Updated: ‘It’s Reno Time’

Criminal Injustice, Family, Freedom of Religion, Law, The State

In 2006, I warned that yet another “prosecutorial team [was gathering] steam, this time in Utah, where the state, feds in tow, has been pursuing Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” (Blog discussion is here.)

Since I wrote “Remember Reno,” the “Benthamites” put Jeffs away for a hitherto-unheard of crime: rape by proxy.

Recently, as My Way News has reported, Texas “child welfare officials seized 416 children from the [polygamist] compound.”

This, based on a vague allegation of abuse by a girl the authorities have yet to locate:

“[t]he investigation began with a call from a young girl who has yet to be located by CPS. The women in the sect said they suspect she may be a bitter ex-member of the church.”

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, as one sect member—Brenda—described America cynically, children are removed from their families absent verified evidence of abuse.

Here’s what I uncovered, and wrote-up, in “Remember Reno”:

“The law is confusing. Although polygamy is banned by the state constitutions of Utah and Arizona, it isn’t a crime and is not prosecuted. Furthermore, provided parental consent is obtained and the marriage voluntary and in the best interests of the minor, the law does not prohibit minors from marrying. More material, and as Court TV has reported, ‘Under state law, it is a crime to have sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 unless the parties are legally married to each other. Because a polygamous marriage can never be legal, the men marrying teenagers as second, third or fourth wives [are] guilty of statutory rape, or sexual conduct with a minor.’ Thus a determination of rape here rests not so much on whether evidence exists that a woman was forced to have sex against her will, but on her position in the harem!”

Update (April 18): HERE COMES FOSTER CARE FUN. Those of you who’re convinced that the State is justified in removing 416 children from this compound, based on false reporting, and other “evidence” that would not hold up in a court that respects the rules of evidence, please consider this:

If these kids have not been forced into sex to date, they most certainly will once they hit the foster-care circuit. Oh yeah, foster parents, bless them, are usually upstanding professional people, who collect strays out of the kindness of those big hearts of theirs, rather than for the cheque account the welfare State affords them.

Whatever are your voyeuristic ideas about the sex life on a polygamist compound, you can take this to the bank: The children seized in this raid lead a protected, relatively innocent and insulated life. The gravest abuse still awaits the kids of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they become intimately acquainted with the loose, licentious, foster-care system.

Their mothers, scorned by moron media, may be quaint, deficient, and demure (not to mention thin!) ladies, but thankfully, these children will soon encounter the libertine, promiscuous life-style fostered under the state.

(I’m dripping cynicism, of course.)

Updated: Quote Courtesy Of Clyde N. Wilson

Ilana Mercer, Israel, Just War, War

Professor Clyde Wilson has a post on Chronicles magazine titled “What Is History? Part 11.” Alongside other worthies, the professor excerpts a line I wrote in “Betraying Brave Boys”:

“… a brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.”

My gratitude to Judge Robert E. Reavis for letting me know. Judge Reavis writes:

“Clyde Wilson over at Chronicles has put you in the company of some pretty stout minds and spunky personalities. Of course I think you deserve it but it is good to see others think so as well.”

I briefly interviewed Professor Wilson, a noted Southern scholar, for my review of the film “Cold Mountain,” entitled “Hollywood’s Hateful Hooey About The South.”

With respect to the quote, Israel lived by the tenet it expressed up until its Lebanon Wars; the last taking place in 2006. Following the principle of monkey-see-monkey-do, Israel took a page out of the annals of unjust American wars, and waged such a war against Lebanon.

Update (April 16): In response to our reader’s comment below: As I explained in “Israel Risks Sundering Moral High ground,” a just war is proportional. It means you don’t level an entire country and kill a thousand innocents, because of a localized attack, where 3-4 people were seized. Such an attack is more efficiently and more justly dealt with by “Precision Pac Men.”

Granted, the Israelis were not nearly as unjust as we were in attacking Iraq, but neither were they as righteous as they had been in all past wars for survival. But unlike Americans, the Israeli people responded magnificently in rejecting the onslaught in Lebanon. Their government will not be prosecuting an unjust war anytime soon. That’s more than we can say about ours.

Dalai Lama La-La Land

Celebrity, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudo-intellectualism, The West, The Zeitgeist

Ask the prototypical dumb bimbo—an American beauty queen, for example—who’s her most favorite person in the whole wide world, and she’ll reply: the Dalai Lama. (And then bare that mandatory big overbite.)

The Dalai Lama is the celebrity airhead’s “intellectual” ornament, every bit as essential a fashion accessory as the rat-like pooch, or the adopted African or Asian ankle biter.

On the surface, the DL seems a sweet enough old man down to his conventional arsenal of simple truisms. He’s no Aristotle that’s for sure, although when he says things like, “Peace good; war bad,” his followers react as though he said something revolutionary. Western liberals love to patronize exotic, foreign activists.

So, as sixty thousand pitiful pinkos flooded Qwest Field stadium in Seattle to feast on the Tibetan leader’s presence (flabby arms and all), it’s worth remembering that the man, and Tibetan Buddhism, was made hip by the likes of Richard Gere, who doesn’t always know a great deal. (I’m being charitable here.)

Indeed, the Dalai Lama is Hollywood’s cause celebre. When the Beatles were young, the rich and famous flocked to India to prostrate themselves before slimy gurus, who promptly took their cash in exchange for Lama-like fortune-cookie “wisdom.” Later, many gurus were exposed for their corrupt, un-abstemious life-styles. The left-liberals lying at the feet of the Lama should know that “during the half century of living in the western world, he had embraced concepts such as human rights and religious freedom, ideas largely unknown in old Tibet.”

The Lama’s wisdom is Western.

All in all, the Dalai Lama is a bit of a liar. He certainly never reminds his acolytes that the Tibetan exile community, lazy Lama included, was funded by the CIA (and George Soros). Michael Parenti, Ph.D has deconstructed the myths of Tibetan Buddhism and history in “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”:

“Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.” The official 1953 census–six years before the Chinese crackdown–recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000. Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves–of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”

Needless to say, the history of the region is far more nuanced than Western liberals allow. Tibet was a slave, serf-based, old feudal theocracy under the Lama, and before the Chinese. “In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La. To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime.” Or the Lama, who is a caricature, the creation of far-out left-liberals.

Bottom line, Americans should be convening to protest the Iraq war, with its 4 million refugees and tens of thousand dead. As little as they know about that recent atrocity, Americans know even less about Tibet. More material, Iraq is an American mess. Americans, most of whom cheered the war when it was launched, have an obligation to expiate and make amends for that mess. Until you’ve done that, shut the hell up about Tibet.

And do read “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” in its entirety.

Updated: Absolut Anti-Americanism Vs. Patriotism

America, Colonialism, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Israel, libertarianism, Socialism

Speaking of a hatred of America (see previous post): Let me say this: I’ve observed that the usual libertarian offenders sided with the Reconquista ad campaign of Swedish vodka maker Absolut.

They have my absolute contempt.

Such people are intent on never showing that they stick up for flesh-and-blood human beings—but can love only deracinated abstractions. Ideas and issues before individuals.

The invasion of the Southwest—or “Reconquista” in the parlance of La Raza libertarians’ —is wreaking havoc on a part of the world that was built-up beautifully by Americans, not Mexicans.

To shelter me and protect me, I’d trust a “red state fascist” any time over a libertarian Absolutist.

Speaking of patriots, I’ve just finished Pat Buchanan’s latest book. It goes without saying that I take issue with economic protectionisms. But about Pat there can be no quibble: he is an absolute patriot.

The other good news to emerge from Day of Reckoning is that Pat is rather complimentary about Israel. In fact, it’s as though he read my “Nature of the Jewish State” column about Israeli nationhood. These ideas are reiterated toward the end of Pat’s book. It was indeed a bonus for me to see a sea change in his appreciation of Israel’s existential challenges.

Update (April 16): For an evisceration of the welfare-state “argumentation” La Raza libertarians put forth see “The Work Open Borden Libertarians Won’t Do,” and other essays in the Immigration Archive.

As to our reader’s contention that “self-sufficient people don’t choose socialism”: Really? If people can get back from the taxpayer more than they earn, they do indeed choose socialism. John C. Calhoun, in “A Disquisition on Government,” warned of this eventuality quite some time back too.