She’s funding a new book project. Worthy of support.
Category Archives: History
Zoroastrianism
The Kurds are converting from Islam to it in disgust.
Gee, it’s almost as though the see a problem with the religion they were born to.
This is good news, I think. Zoroastrians have been disappearing, particularly in Iran, and I think the world could use a lot more of them. Traditionally, they’ve never caused much trouble. It’s probably one of the most tolerant religions, historically.
Don’t Know Much About History
And yet, they vote. This will destroy the Republic if it continues.
Will Hillary Be The New OJ?
Hillary is much better protected. She doesn’t need Johnny Cochran or the rest of the “Dream Team.” She’s got something even more powerful than low-rent appeals to racism and phony charades about gloves that are somehow too small. She’s got the president of the United States and the mainstream media in her corner. Working together, as they so often do, they have the ability to pervert justice, as we used to say, nine ways to Brooklyn. With their help, the chances of an indictment are slim, of a trial even thinner.
Were there to be a trial, however, and even if there weren’t, the real defendants would be the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. They disappear if Hillary gets off — as does our country as we know it. I have written this before, but I can’t write it too many times. It’s that serious.
But in fairness to the other side — you are concerned about “fairness,” aren’t you — I will offer Hillary’s esteemed attorney David Kendall a properly mendacious catch phrase à la Cochran with which to wrap his summation dramatically: “If the emails are merely suspect, you must elect.”
I know it’s not as pithy — doesn’t have quite that certain je ne sais quoi — as “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” (Readers may have better suggestions.) But it should work under the circumstances.
And Ron Fournier seems to think (for some reason he has difficulty explaining) that presidential candidates should get special dispensation. I wonder if the political party matters in hat formulation?
Amazing.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related, somehow: Clinton superdelegate disbarred while awaiting prison. Funny how that sort of thing happens to so many people associated with the Clintons.
[Update a while later]
Hillary’s delusional media courtiers.
The Fastest Man-Made Object Ever
Some of the nuke types over on Twitter have been discussing this. It would have beaten Sputnik to space, but not to earth orbit.
In A Republic
…the people ultimately decide. Some of my expanded thoughts on what the Senate’s “job” is, over at Ricochet.
Space Property Rights
A (relatively) new paper. If the space-settlement bill has hearings and is discussed on the floor, this will become a key issue.
Ancient Warfare
I’m always amused by things like this:
Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” says Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Very few talked about warfare.”
Because they bought into Rousseau’s “noble savage” BS.
I suspect there’s still a lot more that we don’t know about human history than we do.
Molenbeek: A Culture Of Denial
An analysis from a cultural anthropologist who lived there:
It is nearly impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many administrative posts are not filled with competent people. Security services are fragmented and tend to compete with one another. The lack of a strong, central authority may be one of the many quirks of this sometimes charmingly dysfunctional country, but just as it resulted in many botched trials — notably of the Brabant Killers, or “Nijvel Gang” who committed a series of violent raids between 1982 and 1985, and the Dutroux scandal in 1995, to name just two — it also creates the perfect breeding ground for potential terrorists.
But the most important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite that firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.
The debate is paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion. They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for their actions. The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom, perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.
I think that Belgium has outlived whatever usefulness it may have ever had. Time to give just it back to Holland and France.
[Saturday-morning update]
It’s not just Molenbeek. “Belgium, my country, is in denial.”
[Bumped]
Is Barack Obama A Socialist, Or A Fascist?
Yes:
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
The real act that broke the Left from Hitler was when he betrayed Stalin.
[Update a while later]
Obama: “No difference between communism and capitalism.” Well, if you ignore the tens millions of citizens murdered by their governments, sure.
[Sunday-morning update]