The electoral map this year, as in 2004, portrays something other than plain electoral potential.   See one here.   It’s absolutely true that these Red and Blue State distinctions today stand for something other than objective politics.  Anyone who’s lived in either of the colored enclaves knows that they’re insular social systems, with the natural tendency to grow more insular and self-reinforcing, especially during times of stress like an election season. 

Here in Connecticut, our company of the “coastal elites” has no real opposition, and has been especially liberal in its open contempt for that which is not itself.  Politics here is simply white noise, containing all the possible ideas about humankind, but with the same old fantastic historical narratives about how to create a good society. 

Nothing meaningful gets done, because what really matters is the perpetuation of the steely states-of-mind that come from social and cultural stratifications.  Unfortunately, as the ruling classes yammer and assert their worldview into empty space, the ”culture” around them grows more  noisy and chaotic and unstable.   Mass immigration and emigration, and  the blessed end of the ’60’s generation’s power are all happening at once, and the future is unknown. 

What can we expect in the next thirty years?  We don’t know.   America has, ’til now, managed the Hobbsean-Lockean problem - the rule of man versus the rule of law - although rule by courts is essentially rule by man, and rule by minoritarianism is just as wicked.  Still, we have no pockets of cultural entropy like Lebanon, yet, unless it’s Detroit.  We have no lethal tribal, sectarian or ideological wars. Not yet.  But do we have reason to believe that, in forty years,  New York City, or Baltimore won’t look like Beirut does today. 

Or Boston.  When the last restraining vines of the Yankee myth systems have been pruned away and burned, and the levelling blandishments of capitalism  and consumption no longer flatten the passions, will the coercive tools of progressive government  be enough to keep the peace?  I don’t think so.  And by the way, that Yankee myth system isn’t useful because it’s upheld by a Yankee bloodline - that began to disappear in the New England sterility of the 1840’s - but because it knits together a common culture.  Take it away with no replacement and you have third-century Rome, or the Middle East today.  

As for the Middle East, is it accurate to attribute the troubles there to irrational colonial borders,  or post-colonial pseudo-statehood, or poverty, or despotism or lack of economic mobility?  These all add to the poison, no doubt, but is there any category for the plain perversity of human self-assertion, and the moral malfunctions that cause it?  Not today. 

It’s unfashionable to fit Western Enlightenment modes of conduct to the “senseless” hate and murder in the Middle East because it’s culture specific, so we’re left with no disciminating capacities at all.   And for that reason, we can’t even evaluate the past, present and future for ourselves.   If  Hartford, with eleven shootings in a single afternoon, isn’t the land of the Droogs, what is?  In one week, these events have faded from memory.  Who are we today?

It’s a long way from The White Man’s Burden on the express train to moral nullity, but we’ve made the journey without a stop for the mail.  Today, in a multiculutural stupor, we’re close to accepting arranged marriage, female circumcision, polygamy, polyandry, polyamory, the oppression of women and children in general, exceptions to religion/state barriers for Muslims, and the vagaries of Shari’a Law in parts of America, and in many parts of Europe.   All of these adjustments will lead to more  more extreme adjustments to others, and they won’t necessarily be Muslims, but some other group with a claim to legitimacy and indulgence. 

45 years ago I read a dreary thesis on political legitimacy, written by some figure in international relations, and whose name I’ve completely forgotten.  He concluded that free-thinking, tolerant Britain was the most stable country in the world, where the totalitarian USSR and its constituent countries, were fragile pressure-cookers.  Britain’s social vigor then was attributed to the usual assortment of virtues assigned to free-societies. 

Completely ignored was Britain’s post-industrial torpor, Commonwealth immigration policies, declining aspirations, the stirrings of a ”New” Labor every bit as dogmatic and certain as the old hereditary ruling class,  and the burning, destructive fever known as the  1960’s.  Britain is in steep decline today, with a continuous current of emigres to other English-speaking lands.  We should pay attention. 

Plant Drops Labor Day For Muslim Holiday

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. — Some workers at a local plant will no longer to be able to take their Labor Day holiday because of religious reasons.

Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be granted the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. [snip]

 Former employee and Shelbyville resident Anthony Proctor said he thinks what’s happening is wrong.

He said he helped build a special Muslim prayer room that’s located inside the plant and that no other Tyson facility has been that accommodating for any other religion.”If we want to go pray, we don’t have one for Christians,” he said.

This pertains only to the unionized workers at this plant. You know what that suggests for the dues checkoffs. One more reason to can unions and socialist policies.

Maybe the whole country should celebrate this day the same way they do in Iraq and Somalia.

When judging Barack Obama’s Marxist comments in reference to religion being the opium of the people, it’s often useful to consider what other sources have to say on the subject. George Washington’s Farewell Address takes a much different stand:

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Washington’s words don’t need much embellishment. You have a choice between Barack Obama and his raft of radical left-wing , America hating friends or the Father of Our Country. It’s not really that hard a decision, is it?

Paul wasn’t struck this hard

The light of conversion, brighter than that seen by Paul, altered Hillary’s belief in church going and guns. The stump Gospel according to Hillary now proclaims “how positive and ‘fundamentally optimistic’” we are.
Shorn of her elitism like a prostitute’s hair, Hillary castigated Obama’s remarks about bumpkins. Her new view posits that bumpkins are good people, stupid but good.

“I disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in our country cling to guns and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.
She described herself as a pro-gun churchgoer, recalling that her father taught her how to shoot a gun when she was a young girl and said that her faith “is the faith of my parents and my grandparents.”

This alleged conversion took place before the corkscrew landing in Bosnia but after she tried to join the Marines.
God works in mysterious ways. From the Obamessiah to Clinton’s vision, religion is returning to American politics.

Can I get an Amen!

 A passing thought

Hucksterbee’s campaign is getting short on cash. Y’all git down to the camp meeting for the laying of hands on wallets. Time to pass the plate.

For those whose memory hasn’t fallen down the Memory Hole, this hunt for a pastoral president has some down home roots.

The last religious (read evangelical) President was Mr. Peanut. He gave away the Panama Canal in a white hot, snake handling fervor. Then we had to invade the place to get the leftist crook out of there.

I didn’t think Mr. Peanut could be topped. Then in a gout of remorse, Hucksterbee wants to invite everybody south of  26^o N. Lat. up for citizenship. That doubles down on the canal.

Every time I hear something like Acts 2:38 or a bible being thumped, I think of- of-of Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker or Marjoe Gortner. The Huckster may have all them beat for contorting the truth.

Oh well, I had nothing better to do for this time except scratch this itch.

Non-believing US voters feel demonized

One presidential hopeful is a preacher, another proudly Mormon, and most openly tout their Christianity. In an arena where faith can make or break a politician, the one in 10 Americans who profess no religion feel left in the cold.

“They’re very disconcerted,” said Darren Sherkat, an atheist sociology professor specializing in religion at Southern Illinois University. [snip]

I’m sure this gentleman has a solid religious background from which to expand his knowledge of faith and beliefs.

Ian Thomas, 25, got involved in political campaigning as a student and in 2005 ran for a place on the school board in his local district in Pennsylvania.

Days before the vote, a county council member emailed local community groups disparaging Thomas for having an atheist bumper sticker on his car, and for writing a letter about atheism to a local newspaper.

“They are entitled to their beliefs and free speech but it doesn’t make a sound foundation for elected officials who makes our laws … to promote an Atheist that we know anything about,” read the ungrammatical email, shown to AFP. [snip]

But they are also “the least tolerated group by conventional standards of religious toleration in the US,” Sherkat said. [snip]

One might say the sins of their “religion” are visited upon them; who believes the Missouri Synod or the Archdioceses of NY and DC sued to remove “In God We Trust” from coinage. Or wishes to eradicate the word God from general use. Why do they want “religious toleration” since they reject religion

“Legally, there is no religious test for office, but culturally there obviously is,” he said, as polls showed Republican Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, surging ahead in key early nominating states. [snip]

More than one in 10 US adults have no religious affiliation, according to the census figures.

Having no religious affiliation does not default to atheism or agnosticism.

But a Gallup poll in February found more than half of voters would not back an otherwise well-qualified candidate from their favored party if that person was an atheist. [snip]

“The fair question would be to ask … will you impose your theology on civil law?”

And another fair question is, from what body of law was civil law derived? Heh?

“There is no candidate that an atheist would vote for … other than maybe Ron Paul,” Shermer said, naming a Tennessee lawmaker, a long-shot Republican contender.

“He’s a libertarian who feels absoutely (for) separation of church and state.”

“Many of the candidates would be acceptable to me regardless of their religious faith,” Stark told AFP. “Jimmy Carter (who became president in 1977) was perhaps the most personally strident conservative Christian — and I think he did a wonderful job.”

That last statement about sums it up; what further proof of the absence of reason is necessary, except that Ron Paul is from Texas.

Kerry Hints  Evangelicals Will Like Him Next Time He Runs

In his lifelong struggle for relevance, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry  “said Monday there might be a next time for his Presidential aspirations….he’ll be ready for the political torpedoes that helped sink his 2004 White House bid”.

The grandiose ramblings of this pathetic loser compose a triple-canopy jungle of incoherence:

“Evangelicals care enormously about the centrality of the teachings of Jesus Christ and The Bible”, he said, “if you lead a life and if you are involved in issues that manifest a concern for those kinds of issues, there’s no reason that one separate issue or another should create a wedge”.

Huh?

In this context, the reporter from The Patriot Ledger said that Kerry blamed Karl Rove (which is Evor Lrak spelled backwards)  for using religion to “divide voters”.

Personally, I think Karl Rove is “Ark Lover“.  Devilish anagrams wanted.

Since I manifest most of the requirements, and certainly this is not difficult part time work for a semi-retired cultured person, I adjudge it necessary I apply for the position. I encourage others of mind like myself to also apply for employment.

BILINGUAL MIGRANT TUTOR
Addison Northwest Supervisory Union (learn more)
Vergennes, Vermont

Job Details

Job Description Ideal candidate will be fluent in Spanish and English and will have earned a certificate in ESL. Position requires someone highly self-motivated, organized and energetic to work with 16 to 21 year old, out of school youth, in their homes in Addison and Northern Rutland Counties. Successful candidate must hold a valid driver’s license with own vehicle and must be able to work a flexible, non-traditional schedule; create lesson plans for individuals and small groups; coordinate a daily and weekly schedule; work independently and with Migrant Education Team; have excellent record keeping skills; and work with agricultural employers and local support agencies. The position is full-time, full year, at 40 hours/week beginning December 1, 2007. Position will be paid at an hourly rate, plus mileage reimbursement. Benefits will be provided. Experience with rural families working in agriculture desired. Position will be filled as soon as a suitable candidates is found. Please apply here. If you prefer to send hard copies, please send letter of interest, resume and 3 current letters of reference to Carol Wood, Migrant Education Teacher/Coordinator, Addison Northwest Supervisory Union, 48 Green Street, Suite 1, Vergennes, VT 05491.

Position Type: Full-time
Positions Available: 1

Equal Opportunity Employer

Addison Northwest Supervisory Union is committed to maintaining a work and learning environment free from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, pregnancy, gender, sexual orientation, marital/civil union status, ancestry, place of birth, age, citizenship status, veteran status, political affiliation or disability, as defined and required by state and federal laws.
Requirements:

· At least 3 years of relevant experience preferred

· Bachelors degree preferred
Application Questions: There are no application questions required for this job posting.
Contact Information Sally Bushey
48 Green Street, Suite #1
Vergennes, Vermont 05491
Phone: 802-877-3332

Fax: 802-877-3628

In Vermont, our school taxes are close to the highest in the nation in per pupil spending. So why are we educating the citizens of sovereign countries who don’t even pay taxes to the educational fund? The age group puts them outside the usual range of students.
Will the individual hired be a legal resident or is that too much to ask. One notes in the EOE statement, citizenship status doesn’t disqualify one; being a citizen might. I shall take the chance since there are no questions asked.

(see application questions above)

Legally, I have many of the correct impediments. I’m physically disabled (service connected) which means I’m a veteran. My race is Amerind, color is ruddy, Animist religion, born in the Algonquin Nation, have gender (not confused), and have the correct sexual orientation du jour.

Politically, I’m a moderate fascist (Socialist) with a strong politically correct bend. All of the previous are well defined and required by state and federal laws.

(See EOE section above)

As a former Border Patrol person, I have a college degree, and used to conversing with migrants in native vernacular, educating them so to speak.

Educational help of this type should consist of teaching them enough English to get on the correct bus back across the border. And making sure they do! No problemo amigo. Va ya con Diablo compadre.

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.” –Robert Heinlein

From the start of recorded time to now this is an absolute, as absolute as an absolute can be. Starting with the Pantheists to the Deists, Romans and Greeks, Christians, Jews, Anglicans and Muslims, next to the fouler of the collection, Liberals, Socialists and Communists and finally to the most corrupt, the Environmentalists, all will have you live their way or be destroyed.

Believe not, listen to their preachings and be warned!

                       Stay away from me.  Go CARE about someone else.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” to AIDS patient Bob Rafsky during a campaign stop, he seemed to mean it.  And he did, in the same way he felt all the narcissistic sentiments of his various realities to come.  We learned that, as he continued to emote and feel things during his priapic presidency, the facts and values of his emotions varied a great deal.  But, whatever his faults, Clinton was a lone act; he just wore the comedy and tragedy masks and didn’t try to institutionalize his pathos.  For that, we have George W. Bush and Compassionate Conservatism.

“Compassionate Conservatism” as a theoretical approach to social problems is the creation of Marvin Olasky, professor/journalist,  former communist, Jewish atheist turned Born Again Christian, Yale grad and former Bush advisor.  The term derives from Olasky’s study of the relative successes of government and private programs in relieving the effects of poverty throughout American history.  Olasky’s ideas and conclusions were the basis for faith-based initiatives, some of them adopted by GWB as governor to Texas and later as President.  

Compassionate Conservatism passed Olasky’s empirical tests.  It had less to do with religion than it did with communitarian possibilities , and almost nothing to do with the administrative state as a dispenser of compassion.  Bush, however, has infused his administration with a soft compassionate conservatism, and pushed the phrase front stage, and  thence into that deplorable family of catch-phrases inflicted upon historians and the public by political dream merchants.   These phrases define eras, visions, goals, national purposes and the evanescent pursuits of political generations, not of “the people” themselves.  

The last full century was fouled by such blinding banalities - New and Fair Deals, New Frontiers, New Convenants, New This, New That, Straight-Talk Express, WIN, and lots more, plus that apotheosis of mawkish liberal romanticism, stewed with a touch of Albert Speer,  The Great Society.  All of them foundered in some way on the shoals of reality.  As vessels for everyone’s different wishes and interpretations, they could never really function as democratic programs.  

As a digression, what the hell was The Great Society?  Someone tell me.  If the New Haven of today, with its brutalist architecture, bloodstains and cement foliage resembles the progressive vision of 1968,  someone needs to be punished for the artwork and the final rendering.  Liberals reduced the faded,  but restorable illuminated script of American urban life to loopy spray-can graffito, not only in New Haven but in every old city in the country because they cared about the inhabitants!   Listen, Uncle Sam.  Wherever I hurt, please don’t touch me there.

The same is true of Compassionate Conservatism, which to me seems to be the spiritual rationale for the President’s  swelling sympathies for anyone who can make it across an American border, to holders of burdensome mortgages, or to a select few who can lay claim to natural rights somewhere across the seas.  Despite Mexican towns emptying of young men, most who never return, despite the  deepening Latin despotism that make it desirable to leave and abandon hope of change, despite tyrannical stasis in the Middle East among our allies, our indiscriminate goodness survives the contradictions and goes looking for another heart to heal.   And we haven’t even gotten to sub-prime borrowers and their angst.

Now Bush is  waxing sympathetic about injustice in Myanmar, which is not a moral gradient he needs to scale to remain compassionate, and which fades into insignificance anyway in the shadows of monstrous injustices in Africa and the Middle East.  No doubt Rice can make a compassionate case for the Burmese/Myanmaris who must be saved by the ameliorative West.  It’s lunacy. There’s a natural limit to caring; it’s cheap, its reality is unknowable, and conservatism is not about pain, its  simply about liberty and justice for all.   You don’t attain either of these things by sloshing in sentimentality. 

With George Bush we got prescription drug subsidies,  support for affirmative action, a volcano of dollars for the orgy of corruption and graft that followed the genuine suffering of Katrina,  open borders, and Bush’s promotion of his four C’s of “civility, courage, compassion and character” (First Inaugural Address),  but not a word about The Constitution or his governing philosophy.  When you have no governing philosophy to defend as President, just a boundless heart,  then the office is your personal hair shirt.  The last time we went down this road, we got the constipated spirituality and crabbed pieties of Jimmy Carter.  Maybe we’re better off this time.  I’m not sure yet.

We are being pushed out of the southern and western Pacific slowly by China’s aggressive entry into our former sphere of influence. 8 helicopters does not constitute a takeover, however the service of these is an entrance to more expansion. Some of our more secret materiel still operating from those fields could be compromised.

China offers to sell military choppers to Manila

China has offered to sell 8 utility helicopters to the Philippine military as it seeks to replace its Vietnam War-era aircraft, a Philippine air force official said on Wednesday.

Defence ties between China and the Philippines — a longtime U.S. ally — have grown steadily since 2004 when the two sides launched an annual security dialogue.

Beijing has since donated $2.5 million worth of engineering equipment to the military to help it carry out development projects in areas where communist and Muslim rebels operate. On Monday it promised another $2 million in military aid. [snip]

I do not see the Chicoms helping defeat the communist insurgency, the Muzzies are fair game since any religion is inimical to Red China.

At some point we are going to be head to head with the Chinks. Maybe over Taiwan, maybe the Spratley Islands (claimed by the Philippines), or over a stink about lead paint. Trading with them isn’t the same as trading with a democratic government. The Middle Kingdom believes it is above all others.

They have trashed patent and copyright laws, stolen and produced trademarked goods and generally been a bad trading partner. Where is the upside?

Or “hypocracy” which is the preferred spelling for Republican-haters I’ve encountered in the blogosphere.  The word is “hypocrisy”, and its joyous discovery in Larry Craig was the newest golden strand woven  into the vestments of pulpiteering leftists everywhere.  Craig was more proof for their contempt and curtain-twitching scorn for an entire social class: Republicans.  It’s the same confirmation error and simplification underlying all stigmatizing prejudices, but this one is clean because the opinion-makers and liberal elites hold it to be true.

For leftists Craig narrowed the probability that all Republicans are swine.  Think of the yokel who flips a coin 99 times, and having found heads 99 times, thinks the probability of having tails has changed from 50 -50, to 100 to 1,  and bets his house on the outcome.  With millions of adherents, one Republican or Democrat scoundrel, or a thousand, proves nothing about either party, but that’s an idea too complex and knotty for some to unwind.  Even one as bright as the one who parried with us recently about Chris Dodd.   We’ll call him Genius.   He told us he had an IQ of 135  possessed a Master degree and had graduated magna cum laude.

Genius was infuriated by a rude post about Chris Dodd.  Genius detested Republicans, and disgorged a list of Republican types linked to Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff; a few convicted but most indicted, linked, charged, suspected, probed or investigated for wrongdoing, and therefore to the hanging-judge mentality of a pious lefty, guilty.  Then Genius moved on to Larry Craig.

Pertinent to the suspicions about Craig, Genius referred to the Republican Party as The Gay Old Party, and continued to some very suspect comments of his own about homosexuality.  He then ignored being exposed for indelicate comments about gayness.  But later in the thread, a Dodd volunteer and friend of Genius posted that Genius wasn’t homophobic; but that Republican “bible-thumpers” are the chief foil to gay respectability and their right to marriage.  Well, Craig opposes gay marriage, but so does Chris Dodd, along with 67% of Americans (Gallup 2005), but never mind.  She said:

My take on his “Gay Old Party” remark is that so many Republicans deny gay people the right to marriage, bash their lifestyle as immoral and a sin, yet behind closed doors they’re trolling men’s rooms and hitting on Congressional pages.  Are Dems doing this too?  Safe to say - yes but we’re not the one’s (sic) standing up and thumping our bibles about our superior morals and family values.  It’s the hypocracy (sic) - not the homosexuality that is maddening.

What does this paragraph mean?  Its logic is sub-rational, its ethics risible,  it simply isn’t true in any of its disconnected, anecdotal parts, especially about “so many Republicans” OR so many Democrats.  It’s just a literary delivery system for an idea that requires ventilation over and over, no matter how non the sequiturs and fictitious the evidence.  Republicans are homophobic, hypocritical trash.   Our gaze had to be drawn from the planks in their eyes to the motes in our own.  It always does.  It’s called lefty logic.

All ideas have a lineage, a provenance.  Leftism devolved from liberalism, which itself devolved from the great but conflicted Progressivism of the last century, and the decline continues.   Along the way, leftism picked up attitudes, theories and assumptions from its predecessors which today make up the foul slurry that passes for leftist political thinking.   Some of them are as follows: 

First,  elites in all ages have regarded their social inferiors as reservoirs of bad taste, ignorance, carnality and bizarre religiosity.  (This exists alongside their romanticization of the Rousseauean  brute who services the pool.)  To the arbiters of everything important, hypocrisy in the lower classes is a natural outcome of the contradictions in their behavior, and even sometimes reponsible for their diminished  status.  The people whom I believe to be inferior to me will always confirm my opinion.  The left will always think of Republicans in this way. 

Second, among the intellectual staples of atheism, which clings even today to many believers, is that religion is the cause of more carnage, injustice and suffering than the purest godlessness.   The bad behavior of the religious nullifies the validity of  Belief, and confirms a broad potential hypocrisy in all believers.  Absolute moral spotlessness, and total silence about it is, the only remedy for the crime of believing in God.

Third, if postmodernism is “about” anything, it’s about personal sovereignty, and the assumption that morals are a social construct.  Objective morality can’t be disclosed by Reason, so the individual is the fairest judge of his conduct, as long as he keeps it to himself.  Along with this, moral variation is the validation of personal choice, and solipsism is authenticity.

We could add a fourth, although it isn’t about what leftists think. It’s about what they overlook.  Their implicit claim that violations of moral codes discredit not only the offender, but the code itself and all those who hold to it, is particularly wicked.  Codes exist as maps to conduct; we have them because the road is unknown and hard to follow; not natural to us, and the map springs from a host of human needs and self-expectations.   Without them, we are nothing.

From Ba’hais to Stoics, to Epicureans to low cults, to Christianity, to Islam and all the ascetic Green guides to good living, there’s a code that is imperfectly followed.  Lapses are normal, expected.  Leftist pseudo-morality reminds us of Adam Smith’s pithy comment…”Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience”.

From the AP, via AOL News for August 24, 2007. 

             ANIMAL PARTS USED IN ALLEGED WITCH FEUD

Salem Massachusetts -  A self-proclaimed high priestess of Salem witches and a second person were accused of tossing raccoon parts on the doorsteps of businesses, allegedly as part of a Wiccan Community feud.

Sharon Graham, 46, and a fellow Wiccan, Frederick Purtz, 22, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of littering and malicious destruction of property.  Graham also was charged with intimidating a witness.

They were accused of putting a raccoon head and entrails on the doorsteps of Angelica of the Angels and The Goddess’ Treasure Chest in May. 

The historic seaport, famous for holding witch trials in the 17th-century, has an active Wiccan community and thriving witch-related  tourism. 

….A witness, Richard Watson, told police he accompanied Graham, Purtz and other people when they put the raccoon remains on the doorsteps.  He said Graham hoped to frame a Wiccan businessman who fired Graham from a psychic telephone business last Spring.

Watson also said Graham had a disagreement with the owners of the two targeted businesses over proposed regulations that would limit the number of psychics who come to the city during Halloween season.  He said he was told the group found the raccoon dead.

….The Boston Herald (reported)…there were “likely internal issues with the Wiccan Community” but the tossing of raccoon entrails may be a “bastardization” of Wiccan practice because the religion doesn’t condone harming others.

The first and most obvious question is :  Why didn’t the psychics know this was coming, and who was going to do it?

The battlefield is about the size of Texas; four times the size of New England.  Its average annual temperature is like that of Massachusetts.  Its capital city is on the same latitude as Phoenix, Los Angeles and Memphis.  It’s mountainous, dramatically uplifted more than a million years ago by the thrust sheets of the advancing Indian subcontinent.  Roughly half of the country is contorted by its definining feature, a majestic but forbidding mountain range.  The capital is Kabul, the battlefield is Afghanistan and the mountain range is the Hindu Kush.

The Hindu Kush, translated by some historians as “Hindu Killer”, is a Himalayan extension of the Alpine system of Europe and North Africa.  It’s officially part of the Pamir-Karakoram chain of the Himalayas;  it angles southwest from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, the Durand Line.  There are seven mountain passes which have served as highways for invaders and trade at least since 1500 BC, when invaders from Central Asia brought what linguists now call the Indo-European languages to the region.

Alexander The Great, after marching and fighting the width of Afghanistan, used the Khawak Pass to reach Samarkand in 330 BC.  He led his starving army over the 12,000 foot snowy pass, and then west back through the Khyber Pass on the modern Hippie Trail to Kabul.  Today it’s likely that Taliban and other tribal fighters use the same passes for the purpose of fighting NATO and American troops.  The blood of thousands, maybe millions, of nameless soldiers and unaffiliated warriors has been spilled here since the first Aryans arrived 5000 years ago.

Afghanistan borders six countries.  Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west and south, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China to the north.  Its China border lies at the dead end of the valley of the Wakhan Corridor.  The Wakhan is a 150-mile long, ten-mile wide geographic tendril, like an appendix, projecting northeast, between Pakistan to the south and Tajikistan in the north to the Chinese border.  It’s an atavistic survival of Britain’s Great Game with Russia, a border anomaly established to deny Russia access to the Indian Ocean.   Marco Polo used the valley almost eight-hundred years ago to travel that portion of The Silk Road.  Today it’s a remote, hostile patch, the habitat of the Marco Polo sheep, and probably the route used to smuggle drugs to China.

The short account is that humans have been scrambling over, fighting for, and surviving in this land for 50,000 years.   It was Hellenized by the Macedonians and their successors, converted to Buddhism by adherents from India, ignored militarily by the Romans but conquered and converted by Muslims, trampled by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, by Darius and other Persians and Parthians; invaded by Turkic tribes, by the British, the Russians and Americans.  Simulataneous with low-grade warfare, it was also a web of routes for The Silk Road, the commercial paths taken by bearers of luxury goods from the east to the Mediterranean world.  The world’s first mobile shopping mall.

The material for Julius Caesar’s silk curtains probably came through Afghanistan from China, over rocky, barren trails now prowled by American Rangers and Special Forces.  Julius and other Romans who possessed silk, believed that it grew on trees.  Julius, Augustus and Tiberius had intermittent difficulties with the Parthians, who, along with the Afghan Kushans, controlled the trade routes through Afghanistan.  The Romans were not welcome there.  The Parthians left no written account of themselves, but must have known the origins of silk.  Perhaps they played the first lasting joke on the Romans.  They told them it was gathered like fruit and nuts.

The historian’s routine explanation for Afghanistan’s long travail is that it lay at the “crossroads” of competing civilizations; that it was the junction between south and central Asia and the Middle East.  These designations are entirely theoretical to the historian-geographer.  They mean nothing.  The human explanation for the boiling activity in the region is that the wars of conquest that tortured Afghanistan for 5000 years were wars for local power, for goods, and to a lesser degree, religion.  They were fought for the things that fill the voids left by deprivation, insecurity and the anxieties of hard-scrabble life.   It hasn’t ended.

The communist coup staged in 1978 led to the Soviet invasion, and then to the Taliban in large part because of American indifference.  Millions were killed and exiled in the civil and religious wars of the past thirty years.  Today Afghanistan resembles nothing as much as itself of a thousand years ago.  Ghosts everywhere, in every corner of every mud hut and mountain pass.    It is our obligation to bring the country back to life. 

Hear Islamic leaders in London: ‘Queen Elizabeth, go to hell!’

Across town from the site of the recent attempted car-bomb attacks, several thousand Muslims gathered in front of the London Central Mosque to applaud fiery preachers prophesying the overthrow of the British government – a future vision that encompasses an Islamic takeover of the White House and the rule of the Quran over America.

“One day my dear Muslims,” shouted Anjem Choudary, “Islam will govern Britain!”

Choudary was a co-founder of Al Muhajiroun, the now-banned group tied to suspects in the July 7, 2005, London transport bombings and a cheerleader of the 9/11 attacks.

“Democracy, hypocrisy,” Choudary chanted as the crowd echoed him. “Tony Blair, terrorist! Tony Blair, murderer! Queen Elizabeth, go to hell!”

The Muslim leader’s charge, along with interviews with protesters and a “literal foaming-at-the-mouth” diatribe by another speaker, were captured on tape June 22 by nationally syndicated talk radio host Rusty Humphries.

…recorded angry Muslim leader Abu Saif, who kept his voice at a fever pitch through declarations such as: “Brothers and sisters, make no mistake. Make no mistake. The British government, the queen, the MPs in this country, they are enemies to you, enemies to Allah and enemies to the Muslims.” [snip]

“Say, for instance, I was a Muslim in America. Could I call for the destruction of the American government and establishment of an Islamic state in America? No. So where is the freedom of religion? There is none.”

Humphries asked: “Do you call for that?”

“Of course,” he replied, “we want Islam to be a source of governance for all of mankind. And we also believe that one day America will be ruled by Islam.” [snip]

“There’s nothing we can do to be friends?” Humphries asked.

Abu Saif replied: “There is something you can do to be friends. You can become Muslim.” [snip]

The MSM doesn’t print or air items like this; this doesn’t fit the despise America agenda.

Meanwhile, the bedwetters in congress are telling us we must hold a dialogue; we just need to talk. It seems like only one side wants to talk.