Million Dollar Basketball Babies:Should the sport’s top prospects go to college?

The Atlantic:

Lance Stephenson’s nickname is “Born Ready”—as in, ready for the NBA. But on a winter night in a tiny gym in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the 6-foot-5 high-school senior mostly looked ready for a time-out—of the preschool variety. Stephenson slumped when teammates failed to pass him the ball, shook his head in disgust when they missed shots, jogged back lazily on defense, and whined about fouls. Stephenson’s other nickname is “Sir Lance-a-lot,” but he seldom looked heroic, and seemed to be doing little to lead his team, three-time defending New York City public-school champion Abraham Lincoln, as it beat host Paul Robeson, 81–72.

Then the final statistics arrived: 38 points and 14 rebounds, including 17 of Lincoln’s deficit-erasing 27 fourth-quarter points. During an after-school practice the next day, Lincoln’s coach, Dwayne “Tiny” Morton, said the performance highlighted Stephenson’s main flaws: impatience and thoughtlessness. Still, Morton was unwavering on the question of ability. I asked how many players he’d seen in his 14 years as a coach at Lincoln who were ready for the NBA, born or otherwise. “Two,” he replied. “Sebastian and Lance.”

Sebastian is Sebastian Telfair, a whippety 5-foot-11 point guard who, in the spring of 2004, landed a Sports Illustrated cover and became one of a record eight high-school seniors chosen in the first round of the NBA draft. That won’t be Stephenson’s destiny, because the NBA has since banned the leap from prom to pro, requiring draft-eligible players to be at least one year removed from their high-school graduating class.

But college might not be Stephenson’s next stop, either. A year ago, Brandon Jennings, a high-school point guard from Los Angeles, signed a pioneering three-year, $1.65 million contract with the Italian professional club Lottomatica Virtus Roma. A few months later, he received a reported $2 million deal with the apparel company Under Armour. Since his signing, scouts for European teams have begun attending high-school games in the U.S., and Under Armour has been sending free sneakers to Stephenson and other potential high-school exports.

In Rome, Jennings is getting a chance to build up more than his bank account. Elite teams in Europe’s top leagues—in Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece—are considered a notch below the NBA but a full cut above the NCAA’s best. The players are grown men, many of them veterans of top U.S. college programs and the NBA. Coaches are hardened tacticians, practices are grueling, and systems of play are complex. Games are more physical than in the NCAA, and seasons are twice as long. NBA scouts pack top contests. “In Europe, they don’t baby you,” said Sonny Vaccaro, who brokered Jennings’s tryout and signing. “You get beat up, sworn at, kicked out of practice. If your character can hold up, you win.”

Vaccaro has been an executive at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, and he helped make the recruiting and marketing of young players a big business in the past three decades. These days, though, he is crusading against what he considers the NCAA’s phony amateurism and the NBA’s misguided rulemaking. Qualified players, he told me, should be able to earn a good salary playing basketball when they want to, not when the NCAA or NBA decides they can. Over the past year, the families of several high-school seniors have contacted Vaccaro about the European option, he said, and he has identified eight underclassmen, some as young as freshmen, “who are interested when the time comes.” This year or next year, Vaccaro predicted, a player will turn pro and head to Europe after his junior year of high school.

If that seems like one more sign of the basketball apocalypse, consider that many of the Europeans who populate NBA rosters began playing professionally as young as 14. In any case, Vaccaro believes Europe should be a destination only for exceptionally talented and relatively mature players. And Jennings has cautioned that his Italian sojourn hasn’t been one big scoop of gelato: “I don’t want anyone coming over here thinking it’s easy,” he wrote on his Under Armour blog.

Once the basketball machine gets rolling, though, it can be hard to stop. Jennings is expected to opt out of his contract with Lottomatica after this season and enter the NBA draft in June. If he’s a high pick, adolescent interest in playing abroad may rise rapidly.

On the court after practice, Stephenson’s father, Lance Sr., said Kansas, Southern Cal, and St. John’s were recruiting his son. But if he fails to become NCAA-eligible—a legitimate concern, according to people around him—his options will change. No one I talked to seemed confident that Stephenson was emotionally prepared for the professional grind on the Continent. But with the door open, nothing can stop him from dribbling through it, ready or not. “I think he’d be a better pro right now than a college player,” his father said. “Going overseas, it’s not out of the question.”

'What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights!'

Theodore Dalrymple

What a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom. Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath.

The doctrine of rights has borne putrid fruit. In the ward recently was a young woman of the now very extensive slut-babymother class, whose jaw was clenched in a habitual expression of world-destroying hatred. Her glittering saurian eyes swivelled mistrustingly, on the qui vive for infringements of her rights. She exuded grievance as a skunk exudes its odour.

She had been admitted to hospital because she had been out celebrating the night before. In England now, celebration is synonymous with aggression and public nuisance, and she had conformed to type by screaming and pulling another slut-babymother's hair. When the police arrived, she claimed her drink had been spiked and was dumped by them in the hospital rather than in the slammer, where she belonged.
The police having departed, she turned the attention of her lip, as we call it around here, to the admitting doctor, who took down verbatim some of what she said to him.

Her recorded remarks were littered with a word beginning with F, followed by very neatly drawn asterisks, which proves that in India, at least (where the doctor came from), there is still some sense of dignity, decorum and self-respect.

The following morning a friend of the patient arrived in the ward before visiting time. Both patient and friend were what is called in the prison "very verbal", which is to say mouthy. A nurse, acting on the biblical observation that a soft answer turns away wrath, asked them to keep their voices down, only to discover that the Bible has been superseded in modern Britain and that wrath turns away a soft answer. The nurse then told the visitor that she had to leave or else.

Shortly after her departure under foul-mouthed protest, the wife of another patient came to sit with him. She was a respectable Sikh woman with a gentle manner, but it was not yet visiting time, and the nurses feared to provoke the slut-babymother by allowing her to stay, when they had told the slut-babymother's visitor to leave. The nurses could all too well imagine the scene: Why am I not allowed a f—ing visitor when that man over there is?

In vain would the nurses point out the difference in the conduct of the two visitors; if anyone had a right to a visitor, everyone did, irrespective of the conduct of the visitor.
To avoid a conflict over rights, the Sikh woman was asked to wait outside, which she did without demur, reading a book of prayers.

A little later I bumped into one of our security guards whose job it is to deal with slut-babymothers and yob-babyfathers.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Can't grumble," he replied.

"Oh, surely you can," I said.

"No one would listen if I did," he said.

"Well, there you've got it," I said. "That's your reason to grumble. No one would listen if you did. It's a kind of meta-grumble."

Come to think of it, that's what I've been doing all these years: meta-grumbling. It's been great fun.

Government At Work: Another Monument To Failure

The Local:

A pair of stone-age boats, thought to be the oldest in Europe, have been allowed to rot in a partially collapsed shed while the northern German regional archaeology authorities stood by broke and helpless, it emerged this week.

The two 7,000-year-old wooden boats and a third one thought to be around 6,000 years old, were hailed as a sensation when they were found during construction work on the Baltic coast near Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern seven years ago.

But now they are effectively ruined, after a lack of funds resulted in them being stored inappropriately. “It is a loss for Germany if not for the whole world,” said Andreas Grüger, director of the Stralsund historical museum.

The boats had been entrusted to the Authorities for Culture and Preservation of Ancient Monuments in Schwerin for restoration and conservation. But Michael Bednorz, head of the State Office admitted that financial difficulties meant that they were kept in a shed instead of an appropriate space.

“The log boats are only an example for our problems,” he said.

“They are a drastic illustration of what happens when the regional authorities cannot fulfil their obligations.”

Although much damage was inflicted during the first two years of storage, they were then further damaged when the shed they were stored in partially collapsed in 2004. Yet still they were not moved to safety.

The state office’s storage facilities have less than a good reputation – mice have chewed up ancient documents in the main archive mice while a water leakage destroyed precious artefacts in another depot.

The remains of the boats have now been sent to the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin where students are planning to investigate the extent of the damage and draw up a plan to save at least fragments.

The Perfect Crime? Twins With Identical DNA Set Free

Der Spiegel:

Saved by their indistinguishable DNA, identical twins suspected in a massive jewelry heist have been set free. Neither could be exclusively linked to the DNA evidence.

German police say at least one of the identical twin brothers Hassan and Abbas O. may have perpetrated a recent multimillion euro jewelry heist in Berlin. But because of their indistinguishable DNA, neither can be individually linked to the crime. Both were set free on Wednesday.

In the early morning hours of February 25, three masked men broke into Germany's famous luxury department store Kaufhaus Des Westens (KaDeWe). Video cameras show how they climbed into the store's grand main hall, broke open cabinets and display cases and made off with an estimated €5 million worth of jewelry and watches.

When police found traces of DNA on a glove left at the scene of the crime, it seemed that the criminals responsible for Germany's most spectacular heist in years would be caught. But the DNA led to not one but two suspects -- 27-year-old identical, or monozygotic, twins with near-identical DNA.

German law stipulates that each criminal must be individually proven guilty. The problem in the case of the O. brothers is that their twin DNA is so similar that neither can be exclusively linked to the evidence using current methods of DNA analysis. So even though both have criminal records and may have committed the heist together, Hassan and Abbas O. have been set free.

Both brothers have stolidly refused to comment ever since their arrests on February 11. Since no further evidence has become available, police cannot detain them.

"Those who remain silent are not necessarily covering up their guilt, but rather simply making use of their constitutional rights," Hassan O.'s lawyer Axel Weimann told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper on Wednesday. He also noted that the glove with DNA evidence was not necessarily proof that either twin had been at the scene of the crime, since it could have been placed there by someone else in order to frame the brothers.

According to the daily, the twins sent a message that they were "proud of the German constitutional state and gave it their thanks."

There is still no trace of a third suspect -- or the loot.

AIG Bonus Execs Revealed

The AIG Bonus Check We'd Like To See

More Rewritten History In The Middle East

If the reunification efforts on Cyprus are so contentious and controversial, how will the Palestinians (who refuse to even recognize the state of Israel)ever reach a peace treaty with Israel?

Der Spiegel:

Negotiations on the reunification of Cyprus have been going well for six months, but a spat over school books within the Greek-Cypriot community shows the extent to which hostilities can quickly bubble up to the surface.

A bizarre spat over school books has revealed just how deep the divisions are between the two communities on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. With talks on a possible reunification at a sensitive point, a row over school books has shown that the old enmities on the island persist.

Andreas Dimitiriou, the education minister in the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus, has come in for furious criticism because he sent a letter to schools saying that "Greek-Cypriot extremists," also bore some responsibility for the division of the island.

He argued that it was time to rewrite the history books, which still describe the Turkish Cypriots who live in the northern part of the island as "barbarians," who bear sole responsibility for the partition of the island. This is a marked contrast to the books used in the Turkish Cypriot schools, which were rewritten back in 2004 to rid them of any anti-Greek chauvinism.

Dimitriou has faced a backlash from members of the Greek community for his plans to change the school books, with nationalists, teachers and even an Archbishop defending the old stereotypes of the Turkish enemies.

The attempt at the curriculum reform comes at a sensitive time. Ever since Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias took office last year there have been hopes that the United Nations reunification plan, which Greek Cypriots rejected in 2004, could be revived. Christofias has spent the last six months in negotions with the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, and there has reportedly been a "very positive mood" at each of their many meetings.

However, last Friday the UN Cyprus envoy Alexander Downer said that there was no point in rushing negotiations if the deal could unravel. He said an agreement must be reached that "will hold in place for the duration."

He urged patience because of the complexity of the issues. "When you're dealing with complex issues you're of course dealing with problems that go back decades. It's not surprising it's a painstaking process."

The parties, who were meeting again on Tuesday in the city of Nicosia, have still not agreed on the details of a power-sharing arrangement or what to do about the issue of compensation for the 200,000 Cypriots who were displaced by the conflict. Talat has said that talks need to be concluded by early 2010, when he is expected to stand for reelection.

Cyprus was divided into a breakaway Turkish Cypriot north and an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south in 1974 when Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by Athens-backed supporters of a union with Greece.

The resolution of the decades-old dispute is hindered by the fact that Turkey still does not officially recognize the Republic of Cyprus, which is a member of the European Union. This has in turn undermined Ankara's attempt to join the bloc. If Turkey does not agree to allow Cypriot planes and vessels to use it ports by the end of the year then Brussels could break off accession talks for good.

The left must stand up to anti-Semitism

From Spiked Online:

Frank Furedi’s article is a sobering reflection on the connections between anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Semitism (see After Gaza: what is behind 21st-century anti-Semitism?). The central issues he raises have to do, firstly, with the role that sections of the left have played in legitimising anti-Semitism and, secondly, with how interpretations of the Holocaust are being distorted and abused. These issues, I would suggest, may be still more closely connected than Furedi suggests.

There are a number of ways in which much of the left now refuses to engage seriously with anti-Semitism but rather helps to legitimate it. The first takes the form of explaining anti-Semitism in a way that effectively justifies it. This occurs when, for example, suicide bombing (that is, the deliberate killing of Jewish civilians) is explained in a pseudo-materialist mode as simply a product of desperation. That many people have found themselves desperate without resorting to such actions and such hatred is ignored, as is the obvious fact that they are planned by people who are certainly anti-Semitic but not by any stretch of the imagination hopeless or without considerable material resources.

The second form is collusion – the effective toleration of anti-Semitic language, chants and slogans on demonstrations against Israel. I say ‘effective’ because this is a repeated and growing phenomenon, known in advance. It does not require an occasional well-meaning reproof but the recognition that joint participation in, and organisation of, such demonstrations provides a forum for anti-Semites to express their hatred of Jews without fear or anxiety. (It is in this respect a direct reversal of the old socialist programme of ‘no platform for fascists’.)

The third way in which the left helps to legitimise anti-Semitism, and this often accompanies the first two, has to do with the downplaying of evidence of anti-Semitism itself: the claim that anti-Semitic incidents are over-reported or misinterpreted and that, in any case, they are far less significant than other forms of hatred.

How new is all this? Perhaps it is not quite as new as we might wish, especially if we think about the left’s response to Nazi anti-Semitism. There is a certain ‘conceit’ on the left (one I confess I shared myself for a long time) that they were the most principled, committed opponents of Nazi anti-Semitism. This is highly arguable. In Germany in the 1930s, many left-wing intellectuals took an entirely reductive view of Nazi anti-Semitism. As late as 1939, for example, Max Horkheimer claimed that what was really going on was that ‘the Jews are being supplanted as agents of circulation, for the modern economic structure eliminates the entire sphere of commerce’.

In 1942 (just as the Final Solution was under way) Franz Neumann published his major study of Nazism in which he argued that they would ‘never allow a complete extermination of the Jews’. What the left did oppose was fascism, for which they had a much more sophisticated explanation, and which was a priority. For on the ground, too, mobilising against anti-Semitism as a central issue was repeatedly rejected - by both social democrats and communists. To raise this issue, leaders of both parties agreed, was pointless and counter-productive. It would not win support but would further isolate their militants. And there was more than a hidden suggestion that the Jews had somehow brought this upon themselves, that they had been too visible, too prominent, or worse.

Ignorant efforts to equate what happened to the Jews during Nazi rule with what Israel is doing to the Palestinians may be thought about, to some extent, against this background of incomprehension and avoidance. It is true that what happened then remains hard to comprehend even today. The idea that the Nazis wanted to kill all Jews everywhere is hard to hold in the mind, as (even more) is the creation of extermination camps; factories designed not to produce goods or commodities but corpses and ashes, factories of death.

But if there is little history of thinking seriously about anti-Semitism and confronting it directly when it was at its most dangerous, it may not be so surprising that there has been such a weak response to the latest outbreak of this mutating virus. It was easier then to turn away, to deny the full import of anti-Semitism in its most radical form; it is easier now not to think about anti-Semitism at all.

Philip J Spencer is associate dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences at Kingston University, where he teaches courses on the Holocaust, the Politics of Mass Murder, and Human Rights. He has also written on Marxism and the Holocaust and is currently working on a study of the left, the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.

Waiting Period Loophole

It's Not So bad

Six Opinions: Were the 9/11 Terrorists Cowards or Courageous?

In Character:

Ruth R. Wisse:

“Courage and cowardice are culturally determined, and God cannot help the society that confuses its values with those of its rivals.”

We attribute courage to men and women who defend our values in the face of adversity. Facing adversity in itself may be either bold or reckless; upholding values may be noble in some cases and effortless in others. It’s the combination of the two — upholding values and facing adversity — that earns the tribute of “courage.” America sets great store by its freedoms, its constitutional culture and integrity as a nation. We call courageous those who protect and advance these when they come under attack.

I understand the IC symposium to be asking whether multiculturalism has taken us to the point of no longer having the confidence to distinguish our values from those of our assailants. Undoubtedly, some of my university colleagues have reached that tipping point...

James Bowman:

“It is this now almost-vanished honor culture which is speaking when terrorists are called ‘cowardly.’ In its view, they are cowardly because they are sneaky.”

If it doesn’t take courage to immolate one­self along with a crowd of strangers by flying an airplane into the side of a building, then what does it take? Surely it must be something that resembles courage, as we ordinarily understand the term, so closely as to be indistinguishable from it. Former president Bush and others sometimes referred to this and similar terrorist acts as “cowardly” because, I think, of the social class to which they belong...

Paul McHugh:

“[W]e do not find courage with Atta and his team who sought death but with Beamer, Glick, Green, and others on Flight 93 who fought for life.”

...Atta, along with several knife-wielding, muscular accomplices, implemented a studied and practiced plan of deception that took advantage of the trust of airline personnel to slip disguised as innocent travelers onto aircraft filled with men, women, and children. Soon into the flight they sprang upon these defenseless people, commandeered the aircraft by cutting the throats of stewardesses and pilots, and then deceived those remaining into believing that a non-deadly plan was in place. This was so that without interference they could pilot them all to their deaths by plowing the planes into buildings also filled with unsuspecting people going about their morning business.

What I’ll call the Beamer group, on the other hand, had that day no thought of needing their skills and energies for any purpose other than to travel quietly to their destinations. The events they confronted were thrust upon them with little information other than cell phone communications informing them of the likely deadly aims of their captors. With little time to think, with no more weaponry than their own physical endowments, and with the realization that their chances of living through the efforts were small, these men fought their armed captors for the control of the aircraft and brought it crashing down in an empty field rather than into a populated city building...

 Irshad Manji:

“Is it an act of moral courage to promote violent jihad against those whom you consider the enemy? As a reform-minded Muslim, I find myself on the front lines of such questions.”

A generation ago, Robert F. Kennedy introduced students to the concept of moral courage. “Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society,” he declared at the University of Cape Town. “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”

...Recently, a young man named Amin wrote to me with a challenge. He spoke of a European Muslim woman who blogs about Islam’s “duty” to destroy the West, through arms if need be. This woman operates within the law of her country, Belgium, and proudly accepts public disapproval for what she believes. “She is speaking truth to power for a greater good,” Amin intoned.

Thus his challenge to me: is the female jihadi an agent of moral courage?

 Robert Royal:

“From the ancient world until the reductive views of human beings that started to become dominant in the eighteenth century, courage, like every other virtue, had certain intrinsic characteristics, but was also related to other virtues without which its good qualities might quite literally go bad.”

...Of course, you can debase the meaning of the term courage by equating it with merely braving physical dangers that most people could not. But that is a colloquial way of speaking that has never been part of any serious thinking about the virtue of courage. It’s a bit like telling someone, “At least you’re honest,” when he has casually admitted to some deeply shameful act. Yes, he may have just told the truth, but unless he’s repenting or asking for pardon, it would be difficult to say there’s anything much good about it. In some circumstances, quite the opposite may be true...

...There’s nothing noble about walking into a pizza parlor in Israel and blowing up yourself and a bunch of civilians. There’s nothing elevating in shooting up a Mumbai hotel, attacking Westerners, and dying in the process. And even in the marriage of Heaven and Hell, to which the modern world sometimes desperately seeks to aspire, it takes great credulity to believe that there was anything in the September 11 murderers worthy of the exalted name of courage.

Late Night Laugh: Auto Confession

PC And Religion

'My imam father came after me with an axe'

From The Times:

We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.

The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

Hannah Shah says her story is not unique – that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. She wants their voices to be heard and for Britain, the land of her birth, to realise the hidden misery of these women.

Hannah’s own voice is quiet and emerges from a tiny frame. She is clearly nervous about talking to a journalist and the stress she has been under is betrayed by a bald patch on the left side of her head. Yet she has a lovely natural smile, especially when she reveals that she got married a year ago; her husband works in the Church of England, “though not as a vicar”.

I tell Hannah that the passages in her memoir about her sexual abuse are almost impossible to read – but I also found it hard to understand why, now that she is in her early thirties, independent and married, she has not reported her father’s horrific assaults on her to the police.

“What has stopped me is that if my dad went to prison, the shame that would be brought upon the rest of the family would be horrific. My mum would not be able to . . . I mean, it’s bad enough having a daughter who’s left, is not agreeing to her marriage and is now a Christian. Then to have my dad in prison would be the end for her.”

I tell Hannah, perhaps a little cruelly, that in her use of the word “shame” she is echoing the sort of arguments that her own family had used against her.

“I understand that, but what I’m saying is that if I do that, then there will never be a door open to me to have contact with my family ever again. I’m still hoping that there will be some opportunity for that.” Of course, by writing this book, albeit under an assumed name and with all the places and characters disguised, there is a chance that her family and community will identify themselves in it. What does she think they would do, then?

“To be honest, I don’t even want to think about that. Either they will decide between them that they are not going to say anything because it will bring shame on all the community, or they will decide that they want to take action. Then my life will become even more difficult, because they’ll all be looking for me.”

Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”

Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”

Why didn’t you call the police after-wards? “First, I didn’t think the police would believe me. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen in this country – or that’s what they’d think. Second, I didn’t believe I would get help or protection from the authorities.”

Hannah had good reason for this doubt. When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.

“When I’ve been working with girls who were trying to get out of an arranged marriage, or want to convert to Christianity, and they have contacted social services as they need to get out of their homes, the reaction has been ‘we’ll send someone from your community to talk to your parents’. I know why they are doing this, they are trying to be understanding, but it’s the last thing that the authorities should do in such situations.”

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia, Islamic law, rather than British civil law. What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks?

“I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.”

She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams: “It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it’s not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don’t think so.”

It’s fair to say that Hannah Shah is an evangelical Christian, who clearly feels a duty to spread her new faith to Muslims– something with which the Church of England’s eternally emollient establishment is very uncomfortable and the government even more so. She points out that even within this notionally Christian country, people are “persecuted” for evangelism of even the mildest sort. She cites the recent cases of the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for a patient and the foster parents who were struck off after a Muslim girl in their care converted to Christianity.

“Such people – I’m not talking about apostates like me – have been persecuted or ostracised in this country simply because they want to share their faith with others. People call this political correctness but I actually think it is based on a fear of Muslims, what they might do if provoked.”

Shah’s conversion seems to have its origins in the fact that the family who put her up after she ran away from the prospect of an arranged marriage in rural Pakistan were themselves regular church attenders. She began to go with them and, to put it at its most banal, she liked what she heard.

“It was the emphasis on love.

The Islam that I grew up knowing and reading about doesn’t offer me love. That’s the biggest thing that Christianity can and does offer. I sense that I belong and am accepted as I am – even when I do wrong there is forgiveness, a forgiveness which Islam does not offer.”

So does Hannah offer Christian forgiveness to the father who raped and abused her and who, by her own account, was even prepared to murder her?

“It’s taken a long time and it’s only in the past few years that I’ve got to that. It’s very hard to get there and it’s taken a lot of shouting and screaming behind closed doors, and praying, to get me to the point of being able to say: I forgive. I have to, partly because otherwise I would be a very bitter and angry person and I don’t want to livea life that’s full of anger.”

I can’t help asking how she would react if a future child of hers decided she wanted to abandon the Christian faith of the family home and become a Muslim. “It would be very hard for me, obviously.”

Would she try to discourage it? “No. I’d bring them up as Christians, take them to church, but I’d also want them to know about, well, my culture, about Islam. Because being Christian should be a choice, not what you’re born to. But yes, it would be hard if they chose Islam.”

Somehow, though, I think Hannah Shah would cope.

The Dance Of The Broken Mirrors

So Hamas and the PA are still in 'unity talks' and the US is determined to help the 'moderates.' While everyone is focused on Hamas, it bears recalling just who the PA are and what they say in Arabic.

From the Jerusalem Post:

PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday said that he does not rule out returning to the path of armed "resistance" against Israel and took pride in the fact that he had been the first to fire on Israel and that his organization had trained Hizbullah.

In an interview with the Jordanian daily al-Dustur, Abbas said that he was opposed to an armed struggle against Israel - for the time being.

"At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different," he said.

"I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965 and of being the one who taught resistance to many in the region and around the world; what it's like; when it is effective and when it isn't effective; its uses, and what serious, authentic and influential resistance is," Abbas said.

"It is common knowledge when and how resistance is detrimental and when it is well timed," he added. "We (Fatah) had the honor of leading the resistance and we taught resistance to everyone, including Hizbullah, who trained in our military camps."

Matthias Kunzel:

How can a group determined to destroy Israel be a partner in the peace process?

A particular lack of attention is paid to the question as to why this group wants to obliterate Israel. People ignore the Nazi-style antisemitism which is the underpinning of Hamas’ policies. Yet all one needs to do is take a look at the Hamas Charter, which considers “the Jews” responsible for all the evil and misfortune in the world. According to this Charter, Jews “stir revolutions”, “destroy societies” and “colonize and exploit countries”. “They stood behind World War I…, they also stood behind World War II…, they inspired the United Nations and the Security Council … in order to rule the world. … There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.” (3)

We should take every one of these assertions seriously. Anyone who accepts this monstrous image of Jews as the villains of the world must wish to kill them and must wish to see Israel – the “command centre” in antisemitic jargon – obliterated. For them a Palestinian state next to Israel can only be seen as a tool for achieving an Islamic state instead of Israel. Hamas can never be a peace partner as long as it holds on to this Charter...

The powerful effect of this ideology is underestimated in the West. Many either react as if hating Jews were a feature of the Oriental world, like hookahs or mosques. Or antisemitism among Muslims is glossed over as a kind of “anti-imperialism of fools”, and rationalised as an alleged response to the Middle East conflict. From this stems the hope that, with the solution of the Palestine conflict, hatred of Jews will have vanished as well.

This hope, however, won’t stand up to scrutiny. Anyone who is aware of the history of the Middle East will recognise that the escalation of the conflict has not been the cause of the antisemitic hatred. Rather, this antisemitic hatred, imported from Europe, has played a decisive role in the escalation...

Of course, not all Arabs were a part of the history Kunzel addresses.

Still, during the first decades of the 20th century, not a few Arabs considered these modernising effects of Zionist immigration in a favourable light. For example, the editor the Egypt’s daily al-Ahram wrote in 1913: “The Zionists are necessary for this region. The money they will bring in, their intelligence and the diligence which is one of their characteristics will, without doubt, bring new life to the country.” (10) During the 1920’s, prominent leaders in Egypt believed “that the progress of Zionism might help to secure the development of a new Eastern civilisation,” as Mr. Kisch who was at that time Chairman of the Palestine Zionist Executive noted in his diary after visiting Cairo in 1924. (11) In 1924, the modernising model of Kemal Atatürk had replaced the caliphate in Turkey and beginning in 1925, the Shah of Iran, Resa Khan, had embarked on the secularisation of his country...

And now, full circle and Mahmoud Abbas:

Hamas denies that Mahmud Abbas represents the will of the Palestinian people and has seen its position strengthened by the victory in the Gaza local elections at the end of January 2005. (15) It refuses to cease production of more Qassem rockets, let alone hand over its weapons. For the time being, it is not using those weapons, but only because in a counter-move Mahmud Abbas “has agreed to unfreeze Hamas funds held in a number of Palestinian banks.” (16) Last but not least, it is receiving massive support from Iran and its puppet, Hizbullah. On January 30, 2005 Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah, head of Hizbullah, and his Hamas counterpart Khaled Mashal issued a joint declaration pledging coordination of their military efforts. As Mashal put it, “we are partners in the march against Israel, the common enemy. We hope that the same path which led to the liberation of southern Lebanon will lead to that of the whole of Palestine”. (17) Hizbullah’s involvement has since reached such a level “that even the PA leadership is sounding the alarm and begging the world to help it cut off those throwing oil on flames that it is trying to douse.” (18)

From the Wall Street Journal on Abbas:

...His outright refusal to confront and disarm terrorists, in violation of the Road Map, hardly registers anymore in the Western media and where it does, it is usually excused and attributed to his relative political weakness. However, the media also give very little idea of the extent to which the Palestinian Authority continues to glorify terrorists...

...if Americans and Europeans are genuinely interested in promoting Palestinian-Israeli peace, it is time for them to take a realistic look at his record...

His outright refusal to confront and disarm terrorists, in violation of the Road Map, hardly registers anymore in the Western media and where it does, it is usually excused and attributed to his relative political weakness. However, the media also give very little idea of the extent to which the Palestinian Authority continues to glorify terrorists... Then there is the soccer tournament named in honor of the terrorist who murdered 30 people at a Passover celebration in Netanya, or the girls' high school named by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education after a female terrorist who murdered 36 Israeli civilians and an American nature photographer. (The school was recently renovated with money from USAID, channeled through the American Near East Refugee Aid.)

Examples could easily be multiplied. A poetry collection published by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Culture, for instance, is named in honor of a suicide terrorist (dubbed "the Rose of Palestine" in one of the poems) who killed 21 at a restaurant in Haifa. (The collection was distributed this August as a special supplement in the daily Al-Ayyam. Most of Al-Ayyam's editors are appointed by Mr. Abbas.)...

The Palestinian Authority sometimes goes so far as to stamp out even the most symbolic gestures of coexistence with Israel. Consider last month's soccer match, organized by the Shimon Peres Center for Peace, in which Israeli and Palestinian soccer stars played together in a joint "Peace Team" against Barcelona. They played well, losing only 2-1 at Barcelona's famous Nou Camp stadium in front of 31,820 spectators, including many dignitaries. Yet on the Palestinian Authority's orders, the Palestinian Football Association announced that it would punish the Palestinian players for daring to participate in such a match...

More on Abbas, from Jihad Watch:

Abbas went on to praise late Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in March 2004.

He also used Quranic verses to claim Jews are corrupting the world.

"The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth," Abbas said during a portion of his speech in which he criticized recent Israeli anti-terror raids in the northern West Bank.

Abbas anti-Semitic remarks and his call to arms against the Jewish state were not quoted in hundreds of English-language articles reporting on today's speech or by most major Israeli dailies, which featured pieces on their websites about the Fatah commemoration ceremonies.

A widely-circulated Associated Press article, titled "Abbas calls for respect at Fatah rally," states Abbas today called for rival factions to respect each other.

The AP quotes Abbas stating, "Shooting at your brother is forbidden," but the article stops short of quoting the rest of his sentence in which he recommends Palestinians use their weapons against Israel.

Finally, see Hot Wired For Hatred, to understand the psychological origins of the behaviors that are so prevalent in the Arab world.

However frightening this propaganda and its effects might be, we must confront the possibility that an even more hideous engine drives the terrorists' cruelty. Relative to the West, life in Arab countries has always been harsh. Corporal punishment of children is thoroughly embedded in the culture. No mainstream Islamic authority has yet spoken out against slapping children's faces, dragging them by the hair, or any of the other disciplinary approaches that shock Western onlookers.

Survival in such a culture necessitates some numbing. But this psychological component might be insignificant relative to the neurobiological effects of being beaten and tortured in childhood. It was Harvard researchers who first revealed that stress hormones released when children experience physical and sexual abuse actually impede development of that part of the brain responsible for empathy and conscience.

Brain scans of those who suffered through events common in the childhood of Palestinian children reveal an underdeveloped hippocampus and vermis. Among the behaviors associated with this sort of brain damage: impulsivity, sadism, and suicide. It is almost too frightening to consider that Israel today faces a population many of whom are hardwired for the sort of violence we have been witnessing.

More terrifying is the long-term prognosis for Palestinian society. Martin Teicher, a lead researcher in the Harvard study, reports that sadistic parents neurobiologically infect their children with the same trait: Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children. Whether it comes in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual trauma, or through exposure to warfare, famine, or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next.

Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once the key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back. (Scientific American, March 2002)

For source material, see Shrinkwrapped's superb The Arab Mind series, archived at that link. The posts are a must read for any serious student of Middle East politics.

Bring Your Kid To Work Day

The American Dream

No Place Safe For Terrorists

This video was taken inside the cockpit of an A-10 by the pilot. It was a night view. What you see is from 9700 feet away (almost two miles). Four terrorists are walking along a street with no clue that someone is watching them…….. from almost 2 miles away. The A-10 fired a 30 mm cannon WITHOUT injuring the dog nearby who escaped unharmed.

You can see the gun camera shake a bit as the pilot fires; then count about 4 seconds for the rounds to travel 2 miles. Every tenth round is a tracer, so the bullets you actually see are every tenth; they are getting hit with hundreds of rounds, but the dog (in the upper right hand portion of your screen) is unscathed, in fact, you’ll noticed he senses the incoming before the terrorists even knew what hit them.

Muzzle velocity on the 30mm cannon is 2430 feet per second. The result is that four fewer guys won’t be blowing up women and children anymore!

You can run but you can’t hide.

Harvard MBA: The Scarlet Letters Of The Financial Meltdown

The Times:

If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.

From Royal Bank of Scotland to Merrill Lynch, from HBOS to Leh-man Brothers, the Masters of Disaster have their fingerprints on every recent financial fiasco.

I write as the holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School – once regarded as a golden ticket to riches, but these days more like scarlet letters of shame. We MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management By Accident. For today’s purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the Business Apocalypse.

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paul-son, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”

It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.

Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes.

In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.

Much the same appears to have happened with Royal Bank of Scotland.

When I was a student at Harvard Business School, between 2004 and 2006, I recall a distinguished professor of organisational behaviour, Joel Podolny, telling us proudly of his work with Fred Goodwin at RBS. At the time, RBS looked like a corporate supermodel and Podolny was keen to trumpet his role in its transformation. A Harvard Business School case study of the firm entitled The Royal Bank of Scotland: Masters of Integration, written in 2003, began with a quote from the man we now know as Fred the Shred or the World’s Worst Banker: “Hard work, focus, discipline and concentrating on what our customers need. It’s quite a simple formula really, but we’ve just been very, very consistent with it.”

The authors of the case, two Harvard Business School professors, described the “new architecture” formed by RBS after its acquisition of NatWest, the clusters of customer-facing units, the successful “buy-in” by employees. Goodwin came across as a management master, saying: “A leader’s job is to create the conditions that enable people to believe, in their hearts and minds, in the value of what they are doing.”

Then just last December, Harvard Business School revised and republished another homage to RBS – The Royal Bank of Scotland Group: The Human Capital Strategy.

It is tragic to read now of all the effort put in by those under Goodwin, from “pulse surveys” to track employee performance to “the big thank you”, a website where managers could recognise individual excellence in customer service.

Every trendy business school idea was being implemented, it seemed, while what really mattered – the bank’s risk assessment, cash flow and capital structure – was going to hell. To be fair, neither Podolny nor the authors of the case studies were finance professors, but it’s still pretty shocking that a school that purports to teach general management should fail to see the gaping problems at a firm they studied in such depth.

Is there a pattern here? Go back to the 1980s, and you find that Harvard MBAs played a big enough role in the insider trading scandals that washed through Wall Street for a former chairman of the SEC to consider it a good move to donate millions of dollars for the teaching of ethics at the school.

Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contrition.

Last October, Harvard Business School celebrated its 100th birthday with a global summit in Boston. While Wall Street and Washington descended into an economic inferno, Jay Light, the dean of the school and a board member at the Black-stone private equity group, opened the festivities by shrugging off any responsibility.

“We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in the past 15 years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the crucial things in the world of financial markets,” he said.

“We all failed to understand how that fragility could evidence itself in a frozen short-term credit system, something that hadn’t really happened since 1907. We also probably overestimated the ability of the political process to deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed.

“What we have witnessed is a stunning and sobering failure of financial safeguards, of financial markets, of financial institutions and mostly of leadership at many levels. We will leave the talk of fixing the blame to others. That is not very interesting. But we must be involved in fact in fixing the problem.”

You would think after failing on so many levels, the school that provides more business leaders than any other might feel some remorse. Not in the least. It’s onwards and upwards, with the very people who blew apart the world’s financial plumbing now demanding to fix the leak.

You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.

Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now graduate each year with an MBA, 150,000 of those in the United States, creating their own management class within global business.

Given the present chaos, should-n’t we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health?

If doctors or lawyers wreaked such havoc in their own professions, we would certainly reconsider what is being taught at medical and law schools.

During my time at the school, 50 students were chosen to participate in a detailed survey of their development. Scott Snook, the professor who ran it, reported that about a third of students were inclined to define right and wrong simply in terms of what everyone else was doing.

“They can’t really step back and take a critical view,” he said. “They’re totally defined by others and by the outcomes of what they’re doing.”

A group of people unable to see their actions in the broader context of the society they inhabit have no business being self-regulating. Yet in the financial services industry this is pretty much what they demanded and to a large extent got – with catastrophic consequences.

The happiest in my cohort, which graduated into the rosy economic conditions of 2006, are now certainly those who went off to do the unfashionable jobs: a friend who spurned Wall Street to join a Mid-western industrial firm, and now finds himself running the agricultural division of an Indian conglomerate; one who joined a foundation promoting entrepreneurship; one who went into Boston city government, another who moved to Russia to run a cinema chain.

However, these were the rarities: 42% of my class went into financial services and another 21% into consulting, both wretched sectors to be in today and for the foreseeable future.

Applications to business schools in America and Europe are broadly up, as people search for a safe haven from the recession. What are they thinking? Many MBA jobs will not be coming back. Students who stump up more than £60,000 for a two-year MBA can expect a long wait to make that back.

For those about to graduate from business school, these are grim times. Financial and consulting firms, which used to soak up two-thirds of the MBAs from top schools, have all but vanished from campuses. Suddenly jobs in government and at nonprofit organisations are in hot demand from students who used to consider them laughably underpaid.

A dose of modesty among MBAs and business schools is long overdue. But it’s not going to come from Harvard. Light, told his audience in October: “The need for leadership in the world today is at least as great as it has ever been. The need for what we do is at least as great as it has ever been.”

A bold claim to which many might say: please, spare us.

UberBama And The Ubercrats

One of the great legacies of the Nazi’s Third Reich was the idea that modern, educated man, could create an ubermensch, a kind of best man or superman. That baton was picked up by the Soviets and later, by many western leftists.

The creation of the ubermensch is always predicated on being representative of the best of man’s ideals. The Nazis believed that the Aryan ubermensch would serve as an example to those lesser untermenschen, freeing them from degenerate art, music and values. The Aryan ubermenschen were to be the world’s leaders for one thousand years. They and they alone, knew what was best for mankind, and they would reshape the world and mankind with their values- and woe unto anyone or group that saw things differently or provided even a perceived threat. The comparisons to our times are inevitable and unmistakable.

There are a few truths shared by many of today's Ubercrats and the Nazis, Soviets and others that seek to create the ubermensch. There is an unassailable truth; to create an ubermensch, you have to first have to embrace the notion of the totalitarian state, where behavior and thoughts are controlled by the state. In an authoritarian state, it is only behaviors are subject to state control. That may seem harsh but, when the Ubercrats derisively refer to Republicans as belonging to a 'culture of corruption' or disparage anyone who finds themselves at odds with their ideas and agenda, the conclusions are inescapable. They want you to think in a certain way.

Like the Nazis and Soviets before them, many of today’s Ubercrats understand the credibility of an academic imprimatur. That seal of approval is an important foundation stone of a totalitarian state. The Nazis and the Soviets each denied reality and truth in their academic institutions. As an example, the Germans created a kind of ubermensch, a phony science of racialism taught and endorsed by scientists. They attempted to bestow upon astrology and the occult a legitimate scientific status. Al Gore would feel right at home- 'Disagree with me and my science and you are irrelevant and immoral.' Gore is the high priest of environmental hypocrisy- and the Ubercrats dance on.

The Soviets embraced the ‘truth’ of the happy worker, toiling away for the betterment of the State- even if they had to ignore reality and kill tens of millions to propagate that ‘truth.’ Today's Ubercrats embrace the phony truth of multiculaturalism and moral relativism, as if their world were a Sesame Street Utopia. The leftists ignore reality. They embrace and apologize for terrorist butchers and tyrants, blind to the blood pooling at their feet and the millions of hopeless lives they willingly abandon.

The art (read: approved) of the day depicting the happy and healthy worker toiling on the collective farm, was a myth codified and sanctified by Soviet ‘economists,’ all touting the failures of the latest Five Year Plan as successes. Ubercrat economists, like their leftist predecessors tout bailout and stimulus failure as success, much in the way Hamas declared 'victory' over Israel in the recent Gaza confrontation.

There are no images of the Soviet gulag. That reality could no more be made to disappear than Nazi concentration camps. That kind of ugliness was no more real art than Alicia Shvarts and her 'abortion art' efforts, hailed by progressives as 'important'.

Many leftists and Ubercrats now desperately seek the credibility of an academic imprimatur, before their biases and lies are realized. Universities are filled with leftist ubermensch professors for whom ideology is more important than truth. Like their German and Soviet predecessors, leftist and Ubercrat ideologues do little to hide their agenda, or contempt for those who still embrace reality and truth. Leftist ideologues embrace moral relativism, equating all moralities. Leftist ideologues are threatened by religion, because religion might mean a lessened loyalty to their cause- or whatever cause du jour they espouse at a particular time. Leftist ideologues are threatened by any standard of measurement- because they fear they might be measured and found wanting. That too, is why leftists embrace the illusion of multiculturalism- that all cultures are equal, with none better than the other. The fear of measurement and comparison is real.

Leftist ideologues fear and despise capitalism because capitalism allows for the freedom and self expression of each individual, ideas anathema to leftist ideologues. Like the Nazis and Soviet communists before them, it is their vision and their vision only that is acceptable. Deviate even a bit and you become an ‘enemy of the state.’ Just ask anyone who questioned President Obama's bailout package- a bill that was expected to be supported prior to anyone even reading it.

The Nazis, Soviets, leftists and Ubercrats share a common trait. In their goal to create an ubermensch and an ubermensch society, they had to become untermenschen, adopting racist, repressive tactics so as to promote and steamroll their agendas. The Ubercrats talk about integrity and responsibility even as they wallow in porkonomics.

The leftists and Ubercrats do not see themselves as inheritors of the evil ugliness that was the Nazi and Soviet ubermenschen. They wrap themselves in the words of documents of higher calling and the most noble of causes. That said, what they do not see or acknowledge are the repercussions of their support for failed ideologies, beautiful documents and proclaimed statements notwithstanding. The legacy of German and Soviet ideologies are the unmarked graves of the tens of millions of the forgotten dead. Killed because they were in the way as the caring ‘progressives’ marched on. There are tens of millions more, still suffering under the boot of ‘progressive’ oppression- and that is of little concern to the Ubercrats- but only as long as they vote for the Ubercrats.

The Soviets were to create a worker’s paradise, where the bounty was plentiful and the society Utopian. Today’s leftists and Ubercrats want to destroy the evils of capitalism and American and democratic successes- and they don't give a damn about who will get hurt in the process.

Dr Sanity notes in Come For The Egalitarianism, Stay For The Bestiality And Tyranny,

So, many times in politics, programs that originate with the “best of intentions” end up doing exactly the opposite of what was intended. Yet, the political left is so ideologically committed to the utopian ideal of egalitarianism which, in the real world simply makes everyone equally poor and miserable (except for the lucky elites who control the social system) that they reflexly keep pouring money into programs that can be shown to actively harm the people they are meant to help; and reinforce the stereotypes they are meant to end.

The politically correct left heaps scorn on business, capitalism, free trade, and globalization; and instead glorify and praise the most primitive and barbaric of cultures and cultural practices. As Bob suggests, they come for the egalitarianism, but stay for the bestiality and tyranny they unleash with their “progressive” ways.

If they really cared about helping the poor; if they really cared about social “justice”–then they would shut the hell up and get out of the way of those evil, greedy capitalistic bastards, who, while pursuing their own selfish, profit-making agendas, in the long run effortlessly manage to increase the standard of living and improve the lives of everyone around them.

If the left really cared about the ‘victims’ of oppression, they would position themselves as human shields in Darfur. They are content to be ‘human shields’ in Gaza or the West Bank because they know the Israelis will not deliberately target them, unlike the murderous and barbaric janjaweed in Darfur, who don’t really give a damn. If the left and the Ubercrats really cared about the well being of oppressed people, they would actively engage in efforts to empower them, rather than just talk about them as they spent their money promoting their porkonomics, political agendas and ideologies.

It is an unequivocal truth that Utopias cannot be created without imposing tyranny- and that seems to bother President Uberbama not in the least.

See also Dr Sanity's recent post:

Right now in the news we have excellent examples of what I mean by "sociopathic selflessness" (Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama and many others) and "sociopathic selfishness" (Bernie Madoff and the CEO's and governing boards of looted companies that should be allowed to fail and their executives prosecuted). Often, malignant narcissists combine the qualities of both types, vascillating between the grandiosity characteristic of the malignantly selfish and the compassionate do-gooder of the malignantly selfless.

Imaginary Islamist Think-Tanks

From Standpoint, a look at how Islamists game the system:

Despite what the pessimists say, there is one industry that is still flourishing in the UK. It consists of Islamists establishing their own think-tanks and pressure groups. They serve little purpose other than to bestow legitimacy upon ill-informed, extremist Muslim speakers, who can then attend conferences and get media access under the façade of expertise.

This is a surprisingly easy bandwagon to jump on. Come up with an intellectual-sounding name for your organisation, buy a website domain and give yourself an impressive-sounding job title. This was the route taken by Hamas cheerleader Azzam Tamimi. He recently addressed the prestigious UK Defence Academy, is a regular contributor to the Guardian website, and once told the BBC that suicide bombing in Palestine "is the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity". He describes himself as Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT). The domain registered to the IIPT says it has a website "coming soon" (it has been coming since 2007), but meanwhile offers you the chance to download Tamimi's CV. What exactly it is that he is meant to be directing remains unclear. What is beyond doubt is that Tamimi uses the IIPT to try to couch his views in an aura of academic respectability.

Then there is Anjem Choudary, former leader of the banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, who according to CNN called the 9/11 terrorist attacks "magnificent" and boasted that "the black flag of Shariah will fly over Downing Street". Choudary was a regular on the BBC in the wake of 7/7, last year spoke at the National Liberal Club on the need for Sharia in the UK, and calls himself a Principal Lecturer at the London School of Shariah. This consists of Choudary driving around east London trying to find people to preach his version of Sharia to. It is probably the first, and only, school in the world to be based in the back of a van.
However, the group which has probably obtained a credibility most disproportionate to its worth is the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK). Describing itself as a "unique empowerment system" with a "non-violent focus on Jihad", MPACUK has propelled its founder Asghar Bukhari into a position of some prominence. He is regularly consulted on Muslim issues by Sky and the BBC, who once even labelled him a "moderate". MPACUK regularly launches diatribes against the pervasive influence of the insidious "Israel lobby" in Britain and the US. Bukhari himself recently accused "Zionists" of murdering "little children for sport", adding that "any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise".

These groups are taking advantage of a desire to "engage" with the extremist fringe in the spirit of "increased dialogue". Yet for such extremists, belligerence alone is no longer enough to get their voices heard. It must now be complemented with claims of academic respectability and of representing the Muslim community. No matter how tenuous these claims may be, it is an effective tactic. Increasingly, their views are not being placed under scrutiny; they are being put on a pedestal.

Moses Obama

What Set Bernie Madoff Apart?

The Moderates

Don't Write Off America

Is America really in decline? Many say yes but it just may not be the time to bet the farm on that outcome. A world without America would be a very different place.

Standpoint:

The decline of America has been long predicted, though rarely with such enthusiasm as in recent times. The election of a president seen as embodying hope, not just for America but the West, should moderate the declinists' fervour, although I doubt if it will. Their will to see America go down is too great, and they can comfort themselves with the hope that the US may be too far gone economically and the rising powers too well advanced for Barack Obama to make too much difference...

What most declinists want is for America to stop being American and for its citizens to transform themselves into full-blown Europeans, with a socialist economy, a pacifist foreign policy and the rest. In other words, the US should recognise itself as a botched enterprise and come home, spiritually speaking, to what the former Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld called "old Europe". To some, the Obama election will seem a first step in that homebound journey, with his closure of Guantánamo, his readiness to talk to Iran, his nuclear disarmament offer to the Russians, his banning of "water-boarding" and encouragement of stem-cell research. I suspect they are wrong. Culturally, politically and psychologically Obama does not strike as me a European manqué - no one from Chicago ever has.

There is something neurotic in Europe's view of the US, something perpetually out of kilter. Think of the crush on Bill Clinton felt by many women, the demonising of Bush and now Obamamania. We seem unable to get a cool, factual grip on the country, one that is free of fashion, inchoate historical resentments or delusions of superiority. Neurotic too - in the sense of arbitrary and unstable - is our view of American culture and society. It is possible to say anything and its opposite about the US and still command instant agreement. They are pinched Puritans and simultaneously sexually depraved, religious maniacs sold out to hedonism and materialism. America is a country of individualist greed and self-seeking, a place where egotism has reached the point where philanthropists publicly vie with one another to throw billions at museums, the arts, medical research, charities and international aid. Its popular culture is crass and degenerate except when it is black or radical. And its tendency towards obesity is as imbecilic as its dedication to the gym...

The excesses of America's home-bred Americanophobes, such as Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal, are almost rational by comparison, in the sense that a revulsion against the self is a natural phenomenon, a sort of legitimate point of view especially in a guilt-ridden Puritanical psychology...

The attempt to write off democracy in America, one of the greatest achievements of humankind (what other country is capable of mounting an election campaign like the one we have just witnessed?) as a self-evident failure, in contrast to the vibrant new protectionist Europe to come, and to obliterate American successes in science and technology, could be dismissed as so extreme as to be irrelevant to the debate...

For a sane view of the USA you have to look to Americans themselves, just as you look to them for the best science, the best orchestras, novelists, architects, art historians and (so I am told) classicists...

Do America's critics actively want to see Russia and China pulling more strings in the world, and America fewer?

...In the Middle East, it may be right to talk more to Iran or Syria, although with all due scepticism and caution. After all, Europe's "wiser-than-thou" diplomacy in the area does not appear to have made a whit of difference to Iran's nuclear development, apart from buying her time for a bit more uranium enrichment. And while our press runs political glamour pieces on President Bashar al-Assad, he remains hand-in-glove with Hizbollah and shows few signs of reforming an odious regime. How safe would you feel in a multipolar world underpinned in the Middle East by a country avid for a nuclear weapon and whose president has religious visions while addressing the United Nations?

Read it all.

Obama, Even In Private

The PC Cartoonists

One Tired Marine

From Robert A Hall, Marine veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts state senate.

I'll be 63 soon. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce, and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years.. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired -very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth around" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it.

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the leftwing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them-with their own money.

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by leftwing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women's rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won't multiculturalism be beautiful?

I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor;" of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers;" of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery;" of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to.

I believe "a man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin." I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of President Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of US Senators from Illinois. I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, Colon Powell or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government.

I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fund raising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's, at triple the cost, Were wonderful. That thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress, that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his, that slammed Palin with two years as governor for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever.

Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.

I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.

I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough.

I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.

I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military. Those are the citizens we need.

I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people then themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure.

Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years-and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal.

I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian.

Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.

I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers-bums are bi-partisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bi-partisanship. I live in Illinois, where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats and Republicans has worked together harmoniously to loot the public for years. And I notice that the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet are bi-partisan as well.

I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.

Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.

I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination, or big-whatever for their problems.

Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 63.. Because, mostly, I'm not going to get to see the world these people are making.

I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.

21st Century Philosophy

Poli Sci 101 For Obama: Why Democracy Works And Socialism Fails

Why isn't there a single example of a successful 'People's Paradise'? How is it that the best of intentioned revolutionaries was never able to produce a functional society? Why is it that societies that espouse economic equality and predicated on well meaning ideals, either secular or religious, have proved to be abject failures?

Socialists mistakenly believe that a collective 'unity' of belief, thought and ideology empower a society. Their strength, they believe, are in the numbers of those who share their ideologies. Socialists believe that they have every right to design a society based on what they believe is in the best interest of that society. They also believe that an unwillingness to conform to their ideals, poses a threat and quite possibly, a danger.

For today’s liberal elites and their Democrat hangers on, it is about ‘the color of one’s skin’ and not the ‘content of character. It is about image and not substance. The deliberate obfuscation continues and the blurring of reality continues. Mr Obama indicts America as self absorbed and drunk with materialistic inclinations. President Obama wants Americans to believe that if only they would unite under his banner, all would be well with America and the world.

The Obama message, right out of the socialist playbook, is populist and intoxicating to leftists everywhere. Why? Because the promise of equal opportunity pales in comparison to the promise of the equal distribution of wealth.

The Socialist state takes a dim view of anyone or group that might demand lower taxes, or changes in the state welfare benefits. Just recently, millions of Frenchmen turned out to protest an employers right to fire them from their jobs- even if their job performance was sub par.

The Socialists naturally see themselves as 'progressive.' They believe their way of viewing the world is an improvement over the 'old way'- hard work for greater personal gain, for example (it is interesting to note how 'progressives' have aligned themselves with Hollywood- the most narcissistic and self centered group of people on the planet. They are also among the most removed from the real world, believing themselves to be a kind of aristocracy, entitled to material things others would have to pay for. There is much truth to the old saying. 'You are known by the company you keep.' The 'progressives' have made clear their attachment to the phony aristocracy of Hollywood trumps the relationship they might have with the rest of us, 'the little people.'

Of course, the 'progressives' cannot argue that the greatest philosophers and thinkers were free to think and present their cases. It is they, the progressives, who want to present their own versions of history, religion and ideologies. Disagree with them and the wrath of the State will come down on you.

In reality, the 'progressives' are actually regressive. It is because of the single minded, lockstep thinking that we find ourselves in the messes we are in. They believe in the 'My way or the highway' kind of thinking. Disagree with them and the world is coming to an end. The vitriol and visceral hatred of the current administration is a good example. No difference of opinion will be tolerated. Disagree and the well oiled machine of personal destruction comes out. The Democrat controlled House and Senate spectacularly shower themselves with selfish pork barrel politics in these tough economic times, caring little for the shame they heap upon the nation in the eyes of the world.

Tens, if not hundreds of millions have died because of 'My way or the highway' ideologies. Disagree with the powers that be or want to be, and there are calls of “Death to…”. Disagree loud enough and you are marked for death. We all got a taste of that as the cartoon riots unfolded. It was 'My way or the highway' ideologies unleashed on democratic societies.

'My way or the highway' is a nothing more than a regression to a more barbaric time, when disputes, disagreements and different ideas were settled only when blood was spilled. That is a derivative of 'My way or the highway.' Mankind evolved and advanced when societies came to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs. We advanced because we allowed each of us the freedom the opportunity to achieve whatever it was we were capable of in any endeavor we chose. No one told us what to do, what to think or what to invent. The Soviets produced engineers by the millions. They built the world's largest hotel, the Rossiya, in Moscow, meant to be showcase of Soviet superiority. There are walls that are crooked and floors that are uneven. It is true the Russians led early on in the space race. It is also true that many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, died over the years because money that was spent on the space race was diverted from providing food to Soviet citizens. That malaise infected Communist eastern Europe. Once a net exporter of grain, Poland reached a point where she could barely feed herself. To put that in perspective, at one time, Poland grew more grain than France or Canada.

Western democracies have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that living in a free and tolerant society creates a culture of progress and the free exchange of idea thoughts and ideas- realities that frighten the dysfunctional leaders of the region. Socialist states are nothing more than a monument to failure. Replacing democracy in favor of a socialist agenda is a deliberate choice to embrace failure. Those who choose that kind of fate are not the empathetic figures they want you to believe they are.

the entire raison d’etre of the left is wrapped up in identity alone. This is anathema to citizens of a real democracy, people who define themselves by their efforts, work and achievement- and the freedom to have independent and differing opinions and views.

Free societies evolved and political expression advanced when those societies came to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs. We advanced because we allowed each of us the freedom the opportunity to achieve whatever it was we were capable of in any endeavor we chose. No one told us what to do, what to think or what to invent. In free societies, possibilities were open to all, irrespective of their political persuasion.

The Left leaning administration and Congress of today take a dim view of anyone or group who might question the distribution of stimulus money, demand lower taxes or demands for any kind of accountability. Leftists today wants to saddle the citizen with a bigger load and a more intrusive government. Why? Because a lesser burden on the individual and less control of the individual by the state empower the individual. In the Leftist state any kind of individualism and real self expression, empowered or otherwise, represents a threat to the state.

The western Judeo-Christian democracies understand why free democracies succeed over socialist states. We have accepted freedom and democracy as a way of life and as a result our societies prosper and progress and the market place of free thoughts and ideas flourish. Socialists see freedom and democracy for what they are, societies that value independent thinking and creativity. They rightly understand that to be a threat to their power structure and thus insist on uniformity of thought and state approved belief structures.

Mr President, is this what you really want for America?