perfidy

Reuters covers the impending public display of 1/10th of Mexicans demanding to be Americans here.

On the one hand, that sounds like a fine thing: all those millions, that vast multitude willing to risk so much to be one of us. On the other hand, giving ultimatums and listing among your intentions that, "America's major cities will grind to a halt and its economy will stagger" are not the way to engender sympathy for your cause. Just wanted to throw that out there, you know, in case it wasn't blatantly obvious to anyone.

Reuters calls them "pro-immigration activists"; that's who will be taking to the streets on 1 May. "Pro-immigration activists".

That's funny, because every time Lady Lethal and I had to go wrestle with the INS over some bit of her paperwork- which always cost alot of $$, not to mention lost work time and travelling expenses, and disregarding the psychic toll of dealing with cold bureaucrats- I don't recall ever seeing a "pro-immigration" activist. Not anywhere near the JFK Building, the Government Center plaza, the Red Line, or the Green Line.

That's because all the pro-immigration people were inside the building, waiting in line.

Oceania has always been at war with... ahh shit. Who'm I kidding? Here I am with a story about a new video display in development by Apple that contains image-collecting cells interlaced with the image-emitting ones, thereby permitting a fully functional two-way video screen, and all I can come up with are Yakov Smirnoff and George fricking Orwell.

Is there an office I need to report to, to have my pundit-pass torn up? Or at the very least stamped "HACK" in giant red block capitals?

[wik] Speaking of George Orwell, I just read a fascinating brace of books. First was Orwell's debut novel, Burmese Days, drawn from his experience in His Majesty's colonial service, and about the deranging effects that colonialism has on colonizer and colonized alike. Apparently Orwell had some problems with the system.

Shortly after reading that, my loving wife the librarian handed me Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, an American author raised in Southeast Asia. A few years ago, Larkin returned to Myanmar in order to visit all the places that George Orwell either wrote about or himself visited while in the Service, with the notion of making a book out of the trip. Along the way she uncovered the terrible and disheartening fact that Orwell is viewed by those few intellectuals who manage to endure under Myanmar's insane regime as a veritable prophet of their misery. In the back rooms of shops, in apartments with the shutters closed, in groups of two and three so as to not require an official "gathering" permit, people meet to read, exchange, and discuss books, handing moldering paperbacks by Western authors from hand to hand, racing against time and mildew to absorb the text before the books fall to pieces or they are discovered, detained, and disappeared by the government's vast network of informants. In this sub-sub-sub culture, this demimonde of intellectual resistance, they treat 1984 as though it were the roadmap to the system that rules their world.

Being that Myanmar's military rulers do in fact intrude in thousands of ways into every moment of every person's life, spoon feed the populace "news" that advances their purposes, mandates constant public displays of love for the rulers and hatred of the enemy (both internal enemies of the state and the puppeteers that ostensibly move them from abroad) and acts vigorously and without scruple to crush out every spark of independent thought, it turns out that in Myanmar, 1984 isn't merely a chilling if slightly hokey novel for seventh-graders. It's goddamn holy truth.

Based on the latest antics of "Denny Pelosi", one could reasonably get the impression our elected leaders are either gutless or elitist.

Sometimes, reality sucks. Current gas prices are a great example of that.

The French way, it would seem, is to propose a half-solution to the problem (better than none, mind you), and then to climb down from it after street protests by the disaffected presumed-losers from the policy. Examples abound, but the recent tail-between-the-legs by "Black Jack" Chirac on the utterly reasonable attempts by Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to grease the market for youth employment in France is perhaps most instructive.

That was a case either of the government being too weak-kneed to tell the people what they needed to hear or being certain the people were too stupid, greedy, or both to understand the need for change. Result? Cram-down policies, rejected by the people because they weren't explained fully and correctly.

Same deal today in the US, it seems - the scary correlation between Bush's approval rating and gas prices has awakened the sleeping and impotent populist in each of our Republican leaders. Morons. It's bad enough when the Democrats do it, but flatly embarrassing when the GOP does.

I'm sure that sometimes it's better to be seen to be doing something rather than not, but this isn't one of those times, and will simply feed and nurture the economic illiteracy of those who don't know better. How many times will we go through this charade of pretending that if prices go up, someone's slipping us the high hard one? When prices go down, these same folks, illiterates and impotent populists both, seem not to think it odd at all.

Princess Cat, over at A Swift Kick and a Bandaid, has an open letter for the immigrant protesters that infested our nation's capital the other day.

You see, I noticed you and your clan... and now I hate you ... because it took me an hour and a half to get home today. I watched as train after train, car after car of smug, arrogant, antagonistic protestors waved and taunted those waiting on the platform. You purposely targeted and inconvenienced me during my evening commute, because you thought it would make me contact my Congressman or Senator on your behalf? Isn't there some story about flies and honey that you should be learning right about now?

And while you're at it, go ask Apu why la migra isn't trying to nail his ass to the wall and maybe then you'll learn why he didn't have to protest for his rights.

Sincerely,

The Bitch from the Metro

We had a chat about this yesterday, and I find myself largely in agreement. My commute was made double-plus unpleasant by an El Salvadoran in a floppy hat who had failed to execute an adequate personal hygiene regimen any time in the last week. The protestors on their way home were largely as Cat describes them.

A coworker of mine, a liberal, found to his surprise that he and I agreed completely on the issue. We established that we both believe that anyone who protests on this issue is a complete fathead, or worse. The worst sin here is the conflation of two issues: immigration and illegal immigration.

I am all for immigration, of the legal, above board and it least somewhat competantly monitored sort. I think we should reduce limitations on skilled workers from nearly anywhere. We should streamline the process for getting visas - to make it simpler, and with less bureaucratic hassle. We should implement something like the sojourner idea that Bennett had, to make it much, much easier for people from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Great Britain to come, work, and stay here.

That is one issue. A completely separate issue is the people breaking and entering our national bungalo. The first thing they do when they come here is flout our laws and, in essence, give us the finger. Illegal immigrants do not have the same rights as citizens, or legal aliens. If found, they should be deported. Their employers should be heavily fined. We should stiffen the defenses on the border. Put more agents out patrolling.

Any other reaction is simply ridiculous. Illegal is illegal. Anyone who uses the phrase "undocumented worker" is blowing smoke up our collective ass. Anyone who tries to color everyone who opposes illegal immigration as a bigot is a fucktard. I'm tired of people in the administration and congress not dealing with this problem in anything even approaching a reasonable manner.

Bleh.

In a fascinating series of posts about a spur-of-the-moment road trip - "Hey dude... we're in Turkey... let's drive to Iraq" - Michael Totten says what needs to be said about all the trouble in the world today. Arguing that Islamism only seems like the biggest problem in the Middle East, when it's really only that Islamism is its biggest export (which I guess is kind of like summing up the Japanese by pointing to a Camry), he says with great insight that the real problem is that:

The crackup of the Ottoman Empire has still not settled down into anything stable.

Maybe it's just because I am currently reading an excellent book about the crackup of another ancient civilization - Europe - in Tony Judt's magesterial Postwar but that strikes me as being right on the nose. That area of the world is currently going through its own Twentieth Century, made worse by the fact that it's also living with the cast-off aftermath of Europe's own Twentieth. The near-simultaneous collapse of Austro-Hungary, Russia, Prussia/Germany, not to mention the last of the Mongol monarchs (in Azerbaijan and, I believe, Armenia) and a bunch of other upheavals (Italy, Spain...) gave us two horrific wars, Fascism, Communism in all its multifarious splendors, numerous genocides, and a resulting body count in the high tens of millions, if not higher. Not to mention the disastrous aftermath of messy colonial withdrawals around the world as Europe bled itself white. All because of some some silly little empires.

Anyway. No point to that. Why should there be? This is a weblog! Read Michael Totten's road trip series - here's part one, which links at the end to part two.

Italian police arrest the grand poobah of the international La Cosa Nostra in Sicily. In Corleone. I mean, didn't the guy watch the Godfather?

My mom, bless her heart, sent me the following via the internets. No doubt you've seen things like this before. Maybe even this one. Your relatives back home probably sent you one. But fear of repetition has never held back the Ministry. Never. If we give into fear, then the terrorists will have won. And you don't want that, do you? Do you?

So here it is. The top arbitrary number of reasons you will know you are from Cleveland (with commentary, thusly):

• You don't really know any homosexuals; you just know that there are a lot of them in Lakewood. Hence the nickname, "Flakewood." But they don't hate gays, they just envy them their formidible interior decorating powers. Which you would understand if you saw the interior of any house in Parma over by Rt. 42.
• You know you don't really have an accent, the rest of the world does. Every newscaster in the country sounds like they grew up in Cleveland. It's true.
• You hate country music, don't know anyone that does like country music, and yet WGAR just won the music station of the year. I didn't like country music until I moved to the East Coast. Still hate WGAR, though.
• You take credit for Cedar Point even though it is 2 hours away. Why not? The best amusement park in the world is closer to Cleveland than anywhere else, except Toledo. And Toledo doesn't count.
• You honestly believe that Cleveland is the best city in the world. It is.
• The Tri-C jingle "students for life" scares the hell out of you. I think Cuyahoga Community College had some sort of perverse kickback scheme set up with all the guidance counselors in the region. No matter whether you were a valedictorian with a 1600 SAT or some poor schlub who couldn't pass woodshop, the advice was the same: Tri-C.

• You take Dead Man's Curve at 60 mph holding your breath. I never held my breath.
• You know about the Eastside/Westside rivalry, but don't really understand it. Much like the Blue and Green factions in medieval Byzantium, there doesn't need to be a reason for violent rivalry.
• Your neighborhood schools went without sports because all the senior citizens refused to pass the levies. Fuckers
• You actually know how to pronounce Cuyahoga. I imagine that back in '68 when the river caught on fire, national news announcers dreaded the Cleveland reports.
• You can tell Brook Park, Brooklyn, and Old Brooklyn apart. Actually, they all look alike to me.
• You see Christmas lights still up in July. Why save all the fun for winter?
• You love BW-3, but have no clue what the heck weck is. It's a kind of grain.
• You find yourself singing "Garfield 1-2323" in the shower. Even though I have never in my life wanted a patio enclosure, I know exactly how to get one.
• You're still dumbfounded by the Leaping Fountain in Tower City. It's like the Abyss done by Busby Berkeley.
• You have never ridden in a taxi. At least, never in Cleveland.
• You wear shorts the first day of the year it isn't below 30 and snowing, just because you can. If it ever got below 30 in DC, I'd do this when it warmed up again.
• You have gotten 3 speeding tickets, and they are all from the mile long stretch of a suburb named Lindale. My personal law enforcement nemesis was Montrose Township, also on I-71, but a bit south. Five tickets.
• You hate Baltimore and you have never been there. I've been there, and it's a nice town. But I still hate it.
• St. Patty's Day is your number one holiday, and you aren't Irish. Not really confined to Cleveland, at all.
• You're still relishing 1987 when we ALMOST made it to the Super Bowl. Really took all the fun out of that year, and cast a pall over graduation and going to college.
• You counted down with the monument in Tower City to the exact second in 1999 when the Browns came back? Yep.
• You know Tower City isn't a city at all. Yep.
• You're Polish. Yep. Well, in spirit.
• Stories of Little Italy still send chills down your spine. Stories of Hough are worse, though.
• At least half of your wardrobe is Tribe apparel. Even though I have not lived in Cleveland for six years, and my son has never lived there, half of his wardrobe is Tribe apparel thanks to his grandma.
• You measure distance in minutes. Still do, but only because in DC, actual physical distance is not even remotely relevant to how long it takes to get somewhere.
• You've had to switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day. Yep. Once I saw the Savings and Loan time/temperature sign drop forty degrees in half an hour.
• You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition. Example: "Where's my coat at?" Yep. I also say things like, "needs washed."
• You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both un-locked. Yep. I really ought to change that behavior now that I live in DC, and have a stalker.
• You think of the major four food groups as beef, pork, beer, and Jell-O salad with marshmallows. Yep.
• You carry jumper cables in your car. Yep. Doesn't everyone?
• You know what 'pop' is. My mom confused the hell out of my son by saying "pop" - the boy had no idea what she was talking about. All he knows is "soda." Then she accused me of raising my son improperly.
• You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit. In Cleveland, you have to.
• Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow. True.
• You think sexy lingerie is tube socks and a flannel nightgown. No comment.
• The local paper covers national and international headlines on one page but requires 6 pages for sports. Which is saner, when you think about it.

With a hearty "Amen" to Minister GeekLethal's post below, a quick follow up.

In an op-ed from today's WSJ, I saw a line from the Governator that went like this:

How ironic it is to hear some of the same voices who complain about the outsourcing of jobs also complain about the use of immigrant workers here in America.

Realizing that the proper answer to the question I'm about to ask is, "Well, both", I'll ask it anyway.

Is it just me being thick-headed, or does that line not necessarily mean what Ahnuld hoped it would? If by ironic, he meant "totally predictable", then I think I understand. Otherwise, not so much.

Hep me out here.

Still not entirely clear what it is that the roughly gazillion people taking to the streets in our major cities are taking to the streets about. From what I've read so far about all this protest and march and waving of national symbols, the word "illegal" has not yet appeared.

I've read alot about "immigrants' rights", but I'm not sure what that means. I'm willing to bet that if I asked 10 random people what the term "immigrants' rights" means, I'd hear 10 different answers. Or more.

I have a couple of major bighuge problems with illegal immigration, but that's a specific problem: illegal immigration. There are solutions that might fix it. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with "immigrants' rights", but it does have to do with solving a stated, specific problem. I don't believe though that has anything to do with the current demonstrations. Besides, I feel that any event that includes the ANSWER people entering the lists on your side pretty much shuts down the possibility that I'll take you seriously.

If at its core we equate "rights" with "fairness", and by that we mean that illegal immigrants are treated like citizens, it also means that citizens be treated like illegals. Now that might have some merit. Free health care, for starters; if I don't pay medical bills now, I get a lien on my house. Working tax free might be nice, too; I am willing to wager that an illegal working under the table somewhere has a helluva lot more disposable income that myself, who as of this writing, has precisely $54 to my name and by the way it has to last until Friday.

But look, don't get hung up on that rant- I'm more concerned about the future. As best I understand it, the last amnesty ca 1986 gave legal work documents to something like 3-7 million illegals. THAT was supposed to fix the problem, because after that one-time event, we'd get serious about enforcing our immigration policies and border security. So 20 years later we have something like 3-4 times as many, and face the same problem, with the same language being used to offer a fix. And I believe that what will ultimately come down is amnesty by another name. I think it's a slam dunk.

OK, fine. Everyone who came by legal means, ridiculous expense, and interminable paper drill was a sucker. Lady Lethal and I and a whole lot of others will have to live with that.

But what happens in 2026?

I wonder whether it might just be easier, for everybody, to just dispense with the American border altogether. Anyone who wants to live here can just arrive, by whatever means it takes; no pesky checks to see whether the person's a felon in his home country, or infected with a communicable disease; and work. Or not. The legions of bureaucrats who run immigration could be fired and thereby save a ton of dough, which would definitely be a net plus. And it's not like America's market for unskilled- or nominally skilled- labor is going to dry up.

So open it up, dispense with the red tape and the lines on the map, and come what may. I think the cultural, language, and class problems that would be created or intensified by the sudden influx of a billion or so new citizens might not be nearly as bad to contend with as the mush-mouthed verbiage that political leaders and demonstration organizers try to make me believe these days.

Ministry minions will no doubt recall that Lady Lethal, the lady who was kind enough both to marry me and be present at the creation of our offspring- the Li'lest Lethal- is from Poland.

One day over the course of casual discussion, I was talking about the lame places I went on school field trips as a kid. The places that a third rate city whose glory days- if ever there were any- died before Truman did. Places like the aquarium 100 miles away. The lame local museums. The big library. The park. And the "living history"-type faux town with the re-enactors who play colonial characters like tinsmiths and constables and milkmaids, the last of whom always seemed to be churning butter. I remember being there at 8 years old, and instead of being curious about the extraordinary cleverness of a water-powered log skinner was more curious about who ate all the flippin' butter they made.

So after rambling for awhile, I asked her where they went as kids in Poland. The lame museum? The big park? The aquarium 100 miles- whoops, kilomters- away?

"Mmm, not really", she answered, "We go to Auschwitz."

Uh-HUH.

Now it seems perhaps more yoots from outside Poland ought to make the trip or, failing that, pay more attention in school. It seems the gubmint is getting a little irritated about furriners seeing the words "concentration camp" with the word "Polish", and assuming ownership, not merely geography.

The Irish Examiner has a bit about efforts to change the formal name to The Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. If that's what it takes to educate people about it, well then that's what has to be done.

But isn't it sad that enough people were confused about the blackest patch on Earth that this move was even warranted?

While reading a story entitled "Groundswell of Protests Back Illegal Immigrants" in Monday's New York Times, I came across this nugget, spread across two pages. First, the last paragraph on page one:

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that of more than 11 million illegal immigrants, 78 percent are from Mexico or other Latin American countries. Many have children and other relatives who are United States citizens. Under the House measure, family members of illegal immigrants — as well as clergy members, social workers and lawyers — would risk up to five years in prison if they helped an illegal immigrant remain in the United States.

OK, fine, sez me - that sounds harsh. I've read and heard news stories making it clear that the authors of the legislation have no intention of criminalizing the actions of anyone simply "helping" an illegal immigrant to stay in the US, but I can understand why the Catholic Church, the illegals' families, and other aid organizations would be jumpy about the matter. So I clicked on to see page two, and its first paragraph looked like this:

(Page 2 of 2)

"Imagine turning more than 11 million people into criminals, and anyone who helps them," said Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, one of the organizers of Saturday's rally there. "It's outrageous. We needed to send a strong and clear message to Congress and to President Bush that the immigrant community will not allow the criminalization of our people — and it needed to be very strong because of the anti-immigrant environment that we are experiencing in Congress."

With no disrespect to immigrants, and no actual malice toward illegal immigrants, I find myself wondering what part of illegal does Angela Sanbrano not understand?

Those 11 million folks she's worried about are already criminals. Whether they should be or not is an issue best left to another forum, but could we drop the charade that they're not already criminals? And if the issue is immigrants' rights, the matter is pretty simple, according to present laws - as illegal immigrants they have a right to be treated fairly, humanely, and then to be transported back to wherever they came from at the earliest feasible date, absent some mitigating factor, of which there are none related to Mexican immigrants. Shitty government isn't one of the exceptions, you see.

Those that wish to have open borders, with free entry for all, can make excellent points in favor of their positions, as can those against. I find, however, that the arguments of those against purely open borders are more believable on at least one level - they don't generally seem to start their arguments with a bald-faced misstatement of fact.

Where the Times fits into all this is actually moot - the placement of the visual head-fake is probably just an accident. But anyone who read just the first page and moved on might not notice the duplicity of the arguments in favor of what is, today, still a clearly illegal activity. That would be unfortunate, and runs the risk of simply kicking the can down the road rather than addressing the issue once and for all.

For what it might be worth, if the government were to decide to lock the borders tight and properly and then to offer a one-time amnesty to all who've been so fortunate to evade the law to-date, I'd be fine with that, unlike some (many?) to the right of me on the political polarization scale.

Doing one without the other, however, would just be another act of stupidity, and doing neither would be just as bad.

It's not Dubai, friends...this is one of remarkably rare times I'm with the President. The reason this deal should have gone through smoothly is that pissing off foreign investors is a very stupid thing for America to do, now. Somebody's obviously briefed Bush on this fact, and that somebody failed to find a way to convince Congress of the same thing. This is a political bungling of the highest order; the issue should never have been allowed on the public's radar. The public has responded in a highly predictable manner -- rampant xenophobia and plenty of water-cooler talk about what's "obvious", and that of course American control of things like ports is a good idea.

The problem is that the only reason the US economy and financial system hasn't crashed and burned is that foreigners have put trillions of dollars into buying parts of America. Some of the biggest buyers are the Chinese (circa $300 Billion a year) and Arab nations; we have our biggest trade deficits with nations and regions we consider to be "nasty", and we're dependent on them. The total foreign investment the country needs is on the order of $600 Billion a year, thanks to crackwhore-like management of the country's finances by the fundamentalists-in-charge. If that $600 Billion should start to dry up, you can expect a huge increase in interest rates, shortly followed by the financial meltdown of the US government, which is on an utterly unsustainable course. Ripping away significant foreign investment will cause a decline in the overall value of assets within the country, and generally retard growth heavily. Since crazy growth rates are the only mathematical means left of avoiding inbound financial catastrophe, it doesn't seem like good policy to me.

Congress just sent a message to foreign investors everywhere -- that they're not welcome, and that they can't own "key" infrastructure assets. The subtext is that anything they do can and is subject to forfeiture or control. Bills floating around congress defined "key assets" as anything from farms to ports to chemical companies. In short, much of America's manufacturing base can be classified as key, and a security asset.

Of course, America wouldn't be so vulnerable to this if (to repeat myself) the crackwhores weren't in charge of the roll of cash. And the people who put them there will never believe that there are any consequences to their actions until the hammer drops on them personally.

This is good:

One of the most useful aspects of the cartoon controversy is the clarity it has given to liberal ideals. It's become abundantly clear since the beginning of the month that separation of church and state, free expression, and making demands on the government are not disparate concepts randomly yoked together in the first amendment of the United States constitution. They are mutual dependent and essential rights.

Nor are these rights simply offshoots or happy byproducts of a functioning democracy. They are prior to a functioning democracy. That is a hard teaching, and as Secretary of State Rice demonstrated with her idiotic expression of surprise at the results of the recent Palestinian election, even many high-flying Americans don't fully grasp it.

This from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason. Although the whole thing is a bit of a word salad, there is a lot of insight in there.

Boy, do I hate it when people put up a post basically saying "me too!" Now I need to go kick my own ass.

Krauthammer on the cartoon rioting:

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis?

... A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

I would have to agree, here. It is not the place of Muslims, anywhere, to determine through prior censorship (whether official or based on fears of violent retribution) what newspapers (or TV, or blogs, or magazines) publish. I remain amazed at the violence that convulses the Muslim "community" whenever something pisses it off. Which is frequent. Thirty five or more people dead, embassies burned, innocent Danish businesses harmed - all because, essentially, 1.6 billion people collectively can't take a joke.

This will go on, protests and riots, attacks on the west, people like Theo van Gogh stabbed to death, because the Islamic world has a hair trigger temper and is not merely easily offended but actively looking for things to be offended by. What will change these attitudes? It is not reassuring to consider that ending pervasive religious intolerance took several of the vilest and bloodiest wars in western history.

As an update to the recent posts by Patton and myself on the furor over the Danish Bomb-Head Muhammad cartoons, we have these items:

• A US State Department offical, Janelle Hironimus, has said that, "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices." She also mentioned that while there is great press freedom, these rights must be coupled with press responsibility. I don't think the Spiderman creed applies to the press generally, and certainly not in this case. Janelle should take a long walk off a short pier, we don't need to embolden the Muslims in their intolerance.
• Muslims protesting in Morocco.
• Muslims protesting in the West Bank.
• Muslims protesting in Egypt.
• Muslims protesting in Jerusalem.
• Muslims protesting in London.
• I could go on, but I won't.
• Meanwhile, there is a complete lack of protesting in NYC, where some idiot made a picture of Osama bin Laden as Christ.

I won't be surprised if lots of Muslims die in riots over this. Saddened, but not at all surprised.

[wik] So far, at least four people have died.

You may have heard about the whole Muhammad cartoon contretemps. Some Danish newspaper printed some cartoons which featured the visage of the Prophet. Apparently, that alone is offensive, considering the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. But those evil Danes went further. They drew pictures mocking the Prophet. So, a Danish newspaper prints the evil images. And the whole Islamic world breaks out in rioting and shit, Islamic nations recall their ambassadors from Denmark whose government had nothing whatever to do with the original cartoons, and the faithful stop buying legos.

So I found a website that has all the cartoons. The one that was on Drudge and elsewhere was cool, with 'ol Muhammad as Bakunin wearing an lit anarchist's bomb as a turban. Here's a picture:

For some reason, though, this is my favorite:

I don't know exactly what that reason is, but I dig it.

Now, I realize that posting these images on Perfidy could very well result in a Jihad being declared on the Ministry. These images are offensive to Islam, and all the faithful. Well, I had to look at endless pictures and video and stories about things like "piss christ" which is rather offensive to my religion. I did not declare war on anyone, or even get out of my chair. I might have blasphemed and uttered some profane statements. That's about it. See, I'm tolerant. It is my central political belief that everyone has a right to be a completely retarded offensive loonytune. All of our rights derive from this profound insight. It's easy to argue that someone making a serious political statement is entitled to, uh, make it. Without getting shot, imprisoned, or beat up too much. Extending that protection to the soi disant artist responsible for the potty-humor abomination we know as "Piss Christ" is a challenge.

I know the Islamic world has no tradition of tolerance or forgiveness, either politically, religiously or culturally. But still, really, fuck off. Get a life. Pictures of Muhammad drawn by some not terribly talented or funny Danish cartoonists is not an existential threat to a billion-strong, millennia and a half old world-spanning religion.

Go play with some legos.

Found in an AP story:

"If they want a war of religions, we are ready," Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.

A war of religions? "Oxymoronic" doesn't even begin to cover such an idiotic thing.

Yeah, yeah - I know. There have been religious wars for as long as there have been religions. This history is one of the oldest and most valid reasons for eschewing religion entirely, as I hear some people do. The fact that war of religions is an ancient concept doesn't mean such a thing is any less ridiculous. Even when one side or the other is begging to have its ass kicked, the concept of a war presumably demanded by one's God is an idea I have never been able to wrap my head around.

Of course, the latest such kerfuffle is occasioned by the continued and frightening lack of ability of the most fervent of Muslims to recognize irony when it's right in front of their faces. Islam is accused of violence and intolerance by cartoonists in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten, and "Islam" complains mightily. Fair enough. Truth can be embarrassing, and embarrassed people complain.

But when their complaints impinge on the modern world's decided preference for free speech, resulting in further and broader publishing of these same 5 month old pictures, the Islamic zealots react by blowing shit up. Smooth move, fellows. I'd suggest they butch up, even though I'm sure there's a sura somewhere that would tell me this, too, offends mightily.

If you're one of the benighted few who's not yet seem what all the fuss is about, you can find, collected at this site, examples of what it takes to puncture the thin skin of the Islamic extremists.

Oddly, according to a poll reported in the Brussels Journal only a mild majority (57%) of Danes thought publication of the opinions behind the cartoons was the correct thing to do, with 31% opposed and presumably the remaining 12% giggling at the stupidity of it all.

As could be expected, Cox & Forkum summarize matters nicely:

But perhaps a better guide to understanding right from wrong on this matter is to temporarily ignore the free speech implications of Islam's demands to be coddled, as such demands are utterly unacceptable, and instead to focus on the lessons of an old Onion classic.

I was inspired to jot off most of the following in response to a comment over at Murdoc's place. It didn't have awhole lot to do with Murdoc's post, but the issue had been bouncing slowly through my skulljelly.

Hamas won, decisively, an election in Palestine. A lot of people have gotten their panties in a twist over it. This is perhaps to be expected, and really, we ought to rename our chattering classes the "panty-twisting classes." But it was also to be expected in the sense that after forty years of ardent radicalization of the Palestinians on the part of Yassir Arafat, that once a Fatah leader attempted to move even a little toward moderation someone one else would step in as the "real terrorist party" and quickly win the admiration of the people. It didn't help that aside from a new reputation for fecklessness in attacking the Jews, Fatah had a long standing reputation for bumbling, corruption, venality and treachery.

Hamas is of course a perfect fit for the "Real Terrorist Party," seeing as they are in fact real terrorists. The Palestinians know that Hamas will quite literally stop at nothing to kill Jews. And the Palestinians have been trained from birth to salivate at the sound of exploding Jews. Action, reaction.

There is a tendency in the West to fetishize elections. Many of us believe that in some magical way, receiving the lustration of a democratic election somehow makes the winner righteous, or at least sanctioned by a higher authority. That someone expresses the will of the people, and is annointed by the sacred oil of electoral victory is held to be an important thing. That this is beside the point should be too obvious to have to point out, but many very bad people have embodied the will of their people, and have used that mandate to wreak great evil on their neighbors or even the people whose will they embody.

Elections are an effect, not a cause of Democracy. Holding elections does not mystically transmute a grabastic collection of nihilistic refugees into a democratic nation requiring the respect and due deference of the civilized world. Even if it is an honest, rigorous and fair election.

As NDR pointed out in the comments to Johno's recent post, there is a long tradition of demagogues and worse exploiting the weaknesses of a democratic state. The Greeks invented democracy, and were therefore the first to allow it to devolve into tyrrany. The only defense against that is an educated and morally courageous citizenry - a citizenry that (at least for the most part) votes for what is right, not for what is expedient. Or worse, follows the dictates of base emotions at the instigation of the evil.

I don't know if Godwin's Law applies in this case, but Hitler won an election, too. Which is not to say that Hamas is like Hitler. Although it is. The thing is, "The People" in all its profound glory and unlimited sovereignty, can be profoundly and tragically wrong. As the Palestinians are today. We can understand why this came to pass - and I think that's fairly clear - but that doesn't mean that we have to accept the outcome. A leadership committed to genocide and hatred is not legitimate even if they come to power in a way that we ourselves use. It is not the form of the election that makes us what we are. (Or the British, Germans, Japanese, Indians, or whoever.) We have elections because we are free people living in a moderately just soceity.

The Soviets used to have elections to put a veneer of legitimacy on their tyranny. Elections in Palestine is just the means by which Hamas takes over the reins of power from an insufficiently violent and hateful Hamas. The Palestinians have not, I think, ever exhibited any of the qualities necessary for a real democracy to succeed. Electing Hamas shows that they value Hatred and Fear more than anything else.

I don't have much to add to all the professional and amateur punditry surrounding Hamas' win in this week's elections in Palestine, except to say that George Bush was right, and I was wrong. Democracy is the future of Middle East!

It's a pity, though, that "democracy" and "freedom, liberty, and Enlightenment values" don't mean the same thing like Bush's cabal seem to wish they did.

I emailed this out to a few people, and was roundly ignored. Perhaps I shouldn't have sent it Friday afternoon at 5:00. In any event, I was thinking some more about this idea in my first eight hour meeting this morning:

Here's a alternate history teaser for you. I was reading a book by James Hogan called Kicking the Sacred Cow, a fascinating look at scientific theories not accepted by the mainstream, yet short (for various reasons) of full-on crackpotism. One of the things he discussed in his book was alternate theories of relativity. Without getting into too great detail, one aspect of this is that some physicists are coming to believe that Einstein's general relativity might have gone too far in trying to explain the speed of light and other conundrums. What they propose is that unlike in Einstein's theory, there is a peferred reference frame, and that that reference frame is determined by the ambient gravitational field. Further, once you accept this, you can derive many physical constants directly from Maxwell's electromagnetic equations that can only be assumed in General Relativity. Even further, it may be that gravity itself is a side effect of electromagnetism. (It may be that that peferred reference frame is in fact equivalent to the idea of the ether, and the reason why the Michaelson Morley experiment failed to detect it was the same for the same reason that it would be difficult to measure the air speed of an airplane from inside the cockpit.)

All very interesting, and worth a read. But what got me is the thought that if this is all true, powerful electromagnetic fields operated in the right way might have an effect on gravity. Which could be really cool for all of us if someone figures it out. And there's that Russian dude who claimed that he could do it himself. But what if someone like Michael Faraday - widely considered the most brilliant experimental scientist of his or any day, and inventor of the dynamo (on which all subsequent electrical technology is based) had a brainwave and built himself a giant electromagnet and figured out how to cancel out the effects of gravity back in 1825?

Suppose he spent the next ten years getting all the kinks worked out. And at the end of the day, he had a funky device that you could mount in a ship, and it would make that ship fly. By 1840 or so, people are building flying ships. Let's assume that ships can be made more or less arbitrarily heavy, thanks to the antigravity. Either another version of the device, or even something as prosaic as propellers, would push these literal airships through the atmosphere. Speeds would therefore be limited to something on the order of the steamships of the day - but they could go up thousands of feet in the air, and cruise for long distances. Essentially, the new aerial ships would have the same range, speed and carrying capacity as the wetter sort of steamships, but able to fly at altitudes of up to several thousand feet.

Further assume that the production of the device is difficult, but within the capabilities of any moderately industrialized nation of the time, limited perhaps by the need for some rare and expensive element. There might be some variation in the ability of different nations or companies or inventors to produce faster or bigger ships, but all will be more or less in the same ballpark, performance-wise.

What would be the effect of this technology on the wars and politics of the last half of the nineteenth century? These new airships would, unlike modern aircraft, have all the advantages of water-bound ships - range, cargo capacity, armaments and armor, etc., but able to travel at will over the whole globe.

Among the big shows scheduled for the 1860s include the American Civil War and the Austro-Prussian War. 1871 would see the Franco-Prussian War and German unification. The 1880s saw the great powers occupied in an undignified scramble for brown people's land. And all that would lead up to the really, really big show of WWI.

Some thoughts: the South would be unable to produce many of these ships, but it would certainly have some. Gen. Stonewall Jackson leading an airborne division? The German Reichsluftmarine wouldn't be as hemmed in by British control of the passages out of the North Sea. Tsarist Russia would no longer be hampered by lack of warm water ports. Switzerland would no longer be landlocked. Railroads would no longer be the only way to marshal troops quickly and transport them to the front. This last is important, given that the greatest effort and thought was put into plans for marshalling troops and equipment for transportation by rail. Much of the diplomatic screwups that led to the First World War were dictated by mobilization and rail schedules.

Air battleships would not be fragile structures of aluminum, easily blown to bits by AA guns. These battleships would in be in essence, real battleships like the HMS Dreadnaught or the USS Iowa given the ability to fly. Of course, in the time of the Civil War, it would be flying CSS Virginia and USS Monitor. But that's the nature of the beast. Naval air ships would carry the largest cannon available, and be capable of intense bombardment of targets on the ground. Cargo ships could hold hundreds of men and their equipment and travel hundreds or even thousands of miles at 20-30mph.

In short, the advantages of naval conflict - mobility, firepower and carrying capacity - would be carried over to land warfare, long limited by the speed of march and the carrying capacity of the individual infantryman.

What do you think might happen?