The Stone Age Trinity Meets The Tipping Point's Magic Number

It means we are likely to remain in a protracted struggle against Paleolithic instincts -- which, of course, translate into the zigzag of everyday politics. None of this is to argue that guilt, envy, or indignation are emotions we would always be better off without in contemporary Western society. But I would suggest that we'd all be better off localizing these urges in the confines of family and community. And we should continually ask ourselves in precisely what contexts these emotions are appropriate.

Given the tremendous good that is brought about by self-interested market exchange, it seems we'll have to teach ourselves time-and-again the intellectual lessons of prosperity in a complex economic order. We will also have to fight turf wars with those who think the sentiments of Stone Age Trinity can be wrapped up in intellectual claptrap (like Marxism), force fed to our students in the ivory towers, sold to us on the evening news, or foisted upon us inside marble domes.

Now you know you need to read the rest -- it's short -- to understand the critical concept of the magic number 150 that animates this piece. And the 150 years of misery its tardy discovery has caused...

Beauracracy's The Baseline

That post reminds me of a quote from President Truman. Upon Eisenhower's election he said, "I can't wait until that damn General gets in here (the Oval Office) and gives an order and nothing happens."

Looney Liberal Lawyers Lose Laughably

"Roberts's opinion does give rise to, and leaves unresolved, one nonlegal but rather large and disturbing question: How could so many law professors of such high rank and distinction be so wrong about such straightforward issues of constitutional law?

The losing party, the Forum for Academic and Individual Rights (FAIR), is an association of 36 law schools and law faculty, only 24 of which are willing to be named publicly. In addition, groups of faculty members from many of the leading law schools in the land filed separate friend of the court briefs on behalf of FAIR (alone among law faculty, members of George Mason filed a brief--in which I played no role--supporting the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment). These included a friend of the court brief signed by 40 Harvard Law School professors--including Dean Elena Kagan in her capacity as professor of law; University Professor Laurence Tribe; and University Professor Frank Michelman. The brief was prepared under the supervision of counsel of record Walter Dellinger, professor of law at Duke University and former solicitor general of the United States in the Clinton administration.

Another friend of the court brief was signed by 42 members of the Yale Law School Faculty, including Harold Hongju Koh, dean and professor of law; former dean and Sterling Professor of Law Anthony Kronman; and Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Bruce Ackerman. In addition, a joint friend of the court brief was submitted by Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. Their counsel of record was Seth Waxman, a visiting professor of law at Georgetown, and, like Dellinger, a former solicitor general in the Clinton administration.

This dazzling array of eminent law professors proved incapable--even after hiring the best Democratic party legal talent money could buy--of advancing a single legal argument persuasive enough to pick off even a single dissent from the four more progressive justices on the court--Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Stevens--or to provoke even a single concurrence expressing a single demurral on a single point of law from Chief Justice Roberts's opinion."

Jejune Jimmah

"That Carter gets away with passing off his jejune axioms as serious political thought is a barometer of the senescence of liberalism. Liberal Intellectuals once looked askance at Carter. When Carter first arrived on the national scene in the mid-1970s, his superficial references to Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, and other thinkers set off alarm bells among LIs such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Schlesinger, who had been close to Niebuhr, could detect none of Niebuhr's hard-headed realism in Carter's use of Niebuhr's words, causing him to wonder "whether Mr. Carter can really have understood Niebuhr." Schlesinger was not alone among LIs, who grasped immediately Carter's essential fraudulence and warned that he would be a disaster for the Democratic party. Yet now liberals look the other way as Carter fetes Michael Moore in the presidential box at the Democratic National Convention."

Ummm ... Yale Comes To Mind

"The underlying reason why America is doing so poorly in the field of "information warfare" against the Jihad is that its traditional organs of articulation -- the academy, media, Hollywood -- are largely hostile to the War on Terror itself. It's conceivable that an Iranian might flee persecution only to be taught at a US university that he ought to embrace it by the many academic departments whose point of view is exactly that. In a fundamental sense, the War on Terror is twinned to the greatest single issue dividing the Left and Right, which is whether the United States, as a nation, is legitimate or whether, as some would maintain, it is Amerika: an abomination whose demise must be hastened by any means necessary."

Except of course, Yale won't take in the refugees -- only their oppressors. The refugees being too much like whitey...

The Problem Of Evil

"The question that always bothered me was whether that person -- or any man -- had any right to expect someone else to do the dirty job for him. Can we ever simultaneously acknowledge the necessity of a deed and the absolute immorality of doing it? That in a nutshell is the Problem of Evil: that evil exists and that by and by we will have to face it. The question Tom Fox should have posed is "how do you stand firm against a car-bomber headed straight for a schoolbus?" And if you say, "shoot to save the children" ask yourself if it ever justified to be glad that God had sent someone else to shoot the bomber and go hell in your stead. Tom Fox stood for his beliefs to the bitter end. And now the men who killed him are out there, waiting to kill again."

And while we're at it we should ban police departments too I suppose. They just oppress the poor you know.

WW0 In A Nutshell: NYeT Obliviousness Watch

"For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats"

Was The Enlightenment A Mistake?

Ummm ... no. Deafeningly, resoundingly no:

"Of course I realize that some disagree, and see any even possibly pejorative reference to Mohammed — or for that matter any depiction of Mohammed — as a horrible emotional injury. But their subjective feelings, real as they may be to them, are not sufficient reasons for the rest of us to change the way we talk or write. "I'm offended" cannot be justification enough, either in law or in manners, for the conclusion "therefore you must shut up." (Among other things, note that many people are quite understandably offended when others say "I'm offended, therefore you must shut up." If mere offense on some listeners' part is reason enough for the speakers to stop saying, then I take it that those who are offended have an obligation to themselves remain silent.)

This is why this issue is so important: Those who demand that the cartoons not be published or republished are cutting at the heart of public debate. They are either demanding that some ideologies not be criticized, or that they be handled with such kid gloves that normal debate about them — which is inevitably impassioned, given the magnitude of the issues involved — is practically impossible. This is why the West must resist this pressure to silence, both as a legal matter and as a matter of editorial judgment."

By Golly, We Have Them Surrounded Now, Don't We?

"Detainee was present at a clandestine meeting in October 2001 between Taliban and Iranian officials in which Iran pledged to assist the Taliban in their war with the United States."

Why doesn’t it matter if the UAE provides material support to Hamas?

NYeT Again

"Call it the Islamintern. Like the Comintern, it attracts the marginal, the disaffected, the petty thugs and common criminals, and gives them a clear and simple ideology to guide their actions. It allows them to continue in their customary ways — murdering, raping, stealing and extorting — while furnishing them with a mandate from Allah to do so. The Communists were following the dictates of History, and the Islamists are carrying out the will of God.

To the willing dupes in the West, there is no connection among all these groups, just as there was none among the Viet Cong and the FMLN and revolutionaries of Angola. But somehow all these native freedom fighters just happened to be fomenting violence in the same way at the same time.

And somehow all these terrorists spread all over the globe just happen to be murdering and maiming in the name of Allah. It’s just coincidence.

The Comintern, of course, was aided in its efforts by all the fools and shills in the West.

The 1930s had George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Walter Duranty, and The New York Times.

In the 21st century, the Islamintern has Dan Rather, Cindy Sheehan, Jimmy Carter, and The New York Times.

Every generation has its useful idiots."

On retroactively cancelling the Enlightenment...

"Right then. We’ll go do military-type things within sovereign states and call that a policy designed not to piss off the rest of the world (much less get them to potentially declare war on us, since those actions themselves, whether done by Special Forces operators or Predators would be an act of war). And the UN's "obsession" with soverignty won't stand in the way. Riiiight, that's going to play out well in the intrenational arena. "

"If they had not done it this place would still be a toilet."

And check out Michelle's post...

It turns out that some Sunnis know what it will actually take to avert a major spike in the Civil War. You know, the one that's been going on for DECADES. Unless you're so dim as to call Saddam and his thugs spooning children's eyeballs out as good governance.

No doubt the Post will soon be reporting that Jews in America are "often targeted for violence."

Good night and good luck Theo...

And don't forget that old-time rebellion...

Profound puerility.

Did I forget to mention all the help those moderate Germans gave us?

"Apparently when you combine a sub-par 4th grade education, a B+ college average in a special program, and a job history as a spokesperson for a regime that hates America, destroys priceless Buddhas, oppresses women, stones homosexuals, and enforces brutal sharia law in violation of UN Human Rights agreements, you have the magic formula for admission to Yale. Next time I get a phone call from a high school senior in tears over Yale's rejection, I'll tell them to visit a local museum and blow up some sacred Buddhas, stone a homosexual or threaten to beat his/her mother to death if she refuses to wear a burka.

Thank you very much for helping me understand Yale Admissions."

Dhimmis fall apart in data-mining civil war? Irony abounds. Although I don't think people who were never actually together can fall apart ;)

TAMMY: "Yay! From Geert Wilders, the populist member of the Netherlands's parliament as the Dutch consider completely banning the burqa. It is hostile, and should be considered the equivalent of having blacks walk around in leg-irons. And don't tell me it's okay because "the women want it that way." Yes, and we don't take seriously the insistence of battered women that they deserve it. Sure, some really believe they do, but that doesn't mean civilized society looks away and allows the brain-washed to dictate social policy."

EneMedia Vietnam Update

"The -- we do know, of course, that al Qaeda has media committees. We do know that they teach people exactly how to try to manipulate the media. They do this regularly. We see the intelligence that reports on their meetings and -- now, I can't take a string and tie it to a news report and then trace it back to an al Qaeda media committee meeting.

I'm not able to do that at all. We do know that their goal is to try to break the will -- that they consider the center of gravity of this not to be in Iraq -- because they know they can't win a battle out there -- they consider it to be in Washington, D.C., and in London, in the capitals of the Western world."

And in that regard, this IS just like Vietnam.

What Holocaust?

THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN OF COURSE: "Bob Persinger doesn't remember this scene. He remembers half-dead prisoners singing and cheering, and the way he was whipsawed between elation and horror: “They were celebrating like you wouldn't believe, they were so happy. So were we, but on the other hand, we were crying.” " (HT Power Line)

Did I forget to mention the most important lesson of the holocaust? You know, the one we refuse to learn?: "When a man says he wants to kill you ... you should believe him."

Apparently, this little girl is one of those hateful Jews controlling the world that need to be wiped off the map. Well, she would be perceived as such by complete lunatics anyway... I'm sorry but this just makes me want to wretch. Period.

Excellent quotations from "Oncoming" and much, much more in "Our Darkening Sky ..."
You should be able to tell you need to read this one.

"On the other hand, I suppose I'd be willing to trade direct election of the President for a return to the election of US Senators by state legislatures. "

Mullahs lied, Eurabians fried...

WHOOPS UPDATE: The comment of the day is found on this post also: "How many million Jews achieve "peace in our time" this go-round?"