ShrinkWrapped

A Curious Coincidence

Correlation does not imply causation.  However, it is a curious fact that during the last century there were several mass murders that approached the accepted definition of Genocide and there was a common element to all of them:

Armenian Genocide: The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. ... The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.

The Holocaust: The Holocaust, also known as The Shoah, was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany.  The genocide of these six million people was a genocide of two-thirds of the population of nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust. [1938?-1945]

Rwandan Genocide: The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate. 

Srebrenica massacre: The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, refers to the July 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the ethnic cleansing of another 25,000–30,000 refugees, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War.

Here is the curious coincidence: Every one of these atrocities took place while a Democrat was the President of the United States.  Woodrow Wilson, the first Progressive Democratic President, entered office on March 4, 1913  and was President until March 4, 1921.  Granting the benefit of the doubt, communications were much less robust and the possibility of impacting the Turkish decision to destroy the Armenian community would have been minimal.  Yet Wilson was the first of the moral relativists and a believer in the international community and the international community failed the Armenians miserably.

It becomes a little more problematic with FDR, the Patron Saint for Progressives.  He could not have averted the Holocaust, but he did nothing to impede the Holocaust even after he knew it was happening. The excuse for FDR's inaction has always been that he felt the best we could do for Europe's Jews was to win the war and attacking the death industry would have impeded that effort.  Churchill, however, disagreed with FDR, and I have never been comfortable with knowing what FDR did not do.

Finally, Rwanda and Srebrenica occurred under Bill Clinton's watch.  There is no doubt that a minimal show of resolution from the Civilized world (if that is not a misnomer) would have saved many lives, especially in Rwanda.  Did Clinton's disinclination to the use of military power and his moral relativism and internationalism play a part in his decision not to intervene?  There is no way to know but it is indisputable that we could have prevented much of the carnage and refrained.

I want to be clear that I am not attributing any malice or complicity to the Democrats for the genocides that took place under their watch.  However, I also do not think it is entirely coincidental that when America has been led by Progressives, believers in Multiculturalism, Moral Relativism, and Internationalism, the worst impulses of the worst people on the planet find their pathway to expression more available.

Our current Progressive President, a firm believer in the Progressive fantasies of the International Community and Moral Relativism, has done a great deal to empower some of the world's worst actors.  His stated desire to exit Afghanistan/Iraq as quickly as possible makes future horrors more likely in the Levant.  His diffidence in confronting Iran and its allies, and his tendency to place the onus for the multiple impasses in the Middle East upon Israel alone, do not bode well for Peace and stability. 

When the Untied States shrinks from its investment and involvement with the world, out of a misguided belief that American power is harmful or worse, the result has traditionally not been pretty.

Further Explication on Splitting and Societal Regression

I have written extensively about Societal Regression and the concept of Splitting that underlies many of the worst pathologies seen in Regressed Societies.  The tendency to demonize a targeted group ("the two minute hate")  depends on an initial regression to splitting whereby the designated group becomes the repository of all the negative, disowned traits in society while the larger Society ("the Volk") becomes imbued with all of the positive traits associated with an idealized vision of the society.  Understanding what causes Splitting to occur and the psychological functions it serves can help anticipate its appearance and combat the tendency toward simplification that is part of the process.

To briefly review, the developing human infant has a multitude of disparate images, some good and some bad, of its first significant object, the Mother.  To the infant, the good Mother who gratifies (by feeding, holding, rocking, singing, etc) is distinct from the bad Mother who frustrates by not immediately removing displeasure. 

Between 8-12 months the infant develops Object Permanence, where it becomes able to maintain an internal image of an object even when it is out of sight.  This is a necessary step for the later development of Object Constancy, where the toddler has been able to fuse the disparate images of mother and recognizes that the "Good" Mother and the "Bad" Mother are simply different aspects of the same Object/Person.  The solidity of the Object is quite fragile and can easily re-split into the Good and Bad component parts under stress.  As the child grows and develops, such splitting becomes more and more stable, such that by adulthood, splitting in the face of great stress, while ubiquitous, tends to be brief and circumscribed in time and effects. 

People who have a constitutional or developmental predisposition (ego weakness) will have a greater than usual tendency to regression and splitting; as a result they tend to be unstable individuals with unstable relationships that can rapidly turn from "perfect" to "the worst ever."  Little is known about what genetic loading predisposes to such ego weakness but the psychological and historical precursors that establish a tendency toward easy regression and splitting have been fairly well delineated by the Psychoanalytic community.

Consider a typical situation in which a young child is raised by a brittle, emotionally disturbed, perhaps abusive parent.  In order to survive psychologically, it is important for the child to believe that its Mother cares about him and loves him.  This is true for more than the obvious reasons, that we all need to feel lovable and when we are completely dependent on another for our care, we need to believe they want what is best for us.  Beyond that, the core of a person's character (which informs their sense of self) contains significant identifications with his primary objects (the parents).  Thus, for a child to have hateful feelings toward its parent means that he will hate part of himself.  A person who consciously hates himself is someone who will be extremely self-destructive, if not overtly suicidal.  As an emergency measure the child must find a way to love its parent, even when the parent is abusive and hateful.  One way to accomplish the preservation of the internal representation of the parent as loving is to resort to Splitting; all the hateful aspects of the parent in question are suppressed and repressed, held out of emotional  awareness.  This means that when the child develops, he may consciously know that his mother was abusive, but he will change the abuse into love by telling himself that he was bad and deserved her punishments (which cannot be tolerated as abuse, but can be tolerated as punishment for transgressions.)  Note that this implies that the person's sense of himself will also tend to split.  How does this work?

Consider someone newly in a relationship with a desired, idealized Object.  She can have no faults because she is perfect.  (He may recognize intellectually  that no one is perfect but emotionally, which exists on a distinct axis of reality she is perfect.)  His damaged Narcissism means that in her presence, showered by her love, he feels whole, intact, and lovable.  If he angers her, he knows that it is because he is worthless and has done something to disappoint her; all he can do is beg for another chance; after all, his self esteem depends on being near and with her.  However, on the day that she shows herself to be imperfect (perhaps after her perfect beauty has eroded so that it no longer allows him to be seen in the mirror of her pulchritude) he may suddenly notice what a bitch she is and has always been!   At that point she has become the devalued object and he preserves his own self esteem.

Of necessity, I am abbreviating a complex set of psychological processes, but the end result is that for this child, by the time he is an adult, he will have a template for relationships that include an ease of splitting of the self and object in the service of preservation of his self esteem (and secondarily, the relationship.)

Now take it up a level, from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal.  Consider a child who is placed in a situation in which Splitting is a necessary adaptation to an impossible environment.  We see this all the time when immature or regressed parents, in the middle of nasty separations and marital/relationship failure, insist to the child that the other parent is the embodiment of all that was bad in the marriage.  If both parents are equally dysfunctional, the problem is compounded.  Essentially, when with the mother the child must believe that the father is "all Bad" and the mother is "all Good"; when with the father the polarities are reversed.  In this kind of situation, the child learns that when in the presence of one of the parents they must unconsciously adopt a Split in their awareness; eventually this becomes a default state vis a vis relationships and the world and a Manichean worldview becomes easy to adopt. 

Many ideologies implicitly depend upon Splitting in their followers.

An important point that can be understood from this admittedly abbreviated description of the process of Splitting is that it is a two part process, only one part of which is available tot he conscious mind.  When the mother insists she is the perfect victim of the child and the father is the embodiment of evil, the expectation is that the child will agree with his mother and suppress (eventually repress) all awareness of any positive attributes of his father.  What the mother does not understand is that when this occurs, all of her negative attributes are also forced out of the child's awareness.  Her faults then persist in the Unconscious where they are unavailable for reality to soften their edges and where they remain available for expression when circumstances are propitious.  It is not uncommon for the child, once grown and able to take a more nuanced look at his past, to discover that his Mother has/had her own difficulties; there are a great many adult children of such relationships who distrust and dislike the parent who once demanded idealization; when devaluation occurs, it is not a happy event for anyone involved.

What does this tell us about our current Societal Stressors and any tendency we may have toward Regressive Splitting?  As Glenn Reynolds notes, President Obama has failed to convey a sense to the American people that our leaders are protecting us adequately:

I’m against hate crimes.... But I do think that Obama’s inept approach to these issues has made the American public more fearful than it was under Bush, and as a result, more anti-Muslim. The polls certainly demonstrate this shift, and it’s hard for me to see what else would account for it. When people trusted Bush to keep them safe, they weren’t scared. They don’t trust Obama to keep them safe, so they’re more scared. As the President himself suggests, when people are scared, they tend to lash out. . . .

But more than merely leaving Americans more scared, the President's insistence on suppressing discussion of the negatives about Islam are worsening the tendencies toward Splitting that are occurring in response to the current constellation of stressors facing our nation.  When the parents, ie our political/academic/cultural elites, insist upon telling us that Islam is a religion of Peace even while they refuse to acknowledge the multiple, manifest atrocities committed in the name of Islam and with the tacit, and often vocal, support of the world's Muslims, all they manage to do is reinforce tendencies toward Splitting and force the negative disowned Object Representations of "Islam" and "Muslim" underground.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a poorly titled post, makes one valid point, but misses the process described in this post:

Conservatives and Their Poisonous Understanding of Islam

It is obviously difficult for many people to differentiate between Islam and political Islamism, the ideological strand within Islam that breeds terrorism and extremism. But it is exceedingly important to understand that difference; if we don't, we will give al Qaeda what it wants -- a civilizational struggle between the West and all of Islam.

There are certainly Conservatives who are presenting a simplistic, one sided view of Islam but Jeffrey Goldberg shows in his title how easy it is when writing to do the exact same thing.  There are, in fact, many more Conservatives who are presenting a much more nuanced look at Islam than the few examples he cites.  What he misses is that the typical Liberal attempt to minimize the connection between Islam and terror (as in the New York Times reporter dutifully noting that major Hasan shouted "Alahu Akbar" as he began shooting, yet professes to be completely bewildered as to what might have motivated Major Hasan)  is counter-productive and ends up fueling the Splitting that makes an anti-Muslim backlash more likely.  (For the record, as in most situations where Fascism is forever threatening America, it is much more likely that such a backlash will take place in Europe, where the Muslim populations are much more estranged and non-assimilated.  Angela Merkel is walking a tightrope and Europe has a history of easily losing its balance: Multiculturalism is a failure)

The American people, including Muslim-Americans, would welcome an adult discussion about the tension within Islam between those who wish to become part of the modern world and those who wish for nothing less than to return to the 7th century.  Our misguided attempts to protect Islam from criticism make the worst outcomes more likely.

The most powerful elements within the Islamic world today are, from the point of view of Western tolerance, the worst elements.  The Muslim Brotherhood is on the ascendancy:

The Muslim Brotherhood Takes Off Its Mask

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was never a “moderate” organization. I briefly interviewed their spokesman many years ago, and it could not have been more obvious that I was dealing with a dissembler. I know moderate Muslims when I see them, and these guys aren’t even in the same time zone.

Read the whole thing and then read Barry Rubin's article:

Jihad is the answer

In calling for jihad against America, the West and Israel in terms virtually identical with Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric, the leader of Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood uttered one sentence that explains the contemporary Middle East.

Here it is: “The improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as its enemies pursue life.”

Here’s why that sentence is so important. The central question for the Middle East for many decades has been this: Why is it – especially since we are a superior people (Arabs) with a superior religion (Islam) – that we are behind the West? How that question has been answered has been the core of Middle Eastern politics. Let’s call it The Question.

Islam is increasingly answering the question in ways that impinge upon our freedoms; trying to deny and hide such facts does not make the negative thoughts disappear, it just drives them underground where they become immune to reality testing and available for expression when circumstances become propitious.

Cultures Shift Slowly

A not very funny joke that made the rounds after the 2008 elections made the point that the Democrats won, in part, because they motivated their most uninformed voters better than the Republicans motived their least uninformed voters, to get to the polls.  Democracy is ill served when the least informed have the greatest impact on the elections and one of the great failures of our partisan press has been it disinclination to do its job when the reportage might damage the prospects of their "side."   One of the great failures of our educational system has been its disinclination to teach its subjects how to evaluate information and understand multiple views on a subject.  David Thompson has done yeoman work in documenting some of the worst excesses of PC thought disorders in education:

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of “Social Justice”

Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College history professor who’s written at length about leftist groupthink in academia, its various pathologies and its imperviousness to correction. Johnson is the co-author of Until Proven Innocent, which documents the infamous Duke “rape” case and its participants’ extraordinary improprieties and political prejudice.

In May 2005, writing for Inside Higher Ed, Johnson drew attention to the emergence of “dispositions theory” and attempts to impose overt political filtering in dozens of teacher-training programmes:

The faculty’s ideological imbalance has allowed three factors - a new accreditation policy, changes in how students are evaluated and curricular orientation around a theme of “social justice” - to impose a de facto political litmus test on the next cohort of public school teachers.

Looking through various teacher-training outlines, the familiar leftist buzzwords appear repeatedly. “Diversity” and identity politics feature prominently and teachers-to-be are referred to as “critical thinking change agents.” These “agents” will use the classroom “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” and will “speak on behalf of identified constituent groups,” becoming “advocates for those on the margins of society.” (Evidently, “critical thinking” should be taken to mean leftist thinking – critical of capitalism, individualism and bourgeois values - not thinking that might also be critical of the left, its methods and its assorted conceits.)

Read the whole thing; you will especially appreciate the video he includes.

The various derivatives of PC thought that have been in vogue in our educational system through the years have all been designed to explain away the persistent achievement gap between certain designated victim groups and the white middle class.  The classifications of victims are entirely dependent on outcomes, since recent immigrants who are Chinese or Japanese do not fail at high enough rates to qualify yet many third and fourth generation Hispanics, white Americans in all but ancestor's surnames, do qualify.  Much of the resultant distortion of language and thinking emerged as a reaction to longstanding historic (biological/Darwinian) racism, but it persists even in the absence of significant institutional, or pervasive cultural, racism. 

The problem for the PC thought police is that if the outcome differential is not due to inherent biological group differences, there are few other options.  There must either be some heretofore unquantifiable effects of hidden racism, or the problems must be related to culture.

The PC edifice is under assault from a surprising place.

‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

As with most things, the outcome differentials are undoubtedly multiply determined, however, as long as the PC thought police control what is acceptable thinking among our educators, any hope of actually addressing the real problems that make so many Americans so poorly informed will be impossible to address.  It is good to see that the New York Times is beginning to report on work which questions PC orthodoxy.  It is even possible that at this rate it will be safe to send your children to government schools within the next 20 or 30 years.

Satire as a Weapon

When one's enemies are so filled with self-importance as to be complete without a sense of humor, satire can be an incredibly powerful weapon.  LatmaTV is an Israeli TV show (the web site is in Hebrew) that is beautifully done and quite funny.  We could use an English version here; watch and enjoy: [HT: Elder of Ziyon]

Connecting the Dots

Some time ago, in one of our discussions on The Open Mind, Jay Adler made the point that government should be the proper size to do its job.  His point was, if I recall correctly, that the absolute size of government is not the issue but whether the government is able to do its job appropriately is the main question.  My contention is that a smaller government is necessarily better than a larger government (within reason) since, as with any bureaucracy, the government develops goals and interests that are often unrelated to its nominal job.  Further, the government often takes on jobs that it is simply incapable of doing successfully. 

Let's follow some semi-random data points:

Child Abuse Investigations Did’t Reduce Risk, a Study Finds

Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children.

In 1974, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, designed to encourage more thorough and accurate reporting and record-keeping in child abuse cases. In New York, for example, there are now Child Protective Services offices in every county, paid for in part with federal funds.

Researchers examined the records of 595 children nationwide, all at similar high risk for maltreatment, tracking them from ages 4 to 8. During those years, Child Protective Services investigated the families of 164 of these children for suspected abuse or neglect. The scientists then interviewed all the families four years later, comparing the investigated families with the 431 families that had not been investigated.

The scientists looked at several factors: social support, family functioning, poverty, caregiver education and depressive symptoms, and child anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior — all known to increase the risk for abuse or neglect. But they were unable to find any differences in the investigated families compared with the uninvestigated in any of these dimensions, except that maternal depressive symptoms were worse in households that had been visited.

The problem here is that short of an acute situation of a child injured by an adult in the home, or adult drug/alcohol abuse which is manifest, there is usually no clear evidence that a parent is a danger to a child.  Everyone denies everything and with no evidence, taking children away in such circumstances would expose many more children to trauma than would be saved.  CPS, the Government agency tasked with preventing child abuse simply is incapable of doing the job it is tasked to do.  The only way government can protect all vulnerable children would be to have a third party in the home 24/7.  There may be some who would argue that that would lead to an appropriately enlarged government, but the typical solution to government failure, ie more money and manpower, will never solve the problem in any realistic world that we live in. 

Coyote blog offers the classic example of government growing to do a job it is incapable of doing.  He has nice graphs in Government: The Solution to Failed Programs is to Double Their Size.

Eric, at Classical Values, has been discussing the War on Drugs for quite some time.  No one will be surprised to learn that the expenditure of vast amounts of money and the ever expanding size and scope of government engendered by the War have not noticeably worked to reduce the influence and reach of the Drug Cartels.  The War has impinged on our freedoms, but that is just  inevitable collateral damage, right?

Protect us from the toxins we consume -- and the toxins we emit!

My earlier post about big government's systematic elimination of large denomination currency -- ostensibly to fight the war on drugs -- made me wonder whether big government's need for the war on drugs is based not so much on a realistic goal or genuine desire to eliminate illegal drugs so much as it is the need for a contrivance. The drug war rationale thus becomes a pretext to trick citizens into supporting measures they would not otherwise support. Because people don't want to give up their freedom lightly, they have to be provided with a plausible rationale. Citizens instinctively and rightly don't want the government to be able to rifle through their financial or medical records (or bodily fluids) but if they are told it's to fight the war on drugs, or money laundering, they're more likely to be pliant. Citizens are willing to give up substantial amounts of their freedom if they think it's for a "good" cause.

In that respect, I wonder whether the mechanism at work in the Drug War is similar to the mechanism being deployed in the Carbon War (war against Anthropogenic Global Warming). Whether you agree with the principle involved in the former (saving society from people with destructive drug appetites), or the latter (saving the planet from people with destructive carbon appetites), my suspicion is that the stated goals in both cases are not only unachievable, but are not the real goal, which is simply to have as much state control over the lives of citizens as possible, as well as a rationalization for taking ever more. In this respect, the fact that existing controls are "not working" becomes an argument for increasing them.

So, to those in control, it does not matter whether the measures work or the stated goals are achievable.

It is better that they are not!

To those who rule, the issue is not whether the draconian measures involving substantial losses of citizens freedom are "worth the price," for they operate under a very different pricing scheme -- one which is geared towards taking away freedom. Debates over whether the restrictions are "worth it" are off the mark, and help rationalize existing losses of freedom as well as further losses of freedom, for they validate the statist position that the government has the right to take away freedom in the name of protecting people from harming either their bodies or the planet.

Has the drug war "worked"? This question has been asked a million times, and the proponents simply assert over and over again that if it has, it must be continued, and if it hasn't, it must be stepped up. Evidence that drug use has gone down means that this is no time to let down our guard and our efforts should be increased. And, of course, evidence that drug use has gone up means that we have to redouble lest the war on drugs be "lost."

The common denominator is that government takes on a job which cannot be done and then when it inevitably fails, its only response, the only response a bureaucracy knows, is to get bigger and absorb more resources trying to square the circle.

Finally, as bad as it is that our ever growing government can't do the jobs it takes on, in many cases it actively works in ways antagonistic to our best interests:

A Review of Sarcopenia Research

With advancing age, muscles weaken and lose mass. This makes it harder for older people to gain the benefits of exercise, and eventually it leads to frailty. This process of degeneration was given the name sarcopenia some twenty years ago, and efforts have been underway for some years to have the FDA recognize it as a disease rather than "a normal part of aging." Until the FDA does so, there is no way to raise significant funds for research and development, or make the results of what research has taken place commercially available. It's a sad and sick society we live in, wherein the people at the cutting edge of research - those who know best what needs to be done - must bow and scrape for years so that unelected, unaccountable, ignorant bureaucrats will deign to permit work to proceed.

...

As a researcher noted a while ago:

[When] I was heading aging at Glaxo Smith Kline, the issues that I faced were that I was very interested in developing medications for frailty and weakness in muscle for when people get old because when people get weak they usually stop eating and then they fall and break a hip and end up in the hospital and die potentially, but the regulatory apparatus isn’t there yet. Sarcopenia isn’t recognized as an official disease by the FDA, so the pathway to get drugs approved for frailty and to get more people mobile and into society is just not there.

There's something very wrong with the picture of medical research in this day and age, and that has everything to do with the unchecked growth of government.

I have my doubts that the process of bureaucratic sclerosis can be reversed; if it is not reversed, we will soon find the entire regulatory state grinding to a halt as more and more rules and regulations administered by more and more bureaucrats prevents anyone from doing anything.

What is Nicholas D. Kristof Smoking?

This may just be the dimmest (dhimmest?) article I have read in a major publication in as long as I can remember:

What Oman Can Teach Us

As the United States relies on firepower to try to crush extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it might instead consider the lesson of the remarkable Arab country of Oman.

Just 40 years ago, Oman was one of the most hidebound societies in the world. There was no television, and radios were banned as the work of the devil. There were no Omani diplomats abroad, and the sultan kept his country in almost complete isolation.

...

Oman was historically similar to its neighbor, Yemen, which now has become an incubator for Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. But, in 1970, Oman left that fundamentalist track: the sultan’s son deposed his father and started a stunning modernization built around education for boys and girls alike. [Emphasis mine: SW]

Visit Oman today, and it is a contemporary country with highways, sleek new airports, satellite TV dishes and a range of public and private universities. Children start studying English and computers in the first grade. Boys and girls alike are expected to finish high school at least.

It’s peaceful and pro-Western, without the widespread fundamentalism and terrorism that afflict Yemen. Granted, Yemen may be the most beautiful country in the Arab world, but my hunch is that many of the young Westerners who study Arabic there will end up relocating to Oman because of the tranquility here.

It’s particularly striking how the role of women has been transformed. One 18-year-old university student I spoke to, Rihab Ahmed al-Rhabi, told me (in fluent English) of her interest in entrepreneurship. She also told me, affectionately, about her grandmother who is illiterate, was married at age 9 and bore 10 children.

What is wrong with this article?  Nothing, so far; a backward nation introduced modern education to its children and in a blink of an historical eye, the country was peaceful, prosperous, and without the twin malignancies common to its neighbors of fundamentalism and terrorism.  It is a beautiful and hopeful story. 

In short, one of the lessons of Oman is that one of the best and most cost-effective ways to tame extremism is to promote education for all.

...

Sorry if this emphasis on education sounds like a cliché. It’s widely acknowledged in theory, and President Obama pledged as a candidate that he would start a $2 billion global education fund. But nothing has come of it. Instead, he’s spending 50 times as much this year alone on American troops in Afghanistan — even though military solutions don’t have as good a record in trouble spots as education does.

The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.

Again, so far so good; it is what Kristof does next that defies comprehension:

For me, the lesson of Oman has to do with my next stops on this trip: Afghanistan and Pakistan. If we want to see them recast as peaceful societies, then let’s try investing less in bombs and more in schools. [Emphasis mine-SW]

I am going to try to go through this slowly, just to make sure I do not become less comprehensible than usual in my stupefaction.  Kristof correctly notes that introducing a backward Muslim country to the modern world and educating its children allows it to join the modern world and avoid fundamentalism and terrorism.  There is great promise in the idea and so he then offers his moral of the story: If Oman can do it, why can't (America simply make) Afghanistan and Pakistan do the same?  Why don't we spend some of those billions now being wasted on killing the Taliban to build schools for boys and girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Has Kristof been living under a rock for the last 10 years?  What is this man smoking?  We do build schools in Afghanistan AND THE TALIBAN BLOW THEM UP!  We give billions of dollars to Pakistan for them to fight insurgents and build schools and they prefer to BUILD NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO THREATEN INDIA!  (When they are not enabling the Taliban to kill Americans, of course.)

Doesn't Kristof realize that we are killing exactly those people who prevent their children from getting a modern education?  Does he not know that these men do not want their boys to learn anything except to memorize the Koran in Arabic (which they don't understand) and do not believe that girls should be educated at all?  How do we bring modern education to Afghanistan and Pakistan if children who seek an education are splashed with acid and blown up? 

This is simply the most idiotic piece of writing that I have seen in some time (and I have seen lots.)  Only a writer for the New York Times can so spectacularly add 2 + 2 to get 4 and then subtract 1 to get minus infinity.

For the benefit of Mr. Kristof and others who might nod their head in agreement, let me offer one small clue to how such a devoutly desired outcome could come about; in fact, it can only be through the superhuman efforts of the people who I will mention in a moment that Afghani and Pakistani children will ever be able to become part of the modern world.  The people I have in mind?  The men and women of the United States Military. 

Please tell me I am over reacting, that there is something in this article that makes a modicum of sense...

There's a Man With a Gun Over There

One of the most successful tactics of the Deatheaters is to hide behind innocents, provoke violence, and then use the resulting blood to demonize their enemies.  There is an entire international alliance of terror and Western media enablers that provides the medium in which the meme can grow and spread.  A recent incident in Israel illustrates all the elements of Pallywood productions:

News Being Manufactured: A Graphic Example of How This is Done to Slander Israel

It is understandably hard for people to believe the amount of violence that is staged and stories that are manipulated coming from the Middle East. Here is a bit of video from the eastern part of Jerusalem.

See what happens: Kids are ready to throw stones at passing cars with Israeli license plates, five of them run into the road, blocking it, ready to throw stones at an approaching Israeli automobile. Another car is  deliberately parked across the road, partly blocking it. Surprised by the ambush, the Israeli driver slams on his brakes but one of the kids is hit by the car and he flies up and over it.

The picture of the child flying through the air made its way around the world many times (along with the lie that th driver killed two of the boys; one was mildly injured) before the facts could be ascertained.  I will not go into the details here, Barry Rubin has already parsed the events; suffice to say, a gaggle of journalists coincidentally were on the scene, perfectly placed to capture the oh so predictable events.  Once again Israel is smeared by the international media and the Palestinians reinforce their image as helpless victims.

Manufacturing atrocities, or maximizing incidents as pretext, in the service of one's ideology has a long history.

In 1933, the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag, location of the German parliament:

Inside the building, a thorough search conducted by the police resulted in the finding of Marinus van der Lubbe. Van der Lubbe was a Dutch insurrectionist, council communist, and unemployed bricklayer who had recently arrived in Germany, ostensibly to carry out his political activities. The fire was used as evidence by the Nazis that the Communists were beginning a plot against the German government. Van der Lubbe and four Communist leaders were subsequently arrested. Adolf Hitler, who had been sworn in as Chancellor of Germany four weeks before, on 30 January, urged President Paul von Hindenburg to pass an emergency decree to counter the "ruthless confrontation of the Communist Party of Germany".^[2] With civil liberties suspended, the government instituted mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist parliamentary delegates. With them gone and their seats empty, the Nazis went from being a plurality party to the majority; subsequent elections confirmed this position and thus allowed Hitler to consolidate his power.

In 1964, two incidents in the Tonkin Gulf, one of which was based on ephemera, established the legal basis for American escalation in Vietnam:

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents, one disputed, involving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a DESOTO patrol, was engaged by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.^[1] A sea battle resulted, in which the Maddox expended over 280 3" and 5" shells, and which involved the strafing from four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter bombers. One US aircraft was damaged, one 14.5mm round hit the destroyer, 3 North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and 4 North Vietnamese sailors were killed and 6 were wounded; there were no U.S. casualties.^[5]

The second Tonkin Gulf incident was originally claimed by the U.S. National Security Agency to have occurred on August 4, 1964, as a naval battle, but instead may have involved the "Tonkin Ghosts",^[6] and no actual NVN Torpedo Boat attacks.

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

Now comes word that one of the seminal events of the anti-Vietnam War movement may have been more complex than the meme propagated by the media for the last 40 years:

Not a massacre but a mistake

High-tech forensic audio analysis last week of a recently discovered audiotape of the May 4, 1970, anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University may shed new light on the genesis of the tragedy that shut down colleges and universities across America. During a campus confrontation, Ohio National Guardsmen fired into rock-throwing student protesters, killing four - two of them mere passers-by - and wounding nine others. The incident is of more than historical interest because the "Kent State massacre" played a major role in undermining U.S. support for the Indochina war and thus facilitated a far greater human tragedy.

The audiotape reveals that shortly before the guardsmen began firing, protesters may have surrounded and threatened the life of a young man named Terry Norman (a Kent State student, like many of the guardsmen) who was taking photographs for law enforcement agencies.

According to Friday's Cleveland Plain Dealer, the tape captured the command "Retreat!" As the guardsmen moved back up Blanket Hill, pursued by rock-throwing protesters, photographer Norman was left behind - apparently too busy taking pictures to realize the guardsmen were pulling back - and quickly was in the midst of angry protesters.

The tape captures one voice saying: "They got somebody," and a few seconds later, male voices shout: "Kill him!" Kill him!" There is then the sound of a .38 caliber revolver shot, followed by a female voice: "Whack that [expletive]!" Three more handgun shots ring out at about five-second intervals, and soon thereafter - in just 13 tragic seconds - 29 of the 77 guardsmen fire a total of 67 rifle shots that are to help seal the fate of the non-communist people of Indochina.

If alternative media had been on the scene in 1970, it is likely that the terrible events of that day would not have been able to be leveraged by the anti-War (and anti-American) Left to polarize our politics in ways which remain today. 

In The Electric Tea Party Acid Test, Zombie noted that the tea Parties are the natural heirs of those of us who protested in the 1960's.  Yet our 1960's Libertarian tendencies were hijacked by a much more Left wing, collectivist authoritarianism which most of the Hippies I knew in the 60's would have recoiled from if they were paying attention. 

There are deatheaters on the traditional Left and the traditional Right, as well as at the top and the bottom of Zombie's chart.  They are the people who crave power and desire nothing less than the subjugation of others in the service of their own egos channeled through ideology.  They will stoop to nothing in their ravenous desire for power.  Manipulating, lying, hiding behind innocents, using useful idiots, all are forms with which the Deatheaters are familiar and comfortable.   When we see such tactics, shame is too minimal a response; they must be fought and defeated.

During my college years the hard core ideologues of the Left were the most humorless, grim group imaginable.  Their doppelgangers today fill the ranks of the committed radical environmentalists who have made it impossible for us to use our own natural resources; they are in the upper echelons of the Democratic party where the drive for redistribution far outweighs the nurturing of iconoclastic American individualism as a principle; they can be found within the Judiciary among those who believe that fiat rule is preferable to the anarchic chaos that we celebrated in 1969 with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

The polarization that occurred as the 60's dragged to an end, with social conservatives inclined toward controlling what we did with our bodies and in our bedrooms arrayed against a Liberal authoritarianism that was increasingly moving Left and desirous of nothing more than to control our behavior everywhere except the bedroom, has done a terrible disservice to our country and our culture. 

The Tea Parties embody that most American of desires, the desire to be left alone by those who want to control us. 

What it is Ain't Exactly Clear

For quite some time I have tried on and off to explain to liberal family and friends why I believe that the Tea Party movement embodies what is best in America.  My sense is that many liberals do not recognize how their belief system has evolved into something that is no longer classically liberal but is, rather, quasi-collectivist and authoritarian.  Unless one has been paying careful attention it has been easy to miss the slow evolution of Liberalism from Classical Liberalism, which celebrated the individual and rebellion against the MAN, to a reactionary and authoritarian political philosophy that supports some of the most repressive aspects of the SYSTEM against our essential individuality. 

Yesterday Zombie wrote a wonderful post that captures the slow transformation of the youthful iconoclastic individualism of the late 1960's protesters into the lifeless collectivist authoritarianism of today's liberal Left.  I had planned on writing a long post, replete with excerpts and commentary, but time pressures are interfering; fortuitously (and under the rubric of "great minds think alike") a creative and entertaining young blogger of my acquaintance has already done the requisite work for me:

Don't Criticize What You Don't Understand

Today I have read two of the greatest posts I've seen in a while. What makes them so great? They agree with me, of course! I've said a billion times that the tea-party would be embraced by the hippies, and I've tacitly alluded to my hippie-ish nature by posting a song by the Youngbloods, titling a posts after Bob Dylan songs, and professing my love for the Grateful Dead, as well as that fine young lass, Mary Jane. I have lamented that the counter-culture warriors who once bucked the establishment and played government watchdog have no become partisan shills and cheerleaders for The Man. I was having a fun little political debate with my "left-of-center" roommate who said he's a "moderate", and I noted that moderate doesn't really mean anything. I'm pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-marijuana legalization, and I'm also pro-guns, pro-capitalism, and very right of center on social security. Sounds like I'm a libertarian, sure, but it just goes to show that I don't fit in on the left-right divide. That's why, courtesy of Zombie, I can present you with the new political spectrum graph!

Zombie's article is truly epic, as he explains the graph, and explains why hippies are right next to The Tea Party on the list. Also, I loved his bit on Hobos vs. Bums, making me even more excited for Hobo With a Shotgun.

This chart is going to become a fixture in the blogosphere so it behooves you to understand it.  Please read the whole thing and then, if you have time, go to Zombie's post to take in the whole thing; you will not be disappointed.

There's Something Happening Here

In 1996 Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa against the United States and Israel, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.  The fatwa was ignored and escaped the notice of most Americans until shortly after September 11, 2001.  History is now repeating itself:

Muslim Brotherhood Declares War on America; Will America Notice?

This is one of those obscure  Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don't fit their policies; and by experts, because they don't mesh with their preconceptions.

This explicit formulation of a revolutionary program makes it a game-changer. It should be read by every Western decision maker and have a direct effect on policy because this development may affect people’s lives in every Western country.

OK, cough of a build-up? Well, it isn’t exaggerated. So don’t think the next sentence is an anticlimax. Here we go: The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood has endorsed (Arabic) (English translation by MEMRI) anti-American Jihad and pretty much every element in the al-Qaida ideology book. Since the Brotherhood is the main opposition force in Egypt and Jordan as well as the most powerful group, both politically and religiously, in the Muslim communities of Europe and North America this is pretty serious stuff.

Read all of Professor Rubin's report; if it doesnt alarm you, you are not comprehending what it means.  The Muslim Brotherhood is the pre-eminent Sunni Muslim fundamentalist revolutionary  group in the world.  More from Professor Rubin:

Does that mean the Egyptian, Jordanian, and all the camouflaged Muslim Brotherhood fronts in Europe and North America are going to launch terrorism as one of their affiliates, Hamas, has long done? No.

But it does mean that something awaited for decades has happened: the Muslim Brotherhood is ready to move from the era of propaganda and base-building to one of revolutionary action. At least, its hundreds of thousands of followers are being given that signal. Some of them will engage in terrorist violence as individuals or forming splinter groups; others will redouble their efforts to seize control of their countries and turn them into safe areas for terrorists and instruments for war on the West.

When the extreme and arguably marginal British Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary says that Islam will conquer the West and raise its flag over the White House, that can be treated as wild rhetoric. His remark is getting lots of attention because he said it in English in an interview with CNN. Who cares what he says?

But when the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood says the same thing in Arabic, that's a program for action, a call to arms for hundreds of thousands of people, and a national security threat to every Western country.

...

In August 1996, al-Qaida declared war on America, the West, Christians and Jews. Nobody important paid much attention to this. Almost exactly five years later, September 11 forced them to notice. Let it be said that in September 2010 the Muslim Brotherhood, a group with one hundred times more activists than al-Qaida, issued its declaration of war. What remains is the history of the future.

Update: A well-informed friend in Egypt just said that while he's been expecting this move by the Brotherhood for some time that I have been the only one who's noticed it outside the country. This is the kind of service I'm trying to give my readers.

Read the whole thing and don't say you haven't been warned.

A number of commenters have noted that I have recently been sounding less liberal when it comes to Islam and the threat that radical Islam poses to the West.  I still believe strongly that efforts to differentiate between active proponents of Sharia, especially those willing to use violence and threats to gain power and influence, and more passive accepters of Sharia, are worth making.  However, I also believe that our government's efforts, starting with George W. Bush, to support such differentiation, have been an abject failure; the current administration does not even take the position that radical Islam is an integral part of the Muslim World!  The Obama administration appears to believe that our enemies are merely a tiny, misguided offshoot of Islam; this is incredibly foolish and dangerous, not to mention no longer justifiable by any arrangement of facts.

Our government has done everything possible (and giving them the benefit of the doubt, I will accept that this is more likely out of incompetence rather than venality) to empower groups and individuals affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Every time a truly liberal Muslim like Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is ignored while members of CAIR (a group with deep connections to the Muslim Brotherhood) are displayed as official spokesmen for American Muslims, the danger of violence between Muslims and Americans is increased.  Every time an American is forced to hide, like Molly Norris, or self-censors, like the Washington Post, with their craven decision not to run Non Sequitur, the struggle between liberal democracy and intolerant Sharia comes closer to becoming a wide, deep, and violent war.

Scott Johnson's comments are noteworthy:

 Annals of dhimmitude

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander tells the story of the paper's decision not to run the syndicated "Non Sequitur" cartoon (at left) submitted by Wiley Miller that was to run in last week's paper....

Alexander omits from his account any reference to the fate of Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who proposed the observance of "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!" Norris has disappeared from sight. She has gone underground, seemingly having entered a cartoonist protection program along the lines of the FBI's program for turncoat Mafia witnesses.

Alexander renders a mildly negative judgment on his colleagues: "Post editors believe their decision was prudent, given the past cartoon controversies and heightened sensitivities surrounding Islam. But it also can be seen as timid. And it sets an awfully low threshold for decisions on whether to withhold words or images that might offend." The thought that the Post's self-censorship "can be seen as timid" also serves ironically to render judgment on Alexander's column. Reading Alexander's column esoterically, befitting a certain kind of work written under conditions of persecution, we find the column's secret message at the center of the column in the quoted words of the unamused cartoonist.

Here is the offensive cartoon, in its perfect encapsulation of the cowardice of our elites:

 

New York City Bike Lanes: A Perfect Metaphor

In a post last month, Why the Tea Party Is Necessary, I noted the stupidity and incompetence of New York's transportation commissioner's plan to remove car lanes and replace them with bike lanes which almost no one used:

Once upon a time, cars were able to park along the curb, as in most municipalities.  There were three spots set aside for cars with MD plates and the rest were meters for the general public.  The City took away one traffic lane and two parking spots and now has cars oddly placed in the middle of the street.  During periods of usual traffic, the loss of one lane increases transit time significantly.  Traffic never moves fast in New York (though the recession has helpfully cut the number of cars driving in the City; perhaps the Democrats can use that as evidence for the silver lining of their economic policies?)  Here is the conundrum for the Bloomberg administration, as it increasingly attempts to micromanage the behavior of New Yorkers: although their desire to save the planet and protect the health of New Yorkers is admirable, (it is for our own good, after all) they have neglected to factor in the unintended consequences of their policies.  For example, of the number of people who travel up First Avenue everyday, less than 1% are riding bikes.  If the bike lane causes increased congestion (which it does) then the net benefit on our carbon footprint will go up, rather than down.

There is more in my original post about the essential mindlessness of the plan, apparently in service to some fantasy about saving the environment from the dreaded climate destroying CO2 that we exhale and our cars produce.

Now we see the next (il)logical step in a recurring process: 

1) Government comes up with a plan to address a non-existent problem.

2) Said plan does not do what it was imagined to do and shows itself to be counter-productive.

3) Government does a study that shows Plan is not working.

4) Government comes up with a new set of plans for an expanded approach to fix the errors inherent in the original plan.

5) The new plan requires more bureaucracy, costs more money, and does more damage:

Cycle of stupidity

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer sent his staff out to stare at dopey bike lanes popping up all over town. They saw all kinds of what he called safety violations, ranging from taxis and pedestrians using the lanes to cyclists going the wrong way and running red lights.

His answer: a bigger bureaucracy and higher costs. Stringer wants better signs, a public-awareness campaign and strict enforcement by cops.

No thanks. The NYPD is cutting back on anti-terror teams because it doesn't have the cash. Further diluting the force by having cops patrol bike lanes makes about as much sense as the lanes themselves, which is zero.

Add in the Federal mandate to change all the street signs in New York City because some idiot in the Federal bureaucrat doesn't like the current font and you have a near perfect storm of stupidity on the streets of New York, the apotheosis of modern liberalism.