Mark Steyn's Blog, page 25

That's Different, He's Our Vampire

While we're waiting for Obama and the Democrats to return all the money they've taken from the vampires at Bain, let's not forget this:

One of Obama’s top campaign financiers – Jonathan Lavine – is also managing director at Bain, bundling between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions for the 2012 Obama Victory Fund, according to estimates released by the Obama campaign.

So the guy going around raising all that money to help Obama save America from vampire capitalism is the fellow who laid off all those steel workers.

Your Land is My Land

Elsewhere on NRO this fine morning, Lee Habeeb has a terrific column on Woody Guthrie and "This Land Is Your Land," a song I have always loathed, mostly on musical grounds -- the consciously childlike melody, and the stiltedness of its central rhyme ("this land is my land . . . New York island"). I especially dislike it at my town's Memorial Day ceremony when it intrudes on the Fifth Graders' otherwise splendid repertoire of "God Bless America" and "You're a Grand Old Flag."

But Lee reminds us there are other reasons to loathe it. From Inauguration Day 2009:

Hope and change were in the air that cold winter day, and Seeger and Springsteen figured it was time for America to hear the rarely performed stanza.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,

A great big sign there said, “private property”;

But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’;

That side was made for you and me.

No wonder we’ve never heard that stanza. It changes Guthrie’s song from a celebration of America into a bitter indictment of a nation built on unjust private-property rights.

It's not quite true that we've "never heard" that verse. I have a strong recollection from back in the mid-Nineties when the Kennedy Center Honors decided to honor that old Stalinist Pete Seeger. Woody Guthrie's son Arlo concluded the night with "This Land" and sang the little-known verse, substituting "Proposition 187" for the words "private property." If memory serves, Mrs. Clinton clapped her hands with delight, and Seeger laughed -- as well he might: He understood Arlo Guthrie was slyly using the specific topical reference as a cover for the more general point. Seeger, a man who colluded in the half-century-long theft of "Wimoweh" ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight") from a penniless African musician called Solomon Linda, has a long history of indifference to property rights other than his own.

From Seat to Shining Seat

I hope you're sitting down for this one...

Navy's New Gender-Neutral Carriers Won't Have Urinals

Football and Hockey

In the wake of Louis Freeh's report on Penn State's complicity in serial rape, Rand Simberg writes of Unhappy Valley's other scandal:

I’m referring to another cover up and whitewash that occurred there two years ago, before we learned how rotten and corrupt the culture at the university was. But now that we know how bad it was, perhaps it’s time that we revisit the Michael Mann affair, particularly given how much we’ve also learned about his and others’ hockey-stick deceptions since. Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

Not sure I'd have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change "hockey-stick" graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus. And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to "investigate" Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing.

If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won't it cover up? Whether or not he's "the Jerry Sandusky of climate change", he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his "investigation" by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.  

Beyond the Stereotype

As a side note to my weekend column, The National Post of Canada reports:

A Quebec activist who fought the stereotyping of Muslims was charged with supporting terrorism on Friday after an RCMP investigation linked her to an alleged scheme to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah...

Prior to her arrest, Ms. Diab was vice-president of the Association of Young Lebanese Muslims. Her activism was focused partly on changing the stereotypes that too often associate Muslims with terrorism and violence.

Oh, well. Another anti-stereotypist bites the dust.

Firearms parts were found in her luggage at Montreal airport on May 19, 2011. “Based on gathered evidence it is also alleged that she was shipping firearms parts through people in her community traveling to Lebanon. The victims were unaware of the contents of the packages they were carrying for the accused,” the RCMP said.

Had she been more stereotypical, she'd have shipped the parts through the "people in her community"'s underwear. So there is that.

Islamist Generation

Media types like to talk about “the narrative”: News is just another form of storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others.

The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. “I believe that children are our future,” as the late Whitney Houston once asserted. And, even if Whiney hadn’t believed it, it would still as a point of fact be true. Any media narrative involving young people presupposes that they are the forces of progress, wresting the world from the grasping clutches of mean, vengeful old men and making it a better place.

In the West, young people actually believe this. Thus, in 2008, Barack Obama, being the preferred choice of America’s youth, was by definition the candidate of progress and the future. In humdrum reality, his idea of the future doesn’t seem to be any more futuristic than the pre-Thatcher statist wasteland of Britain in the Seventies, but that didn’t stop the massed ranks of fresh-faced youth chanting “We are the Hopeychange!” in adoring if glassy-eyed unison behind him at every campaign rally. Four years later, half of recent graduates can’t find full-time employment; Americans’ college debt is now larger than credit-card debt; the number of young people with summer jobs is at a record low; and men in their late 20s and early 30s trudge upstairs every night to the same bedroom in which they slept as a kindergartner.

And that’s before they’re permanently buried by interest payments on the multitrillion-dollar debt and unfunded liabilities from Medicare. Yet in 2012 the rubes will still vote for Obama and be congratulated by the media for doing so. Because to be young is to vote for hope and change.

#ad#Likewise, halfway across the world, the Arab Spring was also hailed as the voice of youth, tweeting its universal message of hope and change. A year on, it’s proved to be rather heavier on change, and ever lighter on hope. Egypt’s first freely elected head of state is a Muslim Brotherhood man. In the parliament of the most populous Arab nation, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party and its principal rival, the Even More Muslim Brotherhood, between them won nearly three-quarters of the seats. In traditionally relaxed and secular Tunisia and Morocco, elections have been won by forces we are assured by the experts are “moderate Islamists” -- which means that, unlike the lavishly bankrolled American protectorate of Afghanistan, they won’t be executing adulterous women in the street, or at any rate not just yet.

So what are they doing? In Libya, British Commonwealth war graves have been desecrated, something that never happened under Colonel Qaddafi even at the very lowest of low points in relations between him and the West. But hey, one can forgive Libya’s suddenly liberated young men a spasm of very belated anti-imperialism, right?

Meanwhile, in northern Mali, the dominant Ansar Dine group is currently engaged in destroying the ancient shrines of Timbuktu, including the famous door of the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque that was supposed to be left closed “until the end of the world.” Bring it on, baby!

No Britons or Europeans were involved in the creation of these shrines.

Rather, it’s a dispute between the region’s traditionally moderate Sufi Islam and the ever more assertive Wahhabist model exported worldwide by Saudi Arabia with Western petrodollars. The shrines are official UNESCO World Heritage sites, but then so were the Buddhas of Bamyan blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan a decade ago. What’s next on the condemned list? Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sheikhs” (he’s like a supersized sheikh) has invited Egypt’s President Morsi to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not” -- a reference to the Muslim conqueror of Egypt back in the seventh century.

Less controversially, Egypt’s Salafi party does not see the need to destroy the Pyramids but does favor covering them in wax. The Pyramids are the last of the Seven Wonders of the World still around in the 21st century, but that’s no reason not to destroy them, as part of the new pan-Islamic identity’s contempt for any alternative claims of allegiance -- cultural, national, or historic.

#page#The old dictators represented nobody but themselves, their cronies, and their Swiss bank accounts. The new democratic rulers embody all too well the dispositions of their people. In the years immediately after 9/11, many Western commentators argued that Islam needed a reformation. This overlooked the obvious fact that Islam had already reformed, thanks to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Iran’s revolutionary mullahs, and Saudi Arabia’s principal export -- not oil, but globalized ideology. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve found myself sitting at dinner next to a Westernized Arab woman d’un certain age who was at college in the Fifties, Sixties, or Seventies, and listened to her tell me that back then “covering” was for wizened old biddies in upcountry villages, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. The future belonged to modern, uncovered women like her and her classmates.

The assumptions of her generation were off by 180 degrees: The female graduating class of Cairo University in the Fifties looked little different from Vassar. Half a century later, every woman is hijabed to the hilt. Mohammad Qayoumi, now the president of San Jose State University, recently published some photographs from the Afghanistan he grew up in: The girls in high heels and pencil skirts in the Kabul record stores of the 1960s aren’t quite up to Carnaby Street cool, but they’d fit in in any HMV store in provincial England. Half a century later, it was forbidden by law for women to feel sunlight on their face, or leave the home without male permission. Even more amazing to my female dining companions, today you see more covered women in London’s East End or the Rosengård district of Malmö, Sweden, than you do in Tunis or Amman.

#ad#The mistake made by virtually the entire Western media during the Arab Spring was to assume that social progress is like technological progress -- that, like the wheel or the internal-combustion engine, women’s rights and gay rights cannot be disinvented. They can, very easily. In Egypt, the youth who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood are more fiercely Islamic than their grandparents who backed Nasser’s revolution in 1952. In Tunisia, the young are more proscriptive than the secular old-timers who turned a blind eye to the country’s bars and brothels. In the developed world, we’re told that Westernization is “inevitable.” “Just wait and see,” say the blithely complacent inevitablists. “They haven’t yet had time to Westernize.” But Westernization is every bit as resistible in Brussels and Toronto as it’s proved in Cairo and Jalalabad. In the first ever poll of Irish Muslims, 37 percent said they would like Ireland to be governed by Islamic law. When the same question was put to young Irish Muslims, it was 57 percent. In other words, the hope’n’change generation are less Westernized than their parents. Thirty-six percent of young British Muslims think the penalty for apostasy -- i.e., leaving Islam -- should be death. Had you asked the same question of British Muslims in 1970, I doubt the enthusiasts would have cracked double figures.

Unlike the dopes droning the halfwit slogans at the Obama rallies, these guys mean it. The children are our future. That’s the problem.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Gay-for-Payload

Back at the jihad, it's come to this:

However, jihad comes first, for it is the pinnacle of Islam, and if the pinnacle of Islam can only be achieved through sodomy, then there is no wrong in it.

Who Needs Markets?

Ed Driscoll notes an interesting AP "news" "report" by Donna Cassata complaining that "conservatives make it rough for business". Granted the assumptions of the piece (by "business", Ms Cassata means a Global MegaCorp CEO with an established market dominance, half the cabinet on speed dial, and a couple of former administration heavyweights on the payroll as "vice-president, government relations" or some such), it's still impressive that even an American J-school gal can type the following with a straight face. Writing of the "roadblocks" "thrown up" to "industry's top legislative priorities", Ms Cassata says of Republicans:

They and their ideological leaders argue that the marketplace should dictate what businesses thrive and falter, not Washington.

But governing "dictating" whose company gets to succeed is entirely non-ideological? In Communist Hungary, there was a socialist operetta with the stirring title of The State Department Store. Maybe Ms Cassata could write an English libretto.

Jim DeMint has a good line on where cronyism leads:

The South Carolina lawmaker warned that the combination of big government and big industry is creating a nation that is becoming “too big to succeed.”

One of the few heartening trends of this election season is the conservative opposition to cronyism. The micro-regulatory state is, by definition, a hierarchy of privilege - but at AP they're complaining that representative democracy is getting in the way of backdoor lobbying. A Big Government/Big Business alliance promoted by what's left of Big Media.

Re Re: Goodbye and Good Luck

Mark, Jonah, I have no use for Denise Rich -- not so much for the whole cash-for-pardons thing with Clinton, but for those hideous ululatory power ballads she writes for Céline, Aretha et al.

That being said, all this "what sort of red-blooded American renounces her citizenship over tax?" stuff is a wee bit much. It is the Government of the United States, uniquely in the civilized world, that binds citizenship to tax. An American who falls in love with an Uzbek or takes a job helping starving Third World children in Southern Sudan remains liable for U.S. taxation and has to file U.S. paperwork that is, in fact, more onerous than that required of U.S. residents, and is about to get more so.

Jonah asks:

Is she really lowering her tax burden by moving to Austria and/or London?

That's the wrong question. As Jonah deduces, neither Austria nor the United Kingdom are famous tax havens. But it's not the "burden" -- the tax rate -- but a more basic premise. Elsewhere in the world, there are two generally accepted bases for taxation: residency and source of income. Most countries tax you if you live within their borders, some tax you if you live elsewhere but earn money within their jurisdiction, but only America claims the right to tax you simply for being American -- even if you, say, live in Belgium but drive over the border to work in Luxembourg every day. This is unique to the United States: Spain taxes you if you're a resident of Spain; Slovenia taxes you if you're a resident of Slovenia; but America taxes you if you're an American who's working as a teacher in Gabon. You're at permanent risk of double taxation, and the fines for minor and accidental infraction are arbitrary and confiscatory.

As I say, no other developed country does this -- although Eritrea does.

On January 1st 2013, all this gets worse. The FATCAT act (technically, it's FATCA, but we all get the acronymic message) makes it not worth a foreign bank's while to do business with Americans. I don't just mean Mitt Romney's chums in the Cayman Islands, but an American of modest means on a two-year secondment to Hong Kong requiring a small checking account with which to pay local utility bills -- or a small businessman attempting to expand his distribution in Canada.

Maybe you don't care about these people: Why can't the business guy expand his business in Michigan or Idaho like true-blue Americans would do, etc? But at a time when America is ever more mortgaged to foreigners, making it more difficult for Americans to go out and earn money from the rest of the planet doesn't seem a smart move. Unless you're planning on making U.S. citizenship a combination food-stamp card. American exceptionalism and American isolationism are not the same thing.

More to the point, the 2008 "exit tax", the existing foreign bank-account disclosure paperwork, the new FATCAT act, and even the recent habit of publishing the names of those who renounce citizenship are simply inappropriate in a free society. Or to go back to Mark Krikorian's original post:

In a nation like ours, where membership is based on adoption of a combination of ideology and culture, one who renounces that membership has completely severed himself from us and can no longer claim any connection.

Fair enough. But if, as Mark says, American nationality is based on "ideology" rather than blood, then pray tell in what sense is this ever more onerous global tax regime compatible with American ideology? Does American ideology decree that Frenchmen and Swedes and Canadians should enjoy more freedom in these matters than Americans? Yes, yes, Denise Rich is ghastly, and the Facebook guy no doubt, but we're conservatives around here, aren't we? A bit of first-principles analysis wouldn't go amiss.

Oh, and a P.S. on that "completely severed" and "no longer claim any connection" stuff: Under current U.S. law,  Austrian citizen Denise Rich can invest in a U.S. business -- like, say, buying a conservative magazine -- and pay tax on her U.S. profits at a lower rate than U.S. citizens do, a distinction designed to encourage "foreign investment." Less taxation with no representation! U.S. tax law makes U.S. citizens second-class citizens in their own country. What bit of "American ideology" does that come under?

Taxing Inactivity

Decades hence, when the Obama Memorial takes its place alongside the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial et al, this line deserves to be chiseled on the plinth:

Has Obama considering solving unemployment through a not having a job tax?