Archives for October 2006

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the accusation of homophobia against the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is bogus.

The BSA aims to provide activities for young men outside of a sexual context. That’s why there are no girls (as least that I know of) in the Boy Scouts, and that’s why they don’t admit gays.

The issue of discrimination in the BSA is bogus: In the aftermath of Katrina, in each of the states adjacent to Louisiana, Boy Scout troops used their campgrounds and gathered enough volunteers to obtain a ratio of 1 volunteer for every 2 displaced persons.

Since the relief effort being done by the BSA started in September 2005, NEVER ONCE have the displaced persons been refused assistance on account of sexual orientation, race, religion, or any other reason at all. The only criteria was that the people were in need, and the Scouts are helping. There has been NOT ONE INSTANCE, I repeat, not one, of discrimination from the BSA on its hurricane relief.

Having established that point, I was reading The Anchoress yesterday and came across this post from Ace:

Democratic Strategeist Bob Beckel: Fact That Mark Foley Was Gay Should Have “Raised Questions” About More Innocuous Emails

Say again?

Bob Beckel, in Hannity and Colmes last Monday, said that innocous emails should have “raised questions” because Mark Foley is gay.

At the same time, as Ace and The Anchoress point out, the Democrat party

stands as a whole for the proposition we must have no suspicions about gay men who want to hang out with boys in the woods

As The Anchoress brings to our attention

Remember, was it the 2000 convention when some Scouts processed with the flag to open the Dem Convetion and they were boo’d and conventioneers held up signs saying, “we support GAY boy scouts”.

The Anchoress continues,

Now, of course, it is politically expedient to cast suspicion and doubt upon a gay man communicating with a 16 year old boy,

(and, may I point out, the age of consent in Washington, DC is 16, so from the legal standpoint a sixteen-year-old is not jail bait)

and the Dems love what is politically expedient. Which causes even this center-left journalist to call them a party without principles.

It’s not just the Democrat party. The ACLU’s culture of hypocrisy has been attacking the BSA while defending the despicable NAMBLA.

Foley’s a perv, and now the liberals are scandalized:

On dailykos, this situation is generating the kind of moral passion usually reserved for blind Bush hatred. Assuming it is genuine and not merely opportunistic, it makes me very curious. Why? Because there are many on the psychological left who would argue that what Foley did was not only not pathological but perfectly healthy, so long as the boy didn’t object, and Foley didn’t use his position of authority to exert illegitimate power over the boy. At bottom, it would be considered nothing more than an office flirtation with a willing participant.

And so, if Foley is neither a pervert nor a pedophile, what has the left so morally exercised?

What’s more

Radical Gay Rights Activists held on to information about Representative Foley for months and years. These “Rights Activists” knew that representative Foley had relationships with “young men less than half his age.” They did their own investigation on Foley. They even flew in their sources in to be interviewed about the Representative. They shared this information with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They held on to the information for over a year. They wrote about how they would break the story at midterm elections.

It’s time the Democrats, the Liberals and the Left started to look at what they defend.

Update: Via Larwyn, It would seem that if you can’t win an election on the issues, you win it on outing the gay members of the opposite party.

(Please vote for this article at Real Clear Politics)

(technorati tags Mark Foley, Boy Scouts of America, Democrats, Politics, ACLU)

Human rights groups attribute the weight gain to lack of exercise, but I say ’tis from overeating:
Via LGF, High-Calorie Diet Fattens Gitmo Inmates, who are fed a 4,200 calories/day (!) diet, and questioned on Laz-E-Boy armchairs. Don’t miss Patterico‘s series of interviews of an Army nurse at Guantanamo (h/t Larwyn).

Last March I posted on a Frontpage Mag article that compares a Cubans’ daily rations as mandated by Castro’s government to the daily rations of Cubans slaves as mandated by the Spanish King in 1842:

The Food Ration in 1842 for slaves in Cuba:
meat, chicken, fish– 8 oz
Rice– 4 oz
Starches– 16 oz
Beans– 4 oz

Castro Gov. Ration since 1962:
meat, chicken, fish– 2 oz.
Rice– 3 oz
Starches– 6.5 oz
Beans– 1 oz.

Where are the human rights groups when it comes to Cubans’ everyday lives?

Larwyn’s links
More on the Guantanamo conditions at Belmont Club No safe place

The really ironic effect of multiculturalism in both the Islamic world and the West is that it has brought the return of the clandestine act and secret speech. No longer is it possible:

To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am.

To be that was to enjoy a freedom we have already lost; and it was never free.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, One Cosmos, Dr. Sanity, Victor Davis Hanson and The Anchoress have been looking at the culture wars. Also, don’t miss Pieter Dorsman‘s post on The Brief Dutch Sharia Eruption – Or – How political expediency has replaced political correctness in the Netherlands

While on the topic of Sharia law, Religious Freedom In Iran: Discrimination, Forced Mass Conversions

More from Larwyn,
Did You Know Tim Mahoney (FL-16 D) Is A Horse Rancher?

I’m liking the Australians more and more: Howard attacks left intelligentsia

Today’s articles from Maria
Huge ‘launch ring’ to fling satellites into orbit

In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.

I think I’ll skip this concert Horns Up. Bows Ready. Cellphones On, unless the Pythons did it.

Eggs Take Their Place at the Dinner Table, with Eggs poached in red wine

(technorati tags Cuba, health care, revolutions, Islam, Religion, Terrorism)

A friend who read my post on the attack on the two French policemen ten days ago sent this video:

Via Atlas Shrugs, Clash in France Leaves 7 People Injured

The clash broke out after police tried to stop a driver in Les Mureaux, 20 miles from central Paris, for not wearing a seat belt, said Patrick Trotignon, a police union official. The driver refused to stop, and later crashed into another police car that tried to block his path.

A crowd gathered, growing to about 250 people, Trotignon said. Some carried homemade shields, pick handles, stones and threatened the police officers, saying: “You won’t get out of the car alive,”’ he added.

An officer fired a warning shot in the air, and others fired rubber pellets and tear gas to clear a path to a nearby school, where they waited for reinforcements, Trotignon said.

The crowd set a police car, and the car that was initially stopped, on fire, before dispersing when more police officers arrived. Six officers and one resident suffered minor injuries, Trotignon said.

French authorities have kept a watchful eye on low-income housing projects in suburbs nationwide where riots by youths, many unemployed and from immigrant backgrounds, erupted nearly a year ago and continued for three weeks.

I had lunch with Nidra Poller yesterday, and we were discussing the situation in France. Today Nidra posted Beware of Saudi doctors . . . with French degrees

Reports are coming in from French medical schools of a plan to admit a cohort of Saudi students by hook and crook, bypassing the stiff entrance exams and very restrictive numerus clausus. Groups of five Saudi students will be admitted under exceptional conditions to eleven medical schools, leaving an equivalent number of qualified French candidates out in the cold.

The plan is so bald faced it’s hard to believe anyone would dare suggest such things, but it’s been presented as a fait accompli.
. . .
Let’s summarize: the chosen 55 will bypass the normal entry exam, the strict numerus clauses, the tough conditions for foreign candidates, the normal cutoff points and, in addition, these privileges will follow them all the way to home base — that still-prestigious French MD. They cannot falter neither can they fail.

Allowed to enter med school without scrutiny from the commission that normally judges candidates, they will presumably advance from year to year without confronting the pass or fail challenge that faces ordinary mortals.

While the French forbid the use of the jihab in public, the Brits already have come up with the “interfaith” gown:

The new look for Britain’s hospitals

The hooded “Inter-faith gown” is designed to reveal nothing but the patients’ eyes and hands and yet allow access for surgeons.

Expect more of this to come.

Update, via Larwyn, “Youths” are rioting in the UK, too.

Light posting today since I’m going to be otherwise occupied, but here are a few items,
Several people have referred me to this article on Redeker, Philosophers demand help for teacher on run from Islam threats

More than 20 stars of the French intellectual world appealed yesterday to the Government to do more to help. They included the philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann. M Redeker, who is on the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, has said that he cannot afford to pay for his accommodation and other costs in hiding.
. . .
His supporters deplored what they said was cowardice in the face of Islamic extremism. “A handful of fanatics are brandishing supposed religious laws to throw into question in our country the most fundamental liberties,” they said.

You can read my (very rough) translation of the Redeker article.

From Maria
Islam, the Pope and the opera: Most euro muslims sick of extremism

Clinton’s Flawed Legacy

From Larwyn
Tonight on 60 Minutes: Bob Woodward’s State o’ Denial. Elephants in Academia’s asking So who’s the real Queen of Denial?

————————————–
What kind of monster could do this?
Elephants in Academia has a few thoughts on when The devil comes to Paradise
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To avoid ending in a note of despair, here’s the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #3, via Denny

Brazil set for election run-off

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil has narrowly failed to win re-election outright in the first round of the presidential election.
Lula needed at least 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off on 29 October, but fell about 1% short, officials say.

He will now go head to head with former Sao Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, who took 41.4% of the vote.

Mr Alckmin gained ground late in the campaign, after President Lula’s party was accused of dirty tricks.

The Beeb calls it “dirty tricks”; I call it a pile of money $800,000 high, and not showing up for the debate.

Publius Pundit has the round-up.

Brazil is now in a position to choose between Lula (who’s been touted as the counter-Hugo – even when I’m asking, and yes, call me paranoid if you want, where did that pile of money come from?) and a pro-business, pro-development politician.

Sweet!

Make no mistake: this election is of pivotal importance for Latin America.

(technorati tags Brazil, Lula)

The New Pamphleteer has just published

Everything could explode at any moment.
Dispatches from the Lebanese-Israeli front

and
Blog digest #1: The Hezbollah War

both by Michael Totten.

Also don’t miss Michael Totten on Blog-Journalism and the Middle East

(technorati tags Middle East, Michael J. Totten)

Larwyn’s links
Iran mulled nuclear bomb in 1988, and it’s at it now: An alarm signal from Rafsanjani?

What gives with the odd reporting about United 93 in the Times of London?

The Motoons: One Year Later

Vanderleun takes a bull by the horns: QUICK. DON’T THINK OF A BLACK ELEPHANT

A few links on Foley: Mark Foley Flashback: If I Were One Of Those Sickos. Mark Foley Thread – Blurt Out Your Thoughts. Foley setup? What did the GOP leadership know? Foleygate! Altered Images! What’s Going On Here?

HIV Called “Gay Disease”. Michael Fumento wrote about this 13 years ago in his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics

The Coming Storm – Jefferson – The ties that bind

Muslims had better start worrying about

From the Ladies
Via Janette, Chomsky mocking

Via Armies of Liberation, A FOCUS ON THE AFRICAN SLAVES IN THE ARAB WORLD (emphasis added)

A comparison of the Muslim slave trade to the American slave trade reveals some interesting contrasts. While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Muslim slave trade. Two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims.

While the mortality rate for slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Transsahara and East African slave trade was between 80 and 90%!

While almost all the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were for agricultural work, most of the slaves destined for the Muslim Middle East were for sexual exploitation as concubines, in harems, and for military service.

While many children were born to slaves in the Americas, and millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the USA to this day, very few descendants of the slaves that ended up in the Middle East survive.

While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated, and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth. It is estimated that possibly as many as 11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic (95% of which went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions. Only 5% of the slaves went to the United States).

While Christian Reformers spearheaded the antislavery abolitionist movements in Europe and North America, and Great Britain mobilized her Navy, throughout most of the 19th Century, to intercept slave ships and set the captives free, there was no comparable opposition to slavery within the Muslim world.

Even after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and Europe abolished the slave trade in 1815, Muslim slave traders enslaved a further 2 million Africans. This despite vigorous British Naval activity and military intervention to limit the Muslim slave trade.

By some calculations the number of victims of the 14 centuries of Muslim slave trade could exceed 180 million. Nearly 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in America, and 130 years after all slaves within the British Empire were set free by parliamentary decree, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980, begrudgingly removed legalized slavery from their statute books.

And this only after international pressure was brought to bear. Today numerous international organizations document that slavery still continues in some Muslim countries.

Reports on slavery in Sudan, Mauritania for instance needs looking into. Recently, a former slave from the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, Mende Nazer, had her autobiography: “Slave: My True Story” published. Mende Nazer was an alleged slave in Sudan. She was made famous by her transfer to England to serve a diplomatic family.

Maria’s articles:
BILL PARDONED TERROR

SECRETS FOR SALE – CHEAP

HILLARY’S HASTY REJOINDER

A bit of bobnoxiousness: Memo to the NY Times: Conservatism is Caused by Fighting It

Socks

In a lighter mode, Maria would like to stay at the Hotel Fox in Copenhagen Denmark. To me, it looks like a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep there.

Dog Owners Warned Over Sugar-Free Items

And last, but not least,
Two more Americans get the Nobel Prize for Medicine: Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for discovering how to control the flow of genetic information in a cell.

At The Economist: The world according to Chavez: Venezuela’s bid for a UN Security Council seat has divided Latin America (emphasis added)

His diplomacy has split Latin America. Mexico, Central America (except Belize) and Colombia are supporting the rival candidacy of Guatemala, announced before Venezuela’s and backed by the United States. Venezuela claims the support of the Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), Bolivia and much of the Caribbean. Peru and Ecuador will probably support Guatemala. Chile has been wavering: Michelle Bachelet, the president, leans towards Venezuela, but much of her centre-left coalition does not. Recent criticism of its stance by Venezuela’s ambassador will probably force Ms Bachelet to abstain.

Farther afield, Guatemala has the support of most of Europe’s democracies. Mr Chávez claims the backing of the Arab league, much of the African Union, and China and Russia. Some of this support is based on shared anti-Americanism – thus the UN speech. But some of it appears to be the fruit of petro-diplomacy.

The cost of this to Venezuela is impossible to calculate. Much of the government’s spending is off-budget and at Mr Chavez’s discretion (which violates the constitution he himself introduced). A recent study by CIECA, an opposition-leaning research centre, puts at $50 billion the total foreign spending announced by the government in the past 18 months (though this seems to involve some double counting). It includes a $10 billion anti-poverty fund, which officials say has already financed an electrification plan for Havana, a hospital in Uruguay, and subsidised heating oil for poor districts in the United States.

Argentina has benefited from Venezuela’s purchase of $3.1 billion of its bonds. Other outlays come more clearly under the heading of outright aid. Jamaica was offered a $300m motorway. Bolivia has been showered with gifts, including asphalt for its highways, student grants and the indefinite loan of two large helicopters. Over 300,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan oil products is sold at a discount under a variety of concessionary deals.

Many of the headline sums lack a timetable. If true, they are out of all proportion to the financial capacity of a country where at least 35% of the population still lives in poverty, despite the government’s oil windfall. Many of the promises look wildly unrealistic. Mr Chavez has talked of building or upgrading oil refineries in Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Jamaica, Syria, Uruguay and Vietnam, not to mention Venezuela itself. But PDVSA, the state oil company, suffers from a shortage of both skilled staff and cash.

And, at times, a shortage of of oil. According to the Financial Times, under Chavez, PDVSA’s oil output has declined by about 60 per cent.

The Economist continues,

Despite the outlay, Mr Chavez may still not achieve his goal. To be elected, a country requires 128 votes – two-thirds of the General Assembly. Neither Venezuela nor Guatemala is likely to achieve that. Whichever comes second would normally face pressure to step aside. But this time, neither is likely to do so. The onus will then be on the bigger countries in Latin America to come up with a compromise candidate – diplomats mention Uruguay, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.

Also at The Economist:

Who leads Latin America?
If you ask me, it’s all up to Lula. The Brazilian election is today, and he’s expected to win.

Update Don’t miss Publius Pundit‘s post on the Brazilian elections. Aleksander Boyd’s on the Venezuelan campaign trail with Manuel Rosales, and he was mugged by Chavista thugs (the Venezuelan elections are on December 3).

Update 2 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Toasted Bread

This same week we have also known that Chavez has employed Arturo Cubillas, ex-ETA terrorist, allegedly accused of 3 murders in Spain, and his wife. He has been named Director assigned to the Office of Administration and Services of the Agricultural and Lands of Venezuela Minister. His wife has been named General Director of the Venezuelan Presidency, as Spanish Embassy in Venezuela has confirmed. Links above are in Spanish, but are very interesting to know who this man was. In brief, he was one of the ETA-Terrorists looked for by Spanish police in the 80’s -where ETA’s bloody campaign was more active-, deported from Venezuela to Algeria, where talks between Socialist Government and ETA failed.

(h/t Lerwyn/Gateway Pundit)

(technorati tags Brazil, Lula, Hugo Chavez, Latin America, UN)