Los Angeles — and in particular, Hollywood — is greeting the New Year with trepidation, after a series of car fires set by an unknown arsonist or arsonists. There is no indication so far of any cultural enrichment in these fires, but the year is young. Stay tuned.Elsewhere in the USA, word has leaked out that the Obama administration is consulting Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an intermediary in negotiations with the Taliban. The surrender is now complete — the United States government has gone over to the enemy, and no one in the country is paying any attention. They’re too busy tracking the poll numbers on Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry.
God help us all.
In other news, an official in the European Central Bank says that euro is poised to become the world’s leading currency in the next few years.
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5 comments:
"The Palace of Westminster has rejected demands to serve halal meat in its restaurants.
Muslim MPs and peers have been told they cannot have meat slaughtered in line with Islamic tradition because the method – slitting an animal’s throat without first stunning it – is offensive to many of their non-Muslim colleagues."
My Title
[OT, justly deleted from this comments thread]
Lawrence -
"One has to look at the bulk of his supporters to fully understand his platform. [..] Paul's problem is he has no answer to the issues which require laws for an ordered society. People can't just do whatever they want."
Reducing free market philosophy and a free society with limited government under the Constitution to "anarchy", misrepresented as "do whatever they want", is that all you got?
Pity..
You speak about "ordered society", professing a belief of sorts that the welfare state - if properly "managed" by the right people, no doubt - will provide this, distributed in a way that is understood by both "conservatives" and liberals. That's your "order".
I maintain that in fact the exact opposite is the case, in that the interventionist state has sponsored the predatory forces within society, seeking govt power to live at the expense of their fellow citizens. I maintain that it is the state with its ever expanding sphere of meddling that has created a massive "bystander-effect", when state-care from cradle to grave is expected by consumers. Besides sapping the resourcefulness of individual citizens, the "orderly" state has caused many freedom loving patriots to feel more than just a little uneasy about their fundamental liberties being under siege.
You say "order," I say disorder, of the State. Today's illness of the welfare/warfare state is exactly like some of the Founders feared and Alexis de Tocqueville would predict, long ago, when he tried to envision a modern and subtle form of stealthy tyranny.
Take care,
Sag
I am inclined to regard Paul as a political infighter on the same level with Gingrich...which makes parsing his positions from his supporters an exercise in futility.
Ron Paul isn't so excessively principled about his stand for Constitutional government to refrain from using every trick in the political book to defeat legislation that he regards as violating the Constitution while simultaneously making sure that even the passage of such legislation isn't a defeat for him as a politician. This is best illustrated by his record of using "earmarks".
Ron Paul is vocally opposed to earmarks, riders in legislation written to benefit the constituents of a congressional representatives district rather than to serve the overall design of the bill. But he's one of the biggest culprits himself, since he puts (occasionally outrageous) earmarks into everything he doesn't like whenever he has a chance (and given his seniority, he gets a lot of chances). The strategy is a classic dilemma...if the bill passes (over his dissenting vote), then he shores up support among his constituents. If the bill fails as a result of his porking it up and demonizing it as unnecessary and destructive spending...well he's won the day for limited government.
It's a clever strategy, and I admire his audacity and consistency in using it to high-light the evils of earmarks and unconstitutional Congressional over-reaching. But it means that Ron Paul can be legitimately accused of being one of the leading porkers at the trough when it comes to spending excesses. That the accusation falls apart when you filter out things he actually voted against doesn't change the fact that it is a damning accusation backed by the record (as long as you omit other parts of the record).
Ron Paul is a politician. He's willing to say things to make socialists vote for him by exploiting their basic assumptions. And their most basic assumption is described by Bastiat in very clear terms.
"Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all.
"We disapprove of education by the State - then we are against education altogether.
"We object to a State religion - then we would have no religion at all.
"We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc.
"They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.
"How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain - prosperity, in the positive sense, wealth, science, religion - should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never have have entered a human brain."
It is unfortunate that some of the "socially conservative" are more socialist than conservative. Those will not like what Ron Paul has to say nor how he says it. But one would hope that most of those with a serious investment in the roots of Western Civilization would understand that any kind of socialism is fundamentally antithetical to the conservation of Western values such as the rule of law and individual moral accountability.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
"Muslim MPs and peers have been told they cannot have meat slaughtered in line with Islamic tradition because the method – slitting an animal’s throat without first stunning it – is offensive to many of their non-Muslim colleagues.""
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Islamic meat slaughtering is very similar to Jewish meat slaughtering. But I assume they won't make such a big fuss over kosher meat, otherwise they might offend the Jews...
Arsonists in L.A. :
Maybe Ambassador Rivkin from Paris had invited some "Djeunes" from the Paris suburbs to a "cultural enrichement clinic" in California.
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