A Dream Deferred and Stomped On

Okay, I’ve been around the blog block a time or two so I know the score (or at least I can see it if I squint hard).

So. Of all the words issuing forth on Senator Harry Reid’s unfortunate fall from Grace – or maybe from Sea Biscuit – the best are on The Other McCain’s website, guest-posted by her worthiness, Sissypus the Blog Kitty.

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She says:

I got word via Her Majesty’s spy network (what’s a little ‘stealth outsourcing’ between frenemies, eh?) that Tony Scambilloni had a flight booked for Dulles. This within hours of the surprise announcement that Harry “the Cadaver” Reid was not intending to transition from un- to fully-dead right there on the Senate floor, railing about the Koch brothers or some other invented anti-Progressive bugbear. No, Poor, Poor, Pitiful Reid would leave his final trail of embalming fluid in the Senate halls after the 2016 election, and return to afflict Searchlight, Nevada with his lousy personality.

In stark contrast, how can you not love a Renaissance thug like Tony, whose art forgeries cost almost as much as an evening engagement with his chamber quartet, Chin Music? Of course, he had no hourly rate for his “professional services”, which ran the gamut of consulting from matters of body, to mind, to soul.

Access to the 5th floor ventilation in the Hart Building, especially on such short notice, would have been relatively hard for anyone bigger than a feline. Especially without the correct connections. However, arrangements were made, and a helpful security guard “let the cat out of the bag”. (Oh, shut up! You’d’ve used that gag, too.)

The wait was less than an hour there, behind the ventilation grill in the corner of room 522. Harry sat at his desk, illuminated by a banker’s lamp, his good side in profile, one chair and the door in view. Reid, shaking and wheezing, worked at a stack of paper, and swore with more rhythm and passion than one would have thought him incapable of mustering, based upon the usual stream of porridge he emitted on the Senate floor.

The door opened abruptly, with a precisely measured fury. The hall light flooding the room mostly shadowed a man in a black suit bearing an instrument case. Tony.

Reid’s remaining good eye got squinty. “What the philharmonic are you doing here?” he demanded, as Tony shut the door firmly, then strode over to sit in the visible chair. He could have been visiting a junior college professor, and not the United States Senate Minority Leader, for all the waves of disdain exuded. The instrument case occupied what I presumed was another chair on the opposite desk corner. The light of the banker’s lamp on the desk somehow moved Tony’s look away from Robert DeNiro and more toward a Harvey Keitel.

[…]

Oh, Lordy. Pure poetry and purple prose – in a noir kind of way – from Sissypus, that Greek beauty of a boulder roller on Mr. McCain’s staff.

Believe me there is more in the same vein, so to speak, over there, including a link to this piece of modern genius:
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Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/30/2015

The Supreme Court denied an appeal by high school students in California who had been ordered to turn their American flag t-shirts inside out on Cinco de Mayo. The school administration felt that avoiding racial violence that day was more important than free speech, and the court agreed.

In other news, the latest report on Germanwings Flight 9525 says that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who crashed the plane deliberately, had been under treatment for “suicidal tendencies”.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Fjordman, JD, MC, RL, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Rife with Rumor and Conjecture

OOPS…UPDATED with all links working now. Must have been those pesky leprechauns again. Later update: the photo of Prune Face.

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The Baron has gone into town to do our weekly shopping. I have been left with strict orders to stay out of trouble…

…Honest, all I was doing was a teeny little bit of weeding after I hung out the wash. Just the smallest bit. And now I can’t move my arm…

But one of our essayists sent these links so I thought I’d share them.

They all concern the karma surrounding our Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid, known to some of us as Prune Face (because he never seems to smile much).


[Added by the Baron after he returned from the big city]

Our essayist opined:

I just read a summary on Breitbart of what Harry Reid has to fear from a new Attorney General if the Republicans win the presidential election. Of course, it depends on who that is, whether there will be any action or just a “dialogue.” But this is being given as an alternative reason for his retirement.

Reflecting on this made me return to my original reaction to his accident, and then to a history of accidents, shown below. Starting with the “exercise” accident, there are at least two descriptions of what happened and where. One in the gym and one in the bathroom, both — for someone who has done any exercising — borderline incredible. (See first story below)

A survey shortly after revealed that ca. 91% if those asked do not buy the story. (See fourth story)

Then there are the other accidents. His wife and daughter involved, sustaining bad but not life-threatening injuries when rear-ended in DC by a semi. Under investigation. (See second story)

Finally, his motorcade involved in a multi-car crash — no explanation of how or why from the state police. (See third story)

Considering his and his son’s involvement with shady characters of various sorts, foreign and domestic, I recall all those TV police serials where pressure is exerted by violence to exact obedience or silence. I love a good conspiracy theory.

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I have to agree with him. There are so many conspiracies floating about that it’s hard to choose. This one is all Americana, though. Las Vegas rumors, brass knuckles, car “accidents” – but wait, no guns. Not yet, anyway. I hope Harry doesn’t agree to any one-way rides to the desert outside of town. At least he has the comfort of money: if he makes it to his planned retirement next year, he’ll have his nice Senate pension and the five million dollars he managed to save from his Senate salary.

The links to these news reports are below the jump. I haven’t read them yet either. Probably just a bunch of malarkey made up by jealous Republicans.

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Ethno-Religious Diversity and the Limits of Democracy, Part Three

The following essay by El Inglés is the third in a six-part series that examines the sociopolitical effects of mass immigration into the Western democracies.

Ethno-Religious Diversity and the Limits of Democracy

by El Ingles

Part Three: Homogeneous and Polarized Systems

The first post in this series introduced a statistical analysis of political systems that includes various terms referenced by abbreviations in later parts of the text. For the reader’s convenience, a list of those abbreviations and their meanings is below:

Abbr   Term   Explanation
PP   Policy Point   Policies actually being implemented by a government at any point in time
IPP   Individual Policy Point   Policies preferred by an individual
DI   Discontentedness Index   Distance between the PP and an IPP
MDI   Mean Discontentedness Index   Average of the DIs of individuals in the population
TD   Threshold Discontentedness   The level of DI above which an individual considers the government illegitimate
CZ   Contented Zone   The interior of a circle having a radius of the value of TD
DZ   Discontented Zone   The area outside the CZ circle
DZF   Discontented Zone Fraction   The fraction of the population occupying the DZ
 

See Part One and Part Two for a more detailed explanation.

Homogeneous and Polarized Systems

Political Systems for Dealing With Moderate Polarization

That a more diffuse distribution of IPPs and the greater political disagreement they represent create problems for democratic polities is well understood by political theorists, even if not in these terms. It is in response to them that democratic polities usually have multi-tiered political systems, systems that can allow these problems to be ameliorated to some extent. Let us consider this important point here by considering a hypothetical two-tier system.

In this system, there are two levels at which democratic politics operates: a national level and a regional level. At the national level, the system works the same way as the systems we have already described. However, at the regional level, the system is split up into two parts. Each part corresponds to a different region of the polity, and each has its own PP and jurisdiction (represented by the straight lines). In these regions, each of which contains only part of the population of the polity as a whole, people are exposed to a regional set of policies too.

Diagram 11 shows this polity at the national level. Here, IPPs are spread out in a band concentrated around the horizontal axis. The DZF is 25%, and we will take the MDI as being 1.8.


Diagram 11

However, we have stipulated that this is a two-tier system, with a regional level of government with its own policies applicable only to people in the region. We represent this regional level in Diagram 12, Here, the blue circular area on the left represents Region A, the green circular area on the right Region B. We see that all IPPs in the regional system diagram are within the regional CZs of their respective regional PPs, set by regional governments. We see that DZFs are now zero for both regions, and we will say that both MDIs have a value of 0.8.


Diagram 12

What is the significance of this? We simply assign a weighting to each level, which represents its political authority as a fraction of all political authority in the system. Using percentages, we will stipulate that in this initial hypothetical example, the weighting is 50:50, meaning that political authority is equally distributed between the two levels. The MDI is therefore 50% of the national MDI plus 50% of the population-weighted average regional MDIs, or 1.3 for the system as a whole, less than the 1.8 it would have been in a single-tier system. The DZF is the average of the national DZF and the regional DZF, and represents a composite picture taking both levels into account. In this case, it is 12.5%, which is (25% + 0)/2.

Thus, by introducing regional autonomy, the system has created greater political stability, with the MDI falling from the original 1.8 to 1.3, and the DZF falling from 25% to 12.5%. If the split were 60:40 national to regional, these figures would be 1.4 and 15% respectively, as the more polarized national politics took on more precedence. If it were 40:60, the figures would be 1.2 and 10% respectively.

Another way of seeing this is to draw the two regional system diagrams independently of each other. Region A looks like this:


Diagram 13

Region B looks like this:


Diagram 14

This makes it clear that, at the regional level for both regions, the systems are fairly politically homogenous, with low MDIs and DZFs equal to zero. Hence their contribution to the political stability of the system as a whole.

The obvious problem with this model as stated is that we have assumed that the distribution of political diversity in the polity is such that political beliefs correlate very strongly with geographical location. What reason is there to expect the people in Region A, for example, to have such similar opinions?

In reality, there is no reason to assume that political beliefs and geographical location correlate so strongly, if at all. Let us make this point clear by re-drawing the two diagrams above in one diagram. Now, the positions of the IPPs have the same significance as always, but instead of fairly arbitrarily drawing a line on the system diagram to create two separate areas, one green, one blue, let us use green and red IPPs to represent which of the two component regions of the country the people represented by the PP live in: Greens live in Region 1, Reds live in Region 2. We stress again that the colours do NOT correspond to political affiliation. Political positions are represented by the positions of the IPPs, as always; it is geographical location that is represented by colour.

In our first version, which is simply Diagram 11 redrawn with colour, the political heterogeneity is matched very well by geographical distribution; people of like political beliefs live in the same regions. The regional diagrams will be the same as Diagrams 13 and 14. MDIs and DZFs for this system will be as they were in the above calculations, as, we say again, this is simply the same system presented differently.


Diagram 15

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/29/2015

At the last minute Iran rejected the nuclear deal offered by the United States and the “P5+1” group. The Iranians were unhappy with certain aspects of President Obama’s offer, so signing has been postponed. The next deadline will now be in July.

In other news, a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder on Germanwings Flight 9525 reveals that the captain pleaded with copilot Andreas Lubitz through the locked cockpit door in the last few minutes before the jetliner crashed.

Meanwhile, a march by the PEGIDA affiliate in Quebec was cancelled after a greater number of “anti-fascists” convened to oppose it.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Fjordman, Insubria, JD, K, Val Price, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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King of Heaven, Welcome!

Our Arabic translator ritamalik sends this beautiful cantata for Palm Sunday: “Himmelskönig, sei willkommen!” or “ King of Heaven, welcome!” It was written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1714. This 1996 performance is by the Bach Collegium in Japan, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki:

Himmelskönig, sei willkommen,
Laß auch uns dein Zion sein!
Komm herein,
Du hast uns das Herz genommen.

King of Heaven, welcome,
Let us also be your Zion!
Come within,
You have taken our hearts from us.

Allah’s Little Whelpers

Paul Weston is the leader of Liberty GB, and one of the few people running for office in Britain who speaks forthrightly about the menace of Islamization. Please consider supporting Liberty GB; there is an appeal for donations at the bottom of this essay.

Allah’s Little Whelpers
by Paul Weston

When three Muslim girls domiciled in England decided to leg it to Syria to enrol in Allah’s Auxiliary Field Mattress Regiment, the left/liberal establishment went into meltdown and started asking all sorts of questions about how such a scenario was able to happen in wonderfully diverse, happy and communally cohesive Britain.

There was one particular question which was never asked however, that should have gone something like this: “These girls have watched videos of beheadings, torture and murder. They have seen a man burned alive in a cage. What kind of savage, primitive, sadistic, evil little excuses for human beings are they, and do we in all honesty want them back in our country?”

Predictably though, such a question was never asked. Instead we had to listen to the caterwauling of the BBC for days on end. Is it the fault of the police? The intelligence services? Our institutionally racist society? Perhaps Jeremy Clarkson’s name was mentioned as well, but if it was I must confess to having missed it.

When Muslims get upset in England, our ruling elites are quick to appease them in a notably different manner than when thousands of native English girls are gang raped and tortured by Pakistani Muslims who are also domiciled in Britain. The different manner of treatment consisting in the main of arresting (or ignoring) the vulnerable native English girls themselves when discovered naked, aged thirteen, drunk or drugged in a squalid roomful of bearded forty-year old Muslim males with their trousers round their ankles and mischievous glints in their soulful eyes.

But, as I say, a rather different manner of treatment regarding Allah’s Little Whelpers off to Syria. A Parliamentary Select Committee was established in record time. The girls’ families demanded an immediate apology from the police for failing to provide a 24-hour personal chaperone service for their delightful daughters, which London Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe duly provided upon bended knee whilst facing Mecca.

All this theatre of English guilt provided a veritable orgy of air-time from the Biased Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) but suddenly the screeching ceased, the wailing waned and the caterwauling was cursorily curtailed. What had happened? Was there no other guilty, white, Christian entity to be dragged through the gutter of redemption? Were there really no further examples of native English negligence with which we could publicly demean ourselves before the Left and Islam?

No, the media silence which descended faster than the drawers of Allah’s Field Mattress Conscripts (AFMC’s) came down to three issues which seem to be terribly embarrassing to Al-Beeb. First, the father of one of the AFMC’s surfaced in a video shouting Allahu Akbar at one of Anjem Choudary’s rallies for peace and good-will as they burned the Stars and Stripes and demanded death to America. Also at the rally was one Michael Adebowale, who went on to garner global Islamic admiration for his tremendous bravery in running down Fusilier Lee Rigby with his car, prior to semi-beheading him.

Secondly, Tasnime Akunjee, the lawyer representing the AFMC’s families at the Parliamentary Select Committee, was revealed to be a dedicated follower of fascism himself and had previously remarked that the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby had lots to do with imperialist oppression and little to do with murderous Muslims. Mr Akunjee had also previously stated Muslims should not cooperate with the British police, which is of course acutely embarrassing to the BBC, who were hounding the police for their “failure” to cooperate completely with the Muslim community…

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 3/28/2015

According to a recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany will require up to half a million non-EU immigrants every year over the next 35 years. If it fails to maintain that level of immigration, its working-age population will fall by about a third.

In other news, the Saudi ambassador to Sweden has returned to Stockholm after Sweden apologized for insulting the Kingdom when Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström talked about human rights.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Kitman, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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What’s a Liberal, Daddy?

One of our commenters has a reasonable request. It got me to thinking.

Cynthia of California said:

Can we please drop the word “liberals” in these comments? There are Classical Liberals and there are Leftists (often also referred to as Progressives), and they are *not* the same.

As I consider myself one and not the other, thank G-d.

Cynthia has a point, though if she’s a Classical Liberal then she may be all by herself in California. I remember well the politics and policies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Scoop Jackson. Even Joe Lieberman fell into that category — at least he was forced to leave the Democrat Party as it turned toward a bloated welfare state and away from individual liberties. When Moynihan retired from the Senate and Hillary Clinton assumed his New York seat, I think he died of a broken heart.

Here is a brief introduction from George Mason University:

Consider this [edited] snip from “Discover the Networks” to be the Cliff Notes on this subject:

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Geert Wilders in Vienna, Part 5: The PI Interview

While he was in Vienna yesterday, Geert Wilders was interviewed by the German news site Politically Incorrect. Mr. Wilders’ talk ranged over Islam, immigration, nationalism, and other Counterjihad-related topics:

Hat tip: Steen.

Previous posts about Geert Wilders’ visit to Vienna:

2015   Mar   27   The press conference at the parliament
        28   Geert Wilders’ speech at the Hofburg
        28   Interview: How do we defend freedom and democracy?
        28   Geert Wilders at the Gates of Vienna
 

Geert Wilders at the Gates of Vienna

Below is a report from Vienna on yesterday’s visit by Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom to Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian Freedom Party.

Geert Wilders at the Gates of Vienna
Part 4

March 27, 2015

by the Counterjihad Collective

Geert Wilders’ whirlwind visit to Vienna yesterday was action-packed from the very morning. A massive power failure in the Netherlands almost prevented him from coming, but after a slight delay, he arrived to the ornate Austrian parliament under heavy police protection, as planned.

For ten long and lonely years, Geert has been fighting to preserve the values of his country, The Netherlands. He has been vilified and demonized, denounced endlessly, but he battles on regardless. The constant death threats on his life necessitate round-the-clock security.

Inside the Austrian parliament, Wilders first had a private talk with his friend and ally Heinz-Christian Strache, chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). They then hosted a joint press conference under the title “Islamization: The threat to Europe”, which drew heavy press attention from the press. Wilders’ statement at the press conference (in English) can be viewed here.

After further media interviews, Wilders proceeded to the imperial castle Hofburg, where he spoke for half an hour to a room full to the last chair (and more), with over 1,000 participants.

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Teddy Bear Taqiyya

A few weeks three “British” schoolgirls made international headlines ago by traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State and wage jihad in the path of Allah.

One of the girls is named Amira Abase. Her father is Hussen Abase, although in some media accounts he is referred to as “Abase Hussen”, which is very confusing. In any case, after the news about his daughter broke, Mr. Abase or Mr. Hussen presented himself to the British media as a bewildered “moderate” Muslim who had no idea how his dear daughter had fallen in with a bad crowd and developed “extremist” views.

Below are excerpts from an account in The Guardian that was published on February 22:

The father of one of the London schoolgirls feared to be on her way to Syria has said her family “cannot stop crying” as he urged her not to fall into the clutches of Islamic State (Isis) militants.

As British counter-terrorism officers were accused of failing to pick up on signs that the teenagers may have been radicalised online, the father of Amira Abase, 15, said she had never discussed an interest in jihadism with him but “maybe with friends”.

Hussen Abase, 47, revealed that Amira had claimed she was going to a wedding on the day she went missing, but instead secretly met up with her Syria-bound friends.

In a tearful video message to his daughter, Abase said: “We are depressed, and it’s very stressful. The message we have for Amira is to get back home. We miss you. We cannot stop crying. Please think twice. Don’t go to Syria.”

[…]

Abase said Amira had been behaving “in a normal way” with “no sign to suspect her at all” before she disappeared.

“She said ‘Daddy, I’m in a hurry’,” he said. Later that morning, she texted her father, who assumed she was going to the wedding. “She said, ‘Dad, the place is a little bit far. I pray my midday prayer and I get back’. She didn’t come home,” he said. The family reported her missing at midnight on Tuesday.

Abase described his daughter’s actions as “completely nonsense” and said it had caused untold upset to her mother and younger brother and sister. He said his daughter had never spoken about an interest in jihad with him but “maybe with friends”.

“She doesn’t dare discuss something like this with us. She knows what the answer would be,” he said.

“If anyone doesn’t have hope, life would be miserable,” he said. “We don’t despair. We struggle. It’s stressful. We hope, of course.”

There’s no jihad in this family! Cross my heart and hope to die! Uh, no, wait, I mean… May Allah strike me dead if I fail to speak the truth!

Well, that was Hussen Abase in February 2015. It turns out that three years previously, in 2012, Mr. Abase-Hussen was somewhat more “radicalized” in his views. Is he perhaps a recovering jihadolic? He may even now on his way to a Mujahideen Anonymous meeting in the East London Mosque…

Vlad Tepes has compiled a “Then and Now” video of Hussen Abase. You’ve got to hand it to the grieving father; he certainly knows how to push all the lachrymose sentimentalist media buttons — look at the size of that teddy bear in his lap!

Here are excerpts from the most recent Daily Mail report on the tearful father of Amira:

His face twisted in fury, Abase Hussen punches his fist into the air and launches into an Islamic war cry.

‘Burn, burn USA,’ he yells from his prime spot at the front of one of the most notorious rallies in recent times [in 2012].

Once the crowd is whipped into a fever, an American flag is set on fire and held aloft by a fanatic. Video footage shows Mr Hussen desperately trying to hold the burning flag as the chanting behind him intensifies.

He manages to grab the flag briefly before being forced to drop it because of the power of the smoke and flames.

As the remainder of the flag burns on the ground, Mr Hussen chants ‘Allahu Akbar’.

He pushes the palm of his hand repeatedly toward the embers, rejoicing at the destruction of the stars and stripes.

Mr Hussen — the father of one of the three schoolgirls who fled Britain to join Islamic State — then turns his attention to a burning Israeli flag on the floor and begins to chant and gesture toward it.

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