RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dancing at the Abyss: What Beirut’s Debutante Ball Says about Lebanon

Car bombs are a fact of life and the civil war in neighboring Syria continues to flood Lebanon with refugees. Nevertheless, the Debutante Ball in Beirut takes place every year. Wealthy Lebanese families from across the globe send their daughters to waltz on the brink.

Is it because of 3/4 time, that sweetly narcotic sound of the waltz? Or perhaps due to the white, elbow-length gloves, ball dresses and tiaras? As Beatrice, Nadine and Layal walk up the staircase — smiling as they hold up the shimmering folds of their gowns — they seem lost in reverie. Even the rebellious Gaelle, with her braided armbands and shorter hair, says what everyone is saying: how excited she is to be a princess for an evening. And all in white!
The annual Debutante Ball at the legendary Casino du Liban in Beirut, complete with pomp and pirouettes, is the highlight of the Lebanese ball season. The women spend hours putting on their dresses and getting them to hang just so, each of the garments designed by a different local fashion designer. The preparations, including dancing lessons for the debutantes and their beaus, have gone on for months. And for the last few days, local residents were worried about whether the airport would be open, and whether some attack might make the whole affair seem irreverent. But everything went well this year. The ladies on the ball committee, the management, so to speak, are smiling, and chairwoman Regina Fenianos is issuing her final orders.

That some might find a ball like this, in light of the situation in the country, a bit galling is nothing but a misunderstanding, says Fenianos. Though the circumstances are serious indeed: Opposing camps in the north are firing at each other almost daily, car bombs explode frequently in the south, the economy is in free fall and a fifth of Lebanon’s current population is made up of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

“We know what’s going on,” Fenianos said at the dress rehearsal on the day before the ball. “But we are showing the real Lebanon! We have been holding this ball for 16 years and nothing can stop us, neither crises nor bombs. We also danced in 2006, two months after the war with Israel!”

The longest and most expensive election in India’s history began April 7th and will conclude May 12th at a cost of more than $5 billion. To manage the large electorate — estimated at 815 million — and address security concerns in the world’s largest democracy, the election to seat 543 members of the 16th Lok Sabha, or lower house of the Parliament, is running in nine segments over five weeks. The results will also determine who will rule the world’s largest democracy as prime minister. The victor will ultimately be the party winning the most Lok Sabha seats, a minimum of 272.

Top issues in India’s elections are perennial — government corruption, nepotism and economic growth — but also playing a major factor is the burgeoning Islamization of the country. The bulk of India’s population, around 80% Hindu, is concerned about past government policies that appear to have favored Muslims. The most popular candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been painted for years as virulently anti-Muslim in an effort to undermine his political power during years of dedicated government service as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. He has been the subject of eight-years of rigorous investigations and most recently by India’s Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), which found no wrong doing on his part, and he has been legally exonerated of all framed charges in 2010. Yet, he has been denied a U.S. visa, despite this lack of proof. The outcome of the elections in India will help determine if the country will slide further under Muslim influence or pursue a path toward democracy and away from preferential laws for Muslims.

Those preferential laws were created under the rule of the Indian National Congress (INC), or “the Congress.” Formed in 1885, the party played a major role in freeing the country from British colonial rule in 1947. But, in more modern times, the pro-Muslim Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has lost support. As the economic growth of India has slowed significantly, government corruption has become rampant and infrastructure deficiencies abound. Modi, a statesman of the country’s other major political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has pledged to institute good governance, end corruption, boost economic growth, and adopt a uniform civil code to foster equal gender justice and equality for Indian Muslim women who are currently governed by Sharia law.

Modi and Gujarat Riots

Although he is clearly the popular favorite for prime minister, Modi must contend with fallout from ongoing Hindu-Muslim strife in India. A major cause of that strife was the defunct Babri Mosque, which was provocatively built by Muslims in 1527 over a Hindu sacred site in Ajodhya believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu Deity, Rama. A study released later by the Archaeological Society of India concluded that excavations revealed distinctive features of a massive, 10th century Hindu temple and the existence of human activity at the site as early as the 13th century B.C. (The violent conversion of non-Muslims’ places of worship into mosques is common worldwide and there is historically documented evidence that at least 2000 mosques in India have been forcibly built on top of demolished Hindu temples at sacred sites). (See Chapter 10 and Appendix of this online book at this link: http://www.voiceofdharma.com/books/htemples1/ )

Conflicts over the Ajodhya site occurred numerous times over the years and culminated in 1992 with the razing of the abandoned mosque structure by a gathering of over 1.1 million Hindu volunteers who had assembled there for a rally. Violence then broke out across India and more than 2,000 people died, as Muslims used the demolition of Babri Mosque as an excuse for ongoing terrorist attacks ever since.

It all sounds so sensible: recycle bottles and papers; save the rivers, the lakes, the mountains, the parks, endangered species. Who could argue? Behind all this there is a serious and perverse political agenda that is not anti-pollution or really conservationist. Read about it and be armed. And, be sure you get the revised edition. […]

Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary performed at Occupy Wall Street rallies, Anti-War rallies, John Kerry’s wedding and in Ho Chi Minh City to apologize for the Vietnam War.

“Now, I’m here with that history and came to Vietnam ready to get down on my knees as one American and say, ‘Please forgive us.’

No word on whether Yarrow held a concert to apologize to the 14 year old girl he raped.
Jimmy Carter gave him a presidential pardon for it… Lefties are very forgiving when Party Members rape kids. Or as Peter Yarrow put it…

“You know, you make mistakes,” he says. “You feel terrible about it, make your amends. In that time, it was common practice.”

NYC School Plan to Honor Anti-War Activist/Pedophile Leads to Student Uprising

Note to Subscribers – I have received a number of emails lately from people who say they haven’t been receiving the daily emails. If you’re having that problem, please email me to let me know.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIERS
If Muslims fighting Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are the victims of non-Muslims, what are we to make of Muslims fighting other Muslims in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq? Religious civil wars make it hard to believe that Muslims are the victims of other religions instead of the authors of their own violence.

Religions have a long history of not getting along with one another, but there is only one religion that has never gotten along with any other religion, is engaging in a religious war with every religion that exists, with atheists who have no religion, and even with its own co-religionists.

Is all this violence someone else’s fault? Or is it Islam’s fault?

Dem Politician Appointed by Obama Defends Muslim Airline that Bans Israeli Jews

I HAVE NOTHING TO ADD
Several of the 9/11 family members speculated that the Obama administration is intentionally seeking to derail the hearings in a bid to bring them into federal court stateside.

“So I asked [Mohammed’s lead defense attorney David] Nevin why does he do what he does. ‘Because I enjoy my job,’” Nevin responded.

“So I asked [Nevin], ‘What’s it like to sit next to a guy and defend a guy who sawed off [reporter] Danny Pearl’s head? How does that make you feel? He wouldn’t answer the question, how he felt on a human level, how it feels to sit next to a cold blooded murder who sawed off a journalist’s head,” Arias recalled. “He wouldn’t answer. He started spouting Constitution and all this other stuff.

“Take them out to the Bronx Zoo,” Clyne proposed, referring to the detainees as “parasites.” “No, I’m serious. Feed them to the lions, and this way we’ll turn them back into the streaming piles of steaming shit that they have always been.”

9/11 Family Members: Feed Gitmo Terrorists to Bronx Zoo Lions

Chris Hayes Wants to Kill About 5.7 Billion People

MSNBC host Chris Hayes is getting an alarming amount of attention for his latest effort in The Nation, a stemwinder arguing that the abolition of fossil fuels is like the abolition of slavery.

The argument may sound forced, but Hayes has a logical premise that goes something like this: Socrates does not wear sandals; a potato kugel does not wear sandals; therefore Socrates is a potato kugel. It’s also tricked out with quasi-erudition and broad claims such as this one: “Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy (if not the main source) for societies stretching back millennia.” (Busy old fool, unruly Sun!)

Hayes, who serves as an editor-at-large for The Nation, manages to make 4,600 words feel even longer, with overflowing adjectives (“obvious,” “ungodly,” “brute, bloody”); lethal compound modifiers (“heart-stopping,” “full-throated”); cascades of adverbs (“immensely,” “basically,” “unfathomably” “probably,” “literally,” and even “downright”). There’s a to-be-sure paragraph guaranteeing the reader that Hayes is not making a “moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices” — followed by another 3,600 words comparing the enslavement of Africans and African Americans with the burning of carbon. (Hayes is coy as to what devices are in fact powered by these exotic carbon energy sources — about which more in a moment.)

So how does it make sense to compare the use of hydrocarbons with the enslavement of people? Turns out it’s the One Percent again, still clinging jealously to their privileges:

To preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth . . .

The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

The president’s rewriting of narcotics statutes is a gross abuse of power.
So now it’s the pardon power.

To this point, in making a mockery of his core constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully, the broad law-enforcement discretion the Constitution vests in the executive branch has been President Obama’s preferred sleight of hand. In reality, “prosecutorial discretion” is merely a resource-allocation doctrine peculiar to criminal law: a recognition of the obvious fact that enforcement resources are finite; that it is neither possible nor desirable that every penal infraction be prosecuted; and therefore that priorities must be established about which cases should be pursued, which left to state law-enforcement to handle, and which overlooked. The doctrine has never been what the president has turned it into: a license not merely to ignore but to rewrite laws — not just penal laws; any laws — with which he disagrees on policy grounds. Thus is “prosecutorial discretion” the subterfuge for usurping congressional law-making power — the maze of unilateral waivers, amendments, and whole-cloth weaving that marks Obama’s enforcement of the “Affordable” Care Act, the immigration laws, and other federal statutes.

Alas, the next item on the transformational-change agenda is undoing prior administrations’ faithful execution of the narcotics laws. The forward-looking prosecutorial-discretion doctrine is unavailing to address the past. That is where the pardon power comes in.

The Obama administration does not like the federal narcotics laws. The enmity goes way beyond the president’s nostalgic sympathy for pot smokers. And it has nothing to do with the philosophical objections of libertarians to the criminalization of drug use — we are talking, after all, about an administration whose zeal to intrude on our private lives could make Michael Bloomberg blush. Instead, like Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s incoherent dissent in the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling this week — she argues that a public referendum banning racial discrimination is somehow racially discriminatory — the administration’s disdain for the drug laws owes to its obsession with race and the poisonous politics that flow from it.

For years before they came to power, the president and his underlings belonged to a confederacy of leftist defense lawyers, academics, and “community organizers” — the people who gave us the criminal-rights revolution of the 1960s and the resultant soaring crime rates of the 1970s. Their cart-before-the-horse illogic gave us “disparate impact”: The theory that perversely erases from our consideration the only thing that makes racism racism — the intention to discriminate by race. Instead, they conveniently overlook the social, cultural, and government-policy roots of crime rates in minority communities, and instruct us to deduce systemic racism from the mere happenstance of higher minority conviction rates. The absence of a scintilla of evidence of racism in the text or enactment of the criminal laws makes no difference.

This thinking pervaded the bench every bit as much as the bar and the law schools. Criminals were often given absurdly light sentences for serious offenses. Consequently, when the public finally demanded that meaningful action be taken against the rising tide of crime, elected officials who answer to the voters took some sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges who do not.

In connection with drug-trafficking (as well as other crimes in which violence is a commonplace), this meant enacting “mandatory minimum” sentences — incarceration floors that, though a staple of state penal systems, were unusual in the federal code. In narcotics law, mandatory-minimum provisions were driven by the quantities involved in an offense, and varied from drug to drug. For example, if a distribution crime involved a kilogram of heroin, 5 kilograms of powder cocaine (cocaine hydrochloride), or 50 grams of crack (cocaine base), the judge had to sentence the defendant to at least ten years’ imprisonment. For crimes involving 100 grams of heroin, 500 grams of powder cocaine, or 5 grams of crack, the mandatory minimum was five years in the slammer.

Perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of classical liberal philosophy is the tolerance that classical liberalism exhibits towards those who choose to follow opposite ideologies, such as communism, socialism, communitarianism and, more recently, “greenism”. It is a conundrum for the simple fact that it appears counter-productive for the sake of survival ever to tolerate subversive elements. Of all political philosophies, classical liberalism tolerates, permits—and even encourages—people to make their own political choices and follow their political conscience. The same cannot be said of any left-leaning political philosophy or party, even the Australian Labor Party. Political philosophies of the Left do not tolerate diversity of political thought.

Milton Freedman most eloquently described this scenario of the tolerant liberal (and I use liberal here in the Australian sense, referring as it does to classical liberalism; while libertarian more comfortably and more usually now describes classical liberals for Americans). In his definitive text, Capitalism and Freedom, Freedman wrote:
One may believe, as I do, that communism would destroy all of our freedoms, one may be opposed to it as firmly and as strongly as possible, and yet, at the same time, also believe that in a free society it is intolerable for a man to be prevented from making voluntary arrangements with others that are mutually attractive because he believes in or is trying to promote communism. His freedom includes his freedom to promote communism. Freedom also, of course, includes the freedom of others not to deal with him under those circumstances.

But the question remains, why is this the case? Why do liberals tolerate political philosophies within their own society that would seek to destroy all the goods that a classical liberal way of life seeks to grant to human beings—goods such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of association?
Can the answer be as simple as the fact that classical liberal philosophy promotes choice, freedom of association and diversity of thought, therefore it logically follows that anti-liberal philosophies are tolerated regardless of their ultimate consequences and goals? Or could the answer to this conundrum go further? For example, are those who espouse right-wing classical liberalism more enlightened, more “educated” and more rational than left-leaners? After all, not for nothing does the word right imply “the correct” and “the just”. And does classical liberalism use this tolerance to continually test its own strength of argument?

I have just put down a book readers of this website are sure to take to heart — Twilight of Abundance by David Archibald, a fellow Quadrant contributor and currently Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. The book arrived in the mail, sent to me by the author, so I did the dutiful thing and read the first page, and then I did the self-indulgent thing and read it through as fast as time would allow over the next two days — and with such enormous pleasure that the only fault I might mention is how short it is. (I know, two days for a short book, but I’m a slow reader at the best of times.)

You could say Archibald’s book is about climate change, and it is, and you could say it’s about resource depletion, and it is that as well, and you could also say it’s about the breakdown of international order and it is about that too. But really, what it does is take everything I already believe about the problems the West must face and put them together into a tapestry of such pessimistic realism that it is hard not to be drawn in.
But having read the book, the most astonishing thing is that now, when I find myself in the company of greens and leftists preaching the end of civilisation as we know it, I can now so out-do anything bleak prospect they offer and leave them in the dismal, cooling shade. They talk of fifty year and the rising of the seas etc, etc. But their scenarios have nothing to compare with global cooling’s horrors if anything like the kind of picture Archibald paints comes to pass.
And while the book may be overly pessimistic about the challenges we face – and I emphasise that it may only be overly pessimistic because it might actually be the best set of forecasts available anywhere – there is nothing in it that struck me as seriously over the top. What the book does is outline the kinds of trends he sees, starting with the effects that will flow from a cooling of the global temperature just as we are running out of the abundant fossil fuels we have taken for granted for the past two hundred years.

The book reminds me just how viciously stupid have been the left’s attempts to gag debate on global warming. Had the only evidence available supported the warmists’ cause, there might have been something worth continuing to discuss. Instead, with the abrupt end to the warming phase between fifteen and twenty years ago (depending on whose charts and numbers you prefer), and which has followed the solar cycle in the exact way temperatures have always done, we should actually be looking at the effects that may follow if a solar minimum is about to recur, as it did during the Little Ice Age which ended not all that long ago. Suppose the Thames were to begin freezing over again, as it last did in 1802, how will we get on in a world of such cold and reduced growing seasons? Try that out in conversation the next time some propaganda-programmed dimwit brings up climate change.
Global warming is climate change for idiots. A cooling climate may be the real thing and the possibility should be treated with the utmost seriousness. The subtitle, “Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish and Short’’, is exactly what the book explains. It’s a book with a message we should all be thinking about, and not just here in Australia but across the world.

“I think it’s absurd and obnoxious that an obscure and unaccountable government agency should rule an area the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. What for? Why should the 26th largest country on earth (which the Bureau of Land Management is) be maintained in perpetuity as the world’s biggest nature preserve for the desert tortoise? The seven-eighths of the United States that isn’t under the iron rod of the BLM is the Brokest Nation in History: it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more productive land”

Like everyone else, Gavin McInnes has weighed in on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s observations on “the Negro”. Mr McInnes concludes:

This isn’t about some old guy’s views on slavery. It’s about government control. We’re not saying Bundy is the messiah and we accept him as our personal savior. We’re saying the government is wrong.

Let’s stipulate that Cliven Bundy is a racist. Let’s also assume, if only to save time, that he’s Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic. So what? Does that make criticizing the Bureau of Land Management “racist” or “homophobic”?

During my battles with Canada’s “human rights” commissions, defenders of the racket liked to point out that the people it targeted were generally pretty unsavory. And I’d respond that the reason the standard representation of justice in statuary is a blindfolded lady is because justice is supposed to be blind: If you run a red light and hit a pedestrian, it makes no difference whether the pedestrian you hit is Nelson Mandela or Cliven Bundy. Or at least it shouldn’t: one of the basic building blocks of civilized society is equality before the law.

Likewise, if what the Bureau of Land Management is doing is wrong, the fact that Cliven Bundy is a racist sexist homophobe whateverphobe doesn’t make it right – any more than at Ruby Ridge FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shooting Vicki Weaver in the back of the head as she was cradling her ten-month-old baby and running away from him is made right by the fact that she allegedly had “white supremacist” sympathies. As I wrote last week, I’ve little doubt that, in the era before cellphone video, the bureaucratic enforcers would have been happy to off Bundy and then come up with a reason why it doesn’t matter. At Waco, there were supposedly children being abused. So Generalissimo Janet Reno killed them all, and now they’re not being abused. In that sense, Mr Bundy is a lucky man: He got to live, and to trash his own reputation rather than having the feds do it for him.

In the London business paper City AM, John Hulsman writes:

The greatest global political risk can’t be found in Kiev, eastern Ukraine or any of the other hotspots that get the media so excited. It lies in the perception of Western weakness among those countries that find themselves dissatisfied with the current global establishment. For them, the enfeebled state of the West, as laid bare in Ukraine, means the possibility of expansion…

As seen from Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Damascus and Tehran, this is the inspiring, hopeful narrative of Western decline. These countries know they must be careful not to miscalculate, not to press too hard as the lessons of this calamity for the West slowly dawn. But in the medium term, it looks like Iran’s nuclear programme is safe, that Assad can soon pop the corks in Damascus, that for North Korea, torturing Seoul at the edges looks like a no brainer, and as for China, well, the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands await. With time, and after Putin’s groundbreaking efforts, the way history is moving couldn’t be clearer. The West simply doesn’t exist anymore.

That’s not, yet, strictly true. The G7 guys still get together, pose for summit group shots, host banquets. But is it a club others will want to join? After the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe decided it wanted to be western: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have all joined the EU; all the preceding plus Albania have joined Nato. In the Nineties, “the west” was the coming man, the order maker of “the end of history”.

It doesn’t look that way now, not if you’re Estonian or Ukrainian. Where next? If you’re Japan and the Philippines and South Korea and Singapore and maybe even India, you too live in a tough neighborhood. If American power is increasingly felt by its absence, China will fill the void and, to one degree or another, those nations will re-orient themselves accordingly. When Iran goes nuclear after years of Euro-American dithering and hollow words, Arabia’s Sunni monarchies will also make new security arrangements as best they can – but America and the west will not be a part of their calculations.

On NBC the other day David Brooks said Obama had a “manhood” problem. I am loathe to lay it all at the feet of his mom jeans, but it’s certainly true that for America’s global rivals he’s easy to despise. “Mr Obama,” writes Peter Baker in The New York Times, “seems intent on not letting Russia dominate his presidency.” Which, as Mr Putin well understands, is a polite way of saying Mr Obama seems intent on letting Russia dominate anywhere it wants to dominate.