Category: Uncategorized

Michael Ledeen flips arguments:

It’s hard to imagine the MSM getting stupider, but there they go again…a raft of articles today on the “pro-Iranian Shi’ite list” in the Iraqi elections. It’s totally wrong. The Iranians dread the Iraqi Shiites, because the Iraqis, from Sistani to Chalabi to Hakim and on down, all oppose the Iranian heresy of the “Supreme Leader,” a cleric at the top of the state. The traditional Shiite view is that such an event can only take place when the “12th Imam” returns from his disappearance–more than a millennium ago–to claim rightful leadership of the entire Muslim world.

Until then, people in turbans should stay in the mosques, and the state should be governed by non-clerics. Sistani, Chalabi, and Hakim all said they were opposed to clerics in the government. Chalabi said–loudly and publicly, IN TEHRAN–that he and all the members of his list were opposed to the creation of an Iranian-style Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Chalabi also said, publicly on television, sitting next to the Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad, that Iraqi freedom was due to the brave leadership of George W. Bush.

Despite their tricky recent statements endorsing the Iraqi elections, the mullahs know that the Iraqi democratic revolution is a mortal threat to them, and to their heretical version of Shiism. They are now quaking in Tehran, not–as the “expert” commentators and reporters would have us believe–drooling over new-found control over Iraq. If Najaf reestablishes its traditional role as the center of Shiism, the Iranian mullahs will be even further discredited. And that will be quite an achievement for a group that is already fully despised by its own people.

Ledeen sounds like the people who were swearing up and down that there was no connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They were entirely correct, but that was irrelevant. Ledeen may well be correct that the Iraqi Shiites about to come into power are not bosom buddies with their Iranian counterparts, but a failure to see eye to eye is not the same thing as a guarantee that there will be no future cooperation. Ledeen’s position is ironic, since prior to the invasion, he and his neocon ilk were arguing that despite the huge differences between the Islamic terrorists and the secular Ba’athists, the two had managed to find common cause against the United States.

The idea that a majority Muslim government is going to quietly accept a Western-style separation of church and state borders on ludicrous, especially when the leading cleric involved, Sistani, has already declared that the new Iraqi constitution must be based on sharia. It hasn’t happened in Turkey, it hasn’t happened in Algeria or in Indonesia, it has only been grudgingly accepted thanks to the repeated intervention of those nations’ militaries. And it’s interesting how Ledeen asserts that while Iranian Shiites are making tricky statements, declarations by Iraqi Shiites must be taken at their word.

Liberal Democrats very much love to embrace the notion that they are more intelligent, despite the obvious flaw in their logic that the less money and education you have, the more likely you are to vote Democrat for president. And as you might expect, they prefer to stick to vague generalities and baseless assertions instead of actually attempting to put together any evidence to support the concept.

While doing some research for my column on Monday – on a tangentially related topic that should spark some interesting hate mail – I happened to stumble across SAT results listed by state. Now, the SAT is no longer the IQ test it once was, but it is certainly a reasonable starting point for a discussion about intelligence and general intellectual competence, and one much more tangible than any rationale previously cited on the matter.

If one troubles to break down the data by adding up the average SAT score for the 19 states, (including DC) that supported Kerry in 2004, one sees that the average “blue” state SAT score is 518 verbal and 523 math. Converting it to pre-1996 SAT scores makes that 438 verbal and 503 math for a cumulative score of 941 which equates to an IQ of 100.

Meanwhile, the average score for the 32 “red” states that voted for Bush in 2004 is 544 verbal and 545 math. Converting to pre-1996 scores gives 464 verbal and 525 math, for a cumulative SAT score of 989. This equates to an IQ of 105. Therefore, based on a statistically significant amount of hard data, it’s quite clear that Republican states are, on average, more intelligent than Democratic states, which supports the exit poll data which previously indicated that Republicans are smarter.

This is only marginally less nonsensical than the ridiculous Democratic mythology, of course, since the smartest Democratic state, (Wisconsin at 1179 combined), only had 7 percent of its graduates taking the SAT, while the smartest state – North Dakota’s combined score was 1215 – was represented by precisely 4 percent of its grads. Thus, our data is woefully incomplete and inadequate to make a firm conclusion.

And yet, the fact is that based on all of the relevant data available to us at this juncture, Republicans are indubitably smarter than Democrats.

…but homeschooling parents might abuse their children!

Three high school wrestlers face expulsion based on accusations they hog-tied a learning-disabled teammate and zapped him with a grill igniter. Officials call it a hazing prank that went too far. None of the boys were arrested but Volusia County’s sheriff’s office filed felony complaints with prosecutors, seeking felony charges of aggravated battery and false imprisonment.

School officials said two hazing incidents occurred in a wrestling practice room at the high school Tuesday.

Volusia County Sheriff’s Department offers the following account of the incident:

“According to witnesses, the victim — a 17-year-old wrestler — was tackled to the ground by team members while inside the wrestling room, hogtied with a jump rope and then shocked 20 or more

times with an igniter device.”

Not to mention:

A 10-year-old boy has been suspended from a Pompano Beach elementary school amid allegations he raped an 8-year-old classmate. The alleged attack happened last Friday at Sanders Park Elementary School. A school spokesman said an investigation began Monday and the decision was made Wednesday to suspend the boy.

Counseling is available to both the boy and girl.

Well, as long as counseling is available, I’m sure everything will be okay. Here’s the main point. Abusive parents will ALWAYS have access to their children. Abusive teachers and schoolmates won’t if you homeschool. I don’t intend to go through the mathematics of how many more potentially abusive relationships one is likely to enjoy in a public schooled career versus a homeschooled one, but I’m quite sure that it is several orders of magnitude higher.

Anna Quindlen laments the declining opportunity to murder children in Mississippi:

There is only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents. Mississippi has enacted every restriction on abortion possible within the limits set by the Supreme Court.

I think this offers evidence that the supposedly pro-choice Libertarian position is an EFFECTIVELY pro-life one. The number of abortions that will be eliminated simply by allowing the states to exercise their sovereign rights will be significant.

And if the “blue” states wish to follow Europe into death by depopulation, there’s upside on that side of the equation too. The “blue” staters can’t breed their way into power, so they have to steal the children produced by others through the brainwashing provided by the public schools.

While I’m not exactly bullish on America, the three positive strains I see currently active are as follows:

1. Gun control is manifestly acknowledged to be a losing political issue. Stealth regulation is now the more immediate concern.

2. The homeschooling movement is growing literally every day. Christian 30-somethings are starting to ask their peers with surprise: “you’re NOT planning to homeschool?” Secular parents are beginning to take note, and critical mass may be reached within ten years.

3. The more left-liberal people become, the less they reproduce. No evolutionary dead-end is likely to remain dominant for long.

From the New York Times:

On bitterwaitress.com, the most popular page is an annotated database of people who give bad tips (defined on the site as “any gratuity under 17 percent for service which one’s peers would judge as adequate or better”)

If that’s the determining factor, count me in as a proud “bad tipper”. Seventeen percent is absolutely ridiculous… the Almighty himself only expects ten. It seems strange that as service has gotten worse and worse over the years, expectations of compensation for it have nearly doubled.

From the Drudge Report:

Because of the estimated fourteen days required to count votes due to the unexpectedly high voter turnout in this weekend’s Iraqi elections, computerless voting stations in Iraq were provided 415 vote-counting machines from Diebold Election Systems. The so-called “black box” machines are considered by some to be unreliable because they do not leave a paper trail.

In an unexpected development, George W. Bush was determined to have won precincts in the predominantly Sunni Anbar province of western Iraq, the Saladin district of east Baghdad and the Shiite cities of Qadasiya and Amara. Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell could not be reached for comment, but Mark Radke, the company’s Director of Marketing, suggested that while it was possible many Iraqis had written in the name of the U.S. President, who is not a candidate for the Iraqi parliament, it was more likely that some machines had not been reprogrammed following the 2004 American presidential election.

Well, isn’t that intriguing….

Another proposed Vox book bites the dust. Just a week after the revelation of three conservative media whores on the federal payroll, MEDIA WHORES was canceled, sight unseen, by the publisher only six weeks after being signed. I’m told that the book wasn’t calculated to sell well enough to justify the marketing dollars required to push it; apparently people interested in politics are much more likely to buy books about how college professors are liberal and how those dirty, dirty Japs should be kept in concentration camps.

It’s annoying, to be sure, but it’s not a big deal. I had no desire to jump through the publicity hoops in the first place and I had no idea how I was going to find the time to play talking head for a month this fall. I’ll probably just post the first few chapters on voxday.net as an ebook in the next week or so.

One thing that is a relief is that I was never completely comfortable with the notion of holding my fire when it comes to the right’s media whores as the publisher demanded, especially after the affaire d’Armstrong et al. If people want to take the Altermans, Krugmans, O’Reillys and Malkins of the world at their word, then so be it. I never will.

Michelle Malkin claims to want a debate:

What a ridiculous and gutlessly underhanded stunt. During the speech, students noticed Robinson darting in and out of the ballroom. After my event, Robinson was in the back of the room kibbitzing with a Japanese American man who had come in protest and who had politely asked me a few questions about the book. I walked back and introduced myself to Robinson, and asked why he didn’t think to let me know of his visit or suggest to his sponsors that we debate. It would have been the fair and intellectually honest thing to do (and as a leader of the so-called Historians Committee for Fairness, Robinson ought to know something about fairness).

Right, now she wants a debate…. It’s particularly amusing to read this, given that she doesn’t know the first thing about intellectual honesty. What a shameless pseudo-intellectual prostitute!

And as a gutless wonder, Malkin certainly knows something about gutlessness.

I’ve gotten at least five emails arguing that clearly all of my assertions are to be doubted, because Adolf Hitler did not come to power by a process that was in any way democratic. This is wildly ahistorical, as a brief perusal of the six parliamentary elections that took place in Germany between May 1924 and March 1933 demonstrate rather clearly.

During this time, none of the twelve parties active at the time won a majority in the 418-seat Reichstag, so every government was a parliamentary coalition.

The number of Reichstag seats won by the Nazi party, 1924 – 1933:

May 1924 – 032 seats, sixth-place

Dec 1924 – 014 seats, ninth-place

May 1928 – 012 seats, ninth-place

Jul 1930 – 107 seats, second-place

Sep 1932 – 230 seats, first-place (38 percent)

Nov 1932 – 196 seats, first-place (34 percent)

Mar 1932 – 288 seats, first-place (45 percent)

Hitler did not win the presidential election of April 1932, but he did win 13,418,051 votes despite having become a German citizen only one month before. However, not only did he lead his party to electoral victory three times, but also became Chancellor within the rules of the democratic Weimar system, an arrangement settled between the leading parties that placed Hitler and two other Nazis in the eleven-member Cabinet.

Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO:

Daily Kos posted this excerpt from a 1967 New York Times article:

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Me: And the guy’s point is….what, exactly? That we were right to abandon our Vietnamese allies? That we should do the same to Iraqis? That the left wing of his party hasn’t been moved by the democratic aspirations of those facing totalitarianism for four decades? Or maybe his point is to illustrate that the only foreign policy prism he and his kind can see through is Vietnam, even though the two conflicts have exactly nothing in common — save their ability to elicit incoherent rage and bad historical analogies from the left.

This is just willful blindness. The guy’s point – OBVIOUSLY – is that getting caught up in voter turnouts and drawing massive, long-term conclusions from them is likely to be wildly erroneous. The fact that the 83 percent reported then is even higher than the almost surely exaggerated 72 percent figure that was bandied about two days ago makes the democratic triumphalism look even more silly.

A willingness to show up at the polls says precisely nothing about whether a people are willing to fight and defend their own freedom. The Iraqis aside, I’m not even sure that’s true of the American people any more.