Farrakhan demands reparations from the Jews

Turning history inside-out. Who were REALLY the primary groups of people who captured and sold slaves in the past, and who continues to hold black slaves, including Muslims, today, Mr. Farrakhan?

Of course, if they fail to bend to his wishes, Farrakhan “respectfully warns,” “in the Name of Allah (God) and His Messiah, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, that the more you fight and oppose me rather than help me to lift my people from their degraded state, Allah (God) and His Messiah will bring you and your people to disgrace and ruin and destroy your power and influence here and throughout the world.”

If he's really concerned about lifting "Allah's People" from their "degraded state," why doesn't he help Jews like Charles Jacobs, co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, free black slaves and work to stop genocide against blacks in Sudan?

“The most frightening aspect of the letter was the threat of ruin and destruction if we do not comply with his demands, which is why we, at the ZOA, have sent a letter to President Obama urging him to speak out against it…The President has spoken about healing divisions between Jews and the Black community, this is a great opportunity for him to do so.”

If the NAACP, now a surrogate for the Democratic Party, demands that Tea Party leaders specifically denounce each racist crackpot or liberal "Crash the Teaparty" agent provocateur who shows up at a Tea Party event, why shouldn't the President be expected to comment on this letter by a prominent black leader?  NAACP leaders say that blacks who do not support the liberal agenda are not "black enough" to deserve their support.  Do they also reject Mr. Farrakhan's followers?  Will they say so in public?  If not, why not?

"All Racism, Only Racism, 24 Hours a Day"

The reason for those bogus charges of Tea Party Racism?  Insufficient empathy and diversity among liberals!

Timothy Dalrymple:

It is essentially a failure of imagination. Liberals cannot imagine themselves into a way of thinking in which conservatives do what they do and believe what they believe for good reasons. And since they cannot believe that conservatives are motivated by rational beliefs and admirable motives, they must appeal to darker, more primitive impulses to explain their behavior. The racist motive presents itself as a natural and convenient explanation.

Case In Point

Chris Matthews focuses on race as the obvious explanation for the nomination of an Indian-American by the Republican Party in South Carolina. Sounds shockingly malicious, but then maybe it's just the "liberal failure of imagination" concerning the motives of conservatives.

In Hollywood, racism is all about politics. In Illinois, too.

"Think Progress" is so heavily invested in portraying the Tea Party as racist that they use liberal-produced "Crash the Tea Party" signs as evidence of Tea Party racism.

Now Al Queda is racist, too. There are lots of possible explanations for the President's new "racist AQ" theme. But perhaps partly because multi-culturalism dictates that all religions are morally equivalent, it is forbidden to mention Islamic extremism as a motive for terror in the Obama administration.   Racism falls under a different category in the liberal mind.

I Write Like . . .

Margaret Atwood?  Heh.    I used three paragraphs from my 2 posts on Confucius.  No quotes.

Try it yourself.  Just for fun.  Via Crooked Timber, a rather philosophical progressive site.

Willie Brown (!) on Out-of-Control Public Sector Unions

This issue is personal to us because we are part of the California public sector pension system. The current state of the pension system means that future benefits are no sure thing.  We are also painfully familiar, with the corruption and destruction which accompanies the conviction, on the part of many State workers, that extremely generous salaries and benefits are their iron-clad right, particularly if they have friends or relatives in the right places in State government.  This situation played a big part in California's current dramatic decline.

The guy who ruled the California legislature for years (term limits were voted in largely to end his reign) has become a champion of public sector pension reform. Willie Brown has now apologized for his role in dramatically increasing salaries and pension for public employees:

Earlier this year he wrote a widely-circulated column in the San Francisco Chronicle lamenting the "out of control" civil service: "The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians -- pushed by our friends in labor -- gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages."

Reason's commentary:

Willie Brown has been fairly consistent: an extremely likeable political pragmatist with no particular attachment to principle or ideology. Which makes his new campaign worth listening to: It shows that facts on the ground are no longer possible to ignore.

Parts of the assessment of Brown were challenged in the comments.

Past over-spending is now causing serious anxiety for current State workers.  AGAIN.  William A. Jacobson:

The path of big government and the welfare state is the path to broken promises and inter-generational warfare. . . .

Those who feed the big government addiction are the cruel ones.

Is it time to go with the Irish solution? Tie government salaries (and pension payments?) to the deficit? This might be difficult for us, personally, but it could possibly help save the State of California from itself.

Or does Calfornia need someone like Chis Christie in order to avoid inter-generational warfare?   More on Christie, with a comparison to Winston Churchill.    Read the whole thing.   Could Willie Brown be effective in challenging public sector unions which are helping to destroy California?

The Federal Government faces similar challenges in the future.   Britain is further down the path of decline.

 For now, the pain in the U.S.  is being felt primarily in the private sector. “Oh, so that’s what John Edwards meant about the two Americas!”. Ironic that government workers, many dedicated to ideologies from the Left, have now inadvertently become oppressors of the working class, in a practical sense.

Update: NASA's Muslim outreach

Commentary on the current state of science in the Muslim world.   Also includes a link to an update on the status of the professor in India whose hand and part of his arm were hacked off due to a false perception that he had insulted The Prophet.   And an effective  cartoon reminder concerning this issue.   How soon we forget.   In related news: Another Fatwa against a cartoonist.

Might be time for another Obama charm offensive with the so-called Muslim world.

Commentary (even if not news) is starting to leak out in parts of the mainstream media. For example, Krauthammer includes it in a discussion of President Obama's selective modesty:

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply. . .

Mons Charen earlier expressed some thoughts along the same line - that the NASA Muslim self-esteem program indicated hubris on the part of a President who really believes that he that he has significant power to influence how Muslims he doesn't even know think and feel about themselves. (And that this power of his could counteract the influence of Saudi-funded madrassas.) Michael Ramirez lands on target again.

What happened to Awe?

We lose something when people misuse words. The example under consideration here is the transformation of the formerly meaningful word "Awesome" into a throw-away interjection or adjective.

Moments of real awe that overwhelm the soul are rare, but if you look closely at the miracle of creation in the macro or micro cosmos you can create such a moment almost at will. Real awe is front-loaded into the universe.

At the same time, those things of man that inspire awe diminish moment by moment under the unstoppable onslaught of the word "awesome" . . . .

I've had a few moments in my life where genuine awe shook me to the roots of my soul. Holding my daughter in my arms a moment after she was born comes to mind as does a time when I was very young, lying a field and looking up at the sky and the high cirrus glowing burnt orange in the fading rays of day. There were others as well, gifts given and grace notes. Common to all were an intake of breath and a feeling as if your heart had been grazed by a thought of God and forgot,  for that moment,  to beat. Matched up against all the torrent and cascade of moments though, this genuine awe was rare; it was one of the pearls beyond price, the shining instant of "Ah ha, so that's what it's all about."

Not so today. Today awe is as common as clay. Today all things of man possess the awe of someness.

Some of the language in the rest of the piece is quite strong. If you follow the first link, keep in mind that the author is an immigrant from the Netherlands who was once an executive in the "men's magazine" business, if I recall correctly. He doesn't mince words. And he's sort of hard on Aerosmith. But actually, he has a pretty good point. Famous for scarves hanging from the microphone stand? Seriously? Though I think it might take a  phrase or line from the ninth symphony rather than "one note" to crush their entire oeuvre.

Interesting that more people are starting to pay attention to this issue now.

Confucius: "morals and art will deteriorate"

Brought forward from an old post elsewhere.  Note that hyperbole concerning global warming has had even more negative consequences for proponents of these views than when the post was written in December of 2008.

“If language is not correct . . . . . . morals and art will deteriorate":

Many years ago I went through an art exhibition at a glitzy mall in Newport Beach. I remember two of the art exhibits. One was a model wearing one of those iconic French Maid outfits - the short black, form-fitting dress with the little white apron and cap. But the model (perhaps the artist) was a rather tall man who also wore black tights, some really ugly black and white gym shoes and a gas mask. The other memorable exhibit featured wall hangings which exploited the various textures and colors of lint removed from clothes dryers.

I think there was some sort of environmental message intended by both of these art pieces, but I'm not sure what it was.

There are at this moment in history a lot of "artists" on the Left delivering political messages through "art". Relatively few on the Right, most of them satirists pointing out rhetorical or other excesses on the Left. Moe Lane compares Australian Green protesters (dignified by American standards) to performance art. I can imagine myself in the audience. He says about the second photo in this post:

". . . it looks for all the world like a snapshot of a particularly boring and pretentious piece of performance art. You know the kind that I’m talking about; one featuring three or four people moving about and talking aimlessly while atonal, yet annoying, stringed instruments play in the background. You’re there because your S.O.’s friend is involved with the production, and you have been promised that the party afterward will not be dull - so you spend the time trying to decipher the program, which reads like it was translated from German to English via Academic Marxist, with a quick stopover at Martian. You suspect that it has gained in the translation; meanwhile, up on the stage someone has just waved a broomstick at a man wearing a cow suit, which apparently has something to do with the Falkland Islands War.

It is about that time that you grimly conclude that the party afterward will be dull."

Hyperbole on the part of Australian Greens has reduced the tendency of the general population to pay attention to the Global Warming Issue. Particularly since the Australian contribution to greenhouse gasses is so tiny compared to, say, China's growing emissions. But the Greens still have the attention of the news media - just like in America. This may be one reason why political "performance art" gets more and more extreme while serious, fact-based discussions of issues go unnoticed.

Confucius and Clarity of Language

Brought forward from an old post:

Confucius said:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. 


Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

The translation above makes me wonder how the end of a sentence is indicated in Chinese.  That's some first sentence.  We're really not used to long sentences these days.  I put in a paragraph separation just to make the quote easier to get through.

The piece from which this quote was taken makes some over-broad statements about government spending.   But it includes some really good points about how people have been misled about government money.  Click on the link at the bottom of the page for comments from readers which reveal some of the ways government involvement tends to make everything more expensive while sometimes making stuff seem "free".   David could tell many similar stories.  Money from government allows corrupt or astonishingly inefficient systems - public or private -  to survive much longer than they would if they had to earn their own money.

Dr. Helen has some interesting advice concerning how teachers can help their students think critically and clearly understand some of the ways propaganda works:

"  . . . in my opinion, it is not your job to decide the politics of the students in your class, it is your job to expose them to the critical thinking skills that will help them make informed decisions and back them up in a reasoned way. This is what is sorely lacking in our present educational system."

Did you know that there was a Propaganda Game ?  Some non-PC books for kids would also help provide some balance to the liberal mindset which filters down from our higher education system.

United States vs. Arizona: Politics in the DOJ

Amid Crises, Obama declares war - on Arizona.

There are several cases in which the Department of Justice seems to be choosing its cases based on political considerations rather than the law. Now the Department of Justice has filed a case against the State of Arizona concerning its new immigration law.  The President has compared the law to Chinese abuses of human rights.   He has emphasized the possibility of racial profiling in his condemnations of Arizona, but the actual case against Arizona is based upon federal preemption, and does NOT mention racial profiling, apparently. Arizona's law would short-change federal enforcement resourses in other states, or something.

But Arizona has not started enforcing the "problematic" provisions of its new law, while Rhode Island has. So why isn't the Obama crowd boycotting Rhode Island and calling them racists?

(a) Rhode Island has actually been enforcing the same procedures that allegedly make the Arizona law controversial, and (b) those features (checking immigration status when there is reasonable suspicion to do so, referring illegals to the feds for deportation) have already been upheld by the courts. (Indeed, reasonable suspicion is not even required for the police to be able to ask about a person's immigration status.)

Well, Obama has some company in decrying American immigration policy, which the administration is failing to enforce. Interesting op-ed here:

Attorney General Eric Holder finally filed that long-rumored lawsuit challenging Arizona’s new immigration law. In his opinion, only the federal government has the legal authority to “enforce” (read “completely ignore”) border security. If the Obama administration were convinced that Arizona would treat illegal immigration the same way the feds do, they wouldn’t have bothered to sue.


Unfortunately, Arizonans seem to take the rule of law seriously. And this is a big problem for Team Obama. Holder is worried that trained and knowledgeable local cops will actually prove that the law is enforceable, blowing his boss’s cover. Remember President Barack Obama’s claim last week that our borders are “just too vast” for us to secure them through enforcement, with fences and border patrols?


The border’s too big. The hole in the Gulf is too deep. The recession is too stubborn. Maybe we should find the president a smaller, easier-to-manage country to govern. You know - send him to the minors for a few years. . . .

Personally I think that the reason the Obama administration is going after Arizona but not Rhode Island is that Arizona passed its law during this administration. This is a challenge to Obama's rhetoric and plans concerning immigration. Hence the political selectivity in the filing of lawsuits by the DOJ.

Obama's positions on immigration are not totally unreasonable. And we do need an immigration law which allows for more rational legal immigration and assimilation, without people living in the shadows of society due to an uncertain legal status. But going to war against a state which wishes to help enforce federal law, misrepresenting the population and the state government as racist, is not the action an ethical administration should take.

On the lighter side: Democratic County Supervisor: "Arizona's law might have been justifiable if it was a border state". You know, like Rhode Island. Lots of other stupidity is also evident surrounding this case.

UPDATE: The Secretary of State indicates that the suit was filed under the direction of the President. No attempt to insulate DOJ decisions from the rest of the administration here.

More "racist" immigrant policies have also been in  force in the liberal stronghold of Madison, Wisconsin.    Oops.  The City Council doesn't want to be bashed like Arizona.  The threats by Holder have made them think twice about their current policies.