Category Archives: Celebrity

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Crashing The Trash House

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Etiquette, Pop-Culture

TRASH people crash the White House. So what? The place is packed with nasty, noisome parasites. An extra pair makes no difference. At least not to me. Therefore, I’m unexercised by the specter of Tareq and Michaele Salahi frolicking with Rham, Barack, and Biden. There’s something apropos in a couple of reality-show exhibitionists brazenly elbowing their way uninvited into a party of ponces.

This is a party thrown by a president who was launched by the Queen of Kitsch (Oprah). This is the place where Bono came to petition Bush for loot. Before him, Clinton used the space for his nefarious dealings. All in all, from the White House are issued shake-down schemes that make Bernie Madoff look like “a mere babe in grand larceny boot camp.” So it’s entirely fitting that a nation of reality-show viewers should have representatives at the Trash House who themselves “have left an extensive paper trail in federal bankruptcy and state court filings.”

You get the drift: the White House has long since lost the dignity of the office. Trash people crashing a party there completes the picture.

As for security: The president has very few real risks; the huffing and puffing over the alleged danger he was exposed to is just that: a whole lot of hooey.

What you can be sure of is that heads will role over this faux paux. The responsible parties will be made to fall on their swords way faster than will the cogs in the military machine who facilitated the eventual death of 13 servicemen and women at Fort Hood, at the hand of the jihadi Major Nidal Hasan.

Update II: Wear A Turban, Not A Tux (Transparency)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, China, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government

Wikipedia: “A state dinner is a dinner or banquet paid by a government [read: taxpayers] and hosted by a head of state in his or her official residence in order to renew and celebrate diplomatic ties between the host country and the country of a foreign head of state or head of government who was issued an invitation.”

In the tradition of celebrating “crap countries” (Ali G. vernacular), BO’s first state dinner is in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Why not? One of BO’s first major addresses as president was delivered in “Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace.”

President Bush hosted a glittery gala for the same Singh only four years ago.

You the taxpayer most certainly cannot press your nose against the White House windows to get a glimpse of the well-fed, celebrity guests. You’ll have to be content to read about them HERE.

To give credit where its due, when asked “about the tense relationship between India and Pakistan,” Obama said “it was not the role of the United States to intervene and solve such problems.”

That’s all well and good, but then what is he doing beefing up American presence in Afghanistan?

Update I: On the other hand, here’s the neoconservative foreign-policy perspective on Indian-American bond from The Heritage Foundation, chief of which is “the Indo-Pakistani regional rivalry,” terrorism, and, of course, an acknowledgment of the Chinese threat:

“President Obama rightly took advantage of an opportunity to reaffirm ties to India and recognize the U.S.-India partnership as one of the “defining partnerships of the 21st century.” The two countries now need to follow through on their leaders’ pronouncements on a range of issues including education, trade, health, energy, defense, nuclear nonproliferation, space, and the environment.” …

“President Obama hopefully took the opportunity in his private meeting with Singh to provide reassurances that the U.S. is attuned to Indian strategic concerns vis-à-vis China, particularly their ongoing border disputes and Chinese efforts to extend its influence into South Asia. Over the last three years, China has increasingly pressured India over their disputed borders by questioning Indian sovereignty over the state of Arunachal Pradesh and by stepping up probing operations along different parts of their shared frontier.”

Update II (Nov. 25): Transparency. Don’t expect it. Yesterday, the adoring sycophants at CNN—in particular, Anderson Cooper’s fittingly dim sidekick—were salivating for footage from BO’s party, only to be told by a fawning colleague that the administration was not allowing the press to take pics of the prez and his party. Feasts and festivities amid hunger and hardship across the country don’t make for the best optics.

Onward & Downward The Blond Squad

Celebrity, Conservatism, Etiquette, Feminism, Gender, Intelligence, Media

As was said over these pixelated pages, “brains are a hindrance to advancement in the age of the idiot; being a lightweight blond is helpful.” The blond squad is everywhere in American politics. Not even the libertarian faction—my own—has spared us the specter of a dime-a-dozen dames. Dumbing down is to the detriment of all.

Watch this clip of the cretin Carrie Prejean lord it over Larry King (who, I must say, behaves demurely and perfectly politely).

Can you say pretentious, plastic cow?

Whoopee Goldberg is correct. Here’s another empty head, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, defending the trail-blazing Prejean.

Blond-squad watch:

“Conservatives Add Another Blond To The Brain Trust”

A Cow Is Born

Elizabeth Hasselbeck