Because our government isn’t yet doing enough, or costing enough, or interfering sufficiently in our lives, three researchers at the University of California San Francisco now recommend that the government should regulate sugar, just as it does alcohol and tobacco:

A new commentary published online in the Feb. 1 issue of Nature says sugar is just as “toxic” for people as the other two, so the government should step in to curb its consumption.

The United Nations announced in September that chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes contribute to 35 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the commentary. The U.N. pegged tobacco, alcohol, and diet as big risk factors that contributed to this death rate.

Two of those are regulated by governments, “leaving one of the primary culprits behind this worldwide health crisis unchecked,” the authors, Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt and Claire D. Brindis, argued.

I’m struggling here to say something snarky and clever, but I just can’t.  You see, I have this sneaking suspicion that, if Obama gets another four years in the White House, we’ll see a Department of Sugar Regulation, complete with punitive taxes on its purchase, minimum age requirements, rationing to ensure that people don’t eat too much and, quite possibly, rules requiring that sugar and sugar products be kept in special locked areas in stores in order to prevent theft and underage use.

Incidentally, does it strike you as coincidental that this study got published two weeks before Valentine’s Day?  Yeah, I don’t think it’s a coincidence either.  Considering that Communist and Muslim cultures consider Valentine’s Day evil both because of its Christian origin and because of the fact that it triggers an orgy of spending (how capitalist!), it is “holiday non grata” in those totalitarian societies.  It seems as if the food police want to see the same thing happen here.

I am envisioning some sort of bumper sticker, though.  You know, something along the lines of “Protect Valentine’s Day.  Vote Republican in 2012.”

Liam Neeson’s flirting with converting to Islam, a religious quest made possible by the fact that the religion has great calls to prayer and everyone does it (at least in Muslim countries) — and, no, I’m not exaggerating when I belittle his expressed motive when he contemplates abandoning the Catholicism of his childhood in exchange for the religion of perpetual outrage:

On filming in Istanbul, Neeson told British rag The Sun: “The call to prayer happens five times a day, and for the first week, it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit, and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing… There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning, and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.”

Just to be clear, Neeson makes no mention of spiritual or doctrinal failings in his childhood faith, nor does he speak in any way of the profound procedural and moral changes he’d have to make to his life if he did indeed convert.

Thinking about it, Neeson may be on to something here, with his shallow belief that he can go on as before, just singing a slightly different song along with the muezzin.  As my cousin, who spent years ministering as a prison chaplain, wrote me in connection with prison conversions to Islam:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

Prisoners use conversion to justify their rage. Neeson’s admiring little speech indicates that at least one movie star type seems to being using it to justify just how shallow he really, truly is.

The only thing I find disheartening about this piece of idiocy is that it might affect my viewing habits.  For example, I never listen to Cat Stevens’ music.  It’s not conscious censorship on my part, as in “Everyone should boycott that man because he converted to Islam.”  It’s a more informal, visceral response.  Every time I hear one of his songs lovey-dovey 1970s pop songs, I get hacked off at the fact that he is now a vocal, proselytzing enthusiast for the whole Muslim package:  death to the Jews, death to America, women wrapped in tents, dead gays, etc.  My blood pressure shoots up, and then I turn the music off.  Fortunately, Snoop Doggs’ conversion doesn’t affect me because I wouldn’t have listened to his songs before conversion, and I’m certainly not going to listen to them now.

But Neeson . . . ummm.  You see, I like the Narnia movies.  I love the first, like the second, and am looking forward to watching the third (the delay is a Netflix thing, meaning that I put it on the list and Mr. Bookworm takes it off).  It was bad enough when Neeson foolishly denied that Aslan was an allegorical Christ.  It’s high blood pressure time, though, if the actor who voices the allegorical Christ has converted to a faith antithetical to everything C.S. Lewis intended to convey through those wonderful books.

Would anyone care to explain to Mr. Bookworm the difference between an extremist sect breaking its country’s laws by discriminating against women, and a country that has as an integral part of its law and culture murderous attacks on women, “witches,” children and gays?

He professes to be bewildered.

This is an exercise in pure speculation. I invite all here to bring their own notions to the table.

An old friend of mine visited me last Saturday to catch up on things. We walked my dog and began a long conversation that ended later in my backyard over coffee and tea.

Bob is fascinated by history, and has been a long-time contributor to print and online history publications. So our conversations often veer off into that realm. Because we have developed a years-long habit of riffing on whatever thoughts come to our heads, we never know where one of our history threads will go.

We were discussing the dark ages, which not only were characterized by the disintegration of the Roman political order, but also the loss of an immense store of practical technological knowledge: agricultural practices and implements; construction techniques—it would take until the 19th century for Europeans to match the Romans’ road-building prowess—war machines; distribution and warehousing; science; art (which in Roman times was the realm of artisans, not self-absorbed “transgressive” pricks).  

I said that I think we are headed for a “soft dark ages.” That took him aback. “How are we headed there,” he asked, “and how would they be ‘soft’?”

I answered his last question first. They would be “soft” because unlike what happened in Roman times, we have the ability to store gigantic amounts of information in small spaces. One person can carry around encyclopedic knowledge on a flash drive. Multiply him by the millions, and you have a vast repository of recoverable knowledge that is private, widely dispersed, and replicated many times over. No matter how determined or persistent this era’s barbarians—Marxists, Muslims, Democrats, unionists, academicians—they simply would not be able to track down and destroy all modern technological knowledge.

But beyond furtive individual efforts at hiding and protecting the knowledge we would need to create a New America or a New West, there would be vaster, more organized, more collective efforts to protect knowledge until better days. I suggested to Bob three institutions or concepts that would become the next dark ages’ hallmarks: The new castle fortress; the new monastic life; and the new Europe.

1.  The Return of the Castle Fortresses

If the United States, Europe and China disintegrate, as seems likely, there will be a scramble for political power among the remnant provinces, states, and regions. Most power will be wielded by Marxist thugs and old-fashioned warlords, so it would not be surprising to see China devolve to its pre-Qin Dynasty pattern of warring neighbor states, or America’s big cities—Chicago, Detroit, Washington—and its Mexicanized rural regions, become brutal satrapies run by the people like Jesse Jackson, Bill Ayers, La Raza, ethnic mafias, and the like.

Europe could begin a too-late, doomed-to-fail ethnic cleansing of its Muslim underclass, but would probably slip either into fascism or dhimmitude. Poland, the bravest of the European nations, might be able to escape either fate, although that would be doubtful given its lack of firepower and its closeness to the greatest of all the European barbarian states, Russia.

But the barbarians would not win everywhere. Just as Old Europe in the dark ages had its bright centers of learning, protected by force of arms, there would be parts of the world that would not succumb to the new barbarity. They would become mankind’s new castles, fortresses of resistance where decency and unpoliticized science might still flourish.

These new fortresses will not have thick walls and deep moats, although their means of protection metaphorically will be the same. Their moats will be the ability of their computer geniuses to resist and thwart attacks upon their databases, and their walls will be heavily and well armed soldiers and citizens who will unhesitatingly destroy any physical threat to their sanctuaries.

Where will the new fortresses be? Either in lands that can protect themselves or are far enough away from the barbarians that they will be difficult to invade and hold. In the former case, Texas and Utah come to mind, states whose populations are already armed and whose economic infrastructures already lay upon solid technological foundations. More remote places, like New Zealand, Alberta, Baja California, could set up defendable dark age redoubts if they were properly armed, including with nuclear weapons.

There would be secret places, too. Large nations and corporations have set aside fortified places where they can stash tools, seeds, patents, rare materials, genealogies, and other irreplaceable items. Assuming that some of them will not be expropriated  by the new barbarians, these vital repositories of knowledge could be available for a later renaissance.    

2. The New Monastic Life

If the fortresses hold, they will become the new monasteries. Instead of patiently copying barely understood manuscripts from a fallen civilization, the new monastics will preserve the old science that they already well understand and attempt to build on it.

The ends they pursue will be the advancement of medicine (especially countermeasures to the barbarians’ chemical and biological weapons); the protection of personal data against spying or theft; the subversion of the barbarians’ computer and weapons systems (think Stuxnet); and the preservation of seminal texts that will one day replace the adulterated, denatured literature of the new emperors.

In contrast, the science of the barbarians will, because of barbarians’ nature, focus on predictable ends: refining the capacity to deliver death, whether it be through abortion, euthanasia, or mass murder against political opponents; improving methods of surveillance and the control of communications, “education,” and literature; honing tools designed to hunt down wealth or knowledge and expropriate it; and finding ways to increase the lifespans and sexual abilities of the rulers.

3. The New Europe

In the old dark ages, Europe itself was the physical locus of quiet scholarship and the preservation of old knowledge that later flowered into the Renaissance. In the “soft dark ages,” ones cushioned by the existence of fierce armed “monks” in well-defended freeholds, the New Europe will be a state of mind. In some ways, it will be how the Catholic Church sees itself: No matter where you go or what language you speak, there are the universal constants of the Mass and the Magisterium.

Similarly, wherever our new defenders of knowledge and decency find themselves — Patagonia, the Outback, the remote Rocky Mountains, the bowels of Obama-ite Chicago — they will share a common love of truth and real science. They will know how to detect falsehood and be indifferent to the barbarians’ enticements. Whatever secret handshake they develop, it will be something that the barbarians might know exists, but will, like their Vandal and Mongol forerunners, never understand.

How long will it take for the soft dark ages to run their course? Who could tell? My concern is that there remain a core of people who will resist the thugocracy, bloodlessly and not, until the thugs’ own fatal contradictions do them in. The United States defeated the Soviet Union because the USSR not only lived a lie, but because it had long before killed off its best and smartest people.

That pattern will repeat itself among our Marxist, Muslim, and academic brethren. But while they will be doomed to repeat a history of failure and debasement, our destiny will call for us to recreate the wonderful things that men once called “the West” and “America.”  

I didn’t bother to read the entirety of an endless article about a bad thing happening in Mexico.  No, I’m not talking about drug cartels or about Mexican citizens being slaughtered by guns sent over courtesy of a Democrat Department of Justice attempting to prove that guns hurt people.  I’m talking about plants that process old batteries, releasing dangerous toxins into the surrounding country side.  Bad thing, right?  But the big irony is that this bad thing happened because of environmental zealots here in the US:

The rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.

Even when we’re trying to be good, we’re evil.

Americans may be evil, but Nicholas Kristof wants us to know that the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t deserve its bad press, because, over dinner, a really nice 22-year-old girl assured him that it’s a peace-loving organization.  More than that, when he asked her about Israel, amongst other issues, she didn’t answer!  That proves that the Muslim Brotherhood is a force for good:

I asked skeptically about alcohol, peace with Israel, and the veil. Sondos, who wears a hijab, insisted that the Brotherhood wasn’t considering any changes in these areas and that its priority is simply jobs.

“Egyptians are now concerned about economic conditions,” she said. “They want to reform their economic system and to have jobs. They want to eliminate corruption.” Noting that alcohol supports the tourism industry, she added: “I don’t think any upcoming government will focus on banning anything.”

Apparently the charming young Sondos is a more reliable authority than the MB itself.  After all, who can forget the MB greatest hits, a list that includes this:

A senior cleric in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has declared that ordinary Egyptians are obligated to kill ‘Zionists’ whom they encounter.

This:

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which expects to win at least a plurality in Monday’s legislative elections, held a “kill the Jews” rally in Cairo Friday.

Thousands of supporters attended the pre-election rally at a mosque on the Muslim Sabbath, promising to “one day kill all the Jews” and wage war against Jerusalem’s “Judaization.”

And this, from a Muslim Brotherhood handbook:

“The Islamic Ummah [nation]… [is] the most exalted nation among men;…you are the masters of the world, even if your enemies desire your degradation…”

“Jihad and preparation towards Jihad are not only for the purpose of fending off assaults and attacks of Allah’s enemies against Muslims, but are also for the purpose of realizing the great task of establishing an Islamic state and strengthening the religion and spreading it around the world…

“…Jihad for Allah is not limited to the specific region of the Islamic countries, …and it shall continue to be raised, with the help of Allah, until every inch of the land of Islam will be liberated, the State of Islam will be established…

“Then comes the power of arms and weapons,… and this is the role of Jihad…, a religious public duty… incumbent upon the Islamic nation, and is a personal duty to fend off the infidels’ attack on the nation… (…)

The competition at the New York Times is always stiff, but I think that, today at least, Nicholas Kristof walks away with The Walter Duranty Award for most dishonest reporting to advance a political agenda antithetical to America, her values, and her allies.

Ignore the fact that the Qur’an is drenched in Jew hated.  Ignore the fact that, since Islam came into being, it has alternately treated Jews as second class citizens or actively tried to slaughter them.  If you can ignore those realities, you too can be an American ambassador in the Obama administration.  You get bonus points if you’re a self-loathing, Leftist Jew who holds the job.  With those credentials, it is possible to say with a perfectly straight face that world-wide Muslim antisemitism is — yes, wait for it . . . the Jews’ fault!

Growing global anti-Semitism is linked to Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, [Howard Gutman] the American ambassador to Belgium told stunned Jewish conference attendants in Brussels earlier this week.

[snip]

A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Gutman said. He also argued that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.

Fortunately, the speaker who came on immediately after Gutman’s statement (and please note that Gutman ran away for an “appointment” immediately after dropping this antisemitic bombshell) did not feel that politeness constrained him from speaking the truth:

[T]he next speaker offered a scathing rebuttal to the envoy’s remarks.

“The modern Anti-Semite formally condemns Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and expresses upmost sympathy with the Jewish people. He simply has created a new species, the “Anti-Zionist” or – even more sophisticated – the so-called ‘Israel critic,’” Germany attorney Nathan Gelbart said.

“The ‘Israel critic’ will never state ‘Jews go home’ but is questioning the legality of the incorporation of the State of Israel and therefore the right for the Jewish people to settle in their homeland. He will not say the Jews are the evil of the world but claim that the State of Israel is a major cause for instability and war in the region,” he said. “There is no other country, no other people on this planet the ‘Israel critic’ would dedicate so much time and devotion as to the case of Israel.”

“For no other country he would criticize or ask to boycott its goods or academics. And this for one simple reason: Because Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not more and not less,” Gelbart said.

Despite his actions, his words, and the words of his agents, Obama still has the audacity to boast about his pro-Israel credentials:

Though Barack Obama has been picking fights with the government of the State of Israel since his first day in office, the flip side of that relationship is his desperate desire to convince American Jews he’s the Jewish state’s best friend. That’s been an even tougher sell in the last year, and polls have consistently shown Obama’s support among American Jews declining. But at a fundraiser last night at the home of Jack Rosen, president of the largely defunct American Jewish Congress, Obama was tooting his own horn again, in a way that reflects not only his political agenda but his well-known high opinion of himself:

And as Jack alluded to, this administration — I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration. And that’s not just our opinion, that’s the opinion of the Israeli government. Whether it’s making sure that our intelligence cooperation is effective, to making sure that we’re able to construct something like an Iron Dome so that we don’t have missiles raining down on Tel Aviv, we have been consistent in insisting that we don’t compromise when it comes to Israel’s security. And that’s not just something I say privately, that’s something that I said in the U.N. General Assembly. And that will continue.

American Jews have shown themselves remarkably faithful in their love affair with Democrats, despite the fact that this recent administration has been the spousal equivalent of a wife beater. Let’s hope that evidence such as Gutman’s remarks — made in antisemitic Belgium of all places — will help more Jews figure out that they’re in an abusive relationship and decide to get the Hell out of it. The true Lefties amongst the Jews will never leave, but maybe the others, the “I vote Democrat because Republicans are antisemites” will start heading for the battered Democratic Jews’ shelter (aka, the Republican Party).

Bruce Kesler spoke with Jonathan Spyer, who wrote Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict.  Despite the current upheaval in the Middle East, and its attendant rise in antisemitism (which is impressive, considering its previous high level), Spyer is sanguine, and even optimistic.  Check out Bruce’s post and see what you think.

For years, I’ve been trying to articulate the difference between good immigrants and bad immigrants, meaning those that benefit a country and those that I’d like to see kept out.  This has become a particularly pointed concern for me in light of the PC attitude that encourages immigrants of all stripes not to give their allegiance to their home country.  Clifford D. May, in an article about Bat Ye’or’s latest book regarding the inevitable Muslimization of PC Europe, puts together in a single paragraph the concept I’ve struggled with for so long:

Immigrants can enrich a nation. But there is a difference between immigrants and colonists. The former are eager to learn the ways of their adopted home, to integrate and perhaps assimilate — which does not require relinquishing their heritage or forgetting their roots. Colonists, by contrast, bring their culture with them and live under their own laws. Their loyalties lie elsewhere.

It’s a depressing notion, but it is a relief to see it summed up so neatly.

I have been reading and enjoying Leslie Carroll’s Royal Pains: A Rogues’ Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds.  Focusing on Eastern and Western Europe from the 12th century onwards, it’s a brisk walk through royal excesses.

Having read about half the book now, I think that “bad seeds” is the operative phrase in the title. One of the stand-out features of European royalty is the inbreeding, because the royals confined themselves to an extremely small pool of available matrimonial candidates.  This meant that cousin marriages were normative. That inbreeding didn’t just lead to such features as the infamously ugly Hapsburg jaw, it led to insanity.  When that insanity was mixed with a toxic, already violent environment and unlimited power, it all too often manifested itself as grandiose sadism.

The most deranged royal killers were all the products of inbreeding mixed with extremely violent environments (cultures that tortured, violent parents, war and dislocation, etc.).  Examples are Caligula, Vlad Dracula, Elizabeth Bathory, Ivan the Terrible, the Duke of Cumberland, and Peter III of Russia.  As you can see, with the exception of the Duke of Cumberland, who used the military discipline structure to play out his sadism, the most famous sadists were unfettered totalitarian monarchs in the Roman Empire, Russia and Central Europe.  Western European monarchs had stronger structural limits preventing the worst excesses of their insanity.  They went insane (Juana of Spain, Ludwig  of Bavaria), but they were pathetic, not violent.

And the ones I’ve named were very, very violent indeed.  Although all lived in times that thought nothing of rape, torture, and mass murder, and that considered executions a form of public entertainment, the rulers I’ve named were infamous in their own times for the imagination they brought to causing suffering, for the scope of their sadism, and for the manifest, often sexual pleasure, they derived from their bloody, pain-filled escapades.  They killed, not just for political advantage (or, in Bathory’s case, not at all for political advantage), but because they delighted in causing the maximum amount of pain to their victims.

The above essay isn’t just to introduce you to an interesting book, or to ruin your current meal.  It’s a lead-in to an American Thinker article about the inbreeding that goes on in the Muslim world.  I’ve long known about the inbreeding, but I really never thought of it on the scale that Ann Barnhardt describes:  1,400 years of inbreeding.

I also knew that inbreeding causes diseases and mental defects (and think about that on a 1,400 year time line), but it wasn’t until I read Carroll’s books that it occurred to me that inbreeding, plus a violent culture, correlates to sadism.  This may help explain why Islamic countries, aside from being tied to their Koran, have never been able to abandon their medieval approach to punishment (stoning, cutting off limbs, whipping, public hangings, etc.):  It’s entirely possible that, as a result of birth defects, a significant part of the population, or at least of the rule classes, enjoys the spectacle at a very deep and sick level.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

One of the things the Leftist multiculturalists refuse to acknowledge is that Islam does not assimilate.  Individual practitioners of the faith may, periodically and superficially, espouse the culture in which they live, but the fact remains that Islam, by its nature, is the Borg.

Borg-like, the Islam collective’s motto is “Resistance is futile.  You will be assimilated.”  The Borg/Islam collective does not recognize the possibility that it might be the entity that assimilates.  As with the fictional Borg populating Star Trek : The Next Generation, when the Islamists move in on a territory, they move in to conquer and for no other reason.

I mention this pop culture analogy here, because one of Singapore’s past leaders, Lee Kuan Yew, in an interview to promote his new book, spoke about Islam’s failure to assimilate, and he made a statement that is, I think, full comparable to Churchill’s speech about the Iron Curtain dividing Europe:

In the book, Mr Lee, when asked to assess the progress of multiracialism in Singapore, said: “I have to speak candidly to be of value, but I do not wish to offend the Muslim community.

“I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came, and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration – friends, intermarriages and so on, Indians with Chinese, Chinese with Indians – than Muslims. That’s the result of the surge from the Arab states.”

He added: “I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam.”

He also said: “I think the Muslims socially do not cause any trouble, but they are distinct and separate.”

Mr lee then went on to speak of how his own generation of politicians who worked with him had integrated well, including sitting down and eating together. He said: “But now, you go to schools with Malay and Chinese, there’s a halal and non-halal segment and so too, the universities. And they tend to sit separately so as not to be contaminated. All that becomes a social divide.”

He added that the result was a “veil” across peoples. Asked what Muslims in Singapore needed to do to integrate, he replied: “Be less strict on Islamic observances and say ‘Okay, I’ll eat with you.’”  (Emphasis mine.)

Certainly if there’s one image that epitomizes Islam, it’s the veiled face, whether the veil hides women from all civic interactions or masks the men on Western streets who commit violence with impunity as they hide their faces from the authorities.

Yew, who is no longer a power broker, has the luxury of age and retirement to speak of this veil.  It’s interesting, however, that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has suddenly decided to speak up as well about the Borg in Britain’s midst:

In an attack on Britain’s previous government, Cameron said authorities there had been too hesitant to intervene when some sectors of society espoused abhorrent views.

“We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values,” Cameron said. “We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

Cameron said a culture of tolerance had allowed both Islamic extremists, and far-right extremists, to build support for their causes. “We’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them,” he said.

Some European allies have criticized Britain for harboring hardline Islamic clerics and failing to clamp down on mosques that promote a perverted view of Islam.

Several terrorists involved in attacks or attempted plots in the U.S., Sweden, Denmark and Norway over the last two years have had links to Britain, or British-based clerics.

“If we are to defeat this threat, I believe it’s time to turn the page on the failed policies of the past,” Cameron said. “Instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we – as governments and societies – have got to confront it, in all its forms.”

I am delighted to see people with bully pulpits begin to speak, although I don’t expect to hear anything intelligent on the subject from the world’s premier bully pulpit until January 2013 (assuming all goes well in the November 2012 elections).  As it is, my only hope now is that the Islamic/Borg invaders haven’t already reached to a tipping point from which there is no return.

Hat tip:  American Thinker

Cross-posted at Right Wing News