Contrary to the absurdly alienated-from-nature-and-reality view of Hit and Run’s David Weigel ["I was under the impression that birthrates dipped if citizens thought their future was dark or uncertain,"] it turns out that breeders breed during wartime:
The first babies of couples who temporarily had to evacuate the North [of Israel] because of rockets during the Second Lebanon War are being born at Safed’s Ziv Hospital and other hospitals that were the target of Hizbullah attacks.
Ziv medical director Dr. Oscar Embon said that according to health fund reports, the number of pregnancies among women in the North is 35 percent higher now than at this time in 2006. Doctors, psychologists and sexologists explain that the “mini-baby boom” was motivated by the determination that life must go on despite the war and to “take revenge” on an enemy that wants to destroy Israel.
Creating new life, said the experts, is a source of consolation and hope. After every Israeli war, there is an increased number of pregnancies and deliveries; experts said that even animals that feel the threat of war are more likely to mate as an instinct for survival.
I’m beginning to believe that you can’t trust bloggers under 30. They don’t know anything about life.
Windbag Obama, whose campaign has been all about nothing, is now all about hot air. And he’s a bald-faced demagogue to boot. He wants Don Imus to pay for all the sins of our culture:
In an interview with ABC News Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., called for the firing of talk radio host Don Imus. Obama said he would never again appear on Imus’ show, which is broadcast on CBS Radio and MSNBC television.
“I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus,” Obama told ABC News, “but I would also say that there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude.”
Except when he wants Fox to pay for the sins of our culture.
I can’t believe that Hillary Clinton just keeps looking better and better to me.
In a photo gallery, Der Spiegel asks:
Does Germany already Have Sharia Law?
In Dissent, Pascal Bruckner (class of ‘68, French chapter, or, way more obnoxiously, soixante-huitard), ponders, among other things, the meaning of internationalism some forty years after our cohort came alive politically.
The third-worldism that set the wretched of the earth in opposition to the sated North is moribund as a political movement, yet it survives in our minds as a subtle poison, in the way we spontaneously denounce ourselves for the world’s disorders. We live off the dividends of our self-accusation. We are supposedly forever in debt to the poor, the oppressed, the immigrants, and our only obligation is to expiate endlessly. Consider the wave of repentance sweeping through the continent nowadays-like an epidemic, especially in the major religions. This is an excellent thing, a salutary realization of past offenses, provided that other cultures and other beliefs also recognize their errors. Contrition cannot be restricted to a few and innocence attributed to everyone who claims to be persecuted. For too many countries, particularly in the Arab world, self-criticism is confused with the search for a convenient scapegoat: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s.
Johann Hari, also writing in Dissent, reviews some current books about Islam in the West and concludes on a surprisingly hopeful note. He sees an exciting opportunity for Europe to play host to a reformation of Islam.
[A]cross the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularized by the mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative. And if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. …
The Ni Putains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for “no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads.” Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one “pure” Islam, represented by elderly mullahs. Now that Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach places European states closer to the reactionaries than to the feminists and liberals. We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics. …
To host an Islamic civil war—one where the liberals win—Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism. The potential prize is extraordinary.
I would like to believe this is possible. Unfortunately, things are just too damn weird. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less next week or next month or next year, is just full of shit.
The world is upside down. A while back, Spengler said we should sit back and enjoy the chaos. I note that he hasn’t published a word about up-to-the-minute events since Tall Tales from Tehran went into heavy rotation in the global media
until it was thrown off the air temporarily by Sob Stories from the Royal Navy and Marines.
Meanwhile, here at home, Nancy’s Really Big Adventure
was quickly overshadowed by Don Imus’s Really, Really Bad Manners
which got him suspended from NBC.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Which is exactly the way the media wants it. They want our eyeballs, and they get ‘em. Because infotainment rules.
The NYT’s Caryn James is one person who gets this, although she doesn’t quite connect the dots. Today she writes about our other national obsession—Anna Nicole Smith:
From the Who’s the Daddy question to the trumped-up murder-mystery element attached to both her death and to her 20-year-old son’s, her true story has played out in real time, as breaking news. Yet to the public it has also taken on the qualities of a long-running entertainment series, part reality television and part online game show. As on any reality show, the audience has been offered characters to root for or to hiss against. Mr. Stern and Mr. Birkhead have had their personalities shaped by television producers in much the way editing turns contestants on “Survivor” or “Big Brother” into heroes or villains. In the Smith case, there are competing camps, with infotainment shows aligning with the man who has given them access, and rarely bothering with the pretence of objectivity.
My point is this: for the seemingly narcotized (if not depraved) West, the Anna Nicole Smith story is no different from the British Hostages Nabbed by Iran story. Interestingly, Iran’s master propagandists are way ahead of our guys, because they get that.
These are the days of our lives…
Check this:
Jolie, Pitt buy Italian luxury yacht
The passenger cabin will include two 300-square-meter (3,200-square-foot) apartments, plus two guest suites of 150 square meters (1,600 square feet) each.
Other features include a swimming pool, a heliport, speedboats and a small submarine that will allow guests to explore the sea up to a depth of 300 meters (980 feet).
I can see that Angie doesn’t like to be tied down, and I don’t blame her—I’m a little bit like that, too. The thing is, though, the Jolie-Pitts will have to buy a massive security force to patrol their luxury liner, ’cause there’s a lot of piracy in the areas where the family likes to travel. Plus: you never know where Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah might strike next.
Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos must be envious of the Britain’s romp in the hay with Ahmadinejad, because they seem eager to get fucked in public in Tehran:
The Democratic speaker from San Francisco and Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were asked at a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday whether on the heels of their recent trip to the Middle East they would be interested in extending their diplomacy in the troubled region with a visit to Iran.
“Speaking just for myself, I would be ready to get on a plane tomorrow morning, because however objectionable, unfair and inaccurate many of (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s) statements are, it is important that we have a dialogue with him,” Lantos said. “Speaking for myself, I’m ready to go — and knowing the speaker, I think that she might be.”
Pelosi did not dispute that statement, and noted that Lantos — a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust — brought “great experience, knowledge and judgment” to the recent bipartisan congressional delegation trip to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia in addition to Syria.
I think I am now officially retired from trying to talk sense. Why bother?
Me and Neil growing old together—what a treat.
