Sunday, March 31, 2013

Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone: Hamas Won - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone: Hamas Won - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online: "Israel’s prime minister would have to do what he’d spent nearly three years steadfastly refusing to do. Netanyahu would have to apologize to a state sponsor of terrorism that openly, notoriously, and enthusiastically supports Hamas."


In late May 2010, IHH terrorists attempted to break Israel’s lawful naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade is necessary to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, Gaza’s rulers having responded to Israel’s painful peace offering — its withdrawal in 2005 from territory it had captured in a war of Arab aggression — by stepping up their terror campaign against the Jewish state. In seeking to break the blockade, an act of war, the IHH was willfully abetted by the Turkish government.
Israeli officials had pleaded with their Turkish counterparts to prevent the terrorists from embarking on their “peace flotilla.” Members of Erdogan’s government and party not only turned a deaf ear; they sold the jihadists the offending vessel, the Mavi Marmara. They allowed the jihadists — armed with flares, night-vision goggles, 150 bulletproof vests, 200 gas masks, several dozen slingshots, 200 knives, 20 axes, 50 wooden clubs, 100 assorted iron bars, etc. — to board the ship without inspection. When the inevitable high-seas confrontation occurred, the Israeli Defense Forces tried to subdue the terrorists with paintball guns. The IDF resorted to lethal force only after being premeditatedly and savagely attacked — with several of its sailors seriously wounded. In that response, nine of the terrorists were killed.
Squeezed by Obama, Netanyahu would have to apologize for the killing of those terrorists.


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Saturday, March 30, 2013

Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers - nicknamed "the chosen" - who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students' scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Jan Smuts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jan Smuts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Lord Todd, the Master of Christ's College said in 1970 that "in 500 years of the College's history, of all its members, past and present, three had been truly outstanding: John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts."[11]"

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Islamic hard-liners stormed a mosque in suburban Cairo, turning it into torture chamber for Christians who had been demonstrating against the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in the latest case of violent persecution that experts fear will only get worse.

Monday, March 25, 2013

We know from twin studies and more pointedly—“It’s almost all genetic!”—that intelligence is highly heritable, so that genes must be implicated.

We know from twin studies (30m40s and more pointedly—“It’s almost all genetic!”—at 1h12m18s) that intelligence is highly heritable, so that genes must be implicated. What it does mean is that we haven’t yet used big enough samples, as Steve explains very elegantly at 40m49s. That’s what they’re trying to do.

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Genes and Smarts

Amo Probos: Sibley v Obama -- Update on the Litigation

Amo Probos: Sibley v Obama -- Update on the Litigation:

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Saturday, March 23, 2013

Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration ...


SATURDAY ESSAY: Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration

I fear that large-scale, poorly managed immigration is endangering this social contract. Britain is a welfare democracy. Existing citizens have rights of national ownership. Extending the idea of equal citizenship to millions of outsiders raises the problem of how to reconcile the special rights of existing citizens with those of new ones.It is a problem we ignore at our peril.


Among Left-leaning ‘Hampstead’ liberals like me, there has long been what you might call a ‘discrimination assumption’ when it comes to the highly charged issue of immigration.
Our instinctive reaction has been that Britain is a relentlessly racist country bent on thwarting the lives of ethnic minorities, that the only decent policy is to throw open our doors to all and that those with doubts about how we run our multi-racial society are guilty of prejudice.
And that view — echoed in Whitehall, Westminster and town halls around the country — has been the prevailing ideology, setting the tone for the immigration debate.
Goodhart is now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly
Goodhart is now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite's views and those of ordinary people on the street
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite's views and those of ordinary people on the street
But for some years, this has troubled me and, gradually, I have changed my mind. 
Over 18 months of touring the country to talk to people about their lives for a new book, I have discovered minority Britons thriving more than many liberals suppose possible. But I also saw the mess of division and conflict we have got ourselves into in other places.
I am now convinced that public opinion is right and Britain has had too much immigration too quickly.
For 30 years, the Left has blinded itself with sentiment about diversity. But we got it wrong.
I still believe that large-scale immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been. I believe, too, that this country is significantly less racist than it once was.
 
In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs.
But it has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives — notably in the northern ‘mill towns’ and other declining industrial regions, which in the Sixties and Seventies attracted one of the most clannish minorities of modern times, rural Kashmiri Pakistanis.
In Leicester and Bradford, almost half of the ethnic population live in what are technically ghettos (defined as areas where minorities form more than two-thirds of the population). Meanwhile, parts of white working-class Britain have been left feeling neither valued nor useful, believing that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself.
Those in the race lobby have been slow to recognise that strong collective identities are legitimate for majorities as well as minorities, for white as well as for black people.
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been.
In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs
In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should with a degree of harmony, with minorities upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in mixed suburbs
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must 'belong' to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been
For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must 'belong' to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind. But it has not been
The justification for such a large and unpopular change has to be that the economic benefits are significant and measurable. But they are not.
One of the liberal elite’s myths is that we are a ‘mongrel nation’ that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But this isn’t true. From 1066 until 1950, immigration was almost non-existent (excluding Ireland) — a quarter of a million at the most, mainly Huguenots and Jews.
Post-World War II immigration has been on a completely different scale from anything that went before. These days, more people arrive on our shores as immigrants in a single year than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime.
Much of this happened by accident. When the 1948 Nationality Act was passed — giving all citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth the right to live and work in Britain — it was not expected that the ordinary people of poor former colonies would arrive in their hundreds of thousands. 
Nor was it expected after 1997 that a combination of quite small decisions would lead to 1.5 million East Europeans arriving, about half to settle. But come they did, and a net immigration of around four million foreign-born citizens since 1997 has produced easily the most dramatic demographic revolution in British history.
The whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all
The whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all
Yet there was no general discussion in the New Labour Cabinet of the day about who Britain wanted to let in and in what numbers; no discussion about how the country could absorb them without pressure on public services.
By the time of the next census in 2021, the non-white minority population will have risen to around 20 per cent, a trebling in just 25 years. 
By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority.
This is already the case in some towns and cities, including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton, with Birmingham expected to follow in the near future.
If Britain had a clear and confident sense of its national culture and was good at integrating people, then perhaps this speed of change would be of little concern. But this is not the case.
We are deep into a huge social experiment. To give it a chance of working, we need to heed the ‘slow down’ signs that the electorate is waving. And all the more so given that the low economic growth era we are now in means people’s grievances cannot easily be bought off with rising wages and public spending.
The fact is that the whole post-war process of immigration has been badly managed or, rather, not managed at all.
It is often said that the importation of people from the Indian subcontinent to work in textile mills that were soon to close — ironically, partly thanks to competition from India and Pakistan itself — was a poor piece of social engineering. 
But the whole point was that no one really engineered it. It just happened. 
And then no one came forward to grasp the consequences or even acknowledge there might be a problem.
The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’
Immigration has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives
Immigration has also resulted in too many areas in which ethnic minorities lead almost segregated lives
I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
Such grand notions run counter to the way most people in this country think or arrange their priorities.
The British political class has never prepared existing citizens for something as game-changing as large-scale immigration, nor has it done a good job at explaining what the point of large-scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve. 
Crucially, they failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. On the contrary, the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start.
Then, whenever there were problems with immigrant communities, the tendency was for the host society to be blamed for not being sufficiently accommodating or for being racist, rather than considering the self-inflicted wounds of some minority cultures.
Parts of white working-class Britain believe that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself
Parts of white working-class Britain believe that they have been displaced by newcomers not only in the job market but also in the national story itself
Thus, the absence of fathers in many African-Caribbean households was excused as a cultural trait that just had to be accepted rather than a dereliction of duty that needed addressing.
Yes, being a newcomer can be hard, even in a liberal society such as Britain’s that today offers undreamed of protections and rights compared with earlier eras. But what has been largely ignored is that mass immigration makes big demands on host communities, too, and a successful strategy must engage the attention, consent and sympathy of the host majority as well.
Democratic common sense demands that politics and law cannot concern themselves only with the problems of minorities. The majority must have a voice, too, in how we manage a multi-racial society.
Like most white British people of my generation, I am happy living in a multi-racial society. I relish the fact that the immigration-related changes of the past few decades have been overwhelmingly accepted and even celebrated by white Britain.
Caribbean and Chinese men and women ‘marry out’ in large numbers, and there are many places where a cross-ethnic common life is the norm, especially among younger people.
But one of the challenges is how to allow older and poorer white people a safe space in which to express a sense of loss and homesickness for the past, without this mood spilling over into racism.
What, for example, do we say to the elderly white people of the Pollards Hill estate in Merton, in South-West London — which I visited on my travels — many of whom feel displaced and disrupted by the arrival of a large Ghanaian population in recent years? 
To the local whites, the Ghanaians are not fitting in but imposing their own way of life on the neighbourhood. Similar small battles are taking place in thousands of other housing estates up and down the country. 
What has most bedevilled immigration in this country for years now is a twist in the prevailing doctrine of multi-culturalism.
As originally conceived, this was a deliberate and praise-worthy policy of ‘colour-blindness’ — a belief in equal rights and reform of institutions to stamp out prejudice and abuse of power. But it also placed an onus on the newcomer to fit in.
By the time of the next census in 2021, the non-white minority population will have risen to around 20 per cent, a trebling in just 25 years. By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority
By the time of the next census in 2021, the non-white minority population will have risen to around 20 per cent, a trebling in just 25 years. By 2066, according to one demographer, white Britons will be in a minority
The immigrant has chosen to come to an existing country with its own laws, history, language and so on. Those need to be respected and understood. One cannot be British on one’s own exclusive terms or on a highly selective basis. 
That does not mean that pious Muslims must give up their religion and get drunk on Saturday nights.
But it does mean that Muslims must adjust to a society dominated by Christian and secular humanist values, which places a high degree of importance on individual freedom and the rights of women.
And they must accept that their minority rights must co-exist with and sometimes concede to majority rights, especially in the public sphere.
So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the multiculturalism that emerged in the Eighties ditched integration as an objective, put ethnic identity before national citizenship and reinforced a separateness that was already developing in some minority neighbourhoods through simple weight of numbers.
Enlarge Nick Clegg has this week insisted British society has been shaped by migrant communities, but unveiled tougher action against illegal immigration
Nick Clegg has this week insisted British society has been shaped by migrant communities, but unveiled tougher action against illegal immigration
‘Parallel lives’ have been allowed to grow up in some places. Too often, the demands of minority leaders have been for a separate slice of power and resources, rather than for the means to create a common life.
The state cannot force people to integrate, but it can remove obstacles and make it easier to join in. Education is crucial here. 
But when, in 1984, Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford, whose school was 90 per cent Muslim, wrote articles criticising Pakistani parents for taking their children on long trips to Pakistan during term-time and attacked the corporal punishment culture of mosque schools, a campaign by Muslim parents and local white activists forced him to resign.
It was a key victory for separatism and a defeat for integration. 
After that, separatist multiculturalism sided with the imams against Salman Rushdie after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses and the imposition of a fatwa against him; it encouraged people to wear non-Western dress and to continue speaking an ancestral language at home.
It judged the chauvinistic assumptions of many South Asian households by a different standard to that applied to white Britain. It was happy with South Asians going back to the subcontinent for arranged marriages with non-English speaking spouses, despite the damage to integration this often caused (and the misery for many young women).
Separatist multiculturalism, in its extreme form, even turned a blind eye to practices that were the opposite of the liberalism that inspired it — forced marriage, female genital mutilation, the hounding of gays.
The root problem with separatist multiculturalism is that minority Britons are encouraged to identify first as a member of that minority and only second, if at all, as a citizen. And this has made it harder for ordinary Britons to think of some minorities, and especially Muslims, as part of the same community as them, with common experiences and interests.
The problem with mass immigration is that, without integration, it damages the internal solidarity of a country such as ours. 
And if values and lifestyles become more diverse, it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state.
Most of us are no longer asked to risk death for our country, but we are asked to pay around one third of our income into a common national pool and, in return, the state manages large bits of infrastructure for us — such as defence, transport, energy, public services, welfare and so on.
For this to work, the modern citizen is expected to conform to a thicket of rules and regulations. And in order to sustain this level of sharing and co-operation, we need at least some sense of ‘emotional citizenship’, the belief that, despite many different interests, we’re also part of the same team.
I fear that large-scale, poorly managed immigration is endangering this social contract. 
Britain is a welfare democracy. Existing citizens have rights of national ownership. Extending the idea of equal citizenship to millions of outsiders raises the problem of how to reconcile the special rights of existing citizens with those of new ones.
It is a problem we ignore at our peril.
  • Adapted from The British Dream by David Goodhart, to be published by Atlantic Books on April 1, 2013 at £20. © David Goodhart. To order a copy for £14 (including p&p), call 0844 472 4157.


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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Being White in Philly | Philadelphia magazine - Page 2

Being White in Philly | Philadelphia magazine - Page 2: "“I’ve been here for two years, I’m almost done,” she says. “Blacks use skin color as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward. … It’s a shame—you pay taxes, they’re not doing anything except sitting on porches smoking pot … Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot? "

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“It’s almost all genetic!”

“It’s almost all genetic!”—at 1h12m18s) that intelligence is highly heritable, so that genes must be implicated. What it does mean is that we haven’t yet used big enough samples, as Steve explains very elegantly at 40m49s. That’s what they’re trying to do.

Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/genes_and_smarts_john_derbyshire/print#ixzz2OAI9DnCW

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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

2013 Climate Cure – Same As 1839 | Real Science

2013 Climate Cure – Same As 1839
In 1839, experts believed that droughts were caused by man’s sins, and that sacrifice was needed.

Under such circumstances it is, we think, worthy the serious consideration of the Government whether another day of fasting should not be set apart, to allow the people additional opportunity to humiliate themselves before tho Lord in acknowledgement of their sins

2013 Climate Cure – Same As 1839 | Real Science

Monday, March 18, 2013

Currency wars are best fought quietly | Niall Ferguson | Journalism

Currency wars are best fought quietly | Niall Ferguson | Journalism:

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IMF's four steps to damnation

Step One is privatisation.
Step Two is capital market liberalisation.
Step Three: market-based pricing - a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.

Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, which Stiglitz likens to the Opium Wars. In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade, which is just as effective and sometimes just as deadly.

IMF's four steps to damnation | Business | The Observer:

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German Commerzbank calls for Italians to be similarly plundered for 15% of their savings.

News that the International Monetary Fund initially demanded to loot a shocking 40% of savings from the private bank accounts of Cypriots underscores how residents of the Mediterranean country could be the latest victims of the infamous “IMF riot,” as the chief economist of the German Commerzbank calls for Italians to be similarly plundered for 15% of their savings.

cores how residents of the Mediterranean country could be the latest victims of the infamous “IMF riot,” as the chief economist

Pirenne, Henri – MOHAMMED AND CHARLEMAGNE

“This last work of the great Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne offered a new and revolutionary interpretation of the evolution of Europe from the time of Constantine to that of Charlemagne. Pirenne’s major thesis is that it was the advance of Islam rather than the Germanic invasions that caused the break with antiquity and the consequent decline of Western civilization in the Middle Ages.”

Pirenne, Henri – MOHAMMED AND CHARLEMAGNE

"Why We Are Afraid, A 1400 Year Secret, by Dr Bill Warner"

Sunday, March 17, 2013

What Arab Civilization?


What Arab Civilization?
This letter was sent to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech given by her on September 26, 2001.


November 7, 2001
Carly Fiorina
Hewlett-Packard
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185
Dear Madame Fiorina:
It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled "Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What's Next" [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Mulsims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this -- primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book Dhimmi, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, "its architects designed buildings that defied gravity." I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.
You state, "its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption." The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian Mathematics, Neugebauer).
You state, "its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease." The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see The Statutes of the School of Nisibis, by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.
You state, "Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration." This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized -- so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.
You state, "its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things." There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac; see here.)
You state, "when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others." This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in which the author lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1 was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of my review: "The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise which they had established. One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer." I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).
Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see Nestorian Influence on Islam and Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World).
Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?
You state, "and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions." In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist "Young Turk" government. This is the true face of Islam.
Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini). This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years beforeArabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab' is an Assyrian word, meaning "Westerner" (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the "ma'rabayeh" -- Westerners. See The Might That Was Assyria, by H. W. F. Saggs).
Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.
There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.
I hope you found this information enlightening. For more information, refer to the web links below. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.
Thank you for your consideration.
Peter BetBasoo
Web resources:
Brief History of Assyrians
Assyrian International News Agency
Assyrian American National Federation
Assyrian Academic Society
Zinda Magazine
Beth Suryoyo
Nineveh Online
World Maronite Union
Maronite Research Council
World Lebanese Organization
Coptic Web


What Arab Civilization?:

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How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs


....the Greek writers who influenced the oriental world were not the poets, historians, or orators, but exclusively the scientists who wrote on medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, the type of scientific thought which does not always come foremost when we speak about classical literature. In the days when the Arabs inherited the culture of ancient Greece, Greek thought was chiefly interested in science, Athens was replaced by Alexandria, and Hellenism had an entirely "modem "outlook. This was an attitude with which Alexandria and its scholars were directly connected, but it was by no means confined to Alexandria. It was a logical outcome of the influence of Aristotle who before all else was a patient observer of nature, and was in fact the founder of modern science. It had its germs in older thought, no doubt, in the speculations of quite early philosophers about the origin and world and its inhabitants, animals as well as men, but it was Aristotle who introduced what may be called the scientific method.In entering upon this inquiry it may be premised that there are at least three threads very closely interwoven. In the first place there are Greek scientific writers whose books were translated into Arabic, studied by Arab scholars, and made the subject of commentaries and summaries: in such cases the line of transmission is clear. Then there are conclusions and scientific principles assumed and developed by Arabic writers who do not say whence they were derived, but which can only be explained by reference to a Greek (Alexandrian) source. Yet again, there are questions and problems raised which the Arabs dealt with in their own way, but which never would have occurred to them unless they had been suggested by earlier Greek thinkers who had tried to solve similar difficulties, but approached their solution in a different way.Greek scientific thought had been in the world for a long time before it reached the Arabs, and during that period it had already spread abroad in various directions. So it is not surprising that it reached the Arabs by more than one route. It came first and in the plainest line through Christian Syriac writers, scholars, and scientists. Then the Arabs applied themselves directly to the original Greek sources and learned over again all they had already learned, correcting and verifying their earlier knowledge. Then there came a second channel of transmission indirectly through India, mathematical and astronomical work, all a good deal developed by Indian scholars, but certainly developed from material obtained from Alexandria in the first place. This material had passed to India by the sea route which connected Alexandria with north-west India. Then there was also another line of passage through India which seems to have had its beginning in the Greek kingdom of Bactria, one of the Asiatic states founded by Alexander the Great, and a land route long kept open between the Greek world and Central Asia, especially with the city of Marw, and this perhaps connects with a Buddhist medium which at one time promoted intercourse between east and west, though Buddhism as a religion was withdrawing to the Far East when the Arabs reached Central Asia. Further, there were some scattered minor sources, unfortunately little known, such as the city of Harran, an obstinately pagan Greek colony planted in the middle of a Christian area, which probably made its contribution, though on a smaller scale.The term "Arabs"must be taken in a broad sense. It is not here used strictly to denote those of Arab blood, but includes all those who were politically under Arab rule, who used the Arabic language and followed the religion of the Arabs. Some, like the Persians under the early 'Abbasids in the eighth century, were very definitely anti-Arab, but they lived under Arab rule, wrote in Arabic, and at least professed to follow the religion of Muhammad. Such being the case, they and their Arab rulers shared a common life which coloured their literature, education, and interests generally; even though Persian literature and religion diverged in its own direction, it moved from an Arabic starting-point. Neither culture nor language run on lines precisely identical with race. Conquest, superior civilization, economic needs have often caused communities to adopt new languages and new cultures. Yet there was sufficient coherence in the community gathered under the rule of the KhaHf to justify its being treated as a unit, even though not all its members recognized the same khalifi The 'Umayyads in Andalus took their cue from the rinces ruling in Baghdad. The schismatic Shi'ites agreed with the orthodox Sunnis that their leader on earth should be the heir of the Prophet Muhammad, though they differed as to the individual who was the lawful heir. The no less heretical Kharijites had a khaff of their owm, freely elected on a democratic basis, but so elected because it was believed that this best followed Muhanunad's precedent.More important than political, racial or religious unity is the fact that those here classed as Arabs shared the same cultural history and all participated in the scientific heritage derived from the Hellenistic world. At first the city of Baghdad was the distributing centre where Greek material was brought together from different parts, Syria, Bactria, India, Persia, and other, and from Baghdad this material spread out in an Arabic form to all those social groups which were held together by the religion of Islam. Later on, when political and economic disturbances checked the cultural life of Baghdad and the empire of the khalifs began a process of devolution, or disintegration, very siriiilar to that experienced by the empire of the Karlings in the west, the leadership passed from Baghdad to Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Cordova, and Samarqand. But before that happened Greek scientific literature had made itself at home amongst the Arabs and had begun a new and independent life in an Arabic atmosphere.The Greek material received by the Arabs was not simply passed on by them to others who came after, it had a very real life and development in its Arabic surroundings. In astronomy and mathematics the work of Greek and Indian scientists was coordinated, and thence a very real advance was made. It may be stated that algebra and both plane and spherical trigonometry were Arab developments. The Arabs were diligent in making and recording astronomical observations, and these not only extended what they had received from the Greeks, but checked and corrected older records. The Arabs perceived the weakness in the Ptolemaic cosmology and the new astronomy "of the thirteenth century tried to correct it, but in vain. It was not until Copernicus that the solution was found.







How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs:

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Friday, March 15, 2013

Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Development

By Mark Musser

Much of the European Union's green sustainable development plans are largely based on government controlled land use planning theories rooted in the lebensraum tradition.    Literally, lebensraum means "living space."   Lebensraum was originally developed by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and then greatly expanded under the banner of National Socialism (1933-1945).
Ratzel is the father of modern political geography which is commonly called geopolitics.  He believed history was largely a natural evolutionary development of peoples looking for geographical living space.  Ratzel also held that expanding borders reflected the biological health of a nation.  The National Socialists adopted Ratzel's mixing of evolutionary theory, biology, and geopolitics in their own version of lebensraum. "

Articles: Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Development:
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Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Ninety-Five Theses - Martin Luther

The Ninety-Five Theses - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

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Tackling White Privilege - Taki's Magazine

t only takes a second to realize I’m doing better than others because of privilege. Doye. However, to apply this logic to others is insane. Asians face all kinds of racism and have no privileges. The fact that they’re doing better than every other group means they’re simply better. White people suck.

I would like to take a moment to deeply apologize to all our Asian readers and also to all our racially aware readers. In particular, I’d like to thank the student at Berkeley who pointed out how similar my essay was to Peggy McIntosh’s “Invisible Knapsack.” That one was a wake-up call.

“If whites accomplish too much, they probably cheated. If anyone else succeeds, it’s due to hard work.”
In fact, after going over my “Tackling Asian Privilege” essay, I realized the whole thing ceased to be offensive when I subbed out the word “Asian” for “white.”

Check it out…

Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/tackling_white_privilege_gavin_mcinnes/print#ixzz2NXGgpzhd

Tackling White Privilege - Taki's Magazine

Climategate 3.0 has occurred – the password has been released

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

How to Weaken an Economy

there are plenty of ways to slow down even an inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and how they fail. Let’s review some of them.

Works and Days » How to Weaken an Economy

Don Jimmy (Savile) Gambino OBE


Don Jimmy Gambino OBE

funeralusethis
When Dave Lee Travis was released on bail last week he was keen to distance himself from Jimmy Savile in the public’s mind. Fair enough — to be accused of dolly-bird-groping rather than kiddy-diddling is probably a worthwhile distinction to make. But Savile and Travis go back a long way. The future Hairy Monster’s first job was at Manchester’s Mecca-owned Plaza Ballroom. He was only seventeen when the manager, Jimmy Savile, hired him as a trainee DJ. (His age wasn’t a problem because the Plaza didn’t have a licence to serve alcohol.)

LeedsMeccauseThe Plaza was just one of many dance halls and clubs that Savile oversaw, managed, disk-jockeyed at, wielded shadowy control over or had some kind of undeclared stake in, not only in Manchester but also on the other side of the Pennines — in Bradford, in Wakefield, in Halifax, over on the coast in Scarborough and Whitby, and especially in Leeds. In his hometown the joints he presided over included the Cat's Whiskers and the Locarno Ballroom in the County Arcade, known by locals simply as “the Mecca” (later rebranded as the Spinning Disc). That’s where, in 1958, his predilection for underage girls first came to the attention of the police. The matter was swiftly resolved by peeling a few hundred quid off the big roll of twenties that he always carried, right up until he died.

Meanwhile, in Manchester on any given night in the late Fifties and early Sixties, if you couldn’t find Savile at the Plaza at lunchtime, he’d surely be at the Ritz later on. Or, if not, try the Three Coins in Fountain Street. He didn’t even rest on Sundays; that was when he span the platters for upwards of two thousand jivers and twisters at his Top Ten Club at Belle Vue.

The man was everywhere — at practically every major dance hall and nightclub in the North’s heaving conurbations, as much of a fixture as the rotating mirror ball.

How did he do it? Criminally, it seems.

fattonyuse500

He’d started out in the early 1950s, putting on his pioneering “record dances” for any dance hall that would have him. Discreet beginnings, but he was soon Mecca’s “dancing area manager” in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and before the decade’s end he was a director of the company. Most of the fifty-two venues he ran were in the North, but not all of them. We’ll come back to that.

Dance halls back then were — much as today’s clubs largely still are — strictly cash-based operations. The books were easy to cook, and if Eric “Mr. Miss World” Morley had given you the key to the night safe, it was even easier to skim the take. Is that how Jimmy Savile made so much money so quickly? We’ll probably never know, but he already had a Rolls Royce by the end of the Fifties and would soon be parading around the streets of Manchester in an E-Type Jaguar too. Jimmy-Oscar-Savile-1950s-useHow does that work, when he was still only supposed to be a wacky-haired weirdo who acted the yodelling fool and put records on for folk to shimmy and shake to? He already had his show on Radio Luxembourg by then, true, but it’d be another five years before he was a household name with regular appearances on Juke Box JuryThank Your Lucky Stars and Top of the Pops.

A clue to just how much clout Savile wielded on the Northern nightlife scene fifty years ago is casually dropped by an anecdote in his official biography. One night he twigged that the doormen at one of his dance halls were operating some kind of scam. Savile went apeshit — not because his staff were contravening company policy, but because they’d had the gall not to include him in on it. He challenged them to explain themselves. He demanded his “cut” (yes, that’s how the official biographer phrases it), or they’d be out on their cauliflower ears. They acquiesced. Jim had fixed them.

Say hello to László


Hang on. Isn’t it supposed to be the heavies on the door who put the squeeze on the management? Not under Jimmy Savile’s regime. He had a whole crew of moonlighting miners, Eastern European bodybuilders — the one at the Mecca in Leeds was called László — and wrestlers at his permanent beck and call. Proper wrestlers they were, an' all, not mere dilettantes like Savile was during his stint as a novelty grappler. savillewrestlinguseOne of the three wrestling Crabtree brothers, Shirley, was among them — then still a sheer cliff of muscle billed as Blond Adonis or Mister Universe, many years before he turned to fat and reinvented himself as Big Daddy. Whenever trouble broke out on the dance floor, Crabtree would pick up the miscreants, bundle one under each arm like rolls of carpet and carry them outside. "Yow've been naughteh boys. Very, very naughteh boys.” He mostly worked for Savile on the door at the Cat’s Whiskers in Leeds, and in 1965, when he launched a club of his own (or at least ostensibly his own) in Halifax, Savile duly pitched up for the grand opening.

Meanwhile, back under the glare of the brighter lights of the Mancunian metropolis, things were obviously very different. Oh, wait. No, they weren’t. It turns out that most of the doormen at Savile’s Manchester dance halls were not hardnuts from Harpurhey, Longsight or Ancoats, as you might expect. They were Yorkshiremen. Jimmy Savile had taken his crew with him for company on his trans-Pennine commute. TeddyBoysMeccauseHe kitted out the ones on the door at the Plaza with hair clippers to strip off any teddy boys’ offensive sideburns before they’d be allowed in. “Eether them sardboards go, or yow dow.”

Let nobody ever accuse Jimmy Savile of not running a respectable establishment.

What exactly is going on here? Being driven around in a succession of fuck-you flash cars, the big cigars, never spending two nights running in the same house, flitting from nightspot to nightspot with a posse of big-muscled minders, packing a big roll of banknotes to pay off the police, demanding and receiving tithes from his underlings’ illicit earnings.... What does all that suggest to you: the quirks and foibles of a wannabe showbiz personality or the typical trappings of a mob boss?

Beneath the veneer of a Mecca middle manager, it looks as though Jimmy Savile was running a large-scale protection racket at dozens and dozens of Northern dance halls and nightclubs for the best part of two decades.

A lippy little tyke with his hair in a tartan bob (Black Watch, as he liked to point out) is all that most people chose to see. But up North he ruled the night. How’s about that, then?

Smokeward bound

billywalkeruse
And not just up North. By the early Sixties he’d also secured what is now called a “significant presence” down South. One of the Mecca clubs under Jimmy Savile’s very-much-hands-on purview — he nipped down the A1 to DJ there on Monday nights — was the Ilford Palais. And although he didn’t take his Yorkshire bruisers with him for that gig, you can’t say he skimped on their substitutes. One of his doormen at the Palais was the boxer Billy Walker, who no doubt would have become the British pro-heavyweight champion had it not been for the immovable hegemony of Henry Cooper. Walker’s brother and manager, George, had been Billy Hill’s minder. If you can’t quite place the name Billy Hill, he was the Kray twins’ patron.

On his weekly trips to London, Savile ran a schedule as tight as when he was on his home ground back up North. Before heading out for Ilford, and perhaps to Mecca's flagship Locarno Ballroom in Streatham as well,  he recorded his Teen and Twenties Disc Club for Radio Luxembourg. Then he'd pop his head in at the offices of Decca Records. It was not a courtesy call. By the time he hit the street again, he’d not only replenished his stock of music but also fattened his wad. It was a sweet payola deal. He promised to play the latest Decca releases at all his dances in return for a reasonable consideration. Decca, like most other labels at the time, was very much a mixed bag in terms of the quality of their records (they famously turned down the Beatles, although they struck gold with the Stones soon afterwards). And for every future hit they gave Savile first dabs with, they saddled him with several real stinkers. He caned them all the same, one after the other at the start of his sets. Regular punters soon learned that they wouldn’t miss much if they arrived fashionably late, just in time for the decent stuff that they'd paid to hear.

Not the face!


wrestlingbilluseEven the wrestling was bent. And not just because of the sham fights, with heels and blue-eyes working out all their moves in the dressing-room. The promoters were at it too. The top end of the business — because a sport is something it’s never been — was ruled by a cartel called First Promotions, which in turn was dominated by a tight clutch of Yorkshiremen. They bagged all the public’s favourite wrestlers and froze out any would-be rival promoters. Before long, the cartel was raking in £15,000 a week from TV rights alone. Of that, once “expenses” had been deducted, a couple of hundred quid tops would trickle down for the featured wrestlers to split between them. Jimmy Savile’s own bouts were promoted by Relwyskow & Green, two of First Promotions’ leading lights. By the mid-Seventies one of the Crabtree brothers, Max, was running the whole show.

We may never find out who Jimmy Savile really was: whether the entertainer, the philanthropist, the discotheque pioneer, the loner, the Bevin Boy, the loyal company man, the daft-coiffed eccentric, the secure-mental-hospital administrator, the all-in wrestler, the sociopath, the counsellor to royalty, the morgue attendant, the marathon runner or the serial sex fiend. At various times he was all those things. But it seems that from the early Fifties until at least the mid-Sixties he was, above all, a crook.


THE SUMP PLUG: Don Jimmy Gambino OBE:

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Sunday, March 10, 2013

"Boss Tweed" and the Tammany Hall Machine


    From the Wilson readings, it is natural to think of big city "political machines" and negative connotation like "sewers." The ward based, patronage driven form of local government is commonly thought of in criminal terms and, in that sense, so are Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City.
     There is little question that the Tweed Ring were outright thieves and that Tammany Hall did have a series of reoccurring scandals. An estimated 75 to 200 million dollars were swindled from the City between 1865 and 1871. Yet, there is more to the story than a confrontation of the machine form of city government and the ideology of reformer exhortations. Tammany represented a form of organization that wedded the Democratic Party and the Society of St. Tammany ( started in 1789 for patriotic and fraternal purposes) into an interchangeable exchange. The weave of city politics was the triangulation of the Mayor's office, the Democratic Party and the social club organization. During the Civil War era, the Society of St. Tammany became the Democratic Party equivalent to the Union League Club and the Republicans. The difference is that the Democrats won control of New York City and "The Big Apple" was, perhaps, the most important government structure in the United States for more than seventy years.
     In 1854 Fernando Wood became the first Tammany Democrat mayor of the City. 1860 William March Tweed became chairman of the New York county Democratic Party and the leader (called the Grand Sachem) of the Tammany club. For the next seventy years ( until the 1934 mayoral victory of Fiorello La Guardia) the anti machine reformers only held the mayor's office and control of the City for a total of ten years. Given the present day infamy of the "Tweed" identity to disgrace it is curious that the "rascals took so long to be thrown out."
     The success of Tammany Hall to control City politics and persist in power until the years of the Great Depression is better appreciated by understanding Samuel Tilden George Washington Plunkett.
     Samuel Tilden was the Chairperson of the New York State Democratic Party during the Tweed era and ran for President against Rutherford Hayes in 1876. He, more than any other politician, is given credit for bringing down the Tweed Ring in New York City. The problem was that he worked on the task of identifying and bring down the Tweed ring for more than a decade. Republicans charged that length of time amounted to a cover-up; Democratic argued that length of time was necessary for state power to isolate and weaken local government control. In short, Samuel Tilden was a reformer who found himself (in the early l870's) caught between the reformer desires to clean up the criminal excess of the political machine and the practical implications of gauging probable success. As he gathered information to prove Tweed criminality beyond a shadow of a doubt Tilden also wanted the state Democratic Party to not be accused of corruption or covering up. He knew the general movement for municipal reform was growing but he also knew the underlying strength of the political machine form of local government would remain regardless of the reformer success with the Tweed phenomenon.
     George Plunkett was made famous by writer William Riordan who described Tammany Hall as "a series of very plain talk on very practical politics delivered by Tammany philosopher from his rostrum-the New York County Courthouse bootblack stand."
     The book, Plunkett of Tammany Hall was first published in 1963 and contains chapters like, "honest and dishonest graft," "the curse of civil service reform," "reciprocity in patronage," " Tammany leaders not bookworms," "dangers of the dress suit in politics," "on the uses of money in politics," " bosses preserve the nation," and "Tammany the only lasting democracy." Plunkett's formula for staying on top for seven decades of New York City rule was; " Tammany is the ocean, reform the waves, and there is a lot of unofficial patronage to ride out the storms if you know the ropes. Why don't reformers last in politics? Because they are amateurs and you must be a pro. Politicians do not have to steal to make a living because a crook is a fool and a politician can become a millionaire through 'honest graft."
     When we remember Ellis Island was in New York harbor (with the Statue of Liberty) and it is estimated that two fifths of the American population have relatives that were processed through that in migration site, the Plunkett "plain talk" starts to make sense. "Think what the people of New York are. On half, more than one half, are of foreign birth. They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to build up the state....there is no denying the service that Tammany has rendered the Republic. There is no other organization for taking hold of untrained, friendless men and converting them into citizens. Who else in the city would do it? There is not a mugwump who would shake their hand."
    For that city context Plunkett advises those concerned with local governing; " Don't go to college and stuff your head with rubbish; get out with your neighbors and relatives and round up a few votes you can call your own. Study human nature and make government warm and personal." For the way the political machine routinely operates, Plunkett states, "What reformers call 'machine' we call organization. In New York City the smallest unit is the election district committee, headed by a captain. The election districts overlap with the assembly districts headed by leaders who, in turn, constitute the county executive committee. Assembly leaders are elected in primaries and elect their own party chairmen." Author Riordan points out that the New York City Democratic organization in the l920's numbered 32,000 committee men spread over five counties. The amount of patronage in l888 (when Woodrow Wilson was publishing his famous piece) for just the city county containing Manhattan and a slice of the Bronx was 12,000 municipal jobs and a payroll of twelve million dollars. At the time this was a bigger resource distribution than the Andrew Carnegie iron and steel works.
     When George Plunkett dies in 1924 he was eulogized this way;" He understood that in politics honesty doesn't matter, efficiency doesn't matter, progressive vision doesn't matter. What does matter is the chance for a better job, a better price of wheat, better business conditions. Plunkett's legacy is to that practicality."


"Boss Tweed" and the Tammany Hall Machine:

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Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory.


"[This paper] acts to reject the theory that modern humans are of uniquely African origin and supports the notion that emerging African populations mixed with natives they encountered," says Milford Wolpoff, a proponent of the multiregional hypothesis at the University of Michigan.


Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory - life - 03 November 2009 - New Scientist:

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Thursday, March 07, 2013

Quantum theory is wrong

The Copenhagen Interpretation 
So sometimes a particle acts like a particle and other times it acts like a wave. So which is it? According to Niels Bohr, who worked in Copenhagen when he presented what is now known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, the particle is what you measure it to be. When it looks like a particle, it is a particle. When it looks like a wave, it is a wave. Furthermore, it is meaningless to ascribe any properties or even existence to anything that has not been measured. Bohr is basically saying that nothing is real unless it is observed.
It just means that the particles do not communicate by any means we know about. All we know is that every particle knows what every other particle it has ever interacted with is doing.
 NOTE: to actually perform this exact experiment would take detectors more advanced then any on earth at this time.
What is Quantum Physics

On the  contrary the neutron experiment showed that photons can repel neutrons.
When we measure the movement of an object by emitting light towards it and measuring the resultant light reflected back to us, we are interfering physically with the direction and speed of the observed object. If the object is large, the effect of the interference is small. At a sub atomic level, the interference is greater and can become sufficient to negate the observed items motion entirely.
Quantum theory is wrong.
Particles do not retain "information", don't have "knowledge".
It is not that the act of observation that alters reality. In fact the physical nature of the "observation" small though it may be is sufficient to alter the metrics of sub atomic particles.

Monday, March 04, 2013

I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam."

but Ian McEwan put it better than I ever could. In his Saturday, set on the day of the great anti-war march of 2003, he has the hero, Henry Perowne, argue with his daughter. Perowne, a surgeon, has treated the victims of Saddam's torture chambers and asks her: "Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam."

"He's loathsome, it's a given," she replies.

"No, it's not," says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"

Ten years on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid | Nick Cohen

The Quran…should be the highest authority in America

Critics allege that Shariah prohibits other faiths from free exercise when enforced, and would actually invalidate the American First Amendment, unless practitioners were Muslim.

Carroll’s statement was similar to a statement made by CAIR Chairman Omar M. Ahmad, who is on record saying, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

Carroll began joking about the widespread concern surrounding Shariah, the religious code that governs all Muslim civil and political life, saying, “We tried to downplay Shariah, because we didn’t want to give the other side any excitement for being here.”

Read more at http://mobile.wnd.com/2013/03/we-are-above-the-law-of-the-land/#AXoudBmK8zBe7oLm.99

‘We are above the law of the land’

Sunday, March 03, 2013