OBAMA STUMP SPEECH IN RENO DRAWS DOZENS: Don’t miss the photo.
Archive for 2012
May 12, 2012
CENSORING NAOMI RILEY: John Fund writes:
Though it was far away, this hubbub attracted attention from some of the speakers at the Oslo conference. A couple noted how surprising it is that political correctness in academia is now shutting off debate in the U.S., the country where academics supposedly prize vigorous discussion and vigilantly guard against any sign of McCarthyism.
Nick Cohen is an atheist and former leftist who writes for the Observer and Guardian newspapers in Britain. His most recent book, entitled “You Can’t Read This Book,” examines the new forms of censorship that are emerging in the 21st century. He warned those at the Oslo Freedom Forum that many in the West now “surround taboo subjects with a bodyguard of politically correct humbug. This form of self-censorship has had a profound effect on liberalism.” He noted that “censorship is at its most effective when no one admits that it exists. ‘No one else is complaining, so move along now,’ becomes the mantra.”
While Cohen’s warning was directed at those who stifle debate on Muslim radicalism in Europe and refuse to recognize the failure of officially imposed multiculturalism, he lost no time in telling me how appalled he was at the news of Riley’s firing. “These people calling for her head are the same ones who would scream McCarthyism if someone demanded that academics who defend Iran, excuse terrorism, or accept support from dubious Middle East regimes be called to account,” he told me. “At the same time, they would of course be appalled if someone accepted funding from the Pentagon for a research study.”
James Kirchick, a contributing editor to The New Republic and a former writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe, told me of the Riley case, “This is precisely why I am no longer on the left. It is disturbing to see such bullying.”
Read the whole thing.
GERMANY FACES ENERGY DISASTER NEXT WINTER, according to Germany’s Die Welt magazine:
Last winter, on several occasions, Germany escaped only just large-scale power outages. Next winter the risk of large blackouts is even greater. The culprit for the looming crisis is the single most important instrument of German energy policy: the “Renewable Energy Law.”
The dramatic tone of the report by the Federal Network Agency (FNA) on the near-blackouts last winter is hard to overestimate: although the cold spell was short and mild, the situation in the German electricity network was “very serious” according to the Agency.
Several times, the pre-ordered reserve power plants in Austria and Germany were fully utilized. On several occasions, the network operators were not even able to mobilize additionally needed emergency reserves abroad. The number of short-term emergency interventions in network and power plant operating shot up by more than 30,000 percentage points on some network portions.
“Had a failure of a large power plant taken place in this situation, there would have been hardly any room for maneuver available.” This quote from the FNA report is translation for “We narrowly escaped a catastrophe.”
There is no reason for a sigh of relief, however: Next winter, which will possibly be even more severe, everything could get much worse, officials warn. Because then even less base-load gas- and coal-fired power plants will be available to reliably compensate for wind lulls and the almost complete absence of solar power for months.
Less coal plants available? Good thing that could never happen here.
UPDATE: Long time Insta-reader Kim Sommer emails, “Forgot the obligatory Fallen Angels acknowledgement.” Fair enough — here you go!
LIFE IN THE ONE PERCENT: “Socialist Hollande owns three homes on the Riviera,” according to the London Evening Standard. “Francois Hollande, 57, who ‘dislikes the rich’ and wants to revolutionise his country with high taxes and an onslaught against bankers, is in fact hugely wealthy himself.”
CHILDREN OF MEN: The Asian Tiger ― Japan ― is in danger of extinction.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Chinese economy “unexpectedly” slows.
OBJECTIVE REPORTING FROM THE LA TIMES, as spotted by Paul Hsieh:
The Los Angeles Times lets you know that if you don’t support ObamaCare, then you must want the US to be a backwards nation: “Global push to guarantee health coverage leaves U.S. behind.”
Just a little objective reporting to help keep readers informed! (*cough* re-elect Obama *cough*)
When the train’s about to be pushed off the cliff, isn’t being left behind a good thing?
BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living under its media apparatus.”
THE PRESIDENT’S HIT LIST: The Wall Street Journal notes:
Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney’s campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as what’s really behind the drive for more “transparency” in political donations.
As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama’s campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight “less than reputable” Romney donors and a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.
Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”
As Doug Ross wrote back in 2010, “Unlike Tricky Dick Nixon, Obama Wears His Enemies List On His Sleeve.”
MORE: Businessman Says He Lost Hundreds of Customers After Attacks by Obama Campaign.
FASCISM: Reactionary Islamist goons attacked Irshad Manji—a young reformist Muslim woman from Vancouver, British Columbia—with sticks and iron bars while she was promoting her new book
Here is Paul Berman’s take in The New Republic.
It is fashionable among the Western apologists for the Islamist movement to insist that genuine reformists and liberals have no audience in the Muslim world. The claim is false. Manji’s earlier book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith
, has been published, according to the EFD, in more than 30 countries. Manji runs a website, irshadmanji.com, offering translations in Arabic, Urdu and Farsi, which are said to have been downloaded more than 2 million times. But then it shouldn’t be necessary to cite numbers to demonstrate the ability of the genuinely independent thinkers to make themselves heard. Why else are they attacked, after all? Nor do these attacks occur only in Muslim-majority countries. Manji has lately had trouble in Amsterdam, too—where, as everyone will remember, she is hardly the first person to come under attack.
Who will defend these people, these truest heroes of modern freedom? That is the only question.
RAND PAUL: “Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure [Obama’s] views on marriage could get any gayer.” Video at link.
RELATED: Passage of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman makes North Carolina “look like Mississippi,” Gov. Beverly Perdue said Friday.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● “The BBC Broadcasts Its Own Dhimmitude.”
— Headline at PJM, May 8th, 2012.
— Headline at Weasel Zippers, today.
You know, I’m slowly beginning to believe that the BBC’s antennas might just be aimed slightly, ever so slightly, to the left.
UPDATE: An Insta-reader emails, “BBC antennas aimed left? I think not. The Daleks at BBC have their antennas aimed firmly at humans, who for the most part they despise and would rid the world of.”
As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here.”
UPDATE: David Preiser of the Biased BBC blog emails:
I noticed you posted a link to the Weazel Zippers blog about the ridiculous Thought for the Day. In case you weren’t aware, they did this to stifle debate, and partially as a reaction against the inevitable backlash coming from an outrageous episode of Question Time on Thursday, which has outraged many people in Britain. It all involved the latest conviction of a group of Muslim paedophiles in Rochdale for running a gang which raped and prostituted out young white girls from care homes. It’s a growing problem in certain areas of Britain, and apparently the police have been letting it go on and been afraid to do too much out of fear of being called racist. The BBC has a PC, multicultural agenda to promote, so had to try and kill the public’s outcry before it started.
A question was asked on Thursday’s Question Time about whether or not this latest incident was evidence of a cultural problem with Pakistani and Afghan Muslims emigrating to the UK. The entire panel, as well as many members of the audience tried to blame society at large instead, or say that it had nothing to do with race or culture (even though the defendants and the convicting judge made it clear that they viewed white girls as lesser beings and viable targets), and tried to say any talk of a cultural problem was racist. There was even a vicar who tried to blame the girls themselves for being too willing to give up their innocence.
You can watch the awful episode yourself on YouTube.
This and many other instances of BBC bias has been documented at the Biased-BBC blog. We also have a post up about the ludicrous Thought for the Day. The Thought for the Day piece is directly inspired by it – the wrong way, of course. You can’t truly appreciate how awful it is without knowing the full background of that Question Time episode, and the BBC’s history of stifling debate. It’s important for more people in the US to be aware of how bad the BBC’s bias is, not only because of the massive influence they have on public opinion and British voters, but because they’ve also increased spending on their website and on staff in the US in an attempt to capture more US eyeballs (and ad revenue). Not to mention the BBC World News America targeted directly at us and Katty Kay’s partisan appearances on MSNBC and NPR.
Much more at Biased BBC — just keep scrolling.
CONFESSIONS OF A BULLYING DOG-EATER.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE MONSTERS GONE? A post by C. U. Douglas at Ricochet compares the original Dark Shadows gothic soap opera of the 1960s with the campy Tim Burton/Johnny Depp remake. Douglas ponders the changing face of monsters and evil in Hollywood:
Frid is masterful in his portrayal, in my opinion. Barnabas Collins is a creature of depth. He struggles to regain a lost past, yet proves ruthless in his plans to regain what was lost. He coerces a young man into subjugation to him. He kidnaps and attempts to brainwash a young woman. Failing the latter, he imprisons her until she yields to his whims. All the while he exudes proper charm to his cousins and the local townsfolk. He waxes nostalgic before them, giving them images of the past in ways no one else can. Few see the dangerous creature beneath the charming exterior.
Contrast that to today’s vampires and their ilk. I don’t just mean Twilight. Pick most fiction or television surrounding them today. Vampires are as human as human can be; they’re just ‘humans with benefits’. Their drawbacks are nothing more than physical, if they have any. They no longer prey on others — or if they do, they are cast out and destroyed by their colleagues who are more sympathetic to humans. A vampire who falls in love with a human is frequently encouraged by both sides, the struggles to the creature internal.
It’s not just vampires who get this sort of treatment. Dragons, other creatures, more and more they are presented as friendly and sympathetic. There is no longer any danger. Go ahead! Hug that vampire! Make the dragon your best friend! It’s okay!
The disappearance of monsters in general, and Evil with capital-E was a topic that Jonah Goldberg explored over a decade ago at NRO:
Today, monsters are the exact opposite. From Frankenstein to Sesame Street, we’ve become conditioned to believe that monsters are good things. The Cookie Monster is so proud to be a monster it’s his last name for goodness sake.
But it’s not for the sake of goodness that we have abandoned the idea of monsters. The psychologists, sociologists, social workers and other social cleansers have taken it upon themselves to explain that what we call “monsters” are really just things we can’t understand. After all, the old mapmakers used to just throw up their hands when they didn’t have any more info and would just write “Here There Be Monsters.” The social cleansers believe that any time we say “here there be monsters” we’re really just revealing ignorance. “These children aren’t monsters,” we will hear some fool say on the nightly news after some child has done something particularly monstrous. “We shouldn’t demonize so-and-so” just because they have done something so demonic that it takes an act of supreme will to see it as something else.
But why is it such a good thing to understand evil? When we claim that all evil acts are understandable, we excuse them in a way. Oh, he’s a pedophile because his father was a pedophile. That guy? He murders people because society never gave him a chance. Him? He’s a rapist because of a chemical imbalance, etc. etc.
Would it be so terrible for us to say, “He’s a monster” or “he’s just plain evil” and leave it at that? Last August, a man in Merced, California burst into a family’s home and murdered two children with a pitchfork while they cowered under the sheets. The other two children saw it happen. Do we need to explain that?
Being reminded that evil exists, seeing it like a Gargoyle on the wall or, even in a kid’s costume, is a useful thing. For if we don’t think evil exists, if we reject the idea that there are monsters, unknowable in their evilness, we will always make excuses for it when we see it. And when we do that, we forget what the opposite of evil is too.
For more about monsters, see “A Word About Monsters”.
And of course, less than a year after the above was written, America got a (temporary?) wake-up call on what real evil looks like. Naturally, the same efforts to humanize OBL – and/or project his evil elsewhere – quickly began to ferment.
In the comments to the Ricochet post which we linked to above is a link to a fun article at Cracked* on “6 Mind-Blowing Ways Zombies and Vampires Explain America.”
And I’d also recommend Thomas Hibbs’ book, Shows About Nothing, on how Nietzschian nihilism has become deeply soaked into the subtext of numerous Hollywood projects over the years. The title of course, is an allusion to Seinfeld – and Hibbs’ book spends quite a bit of time on that quintessential 1990s sit-com. But he also devotes a fair chunk of his book looking at films such as Silence of the Lambs, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear, and earlier horror films such as The Exorcist. You can hear my February interview with Hibbs at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
* Incidentally, I started to type “in Cracked, of all places,” but I shouldn’t — they’ve somehow transformed themselves from being a Mad magazine clone to producing really fascinating Web articles that are often bite-sized pop culture history pieces.
AT AMAZON, IT’S THE KINDLE DEAL OF THE DAY.
LIBYA, FAILING MILITIA STATE: “With the lid of the old regime blown away, a plethora of simmering ethnic and racial tensions suppressed by Gaddafi’s policy of Arabization have burst into the open. In southern towns, long-standing tensions between Arab tribes and Black Toubou tribes over control of the smuggling routes into the Sahel degenerated into street fighting at a cost of hundreds of lives. Amazigh, or Berber, revivalists based in the coastal town of Zwara fought Arabs in neighboring Reqdaline for control of the Tunisian border. Graffiti promoting ethnic cleansing scars town walls. The goodwill that sustains support for the NTC in Tripoli has largely evaporated in Benghazi, which has precious little to show for engineering the revolt in February 2011, particularly since the leadership moved to Tripoli and is feeding separatist or anarchic tendencies.”
RUBES AROUND THE WORLD.
NEWSBUSTERS: WashPost Ombudsman Upholds Romney Hair ‘Scoop’ As Paper Shamelessly Admits Pro-Obama Story Timing.
This may sound like crazy talk, but it’s almost as if there’s a “non-official campaign” in the media to support Mr. Obama.
IS ROMNEY PULLING AWAY? As the Professor and a certain Corellian smuggler (who runs out for Barney Kessel records or something) are both wont to say, don’t get cocky.
TYPICAL: The Arab world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism accuses the United States of being a state sponsor of terrorism.
In the whole DOJ/big six of publishing kerfuffle something has just surfaced that made me lose my temper and go into rant mode. If you’ve been following and are in the mood for a rant, read on. This is what set me off, via Joe Konrath: One Book Is Pretty Much The Same As Any Other. Lipskar acknowledges, as he must, that the prices of New York Times bestselling books went up following the simultaneous industry-wide imposition of agency pricing …………… But, he claims, these higher prices couldn’t hurt anyone because the prices of other books decreased
THE MIDDLE EAST’S PROBLEM FROM HELL: The longer the war lasts in Syria, the worse the end result is going to be. I’m primarily concerned about the country imploding like a neutron star and sucking in most of the neighbors, but Adam Garfinkle at The American Interest makes the case that it could explode like a supernova.
I would be worried right now if I were a Lebanese. It is impossible to say if the Assad regime can hold out against a radicalized Syrian opposition, with volunteer support pouring in from neighboring countries. Most likely, in my view, it cannot. But it could take many months, even a year or two, for this bloody drama to play out. In the meantime, the conflict will pour across borders, including the Lebanese border, as it has already begin to do. If, in the fullness of time, a jihadi-led or strongly influenced state arises in Syria, or parts of it, then it is virtually inevitable that the Shi’a-tilted status quo in Lebanon will be upset. Sunni radicals in Damascus will not get along with Hizballah, and there are homegrown Sunni radicals in Lebanon that “friends” in Damascus would encourage and support on their behalf. The likely result? A new civil war, with a beginning epicenter most like in and around Tripoli.
ALVY SINGER COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept — and later turn it into an idea.
But I’d better commission a study, first.
GAO: RECOVERABLE OIL IN COLORADO, UTAH, WYOMING “ABOUT EQUAL TO ENTIRE WORLD’S PROVEN OIL RESERVES” COMBINED: “And yet the Obama administration believes the future lies is in algae and exploding Chevy Volts.”