Fitna the Movie: Geert Wilders' Warning

This 15 minute video is oddly understated, given its huge buildup by the dhimmi leadership of the Netherlands. If this footage is too controversial for showing on Dutch television, then Holland is already lost to the forces of darkness.

Much ado about nothing, but then sometimes nothing can sneak up behind you and take your head.

Barack Obama Leading a Mob of Clueless Naifs

Barack Obama's recent smokescreen speech about Jeremiah Wright's influence on his life and thought should have made any thoughtful and intelligent person exclaim, "who the hell does he think he's fooling?!" Instead, the media has led the chorus in proclaiming the brilliance of Obama's unique vision of race. No wonder the old media is dying. Who else fell for the excremental exercise in obscurantism? The usual suspects. White leftists, black leftists, and leftists of all colours and stripes. The common theme in Obama's life seems to be a leftist perspective on all things. Given the distinct minority status of leftist ideas among the American populace, a curious and intelligent person might be forgiven for wondering how Obama finds himself so close to being elected president of the entire United States?

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.__TomSowell

As Sowell so skillfully points out in his column, Obama's candidacy is one huge exercise in chameleon-like shading and shadowing of black, white, and brown ideation.

The ravings of Jeremiah Wright would be enough to make anyone with intact judgment turn away from Obama. The fact that so many people persist in defending the paranoid ranting of the privileged and powerful Wright suggests that judgment has gone away in a large part of the population. If that crew ever elects a US President, the entire world had best take cover.

Secret Invasion Plans By Russia of North America

Reminiscent of the movie "Red Dawn", comes this invasion/attack map by the Russians and their allies on North America, discovered by tourists in a Yugoslavian world atlas in Dubrovnik.

“Submarines labelled SSSR are on both coasts. The apparent flight paths of ICBMs are marked. Cuba’s soldiers and bases are indicated (…) If you can figure out more precisely what’s going on I’d certainly be curious, and I imagine that other readers would get a kick out of it.”...A look at the actual legend of the map does allow for some closer dating. Item #3 (the red vertical stripes) indicates the pro-soviet regimes in the hemisphere – Cuba and Nicaragua. The inclusion of that second country limits the timeframe of the map to 1979-1990, the era when the Sandinistas were in control of Nicaragua....Whereas blue indicates the US itself (Sjedinjene Americke Drzave, acronym SAD – but that is a coincidence, I presume), yellow indicates ’separatist’ forces at work in the North American continent, such as Quebec (although that is a Canadian, not a US issue) and Black Muslims (around Chicago) and Mexican-Americans (in Texas). Again, a pretty remarkable comment, coming from a Yugoslav atlas.___Source

Currently, the Russians are in no condition to invade anyone, except perhaps Chechnya, which is inside Russian borders anyway. It is a bit spooky to go back in time--not so very far--to when the pathetic country that calls itself Russia was called the USSR, and claimed superpower status.

Today, China occupies the niche of "would-be superpower with the intent to rule the world." The eventual fate of China may be even more cruel than the fate of Russia is turning out to be. Because China is destroying herself in the process of trying to achieve her ambitions. Russia, at least, mainly destroyed other countries to fill its ambitions. Still, China is likely to collapse of her own excesses in an even more spectacular fall than that which overcame the USSR.

The sad fate of brutal empires, to have to come into being at the time that the anti-empire of North America was reaching its peak.

Obama-World: Where You Can if You Will

Nothing illustrates the nature of psychological neoteny and academic lobotomy so much as popular movements divorced from reality. Emotion empty of reason. Take the Obama campaign for US President.

Senator Obama wrote his memoir "Dreams of My Father" 13 years ago in 1995. In that book, Obama presents the formative years of his life, and the important intellectual and emotional inputs that went into making Barack the boy into Senator Obama, candidate of hope. Yet, what proportion of Obama-joiners have read the book and considered its importance?

One of the most important influences in Obama's life has been the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In 2006 alone, Obama donated $22,500 to Rev. Wright's church--where Obama and his family are long-time members. A large proportion of Obama supporters are ignoring Obama's 1995 book, and his mentor Jeremiah Wright. That group of consciously oblivious supporters apparently includes the US national mainstream media. And that is not all the US MSM is ignoring.

You might say, the US presidential campaign is in the throes of hope without foundation. But it is actually hope based upon wishful thinking. Wishful thinking without foundation. I can understand why youthful and naive voters would indulge in such wishful thinking. I can understand why US black voters, raised under almost forty years worth of entitlement thinking would indulge in a rather darker form of wishful thinking. But I cannot understand the national news media's willingness to ignore its public trust and obligation to present the news.

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Multiculturalism Meme: Lethal for the West?

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.___RichardDawkins

A lethal meme, analogous to a lethal gene, is a meme that leads to a certain level of lethality for the society or culture that is parasitised by the lethal meme. Meme-complexes are even more sophisticated than simple memes, and lethal meme-complexes produce more wide-ranging lethal effects to entire cultures and civilisations. Multiculturalism is one such meme-complex.

The idea that all cultures are equal in merit and deserving respect, an idea devoid of any historical perspective, could be seriously proposed and adopted only in western liberal democracies. And logically such an idea meant only one thing, the diminution of the West and its achievements in comparison to other cultures.

Multiculturalism institutionalized as a policy, run by self-perpetuating bureaucracies and sustained by entrepreneurs of a growing multicultural industry, became an easy ride for its proponents and clients.

Immigrants were not required to embrace the West's culture and complex history; and the West did not have to strain itself in instructing immigrants on the need or importance of embracing it, warts and all.

Multiculturalism worked so long as the illusion of cultural harmony could be maintained.

But once the sham of equality got exposed by the heat of Islamist violence -- once it became undeniable that a culture in which a woman, for instance, can assert her individual freedom without fear is not at par with a culture where a woman's worth is less than that of a man -- multiculturalism as an idea was dead.

Historians will note a period of confusion followed the death of multiculturalism before the West asserted its ideals of freedom and democracy, and moved on. ___TorontoSun

The West is confronted by more enemies than multiculturalism within, and Islamism without. The West is also confronted with China, Russia, and an unholy alliance of corrupt thugocracies that span the globe.

One thing is certain. As long as the killing meme-complex of multiculturalism is taught as dogma in the universities and lower schools of the West, the death of the West will continue to hang in the balance.

Men and women who love the hard-fought ideals of the West such as

• freedom of economy, thought, assembly, and religion
• limited, representative government
• individual rights of self-determination and self-defense
• separation of ideology and state
• the freedom to conceive and work toward a marvelous future
• and many more ideals of widespread non-violence, self-determination and well-being

will need to make themselves heard, leaving no doubt as to their intention and ability to defeat all enemies of these ideals. The West cannot be weak and passive to these threats from within and without. Never surrender these ideals.

Meme-Gene Coevolution PDF and streaming
Dawkins on Memes
The Meme Meme

Hugo Chavez: Making the Rich Poor, Making the Poor Dead, Making Himself Jefe

Hugo Chavez is seen by leftist idiots as the champion of the poor. That is because leftist idiots are easy to fool by unscrupulous and bloody dictators. Chavez fits cleanly into that mold.

The claim that Chávez has brought tangible benefits to the Venezuelan poor has indeed by now become commonplace, even among his critics. In a letter addressed to President George W. Bush on the eve of the 2006 Venezuelan presidential elections, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Dolores Huerta, and Tom Hayden wrote, "Since 1999, the citizens of Venezuela have repeatedly voted for a government that -- unlike others in the past -- would share their country's oil wealth with millions of poor Venezuelans." The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted, "Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seems to have succeeded in bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas, which previously had seen little of the benefits of that country's rich endowment of oil." Even The Economist has written that "Chávez's brand of revolution has delivered some social gains."

One would expect such a consensus to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any differently from previous Venezuelan governments -- or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations -- in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor. One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

...Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

Even more disappointing are the results of the government's Robinson literacy program....In contrast to the government's claim, we found that there were more than one million illiterate Venezuelans by the end of 2005, barely down from the 1.1 million illiterate persons recorded in the first half of 2003, before the start of the Robinson program. Even this small reduction, moreover, is accounted for by demographic trends rather than the program itself. In a battery of statistical tests, we found little evidence that the program had had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy. We also found numerous inconsistencies in the government's story. For example, it claims to have employed 210,410 trainers in the anti-illiteracy effort (approximately two percent of the Venezuelan labor force), but there is no evidence in the public employment data that these people were ever hired or evidence in the government budget statistics that they were ever paid.

...by late 2007, Chávez's economic model had begun to unravel. For the first time since early 2004, a majority of voters claimed that both their personal situation and the country's situation had worsened during the preceding year. Scarcities in basic foodstuffs, such as milk, black beans, and sardines, were chronic, and the difference between the official and the black-market exchange rate reached 215 percent. When the Central Bank board received its November price report indicating that monthly inflation had risen to 4.4 percent (equivalent to an annual rate of 67.7 percent), it decided to delay publication of the report until after the vote on the constitutional reform was held.

This growing economic crisis is the predictable result of the gross mismanagement of the economy by Chávez's economic team. During the past five years, the Venezuelan government has pursued strongly expansionary fiscal and economic policies, increasing real spending by 137 percent and real liquidity by 218 percent. This splurge has outstripped even the expansion in oil revenues: the Chávez administration has managed the admirable feat of running a budget deficit in the midst of an oil boom.

Such expansionary policies were appropriate during the deep recession that Venezuela faced in the aftermath of the political and economic crisis of 2002-3. But by continuing the expansion after the recession ended, the government generated an inflationary crisis. The problem has been compounded by efforts to address the resulting imbalances with an increasingly complex web of price and exchange controls coupled with routine threats of expropriation directed at producers and shopkeepers as a warning not to raise prices. Not surprisingly, the response has been a steep drop in food production and widening food scarcity.

...What is most distressing is how predictable all of this was. Indeed, Cháveznomics is far from unprecedented: the gross contours of this story follow the disastrous experiences of many Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The economists Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards have characterized such policies as "the macroeconomics of populism." Drawing on the economic experiences of administrations as politically diverse as Juan Perón's in Argentina, Salvador Allende's in Chile, and Alan García's in Peru, they found stark similarities in economic policies and in the resulting economic evolution. Populist macroeconomics is invariably characterized by the use of expansionary fiscal and economic policies and an overvalued currency with the intention of accelerating growth and redistribution. These policies are commonly implemented in the context of a disregard for fiscal and foreign exchange constraints and are accompanied by attempts to control inflationary pressures through price and exchange controls. The result is by now well known to Latin American economists: the emergence of production bottlenecks, the accumulation of severe fiscal and balance-of-payments problems, galloping inflation, and plummeting real wages.

Chávez's behavior is typical of such populist economic experiments. The initial successes tend to embolden policymakers, who increasingly believe that they were right in dismissing the recommendations of most economists. Rational policy formulation becomes increasingly difficult, as leaders become convinced that conventional economic constraints do not apply to them. Corrective measures only start to be taken when the economy has veered out of control. But by then it is far too late. __ForeignAffairs

Chavez is a typical populist strong-arm dictator of a certain "socialist" persuasion, whose grasp of economics is typically thin. He is so much like Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il, Fidel, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, as to be blood brothers in national ruination.

Why are leftists so easily led into perdition by these miscreants? Wishful thinking accompanied by a lack of grounding in the real world of economics. In modern western civilisation, this is an all too common combination. In fact, if you graduate from university without a thorough indoctrination in inane, illogical leftist quasi-utopian delusionary thinking, you are a rare wonder.

Chavez Caught in His Own Trap

Hugo Chavez has mobilized his army along the Venezuelan/Colombian border. Faced with discontent at home, and growing international evidence that he is helping to finance the FARC campaign of narco-terrorist violence against neighboring Colombia, Chavez feels forced to act. Unfortunately for Hugo, his powerful friends--Russia and China--are too far away to be of much help, should the US decide to include Chavez' small nation in the international "Axis of Evil."

This week, Colombia launched a strike against a FARC base in Ecuador. Tired of terrorism, Colombia is not going to let FARC thugs hide in Ecuadorian or Venezuelan jungles. Moreover, the Colombian government now says FARC intended to attack Colombia with "dirty" (radioactive) bombs in a desperate blitz to cow the populace. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe said, "We cannot allow terrorists who seek refuge in other countries to spill the blood of our countrymen."

Ecuador and its ally, Venezuela, responded by threatening Colombia with war.

Colombia argues that support for FARC by Ecuador and Venezuela means a state of quasi-war already exists.

FARC definitely established a political relationship with Chavez-led Venezuela. Chavez advocates "socialism" (socialist dictatorship), and FARC had Marxist roots. Last year, the connections became overt when Chavez asked Colombia to agree to let FARC use Venezuela as a "sanctuary zone."

Despite their blatant thuggery, both Chavez and FARC still have "progressive" apologists in Europe and among American leftists. Chavez claims Fidel Castro's "anti-Yankee" legacy, which polishes his "progressive" appeal. Add this to the flammable mix: Ecuador's president is a personal ally of Chavez and something of a protege.

The conventional wisdom says Chavez is bluffing. The Peru-Ecuador Border War of 1995, however, demonstrates that border skirmishing in South America can quickly escalate. Still, South American border wars stir nationalist passions -- in the 1995 conflict, Peru's authoritarian president, Alberto Fujimori, saw his popularity skyrocket.

Chavez faces domestic troubles. He has brutalized his domestic opponents. He has squandered Venezuela's oil windfall -- on populist political schemes and Russian weapons. He suffered a stinging setback in late 2007 in a referendum that would have essentially made him president for life. Oil production is declining. His political supporters have enriched themselves, sparking resentment among poor Venezuelans who once overwhelmingly backed Chavez. ___StrategyPage

Chavez believes that going to war will unite the country behind him. But that strategy does not always work out well for the aggressor. In fact, with the US preparing to gear down operations in Iraq, battle hardened units of the US military will be looking for new "training ground."

Chavez y Correa: Twin Clowns of Different Mothers

Colombia has been forced to endure the terrorist FARC organisation since the 1960s. But Colombia is growing tired of the narco-terrorism of FARC, the political assassinations, the bloody mess FARC has made of the Colombian countryside. So Colombia borrowed a few tricks from the US coalition's "War on Terror" and dropped a bomb on some of FARC's top thugs. True, the thugs were enjoying the hospitality of Correa's Ecuador at the time, but perhaps terrorists should not be allowed safe haven, after all. Who told terrorists they could take "time out" whenever they wanted. Chavez and Correa--the clowns of latin America?

Colombia said on Sunday documents found in a camp in Ecuador where Colombian troops killed a top guerrilla boss showed ties between the FARC rebels and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, including contacts about political proposals and local military commanders.

FARC rebel commander Raul Reyes was killed inside Ecuador in an army operation that has fuelled tensions between Washington ally Colombia and neighbours Venezuela and Ecuador, where leftist leaders are fiercely opposed to U.S. proposals.

Police Commander Gen. Oscar Naranjo said documents found in computers belonging to Reyes showed contacts between a Correa government minister, Gustavo Larrea, and the FARC commander to discuss political proposals and projects on the frontier.

"The questions raised by these documents need concrete answers," Naranjo said. "What is the state of relations between Ecuador's government and a terrorist group like the FARC."___Source

Other papers found in the camp suggested economic ties between FARC and Chavez' Venezuela. In fact, Chavez was stupid enough to threaten Colombia with war if it ever killed FARC thugs inside of Venezuela! Can you imagine the idiocy of the brainless dictator Chavez? He as much as admitted that he gave safe harbour to the narco-terrorists inside his country!

If Chavez truly wants to shift this farce into the end-game stage, he is going about it exactly the right way. Fidel is gone. Chavez wants to be the new Fidel, but Chavez is stupid. His days are numbered.