At least the boys (though perhaps the girls as well). Horrible History.
A Conversation Between Tim Blair…
…and idiots. Univeristy [sic] idiots.
How Stupid Is This?
It’s not just college campuses. Military commanders on the front of the war have made their bases into gun-free zones.
And in a supposedly “conservative” administration.
I wish we’d had better choices to vote for.
Confusing Cause And Effect
Rich Lowry puts paid to the stupid notion that Tony Blair was George Bush’s lap dog:
Long before President Bush arrived in the White House, Blair championed the idea that the West should intervene to stop human-rights abuses in other countries, putting morality above respect for the borders of sovereign countries. It wasn
A Depressing Report From Londonistan
…from Christopher Hitchens:
Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.
Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque’s sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 (“7/7,” as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London’s transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.
Amazing
The wonderland that is Durham continues. I have the same question as the commenters–what kind of a university would hire a loon like this to teach young people? Is this a problem unique to Duke, or does every university have such creatures among its professoriate? I fear the answer.
I hope that they take the pro bono offer in comments and sue him for slander.
What Is News?
And what is not news?
This is almost like a laboratory experiment, isn’t it? A handful of veterans (including three out of something like 7,000 retired generals) oppose the war: News. Thousands of active duty personnel urge Congress to support the war effort: Not news. That pretty well sums up the journalistic standard that has been applied to the conflict in Iraq.
If soldiers support the war, I’d think that was news, given that they’re bearing the brunt of it. But that’s just me. One of many reasons I’ll never be an editor at a major news publication…
South Florida Drivers
I briefly mentioned south Florida’s drivers in the previous post, but this comment elicited further thoughts:
I’ve driven in southern Florida, and I’m quite surprised to learn they actually have traffic laws. Judging from the near-random maneuvers of the locals, I’ll bet they’d be surprised too. It’s one thing if you’re a farmer stopping in the middle of a country road to chat with your neighbor coming the other way; it’s quite another to do it in Coral Gables in the middle of the afternoon.
I praised Florida’s laws, not their enforcement, or Florida’s drivers. In addition to the complaint here, I’d point out their inability to merge on a freeway, and to find the little stalk on the steering column called a “turn signal.” Or once having found it, to turn it off.
There are (at least) three types of lousy drivers in south Florida, which has the worst drivers, overall, that I’ve experienced in the continental United States. The place that it reminds me of the most is Puerto Rico (though fortunately, it’s not quite that bad). As far as his first complaint, that seems to be right out of San Juan, though I suspect that it might be a Caribbean thing in general.
That said, the three groups are:
- Cubans
- Haitians
- Chronologically-Challenged New Yorkers
The first group is similar to Puerto Ricans in their willingness to just pull over and gab if they see someone they know on the road, even on a freeway (though, again, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as in PR). Not, of course, to imply that there aren’t a lot of borriquenos here as well.
The second are similarly Caribbeans, but have even less experience with cars, coming from the poorest nation in the hemisphere (our own little bit of Africa). On the other hand, most of the dark-complected folks here are Haitian-Americans, rather than “African-Americans” (at least in south Palm Beach County) and great folks (when they’re not behind the wheel), because they’re grateful to be here and out of the hellhole that is their little bit of Africa, and haven’t been here long enough to have absorbed the grievance culture of blacks who were born here, and are still resentful of wrongs done to them decades or centuries ago, fueled by the grievance industry exemplified by the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world. One can always tell them by their unique French dialect. So let me make that a fifth thing* that is better about south Florida than southern California.
The third are people who shouldn’t be driving because they’ve been doing it too long. That is to say, the codgers of both sexes and all genders, of whom there are many down here, in “God’s waiting room.” They’re not only old drivers, but they’re people who never drove well to begin with, because they spent much of their lives in one of the five boroughs of New York (this is the sixth, most southern one), and rarely drove, and when they did, didn’t have to deal with the kinds of driving and freeways that we do here. On top of that, they have a preference for large cars, over the dashboard of which many of them are too short to see. There have been many essays written on this subject, and I shall say no more. I think you can imagine the situation, based on the information already provided.
* OK, for those who want the whole list:
- thunderstorms
- warm ocean temps for diving
- no state income tax
- more rational traffic laws
- Haitians, except for their driving skills
More Immigration Issues
Speaking of immigration problems and non-assimilation, Stanley Kurtz has an interesting post on the problem of giving preference to family members:
I am not saying that anyone in the Duka family, outside the plotters themselves, was involved here. The point is, when you bring over a vast extended clan through chain migration, and when that extended family group maintains constant ties with an originating village, it becomes vastly more difficult to assimilate. For one thing, chain migration means a constant supply of new family members who don
A Deficit Under A Hundred Billion?
Could be. Of course, if we leave it up to the Dems, they’ll screw it up by raising taxes.