And so it goes

As I stated in an earlier post, the so-called International Freedom Center, as proposed, should not be located within the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City. Via The Belmont Club comes the news that New York Governor George Pataki has heard the message and has decided that the IFC will not be a part of the memorial.

"Freedom should unify us. This center has not," Pataki said. "Today there remains too much opposition, too much controversy over the programming of the IFC. ... We must move forward with our first priority, the creation of an inspiring memorial to pay tribute to our lost loved ones and tell their stories to the world."

As Wretchard notes, the New York Times has expressed its displeasure with the decision, further assuring its correctness.

And in a further display of regurgitating what better bloggers than me have written, Wretchard notes:

Nowhere in the article does the NYT say why the September 11 families clamored for revision; it happened after Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of one of the hijacked planes and a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation

drew attention to behind-the-scenes plans to host exhibitions at the complex devoted to such issues as the genocide of native Americans, the fight against slavery, the Holocaust and the Gulag, instead of the bravery and dignity of nearly 3,000 victims of the Al-Qaeda suicide squads. It will also be the site of academic symposiums on the foundations of freedom, providing a “magnet” to activists and academics to debate the US “domestic and foreign policy they despise”, she said. An early design for the cultural centre included a large mural of an Iraqi voter. But in a sign of things to come, said Burlingame, this was replaced by a photograph of Martin Luther King, the murdered civil rights leader, with President Lyndon Johnson.

He goes on to list the principal backers of the IFC and makes the following very interesting observation:

The effort illustrates the extraordinary importance that the Left places on the control of symbols. By preference, a good Marxist symbol should represent the very opposite of its counterpart in reality because its foremost goal, in common with unscrupulous Mesmerists, is to emasculate the mind. It was no accident that in Orwell's 1984, that the Ministries of War, Rationing, Propaganda and Repression were called the Ministries of Peace, Plenty, Truth and Love by the Party.

He then leaves you with a question to which the answer is all too obvious....

Computer upgrades

I've updated the "About my rig" post to reflect the recent hardware changes I've made to the home computer system. It's a pretty rockin' box now.

Quotes of the day

Via The Federalist Patriot.

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." —Thomas Jefferson

"I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and the duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit... The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood." —President Grover Cleveland

"Consider that black households that are headed by married couples have median incomes almost 90 percent that of white households headed by married couples. The problem in the black community is that far too few black households are headed by married couples. Black social reality in New Orleans at the moment when the floodwaters started pouring in was fairly typical of black inner-city social reality around the country. Upwards of 70 percent of the households were headed by single parents, mostly women. When I discuss social statistics with audiences around the country, I invariably hear gasps when I point out that the out-of-wedlock birthrate today among young white women (30 percent) is higher than it was among black women 50 years ago. There, of course, remain residuals of racism in America today, and it's news to a lot of whites that black families were relatively intact, headed by married couples, in the '40s and '50s. Today's out-of-wedlock black births and single-parent households are triple what they were then. The collapse of the black family took off when big government programs, particularly welfare, were launched, compliments of black and white liberals, after the civil-rights movement." —Star Parker

"Perhaps President Bush has inadvertently nominated a true conservative to the court with this Roberts fellow. I remain skeptical based on the following facts: (1) Anita Hill has not stepped forward to accuse Roberts of sexual harassment. (2) The Democrats did not accuse Roberts of having a secret life as a racist. (3) We have no idea what kind of videos he rents. Also, I'm still steamed that Bush has now dashed my dreams of an all-black Supreme Court composed of eight more Clarence Thomases. Incidentally, eight more Clarence Thomases is the only form of human cloning I would ever support... For Christians, it's 'What Would Jesus Do?' For Republicans, it's 'What Would Reagan Do?' Bush doesn't have to be Reagan; he just has to consult his WWRD bracelet. If Bush had followed the WWRD guidelines, he would have nominated Antonin Scalia for the chief justiceship... [M]ost important, if Bush had nominated Scalia, liberals would have responded with their usual understated screams of genocide, and Bush could have nominated absolutely anyone to fill Justice O'Connor's seat. He also could have cut taxes, invaded Syria, and bombed North Korea and Cuba just for laughs. He could even have done something totally nuts, like enforce the immigration laws... According to my WWRD wristwatch, it's time for Bush to invade Grenada, bomb Libya, fire the air traffic controllers, and joke about launching a first strike against the Soviet Union. In lieu of that, how about nominating a conservative to O'Connor's seat on the court? It would be a bold gesture."—Ann Coulter

Not surprising in the least

The Gun Guy notes the following:

[T]he latest FBI crime stats (2004) are out—and in the first full year after the sunsetting of the vile Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), murders and robberies each dropped by 3.6%.

Yes, the word is dropped.

You may recognize The Gun Guy's website as the same one that I have had on my Blogroll since the beginning, and one that I have linked to on numerous occasions, except now the author posts under a pseudonym. I won't say who it is; suffice it to say that The Gun Guy has a very good reason for pulling the cloak of online anonymity around his virtual self.

The IFC must go

Once again I pop my head up from my busy life. I'm currently contemplating the future of this blog but here's something I wanted to put out there for those who happen to find their way here.

Over at Cox and Forkum is their latest editorial cartoon regarding the proposed International Freedom Center which is slated to be a part of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York. The IFC, as noted in this WSJ article, will present to visitors, "a memorial that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the yearning to return to that day. Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world. They will be served up a heaping foreign policy discussion over the greater meaning of Abu Ghraib and what it portends for the country and the rest of the world."

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has come out in opposition to the IFC, as has Senator (and likely 2008 presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton. Hopefully Governor Pataki and the others involved in this decision will listen to the will of the people and cancel plans to build this memorial to apology and moral relativism on that sacred ground.

Where are the statesmen?

The ever-irascible Kim du Toit, being under considerable pressure from the concerns of everyday life, has taken a break from his regular prodigious blogging schedule until such time as the situation improves. He still posts occasionally, but he has also introduced his "Best of" feature where his blogging software randomly presents one or more posts from the past. Today's is titled, "Where Is Washington?"

When asked how long the Republic would last, James Russell Lowe famously remarked, “The Republic will endure as long as the ideals and principles of the Founders remain dominant in the hearts of the people.”

Someone else less-famously remarked that the framers of the United States Constitution had it easy when they were drawing up that wonderful document: they had the august and brooding presence of George Washington sitting in the room with them while they wrote it. And if at any time an ignoble urge might come upon them, they had only to think of Washington’s frown of approbation for that urge to be curbed—and they had the certain knowledge that whatever they produced would eventually have to be subjected to the stern scrutiny of Washington’s unbending honor.

Where is Washington now? It is clear that people in government need some kind of moral compass, some kind of final arbiter, in order that their machinations be kept in check, and that the baser side of their natures be cowed at the thought of awful displeasure.

Where is Washington? He's probably spinning in his grave so fast that, were we to connect him to a generator, we could probably light all of Washington DC with its output. The last president we had which even approached Washington in stature was Reagan. George W. Bush tries, and he sometimes succeeds, but he simply isn't of the same caliber.

This country has so lost the vision of the Founders that I sometimes despair of it ever correcting itself. There are many things that need to be done if we are to return to the type of nation that was forged over two centuries ago. Here are just a few:

• Eliminate the current system of punitive taxation of individuals and corporations. Replace the income tax with a consumption tax, whether it's a national sales tax (i.e. the Fair Tax) or a value-added tax. There are good arguments for either. (Ideally the Federal government would not require a tax on the people of any kind, but fund itself solely through tariffs as it did originally. However, in today's world that's merely wishful thinking.)


• Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution and return the responsibility for selecting Senators to the legislatures of the various states. The original intent was for the House of Representatives to represent the people of the states, and for the Senate to represent the states as entities in their own right. No longer beholden to special interest groups, other than the states, they would be far less inclined to pass legislation that panders to such groups.


• Reign in the judiciary so that it once again acts as the arbiter of the law and not its creator. The Supreme Court must only determine whether or not laws are contrary to the Constitution, and not make new law where none was before.

I could go on and on but these three things would make a large difference. What changes would you suggest?

Katrina

It’s been a long couple of weeks since I last posted anything here.  Mainly I’ve been going to work, playing games on the computer every so often, and generally going about my life.  I’ve wanted to put up a long and detailed post about Cindy Sheehan but so many other bloggers out there are doing such a good job that there really isn’t any reason for me to do so.  Of course this past week has been dominated by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, pushing Cindy off the front page.  I don’t have a lot to say that hasn’t already been said but I did want to point out a couple of things related to the Hurricane that caught my attention.

First up we have rap “artist” Kanye West.  Along with many other performers, he appeared on a televised concert last night to benefit those affected by the hurricane.  However, like all too many famous people, he elected to inject his own political views into an event that should have been about helping people and not about partisan politics:

Appearing two-thirds through the program, he claimed "George Bush doesn't care about black people" and said America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."

Of course he played the race card.  And of course he’s full of it.  There are all kinds of reasons, some justified, some not, that the efforts to help those still in the city were delayed, but the fact that those people are predominately poor and black are not among them.

Next up, Robert Tracinski writing for The Intellectual Activist believes he knows why we’re seeing the behavior that is occurring in New Orleans, namely the looting and general lawlessness:

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

He compares the scenes in New Orleans with scenes from another well-known part of the world:

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

The article he refers to appeared in the Washington Times, a link to which appears in Tracinski’s article.  Further down, he describes a specific condition that is likely exacerbating the problem:

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

As you would expect, a lot of people have spent a lot of time assigning blame. Whose fault is this?

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

Of course we didn’t see this sort of behavior in New York on and after 9/11.  But that was a relatively localized event, affecting only a small part of the city.  If something like Katrina were to come along and force the total evacuation of New York, I expect that similar conditions would obtain there as well.  Let us hope that never happens, but we better start getting ready in case it does.