Angie’s Activism

Art, Celebrity, Foreign Policy, History, Hollywood

Angie’s at it again with a film that is likely to bring as much joy to moviegoers as did “A Mighty Heart”:

The film was Mariane Pearl’s attempts at self-beatification. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who accused Pearl of being a spy and agent of the Mossad and made him recite a humiliating confession to that effect, before lopping his head off. The jihadis released a video of Pearl’s butchering titled, “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”
Mariane, upon whose memoir the film was based, did not seem to comprehended the role vintage, Islamic Jew hatred played in her husband’s “slaughtering.” At the time, she responded to the barbarism by declaring superciliously that “revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable … to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism.”
So as to aggrandize themselves, Angelina and Mariane had diminished Daniel in the film. The dashing Daniel was played by the unknown Dan Futterman, whom Salon.com’s no-doubt feminist reviewer described approvingly as “grave and elfin.” That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome. Mariane did, however, have the mark of a member of the media: she celebrates both herself and the Islamic hajj.

That was then. Our expert on the Balkans watched the trailer of “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (people being lined up and robbed, then shot next to a waiting earthmover). Nebojsa Malic thinks “Angie has watched too much Spielberg. Bosnia was no picnic, but any comparison with the Shoah is just plain insulting to the actual victims thereof. Especially since the Bosnian Muslims (along with the Croats) were eager accomplices in the Shoah. Israel’s Ramathkal in the Yom Kippur war, Elazar, was a Bosnian Jew. He didn’t leave Bosnia because of loud music, you know? :)”

Meantime, the question of plagiarism has been raised. It’s quite possible. Those who possess power and money, but not much by way of original ideas, do often rip off the marginalized.

MORE at Nebojsa’s

Refugees In The Failed State of Iraq

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Religion, War

Saddam Hussein ruled over what the state department considered a rogue state, Iraq. The US eliminated Hussein and invaded his country (not in that order). Thanks to the American invasion, Iraq is now a failed state, where the politically weak are forsaken, and a muscular majority exercises its authority (a dispensation also known as democracy). The deposed dictator had kept a lid on the cauldron of sectarian strife, now boiling over in Iraq.

I’ve covered the plight of the millions of Iraqi refugees we helped uproot.

Against the backdrop of “Obama basking in the Iraq withdrawal” comes a reality check: a report, via CNN, on those Iraqis who have been internally displaced.

While war supporters may console themselves with the fact that “displacement is not new in Iraq,” as this Brookings-Institute observes, Iraq since the blessings of Bush is suffering a displacement crisis.

Jobs: Create Them at Your Peril

Business, Debt, Economy, Labor, Regulation

I meant to give you the rundown about the last jobs report, but did not get around to it. Economist Diane Swonk has parsed parts of it.

• Almost half of the 600,000 strong drop in the unemployment rate can be attributed to people either retiring or giving up looking for work entirely.

In general:

• Labor force participation rate is down.
• The 140,000 “gains in private sector employment” are largely due to “retailers hiring more than expected for the holiday season.”
• “Manufacturing remained essentially flat. Manufacturers are also complaining of a shortage of skilled machinists and electricians; many of the most skilled of United Auto Workers (UAW) ranks have now retired.”

The oink-sector did not shed nearly enough jobs:

• 20,000 loss total in public sector jobs.
• Some 5,000 of them are U.S. postal workers. (Alas, the monster describer here is still gainfully employed.)

The United States Secretary of the Treasury in-waiting (if only) has already explained what’s going on in the labor market.

UPDATED: Decoding The Plan to Make Detroit Work (Blame Honky)

Africa, Debt, Economy, Federalism, Government, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Socialism, Taxation

If these minority penalizing budgetary cuts were inflicted in New Hampshire, Desiree Cooper of Detroit Public TV would have probably cried foul. But they aren’t, so Cooper keeps her cool in an excellent factual account about Detroit’s black-dominated city council, and its efforts to save the city’s finances by consolidating services. (Read: directing these to those who PAY.)

This invariably means directing services to the dwindling tax base (You Know Who), so that this productive, paying minority gets the best bang for its huge outlays and goodwill and… STAYS IN TOWN. These good people want to remain in the city they helped build.

Have their overlords realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that keeping the taxpayers who pay their salaries happy might just be the key to their own statist status? As Cooper puts it in this remarkably impartial report: It is these “dedicated Detroiters, the more affluent Detroiters who are part of the tax base [that] the city desperately wants to hold on to.”

Barbara and Spencer Barefield are an example. The couple has “what they consider a small house amongst Palmer Woods’ mansions.” They (and their ilk; nudge-nudge) will be accorded “preferential treatment in this community’s upkeep, maintaining roads, sidewalks and streetlights. That could mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.”

Of course, it is a travesty to frame as “preferential” the provision of basic services in return for enormous outlays. It shows you how far we have gone in assimilating Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The Barefield are Detroiters of quite a deep dye, as they are prepared to put up with a $900-a-month utility bill!

READ MORE about the “Detroit Works” project, undertaken by Mayor Dave Bing and his crew—architect Rainy Hamilton, Karla Henderson who heads Detroit Works, City Council President Charles Pugh, and others—in an attempt to save the city (and their sinecures?):

With a sprawling city, 139 square miles, and few resources for city services, Mayor Bing took the Detroit Works project as an opportunity to redefine the city’s physical, economic and social landscape. He began by taking inventory, taking a close look at what Detroit really has.
Demographers have identified at least 100 distinct neighborhoods within the city limits. With that in mind, Detroit Works unveiled its short-term plan, classifying the city’s neighborhoods by their quality of housing and stability of population.
The degree of city services and investment would depend on whether the neighborhood is deemed steady, transitional, or distressed.

UPDATE (Dec. 13): Erik in the comment below blames honky in what sounds like vintage Yankee propaganda. You’ll get better historical facts about the South from reading or watching the brilliant timeless “Gone with the Wind.” So too did Mencken write about the civilization destroyed by the “dirty Yankees.” The South was the seat of the country’s aristocracy—and some of the finest families in America.

Although my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, advances the cultural argument in explaining underdevelopment, it is also highly critical of it. As follows:

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”
But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.
In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.

Read it, Erik. Mimicking whitey, if that is indeed your and Sowell’s explanation for black dysfunction, falls flat when it comes to Africa.