Jun 03 2009

Sadly, this won’t be the last American Jihadist

Category: Islam,media,military,sharia,societyharmonicminer @ 9:55 am

ARKANSAS’ LONE JIHADIST: HOW ALONE IS HE? (much more at the link)

Here we have a new case of an individual U.S. citizen who committed an act of terror in the name of his ideology (Government officials have called it inaccurately a “political and religious motive”) against U.S. military targets. Do we see a pattern here? Are we witnessing a repeat and copycats? In fact, as we review several previous cases, from the Miami cell case, to the Fort Dix Six, the Georgia two, the New York Four, the Virginia Paintball network, and many other cases, we’re witnessing the surge of a phenomenon we have been warning about. I have repeatedly coined it Mutant Jihad, including in my book Future Jihad. Two important elements are to be taken into consideration: One is the fact that in many of these cases, U.S. military personnel and targets have been on the short list of these “homegrown terrorists.” If you study the repeated targeting process of these urban Jihadists, they systematically focus on military deployment inside the United States. In a sense, even as the perpetrators are separate, dispersed, and not connected, their targeting seems war-like: attacking the enemy’s forces on the homeland. The second element to be taken into consideration is the clear fact that in all these cases, without exception, we’re seeing one ideology: Jihadism. Despite various levels of understanding and sophistication, the cells and lone wolves who were involved in the terror acts, legitimized their action under the label of “Jihad.”

When relatively perfunctory Christians are re-energized, they tend to give more money, act nicer towards their families, and maybe volunteer more. New converts to Christianity simply do not become violent. The exact opposite is true.  The comparison of Christian fundamentalism to Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most dishonest things done in our Left media.

But too many American and British mosques and imams preach ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to be a good Muslim that boil down to jihad. I wish it wasn’t true. But it has been pretty well documented, though not well covered in the major media.

A question: how many Muslim groups immediately issued unconditional condemnation of the murder of the soldier at the recruiting office, and denied that such actions are any part of being a good Muslim?  Google it.  See if you can find even one.

In contrast, pro-life groups around the USA immediately and unconditionally condemned the murder of Tiller the Kansas abortionist.

Maybe the imams will save their statements of condemnation of the murder for the mosque attendees.   Yeah, that’s it.

In the meantime, I guess our military recruiters had better start showing up for work in full battle-rattle.

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Jun 01 2009

Violence against abortionists: incredibly rare

Category: abortion,media,societyharmonicminer @ 9:24 am

An abortionist who specializes in late-term abortion has been murdered in church.

Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.

It was, of course, morally wrong to kill the abortionist. However, if there are so “few providers of late-term abortions,” they must be awfully busy to do the 10,000 or so abortions that are done each year after 21 weeks development in the womb.

Survival Rates

* Babies born at 23 weeks have a 17% chance of survival
* Babies born at 24 weeks have a 39% chance of survival
* Babies born at 25 weeks have a 50% chance of survival
* From 32 weeks onwards, most babies are able to survive with the help of medical Technology [EPICure data]

Continuing with the report:

……..

Police did not release a motive for the shooting. But the doctor’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

I always thought a “string” meant something that happened often enough to have a pattern with some kind of frequency.  Can you remember the last time something like this happened?  Be honest now…  what year was it?  What happened?  Did you have to look it up on Wikipedia to remember?  I thought so.

Stolz said all indications were that the gunman acted alone, although authorities were investigating whether he had any connection to anti-abortion groups.

Well, of course.  Anti-abortion groups are full of well-known killers, aren’t they?

Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services clinic is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.

This is a flat lie.  Open your telephone book.  Look up abortion providers in the Yellow Pages, in any reasonably large city.  You’ll find “clinics” advertising “procedures to 24 weeks” and some to 28 weeks.  In any case, most hospitals will do late abortions that are truly required to save the life of the mother.   These specialized late term clinics serve women who have some “reason” other than saving their lives.  And this glaring error alone should create doubt in your mind about the accuracy of the rest of the reporting.

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president, said in a statement. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”

And you can be pretty sure they mean it, since these people tend to take the ten commandments reasonably seriously.
……..

The last killing of an abortion doctor was in October 1998 when Dr. Barnett Slepian was fatally shot in his home in a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y. A militant abortion opponent was convicted of the murder.

Wait… didn’t someone say there was a “string” of this sort of thing? From where I sit, it seems to be safer to be an abortionist than a university professor. Several have been murdered on campus in pretty recent times.  And it’s LOTS more dangerous to do research on animal subjects than to do abortions….  those animal rights people are SERIOUS.

……
Federal marshals protected Tiller during the 1991 Summer of Mercy protests, and he was protected again between 1994 and 1998 after another abortion provider was assassinated and federal authorities reported finding Tiller’s name on an assassination list.

Another flat lie. The “assassination list” was merely a list of late-term abortion providers, and the text accompanying the list specifically “accused them of ‘crimes against humanity’ and offered a $5,000 reward for the ‘arrest, conviction and revocation of license to practice medicine’ of these physicians.”   If it was an “assassination” list, why have there been no murders of abortionists since 1998?  If abortion foes have ANY significant percentage of people in their ranks who are capable of doing an act like this, how is it that the last one was 1998?  Calling that list an “assassination list” is a capitulation  to the PR strategy of the abortionists…  of course, that’s exactly what the media have done, isn’t it?

So don’t look for reason or balance in the coverage of this murder.  Look for over-heated rhetoric, fulminating with barely concealed hatred for anyone who simply wants to save the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable among us.  Look for an attempt to connect pro-life groups to incitement to murder, without any factual predicate.

While you’re at it, consider this: because of the confluence of political issues, and the fact that anti-abortion people tend to hold traditional values on a range of issues, a larger percentage of them than the general population are also gun owners.  Does anyone think, if any measurable percentage of pro-lifers were willing to kill abortionists, that there would be very many abortionists left?

I am guessing that more abortionists and abortion mill employees have died in car accidents driving to work, since 1998, than this single murder.  There are a LOT of them (abortion providers, that is).   I don’t expect any news coverage of that fact, however.

But that’s the measure of the actual risk of what they do (risk to themselves, that is).  They’re in more danger from tailgaters than rabid pro-lifers.

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May 09 2009

Altered States

Category: church,left,mediaharmonicminer @ 9:36 am

At this place, on the front page:


You get this ad for “church,” United Methodist style.


And this one for sex toys, hookups, and pornography.  Don’t bother to click it, I didn’t link it.


I’m trying to remember the last time I saw an ad for church and an ad for sex services in the same place.  Oh, yeah.  The LA Times.  Craigslist.  The Yellow Pages.

But really:  wouldn’t you think ONE of these groups would think this wasn’t the place to advertise?

Oh well.  Welcome to the modern Christian Left.  Crackpot politics, sexual liberty, and a feeling of moral superiority, all in one.

It would seem that the United Methodists really know where to advertise to find like-minded folk.

So I went to “RethinkChurch” (just click the graphic above and you can, too).  In the search engine on the site, I typed in the word “Jesus.”

Here’s what I got:


I typed in “salvation,” and got even less.  So, let’s see.  This is a United Methodist Church website, with no mention of “salvation”, and almost none of “Jesus.”  I wonder if that “Carnal Nation” website links to a seminary.

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Feb 13 2009

Stimulus to bad behavior

Category: Congress,economy,societyharmonicminer @ 9:51 am

What gets rewarded is repeated. Everyone knows it, from parents to teachers to employers.

And disguised as a stimulus bill, the Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending

Both the Senate and House stimulus bills are Trojan horses that deliberately exploit anxiety about the current recession to conceal their destruction of the foundation of welfare reform and a massive expansion of the welfare system. Since its enactment in the mid-1990s, such reform has proven to be a very successful policy that dramatically reduced welfare dependency and child poverty. The fact that the stimulus proponents seek to conceal the bill’s massive permanent changes in welfare is a clear indication that they understand how unpopular these changes would be if the public became aware of them. Far from an exercise in “unprecedented transparency”–as President Obama claims–the stimulus bills are an example of unprecedented deception.

There is much more at the link above, including a brief review of the history of welfare reform, and an account of its successes. There is also a description of what the changes to welfare spending will be in the “stimulus bill”, and the Trojan Horse method Democrats have used to sneak it in.

Well worth reading.

Then check this out, and ask yourself why people who claim to be concerned about “social justice” don’t seem especially worried about creating conditions that encourage the proliferation of fatherless children, surely the single biggest predictor of everything from poverty to criminal behavior.

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Feb 10 2009

Hope and Change, part 2

Category: government,Obama,societyharmonicminer @ 10:05 am

Obama has appointed a committed “freedom of porn” advocate to the DOJ as Deputy Attorney General. This man’s track record is full of lovely highlights, detailed here, but here’s the gist:

…there’s another nominee with bigger disqualifiers than unpaid taxes.

Imagine. A veteran pornography defense attorney takes a top spot at the agency charged with enforcing the nation’s child pornography and obscenity laws.

And that’s what will happen if David G. Ogden is confirmed as Deputy Attorney General, the second in command at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

……..

Ogden isn’t just a lawyer who’s had a few unsavory clients. He’s devoted a substantial part of his career in defense of pornography for more than 20 years.

The last thing the Department of Justice needs is a deputy attorney general with a track record on behalf of those who’ve deluged America with pornography and against the federal laws he would be sworn to enforce.

Read it all at the link. It’s simply chilling, and more than a bit repellent.

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Feb 03 2009

Spielberg, where are you?

Category: religion,Russia,societyharmonicminer @ 10:06 am

In American film, religious figures are mocked, accused of every conceivable crime and misdeed, and generally presented as being just below used car salesmen in moral character.  (Pretty much the only celluloid life-form lower than a priest or minister is a Pentagon General.)   But a Russian film producer apparently disagrees.

A Russian TV producer said on Thursday he was launching a “There is God” advertising campaign in London to counter atheist posters that were displayed on buses in January.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) raised 140,000 pounds ($200,000) to place slogans reading “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” on 800 buses. Religious organizations and believers organized protests, but advertising regulators said it was not in conflict with any laws.

….Russian TV producer, Alexander Korobko, …signed a contract with CBS Outdoor to put “There is God” posters on 25 London double-deckers from March 9. The posters will have photographs of a Russian monastery on them.

So, the question:  can anyone name a Hollywood producer who is actually funding public service messages in favor of belief in God?

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Jan 31 2009

Lotsa British students of communism

Category: politics,societyharmonicminer @ 10:20 am

Satisfying his natural curiosity about how his excellent book, Liberal Fascism, is doing in Britain, Jonah Goldberg discovered that his book is only number TWO in the “political science and ideology” category.

Number ONE is  The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.

Hmmm

This would be the crypto-commies re-invigorating themselves before taking on the Islamic invasion of Britain?

Or maybe it’s the Islamic invaders buying the book, so they can know their enemy.  Their former enemy, anyway.

Or it’s the usual dutiful American foreign exchange students taking a political science class from some aging former denizen of Yorkshire at some once-great institution like Oxford or Cambridge (now living on their reputations, mostly), who thinks what Marx thought actually matters anymore, and whose American students are too stupid not to just look up the short version on Wikipedia.

Or it’s all the Russian expats, yearning for the good old days when you could torture someone in the Lubyanka (makes Abu Ghraib look like a meeting of the Women’s Missionary Society…  and you probably don’t even know what it is/was…..  and didn’t when the Soviets were still around, either) without having to look over your shoulder for a western reporter.  (Those days are coming back, though…  good ideas always do, right?  Like plutonium seasoning in your food.)

I think the most likely explanation is far more prosaic.   Britain has taken on the EU’s ridiculous global warming fear-fantasy, and, demonstrating that intemperate public policy is usually invented in the north temperate zone, British bureaucratic wanna-be-apparatchiks are making firewood harder and harder to get.  All that nasty CO2, you know.

And really, really bad ideas burn very brightly, for a short period of time.

I wonder what the carbon offset is for an idea that killed at least 100 million people, conservatively estimated.

I also wonder when my copy of “The Audacity of Hope” is going to get here from half.com.  It’s cold around here.

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Jan 19 2009

Get ready to be sued by your shoes

Category: government,Obama,societyharmonicminer @ 9:53 am

In Iraq, it is a mark of great disrespect to hurl your shoes at someone, as George Bush learned first hand in a news conference.  In the brave new world of the “apostle of change” that we’ve just elected, you may get sued by the family members of your shoes for desecration of a corpse, as President Obama’s appointment of Cass Sunstein to “regulatory czar” will usher in a bright new day of animal rights. Here’s his opinion:

“[A]nimals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

This guy is nutty as a fruitcake, and a professor at Harvard Law School, two things that often go together. He wants to outlaw hunting, make us all vegans, ban the use of leather products, end medical animal testing that saves human lives, etc. I wish this was an exaggeration, but a short perusal of his book, Animal Rights, suggests otherwise.  Here’s a choice phrase from one of his gushing reviewers:  “a remarkably fresh collection of essays exploring our relationship–moral, legal, social, and epistemological–to nonhuman
animals.”  I guess that makes you just a “human animal.”  I don’t know about you, but to me anyone who even uses the phrase seems incompetent to have an opinion on the matter.  I don’t have an epistemological relationship with my dentist, let alone my daughter’s fish.

I guess when you talk to the animals enough, you start to think you are one.  I suppose that makes sense…  I have a dog who thinks she’s human.

More background here.

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Jan 17 2009

Marsalis on today’s music students

Category: education,higher education,music,societyamuzikman @ 9:39 am

Here are comments by a legendary musician on music students today. Some of his comments may apply to students in other areas, but it’s really about the music. Mild language warning.

Branford Marsalis’ take on students today

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Jan 11 2009

Mistaken identity

Category: humor,societyharmonicminer @ 9:17 am

So, a couple of weeks ago I was trying to sell my car.  I had arranged to meet with a potential buyer in a local shopping center, in front of an auto parts store.  The buyer never showed, though I stood around for about an hour waiting.

It was cold.  So I was really bundled up, walking around in front of the store, waiting for my no show buyer.  I am not a snappy dresser, and doubtless looked a bit mismatched.  I was listening to a book on my iPod (earbuds hidden under my aged stocking cap).  The book was “Orthodoxy” by G.K.Chesterton, a gem if there ever was one, and as is my wont when listening to books on audio, I stopped the iPod now and then and thought to myself a bit about what I’d heard.  And since Chesterton is often so pithy, sometimes I stopped and repeated the sentence I had just heard, for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Walking back and forth rather aimlessly, I wasn’t really watching all the people come and go, I just kept on eye on my car, figuring that if the buyer showed up, that’s where he’d go first.

A nice gentleman came up and said something I didn’t hear, what with the audio in my earbuds.  I didn’t even know he’d spoken to me at first.  I silenced the iPod, and looked at him, and he said, “Are you OK, sir?”, and then offered me a ten-dollar bill.  At first, I had the brief, crazy notion that he was my buyer, hoping I’d sell the car for a ten-spot.

Then it dawned on me that he thought I was a homeless person, and was offering me money.  I began to realize that he’d been watching me from inside the store, and probably saw me talking to myself, pace Chesterton.  Briefly, I was tempted to take the money, thank the man, and buy some hot chocolate.  I suspect I looked like an unemployed former Santa Claus imposter.

Better angels won the day, and I explained that I was trying to sell my car, pointed at the ancient Volvo wagon, and asked if he was interested, since my putative buyer never appeared.  The man’s expression became even more sympathetic (verging on pitying), and I realized he thought I was making it up, and didn’t really own the car.  I walked over and unlocked it, and the man’s face fell even further; he actually seemed to believe I was selling my home!

It took some time for me to convince him that I was not one of those well-spoken, educated homeless people, but was exactly what I said I was.  I’m not convinced now that I was totally successful.

We introduced ourselves, and it turns out he is a retired Marine officer teaching special ed in a local high school.  I expect I looked just about nothing like a music professor.  I’m still not sure he believed me.

While I do speak well and sound educated (no snickers, please), I’ve heard several homeless people who sound as good…  and he probably had, too.

He should have bought the car…  it was a good deal.

I really like hot chocolate.

I think I’ll see if I can use this whole narrative as a way to wangle a new jacket from my wife.

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