Nasty unhelpful truths you can't state in public: 1) Most great American popular music, in a variety of genres, was made by people on drugs. (Whenever you hear a musician saying "I'm clean now, and I'm making the best music of my life" you know their next album will be awful.)
Got that Right!
The French colonial general Henri Gouraud created Lebanon from part of Syria for the benefit of the Christian Maronites whose fractional majority was afterwards overwhelmed by the country's Muslim communities. This imbalance helped to provoke the civil war, although – in keeping with the confessional system imposed by the French – a Christian president still presides over a largely Muslim country. The Maronites, roaring their opposition to the Syrian military presence (though never, in the past, to the Israeli occupation), regard Lebanon as their place of refuge, a sanctuary after centuries of Muslim domination of the Middle East. Kemal Salibi, one of the American University's finest academics, has refuted this in a clinical, slightly cynical book.
Maybe cause Israel never occupied the whole country and behaved a lot better than the Syrians. Funny that he's unable to entertain such thoughts, Westernized people are always the baddies in his world view!
Amen. Fortuyn was not a threat to liberalism. His assassination is. What Fortuyn dared to say is that Islam itself, when converted into a political agenda, is a direct threat to the values and tolerance that are the signal achievements of the West. This is not racism; it is a cultural fact. Islam deserves respect as a great religion, but its attitudes toward women, toward homosexuals, toward the freedoms and privacy and social experimentation that are one of the guiding triumphs of Western culture, is a danger to liberal democracy and a free society. Fortuyn was brave enough to say this. One way to respect his legacy and defy the violence that felled him is to follow his example and keep stating what we know to be true.
Heather McDonald weighs in with this trenchant observation.
Expect the race industry to resurrect the same arguments against content testing as were used in the 1940s, but without proposing aptitude tests in its place. There is no reason to think that the test score gap will go away with a different test, since the explanation for it lies largely in a culture that devalues academic achievement. So after spending millions on developing a new test, the education profession will be left with its old options: shooting the messenger by blaming the test for differential academic outcomes, or finally telling the truth about the cultural changes needed to overcome lagging academic achievement. The sky will fall before the latter option comes to pass, so get ready for another decade of covert racial preferences and explicit excuse-making around the new SAT.
John Malkovich wants to improve the UK's journalistic & political standards:
GEORGE Galloway, the outspoken Labour MP, is consulting his lawyers after Hollywood star John Malkovich allegedly said he would like to shoot him....... He was asked by one student who he would most like to fight to the death, and replied "I’d rather just shoot them," before naming Mr Galloway and the Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk.".....
It would be fair to say you can infer from what he said that he was talking about the way George Galloway and Robert Fisk report on the Israel and Palestinian conflict and perhaps that they are not the most neutral of reports and come out with the Palestinian side."
As a matter of note, Galloway once called me a fascist, racist barely literate moron after I insulted him for calling the US & Israel partners in genocide.
As the first execution since 1963 comes up for review, of course, the anti-death penalty people have mounted an effective argument
No. 1
Harris' lawyers challenged the fairness of the law, based on data that shows defendants upstate are more likely to face a capital trial than those downstate. Upstate counties have about 19 percent of all homicides but account for 61 percent of all death penalty prosecutions, the defense lawyers say.
But Harris was convicted in Brooklyn
No. 2
Another challenge involves the law's rules for jury selection. For death penalty cases, the law allows for screening out people who are philosophically opposed to capital punishment. Harris' lawyers argue that makes the jury pool biased toward death.
Was it used?, So what!
No. 3
One of the most simple and narrow issues the court could focus on is an incident in the jury room during Harris' case. During the penalty phase, a bailiff urged jurors to continue deliberations and avoid a deadlock, a move Harris' lawyers say pushed jurors toward a death sentence.
Or in other words, someone told them to hurry up, and that's why he got death. Nothing to do with the fact that he murdered three people in cold blood during a robbery, including stabbing a pregnant woman to death as she screamed for mercy. Face it, the real issue is that Harris is black, as if ultra high black crime rate should get you a free pass.
