Breathtaking Genocidal Evil

You know, watching the total meltdown of political civility that followed the 9/11 massacre has been a trial for all of us. We hear each side accuse the other of being monsters, of being totally destructive abusers of the truth who have no grounds whatsoever of being taken seriously.... blah blah blah blah.

Those who think that global warming is nonsense are referred to as "deniers", as if they were the same sort of individual who denies that the Holocaust occurred. One leading columnist posited this in 2007 and has not yet withdrawn it.

Those Republicans who think that the U.S. government should not be in the health care business are compared to slaveowners and those resisting desegregation .

Those who think that Sarah Palin has something useful to say and to stand for are derided as redneck morons, and Sarah herself degraded and subjected to what has been called almost a public sexual assault: "wilding".

It is, to quote the Squire of Gothos, bad bad craziness.

But it is not often you see explicit and shameless calls for genocide in print.

As here, where one Diane Francis of the Canadian site financialpost.com calls for killing children who are like, oh, me.

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

...None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy.

I hereby formally name Diane Francis of FinancialPost.com as an advocate of mass murder (because that is what the one-child policy implies and requires--the involuntary killing of all children after the first).

She's a bitch, too.

Tattered Remnants #021: Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens

LET THOSE WHO HAVE EARS, HEAR - JEANNIE ROUSSEAU

"What I did was so little." - Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, 1998

Earlier in this series I praised the highly morally questionable work of Richard Sorge, the German communist who very probably saved the Western world through his actions as a spy on behalf of the Soviet Union.

This is the story of a much different kind of spy.

French. Multilingual. Brilliant. Charming. Gutsy. A photographic memory. A superhuman ability to generate plausible falsehoods in defense of her friends in the face of the enemy. The toughness to survive years in Nazi concentration camps.

And, my God, was she beautiful.

The perfect spy. And since she acted in defense of her nation against an invasive enemy, a much less ambiguous character than Mr. Sorge.

Her name during the war was Jeannie Rousseau (later, de Clarens) and, while she may not have saved the Western world from Naziism single-handedly, she certainly played a key role in saving many tens of thousands of lives in London and elsewhere from being blown to bits by Nazi rockets.

Her story was told in 1998 in one of those Sunday-special-section articles in the Washington Post and it is a story that is well worthy of retelling.

Her father was a soldier in the Great War. After he survived to the end–as only half of all French men his age succeeded in doing – he became a diplomat and, later, mayor of one of Paris's most fashionable arondissements, the 17th.

When Paris fell in 1940, and the mythical Rick Blaine was fleeing on the last train to Marsailles, Jeannie's very real family were themselves fleeing: to Brittany, the westernmost point of France, where, they thought, the Germans would leave them in peace.

They had not figured on the Battle of Britain. Or "Operation Sea Lion," the planned Nazi invasion of the British homeland. German soldiers soon swarmed the region and began barking orders. Local officials became desperate for someone to translate the needs and commands of the local military commanders to them. Jeannie volunteered.

Twenty-one years old, very presentable, personable, and with almost-native German linguistic abilities, she was perfect for her role. At a time when most German military forces still wanted to be liked by the conquered, the German officers would have found her almost irresistible-–had she not placed herself physically off limits to them. "I never played Mata Hari games," she said.

Nevertheless, lonely German officers in remote cafes in the presence of a lovely French maiden tended to talk. And Jeannie proved a rapt listener.

She began to take notes and pass them along to the underground. German spies in Britain noted that the intelligence coming to England from her region was excellent. The local German authorities in Brittany started adding two and two.

The Gestapo arrested her and threw her into the Rennes prison on suspicion of being a spy. Her friends among the German officers came to her defense; they could not believe she was spying (or that they had given her so much information). And so –- remember this was still early in the war, when the Germans sometimes still kept a pretense of obeying the rule of law -– they decided there was insufficient evidence to charge her, and she was released.

The Germans, however, ordered her to leave the coastlands–an order that she was more than pleased to obey. She returned to Paris, and found a job with the local equivalent of the industrial chamber of commerce, and burrowed in.

Within weeks, in a scene right out of a Hollywood spy movie, she encountered an old teacher on a train one evening. A quiet conversation, an invitation, and she was in contact once again with the French underground.

She was given her orders: hang out with the Germans, and .... listen.

And soon some of her old German "friends" from Brittany reappeared in Paris as well. And they introduced her to their friends. And they, to their friends. And so on.

By early 1943, she started hearing about something strange, new, fantastical. The Germans in the East were studying a new form of weaponry, a weapon that her friends chatted about endlessly. She began to hear words in German that she had never heard before–what were raketten?

She soon found out. She managed, through simple passive listening, and a God-given gift of a photographic aural memory, to obtain detailed and specific information on two programs being carried out on an island on the Baltic Sea. The island was Peenemünde, and the programs would become known to the world as the V-1 "Buzz Bomb" and the V-2 ballistic missile.

By mid 1943, she was able to assemble a significant amount of information on this program and transmit it to England: its import was recognized immediately by an alert analyst, Dr. R.V. Jones, and it reached Churchill within days.

Churchill took this information and, using it and certain key independent data (provided by two Polish slave laborers on the island itself whose names have been lost to history) ordered that the island be bombed.

In the course of the next year, four crippling bombing raids were carried out against Peenemünde, killing hundreds of workers and significantly delaying the rocket program. When the time came, Hitler was still able to reach London with his "Vengeance" weaponry, killing thousands, but the rocket program as it turned out was not nearly effective as he had hoped, or as it could have been.

(One of the great imponderables of history: what if the buzz bombs and rockets had been directed at the D-Day landings instead of London? And another: what if they had been armed, not with TNT, but with an atom bomb?)

Tens of thousands were killed by these primitive but for the time high-tech horror weapons, but the number could easily have been doubled, but for Jeannie Rousseau's remarkable ears -– and courage.

After Jeannie's report was received, the word went out from British intelligence: they wanted this woman in England for a debriefing. She was ordered, once more, to the Brittany coast to be evacuated.

Alas, she was betrayed and arrested the morning she was to be picked up by a British boat, and she was returned to prison.

Amazingly, however, in a mistake that in today's law enforcement world would likely never happen, she was not identified as the same "Jeannie Rousseau" who had been arrested as a spy in 1941. They had her listed under a different name, and as a result of the confusion she was able to survive.

Her experience in the camps that followed can be summarized: first sent to Ravensbrueck, where she performed menial labor, she was later sent to a labor camp in Eastern Germany, where she was able, through bluster, to avoid being put to work manufacturing munitions. She came down with tuberculosis, was returned somehow to Ravensbrueck, where she hid out until she was released at the end of the war.

She was starving, weighing little over 70 pounds. She would not have survived the camp but for the arrival of a Swedish Red Cross team shortly before the end of the war. She was evacuated to Sweden and slowly recovered.

She returned to France in 1946, where she married a survivor of Auschwitz. She continued to use her linguistic skills over the course of the following years, working for the United Nations and other international organizations. She dodged publicity and refused to talk to reporters.

On October 27, 1993, at the age of 73, she was granted a special CIA citation for her war work, where, together with the analyst to whom she reported, R.V. Jones, she was honored for what the Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Wolsey, called her "embodiment" of the "ideal of human intelligence."

It is today almost 2010. She would be over 90 years old if she is still alive. And, aside from a dinner and an award in 1993, her sacrifice, suffering, devotion and bravery are largely forgotten to history.

Largely forgotten, yes. But not completely.

The Washington Post reporter that told her story asked her why she acted, and she "scoffed." "I just did it, that's all ... [i]t wasn't a choice. It was what you did. At the time, we all thought we would die. I don't understand the question. How could I not do it?"

The reporter put her bravery down to the fact that it was a "simple reflex.... It's a property of the central nervous system, not the higher brain."

For those who have ears to hear, however, the answer is much clearer: she acted as she did because she was one of the Tattered Remnant.

ADDENDUM: WERNER VON BRAUN

Let me take a moment to comment on a key player in this story: the developer of the Saturn 5 rocket, the man most responsible for our successful moon landing, the great and celebrated Dr. Werner von Braun.

Famous, oh so famous he was. Were it not for him we would not have beaten the Soviets to the moon–a key event in history, and (to his credit) one that may have helped avoid the Third World War. While he lived he was covered in accolades and awards, honored with titles and rank and world fame. When he died in 1977 at the age of 65, it was front page news around the world. And it was an event that this shameless teenaged (at the time) space geek followed closely, intently, for he was a hero: a scientist who acted and advanced human knowledge in its first step into space.

Yes, he became a United States Citizen. But he was granted such through a special dispensation, for he was also an SS-Sturbannführer, a key actor in one of history's great criminal conspiracies.

And remember also: his facility at Peenemünde was staffed by slave laborers; every rocket he flew for his Nazi masters was handmade by the kidnaped, the terrified, and the enforced. He was, in fact, a slave master.

He needn't have been. He did act bravely, to an extent, to save certain of his workers from being killed. He showed by doing that that he was not entirely lacking in moral courage. But he never let his moral courage get in the way of his commitment to completing the program. In short, it seems that he could have been one of the Remnant, but refused the commission.

For his efforts, however, thousands of his slaves died building the rockets: one estimate holds that for every rocket launched at England, six slave laborers died, possibly more than were harmed by the rockets' detonation over London. Twenty thousand laborers died, including 200 hanged for sabotage.

And do not forget: his rockets also killed innocent British civilians. The U.S. Air and Space Museum states that the V-2 killed 5,000 people in London. The V-1 buzz bombs killed about the same number.

And also: the very rockets that put us on the moon, which he built, could one day burn the cities of our enemies to ash. And cost us our own. (Do not forget that the first rocket built for the Soviet strategic rocket forces was the R-1, a direct copy of the V-2; while no longer Soviet, those rockets are still aimed at us.)

Yes, Werner von Braun was a great man. But he was also a technological murderer and a great war criminal, a willing instrument of grave evil. For all his achievements and honors, the bitter and mocking lyric of Tom Lehrer forever, and most justly, mars his memory: "'Vanz ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat's not my department!' says Werner von Braun."

He was the very embodiment of the amoral mad scientist, a Viktor Frankenstein of space.

Remember his scientific achievements, which were great. But when so remembering him, do not forget for a moment that he was also a moral monster, less than the dust beneath the chariot wheels of the forgotten Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens.

----

Source: This retelling of Jeannie's story is derived from "After Five Decades, a Spy Tells Her Tale." by David Ignatius, which appeared in the Washington Post, 28 Dec. 1998). The full text can be found here.

Tattered Remnants #020: J Harlan Bretz

A Flood of Evidence: J Harlan Bretz

Not all of the Tattered Remnant die heroic deaths. Sometimes they live the Death of a Thousand Cuts, as when their contributions or discoveries are mocked and derided by those having a vested interest in established orthodoxies.

As has become clear in recent days from the Climategate scandal, sometimes scientists fight very dirty in order to preserve established opinion, particularly when their income is dependent on their maintaining their world view. (As Upton Sinclair put it: "Nothing is harder than to make a man understand something when his job depends on his misunderstanding it.")

This entry is about a man who stood up to an entire scientific establishment and suffered exile and low regard for decades for daring to hold on to a theory against established opinion.

In Eastern Washington State there is a great, dramatic, dry, scraped area known as the Channeled Scablands. The Scablands contain some of North America's most astounding and mysterious land forms: a dry waterfall ten times the size of Niagara, potholes the size of stadiums, huge boulders made up of rocks having no local origin, stunning cliffs and dry valleys hundreds of miles from the nearest river or even glacier action.

For decades, scientists had absolutely no clue how any of these lands may have been formed.

There was no theory that made the slightest sense that would explain them. Under then-extant established theory, the Scablands would have to have been formed slowly, gradually, over thousands, millions or billions of years. It was clear that some sort of water action must have formed the Scablands, but ... what water? River water? The nearest river was 50 miles south of the extent of the Scablands and there was no evidence that the river had ever flowed through the regions.

There were some features suggesting glacial action, in particular the "Erratics"–huge granite boulders, some more than 100 tons, which would have been deposited by glaciers onto the landscape which had no granite in the ground locally. Problem here is that the Scablands are more than 200 miles south of where scientists were certain was the furthest southern reach of the Canadian glaciers in any of the most recent ice ages.

It made a pretty problem.

Enter J Harlan Bretz–the 'J' had no period behind it, and, Bretz being a famous curmudgeon, God help you if you added one and he found out about it.

Bretz started out as a high school biology teacher and semi-amateur geologist, eventually obtained a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago. He spent thirty or forty years walking the Scablands taking measurements and samples, and it became clear to him that this huge geological region was formed through a particular catastrophe--a great megaflood--and not through long term erosion and a slow natural formation.

Unfortunately, the entire geological world at the time was married to a concept called gradualism--the idea that all geographical forms in the world, without exception, were formed through slow erosion and continental forces and not through fast, catastropic action, and particularly not through a flood! (How biblical! Which is to say, how unacceptable! - for scientists then as now tend to be so allergic to Biblical cosmology that they will go out of their way to suppress any theory that even smells of Biblical imagery.)

But back then, in 1927, the thought that a single catastrophe could form a huge geological feature was heretical. They called Bretz in to present his views at an open forum, where they deliberately lined up a half dozen high priests of gradualism to rub him out.

Bretz was relegated to the outer edges of science and for decades was thought of as a nutcase with discredited views. His appearance in Washington, DC in support of his theory in 1927 essentially cost him any chance of being hired by a major university or being taken the slightest bit seriously as a theorist.

The primary attack on his theory was that, at the time, Bretz offered no explanation as to where such a huge flood of water had come from. And a huge flood it was – imagine a great flow of water equal to half the water in Lake Michigan passing in a few days time from stem to stern, from the entry waters in the east to the Pacific Ocean to the west. Such a huge steam-roller of water, a wall of water a half mile high, could tear out everything in its path!

But where did that water come from? There were no rivers or streams with anything near the volume required; the Great Lakes were too far to the west, and there was no mechanism, even volcanic eruption, that could have melted that volume of water quickly enough for such devastation to occur. Bretz himself did not know, and when challenged, he simply pointed to the evidence that the flood had occurred, stating that that should have been enough. Finding the waters was not his task.

But there was one man who knew–an employee of the United States Geological Service, there at the conference to observe, but not to participate. But he leaned over and whispered to the man sitting next to him and said: "I know where Bretz's flood came from."

As it developed, this man - Joseph T. Pardee, or "J.T." as he was known - had the key to Bretz's mystery. For Pardee was the leading authority on "Glacial Lake Missoula."

Once in ages past, certain rivers in Montana - some 250 miles to the east of the Scablands - had formed with the early melting of the last glaciers. Their runoff, however, was blocked by the glaciers themselves–great ice plugs prevented the rivers from draining naturally. The waters backed up, forming what geologists now call Glacial Lake Missoula, an immense lake that rose a thousand feet above the current surface. What is now a medium sized city in the middle of Montana was then the bottom of a huge lake, deeper than Lake Superior and with a volume of water of some 5 billion cubic meters.

And one day that ice dam broke.

It is now known that the region was formed exactly how Bretz thought: a megaflood caused by the draining of the lake in the course of a very few hours and days, scraping and gouging the plains of eastern Washington, taking everything with it, dumping it into the Pacific: a crush of water equal to one hundred times of all the river flows of all the world combined.

But while Pardee knew of this, he was limited to what he could tell to Bretz, as he was not an academic, but an employee of the United States Geological Survey: giving information to Bretz was the job of his supervisors, not him, and his supervisors were present at that very meeting making very clear that his, Bretz's, views were rawest heresy.

And so Bretz returned home from the conference where his work was derided and rejected by a committee of high priests of 'gradualism.' But he persisted, in spite of having his work derided, and he continued in darkness for years.

Time passed, technology advanced. Aircraft were made available to researchers, and the first arial photography of the area again and again bore out both that Glacial Lake Missoula had indeed existed, that the dam had given way, and that the flood into Eastern Washington State had occurred in exactly the way that Bretz described.

Only when satellite imagery and further research confirmed both the floodlike nature of the scablands from orbit and the existence of Galacial Lake Massoula did his work become validated.

Bretz was a lively and independent man; he fought his solo fight against geological orthodoxy for forty years. It was not until the early 1960s that his theories on the Scablands became generally accepted in the scientific community; it was not until 1970 when LANDSAT - the first geological photography satellite, using photographic technologies previously restricted to military use - first surveyed the Scablands from space, finally giving scientists the proof that they needed to establish that Bretz had been right all along.

His vision was, in the end, universally recognized. He was awarded geology's highest award in 1980, when he was 98 years old; he groused that it was a little late to benefit him as all of his enemies were dead. But he has now the highest scientific honor: J Harlan Bretz is now the father of planetary geology, and his discoveries are applicable to current research on the presence and absence of water on Mars.

If one of the attributes of the Tattered Remnant is the absolute commitment to stick to one's guns, no matter how much fire is received, then J Harlan Bretz surely qualifies for admission to the club, for his persistence in the face of, shall we say, the "inconvenient truths" of conventional scientific opinion.

Tiger Woods In Chinese

We were going to ignore the whole Tiger Woods car accident thingy with dignity, but ... this Youtube vid is a must see--and you don't even have to speak Chinese.

In fact, it may be better if you don't speak Chinese....



(Gracias: Lucianne.com)

Trelayne Prances Again

Charles Johnson, the Squire of Gothos, announces he's no longer one of the right, generating some random text in a highly random and nonlinear justification for his political opinions.

Frankly, I don't give a shit where he is in terms of left-or-right.

What makes him repugnant to all that is good and right is the fact that he lies.

He lies.

He lies like a rug. He lies like a dog. He lies like a leftist.

He strains out the gnats of bad behavior by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland seventy years ago yet swallows the camel that leftism is benign instead of genocidal.

Specifically, he and his goons think that it is perfectly acceptable to break faith with, and knowingly spread actionable falsehoods against, individuals with whom he disagrees.

He has no credibility and he has cut the throat of just about every individual who supported him excepting for a few brainless sycophants.

I do not say, farewell, Charles for you have been long gone. Rather, this:

You say, "I won’t be going over the cliff with them."

I say:

Your bones are already there at the bottom of the sea beneath the cliff, Charles, for the shark you jumped has long since eaten you.

On the American Kindermord (1973-????)

There was a madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

"Whither is God" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.

"But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all the suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breadth of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? ....

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is-there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed not too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed...."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out.

"I come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars require time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."

It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches, and sang his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism 125, 1886 (Tr. Walter Kaufmann)

This Twentieth Century, now ended, has been called the age of miracle and wonder. Yet, the written history of the twentieth century has been a catalogue of crime. No excess, no act of cruelty or hate, has been foregone. We have seen foul deeds on such a scale that words had to be invented to describe them: need we be reminded that the word "genocide" was not even found in the dictionary sixty years ago?

The seeds of all the atrocities of this twentieth century are seen in this parable which we have just read. The Death of God, which Nietzsche saw most clearly over a century ago, was indeed not the actual death of God Himself, for God is, of course, eternal, and cannot die. But it is clear that the death of God that he saw was the death of God in the hearts of the people and in the culture of what was once called Christendom. And all the horrors that have occurred in this accursed century, all the vile acts and cruel deeds, all the madness, have at their core the very cause that Nietzsche identified: the death of God, not in Heaven, but in our hearts and in our cultures. The death of God is truly the ejection of God from our lives.

God's Death left a cultural hole, a space, which longed to be filled, but was not. And the Evil One rode on a pale horse into the vacuum left by God's ejection, his name was Death, and Hell followed with him, a hell that has a name: Hemoclasm, the Flood of Blood.

We first saw the madness of the death of God here in the West in the mass hunger for colonies and conquest, which ended in waves of young men marching into bullets and shells and poison gas during the First World War: what was then called in Germany, das Kindermord, or "The Massacre of the Innocents." Children with rifles marched obediently to deaths of fire, steel and cannonry, leaving the civilized world for the seas of bloody mud that were the vasty fields of France, Russia, Italy and the Balkans.

The world gasped with relief at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, thinking the blood-flood was over: but it was not so.

In Russia, the new darkness took the name of Bolshevism, and later, Soviet Socialism. The crimes of that regime rang like a clarion through the world. They started with the brutal and vile killing of the Tsar's family, and carried over into waves of purges, civil war, and chaos. Then followed the idolatry of Lenin and then Stalin and his successors. The secret police. The show trials and purges. The destruction of the Church. The poverty. The informers. The Gulag.

In China, the madness took the name of Maoism. First came the Civil War that followed the Japanese occupation; then, The Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution and the rampage of the Red Guards. The one-child policy. The murder of orphans and the mass abortion of girl-children, leaving generations of men without wives. The tanks of Tienamen Square. And the lao-gai slave camps where toys are made for American children.

In Nazi Germany, the madness wore the face of Adolf Hitler. From him sprang fountains of unholiness: a war of conquest and aggression, barbarism, the bombing of cities, the burning of nations, the massacre of the weak and sick, and, at last, the eternal stench of Holocaust.

Lesser countries saw evils according to their stature. Mussolini. Tojo. Pol Pot. Kim Il Sung. Death. Oppression. Torture. Desolation.

We in America thought ourselves free of the darkness that fell. We never knew the cold hand of a midnight arrest. We never stared out our doors at howling mobs screaming for blood or chanting Seig Heil. We never knew the tanks of an enemy power outside our cities, nor did we ever see bombers vomit fire and death onto our streets. When the atom split and cities melted beneath its angry heat, it was by our hand that it was done. We never knew ourselves the hot breath of the firestorm.

We knew not the terror seen by other nations, and we thought ourselves virtuous.

We defeated the Nazis and Communists, and thought ourselves powerful.

We abolished Jim Crow, and thought ourselves just.

We went to church and thought ourselves pious.

America! In the words of the poet, "Were that all thy children were kind and natural!" But America, "thy gilt hath thee found out—ah! Guilt indeed!" In our love of money, of toys, of comfort, of fun, we have sold ourselves into something akin to slavery. We have betrayed ourselves for a foreign purse, and sold our sovereign wills to death and treachery—the death and treachery of the Culture of Death. Despite our outward appearance of justice, ours are revealed to be nests of hollow bosoms, as empty of the light of God as are those of our late opponents.

We looked upon the tyrannies of foreign governments and the atrocities they caused their people, and smugly gave ourselves the right to oppress and destroy those closest and most dependent on ourselves: the old, who now feel the cold wind of Dr. Kevorkian blowing through their hearts; the handicapped, who, though Not Dead Yet, are deemed worthy of precisely the same treatment given them by Hitler, and most profoundly, the unborn, the child, helpless and passive, awaiting birth.

Rome made a desert of Carthage, and called it peace. We have made a charnel house of the womb, and called it "choice."

Our Supreme Court, acting as a committee of prophets, decreed more than thirty-five years ago, in Roe v. Wade--without basis in law, justice, or morality--that there was no need to determine if the unborn were human—even at the very instant that they decreed that they were to be treated as if they were not. They committed what Justice White called an act of "pure judicial power"--the filthiest words in any judicial vocabulary--and rendered a decree, an ukaze, that stripped away the protection of the abortion laws.

And when finally called to account in the famous Casey decision, they could find no basis to continue than the refusal to change. We decreed it so in 1973, we decree it again in 1992, they said, preserving the violent and foul heart of Roe while eliminating all the excuses and legal reasonong that justified it. Roe has become, indeed, a "Potemkin village" of a ruling that cannot justify itself except by its own inertia.

And now, America has reached a nadir beyond compare in its history: a President of the United States has solemnly declared that the butchery of a child even as it is being born is a necessity, a right, a just thing. Imagine! A president who says that the act of infanticide in the birthing process is a good that must be preserved at any cost. Even a living child newly born can be killed, if aborted: so decrees our President.

President Obama's abandonment of the helpless will be remembered: a "compassionate" indifference in the face of an obscene violence. God shall hold you to account, Mr. President. He is steadfast to the truth in a way you do not see. Please, in the name of the Almighty, repent! And save the children.

What has happened to this, the land of the free and the home of the brave? Such a thing--abortion unto the 40th week, or even later!--is legal nowhere else in the world, not even in the Netherlands, or even China. What has become of our nation?

Abortion has replaced slavery as America's peculiar institution. Like slavery, it only continues through the use of euphemism and cant. Like slavery, it has become engrained into our economy and our attitudes. Like slavery, it unjustly garners and preserves wealth on behalf of those who avail themselves of it. Like slavery, the alternative terrifies, and a conspiracy of silence envelops its enemies.

And like slavery, it is doomed to extinction. But at what price? At what price?

We would like to be optimistic of the future, as faithful as Ronald Reagan in the essential goodness of the American people. But as Daniel Webster learned from the Devil, America has always had a dark lining to her silver cloud, and the Devil no foreign prince to our nation. Abraham Lincoln knew this: in perhaps the darkest and most portentous words ever spoken by an American president, he spoke of the consequences of slavery at the close of his second inaugural address:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, is to be paid by one drawn with the sword, as was said more than 3000 years ago so it still must be said: 'The judgments of the Lord are good and righteous altogether.'

In light of that, let us also remember another American president, Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just."

There are those who would call this warning a form of social terrorism. I say, nay: to warn a man that he is to walk into a minefield is not the same as placing the mines. To warn a man that he is driving toward the edge of a chasm is not to dig it. The minefield, or the chasm, are there, willy-nilly.

Nor do I say that one should take up arms or willingly participate in the sad and dark events to come: indeed, violence must be shunned by all people of good will. Nevertheless, given the astoundingly wide reach of the evil upon us -- fifty million dead unborn Americans, and another milliion or more per year, one baby in four -- it is inevitable that the God of History will one day sweep this wrongdoing from our culture.

But that sweep shall not be kindly, any more than the World Wars or the Civil War were kindly to those who saw them. Grand violence begets grand violence, and the clean sweep to come shall engulf the righteous and the unrighteous alike. History teaches that He is kindly, but He is just, and the grapes of His wrath are a bitter draft to the good and evil alike, the innocent and the guilty, the cynical aged and the bewildered young.

Let us take these as great and mighty warnings of the coming "grievous inquest of history." Let us repent and reform ourselves before it is too late. Let us reflect on these words—and tremble.

May the God who Lives bless—and save—America.

—Richard L. Kent
Founding Editor, Eutopia: A Lay Journal of Catholic Thought (1997-1998)
Former Deputy Political Advisor to the Commanding General, Multinational Division North, Tuzla, Bosnia (2000-2002)
= = = = = = = = =

This editorial was first published in 1998. It has been very lightly updated, as, alas, President Obama and President Clinton's stances on the subject vary almost not at all.

KY Census Hanging: It *was* Suicide.

AP reports: "authorities" say that the Census worker found hanged in Kentucky committed suicide, and was not murdered.

Evidence: two recently purchased life insurance policies with no-pay-for-suicide clauses, fighting cancer, and a $10K indemnity from the USG to his survivors, and the fact that it was apparently still physically possible for him to hang himself in the manner described.

God rest him and forgive him, but, also, thank God he wasn't murdered after all.

And I don't mind correcting the record. Although I DID say "let's not rush to judgment" as well as the possibility that it was more likely not political.

The 10 Ugliest Buildings In The World

Of all the ten, here follows my personal favorite, The Royal Ontario Museum ("ROM"):



Looks like it collapsed into the building next door--a visual archetectural joke.

"At least when the Germans bombed London they didn't leave anything behind that was uglier than rubble." - Charles, Prince of Wales, on modern archetecture

(the only thing he ever said worth remembering)

Lest We Forget 11/22/1963

"Will you kiss me?"

President Obama meets, er, the Chinese leadership.



Painfully, horribly funny. But, alas, NSFW.

If you're at work and want to see the exact same thing written by an economist instead of Saturday Night Live, read this. It won't make you laugh, however. Trust me on this.

Tattered Remnant #019: Irena Sendlerowa

AN ANGEL OF LIFE: IRENA SENDLEROWA (IRENE SENDLER)

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that Your Author continues to be annoyed that the 44th President of the United States was given, as a Christmas present, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, his sole accomplishment being that he was not George W. Bush. He is not the first to have that distinction; Jimmy Carter, in 2004, and Al Gore, in 2008, were also Peace Prize winners, and they, too, were most decidedly not George W. Bush. I'd like to discuss someone who was not named as the 2008 Nobel winner, just for comparison's sake.]

Irena Sendlerowa (known in English as "Irene Sendler") was a social worker in Poland who was among the tiny minority of Polish Catholics who took direct action to save those trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto from death at the hands of the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1944). Specifically, she headed a group of individuals known as Źegota; approximately two dozen of whom cooperated in the salvation of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

For her efforts, she was captured, tortured, interrogated, had all four limbs broken, and was sentenced to death–escaping only when her designated executioners secretly cooperated with the Polish underground to enable her escape.

Poland's long history of anti-Semitism has many bitter incidents to its history, long before the arrival of the German army in 1939. But through that long night of bigotry, many names shone who resisted the popular prejudice against the Jewish people. One of those resistors was Irena Sendlerowa.

Her Catholic father, a physician, died in 1917 of typhus, contracted from treating his Jewish patients, who were suffering from an epidemic in that dark time of the First World War. Others would have used that as an excuse to become anti-Semitic. Irena, on the other hand, remembered her father's sacrifice and became a Judeophile in a land where Jews were held as a bitterly hated and feared minority.

She first showed her courage during the so-called "Ghetto Bench" controversy when in university in the 1930s. In those dark days between the wars, Poland was a dictatorship, run by a shadowy coalition called Sancja ("Sanation" or "The Healing Coalition"), under the iron fisted rule of Jozef Pilsudski, the general who, holding various high political offices, was the true ruler of Poland until his death in 1935. After his death, "Sanation" split into three weak parties as Poland tried to come to terms with the growing Nazi threat to its west.

During this period, German anti-Semitism found a dark echo among students in Polish universities. This resulted, starting from the death of Pilsudski, with demands among nationalist students that Polish Jews in the universities be forced to sit apart from the main body of students, to the left hand of each lecture hall. Organized harassment of Jewish students by nationalists became an ongoing problem, particularly as those running the universities, jealous of their independent status, would not allow local law enforcement to intervene to stop the beatings. Starting in December 1935, Lwow Polytechnic instituted a policy whereby Jewish students were forced to sit in these "Ghetto Benches." Jewish–and Catholic–students who resisted the order were ordered suspended, then expelled from the Universities, in the name of "preventing violence."

Irena Sendlerowa thought the system unconscionable. As a result of her refusal to submit to this organized humiliation of a minority, she was suspended from Warsaw University.

For three years.

When the war broke out, she was working as a social worker in the countryside surrounding Warsaw, and watched in horror as the Germans began to segregate the Polish Jews–first by expelling professional Jews from their work and ordering all to wear a Star of David, then, more ominously, by forcing them to live in a segregated area, the Ghetto–as it developed, the largest in Europe.

The Germans coopted the local Polish city government bureaucracy, and Irena was given an assignment almost unique among Polish Catholics. She was ordered to enter the Ghetto on a regular basis to monitor the appearance of typhus and other diseases–not because the Germans cared if the Jews of the ghetto got sick (they didn't) but because they feared its spread to the civil populace in the rest of the city. She therefore had special papers allowing her to come and go freely in the Ghetto.

While she was inside its walls, she freely chose to wear the Star of David on her arm–both out of sympathy and solidarity for those confined there and out of a desire not to be conspicuous.

What nobody at the city bureaucracy had noticed was that Irena had made contact with the Polish underground.

The Polish underground during the war was actually many "undergrounds." Although most were associated with the Government-in-Exile in London, some were Communist controlled; furthermore, there was much internal division even among those under the London Poles. Most were dedicated to armed resistance against the Germans and thus had few resources (and even less desire) to assist the Jews caught in the grip of the Nazis.

Irena, however, joined a small group, known today as Źegota, the Committee of Aid to the Jews. As part of that group, she began to organize a quiet underground of some two dozen people to assist the Jews in their time of darkest need.

In 1941 and 1942, she commenced an organized effort to remove children from the Ghetto and place them in surrounding farms and families, with convents and parishes. While it was the policy of many to convert Jews in their care to Catholicism, she was determined that these children would retain the birthright of their identities once the war was over. Accordingly, she kept the names of the children she hid, the names of their families, and the places they were hidden in buried jars, so that when the war was over she would be able to reunite them with their birth families. Furthermore, she made specific promises to these children she cared for that they would one day, if possible, be reunited with their parents.

In 1943 the Gestapo captured her, tortured her severely, and sentenced her to death. She was taken to the woods outside Warsaw, where her executioners, possibly having been bribed by Źegota operatives, forewent shooting her, instead beat her severely and left her for almost-dead, breaking both her arms and legs. She was rescued by the Underground and assumed a new identity until the war was over. The Germans listed her among those executed.

The end of the war came and she kept her promise; she dug the jars up and used the information to try to reunite the children with their parents. Alas, however, the parents were almost all killed at Treblinka death camp.

Her work with Źegota was recognized by the new Communist regime: as an agent of the London based Government in Exile, she was declared an enemy of the new Polish state. During this post war period, she lost a child to miscarriage.

In 1965, however, Yad Vashem had obtained enough information to verify her status as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She was not allowed to travel to Israel to receive recognition for her wartime work until 1983.

It was only in her old age that her work began to gain the recognition it deserved. Again, Wikipedia:

In 2003 Pope John Paul II sent [Sendlerowa] a personal letter praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003 she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C..

On 14 March 2007 [Sendlerowa] was honored by Poland's Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elzbieta Ficowska, whom [Sendlerowa] had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile[, an international award recognizing adults who performed special acts of heroism on behalf of children] as the oldest recipient of the award.

In May 2009, Irena [Sendlerowa] was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award. The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognized for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena [Sendlerowa]’s heroic efforts that saved two and a half thousand Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland in World War Two.

In 1999, a group of high school students in Kansas were inspired to write and perform a play based on her life, entitled A Life In A Jar. This has led to the creation of The Irena Sendler Project, an ongoing educational program to teach children about the Holocaust. The funds raised by this project are being used to raise a statue to her memory in Warsaw in 2010, the 100th anniversary of her birth.

The best monument to her efforts remain the children she saved. Although they are not remembered as a collective in the way the Schindlerjuden are known, their numbers are even greater than Oskar's accomplishment. Generations will thrive because of her efforts.

Her work with the Warsaw Ghetto children was truly worthy of honor. I must admit, however, that I am almost more impressed with her willingness to resist the segregation of Jews in her university days. One small advantage of resisting tyranny such as Naziism is that the evil is naked and undeniable, with life and death and salvation and damnation all clearly at stake. But who would risk expulsion in this day and age from university studies over a matter of principle?

In the end, only one award, alas, eluded her. In spite of Lech Walensa's and others' enthusiastic support for her nomination that year, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize was granted to Albert Gore, Jr., a noted science fiction/fantasy film maker.

BRISTOL PALIN ARRESTED!!!!

Palin’s Daughter Arrested in Wasilla for Dangerous Drunk Driving

No.... really?

No. Really.

Good call, Publius. Since it was really Kerry's daughter arrested, ... well, we know what the Press had to say. 'Nuff said.

Over the Rainbow

Eva Cassidy (1963-1996).

Kitten on the Keys(tone Kop)

You Have Been Summoned... to Las Vegas!

Well-known anti-Muslim, ethnic-cleansing-advocating, pro-Mecca-bombing goon "Rodan" at blogmocracy.com (formerly LGF2) announces a convention for his blog members:

and the location I have chosen is Las Vegas.

No doubt having been summoned there by Randall Flagg.

Yeah, LGF1 has turned into a sewer. But so, in spite of certain individuals, has LGF2. Alas.

A plague on both their houses.

ADDENDUM: I'm adding this in response to Mr. Anonymous's comments below: Rodan is a vile genocide cheerleader, as revealed from things said to me personally on LGF2 during the brief time I participated there. For instance, in this discussion here, he actually praised the dead Serb war criminal Arkan and those who committed the genocide at Srebrenica as well as accusing me personally of causing 9/11 (see Comment #23).

Rodan is a slime and needs to be read out of civilized society. There are some at Blogmocracy/LGF2 who are fairly decent, but as long as they allow this obscene child to continue to rant in their name, I want nothing to do with it, by whatever name it goes by.

What the HAL??!?

As if Star Wars ripoffs weren't bad enough.

Tattered Remnant #018: Ignaz Semmelweis

CLEANLINESS AND GODLINESS: IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS (1818-1865)

Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who worked in Vienna in the mid 19th Century was a man who literally saved countless lives--by making a science out of something mothers have been saying for thousands of years.

Always wash your hands.

He should be remembered for two reasons: one, as an example of a courageous member of the Remnant, standing against established opinion; secondly, as an example of someone who, though absolutely and utterly right, might have made a bit more impression if he had been just a little more politic in what he had to say.

In 1846, Dr. Semmelweis was the Assistant (a title meaning, roughly, Chief of Surgery) in one of Vienna's finest hospitals. Vienna, then as now, had a small problem with infanticide that nobody really wanted to talk about. Since poor women lacking husbands were essentially rejected by society, the abandonment and death of newborns was a horrific, ongoing problem. Accordingly, those hospitals in place in Vienna opened special clinics that treated poor women who were expecting children. The fees were paid by voluntary contributions through charity and from the rich nobility.

His hospital was so well known, and so well regarded, that they opened not one, but two clinics, to treat the women in labor.

But there was a strange statistical fluke that nobody understood: at the hospital where he worked, for reasons truly unknown, the women of Clinic 1 died of puerperal, or childbed, fever at an astoundingly higher rate than the women in Clinic 2. In Clinic 1, deaths varied between ten to an astounding thirty three percent! from month to month. In Clinic 2, deaths were steadily under 5%.

This became so widely understood on the streets of Vienna that women literally begged not to be assigned to Clinic 1 for their cases.

But how could this possibly be?

The superficial difference between the two clinics was that Clinic 1 was run by medical students and Clinic 2 run by midwives, i.e., former prostitutes who had been retrained in childbirth procedures.

Furthermore, it was known that deaths at home from childbed fever did not come near matching the death rate of Clinic 1.

How was it possible that doctors and medical students were killing their patients through puerperal fever while those treated by women--whores!--were not?

You know the answer of course: dirty hands. He and his students had been working in a dual environment: with women in labor and then also with corpses under dissection. They carried "something" from the corpses to the women (we know of course that the something was germs, but this was some 25 years before Pasteur, so there was no germ theory as yet).

Dr. Semmelweis discovered that, once he had his students wash their hands in what was essentially a primitive form of Chlorox that the death rate dropped to near zero, almost immediately. In April 1847, deaths reached 17%. In July and August, under 5%. In September 1847, 0%.

You'd think that such an astounding advancement in treatment, such a dramatic drop in the deaths of the innocent–particularly as it required almost no expense to implement!--would be news that would be trumpeted from the rooftops and immediately incorporated by doctors worldwide. Semmelweis's name should have taken its place within his lifetime next to Galen, Edward Jenner, and William Harvey.

Such was not the case, at least not while he lived.

To begin with, Dr. Semmelweis, although a determined surgeon and statistical analyst, clearly did not understand the politics of the medical world. At the beginning of his successful discovery, he chose not to publish the results of his discovery immediately, or to notify other doctors through medical journals–the standard procedure, then and now, of publicizing key scientific discoveries, particularly those in the medical world. Word spread–but through word of mouth, not through rigorously challenged peer review. Semmelweis's discovery therefore was imperfectly transmitted, and, being imperfectly transmitted, was not well received.

His treatment required hand washing using a sort of diluted lime solution not unlike our Chlorox. However, other doctors, getting the word wrong through word-of-mouth, merely washed with soap and water, leaving infectious agents in place and not significantly improving survivability of the women in their care. His methods therefore were considered suspect even when he finally formally published them.

Again, Wikipedia:

Beginning from 1861 Semmelweis suffered from various nervous complaints. He suffered from severe depression and became excessively absent minded. .... He turned every conversation to the topic of childbed fever. ...After a number of unfavorable foreign reviews of his 1861 book, Semmelweis lashed out against his critics in series of Open Letters. They were addressed to various prominent European obstetricians [and] were full of bitterness, desperation, fury, and were "highly polemical and superlatively offensive"at times denouncing his critics as irresponsible murderers or ignoramuses. ...The attacks undermined his professional credibility.

... It is impossible to appraise the nature of Semmelweis' disorder. It may have been Alzheimer's disease, a form of senile dementia, which is associated with rapid aging. It may have been third stage of syphilis, a then-common disease of obstetricians who examined thousands of women at gratis institutions. Or it may have been emotional exhaustion from overwork and stress.

On July 30[, 1865, an associate, Dr.] Ferdinand von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum ... Semmelweis surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, possibly inflicted by the beating.

The autopsy revealed extensive internal injuries, the cause of death pyemia—blood poisoning.

Ironically, he died of the very disease he had fought so hard to prevent in women.

He was, like Mozart some 75 years earlier, buried in a pauper's grave. His death went unnoted by his professional compatriots–not surprisingly, as some of them had murdered him.

But he was not forgotten. Today, he is remembered with Pasteur, the discoverer of the germ theory of disease and Joseph Lister, the father of antisepsis. He has been honored on postage stamps and his birth home in Budapest is now a national museum.

If ever you have undergone a surgeon's knife or poke, thank this man. He may have saved your life. And the fact that he tried so hard to pound his truths into the head of an unthinking medical world–even if he was mentally ill by the time he began the effort in earnest–shows that, even ill, he was one of the Tattered Remnant.

"Or Detroit..... I dunnoooo....."

"We do so many showwwwws in a rooooowwwww......"

Looks like the Boss forgot what state he was in on Friday night at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

Ooops.

Ayn Rand: Good Novelist; Evil Philosopher

Peter Wehner, on National Review On-Line, could not have put it better:

Objectively, Ayn Rand Was a Nut [Peter Wehner]

According to Politico.com, Ayn Rand — the subject of two new biographies, one of which is titled Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right — is “having a mainstream moment,” including among conservatives. (Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wrote a piece in Newsweek on Rand, saying, “This is a very good time for a Rand resurgence. She’s more relevant than ever.”).

I hope the moment passes. Ms. Rand may have been a popular novelist, but her philosophy is deeply problematic and morally indefensible.

....

Many conservatives aren’t aware that it was Whittaker Chambers who, in 1957, reviewed Atlas Shrugged in National Review and read her out of the conservative movement. The most striking feature of the book, Chambers said, was its “dictatorial tone . . . Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal . . . From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”

...

Ayn Rand may have been an interesting figure and a good (if extremely long-winded) novelist; but her views were pernicious, the antithesis of a humane and proper worldview. And conservatives should say so.

So say we all. Read the whole thing.

Just because it's Friday morning.

More Vader silliness.

If I were #2 to the Galactic Emperor....

...I'd probably act like this too.

Tattered Remnants #017: Nien Cheng

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE: NIEN CHENG (1915-2009)

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, recently left her post as mouthpiece for the Obama administration after a video was found where she called Mao Zedong one of her "favorite philosophers" (along with, for some reason, Mother Theresa of Calcutta). Perhaps before she philosophizes again, she should read a bit about Nien Cheng, and about the Maoist regime that killed up to 72 million people, plus at least 250,000,000+ more these last 40 years through abortions, including those forced, as directed by the one child policy.]

Imagine, if you would, having your home invaded by a gang of politically correct teenaged thugs. Imagine having your goods smashed, books burned, letters destroyed, family pictures shredded. Imagine watching them kill your spouse or child in front of you because they won't denounce you.

Imagine being dragged off to a prison for several years and then being harangued the whole time with the writings of, oh, I don't know, whatever random political leader happens to be in charge.

An obituary for the recently deceased 94 year old Nien Cheng, who died in Washington, DC on November 2, 2009, describes a woman who underwent precisely this kind oppression at the hands of Mao's Red Guards, that is, the forces of Political Correctness (to use a term first used in Mao's Little Red Book).

Nien Cheng was a survivor of the Great Cultural Revolution. The Telegraph begins her story with these paragraphs:

On August 30 1966, between 30 and 40 high school students, wearing Red Guard armbands, arrived at the gates of her elegant house in Shanghai to "take up revolutionary action" against her. As the wealthy widow of the former general manager of the Shell oil company in the city, Nien Cheng had been expecting the
visit.

The youngsters, seized with Maoist fervour, smashed her antique furniture and porcelain, destroyed her paintings and burned her books. When she tried to save some irreplaceable items she was kicked in the ribs. "They are the useless toys of the feudal emperors and the modern capitalist class and have no significance to us, the proletarian class," she was told.

The visit was the beginning of an excruciating six-and-a-half years of torture, during which Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a spy and kept in solitary confinement in Shanghai's No 1 Detention House. During her captivity, her only daughter, Meiping, an actress in revolutionary propaganda, was beaten to death by Red Guards.

Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia adds:

Maoist revolutionaries used [her employment by Shell Oil] to claim that Cheng was a British spy in order to strike at Communist Party moderates for allowing the firm to operate in China after 1949. Her book documents her amazing courage and fortitude that enabled her to survive her imprisonment.

Cheng endured six-and-a-half years of squalid and inhumane conditions in prison, all the while refusing to give any false confession. ... Cheng was rehabilitated after the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife) were arrested, and she used the opportunity to leave for the United States, as she was still a constant target of surveillance by those who wished her ill. Cheng used Mao's teachings successfully against her interrogators, frequently turning the tide of the struggle sessions against [them].

After she was released, she managed to go into exile from the regime that despised her, and, like her spiritual brother Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, she looked to the West as a place of refuge among some who were still arbitors and protectors of human freedom. She made her way to Canada, and applied to enter the United States. Having been told that she could be granted immediate entry if she asked for asylum, she refused as a matter of principle: instead, she waited for an immigrant visa to come up in the normal turn of events. She immigrated to the United States in 1982 and, in 1987, was seated at a place of honor next to Ronald Reagan at a state dinner.

She told the story of her stand against tyranny in her book Life and Death in Shanghai.

She passed away in her sleep, peacefully, at her home in the Washington DC area.

The fates of the Red Guards who brutalized and tortured her and murdered her daughter--like the eternal fate of Mao Zedong--remain unknown at this time.

"Thank you George and Laura...." from THESE GUYS?

From a gay Democrat political blog in Chicago:

[W]e will always be grateful for what George and Laura Bush did this week, with no media attention, when they very quietly went to Ft. Hood and met personally with the families of the victims of this terrorist attack.

FOR HOURS.

The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them.

If there are any of you out there with any connection at all to the Bushes, we implore you to give them our thanks…you tell them at a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown, Chicago were wrong about the Bushes…and are deeply, deeply sorry for any jokes we told about them in the past, any bad thoughts we had about these good, good people.

....

We hope someday to be able to thank George W. and Laura in person for all they’ve done, and continue to do. They didn’t have to head to Ft. Hood. That was not their responsibility.

The Obamas should

have done that.

But didn’t.

Emphasis mine.

Well, I'll be damned. And I thought I was the only person who thought that Obama's non-appearance at Hood was a bad, bad move. Color me picking jaw off of floor.

11th Hour, 11th Day, 11th Month

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In memory of all Americans (and British, and Canadian, and Australian, and South African, and Indian, and African, and French, and all the free peoples everywhere) who gave their lives in the four great wars of the century, the First World War (1914-1918), the Second World War (1931*-1945), the Cold War with Soviet Socialism (1945-1992), and the present-day Long Conflict (2001-present).

We also remember those peoples of the now-former Soviet Union who gave their lives resisting either National or Soviet Socialism.

We especially remember the thirteen American service members killed and 31 wounded by a violent jihadist and, yes, traitor to his uniform and the nation of his birth, at Fort Hood last week.

I salute you all. Non sum dignis, omnes.

_______
*Yes, 1931, not 1939. Like many scholars of the time I count the start of the war from the "China Incident" that commenced the Japanese aggression against China as the true start of the Second World War.

Anita is Dunn At The White House

It appears that Anita Dunn is stepping down as White House communications director.

And why is that?

Whellllll.....................




Or to paraphrase an old cat food commercial from the 1970s:

Mao Mao Mao.

And The Answer Is: He Was Pushed

The nuclear scientist who was thrown down 17 storys worth of stairs to his death last week, noted below, and in the Daily Mail, was definitely a victim of murder.

Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna.

CTBTO staff monitor tremors in countries worldwide to uncover illegal nuclear tests. It has been suggested that Mr Hampton may have been involved in talks discussing nuclear testing in Iran. The UN has strongly denied the claims.

Two words. Rut roh.

Recent Deaths of Note

"Some say that [Voldemort] died. Codswallop, I say."
- Rubeus Hagrid

I wanted to take a moment to mention a couple of recent significant deaths in the news.

First was the death, last month, of Susan Atkins, who spent her entire adult life in prison in California after her participation in the Manson murders in 1969. She murdered, either by her own hand or through helping others, a number of innocent people: Sharon Tate, her unborn son Paul Richard Polanski--who, had he lived, would have been 40 years old this year--and her friends Voychek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and a visitor to their property, eighteen year old Steven Parent, at 10500 Celio Drive. (It is sad that I remember all these names from perfect memory). She also murdered, as an accomplice, Mr. and Mrs. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca as well as music teacher Gary Hinman in a previous incident.

Susan Atkins was 61; she died of brain cancer, having never obtained even compassionate parole in her last days, having been at the end of her life the longest incarcerated female inmate in the history of California.

I neither rejoice at her death nor mock her. Having spent 40 years in prison, never freed, she is now (to quote Stephen King) "square with the house."

Her acts had, ironically, a profound influence on my life: the story of her (and Manson's) convictions at the hands of prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, the book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, was a powerful influence on my eventual career decision to work in the legal world.

Manson, himself, of course, remains incarcerated, far too dangerous even now to be set free. He turns 75 on November 12th, and still gets loads of fan mail. A man who murdered by command has had his music played by Axl Rose and others; he is, in spite of his abominably evil acts, a celebrity monster. He still has his followers and devotees.

* * * *

Second was a death in the last two days or so here in Detroit.

It appears that a local gang of radical "Muslims" (I use the quotation marks most advisedly; these, er, individuals had nothing in common with the decent Muslims I work with on a daily basis) have been engaged in various highly illegal activities. They were led by one Luqman Ameen Abdullah, formerly Christopher Thompson. Two days ago, eleven of these people were arrested by the FBI on gun and terror related charges.

Mr. Abdullah chose to respond to the arrival of a dozen FBI agents appearing at his workplace by shooting back. He was 53.

Mr. Abdullah, it turns out, was a spiritual follower of one Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a prisoner you may have heard of under his former name: H. Rap Brown, former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s after it transmorgrified itself from a civil rights group to a violently revolutionary movement before it died.

Al-Amin/Brown later made his name as a killer of two policemen. He now leads his "Islamic" group out of the Colorado Federal Supermax.

Sixties radicals--the gift that keeps on giving.

Heinlein on Obama's Peace Prize

Robert A. Heinlein, 1977, Detroit, MI (Photo by RLK)


ROBERT HEINLEIN AND THE OBAMA PEACE PRIZE

I have to admit the whole Affirmative Action Peace Prize given to our first black President just for being black .... continues to disturb me. It seems to me to be left-wing "soft racism of low expectations".... writ large.

I found a passage which describes just why this whole thing is ridiculous. Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, written 50 years ago, has this whole situation nailed.

The scene is a High School senior class on History and Moral Philosophy, some 200 years from now. A teacher is quizzing a student.

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier… and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?”

“Uh, I suppose it would.”

“No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’ ” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it — or don’t you?”

I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids — a typical sneer of those who haven’t got it — and now this farce.

I ripped it off and chucked it at him.

Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”

“You know darn well I placed fourth!”

“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you…because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song ["The Best Things in Life are Free"] meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money — which is true — just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value.” '

Precisely. Precisely!

Did He Fall Or Was He Pushed?

This is Not Good.

[In Vienna, Austria, a] 47-year-old man died after falling more than 120ft to the bottom of a stairwell. He has not been named.... He worked for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, an international agency charged with uncovering illicit nuclear tests.

A UN spokesman in the Austrian capital said there were no "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the man's death.

Police said no other person was believed to have been involved. No suicide note has been found.

Four months ago another UN worker also believed to be British fell from a similar height in the same building, it has been reported.

The latest incident happened on Tuesday as the United States, France, Russia and Iran held talks nearby about Tehran's nuclear programme.

Nothing to see here, folks, just move along....

I didn't write this (but I wish I did)

HOW TO TELL A LIBERAL FROM A CONSERVATIVE

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't` eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy. If a liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life. If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a person of color is conservative, they see themselves as independently successful. Their liberal counterparts see themselves as victims in need of government protection.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a conservative slips and falls in a store, he gets up, laughs and is embarrassed. If a liberal slips and falls, he grabs his neck, moans like he's in labor and then sues.

If a conservative reads this, he'll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.

A liberal will delete it because he's "offended".

Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

It's been almost four months since the death of John Hughes, a man whom I have always admired--a man whose skills with a camera, and a pen, created some wonderful movies.

Here follows a bit of brilliance: the three-minute scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off where Ferris, Camron, and Sloane visit the Chicago Art Institute, with Hughes' commentary.



The music in the background is The Dream Academy's cover of The Smiths Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, which I have never been able, until now, to find.

I regard it as the single greatest soundtrack song. Ever.

Enjoy.

CHARLES JOHNSON - RACE DETECTIVE!

We haven't beaten on the Squire of Gothos or LittleGreenSTFUtballs in a while, but happily, I don't share sole responsibility for that duty. Someone with far more time on their hands than I have has created CHARLES JOHNSON, RACE DETECTIVE, to supply the USDA minimum adult quantity of ridicule for the week.

Someone needed to do it.

Shtoopid News Story Du Jour

Oh noes!

Someone actually came out with a satirical Halloween costume!

AND SOMEONE WAS OFFENDED! OMG!!!!

Target Corp. apologized Friday after coming under fire from customers and some Hispanic groups for selling an "illegal alien" Halloween costume on its website. The $39.99 costume comes with a space alien mask, an orange jail suit with "illegal alien" stamped on the chest and a large "green card." The Minneapolis retailer said the costume was added to its website by mistake and said it would be removed.

"It's insensitive, it's offensive," said Vicki Adame, a California media relations consultant....

Oh, the HUMANITY!


(or something like that....)

PS.

Q: How many PC types does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: "That's not funny!"

Barack Obama And The Girl On The Swing

When I was in junior high school I fell in love with a painting. It's official title is Reveries; but my private title for it has always been The Girl on the Swing.

You can imagine what things were like for an adolescent geek in the days before being a geek was cool. Aside from the usual travails, there was a certain difficulty that arose that I found particularly hard to bear, and one that would not be overcome until adulthood: my (in)ability to impress girls.

Now, this is probably a very good thing. Adolescent geekiness is the most effective form of pregnancy prevention known to man; it is both salutary to the long-term success of the geek as well as being one form of birth control fully approved by God, The Blessed Mother Mary and the Roman Catholic Church.

Be that as it may, I was miserable at that age, as it seemed that She - the mysterious She whom I would spend my life with, the Woman of My Dreams - would never appear, and that I would spend my life like I spent it at fourteen, standing at the wall during the school dance, doomed to walk the world alone.

So I fell in love with The Girl On The Swing.

Maxfield Parrish was the artist: a contemporary of Norman Rockwell, Rockwell Kent, Frederick Remington, his specialty was creating beautiful, sensual, sweet, kind-appearing, chastely lovely and (ahem) fully clothed young women in poses that would not have offended Mrs. Grundy, yet carried an electric sexuality that was detectable seventy years after they were painted.

She's almost shapeless. Her female form is barely hinted at. She appears to be wearing a semi-toga, semi-bedsheet that covers her entire body from neck to toes. All you see is face, hair, arms, and a wistful and sad look downward that makes you want to approach her and make her look at you - and fall as much in love with you as you with her.

I carried this picture in my notebook throughout my junior high school days. In days where there were no girls in my life, she was my Secret Love. Any time I wanted, I could gaze on The Girl On The Swing, and she was always there, like a flower about to open.

One day, some philistine swiped the three-ring binder with her picture glued inside the front cover and artistically amended certain deficiencies, such as a hitherto unnoticed moustache, goatee, and Groucho Marx glasses. I ripped my picture out of the binder and threw it away in a rage: how DARE they spoil this timeless beauty?

Now, my rage and grief were of course absurd, for the girl was not a girl. The Girl On The Swing was truly an Unperson: she did not exist, she had never existed. She was all those things that I saw in her because of (a) the technical skill of an artist long dead and (b) my own wants, dreams and desires. This girl in the picture represented everything about Woman that I wanted to know... and yet she was not a girl at all. It was an image, a painting, a swath of dried chemicals cunningly rendered.

Nothing more.

I eventually grew up and left the Girl on the Swing behind. I came to know, and (sometimes, rarely) even fell in love with, real women--three dimensional, living, breathing reality. Some were as prosaic as pumpkins; some were as sweet as apples on Christmas day, some were delicate as roses; but none of them were remotely like The Girl On The Swing.

In particular, the wonderful woman I met and married and who bore my children bears absolutely no resemblance to her. And I mean this in the best possible way: for The Girl On The Swing is just a representation of wants; she cannot possibly love back.

She is.... a lie.

A beautiful lie, but a lie.

For the picture was not a person, just a focal point of my desires.

Now, a similar point is made in the Harry Potter series. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry, on Christmas day, encounters a very special magical item: the Mirror of Erised. And yes, this is relevant. From the endlessly plagiarizable Wikipedia:

On it is inscribed, erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi — which, when reversed and correctly spaced, reads I show not your face but your heart's desire. Harry, upon encountering the Mirror, can see his parents, as well as what appears to be a crowd of relatives; Ron sees himself as Head Boy and Quidditch Captain holding the Quidditch Cup (thus revealing his wish to be acknowledged out of the shadow of his highly successful older brothers, as well as his more popular friend, Harry). Dumbledore cautions Harry that the mirror gives neither knowledge nor truth and that men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they see.

Yes. And try to imagine, if you will, the reaction a man, addicted to sitting in front of the Mirror of Erised, when some prankster casts a stone through its glass: rage and vengeance would be left him, with his illusions taken away.

And this is why Barack Obama is so dangerous. He is like the Girl On The Swing, like The Mirror of Erised.

My good friend Jim Kruggel pointed this out to me back in May. The front page of the Washington Post that May Sunday morning featured a young college aged woman reacting to Obama as if she were a thirteen year old girl at a Beatles concert.

He has, somehow, become a natural focal point of millions, or even billions, of people's desires. People see in him not what is, but what they dearly want him to be and themselves to become.

He is, in fact, nothing but a reflector. He is nobody - clothes which contain no Emperor, not a Being of Light, but a Being of Emptiness, filled only with our desires.

And this makes him the most profoundly dangerous kind of politician of all. Combine that level of ability to cause obsession with ambition and power, he becomes a profound threat to the Republic. For to oppose him is not merely to oppose a political figure, it is to oppose the desires and needs of his millions of followers.

Let me be perfectly oblique: it is when someone casts a stone through our Mirror of Amabo, shattering the reflection, that things become most volatile. People will not give up their illusions easily.

Those who would mock and criticize him should beware: they should remember the story of The Emperor's New Clothes, particularly the last part that they don't tell children.

To wit: "And the King's Guards arrested the little boy and he was never heard from again."

And it could be dangerous for him as well. Christ help him when (not if, when) the illusion is shattered: the exact same mob hailing him and laying palm fronds at his feet on Sunday can show up the next Friday throwing stones and screaming for Barabbas.

We live in frightening times.

Tattered Remnant #015: Ilse Sonja Totzke

ALONE AND FORGOTTEN: Ilse Sonja Totzke (1913?-????)

In The Nazis, A Warning From History: Companion Volume to the BBC Television Series, by Lawrence Rees, (New Press, New York City, 1997) pp. 67-68, 6969, there is a discussion of the Gestapo files in Würzburg, which almost unique in Germany were found largely intact at the end of the war. The files contained information on a woman who otherwise would have been lost to history. Nobody had even heard of her before they found the file. The following is a quote from pp. 67-69, slightly edited.


Ilse Sonja Totzke went to Würzburg, Germany, as a music studient in the 1930s. [A Gestapo file in that city, still extant,] reveals that she became an object of suspicion for those around her. The first person to denounce her was a distant relative, who said that she was inclined to be too friendly to Jews and that she knew too much about things that should be of no concern to women, such as military matters. .This relative said that he felt driven to tell the Gestapo this because he was a reserve officer (though there was nothing in being a reserve officer that required him to do so).

Totzke was put under general surveillance by the Gestapo, but this surveillance took a strange form: it consisted of the Gestapo asking her neighbours to keep an eye on her.

There follows in the file a mass of contradictory evidence supplied by her neighbours. Sometimes Totzke gave the 'Hitler greeting' (Heil Hitler) and sometimes she didn't, but overall she made it clear that she was not going to avoid socializing with Jews (something which at this point was not a crime). One anonymous denouncer even hinted that Totzke might be a lesbian ('Miss Totzke doesn't seem to have normal predispositions'). But there is no concrete evidence that she had committed any offence.

Nonetheless, it was enough for the Gestapo to bring her in for questioning. The account of her interrogation in the file shows that she was bluntly warned about her attitude, but the Gestapo clearly didn't think she was a spy, or guilty of any of the outlandish accusations made against her. She was simply unconventional. The denunciations, however, kept coming in, and eventually the file landed on the desk of one of the most bloodthirsty Gestapo officials in Würzburg - Gormosky of Branch 2B, which dealt with Jews.

... in 1941, one of her neighbors denounced her, saying:

Ilse Sonja Totzke is a resident next door to us in a garden cottage. I noticed the above-named because she is of Jewish appearance.. . I should like to mention that Miss Totzke never responds to the German greeting [Hell Hitler]. I gathered from what she was saying that her attitude was anti-German. On the contrary she always favoured France and the Jews. Among other things, she told me that the German Army was not as well equipped as the French... Now and then a woman of about 36 years old comes and she is of Jewish appearance ... To my mind, Miss Totzke is behaving suspiciously. I thought she might be engaged in some kind of activity which is harmful to the German Reich.

On 28 October 1941 Totzke was summoned for an interrogation. The Gestapo kept an immaculate record of what was said. Totzke acknowledged that, 'If I have anything to do with Jews any more, I know that I can reckon on a concentration camp.'

But despite this, she still kept up her friendship with Jews and was ordered once more to report to the Gestapo. [In 1943, s]he took flight with a [Jewish] friend and tried to cross the border into Switzerland, but the Swiss customs officials turned her over to the German authorities. In the course of a long interrogation conducted in southwest Germany, she said:

I, for one, find the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi anti-Semitism to be totally unacceptable. I find it intolerable that such a country as Germany exists and I do not want to live here any longer.

Eventually, after another lengthy interrogation in Würzburg, Totzke was sent to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück....

In Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women who Defied the Final Solution by Mordechai Palliel, published ten years after the above account, it was revealed that she spent most of the war at Ravensbrück, was sent for several months to Auschwitz, was returned to Ravensbrück, and was still alive at the time the camp was liberated by American forces in 1945.

Her ultimate fate to this day is unknown.

But this much is known:

Her name was placed on the wall of honor in Yad Vashem in 1995.

Tattered Remnants #014: Gov. John Slaton of Georgia

THE ANTI-PILATE: GOVERNOR JOHN M. SLATON

I can endure misconstruction, abuse and condemnation ... but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience which would remind me that I, as governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right . . . It means that I must live in obscurity the rest of my days, but I would rather be plowing in a field than to feel that I had that blood on my hands. - Governor John Slaton, 1915

In 1955, Profiles in Courage was published under the name of then-Senator John F. Kennedy. This book, famously remembered by title but little read today, describes several politicians, most United States Senators, who risked their careers and reputations for standing up for what was right rather than what was popular at the time.

Now, the men he honored in this book were, no doubt, politically courageous in their own ways. But whatever these men may have risked, they never truly lost anything for their political beliefs.

But one man in their number above all showed himself to be one of the Remnant, risking, and losing, all in order to save an innocent man from the noose–a man who died in spite of his order to save him.

LEO FRANK AND THE MURDER OF MARY PHAGAN

On April 26, 1913, a thirteen year old girl named Mary Phagan, who worked in an Atlanta, Georgia pencil factory, went to work to get her paycheck. The hours at the factory had been temporarily cut due to a shortage of supplies, so her pay for the week was only $1.20. It was a holiday, Confederate Memorial Day, and most of the factory was empty. Her employer, a Jewish engineer from New York City named Leo Frank, gave her pay to her. She left his office and was never seen alive again.

The next morning, her body was found in the basement of the factory. She had been strangled, probably raped, and robbed.

Evidence in the case was compromised from the beginning. Near her body were two notes, not in her handwriting, but purporting to be notes that the girl left, blaming "a negro" for having killed her.

Suspicion fell to two people: one was the factory owner, Leo Frank, a highly educated and cultured engineer. He had graduated from Cornell University, and had apprenticed at a number of factories to study the business of pencil manufacture. He and his wife had only recently moved to Atlanta, where he was active in opera, tennis and other cultural pursuits. He was also president of the local chapter of B’Nai Brith.

The second suspect was an uneducated black man: one Jim Conley. He had a criminal record and a drinking problem, and admitted his involvement in the crime almost from the first. However, he claimed that his involvement was strictly that of accomplice: for, although he gave many differing versions of what occurred, they all revolved around two basic facts that remained unchanged through all his different versions of the truth. First, he had helped cover up the crime. Second, the person responsible for the crime was Leo Frank.

Looking back, the convoluted tale remains a bit difficult to unravel at a distance of almost a century. But two things are clear through this story: Leo Frank consistently maintained his innocence in the matter. And Jim Conley kept changing his story.

Two local newspapers, recently acquired by the Hearst chain, began a campaign of classic yellow journalism to hype the circumstances of the crime. Passions were raised, and many subterranean cultural hatreds began to bubble to the surface, including a hitherto-hidden cultural hatred of Jews, who were seen as bearers of Yankee capitalism among the purer people of the South.

Georgia was undergoing its first major demographic changes since the end of the Civil War. Northerners and immigrants were moving to the state in significant numbers; Jews and Catholics, hitherto largely unknown there, were viewed by Georgians of the time as being an alien, invading force.

Furthermore, the case was corrupted by old-style Southern racism involved here as well: but in this case, it worked against Frank, as Conley, being a black man, was viewed as being too lacking in intelligence to attempt to cover up a crime he himself would have committed; he "must have been told what to do." (This was, in fact, the first case in Georgia history where the testimony of a black man was held over that of a white. Unfortunately, it appears to have been perjured.)

Leo Frank put on trial for his life only three months after the murder. It being held in the middle of Southern summer heat, the windows of the courtroom were opened, revealing to all–particularly the jury–that hundreds of people were outside the courtroom listening to the proceedings.

There was no doubt what their mood was: they wanted Frank convicted.

The trial proceeded for 24 days. Frank, himself, was well defended; no less than eight attorneys and expert witnesses stood with him as he fought for his life. Furthermore, Georgia law of the time allowed Frank himself to make an unsworn statement on his own behalf without being cross-examined; he gave a lengthy analysis of his work that day, which he stated left no time for him to have committed the murder.

As to the charges that he was "nervous" when the police had come for him, he replied:

Gentlemen, I was nervous. I was completely unstrung. Imagine yourself called from sound slumber in the early hours of the morning ... To see that little girl on the dawn of womanhood so cruelly murdered — it was a scene that would have melted stone.

It should also be said that, in attempting to lay blame on Conley, Mr. Frank’s own attorneys engaged in racial slander in their own right.

Lead defense attorney Luther Rosser, said to the jury: "Who is Conley? He is a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying, n----r." Leo Frank himself had issued a widely publicized statement questioning how the "perjured vaporizings of a black brute" could be accepted in testimony against him.

All was for nought. Frank was found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan. He was not present in the courtroom when the verdict was read, as the judge feared "violence" if the verdict was not guilty.

Leo Frank continued to fight the case all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. In 1915, the Supreme Court found against him 7-2.

Leo Frank's guilt seemed to be well established. His date with the hangman was all but certain.

But, while Frank's guilt was passionately held by many–even today–it is clear that while he may have been found guilty by a jury, there was still much room for reasonable doubt. The unfairness of the trial, the anti-Semitic bigotry of many commentators, and the whiff of Judge Lynch just outside the boundaries of the courtroom corrupted the process profoundly, indeed, irredeemably.

It is entirely possible that Frank was innocent of the crime. It is also entirely possible that he was as guilty as all hell. Who can know, now, a hundred years later?

Throughout the trial and the appeal process, public pressure through the press grew on those with the powers to decide Frank's fate. The jurors and judge heard the clamoring mob just outside the courtroom; in the halls of power, the howls of the press, particularly those of populist politician Tom Watson, for Leo Frank's blood.

It was at this point that Leo Frank sought clemency from the governor.

ENTER JOHN SLATON

In the summer of 1915, two years after the murder of Mary Phagan, John M. Slaton was approaching the end of his term of office. He looked ahead to his prospects. He had had been appointed governor of Georgia once, and then later ran, and won, a race for governor in his own right. He was a protegee of Tom Watson, a prominent Georgia politician–Watson had once run for Vice President under the Populist ticket–and now was a major player in Georgia state politics. Watson had many political opportunities within his gift: one he now offered Slaton. If Slaton would simply stay the course and not rock the boat, he, Watson, would see to it that Slaton's long dream of service in the United States Senate would one day soon be fulfilled.

But.

Watson's politics had taken a turn for the dark side in the days since his national prominence. He who had once been a national name was now a festering, blistering advocate of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti black bigotry, everywhere seeing the decline of Western civilization in demographic change that he barely understood and could not abide.

And Tom Watson wanted to see Leo Frank hang.

Slaton had a terrible choice to make. First, there was the issue of conflict of interest: for he himself was a law partner of the firm that had defended Frank. On the other hand, had he chosen to keep clean hands and decided to recuse himself, he saw a tremendous potential for injustice: an innocent man might be hanged by the State of Georgia.

Third, and perhaps most profoundly, Slaton was a Christian in a Christian society, and the story of the New Testament haunted him. He heard the echoes of another trial, two thousand years earlier, involving a certain other accused Jew, a reluctant governor, and a howling mob. And he could not bring himself to repeat the mistake of Pontius Pilate.

Two thousand years ago, another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor’s name has been accursed. If today another Jew were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice.

Slaton, after reviewing the 10,000 pages of evidence associated with the case, came to decide that it was very likely that Leo Frank had not committed the murder. Although he first decided to pardon him outright, he was convinced by his aides instead to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, to give the system another opportunity to review the evidence.

Nobody was prepared for the reaction to the decision. A huge mob of thousands of outraged Georgians flooded the street in front of the governor's mansion. The state guard, together with a band of Slaton's friends who were hastily deputized to keep order, managed to keep the mob at bay. Slaton was forced to flee the state.

Less than a month later, a mob, led by Tom Watson and a committee that called itself "The Knights of Mary Phagan", invaded the prison where Leo Frank was held. They drove him over 250 miles back to Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.

Leo Frank was the only Jew known to have been lynched in the history of Southern mob violence. But one was enough: half of the Jewish population of Georgia fled the state in the aftermath.

Tom Watson went on to a brilliant career. He used the aftermath of the Frank lynching to help to relaunch the second Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. Himself eventually elected Governor, he spent the last two years of his life in the United States Senate, dying in Washington at the age of 66 of a brain aneurysm. A statue stands today on the grounds of the Georgia State House. Its plinth holds a placard that reads: "A champion of right who never faltered in the cause."

John Slaton never again held public office, and was forever after vilified for having attempted to grant life to Leo Frank. He never achieved his dream of serving in the U.S. Senate. He spent the next two decades serving on the committee of the state bar that reviewed candidates for legal licensing. And when he died in 1956, they buried him in a mausoleum to prevent his grave from being desecrated. Even forty years later, there would those who never forgave him for pardoning "the murderous Jew."

But he was not forgotten. Some remembered him, including Senator John F. Kennedy, who memorialized him that year in Profiles in Courage.

Who *Didn't* Get the Nobel?

Tattered Remnants, all:

* A woman who risked death to teach girls how to read

* A hostage of the Columbian FARC rebels

* A doctor who cares for rape victims in the Congo region

* An organization that fights the use of land mines

* Two opponents of Chinese communism

Details about these individuals here.

And the prize goes to .... Barack OBueller.

THEY. HAVE. TO. BE. KIDDING.

Obama wins... the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!!?!!?!!!!!!!

IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, WHY??? WHAT HAS HE ACCOMPLISHED?

Now it's officially a worthless piece of crap.

We thought it was when the mass murderer Yasir Arafat got the thing.

Now it has officially become a leftist ass kiss.

Well, at least we know one thing: the Nobel people don't watch Saturday Night Live.

Now This

Hell Freezes Over

I'll give David Letterman this much credit: while piling on the apologies for his own abominable sexual behavior on his show, yesterday, he added this:

"And through all of the heartache, and the attention, and the embarrassment, I still feel like I did the right thing [in fighting the blackmail], and now also, because what can it hurt, once again I'd like to apologize to the former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. I'm terribly, terribly sorry. So there we go," he added to cheers from the crowd.

I still think Dave Letterman is a swine. And I'm still tempted to say, "Apology accepted, Captain Needa."

But that gesture is a small, small start.

Debunking the Shroud?

It sez here that Italian atheists have debunked the Shroud of Turin, using methods they say would have been available in the XIV Century.

Apparently, they put a bronze statue of Jesus into a pizza oven at 350 degrees for four hours with a cloth on it, then put it on a guy wearing a rubber mask; the mask was covered in red ochre. Voila'! Instant jeezus!

Right. Forgive me for being dubious, as this little methodology does not explain why:

1. The Shroud has pollen in it from plants that grow in the Jerusalem area?

2. Why the "pennies in the eyes" are surely 30 AD Pilatine small copper coins (how many coin collectors did they have in the XIV Century?

3. The medical perfection of the wounds on the Shroud: how many forensic coroners with postmortem reconstructive training did they have in the XIV century?

Yanno, I wish they put as much effort into debunking the left as they do Jesus.

Of course, debunking the Left is a lot easier to do. Doesn't require a lota brains...

Just look wherever they've taken power, and count the bodies.

Of course, there are a *lot* of bodies to count.

Ostrich

A man walks into a restaurant with a full-grown ostrich behind him. The waitress asks them for their orders.

The man says, 'A hamburger, fries and a coke,' and turns to the ostrich, 'What's yours?'

'Me too,' says the ostrich.

A short time later the waitress returns with the order 'That will be $9.40 please,' and the man reaches into his pocket and pulls out the exact change for payment.

The next day, the man and the ostrich come again and the man says, 'A hamburger, fries and a coke.'

The ostrich says, 'Me, too.'

Again the man reaches into his pocket and pays with exact change.

This becomes routine until the two enter again. 'The usual?' asks the waitress.

'No, this is Friday night, so I will have a steak, baked potato and a salad,' says the man.

'Me too,' says the ostrich.

Shortly the waitress brings the order and says, 'That will be $32.62.'

Once again the man pulls the exact change out of his pocket and places it on the table.

The waitress cannot hold back her curiosity any longer. 'Excuse me, sir. How do you manage to always come up with the exact change in your pocket every time?'

'Well,' says the man, 'several years ago I was cleaning the attic and found an old lamp. When I rubbed it, a Genie appeared and offered me two wishes. My first wish was that if I ever had to pay for anything, I would just put my hand in my pocket and the right amount of money would always be there.'

'That's brilliant!' says the waitress. 'Most people would ask for a million dollars or something, but you'll always be as rich as you want for as long as you live!'

'That's right. Whether it's a gallon of milk or a Rolls Royce, the exact money is always there,' says the man.

The waitress asks, 'What's with the ostrich?'

The man sighs, pauses and answers, 'My second wish was for a tall chick with a big butt and long legs who will follow me and agree with everything I say.'