Yeah, This Will Be A Hit Movie

Just guessing, but I predict this one won't exactly make Box Office Mojo burst into flames. Now, I could be wrong, after all, it just might be the right time for a gay threesome engaged in explicit sex to sing the Star Spangled Banner. You know to make us confront something or other.

Nah. It'll be a complete dog. But the director will end up a real must-have at a Hollywierd party.

Nope, No Double Standard Here

Nothing to see, move along, folks. While Mexico demands a say in American immigration policy, and threatens lawsuits if we defend our borders with them, there are some odd little policies in place there.

Like if you aren't born in Mexico, you can't get certain jobs there.

Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies "xenophobic," Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.

In the United States, only two posts — the presidency and vice presidency — are reserved for the native born.

In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens.

Foreign-born Mexicans can't hold seats in either house of the congress. They're also banned from state legislatures, the Supreme Court and all governorships. Many states ban foreign-born Mexicans from spots on town councils. And Mexico's Constitution reserves almost all federal posts, and any position in the military and merchant marine, for "native-born Mexicans."

Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges.

Mexico's Interior Department — which recommended the bans as part of "model" city statutes it distributed to local officials — could cite no basis for extending the bans to local posts.

After being contacted by The Associated Press about the issue, officials changed the wording in two statutes to delete the "native-born" requirements, although they said the modifications had nothing to do with AP's inquiries.

"These statutes have been under review for some time, and they have, or are about to be, changed," said an Interior Department official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name.

But because the "model" statues are fill-in-the-blanks guides for framing local legislation, many cities across Mexico have already enacted such bans. They have done so even though foreigners constitute a tiny percentage of the population and pose little threat to Mexico's job market.

Tell me again why we're xenophobic.

Oh, and you might want to ask why Americans can't buy land in the more desirable areas in Mexico.

Debating

Mark Steyn has just a bit to say about the almost  surreal debate going on in the US Senate right now about illegal immigration. It's pretty brutal. Are we heading down the identical path that Europe has traveled? Steyn thinks we are.

"Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border."

On what basis? Posse Comitatus? It's unconstitutional to use the U.S. military against foreign nationals before they've had a chance to break into the country and become fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community?

Or is Mexico taking legal action on the broader grounds that in America it's now illegal to enforce the law? Which, given that Senate bill, is a not unreasonable supposition.

Whatever. Under the new "comprehensive immigration reform" bill (Posse Como Estas?), a posse of National Guardsmen will be stationed in the Arizona desert but only as Wal-Mart greeters to escort members of the Illegal-American community to the nearest Social Security office to register for benefits backdated to 1973.

He's not exactly in love with the bill that is progressing through the Senate.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to 5 percent of the U.S. population is now "undocumented." Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried. Fiji, for example, comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, currently 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col. Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups.

That is the danger here. Not xenophobia, not racism. But are we setting this country up to descend into the third world? Are we doing ourselves, our children and our grandchildren any favors here?

Sometimes the differences are huge — as between, say, anything-goes pothead bisexual Dutch swingers and anti-gay anti-drugs anti-prostitution Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, the Washington Post's Bob Samuelson wrote that "we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict."

The key words are "unnecessarily heightened." In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America's political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

Maybe that's what we should be discussing.

Just A Picture

My youngest daughter wanted to do something special to mark the occasion of her cousin graduating from West Point. So she got a special hairdo just for him

It didn't quite come out the red, white and blue she wanted. But I'll bet it will still be a hit. I can't wait for that call from her school.

Read This

All bad in the world? Everything down the tubes? Economy sucks? Gas prices too high? Genocide and war everywhere? It's all going to hell in a handbasket?

Bull.

Read Barone.

Maybe it's not as bleak as you think.

Providing Cruelty For Fun And Profit

If you don't read Done with Mirrors, or don't read it very often, you are missing some great stuff. I go over there less often than I would like, but try to read it at least a couple times a week. And there's a reason I do that. Posts like this. In the article Callimachus is writing about, there is one of the clearest descriptions of monomaniacal radicalism I have seen. Frankly, this puts into words something I have long felt but have not been able to describe adequately.

I take it as axiomatic first that human existence is always to some extent unsatisfactory, and second by that most, or at least many, men desire transcendence in the sense that they want their lives to have some larger purpose than the flux of day-to-day existence. Shopping and going to the pub are all very well in their way, but for people of larger spirit they are not enough.

Radical politics answers the need for transcendence and provides a plausible, though erroneous, explanation for the existential shortcomings of human existence. It kills two birds with one stone. It gives a transcendent purpose to life, by allowing participants the illusion that they are helping to bring about a life that is completely without dissatisfaction.

The religiosity of Marxists has long been remarked by the non-believers, the doctrine of Marxism being that history has a plan for the redemption of mankind. When it became impossible for anyone, except perhaps Professor Eric Hobsbawm, to believe any such thing, just as earlier Christianity had lost its credibility for most people, a new outlet for the religious impulse that motivated belief had to be found.

A further two axioms need to be added to explain the rise of monomaniacal fanaticism. The first is that hatred is a much more powerful political emotion than love, and is therefore also a stronger motive for action. It is my guess, for example, that Mr Brown hates the rich much more than he loves the poor, and that anti-racists, for example, hate whites, even when they are white themselves, more than they love members of minorities.

The second additional axiom is that aggressiveness, destruction and violence are their own reward, because they are enjoyable, at least for quite large numbers of people, in themselves. There is also great pleasure to be had from intimidating and striking fear into people. This is no doubt a regrettable feature of human nature, but it is a real one. Anyone who has observed a riot will have been struck not by the misery of the crowd but by its happiness. To feel morally superior while doing evil is one of the most exquisite pleasures known to man.

Callimachus' Additional commentary is why I try to visit that site:

I don't want to keep piling on animal-rights activists and environmental extremists, in part because that's too easy. But then Dalrymple's essay is about a broader topic. That's just the doorway into it.

What he's offering up here is a convergence of historical threads into a modern phenomenon of hate-driven secular religion. His pieces usually are worth attention, and this is no exception. As a secularist myself, I've sometimes tried to warn people about the trap: That medieval mumbo-jumbo you're so proud of being enlightened enough to live without, it's inside you as well as outside you. It's what feeds an inborn hunger, and even if you decide to stop eating, your hunger will keep looking.

And the old organized religions, as dreary and cold as they may seem, survived in part because they took a hot, fierce human passion and channeled it through rituals that kept it from burning to the ground all human civilization. Even Islam. It takes centuries and hecatombs of victims to work out the kinks. But as our Enlightened Founders knew (here in America); if you see how bad man is with religion, imagine him without it and shudder.

By all means, go visit Done With Mirrors for yourself.

101st Blog Of The Day

Continuing on in my project to visit one member of the 101st each day, today I went to The Bookworm Room and found a really good description of how not to modify behaviors. You really should look at this analogy, it's spot on.

Gas About Gas

One of the things that people who have been around for a while should remember is all the times before when the high gasoline prices have become a major issue.

Which would be during an election year.

Last year, prices were higher than they are right now, but I for one don't remember politicians rolling out packages of proposals to address those prices. I do remember this issue coming up in previous election years. And you know what? Nothing was ever really done to fix anything. "Energy Independence" has been a campaign slogan since the 70's. And nothing has gotten better.

So why do the politicians keep rolling it out during election years? Because the press plays along. Instead of asking why nothing has gotten better despite years of promises, news media, like the Washington Post just keep publishing the same old tired "this time we'll fix it" campaign stuff.

So how about we drill for oil offshore instead of letting our sworn enemies take it all? How about we disrupt about two caribou in a frozen mudflat and drill for oil on our own territory?

Just a thought.

The Be Careful What You Wish For Department

I suspect there was an awful lot being said to the media today by the Attorney General. In an interview on ABC's This Week, Alberto Gonzales very carefully let out that reporters could very well be prosecuted for printing national security information.

The nation's top law enforcer also said the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly.

"There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Gonzales said, referring to prosecutions. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."

In the blind zeal to "get someone" in the administration over the Plame leak, the media cheerfully deconstructed it's own carefully built up image of immunity from prosecution. They cooperated in setting themselves up for this. Now it remains to be seen if they are going to be able to understand exactly how exposed they are in this matter. Take a careful look at what is being said here:

Gonzales said he would not comment specifically on whether The New York Times should be prosecuted for disclosing the NSA program last year based on classified information.

He also denied that authorities would randomly check journalists' records on domestic-to-domestic phone calls in an effort to find journalists' confidential sources.

"We don't engage in domestic-to-domestic surveillance without a court order," Gonzales said, under a "probable cause" legal standard.

But he added that the First Amendment right of a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security. If the government's probe into the NSA leak turns up criminal activity, prosecutors have an "obligation to enforce the law." (emphasis added).

Want to bet they have warrants already?

This Is Rather Funny

It seems that despite the many factions, ethnic groups, tribes and religious sects that make up the population of Iraq, there is one major thing they can all agree on.

Lionel Ritchie.

They love the guy. Mr. 80's music himself is a ginormous hit in Iraq. Who knew?

Grown Iraqi men get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his name. "I love Lionel Richie," they say. Iraqis who do not understand a word of English can sing an entire Lionel Richie song.

This is the same Lionel Richie who wrote "Say You, Say Me." This is the same Lionel Richie who is the father of some young woman named Nicole. Yes, that Lionel Richie. Could he really be an Iraqi icon?

I decided I had to investigate, and not just investigate, I decided I had to ask Lionel Richie himself. So I called him from Baghdad. Actually it was a formal interview. It was the first interview with Lionel Richie ever on the subject of Iraq and Iraqis.

I asked Richie if he knows just how big he is here. He said, "The answer is, I'm huge, huge in the Arab world. The answer as to why is, I don't have the slightest idea."

He has performed in Morocco, Dubai, Qatar and Libya. There is obviously something up there. The more we talked, the more he theorized as to the reasons his music might be so popular here. He thinks it is because of the simple message in his music: Love.

Richie says he was told Iraqis were playing "All Night Long," on the streets the night U.S. tanks rolled into the country in 2003.

It's rather amusing. Maybe we should see if he's available for a job as an ambassador?

This Is Not A Good Thing

The Saudi Arabian government keeps telling the West that it has been cleaning up it's school textbooks to get rid of offensive and harmful ideas like promoting violence against non-Muslims and preaching for repression of other religions by Jihad. They make report after report on it, saying they've really cleaned things up.

Except they haven't.

"We have reviewed our educational curriculums. We have removed materials that are inciteful or intolerant towards people of other faiths." The embassy is also distributing a 74-page review on curriculum reform to show that the textbooks have been moderated.

The problem is: These claims are not true.

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government's statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the "monotheists") and unbelievers (the "polytheists" and "infidels").

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

Freedom House knows this because Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi dissident who runs the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs , gave us a dozen of the current, purportedly cleaned-up Saudi Ministry of Education religion textbooks. The copies he obtained were not provided by the government, but by teachers, administrators and families with children in Saudi schools, who slipped them out one by one.

Some of our sources are Shiites and Sunnis from non-Wahhabi traditions — people condemned as "polytheistic" or "deviant" or "bad" in these texts — others are simply frustrated that these books do so little to prepare young students for the modern world.

We then had the texts translated separately by two independent, fluent Arabic speakers.

The examples quoted in the report show a systematic indoctrination from the very earliest years. Young students are taught such charming things as:

" Every religion other than Islam is false."

"Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________."

Read the whole thing - it's pretty bad. The lessons get progressively more offensive and intolerant as the grades progress.

The Never Ending Cycle Of Revenge

You do something to someone. They have to get revenge. Then you go after them again, to pay back the payback. And the cycle repeats until the original offense if long forgotten. A description of Palestinian/Israeli relations? Well, yes, but that's not what we're talking about in this case. We're discussing giant hamster cages.

A practical joker got a taste of revenge when friends turned part of his apartment into a human-sized hamster cage, complete with shredded newspaper bedding, a six-foot exercise wheel and a giant water bottle.

"It was a lot of work, but it was one of those cases where you do it because you have to," said Keith Jewell, a longtime friend and neighbor who engineered Monday's hamster-cage prank on Luke Trerice.

Trerice, 28, had it coming: In 2004, he enlisted others to help him encase another friend's apartment and most of his belongings in aluminum foil.

The victim of that prank, Chris Kirk, spent nearly two years cleaning up the meticulous coating of foil, which was wrapped around everything from his toilet and CD collection to the individual coins in his spare change.

A giant ball of foil still sits in the basement of Kirk's former apartment building.

Reminds me of the time in college when we turned the RA's room into a horse stall. Straw on the floor, hay bales, various pieces of tack and assorted farm implements - no horse though, we couldn't get one up the stairwell. He was picking hay out of odd places for months afterward. Not that I had anything to do with the prank. Nope, not me.

Eight people put in more than 100 hours assembling the room, and supplies cost about $300.

Jewell, 26, a theater set designer and computer networker, came up with the concept and got a machinist's help in building the giant hamster wheel from metal pipes.

Jewell said he suffered some injuries when testing the ring. "If you spin upside down, you're not gripping the bars with your feet. So of course I went head first on the concrete," he said.

The group worked through the night before Trerice's arrival, shredding newspaper, blowing up a beach ball, installing the water bottle in a window and filling a metal feed bucket with Cheetos. There wasn't time to finish a few details, such as lining the walls with wire fencing.

Trerice has started cleaning up, but trips to the recycling bin still haven't made much of a dent in the two-foot pool of paper shreds on the floor.

The wheel, however, has proven popular and will become a permanent fixture in the room, Trerice said. After all, it took four people to bend it into an oval shape that would fit up the stairwell and through the door.

Trerice also said he's going to start saving now for his own revenge plans.

"They claim they did this on (Kirk's) behalf. If they think that's going to mitigate any of the revenge that's coming, well that's even funnier than the wheel," he said.

And so the cycle of revenge continues unabated.

Something To Chew On

Well, this guy is a real genius. While waiting at the police station for his friend to be processed on a drunk driving arrest, a Rotterdam, New York man decided he wanted a piece of gum.

So he took the gum machine. From the lobby of the police station. Where there are surveillance cameras. And police officers.

(Adam) Jewett was riding in Zachary Peek's vehicle when it was stopped by an officer about 3 a.m. in Rotterdam, police said. A dispatcher watching the surveillance system saw Jewett carry away the gumball machine. He told the officer processing Peek on the driving while intoxicated charge. Patrolman Stephen Dixon found Jewett in the parking lot with the gumball machine.

I'm just guessing here, but could it be that the young Mr. Jewett had also been imbibing?

Slavers

The Times of London reports on the freeing of 20 young Pakistani Christian boys who had been kidnapped to be sold into slavery by a Muslim man connected to an al Qaeda front organization.

The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12.

They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. Using a secret camera, they filmed him accepting $28,500 (£15,000) from a Pakistani missionary posing as a businessman who said he wanted to set up an operation in which the boys would beg for cash on the streets.

The boys, captive for five months and subjected to frequent beatings, were reunited with their astonished families, who had presumed them dead.

Twisting What Was Said

I had a commenter ask me about a report in the Washington Post about statements made by Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Specifically:

Forthcoming military investigations into alleged war crimes in Iraq will show that a squad of U.S. Marines killed about 24 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, while on a patrol in Haditha in November — a higher number than first believed — and then gave inaccurate reports on the incident to their commanders, a congressional Republican said yesterday.

Donna wanted to know if Hunter should also be pilloried, as I did earlier to Murtha. The answer is no. Here's why:

A preliminary military investigation completed in March found that on Nov. 19 insurgents attacked a Marine convoy near Haditha in Iraq's violent Anbar province with a roadside bomb, killing Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso. It said insurgents then opened fire on the Marines from several locations, and during the battle, eight insurgents and 15 civilians were killed, including women and children.

But earlier this week, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) said the incident was "much worse" and had involved no firefight or roadside bomb that killed civilians. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," said Murtha, who seeks a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Hunter also indicated yesterday that new facts had emerged on the number of civilian deaths and unfolding of events, but said he would not preempt the investigation and say that murders were committed. "I think we're going to see those [deaths] in the neighborhood of 20 or so people," he said. A statement from his committee put the number at "about 24." (emphasis added)

Now, this investigation should have been allowed to continue without anyone saying anything about it publicly. Absolutely nobody should have stated flatly that murders were committed. Murtha did that. Hunter was put in the position of having to respond to Murtha's statements yet still managed to say it in a way that does not presuppose guilt and prejudice the Marine's chances for a fair trial should it come to that.

There is a definite difference in the way the two men handled the issue. Had Hunter said the same things Murtha did, you can bet your bottom dollar I would have been screaming about him, too. It is not partisan. It is completely a rights issue. The other thing that Hunter said is very important:

Hunter strongly disagreed with Murtha's statement that undue stress on the Marines contributed to the killings. "I totally reject that," he said, adding that the actions of a single squad should not reflect negatively on the rest of the troops engaged in Iraq or their mission. "There has been no war in our history in which you didn't have incidents in which people did the wrong thing at one time or another," he said. No one should "tar the honorable service of 922,000 brave Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan with the reported actions of one squad in one city on one morning," he said.

But tarring all the troops is exactly what Murtha is trying to do.