Category Archives: The State

How Bad Is Belgium State Security? Very Very Bad

Islam, Jihad, Terrorism, The State

Really farcical is the Atlantic writer’s complaint that Belgium’s “longstanding ethnic fractures”; “divisions between “French- and Flemish-speaking citizens,” and “distrust among different law-enforcement authorities,” “create barriers to effective policing” and “impede communication, investigation, and apprehension of suspected terrorists.”

Yes, let’s add to extant divisions in European countries by bringing into countries already divided more unassimilable Maghrebi Muslims.

Then there’s the alienation blame game:

… Belgium has a sizable Muslim population—roughly on par with that of other Northern European countries—but by some tallies has sent more fighters to join ISIS per capita than any other country in Europe. In Brussels’s Molenbeek neighborhood, the epicenter of Belgian jihadism, there’s high unemployment, an isolated Muslim population, poor education, and a lack of government services. …

… police agencies in different European countries do not cooperate effectively among each other. This creates special challenges, not only because terrorism is transnational but because Europe’s Schengen system makes it possible for people—including attackers—to cross borders with ease. Belgian officials had questioned some of the men involved in the Paris attacks prior to last November, but that information was never shared with French authorities. Since those attacks, European officials have been working to improve communication. …

… Finally, … there’s so much information reaching counterterrorism officials that it’s nearly impossible to sort through it all. [Try working in the private sector; government can never do anything right, b/c the incentives are inverted; the worse they do; the more funding they get.] “You talk about chatter, there’s just too much of it now, so you have all these officials across the world that are trying to neutralize these persistent threats,” he said.

UPDATED: Local, Low Birth Rates & Immigration Are Unrelated, Except By Government

IMMIGRATION, The State, The West, Welfare

The following immigration “argument” has been made by Mark Steyn, and, to be fair, by good guy Pat Buchanan: Westerners are, somehow, unwittingly responsible for the amorphous thing called mass immigration. (That thing just happens, right?) Because westerners won’t procreate at rates deemed acceptable by welfare experts, Third Worlders must be imported to make up for the demographic deficits.

Come again?! And what absolute nonsense.

A low-birth rate people is entitled not to be ethnically cleansed by its government’s immigration policies, even if its people are not reproducing as they “should.” Fertility and immigration are unrelated, except through and by government.

The State and the statists tie the two issues together by using the one, low-birth rates, to excuse the other (mass importation of immigrants).

From “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot”:

… I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.

Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, he proposes nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Declining birth rates—and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative—are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State. …

MORE.

UPDATED (3/10):

Iran Prisoner Swap Likely B/C Of Loss Of Face/Shaming Stateside

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iran, Military, Politics, The State

It would appear that the prisoner swap with Iran had not been written into the nuclear agreement with Iran, as the Obama administration is trying mightily to imply. “We’ve been engaged in tortuous negotiations” for 14 months,” say surrogates for the Obama team, all too eager to depict cabinet members and special envoy doing the impossible for their countrymen.

Not for one minute is this believable. The bastards were going to let those Americans rot. Obama thought he’d get away with touting the diplomatic accomplishment of the nuclear deal above all else. Like all politicking, the Iran deal would be a legacy for the political class involved; a loss for the people whose betterment the pols are supposed to strive.

It’s hard to tell from the veiled language used in reports. Journalist can’t think clearly and therefore are unable to ask a clear, pointed question like this:

Was the release of the American prisoners stipulated in the nuclear deal? Provide the text, please.

As I asked yesterday:

As for the implication on Twitter that Obama, his stellar bureaucrats and their predecessors have been busy for years in negotiations, because, well, that’s the way things are done (faith in government runs eternal). Not quite. Mother of decapitated hostage James Foley attested to being threatened with legal action by the benevolent functionaries if she attempted to independently retrieve her son. (DIANE FOLEY spoke to Anderson Cooper about that haunting regret in her life.) So the bureaucrat (Bush’s or Obama’s) is forever frenetic, but because he’s saving American lives.

RELATED “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS” (9/30/2004)

Another dynamic in operation is the humiliating specter of the American sailors being toyed with by the Iranians. Obama didn’t so much mind what befell those young men and woman; but he couldn’t tolerate his pride and vanity being further damaged in the US.

UPDATED: State of Disunion Stars Two Chief Dividers

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Politics, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

A most divisive president, Barack Obama, will be devoting his last State of the Union extravaganza to dispelling the conviction that he, Obama, has been an extraordinarily divisive and antagonistic president. Even Obama’s decision not to mention the capture, today (1/12/2016), by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of 10 American marines will prove divisive. But hey, legacy before loyalty. In that tradition, hubristic Obama will be speaking to the things that unite America, namely his legacy.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’ll be delivering the Republicans’ SOTU response, is an equally divisive figure, having chosen, last year, to excise a part of Southern history: Haley tore down the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from the State House grounds, even though the Confederate flag “never flew over an official Confederate building,” and “was a battle flag intended to honor the great Robert E. Lee.”

I won’t be dignifying Il Duce’s last SOTU address. Instead I’ll excerpt the 2010 WND column about this “Stalinesque Extravaganza.” Just about everything in the column, “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State,” still obtains:

Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)

“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

“We Are Doomed” deconstructs this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and the trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.” In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is essential to reinvent the state. Since Obama has no understanding of how the economy works and why it collapsed, he honestly thinks that centrally planned political projects are every bit as productive as profit-driven investments of private property.

Ever the source of deafening demagoguery, the president promised pay dirt to businesses that heeded his call to greatness. Should a company “relocate to a community that was hit hard when a factory left town,” the president will plunder (private property), print (funny-money), and beg (borrow) in order to help these friends-in-fascism to “finance a new plant, equipment, or train for new workers.”

In the spirit of brute-force statism, the POTUS also promised a Trade Enforcement Unit to police “unfair trading practices,” and a “Financial Crimes Unit to “crack down on large-scale fraud.” And he, BHO, will corral corporations into “model partnerships” with community colleges, while simultaneously redesigning the curricula and websites of said colleges.

Il Duce’s next derring-do? Send him the bill, and Obama will even instruct the provinces to incarcerate local kids in high school “until they graduate or turn 18.”

To keep the student-loan bubble afloat, America’s potentate wants to mandate more loans at fixed prices, as well as expand federally financed research and development. Nowhere is it authorized by the Constitution, but—don’t you know it?—without “federally financed labs and universities” and “public research dollars,” the Internet and assorted “technologies to extract natural gas out of shale rock” would never have come about.

Having used the military to great political effect, Obama now intends to deploy the Department of Defense, no less, in the “clean energy business.” In Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary—the DOD is bound to do a bang-up job.

From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.

And so the president forges ahead with plans to grow the Dead Zone of government.

(From “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

UPDATE: So was it good for you? Did the earth move? Barack Obama’s presidency was to be, by his account “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.”

Those were the words of the Messiah himself, excerpted from the nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota.