When Obama and Xi Jinping meet next week, I assume there'll be a press conference or two, yes? Will the media hound Xi over China's cyber malfeasance, give him a taste of what it's like to operate in a country where free speech actually matters, is ostensibly revered? Or will they do the president's bidding and keep their mouths shut in order to save Dear Leader the embarrassment of them actually doing their jobs? But wait - look at me, silly sod, foolishly imagining we still had a free fourth estate when everyone knows our press willingly surrendered their first amendment rights the day Obama first put hand to bible and preened for the cameras. Oh, my - brave new world indeed. But who'll be our Prospero, the one man who knows the truth and can command the magic to heal these wounds? Instead we get Calibans everywhere...

Now, here's an interesting thought - should China's yuan one day surpass the American dollar as the world's reserve currency, the face of global finance will no longer be Washington's or Lincoln's or Franklin's - it'll be Mao's, quite possibly the greatest mass murderer in history and a loathsome megalomaniac if there ever was one. Will we all be expected to dutifully cower, pretending that's not the case? Nothin' to see here, just move along. Ah, the glorious days that lie ahead.

Would Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion be considered hate speech in England? If I stage a reading of it, with the stated goal of demonstrating that all religious belief is highly problematic and liable to abuse from extremists and accordingly some Muslim extremists take umbrage with my efforts - and let's face it, Islamists just love taking umbrage over perceived insults, this is how they wield power - and this leads to some protests from some rankled Muslims which leads to a counter riot from a rabble of soccer roughs and this leads to a Mosque being burned down - as the person who staged the reading am I the guilty party and will I then be threatened with jail time for celebrating one of the greatest intellects England ever produced? From what I've read about the law I think it's possible.

You stifle debate, you stifle free speech - and then you've taken away the whole point of democracy, you've drained it of its life blood, its essence. It's frightening how many people in England seem to be okay with that - frightening more still that apparently the law was passed under Maggie's reign - if England's greatest conservative could sign off on something as pernicious as this, imagine the damage a full bodied liberal could do under threats from the umbrage taking aggrieved?

[turns out the actual 'hate law' people are being charged under today was enacted in 2003 - but the foundation of those prohibitions comes from a 1986 public order law passed by Maggie - doesn't matter - point is when it comes to banning debate and controlling speech at what point have you stepped so thoroughly onto the slippery slope that there's no getting off of it? At what point has your irrational attempt to appease the unreasonable doomed your good intentions to an inevitable ruin? The problem with all these misguided attempts to accommodate the spike in Muslim emigration to the West is that they want to try and treat Christianity and Islam as somehow being cut from the same cloth which of course requires ignoring one absolutely crucial difference, a difference which bespeaks of the huge, possibly insuperable existential gap separating the two: over several hard fought centuries Christianity has been tempered and moderated through an often unwilling exposure to the forces of free reasoning, free speech and free actions - Islam has not been down this road, really hasn't even gone near it and indeed may never go near it since Islam's highly political nature renders it extremely intolerant of and resistant to change - which again marks a rather significant contradistinction separating Islam and Christianity - the latter was always in essence apolitical, was evolved outside of a political motive - which is not to pretend it wasn't used often for political ends - but fact was that until Constantine came along a few hundred years after Christ it really wasn't a particularly good career move to be a Christian, although things were improving which is exactly why Conny found Christ on a bridge... and then let's not forget that the intellectual environment Christianity grew up under was strongly influenced by the hyper rationality of the Greeks, the original free thinkers... hey, but Plotinus went to Persia and neo-Platonism found its way into the musings of some Muslim scholars... sure, but I would say that simply indicates just how important a consideration the apolitical foundation of Christianity is when comparing it to Islam... but the point remains, the historical realities that came to define the two systems were fundamentally different and it's positively nuts to talk as if somehow that is not supposed to matter... worse than nuts, it's delusional and dangerously so... ask yourself a simple question: can they teach Darwin in Turkey? The answer is increasingly no - 150 years after Darwin was FREE to turn the Christian world on its head and then pursue his earth shaking studies amidst much acclaim and controversy, 150 years after this in the most progressive Muslim country in the world you're playing with fire trying to teach Darwinism - in a place like Saudi Arabia it's probably illegal to merely own Origin of Species, never mind teach it - and I'm supposed to sit here and pretend that disturbing fact should not enter into my thinking at all when it comes to forming an opinion regarding the accommodation of Muslim beliefs in the Western world? Seriously? But, you say, some religious types in America reject Darwinism and espouse creationism - to which I answer, sure, they're free to be wrong and I'm free to criticize them, ridicule them, point out how flawed their thinking is without having to look over my shoulder wondering if I'm gonna be charged with a crime, or, alternatively, attacked with a meat cleaver - which is the whole point I'm trying to make here, yes?]

Obama sort of announces the end to the war on Islamic extremism, or as he prefers to see it, military-like actions directed towards resolving unfortunate differences in opinion, also once upon a time known as the war on terror until enlightened liberals set about expunging such offensive things from the foreign policy lexicon, including of course references that had the nerve to label Islamic extremism Islamic extremism [in the spirit of which I approached my estranged wife to inform her that apparently our marriage could magically cease being troubled once we stopped referring to it as being troubled - she chose to remain unimpressed]. Anyway, it seems Obama has sort of decided to end this 'war' because as he so astutely argued all wars eventually come to an end, thus making clear that his grasp of military history is about as refined as his grasp of economic theory.

Just one small problem with Dear Leader's thesis - wars just don't simply come to an end - you either win, all sides agree on some sort of a draw, or you lose - so which case is Obama claiming applies here? Certainly there can be informal interregnums, but that's clearly not his meaning - and he certainly isn't declaring a win or the outlines of a draw - so what's he saying? We've lost? That's the implication, far as I can tell.

Although, to be fair, from Obama's uber left perspective, a loss would be the same as a win - so I guess I'll just take that to be his meaning.

Did the recent Islamist violence on a London street prove the point of the second amendment, demonstrate the rationale behind it - not per se as understood by gun rights advocates presently but much more importantly as understood by the founding fathers who fashioned it? Ah... yes, I think it did. Essentially, the Bill of Rights establishes clearly the rules and principles by which it will be understood that the government is the servant of the people and not the other way around - the founders saw fit to make the right to own a weapon second only to the right to freely speak ones mind and that's because they believed that a people that surrenders utterly the protection of its freedoms and liberties to an overbearing state truly renders themselves powerless to defend those liberties and freedoms and thusly cedes in essence all authority to the abusive autocracy they have opened the door to. In this sense the second amendment's significance is almost more in its power as a symbol than in any practical application it may have - this is why when liberals attack it what a conservative hears is the expression of a foolishly naive trust in the unfettered growth of government and the coming of a ruinous enfeeblement.

Was not all that distressingly put on display in London? Isn't that what we saw? Powerlessness? A people who looked powerless, felt powerless, acted powerless and enfeebled, standing around forlornly waiting twenty god damn minutes for the few cops who are allowed to carry guns to show up? And don't you dare go on Facebook or some such public forum to express outrage over this sad state of affairs because that's a crime in England - free speech is tolerated but only if you have nice, government approved things to say about people, regardless of whether or not some of them in the name of their god happen to be trying to chop your head off with a meat cleaver. All seems rather pathetic - and this from the country that gave us John Locke, gave us the whole idea of a constitutional democracy, of a bill of rights - that a mere 70 years ago endured the horrors of the blitz in defense of those rights and beliefs - and this is what it's come to. Sad.

One thing it makes clear is that America is now truly alone in the world as last defender of what's left of the Western tradition [although after eight years of Obama even that slim hope may prove moot] - but forget about Europe, they're lost - look at what's happening in Sweden - that's the future of Europe, and what it will lead to is either the accelerated growth of extreme right wing parties across the continent that fractures polities in all sorts of unpleasant ways or Europe simply as a whole rolling over and playing dead. Not sure what would be worse.

Well, this is a fascinating article - no, not because it surprises me at all - I've always believed without much doubt, regardless of what he said or how he said it, that Obama had no intention whatsoever of ever seriously getting in the way of the Iranian theocracy's desire to go nuclear - and I don't believe Israel ever believed him either - I'm pretty sure the powers that be in Israel see right through the guy. Still, unless he comes out soon and forcefully denies this story or the gist of what this story is about, this will essentially be perceived by our enemies as Obama walking away in short order from a second red line he has drawn against them - how does anyone, I don't care how addled you are by left wing ideology, convince themselves that's a good or at least not necessarily bad thing?

And I'm really scratching my head on this - cause I have a very hard time believing this is all just a result of Obama being a naive fool or an arrogant jerk or both - to me this almost seems planned, calculated - I have no idea what the fuck the plan would be, some ill conceived nonsense I'm sure - but still, I'm having a real hard time believing these people are so stupid as to offer up two frickin' red lines to our enemies only to in short order ignominiously back away from them - it's possible, sure, and certainly given their general idiocy up 'til now not beyond belief - but c'mon... really?

No doubt I'm missing something but I'm not quite sure how it amounts to an expression of egregious racism when Sergio Garcia jokes about inviting Tiger over for some fried chicken - I mean, Tiger is half Filipino - of course this fact usually ignored because in liberal America if you're part black, you're all black, the other race is judged inferior, an oddly racist way of promoting tolerance, but then only a fool would expect common sense from a liberal - but, he being half Filipino, would it have been racist for Garcia to invite Tiger over for some sinangag? Or, turn it around, would it have been racist for Tiger to jokingly invite Garcia over for a big bowl of paella? What if they'd both jokingly invited Rory McIlroy over for a few pints of Guinness? Would the media have risen up in howls of outrage over the Irish once again being stigmatized as drunkards? Is there some argument regarding African-Americans loving their fried food? This is common knowledge, it's the main reason why diabetes runs wild through blacks in America, as a culture they seem pretty damn fond of their fried food - there's not much debating that fact. I don't get it - sure, I understand Garcia was making a 'racial' joke and not in a friendly way - that they dislike each other is well known - but wasn't it rather harmless in the same way such culture based jokes being uttered all over the world on a regular basis are largely harmless? Where's the great offense?

Well, of course, the great offense is in the minds of the white uber liberal elite in America - they manufactured the offense, they stoke the outrage - and that's because nothing gets liberal juices flowing with more ideological rapine than perceptions of white on black racism in America - it's catnip to them, it's the dog whistle [to switch species] that drives them into a wild frenzy of doctrinal rut. Look at 2008: the prospect of the first female president should have at the very least been just as big a story [bigger as far as I'm concerned] as the prospect of the first black [half black] president - not to the white uber liberal elite, wasn't even a competition - which should have been seen as an insult to every woman in America - of course, that would have required the media reporting it as such which was never gonna happen because... well, for reasons that are so obvious one need not finish the thought.

The question is, why this fixation on racism - especially white against black, in fact, that form to the exclusion of all others [indeed, to the liberal intelligentsia racism is strictly the province of rich white men and any southern white male who does not recoil in shame from his heritage] - but why this fixation on claims of racism? Probably several reasons - and not all mere expressions of liberal lunacy or their pronounced tendency to engorge their earnest yet for all that still highly superficial sympathies on perceived victimhood [see obsession with gay nuptials] since the practical political benefits of this obsession on race are manifest - but I tend to focus on two motivations primarily. One, denial: the great liberal experiment in social engineering in the 60s, aka Johnson's Great Society and its sundry spinoffs, was supposed to heal the ills plaguing black culture in America - didn't happen, not even close, some would argue with much legitimacy actually made things worse - being absolutist tyrants the uber liberal elite obviously cannot abide the challenge this abysmal failure presents to the supposed enlightened wisdom of their rule and so they fall back on claims of racism as a way of denying reality - and as besotted idealists they simply cannot function without access to ample means for the denying of reality. The other reason I think is that talk of racism becomes a proxy for the promotion of a socialist ethos - obviously, when it comes to slavery in America, the villain is the rich white guy, he becomes the universal symbol of evil greed and predacious capitalism - consequently a fixation on racism becomes a rather convenient way for the uber liberal to demonize capitalism while promoting the putative charms of the mendacious and enforced egalitarian ideal of socialism.

The troubling thought is - well, one of the troubling thoughts is viz the way uber liberals cling to their media whores and aggrieved cries of racism - the troubling consideration is what happens if [when] the Obama presidency ends in disaster, utter failure? The uber liberal elite is gonna be looking for someone to blame - Obama is gonna be looking for someone to blame - and I think we all know who/what it's gonna be, no? Racism. And then what happens when these unhinged charges of racism filter down to African-Americans who are looking around and noticing that eight years of a black [half black] president did nothing at all to improve their lot in life? Not like they're gonna be inclined to cast blame on a misbegotten liberal ideology or Obama's incompetence. Seems to me you've got the ingredients there for a whole shit load of problems.

Well, obviously these obervations do not shock me with bitter surprise - although the article gives rise to a bitterness of sorts knowing how Obama has avoided the criticism he so thoroughly deserves for the mess that is Libya. Just a few days ago the Washington Post wrote an op-ed about how the lies of Benghazi were just molehills wrought into mountains by the delusions of right wing fanatics. This is the Washington Post, for christ sake, talking as if it's no big deal a president getting the country involved in a war that made no sense at all, without bothering to ask the congress if they minded much his 'humanitarian' caprice, then fighting that war in a completely asinine way which results in leaving behind an Islamist mess that he and the catamite press ignores - which is the exact reason why they had to lie about what really happened in Benghazi, lies which the press allowed to go forward because otherwise it might cost their precious Dear Leader his reelection - and the Washington Post for christ sakes thinks complaints about this sad state of affairs is all much ado about nothing, noise on the margins. Unbelievable.

These people are either drunk on the fumes of an ideological fervor that should deeply trouble any clear minded, unbiased thinker - or they're clumsily trying to divert attention from a gross miscarriage of justice and policy and the deceits thereof that they endorsed and abetted and contributed to - or they're idiots.

With Obama it's as if we're seeing what would have happened to America had Jimmy Carter won a second term... except it actually feels worse than that... Carter was merely incompetent, weak and painfully misguided... Obama adds to that sad list pernicious, duplicitous and possibly dishonorable... the mother of all malaises - and there's still three and half years left of it! I guess we can hope that there's evidence out there that proves what we all know to be true, that the IRS scandal is linked to the Obama administration... then we get to watch Dear Leader do his best Nixon impersonation... almost worth the hell of hope and change to witness that catharsis... but in his stead to be burdened with a president Joe Biden? Jeez. Hardly seems like a win.

"... ah... not shocking a Chinese official crying foul on Obama's putative Asia pivot... this article is just full of misstatements and untruths, it's propaganda and nothing more... well, actually, it's tactically nuanced propaganda... for China to get what it wants in the Pacific its main weapon will be economic coercion backed with implied military threats and this strategy can only work if America is out of the picture... everything China says and does is geared towards making that vacuum a reality... China knows Obama's pivot is political charade meant to cover his exit from the Mideast and a drawdown in American power in general, which Obama disingenuously may deny but is very much a part of his uber liberal DNA regardless... but for the pivot strategy to work as proponents have imagined it would require the investment of a heck of a lot of money and there's no way Obama will do that and so the pivot is by and large just rhetoric and Kabuki... but that doesn't mean China still can't use the threat of it to try and intimidate the weak willed in America into backing off even further... again, China needs to be able to rely on economic coercion to get what it wants because the use of military force would invite a huge backlash against them in the region creating trouble they lack the wherewithal to contain ... and alternatively soft power is quite simply not an option for them... as long as the Japans et al can use US power to hedge against the risk of economic coercion China will be checked, which is why China wants America out of the picture, which is why they want to give the impression that some phony Obama Asia pivot represents the advent of a dangerously new dynamic..."

What I wonder about the lunatic BDS movement, which has now reeled in the big get of Stephen Hawking, proving yet again how being really smart in one thing does not in the least bit point to excellence in anything else, what I wonder about these effete yet somehow still truculent twits is, what happens should their dimwitted efforts bring about the proximate outcome they seek and then everything goes horribly wrong? What happens when peace and justice and goodwill are not the dividends wrought but rather the ideological rapine of extremism and violence and chaos and war? Will they simply rationalise the unpleasantness away? Or truly motivated by anti-Semitism and hatred of the West will they cheer on the carnage? These people remind me of those left wing intellectuals who naively lauded Stalin's Russia and then became its pathetic apologists when they were proven to be so very, very wrong.

"... what fascinates me is how it may be that in an affluent society those who reap the benefit of this affluence through force of circumstances incumbent therein and attached thereof entirely lose the ability to perceive how that affluence became possible and consequently pursue interests and sympathies utterly detached from and often openly opposed to the forces and qualities that made such a beneficence possible, thus leading to the ruin of the very thing they imagine themselves preserving..."

Pictures emerge of a PLA stealthy jet powered drone purposed it seems at least in part for naval aviation use that looks exactly like the stealthy jet powered drone Northop Gruman is building for the US Navy. Ah, yes. One wonders what's going to happen when we wake up on that not too distant day to find China through cyber espionage and malfeasance has stolen everything of value from us so as to use it against us and work our relative demise. Will there be outrage? Acquiescence? Is the public just too stupid and ignorant to care or understand the significance of things? Will we say, more in sadness than anger, that China has found the weak spot of capitalist based, free market driven democracy, ie when it comes to the allure of the burgeoning mass of potential Chinese consumers everything is for sale, including sovereignty, and simply accept our fate?

Questions are coming that we don't at all seem prepared to answer. For example, what happens when a state sponsored Chinese company steals from some future Apple plans for a game changing device and then releases this device as its own before Apple can bring it to market? Will that be a cause for war? The rules are changing, no one I think knows if such could amount to a casus belli - but if the theft is big enough and it is state sponsored, why not? I get the feeling many in the American business community and gov't do not want to think about such things, choose to embrace a sunnier view of the future focused as they are on the profits to be made - but the clouds are coming and they'll have their day.

There's little doubt that many of China's elite, possibly all of China's elite view the PRC's disreputable actions as merely the justifiable cognate of how the imperial powers of Europe behaved and how imperial America behaved - WWII was in reality just a gov't sponsored initiative to promote American business interests etc etc - and there are certainly many, many intellects festooning left wing academia throughout the West that would agree with that judgment - but arguing the validity of such views is not my point - my point is so long as China remains a closed, oligarchic, socialist state a confrontation with the open, democratic, rule of law West somewhere down the road is a virtual certainty and whether we like it or not a choice will be forced upon us: defend our principles or give up.

Clearest sign yet that gang of eight attempts at immigration reform will fail, almost certainly because the democrats don't want it to pass [why else introduce gibberish about gay spouses into the bill]? Obama visits Texas twice within the month - reving that engine of demagoguery, he is, barely able to restrain himself from warning Hispanics of all the harm those angry evil old white guys on the right intend them. If they're viewing Texas as the reward they'll reap here should reform fail, does anyone really think the bill stands a chance?

Obama, in Mexico, blames the grotesquery of violence there on our second amendment and the NRA - yes, of course, if not for a few backward looking white guys and their obsession with that unfortunate we the people scribbled out so many years ago those well meaning cartels would stop with the beheadings and summary executions and the burnings alive - this guy is just an awful president, flat out awful - hell, why doesn't he blame himself for the drug violence in Mexico, he was a drug user in college, that's why there are drug cartels because of the lucrative drug market in America which he enthusiastically contributed to - the guy is just a disaster of a president - it's like he won't be happy until he's created an environment where one half of the country absolutely despises and mistrusts the other half of the country, and vice versa. Whoever follows him is gonna have one hell of a tough time healing the damage this man has let loose on the body politik.