UPDATE III: On The Mosque Monsters

Freedom of Religion, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Private Property, Religion

Provocative to say the least: Dr. Fleming (to mimic the “Dr. Johnson” sobriquet) of Chronicles magazine makes mincemeat of the popular argument that the Ground Zero Mosque monsters cannot be “denied a permit because that would infringe their religious freedom.”

I, of course, argued from private property rights, recommending immigration policies as the broader remedy to an incompatible culture. Construction boycotts would work as a local solution.

“Religious freedom,” writes Dr. Fleming, “is a gift of a society or commonwealth, not a natural right. This is partly because religion is not faith–what one believes or feels–but an organized public action. Thus the public or republic has the right and duty to protect itself from alien or malignant cults. In a diverse Christian society, naturally, the various churches have had to learn to tolerate each other, though in practice toleration is generally a sign of indifference. Church becomes that thing you do or don’t do on one day a week. It is like the beautiful jewel you take out of the box every once in a while to admire and feel good about yourself for owning. But religion is more like a wedding ring, a visible symbol of an enduring commitment.”

“The idea of Christians according religious freedom to Muslims who define themselves in part by their hatred of Christianity and who have oppressed Christians whenever they have had the power to do so, is preposterous. It is worse than preposterous, because the point of the exercise is not to liberate Muslims but to enslave Christians.”

As provocative is Dr. Fleming’s taxonomy of the political spectrum:

“The Hard Left—whether Marxists, Libertarians, or Multi-Culturalists—take their stand on freedom of religion, while the Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives) say that while there is a freedom of religion, it does not quite extend to Satanists or Muslims wanting to build a mosque at Ground Zero, though a mosque anywhere else is just fine and dandy.”

Nothing if not original is our friend at Chronicles.

UPDATE I (Sept. 8): “International Burn a Koran Day” is set to take place in a decidedly provincial setting in Florida, America. It would be a tourist curiosity if not for the media having so hyped up Terry Loony Tunes Jones’ act. Ron Paul has it right:

UPDATE II (Sept. 19): Pat Buchanan is even righter that Ron:

“This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of theQuran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a ‘long war’ in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?”

UPDATE III: Julia Goren wants to know, “Why is there so much more tolerance of extremism in the name of tyranny than in the name of liberty? Why is tyranny more politically correct than liberty?”

UPDATED: Germany’s Geert Wilders (Meanwhile Back At Home…)

Europe, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Islam, Racism, Science

Germany has a Geert Wilders, only more outspoken. His name is Thilo Sarrazin, and he is a board member of Germany’s central bank. His new book, Germany Does Itself In, is flying off the shelves. Via Yahoo News:

“In the book, Sarrazin says Europe’s top economy is being undermined, overwhelmed and made ‘more stupid’ by poorly educated, fast-breeding, badly integrated and unproductive Muslim immigrants and their offspring.

‘If I want to hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, then I’ll go to the Orient,’ he says, saying that allowing in millions of ‘guest workers’ in the 1960s and 1970s was a ‘gigantic error.’

He also says that Turkish and Kurdish ‘clans’ have a ‘long tradition of inbreeding,’ leading to higher rates of birth defects, and ponders whether this might be one reason for immigrants’ poor school performance, Spiegel said.

This and his comment to a newspaper that ‘all Jews share a certain gene’, critics say, is akin to the kind of pseudo-science used by the Nazis.”

[SNIP]

Yes, Sarrazin must be a racist. Germany must be racist, because, as we all know—and having been so indoctrinated—people are all the same. Give them sufficient nutrition and democracy, and differences dissolve. You may note and record difference between individuals, but don’t dare to examine aggregates. Hey, isn’t it the job of science to draw conclusions based on a representative sample of a group? Don’t this man’s observations comport with the kind of reality science might affirm? Should we perhpas ban science so as to spare ourselves from reality?

UPDATE (Sept. 7): CNSNews.com: “As of Sunday, Sept. 5, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a backlog of fugitive illegal aliens of 506,232 people. …

The fugitive illegal aliens are individuals who were apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for being in the United States illegally and then were released ahead of their court proceedings and deemed fugitive when they failed to appear in court.”

UPDATE III: 2010 Battle For Baghdad

Foreign Policy, Iraq, Law, Military, War

“The futility of establishing the rule of law in a place which has no tradition of it, notwithstanding, even if some color is given to the claim that the surge [has] ‘worked,’ it has to be clear that force is a limited weapon against a cause with unlimited recruits. It can cut back the number of insurgents by killing lots, it cannot eliminate the causes fueling the insurgency—these are, predominantly, the religious animus between Shia and Sunni that dates back to AD 680, and the American occupation. Brute force will temporarily curtail the first, but will only inflame the reaction to the last.”

That is how I summed up a September 14, 2007 column, on the week of the tiresome testimonies of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker as to the surge-related success in reducing violence in Iraq. During that week, 79 Iraqis were murdered and 38 were wounded.

Tell me if anything has changed, 3 years on. According to the AP, “Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.”

Read MORE.

Of course, now the battle is on for the spoils of occupation. Without one strongman to provide law and order in that blighted and benighted spot, many smaller, less benevolent dictators have been loosed on the long-suffering Iraqis.

UPDATE I: To Mike: Bibi Netanyahu might have waxed fat about the wonders of exporting democracy, but did he adopt this American—previously French-Jacobin—form of oppression? Not on your life. Israel pretty much sticks to defending its threatened borders.

UPDATE II: Mike, Bibi speaks a superb Hebrew too. As a matter of fact, his son recently won Israel’s prestigious National Bible Quiz for Youth. I will be pleasantly surprised if the US has an equivalent competition. You have to be very bright to win this prize. It was always big deal and we all watched it on TV as youngsters. (You’d try and shout out the answers, but could seldom keep up with the talent.)

I think Chelsea Clinton is a hard-working, smart young woman (and pretty refined). But I can’t imagine the Bush, Obama, or McCain brood doing something seriously intellectual; the kind of thing that required unadulterated brain power (a degree in math), rather than feel-goodism (speak up for gay marriage).

UPDATE III: BACK to the topic. From PBS come the stories of Iraqi refugees on the joys of Daisy-Cutter delivered democracy (and yes, neo-creeps, Iraq once had a very viable professional class):

“DR. JALAL AL BAYA, dental surgeon (through translator): I had the largest dental practice in the country. And I had to abandon it when I fled to Jordan. There were lots of threats. And most of the scientists and doctors were targeted, so we had to reach out for a safe haven that was closest. And, for us, that was Jordan.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The large family home was destroyed in a car bombing and shelling that ripped through their Baghdad neighborhood. That’s when Al Baya joined an exodus of Iraqi professionals, fleeing threats of kidnapping or just running from the wrong side of a political or religious divide. By some estimates, since 2003, at least 60 percent of Iraq’s doctors have either left or stopped practicing.”

MORE.

The Dynamics Of US Government Debt (& Bankruptcy)

Debt, Inflation

$120 Trillion: That’s a reoccurring figure in my writings on the economy. It’s, plus/minus, the sum total of the American government’s debt, including unfunded obligations and promises. According to Princeton’s Garry Becker and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, “evaluating a nation’s economic condition” involves comparing not the “public debt (government bonds) to Gross Domestic Product,” but comparing “assets and liabilities.”

“The major asset of any government is its taxing power, which of course cannot be equated to the entire GDP, or the entire value of the nation’s human and physical capital; for both economic and political reasons, the taxing power is limited to a percentage of GDP well below 100 percent. And, realistically, the liability side of the national ledger includes not only government bonds but also other contractual obligations, entitlements, and at least strongly anchored expectations concerning government services (we’re not about to eliminate our armed forces). In addition … the national balance sheet must be reckoned in dynamic terms, with due regard for likely increases both in GDP and in liabilities, especially increases in entitlement spending that are likely to result from the continued ageing (sic) of the population.”

“Because American tax rates are low by international standards and resistance to increasing them is fierce, … the ratio of current U.S. public debt to realistically realizable tax revenues is 3.58 to 1, which is the highest by a large margin of the countries in the report’s list.”

If you’re looking for the usual pacifier—European countries are way worse off than us in terms of profligacy—DON’T. Only Greece comes close to the Us’s “ratio of current public debt to realistically realizable tax revenues. … because of the uncertainty of the future), America’s net worth is negative, and this negative net worth is eight times larger than our GDP. This means that the net present value of the government’s liabilities, minus assets, is approximately $120 trillion.”

Another theme on these websites of mine: The political resistance from the oink sectors is too intense to effect change (were it not already too late).

The Becker-Posner blog reckons that “the bondholders and holders of other contractual rights against the government have to start worrying about the prospects for outright default or default through inflation. These are possibilities in our future, just as in the future of Greece.”

But if you were reading this space (including the regular posters in the Comments Section), you already knew that.