Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Boehner Rebellion

THIS NOT A GUN PROBLEM, IT'S A PEOPLE PROBLEM

Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.

New Orleans' murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador. Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17.

 St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.

Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.

...and then we break down what really drives the national murder rate

A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine.

The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Our murder rate now largely consists of criminals killing criminals.

There's lots more in my article, "American Doesn't Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Gang Problem."






THE BOEHNER REBELLION

The Boehner rebellion went nowhere because hardly any Congressional Republicans had any other ideas. Few of them, for all the talk, wanted to do anything other than what Boehner did. They might have thought that Boehner handled it badly, but they were happy to let him have the bad headlines.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. When times are bad, it takes men of courage to step forward and find a way to turn the situation to their advantage. The Republicans in the House chose instead to stick with what doesn't work while waiting for the situation to change before making their play. And they chose to let Boehner keep the job he has, aside from some formulaic protest votes, because no one else wants it.

After the fiscal cliff vote, some conservative blogs are voicing the previously heretical thought that Paul Ryan is a fraud. Of course he's a fraud. A cursory look at his voting record would show that. This is not a man who votes for fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatism just happens to be a brand.

The system is corrupt and most people don't really understand what that means. A corrupt system corrupts everyone in contact with it. Functioning within a corrupt system, succeeding within it certainly, requires that you also become corrupt.

Everyone knows that the finances are bad, but that just means more competition for rearranging them to favor specific interests and agendas. It doesn't mean real reform.

The Republicans in the House don't have leaders, they have expendable men who do the dirty work that everyone wants done, but no one really wants to do. There's no future in such work. It won't make them popular quite the contrary, but it's also a necessary sacrifice.



FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS

In the last 40 years, five US ambassadors were killed in the line of duty. 4 out of 5 were killed by Muslims.





NOTHING IS CERTAIN...

In movie theaters, Les Misérables, a tawdry movie based on the tawdry musical based on the tawdry novel, is playing side by side with Django, a black revenge fantasy, and The Hobbit, a bit of conservative escapism from a British author born not long after the death of Victor Hugo bidding farewell to the pleasant way of life of the British countryside.

Cinematically a refried exploitation of the aftermath of the French Revolution is brushing shoulders with a refried exploitation of ’70s black liberation clichés, both of which have been shouldered out of the way by the majority’s longing for the village green and the humble power of the common man who makes no noise at all, but proves surprisingly courageous when the first Nazi bombers begin passing overhead.

In real life, the silent majority of hobbits is often stomped underfoot by revolutionaries and gangbangers. And these days it’s the Django and Les Misérables agenda that is moving forward.

...but "Death and Taxes"... my other Front Page article for the week




WHILE SUPPLIES LAST

But is your house also full of collectibles that only a mentally ill person would collect? Then drop $7,500 on the medallion set featuring gold, silver and bronze medallions of Obama and Biden looking off into the distance, perhaps the place over the horizon where all the money went.

With the official 57th Presidential Inauguration medallion collection of gold, silver and bronze complete with certificate of authenticity so you can be sure that you have the real medallions of two fake men, you will finally have actual things to trade for food and gas when the economy collapses. While your medallions will not retain their face value of $7,500, Fajir will give you a dozen loaves of bread and fill up your tank, biting the gold and silver with his teeth, and throwing the bronze away, before melting them down.

My Taxes Went Up And All I Got Was This $25 Obama Coffee Mug





Comment of the Week

"Oh, yeah, lots of us Scots-Irish gangbangers running around, hopped up on Bushmills whiskey, wearing our kilts pulled down to our buttcracks, blasting bagpipe and fiddle music from our woofers and doing drive bys with our AK's."

Carolina Ulsterman



EVERYONE BELONGS SOMEWHERE...

Whitemoor no longer operated  with Vulnerable Prisoner  (VP) Units, so sex offenders were dispersed around the main  wings.  Being admitted to the Muslim community as the most influential religious group in the prison granted them the certainty of being backed up in precarious situations by a large number of ‘brothers’

Well, why people think it’s a gang is because you have certain prisoners who are in for rape who have given  information about other people on cases.  Basically prisoners who would normally, traditionally, be on the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit and all these prisoners, they turn Muslim and then they’re joined to a brotherhood where people will protect them, so they’re walking around normal

If you’re in for say a violent rape  or killing a woman, you may be approached and told “If you join you’ll  be given protection, if you don’t you will be seen as an enemy”

Prison guards said they had a policy of “appeasement” towards the powerful and growing Islamic population, particularly convicted terrorists who were feared to be recruiting future extremists.

Non-believers avoided confrontation with any Muslim in case it led to retribution from the wider group, and said they even avoided cooking pork or bacon in communal kitchens or undressing in the showers in case it caused offence.

British Rapists and Pedophiles Converting to Islam in Prison





COURT JESTERS NEED NOT APPLY

It’s much easier to be Jon Stewart in America. Even if you do end up with a Republican in the White House, nothing will happen if you go on making wacky faces while reading news items in an exaggerated high voice before saying “Whaaaaat?” (Applause light goes on, audience monotonously cheers something they were thinking but that he actually said.)

But when you succeed in getting the Republican out of the White House and replacing him with not just any Democrat, but one so far left that he makes Jimmy Carter look like Richard Nixon, then life is still good and you still get to read news items while lifting one eyebrow (unless you’ve already given Colbert the eyebrow shtick so that he now has a grand total of one comic reaction) before saying, “Whaaaat. Waaaait a minute here.”

(Audience claps with one hand, checks Yelp on smartphones with other hand to find the best places to eat after the George Clooney interview is done.)

But life isn’t good for Egyptian Jon Stewart, because Jimmy Carter II has done for Egypt, what the original Jimmy did for Iran. And it’s illegal to mock the new Muslim Brotherhood Fuhrer who represents the Jan 25 Islamic Revolution.

Egyptian Jon Stewart Faces Investigation for Insulting Muslim Brotherhood President




TORCH IN THE NEW YEAR

The good news is that the French insurance industry is getting a lot of repeat business. The bad news is that 1,193 cars were torched, three police officers and four gendarmes were injured. And 339 arrests were made. But it’s just another way that Islamic traditions are becoming part of France in a great multicultural mix of petrol, fire and ruin.

In the days preceding Christmas François Hollande made a trip to Algeria to apologize for the war.

Hollande added: “We have this duty to the truth about the violence, the injustices, the massacres, the torture”. Hollande promised to better accommodate those Algerians requesting visas to France and to urge the French consulates to issue the documents more quickly.

French Muslims Celebrate New Year by Torching 1,193 Cars





NATIVE COAL

Back in 2008, Obama vowed to destroy the coal industry. Thus far he has been doing an excellent job of shutting down coal plants and putting coal miners out of work with over 17,000 jobs lost.

But there’s coal, which is dirty, filthy and polluting, and there’s Indian coal which is the heart and soul of an ancient people and is in a special category as indigenous coal.

The gloriously indigenous Indian coal tax credit has been extended for another year. Because that Italian guy who played an Indian standing by a highway doesn’t cry when the coal is held in trust by the United States government. Let the sound of 17,000 unemployed coal miners who don’t happen to be Indians be heard throughout the land.

 Hollywood Tax Credits, Rum Subsidies, Indian Coal and Scooters: The Senate Fiscal Cliff Bill’s 4 Worst Ripoffs




THEIR WAY OF THINKING HAS NOT CHANGED

Q: What was the reaction of the old elite to 9/11?

“They were shocked that the attack occurred in New York which for them was the same as an attack against Europe — Amsterdam or London. They realized that they could be the victim and that the enemy does not pause to ask your name.”

Q: So has something changed in their way of thinking?

“Not really. They are afraid, and want more checkpoints, more control. But it is too late for them to undergo a real change in ideology. They don’t want to argue with Islam, they only want Intelligence operations against radical Islam. They don’t want a discussion about cultural differences or rationality – a very dangerous issue for them. Their way of thinking has not changed. They are only afraid for their own lives but not for the well-being of western culture.

Q: What is the agenda of the old elite as you saw it?

“They have no agenda, they are completely decadent. Nihilists. After the Second World War they lived the good life and thought of bringing over workers to Europe.

Q: Did this attitude have a goal? Did they see in their vision world peace for instance?

“No, they only wanted to pay for their guilt, the historical guilt of Europe, the murderous continent, and they acted out of some atheist kind of Christianity which I call nihilistic.

...from an interview with Dutch-Iranian Professor Afshin Ellian





VIVA LA REVOLUCIA HOMICIDOS

The good news is that the Socialist Paradise of Venezuela, so beloved by Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, is finally on track to defeat the capitalist warpigs of the United States of America once and for all… in the number of murders.

While the US murder total for 2012 isn’t in yet, the Venezuelan murder total has hit 21,692, up from 18,000 last year, despite a ban on private ownership of guns enacted by the Chavez regime this year.

Hugo Chavez Outlaws Gun Ownership, Murder Rate Hits 21,692




BEGGING ONLY WORKS WHEN YOUR ENEMIES HAVE MERCY

Hezbollah fatboy-in-chief Hassan Nasrallah looks uncomfortable, he mops his brow and admits the fighting is hard and long, which from a terrorist group that claims victory after every defeat, means Hezbollah has been getting its ass kicked in Syria.

“Between us and Al Qaeda there is no relationship,” Nasrallah says, “rather there is a form of disputation and sometimes animosity. If they make us our enemy, that is up to them.”

But who is Nasrallah really kidding?

Iran tried to make a deal with Al Qaeda before and after September 11. The policy of the Shiite Islamic Revolutionaries, going back to the old Ayatollah has been to find ways to work with Sunni terrorist groups in a region where Shiites are a minority. And Al Qaeda repaid Iran by massacring Shiites to begin a civil war in Iraq and went on killing Shiites in Afghanistan.

Nasrallah announcing that he wants to negotiate because he fears Takfiris will wipe out Shiites is a show of weakness. And unlike Israeli, America and Europe whom Nasrallah has grown too used to dealing with, Al Qaeda does not reward weakness.

It punishes it.

Hezbollah Leader Begs Al Qaeda for a Truce




WE CARE A LOT

Head of Hamas in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh told UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that the Gaza Strip couldn’t take in Syria’s Palestinian refugees due to an ideological issue: If they take in the refugees from Syria, Israel could use it against them when it comes to the Palestinians’ demand for the “right to return” to villages inside present day Israel, by pointing out that the refugees no longer need to return to Israel because they have been relocated to new homes in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas Refuses to Accept Palestinian Refugees from Syria to Spite Israel



FAIR, LOGICAL AND COMPLETELY UNBALANCED

Sheikh Ayed al-Qarni was scheduled to speak twice during the Muslim American-Society (MAS)/Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) national convention Dec. 22-25.

But a statement released during the convention expressed “the unpleasant and saddening news” that al-Qarni had been removed from his flight from Saudi Arabia despite having a visa from the U.S. embassy, and that he appears to be on the U.S. “no-fly list.”

Al-Qarni is described as “one of our great speakers” and as someone known “for his logical discourse and balanced views, he promotes understanding and collaboration between all people, regardless of their faith, background, or language.”

Here is an example of Al-Qarni's speaking skills.

I pray to Allah that He will make the enemies fall into their own trap and that He will destroy the Jews and their helpers from among the Christians and the Communists, and that He will turn them into the Muslims’ spoils.

Throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered,” al-Qarni said. “This is the path to victory, to shahada, and to sacrifice.”

But while Al-Qarni is a fan of killing Jews and Americans… he’s also a fan of Barack Obama.

“Now we have an educated and rational president with roots in Islam.

“We tell Barack Obama: ‘What a blessed hour, O Abu Hussein! You are a thousand times welcome.’”

CAIR Protests No-Fly Ban of Terror Sheik Who Called for Slitting Jewish Throats



AL-CORRUPT

Probably the funniest thing about the Clinton Administration is that Al Gore was supposed to be the figure of integrity in it, the straight man to Bill Clinton’s rowdy man, except Gore was at least as sleazy as Clinton. The entire Current TV debacle is an ugly reminder of just how creepy, manipulative, exploitative and corrupt Gore really is.

It’s an open question whether Al Gore really intended for Current TV to be a viable proposition or whether he used his influence to get cable providers to carry it long enough to be able to then sell it off and cash in.

Current TV was never viable, it lacked programming, viewers and anything to distinguish it from MSNBC, its chief competitor. Even its name made for poor branding.

But it did have one asset. Carriage.

Al Gore Threatened to Denounce Cable Companies as Islamophobes to Protect $100 Million Al Jazeera Payout



FINALLY REPUBLICANS HAVE THEIR OWN DICK DURBIN

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is somewhat light on the crazy factor. Even the Democratic members are not the worst you could think of, with the exception of John Kerry and Dick Durbin. Kerry is moving on,  but for the last decade or so, he wasn't nearly as bad as Dick Durbin.

Fortunately the Republicans have decided to supplement the SFRC with their own Dick Durbin, Rand "Let's Send All the Gitmo Terrorists Back to Afghanistan" Paul.

Rand Paul isn't the first Republican senator to be pro-terrorist. We've got Hagel coming back as a wannabe SofD as a reminder of that, but his appointment certainly is a present to Democrats. And Rand Paul with all his talk of stopping the American Empire is a good deal worse than Hagel or Durbin and in Bradley Manning territory.

Bradley Manning at least had to smuggle out intelligence on Lady Gaga CDs. How will Rand Paul do it? And I can't wait till we get that hearing into whether steel can really melt.





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

Indian Women Rushing to Buy Guns After Gang Rape

California Supreme Court Claims Unions Have Special Right to “Invade Private Property”

Mandatory Exercise for the Obese Comes to the UK

Egyptian Magazine Claims 2 High Ranking Homeland Security Officials are Muslim Brotherhood Operatives

Socialism Killed Kim Jong Il

China Rushes to Define Itself as a Muslim Country

Back to the Stone Age: Greens Unveil New “Body Heat” Home Heating Plan

Finally Socialism is regressing all the way to the Stone Age, where it belongs.

And how about, in the spirit of perpetual generosity, we just make this work by forcing entire families to live together in the same room and crowding hundreds of employees together in a few thousand square of feet.

Just think of the energy savings and the cycle of generosity as the heat gets turned off and employees huddle together for warmth.

3/4 of Bad British Doctors are 3rd Worlders

Saddam Hussein Party Running for Office in Jordan

Saudi Cleric Promises “Paradise” to 14-Year-Old Girls Who Have Sex with Terrorists

The Jihadis get to molest an underage girl and the girl is told by her family that if she goes through this, she’ll earn paradise and unlike most women, who are hellbound according to Mohammed, will not have to worry about the afterlife

African Migrant Rapes 83-Year-Old Woman in South Tel Aviv

Tzioni pointed at the sidewalk and counted the passersby, most of them Africans, many of them families with baby strollers. At night “you won’t see any Israelis anymore,” he said.

On Salomon Street, haggard prostitutes, strung-out addicts and Israeli Arab drug dealers loiter in the late afternoon sun. Two Chinese workers begin brawling on the corner of Fein Street, throwing bottles at each other before their friends pull them apart and the group scatters. Further down the street, at 22 Salomon Street, sits an Eritrean-run bar, where a 19- year-old woman was drinking on May 14, before she was followed out by a group of African men she had argued with in the bar who then raped her in a nearby parking lot, according to police.

Palestinian Authority Tortured 96% of its Prisoners

Female Blogger Exposes Tunisian Islamist Minister’s Affair, Islamist Leader Says She Should Be Flogged

74% More Mosques in America Since September 11

Muslim Population of Britain Doubles



AND NOW THE ROUNDUP

...Doug Ross has a special gift just waiting for your favorite member of Congress

 from American Digest

Socialism, so caring, so "fair," so humanity based, so green... and so wonderful for the environment! Especially when all the parasites run out of money:

A haze of smoke hangs over the city skyline in Athens, early Thursday, Jan. 3, 2013. The cloud is the result of a massive switch to wooden stoves and fireplaces for heating as many households, already hard hit by the economic crisis, can not afford to buy heating oil after the cash-strapped government decided to harmonize taxes on heating oil and diesel fuel, leading to a 40 percent rise in the price of heating oil.

What's next? Wood is about as basic as it gets. When the infrastructure loses momentum, and the going get tough, then the tough go back to hunting and fishing, to knights, nobles and peasants, and all the rest of it. Civilization is a fragile thing and it rarely survives the civilizers.



FREEDOM ON FOUR WHEELS

The automobile represents freedom.

You climb into a car and go, go, go, whenever and wherever you want. The car is modern man’s path to liberty.

Contrast cars with trains.

Railroads are an expression of the collective. Individual identity is erased. You are at the mercy of a state-controlled system that turns  citizens into passive cogs, manipulated and at the mercy of government bureaucrats.

That’s why democrats/progressives/liberals/ (what are they calling themselves this week?) are obsessed with high-speed rail. The freedom of the road is repellent to big government fanatics. 

...from Robert at Seraphic Secret

or alternatively, from Small Dead Animals

Riding Mass Transit Is Like Inviting 20 Random Hitchhikers Into Your Car

...minus the random part and the invite part



CHECKMATE

"...If you create artificial states with substantial minorities, as British and French cartographers did after the First World War, the only possible stable government is a minority government. That is why the Alawites ran Syria and the minority Sunnis ran Iraq. The minority regime may be brutal, even horribly brutal, but this arrangement sets up a crude system of checks and balances."

Spengler, via Blazing Cat Fur



ME AND THEE

Gregory will never be indicted, prosecuted or punished for a crime he clearly committed, and for which any of the rest of us would have already seen a swift and vicious application of Almighty State “justice.” The “investigation” is nothing more than a delaying tactic, and will be abandoned or whitewashed over as soon as it’s practicable. Sure, there have always been abuses of the system, and the rich will always be able to buy justice at the expense of the rest of us; those truths are eternal, and universal. But we are now undeniably living under two separate but unequal sets of laws in this foul country, and its machinations are right in front of our noses and exercised in broad daylight: one for the protected elites, and another for the rest of us.

...from Cold Fury, Life in the Third World



GOOD TIMES AND BAD

What I’ve deduced (yeah fancy shit words) is that gun bans, confiscations or whatever have not happened during times of tribulations but during times of prosperity and peace.  That’s only when they will they work.  Two examples, when Hitler came to power he promised that Germany would be prosperous, healthy and would avenge the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and he did just that.  Hitler was a monster beyond all compare but he was what others weren’t…a consummate, savvy politician and he knew what the people wanted and he delivered it to them.  During the ’30s Germany prospered where other nations were drowning, including the United States.  In return all he asked was for a little obedience, order and certain other things that were relatively minor (unless you were a Jew) and the people happily complied.  One of those things was gun registration and eventually confiscation. The people thought “Hey, life is good, I’m making money, prices are low so is crime and Germany is once a power player on the world stage what do I need a gun for?”  Germans weren’t afraid of the unknown.

The second?  The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.  Same thing.  Life was good, inflation was low, unemployment was low, GDP was up, the Berlin Wall was dust, the Soviet Union was history and the good times were rolling on Wall Street and Main Street.  You want to take some guns?  Ok, crime is down so we don’t need’em so go ahead, take’em.  Americans weren’t afraid of the unknown so they took them, but we’re going to put a time limit on it…just in case. 

...from the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.

And it's an important point. Security is important to people. In insecure times, unthinking cooperation is harder to come by.


Finally, from Oleg of the People's Cube, an important American Thinker article

The laws of society and human nature are such that socialism can only be achieved through a certain sequence of steps and manipulations.  For instance, the only way to attain material equality is to confiscate someone's property and give it to others.  That necessitates a centralized mechanism of coercion, redistribution, and control.  Such a system gives extraordinary corrupting powers to a small centralized elite, while turning the rest of the citizenry into a compliant, obsequious herd.

All those who claimed they can do it differently were doomed to retrace the same path.  Once you unleash the ancient powers of collectivism, you have only two options: control the human herd or be trampled underfoot.

Power To the People

At a Brady Center event to "Prevent Gun Violence by Jodie Foster Fans from Accidentally Hitting White House Press Secretaries in the Head" the Brady Center Legal Action Project Director asked retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens whether having a right to a cell phone might be a more universal form of self-defense than gun ownership.

"Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a predialed 911 number at your bedside, and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun, which you’re not used to using," Justice Stevens mumbled.

Stevens, who often seemed unclear on the difference between a right and an entitlement, had a point. Why bother waiting for the laborious process of using a gun, when you can instantly dial 911 and wait twenty minutes while being murdered for the police to arrive.

There still is no Constitutional right to a cell phone, but you're already paying into a Universal Service Fund that does just that, providing cell phones to any and all, courtesy of Lebanese-Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's company, who, when he isn't making high interest loans to the New York Times, shovels prepaid government cell phones into the ghetto.

Gun control advocates have been digging away at the pesky 2nd Amendment for a while now. Their trouble with it is that guns are loud and make big bangs when they go off and enable the peasants to resist when their betters decide that they should be moved off their land. But the true trouble is that gun ownership is an individual right. And they don't believe in individual rights, their gospel is group rights.

If the 2nd Amendment assigned the right to bear arms to each racial group by degree of persecution, they would find it much more acceptable no matter what the annual death toll was. An LGBT 2nd Amendment would float their boat. An amendment that treats it as an individual right, rather than a group right, does not.

Justice Stevens and the Legal Director of the "Brady Project to Build a Time Machine, Travel in Time and Convince Jodie Foster to Drop Acting and Open a Baskin Robbins Franchise" were pondering how to make an individual right fair by universalizing it and redistributing it into a group right.

Some people have guns and others don't. But everyone can have a government mandated right to a cell phone... except perhaps the Amish, and their time is coming. Why the average Amish farm uses child labor and doesn't provide its child laborers with health plan coverage for birth control and abortion, and its barns aren't raised to OSHA standards.

If you assume that rights belong to the group, rather than the individual, then predialed cell phones are a better solution than guns. Just push 1 if you're being murdered, 2 if you're being raped, 3 if your house is being set on fire and 4 if you just realized that your health plan doesn't provide abortion coverage on all major legal holidays and 5 if your next door neighbor is having a Jodie Foster movie marathon at ear-splitting volume at two in the morning.

The police may not get there in time, but they will get there to government specifications and will take action in line with municipal, state and federal policies that are formed in deference to group rights. With 911, the policy hand is strong with the government. With the 2nd Amendment, the balance of power is with the homeowner watching a shadow moving up his staircase.

Governments can issue a directive for how many arrests of how many people they want to see, based on type of crime and race. And that is the kind of enforcement you will get through 911, backed by Federal grants to local communities and Department of Justice lawsuits. Whether or not the police officer will be there in ten minutes or twenty, whether he will even take your statement or just doodle something while you talk, depends on policies coming out of Washington D.C.

Group rights are centralized. They depend on weaponizing statistics to achieve some larger goal in the constellation of social justice whose dim star always hangs over Washington casting its baleful radiation down over all that marble, money and blight, group rights are the right to wait in a government line to find out whether your request will be filled or not based on your socioeconomic status, race, gender, transgender, sexual orientation and surfing abilities, and any gimmick that the latest Harvard faculty member slash White House adviser has decided to experiment with on your skin. And the line, in this case, happens to be the phone line to the 911 system, which will send someone to help you at a rate that depends on all the number juggling involving money, crime statistics and votes.

The 2nd Amendment is a very different creature. The controllers would like to turn it into a group right. Replace the home rifle with an IOU for membership in the National Guard or a cell phone from Carlos Slim that will allow you to dial 911, unless the dam breaks or the earth quakes or the service goes. And they would equally like to turn the 1st Amendment into a right to say the things that are socially beneficial, while outlawing speech that is not socially beneficial.

In Europe, free speech means speech that is in the public interest, not speech that undermines the public good. That latter kind of speech can get you a trip to a jail cell. And that is the only kind of speech that can exist in group rights. When the group comes first, then the individual is the last one on the line. When rights serve the group, or the idealized arrangement of groups meant to provide the perfect statistical balance between skin colors, genders, lack of genders, and choice of partners, then the individual has no rights except as a member of Team White, Team Black, Team Gay or Team Badly Confused.

A gun is an individual thing. It's hard for a group to own a gun. You can give Team Gay, Team Union or Team Korean Men in Wheelchairs a cell phone link to a central network of law enforcement support services, but a gun is a thing that an individual buys and learns to use. It is not a network, but an object, its power does not come from pushbutton access to a plea for government aid, but from the skill and courage of the individual. Gun power is merit based.

Effectively using freedom of speech, of religion, of protest or the press has become more difficult in an age where all four tend to be vested or barred by massive institutions. You can still start your own blog, your own religion, your own protest rally or your own printing press in a shed out back, but your ability to effectively make use of them in defense of your own interests is likely to be limited. But when the door breaks down, then you do not need permission or access to large institutions to defend yourself or your family courtesy of the 2nd Amendment. And that is what infuriates group rightists about the 2nd Amendment. Its function does not require their consent or approval. It does not even require their notice. It just is.

There is no conflict between the 1st and 2nd Amendment as loudmouths like Piers Morgan have been complaining of late. There is a conflict between a 2nd Amendment made use of by individuals and a 1st Amendment that has been thoroughly colonized by institutions and corporations that believe in the rights of the group, not the rights of the individual. David Gregory's belief that he was immune from the law because he was acting as a media agenda spokesman is just another reminder that the institutions that have colonized the 1st Amendment consider themselves in all regards above the law.

In an age of group rights, the Fourth Estate is claiming the special status that it is entitled to. But under the 2nd Amendment there are no estates, no groups that are more or less entitled to defend themselves, and no individuals with more or less claim on the right to own a firearm because of their race, religion, gender, bed partner, class or cleverness. It is a right of the people, back when the rights of the people referred to the people as a whole, not some idealized urban peasantry living off welfare checks or a coalition of official victim groups whose tears count more than those of anyone else.

In its purest form, the people means everyone. It means a nation of individuals who are not broken down into any other group and whose rights are not allocated from any secondary source. The left spends a great deal of time shouting, "Power to the People", but the 2nd Amendment with its sharp statement, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is a literal invocation of power to the people. A people who are not designated as such by any category other than their peoplehood.

The left shouts "Power to the People", but doesn't truly mean it. It would like to replace Power to the People with Predialed Cell Phones to the People and Lines at Government Offices to the People and Write to Your Local Congressman to the People.

The people aren't supposed to have guns, they're supposed to have government on speed dial. The people aren't supposed to have power, they're supposed to have a hand out to the government which will decide whether to help them or not based on its own priorities. And if the help doesn't arrive, then they can shout "Power to the People" outside government offices and demand that the rich people give more money to the government so that it can help them faster.

The Director of the "Brady Legal Project to Give James Brady a Cybernetic Body Made of Titanium So He Can Destroy All Guns Everywhere" asked the retired Supreme Court Justice, "The Supreme Court held that the 2nd Amendment assures our right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense as you say. This question’s asked: ‘That protects only gun owners. What about those who don’t have guns? Surely they have a right of self-defense. Instead of relying on the 2nd Amendment and dealing with gun laws, wouldn’t it be more rational to rely directly on the right we all have to self-defense."

Like all gun control proposals, it would be rational. Just as it was rational in the USSR to move all the farmers to collective farms in order to increase wheat production and just as it was rational for China to protect crop yields by killing all sparrows and just as it was rational to bail out the banks and then spend billions more stimulating the economy. Putting all your eggs in one centrally planned basket is rational. It’s also stupid. Rational is not the same thing as right and it's certainly not the same thing as individual rights..

The Constitution is not rational. Not in the sense that word is used by the modernist technocracy, the worshipers at the altar of progress, who deem a thing rational if it can be used to social control their way to utopia. It holds instead to the irrational idea that power should be vested in the individual and that fairness comes from respecting individual rights, rather than from feudal structures that rely on government to level all the playing fields and all the heads.

It holds to the irrational idea that a man has rights, apart from his group or even from the public good, and that these rights are innate, that governments may take them away physically, but never morally. And it holds to the stranger notion still that individual rights become universalized through individual power rather than government power. And from these premises it determines that the people shall have power, while from their premises the gun controllers determine that the people shall have a place on a government line. From these premises it determines that the people shall be armed and from their premises the gun controllers determine that each man, woman and child shall have the right to spend the last 30 seconds of their life begging the government to save them.

Outside the Territory of Reason

As the edge of the fiscal cliff approaches and then recedes, like an imagined desert isle appearing and disappearing admit the waves, the process that has brought America into the tyranny of debt goes on. The national debt, like our annual deficits, is a symptom of the true problem.

Irresponsible behavior is a symptom of irresponsible thinking. Bad choices come from the failure to understand consequences. Power is not just an aphrodisiac, it numbs one to the understanding that there even are consequences.

The centers of people in a nation are the last to feel the cold and their decisions are insulated from their consequences by power and comfort. Even as they warn about the danger, they are too far away from it to truly feel it. It is a shadow to them. An idea. Not a reality.

To the powerful, power is the only reality. And the limits of their own power are unknown to them. The possession of power is a constraint that prevents the possessor from seeing its limits.

We live in a world that has lost touch with the very idea of hard choices. That even in the richest and most prosperous country in the world, you still have to choose one or the other. That you can't have you cake and eat it too. But as the hard edges of reason have blurred into the haze of wishful thinking, the idea of mutually incompatible choices also fades away. Soon there are no choices, only options.

Our government has vanished into that haze. A haze in which our leaders actually believe that we can be tough and kind, strong and beloved and spending as much as we want without worrying about where it's coming from. The haze extends to our policies which assume that we can win wars without offending anyone, and spend as much money as we want without recouping it in some way. In a system built on two party stalemates usually broken by compromises, it's all too easy to believe that you can give and take, without ever having to choose. One or the other.

A country whose leadership does not understand the concept of mutually incompatible choices is doomed to have its political structure decay into tyranny and its economy stagnate and finally collapse. Without the understanding that some choices are hard and fast things, success becomes impossible. When you think that you can do everything, you end up being unable to do anything. When every option is on the table, then no option is on the table. And if the political leadership cannot make those choices, then it will be replaced by another form of leadership that will solve the problem with tyranny. This has happened before. And it will happen again.

The Middle East presents us with the troubling sight of an entire region run by people who are unable to make such absolute distinctions. Princes, sheiks and prime ministers pursue mutually incompatible policies at the same time, make contradictory assertions and often remain unaware that their actions are contradictory. In a region that is outside the territory of reason, everything is always on the table. There is no truth, only layers of lies. Push far enough down and you come away with nothing but hot air. The popularity of Islam as a political solution is due in part to the perception that it represents an absolute certainty. An anchor in a turbulent sandy sea. Not an intellectual anchor of reason, but of fanatical force. The comfort of the thoughtless tyranny of power.

But the West has been headed out of the territory of reason for some time now. Its truths have become ideological beliefs. Its goals have become the self-worship of its own symbols, size for the sake of size, and centralization for the sake of centralization. There is a mingled horror and longing for the savage and the barbaric, as civilization appears to have lost its meaning. The leadership cries "Onward to a united world" on the one hand, and "Back to the caves" on the other. That confused melange boils down to a cultural intelligence which has lost the awareness of its own contradictions. High tech environmentalism, soft wars and valueless money are all symptoms of that same intellectual degeneracy.

The rise of China is directly tied to our own irrationality. The People's Republic of China has become rich and powerful by serving as the reservoir of our contradictions. We wanted cheap products, no pollution, high wages and generous benefits. All these things are not compatible, so we outsourced our manufacturing to China and pretended that we could have it all. But all we got were cheap products, and the country we outsourced them to got the jobs and the national prosperity. We wanted to spend money without worrying about where it came from. Again we turned to China. And like the grasshopper and the ant, we sang and played all summer, while the ants worked and prepared for the winter.

We used China to escape the limits of reality, but there is no escape. Only temporary vacations from consequences. The PRC has made its own choices. It has chosen to compromise the lives of its people in order to amass wealth and industry by selling our own knickknack designs back to us. Now a generation of Chinese is preparing to reap the harvest of that industry. While we are in debt to that same industry. In debt to the banks who loan us the money with which we buy Chinese products and the government which collects taxes in order to repay China for the entitlement programs. And the banks are in debt to the government which bailed them out with China's money. And the government is in debt to China.

The People's Republic of China is no model of reason, but it understands choices better than we do. It left Communism behind in all but name, in order to gain wealth and power. And we left our wealth and power behind in all but name, in order to gain Communism. Without ever admitting it to ourselves, we traded a system that worked for one that didn't. And our leaders used a Communist country to lessen the immediate pain of the transition. But what our leaders treated as waste products, manufacturing jobs and heavy industry, helped turn China into a superpower. We thought that we could have everything, the best of both worlds, cheap products and only high paying jobs or subsidized unemployment. And by believing that, we lost both the jobs and the products will follow once the PRC no longer needs to needs to keep its currency artificially low.

There is no such thing as too big to fail. Size only serves as a delaying factor. The bigger they are, the slower they fall. But they also fall harder. And size also dulls the speed of the response. The more space there is between the outer regions and the inner controlling sector, the slower the system is to respond to a crisis. We're not too big to fail. We're failing so slowly that it's hard to see from the inside.

It comes down to choice again. If we're going to escape from this trap that we have set for ourselves, then we're going to make sacrifices. And our political system is poorly adapted to making sacrifices. The system we have is based on everyone getting what they want. On short term satisfaction over long term solutions. Plenty of Americans are out of work or living hand to mouth, but that deprivation doesn't translate to the centers of power.

But we can't afford to keep going the way we are. We are deep in debt and spending money that we don't have. And we're doing it because our system is built on spending money, not on saving money.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed that, "One of the greatest favors that can be bestowed upon the American people is economy in government". He warned about "the stupendous sum of about 7 billion, 500 million dollars" that is taken from Americans. Today 7 billion dollars wouldn't cover a day in the operation of the Federal government. If things keep going as they are, we might come to look upon the "stupendous" sum of 6 trillion dollars discussed now as equally minute. But it is not likely that day will ever come, because the camel's back is too close to breaking under the strain.

To save ourselves we must return to the territory of reason and make the difficult choices that must be made. It is too easy to fall into the haze of thinking that we don't really need to make such choices. That we can go on the way we have. And the world is full of cautionary examples of fallen civilizations that lost touch with those decisions and accordingly faded out of history.

The ability to perceive and make difficult choices is fundamental to the survival of a country. We used to be able to make those choices. Otherwise we will be another Republic of Ozymandias, a civilization lost through its own ineptitude, a monument to the knowledge that there is no free lunch, only the wages of difficult choices.

December 31, 1912

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912. The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. People use the word gay with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.  There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912, like that of 2012, ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. "Thirteen is my lucky number," he said. "It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune."

Americans of 2013 face the lightbulb ban. Americans of 1913 were confronted with the matchstick ban as the Esch bill in Congress outlawed phosphorus "strike 'em on your pants" matches by imposing a $1,000 tax on them. This was deemed to be Constitutional. In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them.

A recession was here, after several panics, and though there was plenty of cheer, there was also plenty of worry. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis.

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it. The influence of corporations was heatedly debated and the Catholic Church clashed with Socialists.

"Unless Socialism is checked," Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, "within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States." Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932.

At New York City's May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, "Take down that dirty rag" and "We don't recognize that flag." The site of the rally was Union Square, presently one of the locations where the rag ends of Occupy Wall Street hangs out.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank. In our time it was merely the Costa Concordia.

There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.

The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare.

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary. The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things. December 31, 2012 is likewise, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2112 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead. 2012 may be as forgotten as 1912, but 2016 and 2022 may endure in history.

America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

The Values Economy

There are two types of things that we put money into; the things that we need and the things that we don't. The former represent our physical needs and the latter our spiritual needs. Food for the body and food for the mind. We need to eat, but we don't need to see a movie. We need a house to live in, but we don't need a house of worship. We need a car to get to work, but we don't need a painting on our wall once we get there.

Culture isn't a luxury, even the poorest of the poor have it. It doesn't mean a night at the opera, it can just as easily mean sitting under a tree while the village elder explains where fire came from. But it is optional in the sense that we choose where to put our money or pine cones and those choices are our values economy.

The values economy consists of the culture you support. It's the books you buy and the movies you see, it's the paintings on your wall and the house of worship you attend. It's the concerts and games you buy tickets to and it's the colleges you attend. It's all the intangible investments in the intangible things of aesthetics, faith and cultural knowledge.

In a healthy culture, these things mirror your values. In an unhealthy culture they do not. Not only do they not, but they don't even mirror any stable set of values that can go the distance. Instead they're a species of insanity, confused and convoluted bits of specialist jargon, perpetual revolutions against good taste, ideas without ideas and taboo hunters with no more taboos left to break.

Cultural industries operate on perception. Everyone must see a movie or hear a song. Everyone must go to college, even though it's mostly as useful as a donkey on a pogo stick. Everyone must accept that all religions are basically the same and can be boiled down to a love for one's fellow man. All these things are the means through which the values economy manufactures the perception of the centrality of its own values and the importance of its own products. And its only real product is convincing you of its indispensability.

All cultural products are part of the values economy. When you put money into the values economy, you are subsidizing a particular set of values and regardless of where your real tastes and beliefs lie, you will get more of what you buy. If you buy a set of lead pencils every month, the company will go on making more lead pencils. If you buy cultural products at odds with your values, then more of the same will keep on being made.

Culture is an investment. It might be the second biggest investment there is after the family. Any society can build a dam or go to the moon or harness the talents of its innately gifted artists and musicians to create great works of art... if they have the cultural framework in which that can happen. Without that framework, great engineers, musicians, poets, artists, scientists and architects  will be born and their skills will be wasted, as they are wasted in most of the world and in most of history.

Culture is the difference between making things of worth and making worthless things. It is the glue that brings together bold ideas and makes them possible. It is what explains the universe and tells us how to make the impossible, possible. And it's the most fragile of all these things because it dies easily.

The values economy is how a society maintains its culture, investing its energy, money and structure into maintaining a healthy culture that projects its values and makes its achievements possible. Like any other investments, there are bad investments and good investments. A society can invest in Bach or it can invest in Andy Warhol. It can invest in engineers or Transgender Guatemalan Poets 101. And these investments have consequences, they pay out profits or lead to losses even if they appear to initially be intangible, with Andy leading to more Andy and Bach leading to more Bach.

Highbrow culture had patrons. Lowbrow culture had people who stopped by and threw pennies into a hat. Those boundaries have mostly been erased. Highbrow culture is now the pursuit of the utterly senseless, whose senselessness verifies its superiority, and the vast territory is occupied by a populist  culture that is high and low at the same time, blending an empty intellectual superiority with bad taste and worse standards where everything is sincerely a joke, and ironic detachment is a pratfall away.

Aside from fans of one thing or another, most people don't think of their learning, their religion or their entertainment as an investment, a seed planted in the earth to produce more of its kind. And the failure to think that way leads them to make bad investments in a bad culture.

The culture that we are stuck with now has mostly been one bad investment after another, tracts of smelly swampland where nothing can grow pawned off by sleazy weasels wearing too much polyester and more gold chains than the pharaohs, who haven't even had to work very hard to pull off their malignant scam. Good has been traded for bad and then for worse.

The values economy is tanking and the economic indicators are just one sign of how awry things have gone. The social indicators are another.

Culture is how we teach ourselves to perpetuate our society. Instead our cultural investments have given us broken families who are willing to sell their rights to the government in exchange for being taken care of from cradle to grave. And the government is willing to make the deal so long as it can bring in more foreign laborers to balance out the gap in the birth rate and then increase the police forces and the military to deal with the fallout from that immigration leading to a police state.

As cultural investments go, it's not hard to see that this is a bad one.

Our society is less literate than it used to be, it's less sane than it used to be and less productive. And those are not due to some innate defect in the youth or a fault in the stars, but in our culture. If our society is breaking, it's because our cultural investments have been bad ones. And if our cultural investments have been bad ones, it's because we didn't approach culture as an investment, but as a thing of momentary enjoyment, or as a consensus that we accepted as coming from within the culture.

Reversing that will not be easy, but it is possible. Cultures have dramatically changed, particularly after traumatic events. The culture that we are living in bears the scars of such turnarounds. And that can be done again, which isn't to say that it will be easy. The first step is to think of culture as a values economy, not just as education, enlightenment or entertainment. An investment that we are making for the future.

This does not have to be some dreary Marxist exercise in art criticism or a dogma-ridden analysis of every show on television. It means, first and foremost, caring about what you consume, instead of consuming culture as junk food, by being enthusiastic about its merits. That experience can be solitary, but it should also be undertaken with an awareness that culture is an investment in the values economy and that what you pay into will go far beyond the books and movies you take in, or the house of worship or college you attend. Culture is a conversation and we are all part of it.

Every person has a set of values that they live by. The test of any cultural investment is whether it meets those values, fails to meet those values or has values that runs counter to it. Most culture is not entirely one thing or another. There are conservative impulses in even the most liberal works and liberal impulses in even the most conservative works. And so our cultural investments confront us with the entirely subjective question of whether a thing will do more to build our culture than to tear it down.

The values economy follows the old principle GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you invest in bad culture, you will get bad culture. And your children will get worse culture and your grand-children will get even worse culture. There is a multiplier effect to decay, it feeds on itself and becomes worse with each cycle. The bad culture of five years ago becomes the horrible culture of today and the nightmarish alien culture of tomorrow until a breaking point is reached and there are too few worthwhile things left to keep it all going.

Cocooned in tangible luxuries, it becomes easy to let the intangibles slide, to consume without contemplating the cultural cost of our cultural investments. But there's only so much lotus that can be eaten before all memory is lost and there is no longer any voyage, only an island of shrinking land with the tide coming in.

The values economy is the calculus of our culture. It determines who we are and who our children will be. If our borders and our buildings, our roads and our technologies are our structure, then our culture is our soul. It is the spirit that lurks within the concrete and steel, it is the soul of the plastic, and if it is lost, then all that remains is structure no different from the pyramids and the countless fossilized relics of dead civilizations; empty stone with no spirit. 

The economy decides if our bodies have a future. The values economy decides whether it will have a soul.

First Plane Out Of Benghazi

It took some 22 hours for American help to arrive in Benghazi after all the t's had been crossed and the i's had been dotted, and the body of America's ambassador to Libya had been dragged through the streets by "rescuers" stopping along the way to pose for cell phone pictures with his corpse.

By way of comparison it takes about 16 hours for a boatload of Libyan illegal immigrants to row to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Support for the Americans under fire in Libya would have arrived sooner if a few former members of the Harvard Rowing Team had gotten in one the many rowboats beached on the shores of Lampedusa and pushed the oars all the way to Benghazi.

It says something about the current state of asymmetrical warfare that not only can Al Qaeda throw together a coordinated string of attacks on American embassies around the region without anyone  being the wiser for it, but boatloads of migrants from Libya can reach Europe faster on muscle power than American forces can reach a mission under attack while equipped with jet power.

For that matter less time passed between the ubiquitous campaign fundraising emails that every American with internet access was barraged by no less than three times a day, than between the Benghazi's mission first call for help and the arrival of American support. But that night, Obama's priority was to get to a Vegas fundraiser, not to get American support to two former SEALS fighting and dying in a hellish mess created by his policies.

Obama Inc blamed the second set of September 11 attacks on a movie, which was giving Al Qaeda credit for not only orchestrating worldwide attacks on American embassies and consulates, but doing it in a matter of days based on nothing more than a YouTube trailer. That would make Al Qaeda one of the more impressive organizations around, but the administration of the perpetual campaign found it easier to give Al Qaeda credit that the terrorist group didn't deserve rather than accept the blame that it did deserve.

When madmen in America shoot up schools or movie theaters, Obama blames the weapons they used and calls for gun control. When madmen in the Middle East shoot up American consulates and embassies, he blames movies and calls for film control.

The filmmaker was locked up because he was one of those non-union types and none of Obama's Hollywood friends would complain about a scab that wasn't in the Producers Guild of America, whose director was not in the DGA and whose writers were not in the WGA being thrown in the slammer for making an offensive movie.

In another time and place, a place called America, an attack on an American diplomatic mission would have been considered an act of war, but the United States had just gotten over fighting a war in Libya, despite denying that any such thing was going no matter how many bombs were being dropped, and that war had led to Benghazi being run by Al Qaeda militias.

Obama assured the nation that the "folks" from the militant militias of Mayberry, Libya  responsible would be brought to justice. After three weeks of trying to get through Libyan immigration and dealing with concerns about conducting a criminal investigation in a war zone, the FBI finally made it to Benghazi, strolled around the compound for a few hours, took some pictures and then went home without interviewing any persons of interest.

An independent commission chaired by an Iranian lobbyist whose members were handpicked by Hillary Clinton conducted a review of what went wrong and found that the State Department probably should not have relied on an Islamist militia affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood for security, especially considering that its members had been going on strike for pay raises.

Four State Department officials resigned voluntarily, which in government lingo means that three of them took administrative leave and the fourth resigned one of his portfolios while keeping the rest. And the media declared that Benghazigate was over at last. Time for everyone to move on and close the book on another one of those Obama success that up close look a lot like failures.

Three days after unilaterally deciding to go to war in Libya, while insisting on calling it something other than a war, Obama had justified his intervention to the American people based on protecting what would shortly become Libya's most famously infamous city. "We saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city... we knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi... could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

But there was no massacre. Nor was there ever going to be one. The only people who were massacred in Benghazi were Americans.

Obama had not kicked off a war because he was genuinely worried about the "700,000 men, women and children who sought their freedom from fear", as some tin-eared speechwriter had scrawled on the teleprompter, but because the fall of Benghazi would have meant the end of the rebellion and the end of the Arab Spring, showing every dictator that he could stay in power by toughing it out and fighting the rebels down to the last man.

The Libyan War was not fought so that the 700,000 men, women and children of Benghazi could go from living under the rule of a totalitarian government to living under the rule of totalitarian militias. That was just an unintended consequence of bombing a country so that the militias can take it over. And it wasn't the only such unintended consequence as Gaddafi's Touraeg allies paired up with Al Qaeda to seize half of Mali and Libyan weapons were passed around to terrorist groups like Hamas.

Those unintended consequences came together on September 11 when those militias decided to commemorate the day with a round of attacks against American targets. Ground Zero for their campaign was Benghazi, the city where they were strongest because the heavily armed militias there had been growing fat on protection money. The same militia that attacked the Benghazi mission also provided security for the hospital where Ambassador Stevens was taken after the attack, providing gainful employment to Salafi terrorists from as far away as Iraq and Pakistan.

Obama had gained attention as a critic of the Iraq War, squawking about necessary wars to small crowds of wealthy elderly Marxists from Chicago's upper crust champions of the red working class, but no sooner had he gotten out of Iraq than he was jumping up and down on the diving board and splashing down into Libya to show how much smarter and better he was at fighting unnecessary wars than that ignorant Texan who shot first and nuanced later.

George W. had told the American people that there was a vital American interest in stopping Saddam, from getting his hands on WMDs. Barack H. told the American people that "it was not in our national interest" to let Gaddafi capture Benghazi. What national interest was at stake in keeping Benghazi run by homicidal Islamist militias tied to Al Qaeda will be a lot harder to find than Iraqi WMDs.

Bush had told the United Nations that he wanted regime change in Iraq. Obama lied to the UN and told them that he was only looking for a No-Fly-Zone and then used that zone as an excuse to keep bombing Libya long after its air force had run out crop dusters and bottle rockets, until a drone pinned down Gaddafi's convoy long enough for a mob to gather around and sodomize him to death.

The crazy Texan had built a fortified Green Zone for the American diplomatic presence. The smart Kenyan stuck them in an exposed mansion patrolled by terrorist militias and waited longer to rescue them than he did to send out another email offering a chance to win a free dinner with him, proving that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

The ignorant cowboy-hat-wearing hick had tried to manage Iraq's transition to democracy by moving in the troops to keep order, but his far cleverer coke-snorting successor with far more experience in the international arena outsourced the Libyan transition to the militias. And it kept the American casualties down until was the militias decided to manage the transition of the Benghazi mission from a boring compound to an exciting war zone.

Benghazi though, as Obama put it while yukking it up with the media's favorite liberal clown, was just one of those bumps in the road. The road began when Obama bombed Libya to keep Gaddafi from taking Benghazi. Along the way there were some bumps when American diplomats were forced to flee Benghazi, those who were still alive at any rate, but the road goes ever on as it meanders through exotic locales such as Timbuktu, now under Al Qaeda control, and Aleppo, only under partial Al Qaeda control.

Back in the bad old Bush days, Iraq became a focal point of activity for terrorist groups and terrorist militias, but that was bush league stuff. With Obama, there is no longer a focal point because the entire Middle East is crawling with terrorist groups and terrorist militias running from one war to another in the endlessly exciting adventure of democracy that is the Arab Spring.

Obama pulled out of Iraq and Al Qaeda in Iraq showed up in Benghazi. Now it's moved on to Syria. A year from now it may be in Jordan. "The front line," as one of Obama's favorite atonal bands sang, "is everywhere." The entire Middle East is a war zone now with terrorists and militias moving back and forth to feast on the instability and carve out their own private Benghazis where a man with a beard and a gun can provide protection in exchange for cash, and then take the weekend off to torch an American embassy or two.

This is Obama's Brave New Middle East, born out of Benghazi, but coming to every town and city. Four Americans dead in a single attack is not the scandal of it, but the symptom of it, those deaths are what happens when you tear down every allied government and replace them with mobs of gunmen whose constitution is the Koran and who despise the United States no matter how many bombs and press releases it drops in their defense..

"O brave new world," Miranda exclaimed in The Tempest, "That has such people in't!" Americans in Benghazi were confronted with the Brave New Middle East that Obama had made and the people who live in it. Two brave men died fighting them and the rest took the first plane out of Benghazi.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Cashing In

CASHING IN ON THE DEAD

The left's plan has always been very simple. Find a grievance or create a crisis, in whatever order, and then cash in on it. Whether it's the economy or the murder of children, the left's response to any tragedy is to find a way to shamelessly try and cash in.

Recently a woman was charged with falsely raising money by claiming to be setting up a fund for some of the dead children of Newtown. This is the sort of thing that's illegal if you're an ordinary person, but perfectly acceptable if you happen to run the American Red Cross which raised a ton of money on the backs of hurricane victims, another fund that raised money for the victims of the Batman shootings and then decided not to give it to them, and Bill Clinton who has claimed another success in Haiti.

In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it.

“As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”

Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”

“One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.

Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down.

That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.

Cashing in. That is what it's all about. Pile up the dead and make your money and grab your power. And then wait to do the same thing to the next crisis and the one after that.




JUST WAIT ANOTHER 180 YEARS AND YOU'LL SEE

In Commentary, Max Boot has written yet another defense of the Arab Spring, now deep in its Islamist Winter.

"France, after all, transitioned from absolute monarchy by way of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror… and, finally, in 1958 the overthrow of the Fourth Republic and the birth of the Fifth Republic which has lasted to this day."

So all we have to is wait around a mere 160 years and the Arab Spring will yield a bounty of productive and civil democracies.

.... No, Don’t Have Patience With the Arab Spring




UNIONIZED DIRT COOKIE MAKERS COME TO HAITI

Haitian villagers have resorted to eating dirt. “In places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis on Thursday announced a $2.2 million grant that will be used to strengthen budding labor unions in Haiti and Peru.

Who needs food when you've got unions?



WHO'S UP FOR SOME SERIOUS COLLEGE DEBT?

And for once we're not talking about students, but the Ivy League institutions that run our country.

While Harvard is the wealthiest university in the country, it also has $6 billion in debt, the most of any private college

Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s

The pile of debt — $205 billion outstanding in 2011 at the colleges rated by Moody’s — comes at a time of increasing uncertainty in academia.

Any more questions about our national debt? If we really were governed by a dozen random people from the Boston phone book instead of the faculty of Harvard, this would not be happening.




SO MANY FLIPS, SO MANY FLOPS

Before the original Gulf War, Kerry urged Bush I to give Saddam Hussein room to back off, negotiating an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in exchange for allowing Iraq to make a claim on some Kuwaiti territory and proposing some Israeli concessions as well. He claimed that threatening Saddam “stiffened Iraq’s resolve and weakened America’s.”

After the war, Kerry turned into a hawk, saying of Bush that, “The administration has basically sided with Saddam Hussein” and demanded that Saddam be tried for environmental terrorism. During the Clinton Administration, Kerry called for using ground troops to force Saddam out of power. It was no surprise at all when during the Bush Administration, Kerry flipped in reverse, going from a strong supporter of the war to a strong opponent of it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your next Secretary of State.




PROGRESS IS AT HAND! FORWARD!

This is what I love about progressives. They’re such moral people that they are opposed to the death penalty, but will begin drawing up lists of who should be killed at the drop of a hat.

This differentiates them from most people who support the death penalty for murderers, but don’t aspire to be murderers themselves and do not have lists of people they think should be killed. Particularly not people whose only crime is having different beliefs than them.

But this is why we should let progressives run our societies. It worked in Russia. It worked in China. It worked in Cambodia. It worked in Cuba.

How can it not work out here? What’s the worst that could happen? A few million dead at the hands of cretins who think that the death penalty is immoral unless they get to draw up the lists of who should be killed.

Progressive Professor Demands Death Penalty for Global Warming Skeptics and the Pope






THE LEFT KILLED SATIRE

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.

Satire is dead. Anything you can think of has already been proposed.





WHO'S UP FOR A GREATER SYRIA?

1. Al Nusra has stopped trying to pretend that it’s not Al Qaeda. They are now openly calling themselves the soldiers of Osama.

2. Al Qaeda wants Obama to intervene in Syria.

3.  This isn’t just about Syria, it’s about Greater Syria, a territory that includes Syria, Israel, Lebanon, a piece of Turkey, and Iraq.

What that means is when Assad falls the conflict moves into its next stage. Our “good Syrian rebels” already have a deal with the Salafi militias. The Muslim Brotherhood will set up its government in Damascus and suck up Western aid. The Salafis will hold a number of cities and towns, and will continue killing Christians, enforcing Islamic law, etc, but will begin focusing on the next phase of a Greater Syria program.

So phase 2 is likely to be Jordan, Lebanon or Iraq.

Well that's just great.




READ THAT LAST SENTENCE CAREFULLY

On March 21, 2003 his arrest was ordered by Økokrim, the Norwegian law enforcement agency for financial crime, to ensure he did not leave the country while accusations that he had financed terrorist attacks using Norway as a base were investigated. Court proceedings against Krekar were however dropped when it proved impossible to prove his connections with the terrorist attacks staged in Iraq by Ansar al-Islam during his leadership.

Any day now...

Krekar told the Kurdish magazine Awene that he wants to return to Iraq to fight openly against the Iraqi government and the coalition, but that he lacked travel documents from the Norwegian government. He confirmed to a Norwegian newspaper that he had been correctly quoted. The Norwegian minister of labour and migration, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, responded that Krekar could leave at any time and that he would be given “travel documents within the day. He’ll also get money for airline tickets, taxi cab, and the whole deal. If he really wants to go, that is.” Krekar is still living in Norway.

Norwegian Court Strikes Down Terror Charges for Founder of Iraqi Al-Qaeda Affiliate







A BROKEN THING WILL NEVER WORK

 We are not at a point in history where conservatives enforce traditional morality, but where we resist the enforcement of progressive morality.

Social mores are a political vehicle for the left. Neutrality is not an option. The left is not interested in some kind of libertarian sexual revolution based on the values of individual choice. The left uses revolutions in all spheres of human activity as a means of destroying existing institutions and replacing them with its own totalitarian approaches to doing things.

"Should Conservatives become Competent Liberals?"



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

New Poll Shows Hamas Will Win Presidential Elections

Former Al Qaeda in Mali Member Accuses Terrorist Group of Racism

This is a serious subject and if Islamic terrorists fail to take immediate action they risk losing the support of the left which could impact the number of pro bono lawyers available to them and the number of media columnists willing to write flattering profiles of them

US Government Paying for Birth Control, Abortion and Sex Changes for Illegal Aliens

Saudi Arabia Arrests 41 People for “Plotting to Celebrate Christmas”

EPA Chief Steps Down After Secret Email Account is Exposed

Mubarak Lawyer Claims Hamas Broke Morsi Out of Prison

Benghazigate Officials Fake Resignations, Go On Working Anyway

Obama Hijacks 500 Million from National Health Research Budget to Promote Diversity

UN Increases Budget by 5 Percent

Egypt Credit Rating Downgraded to “Junk” Status


Sudanese Islamists Financing Genocide by Wiping Out Africa’s Elephants

Cameroon’s Special Forces have been deployed to foil an imminent raid by Sudanese poachers who for eight weeks earlier this year slaughtered half the population of elephants for their ivory at one of the country’s wildlife reserves.

The heavily armed and well coordinated poachers, who had told local villagers of their plans to kill as many elephants as possible, claimed they had killed as much as 650 out of some 1,000 that roamed the park.

Several Somali elders said that the Shabab, the militant Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, recently began training fighters to infiltrate neighboring Kenya and kill elephants for ivory to raise money.

THE ZIONIST SUPERDOGS ARE COMING

The source, who is a retired security official from a Gulf country, made the claims while referring to one of his junior comrades who was tasked with undercover information gathering in the illegitimate state more than 7 years ago.

“He described a large, underground laboratory adjacent to the Negev desert where a highly-secured bunker was located, guarded by about two dozen troops of the elite Sayaret Matkal commandos and Military Intelligence units”.

“He recalls those Zionists (Israelis) talking of ‘super beasts’ equipped with improvised weapons”.

“Once, he shared details of a group of bizarre rhinoceroses and canines but never spoke on the subject again." 

Muslim Intelligence Source Accuses Israel of Building Army of Mutant SuperDogs




THE FINAL WORD

The reason the Second Amendment was included in the founding documents was to ensure that the people could meet the threat of a standing army. Its writers knew from history that a standing army serves only the government, not the people. Since the form of government they provided rested the ultimate authority with the people, it was only fitting and proper that the people had a means to ensure their power was not usurped.

,,,from Ebben Raves' article, You're In the Army Now



A NATION OF LOST FATHERS

In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers...

This is what the left's version of utopia looks like. And here's a brief video of Allen West replying to a question about the perpetual search for role models in the black community.





BUT I DON'T WANT THEM FORBIDDEN TO ME

The following is in a way the final word on the entire ridiculous gun debate

These failures of a minority of bad apples to get with the program invite the state to step in in an effort to provide controls and supports externally. Thus we all lose a bit of freedom each time some jerk, idiot, sociopath, addict, or lunatic abrogates his American dignity and fails at running his own life in the manner of an honest, free, law-abiding and upstanding citizen. It's a shame - and wrong - that the least moral and worse-behaving of our population should have the power to deprive freedoms from the vast majority of decent citizens who aim to construct honorable, dignified, and independent lives by following their consciences or God's will as best they can.

Go ahead and ask me why I might want a 30-clip magazine, or a Big Gulp Coke. Well, I don't really want those things, but I don't want them forbidden me. I have a handgun carry permit, but I don't walk around armed all the time. Rarely, in fact. I might as well ask why you need a car that goes 110 mph, when car deaths in the US are far higher than gun deaths (32,000, vs 600 deaths by rifle - half of them suicides and others accidents).

Leftist control freaks often try to find signs of "market failure" to justify government intrusion into the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services. Similarly, they seek signs of "freedom failure" with the same goals. 

from Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm



HOW POOR THE EYE OF MAN

During the day, Jerusalem’s appearance was completely different.

From morning until the afternoon the colours change and alternate, forming surprising shades. About one hour before sunset the symphony of colours reaches the highest point. I can promise you that even the selection of colours by the most perfect computer could not produce even one shade from the many shades of the interweaving of colours created at the moment of the setting of the sun!

I looked around and asked myself, how is it possible that the human eye can feel and differentiate every single shade in the clearest way, but words are not able to express them? I thought how poor man’s ability is to express the exaltedness of Creation:

...from Joseph Rosen's book, "Why a Jew..."




I'M ON THIS LIST I SUPPOSE

The Golda Meir Award for Best Anti-Jihad Blogger: Atlas Shrugs, Gates of Vienna, JihadWatch, Sultan Knish and The Astute Blogger (tie)



BRAND RECOGNITION

All it took was a collar and a name and Fatso was never beaten up again and certainly never went hungry ever again. In time his saunter became a strut. You couldn’t help but like Fatso since liking him was what Fatso was all about.

....from Fatso the Cat, and a reminder of why Gerard was named Best Essayist




TWO NOTHINGS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

As the dreaded date approached, the media downplayed the Doomsday prediction as some authentic New Age gibberish propagated by people using medical marijuana for non-medicinal purposes. Such moral and intellectual guidance helped to stave off panic among the middle class working families, which could lead to a scarcity of wait staff at bistros that media personalities patronize. Privately, however, they realized that the prophecy was true and that we were all doomed.

But, as members of the fourth estate heroically passed their final hours feasting on wine and cheese while cursing people who disagreed with them on Twitter, something wonderful happened: NOTHING! It was like the fiscal cliff negotiations writ large.

Suddenly, as if by magic, all top-shelf, professional, state-accredited journalists across the nation knew the truth: the reason for both nothings were the actions of president Obama.

....from The People's Cube