Bad News From Escondido

The battle over immigration took a turn for the worse in Escondido earlier this month. The city council - which endured hours of nonsensical abuse and lecturing from a coalition of belligerent racists, self-interested black marketeers, and militant altruists - suspended their ordinance against renting to illegal aliens:

City officials said Wednesday night they would not proceed with the lawsuit because it would be "unnecessarily costly to the city, and (would) unnecessarily consume the court's time." Several civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, filed the lawsuit in November challenging the law's constitutionality.

U.S. District Judge John A. Houston last month temporarily barred the city from enforcing the law.

What happened is that the council deemed the fight futile with this particular judge.

The ACLU, MALDEF, and various bleeding heart media pundits tell us the biggest problem here isn't that federal and state officers not upholding the oath they swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, including Article IV, Section 4:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

We are lectured that the big problem is that the Escondido city council's attempt to deal with the immigration mess is "unconsitutional". Cities should not "usurp the federal government's authority over immigration".

In order for this to be true the feds would have to be doing something worthy of usurping. And if there's anything unconstitutional going on it's our state and federal agents' dereliction of their duty to protect us from invasion. Escondido's civil servants are doing what their citizens have implored them to do. They've done it peaceably and democratically. Open to public scrutiny and criticism. Contrast this with the sneaking and bullying tactics of the open borders advocates.

Escondido's real problem is a too long tolerated flood of impoverished poorly educated English-lacking illegal aliens. It's second largest problem is identity grievance lawyers singing sob stories to sympathetic dictators in black robes. Their loyalty is not to the Constitution. They care not at all about the illegal aliens' disregard for government authority.

We need the National Guard to go door to door and haul off anyone who isn't a legal resident. What we'll get is more lame ordinances and more threats from the lawyers of the "oppressed".

Christmas Wishes 2006

A simple list. No "world peace" or "all the power/money in the world" fantasies. Only truly attainable desires. In no particular order.

Gingrich/Bolton sweep to victory in 2008. Whether or not it produces a Clinton/Obama sore loser hissyfit.

TWO solid fences on the southern border. Another to the north. Secure the ports and airlines too. And pronto. "How much will it cost?" No. The question is: How much will it save? So throw in a "virtual" fence. Or four. Si se puede.

A visit from God in which He transforms Richard Dawkins into a Flying Spaghetti Monster, scrubs the biosphere clean, tops off all the oil fields, and moves the large ones a tad closer to civilization. If He could also tune down political correctness, multiculturalism, moral relativism, envirowhacktivism, racial grievance mongering, and all the other crypto-totalitarian tendencies of man (not to mention the outright obvious ones) that would be just great.

And finally, my most fervent wish.

To never ever again hear: "Muslims want ...", "Muslims don't want ...", "Muslims are outraged by ...", "Muslims have attacked ..." It's getting tedious.

Humbug. I broke the rules. That last one is pure fantasy.

The Botched Jokes Keep Coming

Senator Kerry urges dialogue with Iran, Syria

Following the fine tradition of Fonda, Dodd, Sheehan, and Belafonte... Kerry criticizes US policy from Egypt while fellow Democrat Bill Nelson meets with Assad in Damascus.

Why is it that the admirers of these people make such a fuss about Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in the 80s? Because Saddam eventually turned into an enemy? Isn't that it? And don't the same people make a similar point about the CIA and bin Laden? Never mind that Saddam and bin Laden served US interests at the time. Reagan should have considered the blowback. He should have known these snakes would turn against the US.

Well then why are moonbat heroes always so eager to meet and indulge every tinpot enemy of the US? After their hostility is well known. The moonbats don't even have to predict the future. They just have to read the news. Beyond hypocrisy.

The ISG report is so worthless its not worth criticizing. How embarrassing. No surprise that Kerry supports its most ridiculous proposal. After its worthlessness is well known. Iran and Syria are fueling the chaos in Iraq. Beyond stupidity.

UPDATE: Classic. Eight days after 9/11 they blame the CIA for bin Laden. Today they cheer for Chavez.



Reagan sang the praises of the native Afghanis. The Arabs, including bin Laden, played a late and very small role in expelling the Russians. More traveled to Afghanistan for jihad after the Russians left and US support stopped. Sorry to burst Norm Dixon's bubble but Reagan didn't praise or support the Arab jihadis, and he had retired and gone senile before the Pakistani-based Taliban even existed.

Going Going Gone

Ralph Peters says we can't win. Tim Russert says Rummy wants to cut and run.

Next stop, peace with honor. So many worthless words. When the US left Vietnam millions fled. Millions died.

The mass media is usually eager to connect Iraq and Vietnam. Not when it comes to the aftermath. Emboldened by the latest election results they've now narrowed the argument over Iraq to finding a way out. Our oh-so-war-weary society just can't stomach the costs and sacrifices anymore. Iran and Syria will help. Jimmy Carter stands ready too! They know our own paranoid and thoughtless actions have created these purely hypothetical so-called jihadis. Our boys shouldn't be dying over there for questionable causes like freedom and democracy. If it's not about oil (though it sure as Halliburton is) we've got no business being there at all.

That's a bit of a caricature, but only a bit. Even the military has a part in this latest episode of Let's Pick An Exit Strategy:

The Pentagon's closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.

Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home."

The situation is serious, yet the chattering class is obsessed mainly with how the US will give up. The timetable. The euphemisms. Those who think further know withdrawal will only make a bigger mess. Many think it will only affect Iraqis.

In this surrealistic atmosphere there are quite a few other options.

Go Scapegoat - Read the Iraq Study Group report. Do exactly what they advise. Refer to them alone all future questions about Iraq.

Go Strongman - Return to the long and ignoble traditions of realpolitik typified by US support for the Shah, Saddam, Mubarek, Musharraf, and other secular autocrats. Identify the next Saddam. Back him.

Go Moonbat - Scream at the top of your self-important lungs about the incalculable injustice and misery already created by the US's pursuit of an arrogant imperialist vision of hegemony. Demand that they do something about it. Scream that it can't be done. Make them pay for it. Scream about how much it costs.

Go Team - What the rest of us wish we heard from the moonbats who see the members of our all-volunteer military as stupid misguided children who need protection rather than as noble capable protectors motivated by a powerful sense of duty, honor, and respect for their country and for civilization in general.

Go Fish - No WMDs in Iraq. Try the neighboring mud huts. The one to the east has potential.

Go Muslim - There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet. Keep it simple. Moonbats go Shia, Wingnuts go Sunni. Partisanship proceeds as usual except we all get suicide belts.

Go Easy - The problem is we're not being nice enough. We're not being fair. Our torture and eavesdropping the true crimes. The jihadis skulk and cut throats only because they're misunderstood victims. Pay no heed to their silly rhetoric about pigs and apes and unbelievers. What really ticks them off is Bush's police state. And his racist mishandling of Katrina.

Go Caveman - Off with the gloves. The jihadis eshew even basic civility. Their apologists say whatever works in war is fair. OK then. Ramadan? Not on my calendar. Sniper in a minaret? Knock it down. Imams preaching violence? Jail them. Everywhere, not just Iraq. Of course then we'll be called xenophobes, racists, invaders, infidels, inferior. Oh that's right. We already are.

Go Orgasmic - You expected more from heathen hedonists? If it weren't for the fact that they're consumed with pampering themselves and shooting blanks we might consider this option more seriously. Instead we'll just wait a generation or so until they party themselves into oblivion.

Go Figure - The only real option, notwithstanding the last, for those of us watching but nowhere near the controls.

Dawkins and God

Richard Dawkins has been foremost among Darwin's defenders for many years, speaking and writing to popularize and refine the Theory of Evolution. He also coined meme - the idea that ideas are replicated, altered, and selected and thus can evolve.

Not long ago Dawkins was spreading a meme about Brights:

Think about your own worldview to decide if it is free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities. If you decide that you fit the description above, then you are, by definition, a bright!

No shit? Where I come from calling yourself "bright" is a good way to get your ass kicked. Glibly denying any lacking in your worldview is another.

Dawkins rationalizes his bright idea like so:

I don't know whether gay - meaning homosexual - just happened, or whether it was launched. Either way, it has been a successful meme. The new definition is in the dictionary, and it is used more or less universally by heterosexuals. Did some syndicate deliberately release gay into the memosphere? Or did it spring up spontaneously, then take off as a brush fire? I don't know how, or when, gay got its start, but 2003 is seeing the deliberate launch of a new meme. It is bright, and we are at its birth. The bright meme is intentionally imitating gay's provenance in the explicit hope of copying its success.

The gay meme improved the image and, I dare add, the happiness of a once unpopular minority. Similarly, bright is intended to come to the aid of another beleaguered community in the US: those who, in the most religiose country in the Western world, have no religion, who are variously labeled atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, philosophical naturalists, secularists, or humanists.

Lately Dawkins is pushing a related but more in-your-face strain of the Bright meme. Not content with his own disbelief Dawkins would like all believers to stop. Now preferably. It's called New Atheism:

Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion.

Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

It is ironic that such a prominent man of science and reason can miss the point so badly. Decades ago other great men ruthlessly applied these principles only to discover fundamental, insurmountable limits to what humans can know or understand. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems utterly destroyed the classic basis for atheism: the assumption that man alone can sort everything out without any need to invoke God.

The achievements of science are truly breathtaking but as it turns out the most profound intellectual results of the last century inform us that hard study and cold reason will only go so far. Dawkins impishly focuses on the infinite trees we can't disprove and completely misses the forest. He is unable or unwilling to grasp that God is not Thor, a fairie, or a Flying Spaghetti Monster - God is all of these and the infinite other things we cannot know.

Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?

Dawkins can tear down all the Bronze Age straw men he likes. Rather than delighting in the hyperbole of a Flying Spaghetti Monster Dawkins would be better off soberly considering the implications of Shrödinger's Cat or Maxwell's Demon.

The elephant in the room that he will not and cannot address is the meme that infinity itself is just another name for God. Gödel himself embraced the spiritual and theological components of mathematical philosophy. Reading other explanations of Incompleteness and its implications what is hard to escape, even when put in the most dry and secular terms, is a sense of wonder and delight far superior to Dawkins' ignorant sarcasm.

If memes are like genes then it's fair to see attempts to manipulate ideas as similar to the unnatural selection responsible for such wonderous advances in animal husbandry and cultivation. The very existence of civilization depends upon the free exchange and improvement of ideas. Pushed to the extreme however, whether by activist atheists or Islamofacists, the intentional hunting down and killing off of "unacceptable" or "foolish" ideas is nothing short of eumemics.

I'll take my thinking free, thanks. Without Mr. Dawkins or anybody else telling me what is or isn't allowed.