Why We Hate You

Here is the July, 2016 issue of "Dabiq", the magazine of ISIS, containing the article, "Why We Hate You".  They give six reasons,

1. First and foremost because you are disbelievers;
2. Because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted;
3. We hate atheists;
4. Because you mock Islam, insult Muhammad, burn the koran, and reject sharia;
5. Because you kill Muslims;
6. Because you invade Muslim lands.

They sum it up,

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

Now do you understand why the incomparable Wafa Sultan entitle her book, "A God Who Hates"?

Fyvush Finkel, May His Memory Be A Blessing

As the Quakers are wont to say, "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop," and when my father retired, he got ideas.  One of those ideas was that he would not pay the mortgage on his house.

"What do you mean, you're not paying the mortgage?" my mother remonstrated, but my father was adamant.  In the end, my mother divorced my father solely to extract the mortgage payments out of him.

My mother got much more in the divorce because my father was not well represented.  He was outraged when his lawyer asked for money.  "All he did was talk," my father complained.  As a doctor, I think he expected some kind of laying on of hands---not to be forthcoming from a lawyer.

No matter because nothing changed.  My parents divorced and they continued living together, my father paying rent to my mother.  Does that seem odd to you?  Truthfully, it seemed a bit odd to me, but in the Grand Scheme of things, how could I complain?  Other people's parents commit crimes, go to jail, etc.  Really serious shit.  My father paid rent to my mother.  So what?  I was pretty sure, however, that my family was unique in this matter.

Until one day, I turned on the TV and saw Fyvush Finkel singing I Was A Border By My Wife, and my head exploded.  There is a song about this?!  That can only mean other people do this, too.  Who are these other people?  Do the goyim do this, or only Jews?  Can you imagine the waves of relief and amazement that came over me?

Fyvush Finkel increased the sum of human happiness in his lifetime.  As his life was already a blessing, his memory certainly will be one, as well.

Environmental Love At The Rio Olympics

When I told my dad, way back in the 20th century, that my wife and I were travelling to Rio de Janeiro, he remembered reading about Rio, in his Romanian high school, as the most beautiful city in the world.  And it was easy to see why.

The geological setting is magical.  The colonial architecture of the old city is charming.  Together they made for an exquisite city.  There was much else to love about the place.

Of course, by the time we got there, Rio had long outgrown its original boundaries.  People have to live, after all, and there was a lot of modern construction.  Not as charming as the colonial architecture, but not terrible.  That was some years ago.  So these days, with all the reportage on the Olympic Games, it is with some personal pain that I read about the filth of Rio,
Rio's Terrible Pollution
Sewage In The Water

I am saddened but not surprised.  You see, from January, 2003 to January 2011, the president of Brazil was Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, a communist.  He was succeeded to the presidency by his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, a communist.  It goes without saying that the economic miracle of Brazil, this past decade, was all smoke and mirrors that is now rapidly dissolving into poverty and social unrest.  But the issue for now is the horrific pollution.

"C'mon, Ed," you say, "socialists love the environment."  G-d save us from such love.  Some of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the modern world were precipitated by socialists.

Consider the Aral Sea.  Once-upon-a-time one of the four largest lakes in the world, grand irrigation schemes under the Soviet Union diverted the feeder rivers, and the eastern basin of the Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert,
Before and After Satellite Images
High And Dry
Then, Chernobyl.  And other disasters.

Looking elsewhere, here is to laugh:  that Left-wing rag, The Daily Kos reports that China suffers massive, Unrepairable ecological disasters.
Of course, there is more, much more,
7 of the 10 most air polluted cities in the world are in China
and so on.

When I hear of socialists taking power, I first tremble for the people, as with Venezuela most recently.  But if I give any thought to it, I know environmental disasters cannot be far behind.

Henny Youngman and the Theory of No Voter Fraud

Experts, mainly of the leftist variety, tell us there is very little voter fraud and we should not worry our pretty little heads about it.  Can this be true?

One way to think about this is to ask the question:  is a vote valuable?  The question practically answers itself.  Of course a vote is valuable.  How do we know this?  Because contenders for public office spend huge sums of money to get votes.

Many local elections, like civil court judge in NYC, cost tens of thousands of dollars.  Statewide races typically cost several million dollars.  In anticipation of the 2016 elections, Charles Schumer, the senior U.S. senator, already has a war chest of nearly $24 million.  The 2016 presidential race will almost certainly cost more than $3 BBBillion.

Oh, of course your vote is not terribly valuable and nobody is going to pay you a lot of money for it.  But to conclude that all votes together  are not valuable is like saying money is not valuable because a $1 bill is only worth, well, $1.  Many people would not cross the street to pick up a $1 bill off the sidewalk, but it would be absurd to conclude that money is not valuable.  In the same way, one vote may mean little, but all votes together are worth a whole lot, and people spend a lot of money to get them.

Valuable things are susceptible of being stolen.  You would not leave your wallet in some open public place, unattended.  You do not leave your car or house unlocked.  In most places, you wouldn't even leave your bicycle unlocked.  And if your money is not safely locked away in a bank, you have at least carefully hidden it in a mattress or some other safe place.

Why all the care with valuable things?  Because somebody is likely to steal them, if he can.  Valuable things get stolen, if you are not careful.  That's the way the world works.

So, to suggest that votes are not susceptible of being stolen is like saying that the laws of thermodynamics apply everywhere in the known universe, except Washington, D.C.  It is to suggest that all valuable things are susceptible of being stolen, except votes.  Well, why does that make sense?

One of the reasons votes are valuable is because they exist in the confluence of money and power.  People spend a lot of money to get votes because votes are the key to enormous power, and more money.  Just how do you think the Clintons made $34 million on government salaries?  And, it has long been observed that people who are greedy for political power are more avaricious and less scrupulous than people who are greedy merely for financial power.

Consequently, to suppose there is no voter fraud is to believe that, unlike all other human beings, especially unscrupulous people who are greedy for political power are less likely to steal valuable things.  I think not.

Ah, but where's the proof people, especially leftists, will ask.  There does seem to be little proof of voter fraud.  This, too, is easy to understand.  The people who are responsible for guarding the vote are the people who are already winners inside the existing system.  Like the fox who guards the hen house, they have no incentive to find and stop voter fraud since they are the beneficiaries.  Voter fraud is working just fine for them, thanks.  Of course you will not find proof of voter fraud if you are not looking for it.

Perhaps you think I am being rather closed-minded about this, since I continue to believe in voter fraud despite a paucity (certainly not a complete absence) of proof.  Guilty as charged.  I put the idea of no voter fraud into the class of ideas I call "Henny Youngman Hypotheses."

Henny Youngman had a routine in which he would rush out on stage breathing heavily, he would mop his brow, and say, "I just flew in from Chicago, and boy!  Are my arms tired." And people laughed.

Why did people laugh?  Youngman was implying that he could flap his arms and fly like a bird.  What's so funny about that?  What if that were true?  The possibility of a man flying like a bird is so remote, nobody in his right mind is going to spend even a minute investigating the claim.  Some ideas are just not worth exploring.

That is just how I feel about the assertion that the vote does not need to be protected.  You would have to be some kind of gullible fool, or a Democrat, to take that seriously.

It's The Martians, Stupid

Every once in a while a curtain parts, a mask falls, a slip shows, and you catch a glimpse of inner works.

I remember one such moment, many years ago at the dawn of "Nightline", the then innovative late evening news show on the ABC TV network.  Ted Koppel was trying to get his guest to explain some technical point in a certain way but was getting no satisfaction.  The guest simply did not understand how he was to answer.  Finally, an exasperated Koppel blurted out, "How would you explain this to an 8th grader?"  A revealing comment.

Most public discourse works at a very low intellectual level.  For example, during my childhood, The New York Times was famously written at the 8th grade reading level, and this self-styled newspaper of record is supposed to be for educated adults.  It is a mark of our degenerate age that these days the NY Times is said to be written at the 10th grade reading level.  This is consonant with other measures of school effectiveness that document a two grade level decline from approximately 1985 to 2000 (I tremble to think what has transpired since then).

And if you still think I overstate my case, I invite you to read some of the ethnic papers, like the "NY Post" or---brace yourself---"The Amsterdam News".  During the Tawana Brawley Hoax, circa 1990, I made a point of regularly reading both "The Amsterdam News" and the now defunct "City Sun" (not to be confused with the "NY Sun" newspaper).  Try a newspaper like those, for a bit, and you will understand everything there is to understand about my pessimism regarding American democracy.

So, last night I heard a snippet of a radio broadcast in which David Brooks, the putative conservative commentator for the NY Times, was remarking upon the Democratic Party convention.  If a Martian had observed both Democratic and Republican conventions, Brooks was saying, he would suppose that the Democrats are the more patriotic party.

What an odd comment, I thought.  Why a Martian?  The only sense I can make of this observation is that Brooks is assuming that a Martian does not bring with him any intellectual baggage.  Put another way, a Martian, if such a creature existed, would not actually know anything about the political parties or, indeed, anything about American society or American history.

And that, I think, reveals much.  Modern American politics is a Theater of The Absurd for an ignorant electorate.  If you have a better explanation for how we have come to this:  Donald Trump leading the Republican Party and---it's hard to write this---Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic Party, I would dearly love to hear it.

And if you do not have a better explanation, then you must accept Brooks's comment as yet more evidence for the end of democracy as we have known it.

The NY Times Comes Out of The Closet (again)

Socialists are exquisitely attuned to history.  When Donald Trump declared that his foreign and trade policies will be organized around the principle of "America First", the Left was quick to pounce, making the connection between Trump and the "notorious" America First Committee.  Started in 1940, the AFC was isolationist (anti-globalist, in modern parlance) and, by association with Charles Lindbergh, faintly racist and White Supremacist, if not actually sympathetic to the Nazi cause.  This was an arcane connection even I did not make, and I am more historically literate than the average American (a very low bar, so I am hardly bragging).  So, what are we to make of the NY Times editorial, "President Obama and the Long March"?

Does the phrase, "Long March", sound familiar to you?  It should.  Google "Long March" and the very first item to pop up, and rightly so, is the Wikipedia article about the heroic military retreat of the Red Army, under Mao Zedong.  Passing through some of the most difficult terrain in China, over the course of a year Mao took his army more than 9,0000 kilometers (about 5,400 miles) to evade the Kuomintang, leave China to the tender mercies of Imperial Japan, and remain intact to fight, not the Japanese of course, but the Nationalists after they had been severely weakened in their mortal struggle with Japan.  Rather than find common cause with the Nationalists to defend China, Mao sacrificed millions of his countrymen in order to enhance his ability to take over China after the Western powers defeated Japan (with no help from him).

For a generation afterwards, most of the power hierarchy of Maoist China was populated by the likes of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, comrades of Mao in that arduous enterprise.

The next time we encounter the phrase "Long March" is with Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).  Gramsci developed the theory of "Cultural Hegemony", later aptly nicknamed "The Long March Through The Institutions".  Probably the most realistic and practical thinker among the socialists, Gramsci realized much earlier than his socialist friends that they will never win against society via a marxist-style, mano-a-mano Class Struggle.  Rather, the right strategy is that of the Glyptapanteles wasp, which lays her eggs inside the body of a paralyzed but still living caterpillar.  Over a brief time, the eggs hatch and the wasp larvae eat their way out of the caterpillar, leaving behind a dead husk.

In other words, forget about Class Struggle.  Rather, take over the schools, the universities, the government bureaucracies and other appointed positions of public service.  Inject yourself into the institutions and, in this way, gradually transmogrify society into socialism.

How real is the Democratic Party's connection to Antonio Gramsci?  Here is Anita Dunn, erstwhile communications director for Barack, telling us that one of her favorite political philosophers is the mass murder Mao Zedong.  Van Jones, Barack's erstwhile Green Jobs Tsar is a self-avowed communist.  For all his protestations to the contrary, Barack speaks in the lingo of socialism (redistribution, positive rights, radical transformation).  And, finally (but not exclusively), one of the most important figures in recent Democratic Party politics is the socialist Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump's connection to the America First Committee is illusory.  Barack Obama's and the NY Times' connection to Karl Marx is not.

The Sad Turkish Military Coup

Normally, Ralph Peters is a man well worth paying close attention to.  I tremblingly disagree with him regarding the recently attempted coup d'etat in Turkey.  Sort of.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was keen to drag Turkey into the 20th century by converting it into a secular state.  And, since the fall of the Ottoman Sultanate, around 1923, the army had been the guarantor of Turkish secularism.  Not of democracy, of secularism.  With the creeping Islamification of Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, many people, myself included, looked upon Friday's coup with great hope.  Ralph Peters trenchantly explains this hope

No matter what, the coup was never going to be about democracy, Erdogan is a democratically elected president  It might have been about secularism.  However, I had misgivings from the beginning.

First of all, the Turkish army of today is not the Turkish army of old.  Erdogan has been in power since about 2003, and he has had a lot time to purge the army of much of its professional, secular leadership.  Peters rather colorfully illustrates the incompetence of the remaining officer corp in describing the poorly worked out strategy of the rebellious leaders.

Second, since the army had been substantially, if not completely, purged, who was behind the coup?  Erdogan, himself, seems to think it is one Fethullah Gulen, a rather secretive and sinister Muslim cleric who had strong influence in the army before he sought refuge in the U.S.  It seems he still had influence.

The point---and this is where I differ with Ralph Peters---is that if Gullen was the coup mastermind, then there never was any hope for the restoration of secularism.  I don't know anything about Gullen, but his motivation may well be that Erdogan is not Muslim enough.  At any rate, it is impossible that he is a champion of secularism.

Finally, the purge of the professional officers, years before, may explain a lot about Turkey, and much of the recent commentary may be mostly nonsense if the commentators do not take this into account.  For example, there has been a lot of commentary on Turkey's unwillingness to mix it up with ISIS.  The implication is that Turkey is sympathetic to ISIS.

I doubt it.  First of all, Turks have no great love for Arabs, and Turkey is straining under a staggering refugee crisis within its own borders.  There are nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.  This cannot be easy for anyone, especially Turkey.  Turkey could very quickly solve their refugee problem by killing ISIS.

In principle, an armored division of the Turkish army should be able to roll up ISIS like a carpet.  Why don't they do it?  I think they don't do it because they can't.  The first thing an army loses, when they lose their professional officers, is mobility.  I think the Turks are scared to death of sending a division into Syria.  At best, it would get bogged down.  At worst, it might get defeated, and that would be very bad.

Furthermore, the Turkish army has not fought a battle-hardened foe since WW I.  They might very well come off second best in a fire fight with ISIS.  Just this happened to China, for example, when they mixed it up with Vietnam in 1979.  You can look this up yourself.  In brief, massive China was going to teach puny Vietnam a lesson for their invasion of Cambodia.  In fact, the Chinese got their noses punched comprehensively.  You see, the Chinese army exists mainly on paper.  They, too, had not had a real fight since the Korean War, and they were rusty.  The Vietnamese, on the other hand, were tough, well organized, and thoroughly hardened by a generation of fighting with first the French and then the Americans.

Finally, we have seen what happens when you replace professional officers with religious zealots and political sycophants.  The Iranian army, under the Shah, was once thought to be the most professional and effective force in the greater Middle East.  They were armed and trained by the Americans.

However, the Ayatollahs took over in 1979.  Not only did they purge much of the officer corp (it's the old trust thing), but they also installed the Muslim equivalent of the old, Soviet-style political commissars.  Every professional officer had a religious dopple-ganger second guessing his motives and his operational plans.

The Iraqi army was similarly hobbled, though not out of religious zealotry.  Saddam feared competent military officers with "a lean and hungry look".  In other words, he feared intelligent men with initiative, and got rid of them aggressively.

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 would have been hilarious if it were not so grisly.  Both sides were completely incapable of tactical movement, or effective logistics, or coordination between land, sea, and air elements of their forces,  They were almost immediately reduced to two hulking cavemen taking turns bashing each other's brains out with clubs.  You would have to read some of the details to get a real sense of the bathos and the horror of it all.   (Boys armed with wooden rifles, or nothing at all, marching through minefields, against Iraqi counter-fire, to clear the way for the Revolutionary Guards.  They were all massacred.  Iran lost nearly a million young men in that war.  That is why Iran was quiescent for a generation.)

It is not clear to me that the Turks would fair any better against ISIS than Iran against Iraq (or vice versa).  And now, with a purge that cuts even deeper into the muscle of the Turkish army, I think the Turks have lost all military effectiveness.  I think you can forget about the Turks ever mixing it up with ISIS, into the foreseeable future.  Whether or not they want to fight ISIS is debatable, but I am sure they cannot do it.