Edward Cline's Blog, page 23

The Many Appetites for Cruelty

Daniel Greenfield, during an interview on Jamie Glasov's radio show on March 28th, was discussing Hitler and Stalin when he noted that they had an "appetite for cruelty." That got me thinking about the nature and purpose of cruelty.

Hitler and Stalin (and Mao of China) murdered millions by order or by policies they knew would result in the deaths of millions. Was theirs a passionate cruelty, or a disinterested one? Hitler was certainly passionate in his hatred of Jews. Stalin, however, and his predecessor, Lenin, put their victims in an abstract equation that dehumanized those millions and spared the dictators any personal involvement.

Cruelty comes in two sizes: flaming and disinterested. They can be mixed and matched in a bewildering array of styles. All are facets of nihilism. Nihilism has meaning only if there is a good for it to erase or disfigure. It otherwise does not manifest itself. The good must be seen by a nihilist as a threat or a nemesis. Nihilism is evil. It is an evil in action.

Flaming cruelty, for example, is a Turkish or Pakistani or Somali Muslim raping, beating, maiming, and disfiguring a non-Muslim girl or woman in Europe. This also includes "honor" killings of Muslim women who flout Islamic "traditions" or "mores" or prescribed Islamic social behavior. It is a literal crime of passion, a passion for destroying the good for being the good. The offended "honor" is a self-estimate in the eyes of others. The "passion" is rooted in either a malevolent hatred of the good, or in a desperate fear of what other Muslims will think of one if one does not take "corrective" action – the destruction of a value, such as a wayward Muslim girl by her parents and relatives – to preserve one's standing in the eyes of those others.

Disinterested cruelty is a government arm-twisting the news media into not reporting the rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings lest Muslims take exception to the fact that Muslims committed the crimes in conformance with Islamic doctrine. The rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings are not crimes in Islam's eyes. They are expressions of conquest and dominance over an individual deemed an unbeliever or an apostate – of someone outside the collective. Islam has no moral basis. It is nihilistic to the core.

Government cruelty is its minions walking away from the suffering and impoverishment of individuals stripped of their wealth and rights and left to fend for themselves in an increasingly collectivist society. Observe the ubiquitous indifference to the wishes of Americans expressed by the advocates and champions of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"). That it is an incomprehensible law, beset at the very beginning with corruption and special pleading, and is eminently "unworkable" are of no concern to its authors and advocates.

Cruelty is intimately linked to sadism. A sadist is chiefly a nihilist. Like the villain James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, who yells, "I want to break him! I want to hear him scream!" he wishes to erase the good so that the evil can exist unidentified as such and unopposed.* Destroying the good is an attempt to prove the efficacy of the irrational. It is important to the sadist that the victim be conscious of that intention, and then to acknowledge it. That is the nature of cruelty's victory.

The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for punishing those who do not submit, Muslim-like, to its mandate. It seeks to break the recalcitrant when they are taxed and punished until they scream in acknowledgement of the law's efficacy and power. That is the secret hope of Kathleen Sibelius, Nancy Pelosi, and the White House. It is a disinterested example of cruelty. Of nihilism.

People stop being flesh-and-blood individuals with their own personal virtues, and become psychological night-vision, infrared silhouettes with no personal attributes and little or no value to the power-holder. People and the electorate become mere ghostly blobs "out there" beyond the insulated corridors of power.

Still, no matter the distance between the power-holder and the powerless, the appetite for cruelty sits unacknowledged deep inside the enactors and the enforcers.

Cruelty is the inflicting of pain, and serves two purposes: to demonstrate the existential efficacy of the perpetrator's philosophy, and to derive pleasure from the evidence of pain in a victim.

This makes possible a third purpose, which is linked to or inextricably integrated with the first two: to see the good erased from existence, to see it perish in paroxysms of a pain that acknowledges defeat. The destruction and the pain "prove" to the sadist that his metaphysics is the right metaphysics. The destruction and the pain seem to sanction his actions.

Islam, for example, is a mode of existence that allows men to live half-lives. It does not tolerate an independent mind, and is an enemy of any other religious belief. It requires a mind frozen in action – a kind of conscious coma – arrested at the level of a litany of disparate moral imperatives. Which is why I often refer to Muslims as zombies – the living dead. It is collectivist from top to bottom. It demands the erasure of whatever self a child manages to create for himself and to submit to the collective. To the Borg hive.

Islam is totalitarian in nature, governing all aspects of an individual's life. It cannot abide anything outside its doctrinal and behavioral confines that contradicts its essence, which is the requirement of mindless and selfless submission and the surrender of all values not approved by the doctrine. What the doctrine does not permit cannot be allowed to exist.

Front Page featured a video of the malevolent hubris of Belgian Islamist Abu Imran, leader of Shariah4Belgium, in Brussels, who explains calmly to a Western reporter how and why Belgium will become an Islamic caliphate (and eventually Europe, and then the world).

"We believe Sharia will be implemented in Belgium and worldwide…Islam and Sharia are inseparable….Democracy is the opposite of Islam and Sharia….This is a dirty, perverted community [Belgium, in particular, and western culture in general]."

Abu Imran can state the goals of Muslims in Europe with impunity and without fear of censorship or government reprisal. However, other rules apply to Europeans who criticize Islam. In Germany,

On February 14, 2012, Michael Mannheimer received a penalty fine from the Heilbronn district court in the degree of 50 days at 50 Euros per day (2,500 Euros). The basis for the fine was Mannheimer's criticism of Islam, especially his claim that Islam is working on taking over and Islamizing Europe. In addition to this, his evidence that Islam is striving for world power and his conclusion that Qur'an and Sharia are irreconcilable with the Constitution.

The charges against Mannheimer are quoted in the article. He was fined and scheduled for trial by Turkish judges in a German court. This is disinterested cruelty in action. Or nihilistic sadism. The German court proved Mannheimer's point by doing exactly what he was warning his country against. He was made an example of as a lesson for anyone else who dares criticize Islam.

You can't condemn a man for the contents of his mind, no matter how evil the contents. It is only when he has taken actions to achieve that evil that one can judge him. Mannheimer spoke out to uphold the good. He was punished by those who seek to erase the good. In fact, he was punished for the contents of his mind.

In the final analysis, his mind was made a meal by and for those whose appetite for cruelty is not limited to mere physical or financial pain.

*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957. New York: Signet 1992. P. 1048.

The Court’s Mock Examination of Obamacare

JUSTICE SCALIA: ….And we’ve held in two cases that something that was reasonably adapted was not proper [the necessary and proper wording of the Commerce Clause] because it violated the sovereignty of the States, which was implicit in the constitutional structure. The argument here is that it may be necessary, but it’s not proper because it violates an equally evident principle in the Constitution, which is that the Federal Government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; that it’s supposed to be a government of limited powers. And that’s what all this questioning has been about. What – what is left? If the government can do this, what else can it not do? [pp. 26-27]

JUSTICE SCALIA: An equally evident constitutional principle is the principle that the Federal Government is a government of enumerated powers and that the vast majority of the powers remain in the States and do not belong to the Federal Government…. [pp. 27-28]

Justice Antonin Scalia enunciated those most relevant but less than scintillating words during exchanges between the Court and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the second day of the Supreme Court’s review of the constitutionality – or its unconstitutionality – of the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010, nicknamed “Obamacare.” Most of the balance of the back-and-forth between the justices and Verrilli was in the way of bean-counting: the justices would identify specific beans, and Verrilli would deny they were beans, or claim that they might be beans, depending on one’s perspective.

Not once during the exchanges did the term individual rights escape the mouths of any of the parties. It was all about what was and wasn’t a market and whether or not the government could compel individuals to enter a market created by the government for the express purpose of regulating it. The “necessity” of health care or health insurance reform was conceded by the justices, but not deemed strictly “proper” under the aegis of Obamacare. At issue was not the government’s coercive power, but its lawful power of coercion.

Reading the entire transcript of the exchanges, without listening to them, one gets the impression that the justices were only slightly less blinkered than was Verrilli. They seemed to be focused on whether or not a smörgasbord was a smörgasbord because one or two bean casseroles were missing. Definitions of beans and smörgasbords were disputed.

Politico reported that the Left was not happy with Verrilli’s defense of Obamacare:

“Solicitor General Don Verrilli seemed to struggle more than Paul Clement, attorney for the states… Over and over again, [conservative Justices] asked for a limiting principle – a reason to think approving the mandate wouldn’t lead to unlimited federal power. Verrilli struggled to answer the question and, at times, seemed unsure of whether to call upon the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause as justification,” noted Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic in a piece titled “”Day 2 at the Court: Well, that Could Have Gone Better.”

At issue was the compulsory "mandate" that everyone must "buy" health insurance or pay a penalty for not buying it. The Solicitor General couldn't decide whether that penalty was a tax or a penalty. He was derided by two of the justices for not being able to make up his mind, which he still hasn't. The exchanges on this subject were humorous, at least to the auditors of the session. The government's case is shot full of holes on Constitutional issues centering chiefly on the power of the Congress to "regulate" commerce.

The term regulate meant something completely different to the Founders; it meant the power of Congress to stop states from interfering with commerce between the states, such as taxing goods coming across state lines and not taxing similar goods produced within a state, thus giving the untaxed producers an edge (the international version of that policy is the “protective tariff”). To the Progressives and other socialists, however, it means the power to control commerce, in this instance, to force people to buy insurance and thus participate in the resultant but nonetheless pseudo-commerce.

But then the Court’s position – at least the positions of the conservative members of it – is also shot full of holes. To judge by the nature and content of the best questions put to Verrilli, there is no reason to feel confident or encouraged that the Court will strike down the entirety of Obamacare. It may declare the individual mandate unconstitutional on purely rationalistic grounds, and leave the rest of the law in place. But it is the coercive and confiscatory nature of the law that is its core. Listening to the Court question the constitutional validity of Obamacare is much like watching someone hunting for a place to fit a piece into a jigsaw puzzle, or looking for round holes for square pegs.

A great deal of verbiage was spent on the nature of the penalty for not buying health insurance, and whether or not it was a tax – that is, a revenue-raising device – or simply punishment for not buying the insurance. Verrilli denied that it was a tax. Yet the Court seemed to think it was one, because it would be collected by the IRS. Verrilli expressed hope that not much pseudo-revenue would be raised by impounding an individual’s income, that the workability of the whole law depended on the pseudo-voluntary compliance with it by Americans and would succeed.

It may be that the conservatives realize that to declare Obamacare unconstitutional because it exceeds the enumerated powers of Congress by violating individual rights, the Court would need to also declare unconstitutional the income tax, the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, and a host of other kinds of legislation – all of which violate individual rights by direct or indirect coercion or force, or by direct or indirect confiscation. It would mean a wholesale challenging of the doctrine of altruism and collectivism, on which all such legislation is based.

Clearly, such a crucial task is beyond the ken and scope of the current Supreme Court.

The only justice who did not question the Solicitor General was Clarence Thomas. There is hope that he can educate the other conservative justices on the matter of individual rights.

But rather than dwell on the Court’s philosophical and moral shortcomings, several articles have been written that outline “necessary and proper” arguments that the Court ought to have made in reply to Verrilli’s hesitant and eclectic assertions about the imperative nature of Obamacare.

The Institute for Justice has filed an amicus brief which possibly the justices have read. It states that a compulsory contract such as is proposed by Obamacare is not a contract, because a contract is a voluntary affair entered into by two or more parties sans coercion. Compulsory participation has nothing to do with contracts, and whether or not non-participation can be "penalized" or "taxed" is irrelevant. It is still compulsion. George Will, in his nationally syndicated article, “Obamacare’s Contract Problem,” discussed the Institute’s argument:

Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, has focused on this fact: The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.

That is, bananas are not a kind of citrus fruit. Oranges cannot be classified as jelly beans. A contract denotes, not merely implies, a voluntary agreement between individuals or private entities, such as corporations or companies. Even should bribery be involved in the creation of a contract, the contract remains a contract.

The brief…says Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law "from which there is no escape." And "coercing commercial transactions" -- compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies -- "is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today…."

The Supreme Court in Commerce Clause cases has repeatedly recognized, and Congress has never before ignored, the difference between the regulation and the coercion of commerce. And in its 10th Amendment cases ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people") the court has specifically forbidden government to compel contracts.

IJ argues: The 10th Amendment forbids Congress from exercising its commerce power to compel states to enter into contractual relations by effectively forcing states to "buy" radioactive waste. Hence "the power to regulate commerce does not include the power to compel a party to take title to goods or services against its will." And if it is beyond Congress' power to commandeer the states by compelling them to enter into contracts, it must likewise be beyond Congress' power to commandeer individuals by requiring them to purchase insurance. Again, the 10th Amendment declares that any powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people.

This is the language that ought to have been used by the Court in its interrogation of Donald Verrilli. The Institute for Justice focuses on individual rights and one’s voluntary, consensual contractual relationships with others. This language, unfortunately, is missing from the Court’s proceedings. Will concludes his article with:

IJ correctly says that if the court were to ratify Congress' disregard for settled contract law, Congress' "power to compel contractual relations would have no logical stopping point." Which is why this case is the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government.

George Leef, director of research, John W Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in North Carolina, also published an article that reprises several salient constitutional points, “The Constitution, 'Constitutional Law,' and ObamaCare.”

What must be challenged is the premise that the Constitution actually does grant Congress "broad power" over interstate commerce. The fact is that the language of the Constitution itself does not confer such power. Anyone who reads the document in search of a clear statement -- and the drafters were nothing if not clear, careful writers -- that Congress or the executive branch is supposed to have any power at all to dictate to individuals and businesses how they must act when engaged in "interstate commerce" searches in vain.

As noted above, the original meaning of the term “regulate” has been swept under the rug of past Court decisions. It no longer means prohibiting states from taxing or handicapping production and trade between individuals in different states.

At the heart of the current dispute is "the Commerce Clause." Included in Article I, Section 8 under the powers specifically given to Congress, we find this language: "To regulate Commerce with Foreign nations, and among the several States..." Why was that inserted? James Madison later explained that "the Commerce Clause grew out of the abuse of power by the importing states in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the states, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the general government."

Thus, the purpose of that clause was to remedy a problem that had arisen in the new nation -- namely, that some states were impeding the flow of commerce with laws favoring producers within their borders. To keep commerce "regular" meant that Congress could enact laws to prevent that abuse of power by the states. It was never meant, as Madison wrote, as a grant of power for whatever future Congresses might want to do to control everything relating to people's commercial affairs.

Leef provides the historical context of how the modern meaning of “regulate” came into circulation:

Late in 1936, however, President Roosevelt, angered at a Court that had struck down many of his statist plans for controlling the nation's economy, issued his infamous threat to pack the Supreme Court. That plan met with a great deal of opposition within his own party, but it apparently worked on two members of the Court: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen Roberts. When it came to deciding the test case involving FDR's extraordinarily authoritarian National Labor Relations Act in 1937, they switched from supporting the old, correct understanding of the Commerce Clause to supporting the "progressive interpretation" that the clause gave Congress power to enact any law that would somehow "affect" interstate commerce. The funny thing about that decision, Jones & Laughlin Steel, is that the majority never bothered to mention the Court's previous Commerce Clause decisions. It was as if Schechter disappeared into a black hole.

The Court continued along that same line, allowing Congress to do whatever it wanted by calling it "regulation of interstate commerce" until reaching the utterly absurd case Wickard v. Filburn in 1942. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a farmer in Ohio was fined for having grown more wheat than federal regulators permitted him to. He argued that the law was unconstitutional (at least as applied to him) because all of the wheat had been consumed on his own property. None had been sold at all, so there was no commerce, much less "interstate commerce." But, eager to uphold the "progressive" ideal of unlimited federal control over every aspect of the economy, the Court fashioned a remarkable justification. Since the farmer might have purchased some wheat in interstate commerce if he had not illegally grown his own, his conduct therefore could have "affected" the interstate market for wheat, and therefore his action was subject to federal punishment.

Much more verbiage was devoted on March 27 to how an individual who did not purchase health insurance would somehow affect the costs of insurance and cause those costs to rise. To borrow a line of thinking from the Court: I do not consume avocados, never have, never will. But somehow that affects the price of avocados everywhere and I am to blame for the current and probable rise in the price of avocados. So, I must be compelled, under penalty of noncompliance, to buy avocados to help share the cost of avocados with everyone else, in the name of avocado regulation. My former absence from that market, after all, was a detriment to society as a whole.

Now, that is just as remarkable an analogy as that presented by the Court. But it is not an argument, by either the bench or the dock, that addresses the fundamental coercive nature of Obamacare, all 2,700 pages of it.

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade ..."*

In Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, Narragansett is a judge who has withdrawn his wisdom from the world in protest of the kind of “wisdom” exhibited by the Supreme Court. What he would actually be writing is an amendment.

Doubtless he would have included the private realm of health insurance. It would have been a no-brainer.


*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957. New York: Signet 1992. Pp. 1068-1069.

The Court's Mock Examination of Obamacare

JUSTICE SCALIA: ….And we've held in two cases that something that was reasonably adapted was not proper [the necessary and proper wording of the Commerce Clause] because it violated the sovereignty of the States, which was implicit in the constitutional structure. The argument here is that it may be necessary, but it's not proper because it violates an equally evident principle in the Constitution, which is that the Federal Government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; that it's supposed to be a government of limited powers. And that's what all this questioning has been about. What – what is left? If the government can do this, what else can it not do? [pp. 26-27]

JUSTICE SCALIA: An equally evident constitutional principle is the principle that the Federal Government is a government of enumerated powers and that the vast majority of the powers remain in the States and do not belong to the Federal Government…. [pp. 27-28]

Justice Antonin Scalia enunciated those most relevant but less than scintillating words during exchanges between the Court and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the second day of the Supreme Court's review of the constitutionality – or its unconstitutionality – of the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010, nicknamed "Obamacare." Most of the balance of the back-and-forth between the justices and Verrilli was in the way of bean-counting: the justices would identify specific beans, and Verrilli would deny they were beans, or claim that they might be beans, depending on one's perspective.

Not once during the exchanges did the term individual rights escape the mouths of any of the parties. It was all about what was and wasn't a market and whether or not the government could compel individuals to enter a market created by the government for the express purpose of regulating it. The "necessity" of health care or health insurance reform was conceded by the justices, but not deemed strictly "proper" under the aegis of Obamacare. At issue was not the government's coercive power, but its lawful power of coercion.

Reading the entire transcript of the exchanges, without listening to them, one gets the impression that the justices were only slightly less blinkered than was Verrilli. They seemed to be focused on whether or not a smörgasbord was a smörgasbord because one or two bean casseroles were missing. Definitions of beans and smörgasbords were disputed.

Politico reported that the Left was not happy with Verrilli's defense of Obamacare:

"Solicitor General Don Verrilli seemed to struggle more than Paul Clement, attorney for the states… Over and over again, [conservative Justices] asked for a limiting principle – a reason to think approving the mandate wouldn't lead to unlimited federal power. Verrilli struggled to answer the question and, at times, seemed unsure of whether to call upon the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause as justification," noted Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic in a piece titled ""Day 2 at the Court: Well, that Could Have Gone Better."

At issue was the compulsory "mandate" that everyone must "buy" health insurance or pay a penalty for not buying it. The Solicitor General couldn't decide whether that penalty was a tax or a penalty. He was derided by two of the justices for not being able to make up his mind, which he still hasn't. The exchanges on this subject were humorous, at least to the auditors of the session. The government's case is shot full of holes on Constitutional issues centering chiefly on the power of the Congress to "regulate" commerce.

The term regulate meant something completely different to the Founders; it meant the power of Congress to stop states from interfering with commerce between the states, such as taxing goods coming across state lines and not taxing similar goods produced within a state, thus giving the untaxed producers an edge (the international version of that policy is the "protective tariff"). To the Progressives and other socialists, however, it means the power to control commerce, in this instance, to force people to buy insurance and thus participate in the resultant but nonetheless pseudo-commerce.

But then the Court's position – at least the positions of the conservative members of it – is also shot full of holes. To judge by the nature and content of the best questions put to Verrilli, there is no reason to feel confident or encouraged that the Court will strike down the entirety of Obamacare. It may declare the individual mandate unconstitutional on purely rationalistic grounds, and leave the rest of the law in place. But it is the coercive and confiscatory nature of the law that is its core. Listening to the Court question the constitutional validity of Obamacare is much like watching someone hunting for a place to fit a piece into a jigsaw puzzle, or looking for round holes for square pegs.

A great deal of verbiage was spent on the nature of the penalty for not buying health insurance, and whether or not it was a tax – that is, a revenue-raising device – or simply punishment for not buying the insurance. Verrilli denied that it was a tax. Yet the Court seemed to think it was one, because it would be collected by the IRS. Verrilli expressed hope that not much pseudo-revenue would be raised by impounding an individual's income, that the workability of the whole law depended on the pseudo-voluntary compliance with it by Americans and would succeed.

It may be that the conservatives realize that to declare Obamacare unconstitutional because it exceeds the enumerated powers of Congress by violating individual rights, the Court would need to also declare unconstitutional the income tax, the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, and a host of other kinds of legislation – all of which violate individual rights by direct or indirect coercion or force, or by direct or indirect confiscation. It would mean a wholesale challenging of the doctrine of altruism and collectivism, on which all such legislation is based.

Clearly, such a crucial task is beyond the ken and scope of the current Supreme Court.

The only justice who did not question the Solicitor General was Clarence Thomas. There is hope that he can educate the other conservative justices on the matter of individual rights.

But rather than dwell on the Court's philosophical and moral shortcomings, several articles have been written that outline "necessary and proper" arguments that the Court ought to have made in reply to Verrilli's hesitant and eclectic assertions about the imperative nature of Obamacare.

The Institute for Justice has filed an amicus brief which possibly the justices have read. It states that a compulsory contract such as is proposed by Obamacare is not a contract, because a contract is a voluntary affair entered into by two or more parties sans coercion. Compulsory participation has nothing to do with contracts, and whether or not non-participation can be "penalized" or "taxed" is irrelevant. It is still compulsion. George Will, in his nationally syndicated article, "Obamacare's Contract Problem," discussed the Institute's argument:

Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, has focused on this fact: The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.

That is, bananas are not a kind of citrus fruit. Oranges cannot be classified as jelly beans. A contract denotes, not merely implies, a voluntary agreement between individuals or private entities, such as corporations or companies. Even should bribery be involved in the creation of a contract, the contract remains a contract.

The brief…says Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law "from which there is no escape." And "coercing commercial transactions" -- compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies -- "is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today…."

The Supreme Court in Commerce Clause cases has repeatedly recognized, and Congress has never before ignored, the difference between the regulation and the coercion of commerce. And in its 10th Amendment cases ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people") the court has specifically forbidden government to compel contracts.

IJ argues: The 10th Amendment forbids Congress from exercising its commerce power to compel states to enter into contractual relations by effectively forcing states to "buy" radioactive waste. Hence "the power to regulate commerce does not include the power to compel a party to take title to goods or services against its will." And if it is beyond Congress' power to commandeer the states by compelling them to enter into contracts, it must likewise be beyond Congress' power to commandeer individuals by requiring them to purchase insurance. Again, the 10th Amendment declares that any powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people.

This is the language that ought to have been used by the Court in its interrogation of Donald Verrilli. The Institute for Justice focuses on individual rights and one's voluntary, consensual contractual relationships with others. This language, unfortunately, is missing from the Court's proceedings. Will concludes his article with:

IJ correctly says that if the court were to ratify Congress' disregard for settled contract law, Congress' "power to compel contractual relations would have no logical stopping point." Which is why this case is the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government.

George Leef, director of research, John W Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in North Carolina, also published an article that reprises several salient constitutional points, "The Constitution, 'Constitutional Law,' and ObamaCare."

What must be challenged is the premise that the Constitution actually does grant Congress "broad power" over interstate commerce. The fact is that the language of the Constitution itself does not confer such power. Anyone who reads the document in search of a clear statement -- and the drafters were nothing if not clear, careful writers -- that Congress or the executive branch is supposed to have any power at all to dictate to individuals and businesses how they must act when engaged in "interstate commerce" searches in vain.

As noted above, the original meaning of the term "regulate" has been swept under the rug of past Court decisions. It no longer means prohibiting states from taxing or handicapping production and trade between individuals in different states.

At the heart of the current dispute is "the Commerce Clause." Included in Article I, Section 8 under the powers specifically given to Congress, we find this language: "To regulate Commerce with Foreign nations, and among the several States..." Why was that inserted? James Madison later explained that "the Commerce Clause grew out of the abuse of power by the importing states in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the states, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the general government."

Thus, the purpose of that clause was to remedy a problem that had arisen in the new nation -- namely, that some states were impeding the flow of commerce with laws favoring producers within their borders. To keep commerce "regular" meant that Congress could enact laws to prevent that abuse of power by the states. It was never meant, as Madison wrote, as a grant of power for whatever future Congresses might want to do to control everything relating to people's commercial affairs.

Leef provides the historical context of how the modern meaning of "regulate" came into circulation:

Late in 1936, however, President Roosevelt, angered at a Court that had struck down many of his statist plans for controlling the nation's economy, issued his infamous threat to pack the Supreme Court. That plan met with a great deal of opposition within his own party, but it apparently worked on two members of the Court: Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen Roberts. When it came to deciding the test case involving FDR's extraordinarily authoritarian National Labor Relations Act in 1937, they switched from supporting the old, correct understanding of the Commerce Clause to supporting the "progressive interpretation" that the clause gave Congress power to enact any law that would somehow "affect" interstate commerce. The funny thing about that decision, Jones & Laughlin Steel, is that the majority never bothered to mention the Court's previous Commerce Clause decisions. It was as if Schechter disappeared into a black hole.

The Court continued along that same line, allowing Congress to do whatever it wanted by calling it "regulation of interstate commerce" until reaching the utterly absurd case Wickard v. Filburn in 1942. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a farmer in Ohio was fined for having grown more wheat than federal regulators permitted him to. He argued that the law was unconstitutional (at least as applied to him) because all of the wheat had been consumed on his own property. None had been sold at all, so there was no commerce, much less "interstate commerce." But, eager to uphold the "progressive" ideal of unlimited federal control over every aspect of the economy, the Court fashioned a remarkable justification. Since the farmer might have purchased some wheat in interstate commerce if he had not illegally grown his own, his conduct therefore could have "affected" the interstate market for wheat, and therefore his action was subject to federal punishment.

Much more verbiage was devoted on March 27 to how an individual who did not purchase health insurance would somehow affect the costs of insurance and cause those costs to rise. To borrow a line of thinking from the Court: I do not consume avocados, never have, never will. But somehow that affects the price of avocados everywhere and I am to blame for the current and probable rise in the price of avocados. So, I must be compelled, under penalty of noncompliance, to buy avocados to help share the cost of avocados with everyone else, in the name of avocado regulation. My former absence from that market, after all, was a detriment to society as a whole.

Now, that is just as remarkable an analogy as that presented by the Court. But it is not an argument, by either the bench or the dock, that addresses the fundamental coercive nature of Obamacare, all 2,700 pages of it.

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade ..."*

In Ayn Rand's prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, Narragansett is a judge who has withdrawn his wisdom from the world in protest of the kind of "wisdom" exhibited by the Supreme Court. What he would actually be writing is an amendment.

Doubtless he would have included the private realm of health insurance. It would have been a no-brainer.


*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957. New York: Signet 1992. Pp. 168-169.

Islamic Jihad: Hurry Up or Wait?

"The difference between the "radicals" and the "moderates" is that the radicals want to engage in genocide even while they are a minority, while the moderates want to wait until they are a majority. The radicals are satisfied with killing a few Hindus, Christians, Jews, here and there. The moderates want to wait and kill millions. Neither are our allies. Both are our murderers."

So wrote Daniel Greenfield in his Sultan Knish column of March 21st, "The New Nazis," in response to the murders of a rabbi and three children in Toulouse, France, and to the murders of the French paratroopers by Mohamed Merah. He likens, and not for the first time, Muslim jihadists, their agenda, and their tactics, to those of the German Nazis. He ended his column with:

"The old Nazis marched in at the head of an army. The new Nazis bought a plane ticket. The old Nazis had to get by the French Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force. The new Nazis are welcomed in and anyone who says a word otherwise faces trials and jail sentences. The old Nazis deported Jews to camps. The new Nazis kill them right in the cities. And the killing will not stop until the Muslim occupation of Europe comes to an end."

Greenfield is right. I would liken Islam to an ideological Black Death that must be faced up to by politicians and intellectuals. There's no such thing as a "benign" Islam. It is a death-worshipping ideology from top to bottom. And the only way to emasculate it is to repudiate it in its entirety.

The Black Death or the Bubonic Plague invaded Europe in the 14th century chiefly through Europe's seaports. Ship rats carrying the Oriental rat fleas and passengers and crews of merchant vessels already infected by the fleas called on these ports and transmitted the disease to populations. The plague wiped out between 30 to 60% of Europe's population over the course of two centuries, chiefly because no one knew what caused it or how to fight it. Beginning in 1346, it crept across Europe until by 1353 it had decimated all of Europe including a goodly portion of Russia. The Mideast was also stricken; many vessels calling on Italy, France, and England originated in the Black Sea. It would recede, then return many times over the centuries with diminishing potency, until the last outbreak of it in the early 19th century. The only nation to escape the Black Death's first wave was Poland, which had no seaports, and Iceland, which had relatively little contact with Europe.

The Black Death was not welcome to Renaissance civilization. Political and religious leaders did not rationalize away its presence or its causes. They may have prayed for relief, or called it God's vengeance, or perhaps blamed it on witches, but whatever they said, was said in ignorance of the causes. Suddenly, the plague was there and city streets filled up with the dead and diseased.

And today, just as suddenly, Europeans have noticed that their city streets were filling up with the living, walking, and arse-lifting dead, an invasion of them by invitation of their governments and often by the citizens themselves. The living dead wish to be accommodated in all things, which means gutting the cultures they migrated to and transforming them into replicas of the cultures they left behind.

I make no bones about my hatred of Islam. It isn't the Rotary Club, or the Moonies, or any other harmless cult. Islam is as much a collectivist ideology as are socialism and communism and Nazism, and like those secular brands, its primary aim is total domination of their adoptive societies to the point that those societies become wholly Islamic. To submit to Islam is to voluntarily lobotomize oneself in favor of a ghostly authority and an iconic "prophet" who was basically a thug and a killer. Muslims submit to it, and expect all those around them to submit to it, or to defer to them.

Islam is the Black Death of modern times. It completes with secular totalitarianism. Its carriers are Muslims, who arrived by countless planeloads at the invitation and encouragement of western governments and proceeded to procreate and begin a process of insulation. At first these governments believed that Muslims would assimilate into the cultures they were migrating to, as though they were Christians of one sect settling into a country dominated by Christians of another sect. However, they were not Catholics settling in Lutheran Germany, or Episcopalians starting over in Catholic Italy.

There is no middle ground. There is no "reforming" Islam. Just as there is no "reforming" Nazism, or Maoism, or Stalinism. Islam is not a "buffet" religion; there is no picking and choosing which of its imperatives to adhere to, and which to disregard. The creed demands one's full allegiance and obedience in every aspect of one's private and public life, all one's waking hours. That many Muslims do not live "by the book" is irrelevant. It's their creed in whose name violent jihadists commit atrocities, and stealth or cultural jihadists corrode or corrupt Western social and judicial norms like bagworms consuming a tree's bark, which means the death of the tree. The "silent majority" of Muslims dare not or care not to speak against the actions of their more zealous religious colleagues.

"Radical" and "moderate" Muslims aren't about to "reform" Islam to make it "tolerant" of other creeds or more palatable to their adoptive cultures. So that task must be accomplished by those who will be its ultimate victims, either as dhimmis, or corpses. The penicillins of multiculturalism, "diversity," "tolerance," "sensitivity," moral relativism and plain political expediency are what have allowed the plague to kill so many and make significant inroads in Western civilization. It's time those who value that civilization to adopt the same "in your face" tactic as the violent and stealth jihadists have adopted. That will mean identifying Islam as a killer ideology. Period.

In his review of Abigail R. Esman' Radical State on Family Security Matters, Patrick Donleavy noted:

"It would seem that the very strength of Holland's democracy and tolerance became an Achilles' heel when it came to dealing with Muslim immigrants arriving from non-democratic, Islamic fundamentalist regimes." [Italics mine]

The problem is that the Netherlands, like the U.S., has "democracy." Democracy is mob rule. Should the Muslims achieve an electoral majority there, or even a significant minority – then The Netherlands is finished. As will be any other European nation that boasts both "democracy" and a Muslim population whose adults don't believe in condoms or contraceptives or self-restraint. Their "planned parenthood" strategy is to breed like rabbits with the aim of swamping indigenous populations with their numbers.

The antidote to "democracy" is a republican, limited government that upholds and respects individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, all concepts antithetical to Islam and any other species of collectivism. This is what the Founders intended. They abhorred democracy. Democracy means that the majority can nullify one's rights and seize one's life and property, and abridge one's happiness at will. This is what successive American administrations have been doing under the guidance of the Democratic Party, abetted by a politically bankrupt Republican Party. So, until Europe discovers the principle of individual rights, it is doomed to thrash about combating Islam without knowing what political system would make it impossible to conquer Europe. Banning burqas in France isn't going to prevent such a conquest.

The Economist ran a story on Mohamed Merah that is typical of mainstream media reporting of the killings. Unlike many other publications, It actually employed the term "Muslim" but with cautious qualification to underplay the Islamic motivation in the killings: Merah was segregated from his Muslim calling and branded as a "lone wolf":

Yet the number of Frenchmen returning from al-Qaeda camps with such high-level training is only "in single digits" reckons François Heisbourg, of the French Institute for Strategic Research. Isolated French Muslims, radicalized in Islamist training camps, have been foiled trying to mount terror attacks in France before.

Once the candidates resume their campaigns, Mr Sarkozy may emerge strengthened. Having flown straight to Toulouse after the school shootings, he has done a skilful job of being statesmanlike and solemn, yet in touch with the national mood. His Socialist rival, François Hollande, has also sounded the right note, but from the shadows. Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front candidate, may also benefit. She spoke out this week against confusing Muslims with fundamentalists, and denounced those who had at first accused her of being implicated for having fuelled racial divisions in France. "Putting real problems on the table in no way justifies the spread of Islamic fundamentalism," she declared. The real issue, she added, was that such fundamentalism in France had been "underestimated". [Italics mine]

Even Marine Le Pen, who is campaigning against Sarkozy on an anti-immigration and nationalist plank, found it politick to temper her words by claiming that Muslims shouldn't be confused with Islamic fundamentalists. Which misses the point that Islam is inherently radical and can't be divorced from its inherent fundamentalist tenets. That is, Merah's motivations can't be excised from Islam. What is already radical cannot be radicalized. One may as well deny that spaghetti is a form of pasta.

Merah wasn't a "lone wolf" sociopath like Andre Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer. Merah was not acting out an episode of Sesame Street, but rather the imperatives of the Koran. He went to Afghanistan for jihadist training. His brother was a probable accomplice in securing Merah the weapons he used and stockpiled in his apartment. And the further the French authorities delve into Merah's background and actions, the more they will find links to the "leaderless jihadist" network and Islam.

The Associated Press also commits the same error. Rewritten to excise any mention of Muslims and Islam, the original Associated Press article read:

PARIS - Authorities investigating France's deadly shooting rampage have released the mother of the Islamist fanatic blamed for the killings but were questioning his older brother to determine whether he served as an accomplice, officials said Saturday.

Police are trying to determine whether 23-year-old Mohamed Merah had any help in carrying out the execution-style murders of seven people that have shocked France and refocused attention on the threat of radical Muslim terrorists. Police say there is evidence to suggest that his brother worked as an assistant. [Italics mine]

The usage of the terms "Islamist fanatic" and "radical Muslim terrorists" is an instance of denial that a Muslim's criminal action has anything to do with Islam. "Islamic fundamentalism" is a redundancy. One's life is not jeopardized by "fanatical" Catholics or imperiled by "Mormon fundamentalism" because one isn't asked by fanatical Catholics or Mormon fundamentalists to defer to their beliefs or even respect them. But such deference (and submission) is routinely required of non-Musims by Muslims and organizations such as CAIR, the ICNA, the MSA, and other Islamic front organizations.

I was reminded of an early episode of Star Trek, in which Captain Kirk and his crew land on a planet governed by 1930's period gangsters, whose "bible" is a history of 20th century organized crime and whose customs and practices are followed to the letter by the society. It was an amusing episode written around an incredible premise.

And that reminiscence caused me to recall the ending of Francis Ford Coppola's first Godfather movie. While Michael Corleone, acting as godfather of a son of a gang member he has had executed (his sister Connie's husband), is attending the solemn baptism of his godson, on his orders rival gangsters are violently wiped out across the country.

That powerful, cascading sequence of scenes may be taken as the essence of Islam. There is no fundamental difference between Michael Corleone's loyalty to the tribe and his concept of "family honor" and demands for respect, and that boasted of by Muslims. That is what panicked politicians and "moderate" Muslims must grasp here and in Europe before any progress can be made against the war declared and waged against the West by Islam. No compromise is possible between Islam and its utter and complete repudiation.

This is a philosophical conflict, and not merely a "religious" or political one. Islam's spokesmen seem to know or sense this. Our "protectors" do not. The Mohamed Merah's of Islam are in a hurry. The "moderates" are counseling patience.

We are their enemies. We are targeted for destruction or subjugation by both groups. Whether one views the Islamic incursions as a form of the Black Death, or as the corrupting influence of gangster government, the West must identify its enemy before it can be successfully opposed.

Allah’s Oops!

Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a chaotic and bewildering novel which earned him a permanent death fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1989, will attend a literary conference in New Delhi, India in March, in defiance of Islamic naysayers. We can credit him with the defiance, but not his oeuvre with literary worth. I signed a petition in 1989 that opposed the fatwa and called on Western governments to uphold freedom of speech, a petition inspired by Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie and on anyone who dared defend him or promote his book.

Out of curiosity, I tried reading The Satanic Verses, and one-quarter into it was unable and unwilling to finish it. I would liken it to a fantasy tale centered around the ribald adventures of believers in the merged worlds of the Rosicrucians and Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society.

If it hadn’t been for Khomeini’s fatwa, as someone has noted elsewhere, Rushdie’s novel would be gathering dust in second-hand bookstores, and Rushdie himself perhaps would be writing for The Daily Telegraph or the Guardian to earn a living.

So, what were those “Satanic Verses” that got the turbaned tyrants of Iran incensed? What is Sura 53 all about? It has to do with that obsession of inadequate and repressed Muslims everywhere: women ! No wonder they’re raped, and beaten, and disfigured, and reduced to fractions and invisibility! Allah was the original male chauvinist pig. But, never mind The Satanic Verses. Here is a less obtuse accounting of what really happened in seventh century Mecca.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Once upon a time Allah had three daughters. You heard right. Not one, but three daughters, and they were all as powerful as he. As goddesses, they were worshipped by Arabs before Mohammad put an end to that pagan polytheism. Their names were al-Lät, al-Uzza, and Manät. They were okay, said the Angel Gabriel to him in his sleep, or in his dreams, or in his ear. “They are the Sorority of Serenity Now! Sirens of the Belly-Dance. Top-drawer cunning vixens! Make offerings to them in their temples, and your wishes will be granted!”

That was the original Sura, as reported by early Islamic scholars. Mohammad of course was dictating the Koran and speaking as though in a trance (reciting what he was hearing, so to speak, or so he claimed), and his scribe hurriedly scratched it all down on parchment rescued from the looted Alexandrian Library, bleached of any blasphemy. Mohammad, the Billy Sunday of his day, had decided that the Meccans he was trying to convert to Islam liked variety in their deities. Why not keep some sexy seductresses, and add some spice to the creed?

At least, that’s what he thought he thought, as he was listening to “the voice.” Mohammad was of two minds: he was hearing voices, while his subconscious worked overtime to see how he could take advantage of what he was hearing.

Then he had a change of mind. Or Gabriel came to him again one night, chewed him out, and changed it for him. Gabriel peered over the scribe’s shoulder and read the latest Sura. He exploded.

“You fool! You dunderhead! That wasn’t me whispering in your ear last night! That was…Shaytan! I was in the Crab Nebula last night on other business, so I never told you that Allah had three daughters! I got a proper tongue-lashing from Allah this morning, thanks to your date-addled brain, you mewling kid of a camel, you spawn of a Jewess!”

Mohammad looked hurt and humiliated. He muttered under his breath, “Oops!”

Gabriel paced back and forth furiously, shaking his finger at Mohammad. “Now, listen up, chowder head! There is only one God, and his name is Allah! No goddesses! No daughters! No sons, either! Tell your scribe to cross out that Sura, and replace it with, ‘Are men’s children to be boys and Allah’s to be girls? How unfair!’ That’s how it should read! Those are Allah’s very words!”

Now, Mohammad wanted to establish a new religion, and be exalted for what remained of eternity as its infallible founder. Still, he found it a curiously awkward means to spread the Word, and the Word was Allah’s. A rather roundabout way of revealing that Word to mortals he could not imagine, he would think in his most private moments. Allah speaks it to this snooty Angel, and the Angel whispers it to him, and he recites it to this bent-over, aging scribe. Not very time efficient.

Mohammad blinked in confusion. “But, oh, my Winged Whispering Wonder! What about al-Lät, and al-Uzza, and Manät? Do they not exist? Temples have been built for them, the yokels here have worshipped them for ages. Are we to have no variety in our worship? Allah is fine, as the Main Moon Man, but…people say it gets old, just worshipping one god. Why not a family of them?” He paused, and had a thought. “And if they are his daughters, who was their mother? We are missing a goddess, it would seem.”

“What Shaytan told you was blasphemy!” shouted Gabriel. “There are no other gods! Only Allah! All other gods are figments of men’s imaginations! Unreal! Without temporal or spiritual substance! Shape up, Mohammad, or Allah will choose another Prophet, and leave you to run with the dogs!”

Mohammad looked quizzical. He blurted, “Is Allah androgynous? Is he…without gender?”

Gabriel was stunned by this statement. Mohammad was illiterate. Where could he have picked up those words? But, he stepped up to Mohammad and slapped him silly, and so hard that the lice in the Prophet’s beard jumped ship, and Mohammad’s cheek was red for a day and a night. “How dare you question Allah’s manhood, you filthy jammal! You pile of dog chur!”

But Gabriel otherwise did not answer the question. He remained in the tent long enough to make sure that Mohammad instructed the scribe to make the change. He could not instruct the scribe himself, because he was visible only to Mohammad, and could only be heard by the Prophet. Mohammad explained to the scribe that he got it wrong the first time, because of accumulated wax in his ear.

The scribe, of course, was accustomed to Mohammad talking to himself, or at least to the unseen and unheard Angel Gabriel. He sort of believed in the existence of the Angel, because, often as he scratched away on the parchment, he felt a cold presence weighing on his shoulders and breathing down his neck.

We are assuming that Gabriel was of the masculine suasion. The Bible tells us so.

Before he went poof and vanished, the Angel Gabriel pulled from inside his robes a long, curved object. “Here,” he said. “With this you will conquer Arabia, if all else fails.” He handed it to Mohammad.

The Prophet gasped and took the object. Holding the bejeweled and intricately tooled leather scabbard in one hand, with the other he drew out a curved sword. The blade was shiny and beaten to razor sharpness. It was the most wicked looking weapon he had ever seen. His hand fit perfectly inside the guard, grip, and pommel. He hefted it once or twice. It had an admirable balance. “Milord!” he exclaimed. “What workmanship! What is it called?”

“It is a scimitar,” answered Gabriel, ignoring the open-mouthed amazement of the scribe, to whom the weapon had appeared miraculously in Mohammad’s hands without cause. “It is a better tool for conversion than the spears and flat swords your companions carry.” He paused and looked sly. “What does its form remind you of, Mohammad?”

The Prophet’s sight was fixed on the gleaming metal. His mind was dazzled. He shook his head.

“Allah is the Moon God, and that is the shape of the quarter moon. Henceforth, that will be your symbol, and your pulpit, so to speak. Sew that symbol to your banners. Now, get to work! Pack up everything here and move to Medina! There you may plot without distraction.” With that, the Angel Gabriel said, “ma'a as-salaama,” and went poof.

“Thank Allah for me,” said Mohammad to the empty air.

So, Sura 53:19-20 were emended to deny the reality of Allah’s daughters. These are verses 21-22.

Of course, this embarrassing and compromising episode was reported over a century after Mohammad’s alleged death (his existence being alleged anyway) by Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari. They had cell phone camera video evidence of the confrontation and correction – recorded by an anonymous witness, who may have been Baal – but that evidence was lost during the turmoil of the Islamic conquest of the Arabian Peninsula.

As everyone knows, Islam was so far ahead of its time. Lost also are volumes on quantum mechanics, heart transplants, the discovery of Uranus and Neptune, various heliocentric theories, a tantalizing treatise on electricity, a dissertation on agricultural irrigation, not to mention the entire oeuvre of Abdul ibn-Knish, including his Córdoban comedies. Western scholars argue that ibn-Knish was the Noël Coward of his day, to judge by the pitifully few fragments of his plays that are preserved in the Vatican Library. It is thought by experts that the Angel Samantha served as ibn-Knish’s muse, going by the name of Elvira.

In the Unexpurgated Koran, only one copy of which has survived and which is secured in a booby-trapped vault deep beneath the Vatican, another scholar relates that it was the Angel Samantha who whispered the untruths into Mohammad’s ear about Allah’s daughters. In this rare, early copy of the Koran, Suras 53 through 57 have been nicknamed the “Henpecked Allah Verses.”

The Angel Samantha was in due course unceremoniously chucked out of Paradise by Allah, once he learned of her betrayal and her role in advising Mohammad behind Gabriel’s back. As she plummeted to the flaming nether regions in a burqa, she balled up a fist, punched a hole through it, and shouted back, “Oh, who wants to sit at your stinking feet forever singing your praises, you megalomaniac!” It is reputed that she formed a liaison with Shayton and assisted him over the millennia in spurring hostile and often bloody divisions among Muslims. It was, underground scholars aver, she who enticed many Muslims to part from the Sunnis and become Shi’ites, whose original name was “She’s It!” It was quite a radical career change.

The End.

____________________________________________________________________________________


Of course, most of the Korans that are regularly burned by Muslims are those containing the uncorrected Sura 53 and other shocking and prurient chapters that were simply edited out of standard, general circulation Korans over the centuries by conscientious Islamic scholars. It explains much, such as why most Muslims are a humorless lot and super-sensitive to any criticism. Muslims are a most repressed people. And the Korans with the corrected Sura 53 underscore Islam’s inherent and wholly creditable misogyny, not to mention the scale of its troubling and murderous psychosis.

Allah's Oops!

Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a chaotic and bewildering novel which earned him a permanent death fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1989, will attend a literary conference in New Delhi, India in March, in defiance of Islamic naysayers. We can credit him with the defiance, but not his oeuvre with literary worth. I signed a petition in 1989 that opposed the fatwa and called on Western governments to uphold freedom of speech, a petition inspired by Khomeini's death sentence on Rushdie and on anyone who dared defend him or promote his book.

Out of curiosity, I tried reading The Satanic Verses, and one-quarter into it was unable and unwilling to finish it. I would liken it to a fantasy tale centered around the ribald adventures of believers in the merged worlds of the Rosicrucians and Yale's Skull and Bones secret society.

If it hadn't been for Khomeini's fatwa, as someone has noted elsewhere, Rushdie's novel would be gathering dust in second-hand bookstores, and Rushdie himself perhaps would be writing for The Daily Telegraph or the Guardian to earn a living.

So, what were those "Satanic Verses" that got the turbaned tyrants of Iran incensed? What is Sura 53 all about? It has to do with that obsession of inadequate and repressed Muslims everywhere: women ! No wonder they're raped, and beaten, and disfigured, and reduced to fractions and invisibility! Allah was the original male chauvinist pig. But, never mind The Satanic Verses. Here is a less obtuse accounting of what really happened in seventh century Mecca.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Once upon a time Allah had three daughters. You heard right. Not one, but three daughters, and they were all as powerful as he. As goddesses, they were worshipped by Arabs before Mohammad put an end to that pagan polytheism. Their names were al-Lät, al-Uzza, and Manät. They were okay, said the Angel Gabriel to him in his sleep, or in his dreams, or in his ear. "They are the Sorority of Serenity Now! Sirens of the Belly-Dance. Top-drawer cunning vixens! Make offerings to them in their temples, and your wishes will be granted!"

That was the original Sura, as reported by early Islamic scholars. Mohammad of course was dictating the Koran and speaking as though in a trance (reciting what he was hearing, so to speak, or so he claimed), and his scribe hurriedly scratched it all down on parchment rescued from the looted Alexandrian Library, bleached of any blasphemy. Mohammad, the Billy Sunday of his day, had decided that the Meccans he was trying to convert to Islam liked variety in their deities. Why not keep some sexy seductresses, and add some spice to the creed?

At least, that's what he thought he thought, as he was listening to "the voice." Mohammad was of two minds: he was hearing voices, while his subconscious worked overtime to see how he could take advantage of what he was hearing.

Then he had a change of mind. Or Gabriel came to him again one night, chewed him out, and changed it for him. Gabriel peered over the scribe's shoulder and read the latest Sura. He exploded.

"You fool! You dunderhead! That wasn't me whispering in your ear last night! That was…Shaytan! I was in the Crab Nebula last night on other business, so I never told you that Allah had three daughters! I got a proper tongue-lashing from Allah this morning, thanks to your date-addled brain, you mewling kid of a camel, you spawn of a Jewess!"

Mohammad looked hurt and humiliated. He muttered under his breath, "Oops!"

Gabriel paced back and forth furiously, shaking his finger at Mohammad. "Now, listen up, chowder head! There is only one God, and his name is Allah! No goddesses! No daughters! No sons, either! Tell your scribe to cross out that Sura, and replace it with, 'Are men's children to be boys and Allah's to be girls? How unfair!' That's how it should read! Those are Allah's very words!"

Now, Mohammad wanted to establish a new religion, and be exalted for what remained of eternity as its infallible founder. Still, he found it a curiously awkward means to spread the Word, and the Word was Allah's. A rather roundabout way of revealing that Word to mortals he could not imagine, he would think in his most private moments. Allah speaks it to this snooty Angel, and the Angel whispers it to him, and he recites it to this bent-over, aging scribe. Not very time efficient.

Mohammad blinked in confusion. "But, oh, my Winged Whispering Wonder! What about al-Lät, and al-Uzza, and Manät? Do they not exist? Temples have been built for them, the yokels here have worshipped them for ages. Are we to have no variety in our worship? Allah is fine, as the Main Moon Man, but…people say it gets old, just worshipping one god. Why not a family of them?" He paused, and had a thought. "And if they are his daughters, who was their mother? We are missing a goddess, it would seem."

"What Shaytan told you was blasphemy!" shouted Gabriel. "There are no other gods! Only Allah! All other gods are figments of men's imaginations! Unreal! Without temporal or spiritual substance! Shape up, Mohammad, or Allah will choose another Prophet, and leave you to run with the dogs!"

Mohammad looked quizzical. He blurted, "Is Allah androgynous? Is he…without gender?"

Gabriel was stunned by this statement. Mohammad was illiterate. Where could he have picked up those words? But, he stepped up to Mohammad and slapped him silly, and so hard that the lice in the Prophet's beard jumped ship, and Mohammad's cheek was red for a day and a night. "How dare you question Allah's manhood, you filthy jammal! You pile of dog chur!"

But Gabriel otherwise did not answer the question. He remained in the tent long enough to make sure that Mohammad instructed the scribe to make the change. He could not instruct the scribe himself, because he was visible only to Mohammad, and could only be heard by the Prophet. Mohammad explained to the scribe that he got it wrong the first time, because of accumulated wax in his ear.

The scribe, of course, was accustomed to Mohammad talking to himself, or at least to the unseen and unheard Angel Gabriel. He sort of believed in the existence of the Angel, because, often as he scratched away on the parchment, he felt a cold presence weighing on his shoulders and breathing down his neck.

We are assuming that Gabriel was of the masculine suasion. The Bible tells us so.

Before he went poof and vanished, the Angel Gabriel pulled from inside his robes a long, curved object. "Here," he said. "With this you will conquer Arabia, if all else fails." He handed it to Mohammad.

The Prophet gasped and took the object. Holding the bejeweled and intricately tooled leather scabbard in one hand, with the other he drew out a curved sword. The blade was shiny and beaten to razor sharpness. It was the most wicked looking weapon he ad ever seen. His hand fit perfectly inside the guard, grip, and pommel. He hefted it once or twice. It had an admirable balance. "Milord!" he exclaimed. "What workmanship! What is it called?"

"It is a scimitar," answered Gabriel, ignoring the open-mouthed amazement of the scribe, to whom the weapon had appeared miraculously in Mohammad's hands without cause. "It is a better tool for conversion than the spears and flat swords your companions carry." He paused and looked sly. "What does its form remind you of, Mohammad?"

The Prophet's sight was fixed on the gleaming metal. His mind was dazzled. He shook his head.

"Allah is the Moon God, and that is the shape of the quarter moon. Henceforth, that will be your symbol, and your pulpit, so to speak. Sew that symbol to your banners. Now, get to work! Pack up everything here and move to Medina! There you may plot without distraction." With that, the Angel Gabriel said, "ma'a as-salaama," and went poof.

"Thank Allah for me," said Mohammad to the empty air.

So, Sura 53:19-20 were emended to deny the reality of Allah's daughters. These are verses 21-22.

Of course, this embarrassing and compromising episode was reported over a century after Mohammad's alleged death (his existence being alleged anyway) by Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari. They had cell phone camera video evidence of the confrontation and correction – recorded by an anonymous witness, who may have been Baal – but that evidence was lost during the turmoil of the Islamic conquest of the Arabian Peninsula.

As everyone knows, Islam was so far ahead of its time. Lost also are volumes on quantum mechanics, heart transplants, the discovery of Uranus and Neptune, various heliocentric theories, a tantalizing treatise on electricity, a dissertation on agricultural irrigation, not to mention the entire oeuvre of Abdul ibn-Knish, including his Córdoban comedies. Western scholars argue that ibn-Knish was the Noël Coward of his day, to judge by the pitifully few fragments of his plays that are preserved in the Vatican Library. It is thought by experts that the Angel Samantha served as ibn-Knish's muse, going by the name of Elvira.

In the Unexpurgated Koran, only one copy of which has survived and which is secured in a booby-trapped vault deep beneath the Vatican, another scholar relates that it was the Angel Samantha who whispered the untruths into Mohammad's ear about Allah's daughters. In this rare, early copy of the Koran, Suras 53 through 57 have been nicknamed the "Henpecked Allah Verses."

The Angel Samantha was in due course unceremoniously chucked out of Paradise by Allah, once he learned of her betrayal and her role in advising Mohammad behind Gabriel's back. As she plummeted to the flaming nether regions in a burqa, she balled up a fist, punched a hole through it, and shouted back, "Oh, who wants to sit at your stinking feet forever singing your praises, you megalomaniac!" It is reputed that she formed a liaison with Shayton and assisted him over the millennia in spurring hostile and often bloody divisions among Muslims. It was, underground scholars aver, she who enticed many Muslims to part from the Sunnis and become Shi'ites, whose original name was "She's It!" It was quite a radical career change.

The End.

____________________________________________________________________________________


Of course, most of the Korans that are regularly burned by Muslims are those containing the uncorrected Sura 53 and other shocking and prurient chapters that were simply edited out of standard, general circulation Korans over the centuries by conscientious Islamic scholars. It explains much, such as why most Muslims are a humorless lot and super-sensitive to any criticism. Muslims are a most repressed people. And the Korans with the corrected Sura 53 underscore Islam's inherent and wholly creditable misogyny, not to mention the scale of its troubling and murderous psychosis.

The “False Alarm” of the latest Executive Order

A few nights ago I watched John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964). And a few nights before that, his The Manchurian Candidate (1962). I was in a foul, pessimistic mood, given the nature of the presidential election campaign and the vacillating prospects of seeing a changing of the Red Guard in the White House. Both movies, excellent in their direction, casting and theme, dramatized conspiracies to take over the United States government and establish a dictatorship.

Then, on Sunday morning, March 18th, I learned about the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, signed into law by President Barack H. Obama on March 16th. As some news blogs noted, Friday was a curious time to inform the nation of the NDRP EO, or “EO 12919” (for Executive Order), an EO to which the mainstream media seemed oblivious and un-newsworthy.

I immediately recalled Directive 10-289 from Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged , in which the Head of State, at the behest of his national economic planner, issues a decree that freezes everyone and everything in place to combat an ongoing, government-caused national “emergency.”

Previously, in December, I had written about the ambiguous language in certain sections of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA), language that could authorize the warrantless arrests of American citizens for cocking a snook at the government and treating said citizens as enemy combatants or prisoners of war subject to indefinite detention in conditions less salubrious than those enjoyed by actual enemy combatants now housed in Gitmo. EO 12919 seemed to complement the NDAA. Searching for the text of the EO on the Internet, I saw that it was the subject of scores of blog sites and news outlets, most claiming that it was a move by Obama to take over the government or establish tyranny. In fact, many of them cited Directive 10-289.

I found the full text of the EO on the White House site, and also a critique of it on Hot Air by Ed Morrissey, “’National Defense Resources Preparedness’ executive order: Power grab or mere update?” I read the EO, expecting to find the worst; however, the droll bureaucratic language almost caused me to nod off. It dwelt mostly on shifts of delegated powers among the Cabinet and federal departments to “identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation.” Most of the language seemed to be a legitimate mandate for a government charged with defending the country from its enemies.

Then I read Morrissey’s comments. Morrissey justifiably chided everyone for being alarmed by EO 12919. In a thoroughly researched article, he stressed that the EO is merely an amendment to an EO enacted in 1950 during the Korean War and subsequently revised to accommodate technological and policy changes since then.

Again, this is almost identical to EO 12919 from 18 years earlier [1994]. Note what this EO specifically orders: identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation. None of these items claim authority to seize private property and place them at the personal disposal of Obama. What follows after Section 103 are the directives for implementing these rather analytical tasks, mostly in the form of explicit delegations of presidential authority to Cabinet members and others in the executive branch.

If one takes a look at EO 12919, the big change is in the Cabinet itself. In 1994, we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, for instance, and some of these functions would naturally fall to DHS. In EO 12919, the FEMA director had those responsibilities, and the biggest change between the two is the removal of several references to FEMA (ten in all). Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of changes between the two EOs, which looks mainly like boilerplate.

In fact, that’s almost entirely what it is. The original EO dealing with national defense resources preparedness was issued in 1939 (EO 8248) according to the National Archives. It has been superseded a number of times, starting in 1951 by nearly every President through Bill Clinton, and amended twice by George W. Bush.

As Morrissey writes, many “right-wing” bloggers susceptible to conspiracy theories jumped the gun, asserting that EO 12919 was a creature of the current administration. That was my original supposition, as well. Morrissey was seconded in his correction by Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway:

Executive Order itself is nothing more than a restatement of policy that has been in place in decades and grants no authority to the President or the Cabinet that they don’t already have under existing law. …

There are, perhaps, some issues worth discussing that this EO raises. The fact that the President of the United States is still exercising authority granted during the Korean War and the height of the Cold War is yet another reflection of how power, once assumed by the Imperial Presidency, is never surrendered.

The fact that an Executive Order like this was released on a Friday afternoon and has been largely ignored by the traditional media is an indication of just how easy it is for politicians to manipulate the news cycle. And the idea that the government has authority like that described in this document, even only in theory, and that most Americans aren’t even aware of it, is a reflection of just how little we know about the things that are done in our name. Those are all legitimate issues, but they go far deeper than this one relatively innocuous Executive Order.

So, the news about EO 12919 is that there is no news.

Still, Mataconis does question the dubious legitimacy of granting the executive branch powers that could easily morph from ensuring that the government has the equipment, funding, and means to deal with “national emergencies” – which remain undefined throughout the document, which could mean a war, or a natural catastrophe – to powers to “manage” any crisis the White House could find handy or even manufacture to excuse an assumption of dictatorial powers.

Furthermore, actions sanctioned by the EO do not require Congressional approval. Precedents include President Bush not asking for a formal declaration of war against Iraq, albeit taking military action, or Bill Clinton’s Bosnian “intervention.” Or even Obama’s Libyan “intervention.” The EO could have been invoked, for all we know, to take over General Motors (“too big to fail”), or be invoked to ensure the survival the Patient Affordable Protection Act should the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional.

There are two ways that presidents can enact initiatives without congressional approval. Presidents may issue a proclamation, often ceremonial in nature, such as naming a day in honor of someone or something that has contributed to American society. A president may also issue an executive order, which has the full effect of law and is directed to federal agencies that are charged with carrying out the order. Examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order for the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces and Dwight Eisenhower's order to integrate the nation's schools.

Congress cannot directly vote to override an executive order in the way it can a veto. Instead, Congress must pass a bill canceling or changing the order in a manner they see fit. The president will typically veto that bill, and then Congress can try to override the veto of that second bill. The Supreme Court can also declare an executive order to be unconstitutional. Congressional cancellation of an order is extremely rare.

There are many troubling points in EO 12919, one of which is the indeterminate nature of the “national emergencies” that would justify the decree of an EO. Another is the ambiguous statement that:

The head of each agency otherwise delegated functions under this order is delegated the authority of the President under sections 710(b) and (c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(b), (c), to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations. [Sec. 502. Consultants]

Which may or may not mean indentured servitude. Time will tell

“Section 702 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2152,” as well as other Acts, is frequently cited throughout EO 12919. Section 702 here concerns “emergency” powers approved in 2003. But one must wonder if the Founders had intended the government to collect so much information on not only the economy, its industrial and technological base (which the government treats off-handedly as a personal asset), but on the private citizens who make it all possible. I think not.

And how does the federal government usually “foster cooperation,” except by extortion, fraud, bribery, falsehoods, blackmail, and direct physical force? It is not as benign a term as it appears.

Mac Slavo at The Intel Hub also “jumps the gun,” but ends his column with a calmer warning:

When implemented simultaneously with existing laws and Presidential orders, the National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order establishes a clear chain of command and control over all aspects of American life in what can only be described as a police state under martial law.

And that’s the rub. The groundwork for a fascist control of the country is there. It has been carefully laid over decades. And it may be that even the White House knows that it is too early to implement simultaneously all those “emergency” orders and laws, because the reaction by Americans would make the Tea Party phenomenon look like a friendly marital spat.

The "False Alarm" of the latest Executive Order

A few nights ago I watched John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964). And a few nights before that, his The Manchurian Candidate (1962). I was in a foul, pessimistic mood, given the nature of the presidential election campaign and the vacillating prospects of seeing a changing of the Red Guard in the White House. Both movies, excellent in their direction, casting and theme, dramatized conspiracies to take over the United States government and establish a dictatorship.

Then, on Sunday morning, March 18th, I learned about the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, signed into law by President Barack H. Obama on March 16th. As some news blogs noted, Friday was a curious time to inform the nation of the NDRP EO, or "EO 12919" (for Executive Order), an EO to which the mainstream media seemed oblivious and un-newsworthy.

I immediately recalled Directive 10-289 from Ayn Rand's prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged , in which the Head of State, at the behest of his national economic planner, issues a decree that freezes everyone and everything in place to combat an ongoing, government-caused national "emergency."

Previously, in December, I had written about the ambiguous language in certain sections of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA), language that could authorize the warrantless arrests of American citizens for cocking a snook at the government and treating said citizens as enemy combatants or prisoners of war subject to indefinite detention in conditions less salubrious than those enjoyed by actual enemy combatants now housed in Gitmo. EO 12919 seemed to complement the NDAA. Searching for the text of the EO on the Internet, I saw that it was the subject of scores of blog sites and news outlets, most claiming that it was a move by Obama to take over the government or establish tyranny. In fact, many of them cited Directive 10-289.

I found the full text of the EO on the White House site, and also a critique of it on Hot Air by Ed Morrissey, "'National Defense Resources Preparedness' executive order: Power grab or mere update?" I read the EO, expecting to find the worst; however, the droll bureaucratic language almost caused me to nod off. It dwelt mostly on shifts of delegated powers among the Cabinet and federal departments to "identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation." Most of the language seemed to be a legitimate mandate for a government charged with defending the country from its enemies.

Then I read Morrissey's comments. Morrissey justifiably chided everyone for being alarmed by EO 12919. In a thoroughly researched article, he stressed that the EO is merely an amendment to an EO enacted in 1950 during the Korean War and subsequently revised to accommodate technological and policy changes since then.

Again, this is almost identical to EO 12919 from 18 years earlier [1994]. Note what this EO specifically orders: identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation. None of these items claim authority to seize private property and place them at the personal disposal of Obama. What follows after Section 103 are the directives for implementing these rather analytical tasks, mostly in the form of explicit delegations of presidential authority to Cabinet members and others in the executive branch.

If one takes a look at EO 12919, the big change is in the Cabinet itself. In 1994, we didn't have a Department of Homeland Security, for instance, and some of these functions would naturally fall to DHS. In EO 12919, the FEMA director had those responsibilities, and the biggest change between the two is the removal of several references to FEMA (ten in all). Otherwise, there aren't a lot of changes between the two EOs, which looks mainly like boilerplate.

In fact, that's almost entirely what it is. The original EO dealing with national defense resources preparedness was issued in 1939 (EO 8248) according to the National Archives. It has been superseded a number of times, starting in 1951 by nearly every President through Bill Clinton, and amended twice by George W. Bush.

As Morrissey writes, many "right-wing" bloggers susceptible to conspiracy theories jumped the gun, asserting that EO 12919 was a creature of the current administration. That was my original supposition, as well. Morrissey was seconded in his correction by Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway:

Executive Order itself is nothing more than a restatement of policy that has been in place in decades and grants no authority to the President or the Cabinet that they don't already have under existing law. …

There are, perhaps, some issues worth discussing that this EO raises. The fact that the President of the United States is still exercising authority granted during the Korean War and the height of the Cold War is yet another reflection of how power, once assumed by the Imperial Presidency, is never surrendered.

The fact that an Executive Order like this was released on a Friday afternoon and has been largely ignored by the traditional media is an indication of just how easy it is for politicians to manipulate the news cycle. And the idea that the government has authority like that described in this document, even only in theory, and that most Americans aren't even aware of it, is a reflection of just how little we know about the things that are done in our name. Those are all legitimate issues, but they go far deeper than this one relatively innocuous Executive Order.

So, the news about EO 12919 is that there is no news.

Still, Mataconis does question the dubious legitimacy of granting the executive branch powers that could easily morph from ensuring that the government has the equipment, funding, and means to deal with "national emergencies" – which remain undefined throughout the document, which could mean a war, or a natural catastrophe – to powers to "manage" any crisis the White House could find handy or even manufacture to excuse an assumption of dictatorial powers.

Furthermore, actions sanctioned by the EO do not require Congressional approval. Precedents include President Bush not asking for a formal declaration of war against Iraq, albeit taking military action, or Bill Clinton's Bosnian "intervention." Or even Obama's Libyan "intervention." The EO could have been invoked, for all we know, to take over General Motors ("too big to fail"), or be invoked to ensure the survival the Patient Affordable Protection Act should the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional.

There are two ways that presidents can enact initiatives without congressional approval. Presidents may issue a proclamation, often ceremonial in nature, such as naming a day in honor of someone or something that has contributed to American society. A president may also issue an executive order, which has the full effect of law and is directed to federal agencies that are charged with carrying out the order. Examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order for the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces and Dwight Eisenhower's order to integrate the nation's schools.

Congress cannot directly vote to override an executive order in the way it can a veto. Instead, Congress must pass a bill canceling or changing the order in a manner they see fit. The president will typically veto that bill, and then Congress can try to override the veto of that second bill. The Supreme Court can also declare an executive order to be unconstitutional. Congressional cancellation of an order is extremely rare.

There are many troubling points in EO 12919, one of which is the indeterminate nature of the "national emergencies" that would justify the decree of an EO. Another is the ambiguous statement that:

The head of each agency otherwise delegated functions under this order is delegated the authority of the President under sections 710(b) and (c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(b), (c), to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations. [Sec. 502. Consultants]

Which may or may not mean indentured servitude. Time will tell

"Section 702 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2152," as well as other Acts, is frequently cited throughout EO 12919. Section 702 here concerns "emergency" powers approved in 2003. But one must wonder if the Founders had intended the government to collect so much information on not only the economy, its industrial and technological base (which the government treats off-handedly as a personal asset), but on the private citizens who make it all possible. I think not.

And how does the federal government usually "foster cooperation," except by extortion, fraud, bribery, falsehoods, blackmail, and direct physical force? It is not as benign a term as it appears.

Mac Slavo at The Intel Hub also "jumps the gun," but ends his column with a calmer warning:

When implemented simultaneously with existing laws and Presidential orders, the National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order establishes a clear chain of command and control over all aspects of American life in what can only be described as a police state under martial law.

And that's the rub. The groundwork for a fascist control of the country is there. It has been carefully laid over decades. And it may be that even the White House knows that it is too early to implement simultaneously all those "emergency" orders and laws, because the reaction by Americans would make the Tea Party phenomenon look like a friendly marital spat.

Objectivist Round-Up

Welcome to the March 1st, 2012 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Nicholas Marquiss presents "Ron Paul Lacks the Principles Needed to Defend Freedom" at The Undercurrent, saying: "In this piece written for The Undercurrent, Nicholas Marquiss highlights the failure of Ron Paul to truly grasp and defend individual rights."

Jon Glatfelter presents "Do We Need Faith to Know Right From Wrong?" at The Undercurrent, saying "Is morality the process of adhering to divine edicts? In this Campus Media Response, Jon Glatfelter argues otherwise."

Zak Szalewski presents "The Hypocrisy of Islamic States" at The Rational Extremist, saying: "I am an Objectivist and new to the blogging circle."

Jared Rhoads presents "Assorted thoughts on contraception, Bell, physicians, and more" at Center for Objective Health Policy, saying "Here are a few short thoughts and observations on recent events--some health-related and some not."

Darius Cooper presents "Federal Debt Project" at Practice Good Theory, saying "I show how government debt is projected to grow."
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Ross England presents "Organ Donation: Check the 'Selfish Bastard' Box for Me Too" at Think Twice, saying "Some of my thoughts on the wisdom of having organ donor status on your driver's license."

Paul Hsieh presents "Free Market Lessons from Contraception Fight" at We Stand FIRM, saying "My latest at PJM discusses 3 lessons we should learn from the political fight over birth control."

***

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Ayn Rand Nation: A Celebrity Roast

Imagine a lecture on the ideas of Ayn Rand – or on those of Immanuel Kant, or John Locke, or Plato, or Aristotle, or on the philosophical system of any major thinker of the past – delivered by Ronald MacDonald in full clown regalia. Pretty ludicrous?

Picture it combined with the rhetorical equivalent of "death by a thousand chortles," punctuated with spittle-spewing Bronx cheers. Pretty disgusting? Not very amusing?

Then you will have an idea of the nature and purpose of Gary Weiss's book on Rand and Objectivism, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul. (St. Martin's Press, 2012). Weiss presumes to be a kind of modern day Dante Alighieri who will show you the "truth" about Rand and her philosophy. What he actually is, is a pretentious stand-up comedian who's cadged the words and sentiments of a host of malicious detractors who went before him.

The title itself is misleading. At first glance, it suggests an in-depth study of how Rand's ideas have permeated the culture, especially in politics, in terms of opposition to federal economic and social policies. But it is no such thing. The book is mocking, sneering screed, two hundred and ninety-nine pages long, penned by a nihilist posing as an "investigative" journalist. Or muckraker. Better copy can be found in any supermarket tabloid.

The first part of the title also is an exercise in calculated tackiness. Roll it off your tongue. "Ayn Rand Nation" slurs into "Alienation." This is called syllabic autosuggestion, and is meant to worm its way into one's mind like an aural earwig. If you are susceptible to that kind of psychological manipulation, it might work.

In his Huffington Post column of March 7th, "Why You Shouldn't Dismiss Ayn Rand," Weiss claims that his book is about why Ayn Rand's ideas should be taken seriously. But once one has the book in hand and is read from page one, one will see that it is actually a plea to not take her ideas seriously. It is a long-winded warning, written as an "exposé," to stay away from Rand's ideas, lest one be branded as a kook or a cultist or a zombie. Weiss coined several other disparaging names for Rand and Objectivists in this book, which will not be repeated here.

Nor will any of the book's contents be discussed here. There is not a single page in which Weiss does not employ his disdain and malice. And what would be the point of actually reviewing such a book? It is a hatchet job from beginning to end on Ayn Rand, on Objectivism and Objectivists, and on many of the interviewees, whom I suspect were interviewed under the false pretense of a serious interest in Rand.

A Barnes & Noble ad for Weiss's book glowingly reads:

Weiss provides a strategy for a renewed national dialogue, an embrace of the nation's core values that is needed to deal with Rand's pervasive grip on society.

Yes, that's right. Weiss wishes people to "deal with" Rand's allegedly "pervasive grip on society." If it were true that her ideas had such a "pervasive grip," the country would not be in as bad a shape it is in. But the ad does identify the fact that Weiss regards Rand as an enemy to "deal with." The "strategy"? Guffaws unlimited. Snickers by the dozen. Countless calloused elbows and sore ribs.

Publishers Weekly also gave Weiss a pass.

Weiss poses an important question: will we be a country that values human life and dignity, or one that values only the dollar?

There's a dichotomy? A conflict? Rand wrote there needn't be one, but neither Publishers Weekly nor Weiss understands this. Well, perhaps Weiss does, which would partly explain why anyone so desperate to derogate Rand and her ideas would stoop to writing a two-hundred and ninety-nine page celebrity roast.

To attempt to refute or rebut anything said in Weiss's book would merely dignify an insult by elevating it to the level of a philosophical proposition worthy of an answer.

Caveat emptor.