UPDATED: The Babes Leading The Blind

English, Free Markets, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Literature, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, The Zeitgeist

With apologies in advance to all non-human primates. In the quest for the lowest common denominator, mainstream American publishers will publish the musings of a monkey, or worse: a small boy. Colton Burpo, barely out of short pants, is the “author” of a best seller, “Heaven is for Real.” ALLEGEDLY, this “four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor, during emergency surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.'” Yeah, I kid you not.

The only scientific variable worth noting in this equation is the fact of a father with a vested interest in the belief system. (Hypothesis: Boys whose fathers believe are more likely to develop after-life ideation than boys whose parents don’t believe. Examine whether the difference between the groups is statistically significant.)

The same awe accorded to the Nobel Savage and to the natural world is accorded in American culture to The Child, who is seen as possessing uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom.

Heaven help us! Errant adults elevate infants as philosopher kings.

I love the free market, as was said here, but faith in the free market need not require a nearly equal faith in popular culture. Why does it follow that a product produced and exchanged in the process of making a living must inspire faith? More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art, pop culture, or literature. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers.

Aguilera (Christina) sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney and Burpo outdo Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

Seriously, that America’s adults are reading this tripe (and bopping in front of a TV screen using Microsoft Kinect) goes a long way to explain a hell of a lot.

UPDATED: Guys, you’re missing the point: the problem here is not the issue of faith in the afterlife; it’s the publishing of this tyke. A nation that looks to kids for spiritual, intellectual, and moral guidance is a nation without any idea of ordered liberty, which demands a certain hierarchy in terms of age, intelligence, experience, knowledge, etc. It’s something the Japanese know about. Adults should not be reading books written by kids.

UPDATED: ‘The Three Sisters’ War’ (US Hubris)

Africa, Barack Obama, Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Middle East, Military, Old Right, UN, War

Estrogen driven paternalism: That’s the impetus behind Obama’s offensive in Libya. Patrick J. Buchanan sums it up:

“Why are we in Libya? Why are U.S. pilots bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who have done nothing to us?

These soldiers are simply doing their sworn duty to protect their country from attack and defend the only government they have known from what they are told is an insurgency backed by al-Qaida and supported by Western powers after their country’s oil.

Why did Obama launch this unconstitutional war?

Moral, humanitarian and ideological reasons.

Though Robert Gates and the Pentagon had thrown ice water on the idea of intervening in a third war in the Islamic world – in a sandbox on the northern coast of Africa – Obama somersaulted and ordered the attack, for three reasons.

The Arab League gave him permission to impose a no-fly zone. He feared that Moammar Gadhafi would do to Benghazi what Scipio Africanus did to Carthage. And Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power conveyed to Obama their terrible guilt feelings about America’s failure to stop what happened in Rwanda and Darfur.

This is the three sisters’ war.

But why was it America’s moral duty to stop the Tutsi slaughter of Hutus in Burundi in 1972 or the Hutu counter-slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Why was that not the duty of their closest African neighbors, Zaire (Congo), Uganda and Tanzania?

These African countries have been independent for a half-century. When are they going to man up?

The slaughter in Darfur is the work of an Arab League member, Sudan. Egypt, the largest and most powerful Arab nation, is just down the Nile. Why didn’t the Egyptian army march to Khartoum, a la Kitchener, throw that miserable regime out, and stop the genocide?

Why doesn’t Egypt, whose 450,000-man army has gotten billions from us, roll into Tobruk and Benghazi and protect those Arabs from being killed by fellow Arabs? Why is this America’s responsibility?”

Read “How killing Libyans became a moral imperative.”

UPDATE (March 27): USA=GOD.

Myron Robert Pauli on my Facebook page: “Another great column from Diana West on the strategic hooey of the War in Libya (a no fly zone imposed on Israel by the US-NATO-UN-Arab-League could occur one day) http://jewishworldreview.com/0311/west.php3

My reply: M., all the obligatory stuff about it “never being a bad notion to rid the planet of Gaddafi”: as if there aren’t a few fellows here in the US one could easily live without.

The idea that the US decides who the world can do without and who can remain boggles my mind. Still, after years in this country.

I love West, but, as far as I know, Diana supported the Iraq adventure, at first.

‘Black Racism’: A Conversation With Erik Rush

Democrats, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, Republicans

This week, on WND.COM (HERE), I talk “Black Racism” with Erik Rush. “Black Racism” is the title of a chapter in the book under discussion, and is the first of a two-part conversation with Erik, who is a WND columnist, and the author of “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession.”

Do you know what Erik told an African-American reader who accused him of not being sufficiently concerned about “his people” who were dying all over the world? Besides assuring her that he was not a member of a racial tribe, Erik also informed the woman that blacks were indeed dying … in Africa, mainly, because they were killing each other. And he recommended that she decamp to that continent where she would be appreciated as a sex slave or as lunch.

More with The Rush in “‘Black Racism’: A Conversation With Erik Rush (Part 1),” now on WND.COM.

Subsidizing “Freedom” for the Arab Street

America, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Government, Islam, Middle East, Military

“We are not part of the picture” [in Libya], Ehud Barack told Greta van Susteren, who recounted to him the familiar war-for-Israel-and-oil accusations circulating in some Arab quarters vis-a-vis the offensive in Libya. This, even as the US commits itself to furthering the whims of the seething Arab Street—whoever it comprises, wherever it is, and whatever it wants. American warriors, in arms and in armchairs, seem to believe that repeating the word “rebel” enough times will transform the shady ragtag factions we are fighting for as a princess’s kiss transforms a toad.

Ehud Barack, Israel’s Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister (bio information), has politely applauded NATO and the US for rescuing the Libyans, but he also expresses a conscious thought about the feel-good operation, the kind of thought that will never be floated stateside:

“It’s up to the Arab people to struggle for their rights; to change regime or impose corrections and new procedures in their internal political life.”

My sentiments exactly:

If indeed we’re subsidizing “freedom” for [the Libyans] and are fighting their battles—then we’ve also increased their impotence and diminished their initiative. Subsidize individuals because you believe they are helpless—and you’ll get more learned helplessness.

Besides, what are these people? Wards of the American state? Whatever happened to fighting your own revolutions?