Hypocritical, Puritanical Noise. Media have been abuzz the past couple of days about — heaven forfend! — sex. It seems a U.S. Senator from Idaho was arrested in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport for soliciting sex in a men's room. Except of course he didn't actually DO anything. He didn't touch anybody, didn't expose himself, didn't say a word to ask for sex. In short, he did NOT commit anything that the law should regard as a crime, not ANYTHING.
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He was entrapped by antihomosexual police in a supposedly liberal state. That is both unexpected and outrageous. If the police in the Minneapolis area have so little to do that they have to induce gay men into approaching vice officers, then the Minneapolis police force should be chopped drastically in size and budget, so Minnesotans — including gay Minnesotans — can save some money on their tax bill. Are all parts of the Twin Cities crime-free? Or are police too cowardly to face off against real criminals, preferring to work the men's room while armed thugs victimize Minnesotans elsewhere, free of worry that they might be caught by cops who are busy harassing homosexuals in safe areas?
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The evil cops working to trap gay men should be transferred to the worst neighborhoods of America's cities, to face down the Bloods and Crips, and protect college kids from being murdered in cold blood in schoolyards. Send them to Newark, L.A., or the South Bronx. Let them earn their pay and actually protect somebody.
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Hoping to avoid public exposure, Senator Larry Craig (Hm, "L. Craig". Now, where have I heard that?) pled guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine of several hundred dollars. He also got a year's unsupervised probation. For tapping his foot in a men's room stall. Has this society lost its mind?
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We have murders all over this country that the police can't solve, and we're misdirecting police resources to arresting men for tapping their foot in a men's room. Senator Craig should be fiting such nonsense, not paying extortion to the state. But it's worse than extortion by criminals. The typical blackmailer doesn't take the money and then tell the secrets anyway.
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The self-righteous claptrap — an appropriate word, considering how much venereal disease there is in this Nation of Whores — about how 'disgusting' it is of some gay men to seek sex in public places, is nothing but bullsh*t. Straight people, various media commentators declaim virtuously, don't cruise lavatories for sex. Oh? And why might that be? Because men's rooms and women's rooms are separated, that's why. And why, exactly, is that? Because if both sexes shared the same lavatories, nobody offended by sex could use them much of the day and nite because straight people would be screwing around in them at all hours, that's why. Late-nite cable TV runs a commercial for a phone-sex line in which a man and woman come out of a stall in a public restroom. But that's just fantasy, right? And, of course, 'normal', so not disgusting. Are we to believe that heterosexual sex in public restrooms never really happens? Then how is it we hear stories about it? Because it does happen. And heterosexual public sex doesn't happen just in lavatories when no one's around. Straights have sex everywhere!
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The delicate, antisexual sensibilities we hear all over the media would be persuasive in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but not in the United Whores of America. In the typical year, 1.5 million babies are born out of wedlock (36% of all births in the United States; 64% for black women). 19 million cases of venereal disease (or "STD's", to use this week's fad term) are recorded each year. Millions of (heterosexual) marriages have been destroyed by infidelity, including on the part of at least one leading contender for the Republican Party's nomination for President. There's an awful lot of illicit sex going on among straight people in this country, and everybody knows it.
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So why are so many people in media feigning shock over sex among gay men in supposedly 'public' places (tho plainly not in public view)? Straight people are having sex all over the place, in movie theaters, airliners (the "Mile High Club" we hear so much about), parks, parking lots, "lover's lanes" — hell, in the car at the curb outside their girlfriend's house. Under bleachers, behind garages, in alleys, in bars and dance clubs, in sex clubs, in strip clubs. Babysitters and their boyfriends screw on the couch while the kids sleep a few yards away. What about all those lapdances in "gentlemen's clubs"? Porno videos offered by 'legitimate' video rental companies? Porn on cable TV that is shown not just in one's bedroom but even in public places? Straight porno theaters and peep shows? Legal prostitution in Nevada? Brothels in other places that the police take payoffs to let operate unfettered? "Escort" services? Hardcore and softcore heterosexual porn magazines available on publicly viewable racks at newsstands? Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on Oxygen TV? The repellant dwarf Ruth Westheimer? As long ago as 1992-96, Bob Berkowitz had a sex-talk show on CNBC. Where there's talk, there's action. (More talk than action, perhaps, but still some action.) TV takes ads for phone sex. And the Internet is filled with sexchat. What about that ad campaign from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"? I don't think those ads are talking about sightseeing trips to Hoover Dam. And do we really need to point out that the Internet is filled with fotografic and video porn?
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On the Tonight Show this evening, a young man told of staying at his girlfriend's house overnite. The girl's parents put him and their dauter in separate rooms. After they had all gone to bed, however, he sneaked into his girlfriend's room. They thought they had got away with it until the following morning when the family dog sauntered into the kitchen during breakfast, with a used condom in his mouth. What a deliteful, charming story about today's upstanding youth. (That particular youth was Canadian (as is Talk Sex hostess Sue Johanson), but American kids sneak around in their parents' house too, to screw around very quietly while their parents sleep in the next room.) So why the pretense that gay men's looking for sex wherever they might find it is somehow outrageous, but heterosexual society's obsession with sex is completely unobjectionable?
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Straight society needs to admit that it is saturated in sex. Four-year-old girls dress up like sluts in kiddie beauty pageants and 12-year-olds gyrate suggestively in talent contests, their face painted like that of an aging $5 hooker.
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John McCain, the Superloon among the announced Republican candidates for President, has disgraced himself yet again in urging Senator Craig to resign from what is called "the world's greatest deliberative body" because he tapped his shoe on a men's room floor! The 'crime' of which McCain complained was a misdemeanor, about as significant, legally, as a speeding ticket. I've said it before and will probably have to say it again: John McCain is out of his mind. I don't know if he always was, or if the North Vietnamese destroyed his mind in the Hanoi Hilton. At end, it doesn't matter. He's nuts.
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Mormon candidate for President, Mitt Romney, member of a cult that has ruined myriad lives with its lunacy, forced Craig out of his campaign committee, apparently fearful of being 'tainted' by association with homos. Romney is more than a bit too goodlooking to be seen as comfortable with "faggots". I wonder about him. That's called "gaydar", and mine pings when I watch Romney.
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I am indignant and contemptuous of all this ridiculous posturing by imitation-righteous straight people that gay men are somehow depraved for looking for sex in public restrooms. Straight society makes it impossible for gay men to meet one another in the wholesome places straight people go to "hook up". We can't look openly at each other at a church social, PTA meeting, supermarket, laundromat, or (straight) bar, and strike up a relaxed conversation, to find out if we have enuf in common to investigate forming a relationship or even just take a quick roll in the hay. No, we're forced into the shadows, and then bitched at for living in the shadows!
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By contrast, this supposedly antisexual society pushes boys and girls at each other from a very early age. It not only countenances sexual activity that it supposedly disapproves of, but actually facilitates it. Prom nite is almost a required virginity-ender, and despite the best efforts of modern-day Puritans to promote abstinence, the age at which Americans typically lose their virginity is 17, and only 4% of Americans remain virgins their entire life. Presumably many of those people have serious physical handicaps or are in religious orders that forbid sexual activity (not that that stops everyone in such orders).
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Last nite, on MSNBC Live With Dan Abrams, the host and fellow rightwingers Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson all played very innocent, as tho a sexual thought never entered any of their heads. Carlson bragged about having fought back against a man who "bothered" him in Washington. The poor baby was so scared he had to run for help to a friend, then bring the friend back, throw the offender against a wall, and have him arrested. For what? Today he clarified why he reacted so violently, while denying the violence he had admitted the nite before:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

Neither Hannity nor Abrams had ever had such difficulties, and gay men looking for sex are almost always easily discouraged by pointed shows of uninterest. If they persist, a firm "No" or "Hey, get away from me" suffices.
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Let me point out to these innocent babes in the sexual woods that WOMEN are harassed by heterosexual men all the time, everywhere they go. They are "hit upon" by men they have no interest in. They are whistled at and hooted at by men on the street as they simply go about their business. In bars, aggressive men crowd them, brush against them, say suggestive things to them, offer to buy them drinks (which would, the men think, indebt the woman to the man who treated them), put their hands on them, in innocent places and not-so-innocent places. If every heterosexual man who crossed the line with a woman were thrown up against a wall and arrested, our entire national budget would be spent on jails and prisons.
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So cut the crap. The little Mother Tucker was subjected to some of what women go thru every day, and it hurt his little feelings! Poor thing. That's the real issue here: heterosexual men's feeling threatened by being treated, to their mind, like women. That threatens their manhood. It shouldn't. A gay man's "hitting on them" proves not their lack of manhood but their masculine appeal, because gay men want men, not women. It is a compliment to his manhood that a gay man might be drawn to a (straight) man.
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Straight men need to get a life — and stick to it. That's the real problem, and the real reason there are police actions against homosexuality, even after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws on the basis that they violate privacy rights. So cops go out of their way to entrap gay men into public "lewd conduct".
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Straight men are terrified of their own homosexual thoughts and desires. They are afraid that if society doesn't keep them on the straight and narrow, they are going to find themselves in the arms (and other parts) of a man, because they know that they have all had thoughts about guys and cannot find men's bodies disgusting because they would have to find themselves disgusting. They may never have been tempted, yet, but, they think, that might just be because they haven't met the right man. Yet. Maybe there is a man out there, somewhere, with piercing blue eyes or a smile that lites up the room who would make their heart pound and other parts push them to contact.
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I'm the last person in the world to say it couldn't happen. But straight men are much more commonly tempted to heterosexual sex. That does not argue for them outlawing heterosexual sex or forbidding all situations in which temptation might arise. Where is the insistence that Louisiana Senator Vitter, who cheated on his wife with (female) prostitutes, resign? Nowhere, that's where.
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Senator Craig's real offense, and the reason people who should be sympathetic to a man who has sexual desires for men that cause him anguish, are instead indignant and out to "get him", is hypocrisy. He has made all kinds of antihomosexual noise, working to prevent gay marriage and otherwise promote antigay bigotry. We react to such behavior on the part of a man with overpowering sexual desire for men as we would to a "high yellow" 'black' man passing as white and becoming Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The hypocrisy of straight society about opposing gay marriage allegedly out of concern over the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage is detestable. The bulk of states in recent decades made marriage so trifling and the legal causes for divorce so trivial that they catastrophically weakened the institution long before gay men pressed for the extension of marriage to gay couples. Nevada, which could be regarded as Satan's home state, dares to pretend to be concerned about the sanctity of marriage, and inserted a provision into its constitution to define marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman. So all those legal prostitutes in Nevada surely must determine that a man is unmarried before having sex with him, right? No? If not, then Nevada isn't concerned about defending the sanctity of marriage at all, just in reserving some rights for straight people, including the right to have sex for money, there being no legal homosexual prostitution in that model of propriety. Dare one ask how many marriages have been destroyed by a spouse's calling upon a legal prostitute in Nevada? Or by compulsive gamblers' losing fortunes they could not afford, in Nevada, land of virtue? I think the gay movement should promote a boycott of Nevada by all progressives, to make an example of Nevada for hypocrisy, and show there are costs to antigay bigotry.
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As for Senator Craig's state, Idaho, I have been to Idaho twice, once to Boise (which is pronounced with an S-sound, not Z) on my own and once to Coeur d'Alene with several members of my family. As I recall, there was a tiny gay contingent in Coeur d'Alene's Fourth of July parade who were not booed or threatened. I don't think Idahoans in general are vicious or fascistic, despite Idaho's reputation (like neighboring Montana's) for welcoming Neo-Nazi, survivalist groups. I don't think Idaho is a toxic place or that the people of Idaho mean to damage young gay people's self-acceptance. But they do, as all areas of the world do that assume that every child will be straight, and thus raise everyone to be heterosexual, and never so much as raise the possibility that something else will happen. Never raising the issue, they lead their young people to think that what the larger society has apparently not thought about is thus unthinkable. That causes kids who do think about such things, to think as well that there must be something wrong with them; that they are grotesque, abnormal, evil, not just something that most of the people around them haven't much thought about. Or admitted to thinking about.
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Senator Craig's story is hardly unusual. He was made to hate himself by an oblivious, intolerant, and insecure society that seems to feel that if homosexuality is given free rein, it will wipe out heterosexuality and the human race will disappear because, they fear, homosexuality is preferable to heterosexuality! Is the human race really in danger of disappearing from too few children? Or is the prime threat to our survival not depopulation but grotesque overpopulation? I don't really have to answer that, do I?
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If, as seems certain, Senator Craig is sexually drawn to men, he could still make the claim that he is not "gay", because he does not want a lasting, loving relationship with a man, and actively wants not to identify as gay. He is assuredly not "gay" in the ordinary sense, happy and carefree, which may be how he justified his denials. Bill Clinton was able to persuade himself that he wasn't really lying when he said he "did not have sexual relations with that young woman", because he played a definitional game in his head: "sexual relations" meant coitus. Senator Craig says he's not "gay". He may be able to say that with clear conscience because he has internally defined "gay" to mean wanting something more from men than sex, something emotional, something as to lifestyle and self-identity, and he doesn't want that (or so he may have persuaded himself).
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Senator Craig toed society's heterosexual line rhetorically, and may actually have believed what he said when he said that homosexuality should be proscribed, perhaps out of the misguided notion that if he didn't have the internal strength to fite off his homosexual desires alone, society's prohibitions could strengthen his will and keep him in line. He internalized the antihomosexual crap he was raised with and then publicly fed it back to an appreciative audience, just as a parrot — or perhaps more appropriately, parakeet — delites people around by making noises that sound just like meaningful words, when they are to the bird only imitative noise.
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Everything we hear from antigay activists is meaningless, empty noise. They have absolutely no basis for their hostility. They may, or may not, have reasons for any insecurity they may feel about society giving them, personally, too much freedom, freedom they can't handle. But temptations of many kinds are all around us. We find out, when first this ban is relaxed, then that, who has internal strength and who has not.
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When Prohibition was ended, some people became alcoholics. When states legalized various forms of gambling, some people with weak wills and addictive personalities became gambling junkies. Some ghetto kids who became sports stars saw all kinds of barriers drop, and they promptly fell into drug addiction, sexual abuse, and other outrageous vices, even dogfiting. It is not the availability of alcohol that makes an alcoholic, nor the legality of gambling that creates a gambling problem, nor the presence all around us of dogs that makes a person descend into staging dogfites and then killing poor performers. It is not what is outside us that is responsible for our internal feelings, nor our actions.
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Faithful people defeat temptations to infidelity, from any source, homosexual or heterosexual. People in love aren't interested in sex with strangers. And, most important always to remember, sex is TRIVIA. This country has got (literally) to grow the f*k up.
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Senator Craig should 'fess up and ask forgiveness. If he needs sex with men, he should be forthrite about that. If he really loves his wife, he should just control himself, just as he would if he were attracted to another woman. But if he married only because society demanded he play the game, and he would really be happy only as a gay man, he should apologize profusely to his wife, get a divorce, and live the rest of his limited days happy, as a genuinely gay man, in every sense. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Then Idaho would have an honest man as its senior Senator.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,733 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Dissembling (and Disassembling). In a very peculiar speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, our imitation-'President', George W. Bush, who dodged service in the Vietnam War, dared to instruct us on the lessons of that other undeclared war. He said a number of odd things in that speech, which spoke to our involvement with three wars in the Far East, against Japan, North Korea and its Communist allies, and North Vietnam and its Communist allies. He called all of these ideological wars, and likened them to Al-Qaeda's war today.
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But Japan's war upon its neighbors, and against us to clear the way for annexation of its neighbors, had nothing to do with ideology. It was militarist, nationalist, tribalist, racist, but not ideological.
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There turns out to be an unhappy parallel in the Korean War to our experience in the Iraq war. According to Wikipedia, the CIA told President Truman that Chinese intervention was unlikely, and General MacArthur was confident both that there weren't a great many Chinese troops available in that area and that without an air force, Chinese forces would be easily decimated, and thus nothing to worry about. It is from things like this that we get the sad little joke that "military intelligence" is a contradiction in terms.
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In perhaps the most widely cited passage from the VFW speech, Bush said:

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"

See the oddity? No? Listen to this passage, which immediately followed that one:

There's another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle, those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001.

Now do you see it? "Citizens". Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Americans are all called "citizens", not "Cambodian citizens" nor "Vietnamese citizens" nor "U.S. citizens". Just "citizens".
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Bush also said that if we don't win in Iraq, Al-Qaeda will. That is certainly not a foregone conclusion. Already we see that Sunnis in Al-Anbar province have nearly destroyed Al-Qaeda there. That is touted as one of the great success stories of the war. But Bush doesn't want us to think that Iraqis, on their own, would crush Al-Qaeda, as Saddam crushed similar movements.
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And who is to say that forces from the Arab League, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other Moslem countries, or from the United Nations more generally, or Russia, or China, could not replace us, and train and support the Iraqi military and local governments more effectively, and with far less resentment, than we can? We are not the only force on Earth capable of exerting military force and bolstering the Iraqi government until it can stand without help.
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Bush's speech to the VFW went on:

Unlike in Vietnam, if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home, and that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

Oh? North Vietnamese Communists fought for decades against first France, then the U.S., but did not follow either France nor us home. North Korean Communists and their Communist Chinese allies fought us on the Korean Peninsula but did not follow us home. But if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq, Al-Qaeda would follow us home. Why would they, if all that the bulk of the people from whom Islamists recruit want, is merely to expel the United States and Israel from the Arabian homeland?
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Very few people really believe Islam can conquer the world. Moreover, devout Moslems know that it is forbidden to force conversion to Islam of "peoples of the Book" (that is, peoples of the faiths derived from the Bible (Jews and Christians), and, by extension, faiths derived from some other sacred scriptures, as those of Buddhism and Hinduism).
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Even fewer Moslems believe that a war by individual terrorists in a private organization could triumph over the United States on its own territory. It's one thing to fite an invader operating 7,000 miles and more from its homeland, with at least the passive connivance of local people, but quite another to defeat that same power in its own homeland.
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Bush claims that Usama Bin Laden (who, I suspect, has been dead for years) has said that the war in Iraq is for them or us to win, and that if they win, the U.S. will suffer "disgrace and defeat forever". Hm. Forever is a very long time.
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The U.S. retreated from the Yalu River after Communist China entered the Korean War. Surely that was a permanent disgrace and defeat, no? Apparently not. Then the U.S. ran out on South Vietnam, another permanent disgrace, no? Apparently not that either. Then the U.S., under the great hero of the Republican Right, Ronald Reagan, ran screaming like a little girl out of Lebanon after 241 Marines were killed in the bombing of a barracks outside Beirut, in the same region as Iraq. Surely that had to have been a "disgrace and defeat forever". Then the U.S. ran out of Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" incident. Surely there is no way the world would ever take us seriously again, right? Oh, no, the world did not count us out even then, and that wasn't a "disgrace and defeat forever" either. How many "disgraces and defeats forever" can we bounce back from? When is "disgrace and defeat forever", ever going to happen?
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The reality is that everyone understands that "you win some, you lose some", and that what matters is that you pick your fites carefully, as to which really matter and which do not. The Taliban was complicit in the attacks upon us by Al-Qaeda. Afghanistan is involved in the growth, processing, and distribution of massive amounts of illegal drugs that poison the West. Afghanistan matters. Destroying the Taliban and keeping it from ever retaking Afghanistan matters. But rather than fite the real enemy, we have diverted attention and resources from the real war to this phony war, against a country that never attacked us.
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Iraq has within itself the seeds of its own reconstruction, as Sunni pacification of Al-Anbar demonstrates. The conclusion is, alas, inescapable that we aren't in Iraq to rebuild it but to keep it from rebuilding.
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That is, the sad fact is that the U.S. is in Iraq not to save it but to destroy it, by keeping it in chaos, divided against itself. This war, as all other U.S. wars and other efforts in the Middle East, is about one thing and one thing only: Israel. It was never about oil. Never about democracy. Never about anything but Israel. The United States attacked Iraq to destroy it, not save it, and we remain there to make sure it cannot rise again. The U.S. Government wants to keep Iraqis fiting among themselves, because if they unite, one of the things that will unite them is the will to destroy Israel. Foes of the war need to understand that, because only if you address the real motives behind U.S. policy can you change that policy.
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If Bush and the faceless cabal that is the Real President were honest, they would say aloud what really motivates them:

The United States is in Iraq to keep Iraq from attacking Israel. The United States wishes to destroy the governments of Syria and Iran because those governments threaten Israel. We will do anything we need to do to defend Israel. If that means perpetual war against the whole of the Moslem world, a billion people and more, we will wage that war, no matter how many trillions of dollars it may cost, no matter how many Americans must die in it. Because Israel is God's chosen land, the Jews are God's Chosen People, and it is our God-given duty to defend Israel, no matter the price in American lives and treasure. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of Israel, an enemy of the United States, and an enemy of God.

Oh. OK! Why didn't you say so? Alrity, then.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,722 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Silliness about Montebello. The heads of government of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are meeting for a two-day summit in Montebello, Quebec (about 50 miles east of Canada's capital, Ottawa, on the Ottawa River, a tributary of the magnificent Saint Lawrence, a river I love, in "La Belle Province", Quebec, which should be "Le Bel Etat" des Etats-Unis). Protestors of various stripes, but few in number due to the relative remoteness of the location, have gathered to object to what they term 'secret negotiations to destroy the sovereignty' of the three member countries. Yeah, right. The heads of government of these three DEMOCRACIES can create a secret entente to destroy the sovereignty of each without any kind of approval by the legislatures of the respective countries. Come on, people, let's not be ridiculous.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:59 AM

 
Enjoying Life in the Sunbelt, Are We? It's been a bad summer for the Sunbelt and the tens of millions of weathersissies who left the cold North for the mild winters of the South. They seem to have forgotten that if it's a lot warmer in the winter, it's a lot warmer in the summer too. Now they get the chance to enjoy heat waves of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end. Some have the pleasure of a drought; others hurricanes and tornados fed by the heat, massive evaporation, and winds of the tempestuous Gulf of Mexico.
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I'll stay in New Jersey, thank you very much. We have had an unusually cold and wet August, which is ordinarily sweltering. Today it was in the 60s and rainy much of the day, and tomorrow is expected to be more of the same. I have had to sleep under a topsheet several nites in a row, and even close my bedroom windows. In August. But we have no drought, no heat wave of 100+ temperatures, no hurricanes, no earthquakes as occur in the Far Western portion of the Sunbelt. All in all, a few cold months and some snow is a fair trade, it seems to me.
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Perhaps some millions of the refugees from winter will rethink their move and return North, backfilling the reduced cities and small towns and restoring national prosperity by reducing the wreckage hurricanes and the like can in the future inflict. And maybe we shouldn't rebuild in areas smashed by storm surges driven by tropical storms. If such areas are to receive help from anyone outside their immediate area (town, county), let it all come from other parts of the Sunbelt. Why should the Frost Belt, which has already been ravaged by mass movement of people and Federal dollars to the Sunbelt, have to send even more money where Northern dollars have been poured by the tens of billions for decades?
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Hey, you want to live in the Sunbelt? Pay for your own Sunbelt problems. The Frost Belt has been drained enuf.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,706 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Legalizing Murder. This country has gone out of its mind in leniency toward killers. And then we react with shock that life is so cheap that four college kids can be shot in the back of the head and that gangs are spreading like the Black Death all across the Nation's cities. There's no mystery here.
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Mary Winkler, the monster who killed her husband, a minister, and then fled to another state to elude prosecution, was released today after serving 67 days for KILLING her husband. 67 days. Days, not years.
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Among the reasons given for this preposterously, inexcusably trivial sentence was "no previous criminal record". So in Tennessee you have to have killed at least once before the murder now at issue in order for murder  to be considered a serious offense. Now the murderess will ask the courts to return the murdered man's children to her care. What a great idea: returning children to the care of a mother who murdered their father. A woman who was supposed to love her husband, but murdered him. Why would we expect her not to murder her children as well?
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Perhaps we should just forget about laws and let everybody do anything they want to anybody — that is, just give up on the idea of civilization. It's too much trouble, and we'd have to be mean. We would actually have to kill killers to stop murder, and that's not nice. It's much nicer to allow ourselves to be killed with impunity and not strike back.
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No, I have a better idea: let's kill the legislators who permitted this, kill the judge, kill the jury, kill the mental health professionals responsible for releasing a murderess after 67 days. Kill them all. And of course kill the murderess, too, by torture. Forget lethal injection. That's pattycake. Flogging, hoisting by the neck until dead, the Chinese torture of a thousand cuts. You institute punishments like that, or the old standby, the electric chair (charge up Old Sparky), and 'people' who now hold society in utter contempt will fear society and obey its laws rather than face a gruesome death at the hands of society. Absent execution, we should just forget about American civilization, because it doesn't exist. Permitting barbarism is barbarism, ergo, we have already lost our civilization. We can restore it, but the people just don't have the guts. Or is it that the people have the guts, but the "leaders" don't? The people don't write the laws. Their elected "leaders" do. And they have led us down the path we are now on, to mass destruction, thru auto-genocide. Can the people stop this freight train racing toward a cliff?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,699 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:01 AM

 
It'll Be a Cold Nite in August ... before I'll spend an hour and more of my life watching a speech by Louis Farrakhan. That's what I might have thought before tonite. It's 58 degrees, in early August, and I've had to close several windows to keep out the chill. In channel-surfing on a crappy TV nite, I chanced across what appeared to be a church service on public access, with a familiar face behind the rostrum. I listened and was puzzled, because the speaker, who I thought was a Moslem, kept invoking the name of Jesus and speaking about Christ, in the familiar intonations of That Old-Time Religion, Southern Baptist-style. He was brilliant, alternately engaging; nasty; entertaining; fire-and-brimstony; personal and confiding; condemnatory and judgmental; aspirational; street/jive; inspirational; even, gasp, PATRIOTIC! He appealed to egotism; guilt; and racism/racial pride, blaming everything on "The Enemy". You had to supply who, exactly, The Enemy was, but I think pretty much everybody understood it to be Whitey.
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He claimed that blacks built everything in this country (never mind that there were large parts of this country in which nary a black face could be found), and accused Eli Whitney of being a thief and liar for claiming to have invented the cotton gin, because only the hand that picked the cotton would inspire the mind to create a better way; and since the hand that picked the cotton was black, the inventor of the cotton gin had to have been black, and the white man who claimed credit for the invention must, therefore, have been a thief and a liar. Never mind that the cotton gin did not pick cotton bolls from the bush but merely separated the fibers from the seeds.
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I listened all the way to the end and found that the speaker was indeed Louis Farrakhan, "(born Louis Eugene Walcott, May 11, 1933) ... in the Bronx, New York and raised as Eugene Wolcott within the West Indian community* in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts". Altho at one point in his speech he condemned integration (as lowering blacks to the level of (subhuman) whites), Louis Farrakhan, of all people, ended his speech by urging that black audience to make the United States the world's great superpower, and turn it around to use its power for good. Never mind that the United States is 80% white, and in order for blacks to 'turn around' this country, they will have to be fully integrated into at least the power structures of a predominantly white society.
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What I found most irritating was Farrakhan's constant invocation of the name of Jesus, as tho he was a Christian, and even of God's (supposed) covenant with the Jews, as tho he revered Judaism! He repeatedly quoted from or paraphrased the Bible, and, in the more than an hour of his presentation that I heard (I don't know how much I might have missed from the beginning; perhaps a few seconds; perhaps 15 minutes or more), he so much as paraphrased the Koran only once. In that solitary instance, Farrakhan couldn't even quote chapter and verse (well, actually, in the Koran, it's sura and verse), and tho he took out his pocket Koran and briefly searched thru it (or pretended to do so), he didn't find the exact verse. You'd think he'd have noted the sura and verse numbers of something that struck him when, he said, he was reading earlier that very day). Farrakhan said he wouldn't take the audience's time right then, but would simply paraphrase that passage: don't oppress those who believe in other gods than Allah, lest they oppress the followers of Allah. That is my approximation of his approximation of what he is supposed to have read. Unless that is in the area that speaks of respecting the People of the Book (the particular "Book" at issue being, originally, the "Bible", Greek (biblion) for book), that is utterly out of keeping with Islam's infamous policy of forced conversion of 'heathens'.
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(Farrakhan spoke negatively in that same part of his address of "Malcolm", by which I assume he meant Malcolm X, in whose murder many people (including, it seems, both Malcolm's wife and dauter) believe Farrakhan played a part. He feigned tolerance of Malcolm's disagreement with the teachings of Farrkahan's own teacher, Elijah Muhammad).
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Farrakhan's speaking style is definitely that of a Southern black preacher, and he gaily mixed and matched messages from Judaism — while denouncing today's Jews as not Jews at all — and Christianity, with just a smidgen of Islam thrown in for good measure. Was he altering his message for a largely Christian audience? I have no way of knowing, since I've never seen him speak to a wholly Moslem audience (and am not really eager to do so).
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It was in any case a breathlessly brazen performance, brilliant — no: absolutely brilliant — in its way. He appealed to guilts about unspoken vices in each listener; to prejudice against homosexuals; to racial pride, resentments, and feelings of persecution by The Man; to aspirations to be one's own best self; to solidarity with poor people 'over there' who are going thru now what blacks in the United States so recently emerged from; to social and economic justice; to legal and social equality; to patriotism (the man's brazenness knows no bounds); to egotism (God is working in you — yes you in particular; you are chosen; God is in YOU); to sympathy for a bout of near-mortally bad health, described in detail; to faith in the presence in the world of God and his works; to the belief that Satan, however, is also here, right now, working his dastardly charms (we are never to ask why God "Almighty" cannot simply destroy Satan); to fear of fast-approaching End Times. It would, indeed, be hard to find anything he did NOT try to appeal to.
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He mixed in bits of history, some apparently correct (Indians crossing the land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait and down into North America and thence South America), and cultural resentments. (The mean old white man destroyed Indian 'high civilizations' and the books of mathematics of the Mayans that might hugely have advanced Western mathematics had the bad old Spanish priests not ordered them burned. Never mind that the Mayan 'civilization' had long since passed its peak by the time Cortez entered Mexico and other conquistadors later reached the Maya area, and few to none of the then-existing Mayans could even read their old books. Moreover, what "high [or was it "great"?] civilization"' practices human sacrifice?)
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Now and then Farrakhan would say something intriguing, if odd, such as that Amerindians were expelled from Asia and sent into the wilderness of the New World for their sins! And that God permitted the white man to conquer the Americas and, yes, to bring blacks from Africa in chains. It was all part of His plan, you see. But the 'fact' that that was God's plan doesn't stop Farrakhan from resenting the bondage and "400 years" of injustice (to his credit, Farrakhan didn't assert 400 years of slavery, because the very longest slavery lasted in the United States was from 1619 to 1865 = 246 years). Farrakhan didn't trouble to mention that other parts of the Americas instituted slavery (among Indians as well as blacks) earlier and abolished slavery later (Puerto Rico, then part of the Spanish Empire, abolished slavery only in 1873; Cuba, ditto, 1886; Brazil, 1888).
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It's hard for a rationalist to follow the delusional thinking of the religious faithful, such as the notion that God deliberately permitted whites to bring blacks to America in chains, but that's still not alrite, even tho it was part of God's plan. Any absurdity is to be believed as long as you say it's part of God's plan.
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And yes, Farrakhan even invoked "love", claiming to love everyone in the audience, as God loves everyone in the audience. He very nearly claimed to be, himself, the voice of God, but broadened that to say, in effect, that God speaks to all of us, in the quiet of our minds, and thru some of us who buy int ... spread His word.
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The address was given in a church in the Atlanta area in 2002, shortly before the Congressional primary election, since Farrakhan vaguely endorsed then five-term incumbent Cynthia McKinney in 'next week's election'. McKinney went down in flames, defeated in that primary by a (female) newcomer to partisan politics, 58% to 42%. I don't know if Farrakhan's endorsement played any part in that humiliation.
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Still, this was a most impressive performance, much like another impressive performance I recently caught on television, Lindsay Lohan's playing a double role in a remake of the classic 1961 Disney film The Parent Trap. I had never before seen Lohan in anything. So I didn't remotely understand media's fascination with her, until I saw that she is indeed a very gifted actress. (Oh! that forbidden word, "actress"! I should be ashamed of myself. No.) Now I see why there is such concern that a young woman of such talent seems intent on obliterating that talent in a fiery automobile crash while driving drunk. In watching the film (I was desperate for entertainment; forgive me), I knew that Lindsay Lohan wasn't one of twins, but almost wanted to go online to check that to be sure, she was so convincing. You find yourself, after the physical switch of separated twin 'tweens (yes, I know that's hard to say; stop moving your lips while reading!) to fool their divorced parents, just waiting for the British kid in California to say something British to give it all away, or the American kid in London to slip up. And then you catch yourself as having suspended disbelief, as truly good actors/actresses induce you to do.
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So it is with Louis Farrakhan's performance in Atlanta in this taped speech. He's not the vicious anti-Jewish, antihomosexual, antiwhite troublemaker and divider he's represented as being. No, he's an amiable, loving, wise, and indulgent, inspired man of God who is just trying to get (black) people to be all that they can be ('cause we need you, in God's arrrr-aar-ar-my!). So what if he uses some rhetorical tricks and pulls some emotional strings to stir guilt one minute, then offer redemption the next? So what if he invokes the name of Jesus as much as would an evangelical Christian preacher? So what if he incites bigotry against homosexuals and whitey? At end, he's just trying to help! No. He's not.
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Louis Farrakhan is not a Christian, even if he speaks the names "Jesus" and "Christ" over and over as tho he is a true believer in the "Son of God". Islam denies the divinity of Jesus, tho it does accord him a very special place, of very high honor (unlike Judaism's treatment of Jesus as "blasphemer"). Nor does Farrakhan really accept that God's Covenant with the Jews is perpetual, and Islam is blasphemy for denying that the four corners of the truth of God is contained in the Torah. Farrakhan will use the language of the Old Testament, New Testament, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution to win over his audience to his point of view.
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He is a brilliant poseur, and not the simpleminded cartoon caricature his foes like to portray, a bowtie-wearing, teetotaling demagog who is up to no good. For one thing, he was wearing a long tie, not bowtie, in this appearance. For another, he actually does seem to be up to some good. It is his idea of good that is the problem.
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He talks the talk of "equality", but it's not the equality of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin (one of my people, gay men, who was instrumental in keeping MLK on the straight-and-narrow — you should pardon the expression — of nonviolence), John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, or any other American champion of racial or socioeconomic equality. Farrakhan's message is tinged with unatonable white guilt, not Christian forgiveness and reconciliation. He is no Desmond Tutu. He is no Jesus, tho he's eager to use Jesus's name to advance his goals. He is also no success, despite his brilliant rhetorical skills, because blacks refuse his message, for they are not about to leave their sweet Jesus for the Mohammed of the sword and suicide bomber.
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Farrakhan's health apparently did not fully recover from a 1999 crisis he spoke of in this performance. He admitted that he worried at that time that (white? Jewish?) doctors in a hospital would willingly let him die rather than exert all their medical skills to save him, so had himself flown to Howard University Hospital for surgery after (white? Jewish?) doctors elsewhere had stabilized his condition. (What? They didn't kill him? How could that be?) It may thus be that Louis Farrakhan will not much longer be with us. What a pity.
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But seriously, folks, it's sad to see a man of such obvious gifts so delusional (God is all around — think a variation of the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme: "God is all around, no need to waste Him. You can have Him all, Why don't you take Him? You're gonna make it after all!"), who has spent so much of his life resenting others rather than working apart from and without regard to those others. "The Enemy"? Who exactly is that, Mr. Farrakhan? Is it the person, of whatever race, or all such persons as a group, whose heart has no room for charity and whose mind is so insecure that extending equality to others not like him- or herself is unthinkable? Or is it white people? Jews? Christians? Americans? Who?
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If it's white people, isn't The Enemy in you? Your skin is pretty lite, and your hair isn't coiled ("kinky"). Surely you of all people wouldn't have straightened your hair to look white, so I must assume your hair is naturally non-nappy, that is, non-African. I've seen African immigrants of pure sub-Saharan ancestry. They don't look like you. One "black" militant, I forget who (I thought it was (the late) Eldridge Cleaver, but he apparently didn't spend any time in black Africa), visited sub-Saharan Africa and was introduced as 'our white guest'. That shook him up, and woke him up to the fact that white and black were united in him, and that that was a good thing, not bad.
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And so, Mr. Farrakhan (of the Bronx), you may invoke Americanism as cynically as you invoke the name of Jesus, to manipulate black Americans raised as Christians even if they later converted to Islam, but it's in you. (Again, I'm thinking media, the spaghetti-sauce commercial, "It's in there!")
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You, Mr. Farrakhan, are what you are because of where you are and where you come from. You're not in black Africa, and your feeble identification with all those people 'over there' who are in misery today does not alter the fact that your missionary zeal to save those people from that misery arises not, really, from Islam but from Americanism. We are here ONLY to change that. Ain't that a pisser?!?
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Isn't that really what you meant when you spoke of God allowing Whitey to conquer the Americas and bring blacks in chains from Africa? Wasn't THAT the plan: that the Africans and Amerindians and Europeans and Asians who merged here would want for all the peoples of all the places they came from to live in freedom and prosperity, and actually DO something to achieve that?
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Louis Farrakhan may be a brilliant con artist, but he is an American con artist, American thru and thru. And part of him actually believes his own spiel. God rest his soul.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,683 — for Israel.)
____________________

* Farrakhan's mother was from Nevis and St. Kitts. Alexander Hamilton was from Nevis, but I don't know if Farrakhan's mother was from Nevis (one island) or St. Kitts (another).
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Ignoring Our Will.

(1) Electronic Harassment. Disreputable businesses insist on pushing popup ads at unwilling visitors to their websites. Popup-blocking programs try but fail to block some of these ads. In the struggle or in the execution of code to evade popup-blockers, our computers are frozen and useless to us until the popup trumphs, 30 seconds, 50 seconds later. There's no way we should put up with that. Legislators should regard willful freezing of people's machines and the imposition of unwanted advertising upon them as seizure of people's machines (multiply every 40-second seizure by millions a day, and you're talking about a lot of time stolen by advertisers) and make it a crime punishable by a fine to be imposed for every single occurrence, and by imprisonment of the executives and programmers who work to evade popup-blockers.
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I have had it with this crap. So when it happened today when I tried to read an article that the New York Post's emailed newsletter mentioned, I went to unsubscribe from that newsletter. At the unsubscribe screen, there is an optional fill-in box as to reason for unsubscribing. I typed:

You insist on inflicting popups on us. The popup blocker and your popup program fite, and freeze my machine for 30 seconds and more each time. I won't put up with it. If nypost.com insists on popups, I insist on avoiding nypost.com.

And then I clicked on "Unsubscribe". But I got an error message that that order did not go thru. 'The webmaster has been notified.' A lot of good that does me. I'll try later. But surely there is a provision in existing law that when a business is told to stop sending unwanted email and they continue to send it anyway, they are guilty of an offense. Government needs to punish nypost.com, which does not have the right to refuse to unsubscribe people and pretend it is a computer problem. The New York Post is part of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, which just paid $5 BILLION for The Wall Street Journal . Surely it can pay to fix the unsubscribe feature at nypost.com. Or it can pay fines to Government to lower our taxes a tiny bit.
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(2) Democrats Go Over to the Dark Side. President Bush this week signed into law the so-called "Protect America Act of 2007", which authorizes Government to spy on Americans without warrants. The Democrats approved that legislation! Supposed "liberals" like Dianne Feinstein voted for it! The American people voted Democrats into the majority to save us from a lawless White House, but the Democrats turned around and enlisted in Bush's campaign to exterminate civil liberties in the name of "security"!
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No one does what the people want them to do anymore. Voting doesn't matter, because neither of the present major parties will obey the people. What do we do about that? Is it possible for existing tiny splinter groups, like the Expansionist Party, Green Party, Libertarians, and Socialist Labor Party, to create a viable third party dedicated to protecting the people from Government but instead using the power of Government to eradicate poverty, ignorance, and curable disease everywhere on this benited planet? Or are the programs of minor parties too different for them to form even an ad-hoc alliance to destroy the primacy of Tweedledum and Tweedledummer? Is the only viable third party likely to be the one created by multibillionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who will hire the people necessary to create a third party because he can't inspire them to work for free? If a multibillionaire is the only realistic hope of a third party, of what conceivable use to the people would such a third party be? Will we then have Tweedledum, Tweedledummer, and Tweedledummest?
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If third parties, perpetually starved of funding and volunteers, cannot achieve anything in the mass society in a time when mass media dominate public discourse, what chance is there to get the political process and government to do what the people want done?
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If we cannot build, can we at least destroy?
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That is the thought process many people must be going thru. Building an alternative is prohibitively expensive and difficult. But destroying is a lot cheaper, faster, and ultimately more cost-effective. If, for instance, a lone gunman were to shoot Dianne Feinstein dead for betraying her constituency and turning against civil liberties, would the replacement that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appoints until a special election can be held, dare to take the same stance against civil liberties that got Feinstein killed?
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If, again, a lone gunman, wearing body armor and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building and machine-gunned 160 Republican Representatives or 40 Republican and 15 Democratic Senators, wouldn't that achieve enormous change instantly? Even if they didn't all die (but we can hope they would, assuming it was the right — sorry: Right — 15 Dems), there would inevitably be massive change in the attitudes of Congress after the resulting turnover. The media would finally talk about the rage building in this country as scores of millions of Americans are crushed into hopelessness by debt and the unwillingness of Congress or the Presidency to do anything the people want them to do. Improved "security" would not be the only response.
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Building is hard. Destroying is easy. Building takes a long time. Destroying can occur in seconds. And sometimes you cannot build until you first destroy. Thus the explosive demolitions (misnamed "implosions") of old buildings in dense city centers to make space for new buildings.
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If we cannot get term limits and we cannot get public financing of campaigns — oh, we'd also need a gunman to kill every member of the Supreme Court — but must continue to permit the rich to buy Congress and the White House, maybe we can achieve thru violence what we cannot achieve by voting. A few gunmen in key lobbyists' offices, for instance, could also work wonders. How about a lone gunman killing everybody in the offices of the NRA, making sure to shoot first lest the staff is armed, and making sure they are all dead before leaving for the next lobbyist, say, the tobacco lobby or oil lobby or anti-public-financing lobby or ISRAEL LOBBY. Simultaneous assaults on all those offices and Congress, the White House, and Supreme Court could achieve massive change in a single bloody day, with minimal loss of life.
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This is "extremist" thinking, to be sure. But what is "moderate" thinking? "Moderates" have given us a war in Iraq in which thousands of Iraqis die every single month. "Moderates" have given us the best Government money can buy, and elections that cost billions of dollars but produce no change. "Moderates" see 410,000 Americans a year die from tobacco and 30,000 die from guns but do nothing to outlaw those killers. "Moderates" have consented to have huge swaths of our cities turned into violent hellholes too dangerous to be out in at nite.
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"Moderates" run on campaigns to get us out of Iraq and undo the assault on civil liberties being carried out by the present Administration, but then fund the Iraq war and approve even more sweeping assaults upon civil liberties.
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What if the deaths that occur every day in Baghdad occurred instead in Washington? What if instead of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children going to the market to buy food for dinner, or waiting in line for gasoline or a job, it were the President and Vice President of the United States, a few hundred Congressmen and Senators, nine "Justices", and a few hundred lobbyists who died in the next four weeks? Same death toll. Much different result.
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Ah, but that's pie-in-the-sky "extremist" thinking. We Americans are moderates. Permitting mass slauter in Iraq, and from tobacco, guns, and drugs at home is moderation, much more sensible. We mustn't think about violence as the solution to our problems at home. We must pretend we're opposed to violence, even as, each day, 4 Americans and 60 Iraqis die because our invasion — fully funded by the Democrats — continues, and dozens of young Americans are slautered on the streets in drug-related violence at home. To think that the same number of deaths, of the right people, could end the deaths of the wrong people is madness. Or is it?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,683. In addition, media announced yesterday that the death toll for American contractors working in Iraq passed a thousand, to 1,001. So the death toll of Americans in Iraq is now a bedrock minimum of 4,684 — for Israel. That's what "moderation" gets you.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:33 PM

 
Newark Murders. By now most Americans will have seen reports about a dastardly crime in my city this past weekend, a bit more than a mile from my house. Four young people, three college students and one kid who had just been accepted to college, were shot in the back of the head, in what media insist, insanely, on calling "execution-style". Oh? Where, exactly, are executions performed by shooting people at point-blank range while they stand? In Communist China, the Government executes people by making them kneel and then shooting them in the back of the head. No U.S. jurisdiction, not Federal, not State, executes people that way. So why do U.S. media insist on using the grotesque expression "execution-style" for cold-blooded murders at close range?
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That, you see, is the way criminals kill people, and there is in this abuse of language, "execution-style", the extremely ugly reality that media equate gangland murders with governmental executions, which means (a) the Mafia, Crips, and Bloods are the exact moral equivalent of Government, entitled to kill people, and (b) execution of criminals by Government is the exact moral equivalent of murder. Everyone in media who uses the term "execution-style" for murder should be tied to a whipping post and flogged 100 lashes or so for each offense, then warned that if they don't take back that outrageous misstatement they will face death in actual "execution-style": by lethal injection, electric chair, hanging, or firing squad.
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In any case, tho I have hesitated to address this vile crime in my city because not all details are known publicly yet, it seems almost certain that this was not a random crime, botched robbery, or anything like that, but that the killers knew the victims, and, unfortunately for the victims, vice-versa. One of the young women shot did not die, and did offer some information to police in the hospital. What she said has, however, not been released to the public, so the public is speculating about the cause of the crime. I find it most unlikely that this was a crime that you or I would fall victim to, as strangers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Far more likely is it that some kind of interpersonal conflict led to this outrage.
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Our local newspaper, The Star-Ledger, posted an editorial online today, which said in part:

There are no short, easy answers for wiping out the culture of gangs, guns, drugs and disrespect for life that has been replicating itself in Newark for too many years, feeding off a host of social ills, which include individual and municipal failings. * * *

In the face of each murderous outrage, the city's leaders insist on spouting insipid statistics, trying to make the claim that crime is down. Stop it.

The percentage points mean nothing in the context of weekends like the one just past. For one neighborhood, the violence quotient climbed exponentially. For a few grieving families, the homicide rate hit the stratosphere and is never coming down. What good is it to claim that Newark's 60 homicides so far this year are three fewer than this time last year when one bloody weekend proves that statistical victories can be obliterated in a staccato of gunfire?

There's a war going on in Newark. This is a time for a show of forceful unity and strength among those connected with the battle for the salvation of the city.

I placed the following comment on the NJ.com forum where that editorial appears online, in response to that editorial and to comments from other readers that I found objectionable.

DON'T blame the victim, and don't expect people who have jobs, family responsibilities, and other demands upon their time and energy to do the work we hire politicians and police to handle. It makes no more sense to say that individual Newarkers have an obligation to police the streets than to say they have an obligation to put out fires.
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As for the suggestion [made in a comment by a reader] that we will all be safer if there are more guns on the streets, that is madness — certifiable lunacy. The bulk of people killed and injured by legal guns are not criminals but gun owners and their friends and families, due to suicide, accidents, and momentary rage that leaves people fallen and bleeding before the rage passes. A hidden camera on a TV newsmagazine showed that children play with guns IMMEDIATELY AFTER being told not to. Legal guns are stolen when their owners are out of the house, and then become illegal guns. No, the answer to gun violence is to round up and destroy guns, not to put them in every hand.
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The solutions to crime in Newark, and in most other places in this country, are plain: death, not trivial imprisonment, for murderers, and the suppression of the drugs that fuel this lawlessness, by extremely harsh punishments: death for dealers, imprisonment or flogging for users of hard drugs.
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We have tried to educate people away from drugs. That is an utterly failed strategy, doomed ALWAYS to fail, because people who use hard drugs KNOW that drugs are dangerous, and that is precisely WHY THEY USE THEM, because they hate their lives and have a will to self-destruction. They don't care that hard drugs are dangerous as long as those drugs can give them a few hours when they don't have to think about their problems. It's no use telling them that avoiding problems doesn't solve their problems but only makes them worse. People never unlearn destructive behaviors, save thru punishments. That's the nature of the creature. It's the carrot and the stick, not the carrot alone.
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Our "wars" on drugs and violence are Phony Wars, one-sided "wars" in which all the dead are on the side of the good. In war, the people attacked fite back with lethal force, and a genuine war on drugs would kill the pushers, a genuine war on violence would kill the killers. Until we do that, we can forget about Peace in the Streets [a slogan of indignant Newarkers who demonstrated outside City Hall]. The innocent must not be the ones who die. But until New Jersey starts taking its capital-punishment laws seriously and actually starts executing the subhuman slime who ravage society, all the brave words about taking back the streets are but contemptible posturing. Conversely, however, if New Jersey does start killing the killers, we will see crime rates plummet like a stone.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,679 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:51 PM

 
(1) Pakistan Problem Perceived — by Somebody, at Least. Presidential candidate Barack Obama today said very publicly that the United States must prepare to take military action in Pakistan against the Al-Qaeda safe haven that the central government of Pakistan has allowed to develop in the Tribal Areas along the Afghan border. I said the same thing here on July 13th. (See archive at http://antipost.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html and search for "Pakistan Problem".) Obama was criticized immediately by some of the do-nothing types who fear a destabilized Pakistan. His response, at least as I heard it on tonite's ABC World News, was inadequate. He should have said plainly that it is not in our interest to have a stable Pakistan that permits Al-Qaeda to plan and train for attacks upon the United States from stable Pakistan's territory.
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(2) Making Arabs Pay for Israel's Arms. The Bush Administration has advocated selling $20 billion worth of arms, in the next ten years, to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States to strengthen them against intimidation by Iran. To soothe the Zionist lobby, who worry that Saudi arms and U.S. military training in their use could be turned against Israel, Bush cleverly advocated that Israel receive $30 billion worth of arms, half again as much as he proposes be sold to Arabs. The news reports of this proposal that I have seen sneakily conceal the apparent fact that altho the U.S. wants to SELL arms to the Arabs, it will GIVE arms to Israel. What this amounts to, if you think about it for more than 3 seconds, is that Washington wants the Arabs to arm Israel against Arabs!
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Alas, the money to be paid by Arab governments won't (all) go to the U.S. Treasury, where it could offset public outlays — welfare — for Israel, but to private arms dealers. So the public will get back only the taxes on profits of those companies, export license fees, etc. This is, in short, a gigantic welfare program for rich corporations, whereas the welfare we are to send to Israel is to be stolen from American taxpayers' pockets against their will. And since the rich pay almost nothing in taxes as against the rates paid by the middle class and even the poor, the people who are now struggling against foreclosure (up 58% this year!) will have to send their money to Israel so Israel can kill Arabs with it and make enemies for the United States who will be so infuriated by endless, massive U.S. backing for the crimes of Israel that even more Arabs will enlist in Al-Qaeda to kill us. What a brilliant Middle Eastern policy the Bush Administration pursues!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,657 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:11 PM