‘D’oh!’ Is Not Always For Democrat

Free Markets, Islam, Republicans, Science, Socialism, Technology, The State

Oh the contradictions of being a Republican! Republicans, the ostensible party for market forces, were furious when BHO and his posse, who work against such forces, indicated that they were keen on privatizing aspects in the operation of NASA, the National Aeronautic Space Administration.

How do Repbulicans reconcile their desire to retain NASA as a state entity, in the face of new revelations about the main mission with which the Democrat-run state has charged NASA?

According to a top NASA official, speaking to Al Jazira, President Obama has charged him with “reaching out to the Muslim world and engaging much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.”

Do Repbulicans think that a privately-run, for-profit space agency would set Muslim outreach as one of its goals?

‘D’oh!’ is not always for Democrat.

The Afrikaner Shanty Towns Of South Africa

Africa, Democracy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Finbarr O’reilly of Reuters reports: “At least 450,000 white South Africans, 10 percent of the total white population, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive, according to civil organisations and largely white trade union Solidarity. South Africa’s population is about 50 million. …”

“South Africa’s unskilled whites find themselves on the wrong side of history, gaining little sympathy from those who perceive them as having profited unfairly during the brutal apartheid years.

Trade union Solidarity says there are around 430,000 whites who live in squatter camps. Around the capital Pretoria alone there are 80 squatter settlements. There are over 2,000 much larger black squatter camps across South Africa.

Formerly comfortable Afrikaners recently forced to live on the fringes of society see themselves as victims of ‘reverse-apartheid’ that they say puts them at an even greater disadvantage than the millions of poor black South Africans.

This feeling of victimisation and abandonment by the state has forged at the camp a collective sense of fatalism, isolation and firm reliance on their Calvinist religion. Each of the camp’s ramshackle huts and tents is adorned with religious paraphernalia and an Afrikaans language bible.” …

Finbarr O’reilly’s photojournalistic effort was featured in the New York Times too where one reader wrote correctly as follows:

Lower middle class people living close to the line have been discarded by the governments Black Economic Empowerment policy which forces companies to hire people with black skin.
After the 1994 elections a lot of white people lost their jobs and have clearly never recovered. The BEE policy has resulted in poor performance across the board especially from a governmental service delivery perspective, as highly skilled and qualified people with years of experience were replaced by people who were black but lacked the necessary qualifications or experience.

As usual, Adriana Stuijt, a pro-Afrikaner activist living in the Netherlands, posted the most poignant post at the NYT:

“The important point completely missed by the photographer and by the journalist is the fact that these aren’t ‘whites’- these are Afrikaners, a 3-million-strong minority. There are two kinds of ‘whites’ – the wealthier mercantile English-speakers who can flee the country with their British passports when times get rough; and the Afrikaner artisan-working class, which have no familial ties to their Northern-European roots and have a very difficult time emigrating to other countries. I am also appalled at the fact that the photographer took pictures of these very young and vulnerable children: Afrikaner children are being widely targeted by kidnapping gangs in South Africa. Basically these Afrikaners, being poor, have clearly lost all their privacy-rights as far as this photographer was concerned. Did the man at least make a donation to the only private charity which is allowed to help these Afrikaner people by law, namely Helping Hand of the Solidarity trade union movement? The ANC-regime denies these Afrikaners all food-aid, and many also are denied the right to medical care in public hospitals. Many of these Afrikaner women give birth inside their own shacks without any medical help. And according to a recent documentary by Dutch investigative journalist Saskia Vredeveld, they are so chronically underfed now that the newborns are beginning to die of malnutrition.

[SNIP]

My book is timely. Last week, I completed Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. It’ll soon be off to the publisher.

Bibi’s Paleo Position

IMMIGRATION, Israel, Labor, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism

“We have created a Jewish and democratic nation, and we cannot let it turn into a nation of foreign workers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a conference of the Israel Manufacturers Association in January. … Although the Israeli government issued a record 120,000 foreign work permits in 2009, the country’s political leaders say they want to phase out migrant labor. .. [that it] threatens the nation’s Jewish character” …

The New York Times has awoken to the story about “Netanyahu Wanting To Retain Israel’s National Character,” discussed on BAB in March.

Bibi’s is quite an extraordinary a position; it’s a paleoconservative position.

NYT: “Since the first intifada of the early 1990s, more than a million migrants from the developing world have come to Israel to replace the Palestinians, who were the country’s original source of cheap labor.”

Bibi thinks that unemployed, minimally skilled Israelis and Palestinians (provided they don’t smuggle bombs under their clothes) should do the jobs foreigners want so badly to do in Israel. Just as the same segment of American society should have dibs on those jobs in the US. While no one owns a job, and one cannot tell employers who to hire—people who care about the fabric of the society in which they live will want to see low-skilled locals making a living.

Israel is fortunate to have a better class of foreign laborers; these poor Chinese workers—some treated atrociously—do not march demanding political rights and calling their employers racists; they sue for the wages they’ve earned.

UPDATED: A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

America, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Pseudo-history

“The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked ‘through the night’ to set the full text on ‘a handsome folio sheet,’ recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it ‘an expression of the American Mind.’ An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, ‘American’ in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. …

… Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. …

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

On the occasion of Independence Day, re-read the original column in its entirety, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”

UPDATED (July 4): “Assimilation and the Founding Fathers”: Michelle Malkin picks up on the theme in her superb syndicated column. Here are a few excerpt:

“… as I’ve noted many times over the years when debating both Democrats and Republicans who fall back on empty phrases to justify putting the amnesty cart before the enforcement horse, we are not a “nation of immigrants.” This is both a factual error and a warm-and-fuzzy non sequitur. Eighty-five percent of the residents currently in the United States were born here. Yes, we are almost all descendants of immigrants. But we are not a “nation of immigrants.” (And the politically correct president certainly wouldn’t argue that Native American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and descendants of black slaves “immigrated” here in any common sense of the word, would he?) …

George Washington, in a letter to John Adams, stated that immigrants should be absorbed into American life so that “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”

In a 1790 speech to Congress on the naturalization of immigrants, James Madison stated that America should welcome the immigrant who could assimilate, but exclude the immigrant who could not readily “incorporate himself into our society.”

Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1802: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”

Hamilton further warned that “The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”

The survival of the American republic, Hamilton maintained, depends upon “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character.” “To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.” …

Read the rest at MichelleMalkin.com.