When I was at the Eagles’ gathering last Saturday, I stood for a while with some of the Rolling Thunder guys while they screened people who wanted to enter the walkway that led to the Vietnam War Memorial.

The first time I saw one of the vets turn away a protester at the checkpoint, I asked him, “What are you doing, screening out the moonbats?”

“Well,” he replied, “let’s just say ‘the college-educated’.”

I thought about what he said when I went up to Moonbat Central a few minutes later to scope out the demonstrators. There were some veterans taking part in the demonstration up there, but not many. Besides the Aztlans and the Palestinians — who were out in force — the crowd consisted mainly of college students and aging boomers, hippies for whom the sixties never ended.

It was definitely an effete crowd, a bunch of people who had enough education to know that they were better than the vulgar flag-wavers down the hill, people who were sure that they had a truer knowledge of the world than all of the great unwashed with their repulsive patriotic display over by the Vietnam memorial.

By all rights I should have been with the protesters. I come from a solid middle-class background. I’m a college-educated man and an unabashed intellectual. I’ve read Chaucer and Schopenhauer. I listen to Bach. I even like to drink latte.

So why is it that I felt at home among those Rolling Thunder guys with their flags and their Harley-Davidsons? Why did those demonstrators seem to be aliens from Arcturus?

All I know is that the veterans are my people, and the ANSWER folks most assuredly are not.

The Party for Sedition and Treason

The major issue that keeps me out of the ranks of the moonbats is that I love my country. No matter what Nancy Pelosi and Hillary do when they’re running the place, I still love my country.

The same cannot be said of the demonstrators. They claim that they love America, but when you listen to what they have to say, there isn’t a single example of American history or culture of which they approve. They revere Cuba, Palestine, North Korea, and any other barbaric thug-state, so long as it’s an enemy of the United States.

And I don’t think electing Democrats is going to ease their dissatisfaction much — they are, after all, communists, and nothing short of the Revolution will cure their alienation from Amerikkka.

Take, for example, this paragraph from The Militant, whose members were among the demonstrators:
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Here in Washington Democrats continue to posture in “opposition” to the war. Their latest charade is to attach amendments to a $100 billion supplemental bill on war spending that would also set Sept. 1, 2008—two months before the next U.S. presidential election—as the date for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. As with previous proposals of this type, it faces substantial opposition from within both parties.

As far as these folks are concerned, the Democrats are taking their campaign donations and then acting like warmongering imperialist running dog lackeys! They’re no better than the Rethuglicans! You can bet they’ll be among the first up against the wall and blindfolded when the commissars finally take control.

Socialism is the Dream That Will Not Die. I picked up some literature from one of the groups and scanned it to present here for your edification.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a newly-formed working-class party of leaders and activists from many different struggles, founded to promote revolutionary change. Capitalism — the system where all wealth and power lies with a handful of big banks and corporations — is the source of the problems facing humanity today: “endless war,” poverty, exploitation, layoffs, unemployment, racism, sexism, LGBT oppression. Socialism is what we’re fighting for: a society where all wealth belongs to those who produce it, for the benefit of all, based on solidarity instead of greed and competition. Do you want to learn more about socialism and Marxism? Do you want to join us in struggle? Contact the PSL, check out our website, subscribe to our magazine, and get involved… The time is now!

“Working-class”? How many of those people at the Lincoln memorial were really working class? Do working-class people consider LGBT oppression to be among their highest priorities? How many in the Socialist Workers’ Party are really workers?

One of the notable features of the Socialist conglomeration was how splintered it was into different and distinct sub-groups and sects. Christine of the 910 Group was there, and had this to report:

Along Portapotty Walk — marked by a row of small Cuban flags on the south end, and a Palestinian flag at the north — there were pairs of people selling socialist newspapers, but each one was not only a different paper, it was from a different party. The Revolutionary Communists… Socialist Workers’ Party… Freedom Road Workers’ Party… several others, each anxiously and earnestly affirming that it was different from the others.

But on being asked exactly what the difference was, one person said, “Well, Cuba. We’re different from other groups on Cuba. Somehow…” Passersby seemed to welcome having all that reading material there given the proximity of the portapotties — though reading may not have been the intended use.

I’m reminded of Protestant denominations, of schisms over Predestination and the true nature of the Paraclete. Trotsky or Che? Lenin or Mao? Can the Dictatorship of the Proletariat wait, or must it be ushered in immediately?

And Socialism is not without its lighter moments. Take this St. Valentine’s Day treatise on Revolutionary Love, from Freedom Road (Organización Socialista Camino de la Libertad):

I want to talk about love this month not because the corporate holiday is coming up but because it is a little summed-up experience that has a big impact on our movement. I draw here from both theory and practice. I am in no way an expert on dating or love, with my limited experience of it, but my mother always said that the people who struggle make the best teachers. She was talking about math as an example, not the struggle, but I think you can apply it to both. In either case, I think I might make a good teacher.

Revolutionaries need love is the point here and we need to share love with other [sic] in our circle in good principled ways. Of course the conditions we live under — hegemony, oppression, patriarchy — affect all of this. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes, or Lenin’s if you prefer…

Revolutionaries need love! Have you hugged your Trotskyite today?

Watch out — those bomb belts really hurt your chest when you hug those righteous Hamas dudes.

Thanks to Christine from the 910 Group for all the moonbat research.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. – Marcus Aurelius

I found the quote above in the comments section of a Newsbuster’s article. The commenter, dscott, claims membership in The 14th Amendment Society. To my sorrow, this group appears to be non-existent, though I appreciate the sentiment. We need “The 14th Amendment Society.” If you follow the link to his site, you’ll see why he wants one.

Meanwhile, the Newsbuster’s essay is most encouraging. Enough to put some shine on your Monday. Who would have thought Algore’s hallucinations would have jumped the shark so soon after his glorious Hollywood appearance? Not I. Surely this Henny-Penny-the-sky-is-falling scare-mongering had several more months of slavering media attention due?

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Apparently not. The gods of Journalism, pronouncing from Mt. New York Times, have decided – for their own [currently] inscrutable reasons – that Algore’s theories need a brake. Here, Noel Sheppard hat tips Drudge for the report:

Question: When you’re a liberal, how do you know if you’re on thin ice, especially the kind that you’re claiming is melting all over the planet due to global warming?

Answer: When even papers like the New York Times are publishing articles skeptical of the junk science you’ve been peddling across the questionably warming globe.

Sure, soon-to-be-Dr. Gore has kind of won an Oscar for his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” even though all he got to take home that evening was Tipper and all the food she was able to stuff into her pocketbook at the buffets thrown in his honor.

However, it must have been a quite shock to find out that the leftists working for Punch Sulzberger were going to publish a not so adoring article after all that oohing and aahing Gore received from the Hollywood elites just days prior…

Poor Tipper.

Sympathy aside, it is amazing that the gods have turned their gaze from Algore so soon.

What goes here? Who is going to be propped up in his stead? Obviously, they are dethroning AG, but in preparation for whose coronation?

Bad science on the environment has wafted from the pages of the NYT since the 1970’s. Why this sudden conversion to reality?

Stay tuned. The Times could get interesting.

For those of a certain political persuasion, the phrase “sex worker” has replaced the word “prostitute”. “Prostitute” itself replaced the word “whore” back in Victorian days. Each substitution arose from the zeitgeist of its era, but the reasons for the successive euphemisms were quite different: Victorian circumlocutions arose to screen distasteful immoral activity from the public discourse, while postmodern ones are used to empower the affected individuals and remove stigma from them. In other words, the former served a communal social purpose, and the latter a narcissistic one.

Similar euphemistic transformations of other words are:

• From “cripple” to “handicapped” to “disabled”, and recently to the ludicrous “differently abled”.
• From “idiot” to “imbecile” to “retarded” to “special needs”.
• From “deaf” to “hard of hearing” (the Victorians seemed to have no need to euphemize this one).
• From “sodomite” to “homosexual” to “gay”.

When, as is inevitable, the phrase “sex worker” develops its own stigma, will it have to be replaced by yet another euphemism?

My candidate for its successor is “pleasure consultant”.

The original word for the oldest profession has an appropriately ancient pedigree. According to my tattered copy of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the word whore is derived from the Old English word hōre, which came from the Common Germanic root χōrōn, and has very similar relatives in all the Germanic languages. The Germanic root in turn is derived from an Indo-European base, qār-, and has descendents in many Indo-European languages. Among those that have made their way into modern English are caress and caritas via Latin, and charity via Latin and French.

Somehow the word’s original connotation of affection evolved into one of opprobrium when it was applied to a person whose affections were for sale. This is a deep and natural human response, and presumably speaks to an instinctively ambivalent reaction to prostitution.

But modern political ideology deems these natural sensibilities to be benighted and archaic, and requires that they be overthrown by linguistic engineering.

The Victorian fad for prudish euphemism eventually faded, leaving us with a few incongruous remnants such as “drumstick” and “white meat” for the leg and breast of a chicken. I presume that the current politically correct fads will fade in their turn, to make way for the ascendancy for some new rule of euphemism.

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I bring all this up because of a comment that came in last night on an old post, made by a sex workers’ advocate named “pick”. Pick was reacting to my essay about the Sex Workers’ Art Show, which, as you may remember, was brought to the campus of the College of William and Mary by official student activity funds and your tax dollars.
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Here’s what pick had to say:

Hi Baron,

Couple of things…

Does it bother you at all to hold such a virulent opinion on a show that neither you nor your progeny have ever actually SEEN? Are you really content to let fox news tell you what it was all about, and then make your decisions from there?

How is it at all feminist for you to compare women to turds? You claim to be so opposed to the degradation of women, but you say that sex workers and turds are both distasteful things that need to be kept out of the public eye. How is calling women shit not degrading?

If you don’t think you should have to pay for shows on campus that you disagree with, what about people who don’t care for football, or ballet, or visual arts, or choir concerts? Should those be abolished on campus as well? Clearly your truck is with the actual content of the show, not with the fact that you had to ‘pay’ for it, otherwise you would not support funds for any arts and recreation. The complaint about funding is just a distraction from the fact that you support censorship, which is highly un-American.

By the by, your links are all messed up. You conflate the SWAS with the sex work matters conference, referring to one at the beginning of a sentence and then linking to the bios of the other.

I hope you’ll consider what it is that REALLY threatens you about the idea that sex workers might be able to make decisions for themselves, and might have something worthwhile to say.

Although my first impulse was to ignore her, I decided to answer at length. Below are her words in italics interleaved with my responses:

Pick —

Does it bother you at all to hold such a virulent opinion on a show that neither you nor your progeny have ever actually SEEN? Are you really content to let fox news tell you what it was all about, and then make your decisions from there?

No and yes, respectively. The argument that one can’t judge something that one hasn’t witnessed is fallacious. That logic would prevent me from offering an opinion on the Gettysburg Address or the Holocaust.

If one has sufficient information, it’s possible to offer an opinion on an event without being present. There was a large amount of detailed information on the show available in various news articles.

How is it at all feminist for you to compare women to turds? You claim to be so opposed to the degradation of women, but you say that sex workers and turds are both distasteful things that need to be kept out of the public eye. How is calling women shit not degrading?

I didn’t say that I was a feminist. And I didn’t compare women with turds. I questioned the validity of the unexamined premise that it’s a good idea to air everything in public, no matter how vulgar, inappropriate, or distasteful most people find the material. No one has ever offered a convincing argument to support that premise.

If you don’t think you should have to pay for shows on campus that you disagree with, what about people who don’t care for football, or ballet, or visual arts, or choir concerts? Should those be abolished on campus as well?

If the vast majority of the people who actually pay for them disapprove of them, then, yes, they should be abolished — or, rather, de-funded. Let the interested people who comprise the audience be the ones to pay for them.

Clearly your truck is with the actual content of the show, not with the fact that you had to ‘pay’ for it, otherwise you would not support funds for any arts and recreation.

My “truck” is that people are forced to pay for something that the vast majority don’t approve of. That’s all.

The complaint about funding is just a distraction from the fact that you support censorship, which is highly un-American.

The assertion that a refusal to fund an activity is tantamount to censorship is an old one, but it is not true. Censorship only occurs when expression is forbidden by law.

By the by, your links are all messed up. You conflate the SWAS with the sex work matters conference, referring to one at the beginning of a sentence and then linking to the bios of the other.

I followed links within these groups which clearly indicated that all were associated with one another. They shared a link base, just as Gates of Vienna does with Jihad Watch. I don’t mind if you conflate us with Jihad Watch; it’s appropriate.

I hope you’ll consider what it is that REALLY threatens you about the idea that sex workers might be able to make decisions for themselves, and might have something worthwhile to say.

The vast majority of “sex workers” are exploited drug addicts, many of them underage. A huge trafficking of them goes on, especially in Europe. It is to the eternal shame of the Left and the feminists that they have turned a blind eye to the overwhelming evidence of the immense harm done to young women by sex trafficking. Calling it a “choice” for these underage refugees is an Orwellian use of the language.

What’s interesting in all this is pick’s conceit that I am “threatened” by her ideas. This is a common formulation on the Left — that conservatives are somehow threatened by the ideas of the progressives.

Can you say “projection”?

This topic is also important because it presents four themes which have been drilled in by postmodern theorists for so long that they have become dogma:

1.		The fallacy, most commonly seen in the “chicken hawk” argument, that someone who has not participated in nor observed an activity is disqualified from commenting on it.
2.		The conceit that turning a private activity into a public one is a self-evident good, even when that activity is, in most cases, considered shameful and degrading by both parties to it.
3.		The assertion that the removal of public funds from an activity is the same as censoring it.
4.		The notion that the prostitute’s occupation is always a matter of choice, and that she is not being harmed by what she does.

The last one is the most pernicious. Many thousands of women and girls, some as young as thirteen, are abducted, sold, and live in a condition of virtual slavery as prostitutes in Western Europe and the United States. There is copious documentation for the callous and cynical exploitation of these children, yet the bien-pensants avert their collective gaze.

It would be better for them if great millstones were hung around their necks and they were cast into the sea.

Yesterday the Baron trudged through the cold in Washington, talking to veterans and families, witnessing various acts of kindness among strangers, and seeing determined patriotism when it came to protecting the Vietnam Memorial. Given the fact that this demonstration of protection came together by word-of-mouth and internet organizing only, it is amazing that so many people from all over the country were able to show up.

Don’t believe the MSM — either their lying by entirely omitting any mention of the numbers of people attending the Gathering of Eagles, or their deliberate playing down of the numbers who did come. The Parks and Service people counted thirty thousand patriots gathered to protect the Wall.

I searched Fox News this morning and couldn’t find even a mention of yesterday’s event. Their pictures of the week in review featured such momentous occasions as a woman spraying her dog green for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Less than twenty-four hours later and the Gathering of Eagles is already down in the memory hole. In their defense, at least for today, they also ignored the well-engineered Moonbat Mingle further down the way, including the march on the Pentagon. No doubt the leftie blogs have their own pictures of derring-do against the evil country in which they are forced to live. I often wonder why more of them don’t simply emigrate to, say, the socialist EU. I also wonder why so many of the moonbats were Mexicans, protesting against their country of choice.

Whatever. The “we-report-you-decide” motto of Fox is certainly hollow. The Baron is right: in order to get any semblance of truth, we need a new order of journalism, one which lacks the narcissism and triviality of what is currently on offer. Who gives a damn what Brittney Spears thinks? Or that she is even capable of cerebration? What does she, or others in the entertainment circus, have to say that we would want to hear?

While the Baron was in the midst of the scene in Washington, asking questions and taking pictures, the future Baron and I were elsewhere: we went to a Gathering of Eaglets in Farmville, VA.

It was the annual fund-raising dinner for the Heart of Virginia Boy Scouts’ Council, District 60. Ironically — when you think about the MSM phobia noted above — the speaker was a retired television journalist, Jim Kincaid. He talked of his rural upbringing in Kansas, and the experience of earning his Eagle Scout badge. The Peabody awards and other achievements he earned in his career in media never came close to the sense of pride and success he felt at his Eagle Scout ceremony.

The fund-raising dinner was held in the National Guard Armory. Going in, I noticed the sign which said the Farmville Guard had served in Omaha Beach and Iraq. I wished I had the camera at the time, to capture this image of the baton being passed. However, the Baron had taken it to the Gathering of Eagles so the night went by without any pictures from us. I didn’t think to ask any of the camera-wielders inside the armory to email some images to us. Maybe it was the Scout food we were served that distracted me from thinking ahead.

Some interesting features of this “Friends of Scouting” fundraiser: the number of men who stood up when they asked for a count of Eagle Scouts. For all of them, it was a defining moment; I was reminded of the elderly Episcopal priest who attended the fB’s Eagle ceremony in 2003. Father Weatherly’s Eagle badge was pinned proudly beneath the white collar of his adult ministry. Did this achievement lead to his calling as a chaplain in the Korean War? Or to his service in World War II? Or to his son’s following in his footsteps in the military and the ministry?

The Boy Scouts are one hundred years old now. And some of the people there nearly matched it in age. In a state known for its slave-holding history, the crowd last night had its fair share of black men of all ages. In fact, the fB and I gave a ride home to a man of 93. He still drives, but not at night. And given the far reaches of District 60, we were the nearest family on his route home. It was probably eight miles out of our way, and as we rode to his house, he told an old man’s stories of being in New Guinea during the war, of prospering after he came home — he owns a great deal of valuable land in our county — and of the achievements of his children. Now he numbers among his grandchildren several lawyers and doctors, though he slyly noted the propensities of lawyers and laughed.
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So we had our local gathering of eaglets while the Eagles gathered in Washington D.C. We carried home pledge cards and brochures and car decals. We also came away with the knowledge we were contributing to the good. Not just talking about it, but doing something important. Just like the Eagles at the Wall.

Here are some Boy Scout statistics to consider:

Scouting tradition — do a good turn daily

For every 100 boys who join:

• Two will become Eagle Scouts
• Rarely will any be brought before juvenile court
• Twelve will have their first contact with a church or synagogue
• Eighteen will develop hobbies that will last a lifetime
• Five will earn their religious award
• Eight will enter a vocation learned through a merit badge
• One will use his Scouting skill to save a life
• One will use his Scouting skill to save his life

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And in a recent National survey of Scouts, former Scouts and adult volunteers, these were some of the results seen —

• Of adult Scout volunteers, 88 percent said Scouting helps them become better parents. And 71 percent said it helps them to be a positive role model for their own children.
• Of current boys in Scouting, 84 percent said getting an education was very important.
• 70 percent of inductees into Who’s Who in America were once Scouts, compared to 51 percent of all men in the United States.
• 40 percent of men who were Scouts for five or more years are college graduates, compared to only 16 percent of men who were never in Scouting.
• Nearly 75 percent of men who were Scouts say there have been real-life situations where having been a Scout helped them be a better leader.
• More than 80 percent of men who were Scouts agree that the values they learned in Scouting continue to be very important to them.
• The longer the Scouting experience, the greater the positive effects of the program seemed to have on adult men.

Want to do something meaningful and lasting for the future generation? Join the Scouting family. You don’t need to be a Scoutmaster, or give great amounts of time you don’t have. There are needs you could meet in a few hours a month or even a few hours a year.

For example, volunteer your expertise to help boys earn their badges. When the future Baron wanted to earn his badge for Personal Management (Eagle requirement), he worked with a local banker who was willing to spend some hours with the fB helping him develop his ability to manage his finances and plan for future spending.

When he needed help with his Bird Study badge, a local amateur bird watcher helped him acquire that one. As a result, the future Baron can identify almost any bird with just a glimpse, differentiating males and females. He knows the nesting habits, the shapes and sizes of nests, the egg shapes and number of eggs usually hatched by a given species of bird. He can recognize the bird songs — I know, I often ask him to tell me what I’m hearing when we do yard work. The field glasses he used still hang by the kitchen window so we can spot the various birds that flit through the yard.

Obviously, he could tell you far more about his experiences than I will ever know. But as a mom, one memory stands out particularly. The fB was fearful of being alone in the woods, particularly at night. As a middle-schooler, this fear was shameful to him, but there it was, lodged deep in his character. He knew if he was to achieve membership in the Order of the Arrow, which is the national honor society for Scouts he would have to do exactly the thing he most feared: spend a night alone in the woods, separated from other young Scouts who were going through the same experience. So on a cold weekend in early March, he did it. He persevered through that long night and he came home proudly wearing his new white sash with the bright red arrow. For him, perhaps, it was even more of a milestone than the Eagle badge. To earn his Eagle, he had to slog through the many requirements. However, to become a member of the Order of the Arrow, he had to face his greatest fear and transcend it.

To see where you can donate your time one-on-one, or with a group, go here, to the merit badge page. You’ll be surprised to find that you do indeed have something to give.

Not all of us can go to Washington, D.C. to guard the Vietnam Memorial from those who would dishonor our dead. Nor can we march off to war — even if the military would take the tattered brigades we would make. But each and every person reading this post can give a little time to boys; each of us can contribute to our future generation of men.

The boys of today are an endangered species. They need your help.

There was another big anti-war rally today in Washington DC, and an anarchist website tipped its hand by announcing that they intended to vandalize the Vietnam War Memorial as part of the action, as they did earlier with the Capitol building.

Free Republic responded by organizing a massive counter-protest of Vietnam vets and other patriotic volunteers in order to protect the memorial. I made the long drive up early this morning to report on “A Gathering of Eagles” for Gates of Vienna.

Note: each of the following photos is a thumbnail. Click the small image to see a larger version of the same thing.

After a long walk down from the Metro station at Farragut West, I expected the area on the Mall around the Vietnam Memorial to be crowded with lefty demonstrators. But it wasn’t — apparently the moonbats like to sleep in. But the veterans were out in force; I saw a heartwarming combination of Rolling Thunder people, Patriot Guard Riders, and VFW representatives of various ages crowding their counter-demonstration area next to the memorial.

It was very cold and blustery with occasional snow showers, and the veterans’ area soon became a sea of icy mud. But that didn’t dampen the spirits of those who came to protect the memorial. I talked to people who had come in from California, New York, Florida, Texas, and many other places across the country.

The first veteran I talked to was a man named Kevin Gray, who was carrying a sign dissing Jane Fonda. Ms. Fonda is a frequent target of gibes and insults among vets — I heard one of the organizers announce over the PA system that the porta-johns were available along Constitution Avenue “for anyone who wants to take a Fonda or a Sheehan.”
The veterans were industriously putting up flags all over the area when I arrived.
One of the Rolling Thunder vets kindly agreed to hold still for me to take a photo of his back. Notice Jane Fonda’s upside-down appearance here.
Major Eric Egland, a reservist who returned recently from Iraq, had set up a table to sell his book, The Troops Need You, America! He found a publisher for it, but it would would have taken until June for the book to come out. As a result, he decided to self-publish it, and I bought a copy, but haven’t had time to read it yet. It’s available for sale on his website, in case you’re interested.

Those who wanted to visit the memorial wall had to wait in one of two very long lines in order to be X-rayed and wanded for dangerous contraband. I spent an hour in the cold with a lot of veterans, and directly in front of me was a disabled veteran in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife.
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Even though he was bundled up with a hat, coat, gloves, and a lap blanket, the poor guy was obviously very cold — you could see his arms shivering.

Next to him was a family, a husband with his wife and teenage son. The wife took off her coat to drape over the disabled vet’s shoulders.

“I’ve got my long underwear on, so I’m fine,” she told him. “And you can keep it. I’ve got four more just like it at home.”

The family continued to chat with the vet and his wife, and I noticed the woman was very well-informed about the Great Jihad, and also the enemy within. At one point she said, “You know, we had to throw Islam back once before at the gates of Vienna.”

I said, “Excuse me — did you say ‘Gates of Vienna’”?

She agreed that she had, so I told her, “I’m half of the blog Gates of Vienna.”

“You’re Baron Bodissey? I love your blog! I read it every day.” It turns out that she has commented here occasionally, under the nickname “Right Mom”. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Right family: Right Dad, Right Mom, and Right Junior.
There were volunteer veterans at the wall to help visitors find any specific names they were looking for.
Some of the vets stood there a long time finding the name of someone they remembered who never made it home.
This is a group of vets who agreed to pose for a photo. I specifically asked one of them to pose so that the back of his jacket could be seen.
When I came out of the memorial area, the moonbats had arrived in force up on Constitution Avenue.

I was in deep cover — I had no flag or other insignia identifying me as a member of the VRWC — so I headed up to the Lincoln Memorial to investigate the demonstration.

Signs for ANSWER and the Socialist Workers were everywhere, as were Cuban and Palestinian flags. There were plenty of Latin Americans and Muslims present, judging by appearances. The music over the loudspeakers seemed to alternate between anti-war standards (“War! HUH! What is it good for?”) and salsa numbers.

My favorite sign was one that read “The Only Way To Win The Hearts And Minds Of The Iraqi People Is To Apologize And Leave.” Second prize went to “Workers’ Rights Have No Borders”.
A squadron of vets had set up a fortified position inside the snow fence around the Lincoln Memorial coffee shop, and some of them argued with any of the demonstrators who came close enough.
I was very surprised to find that Holger Danske was there helping to protect the memorial. He said he had ridden in on his Harley-Davidson from North Carolina, but I wasn’t fooled — you could tell he was really Holger. He even had both eyes open, so the moonbats never had a chance.
A number of veterans got up on the platform and spoke to the crowd. In this photo Kevin Martin is making a passionate and inspiring speech, but, unfortunately, he’s mostly obscured. The vet in the foreground on the stage is signing the speech for the audience.

The Rolling Thunder guys stood shoulder to shoulder across the walkway that leads to the memorial, and refused entry to any of the demonstrators who tried to get in. I was standing next to one of the vets when a woman carrying a peace sign and pulling a suitcase on wheels wanted to get past us.

“Excuse me,” she said, with a thick European accent.

“You can’t come in here,” he told her. “You’re not wanted.”

“What do you mean?” she exclaimed in outrage. “This is America! You can’t stop me going in there.”

“Oh, yes I can. Go back down there —” he pointed towards the Lincoln Memorial — “that’s where you’re wanted. And we’ll stay down here.”

He never did let her get by.

There were several DC cops opposite the vets, watching impassively from across the sidewalk next to Constitution Avenue. I asked one of them if the checkpoint was OK with him. He shrugged. “They’re not blocking the sidewalk. That’s all I care about.”

The demonstrators were now arriving by the busload and massing on the lawn by the Lincoln Memorial. Their plan was to cross Memorial Bridge and march a mile and half to the Pentagon. There was no way I was going out over the Potomac in those temperatures and with a stiff wind blowing, so I decided to head back towards the Metro.

The last thing I saw before turning to walk up the hill was this very peculiar icon or totem. It was being wheeled up the sidewalk by one woman while two others held ropes and struggled to keep the wind from blowing it away. It seemed unlikely that the monstrosity would ever make it across Memorial Bridge intact.

I never did figure out exactly what the thing represented. It sported an eye-and-pyramid on its forehead, and had something to do with Bush, and something to do with Oil, but beyond that it was inscrutable.

After I left DC, some of my TV-owning sources told me that CNN had lavish coverage of the anti-war protesters, but no footage of the veterans. CNN reported that there were “about two thousand counter-demonstrators”, but don’t believe them — early in the morning, when the vets met at their staging area, I saw considerably more than that. I heard that they fanned out across the city later on to place a protective cordon around all the major monuments.

God bless those veterans! They renewed my spirit.

I’ll have more to report on these events later, when I have more time.

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

Although the European Union warns against “,” those who live in the real world know that there has been an explosion of violent infidelophobia in Western Europe staged by Muslim immigrants. This wave of violence especially targets
Jews, but the attacks against Christians that are going on in the the Middle East, where there may soon be no Christians left in the cradle of Christianity, are increasingly spreading to Europe as well. In more and more cities across the continent, non-Muslims are being harassed, robbed, mugged, raped, stabbed and even killed by Muslims, yet EU leaders continue their quest to merge Europe and the Arab world by making it easier for Muslims to enter and settle in Europe.

The fact that European leaders and media voice such concern for “Islamophobia” yet do very little to stop attacks against Christian Europeans demonstrates the creeping dhimmitude in Europe which has been accurately predicted by Bat Ye’or. Native Europeans are slowly becoming second-rate citizens in their own countries.

This violence by Muslims is usually labelled simply as “crime,” but I believe it should more accurately be called Jihad. Those who know early Islamic history, as described in books such as The Truth About Muhammad by Robert Spencer, know that looting and stealing the property of non-Muslims has been part and parcel of Jihad from the very beginning. In fact, so much of the behavior of Muhammad himself and the early Muslims could be deemed criminal that it is difficult to know exactly where crime ends and Jihad begins. In the city of Oslo, for instance, it is documented that some of the criminal Muslim gangs also have close ties to radical religious groups at home and abroad. As Dutch Arabist Hans Jansen points out, the Koran is seen by some Muslims as a God-given “hunting licence,” granting them the right to assault and even murder non-Muslims.

It is hardly accidental that while Muslims make up about tem percent of the population in France, they make up an estimated seventy percent of French prison inmates. Muslims are over-represented in jails in countries all over the world, and a striking number of non-Muslims in jail also convert to Islam. There could be many reasons for this. Some observers have suggested that prison inmates generally lack control over their personal lives, and thus seek a strict code which provides them with the discipline they themselves don’t have. Perhaps, but personally I suspect that the most important reason is much more simple: If you’re a Muslim you can continue doing criminal things yet at the same time claim to be morally superior. If you rob and mug non-Muslims you are not a thief or a thug, you are in fact a brave Jihadist doing God’s noble work:

Tariq Ramadan and Islam’s Future in Europe

Non-Muslims are lesser people. By saying this they justify the behaviour of young Muslim criminals who target the non-Muslims whilst they never touch fellow Muslims. They told me that drug trafficking is perfectly acceptable as long as one only sells to non-Muslims. They told me that stealing from non-Muslims is allowed as long as one does not harm fellow Muslims. One day our office was burgled and our computers were stolen. All except the two computers belonging to our two Muslim colleagues. You don’t steal from brothers or sisters! …

Many victims of burglaries in houses and cars, of steaming and other forms of violence, can testify that aggression by Muslims is not directed against brothers and sisters, but against whoever is a kafir, a non-believer. Young Muslims justify their behaviour towards women who do not wear the headscarf, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, by referring to the Salafist teaching which says that these women are whores and should be treated as such. They told me this. I wrote it down in my reports, but the authorities refuse to hear it.

Andrew Bostom has demonstrated in his book The Legacy of Jihad that the basic patterns have remained remarkably similar throughout the centuries, regardless of whether the non-Muslims in question were Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists. Jihad and dhimmitude frequently have less to do with huge terror attacks or spectacular invasions than with accumulated daily humiliations and insults. A small group of Muslims move into an area, then gradually expand their numbers and with continuous verbal and physical harassment of non-Muslims and sexual harassment of their women force them to leave their homes or convert to Islam. Here is an example from Iran where the non-Muslims are Zoroastrians, but it might as well have been certain areas of Amsterdam, Birmingham or the suburbs of of Paris today:

The Islamization of Europe

Mary Boyce, Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of London, has confirmed the external validity of Bat Ye’or’s analytical approach in her description of how jihad and dhimmitude (without the latter being specifically identified as such) transformed Zoroastrian society in an analogous manner. Boyce has written definitive assessments of those Zoroastrian communities which survived the devastating jihad conquests of the mid 7th through early 8th centuries 20. The Zoroastrians experienced an ongoing, inexorable decline over the next millennium due to constant sociopolitical and economic pressures exerted by their Muslim rulers, and neighbors… Boyce describes these complementary phenomena based on an historical analysis, and her personal observations living in the (central Iranian) Yezd area during the 1960s:

…Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroastrians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore posses the truth; and also on how many material advantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and bullied individual Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so another village was lot to the old faith. Several of the leading families in Sharifabad and forebears who were driven away by intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Yazd; and a shorter migration had been made by the family of the centenarian ‘Hajji’ Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious, had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad) when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life. Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi become in 1961. [Boyce’s footnote: The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in 1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters.] It was noticeable that the villages which were left to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of water, where farming conditions were hard.

– – – – – – – – – –
Note: The following examples are all from Sweden, which is probably the most politically repressive and totalitarian country in the Western world, with virtually no public debate about immigration. Still, the muggings, rapes, beatings, murders and daily harassment described here could be from virtually any country in Western Europe, and indeed from any region in the world where Muslims are numerous enough to harass their non-Muslim neighbors:

Veiled girl gang in Stockholm attacks old ladies

A group of five teenage girls have been accused of a wave of vicious attacks against old women in Stockholm…

The girls, aged 17 and 18, have been remanded in custody for attacking the women in Tensta and Rinkeby, suburbs of the capital.

Their victims, mostly in their seventies and eighties, were usually mugged outside their homes…

In one of the muggings, the girls stole a 71-year-old’s handbag and pushed her down a flight of steps. In another case, a 78-year old woman was pushed to the ground and kicked where she lay.

The girls worked in groups and wore veils during the attacks, making it harder for the police to identify them.

While Sweden Slept, by Bruce Bawer

Recently, the city of Stockholm carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics — but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways.

Stockholm Suburb: “It’s too Dangerous for Children here, Many are Wearing Bulletproof Vests”

Nalin Pekgul, a well-known Social Democratic advocate of suburbs with a high concentration of immigrants, is leaving her own suburb Tensta because she thinks it has become too insecure. Tensta has become too dangerous for the children, she says. Nalin Pekgul, who is a Muslim herself, has also noted that fundamentalist variants of Islam are growing stronger in Tensta. Her children come home and wonder why their mother doesn’t wear a hijab or why their family don’t go to the mosque. They also have heard that Muslims are better than Christians. “I don’t like it when my son comes home and says that ‘Mom, we Muslims don’t lie, but Christians do, because they don’t have God.’ He hasn’t got that from us . We had not reckoned on this religious fundamentalism,” she says.

Swedish Welfare State Collapses as Immigrants Wage War

The wave of robberies the [increasingly Muslim-dominated]city of Malmö has witnessed during this past year is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds when questioned about why they only rob native Swedes, in interviews with Petra Åkesson for her thesis in sociology…

“When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “It’s so easy to rob Swedes, so easy.” “We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.”

Immigrant Rape Wave in Sweden

The number of rape charges in Sweden has quadrupled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six – 6 – times as common today as they were a generation ago. Most other kinds of violent crime have rapidly increased, too. Instability is spreading to most urban and suburban areas.

An Islamic Mufti in Copenhagen sparked a political outcry after publicly declaring that women who refuse to wear headscarves are “asking for rape.” Apparently, he’s not the only one thinking this way. “It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl,” says Hamid. “The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably f***ed before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries. It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean;” says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That’s what I am going to do. I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get f***ed to pieces.”

The New York Times and Sweden: The Dark Side of Paradise

Ethnologist Maria Bäckman, in her study “Whiteness and gender,” has followed a group of Swedish girls in the suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm, where native Swedes have been turned into a tiny minority of the inhabitants due to rapid immigration… Bäckman relates that several of the girls she interviewed stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid unwanted attention and sexual harassment. They experienced that being blonde involves old men staring at you, cars honking their horns and boys calling you “whore.”…

The official explanation given by Swedish authorities to the increase [in rape charges] is that much of it is a “technical” increase due to the fact that more victims of rape now report this crime to the police. There is not a hint of evidence for this explanation. On the contrary, intimidation of people reporting any kind of crime to the police has rapidly worsened in Sweden during the same time period. Threats against witnesses in Swedish court cases quadrupled between 2000 and 2003 alone… Street violence of all kinds is soaring on a national level. Private security companies are in great demand in major Swedish cities, as a serious lack of police to combat rising crime has made many citizens tired of being robbed.. Gangs of 14- and 15-year-olds raping and robbing is now common in many Stockholm suburbs… At the same time, the underfunded and undermanned Swedish police officers feel “unmotivated” to fight crime, according to a study made by police researcher Stefan Holgersson, who interviewed 2000 Swedish police officers.

One person who seems to have a decent grasp of what’s happening with Muslim immigration in Sweden and Europe is Christopher Caldwell, who has written several articles about the topic, including one in the New York Times in February 2006 called “ Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State.” Visiting the Stockholm immigrant suburb of Rinkeby, Caldwell asked whether something like the French riots of the fall of 2005, with burning cars and rampaging gangs, could happen in Sweden. “Absolutely,” said one lanky boy near the window. “People burn cars here all the time. Not because they’re angry — because they think it’s fun.”

One person who seems to have a decent grasp of what’s happening with Muslim immigration in Sweden and Europe is Christopher Caldwell, who has written several articles about the topic, including one in the New York Times in February 2006 called “Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State.” Visting the Stockholm immigrant suburb of Rinkeby, Caldwell asked whether something like the French riots of the fall of 2005, with burning cars and rampaging gangs, could happen in Sweden. “Absolutely,” said one lanky boy near the window. “People burn cars here all the time. Not because they’re angry — because they think it’s fun.”

Sweden: The Country that Sacrifices its Children, and Celebrates

Sweden is a country that has virtually no public debate about mass immigration, which continues at full speed. The Swedish political and media elites congratulate themselves for their Multicultural goodness. If sacrificing your own children is the definition of good, then exactly what constitutes evil?

[…]

A high school teacher in Malmö discovered that about a dozen Arab students were laughing and shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while watching a DVD of infidel hostages being beheaded in Iraq. The headmaster didn’t think the incident was such a big deal. At least 139 schools in Sweden suffered arson attacks during 2002 alone, a number which by 2007 has grown to at least 230. Such as an incident in Malmö, where three schools were put on fire during one night. “Teenage boys” are suspected to behind the arson. Björn Vinberg from the fire department in Kroksbäck in the Malmö area says it’s humiliating and degrading to put out fires again and again in the same immigrant areas, with school kids laughing at them and lighting a new one just afterwards. His colleagues have been to the same place no less than twenty times, all totally unnecessary.

From The Local, January 12, 2007: Rival gangs of 10-year-olds in the eastern town of Söderhamn have threatened to wipe each other out. One of the gangs is made up of indigenous Swedes and the other of immigrants, and police in the town are taking the problem very seriously. The conflict has escalated on the Internet, and police fear that there may be fatalities if the fighting is not stopped.

“Let Them Eat Kebab” – The New Marie Antoinettes

Jens Orback, Democracy Minister in the previous Social Democratic Swedish government, said during a radio debate that: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

In 2006, a man was attacked and nearly killed for the crime of wearing clothes with his own national flag while Sweden was participating in the World Cup. Sweden, of course, has the same Christian cross in its flag as does England, and apparently, some “Multicultural youths” found this to be an intolerable provocation. The 24-year-old man was run down by a car in the city of Malmö. According to the police, he was wearing some clothes with Swedish national symbols on them, and this “provoked some emotions.”

I’ve made a little sidebar logo for our Danish colleagues.

Feel free to borrow it, but please don’t hot-link it — that is, make yourselves a copy, and store it on your own image server.

For our Anglophone readers: the caption says, “Holger Danske is stirring.”

When he manages to get that other eye open, everyone would be well-advised to take cover…

Thanks to Kepiblanc for the translation.

[Nothing follows]

Wally Ballou pulls it out of the hat again…

I had been wondering about the appearance in Turkey of the disappeared general‘s family — wifey and children showed up unannounced and demanded that Turkish officials do something about her husband’s disappearance.

Say wha’? I’d read that Ali Reza Asghari, a former deputy defense minister had pulled a fast one, a flit which included his wife and family. So what was this spouse doing even existing?

It turns out the one in Turkey is wife #2.

Wife #1 and children are gonzo:

As it turns out, Gen. Asgari has two wives. His first wife left Iran with him, bringing along their three children. His second wife, Mansoureh Mirmohammadi, is just 31 years old and is a relative of Rezai, the sources said. She has indeed remained in Iran.

Shortly after Gen. Asgari went missing on Feb. 7, a damage control team headed by Rev. Guards Brig. Gen. Naser Ghasemi was set up.

Gen. Ghasemi is the deputy chief of counterintelligence for the Revolutionary Guards. Over the weekend, he recommended that the regime blame the “kidnapping” of Asgari on the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a militant opposition group that was supported all during the 1980s and the 1990s by Saddam Hussein.

On Sunday, Baztab dutifully quoted Rasoul Nafisi, an Iranian political analyst based in Virginia, asserting that the MEK was responsible for Asgari’s kidnapping, noting that the group “is active in Turkey . . . and might be behind this event.”

Wally B, researcher extraordinaire.

[le fin]

Three weeks ago the Iranian armed forces command in Teheran lost contact with a senior officer who had been serving in Iraq with the al-Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to a senior Iranian official cited in the Wednesday edition of the London-based Arabic daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.

The Iranian source said that it is still unclear why contact with the officer, Colonel Amir Muhammad Shirazi, was lost. “It is possible that the American forces in Iraq arrested him along with a group of 13 Iranian military and intelligence officials,” he said, adding that this is just one of the scenarios being investigated by Tehran.

Y Net news also says dozens of other officers have defected:

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that a Tehran military court sentenced to death a colonel in Iranian military intelligence who recently returned from service in Iraq. The officer was accused of collaborating with American forces and providing them with details on the deployment and activities of the al-Quds unit and Iranian military intelligence operatives. He was also accused of providing the Americans with classified documents, photographs and maps related to Iran’s nuclear program and armed forces.

..over the past three years, dozens of members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and military intelligence units have defected to the American forces in Iraq.

Officers from various branches of Iran’s armed forces operate in Iraq in both covert and overt roles. The United States accuses Iranian agents of aiding Shiite militias in Iraq with training, weapons and funding. Over the past few months, American forces in Iraq have arrested a number of Iranian officers.

Arrests? Hmmm…how about defections? Kidnappings? Zionist plots?

The murk darkens…

[this plot will continue in the future. No more for the moment]

Hat tip: Barcepundit

“Pulling a Kennedy” means trying to shove your way past the rules because you’re special. Teddy has done it too many times to count (or report). And the younger generation has accomplished everything from murder to sexually engaging the baby sitter, to leaving a passenger in a car he was driving paralyzed for life (that was Joseph K. II). A few years ago, Patrick, son of Ted and a congressional representative from Rhode Island, had to pay off an employee at LAX (the L.A. airport). As it turned out, he was found guilty of assault and had to pay damages — all because his baggage was too big to carry aboard the airplane and he didn’t want to abide by the rules. Kennedys don’t do rules; rules are for peons.

Now the Terror Finance blog (via Larwyn and Joseph Crowley in The American Thinker) has reported that Tariq Taqiyya Ramadan has a similar sense of noblesse oblige:

Tariq Ramadan, the so-called “moderate” Islamic “intellectual”, was briefly detained and charged for “insulting a public agent” on Sunday at Paris Roissy Charles de Gaulle International Airport, while in transit to London.

From informed police sources, we have learned that when Ramadan tried to enter a prohibited area, a young policewoman stopped him. He began shouting at her and was then taken into police custody; the officer filed a complaint against him.

While in custody, he admitted the offense and was ordered to appear before a criminal court of Bobigny on April 6. Tariq Ramadan faces up to 6 months of imprisonment and 7,500 Euros of penalty.

With the scare quotes around the words moderate and intellectual, the Terror Finance blog obviously understands only too well the character of this grandson of one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood. They know his true colors.

– – – – – – – – – –
Regular readers know why I loathe this man. You can see previous posts here, and here. Fjordman’s essay on Ramadan’s rôle in Eurabia is here.

The man is loathsome. What a shame that Britain has allowed this so-called “gentle jihadist” into the country to teach. Or that Time magazine, clueless and dhimmified, declared him among the top one hundred “spiritual innovators“ currently on offer.

Yes, indeed. Taqiyya Ramadan is a spiritual innovator in the same mode that Teddy Kennedy is an elder statesman of American politics.

That blog, Terror Finance, is well worth your time. From the top post today:

Mobile payments or “m-payments.” are now available for terrorists and other criminals. An m-payment system is being developed by members of the GSM Association to enable migrant workers and the poor who do not have bank accounts to transfer money internationally, efficiently and inexpensively. According to the World Bank, 175 million migrants transferred at least $230 billion international remittances in 2005. Are Hamas, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and their likes far behind?

Soon, every mobile-phone owner will be able to send money, pay bills and make purchases anywhere, anytime. According to the GSM Association, 3 billion people have mobile phones, but only 1 billion people worldwide have bank accounts. BearingPoint, a major management and technology consulting company, estimated the unbanked marketplace in the United States alone in 2006 at $510 billion.

[…]

Without the implementation of a real-time digital anti-money-laundering compliance framework, the m-payment system is well suited to become the “killer application” for money laundering and terror financing. All you need is a stored value card and m-payments enabled mobile phone and carrier.

A “real-time digital anti-money-laundering compliance framework”? Not in these United States, not with George Bush in the White House and Nancy Pelosi ready to do battle for phone freedom for terrorists. It will never happen.

I suggest you go over to Terror Finance and do some exploring.

On Tuesday Fjordman wrote about Russia’s dire situation with respect to Islam, both inside and outside of its own borders. Later that day a native of Russia named Dimitri wrote me with his own take on the subject:

Hi Baron,

I don’t have an account to post at Gates of Vienna, but the subject is so interesting to me that I dare to send my comment directly to you, answering your email which you sent long ago. If you think it is worth publishing, please attach my comment to the blog.

So this is what I think about Russia.

I am originally from Russia and I have been always asking such questions of myself: what is the reason for the alienation of Russia from the West? This alienation is seen clearly on both sides. For example, the traditional criticism of the Russian Empire as a despotic regime is based on left-wing liberal opinions, originating from the French revolution, which Russia opposed.

On the other hand, a strong anti-Western sentiment in Russia started after the Russian socialist revolution in 1917. Thus, the first explanation is that socialists always hate each other. At the same time they are ready to embrace Muslims, if they think they can gain from it. Already Lenin, in one of his latest papers, suggested an alliance with Muslims against Europe, after he was disappointed with Europe’s failure to support revolution.

However, there is a much older anti-Western element in Russia, and it comes from eastern Christianity. Orthodox Christianity has always considered itself as the only true Christianity, never ever admitted its own mistakes, and blamed it all on the West (sounds familiar, eh?). It was always associated with the Empire rather than with Biblical tradition. For example, the Russian church does not recommend reading the Bible, because too much in it is about the Jews. Russians rather call themselves “orthodoxes” than Christians, which shows that they actually consider themselves to be a kind of special religion. Thus they miss another common issue with the West.

—Dimitri

[Nothing follows]

If you’re Algore, the hour-plus video on YouTube must be a nightmare.

For seventy five minutes, meteorologists and environmental scientists — not to mention the co-founder of Green Peace, who quit in disgust — give us the real skinny on “The Great Global Warming Swindle” complete with all its hideously ambitious and prevaricating zeal.

Frankly, I never thought we’d get to this point so quickly and so completely. If Algore was planning to run on his convenient half-truths and misrepresentations about the environment, he’d better have a Plan B.

This film is a tsunami, washing over all his hopes and hallucinations.

Watch it in sections, or sit down with a bag of popcorn for the whole thing. It’s worth every single minute. I first saw if at LGF, and then noticed a plug on Belmont Club. The question is, will it ever be mentioned by the MSM?

The producers of this undoing of the drivel we’ve had to listen to for the last ten years deserve a medal. Like Galileo, they may have to wait awhile.

I plan to see it again, just to watch the part about the solar rays and the production of clouds. What a great mixture of talking heads and time-lapse photography and lots of natural disasters.

The Emperor is naked at last, and an ugly sight he is!

Good flick. Click on it.

[end here]

No, she didn’t say “recess time.” Unfortunately, the cards she’s reading point to a downturn in the economy — i.e., one of those smiley faces with the frown.

As defined by Answers.com an economic recession is

…an extended decline in general business activity; typically two consecutive quarters of falling real gross national product.

For her stats, Momma turns to the Census Bureau Reports, published March 13th, listing ADVANCE MONTHLY SALES FOR RETAIL TRADE AND FOOD SERVICES. Jolly good reading if you can stand the details. I started to snooze after Table 1B, but the indefatigable maternally Maxed is made of sterner stuff. Thus, she managed to tweeze out these disturbing little nuggets:

• MoM adjusted total retail would have been negative except for the increase in gas sales.
• Grocery store receipts are negative YoY when adjusted for price increases.
• MoM adjusted for restaurants and bars is negative.
• YoY adjusted and non adjusted for restaurants is negative when price increases are taken into account.

Help, Starling! Throw me a rescue line here; I’m in over my head. What is a YoY when it’s up and dressed? Let’s hope he notices and shows up with a few helpful terms in hand.

Meanwhile, Maxed Out Momma explains her contention that we’re declining and expands on her bad news:

Consumer credit from last week (Jan preliminary) showed moderate increases, no doubt because consumers were appalled by the credit card binge in November. The bottom line is that Q4 2006 total consumer debt rate of increase doubled from Q4 2005. Q4 2006 revolving credit (credit cards, basically) rate of increase nearly doubled from Q4 2005.

What we are seeing in consumer credit is the end of consumer spending financed by mortgage equity extraction (MEW). And what we are seeing in retail is that the consumer cannot borrow enough on credit cards to sustain spending increases.

Now these two reports make it clear that consumer spending will be decisively weak all this year, and that is because of the income distribution involved in those total wage increases reported so positively by the media. The problem is that the top echelon is getting nearly all of it, while the bottom echelon is getting less than enough to compensate for price increases.

The end result is that the housing problems have spread throughout the wider economy. In short, we are experiencing contraction not just in manufacturing, autos and housing, but in consumer spending. Very shortly we should see the four week moving average of initial unemployment claims move past the 350,000 mark.

All I can say is I’m glad the Baron trained me to pay off our credit cards every month or to go without. Actually, it didn’t take much training — I’ve seen what credit card debt does to people. In fact, that may be why answering machines were invented. Nope, the only risk I take is in tiny stock purchases. For fun. Like two dollars a share.

Meanwhile, our sometime-neighbor, who only visits here occasionally, has taken up permanent residence for awhile to do some clean-up on his property. His construction business further south is in the doldrums so he has time on his hands. In addition, he’s stuck with a high-end vacation home he can’t get rid of.

Well, that’s my anecdotal evidence for Maxed Out Momma’s contention about the housing part of this pattern.

What’s yours?

In the meantime, go over to her site just to read her other posts so you’ll know what not to invest in.

Makes for grim reading.

[Post ends here. It’s bad enough without laying it on any more thickly]

“Gray Lady Uses Skirts To Hide CAIR” is how Captain’s Quarters terms the current article on CAIR in The New York Times.

As usual, the NYT piece is a smooth, bland piece of PR which covers over the radical mission of CAIR with supposed allegations that haven’t been proved:

A small band of critics have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling the group an American front for the two.

Ah, the spirit of Walter Duranty lives on in the bowels of the Times. The Duranty tapeworm. No wonder this paper is so anemic.

Meanwhile, Investor’s Business Daily asks what CAIR is afraid of:

The first Secular Islam Summit [held last week] was a success if for no other reason than it intimidated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the PR machine of militant Islam.

The Washington-based group that boycotts airlines and bullies radio personalities and politicians into toeing the Islamist line is clearly worried about the message from Muslim reformers.

It dispatched its henchmen to Florida to shout the reformers down at their confab earlier this week. CAIR also posted on its Web site no fewer than four stories bashing the event and its courageous speakers, many of whom are women calling for an end to inequality and mistreatment under radical Islam.

– – – – – – – – – –

CAIR declared the summit illegitimate because few of the participants are ‘practicing Muslims,’ and those who are, it claims, are merely pawns playing into the hands of ‘Islamophobes.’

‘In order to have legitimate reform, you need to have the right messengers,’ asserted CAIR spokesman Ahmed Bedier.

And who might that be? The four CAIR executives who have been successfully prosecuted on terrorism-related charges? The CAIR co-founder who said the Quran should replace the U.S. Constitution as ‘the highest authority in America’?

True voices of moderation are the delegates to the Secular Islam Summit, who insisted in their declaration that mosque and state should always be separate. They also called for tolerance for non-Muslims, and an end to violent jihad. CAIR should take notes.

So what if many of them are ex-Muslims? They risked their lives to leave Islam and now dare to openly criticize an ideology that everyone else is afraid to criticize. What these brave souls have to say carries far more weight than anything said by CAIR, which couldn’t even bring itself to condemn Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, Bedier argued, but the summit’s ‘funding is coming from the neoconservatives.’ An article posted by CAIR suggests ‘Israeli intelligence’ is behind the movement.

In CAIR’s kooky world, the Zionists are behind everything, even 9/11.

But if anyone was behind 9/11, it was the Saudis. And guess who bankrolls CAIR? Right: the Saudis.

Fittingly, CAIR’s Bedier balked when summit delegate Tawfik Hamid, a former terrorist, challenged him to denounce Saudi sharia law for ‘killing apostates, beating women and stoning women.’

‘This is not about Saudi Arabia,’ he huffed. ‘We condemn any nation that misuses Islam, but we’re not going to condemn an entire nation. That’s like condemning London (sic).’

It’s disgusting how the NYT panders, postures, and lies by half-truths. Take this one, for instance:

Government officials in Washington said they were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group. More than one described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.

“Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares,” said Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. official who directed counterterrorism in the Washington field office from 2002 to 2005.

Somehow the Times missed the speeches of CAIR’s co-founder, Nihad Awad. Here are some choice quotes:

“After I researched the situation inside and outside Palestine, I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO… I know that this movement as an Islamic movement has not been objectively reported in the United States…” (stated at symposium at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, March 22, 1994)

“The arrest, detention and extradition is politically motivated… [and] this campaign has been orchestrated to serve as a wedge between America and Islamic countries.” (stated at May 10, 1996 press conference organized to support U.S. detained Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook)

“They [the Jews] have been saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ — we say ‘Next year to all Palestine.’“ (stated at Al-Awda rally at Lafayette Park in front of the White House, September 16, 2000)

“Hollywood is not our friend. Hollywood has distorted the facts. Hollywood has shown freedom fighters as terrorists. Hollywood has done the work that Zionists cannot done [sic].” (ibid)

Awad refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization. (Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, ‘CAIR Play?’ December 29, 2006)

The real motto of the Times: “All The News We Think You Should Know and Not One Idea More”

Feh. McCarthyism has nothing on Durantyism

NB: I forgot to quote Joe Morrisey’s post on this disgraceful piece of “journalism(see his CQ link above)–

That’s not all that makes critics suspicious of CAIR. Several of its officers have involvement in terror, including the founder of CAIR’s parent group and the man who ran the Holy Land Foundation, Mousa Abu Mazook. The US deported Mazook in 1997 for his work with Hamas. Ghassan Elashi helped found the Texas chapter and served on its board until 2002 — when the US deported him for selling forbidden computer technology to Libya and Syria. Rabih Haddad worked as a CAIR fundraiser until his deportation in 2003, as well as launching the Global Relief Fund that fed al-Qaeda and Hamas. Joe Kaufman included these specifics in a Front Page article three years ago — again, something MacFarquhar [the author of this NYT ‘wash’ -D] apparently missed in his journalistic investigation.

In short, the Times has published an ass-kissing paean to the poor, misunderstood folks at CAIR and smeared its critics. It’s practically a textbook example of hackery; spend all of an article rebroadcasting the complaints of one side and none of it covering the specifics of the other. MacFarquhar apparently couldn’t disprove these specifics, and so pretended they didn’t exist. The result should be an embarrassment for the New York Times, if they weren’t already so incapable of shame.

Now there’s an adjective I forgot to tack on to this piece of gar-bage: “shameless.” Yep, just another Duranty characteristic.