Friday, June 21, 2013

QUOTE OF THE DAY.

By Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics, George Mason University.


 photo walterwilliams_zps49480cc4.jpeg"Here’s Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits."


Got that, schtoopid leftards?



MFBB.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

FORMER GEERT WILDERS ALLY CONVERTS TO RELIGION OF PISS AKA ISLAM.

From the Nou breekt mijn klomp Department (Dutch equivalent of Well I'll be damned). Mark Steyn on a most peculiar conversion, that of Arnoud van Doorn, formerly of Geert Wilders' PVV party and one of the producers of Wilders' movie Fitna.

Yes, Steyn again. I do have some original material in the scaffolds but the man beats me to it every time.


Four years ago in this space, I was anticipating an increase in Islamic-conversion rates in the likes of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:

Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.

What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's anti-Islamic film Fitna, announced that he'd converted to Islam — or "accepted Islam," as they say — and made a pilgrimage to Medina to repent and ask for Allah's forgiveness. There's a lot of it about. Tony Blair's sister-in-law has converted. So has Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who was touched by the way the detainees "wake up each day and smile," and Katherine Russell, the "all-American girl" from Rhode Island who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whose parents were "very supportive" of their daughter's decision to "accept Islam" and retreat beneath the veil and stayed "very supportive" right up until their son-in-law blew up the Boston Marathon. The two men who butchered Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby on the streets of London were also converts, British-born sons of Nigerian Christians. Captured by the cameras with, literally, blood on their hands, they reminded me of another convert, the British comedian Omar Brooks. Mr. Brooks's best-known surefire side-splitting showstopping gag is that the attacks on the World Trade Center "changed many people's lives." Comic pause. "Especially those inside." It brought the house down!

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A few years back, in a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, he was asked what Mohammed's message to non-believers was and replied, with disarming honesty, "I come to slaughter all of you. . . . We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy." I thought of Omar Brooks for the first time in years as I watched his two blood-soaked coreligionists stagger about Wellington Street bragging about what they had done in the name of "almighty Allah." I wouldn't have been surprised to see them drinking blood had the constabulary taken any longer and left them with another 20 minutes to show off for the cameras. On the other hand, the Medway Messenger in Kent reported a prompt police response to an outbreak of octogenarian Islamophobia:

"An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers."

Oh. That's helpful. If you yell at a mosque, the coppers are already inside. If you deface a London war memorial with Islamic slogans, there's none in sight, and even the ubiquitous British CCTV cameras are apparently of no use in identifying the perpetrators. The day after Drummer Rigby's murder, a march in support of the "Help for Heroes" military charity ended in a five-hour standoff between marchers and police, ending with the arrest of Lee Cousins for "mocking the Islamic prayer ritual" by getting down on his hands and knees outside the pub. He was fined 600 pounds — or just shy of a thousand bucks.

"Terrorism's great achievement isn't hijacking jetliners, but hijacking the debate," wrote George Jonas in Canada's National Post. "Successful terrorism persuades the terror-stricken that he's conscience-stricken." Which is why, in the decade after 9/11, Western governments ramped up Islamic immigration instead of slowing it to a trickle; and their citizens were "very supportive" of those who converted in record numbers, instead of mourning the wholesale abandonment of their inheritance; and their community-outreach enforcers dragged those who disrespected the Prophet into court for ever more footling infractions, instead of obliging Islam to adjust to core Western values like freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Islamic self-segregation intensified. The "War on Terror" was always an evasion, for "terror" doesn't easily encompass, say, demands for segregated swimming sessions or even the nightly car burnings in Stockholm. It does, however, accurately capture the response of Sweden's "center-right" government, bleating about doing more to alleviate "social exclusion." We now expect European leaders to sound like battered wives — like Katherine Tsarnaev.

Sweden's foreign-born (i.e., overwhelmingly Muslim) population has increased from 10 percent to 15 in the last decade. Where will it be a decade hence? The Canadian author Doug Saunders, refuting theories of a "Muslim tide," says that Europe's Islamic population will peak at about 10 percent, and more likely stabilize around 7. Right now, 10 percent of Britons under 25 are already Muslim, which means one day Britain will be 10 percent Muslim — at least. And the octogenarians who yell outside the mosque will be gone.

And then there will be silence, and submission.



Of course, the mentally unstable, the ignorant, and those with fatal flaws in character will convert first.


MFBB.

Monday, June 17, 2013

MARK STEYN ON THE PC INSANITY DISPLAYED BY THE BOSTON POLICE, HAPPILY FUNDED BY THE DHS.

Mark Steyn is outdoing himself these days providing smack in your face insight. From National Review:


"A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for the National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology The Face of the Tiger. It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected. The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long-ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-aged latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy....

... Along the way, alas, Secretary Mineta’s dream of a world in which “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach” and “a Muslim young man” are subject to equal scrutiny has not come to pass. The Vero Beach gran’ma gets a lot more attention than the guy from the Yemeni madrassah, especially if she’s made the mistake of attending a tea-party meeting or two. The other day the Boston Globe ran a story on how the city’s police and other agencies had spent months planning a big training exercise for last weekend involving terrorists planting bombs hidden in backpacks left downtown. Unfortunately, the Marathon bombers preempted them, and turned the coppers’ hypothetical scenario into bloody reality.

What a freaky coincidence, eh? But it’s the differences between the simulation and the actual event that are revealing. In humdrum reality, the Boston bombers were Chechen Muslim brothers with ties to incendiary imams and jihadist groups in Dagestan. In the far more exciting Boston Police fantasy, the bombers were a group of right-wing militiamen called “Free America Citizens,” a name so suspicious (involving as it does the words “free,” “America,” and “citizens”) that it can only have been leaked to them by the IRS. What fun the law-enforcement community in Massachusetts had embroidering their hypothetical scenario: The “Free America Citizens” terrorists even had their own little logo — a skull’s head with an Uncle Sam hat. Ooh, scary! The Boston PD graphics department certainly knocked themselves out on that.


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Meanwhile, back in the real world, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was training in Dagestan, posting terrorist videos on YouTube, and getting fingered by the Russians to the FBI. Who did nothing.

If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.

We’re told that universal surveillance has prevented all kinds of atrocities we can never hear about — an answer straight out of Orwell. Yet oddly, in the ones we do hear about, the perps are hiding in plain sight (Major Hasan with “Soldier of Allah” on his business card), the intelligence services do nothing (the Pantybomber known to the CIA but still permitted to board the plane), and the digital superstate is useless (the Tsarnaev photo rang no bells with the facial-recognition software, but was identified by friends who saw it on TV).

And thus, the bozo leviathan blunders on. Big Politically Correct Brother sees everything . . . and nothing."



Watch and weep:




Dante Alighieri should have provided an Extra Hell Layer in Inferno for the Left.



MFBB.