CPSIA: "It's Hard To Remember Anything In The Last 20 Years As Crazy As This"

CPSIA update: Hugh Hewitt had a riveting first hour on his radio talk show tonight, as he continued his significant coverage of the economic carnage being wrought by the legal insanity known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which was let loose upon an unsuspecting America this past February. Hundreds of product lines have been unduly affected by this monstrosity born of good intentions, who-knows-how-many millions (or has it reached billions..?) of dollars worth of inventories are being needlessly destroyed, businesses are going out of business and there's no relief in sight.

Hugh Hewitt has been far and away the most responsive journalist in spreading awareness of this unbelievable economic scourge; as he himself points out later in the interview, he's even telling other journalists about CPSIA's infernal existence. For his program this evening Hugh interviewed a guest he's had on before on this subject, attorney Gary Wolensky, who represents the besieged motor bike industry, and the Manhattan Institute's indefatigable Walter Olson. It was a great discussion. Well, "great" is a relative term in this case, as the story being discussed is a preposterous example of the complete indifference that Congressional elites have for working class Americans.

The audio is here. It doesn't seem like Hugh is going to provide a transcript as he sometimes does with important interviews, so as my small contribution to keeping people informed on this story, I've quickly put one together myself. Here's part one [corrections welcome]:

[11:00] HH: ...We’re arguing about $165 million in bonuses to AIG, what is your best estimate about what the CPSIA has cost America?

Walter Olson: It’s hard to get a peg on it. Certainly billions of dollars. And it’s hard to measure what happens when a small business has to close down. What happens to that family, what happens to the employees. But, we know that in just one industry, the mini-cycle/dirt-bike industry, they’re talking about a billion dollars of damage this year. That’s just one of many industries affected by this.

HH: Now Walter Olson, we’ve talked in the past before, we know that sometimes laws lead to extraordinary hardships, wrongfully. In this instance, everyone knows what’s going on, but do you see any signs in Congress that they are going to move to save these billions of dollars, these tens of thousands of jobs, which they did not intend, at least they say they did not intend to kill.

WO: It’s very discouraging in a way, because even though you’ve now got a lot of talk going from people on the Republican side, even John Dingell, one of the Democrats is making some of the right noises, the ones in control are Henry Waxman and his counterparts on the Democratic side of the Senate, they are stonewalling, they are saying they will not even have hearings let alone amend the law.

HH: Gary Wolensky, Walter Olson mentioned ATVs, off-road vehicles, all-terrain vehicles; on this show on Friday, Chairwoman Nord of the Consumer Products Safety Commission told me there was going to be a hearing this week on this and I urged them to just pass an exemption regardless of what the law said. Has that hearing happened?

Gary Wolensky: The hearing has not happened up to now Hugh, and I have not heard that in fact there is going to be a hearing this week.

HH: Do you have… do you think she was shining me on? Did you hear that interview?

GW: I heard the interview. I think she’s a very nice person, unfortunately she’s irrelevant, because her hands are tied and she can’t get anything done. And she won’t go adversarial, which she can do but won’t.

HH: Walter Olson, my urging of the chairwoman on Friday was, they just instruct their staff, to pass exemptions out left and right, because this is a nutty law that is endangering children. Their mission is to protect consumers, but if you put kids on adult bikes they get injured, some of them get killed. Do you see any sign within the CPSC that their staff will do whatever it takes to stop this outrage from happening?

WO: Well, they are being driven by their legal staff on this, because I think that legal staff is telling them that the statutes are written to tie their hands, and they might lose a lawsuit if they ignore the crazy language that Congress put in.

HH: But Walter I was a General Counsellor to two Federal agencies, I know what it’s like to see crazy language, but I also know that I did what the boss said; if the boss came out and said “we’re not going to do stupid things, we’re going to give exemptions”, they have to go that way. If media generated some demand on the CPSC, do you think that would matter?

WO: [sigh] I’m fairly skeptic it would not have, because… remember, they tried to do a common-sensical thing on the inventories, the stuff with the plastic, and they got struck down in court. Apparently they were trying to soften the blow on some of the crazy things in the law, but they pointed to specific language, that “not any lead exposure”, so the mini-bike people, the ball-point pen people, who knows who else who can’t take the lead out of their products without losing the product, who knows what’s going to happen to them.

HH: Gary Wolensky, today a motorcyclist announced that he was simply going to sell the ATVs. “Screw ‘em”. “Tell them to come prosecute me.” What’s your reaction to such obvious civil disobediance? I’ll get his name off the printer at the break.

GW: I saw that. As a lawyer, giving my best legal advice, I certainly would not tell anyone to break the law.

HH: Do you think they’ll prosecute him?

GW: I don’t think they are going to prosecute him.

HH: Walter Olson, what do you think about that? Have you read that story yet?

WO: I’ve read the story, I think it’s going to rev up the press’ interest in this. He’s a very well-known person…

HH: His name is Malcolm Smith…

WO: Malcolm Smith, very famous in that sport.. it could be like H.L. Mencken on Boston Common, remember when he sold the banned book and he became a cause celebre. In that case I think they arrested him but nothing happened to him. In this case… you know, they’re not going to send someone to arrest him, it’s… it’s not as if a public citizen is going to do a citizen’s arrest, I don’t **think** anything will happen.

HH: What I worry about, Gary Wolensky, is that since there’s a private plaintiff’s action attached in the law, some idiot plaintiffs lawyer will go and lay a suit against Malcolm Smith Motorsports and that that lawyer will get a summary judgment.

GW: Well, I can see it coming two ways. Number one, a private plaintiff’s attorney, also, a state’s Attorney General, our state Attorney General sees something like the statement that you’ve just referred to, and he can start an injuction proceeding. I can also see a plaintiff’s attorney, getting a motion for summary judgment, and also compulsatory damages.

HH; Malcolm Smith, God love you. Malcolm Smith Motorsports located on Indiana avenue in Riverside, you can read about this on Motorcycle-usa.com. Walter Olson, what’s the interest of the readers of your blog? Obviously, you’ve covered litigation abuse for a decade now… you’ve been doing this for 17, 18 years now, and this really one of the most outrageous episodes in the law that I’ve ever covered; what’s the interest at Overlawyered.com?

WO: I happened onto it. I have to say, I neglected it last year when they were actually passing this darn thing, but as I began seeing the stories, I realized that in some ways this is the craziest legislation that I will get a chance to write about… [chuckles]

HH: Yes!!

WO: … in this decade. And it is so full of interest, there are so many different, innocent people out there, nice people, the sort of people you would want to be making things for your kids, but who are having their lives turned upside down by this. I can’t resist the human interest. Secondly, simply as a defiance of cost-benefit analysis and common sense, it’s hard for me to remember anything in the last twenty years that was as crazy as this.

HH: Now I also want to press you, Walter, as we’re both journalists, and we’re both lawyers – Mr. Walensky does not have to share the shame of being a journalist – I find mainstream media abysmally incompetent here. Now I’ve asked a number of my pals who’ve called in, guys I like a lot, like [Newsweek's] Howard Fineman, [the Washington Post's] E.J. Dionne, if they’ve even heard of the law. And they haven’t heard of the law. Mark Steyn has, by the way. Are you as astonished as I am that nobody cares about this?

WO: I am astonished, and I’ve even written about this, why is it the more you lead the press to this the more totally out to lunch they are on this issue. The east coast, the New York Times and so forth, they just have no clue what is going on out there, almost none of the good journalism has come out of Washington on this, even though that’s where the Agency is, that’s where most of the legal knowledge is and so forth. Instead, the AP is finally doing something good, after months and months, it’s coming out of Jefferson City Missouri, because they’ve got one good reporter there, who's actually figured out it’s a major issue.

HH: Last question for Walter Olson… if President Obama came out, and said, “I am going to fix this”, do you think that would be a huge political plus for him?

WO: Well I think it would be a huge political plus, because as soon as people learned about the issue, and of course you’ve got librarians and book people and so forth all suffering under the law, there would be overwhelmingly on his side. In fact all he would have to do is stare down Henry Waxman, which they’ll tell you in Washington is impossible. I don’t actually think it would be impossible, at all. Barack Obama, you can do it.

HH: I don’t know why Henry Waxman wants to dis-employ so many people....

[commercial break]

[Part two of the transcript continues here]

Keeping Faith In Music

With many schools eliminating the funding for all their art programs, especially music, this latest study linking reading skills to musical literacy may strike just the right note for keeping faith in the value of music to the life of a child:

Children tutored in music involving progressively complex rhythmic, tonal and practical skills display superior reading skills than their peers, according to a new study.
...
[Joseph M. Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University] investigated the hypothesis that children (in two elementary schools) who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum that becomes progressively difficult over the years, would demonstrate significantly better performance on vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children.
The authors said there are similarities in the way individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. It would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviours, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.
Children in the intervention school studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program.
Children attending control school received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study.
Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure, said a Long Island University release.
Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group.

There comes an age when children listen to their childish efforts at music and suddenly hear it all with new ears, causing many of them to declare, "Hey, I'm not really a good musician"; this fresh insight leads them to abandon their flutes and pianos for other things, as it might with their singing, with their painting, with their writing... with most of their acts of creation.

It seems a rite of passage into adulthood, to assess one's abilities as "amateurish", and therefore so second-rate that their very existence is a threat against our adult pose as "professional" experts at living. Who will take us seriously, if they hear our amateurish attempts at music, if they see our amateurish approach to creativity itself?

Once upon a time, the word "amateur" was not the sour note it tends to be thought of today. In its original, literal definition, to be an "amateur" means simply to be "a lover of something"... in French, it still retains this old-fashioned sense of the term, as we would say that I'm an "amateur de baseball", a lover of baseball. My skill has no relation to my passion.

I think one of the reasons that adolescents tend to be so cynical, so nihilistic in their point of view, is that there is not enough effort placed on convincing them to stay in love with life. They've left so much behind, all they can see is the hole that such abandonment brings; no wonder they wear black, I'd be in mourning too if I felt I had left so much of my previous life behind me.

The amateur's passion they once may have felt when devoting themselves for hours to their various acts of creation, especially playing music, is a romance worth remembering, and renewing. The courage needed to create new things comes partially from the childlike faith that our personal accomplishments can actually make a genuine difference in the world around us. As adults, our supposedly heightened powers of observation often end up obscuring that which is most important to perceive: it pays to have faith, to stretch our perspective so that it sees the single note of the present in the context of an overall melody of moments, especially those to come. That which we are today, is not necessarily all that we ever will be: we are creations forever in the process of becoming.

It's a lesson renewed by the experience of parenthood, probably the ultimate example of amateurism. That first time where a parent cradles their new-born baby, and takes inventory of their creation: what is there to see, except the fog of a far-off future? The little, tiny hands, inexpert at the simplest of tasks. The closed eyes, not yet able to register much of anything in their orbit. The probing mind, not yet aware of even what questions there are to ask about the world it's entered into. And yet from parental love springs the faith to perceive the hoped-for symphony, that the hand, the eyes and the mind that orchestrates this harmonious duet will someday truly make a difference.

It takes a lifetime to practice this art, so why not start as early and as often as possible, especially by keeping faith in the blessing that making music may bring to the life of a child.

One Bad Ass Mistake America

The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - Janet Napolitano & the Dept. of Homeland Causation of Insecurity Prevention

"Terrorism" is out. "Man-caused disaster" is in. And you can just forget all about "jihad." From an interview with Janet Napolitano at Der Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

Is this a joke, a late-night skit's attempt to skewer PC lingo?

No, this is PC lingo. Having abandoned the idiotic but at least somewhat bellicose moniker "War on Terror," we are now into, what...the "Intervention into Man-Caused Disaster."

Of course, there are two PC problems with the "nuance" Mzzz Napolitano claims.

There is that pesky term "man"--sure to rile the feminists, let alone the female suicide bombers. Brace for the day when Secretary Janet discusses "Person-Caused Disasters."

But that leaves the fact that the kind of "persons" who cause the "disasters" in question believe that Allah, not man (and certainly not woman) causes everything. Remember Operation Infinite Justice? That was the name the US tagged onto the military campaign against the Taliban until Muslims complained (p. 166) on the grounds that they believe only Allah dispenses justice, infinite or otherwise. (And that was enough for Uncle Sam to changes names, natch.) This line of religious belief surely makes "Man/Person-Caused Disaster" practically a term of defamation. I'm thinking Madame Secretary will have to go with something else, maybe renaming the whole agency for futher sensitivity's sake. Department for the Prevention of Allah-Caused Disasters, anyone?

Perssonally, I don't think "War on Terror" was idiotic since it was clearly not Bush's desire to fight a war against all Muslims, and that made much tactical sense. Bush drew the line between those willing to join sides with the modern world and those for whom terror is the only response to modern freedom and freedom's antipathy to barbarism and dissimulating religion.

Time for Canada to wise up and drop the dicatator-dominated United Nations

Egypt blindsides Canada’s efforts to create free speech laws at U.N. :: International Free Press Society

“Canada will continue to speak out against limitations in freedom of speech at all levels. While there is not yet a resolution tabled, Canada has in the past made it clear that it will not support any text which would undermine this fundamental right,” said Catherine Loubier, spokeswoman for Cannon.

Well, it's not enough to "speak out". Time for the liberal democracies to break ranks with the dictators and deniers of Islam-critical speech, the Caliphascist dreamers, and rethink inter-national relations.

Another day, another Christian minister in the UK beaten up

Minister beaten after clashing with Muslims on his TV show | Mail Online.

Maybe these guys have the right idea.

A woman in hijab is gunned down in the streets of California...

...The suspect is Hispanic. What is the first thing that comes to your mind: anti-Islamic hate crime? family feud contract killing? drug dealers' war? Miss Kelly : Passing Off Rumor as Fact, Alia Ansari's Tragic Death describes the industry that makes a living from promoting one scenario.

Class Action

Clothes make the man, so they say. And if such is true, then I'm a dud. I asked a buddy in the jungle why I never got attacked, and he said it's because I look like I'm not worth the effort. Of course I am. I can talk about Spinoza for hours.

Redneck? My cowboy boots tell a different story. They say: "Big Class."

I don't wear my cowboy boots every day. I wear them when I'm dressing up and going out to impress people. Usually I don't care to try to impress anyone. Sarah Palin doesn't know this or that? Obama knows all things cool and smart? I know a few things about class that Obama must have missed in Marxism 101. I know a few things about class that Debra Jackson knows.

Do-Sa-Do: Square Dancing and Mindfulness

When I was 12, one of my best friends was a square dancer. Twice a week, her family would pile into the Country Squire station wagon and head to the Grange Hall, where they'd gather with their square dancing club for an evening of music, friendship and do-sa-do.

As a regular guest, I was fascinated by the form but, in the height of my coolness-conscious years, also acutely aware of the overwhelming dork factor. These people lived to square dance.

They skipped around for two or three hours at a time, twirling and smiling and dabbing at their foreheads between dances. They hunted for holiday-themed fabric months before special dances in order to whip up the perfect ruffled dress and matching shirt for each occasion. They packed their petticoats and headed to Penticton, British Columbia every summer for a regional square dancers' convergence.

The square dance girls were just as boy-crazy as my regular friends, but they had a built-in way to hold hands with the guys they liked. As for me, I had a major crush on my friend's older brother who, at 15, was an articulate, ambitious student body president with piercing blue eyes and blond hair to his shoulders (it was 1972, after all).

In one of our (for me, anyway) excruciating conversations involving much blushing, he told me that square dancing was like meditation. "It's a way to forget about everything except what's going on right now. You have to pay attention to what the caller says, and let your mind and body make sense of it naturally, without trying too hard."

http://ambafrance-do.org/alternative/19621.php

When we take a class action and return ourselves to our home, maybe then I'll go home too. For now, home doesn't impress me. I'm not dressed up for it. Folks'd sneer at me, I do think so. When I go back home and walk through the door and see the Debras dressed to dance, and when I smell the hay and cattle and the clouds, then do sa do. That's a class action I'll be part of.

Blessings In Disguise: Tragedy And The Inner Strength Of The Young

I do my share of complaining about "kids today", about the cynicism and sloth and vulgarity I see in such abundance in young people. Therefore it's all the more important for me to pay proper respect to the bigger picture, admitting that there's also a lot to be proud of about our newest generation. Old(er) dogs like me could learn a few new tricks from the many wonderful examples of their inner strength... if we can but summon the humility to perceive the good within them as readily as the bad.

First, the amazing example of 17 year-old Nick Goldner's remarkable efforts to renew the lives of children marked by tragedy... as he was when he was younger himself:

West Allis - Nick Goldner still remembers the treasured Dr. Seuss anthology he read over and over after his family lost everything - even his favorite blanket - in a house fire a decade ago.
He turned to it constantly for comfort in the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his parents and three brothers as they waited for their home to be rebuilt and their lives to restart.
...
So when it came time for Goldner to choose an Eagle Scout project, he selected a charity that provides books to children in crisis situations. His enthusiastic efforts resulted in the largest single donation ever to the Waunakee-based With Wings and a Halo, according to the organization's chief executive and co-founder Paul Gilbertson.
"I'm really proud of him," said Gilbertson, whose organization provides backpacks filled with children's books to sheriff's deputies throughout the state.
So far, Goldner has collected 4,000 books and about $1,100. In addition to the donation to With Wings and a Halo, Goldner said, he also plans to give some of the books to local fire departments so they can be passed on to other children who have lost their homes.
Although he estimates he has put about 350 hours into the project, Goldner credits the generosity of other students - both Nathan Hale and others in the Milwaukee area - for making it such a success.
"Here, I was really only expecting 1,000 books and 50 bucks," he said. "But the students here at Hale blew my expectations out of the water."
...
Goldner also highlighted efforts by Hoover Elementary School in New Berlin, where students gave 480 books - more than one per student - and Fox River Christian Church, which donated $100 and some books to the charity.
The work for the students isn't over yet. Goldner said he plans to drive the books in a donated truck to Waunakee, where he and 10 friends will sort through them by their intended readers' ages and place them - about a dozen at a time - into backpacks.

We follow that with another incredible story, this time out of Florida, where one inspiring 13 year-old's example is used to shine a light on the silent sacrifices made by an estimated million other young people:

BOYNTON BEACH — When she gets home after a long day, Ashley Coyle does what any grown up would do.
She prepares dinner, washes dishes, folds laundry and gives her sister a bath. All typical household chores for most any adult.
Only Ashley is no grown up.
She's barely a teen.
The 13-year-old is a grown-up kid - children in mostly single-family homes who take on adult roles because the parents can't juggle it all. It's becoming all too common lately with more people losing jobs and families cutting costs.
That's why the American Association of Caregiving Youth has a waiting list of middle schoolers hoping to join its program.
The Caregiving Youth Project, based out of Boca Raton, searches for middle schoolers like Ashley whose daily responsibilities extend beyond homework and making the bed. It is the only branch of AACY in the United States.
Project staff is working with more than 200 students in five Palm Beach County schools who care for sick or elderly relatives or for brothers and sisters at home while their mom or dad works. They're in charge of medicine, food, cleaning, cooking. And most of the time, homework comes last.
"As soon as I get home, I see what my sister needs first and then do the chores," Ashley said.
The staff of Caregiving Youth works to prevent these children from dropping out of school to care for their family.
"These kids have stress," said Connie Siskowski, who started the project in 2006. "Knowing they're not alone is important to them."
An estimated 1.3 million children throughout the United States ages 8-18 are youth caregivers, according to Siskowski. ...
In Ashley's case, her mother, Tania Coyle, works full-time and her sister, Jessica, who was born with a genetic disorder, needs constant attention. Though Jessica is the big sister at age 18, she looks no older than Ashley. She rarely speaks and trusts few people. Ashley is her best friend.
Their mom works as a nurse's aid and barely earns $10 an hour - not enough to pay for daycare or even a babysitter, which is why Ashley is in charge.
"I never in my life thought I'd have to depend on my daughter like I do," Coyle said. "It's been very hard. I need my daughter to feel like a kid."
Through generous donors, Caregiving Youth provides help with home health care so the children can be with friends or get to school on time. It's raised money for laptops and for items like wheelchair ramps and scooters for families in medical need. It also provides field trips to grocery stores where the children are taught how to shop and how to use a slow cooker.
...
"It's hard. Some days are not always the best," Ashley said. "My mom gets so stressed and my sister gets in a bad mood. I always want them to be happy."
...
At Boca Raton Community Middle School, where Ashley is in the eighth grade, enrollment in the Caregiving Youth Project doubled last year. It jumped from 8.5 percent to 16 percent and Siskowski expects those numbers to keep growing.

I note that both these stories of amazing young people seem to share a common origin; it was from seeds of tragedy that they were able to grow their respective abilities to see the good in life, particularly how to find the potential for good waiting to grow within themselves. However unbidden their struggles may have been, their inspiring accomplishments may never have been realized if theirs had been less eventful childhoods. One generation's visible success against great odds can ensure a migration of that success, handing it down to the next generation coming behind them (or ahead of them), by learning from example.

We can't always choose our circumstances, but we can choose our reactions to them; that's a timely lesson we need to re-affirm, no matter our age.

When gender freedom clashes horribly with nature...

...the liberal, relativist, nihilist, media call an alleged attempt at violent rape and forced insemination, of a "wife", by a "wife", "a fight": Insemination fight ends in wife's arrest - Berkshire Eagle Online

A woman who allegedly intended to artificially inseminate her wife with her brother's semen has been charged with domestic assault and battery.

It's only alleged, but in any case I can't bring myself to comment on this "woman"; and it sounds like that brother is not exactly a man...

Italian judges hate women, roll over and die.

Via Ghost of a Flea, my first exposure to this amazing story: Shari'a making inroads in the West | Op-Ed Contributors | Jerusalem Post

In Italy, three members of a Brescia-based Maghrebi family (father, mother and eldest son) were accused of beating and sequestering their daughter/sister Fatima because she had wanted to live a "Western" life.

In the first trial, the three were sentenced for sequestration and abuse. The court acknowledged that the teenager had been "brutally beaten up" for having "dated" a non-Muslim and, in general, for "living a life not conforming with the culture" of her family. But on appeal, the family was acquitted because the court deemed that the young woman had been beaten for "her own good."

The Bologna public prosecutor's office then disputed the acquittal of the three accused parties, but the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation dismissed it and ruled in favor of the charged parties.

Interestingly, two Italian political leaders on opposite sides of the political spectrum - Isabella Bertolini, vice president of the MPs of the right-wing party Forza Italia, and Barbara Pollastrini, a post-communist former minister - condemned the Supreme Court decision, calling it "one of the darkest pages in the history of the law in our country." Bertolini was upset that the court had "allied itself with radical Islam." Pollastrini is now pushing for parliament to pass a law condemning violence against women. "Now more than ever, it is urgent to defend the rights of a large number of immigrant women victims of an intolerable patriarchal culture," she says.

Muslim women were quick to denounce the Supreme Court's decision. Among them was Souad Sbai, president of the Organization of Moroccan Women in Italy. She said, "It is a shame, this verdict is worthy of an Arab country where the Shari'a is vigorously enforced. In the name of multiculturalism and respect for traditions, the judges apply two kinds of rules: one for the Italians and one for the immigrants. A Catholic father who had acted this way would have been severely sentenced."

According to her organization, at least nine Muslim women have recently been killed in Italy by close relatives. The number of young girls forced to wear the hijab "as early as eight or 12" is on the rise, as is the number of female teenagers fleeing home, and "lots of them are looking to flee to France." But France might not be the panacea either...

One wonders how such madness inflicts a judiciary in what was at least to some degree a Western democracy founded on the sacredness of the Christian person: do they suffer some confused idea that recognizing "diversity" in this way is tto maintain social peace and order? But how can any thinking person come seriously to think that a people living under different laws in the same state can come together in anything other but a seriously diminished capacity for building a common order? I fear that Flea has it right:

It is not only the Swat Valley that has been conceded to the Taliban. For many in the West, there is nothing to surrender - no patriotism, no pride, no history, no civilization - so why not get it over with. The nullity they have made of modern life makes the prospect of a new Dark Age appealing to them.

As to their sisters and wives and daughters - let alone their daughters' daughters - to hell with them. Such is the selfish logic of a suicide.

And so our only response is to act and say to hell with those who have given in to nihilism and civilizational despair. To hell with those who would procure our young women, our fellow citizens under our common law, for the brutal trade in sharia.

Condemn the nihilist, wherever you find him.

A Memorable Auction In Winnipeg

Here's a heart-warming story out of Winnipeg that suggests how often sudden initiative can play a role in acts of kindness:

Last Thursday turned into a memorable evening for auctioneer Andy Kaye. Unpaid storage fees had led to the regrettable sale of a storage locker's contents at Kaye's Auctions. A three year-old boy approached auctioneer Andy before the sale began, to ask him if he could "have some of his toys". His mom was present as well, as it was their family's possessions being auctioned off.

"Sure", said Andy, "Go Ahead."

After the young fellow had grabbed what few toys his little figure could handle, the auction started in earnest. Karen, a longtime regular of Kaye's auctions, bid for a couple of the boxes on sale, and immediately donated them back to the family.

One by one other attendees followed Karen's example, and by the end of the auction the mother and son had received much of their stored possessions back again.

"I've been in this business a long time," says Andy, "and I have to tell you, that was really something. The little guy's mom certainly had tears in her eyes."

Consumer Product Safety Chairman On CPSIA: "There Are Some Real Problems Here"

The economic scourge caused by the CPSIA continues to destroy billions of dollars worth of inventories in this recessionary ecomony, and the US Congress doesn't appear in any hurry to amend any of the unintended consequences of their Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. They seem unable to admit they have made a mistake, and the final cost for this vanity is reaching an astonishing level.

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt continues to do an excellent job of covering this appalling story, in fact he's one of the only media voices giving this economic plague any regular attention. Yesterday Hugh Hewitt interviewed Nancy Nord, Chairman of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, looking for some answers to the obvious question: What is being done to fix this problem?

The good news: the commission knows about the economic damage the CPSIA is causing.
The bad news: there doesn't seem to be anything they can do to stop the damage from continuing.

From the transcript:

...
Hugh Hewitt: Congress and the commission are now sort of pointing fingers at each other. I’ve been forwarded e-mails from Senator Durbin’s office to some of the impacted business out there saying it’s up to you guys to grant exemptions. And I’ve read some statements from commission staff saying we don’t have the authority to grant exemptions. You know, so the finger pointing goes on, and the businesses are burning down. What’s happening?

Nancy Nord: Well, it really is something that we’re very concerned about. Congress passed this very well-intended piece of legislation in response to the recalls of 2007-2008. They did it very quickly, and perhaps did not give sufficient thought to some of the provisions. You raised the exemption provision, and that is a very, very good example of what I’m talking about. Although the legislation indicates that we can give exemptions from the lead provisions of the law, in certain circumstances, those circumstances are very, very limited. And Congress was very precise in telling us when we could give exemptions, and when we could not. And unfortunately, we are now seeing many, many more products that have trace amounts of lead, products that really are not going to harm consumers at all. They’re not unsafe. But they don’t meet the very, very strict standards of the law. And the way the law is written, our hands are tied. So Congress really needs to find, to help us find some wiggle room here, if you will. We’re very hard-pressed to find exclusions from this new law.

HH: Now if I were your general counsel, and I have been the general counsel of two federal agencies, OPM and NEH, I’d come in and I’d say to you, Madame Chairman, we’ve got to take a stand here, we’ve got to issue an exemption, for example, to all-terrain vehicles, regardless of the trace amounts of lead, because they’re dying, people are losing their jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory are lost, and let the chips fall. You’re not going to go to jail, I’m not going to go to jail, but these people are going to go out of business. How do you respond to that?

NN: Well, our job as a regulatory agency is to implement the law that Congress wrote as Congress wrote it. So that is what we need to do. You should be aware, I’m sure you probably are aware that we did try to take a reasonable approach with respect to implementing one of the provisions dealing with a substance called phthalates, which are used in plasticizers. It’s what makes a rubber ducky squeezable, if you will. And a federal district court overturned us and said no, our reading of the law was incorrect, that Congress really intended that everything in inventory, everything on store shelves, things sitting in container ships making their way to this country, they were all outlawed if they were not tested for phthalates.
...
HH: I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails, you probably have as well…from very small businesses, people who make a thousand dollars worth of products, or five thousand dollars worth of products. Now I’ve had big time lawyers on like Wolensky of Snell and Wilmer, and they represent sporting goods and all-terrain vehicles, and they can go argue the case to the commission. But these small timers, they’re just wiped out. Are you getting those e-mails as well?

NN: Well, of course we are. One of the problems with this law, and actually, I think one of the biggest problems with this law, is the fact that it basically is retroactive. It put in place a ban on lead in children’s products, and it applies not only to products manufactured after the effective date of February 10th, but it applies to all products sold in the United States after that date, which pulls in inventory, it pulls in products on store shelves, things that were deemed perfectly safe on February 9th, on February 10th, are deemed to be illegal. And that is perhaps not the best way to regulate...
...
The thing that I think you need to understand, and your listeners need to understand, is that the law has been pretty precise in what they have told us to do, and that is what we need to do. Our obligation as a regulatory agency is to implement the CPSIA.
...
Now as we have gone through this process, we have found that there are some real problems here. We have brought them to the attention of Congress. I would hope that we can work with Congress to solve these problems as quickly as we possibly can, because the last thing that we want to do, that I want to do, is to impose economic havoc on businesses that are really just trying to provide safe products to the consumers.

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal castigates Human Rights Commission and Richard Warman

And yet still finds that whatever discredible things those bodies do in performing their dubious roles, Section 13 remains the law. Ruling here. Anti-Section 13 discussion here: Blazing Cat Fur: Lucy ruled to have lost credibilty by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal; and here: Lucy gets spanked | Jay Currie; and here: five feet of fury: slanted eyes greet a new sunrise/ a race of bodies small in size; and here:SteynOnline - Richard Warman's arse (cont)

The costs of engineering "gay marriage": silencing critics?

This letter from Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League in today's Vancouver Sun has me thinking a little about social engineering: Social engineering spawns long-term consequences

The letter is responding to yesterday's opinion piece by the naive Leonard Stern who argued

With almost four years having passed since we resolved the same-sex marriage question, it's hard to remember there was controversy in the first place.

The debate wrapped up without drama. Parliament passed the Civil Marriage Act on June 28, 2005, Canadians said okay, and the country went back to its business.

It's amusing, in a been-there-done-that sort of way, to see our American neighbours in the throes of internecine battle. A number of states have passed divisive declarations banning gay marriage. For all his supposed liberalism, even Barack Obama is conflicted about gay marriage. Many Americans seem to feel that gay marriage is a radical and dangerous proposition.

The Canadian experience shows that those anxieties are misplaced. Our social fabric hasn't unravelled...

I call this naive for the idea that the social consequences of gay marriage can somehow be known in a mere four years. But what about the Catholic, Murphy's claims regarding social engineering?

Leonard Stern appears to lead a sheltered life. His smug and condescending reflections about "the Canadian experience" are superficial and highly selective.

He overlooks attacks on freedom of expression, like efforts by the Alberta human rights inquisition to punish and silence a Christian pastor. He trivializes the head tax levied on the Knights of Columbus by its B.C. counterpart as the cost of exercising religious freedom. He ignores the fact that B.C. teachers opposed to the "new order" dare not speak publicly, lest they be suspended, fined or (like Chris Kempling) driven out of the state school system. He fails to notice the Corren Agreement, a private contract between the B.C. government and two homosexual activists to suppress parental authority in education.

Man inhabits a moral environment that is every bit as complex as the physical environment, and just as susceptible to significant damage as a result of ill-considered human activity. Four years is hardly sufficient to evaluate the long-term consequences of an unprecedented experiment in social engineering. But even four years is enough to recognize that the interests of a free people are not served by repressive measures hitherto characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

After living through or remembering the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, for most people today I think our first assumption when hearing the term "social engineering" is that it is bad, for it leads to horror stories like that of artist Maureen Mullarkey who writes of having been the target of a homosexual hate campaign, aiming to ruin her career and shut her up, merely because at one point in her career she represented gay culture in her art and then recently had the temerity to donate money to the side opposing gay marriage in California's bitterly-fought referendum on the issue. To some, that's the ultimate in homophobic hypocrisy, and reason for a frenzy of character assassination.

But, I might ask, can the Catholic and the Gay activist not see any common ground, despite their differences? Don't they see that, in the longer historical perspective, both the Catholic family and the nascent gay family are the fruit of the same Western tradition and while it is a tradition that has evolved, it has not been without its social engineering. "Gay marriage", whatever the many varieties of sexual partnership in the human past, would be something unimaginable in any traditional society where marriage is fundamentally a question of how the production of children, and their place in the social order, is to be recognized, organized, and licensed.

What's more, the nuclear family that is one of the distinctive features of Western civilization is the product of the church's long war to substitute the extended family, clan, and tribe, with a new kind of symbolic family in the church. By outlawing things like cousin marriage, by making priests officially celibate (i.e. without recognizable heirs), by promoting the idea that the church was a corporate family with a claim on inheriting personal or family wealth, the strength of the extended family of traditional society was over time diminished in favour of the nuclear family. And, as the resources or insularity of the clan were diminished, the nuclear family's dependence on interacting in all kinds of ways with other nuclear families to build a social safety net along with a productive economy grew. The nuclear family is weak and thus pressured to create the kind of free individuals who can interact with other free individuals in taking care of the weak family in interaction with the larger "family" once conceived in terms of the church and then in terms of the nation. Western society is built around a culture of mutual trust in strangers, as free individuals consecrated, during much of our history, by sharing in communion in the life, death, and rebirth of Jesus. And ultimately it is the Western idea of a sacred personhood that makes gay marriage possible. Homosexuality is surely common throughout human history, but homosexual marriage would be and is something inconceivable in the minds of those rooted in traditional societies. In other words, gay marriage requires the kind of secular culture that is specifically a secularized form of Christianity, a secularized form of the Christian eucharist that makes each individual into a divine, free, person. That many a Western homosexual conceives of his or her gay family in opposition to the church is only a sign of the two "families'" close historical connection, of their rivalry for common ground. As we never tire of noting, many Western homosexuals are much more anti-Christian, in general, than they are, say, anti-Islam even though the latter faith constitutes a culture arguably much less tolerant of gay rights.

Since the Christian nuclear family is the product of a long history of what one might call "social engineering", one wonders what it means for the Catholic to now attack the social engineering or thought control that is part of the movement for same sex marriages today. What, in other words, allows one to speak negatively of certain social engineering while accepting the fruits of other engineering as the proven results of a successful "evolution"?

While I think it's clear that the Western nuclear family has proven a historical success, at least up until now (when its inherent fragility is exposed in a society that no longer reproduces its numbers from generation to generation) how do we know that "gay marriage" is not the social engineering equivalent of, say, the hippie commune, or perhaps something yet more dangerous? Will homosexual partnerships lead to families somehow reproducing themselves with children and raising these to be the kind of individuals who can succeed in a free society premised on the mutual interaction of strangers? Or will homosexual marriage prove itself an attractive, socially acceptable alternative to the hard work of the nuclear family's child rearing? Will gay marriage lead to people making valuable contributions to our society that outweigh any effects of developing an attractive alternative to the child-rearing family? In other words, might gay families become some rough equivalent of the celibate priesthoods of old?

At this point in time, we all have our own intuitions and desires in respect to such questions, but the lessons from the laboratory of history are far from known; these will take decades and quite possibly centuries to become widely recognized. I have my own prejudices but of one thing I'm sure enough to state boldly: "social engineering" can only work to the extent it is grounded in a true revelation into human nature. And consequently it is incumbent on those on both sides of this issue to be open to free debate that we may reveal our unfolding human reality to each other. Those who would silence opposition to gay marriage are simply giving us reason to doubt the long-term viability of gay marriage. Those who would outlaw gay marriage are trying to cancel an experiment, but on what rational forecast of the potential risks? Only a serious engagement in elucidating our shared reality can help us answer these questions.

To my mind, both Catholic families and gay families are today products of the Christian revelation into the nature of the person and his or her relationship to the means by which human societies generate themselves through sacrificial (and anti-sacrificial) processes. The manifold truths and revelations of the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be discussed in this post, truths I believe can be largely demonstrated in purely anthropological and historical terms, while bracketing the question of God's existence (a question that, in today's lame debates over atheism, tends to sidetrack many from recognizing the larger anthropological issues at stake - why do we have a God concept in the first place?).

What those defending gay marriage need to do is show, in the years to come, either how the same-sex marriage is a way of extending and renewing the productive tradition of Judeo-Christian revelation into the possibilities of a free, individualized, personhood and its ability to work with millions of strangers and other nuclear families in insuring the continuing strength and fertility (i.e. faith in the future) of Western societies, or how the idea of gay marriage is rooted in some fundamentally new revelation that will allow for the kind of success in "social engineering" that the Christian nuclear family, in opposition to the extended clan, has had. On the latter possibility, I, for one, see yet no evidence of any great new revelation into our common humanity propelling the calls for gay marriage, and so I fear that the purely anti-Judeo-Christian stream of "gay" thought will not lead to success and will maybe only revisit the kind of failed, totalitarian, social engineering that characterized, for example, the Nazi and Communist movements.

One either interacts with other free individuals and families in ways that build covenants for the future growth and security of our shared society, or one indulges in destructive fantasies premised on some kind of narcissistic detachment from a larger social purpose. In overcoming the traditional society and clan, we have learned the dangers of imposing any settled understanding of life's purpose on the free individual (we can all benefit from his or her freedom to further our understanding of our shared reality and its possibilities, not least when this freedom leads to failure, and especially when failure can be freely admitted); but we should not give up the idea that our lives have a purpose beyond ourselves, one that is rooted in a shared human reality. Let Catholic brothers and gay sisters fight an honest fight, frank, honest, but sportsmanlike, to discover and further articulate the shared human truth behind our differences. Shutting people up is for losers.

Does Obama really hope?

Has a deep-rooted Western nihilism, only masquerading as hope and change, in a perhaps final delusion, found its president?

Belmont Club » Beginnings and endings

One of the tell-tales of a growing dysfunction within a system is the collapse of priorities. When small things begin to loom large and truly momentous events are regarded with a dispassionate, almost distinterested attention, it is often a sign that leadership culture has lost its way. The Week describes the strange narratives being emitted by the Obama administration: talking up fiscal packages that they know are ineffectual; making fatalistic references to Depression Era history and Happy Talk in place of real plans.
[...]
It almost seems like one of those movies where paratroopers are telling jokes before jumping into certain death; almost as if the main issues are foregone and so the conversation must turn to something else. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist caught the obsession with trivia in the midst of an existential crisis perfectly. When Fagin is sentenced to death, he can think of nothing but unimportant things on the brink of his own execution.
[...]
Dickens might almost be describing the Obama administration. Maybe BHO’s grand speeches aren’t really promises to save the world. Perhaps he’s really saying the precise opposite. Here the illusion ends. There is no cake, as one reader wrote to me, “the cake is a lie.” You know when a man really has hope because he’s full of fight; bursting with defiance. In Obama’s case, it is like watching a man go through the motions while the world prepares to go on, almost without him.
[...]
The British newspapers say the President can’t even fake an interest in foreign affairs. Maybe at the end of the rainbow, the one he’s been chasing all his life, was the thing that had been pursuing him.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

"Thank God we have a government"

Museum finds secret message in Lincoln's watch | U.S. | Reuters

Funny that this hidden graffito is only turning up now...

Drink and forgiveness: the secrets to Western success says Roger Scruton

Wretchard has a look at Obama's nascent foreign policy and concludes that since Obama has no clear vision of where he wants to be going, he is taking his cue from America's enemies and asking them what they want: Belmont Club » Stratfor on Obama’s diplomatic ‘reset’ buttons

Roger Scruton would probably frown on this as he says what we Westerners need right now is a renewed sense of who we are and what we stand for. This speech Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation | Azure is full of keen insights. Here are some excerpts:

In both America and Europe there has been a growing desire for appeasement: a habit of public contrition; an acceptance, though with heavy heart, of the censorious edicts of the mullahs; and a further escalation in the official repudiation of our cultural and religious inheritance. Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the archbishop of Canterbury would give a public lecture advocating the incorporation of Islamic religious law (shari’ah) into the English legal system. Today, however, many people consider this to be an arguable point, and perhaps the next step on the way to peaceful compromise.

All this suggests that we in the West stand on the edge of a dangerous period of concession, in which the legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance will be ignored or downplayed in an attempt to prove our peaceful intentions. It will be some time before the truth will be allowed to play its all-important role of rectifying our current mistakes and preparing the way for the next ones. This means that it is more necessary than ever for us to rehearse the truth and come to a clear and objective understanding of what is at stake. I will, therefore, spell out in what follows some of the critical features of the Western inheritance which must be understood and defended in our current confrontation. Each of these features marks a point of contrast, and possibly of conflict, with the traditional Islamic vision of society, and each has played a vital part in creating the modern world. Islamist belligerence stems from having found no secure place in that world, and from turning for refuge to precepts and values that are at odds with the Western way of life. This does not mean that we should renounce or repudiate the distinguishing features of our civilization, as many would have us do. On the contrary, it means that we must be all the more vigilant in their defense.
[...]

Scruton then discusses citizenship, law, nationality, and Christianity:

I have no doubt that it is the long centuries of Christian dominance in Europe which laid the foundations of national loyalty as a type above those of faith and family, and on which a secular jurisdiction and an order of citizenship could be founded. It may sound paradoxical to identify a religion as the major force behind the development of secular government. But we should remember the peculiar circumstances in which Christianity entered the world. The Jews of first-century Judea were a closed community, bound by a tight web of religious legalisms but nonetheless governed from Rome by a law which made no reference to any God, and which offered an ideal of citizenship to which every free subject of the empire might aspire.

Jesus found himself in conflict with the legalism of his fellow Jews, and in broad sympathy with the idea of secular government. Hence his famous words in the parable of the tribute money: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” After his death, the Christian faith was shaped by Paul for communities within the Roman Empire that sought only the freedom to pursue their worship, and had no intention of challenging the secular powers. This idea of dual loyalty continued after Constantine, and was endorsed by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century in his doctrine of the two swords given to mankind for their government: that which guards the body politic, and that which guards the individual soul. This endorsement of secular law by the early Church was responsible for subsequent developments in Europe, from the Reformation and the Enlightenment through to the purely territorial law that prevails in the West today.
During the early centuries of Islam various philosophers attempted to develop a theory of the perfect state, but religion was always at the heart of it. The tenth-century polymath al-Fârâbî even tried to recast Plato’s Republic in Islamic terms, with the prophet as philosopher-king. When all such discussion stopped, at the time of Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century, it was clear that Islam had decisively turned its back on secular government, and would henceforth be unable to develop anything remotely like a national—as opposed to a religious—form of allegiance. Indeed, the most important advocate of Arab nationalism in recent times, Michel Aflaq, was not a Muslim but rather a Greek Orthodox Christian, who was born in Syria, educated in France, and died in Iraq, disillusioned with the Baath party he had helped to found. If national loyalties have emerged in the Muslim world in recent times, it is in spite of Islam, and not because of it. And it should come as no surprise if these loyalties seem peculiarly fragile and fractious, as we have noticed in the case of Palestinian attempts at national cohesion, and in the troubled history of Pakistan.
[...]
This habit of self-criticism has created another critical feature of Western civilization, and that is representation. We in the West, and the English-speaking peoples preeminently, are heirs to a longstanding habit of free association, in which we join together in clubs, businesses, pressure groups, and educational foundations. This associative genius was particularly remarked upon by Tocqueville in his journeys through America, and it is facilitated by the unique branch of the English common law—equity and the law of trusts—which enables people to set up funds in common and to administer them without asking permission from any higher authority.

This associative habit goes hand in hand with the tradition of representation. When we form a club or a society which has a public profile, we are in the habit of appointing officers to represent it. The decisions of these officers are then assumed to be binding on all members, who cannot reject them without leaving the club. In this way, a single individual is able to speak for an entire group, and in so doing, to bind it to accept the decisions made in its name. We find nothing strange in this, and it has affected the political, educational, economic, and leisure institutions of our society in incalculable ways. It has also affected the government of our religious institutions, both Catholic and Protestant. Indeed, it was among nineteenth-century Protestant theologians that the theory of the corporation as a moral idea was first fully developed. We know that the hierarchy of our church, be it Baptist, Episcopalian, or Catholic, is empowered to take decisions on our behalf, and can enter into dialogue with institutions in other parts of the world, in order to secure the space that we require for worship.

Association takes a very different form in traditional Islamic societies, however. Clubs and societies of strangers are rare, and the primary social unit is not the free association, but the family. Companies do not enjoy a developed legal framework under Islamic law, and it has been argued by Malise Ruthven and others that the concept of the corporate person has no equivalent in shari’ah.2 The same is true for other forms of association. Charities, for instance, are organized in a completely different way than are those in the West: not as property held in trust for beneficiaries, but as property that has been religiously “stopped” (waqf). As a result, all public entities, including schools and hospitals, are regarded as ancillary to the mosque and governed by religious principles. Meanwhile, the mosque itself is not a corporate person, nor is there an entity which can be called “the Mosque” in the same sense as we refer to the Church—that is, an entity whose decisions are binding on all its members, which can negotiate on their behalf, and which can be held to account for its misdeeds and abuses.

As a result of this long tradition of associating only under the aegis of the mosque or the family, Islamic communities lack the conception of the spokesman.3 When serious conflicts erupt between Muslim minorities in Western cities and the surrounding society, we have found it difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the Muslim community, since there is no one who will speak for it or take responsibility for imposing any decision upon it. If by chance someone does step forward, the individual members of the Muslim community feel free to accept or reject his decisions at will. The same problem has been witnessed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries with radicalized Muslim populations. When someone attempts to speak for a dissident group, it is very often on his own initiative, and without any procedure that validates his office. Like as not, should he agree to a solution to a given problem, he will be assassinated, or at any rate disowned, by the radical members of the group for whom he purports to be speaking.
This point leads me to reflect once again on the idea of citizenship. An important reason for the stability and peacefulness of societies based on citizenship is that individuals in such societies are fully protected by their rights. They are fenced off from their neighbors in spheres of private sovereignty, where they alone make decisions. As a result, a society of citizens can establish good relations and shared allegiance between strangers. You don’t have to know your fellow citizen in order to ascertain your rights against him or your duties toward him; moreover, his being a stranger in no way alters the fact that you are each prepared to die for the territory that contains you and the laws which you enjoy. This remarkable feature of nation-states is sustained by the habits to which I have referred: self-criticism, representation, and corporate life, the very habits not to be found in traditional Islamic societies. What the Islamist movements promise their adherents is not citizenship, but “brotherhood”—ikhwân—an altogether warmer, closer, and more metaphysically satisfying thing.

And yet, the warmer and closer an attachment, the less widely can it be spread. Brotherhood is selective and exclusive. It cannot extend very far without exposing itself to sudden and violent refutation. Hence the Arab proverb: “I and my brother against my cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” An association of brothers is not a new entity, a corporation which can negotiate for its members. It remains essentially plural—indeed, ikhwân is simply the plural of akh, “brother”—and denotes an assembly of like-minded people brought together by their common commitment, rather than any institution which can claim sovereignty over them. This has significant political repercussions. For instance, when Nasser’s successor as president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, set aside seats in the Egyptian parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood, they were immediately occupied by those judged suitable by the president, and disowned by the real Brotherhood, which continued its violent activities, culminating in Sadat’s assassination. Simply put, brothers don’t take orders. They act together as a family—until they quarrel and fight.

This brings me to a final and critical point of difference between Western and Islamic communities. We live in a society of strangers who associate rapidly and tolerate each other’s differences. Yet ours is not a society of vigilant conformity. It makes few public demands that are not contained in secular law; and it allows people to move quickly from one group to the next, one relationship to the next, one business, religion, or way of life to the next, and all with relative ease. It is endlessly creative in forming the institutions and associations that enable people to live with their differences and remain on peaceful terms, without the need for intimacy, brotherhood, or tribal loyalties. I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but it is the way things are, and this is the inevitable byproduct of citizenship as I have described it.

What makes it possible to live in this way? There is a simple answer, and that is drink. What the Koran promises in paradise but forbids here below is the necessary lubricant of the Western dynamo. You see this clearly in America, where cocktail parties immediately break the ice between strangers and set every large gathering in motion, stimulating a collective desire for rapid agreement among people who a moment before did not know each other from Adam. This habit of quickly coming to the point depends on many aspects of our culture besides drink, of course, but drink is critical, and those who have studied the phenomenon are largely persuaded that, for all the costs that our civilization has paid in terms of alcoholism, accidents, and broken homes, it is largely thanks to drink that we have been, in the long run, so successful. Of course, Islamic societies have their own ways of creating fleeting associations: the hookah, the coffee house, and the traditional bathhouse, praised by Lady Mary Wortley Montague as establishing a solidarity among women that has no equivalent in the Christian world. But these forms of association are also forms of withdrawal, a standing back from the business of government in a posture of peaceful resignation. Drink has the opposite effect: It brings strangers together in a state of controlled aggression, able and willing to engage in any business that should arise from the current conversation.

The features to which I have referred do not merely explain the uniqueness of Western civilization; they also account for its success in navigating the enormous changes that have come about through the advance of technology and science, just as they explain the political stability and democratic ethos of its component nation-states. These features also distinguish Western civilization from the Islamic communities in which terrorists are cultivated. And they help to explain the great resentment of those terrorists who cannot match, with their own moral and religious resources, the easy competence with which the citizens of Europe and America negotiate the modern world.

If this is so, then how should we defend the West from Islamist terrorism? I shall suggest a brief answer to that question. First, we should be clear about what it is that we are and are not defending. We are not defending, for example, our wealth or our territory; these things are not at stake. Rather, we are defending our political and cultural inheritance, embodied in the seven features which I have singled out here for attention. Second, we should be clear that you cannot overcome resentment by feeling guilty or by conceding fault. Weakness provokes, since it alerts your enemy to the possibility of destroying you. We should therefore be prepared to affirm what we have, and to express our determination to hold on to it. That said, we must recognize that it is not envy but resentment that animates the terrorist. Envy is the desire to possess what the other has; resentment is the desire to destroy it. How do you deal with resentment? This is the great question that so few leaders of mankind have been able to answer. Christians, however, are fortunate in being heirs to the one great attempt to answer it, which was that of Jesus, who drew on a longstanding Jewish tradition that goes back to the Tora, and which was expressed in similar terms by his contemporary R. Hillel. You overcome resentment, Jesus told us, by forgiving it. To reach out in a spirit of forgiveness is not to accuse yourself; it is to make a gift to the other. And it is here, it seems to me, that we have taken a wrong turn in recent decades. The illusion that we are to blame, that we must confess our faults and join our cause to that of our enemies, only exposes us to a more determined hatred. The truth is that we are not to blame; that our enemies’ hatred of us is entirely unjustified; and that their implacable enmity cannot be defused by our breast-beating.

There is a drawback to realizing this truth, however. It makes it seem as though we are powerless. But we are not powerless. There are two resources on which we can call in our defense, one public, and the other private. In the public sphere, we can resolve to protect the good things that we have inherited. That means making no concessions to those who wish us to exchange citizenship for subjection, nationality for religious conformity, secular law for shari’ah, the Judeo-Christian inheritance for Islam, irony for solemnity, self-criticism for dogmatism, representation for submission, and cheerful drinking for censorious abstinence. We should treat with scorn all those who demand these changes and invite them to live where their preferred form of political order is already installed. And we must respond to their violence with whatever force is required to contain it.

In the private sphere, however, Christians should follow the path laid down for them by Jesus: namely, looking soberly and in a spirit of forgiveness on the hurts that we receive, and showing, by our example, that these hurts achieve nothing save to discredit the one who inflicts them. This is the hard part of the task—hard to perform, hard to endorse, and hard to recommend to others. Nonetheless, it is the task at hand, and in a battle the stakes of which are so high, it is a task that we cannot fail to undertake.

Maybe the Covenant Zone should consider shifting its Thursday meetings away from the cafe and into the pub. What is the future of our cities now that cafes for solitary laptop thumpers are taking over every corner and our old drinking culture is being marginalized?

Bat Ye'or: Islam can change, despite its great sensitivity to "blasphemy"

The International Free Press Society has recently formed and now has a useful web site with news of interest to free speech advocates. Among the posts presently highlighted, there is a (partial?) transcript of Bat Ye'or's comments at a recent Columbia Law School panel on "Candor or Respect? Talking About the Religion of Others." Here are some excerpts I find of interest: Bat Yeor’s remarks at Columbia Law School :: International Free Press Society

Since religions are composed of several components: faith, ethic, legend, history, laws, art, rituals - it is clear that suppressing from discussion this major field of human history is tantamount to promoting illiteracy. Of course, different opinions, even insulting and choking ones can be heard by the faithful, but this is the democratic game which allows a pluralism of opinion and everyone accept it.

That said, we can ask, why for some, religions is so touchy? I do not know if it is so touchy for the Buddhists, the Hindus, but it is certainly so for Muslims. Are their specific reasons particular to this religion that provokes reaction to the extent of killing for a criticism? Well I think there are and I will explain why.

In my view this situation results from the character of the Koran. Contrary to the Bible, the Koran is considered uncreated and therefore consubstantial to Allah. Hence criticizing the Koran or holding opinions contrary to its principles is a blasphemy and a direct attack against Allah.

The other point is the particular character attached to prophethood and therefore Muhammad. The figure of Muhammad is like his revelation, he is considered the perfect model and therefore the Sunna, the compilation of his words and deed, are infallible. Any criticism is considered a blasphemy.

The third point relates to history, law and sociology. Muslims lived as an Umma, a religious community convinced, because of its military conquests worldwide and its power, of its superiority which is affirmed anyway in its sacred texts. The Umma developed around its religion not only its whole jurisdiction, historical myths, the feeling of grandeur, superiority and mission - but also its world cohesion. You can argue that Jews and Christians also feel that they belong to a religious group. But they have other pole of interest and of social cohesion, like nationalism, which in a way, competes with religion and is a secular concept. But nationalism came very late to the Muslim world, and it was a European initiative whereas the Muslim sense of unity was the Caliphate, a religious construction.

Any attack or doubt on the validity of its religion might destroy the whole structure. Islam developed through continuous wars and conquests. It has elaborated a code of war, jihad, which is integrated in its religion through the Koran, the Sunna and the biography of the Prophet. This war is justified by its doctrine of religious superiority and perfection. The feeling that Islam has the duty to govern the world is very pregnant today. This implies contempt for non-Muslims and their vilification. Dhimmis, non-Muslims were always obliged to exhibit signs of respect to Muslims. This behavioral obligations imposed upon death sanctions, form an important body of laws and social customs from the beginning of Islam till today, this is what I call dhimmitude. So what we are seeing now is the OIC policy to prohibit the West to criticize Islam in an effort to establish the rules of dhimmitude in the international arena. This objective motivates the fight against Islamophobia that has been declared a central element in the OIC policy.
[...]
Yes actually Islam can change. It has to find in itself the instruments to help the modernist Muslims to change. Unfortunately what I see now, organized in the OIC, is exactly the contrary. The OIC brings all the Muslim countries, the 57 Muslim countries, together, and I wouldn’t say the same rule of course, the same organization, the same politics, its aim at creating a block, a Muslim block, which is, it plans to unify it by rooting it in the Koran and Sharia and the Sunna. So we are going to see a stronger, even a stronger Islamic block, more fundamentalist. But I hope that Muslims, others inside the OIC or in Europe will challenge that, this return to the caliphate, in order to oppose the West, and that will find a way to collaborate on equal terms with other populations, and accept the other populations as equals. This is my hope. And because I always hope in human nature, I am positive and an optimist.
[...]
and also how long it will take, and how long the change, the evolution in the Muslim world will be. Well, it depends upon us, on the non-Muslims. How can we help the Muslims? Because there are many modernist Muslims, as I have said before that are living under a terrible threat, and because they want to challenge that order, and they want to bring another Islam. So how can we help them to achieve this change? We are together, we are in solidarity with them, to bring this renewal, this change.
[...]
there are Muslims who are contesting the fact that the Koran is an uncreated book. They are trying to contextualize some verses by saying that is of this period, but now this version is different….. in fact what was done with the bible. And also others who say but the hadiths were written two centuries afterward so they doubt the veracity of the hadith.There are Muslims who are working within the possibility of Islam to change the rigidity that has inhabited for centuries …. so we have to help them and hope that this will change.

Now about the OIC, what can we do? This debate is related to this. How can we speak to Islam? How can we speak about religion? How can we avoid offending people? Do we have to be civilized and polite? Then we are missing candor and so on. I think we need candor in some situations where for instance where religions prescribe the death of people. Where religions are very aggressive and manifests an aggressivity towards other people and want to destroy their system. So we have to be candid about it and fight back.

The problem is that, in the West, the situation is not very well understood and also there is a great challenge of terrorism, indigenous terrorism in Europe. You don’t have it here in America. But we are very much afraid of European terrorism and also foreign terrorism and also economical boycott, which is very imortant. So for all these reasons we are not bringing a different or necessary answer to the challenges of our time

Dutch diviners go Delphic?

nrc.nl - International - Dutchman acquitted of insulting Islam

A question I have raised from time to time in our discussions of free speech and laws targeting putative "hate speech", is how is it possible for any court to draw a line around hate speech without becoming politicized and, quite possibly, mystical. I'm still trying to get my head around this report on the latest definition of hate speech from the Dutch high court. It would appear that to be guilty of hate speech in the Netherlands you have to be "needlessly offensive" and offering a criticism of a group that has little bearing on the members' substantial ideas or behaviour. I suppose this is a reasonable way for a court to limit its exposure to politics without completely tossing out a law that threatens to politicize justice. Still, while limiting the exposure of religious critics to the law, it might seem the court only makes those cases where people will be pursued by the law into something noteworthy, as if we need to make a public spectacle of the needlessly offensive, like someone saying "the devil sucks!".

One wonders how needlessly offensive comments that don't bear on the ideas or behaviour of at least some followers of a religion are to be decided. It might appear that to be guilty one has to be needlessly offensive towards a religious community in a way that is really not too consequential to the world of serious ideas. The court seems to want to leave the door open to serious criticism of religions, and yet criminalize those who are just plain rude and thus, one might think, eminently forgettable and inconsequential if not made into a public demon/martyr. In any case, one imagines finding someone guilty under this law will now become a bizarre process. Geert Wilders is the next challenge for the court:

"Stop the tumour that is Islam" is not an insult to a group on the basis of its religion, the Dutch high court ruled on Tuesday. An activist from the southern town of Valkenswaard, who had hung a poster using this slogan in his window, has been acquitted of the charge, which is similar to one of the charges faced by controversial Dutch anti-Islam member of parliament Geert Wilders.

The man from Valkenswaard had hung the poster after the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. The poster read: "Stop the tumour that is Islam. Theo has died for us. Who will be next? Resist now! National Alliance, we will not bow down to Allah. Join now." [The National Alliance in the Netherlands is an extreme right movement.]

The high court on Tuesday explained its ruling by saying that it is not a crime to express insults towards religion. "Not even if that happens in such a way that the devotees feel their religious feelings are hurt", the court said.

The highest judge in the Netherlands said that only if a needlessly offensive remark is 'explicitly' geared towards a certain group, which is distinct from others in society based on its religion, can there be a matter of group insult as defined in article 137c of the Dutch criminal code. For an insult towards a group to be punishable, that group has to be 'collectively' hit in what defines that group, namely religion. Criticism towards opinions that exist within a group or the behaviour of people belonging to that group cannot be penalized, according to the ruling.

The regional court and the court of appeals had given the man a suspended sentence, but his lawyer took the case all the way to the high court pleading that the defendant only targeted a radical part of Islam that wants to disturb western society. He said the poster was at most a political opinion about a social evil.

The high court said the same criteria of group insult will apply in the prosecution of Geert Wilders. The appeals court in Amsterdam last month ordered that Wilders should be prosecuted for hate speech and inciting discrimination because of his statements about Islam and the short film Fitna.

The judge in that case will also have to determine whether Wilders' remarks are "unmistakeably aimed at a certain group of people that are distinguished from the others in society by their religion". Wilders, when asked to respond, called Tuesday's ruling good news: "This could have consequences for my case".

Australian film silenced

A critically acclaimed film dramatizing the 2005 Sydney beach violence has been pulled from local theatres due to cowardice, a failing state, and some small Muslim gang violence. World Challenges for the XXIst century » Australia: film about 2005’s violence pulled from cinemas after brawls(HT: Catfur)

A Type of Beauty

Life can sometimes be terribly cruel, as we see from the biography of Cervantes, as an example: Muslims cut off one of his hands. He went on to write Don Quixote, true, but had he been left with both hands, he might have written two books. Yes, life is sometimes cruel. I hope, though, that your life will improve noticeably soon. To achieve that I recently got two things to improve my writing and your life: I got from a graduand at a local college a cap I can wear so I can write far smarter copy; and I got a beautiful typewriter so I will write more beautiful prose, finer poetry, and even more famouser headlines. I look very smart in my new cap, but the typewriter is a thing of real beauty. Below is a bit about it and its parents.

E.B. Hess co-founded The Royal Typewriter Company, in Brooklyn, New York, and moved it to Hartford, Connecticut in 1908, according to the Federal Writer's Project (Connecticut. By Federal Writers' Project. Published by US History Publishers, 1938.)

Company: Royal Typewriter Company , New York , USA. First year of production: 1906

The Royal typewriter entered the market in 1906. It would grow to be one of the leading brands that would dominate the market together with the Underwood and the Remington. That alone should be enough to earn a place in a museum.

[I]n 1914 the upright Royal 10 appeared... the classic model with beveled glass sides that would grow to be one of the market leaders.

http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=royal1&cat=kf

The Royal 10 is another giant in the typewriter market. Like the Underwood 5 it is one of the machines that essentially marked the end of the history of typewriter development. Machines like the Royal 10 continued to be built for many decades, with most changes limited to cosmetic alterations.

The Royal 10 was introduced in 1914. It had two bevelled glass panels on either side of the machine. A later version only had one glass panel on either side. It is not clear at what point exactly that change was made....

http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=royal10&cat=kf

Yes, dear reader, it's a poor workman who blames his tools. I gave that up and simply bought a new machine. I think you must be deeply impressed already. I know I am. Funny how life can be. I used to type with two fingers, but I quickly ran out of two letter words, which forced me to learn to type with four fingers. That got me into lots of trouble, I know not why. But now, with five fingers, I can type all sorts of cool words. This new typewriter also ensures that I'll write beautifully. On the other hand, there are five more fingers! Life is good.