert and more than capable of protecting themselves in that harsh environment. For Muslims the Jew is a tree that must be torn out of the soil, but the Jew in Israel sees his people becoming trees whose roots hold fast to the soil of a revived land.

AND SPEAKING OF BOOKS

...here's an excerpt from Edward Cline's new novel. Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk series and here in "We Three Kings" he takes us to an entirely different milieu where "the "three" kings are Fury, the hero; Sheik Quamisi, and Wade Lambert, a NYPD homicide detective taken hostage by the sheik."

Quamisi frowned. “You are not a man of God, Mr. Fury?”

Fury smiled. “I don’t even worship the false ones.”

“That makes you the universal infidel,” said Quamisi, who then laughed. He smiled generously at Fury. “Truly a man of the world, with no eye on the next one. And he knows this world.” A distant, speculative look came to the sheik’s face. “A formidable man,” he added. “I must thank you for accepting the invitation, Mr. Fury. You have been the sole bright note in what has been a tedious evening.”

“I didn’t come here to celebrate,” said Fury.

“I imagine not. But it is difficult to fit you into the familiar categories. I confess I am at a loss.”

“Stephen Crenshaw,” Fury said. “Queen Una and the Hall of the Firmament.”

“Yes,” said Quamisi tentatively. “I understand from Mr. Dean that you do not wish to sell the coin in question for any figure. I am certain now that your words are not mere sales strategy. I would make you an extremely high offer for it, but I feel that it would simply be adding zeroes to zeroes.”

“Mr. Dean’s been dirtying his hands lately,” remarked Fury.

Delight spread over Quamisi’s face. “You know something of our attitudes, Mr. Fury! What a pleasant surprise!”

“The dirt on Mr. Dean’s hands is not the usual kind, gotten through honest work.”

“Truly cosmopolitan!” exclaimed Quamisi. “Tell me: What is your view on the state of the world today?”

Fury sighed. “I don’t do soliloquies on the obvious.”

“Poor Mr. Crenshaw,” said Quamisi.

“Not so poor,” replied Fury.

Quamisi shrugged and permitted himself a smirk. “If one man owns a handful of marbles, and another the quarry from which they came before being encased in glass, I will not quibble over the issues of scale.”



AND THE ROUNDUP

Director Blue has the union numbers rounded down to the penny. Here's a tidbit.

Financial Information

    Annual Dues Paid to Unions: $8,209,113,955
    Total Union Assets: $8,775,962,626
    Total Spending
        Representational Activities: $4,074,510,945
        Political Activities: $582,248,875
        External Contributions: $333,982,197
        Overhead: $3,914,513,501
    Unions that fail to pass Department of Labor audits: 92%

Someone has to defend the "middle class".


IT'S ALL IN THE NUMBERS

....from a comment on American Digest

They'll keep track of how often you help them. The compliant ones, who respond to their pleas, will soon start getting bennies. And who the heck is paying for all this? Shoot, no one had the courage to sue them when they were laundering millions in illegal foreign money during both elections. The Courts and the constitutional lawyers mewled that "nobody has standing to sue". Now that they are beyond the reach of election law, the money just magically appears. None dare call it treason.

Like a pusher or a pimp, they'll next try to get you to graduate to the "hard stuff": direct action. Please, they'll say, we really need your help, show up at this time and place to help the Usurper. They'll loan you a t-shirt to wear (and ask you to buy it). The leaders will have special shirts, and campaign-style buttons, and perhaps cute little hats. And you'll go where you're told, and do what you're asked to. They'll bus you there and give you a stipend. You're One of Them now.

And if you keep answering their call, you go higher on the "One of Us" list, and qualify for more bennies. Free phones, debt forgiveness, extra ration cards. Chevy Volts at an unheard of discount.

Watch for it.

The turning point is when the purple T-shirts disappear, and it becomes button-down shirts with epaulets. Uniforms. Insignia. The hats aren't so cute anymore. You'll be part of the team now, the core of the Usurper's civilian national security force. And you'll go where you're told, and you'll do what you're told, because the bennies keep coming, and you're in for a penny, in for a pound. 

IT'S OBAMA'S PARTY AND HE'LL ACCIDENTALLY ARM ASSAD IF HE WANTS TO

Meanwhile, actual Iranian tankers are shutting off their automated reporting systems as they approach Libya, and leaving them off until they have departed Libyan ports.  Peripheral evidence of this has been noted by journalists like Claudia Rosett (I wrote about it here), but the analysis reported by Reuters on 7 December provides the first specific confirmation that Iranian ships are shutting their Automated Information Systems (AIS) off to avoid being tracked into and out of Libyan ports.

The likelihood that arms have been shipped from Libya to Syria by this method is high enough to be considered a certainty – and, of course, the arms would have gone to Bashar al-Assad.  He is Iran’s protégé, and Iranian solicitude for Syrian shipping is devoted to bolstering his chances.  The irony here is obvious, as there have also been plenty of reports of arms shipments from Libya to the Syrian rebels, some of which may have been facilitated by the US mission in Benghazi.  The possibility that arms for Libya also got packed off to Assad himself cannot be discounted.

...from J.E. Dyer at Optimistic Conservative




THE PLANET, IT ISN'T MELTING

Breaking news from the US – h/t Watts Up With That? – where a leaked draft of the IPCC's latest report AR5 admits what some of us have suspected for a very long time: that the case for man-made global warming is looking weaker by the day and that the sun plays a much more significant role in "climate change" than the scientific "consensus" has previously been prepared to concede.

Here's the killer admission:

    Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

That's a rather fancy way of saying... it was the sun. Now all that the environmentalists have to do is fulfill man's greatest dream by putting out the sun.

The Darkness and the Light

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee. And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Macabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

Seron, General of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria who dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning."

Though the Macabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands. Worn from battle, the Macabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Macabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on.

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on. For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of a Roman Idumean governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Idumean murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Sixty-four years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.