Who's Watching The FBI Watching The Radical Islamist Loonies?

I wonder how the FBI front liners who investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago feel about the intervening months between that investigation and his alleged participation in the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2012. "Failure" comes to mind, and I'm sure they are sickened by the progression of failures within their agency that led to terrorism.  The FBI's performance in the battle to protect us from terrorism may need a review more thorough than we suspected. Even the most redundant intelligence cannot protect us from every assault on our free society. At the same time, we do not help our efforts by ignoring reasoned observations in the course of an investigation.

Here is how the story progressed as reported by Instapundit over the past week - latest post at the top of the list.

Suspect followed a radical religious agenda

Why was the suspect not on a watch list after a six-month visit to Chechnya ? 

"FBI training manual purged all references to Islamic terror."

America has "a false confidence over the terror threat."  This article appeared in the British press

Naming the suspects "foils racialist, sociological agendas."

What's the Boston bombing all about: Islamic ideology.

The "T" word.

Federal officials name the suspects.

The media meltdown

Politicization of the attack



Photo: Tim Davis, New York Times

"...He That Hath No Stomach For This Fight, Let Him Depart."

Odysseus and the Sirens                                                               British Museum

It is unfortunate that political correctness has infected our culture to the point where the classic literature of Western civilization must be cleansed for nine year olds. That is the case in Seattle where the parent of a third-grader has objected to some phrases  that were to appear in the class's production of an abridged version of Homer's Odyssey. The parent certainly has a right to object. Furthermore, I admit that staging this production for third-graders is ambitious. I also acknowledge the learning potential from such an opportunity and find it unfortunate that we must restrain the reach of all by cancelling a play because one person objects. The principal made a serious administrative error. Far better to seek compromise - apparently the play will be revised -  rather than cancellation.

We may be quite surprised about learning if we could only move beyond the boundaries we erect around ourselves and our children.

We always taught our children to reach for their personal infinities, then go beyond. And we think Buzz Lightyear would have made a great teacher.


A big hat tip to Sippican Cottage for posting the video. Sip's blog is well worth your time - superb writing, compelling subjects, admirable politics.

Glenn Beck: Urinary Inflection

It seems Glenn Beck has created quite a stir with his "Obama in Pee Pee."  On the other hand, Andres Serano's "Piss Christ" seems to be doing fine. Nothing to see here, move along.

We'll be waiting a long time before a mob of enraged Christians declares a holy war on Serano.

With apologies to George Cromarty and Ed Rush:

I don't care 'about auto trauma long as I got my plastic Obama riding on the dashboard of my car....

N.B. We hear it's beer. Sam Adams perhaps?

Photo: Gateway Pundit

Illusions We Should Know

Here is an optical illusion, a safe and entertaining curiosity:

Here is a political illusion, an instructive and frightening reality:

His name is Herbert Marcuse. If you attended college when history courses were actually a requirement, you likely read about him or even read his book, One-Dimensional Man (1964). If you were a member of the 1960s counterculture, you likely worshiped him.

Robin Phillips has much to say about Marcuse and his legacy in this brief, revealing article in Salvo Magazine. This is essential reading, friends. Phillips's new book, Saints and Scoundrels from King Herod to Jim Elliot, may be of interest as well.

H/T Paul Mehl, Concordia, MO

"I'm Pretty Sure Even Emma Goldman Would Eat Oysters Rockefeller If She Didn't Have To Pay For Them."

Northeastern University has decided to ban a Chick-fil-A restaurant from its campus because the company's foundation has supposedly contributed to anti-gay organizations. This move has created an entertaining ripple of interest on the part of the blogosphere. Nick Gillespie, writing at Reason, provides us with an interesting, humorous post - and a Seinfeld clip, to boot - addressing this development.

OTR interprets this decision as another step toward the understanding that everything rots. We've all heard about the concept of six degrees of separation whereby any person is only six introductions away from any other person on the planet. The principle that everything rots is similar: explore anything deep enough or give it enough time and it will rot. The blogosphere has made it very easy to observe a similar phenomenon OTR calls the Nazification Principle. It reads: any message thread discussing a controversial subject moves to a point where one messenger introduces the term 'Nazi,' thereby rendering the subsequent thread as meaningless.

The Chick-fil-A ban at Northeastern is a nice illustration of nazification in that the donations have been "peeled" many times until the objectors found the rot, no matter how small, that they could interpret as "anti-gay." When we apply this thinking and the idea of six degrees of separation, we find that everyone eventually rots. We are all murdering, slave holding, child molesting, meat eaters! If we were to carry this reasoning into our everyday decision-making, our lives would be paralyzed.

Have we reached absurdity yet? OTR thinks so. He doesn't care what goes on in your bedroom, but he does care that Chick-fil-A makes a damned good sandwich even if they are closed on Sunday.


H/T to Instapundit


N.B. The anarchist and intellectual troublemaker, Emma Goldman (1869-1940),  is one of OTR's favorite characters in the American experience. She was an extraordinary writer and orator with an indomitable personality and spirited independence. She loved to seek out the rot and likely would have made a most interesting contribution as a "founding mother" during our colonial times. Though her political thought was the antithesis of order and stability, and anathema to OTR's center-right thinking, he greatly admires her celebration of the concept of individualism lived to the fullest. For further reading, see her Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), and her autobiography, Living My Life (1931).

OTR also holds the English anarchist, poet and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827), in similar esteem.

Who's On First?: Kennewick Man Meets The Beauty Of Xiaohe

OTR has never had much use for superlatives including the terms "first people" and "Native American." He was trained by the first generation of students of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School of cultural geography where the study of origins, diffusion, and landscape reigned. There was nothing static about places studied under such a lens. Waves of settlement, often over thousands of years, modified landscapes. The people, objects, structures and sites in each wave left rich resources for study by anthropologists and archaeologists. The Sauer School took information from these and other fields to define places throughout the world. Also, by studying the diffusion of cultural items, geographers traced peoples and cultures to their supposed points of origin.

In this day and age of political correctness, being declared the "first culture" has its advantages, often dispensed in the form of privilege, property and money. When the declaration is by law, the limitations of such thinking becomes very evident. The best example in the United States is the term, "Native American." It is purely a legal term. If your tribe is recognized by the federal government, you are a "Native American." If your tribe does not meet the criteria for recognition, you will be forced to settle for the term, American Indian. All Native Americans are Indians, but not all Indians are Native Americans. The "natives" get the privilege, property, and money. The Indians may have the genes, but they don't get the recognition. So confusing. And what happens when those waves of settlement produce something that doesn't fit the legal model? OTR thinks the same question emerges when cultural geographers run out of evidence. Is this really the original? Could there be earlier waves lost to catastrophe?

These questions arose in 1996 with the discovery of Kennewick Man, a prehistoric skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River. There was no controversy at first, but one soon emerged when scientists revealed this 9500 year old skeleton was not genetically related to any Native American tribes. In fact, he is more genetically associated with the ancestors of the Ainu people of northern Japan. The tribes saw this as a serious threat to their nativity claim and began a protracted legal battle for the skeleton and a quick ceremonial burial. It didn't happen, as Kennewick Man remains the property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The value of being first isn't confined to the shore of the Columbia River, the United States or even the Western Hemisphere. It seems the same thinking surrounding Kennewick Man has now forced the Beauty of Xiaohe out of an exhibit making its rounds in the United States. Beauty was buried in Xinjiang province in western China about 4000 years ago. Today, that province is filled with oil and a strong separatist sentiment. The fact that Beauty has distinctive Caucasian features emphasizing the Western origins of Xinjiang isn't helping the situation. The Chinese government wants no part of that Western linkage to show. This is a case where millions of barrels of oil trump diversity and the truth.

OTR wonders how many more model breaking surprises await us as we play this and similar games of who's on first. While identity politics has been lucrative for Native American tribes, good fortune has come at a cost, often to the traditional culture it was designed to preserve. He thinks we could build more beneficial political constructs out of our academic models. The pursuit of honesty would be a good start. As for the argument about "firsts," OTR recalls walking the streets of Old Oraibi, a village on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona. People in Old Oraibi have been doing that for almost a thousand years. The folks on Charlotte Street in St. Augustine - "our nation's oldest city" - don't like it one bit. And Old Oraibi is a relatively new town when you examine settlement history in the Western Hemisphere.

Parent One And Parent Two In America

The recent move on the part of the State Department to replace Mom and Pop with Parent One and Parent Two on passport applications didn't sit well with lots of folks. There's plenty in print about it, but the best of the lot is Michael A. Walsh's commentary in today's New York Post. Here's a sample

Leaving aside the wretched barbarism of the phrase "gender neutral" -- what State really means, of course, is "sex neutral" -- the move is another salvo in the ongoing sapper war against American and western cultural norms. Even as recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that words like "mother" and "father" would become politically incorrect, but such is the world we now inhabit.Leaving aside the wretched barbarism of the phrase "gender neutral" -- what State really means, of course, is "sex neutral" -- the move is another salvo in the ongoing sapper war against American and western cultural norms. Even as recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that words like "mother" and "father" would become politically incorrect, but such is the world we now inhabit.

For more than two centuries, dating back to Rousseau, the left has been waging an unrelenting war on the wellsprings of Western civilization, as if it were some deliberate, malign conspiracy against an oppressed minority instead of the bulwark against savagery that picked up the pieces of Greco-Roman culture and transformed them into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. No society is perfect, but where would you rather be? Dubuque or Darfur? San Francisco or Riyadh

Walsh says the vandals will fail as they always have in the West. You can read the hows and whys of the rest of this story here.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

More PC Madness

Mark Steyn makes note of a case illustrating how the sense of entitlement is devouring our sense of reason and leading toward behavioral gridlock. The story appeared in the Seattle Weekly under this headline:

Gay, Mentally Challenged, Biracial Male Cheerleader Claims Discrimination.

No good deed shall go unpunished. No good deed shall go. No good deed. No good. No. My source: Dr. Sanity.

The Myth Of The Poor, Oppressed Jihadist

. . . Barack Obama clings, like so many willfully blind, to the myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist in the face of years and years of contrary evidence. The "essence" of the 9/11 "tragedy," he wrote days after that attack, "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignornace, helplessness and despair." This woeful misdiagnosis allows the apologist to treat deliberate, carefully planned evil acts of the long-waged Islam war on the West as responses to social injustice.

Read the rest of the story here, including a long list of wealthy Islamic terrorists and a dozen links for further reading.

Paradigms & Weltanschauung

Shrinkwrapped has some thoughts on anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) couched in terms of two insightful posts by Dinocrat and Matthew Yglesias. Thomas Kuhn's seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), gets mention in Dinocrat's post. The book was important in shaping my understanding of science and has become a favorite title recommended to friends and associates for over forty years.

President Bush Goes On Trial In NYC

Mona Charen may have nailed the real reason why Attorney General Eric Holder, wants to try our Guantanamo captives in a civil trial in New York. If she's right, I think this will a fatal political mistake for the Obama administration, the Democrat party, and leftists in general. History tells us you cannot pander to the fringe in American politics and expect to survive. Personally, I'm very happy these folks from the Oval Office on down never took an honest history course. They won't know what hit them come November 2010. Thanks to NRO for the post.

Is The Global Warming Hoax Really Exposed?

It looks that way from reports coming out of telegraph.com. The controversial global warming expert responsible for the famous "hockey stick graph" apparently has been exposed through a number of incriminating emails. Over 1000 messages and 79 documents were released. Penn State Professor Michael Mann now has a lot of explaining to do. If his explanation is insufficient, much of the junk science and the international conspiracy promoting it will be revealed and prove beyond reasonable doubt that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a hoax. Gateway Pundit provides a good summary and several links for the backstory.

UPDATE: The story has reached Fox News and Drudge.

A Merry Little Nazi Christmas

Building on the destructive and humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the National Socialist movement in Germany wasted no time in using patriotism and propaganda to remove Christ from Christmas beginning in 1933. World War II, which began with the invasion of Poland in 1939, made them even more determined. The goal was a holiday without Christianity and its Jewish antecedents.














Imagine baking your own swastika cookies for the holidays or decorating the tree with ornaments glorifying Germanic culture. Mail OnLine has the story and additional illustrations here. "Chilling" is a reasonable description.

The article notes that German churches did not protest the attempts to cleanse the holiday, probably out of fear. That should please the ACLU.

Source: Jonah Goldberg, NRO, The Corner

"From Every Kind Of Man Obedience I Expect ...."

By protocol, American presidents don't bow to heads of state, but the message still hasn't reached Obama, as the picture below shows.














Yesterday's bow to Japan's Emperor Akihito elicited this response from Scott Johnson at Powerline:

Obama's breach of protocol is of a piece with his foreign policy. He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines. He gives expressive form to the idea that the United States now willingly prostrates itself before the rest of the world. He declares that the United States is a country like any other, only worse, because we have so much for which to apologize.

Read the whole thing here.

Title courtesy of W.S. Gilbert, from The Mikado

Diversity Incident Boiling At The Naval Academy

Powerline (Scott Johnson) is reporting on a disturbing discrimination issue involving the Naval Academy's color guard and its appearance at the World Series on October 29. It seems the guard would have been "performing while white and male," so administrators replaced two of them on October 28 with a white female and a male of Pakistani descent as a person of color. This attempt at diversity backfired when the Pakistani forgot his shoes and cover and had to be replaced by one of the original guard members. It gets better.

The color guard at Annapolis is a competitive, extracurricular activity for which members compete. In other words, they earn rank. The incident has created anger and frustration among the middies and the alumni. The Academy administrations attempt at a cover up, including a gag order, and contradictory written statements is testimony to what Mother always told you: tell the truth. Be sure to follow all the links in Johnson's post so you can enjoy the comedy as it builds, and understand the sad reality that a multi-culti diversity policy poses for our military.

Environmental Mythology And The Evil White Christian Capitalist

In 1983, the environmental historian, William Cronon, published a seminal book on American Indians and colonist in New England and their relationship to the land. Most prior scholarship accepted and reinforced the idea that Indians were dependent on the "wilderness" in which they lived. Cronon's work introduced a far different picture of the Indian as an active shaper of the American landscape. Although the mythology of the "noble savage" living harmoniously with the Earth Mother is still very much alive, a generation of new studies confirms it wasn't so. Unfortunately, much of the environmental movement will never accept this premise as its membership is largely composed of leftist ideologues hellbent on crushing the free world. Believe me, I know because I worked with some of them.

This morning, a post on Moonbattery links to highlights from an article on the pre-Columbian Americas written by Charles G. Mann and published in The Atlantic in 2002. It shows readers how far the new scholarship has come in a generation by exposing a full range of myths about Indians and Europeans alike. There is a link to the full article in the first paragraph. Be sure to read all of it.

Multi-Culti Political Correctness And Our "Don't Ask, Don't Kill" Policy In The Military

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley blames the Fort Hood assault on our love of guns. President Obama says it's a matter of cracking over stress. The state-run media talking heads provide deep cover for the counter intuitive blather from the leftists about the "alleged" gunman, the "suspect" Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a "purported" Muslim.

Thanks to the British journalists, we're getting an ever clearer picture that this event was closely linked to radical Islam. Unfortunately, our love of multiculturalism and political correctness has prevented us from seeing what has become a dangerous reality. That this policy infects our military has likely led to the killing and wounding of fifty American soldiers and civilians inside a domestic military base. Even policies have tipping points, and I believe we're rapidly approaching one that will realign our thinking about the PC insanity swirling about us. Perhaps most of us could have lived reasonably with "Don't ask, don't tell," but there is no way we can tolerate "Don't ask, don't kill." For more on the Fort Hood story, read this at Blue Crab Boulevard, this and this at Gateway Pundit, and this from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO.

"What A Delightful Culture:"

John Hinderaker at PowerLine reminds us again why peace is not a process. A sample:

This one shows a guy with a fake rocket surrounded by a group in burial clothes. I take it that the latter is the usual celebration of death via mass murder bombing.

Will Scandinavia Be Next?

We've established here in this blog that meanings reside in people. For the most part, we share our perceptions and meanings in terms of common understanding. Sometimes, those meanings both define and confine people into the narrow corridors of obsession and paranoia. Unfortunately, threats to the self can translate into national illness, especially when we stray from reason into the netherworld of political correctness and multiculturalism. Here is a classic example from Penn State of what happens when reason is no longer part of the intellectual equation.

The Internet is full of this story. My source: Moonbattery

Huzzah Free Speech

May I propose a rousing cheer for free speech in the United States. With some luck, the Obama White House will overlook this indiscretion and allow my humble blog to continue. Though you may find this hard to believe in this country, the White House actually tried to ban Fox News from interviewing our pay czar ,Kenneth Feinberg, at a joint major media outlet briefing they have attended since 1997. The five Washington bureau chiefs from those outlets stood together opposing the Fox News ban. They chose to hang together rather than hang separately. The White House soon relented.

I'm glad the chiefs understand this behavior on the part of the White House cannot be a part of American journalism. Read the incredible story for yourself.

Confident, accomplished leaders control without controlling. That they feel such a need should be a warning to those who stand with the principles of the Founding Fathers.