Scragged

Obama's New Spoils System Will Benefit Conservatism

Petrarch — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:06:00 GMT

America's federal bureaucracy, alas, is the largest civilian employer in the country and, alas again, by far the fastest-growing one. Despite happy talk from the White House, our private-sector economy is not in any mood to take on more employees; so, if you're unemployed and want to work, working for Uncle Sam is your most likely bet.

If we are all as equal as the Constitution says, we all should have an equal opportunity for government employment based on our qualifications. Remember the "scandal" when the Bush administration fired a handful of politically-appointed prosecuting attorneys? Never mind that they weren't Civil Service, and never mind that Clinton sacked every last one of them when he came into office including a couple that were investigating his actions in Whitewater. Just working for the government, supposedly, puts you beyond reach of the politicians who were elected to run that government.

That is not the way it worked for our first century as a nation. In our early days, if you were President you were elected to do certain things, and by gum, you had the right to appoint people who do what you want! The Civil Service Act in the late 1800s ended that freedom and power, putting the newly minted "civil servants" under strict rules of non-partisanship with promotions and hiring supposedly based on exams and competency evaluations.

Suddenly and without warning, Barack Obama brings us change we can believe in:

OPM [Office of Personnel Management, the Federal hiring agency] is now claiming authority to weed out every former political appointee from being considered for any federal positions at every level of the GS Pay Scale, for both the competitive and excepted service – made retroactive for the past 5 years.

In a complex document full of red-tape-ese, OPM basically says that if you're an ex-employee of a political administration in the last five years, but now you work for the Federal government in any position... well, you can't, and you're fired, unless you can get written permission from the very highest levels. Now just whom do you suppose might be in this situation? There surely aren't very many ex-Obama officials in the civil service yet, and ex-Clintonites, well, that was much more than five years ago.

That's right: President Obama is plotting a purge of all Republicans from government employment - no, not Republican voters (yet), but certainly anyone who ever did political work for W.

Misplaced Horror

Needless to say, the right-wing blogosphere is hitting the ceiling. This action by OPM is directly illegal; the Civil Service Act expressly forbids a person's political positions or prior service from being a factor in their government employment or termination. Odds are, the law will be no obstacle; clearly, Obama doesn't want anyone collecting a government paycheck who isn't 100% on board with his liberal agenda, and who's going to stop him? Republicans are trying to stir up voter anger as the only possible check on this power grab.

Unfortunately, the Right is not thinking this through. True, Mr. Obama's action will make the bureaucracy even further left than it already is; what difference is that going to make? It's as intrusive now as its funding and legal checks-and-balances allow it to be. True, it will cause hardship for some deserving Republican political servants; can we not find some other home for them for a few years?

Because sooner or later, Mr. Obama will be out. There will be another Republican president someday. Thanks to the precedent Mr. Obama is so helpfully setting for us now, conservatives will have an opportunity that we have not had for a century: to actually clean house of far-left bureaucrats.

Think of it: when every recent past administration neared its end, dozens of political hacks "burrowed" into the ranks of the civil service, there to pursue their policy preferences unchecked. Mr. Obama understandably doesn't want ex-Bushites to do this, but there never were that many of them anyway.

There will be hundreds if not thousands of ex-Obama minions, though, and thanks to what by 2013 will be "a longstanding and well-established policy," we won't have to let them take over powerful bureaucratic positions from which they can sabotage the conservative agenda!! The harm caused to Bush by burrowed Clintonites who subjected his administration to the death of a thousand cuts constantly resurfaced over the years, crippling his presidency and he couldn't fire them. No more!

What we truly need is a return to the original "spoils system," where a new president could sack every single government paper-pusher and replace them wholesale with party loyalists who'd do as he said - and, of course, the president bore full responsibility for what they did and could answer for it at the next election. Until that day comes, we'll take this as a close second-best.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on Inconvenient Truths, bureaucracy and civil service

Kermit The Frog Was Right - It's Not Easy Bein' Green

Will Offensicht — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:37:00 GMT

Back when my kids were growing up, they'd watch the occasional Sesame Street cliffhanger. Little did we know that Kermit the Frog's signature lament, "It's Not Easy Bein' Green," would come to be the byword for our times.

In "The price of cleanliness," the Economist wrote "China is torn between getting greener and getting richer." Mr. Obama's highfalutin' talk about growing the economy by creating high-paying "green jobs" not withstanding, both the Economist and the Chinese government recognize that there's an irreconcilable conflict between economic growth and "bein' green."

That makes sense - if eco-friendly energy could be produced at lower cost than what we're doing now, businesses would already be doing it. The only way to get eco-friendly energy is by subsidies which raise taxes or by restricting current energy generation methodologies which raises costs. Either way, living standards go down, which is a hard sell indeed.

Bein' Green is Hard to Do

The article opens:

The Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant in north-east Beijing is delightfully green. Unlike most of China's smoke-belching power stations, it has such low emissions that luxury flats are being built next to it. They are fetching high prices. Owners will look out over something that looks more like a cluster of office buildings (apart from a couple of grey chimneys) than a power plant. The cooling towers, near a grove of date trees and an ornamental pool, look a bit like the Great Wall.

The plant has two General Electric gas-fueled turbines. It produces half the emissions of a comparable coal-fired facility and its steam supplies heat to 1 million homes as well as to the American embassy in Beijing. Sounds ideal, right?

Well, no. The plant was built during the "cost is no object" era in the run-up to the Olympic games. Now the party's over; the banners have been rolled up and put away, and the plant's owners have the problem of making electricity economically. They find that eco-friendly electricity costs 50% more than in a coal-fired facility. Energy cost increases of that magnitude shouldn't surprise you if you've been paying attention. The New York Times wrote:

The price tag for a new climate agreement will be a staggering $100 billion a year by 2020, many economists estimate; some put the cost at closer to $1 trillion.

Our Money for Their Carbon

Fortunately for the Chinese, the plant qualifies for the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by which rich countries offset carbon emissions by paying for carbon cuts in developing ones. Even with $12 million in annual CDM payments, which are paid to the Chinese by guess who, the plant barely breaks even.

China realizes that using energy less wastefully will reduce carbon emissions and also save money. To that end, China is talking about generating less carbon per unit of GNP; the United States successfully made similar changes during and after the Carter oil shock many Presidents ago. Unfortunately, keeping their citizens content requires that Chinese GNP grow faster than energy use can be reduced cost-effectively. China's total emissions will go up unless GNP growth is held down by raising energy costs artificially. Holding down economic prosperity would lead to hate and discontent among the Chinese masses so their leadership isn't as eager to do that as ours seems to be.

There's a further difficulty - the most effective technologies for reducing energy consumption come from America. The Chinese are not eager to pay royalties and the Americans are not eager to teach the Chinese how to compete with them in the future. The Chinese claim that America ought to pay much if not most of their costs in reducing carbon emissions, a concept not likely to go down well with American taxpayers who're already struggling with large deficits.

Bein' Green Costs MUCH Green

The Chinese aren't the only government to recognize that it's neither cheap nor easy bein' green. Reuters reports:

Asia Pacific leaders backed away on Saturday from supporting a global halving of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, even as Brazil pledged deep cuts of its own over the next decade.

An initial draft leaders' statement from an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore had said that "global emissions will need to ... be reduced to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050."

But a later, watered-down version stated: "We believe that global emissions will need to peak over the next few years, and be substantially reduced by 2050, recognizing that the timeframe for peaking will be longer in developing economies."

The world's two biggest carbon emitters who account for 40% of worldwide emissions - China and the United States - are members of APEC; this change to the draft APEC announcement says a great deal about what's likely to happen. Western governments who answer to the voters from time to time are finding that their citizens a) believe that the economy is more important than the environment, at least for now, and b) are beginning to have doubts that what the climate doomsayers are saying is true.

We're still looking forward to seeing what comes out of the Copenhagen conference on the environment even though the New York Times reports:

President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future. [emphasis added]

Why are we not surprised? Mr. Obama might not mind trillion-dollar deficits, but some of the other national leaders seem to have a bit more sense. We're eagerly waiting for them to tell us the difference between an "agreement" and a less specific "politically binding" agreement. We already know a major part of the outcome - the great and the good will generate huge amounts of carbon at our expense as they fly to beautiful Copenhagen. Given that they've already agreed that they don't have to be specific, they'll produce much hot air and slaughter many trees whilst bloviating about the sacrifices we unimportant people will have to make to Save the Planet. They'll run all over town in low-mileage limos, generating even more emissions while punting all the difficult issues. Sounds like more of the same old-fashioned political junketry at our expense.

Whether anything of significance will emerge remains to be seen. We doubt it, but that's a good thing. The more we see of the specifics that true believers in Saving the Planet are demanding, the more we like the idea of punting climate change into the future, the further into the future, the better.

Read the original article on Scragged.com

Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on carbon, energy and global warming

Muhammad Meets His Maker

Petrarch — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:24:00 GMT

The remembrance of Veteran's Day and mourning for the victims of Muslim treason at Ft. Hood diluted its impact, but another terrorist met his Maker last week:

John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind of the sniper attacks that terrorised the US capital region for three weeks in 2002, was executed earlier this morning.

During the anxious days of the "Beltway Sniper", I frequently visited the region on business. Whenever I'd fly in, my wife would express concern that I might be the next unsuspecting victim - never mind the millions of non-victims in the area and the far higher probability of being squashed like a bug in DC's notorious traffic. Everyone was fearful because there was no rhyme nor reason to the killings - the victims and the locations seem to have been entirely random.

Muhammad was a terrorist by any definition: he attacked civilian targets, terrorized millions, and spread panic far and wide. Rumors flew: a white van was spotted driving away from a murder site! Don't go out in the open if there's a white van around! How many tens of thousands of white vans must there be? How many white van drivers were hassled without result? Nobody noticed the ordinary-looking sedan the killers actually used.

But then, nobody was looking for a pair of black male converts to Islam. At the time, the FBI's vaunted profiles said the suspect had to be a white man. Why? Because all serial killers are white! Oops.

Oddly enough, Muhammad's appointment with the Grim Reaper was not marked by the customary candlelight vigils and anti-death-penalty protests; even liberals get vengeful when they've been scared out of their wits. Which makes it a good time to talk about the death penalty and why we need far, far more of it.

The Deterrent Argument

Most pro-death-penalty debaters like to say that executing criminals deters other would-be criminals from committing crimes. It makes a certain logical sense: if doing something may lead to your death, most people won't do it. Indeed, the statistics support this position.

The trouble is, for deterrents to work, justice must be seen to be done. John Muhammad terrorized millions and was arrested soon after his crimes, yet he lived for seven more years. Justice delayed is justice denied; there's no reason why any criminal case should take more than a few months, maybe a year. President McKinley's assassin was executed within two months, but that was back in 1901, a time when we still believed in individual responsibility and in imposing consequences for crimes.

Under the Constitution, accused criminals have rights and are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That's as it should be; but we've gone way too far in allowing endless delays and countless appeals. Prompt justice, one appeal; then, if you can't present some astonishing malfeasance or shocking new evidence, that should be it.

The vast majority of murderers are neither arrested nor convicted; the vast majority of those convicted are ultimately released, free to kill again. What sort of deterrent is the death penalty if you're more likely to win the Megabucks than wind up frying in the Chair?

We know that private penalties work - when Bernhard Goetz shot back at the gang who tried to mug him on the subway and bagged four of the thugs, subway muggings dropped and stayed down for months. Only our government is able to render capital punishment relatively ineffective.

The Sword of Vengeance

Another reason sometimes given for the death penalty is that it allows society to demonstrate its harshest disapproval for the most depraved crimes. In this argument, executing the murderer makes society feel better and provides a sense of closure for the victims' relatives.

Alas, this argument carries in itself its own weakness: is it truly ethical to terminate somebody's life in order to make you feel better? Put that way, the death penalty sounds immoral, which of course is what its opponents want you to think.

What liberals hate to admit is that vengeance is not simply about your feelings. One of the ways in which human beings are distinct from animals is that we have a concept of "justice." Lions don't consider whether it is "just" to kill the weakest gazelle; they just do it and feast. The healthy gazelles don't fret about whether it's fair to leave their handicapped relatives behind as lion chow; they just want to keep their own skins safe. Throughout most of the animal kingdom, the only "altruistic" actions are those of mothers and occasional fathers defending their young, which can easily be explained in genetic and evolutionary terms.

As humans, though, we do have an abstract concept of Lady Justice. Something is not right simply because you can get away with it; you can be an evil, wrong person even if you never get caught and never pay any price for your depravity. In evolutionary terms, this makes no sense, but this view of justice is common to all viable human societies throughout all of history. Even young children haven an innate sense of justice - "It's not fair!" - though oftimes it's insufficiently developed as to be accurate. But they know it exists nevertheless.

It is not just for one individual to be able to wrongfully take the life of another without paying the severest penalty. Even in our liberal society of today, the ordinary person recoils on hearing of a brutal murderer being let free to walk the streets after only a few years behind bars - even when that murderer is released at the other end of the country and there's little to no chance that you personally will ever encounter him.

Self Defense - For Society as for Individuals

That brings us to the most powerful, but rarely heard, reason why capital punishment is essential: Even as individual human beings have a right to self-defense, so has society. By terminating the lives of those who show no respect for the lives of others, society as a whole defends itself from monsters.

Consider the infamous Willie Horton. Mr. Horton was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without parole in the state of Massachusetts.

Thanks to the policies of the liberal Democratic governor Michael Dukakis, however, Massachusetts decided that even the most monstrous felons deserved a vacation from the pen and started permitting weekend "furloughs." Lifers were set free to roam the streets and breathe the free air on Saturday and Sunday, but come Monday morning, it was back to the slammer!

The end result would be obvious even to a child: if you are already serving a life prison term in a state that doesn't do capital punishment, what possible additional punishment could you get? In effect, these furloughed killers had a free pass to do whatever they pleased, and that's exactly what Mr. Horton did: while out on "furlough," he committed assault, armed robbery, and rape.

Mr. Horton had already been convicted of murder. He was known to be a killer; he was proven guilty in a court of law. There is no reason whatsoever why he should ever again have seen the light of day; yet thanks to bleeding-heart liberalism, he did, and a woman was raped as a result. He is guilty of that rape, but Gov. Dukakis and the Massachusetts legislature bear a heavy burden of guilt as well - at least, the American people decided as much, and kept Dukakis out of the White House.

The government of Massachusetts failed in its first duty to its citizens: to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic. If a government can't protect people from criminals, why have a government at all?

Of course no government can stop all crime, but at least known criminals can be stopped. We hear about "reforming" prisoners - but the recidivism rates show that truly reformed ex-convicts are few and far between. The Department of Justice reports that more than two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years and around half end up right back in jail.

Not every crime deserves a "throw away the key" response. Murder, rape, armed robbery - in other words, felonies - do. By releasing known violent criminals instead of executing them, the government issues a death sentence for their innocent victims yet to come. It's simple common sense: a dead murderer can't kill anybody else, whereas a live one most likely will.

To be precise: studies show that each executed murderer saves the lives of five innocents, and each commutation of a convicted criminal's sentence costs five lives. Five innocent lives, which the state has the power to protect, and chooses not to.

John Muhammad's rampage of terror was stopped only by his arrest and incarceration; it's now been permanently stopped by his demise.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan of Ft. Hood infamy was stopped, for now, by a bullet; will he be stopped permanently?

The use of deadly force is government's ultimate power of protection; that's why soldiers kill our enemies. In peace in our own land, we have the luxury of lawyers, judges, and trials to determine who is guilty. Once that's been accomplished and the guilty party proved "beyond reasonable doubt," a murderer has no right to live. Keeping murderers alive is neither merciful nor civilized; on the contrary, it's a barbaric decision that the life of a monster is worth more than the lives of five innocents.

The death of John Muhammad should be celebrated. Maj. Hasan should receive the same penalty; so should the countless other killers who are currently rotting in prison or, God forbid, out on the streets stalking their next victims. The death penalty isn't cruel; what's truly cruel is that executing criminals has become so unusual.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on murder and death penalty

How I Became a Banned Author in Canada

Guest Editorial — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:17:00 GMT

The following article was supplied to Scragged by Howard Rotberg about a startling series of events that changed his life. He has asked us to publish it.

A quiet Sunday afternoon at the Chapters store in Waterloo, Ontario. (Chapters is Canada's monopoly book retailer with 73% of the retail book market - ed) A nice, relaxed informal lecture to a small group about The Second Catastrophe, my new novel.

I had just started talking about why I had written the book — about how, after the failure of the Oslo process, and Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s generous offer for a two-state solution at Camp David II, the Palestinians had started the Second Intifada. I mentioned how disappointed a lot of us were to see that Arafat apparently did not want a state alongside Israel, but one in place of Israel.

That was a mistake.

I now realize that I was in Canada, where only politically correct speech is protected.

I was in Canada, the land of cultural relativism, where the most important value is tolerance. Criticizing any other country or culture is a breach of the now distorted policy of multiculturalism. Now, I would pay the price.

If I had only known how big a price.

A young man came in and sat in the second row. He picked up a copy of my book from the table, took a perfunctory look at it, and started interrupting me.

“You think all Muslims are terrorists,” he asserted.

“I do not,” I replied, as categorically as possible.

“Well, that’s what your book says,” he retorted.

It looked to me as if he had just taken a few glances at it, so I replied: “Have you read my book?” He paused and then said, “Part.”

I decided not to take him seriously and I continued. Another mistake.

Suddenly a man appeared, standing off to my left, and started into a rant. It was something about how the Americans and the Israelis are the real terrorists, and that democracy is really fascist. He was scary.

University of Waterloo Professor Dennis Stoutenburg was there and tried to calm the man.

“Sir, this is a lecture. Why don’t you sit down and listen?”

Another mistake.

The first man identified himself as a Palestinian, and the second as a Kurdish Iraqi.

Then they took turns talking — and talking. It was apparent that they were not going to let me speak any more. They had decided to take over my lecture.

The Palestinian was shouting something about how the Israelis kill five Palestinians a day. Some audience members had heard enough.

“Be quiet and let the author continue with his lecture; he has the right to give his lecture,” said one audience member.

“He has no right to lecture if he is going to say things in support of Israel,” said the Palestinian. His words cut me like a knife.

Then the Iraqi started in. Again someone pleaded with him to be quiet so I could lecture. Then came the words that still ring in my ears: “He’s a f****** Jew.”

Up to this point there had been no store employees sitting in on the lecture. A couple had earlier come by and stood at the periphery of the seats for a few minutes each. One of them, a young woman, was wearing a hajav, the head-covering worn by many Muslim women.

That was the end of the lecture. I said something to the effect that I would not be called a “f****** Jew” at my lecture. The store manager came over to me and told me not to swear. I told him that I was the one being sworn at; he said that it didn’t matter. He gathered up the books on the table and escorted me to his office at the back.

“I want you to call the Police.” I said.

“What for?” he replied.

“Because these totalitarians just stopped my right to lecture, and are swearing at me, and who knows what they will do next?” I said.

“I don’t have the number,” he claimed.

I couldn’t believe this. “Try 911,” I suggested.

Professor Stoutenburg and his wife Laura, who teaches English at Conestoga College, came by to see if I was all right. I wasn’t. I was in a state of shock.

Stoutenburg said he had just finished talking to the store employee with the hajav. “She is a Palestinian,” he added. “I think she knew the protestors.”

Finally, the police officer indicated he was ready to talk to me and any witnesses. He had been interviewing the protestors outside.

“Do you know that one fellow stopped my lecture, and then called me a “f****** Jew‚” I said.

Apparently he didn’t know, because he began to jot down the derogatory expression.

“I hope you are going to charge them,” I said.

“Well, I have investigated, and the only thing I could really charge them with would be causing a disturbance, but I decided to let them go, with a warning not to come back to this store.”

I was incredulous. He had let them go before talking to me and some of the witnesses, like the Stoutenburgs.

“Do you mean that it’s not a crime to use Gestapo tactics to break up a lecture and tell the author that he is a “f****** Jew?” I said.

The constable looked as if he would rather be somewhere else. “Well, we get 2 or 3 racial slurs a day in Kitchener-Waterloo; I can’t charge everybody,” he replied.

“But don’t you see a difference between a racial slur used in a dispute over a traffic accident, and one used to silence an author at a lecture he was invited to give by Chapters?”

“I can’t give you any special treatment because you are an author,” he said with what sounded a lot like sarcasm.

I was in shock. I said to him, “Don’t you understand what it is like for a Jewish author whose grandparents were gassed in Auschwitz to be called a ‘f****** Jew’ at a lecture?”

He looked at me blankly.

Then I understood. I said, “You don't know what Auschwitz was, right?” He didn’t say anything.

I asked him to escort me to my car, for my safety. When we got outside, there was a man milling around, who looked to me like he might be of Middle Eastern background. The officer just climbed into his cruiser.

“Aren’t you going to escort me to my car?” I asked.

He started his car. “I can see what happens from over here,” he replied.

That evening Mantua Books, my publisher, issued a press release saying they regretted to announce the cancellation of my speaking engagements at Chapters/Indigo, including the previously advertised events at the Ancaster store on May 30 and the Ottawa store on June 13.

The release went on to say that Mantua was NOT giving in to inflammatory tactics, but were trying to protect the author from physical harm and not inconvenience and annoy Chapters/Indigo and its customers when it came to heckling and racial/religious slurs.

In the meantime, Mantua Books said they would endeavour to find more secure forums for me to lecture, where they can provide the necessary level of security for my physical safety, and where they can provide personnel who can eject those whose purpose is not to engage in free and open debate but to silence those with whom they disagree.

Another mistake. My publisher had not precleared the wording of the press release with the director of public relations at Chapters. Sorya Ingrid Gaulin, the PR director, went ballistic.

She called me and said it was improper for my publisher to issue a media release before going over it with her. I said that it was up to my publisher, and that I didn’t think my publisher’s release had been in any way critical of Chapters.

Then she lowered the boom: “I heard you said some things at the lecture just as objectionable as what was said to you. We are going to issue our own press release, and you may not be happy with what it says.”

“What are you alleging that I said?” I was shocked, to say the least.

“Racist things.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” I asked.

“I heard that you said that all Muslims are terrorists!”

I was sinking deeper into my state of shock. All I could say was: “I definitely did not say that. If you put out a press release with such nonsense, I will sue to protect my reputation.” I hung up.

She issued her press release all right. Suddenly, I was in an Orwellian world where the victim of racism was now the racist. The press release apologized for any “inappropriate behaviour and… racist comments both from the guest author and some of the attendees at this particular event.”

Two months have passed. I have written to or spoken with most of the civil rights organizations in Canada, most of the Jewish organizations in Canada, and the organizations that serve the interests of authors. Some ignore my letters, some call back with messages of empathy, some even say they are investigating. But to date, not one organization has published a statement, in a newsletter, in a press release, or by verbal statement to the media, expressing dismay at what has happened to me, at what has happened to freedom of expression, at what has happened to someone who dares support Israel, at what has happened or not happened in the police investigation.

I have had a lot of support from individuals on Internet sites. I have had no official support from any organizations to date, Jewish or non-Jewish, except from PenCanada (which says it wrote a letter requesting Chapters to reschedule the lecture - which letter Chapters President Heather Reisman denies receiving) and the Canadian Coalition for Democracies. Three newspapers saw fit to report the incident. One (the Kitchener-Waterloo Record) portrayed it as a “scrap” with competing claims of who was the racist. Until this article in the Jewish Tribune, only one newspaper (the Globe and Mail) has thus far carried an opinion piece (by Professor Emeritus Herbert Lefcourt) warning that allowing this to happen unchallenged is conducive to the “slippery slope” where it is much easier for the next incident to happen.

Professor Lefcourt was right. In June, someone wrote in to the Public Forum message board of the website for the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, a message board where quite a few people had posted messages of concern over the incident. This person used the name of a reputable Jewish family in Waterloo, and in broken English, wrote that he/she was in attendance at my “reading” (if he had been there, he would have known it was a lecture not a reading), that he was Jewish, and that I am a “hypocritical evil little bigot,” a “rascist (sic) scum” and then the clincher; he claims that in response to my being sworn at, I had said, “This just proves that all Arabs and Muslims deserve to die.”

The Canadian Coalition for Democracies, to its credit, is undertaking a court application to require Rogers, the Internet provider for the computer from which this message was sent, to disclose the name of its customer.

The awful irony for me is that my book, The Second Catastrophe, is in part about a Canadian professor who writes a book about Israel, and then gets in trouble after giving a lecture at his university. Most of the lecture is completely unassailable, but in one small portion he gets a little loose with his wording. The lecture takes place in early 2002, the peak of the suicide bombings. He asks what are Israel’s options when faced with these almost daily attacks. I have him state: “(One) suggestion is to create a series of impenetrable fences and buffer zones, essentially to keep the animals in the zoo.”

Of course, the next day, the novels Anti-Israel student newspaper runs a big headline: "Zionist professor calls Palestinians (animals in the zoo)."

The poor professor pays dearly for his slightly inappropriate wording. He is charged with offences against the university’s Human Rights Code, which makes it an offence to demonstrate bias against an ethnic, religious or national group, and an offence to make statements that would reasonably cause some students to think a professor is biased against them.

However, as much as I think about what I have said, or what I have written, I can never find the words that are inappropriate or find any words that are racist. Maybe I should not have repeated the ‘f’ word, even to admonish someone else for using it. But a racist I am not.

I have met my Waterloo, and I don’t like it.

Postscript

After this article was written, we continued with the Court Application. I was aided by Alastair Gordon of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, who was quite upset that his organization’s internet public message forum should be used for the posting of the message with the terrible allegation against me.

The family name used by the person making the post was the name of a reputable Jewish family in Waterloo, who were well known to me. In fact the gentleman is the son of Dutch Jewish Holocaust survivors. I asked him if he knew of anyone in his family with the first name given on the posting. His response was interesting. He was sure that there is no such person in North America with that name. He said that since his family had been mostly wiped out in the Holocaust, he had made it a hobby to look for other people with his family name, in the hope of someday finding some relatives. With the internet of course it is far easier to make these searches than it used to be. He told me with some confidence that there could not be a person with that name in Canada, and that the name was probably made up.

Thanks to the footprints that everyone unwittingly leaves in cyberspace, and the pro bono legal services generously provided by Toronto law firm Weir Foulds LLP, the Court Order referred to above was successfully obtained.

What we found out when Rogers made disclosure was truly fascinating, and enlightening. At the same time it was truly frightening. The Internet subscriber from whose computer the posting originated was identified as Ms. Howaida Wahdan of Waterloo at an address listed in directory assistance under the name of Mr. Elsayed Khedr. The address was a few doors away from the Jewish family whose name appeared on the posting!

The Jewish family whose name was “stolen” for purposes of the nefarious internet posting were well acquainted with the Wahdan/Khedr family. In fact, up until recently, their children had played together! For some reason, the Jewish family told me, the Khedr child had stopped coming around to their house, just about the time of the posting!

The Jewish family told me that Ms. Wahdan is the wife of Elsayed Khedr, that they are well-to-do Palestinians, and that Mr. Khedr is an Engineer, working often in Egypt, while Ms. Wahdan looks after the children in Canada.

In today’s world, there are some Islamists who will riot and kill over a political cartoon. I am not pleased that Chapters has falsely accused me in print of making anti-Muslim “racist” comments. I am even more upset when it is alleged in print that I said “all Muslims and Arabs must die”. This could be dangerous to my life.

Does anybody care about all the lying going on? Does anybody care about the danger to Canadian authors?

In the meantime, Mantua Books brought a Court Action in Small Claims Court claiming damages as a result of Chapters’ actions and words, based on their employees actions and words, which hurt their author’s credibility and damaged Mantua financially.

Something very odd happened during the course of the litigation. Chapters/Indigo had returned all of my books shortly after I demanded a retraction from them for calling me a "racist". They had been carrying 7 copies per store, and some stores in the bigger cities had already sold out their allotment. Yet the vice-president who wrote Mantua Books said they were returning ALL of the books due to "slow sales". This was a bit odd, because normally they would first reduce their inventory down to 1 or 2 from 7, or would carry it only in the stores where it was selling well. The really odd thing that happened was that during the Israel-Hezbollah War, the flagship Indigo store at Bay and Bloor in Toronto suddenly ordered 30 copies from the publisher, perhaps not knowing about the "ban" on the book. Usually orders from Chapters/Indigo are done centrally, but it seems individual stores have the ability to make their own orders. The publisher mentioned the order to the lawyer for Indigo, but did not hear anything right away, so went ahead and shipped the 30 copies.

These were not placed as part of a special display, but rather all placed back in the stacks of fiction indexed by author's last name. Mantua then advertised in a newspaper ad that the book was available at that store. But by the time purchaser's came to the store, someone at Indigo/Chapters found out about this order of the "banned book" and instructed someone at the store to remove all copies, so that when purchasers inquired, first store staff had no idea what happened to all the books, and then they were told to offer customers coupons if they wanted to buy a different book.

Anyway, later, after legal threats, Indigo put the books back on the shelves, but the original customers who were attracted by the ad, were not aware of that. But regardless, of the 30 books, ordered, and without any further advertising, at least 25 were sold. This was despite Chapters' website stating that the book was unavailable at any of their stores, which was of course, untrue. Obviously there was a large market for the book, especially during that war.

As part of the law suit we finally got to see the written statements of Chapters’ staff. Here is the original 2004 statement of the part time employee at Chapters Book Store in Waterloo :

"I went to see the author signing fifteen minutes into it and when I got closer to the area, I heard voices that became louder and louder. I saw two people in the audience, one calmly stating basic facts to the author, the other yelling out, ‘What are you … a f***ing Jew?’ only to have the author yell back, ‘A f***ing Jew? This only proves that Middle Eastern people are terrorists.’ From there the yelling progressed, eventually reaching a point where the managers asked the audience members to leave, and the author gave up and stepped into their office.

"For a person to come into my workplace and insult and judge me in such a manner without him knowing anything about me is absurd. According to him, when walking down the street, I should be avoided at all times because my skin is darker and I wear a headscarf. I am aware that the man in the audience should not have cursed at all given the atmosphere. Nonetheless, the author, as a professional and as a representative of what books the company holds should have controlled himself against saying such piercing words. It was uncalled for, rude and worst of all it was racial discrimination.

"What frustrates me most about this whole scenario is the fact that both customers and employees alike had to witness something so hateful towards those of Middle Eastern descent. At one of the most difficult times to be of a visible minority for Arab and Muslim people, it was completely unjust for him to generalize the way that he did. I also noticed that he kept repeating the word ‘they’ and ‘them’ like we were some vicious robots that act, think and speak alike with one brain. Even if it was for a split second that someone looked at me and thought, ‘So she’s a terrorist?’ that is one split second too much. I have never in my life done anything to intentionally hurt anyone, and to be accused of being one that intentionally inflicts pain upon others is hurtful and untrue. It seems as if my genetic makeup caused him to automatically make an unfair assumption. And that is racism at its worst."

Note that the allegation made against me verbally at the beginning of all this was that I said that “all Muslims are terrorists”, but by the time the part time employee had to reduce it to writing it was changed to “this only proves that all Middle Easterners are terrorists”. Of course, I did not say that, but even had I done so, a claim that all “Middle Easterners” are something or other would be not racist, but just plain stupid, since Middle Easterners include white Jews, brown Jews, black Jews, Coptic Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, Bahais, Druze and various Muslims. Here is the bookstore clerk’s retraction obtained just prior to the start of trial, this week. I have agreed to only post it and not make further comments:

1. At the presentation given by Mr. Rotberg on Sunday, May 16, 2004, I observed two individuals arrive part way through his presentation and commence interrupting him, to which he responded. The Iraqi Kurdish individual then called Mr. Rotberg a “f*****g Jew”, which was completely inappropriate and very offensive.

2. Mr. Rotberg stated that he would not be called that slur and he repeated this slur several times himself, as if he could not believe it had been used. I then heard him say something further, in response, concerning Middle Easterners and terrorism.

3. I cannot say with certainty that my written statement contained a completely verbatim transcription of Mr. Rotberg’s comment, which he would have made in the heat of the moment. I wrote down my belief and understanding of what I thought I heard him say. He was understandably upset at the time and these comments all happened in a matter of a few seconds. It is possible that I may have misunderstood what he intended to say.

4. Any dispute between Mr. Rotberg and myself as to the precise content and meaning of his words, and the beliefs they reflect, could easily be attributed to our respective life experiences and built-in biases, as people of Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds. The events of that day are not evidence that either one of us is racist. Well-intentioned people of different backgrounds occasionally mis-communicate.

5. In exchange for the Terms of Settlement dated August 27, 2008, between me and Mantua Books, I disclaim any and all legal rights against Mantua Books and Howard Rotberg that have arisen to date.

And so, by the time of this settlement, the allegation was further downgraded to the allegation that I said"something further, in response, concerning Middle Easterners and terrorism.”

So, the monopoly book chain in Canada called me a racist, then banned all my books because I said “something” concerning Middle Easterners and terrorism in response to hecklers taking over my lecture with no protest by their employees and in response to being called a “f*****g Jew”.

The actual Small Claims Court proceeding was a farce, because the rules of the Small Claims Court allow the defendant to file affidavits of people who do not have to appear in Court and be cross examined before the Court. We were successful in collecting the money owed for the books sold (Indigo paid up after the Claim was started) but in Court the Judge would not hold Indigo responsible for the actions of its employee who stood by smiling as the lecture was taken over by Islamists.

While the Court had some adverse things to say about Indigo and we achieved payment of the amount owing to us, which Indigo had withheld for a year, incredibly blaming “computer problems” for non-payment, the Court rejected the most important matter of Indigo’s liability in negligence for actions and non-actions of their employees.

Unfortunately, the Court absolved Indigo from anything that happened before the Manager came back to the lecture after hearing the commotion. The Court said that “what occurred was a rapid escalation, a sudden conflagration which culminated within a matter of minutes”. It appears that we did not make our case that Indigo was negligent in allowing the take-over of an author lecture by extremists who announced, in the presence of at least one Indigo employee, that they would not allow the author to talk. We did not make our case that this take-over of the lecture happened before the “rapid escalation”, which, in the view of the Court, Indigo managers handled properly in their conduct to the guest author.

The result was that Indigo was held not to have breached a common law duty to protect its guest author from verbal assault and racist taunts.

While the Court found that the guest author “presented as an intelligent man with a passion for civic and community involvement”, with “many commendable civic and community activities”, the Court found that the guest author, in yelling out that he would not be called a “f*****g Jew” was as blameworthy as those who called him a “f*****g Jew” and stopped his right to lecture at a location where he had been invited to speak. Perhaps it was a waste of time to sue the bookstore. Of course, we wouldn't have bothered if the police would have agreed to charge the hecklers with the offense of causing a disturbance.

One of the things that bothered me most was that no civil rights organizations would honour my request to ask the police to reconsider their quick determination not to lay criminal charges for "causing a disturbance" (easier to prove than a charge of hate crime). When I was quoted in the Canadian Jewish News bemoaning that fact, the director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who I had known for years and had unsuccessfully asked for assistance, got angry. He then in print said that he had no knowledge of what happened in the store, that the Congress was not an "investigative" organization (notwithstanding that I had offered him written and sworn affidavits from audience members, and most immorally of all, that he had "every confidence" in the Waterloo Police Force.

This was after I requested an investigation by a detective. The detective assigned, a woman named Detective Dietrich, treating me with the utmost sarcasm and finally told me that I should stop bothering the police about the incident or she would find something to charge me with!

I no longer feel that I have freedom of expression in the country to which I have given so much. I practiced law with a stellar record for 20 years, I participated in community and volunteer organizations, often in a leadership position, I donated money to charities, I wrote for a number of different newspapers and magazines, wrote four books, set up a publishing company for authors whose works were too politically incorrect for mainstream publishers, raised three children, and I am an award-winning developer of affordable housing for low income working people in converted heritage buildings in various cities in Southern Ontario, and lecture widely on the topic of affordable housing. But when I think of myself as a Canadian citizen, all I can think about is how I am a "f*****g Jew".

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Worse Than Rejecting Obama

Petrarch — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:21:00 GMT

The echoes from the recent election are still reverberating throughout the political arena. Was the shellacking of Democratic candidates in Virginia and New Jersey a repudiation of the Obama administration? Is this a warning of Democratic devastation coming next year? Is the fact that Mr. Obama's heavy support of the losers did them no good a worrying portent?

The Republicans are crowing as you'd expect: America has woken up to the socialist, Chicago-style brutalist tactics of Obama and his far-left extremists, and Republican capture of Congress next year is all but in the bag.

To hear the Dems talk, it's nothing of the sort. These were minor off-year races; the ruling party always loses something at the next election. Anyway, how about that New York house seat picked up by the Dems for the first time since the Civil War?

The fact is, the Dems are right: These electoral defeats were not a referendum on Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama is still personally popular; the liberal governors lost due to local concerns, not national.

Democrats should take no comfort in that, however. Democrats would actually be in a better position had Mr. Obama caused the losses. The losses came about, not by a rejection of Mr. Obama himself, but by a revulsion at the entire Democratic philosophy of governance that has driven the party since the days of FDR.

Who Knows Best?

There are some things for which governments have been responsible for since the dawn of time: national defense, international trade, national-scale transportation, and commonality of exchange (common currency, weights and measures, that sort of thing.)

Beyond that, though, there are not just an infinite array of different methods of governance, there is a wide variety of things to do which might or might not be done by government. Should government provide food? Housing? Education? Health care? And on and on down the line.

All these questions are different ways of asking one key question: Who knows best? Does the government know best what sort of education you should receive - or, do you, or perhaps your parents? Does the government know best how to spend the money you earn and which it confiscates via taxes, or do you? Are you able to choose what sort of TV you'd like to watch, or should the government control the choices presented to you? Do you have the ability to decide which toys are safe for your kids, or should the government take care of that via regulation?

Obama, the Left, and the Democratic Party believe as an article of faith that they know best. After all, they (the leaders anyway) have the most elite of educations; they are Smarter Than You Can Even Imagine. They know more than you ever will. They are not limited by narrow-mindedness or a tendency to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment," as Obama so trenchantly described the solid middle Americans of Pennsylvania to an audience of his fellow far-left wealthy elites in San Francisco.

You might foolishly think you'd like a Hummer or big SUV, but the government knows that's bad for you; what you really need is a Prius, or actually, a bike.

You might selfishly believe that Grandma's life is worth saving at almost any cost. Not so; government bureaucrats consider that the money would be better spent treating a half-dozen children of illegal immigrants who'll grow up to vote for Democrats.

You might feel that you work hard and should be entitled to keep whatever pay you earn. Nothing could be further from the truth: it's the sheerest luck that allows you to earn a good paycheck, not any personal merit or effort. There are others more deserving of your own earnings than you are, and those wise and just authorities will decide to whom your money ought really go.

But, you ask, was there not a very large nation on the other side of the world that tried this approach and it didn't work out so well? No, the problem with the Soviet Union was just that the central planners were not as well-educated, smart, and wise as Mr. Obama and his appointees. Central planning is not the problem; we just need better central planners, that's all, and now we've got them.

Stuck On A Limb

It is not possible for the Democrats to move very far from this philosophy; it is their guiding light and the key logical underpinning to everything they do. There is no tax they do not like; no new program or bureaucracy that is unnecessary; no government spending that is truly a waste. It's all good, because They Know Best.

Alas, all too many Republican politicians feel much the same way. No true conservative does. The lesson of Tuesday is that, when faced with a clear choice, most Americans would rather make their own mistakes and waste their own money, thank you very much, than allow a crooked, arrogant, utterly corrupt and authoritarian political class to do it for them, regardless of what party they claim.

Draw the contrast in a convincing way, and Republicans cannot lose. Let the truth be known - and it is being known, despite the best efforts of the liberal media - and Democrats cannot win... even if their standard bearer's name is Barack Obama, gifted with the tongues of men and of angels.

It would be better for the Democrats if the voters had rejected Mr. Obama, but they didn't; after all, Obama could be easily swapped out for Hillary Clinton if need be. No, they rejected the Democrat's core philosophy - as working voters always do when they have been enabled to understand the Democrat's real agenda.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on Democrats and statism

Voters Say Gay is Not OK

Petrarch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:45:00 GMT

The big news of Election 2009 is a resurgent conservative movement. "Change" is the order of the day - Change last year, and more Change this year.

There's one major issue, however, that has not changed: American voters from sea to shining sea do not think that the government should dignify homosexual liasons with the name of "marriage."

The interesting thing about this debate is how different it is from most other issues. From taxes to abortion, the major hot-button national concerns each have their state bastions. South Dakota would outlaw abortion entirely if it could; Illinois happily permits it right up until the moment of birth, and arguably even afterwards. The actual laws in place don't fully reflect the views of the constituents because the Supreme Court doesn't permit them to, but differences in public opinion are deep and profound.

Not so with homosexual marriage! Yes, there are individual localites that strongly feel the gender mix of a marriage is irrelevant, as San Francisco famously demonstrated. To the pundits' surprise, however, even that most liberal of states, California as a whole, voted against homosexual marriage when the people were given a chance to do so via Proposition 8. And Prop 8 was the second time around, the first time had the same result but was rejected by activist judges who prefer their opinions to the will of the people.

In every state where the voters have been given the opportunity to express their will directly, without a single exception, that will is always the same no matter how conservative or liberal they might otherwise be: marriage is one thing and homosexuality is quite another. Those states which permit homosexual marriage do so by judicial fiat, as in Massachusetts, or by vote of elected representatives as in New Hampshire. Actually, Massachusetts provides a cautionary example: a heavily-supported referendum on the subject was killed by the legislature, in clear contradiction of the state Constitution. Alas, the court which would rule on the constitutional violation was the same court that created the problem in the first place; the view of the voters was not so much flouted as actively suppressed.

Once again, we see a socially liberal state finding that, when it comes right down to it, marriage is one of those things that should be left alone: The State of Maine chalks up another referendum victory, overruling the legislature, Governor, and courts on the subject.

In the teary-eyed liberal media reports, a fascinating observation shines through. One dejected would-be participant in a homosexual union had this to say about the result:

It's a personal rejection of us and our relationship.

Quite so - and the sooner the far left realizes it, the better. Nobody on any side of the political spectrum wishes harm to homosexuals; nobody significant believes that the police should be bashing in doors of consenting adults. But there's a big difference between believing that private consensual homosexual behavior is not the proper purview of government - which pretty much everybody agrees with nowadays - versus requiring that such unions be celebrated and honored by one and all under force of law.

Really, it's the flip side of the "leave me alone" theory of government. People of the homosexual persuasion had a point when they wanted government out of their lives and bedrooms; we can all sympathize there. People of the religious persuasion have an equal point when they say that they do not wish to be forced to participate, aid, abet, or respect actions that their religion finds abhorrent.

Why can't we just leave each other alone? If we could do that, everybody should be mostly content. The more the far left and the extremist homosexual activists try to push their agenda down the throats of voters, they will discover that there are a lot more religious voters than homosexual ones - and that, to the vast middle ground, ministers and the devout are rather more sympathetic than Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno Gehard prancing and singing, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!"

If they were wise, liberal homosexuals would take their gains and leave the political forefront. That they don't demonstrates the true nature of liberalism: it's not enough that people be free to go your own way, everyone must be forced to treat all ways as equal whether they like it or not. If everything is equally valid and acceptable and above any sort of criticism... then nothing is, and we have no freedom at all.

Is that the liberals' true agenda? To force us all into the tyranny of permitting no moral standards, religious rules, or societal preferences whatsoever?

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on marriage and rights

The Looming Nuclear Medicine Crisis

Will Offensicht — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:54:00 GMT

We've written about bureaucrats making it harder to find cancer cures by making it difficult to enroll people in studies of new cancer treatments and we've told how regulations are forcing certain types of heart disease research to be done in other countries.

Bureaucratic harm to public health knows many forms: our bureaucrats aren't always hyperactive. Sometimes they're asleep at the switch instead.

Science News put "Unstable Imaging" on their Sept. 26, 2009, cover to highlight the upcoming shortage of radioactive isotopes which are used in medical imaging. The story "Desperately Seeking Moly" reports:

Mo-99 is the feedstock for technetium-99m, the isotope used in 80 percent of diagnostic nuclear medicine. Roughly every three days, half of the Mo-99 will decay into TC-99m (the m stands for metastable). Every six hours, half of that decays into the long-lived TC-99 (not useful in medicine) which glacially decays into ruthenium.

This high-tech gibberish is saying that technetium-99m, which is used for more than 60,000 medical diagnostic procedures every weekday, doesn't last very long. Every six hours, half of it decays into another material which isn't useful.

Tech-99m comes from the decay of Mo-99, but that doesn't last very long either. Hospitals need weekly deliveries of Mo-99 to maintain their diagnostic schedules.

Unfortunately, a 52-year old nuclear reactor in Canada makes about 1/3 of the world's Mo-99 supply and a 47-year-old reactor in the Netherlands makes another third. The Canadian reactor was shut down last May to fix a small leak. Unfortunately, other corrosion problems were found during the repairs. Officials are saying that the reactor won't start up again until well after the first of the year, and there are whispers that it's so old and so corroded that it may not be possible to start it up at all.

The reactor in the Netherlands shut down for routine maintenance for a month this summer. With 2/3 of the production capacity offline and all the available material decaying fast, supplies of Mo-99 fell and medical diagnosis suffered greatly. The Dutch reactor will have to be shut down for at least six months starting in March of 2010 for further maintenance.

There are no Mo-99 production facilities in the United States.

What the Shortage Means

Roughly half of the world's Tc-99m supply is used in monitoring blood flow into heart muscle after stress tests. The patient exercises enough to get the heart rate up, then they inject radioactive material into the blood stream and track the movement of the radioactive particles. This shows whether the blood vessels which supply the heart are working properly. Treating such conditions before they become critical saves many lives.

There's an older procedure which uses thallium-201. Thallium images are not as clear, doctors have forgotten how to read them, and they expose patients to much larger radiation doses, but the old way is better than no way.

About 16% of the technetium-99m is used to look for bone cancer. There is a substitute test which uses sodium-fluoride. This test has been approved by the FDA but Medicare won't cover it because they believe that technetium-99m is more effective. That may be true, but the fact that tech-99m is unavailable makes its superiority moot. A number of medical centers have petitioned Medicare to cover the only available alternative, but Medicare doesn't plan to make an announcement until March.

Without these tests, patients will die unnecessarily. How will supplies be allocated during periods of shortage? Will important government officials get priority when supplies are scarce?

How Did We Get Here?

This crisis has been coming for a long time. It's no surprise that ancient nuclear reactors would need unexpected maintenance. The question is, why wasn't another source brought online before now?

The problem is that American government regulations make building any sort of nuclear facility immensely time-consuming, costly, and cumbersome. What's worse, this reactor will make substances which are used in medical care. Add the FDA's slothful bureaucracy to the leisurely Byzantine processes of the Atomic Energy Commission and you're looking at years of somnolence before you'd see any Mo-99.

Even on an urgent basis, building a new facility would take 4 to 10 years to build, license, and put into operation. It doesn't seem that we can count on the existing reactors to work that long, so the government is looking into alternatives.

Mo-99 is made by bombarding nearly-pure, weapons-grade uranium with neutrons. Some of the uranium turns into Mo-99 which is then extracted from the remaining uranium. One shortcut would be to irradiate targets in the US and ship them to Canada where the Mo-99 could be extracted. The Canadian extraction facilities are designed to work with targets from anywhere. Using the Canadian extraction plant would avoid the FDA having to license a new extraction facility which "can take years."

Relatively few people are happy about shipping weapons-grade uranium around. Any American plant would have to follow a new federal policy which limits the purity of targets they're permitted to bombard. Instead of using 95% uranium as the Canadians do, they can use only 20% pure uranium targets. This multiplies the number of targets needed by a factor of five. It also makes it much more expensive to separate out the Mo-99 because there's five times as much uninteresting material mixed in with it.

There's been a great deal of discussion, but little action. There's no plan for ensuring supplies of Mo-99. There are still a great many regulatory and licensing obstacles that have to be overcome and nobody besides a few doctors seems to be particularly concerned about the years and years of regulatory delay we're facing.

To sum up: we have a serious, life-threatening problem that's been known for many years yet nothing much has happened. The media are pointing out that the government's plans for making flu vaccine available aren't working well either - there are vaccine shortages everywhere. Given their abysmal track record with well-understood medical problems, do we really want to give government yet more authority over medicine?

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on health care, medicine, nuclear and regulation

Still In Denial About Ft. Hood

Petrarch — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:17:00 GMT

Today we celebrate Veterans Day in America. Many other countries honor this day under the name of Remembrance Day, Poppy Day, or Armistice Day ever since November 11 was the day of the 1918 Armistice that ended the First World War.

World War One has to be one of the great turning points of history. Though the American Civil War offered a taste of "total war," World War One was the first real demonstration of the bloodbath which could be achieved by multiple nations each totally committed, throughout society and with a modern industrial base, to killing the other side first.

The existence of wars serves a useful purpose: wars remind us that there is evil in the world, and that evil must be opposed. To do that, though, first you have you identify it. For all the countless masses slaughtered in the trenches of France, at least everybody knew who the enemy was: the guy on the other side of the line in a different uniform.

No longer. For the very first time in American history, a commissioned officer of the United States military turned his gun against his fellow soldiers, while still in American uniform, in the service of our enemies. U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 12 soldiers and one civilian on Fort Hood.

This was no random act of insanity. Maj. Hasan had sat under the preaching of, and corresponded with, a jihad-preaching Muslim imam; that firebreathing cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, lauded last week's "heroic" murders:

He [Hasan] is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

Hasan's neighbors reported him regularly walking around in traditional Muslim robes when not in his military uniform. He was known to aggressively promote Islam to his patients and co-workers, causing discomfort and pain to others. He had even given a formal presentation, complete with PowerPoint slides, to fellow army psychiatrists which apparently had to be heard to be believed:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats... He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.

If ever there was a man who considered himself to be "Muslim first and American second," Maj. Hasan was he. If Internet reports are to be believed, he identified himself as a "Soldier of Allah" on his business card! When he attacked people wearing the same uniform he did, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" in praise of his murderous religious obligation after that very morning telling a neighbor that "I'm going to do good work for God," one could hardly seek a more crystal-clear explanation for his actions: He was a devout Muslim who read his Koran and took seriously its many admonitions that perfidious unbelievers be slain wherever they can be found.

Or not. Here's Newsweek's take:

What if Thursday's atrocious slaughter at Fort Hood only signals that the worst is yet to come? Soldiers and their families are living, and bending, under a harrowing and unrelenting stress that will not let up any time soon. And the U.S. military could well be reaching a breaking point as the president decides to send more troops into Afghanistan... The accusations against [Hasan] can't help but bring to mind the violence scarring military bases all over the country after the duration of two long, brutal wars.

Is that so? Perhaps we need to call in the CDC to finally identify the contagious germ that causes PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) - because while countless thousands of American troops have served in violent combat and not returned to shoot the innocent, the murderer Hasan had never even been deployed overseas, much less been in combat. Why would you send an expensively-trained psychiatrist into combat anyway?

Not to be outdone, we find Congresscritters calling for investigations into religious extremists:

I expect political hardball on any legislation as important as the health care bill. I just didn’t expect it from the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Who elected them to Congress?

The role the bishops played in the pushing the Stupak amendment, which unfairly restricts access for low-income women to insurance coverage for abortions, was more than mere advocacy. They seemed to dictate the finer points of the amendment, and managed to bully members of Congress to vote for added restrictions on a perfectly legal surgical procedure. And this political effort was subsidized by taxpayers, since the Council enjoys tax-exempt status.

When I visit churches in my district, we are very careful to keep everything “non-political” to protect their tax-exempt status. The IRS is less restrictive about church involvement in efforts to influence legislation than it is about involvement in campaigns and elections. Given the political behavior of USCCB in this case, maybe it shouldn’t be. [emphasis added]

- Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Riiiight. So people who don the uniform of America's defenders, yet swear allegiance to a creed dedicated to destroying America, its freedoms, traditions, and people, are not a problem to be investigated; but a religious group exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and redress of grievances in opposition to an law that they see as promoting the murder of the unborn, should come under the hammer of the IRS?

Our elites have been in denial about evil for a very long time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was booed at Harvard when he warned of "an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses" and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil ... evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature." Many members of the Obama administration seem to share the view that there is no such thing as evil. They not only believe that there's no such ting as evil, they've managed to convince a lot of people that it's politically incorrect to say that people who do evil are evil - and that their friends and fellow-believers are likely to be, too. People back off from naming evildoers out of political correctness.

Unfortunately, political correctness kills people. Army officers knew Hasan was a jihadi but did not dare to properly investigate the issue for fear of appearing to discriminate against Muslims.

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Another, Dr Val Finnell, who took a course with him in 2007 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, did complain about Hasan's "anti-American rants." He said: "The system is not doing what it's supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty."

If an Army officer wore a Nazi uniform while off duty; gave presentations talking about how evil Jews were ruining the world and had to be killed; and shouted "Sieg Heil!" down the corridors, how long do you think he would be a free man? His feet wouldn't even touch the ground before he landed in the deepest, darkest Federal prison cell that could be found for him, and rightly so. Is it a bad thing to be discriminatory against Nazis? For darn sure we should discriminate against them in every possible way.

Yet here we find America's honorable defenders, who risk their lives on our behalf all around the world, being forced to watch their backs right here at home because the Great and the Good don't want to offend one particular group of people whose holy book, most prominent leaders, and most noted preachers all want all of us dead.

When the Army Chief of Staff is more concerned about our army's diversity becoming a casualty than he is about his soldiers being murdered by a well-known group of people with readily-identifiable views, America needs to have its head examined - while we still have one, before somebody in the next mosque-pew down from Hasan chops it off as the Koran commands. Honor our veterans: stop those who want to kill them, treating them as the traitors worthy of death that they are. Even the stupidest Col. Blimps of World War One knew that much.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on Islam, terrorism and treason

Food Imports Wreck Farming and Create Famine

Will Offensicht — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:22:00 GMT

Time Magazine recently explained how the Ethiopian agricultural system was destroyed by food aid so that the country remains in a state of perpetual famine and will need food aid to avoid starvation for the foreseeable future. We've also discussed a German professor's computer models which demonstrate that doing actual good is very difficult even in simple economies. Dr. Dorner's simulations showed that anything that increased population in impoverished third-world nations led to the simulated people using up ground water faster than rain replaced it; the population crashed in famine when the water ran out.

Drought Comes For Real, Not Just In Computers

The New York Times article "Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen" explains how too many wells pulling too much water out of the ground are about to cause a similar famine in Yemen, just as Prof. Dorner's model predicts. The article begins:

More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.

Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.

Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.

Population growth brought about by improved medical care and sanitation along with imported food is driving the problem - the population quadrupled in the last 50 years and should triple again to 60 million in the next 20 years assuming that famine or civil war don't slow things down. There isn't much chance that human fertility will drop naturally, unfortunately. As the Economist explains, children have positive economic value in poor, agricultural nations. Fertility drops naturally as nations become wealthier, but Yemen is becoming poorer.

Yemen had a tradition of sustainable water use for thousands of years. A major dam in northern Yemen was used for more than 1,000 years before it collapsed in 400AD; though that particular dam was not rebuilt, the overall system continued in effective use until very recently.

The centuries-old sustainable agricultural system fell apart in the 1960's when Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain. Unable to make money growing traditional crops, farmers switched to growing the narcotic qat. Qat needs a great deal more water than grain, so farmers started drilling new wells.

Drilling unauthorized wells was outlawed in 2002, but the government isn't able to enforce the law. In some areas, the water table is dropping by 60 feet per year.

The Times article shows Prof. Dorner's simulations being played out for real in a different part of the world. The Yemeni agricultural system was disrupted by cheap grain imports rather than by food aid, but the results are the same - agricultural productivity fell, population grew, and water use went up faster than rainfall could be increased. Yemen is headed for a crisis.

This Has All Happened Before

Historical records show that Yemenis scattered all over the Middle East during the famine that came when the dam collapsed in 400AD, but that was before national boundaries were established. It's unlikely that nearby governments would welcome hordes of starving Yemenis; they've left Palestinians festering in refugee camps for lo these many decades. Could the international community keep 60 million Yemenis alive through food aid? Would they?

Even if starvation could be averted, where would drinking water be found? Lacking oil, Yemen can't afford to desalinate sea water as the Saudis do. Recycling water takes less power than desalination, but recycling sewage has been criticized by some mullahs as being against the Koran.

The crisis could be postponed through more careful water management and a return to traditional crops, but the "qat mafia" doesn't want to give up the more profitable crop regardless of how much water is used growing it.

Water, Water Everywhere...

We're facing water shortages in California, Ethiopia, Australia, and now Yemen. The more we hear about drought, the more likely it seems that water shortage is the real crisis, not global warming. Indeed, that's what Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus of development experts found.

Alas, attempting to force America's middle class back into the third world through totalitarian international "environmental" regulations seems to have more appeal than saving the lives of already-existing, but soon to starve, third worlders. It's enough to make you wonder if, just possibly, the conspiracy theorists might possibly have a point.

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on Africa, famine, farming, food, foreign aid, poverty and Inconvenient Truths

Rape in a Schoolyard

Petrarch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:39:00 GMT

The London Telegraph brings us a report that is so profoundly disturbing in so many ways as to be worthy of extra-careful consideration.

A 15-year-old girl was gang raped by up to 10 teenagers outside a California high school homecoming dance as others laughed and took photographs. In a crime that has shocked America up to two dozen passers-by were said to have seen the crime happening and failed to report it as the girl was subjected to an ordeal lasting two-and-a-half hours... The crime was only discovered when a woman at a nearby party telephoned police to say that two of the suspects were bragging about their role in the attack, which was still going on.

The responses of shock from all corners are entirely natural and entirely predictable. How could any human beings, not yet adults, be so depraved? How could anyone on encountering a rape in progress, respond by watching it as a performance, photographing it, or even joining in line to take a turn? What sort of monsters lurk in these schools?

These are legitimate questions, but they are very much the wrong questions. Consider what the passers-by saw. Not a rape - well, of course it was a rape, but would that necessarily be obvious? No, they saw a group of schoolmates enjoying some slut on a park bench.

It was not so long ago that anyone coming upon a couple having sex in public - to say nothing of a group engaging in an apparent orgy - would immediately respond with disgust and call the police, rape or no rape. The reaction of this bunch of teens was the exact opposite - the situation was so blase, so devoid of any particular surprise, as to be nothing more than a mildly-diverting addition to the evening's entertainment. Much like passing by the tip jar of a street musician: walk on; listen for a few minutes; stay for a while; put something in the tip jar, or not; but either way, it's not worthy of note.

The true question is not just one of rape, as repugnant and evil as that horrendous crime is. The question is: what sort of day-to-day lives must these kids lead for their reaction of utter unconcern even to be possible? Is random, public, group sex so common in their midst as to be so ordinary as to be unworthy of remark?

We can't help but think of another recent story, that of a false rape accusation at Hofstra University.

The woman had originally told police that she had been dancing with Ortiz at an on-campus party just before 3 a.m. when he grabbed her cell phone from her belt and went outside.

The woman told police she followed Ortiz to a dormitory hallway, where she was confronted by Felipe. The woman said the two men forced her into a men's room toilet stall, tied her up and raped her, police said. She said later the three other men entered the bathroom and raped her, too, police said.

The forensic evidence supported her tale. She had, indeed, had sex with multiple men; she had, indeed, been tied up over the men's john. For any reasonable jury, that would be proof enough of a felony; what other interpretation could there be for these facts?

Unfortunately for the accuser, one of the male participants had taken a prudent precaution that may have saved his life: He'd filmed the entire encounter on his cellphone. Replaying the record of this indescribable debauchery proved conclusively that the event was fully consensual.

"The alleged victim of the sexual assault admitted that the encounter that took place early Sunday morning was consensual," Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said in a statement.

What sort of - the term "lady" hardly seems appropriate here - would consent to such a degrading encounter? Yet one did. Perhaps she had enough remaining conscience to feel shame afterwards, but rather than mend her ways, she compounded her wickedness by falsely accusing her erstwhile lovers of one of the foulest crimes possible.

If you or I had walked into that men's room, we'd surely have called the police instantly, who in turn would have arrived with guns drawn. Yet we'd all have been completely wrong in our conclusions.

The passers-by at the high school came to an equally wrong, though opposite conclusion. Yet is it possible that, given what they'd previously seen and experienced, that conclusion was not unreasonable?

For all our modern enlightened habit of ridiculing those old prudes the Puritans and Victorians, there is something to be said for a society that keeps all forms of sex firmly out of public view and highly regulated for anyone of decent society: It makes mistakes of this nature quite impossible. The only participants in a Victorian orgy would have been professional prostitutes and paying customers cavorting consensually in a facility well-known for the purpose. The only occasion for public sex would, indeed, have been a felonious assault deserving of a full police investigation.

Today, who can know? How can you tell them apart without getting involved yourself - and with what uncertain and potentially dire consequences?

The students at Richmond High School, many of them, are indeed monsters, but they are that way because we have made them so - by steeping them in a society in which there is no such thing as unthinkable debauchery and no such concept as evil. They felt good at the moment; that's all they knew, and that's all they had been taught to care about. It's the old slogan, "If it feels good, do it!" writ large.

And that fact, far more evil and dangerous even than one single evil rape, is the true horror of this story. There will always be rapists, just as there will always be murderers, but when passers-by no longer find anything noteworthy about such an evil crime, the end is nigh.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on crime, morals, prostitution and schools