The Infinite Monkey (At The Keyboard)

WE ARE NOW THE MICHIGAN SILVERBACK!

2010-04-01T06:54:00.002-04:00

As of this most auspicious day (April 1), The Infinite Monkey (At The Keyboard), a political and thinking blog publishing since February 2009, is now....

...THE MICHIGAN SILVERBACK!

You are cordially invited to check it out.

Et Lux Perpetuae: Andrew Koenig

2010-02-26T08:53:00.005-05:00

Andrew Koenig--Mr. Chekov's son--committed suicide a few days ago, and they found his body yesterday.

Sad. Nichelle Nichol's brother Thomas did too as part of that Heaven's Gate UFO/comet cult back in '97. Nerine Kidd-Shatner, Bill Shatner's third wife, died in what may have also been suicide or may have been an accident.

Even the crew of the Enterprise get their share of horror and pain. Alas.

ADDENDUM

And Marie Osmond too. God rest her son, and grant her peace.

Rejoice, and believe the Good News....

2010-02-25T05:13:00.002-05:00

...not only is it true....

".... it's good for ya besides helpin' ya." - MAJ William J. Kent, USAF RET (1919-1991)

Dad knew what he was talkin' about. And it was amazing how much he learned as I grew up.....

TEMPORARILY ON HIATUS - PLEASE STAND BY

2010-02-24T19:51:00.002-05:00

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please do not adjust your set.

I'm trying to catch up from the madness of CPAC and of missing four days at the orifice. Please stand by. We'll be back shortly.

Warning: Strong Language.

2010-02-18T17:29:00.003-05:00

News item #1:

A man enraged at the IRS committed suicide, and possibly murder, by intentionally flying a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX. At least one person is missing.

News item #2:

The woman who falsely accused certain members of the Duke University lacrosse team of rape two years ago was arrested for attempted first degree murder after she allegedly tried to kill her boyfriend.

I'd spin these two into a tirade about the futility of human violent rage, but I'm just too tired at this point.

I'll just sum it up:

Whatta coupla assholes!

ADDENDUM:

NEWSBUSTERS quoted Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart connecting the above mentioned air-attacking-tax-defendant to the Tea Party movement. After all, they're both extremists, right? Right?

Hard right.

Jonathan Capehart? I now modify the statement I made above and formally include you in the following:

Whatta buncha assholes!

Senator Mellencamp?

2010-02-17T15:03:00.005-05:00

The Hill is reporting that rocker John Cougar Mellencamp is being actively drafted in Indiana to run for U.S. Senator.

Right.

This is the same guy who said

“I don’t think people fought and gave their lives so that some guy can sit in his bedroom and be mean. I don’t think that’s what freedom of speech is,” he continued. “Freedom of speech is really about assembly — for us to collectively have an idea. We want to get our point of view out so we can assemble and I can appoint you to be the spokesman. That’s freedom of speech — to be able to collectively speak for a sector of people. But somehow it’s turned into ‘I can be an a****** whenever I feel like, say whatever I like, be disrespectful to people and not be courteous.’ It’s not good for our society. Not being courteous is not really freedom of speech. …

To which I can only reply:

Gonna let it rock
Let it roooolllll
Let the bible belt come and save my so-wo-wol
Hold on to 16 as long as you can
Changes come around real soon
Make us Republi-can!

Excuse me while I go be disrespectful to people some more now.

Q: What's a EuroColony? A: "Greece" Is The Word

2010-02-17T13:00:00.005-05:00

Greece was conquered this week without firing a shot, by a coalition of powers led by Germany.

The last time it happened, Italians and Germans tore down the Peloponnese and took Athens in the spring of 1941.

It happened again most recently when the Germans, under the figleaf of the European Union, caused Greece to lose its vote as a sovereign member of the Union as one of its prices for bailing them out for their profligate ways of spending.

Oh, sure, it's peaceful, all right. As peaceful as you can ask, this time.

But it's still conquest, subjugation, and foreign imposed rule any way you slice it.

If European moneymen are unhappy with the way Greece handles its national and international debt over the course of the coming weeks, they can take the country over and strip its parliament of its authority over its own budget. Greece then becomes, not a 'member nation' but a subjugated peoples controlled by a foreign power.

The term for this is colonialism, ladies and germs, and the Europeans, after some sixty years, appear to be back in business.

Except this time, it's EUROPEANS who are getting colonized.

I'm not a big fan of modern Greece, but hey, this is just the first step down the road to perdition.

Get out while you can, Ellas.

IF you can.

IF.

ADDENDUM

A friend of mine comments thusly:

"Once all the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn't happen again
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then"

-- Professor Tom Lehrer, 1962

COMING SOON: THE MICHIGAN SILVERBACK!

2010-02-16T23:00:00.001-05:00

Heads up, dear readers!

THE INFINITE MONKEY (AT THE KEYBOARD)

is soon to become

THE MICHIGAN SILVERBACK

michigansilverback.com

(...because we're through monkeying around.)

More soon.

PS. Don't worry. We'll keep blogging at this address until the switchover is complete.

OFF TO CPAC!

2010-02-16T22:55:00.003-05:00

I'm off to meet other mostly harmless drudges at the Conservative Political Action Conference in DC this weekend. You'll hear from me sporatically.

This is gonna be exceedingly cool.

365.25 Days

2010-02-16T19:53:00.002-05:00

Today marks the one - year anniversary of the existence, or should I say persistence, of this Blog.

Happy Birthday, Infinite Monkey. And thank you to the readers who have sent such kind notes to me in private.

We're not going to go away. That much is certain.

More soon.

Michael Barone Reads Another Political Obit

2010-02-15T10:49:00.007-05:00

From today's Washington Examiner: Michael Barone, the oracle of the Potomac, reads the political obituary of one Congressman William Delahunt of Taxachusetts.

Third is the case of Amy Bishop, the woman who shot and killed three colleagues at the University of Albama in Huntsville. What does this have to do with Delahunt? Well, back in 1986 Amy Bishop, then a resident of Braintree, Massachusetts, shot and killed her brother. No charges were brought against her. Bill Delahunt was the District Attorney of Norfolk County then. Boston’s Channel 5 has some of the puzzling deals. Delahunt’s apparent decision not to bring charges 24 years ago may be entirely defensible, for all I know. But it certainly looks questionable today. And it’s not something I would want to be litigating in a political campaign. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill Delahunt decides that this is a good year to spend more time with the family.

IOW, "He's dead, Jim."

P.S. His money graf spares me the need to write anything further about Ms. Bishop, who is hereupon best consigned to the Forgotten.

In Recognition of Julian Day 2455241.

2010-02-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

This title refers to someone else's brilliant blog post.

2010-02-14T10:11:00.000-05:00

...and clicking here will take you to it.

And this line hat tips the author, whose name is Chris Clarke. It's italicized, too.

Tattered Remnants #027: Oscar Biscet Gonzalez, M.D.

2010-02-13T21:33:00.001-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

THE CONQUEST OF LIBERTY: OSCAR ELIAS BISCET GONZALEZ, M.D.

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy." John Derbyshire*

The following is taken word-for-word from The Lawton Foundation's official web site. It is my intention to rewrite this section shortly. - RLK

Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzalez was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 20th of 1961, to a family of modest means. He is the founder and president of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, an organization outlawed by Cuban authorities, which peacefully promotes the defense of all human rights through nonviolent civil disobedience. He is married to Elsa Morejón Hernández, a nurse. He has two children, daughter, Winnie, and son, Yan.

In 1985, Dr. Biscet obtained his degree as a specialist in internal medicine. A year later, he publicly opposed the long hours without pay that Cuban physicians were expected to work. As a result, he was suspended from the Hospital Nacional and the practice of medicine for a year.

In 1987, he returned to the practice and teaching of medicine at the Obstetric Pediatric Hospital, Hijas de Galicia, in Havana. By the late 1980's, Dr. Biscet began to openly coordinate activities to oppose the human rights violations of the communist Cuban regime. In 1994, he was officially charged by the Cuban authorities with "dangerousness" defined in Article 72 of the Penal Code of Cuba as the "special proclivity of a person to commit crimes demonstrated by his conduct in manifest contradiction of socialist norms."

In 1997, Dr. Biscet founded the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights in collaboration with fellow members of the peaceful opposition movement and conducted a clandestine ten month research study at the Hijas de Galicia Hospital documenting unofficial statistical data on abortion techniques. During this study, many Cuban mothers testified that their newborn babies were killed right after birth, a common practice in hospitals throughout the island. The research study "Rivanol: A Method to Destroy Life," was made public on April, 1998. It was not until June 9, 1998, that the study was officially delivered to the Cuban government along with a letter addressed to Fidel Castro accusing the Cuban National Health System of genocide. This study was translated from Spanish to English and sent to The Convention of the Rights of the Child in Geneva, Switzerland. This document was dedicated to the memory of the 23 children who drowned when the tugboat "13 de Marzo," which was full of would-be-refugees, was deliberately sunk by Cuban gunboats.

Dr. Biscet was officially expelled from the Cuban National Health System in February of 1998, and has never been allowed to practice medicine again. Elsa Morejón, Dr. Biscet’s wife, a nurse, is not allowed to practice her profession due to her husband’s human rights activities. Therefore, the family was evicted from their home in March of 1998, and have since had to depend on the charity of friends to survive.

In January of 1998, the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights publicly demanded freedom for all Cuban political prisoners by holding up banners and posters during the historic mass that Pope John Paul II celebrated in Havana. Dr. Biscet staged public demonstrations in favor of justice in front of the courthouses where arbitrary trials were scheduled to take place and demanded freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Also, the Lawton Foundation presided by Dr. Biscet, along with other human rights groups tried to establish a school to teach nonviolent civil disobedience.

The Lawton Foundation for Human Rights has also been involved in several other pro-life and human rights activities. It has requested solidarity with Cuba by addressing letters to doctors, religious leaders, government officials, health organizations, human rights groups, and dignitaries throughout the world. The Foundation has also coordinated peaceful demonstrations in parks to observe the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In addition, they have organized monthly distributions of the aforementioned document to passersby on the streets. Besides, the Foundation has held press conferences in Havana to inform the international press about human rights abuses in Cuba. A press conference was held on March 26, 1999, during which The Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, along with other pro human rights activists, established that the Cuban nation was one, comprised of individuals living on the Island and in exile, and that the following three objectives should be achieved through nonviolent means:

1. Freedom for all political prisoners.
2. The abolition of all articles that violate human rights.
3. The reestablishment of democracy in Cuba.

From June 7 to July 16, 1999, one of the most significant events carried out by the peaceful Cuban opposition movement took place under the leadership of the Lawton Foundation. A group of human rights activists in Havana began a forty day liquid fast to demand the release of all political prisoners and draw attention to the violation of Human Rights in Cuba. This activity spread throughout the island and thousands of Cubans joined in 54 fasting sites. In addition, some of their compatriots in exile around the world joined the fast to show solidarity. Members of the international press who covered the story and foreign diplomats visited the small apartment at Tamarindo 34 in Havana.

Dr. Biscet was arrested on November 3, 1999, and was held at the prison of the Technical Department of Investigation located at Cien and Aldabó streets in Havana. According to Sergio Hernández, the state appointed defense attorney, the case files disclosed that Dr. Biscet had been officially accused of such crimes as "dishonoring national symbols," "public disorder," and "inciting delinquent behavior" for which the State Prosecutor of the Republic of Cuba was asking for a ten year prison sentence.

Two incidents were connected to these accusations. The first incident occurred on February 22, 1999, when Dr. Biscet was accused of “disorderly conduct" for staging a peaceful pro-life demonstration outside the Hijas de Galicia Hospital in Havana. The hospital’s director, Dr. Laura Fernandez, and Dr. Norma Silva, the leader of the Communist Party, led a physical attack on Dr. Biscet. The second incident took place a few days prior to the Ibero-American Summit in Havana, and resulted in Dr. Biscet being accused of all three of the aforementioned crimes. The Lawton Foundation and numerous members of the opposition movement held a press conference on October 28, 1999, to announce a peaceful march through the streets of Havana to demand freedom for all political prisoners and human rights for Cuba.

At this conference, the Cuban flag was displayed in an inverted vertical position as a sign of distress and protest for the human rights violations in Cuba. The human rights activists who attempted to participate in the march were attacked by government sponsored mobs. The charges related to the above mentioned incidents resulted in Dr. Biscet serving a three year term at the Cuba Si Prison near Holguin, Oriente, 768 km. from Havana, making family visits extremely difficult during those years.

Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet González, a devout Christian, follower of the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, was arbitrarily detained 26 times from June 1998 to November 1999. This Cuban physician, a prisoner of conscience, has been mistreated physically and psychologically and has suffered beatings, threats, humiliations, blackmail, intimidating interrogations, and incarcerations in underground cells which he has had to share with insane individuals and common criminals. On several occasions, State Security has tried to subject Dr. Biscet to psychiatric examinations at Mazorra, the main psychiatric hospital in Havana. State security has also pressured him into leaving Cuba, to which he responded that he would never leave his country.

After he finished serving his three year sentence on October 31, 2002, Dr. Biscet was released and allowed to return to Havana. During his 36 days of freedom from October 31 to December 6 of 2002, Dr. Biscet completed his work on the Democratic Principles for Cuba. This work has achieved worldwide acceptance. He also promoted a civic project called “Club for Friends of Human Rights” whereby Cuban people could meet in small groups and educate themselves on human rights and learn ways to defend and demand them peacefully.

On December 6, 2002, in Havana, when he was preparing to meet with human rights activists from Matanzas as part of the “Club for Friends of Human Rights,” the Cuban Secret Police detained him along with many of the activists. The group staged an act of nonviolent civil disobedience by laying down in front of the home and saying: “Long live human rights” and “freedom for political prisoners.” On this occasion, the peaceful protestors were arrested and taken to the Tenth Unit of the National Revolutionary Police (Décima Unidad de la PNR) on Acosta Avenue. During this prison period, he was placed for 19 days in a calabozo (punishment cell.)

After several months in prison and having been transferred from Villa Marista to Combinado del Este Prison, on April 2003, Dr. Biscet was charged in a summary judgment with violation of Article 91 of the Cuban Penal Code which refers to crimes against state security. This time he was sentenced to a 25 year prison term which he began to serve at the Pinar del Rio prison system in western Cuba, in Kilo 5 and Kilo 8 prisons, 162 km from his home. During his stay at these prisons, he was tortured on numerous occasions and denied communication with the outside world. Dr. Biscet was placed in a tapiada (a humid, dark cell with no sunlight) both in the main prison cells and in the underground cells. At one point he had to share a cell with a common criminal for up to 3 weeks.

He remained in these tapiadas for up to 8 months. In the year 2003, his wife was only permitted to visit him once. On November 30, 2004, he was transferred to Combinado del Este prison in Havana, Cuba. In the year 2004, he was allowed only one family visit every three months and a marital visit every 5 to 6 months. Currently, he is allowed to have one conjugal visit and one family visit every sixty days, while other prisoners are allowed visitations every 45 days. The Cuban guards tell Dr. Biscet that his case, in particular, is handled by the State Security (Seguridad del Estado.)

In spite of Dr. Biscet's difficulties in prison, he is in good spirits and remains firm on his demands for justice and freedom. On a prison visit, Dr. Biscet gave a message to his wife Elsa, asking his Cuban brothers and sisters on the island and in exile to join in prayer with the international community for freedom for all political prisoners and freedom of expression in Cuba. In that same message, he expressed his gratitude to all those concerned for his well-being, particularly his colleagues in the medical profession.

On May 1, 2004, Dr. Biscet was the recipient of a Doctoral Degree in Honoris Causa. The honor was presented by Dr. Eduardo Padron, the president of Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida. On July 3, 2004, he was named the Honorary President of the Pan American Cuban Medical Convention in Miami Florida, a distinct honor awarded by his medical colleagues in exile. Both honors were awarded in recognition for his work on human rights for promoting nonviolent civil disobedience, and for his dedication to the struggle to bring democracy, justice, and liberty to Cuba.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award, was given to Dr. Biscet, in absentia, by President George W. Bush, at a ceremony held at the White House on November 5, 2007. Dr. Biscet's children and directors of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights attended the ceremony. Dr. Biscet requested that the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights hold the presidential medal until the time that Cuba is free.

At a ceremony in Berlin, on December 12, 2007, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was once again recognized for his struggle for human rights. He was honored with the International Award for Human Rights, the Dr. Rainier Hidelbrandt Medal. This medal is named after the man who founded and who until his death directed the Hause Aum Checkpoint Charlie, a museum that documents the attempts to escape from communism to the West. Dr. Angel E. Garrido, Vice-President of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, accepted the award in his name.

The most recent commendation received by Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was a human rights award, an honorary plaque from the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. On February 27, 2008, Dr. Rigoberto Rodriguez, director of the Lawton Foundation, received the award on behalf of Dr. Biscet at the Czech Embassy in Washington, DC.

Presently, this peaceful human rights activist and devout Christian, follower of the philosophies of H. D. Thoreau, Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King, Jr., remains in prison due to his struggle for justice in Cuba. We urgently ask all men and women of good will, the international press, human rights organizations, world health organizations and dignitaries of democratic nations to denounce before the Cuban government the unjust incarceration of this Cuban physician whose only crime is to honor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to desire the reestablishment of democracy of his own country, Cuba.

"The conquest of liberty for Cuba is the present priority and will require a struggle that is detailed in its organization and persevering. My steps are headed towards the conquest of that priority. Hear, oh God, my cry, listen to my prayer fulfilling my vows day by day. Free me and free the Cuban people."

*Hat Tip: The Transsylvania Phoenix (transsylvaniaphoenix.blogspot.com)

My especial thanks to my friend Jose Palacio for bringing this individual, of whom I had never heard, to my attention.

Kathleen Parker Exploits Trig Palin

2010-02-13T13:45:00.000-05:00

The WashPost today runs an op ed article which asks if Sarah Palin is "exploiting" her child by "using" Trig as a poster child for an endangered species - the Downs' child.

Kathleen Parker, you will recall, called for Palin to step down last year.

Palin herself has hardly been discreet regarding her youngest child. She has spoken and written about her misgivings upon learning that she carried a Down syndrome baby. She told a pro-life crowd that she considered abortion and wasn't sure she could care for a child with special needs. These were surely sincere and heartfelt remarks shared by others in the crowd. ...Doubt always stalks conviction, but does it always demand expression? Might Trig someday read his mother's abortion thoughts and find them hurtful?

What vile horsehockey.

It is Kathleen Parker herself who is trying to exploit Trig Palin by using him as a tool to try to discredit Sarah. It is his disability, and his mother's courage in confronting those who would kill him, that shames Parker. If Sarah Palin had killed her child and come out with it on the stump, Kathleen Parker would have had--I'll try to put it nicely--paroxyms of joy.

In her statements Parker has shown herself as a mouthpiece for the abortion industry--an industry that would have enthusiastically butchered Trig Palin. It is she who should step down. Better yet, she should spend the rest of her life in penance, preferably at some monastic silent order.

Drive on, Sarah. Drive on.

"Camelot!..... Camelot!.... Camelot!"

2010-02-13T07:27:00.000-05:00

"(It's only a model!)"

Hollow Men

2010-02-12T10:40:00.001-05:00

I see that Charles Johnson is quoting T.S. Elliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

The depth of his self knowledge is astonishing, is it not?

Set Phasers to "Flambe'"

2010-02-12T07:24:00.000-05:00

Reuters reports:

A U.S. high-powered airborne laser weapon shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said on Friday. The agency said in a statement the test took place at 8:44 p.m. PST (11:44 p.m. EST) on Thursday /0444 GMT on Friday) at Point Mugu's Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off Ventura in central California. "The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile" the agency said.

Take THAT, Ahmonajihad!

Former President Clinton Has Heart Surgery

2010-02-12T06:52:00.000-05:00

It's all over the news; Former President William Jefferson Clinton had heart surgery last night. We wish him well and an early recovery.

Okay, okay. I'll speak honestly. Frankly, I can't stand the man, his politics, or the way he whored his way through eight years in the White House.

But. Still. He's out of office, and he's largely harmless now. And given his successor, I'm almost nostalgic for the 'good old days' when all we had to worry about was his taking credit for GOP successes in passing laws in the House.

And more important, I remember a conversation I had with a drunken, tear filled Bosnian businessman in 2002.

"I know you hate President Clinton, but I love him. I love him. He save my daughters, he save us, he end the war. I love Bill Clinton."

I disagreed with almost everything he did, but it's clear now that for all is faults, he DID end the war in Bosnia and brought peace there. And that is good.

Tattered Remnants #026: Gao Zhisheng

2010-02-11T16:05:00.000-05:00

THE RESULT OF OUR SILENCE: CHINESE CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY GAO ZHISHENG

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

Gao Zhisheng is a self-taught human rights lawyer. He resigned from the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 in protest to their treatment of the Falun Gong and of Chinese Christians, who continue to be severely persecuted under the rule of the Chinese communist party. He disappeared a little over one year ago.

He made a career, between 1989 and 2007, of first, defending individuals against incompetently run public companies, and later, defending individuals accused of participating in Falun Gong or Christian church-related activities.

Once more, Wikipedia:

Amnesty International alleged on January 17, 2006 that Gao narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, planned as a traffic accident ordered by Chinese secret police. On February 4, 2006, Gao, together with Hu Jia and other activists, launched a “Relay Hunger Strike for Human Rights,” whereby different activists and citizens fasted for 24 hours in rotation. The hunger strike was joined by people in 29 provinces, as well as overseas, though several participants were arrested for joining.

On August 15, 2006, after numerous death threats and continued harassment, while visiting his sister's family, Mr. Gao was abducted by the Chinese secret police without any legal proceedings. On September 21, 2006, he was "officially" arrested. On December 22, 2006, Mr. Gao was convicted of "subversion", and was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended, and placed on probation for five years. The sentence also deprives him of his political rights - the freedom to publish or speak out against the government - for one year. He had publicly confessed to a number of errors. On his liberation, Gao recanted his confession and described torture he experienced during his 54 days in custody. He also said captors threatened he would be killed if he spoke publicly about the matter. In chapter 6 of his memoirs written in 2006, Gao criticised the CCP for employing "the most savage, most immoral, and most illegal means to torture our mothers, torture our wives, torture our children, and torture our brothers and sisters…". He formally renounced his membership of "this inhumane, unjust, and evil Party", declaring it "the proudest day of my life."

On June 2, 2007, Gao was beaten by a national security officer after he complained about officers assaulting his wife. On June 24, 2007, Gao was kidnapped by the Chinese government in order to prevent him from attending an award ceremony in the United States. The American Board of Trial Advocates selected Gao to receive the prestigious Courageous Advocacy Award; they had invited him to receive the award personally in Santa Barbara, California on June 30, 2007.

In the fall of 2007, Gao’s memoir A China More Just was published in English in the United States.

On September 22, 2007, after writing open letters to Vice-President of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott, and then to US Congress calling for a boycott of the Olympics,[17] Gao was once again taken away from his home, where he had been under house arrest, by Chinese secret police. A letter from Gao revealed he endured ten days of torture that involved beatings, electric prods and even toothpicks to his naked body, followed by weeks of emotional torture. Gao wrote that his torturers said his case had become personal with uncles in the state security apparatus after he had repeatedly publicised previous mistreatment.

A dramatic reenactment of what he endured follows. Warning: Not for children or the meek.

He disappeared again a little over a year ago, on February 4, 2009. He has not been seen since; his detention this long without charge is illegal even under Chinese Communist law--assuming he still lives.

You can find out more about Gao Zhisheng by {{{clicking here}}}.

Let us consider his final words to us:

"I leave you with this thought: the increased level of confidence of the Chinese Communist Party in the treating of its people with cold blooded brutality and cruelty is the direct result of our silence."

Iran a "Nuclear State"

2010-02-11T15:23:00.000-05:00

President Irnyrdinnerjacket of Iran today announced that his country is now a nuclear power.

This claim, it is reported, is highly plausible.

Okay, fine, guy. Whatever. Just remember. There's another term for "nuclear state."

"Preemptive nuclear target for bigger nuclear states."

And America has never, ever forgotten the Hostage Crisis. Nota bene.

Congressman Charlie Wilson, RIP

2010-02-10T23:39:00.000-05:00

In marked contrast to my last post, I'm now in active mourning.

Charlie Wilson, the flamboyant playboy Congressman who played a key role in arming the Mujahedeen--the armed guerillas who broke the back of Soviet power in Afghanistan in the 1980s--has passed away.

God rest him.

Yes, he is to be respected and mourned, in spite of the possibility that the campaign cost us the Twin Towers as "blowback." In the end, freeing the world of Soviet tyranny was, and is, worth the cost we paid, before and after.

To the honored Member from Texas: we salute you.

ADDENDUM:

I really MUST share this story, from his Wiki entry:

It is speculated that Wilson first entered politics as a teenager by running a campaign against his next-door neighbor, city council incumbent Charles Hazard. When Wilson was 13, his dog entered Hazard's yard. Hazard retaliated by mixing crushed glass into the dog's food, causing fatal internal bleeding. Being a farmer's son, Wilson was able to get a driving permit at age 13, which enabled him to drive 96 voters, mainly black citizens from poor neighborhoods, to the polls. As they left the car, it is speculated that he told each of them that he didn't want to influence their vote, but that the incumbent Hazard had purposely killed his dog. After Hazard was defeated by a margin of 16 votes, Wilson went to his house to tell him he shouldn't poison any more dogs. Wilson cited this as "the day [he] fell in love with America."

A love that lasted his whole life, one should add.

God bless him.

John Murtha Dies.

2010-02-10T07:24:00.001-05:00

It is not good to speak ill of the dead, so I'll try to bite my tongue on this one.

Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania--noted Abscam artist, "anti-Iraq activist" beloved by the HuffPost crowd, and most unforgivably, libeller of American troops who fought at Haditha,has gone the way of all flesh.

I note that his final illness was a consequence of incompetently provided government health care: he went into Bethesda for a gall bladder operation and emerged with an unrepaired slashed intestine.

It is regrettable that he has died. It is regrettable that he died the way that he did.

But with every death, as PDQ Bach once noted, there comes a vacancy: perhaps, like Ted Kennedy, that may be his greatest legacy.

ADDENDUM 2/15/2010

Michelle Malkin gives The Honorable Murtha an appropriate sendoff.

"The Internet" Nominated for Peace Prize??!?!

2010-02-06T18:28:00.000-05:00

This is apparently not a joke.

Were "The Internet" to win, that would likely make it either the second, or the third, time that the award has gone to a soulless inanimate object (given that past prizes have gone to the President of the United States for his 98.6 degree body temperature, and to noted fantasy filmmaker Al Gore, for his winning the election in 2000).

So. What gives me the authority to say such nasty things about our President and Vice President?

Well, remember, I was named the 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year.....

Our President On A Heroic "Corpse-man"

2010-02-06T14:58:00.000-05:00

We Remember

2010-02-06T10:51:00.000-05:00

We remember.

He would have been 99 today.

300 million people walk freely today, and millions more live, because he was once our President.

We remember.

"25 REASONS I OWE MY MOTHER"

2010-02-06T10:49:00.000-05:00

GOOGLE reports that the following has appeared on the Net 67,000 times.

This makes 67,001. :0)

25 REASONS I OWE MY MOTHER

1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE.
'If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning.'

2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
'You better pray that will come out of the carpet.'

3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
'If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!'

4. My mother taught me LOGIC.
' Because I said so, that's why.'

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
'If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me..'

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
'Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you're in an accident.'

7. My mother taught me IRONY
'Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about.'

8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
'Shut your mouth and eat your supper.'

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM.
'Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!'

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
'You'll sit there until all that spinach is gone.'

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
'This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.'

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
'If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!'

13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
'I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.'

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
'Stop acting like your father!'

15. My mother taught me about ENVY..
'There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do.'

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
'Just wait until we get home.'

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
'You are going to get it when you get home!'

18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
'If you don't stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way.'

19. My mother taught me ESP.
'Put your sweater on; don't you think I know when you are cold?'

20. My mother taught me HUMOR.
'When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me.'

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
'If you don't eat your vegetables, you'll never grow up.'

22.My mother taught me GENETICS.
'You're like your father.'

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
'Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?'

24. My mother taught me WISDOM.
'When you get to be my age, you'll understand.'

25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE
'One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you!'

In Living Color

2010-02-05T07:51:00.000-05:00

The white folks at NBC are celebrating Black History Month.

This simply must be seen to be believed.

As Lucianne put it, "if Fox had done this they'd be out of business."

We have a new most-junior Senator....

2010-02-03T16:42:00.000-05:00

.... let it not be said that I am not an equal opportunity offender.

I'm having a tough time choosing between the two for which is the most disgusting.

But you can say that Senator Brown certainly forewent the diaper.

And the bunny ears. (Physically, at least.)

"I'd have Been Better Off Broke"

2010-02-03T15:17:00.000-05:00

Well, the search is over.

They've found Abraham Shakespeare.

The former 'trucker's assistant' (read: truck loader/laborer) who brought home a $17 million lottery win three years ago has been found... buried in the back yard of a "friend." He's been missing since last April.

He spent most of his last months alive actively giving his money away to just about anyone who asked him, including one Dorice "DeeDee" Moore, in whose back yard they found him buried in a shallow grave.

He apparently was a good man who wished none ill and did no one any harm. God rest him, and remember, God may be doing you a favor by not granting your lottery prayer.

James O'Keefe Was NOT Planting Bugs....

2010-02-03T15:16:00.000-05:00

....in Senator Mary Landrieu's office--according to just about every reliable report that followed his arrest a few days ago.

I'm very happy to hear that. It IS possible he knows a bit of history after all.

But.

Still.

What were you THINKING, DUUUUDE??!?!!?

The Disappearing "D"

2010-02-01T20:21:00.000-05:00

A report on NewsBusters highlights one of the more curious difficulties faced today in broadcast journalism: their inability to use certain letters of the alphabet.

In coverage of the now-utterly discredited John Edwards, both ABC and George Stephanopolos devoted more than a full hour of coverage to the Edwards scandal, which involved him askidentally fathering a child by his mistress while running for President. They manage to discuss every aspect of the case....

...without ever mentioning his party affiliation.

You see this shit all the time. Whenever a Pubbie gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar (or the cookie baker, as the case may be) they drive in the party ID with a sledgehammer. But let a _emocrat go wrong, and lo and behold, it never gets mentioned.

Suhprize, suhprize, suhprize.....

The Seven Stages of Leftist Descent

2010-01-31T20:57:00.000-05:00

The always-insightful poster Engraved-On-His-Hands at lucianne.com just made a brilliant observation, so brilliant that I'd like to share it in full.

The post is made in reaction to an Air Force Times story detailing a recent modification at the Air Force Academy, giving a "sacred space" to so-called "pagans."

EOHH had this to say in response:

There seems to be various steps or progressions, not only in this particular subject, but in many others affecting our culture. The steps include, but are not limited to, the ones that I hastily put down below:

1. ''You are crazy for suggesting that something like that could ever happen around here.''

2. ''It's not that widespread, and it would cause more harm than good to outlaw it.''

3. ''A lot of good people, including some of my friends, participate in it.''

4. ''It's really not that bad.''

5. ''Those who oppose it are extremists who are worse than the problem itself.''

6. ''We need as a society to marginalize those who oppose it.''

7. ''We need to enact laws to prosecute and silence the bigots who oppose this.''

(Well, is your seat in the handbasket all comfy now?)

Exactly. Exactly.

"Imagine a Free Vermont"?

2010-01-31T19:41:00.000-05:00

Time Magazine, in the first article worth reading that I've seen in a long time, covers the secessionist fantasies of a bunch of middle aged paleocons in Vermont who'd rather pull out of the Union than continue to bear the 'burdens of empire.'

These guys need to imagine, not a Free Vermont, but a Vermont after a one megaman-army marches through it.

We don't do secession in the United States of America.

We do this instead.

Obama's True Message to GOP (0:25 Sec Mark)

2010-01-30T14:15:00.000-05:00

Nothing more need be said. Alas.

Roeder Convicted of Murdering Tiller

2010-01-29T13:22:00.001-05:00

Scott Roeder has been convicted of killing late term abortionist George Tiller.

This is as it should be.

By this act he brought disrepute to the prolife movement.

Prolifers don't commit murder.

That's kinda the point.

However, I should comment on the following from the above-cited LA Times article:

Tiller, 67, who was beloved by his patients...

...uh, you can say that this is a half-truth.

Chemical Ali Byebye

2010-01-28T15:01:00.000-05:00

Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali," convicted in four separate war crimes trials for various crimes against humanity and the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, went to his eternal reward yesterday at the hands of an Iraqi court-directed hang man.

Seems to be a bad day for mass murderers all around.

The Good Die Young

2010-01-28T03:00:00.000-05:00

The NYT reports:

Ruth Proskauer Smith, a longtime reproductive rights advocate who helped found what is now Naral Pro-Choice America, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 102.

May the Risen Christ, Son of the Triune God, have mercy on her coal-black soul.

ADDENDUM

Besides her son, Anthony, of Manhattan, Mrs. Smith is survived by a daughter, Gael S. Arnold, of Washington; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Wellllll.... ITHN'T THAT THPETHIAL!

"We Choose Not To Go To The Moon.... "

2010-01-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

".... Not because it is hard but because it is easy." - Barack Obama

Just to Remind Us!

Note to the reader:

I ran this story in August.

I'm going to run it again until somebody appreciates it.

The great Chinese explorer Zheng He (or Cheng Ho).

They're reporting that the Moon rocket program has been axed.

Not enough money, they say.

Fine, then. They think it's better to spend our money on socialized medical insurance. Or to give to the banks. Hooo...kay. Elections have consequences.

But let me tell you a story.

When the Ming Dynasty (refounded by the Emperor Yongle) took over China after a period of chaos in the early 1400s, he discovered a source of great potential wealth: a huge swath of land that had been set aside as a hunting preserve for the old dynasty.

The Mings chose to sell the land to the peasants in small lots. This generated a huge surplus of money.

After some debate, the Mings decided to spend the cash on .... exploration ships. They chose a remarkable individual, Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho), famously a eunuch, to command the ships.

This account (from Wikipedia, thank God for their free-use rule!) sums up his career very well.

Zheng He's first voyage consisted of a fleet of around 300 ships (other sources say 200) holding almost 28,000 crewmen. These were probably mainly large six-masted ships....Zheng He's fleets visited Arabia, East Africa, India, Indonesia and Thailand (at the time called Siam), dispensing and receiving goods along the way. Zheng He presented gifts of gold, silver, porcelain and silk; in return, China received such novelties as ostriches, zebras, camels, ivory and giraffes.
Zheng He ... ruthlessly suppressed pirates who had long plagued Chinese and southeast Asian waters. He also intervened in a civil disturbance in order to establish his authority in Ceylon, and he made displays of military force when local officials threatened his fleet in Arabia and East Africa. From his fourth voyage, he brought envoys from thirty states who traveled to China and paid their respects at the Ming court.
In 1424 [his primary sponsor] the Emperor Yongle died. His successor, Emperor Hongxi (reigned 1424–1425), decided to curb [Zheng He's] influence at court. Zheng He made one more voyage under Emperor Xuande (reigned 1426–1435), but after that Chinese treasure ship fleets ended. Zheng He died during the treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty: he was, like many great admirals, buried at sea.
Zheng He, on his seven voyages [1405-1433], successfully relocated large numbers of Chinese Muslims to the nascent Malacca, which became a large international trade center.

What is important about this story is that after Zheng He died and the fleet returned, the Chinese abandoned further naval exploration. Had they tried to travel due east, they likely would have discovered America through the back door--and America would be half Chinese today. As it was, the Ming Dynasty turned inward, abandoned naval exploration... and became a very sad second-best to the Europeans, who started to explore the seas just a few years after China abandoned them. As a result, China is still not even competitive with the European Union, much less ourselves.

We have the choice, and the chance, not to repeat their mistake.

I'm confident that Obamism and all its pomps and works will be destroyed and in four years the grown ups will be back in charge. All this decision means is that the landing has been delayed by four years.

I ask you to remember the last line from the great movie Apollo 13 (known in this household as 'Daddy's Movie'):

"When are we going back? And who will it be?"

ADDENDUM: This one's for the Tattered Remnant. A guy who volunteers for this kind of duty HAS to have been one of the club.

Charles Johnson? Is that YOU?

2010-01-26T22:36:00.001-05:00

There's a report that a man was arrested at an airport with 44 lizards in his pants.

No further comment is necessary, methinx.

So Much for the ACORN Exposé

2010-01-26T21:01:00.000-05:00

If reports are correct, the individual responsible for the Acorn exposé videos was arrested for a Federal felony today.

James O'Keefe, the filmmaker responsible for breaking the back of ACORN with his 'undercover' filming of ACORN decisionmakers, was arrested for -- get this -- apparently trying to break into Senator Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans in order to interfere somehow with their telephone system.

Three other young men were also arrested, including Robert Flanagan, the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. All have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

Now, Republicans of a certain age know better than to try to plant bugs in Democrat offices. I seem to recall there was some trouble a few years back when something like that happened, and if memory serves, it didn't end well.

This young man, O'Keefe, if he really was involved in a monumentally stupid attempt to bug Democrat offices, deserves to go to jail. He should also know, however, that not only has he just won himself a prison sentence, he just discredited his own work and unleashed and reinvigorated his enemies at ACORN, who will certainly use his criminal behavior - if it is that - at the Boggs Building as an excuse to reinvigorate itself. In the end, we can watch them transfer its own well earned opporbrium onto O'Keefe's apparently hollow noggin.

Christ on a crutch and Lord above.

What were you THINKING, DUUUUDE??!?!!?

ADDENDUM

When I say "So much for the ACORN exposé" I don't mean either that the exposé itself is bogus or that Andrew Breitbart, who brought it to light, had anything to do with the above mess in New Orleans. I AM saying that Mr. O'Keefe's days as a creditable source for anything are hereby terminated, unless there is some chance (God knows what!) that the arrest is not what it appears to be.

Andrew Breitbart himself denies any connection with any of the four other than O'Keefe, and denies knowing what he was up to. Click here for more.

Fridge Pic #015: 1 PIC = 1 KWord

2010-01-26T08:34:00.000-05:00

(Hat tip: Free Republic)

A Victory for Free Speech in America

2010-01-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

The United States Supreme Court, last Wednesday, revolutionized and reinvigorated free speech protections in its decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (558 U.S.____, Docket No. 08-205, January 20, 2010). An excellent legal summary of the decision itself can be found here.

You can spent an hour or two reading a zillion articles to try to figure out what the hell went on.

Or you can watch THIS video, which summarizes it very well in less than five minutes.

I'm not a big fan of the CATO institute--libertarianism is NOT my cuppa tea--but I'm glad they're here to tell us these things.

And I'm glad they now can't ban stuff like this.

We have a new most-junior Senator....

2010-01-24T03:02:00.000-05:00

.... and I just wanted to remind you who Scott Brown replaced in that role.

WashPost Journo: Racists Will Elect Palin

2010-01-24T03:01:00.000-05:00

One Jon Jeter, a blogger at www.theroot.com, has a bad case of the vapors.

He is sensible to the degree that he sees, clearly, the utter incompetence and inability of the Obama administration to cope with our difficulties.

And he sensibly sees that Obama's inabilities are paving the way for a President Palin.

However, his analysis of how we will get from here to there is like looking in a funhouse mirror. All the attributes are present but the picture presented is highly distorted. To say the least.

For starters, he sees that

[T]he economic crisis that is most comparable to the current situation is not the Great Depression, or the 1981 slowdown, but Japan’s decade-long recession that began with the bust of its real-estate bubble in the early ‘90s.

Okay, as far as it goes.

However, he sees the response to this by conservatives in flyover country as "tribal."

Like the defiant, segregationist Alabama governor, Palin, the former Alaska governor, speaks the language of the white Southern and suburban voters who fear that the American way of life is under attack from an out-of-touch, Godless, effete and multiracial big-city crowd. With her folksy charisma and parochial values, Palin is the latest in a long line of demagogues —from post-Reconstruction governors in the Deep South to Father Coughlin in the ‘30s, from Reagan to Lou Dobbs—who’ve emerged to redeem, or reclaim, the land from Northern carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes.

Astounding.

It's all about racism. Always, always, always.

Got news for you, Mr. Jeter. It's not about your race. It's about our choices, all of us, white, black and in between.

Jeter is right that it is very likely that America will elect President Palin in 2012 whether the national Democrat socialists like it or not.

He is accurate in that our situation is like that of Japan in the 1990s. The reason the housing market collapsed in 2008 is the same as the Japanese real estate collapse 20 years ago: all that borrowing was based on a supposed inevitably increasing price for housing, arising from endless new demand for housing... but there suddenly was no burgeoning demand for new housing. Oops.

The reason why there was not burgeoning demand for new housing is that not enough young people were aching to buy houses in the market.

The reason why there are not enough young people aching to buy houses is because huge numbers of those who might be buying houses were exterminated in utero by the peculiar institution we call "legalized abortion". That's about two in seven conceived since 1973. (And about 1 in 3 African Americans!)

And this is EXACTLY why Japan is in permanent economic stagnation. They've aborted so many of their children that there is no hope for economic growth.

There are 50 million or so missing Americans--25 million of them would be between the ages of 18 and 35 right now, and of them, we can expect, oh, maybe about 10-15 million potential home buyers would have been out there had they not been aborted.

The reason the Left hates Sarah Palin has nothing to do with her "parochialism." It is due to fact that she and her daughter reminds each one of them, father or mother, who ever aborted a child of their "choice." And I fear that the Left will do anything, anything at all, to avoid having her and those who support her from controlling the national government because they do not want to be confronted with their own, personal contribution to the mass killing of our nation's children.

And for the writer, above, who fears Palin's "racism"--how can she possibly be a racist when she, unlike Obama, wants there to be many more black children born than are born now? (Leaving aside the additional inconvenient truth that her husband is, ahem, non-white.)

Yes, it's about the economy. And yes, it's about Obama's manifest, total and irredeemable inability to be an effective President. But it's ultimately about our national self-destructive behavior of insisting that we abort freely and without consequences.

But there are ALWAYS consequences to evil.

Always.

"I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just."

Our economic troubles are not God's punishment for abortion: it is merely that He allows us the consequences of our choices. If we jump off of a bridge, He lets us hit the bottom... although we may (may) have a few seconds to reconsider and repent before we hit the ground.

And it is truly dismaying that someone like Jeter, who one would think should know better, blames it, indeed everything, on racism. But then, if he knew better and wrote the full truth, the WashPost probably would not have hired or promoted him; they would have found some other politically correct leftist to write in his place. PC journo school grads are a dime a dozen. There are always plenty of, oh, Jayson Blairs and Stephen Glasses out there who are willing to, er, get the real story.

Tattered Remnants #025: Ray Vivier

2010-01-23T23:02:00.000-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

THE MAN HE BECAME: RAY VIVIER
I have been, and remain, a staunchly anti-elitist individual. I find the idea of belonging to a special group the most dangerous philosophical ground you can stand on. But what is remarkable about this Remnant is that the people that compose it seem to be drawn completely at random. It is not a philosophy. It is a frequency. You are on it or you are not. And this is not a million-dollar lottery win, either: it is a call to face unpleasant facts and impending hardship. It is a quiet summons to duty. It often makes one uncomfortable, and, most often, this unfocused, vague desire – this need – to do something useful most often makes one feel very much alone.

What’s remarkable about the Remnant — to me, anyway – is the sheer unpredictability of its composition. Perhaps that homeless drug addict, panhandling under the overpass… perhaps he will be the one to run into a burning building while other decent and good people stand idle, waiting for something to happen.

Waiting for someone to happen.

--Bill Whittle, You Are Not Alone, Part 1, the essay that inspired the Tattered Remnants series.

His name was Ray and he was a homeless wreck.

He had been fighting alcohol for years. He had spent most of the previous months living beneath a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio. When young, he had been a United States Marine, once, but had only lasted a year. He wandered the Left Coast of our country, never quite settling down. He hadn't seen his ex-wife for decades. His children had lost touch with him; no word had been received from him for fifteen years. He was sixty-one years old and had nobody--nobody except his fellows in the boarding house. They didn't even know his right name.

And yet, when he died, unidentified, in a Cleveland boarding house blaze, he died in glory.

The fire, in November 2009, was caused by arson--two men deliberately set fire to the building for undisclosed reasons. There were nine in the home when the fire broke out.

Three within the building were trapped and burned to death. But the others were awakened and removed from the building by Ray. He repeatedly went back into the building and carried his housemates out.

He saved five.

But he was gravely injured and collapsed outside the building after his final rescue. He was taken to a hospital, suffering from severe smoke inhalation and burns from his efforts. He died in agony.

And he lay in the hospital morgue for weeks as nobody knew his true name or his next of kin; it seemed likely that this anonymous hero would be buried in a pauper's grave, unmarked and unremembered.

After some old friends heard word of the fire–-friends who went back to Cleveland from Pennsylvania to identify his body--he was given a name. He was identified as Ray Vivier.

He was inurned on January 23, 2010, in Arlington National Cemetery, his ashes placed in a columbarium overlooking the Potomac, within sight of the Mall, after a funeral attended by more than a hundred of his family, his friends–and those who admired him, his ashes in a gold urn.

When he was laid to rest, he received full military honors.

"I am proud of the man he was becoming," his daughter said. And it could be said that, no matter his struggles, in the end, he succeeded.

There can be no better epitaph for any of us.

I do not have a picture of Ray Vivier.

But God knows him well. May he sing His glory forever.

Charles Johnson: 'Weasels Ripped My Flesh'

2010-01-23T07:34:00.000-05:00

A profile of Trelayne, the Squire of Gothos, in the New York Times no less. Money grafs:

THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. ... Johnson insists that ... no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.

AND:

Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog — this one assailing Johnson from the right — sprang up, administered by banned former “Lizards,” as L.G.F.’s registrants are known. Johnson responded by posting those former registrants’ real names and photographs on L.G.F. — an astounding breach of civility on the Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.

This sucks. Credite experto. (For the benefit of Charles, that means "Trust him who knows." Firsthand.)

Most hilariously of all, a quote from Trelayne his own self:

“I don’t know why things can’t just stay on the level of the factual,” he said. “I don’t know why everything has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the past I’ve called them out for that.” He sighed. “I miss the days of Walter Cronkite.”

In other words, Trelayne is every bit as thin skinned a whiner as we thought.

And he views as his hero a Communist sympathizer who helped turn Southeast Asia over to the North Vietnames Army, Pol Pot, and their killer minions.

RZZZZZ!

ADDENDUM

The Squire has this to say about NYT's account:

I have a few significant disagreements with the angle taken by Jonathan Dee in his profile for the New York Times, most of all his willingness to accept unverifiable anecdotal information from people who post comments on the Internet under fake names, to claim that their LGF accounts were blocked simply for disagreeing with me — a claim which, in the vast majority of cases, is simply not true.

I am Richard L. Kent, Esq. I am attorney in Eastpointe, Michigan. I work at a law office at 22815 Kelly Road, Eastpointe, Michigan, 48021-2073. My phone number is 586 202 6170. I'm making this public because Charles and his mob of diseased flying monkey maniacs outed me when I dared to challenge his bad behavior, and when they put my personal information on his blog, he didn't bother to delete it.... thereby making him a party to their calls to get me fired. (Fortunately I'm self employed, and my boss just loves me unreservedly.)

I post my real contact information since it is a matter of public record and can be verified by anyone willing to spend five minutes on the Web trying to track me down. Besides, Charles himself allowed it to be posted to his blog.

And I'm here to say so because the fact that people's LGF accounts were blocked simply for disagreeing with him is absolutely true. I have seen it. And I say so under my own name.

It didn't quite happen to me personally because I resigned his blog first. But, after I resigned, he then outed me, revealing my personal information to the world in gross violation of the trust given him, in the same way that he outed those now running "Blogmocracy 2.0." aka LGF2. (The fact that one of those he outed, LGF2 flounder "Rodan" is a vile, genocide cheerleading hate-punk, doesn't change the fact that Charles absolutely shoudna done what he did.... i.e., using information from his donor page(!) to track down and out those who diss him.)

But I am here to tell you that Charles' whines about those he has banned are the whines of someone who is guilty as charged.

GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!

And if he doesn't like my saying so he can go screw himself.

"Bless me, Father, .... "

2010-01-22T12:26:00.000-05:00

"... for I have sinned."

It has been far too long since I have been to Confession....

Father, this is kind of hard to explain.... you see, about ten years ago, I was stationed in Bosnia as a peacekeeper. I lived in a US base near Tuzla and drove around the back roads of the northern part of the country helping to keep the Croats, Muslims and Serbs from restaring the war of 1995.

Well, my sin is possibly one of blasphemy. Or at the very least, idolatry.

Everywhere we went, every hour of every day, we were required to wear a little plastic bag around our necks. In the plastic bag went our SFOR ("Stabilization Force") ID cards, and our military ID's. The point was that we were supposed to be able to identify one another on sight.

Well, we were far away from home. And we were very frightened of being in a hostile country where one wrong step could set off a land mine.

So, as soldiers do in hostile territory--we called it "Indian Country", very un-PC of us--we turned to religious observation to invoke the help of God Almighty to protect us.

Many of us, being Protestants, started carrying and reading one of the many freely available Gideon Bibles. Those of Jewish background suddenly discovered the Sabbath prayers and avoiding pork. And we Catholics turned to our traditional standbys of holy objects, rosaries, and other "sacramentals." These went into our little plastic ID pouches.

Shortly after I arrived, a woman friend of mine gave me something particularly special: it was a bit of the Sacrament--the Host, "Holy Communion", the Consecrated Body of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ--which she had bought from a street seller in Croatia. It was a tiny bit of Communion host embedded in a tiny plastic case.

"I'm not Catholic, I'm Jewish," she explained. "But I understand well how sacred this is to you and I thought it was evil that some guy was selling this like it was a hot dog on the street. So I bought them all and I've been making a point of giving them to my Catholic friends."

Now, I am sure that, were this actually consecrated, it would be the grossest blasphemy to have this on (rather than within) my person. The Host is a Sacrament, not a mere sacramental, and this meant that every time I sinned, from swearing up to whatever, I was doing so in His direct Presence.

And yet... and yet... it was an enormous comfort in times of danger. And while there was nobody shooting at us, there was plenty of danger in Bosnia. (Ever walk in a minefield? Ever see an open mass grave? Ever fly a helicopter blind in fog in the mountains? No? I have. I don't recommend it.)

There were times I might well have lost my cool and cried like a child without the ability to hold that thing in my hand when I was in deepest fear.

Shortly before I left the country for good, I gave it away to another soldier, who, I trust, gave it to another, .... and so on.

My conscience is pricked because I read about an artificial kerfluffle being sounded in certain quarters concerning the fact that some sniper rifle sights have been engraved with Biblical references--and that same has been decried by the soi-disant "Military Religious Freedom Foundation".

Now, having inappropriate markings on combat rifles can be a bad thing. I remember the legend (don't know if it's true) about how the shoulder stocks of the first M-16 rifles were marked with the corporate logo of their manufacturer.... Mattel.

Plus, I seem to recall the problems arising when the Reagan administration wanted to name a nuclear wessel* after Corpus Christi, TX.

Be that as it may, I must say that in a technical sense, those objecting to Bible citations on rifle sights are right, sort of. It is not a good idea to put references to the words of Jesus Christ onto an instrument of instant death. I, for one, might worry about being on the receiving end of a lightning strike. (And I *certainly* would not want to name a Final Counterstrike mechanism after the Body of Christ.)

More importantly, I am sure that putting bible references on a sniper scope would give some Constitutional lawyers a bad case of the vapors. ("We can't do that! Cuz... cuz... cuz we can't!")

On the other hand, I recall that a few years ago, America cheered at the hard-core-fundamentalist-bible-quoting U.S. Army infantry sniper named Daniel Jackson, played by Barry Pepper, who prayed "Blessed be the Lord Our God, who teacheth my fingers to fight, and my hands to war," immediately before using his U.S. Army issued sniper sight to kill Nazis.

"We sleep safe at night because rough men stand ready at night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." And some of those men are deeply committed (if, arguably, theologically shallow) Christians, who battle in the face of an implacable enemy who would, indeed, do us, and him, immeasurable harm if they could.

And these men (and women) need all the help they can get.

Anyway, if there is any truth to the Catholic faith, I am sure that carrying the Body of My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on my person for two years in a war zone is far more blasphemous than carrying a sniper rifle with "code words."

Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.... if indeed I have.

And I must admit that I am sorriest that I am not really very sorry at all. It was a comfort to have You with me.

-------

*That's not misspelled, that's Chekov. ("Where are the nuclear wessels?")

Sen. Franken Called For Violent Overthrow of US Gov't

2010-01-21T03:01:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago I had the strangest dream.... Al Franken, the United States Senator (who, last time I saw him, defamed my beloved Bosnia as a "shit hole") was on a stage calling for nothing more or less than violent revolution.

Well, I googled it.

Turns out I was remembering an actual event. October 21, 1978. I must been, what, sixteen years old? Anyway, Al Franken and his buddy Tom Davis were filmed saying... THIS:

Al Franken: Thank you, thank you! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! It's GREAT to be back!

Tom Davis: That's right. And, tonight, we'd like to stick our necks out a little bit on national television, and call for a violent overthrow of the United States government! [ he bows, as the audience applauds ]

Al Franken: Thank you! Thank you! You see, besides being a professional comedy team, Tom and I are international Communist revolutionaries... and we believe that nothing can really be changed in this country, through the Democratic process! [ brief applause ] Oh, thank you! We're glad a lot of you feel that way!

Tom Davis: Right you are, Al. You see, in a Capitalist society, anybody who's running for public office is automatically corrupted by... well, instead of telling... why don't we show you?.... (cut to pointless comedy routine)

Well, as it turned out, Al DID show us. We just had to wait thirty one years.

(The above script is from an appearance on Saturday Night Live, but is presented just to let you know that (a) Al Franken actually said this, and (b) that he was just, ahem, kidding.)

(Right?)

Guess the answer to this is 'yes'....

2010-01-20T11:11:00.001-05:00

....in light of yesterday's election results in Massachusetts.

Teddy, We Hardly Knew Ye

2010-01-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

In August 2009, this blog bade a fond farewell to Teh Loin of the Senate, Edward (Ted) Kennedy, the Submariner, as he drove his metaphorical car over the Bifrost Bridge, alone this time.

We made the following snide comments:

His death at this moment reduces the Democratic majority in the Senate to 59 votes, thus making it mathematically possible to stop socialized health care until his successor is elected, which should take, oh, about six months.

Thank you, Senator, for your contribution this day to the continuation of American freedom.

We never, in our fondest fantasies, ever dreamed that the door that hit him on the way out would open the way for stopping Obamacare flat.

Again, Senator, we AGAIN thank you for your lasting contribution to the continuation of American freedom.

And we rejoice in the victory with knowledge that there is much struggle yet to come.

You. Just. Gotta. See. This.

2010-01-19T18:05:00.000-05:00

From YOUTUBE:

"A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase."

Doncha hate it when that happens?

PS. That really is 16th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, and yes, it looks just like that.

Aside from the nuclear pigeon.

In Re: Glenn Beck

2010-01-16T20:28:00.001-05:00

You know....? The "Idiotarian of the Year"? The guy whom Charles Johnson, the Squire of Gothos, describes as...

He spreads End Times craziness and has guests who suggest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the Antichrist. He constantly predicts that the end of America is imminent. He asserts that President Obama is a "racist with a deep-seated hatred of white culture." He says President Obama is part of a decades long communist plot to destroy the country. He thinks the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan is a hotbed of commie propaganda. He promotes a book by W. Cleon Skousen, a crazed work of conspiracy theories that served as an inspiration for the John Birch Society.

Well, the Wall Street Journal today gives us, ahem, a *slightly* different view about him.

"Look, I know a lot of people will disagree with the way I present things. I am being myself—I am a guy who is a recovering alcoholic, who lived a pretty fast life, who works hard every day, quite honestly, not to use the F-word—it used to be an art for me. I am a work in progress. But I also am a businessman that looks to get the word out to the maximum number of people."

Imagine! Glenn Beck, actually a member of the human frakking race!

Naaaah. After all, he's the Idiotarian of the Year. Charles Johnson told us so.

Right.

Now, I have never watched Glenn Beck. I have never listened to his radio show. Or Rush's. Or anybody else's. I don't get cable TV, I don't listen to talk radio. I think for myself, frankly, and when I am interested in Glenn Beck's, Rush Limbaugh's, or Charles Johnson's opinions, I'll give it to them.

But still.

It's interesting to see that he is, indeed, not an autotheistic phlegm monster.

Unlike, oh, certain bloggers I know. Right, Trelayne? Right?

Eat Yer Heart Out, Gene Simmons

2010-01-16T16:42:00.001-05:00

"Zoo visitors got a surprise when this small bear rolled his foot-long tongue out of his mouth when it yawned. The bear measured only four feet long. The Sun Bear may look bizarre, but it is perfectly designed for foraging for food - especially honey".

Very Useful App....

2010-01-16T15:12:00.000-05:00

This application will very thoroughly clean the inside of your screen for you.

Give it a try.

Haiti, Before and After

2010-01-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

WIRED Magazine brings us satellite pix of the devastation, with pics of the same areas before the quake.

Mother of God.

In Re: Dirty Laundry

2010-01-15T11:46:00.000-05:00

In connection with the above - Don Henley playing at the 1992 Clinton Inaugural Ball - I wish to bring your attention to THIS little essay by one claiming to be a Real TV Anchor.

If it is true, no wonder the Dinosaur Media DeathWatch claims another victim every day.

Holly[Extremely]Weird

2010-01-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

In the course of the human events I've beheld this last half century, I can say that I've seen a great deal. I've seen cities like Chicago rise to glory, and my home city die of leprosy. I've seen the glory of Europe and the lights go out on Broadway. I've met Presidents and peasants, shaken hands with amiable murderers and irascible saints, held my newborn son and ancient mother in my arms. I've been to the Embassy Ball and I've beheld mass graves and the victims of genocide.

But never, but never, have I met anybody like Tia Tequila or Katy Perry.

And for that last I must say I am eternally grateful.

Haiti: My. God.

2010-01-14T06:34:00.000-05:00

I'm shamelessly stealing this link from LGF.

This needs to be seen.

They're talking a HALF MILLION casualties.

"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed," Preval told the Miami Herald. "There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them."

Even the main prison in the capital fell down, "and there are reports of escaped inmates," U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was dead.

Mother of God. Have mercy on these people, Lord.

Avatar: Hogwash in 3D

2010-01-10T08:17:00.000-05:00

Hat Tip: the geniuses at failblog.org

Yesterday AM I was digging through a stack of old and much loved paperbacks and found myself rereading Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which celebrated human victory in interstellar war against a hive-race of space spiders -- an achievement worthy of celebration because "both races are strong and tough and want the same real estate."

Last night I went to see (front row, 3D, Imax) Avatar.... the anti-Starship Troopers. To say the least.

I emerged with a splitting headache.

Oh, sure, the visuals were awesome. But the story was nothing more than a rehash of the what-happens-when-White-Europeans-encounter-noble-savages nonsense we've all come to know and loathe.

Noble Savages my butt. Sure, 15th Century unbathed Euroes were no prize, but the peoples of the Americas weren't exactly peace-love-dove types either (EVERY human has eaten the apple!).

Just once I'd love for them to make a movie about the fall of the Aztecs that showed the monstrous bastards for what they were before Our Lady crushed them beneath her heel. Hint: they weren't exactly Christian Bernard wannabees wielding stone knives on their sacrificial altars.

Besides, the premise of the movie is absurd. With PC nazis everywhere now, the chances of our actually REACHING an alien planet are zilch (leaving aside the physical barriers); were we to find one with sentients on the surface, we CERTAINLY wouldn't be down there mining dilithium crystals from under their sacred shrines and apartment complexes. What frakking hogwash.

I want those three hours of my life back so I can spend them on something useful.

ADDENDUM

Somehow the moral superiority of spear-and-arrow-casting woad warriors over humans is not clearly established. Truly, their only claim to the forest is, "We were here first!". A claim that, alas, history shows that when confronting vastly superior alien tech will, along with a buck and a half, get you a Venti at Starbuck's. (A grande is three and a quarter.)

I DO know that the advantages of living in a forest and shooting deer with blowdarts over ambling over to a grocery store and buying fresh ground beef to make hamburgers out of escapes me; give me light beer and blue jeans any day of the week, thanks.

ADDENDUM II

THIS would have made a much more interesting movie, methinx: the story of Scientist Kenneth Good and his Yanomama mama, Yerema, nine years old when they first married, and her eventual decision to go with him to New Jersey.... and return to the rain forest after deciding that a steady diet of MTV and Mickey Dees wudn't for her.

Headline du Jour

2010-01-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

The WashPost reports:

Obama administration says there was no smoking gun before attempted airline bombing

Maybe not before, but there appears to have been one afterwards....

(ba DUM bump)

Holocaust Museum Killer Is Dead

2010-01-06T15:18:00.001-05:00

The killer of Stephen Tyrone Johns at the Holocaust Museum in July has died.

May God have mercy on his sorry excuse for a soul.

Tattered Remnants #024: Titanic Heroes

2010-01-02T12:08:00.000-05:00

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST: HEROES OF THE TITANIC

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

Dance band on the Titanic
Sing "Nearer, my God, to Thee"
The iceberg's on the starboard bow
Won't you dance with me
- Harry Chapin

It is in time of horrible disasters that the hidden virtues of the Tattered Remnant are often revealed. Some in steadfastness and strength keep order so that those who can save themselves do so. Some simply withhold themselves from rescue so that the young, the weak, and the ladies may survive. And some deliberately sacrifice themselves so that others may live.

The sinking of HMS Titanic forms the left-hand bookend of the catalogue of horrors we call the Twentieth Century, with the 9/11 atrocities forming the right. On this bitter and terrible night remembered, that of April 14-15, 1912, when a shipload of over two thousand people went from sleep to wakefulness to alertness to panic to horror to death in the course of three hours, some 1500 people lost their lives in the cruel, cold North Atlantic.

Now, three paragraphs into this retelling of an oft-told tale, I'm going to mention James Cameron's 1995 film "Titanic" just to get it out of the way. I have a love-hate relationship with this movie. The plot for the first half of the flick is lifted directly from the 1980 classic weepy Somewhere in Time: all of the plot elements are there, including the setting of a luxurious castle in the middle of great waters (the Grand Hotel is on Mackinac Island in northern Lake Huron), the old lady actress recalling her young love, the Iconic Object From The Past, the traveling-back-in-time to Spring 1912, the young man dying for his lady, the again-youthful lovers reunited in the next world, etc etc. The main difference, of course, is that the Grand Hotel doesn't sink into the Great Lakes at the end. (And a good thing, too.)

Anyway. The movie has become so embedded into the popular consciousness that "Titanic" is the gold standard of Titanic memory. But this is not about fictional turnip ghosts -- but true heroes.

THE WALLACE HARTLEY BAND

Well, they soon used up all of the lifeboats
But there were a lot of us left on board
I heard the drummer sayin' "Boys, just keep playin'"
"Now we're doin' this gig for the Lord"
-Harry Chapin

Their names, clockwise from the top left:

John Clarke
Percy Taylor
Theodore Brailey
Roger Bricoux
Jock Hume
Georges Krins
John Woodward (not pictured).

And in the center, band leader Wallace Hartley.

There is much to tell of the Titanic band members; Bill Whittle has done a marvelous job here; I cannot better his version.

But I join with him in saying: Remember these men.

They were, essentially, "deadheaders." The ship didn't employ them as crew; they were entertainers hired at dirt wages by some subcontractor for the privilege of entertaining the rich of First Class as they dined. They weren't paid by the contracting company, either; the assumption was that their tips would serve as their pay.

The Captain asked them to play happy and hopeful music as the ship began to go down.

So, they stayed and they played.

They played waltzes. They played ragtime. They played hymns of hope and hymns beseeching.

They played their lives away.

They were under no obligation to do so. They weren't under the Captain's command. As first class inhabitants (if not passengers) they had the best chance of any aboard the ship to survive.

But they remained.

They didn't play because they were ordered to. They played because music was their life. And in playing, they earned eternal memory by the human race, who look to them even now, a century later, as among the very the best to whom their people ever gave birth.

There are those who argue, perhaps rightly, that the stand of Englishmen against the Nazis were their finest hour. Perhaps. But the hour of music these men provided must surely rank as equal to the valor of their nephews of 1940.

Wallace Hartley.

John Clarke.

Percy Taylor.

Theodore Brailey.

Roger Bricoux.

Jock Hume.

Georges Krins.

John Woodward.

None of them survived.

A contemporary news account stated that "the part played by the orchestra on board the Titanic in her last dreadful moments will rank among the noblest in the annals of heroism at sea."

Indeed.

Shut off, shut off the ragtime ! The lights are falling low !
The deck is buckling under us ! She's sinking by the bow !
One hymn of hope from dying hands on dying ears to fall-
Gently the music fades away — and so, God rest us all !
- Arthur Conan-Doyle

FATHER THOMAS BYLES

"There's no way that this could happen"
I could hear the old captain curse
He ordered lifeboats away, that's when I heard the chaplain say
"Women and children and chaplains first"

I love Harry Chapin, but Father Thomas Byles, a priest of Christ, surely gave lie to that last line.

Thomas Byles

....was born Roussel Davids Byles in Leeds, Yorkshire, the eldest of seven children of the Reverend Dr. Alfred Holden Byles, a congregationalist minister, and his wife Louisa Davids. He attended Leamington College and Rossall School, Fleetwood, Lancashire, between 1885 and 1889, then went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1889 to study theology, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1894. While at Oxford, Byles converted to the Roman Catholic faith, taking the name Thomas. In 1899, he went to the Beda College in Rome to study for the priesthood, and was ordained in 1902. He was assigned to St. Helen's Parish in Ongar, Essex in 1905.

Father Byles was walking the deck, reciting his breviary, when the iceberg struck. As the ship descended into chaos, he held his place, guiding women and children to the boats, and is credited to getting Margaret Brown to hers. He was said to have refused a lifeboat at least twice.

He gave his last moments in offering confession, absolution and perhaps even eternal life to those who turned to him their final minutes. He too chose to go down with the ship rather than turn his back on his calling. While he was neither a saint nor a martyr in the strict sense, it is clear that his actions in his last minute showed that he had the makings of both.

Father Boyle did not say "...and chaplains first." He died at his ultimate duty station, and if there is any truth to Catholic theology at all, it is entirely possible that his death bought the salvation of the souls of many. There is no finer way for any Christian to end his life; for no greater love hath a man.....

"He died a martyr of charity, performing the most perfect act of love of his God and of his neighbor." - The Vicar General, Society of Jesus, 1912

THOMAS ANDREWS

Mama stood cryin' at the dockside
Sayin' "Please son, don't take this trip"
I said "Mama, sweet Mama, don't you worry none"
"Even God couldn't sink this ship"
- Harry Chapin

The man who built Titanic, he took full and total responsibility for its failures and its design flaws, the exact nature of which was unknown to him at the time of the sinking, but ultimately revealed to be a short rudder and, possibly, bad steel and rivets that went into the hull.

He was seen below decks during the evacuation, making a last check to be sure that as many people from the lower levels of the ship as possible had a life jacket and an opportunity to survive.

He was last seen in life staring into a painting in the clubroom, waiting for the last call, contemplating in melancholy the painting of Southampton port.

Like the Captain, he chose to go down with his ship. The accident that occurred could not be attributed fully to him -- excessive speed was problem number one, followed by the choice of White Star Line not to put enough boats on board -- but he still took responsibility for whatever contribution to the loss he had made by choosing to stay until the end with those who died as a result of the catastrophe.

One might question whether this makes him one of the Tattered Remnant, for suicide is forbidden. But he recognized that he shared responsibility for the disaster, and withheld himself from rescue, allowing others to take his place: which is more than you can say for the owner of the White Star Line, who was rescued, but whose name I cannot recall at this instant.

WILLIAM MURDOCH

Well, the whistle blew and they turned the screws
It turned the water into foam
Destination sweet salvation
Goodbye home sweet home-Harry Chapin

Of all the distortions of the movie "Titanic" the denigration of William Murdoch was possibly the most outrageous.

He was First Officer, on duty on the bridge when the ship struck the berg. He it was who desperately attempted to port around it; he it was whose hand was at the conn when the accident occurred. But in no way did he shoot any passengers and certainly he did not take his own life like a coward, as portrayed in the film.

After the collision Murdoch was put in charge of the starboard evacuation, during which he launched 10 lifeboats, containing almost 75 percent of the total number who survived. He was last seen attempting to launch Collapsible Lifeboat A. He was never seen again after Titanic disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of 15 April 1912. His body, if recovered, was never identified. .... Several members of the crew, including the ship's lamp trimmer, Samuel Hemming, and Second Officer Charles Lightoller said they saw Murdoch attempting to free Collapsible A from the falls on the Boat Deck just before the bridge submerged in the final stages of the sinking, when a huge wave washed him overboard into the sea. Surviving wireless operator Harold Bride later stated that he saw Murdoch near Collapsible Lifeboat "B," but that he died in the water.

A great memorial fund was established in his memory in his home town: a fund that was much enhanced when an executive from the movie studios responsible for the film flew to Scotland and made a public apology, as well as a great donation to the fund.

MARGARET BROWN

They were burnin' all the flares for candles
In the banquet they were throwin' in first class
And we were blowin' waltzes in the barroom
When the universe went CRASH!
- Harry Chapin

"The Unsinkable Molly Brown" of course is most famous for having received that most American of tributes, a musical comedy written in her honor.

In spite of that, her actual achievements, and not just those on the night of the sinking, deserve to be remembered. First, Wikipedia:

Margaret helped others board the lifeboats but was finally convinced to leave the ship in Lifeboat No. 6. She would come to be regarded as a heroine for her efforts to get lifeboat 6 to go back to look for survivors. After the Titanic sank, she and several other women passengers took control of Boat 6, rowing "to keep warm" but headed back, against the demands of the head crewman, to find survivors in the water ... However, some sources report that no survivors were found, except by Lifeboat No. 12. Onboard the rescue ship R.M.S. Carpathia, Margaret Brown took a leadership role among the women passengers.

When the Carpathia reached dockside, Margaret went to considerable expense to have made a silver loving cup to be given to the crew of the Carpathia; furthermore, she had commemorative medals made for the individuals who crewed the rescue ship.

Her heroism and strength showed itself again after the event. Almost exactly two years later, in the town of Ludlow, Colorado, some 20 people were killed when the Colorado National Guard assaulted a tent colony of striking coal miners. Wikipedia reports that two women, eleven children, six miners and union officials and one National Guardsman were killed.

On the morning of April 20, [1914,] the day after Easter was celebrated by the
many Greek immigrants at Ludlow, three Guardsmen appeared at the camp ordering the release of a man they claimed was being held against his will. This request prompted the camp leader, Louis Tikas, to meet with a local militia commander at the train station in Ludlow village, a half mile (0.8 km) from the colony. While this meeting was progressing, two companies of militia installed a machine gun on a ridge near the camp and took a position along a rail route about half a mile south of Ludlow. Anticipating trouble, Tikas ran back to the camp. The miners, fearing for the safety of their families, set out to flank the militia positions. A firefight soon broke out.

The fighting raged for the entire day. The militia was reinforced by non-uniformed mine guards later in the afternoon. At dusk, a passing freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the Guards' machine gun placements, allowing many of the miners and their families to escape to an outcrop of hills to the east called the "Black Hills." By 7:00 p.m., the camp was in flames, and the militia descended on it and began to search and loot the camp. ...
[Three] captured miners were later found shot dead. ... During the battle, four women and eleven children had been hiding in a pit beneath one tent, where they were trapped when the tent above them was set on fire. Two of the women and all of the children suffocated.

Molly Brown's connections to the Colorado mining industry -- which had given her and her husband their riches -- combined with her fame from the Titanic disaster, gave her "good offices" to serve as an intermediary and a badly needed moderating influence between management and labor.

Margaret, who had connections in both the West and the East, went to Ludlow, in answer to urgent appeals for help from both sides, each seeing her as an ally. Margaret struggled to maintain a middle ground, refusing to join radicals calling for the resignation of the governor, while also challenging Rockefeller on his harsh business practices. As the two sides became further entrenched, Margaret spoke out about miners’ rights and pressured Rockefeller with the resulting negative media. Rockefeller eventually softened his stance and agreed to make concessions. The conflict at Ludlow was ultimately resolved and, in many ways, marked the end of the radical wing of the workers’ movement in America as the new PR savvy of industrialists like Rockefeller grew more and more effective.

She also went on to work in France providing war relief before American entry.

She died in 1932 at the age of 65, her money almost all spent.

KINGS OF THE WORLD: THE MEN OF THE TITANIC

Dance band on the Titanic
Sing "Nearer, my God, to Thee"
The iceberg's on the starboard bow
Won't you dance with me
- Harry Chapin

"Thank you, no; we are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen. But we would like a brandy!"
- attr. Benjamin Guggenheim, April 15, 1912, 12:30 AM

In the Waterfront section of Southwest Washington, DC, not far from the now-bitterly poor neighborhood called "Anacostia," there is a battered memorial. In one of those strange rituals that only a capital city can long support, there has been a tradition that, at midnight or so of April 14 of every year, a society of men gather at this monument and, as the clock strikes twelve, they raise a toast in commemoration of the men who chose to follow the ancient custom of "Women and Children First."

Those numbers were very great. Wikipedia reports that, for instance, of those men in Second Class on the Titanic, some 92% died, giving their places to the women and children on board. All but one child in first and second class survived; only 20% of the men survived, compared to nearly 75% of the women.

It is unknown if this rule would still be respected in this bitter era of sexual equality-as-battlefield. I think it would be, for I think it is one of those eternal rules of human decency that is written in every human heart (even if it is disregarded by many).

I should also note one of the many women among those who stayed behind: Ida Strauss, husband of former Congressman Isadore Strauss. Although a first class passenger, she refused a place in the boat, choosing to honor her vows to her husband and stay with him to the bitter end. "Not I—I will not leave my husband. All these years we've traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one."

(And of course we also remember the mothers who had small children that they protected as best they could as the waters came to enclose them.)

But that said, let us not forget those men who chose not to step on a lifeboat so that others might live, for it is this selfless act that made them all "Kings of the World."

For they are the truest embodiments of the Tattered Remnant that could be.

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. ... Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal....
- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein), Time Enough for Love

ADDENDUM I - ROSE DEWITT BUKATER

I've always loathed "Titanic's" lead character. Rose Dewitt Bukater -– portrayed at the age of 17 by Kate Winslett and her two best friends, Port and Starboard -– is most decidedly not one of the Tattered Remnant, but is a self centered rhymes-with-witch who stops at nothing to get her way. She humiliates her family in public at every opportunity. She later makes her unmarried granddaughter wait in her hand and foot.

She deliberately tosses a zillion-dollar blue diamond that belongs to the insurance company (or should be left to the granddaughter) into the drink. The alternate ending on the CD -- where Rose throws the rock into the sea in full view of her hosts on the Russian research vessel -- needs to be seen (once).

(But, either way... didn't she realize how many billable hours in litigation she prevented? Doesn't she know there are starving lawyers in Ethiopia?!)

It could be argued that the sinking of HMS Titanic was her fault--since she was on the deck smooching with Jack, distracting the first officer and the seamen in the crow's nest from paying proper attention to their jobs.

More seriously, she was remarkably cruel, in that she let her own mother believe, for the rest of her (the mother's) life, she was dead in the sinking, which if you think about it is about a 9.5 on a logarithmic Nastymeter.

Really, I always figure that the alternate universe in which Cameron's "Titanic" takes place would probably have been better off if somebody else had gotten to the floating bedstead.... but that would not have made a very good movie, would it?

ADDENDUM II - ELBERT HUBBARD

Mr. and Mrs. Straus, I envy you that legacy of love and loyalty left to your children and grandchildren. The calm courage that was yours all your long and useful career was your possession in death. You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die. One thing sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. All disease is indecent. Suicide is atrocious. But to pass out, as did Mr and Mrs Isador Strauss, is glorious. Few have such privilege. Happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided.

- Artist Elbert Hubbard, 1912

On May 7. 1915, Elbert Hubbard and his wife Alice perished in the sinking of the Lusitania.

On Patriotic Dissent

2010-01-02T03:01:00.000-05:00

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate, and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic, and we should stand up and say we are Americans, and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration!

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 4-28-03

"...A Harsh Mistress"

2010-01-02T03:00:00.001-05:00

Lunar Colonies in holes in the ground?

(CNN) -- Building a home near a moon crater or a lunar sea may sound nice, but moon colonists might have a much better chance of survival if they just lived in a hole.

That's the message sent by an international team of scientists who say they've discovered a protected lunar "lava tube" -- a deep, giant hole -- that might be well suited for a moon colony or a lunar base.

As usual, Robert Heinlein got there first.

Happy International Binary Day!

2010-01-01T07:39:00.000-05:00

Thousands of people will gather in Times Square this afternoon to watch the ball drop at 1:01:01 PM today 01/01/10....

This is not to be confused with the National Pi Fight, which will happen on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53, or International e Day, which will take place on 2/7/18 at 2 PM.

These latter holidays are not expected to be widely celebrated as the reasons for them are completely irrational.

The Naughty 'Aughties are Over.

2009-12-31T06:38:00.000-05:00

So there is but one thing to do.

A blessed New Year and New Decade to everyone.

It's gotta get better; it can't get worse. (Please, Lord!)

NYT: Nothing To See Here, Folks, Just Move Along

2009-12-31T06:27:00.000-05:00

The all-knowing New York Times on the Interpol thingie:

Contrary to its portrayal in some movies, Interpol has no police force that conducts investigations and makes arrests. Rather, it serves its 188 member countries by working as a clearinghouse for police departments in different nations to share law enforcement information — like files on wanted criminals and terrorists, stolen cars and passports, and notices that a law enforcement agency has issued an arrest warrant for a fugitive.

In the United States, a bureau at the Justice Department staffed by American officials transmits information between law enforcement agencies and Interpol. If a foreign country issues an arrest warrant for a person inside the United States, it is up to the United States government, based on its own laws, to decide whether to apprehend the suspect.

So 'splain, please, Mr. NYT, why was it necessary therefor to give them diplomatic immunity and to make their archives off-limits to FOIA and subpoena?

Answer: Because it gives the US DOJ the ability to simply shove a box full of uncomfortable documents across the hall to the Interpol liaison office and voila! Instant inability to access by the public! No FOIA jurisdiction! And, yes, no nosy NYT reporters can look at it!

You'd think that the folks who brought you the Pentagon Papers would find this just ... a wee bit disturbing, no? No?

Guess not. Guess only mouthbreathing dimwit conservatives who love Sarah Palin and want to fill the world with little Trigs worry about such things.

Bah.

War's Over: A Photoessay.

2009-12-29T10:50:00.001-05:00

(Someone forwarded this to me; I do not know the source.)

HIROSHIMA, 2009

DETROIT, 2009.

The war is over. So who won?

P.S. The picture of Tiger Stadium no longer reflects reality.

They tore it down this last fall. (The abandoned building to the left however is still standing.)

Is Interpol Now Immune from Restraint in the US?

2009-12-28T11:46:00.000-05:00

The Web is screaming.

Everywhere you look, they're screaming about a new Executive Order, that supposedly gives INTERPOL – the international police organization once headed by Heinrich Himmler – TOTAL IMMUNITY to operate within the United States, free from let or hindrance by the FBI or from any Federal or State Court. The acts of their agents, they say, are absolutely diplomatically immune; their records, inviolate and unsearchable (and un-subpoena-able!), their property free from search, and everyone employed by the organization is now exempt from all Federal income tax, Social Security, or property taxation.

Sounds like tinfoil-hat territory, right?

There's one little problem with this story.

It appears to be entirely true.

ONE UPON A TIME, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave the following order authorizing INTERPOL to operate in the United States as an International Organization, however requiring that it be subjected to certain restrictions: their records, like any law enforcement agency, would be subjected to search and review under certain circumstances; income of INTERPOL employees were taxable for both income tax and Social Security taxes; they were subject to our laws and not granted diplomatic immunity for their acts. In short, they were under the same restrictions as the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, or other Federal law enforcement agency His order reads like this (boldface for emphasis).

Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983
International Criminal Police
Organizations

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), it is hereby ordered that the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), in which the United States participates pursuant to 22 U.S.C. 263a, is hereby designated as a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities conferred by the International Organizations Immunities Act; except those provided by Section 2(c), the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act. This designation is not intended to abridge in any respect the privileges, exemptions or immunities which such organization may have acquired or may acquire by international agreement or by Congressional action.

Ronald Reagan

In 1995, certain amendments were made to the order, stating that all physical property of INTERPOL in the United States was exempted from all taxation to the same extent that our diplomatic property is exempt. Furthermore, their agents and official communications obtained diplomatic immunity (and thus are exempt from our laws).

Executive Order 12971 of September 15, 1995
Amendment to Executive Order
No. 12425

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities upon the International Criminal Police Organization (‘‘INTERPOL’’) it is hereby ordered that Executive Order No. 12425 be amended by deleting, in the first sentence, the words ‘‘the portions of Section 2(d) and’’ and the words ‘‘relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes’’.

William J. Clinton

Finally, most disturbingly, the President of the United States last week stripped away all protections of the American people from the actions of INTERPOL by granting them full diplomatic immunity, full inviolability of their records and complete immunity from search or seizure, even in the case of law enforcement investigation by another law enforcement agency (like, oh, the FBI).

Executive Order 13524 of December 16, 2009

Amending Executive Order
12425 Designating Interpol as a Public International Organization Entitled To Enjoy Certain Privileges, Exemptions, and Immunities

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words ‘‘except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act’’ and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

Barack Obama

Therefore Presidential Order 12425 now reads as follows:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), it is hereby ordered that the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), in which the United States participates pursuant to 22 U.S.C. 263a, is hereby designated as a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities conferred by the International Organizations Immunities Act. This designation is not intended to abridge in any respect the privileges, exemptions or immunities which such organization may have acquired or may acquire by international agreement or by Congressional action.

Which means that INTERPOL now has privileges and immunities as an International Organization with the following new (or in the case of the un-italicized text, Clinton-era) immunities:

except those provided by Section 2(c), the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act.

INTERPOL was previously excluded from all of these immunities under the International Organizations Immunities Act. They paid taxes; they were not personally inviolate; their records were not inviolate; their records could be seized, searched and, when necessary, subpoenaed; and their employees were taxed for income, Social Security, and property taxes.

No longer.

Let's examine, section by section, Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), which can be found at this link.

59 Stat. 669, §2c

Property and assets of international organizations wheresoever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search unless such immunity be expressly waived and [be free] from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.

[Translation: If INTERPOL violates our laws we can't search or seize their "inviolable" records AND NO COURT CAN SUBPOENA THEM.]

59 Stat. 669, §2d

Insofar as concerns customs duties and international revenue taxes imposed upon or by reason of importation, and the procedures in connection therewith; the registration of foreign agents, and the treatment of official communications, the privileges, exemptions and immunities to which international organizations shall be entitled shall be those accorded under similar circumstances to foreign governments.

[TRANSLATION: All physical property of INTERPOL in the United States is exempt from all taxation to the same extent that our diplomatic property is exempt. Furthermore, their agents and official communications have diplomatic immunity and thus are exempt from our laws. This is a Clinton era change.]

59 Stat. 669, §3

Pursuant to regulations prescribed by the Commissioner of Customs with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, the baggage and effects of alien officers and employees of international organizations, or of aliens designated by foreign governments to serve as their representatives in or to such organizations, or of their families, suites and servants of such officers, employees, or representatives shall be admitted ... free of customs duties and free of internal revenue taxes imposed upon or by reason of importation (this italicized text was a Clinton era change).

[TRANSLATION: Customs can't search any property or baggage belonging to INTERPOL, any employee or servant of INTERPOL, or any members of their families.]

59 Stat. 669, §4
(Omitted; long passage on the terms of the Internal Revenue Act.)

[TRANSLATION: up: INTERPOL employees, servants or agents don't have to pay federal income taxes on their wages while working in the United States.]

59 Stat. 669, §5
(Omitted; long passage on Social Security Act.)

[TRANSLATION: Long passage; I'll sum up: INTERPOL employees, servants or agents don't have to pay SOCIAL SECURITY taxes while working in the United States.]

59 Stat. 669, §6
International organizations shall be exempt from all property taxes imposed by or under the authority of any Act of Congress, including such Acts as are applicable solely to the District of Columbia or the Territories.

[TRANSLATION: None needed; they're not subject to property tax.]

I hesitate to sound like an end-of-the-worlder or a tinfoil hat-wearer, but ladies and gentlemen, .... to use Law French, this Presidential Order is... ahem...

A. Very. Bad. Move.

Or worse.

They want to make a former SS controlled secret police force diplomatically immune, exempt from search or seizure or subpoena, and all its employees free from any and all taxation?

Please, Mr. President, what are you thinking?

ADDENDUM

Turns out that this is NOT-NOT-NOT tinfoil-hat territory.

Even National Review sees this as a problem.

Money graf:

Why would we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files which, therefore, will be beyond the ability of Congress, American law-enforcement, the media, and the American people to scrutinize?

WHY, INDEED.

LABEL THESE PIX

2009-12-27T20:46:00.001-05:00

Are these:

(1) Iranian protestors being gassed by the Ahmonajihad islamocrazy regime? Or

(2) Former LGF posters being run off of LittleGreenSTFUtballs by Charles and co.?

Your call.

Tattered Remnants #023: László Tőkés

2009-12-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

THE SPARK OF TIMIŞOARA: LÁSZLÓ TŐKÉS

I write this on December 26, 2009. Yesterday, along with being the Feast of the Nativity of Christ the Lord, was also a special anniversary of a different sort: twenty years to the day from the time that a long Winter at last yielded to Christmas, that an evil dwarf and his ice queen finally met the justice that they long deserved, and their people delivered to freedom.

* * * * *

His name was László Tőkés and he was a minister of Christ. He lived in the obscure town of Timişoara, in the far western tip of Romania. The region in which he lived is called The Banat; although within the borders of Romania, it has a very large Hungarian-speaking minority. The region has, over the years, toggled back and forth between Hungarian and Romanian control.

In December 1989 László Tőkés was a pastor of a Hungarian speaking Protestant church in this town far away from the nation's capital and leadership. He had acquired a name for himself as a supporter–-some say agitator–-in favor of greater linguistic and cultural rights for those, like himself, of Hungarian extraction.

Let Wikipedia tell the story:

Like his father, Tőkés was a persistent critic of the Ceausescu regime. While a pastor in the Transylvanian town of Dej, he contributed to the clandestine Hungarian-language journal Ellenpontok ("Counterpoints"; 1981-82). An article there on abuses of human rights in Romania appears to have been the occasion of his first harassment by the Securitate [secret police]. He was reassigned to the village of Sânpetru de Câmpie, but refused to go and instead spent two years living in his parents' house in Cluj-Napoca.

His situation was discussed in the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which led indirectly to his appointment to be assistant pastor in Timişoara, where he gave sermons that opposed the Romanian national government's program of systematization, which proposed radical restructuring of the infrastructure of Romanian towns and villages. This was seen by Hungarians as a particular threat to their villages, although Tokés' sermons did not single this out, calling for solidarity between Hungarians and Romanians.

But times were changing in the late 1980s. The death of the monstrous Yuri Andropov was followed by the brief papacy of Constantin Chernenko–and then by the so-called reformer, Gorbachev.

And the first signs of springtime began to appear in Eastern Europe.

In May 1989, Hungary dropped all travel restrictions to the outside world; in August, a so-called "Friendship Picnic" ended when 900 guests–almost all East Germans–crossed the Hungarian border into Austria. The Hungarian Communists gave up absolute power in October, and the Berlin Wall first opened, and then completely fell in November. Solidarity had quietly but firmly taken power from the communists of Poland; the Velvet Revolution threw out Czechoslovakia's communist party.

There was but one bastion of hardline Communism left in Eastern Europe: Nicolae Ceauşescu's Romania.

This last near-Stalinist dictatorship had not changed a whit from the mid-1960s. But the winds of change were blowing, and to those who tried to listen, the creaking of the Romanian communist regime was clearly audible.

The horrors of the Ceauşescu regime, while perhaps not comparable to Auschwitz or the Cambodian killing fields, were still remarkable in their cruelty. Again, Wikipedia:

Ceauşescu visited the People's Republic of China, North Korea and North Vietnam in 1971 and was inspired by the hardline model he found there. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programs of the Korean Workers' Party and China's Cultural Revolution. Shortly after returning home, he began to emulate North Korea's system ....

[Ceauşescu] heralded the beginning of a "mini cultural revolution" in Romania, launching a Neo-Stalinist offensive against cultural autonomy, reaffirming an ideological basis for literature that, in theory, the Party had hardly abandoned. ... Strict ideological conformity in the humanities and social sciences was demanded. Competence and aesthetics were to be replaced by ideology; professionals were to be replaced by agitators; and culture was once again to become an instrument for political-ideological propaganda.

In this period, great but pointless national projects were undertaken. A new National Palace of the People and a subway system for the capital of Bucharest were built at enormous expense to the common people. Food and gasoline were strictly rationed: not because there were shortages but because as much agricultural output as possible was sold abroad with the intention of paying off Romania's national debt, a goal that was actually achieved in early 1989.

In contrast to the West and China, which turned wholeheartedly to violent population control through legalized abortion, Ceauşescu, through his wife Elena, fell off of the other side of the horse: they instituted a policy of population expansion at great cost to the common people, instituting policies that forced people to have children and actively taxed them if they did not have any (even if they were single).

They opened enormous orphanages to care for the children who were born to unwilling parents, then instituted policies, such as medically pointless involuntary blood-transfusions, that ended up spreading HIV to huge numbers of children. Even today, in 2009, Romania has 95% of Europe's pediatric AIDS population even though it has 3% of Europe's population.

It should also be noted that the Ceauşescus attempted to obliterate the culture of one of their own minorities. Romania had (and has) one of the largest populations of Roma (those people known most commonly to us as "gypsies") in Europe. They were (and are) viewed with hostility as they were and are commonly viewed as a criminal element. To solve this "problem" it became Ceauşescu's and his wife's desire that the Roma lose their identity as a people. They were forbidden to wander in their time-honored fashion, forced to settle in reservations, and were forbidden to use their ancient Romany language; furthermore, their children were often taken away from them and placed in the above-mentioned orphanages.

This combination of needless privation, political and literary oppression, the Ceausescu cult of personality, and the steadfast refusal of Ceauşescu and his wife to read the signs of the times and to sense the winds of change, led to an explosive situation.

It was in this atmosphere of an accumulation of toxic political waste that László Tőkés caused a spark. Again, Wikipedia:

In the summer of 1988, [Tőkés] organized opposition to systematization among Hungarian Reformed Church pastors, again drawing the strong attention of the Securitate. After the Securitate objected to a cultural festival organized on October 31, 1988 (the Day of Reformation), jointly with the amateur Hungarian-language theatre group "Thalia", Bishop László Papp banned all youth activities in the Banat (the region of which Timişoara is part). Tőkés nonetheless collaborated with the bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church on another festival in spring 1989.
On March 31, 1989, Papp ordered Tőkés to stop preaching in Timişoara and move to the isolated parish of Mineu. Tőkés refused the order, and his congregation supported him. The bishop began civil proceedings to evict him from his church flat. His power was cut off and his ration book taken away, but his parishioners continued to support and provision him, some of them being arrested and beaten for their trouble. At least one, Erno Ujvárossy, was found murdered in the woods outside Timişoara on September 14, and Tokés's father was briefly arrested.

A court ordered Tokés' eviction on October 20. He appealed. On November 2, four attackers armed with knives broke into his flat; Securitate [secret-police] agents looked on while he and his friends fought off the assailants. The Romanian ambassador was summoned to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and told of the Hungarian government's concern for his safety. His appeal was turned down, and his eviction set for Saturday December 15.

His Hungarian-speaking parishioners began to gather at his apartment to discourage the eviction. Like a snowball rolling downhill, the group grew to include Romanian youth, and then people from all social groups. Signs denouncing the regime and calling for free elections began to appear. Within days the entire city of Timişoara was in revolt.

Ceauşescu, clueless to the last, organized a massive "spontaneous" rally as he gave a great speech on December 21. And spontaneous it was, but not in a way he expected. This massive televised rally, intended to transmit his supremacy to the nation and the world, ended in unexpected booing. Ceauşescu's look of astonishment at the people's hatred was the crowning moment of the Revolutions of 1989. His TV cameras were cut off, and he fled his own Presidential palace by helicopter; captured before he could flee the country, he was returned to Bucharest and, after a two hour drumhead court martial, he and his wife were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989.

The death penalty should not be so lightly given, but bitter things happen in revolutions. And Ceauşescu's quarter-century of brutal terrorism and manhandling of the people of Romania, as well as the abominable social policies pressed by his wife, earned them both their date with the firing squad.

To Tőkés' credit he played no part in the violent denouement of the Romanian revolution. He was eventually elected the Lutheran bishop of his region, and devoted the next years to an (alas, largely unsuccessful) attempt to re-obtain his church's properties that had been confiscated by the Communists. He was elected to the European Parliament in 2007. In 2009, he achieved recognition for his efforts to overthrow his nation's bitter dictatorship when he was awarded the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom from the Victims of Communism Foundation.

In some way, Tőkés' contribution cannot be viewed as crucial in that it is very likely that some event would have triggered the collapse of Romanian Communism. The Ceausescu regime was on its last legs by any measure and its overthrow was almost certain, given the events in the nations surrounding it.

But László Tőkés was not some random historical personage. He, like his father before him, suffered significant retribution from the Communist authorities for decades before his stand. He was a subject of concern and of hearings before the United States Senate long before his stand that December night. While perhaps not a Solzhenitsyn, he was heroic in his own way. And it should be remembered that he chose not to take up arms in defense of himself but rather stood on his moral authority as a pastor and as a Christian.

The pen of history writes, and having written, moves on. History moved forward and Tőkés was, in fact, the individual who fired a moral shot heard around the world. His contribution to the destruction of communism is measurable, and he should be saluted for what he did. László Tőkés is surely one of the Tattered Remnant.

ADDENDUM

It is melancholy for those of us who are individuals who struggle against prenatal surgical violence to contemplate Nikolae Ceauşescu and his vile wife Elena. While the end of preserving unborn life may have been laudable in itself, his motives were not, and the direct and oppressive manner in which they persued their ends should make anyone who stands for human liberty recoil.

Yes, if legalized abortion is once more suppressed, there need to be legal mechanisms in place to encourage childbirth and to discourage and punish those who insist on killing the unborn. But the methods used by the Romanian Communists are in thier own way just as repugnant as those used by the Chinese Communists to restrict birth. Careful thought must be given to how we achieve our ends. This much we know: if there is a question as to which way we must modify our society to end the horror called legal abortion, the bitter ghost of Nikolae Ceauşescu, a philosophical descendant of Vlad Ţepeş the Impaler, surely does not provide an answer.

Not by a long shot.

Holy Innocents: Still Dying At Herod's Hand

2009-12-26T19:37:00.000-05:00

Sunday commemorates the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which remembers those young children destroyed by a tyrant at Bethlehem. Whether they were counted in the thousands (as thought in Tradition) or dozens (as believed today) they represent all the children, from those murdered at the hand of Pharaoh to kill Moses up to today, who died at the hands of murderous princes seeking eternal power.

The following essay appeared in The Taipei Times. However, since it is a public statement by a sitting U.S. Congressman made in the line of duty, I am assuming that it is not covered by the Copyright Laws of the United States and am taking the liberty of reposting it in its entirety.

Remember: Someone at the White House actually saw fit to hang a picture of Mao on his Christmas Tree.

Behold the handiwork of The Mao Emperor. Anita Dunn and Diane Francis of FinancialPost.Com, in particular, please note.

=======================

One-child policy a rights disaster

By Chris Smith

Thursday, Nov 19, 2009, Page 8

She was dragged into a room to be forcibly aborted with “hundreds of pregnant moms … just like pigs in the slaughterhouse,” Wujian, a Chinese student in the US, told a congressional human rights commission in Washington on Nov. 10.

“He must speak up for us, for our lives, for our human rights. He must speak now,” she pleaded.

He — US President Barack Obama — was in Beijing this week for talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and other senior Chinese officials. Coming on the heels of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s infamous remark made en route to Beijing earlier this year, that human rights can’t “interfere” with US engagement on climate change or selling Treasury bills, the witnesses at the hearing expressed deeply held concerns that human rights in China — especially forced abortion — have been demoted, trivialized and dismissed by the Obama administration.

Through her tears, Wujian appealed to the president to speak with clarity and boldness for the women and children of China who, like herself, have been traumatized by China’s one-child-per-couple policy, which relies on forced abortion and forced sterilization to achieve its goals. Her appeal was echoed by several human rights activists and a world-renowned demographer.

Having become pregnant without a government “permit,” Wujian lived in hiding for months. Family planning cadres, unable to find her remote shack, beat her father almost to death. Still she refused to turn herself in. Eventually the cadres found her.

“The room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion,” she remembered. “Some moms were crying, some moms were mourning, some moms were screaming and one mom was rolling on the floor with unbearable pain.”

The Chinese people are not docile in the face of government abuse. There are about 80,000 anti-government protests in China every year. Nor do the Chinese people accept the one-child policy. Women’s Rights in China (WRIC), a group of Chinese-American women established by Annie Jing Zhang (張菁) and Chai Ling (柴玲) — the famous students’ “general commander” at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — commissioned some courageous Chinese to collect new evidence on such hitherto murky events as a mass uprising in Guangxi Province.

When Guangxi cadres started a one-child policy crackdown in 2007, as many as 50,000 people rose up and destroyed half-a-dozen government buildings and beat several policemen to death. Male villagers smashed the homes of one-child policy personnel, while pregnant women hid in the mountains and along lake shores. It ended worse than you might expect.

Police and family planning cadres organized themselves into military formations and captured hundreds of farmers, surrounded villages, extracted fines by armed force, smashed homes, broke up families, confiscated farm animals and valuables, and took hostages. The captured women were bound, taken to the hospital and sterilized. Other women agreed to be sterilized in order to get their husbands, sons and fathers released from jail.

The one-child policy is enforced with the most ruthless measures, which have not abated in recent years, as the Chinese government would have us believe. Again, Wujian’s tale is emblematic. Struggling with a nurse, begging and weeping, she was told that cadres had performed more than 10,000 forced abortions in her small county that year. Her forced abortion over, Wujian, so traumatized she could not eat, speak or drink for days, returned home to nurse a father recovering from his beatings.

The message is unmistakable. Former longtime Chinese political prisoner and now activist Harry Wu (吳弘達) showed the commission photographs of banners hung across village streets: “Resistance to IUD [intrauterine device] insertion, sterilization and paying fines will cause the total destruction of your home and property! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” and “Resistance to sterilization will bring you nothing but detention; refusal to abort will lead to the destruction of your house and confiscation of your cattle.”

This policy affects every Chinese woman’s life. It invades her privacy, colors her experience of intimacy and motherhood with a sense of fear, humiliation, and powerlessness, and traumatizes her. As WRIC reported, family planning cadres require all women to maintain menstrual records and report every four months for crude breast-uterine-labial checks — called “the three examinations.” The cadres are looking for indications of pregnancy or miscarriage, or removal of contraceptive rings — a serious crime. There are women who have removed their IUD rings living on boats in the Guangxi River, like hoboes or escaped criminals.

Thus the WHO reports more than 500 female suicides per day in China. It is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than the male — and it is three times higher.

“When I was writing this short testimony, several times I cried out,” Wujian said.

And so I — we — appeal to Obama: Seriously raise the plight of Chinese women who are every day cruelly and systematically assaulted by population control police. China’s population control policy is violence against women and violence against children — by the hundreds of millions. It is the worst violation of women’s rights in human history.

Chris Smith is serving his 29th year in the US House of Representatives and specializes in human rights issues. [In November] he chaired a hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.

"A Sign Is Given Unto You"

2009-12-24T16:28:00.000-05:00

Says it all.

Mousey Dung On The White House Christmas Tree

2009-12-24T16:26:00.000-05:00

But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao
Ya ain't gonna make with anyone any how
-- John Lennon, 1967

One death is a tragedy.
A million deaths are a sadistic.
--with no apologies to J. Stalin

In what must be called the most astounding case of bad judgment in the White House since, oh, I don't know, last week maybe, a Christmas ornament hanging from the White House Christmas Tree has a picture of mass murderer Mao Zedong on it, so:

Leftist heads would certainly (and rightly) explode if a picture of Eric Rudolph (who killed two) were on the Christmas tree, or of Manson (who killed seven). But Mao? Hey, you can't make eggdrop soup without breaking eggs, right?

Some Obamatons are even trying to justify it by claiming, "But it's a Warhol painting!" Yeah, right. So what? It's still Mao Zedong. It's still a picture of history's bloodiest butcher. And it's still the White House CHRISTmas Tree.

In short:

WHAT THE FRAK ARE THEY THINKING!!?!?

(Maybe I don't want to know....)

ADDENDUM

Naturally, the weasel running LittleGreenSTFUtballs thinks this is unimportant:

Gahh! It’s a commie on the White House Christmas tree! Gahhh! [run around screaming]

Well, actually, it’s an Andy Warhol print, but if you really want to run around screaming, don’t let me stop you.

Let me educate you, sir: the man whom our President honors with his portrait on the White House Christmas Tree may have killed TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE AS HITLER.

Including the grandfather of my only godson.

As for the White House, let us take this as a warning of the kind of people in charge these days.

And as for LGF, well, Trelayne, if someone who murdered a member of YOUR family had his pic on the Xmas Tree, you'd be a little ticked, too, no? Actually, come to think of it, probably not. After all, if a commie killed him, he must have been a right wing nutjob and deserved it, right?

Lump of coal for you, sir.

ADDENDUM II

Further evidence that Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs is a lying sack of spit who cannot parse a simple English sentence:

UPDATE at 12/23/09 1:16:04 pm:

And in the comments at Big Government, they’re calling for Barack Obama to be executed:

Raul · 14 minutes ago

We can’t wait until 2012 to get rid of this comunist bastard of Hussain Obama. The people of the United States must revolt, and demand that this low life, President be impeached and tried for treason agaisnt this great nation of ours. Mao Tse Tung would have allready placed him before a firing squad. A fate he deserves, but that we are too civilized to impose upon this bastard.

Let's examine "Raul's" rant (and a stupid rant it is) carefully:

Sentence 1: We can't wait to get rid... No call for execution here.

Sentence 2: The people of the United States must revolt.... No call for execution here either.

Sentence 3: Mao Tse Tung would have allready [sic] placed him.... No call for execution here, just an observation that the man who had up to 72 million people murdered would likely have had Obama executed as well.

Raul is an idiot, although the basic idea that Obama must be politically stopped is not one that I can differ with. But Johnson, in claiming that Raul is "calling for Obama's execution", is, as usual, vomiting lies on his keyboard.

It's time for Amazon to pull the rug out from under him and make him live on his day job.

Dem HQ Vandalism in Denver - The Truth Outs

2009-12-23T11:14:00.000-05:00

We reported on a Reichstag Fire type attack on a Democrat Party Headquarters in Denver on or around August 25, wherein the Dems blamed "fundamentalist right wingers" for trashing their HQ.

Turns out that it was a gay-activist/anarchist "transvestite," nominally male, who pled guilty to the attack yesterday.

It's always good to set the record straight.

Kim Peek, The Human Google, Goes Home to God

2009-12-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

Kim Peek, the model for Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man, has died.

This father of three autistic children salutes him.

God bless you, Sir, and eternal joy to you.

Tattered Remnants #022: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

2009-12-20T23:53:00.001-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

LEAP YEARS: ALEKSANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"

The name Solzhenitsyn is known to every adult American over the age of 35. But times are changing; already, he is fading into history and into disregard as the train of history moves forward. Although he is today still among the most famous of men, he was, at his finest, an unknown, a single minded enemy of one of the 20th Century's Great Tyrannies, the smallest of Davids against the greatest of Goliaths. As such, he was without doubt one of the Tattered Remnant.

* * * * *

In the year of 1961, in a tiny town called Ryazan south of Moscow, a high school teacher sat, late at night, before his typewriter, composing a short story. It was written in single space, on both sides of the paper (to save on the paper itself, which was hard to find at the time).

The story he wrote was a hidden artwork, created in darkness in a corner of his small apartment; he had never shown this, or any other work, to anybody else, as he was convinced that his works would never be published in his lifetime. This was, after all, only eight years after the death of Josef Djughashvili, known as Stalin; and the gang of terrorists who had assisted him in blighting the evil empire called the Soviet Union still ruled the country with a bitter, iron hand. The cold body of Stalin himself still lay in state next to Lenin's in the latter's Tomb.

He sat in his room writing a story that would change the world, retelling his experience of eight years in Siberia, where he had worked as a slave for the Soviet state, under sentence for "disloyalty" and "founding a hostile organization." His crime had been one of calling the leader of his nation "The Whiskered Guy" and "The Boss" in a private letter to a friend.

The final paragraph he composed slowly, carefully, savoring every single word:

The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell.

The extra three days were for leap years.

It took time, but within thirty years the writing of this short story would come to be seen as the first and single most significant event leading to the destruction of his nation's dictatorship.

His name was Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. And in typing his story he changed his universe, and ours.

Solzhenitsyn was at that time a 42-year-old survivor of the Soviet labor camps, a former "Zek", or zakliuchonniy, a prisoner. He had been arrested while serving in the Soviet Army in Poland as the Red Army approached Berlin. His letters to his friend having been intercepted, he was shipped by a special train to Moscow proper, where he was imprisoned in the famous Lyublyanka prison. He was severely beaten and, after a drumhead trial before three State Security officers, he was sentenced to eight years in the Soviet labor system. He was shipped to the east, to Siberia, where, in a series of camps, he labored as a bricklayer for the heroic Soviet people.

Solzhenitsyn had been an unquestioning Communist until his arrest. But as he spent eight years in backbreaking labor, his former appreciation for the Soviet way of life gave way to a realization that he lived in the heart of darkness, which called itself a light to the workers of the world but which was, in fact, a vile political monstrosity that ate human flesh.

(Let it not be forgotten that the Soviet empire, in its 70 years, consumed 40 million lives on its own initiative and lost another 20 to the invasion of Hitler.)

At the conclusion of his eight year sentence, he was freed from the camps, but sentenced thereupon to lifetime exile in the East. He was only allowed out of his imprisonment long enough to travel to the city of Tashkent, to receive treatment for stomach cancer.

After Stalin died, he was again allowed to leave the far East and he returned to central Russia, where he settled in Ryazan. His wife, who had divorced him during his imprisonment, remarried him and they settled down to a quiet life.

But he wrote on, regardless, knowing that he had no future: his works would never be published; indeed, if they were discovered, he would likely be arrested again and returned to the cold hell of the far East.

He chose, however, to take a chance. He sent a manuscript copy of his short story – Yedin Den' Ivana Denisovitcha, or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch - to an old friend of his, Aleksander Tvardovskiy, editor of the magazine Novy Mir ("New World"). The excellence of the work was recognized immediately; some of those reviewing the short story comparing it to Dostoyevski.

But old habits die hard, particularly in socialist dictatorships. The publication of such a (counter-)revolutionary work would require approval at the highest level. It finally came from the unlikeliest of sources: Nikita Khrushchev himself, who, telling the Politburo of his decision to approve the release of the story, made what is possibly the most remarkable admission of any public official in Soviet history:

There is a Stalinist in each of you; there is even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.

But this was but a false spring of freedom in Russia. Although the nation was swept by this daring new writer who actually was allowed to attack the (former) leadership of the Soviet Union, the brief era of tolerance for dissent soon ended when Khrushchev was overthrown and replaced by the Brezhnev clique of reactionaries. And Solzhenitsyn, the golden boy of the Khrushchev era, found himself almost an unperson.

In this period, his next novel, Cancer Ward, was published, but his next, The First Circle, was blockaded. In the years that followed, while the children of the "Free Speech" protestors in Berkeley decried American "censorship" and Woodstock became the symbol of freedom, Solzhenitsyn's home was raided by KGB agents and a copy of his most important work, Arkhipelag GULag, or The Gulag Archipelago, was seized. In 1969 he was expelled from the Union of Writers–membership in which was a sine qua non to being a published novelist in the U.S.S.R.

While the police had seized the manuscript, however, copies had been carefully stored in the homes of friends, and were smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West. An American at the Embassy, military attache' William Odom -- later head of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan -- got the manuscript to publishers in Paris.

As time passed, his importance as a writer and as a solitary opponent of the Soviet system became more apparent, even to his enemies. The Soviets could not afford to kill him, and they were unable to effectively silence him. His growing reputation became a rebuke to everything the Soviet system stood for. He was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970–this, back in the days when Nobel Prizes were still meaningful–and he came to stand for all those silent men of good will inside the Soviet Union who quietly opposed the stone face of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Since he could not be silenced, and since he could not be safely killed, they expelled him.

One day, in 1974, he was again arrested in his home. At this time, he was informed by the KGB officers arresting him that the decision had been taken by the Politburo to strip him of his citizenship and expel him from Russia. He was forcibly placed on an Aeroflot plane to Germany, and he was unceremoniously dumped onto the tarmac.

In the days that followed, he was allowed to migrate to the United States, where he took up residence. His second wife, Natalya -- he had divorced his first wife in 1971 -- was allowed to join him, along with their three young sons.

He took up residence in Cavindish, Vermont, a small, woodsy town in the Northeastern United States, which resembled in many ways his old home in central Russia. He chose well, for his Vermont neighbors had almost as insular views of privacy as he did. He stayed there, shielded by his neighbors' willing shielding of the family from the curious, and quite pointedly rarely left his estate. Although his wife and children all obtained American citizenship, he chose to remain officially stateless.

Never learning to speak English fluently -– although of course he read it well enough –- he spent his seventeen years in exile concentrating on finishing his Red Wheel cycle of four novels on the Russian Revolution. During his stay in Cavindish, he made one public appearance–a speech at Harvard University's Commencement ceremonies in 1977, where he denounced American culture, materialism, and "bad music" to an audience that found his words, to quote the New York Times, "bewildering." It almost seemed like he was biting the hand that fed him–except that this particular "hand" was made up of a lot of people who believed that the USSR was, to put it kindly, unobjectionable.

Your Author recalls seeing him in one of his very rare appearances on American television in 1984, giving an interview where he advocated that the USSR should be broken into its component parts, and the other nations forming it allowed to be free and independent states. Although he foresaw some internal border changes that never took place–he thought, for instance, that majority Russian-speaking regions in Ukraine and Kazakhstan should become Russian territory–his foresight in predicting the shattering of the USSR which came only seven years later was, in retrospect, truly astonishing. (Were that our CIA had had such vision!)

I can remember my father shaking his head after the interview ended. "The man's a dreamer," he said. But, as it turned out, he was (pace John Lennon) not the only one.

Time passed and the ice dam that he had first pierced shattered into a million pieces in his absence. To those of us who lived through those heady years, the events that moved so swiftly still seem miraculous – the "Easter Sunday party" that broke the fence between Austria and Hungary in 1988 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the return of Solidarity, the death of the Warsaw Pact, the execution of Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989, the independence of Lithuania, the August coup of 1990, Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank, and, most gloriously, the fall of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991 and its irrevocable consignment to the ashheap of history.

But Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was forced to observe all this from exile.

In 1995, he finally came back to Russia, landing in Magadan, a city in the Far East near Vladivostok. His first act on emerging from the plane was to kiss the ground in remembrance of his fellow Zeks who had died as Stalin's slaves tearing this city out of the Siberian waste. He then took a train with his wife across Siberia, soaking in the "new Russia."

He was, as one might expect, dismayed. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the nation impoverished, and yet the Russian people who had suffered so long did not seem to have emerged from their decades of horror morally improved. He saw Russian Mafia influence everywhere, Soviet Communistic influence still abounding, Western materialism, extremely gross sexual immorality, drugs, and mindless pursuit of pleasure, and he was shocked and appalled at what he saw.

He settled in Moscow and became what we might call a "pundit." He had, for a time, his own TV show, two fifteen-minute spots a week where he would interview leading politicians and thinkers of the day. But his bitter and hectoring style attracted few viewers and the show was cancelled after a few months.

He was, in the end of his life, viewed (fairly or not) as a has-been and an eccentric, a supporter of Tsarism and an opponent of democracy. He also held many views that today are held to be unacceptable, including a bitter attitude toward the Jewish people that approached anti-Semitism, although to his credit he recognized it in himself, admitted to it, and battled it. It should be remembered that it was he that observed that "the line between good and evil lies not between 'us' and 'them' but down the middle of every human heart." And none knew that line better than he himself. We all must struggle with evil; some of us have the misfortune of doing so publicly.

Yes, at the end of his life, he was in many ways a crank. But his legacy is clear.

Today, his master work, The Gulag Archepelago, composed in fear of the KGB, is now required reading in every high school in Russia.

ADDENDUM - MADELYN MURRAY O'HAIR

I will not recount her life story here. While she had the makings of a member of the Remnant--she was, indeed, courageous, in a twisted way--she chose to stand up and be counted for the other side.

In the spring of 1985, I was in my final semester as an undergraduate at Michigan State University. A major public speaking event was scheduled one evening at the main theater, where the celebrated Madelyn Murray O'Hair was to come to give a speech.

O'Hair of course was and is famous as the individual who was responsible for forcing public schools to stop allowing prayer or the reading of the Bible as part of educational curricula. She gloried in her title as "the most hated woman in America," and taunted those Christians who she claimed dreamed of her death.

I remember going to see her at MSU on that occasion. As was common at such events, microphones were set up around the ampitheater so that, following her speech, the audience could comment and ask her questions.

I do not remember much about the speech, except that it was standard atheist boilerplate: Christians are idiots, atheists are the smart ones; believers are idiots, scientific materialists are the smart ones; those who imagine that the world was created are idiots... yadda yadda.

I patiently stood in line and was standing before the microphone when someone asked Mrs. O'Hair about freedom of worship in the Soviet Union.

"I've traveled several times in the Soviet Union," she bragged. "In every city there are still churches. They're open. Nobody is in them because nobody believes there any more. But there is no persecution of religious believers in the U.S.S.R."

I spoke up into the microphone at that instant.

"I don't believe Aleksander Solzhenitsyn would agree with your last statement."

"Aleksander Solzhenitsyn," she said, voice dripping contempt, "is a fascist."

At that the room erupted in applause. I had not realized, until that moment, how alone I truly was in that building--or that almost everybody else there seemed to be enthusiastically buying the bovine scatology that she was selling.

I will also not recount what ultimately became of her: an atrocity so horrible that I would not wish it happening to Charles Manson.

I'll simply observe the difference between their respective legacies: Solzhenitsyn's being a book that every school child in his nation must now read; O'Hair's, a Book that no school in her nation is allowed to teach.

"I find your lack of Faith disturbing...."

2009-12-20T19:10:00.000-05:00

The Vatican has declared the person of His Holiness The Pope, the Servant of the Servants of God, Patriarch of the West, Bishop of Rome, Successor to St. Peter and Vicar of Christ to be a copyrighted figure, in order to prevent his image from being, well, misappropriated.

We fully support this move, as we cannot have people publishing pictures like this......

(Come on, I'm as big a fan of the papacy as you can ask for, but I gotta think even old JP2 himself would have laughed at this one....)

"Would You Kiss Me?", Part II

2009-12-18T12:39:00.000-05:00

The newspaper The Times (of London) reports

UK diplomatic sources confirmed there had been a major setback after China took huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country carbon emissions.

In his speech President Obama said: "Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page" - remarks the Chinese interpreted as an attempt to humiliate them, prompting Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel.

Hmn. I wonder, does Wen look like Mrs. Obama?

How Now Brown Shroud?

2009-12-18T12:00:00.000-05:00

In other news, The Times also reports that the Shroud of Turin has been "debunked" because they found another First Century AD shroud in a cemetery, this new shroud belonging unquestionably to a leprosy victim.

The leprosy victim's shroud was of a single weave and was very crude.

Therefore the Shroud of Turin can't be real because it's a rich and complex weave.

By that logic, there are no Lexuses or Mazeratis on the road because they found my three color ten year old Oldsmobile in my parking lot.

Amazing, these scientists. Is there nothing they don't know?

Philip Pullman Loses His Bearings

2009-12-16T06:21:00.000-05:00

It sez here that plans to make movies based on Philip Pullman's "Golden Compass" novels have been shelved due to the fact that the first one didn't make enough money.

Okay, fair 'nuff.

But Mr. Pullman is blaming Catholic opposition to the fact that his movie didn't make very much money.

And THAT is, ahem, specious. (That's lawyerese for "bullshit.")

In this day and age, where Christianity and Catholicism are so disregarded that our Congress feels free to pass a health care law that murders children at government expense, the thought that "we" ruined his movie is ludicrous.

Face it, Pullman; your movie didn't make money because your movie sucked. And it sucked because the underlying premise sucked.

Of course, then there is this: When a seller of barnyard-derived agricultural fertilizer is unable to sell his wares, maybe he should look at his product as the source of his troubles. So here.

ADDENDUM

Now Sam Elliot is making the same pathetic claim. Sad, really.

"I'd like to beeeee.... under the seeeeea....."

2009-12-15T06:11:00.000-05:00

A video from National Geographic reports: "Octopuses have been discovered tip-toeing with coconut-shell halves suctioned to their undersides, then reassembling the halves and disappearing inside for protection or deception".

The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus [Amphioctopus marginatus] the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.

Hmn. The ONLY spineless tool-users? They obviously didn't take Homo sapiens congressi into account.....

What Christmas is Really All About....

2009-12-12T19:48:00.000-05:00

....Christ, the Lord.

This 2005 USA TODAY article explains, far better than I could why this program is so brilliant.

(I should also note that the song that opens this show -- "Christmas Time is Here" -- is the only intelligent Christmas song written in the last half of a century.)

Some Good News from Michigan (For Once)

2009-12-12T18:14:00.000-05:00

Back on July 15 I posted about a horrible accident that happened on I-75 at the Nine Mile overpass--the bridge, only recently rebuilt, was burned and destroyed down to the foundations by an exploding tanker truck.

There were no casualties in that accident, thanks to quick action by the local law enforcement, firefighters, and citizens-on-the-spot. But the bridge was totally destroyed. (Pix here.)

Well, whaddayaknow? Yesterday, Friday, December 11, 2009, the bridge was reopened. Around-the-clock labor and an open checkbook made completion of the project in under six months possible.

There's a lot about Detroit that sucks, yes. But a hat tip to all involved in this minor urban miracle. We haven't completely lost what or who we are or what we can do!

I like the guy on the right.

2009-12-11T21:01:00.000-05:00

(as if that is a surprise)

Breathtaking Genocidal Evil

2009-12-10T15:59:00.000-05:00

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.

ADDENDUM

AND the mother of two.

Hat Tip: National Review The Corner.

Tattered Remnants #021: J Harlan Bretz

2009-12-07T19:44:00.000-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

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.

ADDENDUM:

The physics of the failure of the ice dam, however, are of particular interest to us before we move on to our next section.

The ice dam was the leading edge of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, an immense glacier that covered most of what is now western Canada; as it moved forward, it cut off the flow of the Clark Fork river. The river backed up and, in the face of the immensity of the ice plug, grew deeper and deeper, reaching one point a thousand feet above what is now the city of Missoula, Montana. The ice plug itself reached a height of over 2000 feet at its highest point.

The excellent PBS series NOVA examined the mystery in an episode entitled "Mystery of the Megaflood." The ice dam, however, was not shattered by the melting action of the sun or of warmth, but through causes rooted in some of the more esoteric laws of physics.

As is well known, water has a unique physical property in that it expands as it freezes, which as it developed had a dramatic effect on the ice dam. As the water in the lake grew deeper, pressure on the lower depths became greater and greater. The water in close proximity with the ice grew cooler; indeed, it dropped below freezing temperature, but could not form ice as the great pressure of the waters behind it prevented the necessary expansion into crystalline form.

This water, flowing into every nook and crack of the ice, eventually wore away the ice within the cracks, making them wider and wider. Eventually the supercooled water burst through the dam, causing its eventual sudden and catastrophic collapse.

In short, small amounts of free flowing water that was not physically capable of becoming ordered ice destroyed the structure that held it back, shattering the dam and releasing the water to freely flow again.

As it turns out, it is not merely ice dams that are broken this way...whereby hangs our next entry.

Tattered Remnants #020: Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens

2009-12-06T11:41:00.000-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

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 orders of the local military occupation 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.

Tiger Woods In Chinese

2009-12-02T06:46:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-01T12:12:00.001-05:00

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-????)

2009-11-28T00:04:00.000-05:00

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.

2009-11-24T18:54:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-22T15:58:00.000-05:00

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 architectural 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 architecture (the only thing he ever said that is worth remembering).

Lest We Forget 11/22/1963

2009-11-22T15:45:00.001-05:00

"Will you kiss me?"

2009-11-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

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 Remnants #019: Irena Sendlerowa

2009-11-20T09:46:00.000-05:00

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

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!!!!

2009-11-19T21:17:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-18T22:08:00.000-05:00

Eva Cassidy (1963-1996).

Kitten on the Keys(tone Kop)

2009-11-17T23:18:00.001-05:00