What’s Wrong with the World

One of the acts of George W. Bush that caused me to lose respect for him was his signing the McCain-Feingold bill, which he had campaigned against, while at the same time stating that he thought parts of it were probably unconstitutional.

Since he had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, it seemed, and seems, completely wrong for him to do that.

The only explanation I could think of at the time was this: He was punting to the courts. Rather like Nancy Pelosi telling us that we need to pass a law to find out what's in it, GWB was saying that he needed to sign a law to find out whether it was really unconstitutional or not. He thereby rendered at least partially meaningless his oath to uphold the Constitution, for if the Constitution is really so arcane and its relation to laws really so inscrutable that he has no responsibility to refrain from signing those that he thinks probably violate it, this evacuates one of the most significant ways in which the President might be expected to uphold the Constitution--namely, in his role in the passage or non-passage of legislation. In other words, GWB was engaging in a shockingly irresponsible act of constitutional abdication.

Continue reading "The TSA and constitutional abdication" »

Just concluded a pair of introductory philosophy courses wherein I used Ed Feser's Aquinas as a required text. Here's my Amazon review:

Continue reading "Ed Feser's Aquinas" »

The Glastonbury thorn has been hacked this year on the very day that a sprig of it is traditionally taken to the Queen.

I can't quite get from the stories whether there is enough of the trunk left for this token of the type to survive. (Readers, what do you think?) Evidently the intention is instead for it to be replanted from cuttings that have grown elsewhere in the town as it was after Cromwell & Co. hacked it down during the English Civil War.

I don't think the director of the Glastonbury Abbey (why is a woman the director of the Glastonbury Abbey?) should be calling this act of vandalism "mindless," as if it were perpetrated by androids. But that's the way crime is always spoken of nowadays. Nobody commits crimes. They "happen" or they are "mindless."

One story, which I can't seem to find again now, implied that there may be no prosecution even if the perpetrators are found, because there was no preservation order on the tree. So vandalism isn't illegal by itself in England anymore?

I hope they catch them and punish them to the full extent of the law, such as it is.

(Great minds must think alike. I was already thinking about this post before Jeff put up his previous one.)

A Western song goes like this:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.
...
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.

I've heard it said that the American pioneer spirit is the enemy of civilization and "community," and I suppose the cowboy spirit expressed here would be even more so. The focus on freedom is, in contemporary jargon, "in your face." I would guess that no woman, in particular, can hear old Bing sing "Don't Fence Me In" without raising her eyebrows. "Oh, yeah, buddy? You ever want to be married? Have children? Is that hobbles and fences? You're going to have to settle down sometime or die alone, and we'll see how you like that."

Continue reading "Don't Fence Me In" »

Continue reading "Maybe if we just ask Texas to invade ..." »

In my original post in the Disinviting Islam series I pointed out examples of outrageous Muslim demands for special accommodation by employers and by those serving the public.

One of the purposes of some of Jeff's policy suggestions (though not the only purpose) was to make it clear that such accommodations do not have to be made.

A different route to that particular goal would be this: Since enforcement bodies such as the EEOC and various civil rights commissions have wide latitude to decide what constitutes "reasonable accommodation," a determined administration at the federal level could make a large difference to such accommodations, especially if the federal move encouraged copy-cat moves at the level of state bureaucracies.

I herewith present a suggested informational open letter to be written by the head or heads of enforcement agencies for non-discrimination laws. See what you think of it:

Continue reading "A bureaucratic response to outrageous Muslim demands" »

My jaw already dropped over this story several days ago when I first learned of it. I've only been waiting to post it until the Islam series was fully launched, because it is on a completely different topic.

I still find this hard to believe, but here it is in cold, hard pixels:

Manhattan is going to start a federally funded pilot program intended to procure more kidneys for transplant. Here's how it will work: The people running the program will monitor 911 calls and dispatch chatter via radio. They will discover from this when someone has collapsed and is in danger of death from apparent or possible heart failure. If an EMT arrives and declares the person dead, the procurement team will rush to the scene where they will have a brief window of time (fifty minutes from declaration of death) to obtain confirmation that the suddenly dead person is on a donor registry and to obtain consent from relatives who happen to be present. The story is unclear as to whether family consent is sufficient even if the person is not on an organ donation registry. (If the person is already on a donation registry, would family consent be necessary?) After getting the required paperwork, the (very new) body will be put into a special ambulance and hooked up to a machine to keep it oxygenated, then rushed to a hospital where the kidneys will be taken.

Oh, and somewhere in that narrow window of time they will also fit a lightning-quick evaluation by a police detective to make sure that there is not going to be a criminal investigation for which the body might be needed.

Imagine the scene: Your previously healthy husband has just collapsed at the dinner table. You frantically call 911. The EMTs show up and declare him dead on the spot. Nothing they can do for him. Sorry ma'am. You are in shock, hardly even able to take in what has happened. Suddenly, entirely uninvited, a whole additional team of complete strangers shows up at your home. They start trying to comfort you, and you try, in your state of shock, to figure out who all these people are. Then they start asking you whether your husband was signed up to be an organ donor. You don't know. Not that you know of. The two of you really hadn't talked about the matter. Look, you ask, is it true? Is he really dead? Can't anything be done? No, ma'am, no ma'am. He's been declared dead. Now, about those organs. Our computer records show that he is listed as being on the registry. He could give the gift of life to someone else. Do we have your permission? Can we take the body? There isn't much time, you see, to get this done. Just sign here, ma'am...

And off they go with his body, in some haste, to get the kidneys.

Continue reading "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" »

Is there something un-Christian about the idea of disinviting Islam here in America? Are we not, as Christians, supposed to desire to help people? Josh McDowell, who produced a "Sharia Love" Youtube video snarkily criticizing the Acts 17 missionaries for getting arrested in Dearborn, can be fairly said to exult in the fact that Dearborn is a Muslim enclave. Now, McDowell says, we can be foreign missionaries without going outside of the United States. Having turned part of the United States into a foreign country, we can go and be missionaries there quite easily. (Listen to the radio interview.)

Even if McDowell's way of putting things (including his love of sharia) seems to be going too far, it still might be argued that stopping Muslim immigration and other similar proposals, such as those in Part II, evince a lack of charity toward our Muslim fellow men. Interestingly, the missionaries McDowell was criticizing are also resistant to the idea of keeping Muslims out of America. (See my discussion with David Wood here by searching for my name in the comments.) It seems that it is difficult for those Christians who have the deepest heart for helping Muslims and reaching Muslims to agree that America should have fewer of them, and it might seem that this should make other Christians stop and think twice about proposals to disinvite Islam.

There is no point in denying the fact that there is a tension here between two things--1) the desire in the short term (more on that below) to preach the Gospel to as many Muslims as possible, to give, in the short term, as many Muslim women as possible the opportunity to seek freedom from evils such as beating and FGM, and to give, in the short term, as many Muslim children as possible an opportunity to witness what is good in American life and possibly to choose to break free from Islam as they grow older and 2) the desire to protect Americans from Muslim violence and to protect American culture from Muslim invasion and negative change.

Continue reading "Disinviting Islam: Part III--Christian Charity" »

Alas, I am stunned and inspired. The tide is finally turning, even in decadent old Europe. Pray it isn't too late.

Another Muslim "moderate," that is.

I couldn't resist this brief post:

An imam in Germany has been arrested for beating his wife so badly that he broke her nose and shoulder and gave her numerous cuts and bruises. He's charged with grievous bodily harm. He tried to resist the police when they came to his house to rescue his wife from him. It's alleged that he shouted the Koranic verse justifying wife beating while beating her.

He is an official "moderate" who recently gave a lecture at a Catholic University called "An Islam which distances itself from violence," and he has been receiving government protection from extremists because he's been calling for Muslims to "reject radical Islam."

I tell ya', you can't make these things up.

Well, the Federal Reserve has, under orders from Congress, released a huge mass of data on its extraordinary interventions into the financial sector during the height of the crisis, from 2007-2009. These documents make for interesting reading. In a word, the Fed was throwing money at everything that moved. Never has “lending of last resort” been realized so radically. The variety of institutions partaking of the acronymic cacophony of lending facilities and other devices is something to behold. I was amused to see that Harley-Davidson was a regular participant in a commercial paper lending operation. Motorcycles and shadow banking: an interesting business amalgam. Then there is the sheer size of these loans to the big banks. We’re talking about firms borrowing $15 or $20 billion in overnight loans, every night, for weeks. And foreign banks no less than domestic ones were clinging to the Fed for dear life. The documents leave no doubt that the private banking system was in ruins. Here are several good summaries of the documents.

Relatedly, Martin Wolf of The Financial Times has an excellent column yesterday describing in overview the crisis in Europe. What’s going on is that private obligations are being converted into public obligations: government and finance are merging. This is a historical and global trend, most acutely evident in Europe right now.

PUBLIC POLICY

A number of specific policies for dealing with domestic Islam have been proposed since 9-11, mainly by pundits well outside the political mainstream. A few of these proposals have already been discussed at length by the contributers and commenters here at W4. As Lydia McGrew reminded me yesterday, the first and most obvious thing to do is simply to enforce our own just laws, many of which are winked at, flouted or ignored in the name of sensitivity to Islamic cultural practices. Beyond this fundamental beginning, I’d like to summarize what I consider to be the best and most realistic proposals in order to create a practical guide for political action on the national level.

1. Halt Muslim immigration. This policy should be specifically directed at the immigration of Muslims, from any nation, and not simply at immigration from Muslim states or from states known for their Islamic extremism. (According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations there are an estimated 7 million Muslims in this country, along with almost 2,000 mosques and Islamic centers, forming what amounts to an impenetrable Islamic sub-culture on American soil.)

2. Halt the issuance of all student, religious and immigrant visas to Muslims, and revoke those presently in effect. (Of the 48 Islamic terrorists apprehended between 1993 and 2001, only 12 were in the country illegally.)

Continue reading "Disinviting Islam: Part II - Proposals" »

"Suicidal liberalism" is something of a catch phrase. It's old news that liberalism is suicidal. But I'd like to highlight a couple of examples here so that we conservatives can look soberly at the very real possibility that our liberal leadership and their liberal followers would prefer that we die, that they die, that large numbers of people die, rather than that anything be done that goes contrary to their first and greatest commandment: Thou shalt not discriminate.

I already mentioned in Part I of the Disinviting Islam series a rather amazing statement by a liberal blogger: "[I]t is more important to you to preserve an open and tolerant society than to survive this trip."

By this time we should know that this is not all that atypical. It has resonances in General Casey's shocking statement, a statement that should have lost him his job and made him a pariah with all patriots, "[W]hat happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

And now, in the wake of the Portland attempted Christmas tree bombing, we have more examples.

Continue reading "Suicidal liberalism" »

This post inaugurates a series co-written with my colleague Jeff Culbreath on the topic of disinviting Islam. Each individual post will be written by one of us, allowing us each the freedom to state opinions with which the other might not agree in every detail, but allowing us to show our general agreement on the topic by rolling out the series as a joint project. The first part will argue for a need to disinvite Islam. Part II will make policy suggestions. Part III will address the question of Christian charity.

It is no secret to the readers of What's Wrong With the World that I have expressed elsewhere, as has Jeff Culbreath, the position that Muslim immigration to the United States should be halted and that measures should be taken to make it clear that the religion of Islam is not just another religion and is not welcome in the United States.

Why, to begin with, should we disinvite Islam? To go into detail on all the reasons that could be adduced would take far, far more than a blog post, and much spadework has been done on this issue elsewhere. Indeed, one of the reasons that Robert Spencer's work is so valuable is that he has given all the ammunition necessary for the argument that Islam is incompatible with American values and that, e.g., our current non-discriminatory immigration policies are dangerous and out of touch with reality. Whether and to what extent he has personally made a point of the immigration issue is a question that is relatively unimportant in comparison with the sheer quantity and quality of detailed work he has done that supports, de facto, a restrictionist position.

In relatively brief compass, then, for so large a topic:

I. We should disinvite Islam because unrestricted Muslim immigration and/or a large Muslim presence in the United States unnecessarily increases the danger of terrorist attacks on American soil or on American airplanes.

It should not really be necessary to talk about this, nor should we have to document it at length. Please, do not waste our time with talk of Timothy McVeigh. Muslim attacks have taken place or have been intercepted before taking place time and time again in recent years against American citizens on American soil or airplanes, from 9/11 to Nidal Hasan to the Christmas underwear bomber to the plot against the fuel lines at JFK to a plot to bomb the subways in D.C. to the New Jersey Muslims planning to train abroad to commit terrorism at home--the list goes on and on and on. The most recent as of this writing is, of course, Somali immigrant Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the would-be Christmas tree bomber, but he won't be anywhere near the last. Jihad Watch, with typical dark humor, refers to such terrorists as "misunderstanders of Islam," and googling that phrase at Jihad Watch turns up a huge number of highly informative posts, a compendium of the acts and plans of those "misunderstanders" of the Religion of Peace here and abroad.

It is folly to try to tell us that this has nothing to do with Islam. This is not a matter of abstract argument. Tell it to the perpetrators, and let us know how that's working out for you after a few more plots and attacks. And tell it to all the air travelers and victims who have paid the price for multiculturalism in loss of time, loss of privacy, and loss of freedom, not to mention loss of life.

Really, point I is almost too easy to substantiate. It is so easy to substantiate that the really religiously committed multiculturalist tacitly acknowledges it when, as in the case of General Casey, he implies that the deaths of Americans really don't matter all that much, that non-discrimination is more important than saving lives. We should be willing to die for the religion of non-discrimination--no airport profiling, no sacrificing of diversity in the military, no matter what the cost. One blogger has said as much, calling on the people of the West to be "brave" by refusing profiling on airlines, because "it is more important to you to preserve an open and tolerant society than to survive this trip." (Link HT: VFR)

Continue reading "Disinviting Islam: Part I--the need" »