Bruce is a lefty sort, but there’s a whole lot of pithy interest and insight in this essay, as there usually is in Bruce’s essays. And also like many of Bruce’s essays, it’s very long. I hope to finish it myself later on today…
Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks
December 23rd, 2010This Week in Jihad for December 23, 2010
December 23rd, 2010Some pre-Christmas Jihad news:
- Speaking of Christmas, crosses have been banned in Bethleham.
- UK Islamic group launches campaign against Christmas, saying it leads to rape, abortions, crime, pedophilia and raves. They forgot fruitcake.
- In the course of a general indictment of Islam, Rule Britannia (a blog I’m not particularly familiar with; a quick perusal suggests a mainstream Euro/Islamic skepticism rather than the swamps of the National Front) cites this death toll for all of Islam from its founding to the current day of 270 million people. I don’t know enough about the history of the regions cited (Africa, India, etc.) to say how accurate this estimate is, but my initial look suggests its on the high side, with extrapolated estimate taken from of single data sources, which tends to result in distorted figures. Still, Will Durant called the Islamic conquest of India the bloodiest episode in all of history (though that was in 1935, which Hitler and Mao still to come, and the sizes of Stalin’s crimes still largely hidden).
- Somalis unite for the time-honored pastime of burning christian books.
- Iranian truck drivers go on strike due to an end to diesel subsidies in port of Bandar Abbas. This would suck if it was happening in a European country, but I’m just fine and dandy about it happening in Iran…
- The Washington Post says there are similar problems in the rest of Iran. Faster, please.
- Australian muslims found guilty of plotting to attack an army base.
- Kosovo’s Prime Minster involved in organ trafficking. Sadly, this does not appear to be an urban legend, and The Guardian is hardly known for their fierce anti-Islamic agenda…
- Here’s another Greek Orthodox prelate going off the deep end. Sayeth the Metropolite of Piraeus Seraphim: “Adolf Hitler was an instrument of world Zionism and was financed from the renowned Rothschild family with the sole purpose of convincing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to establish the new Empire.”
- Everyone and their dog (including Fark) has covered this story about a Gitmo detainee claiming that “Jewish guards used witchcraft on prisoners, made me feel a cat was trying to penetrate me.”
- Spanish teacher reprimanded for merely mentioning ham.
Linkswarm for December 22, 2010
December 22nd, 2010A few bite-sized links of interest for the holiday season:
- Michael Barone digs deeper into the census data. Among the tidbits: Five of the seven states with no state income tax gained the most population, and the other two each gained the most within their region, and immigration seems to have slowed in the last decade.
- More on redistricting from lefty election wonk Nate Silver.
- China’s housing bubble is worse on a percentage of GNP basis than the U.S. or Japan.
- California’s Treasurer claims that the state economy is not in trouble, but is merely resting. He also asserted it has beautiful plummage.
- We’ve got spirit, yes we do!/I killed a buck, how about you?
(Hat tips: Instapundit, mostly.)
Texas to Gain Four House Seats in Redistricting
December 21st, 2010The census data has finally been released, and Texas will gain four seats in the U.S. House. (Here’s a map breaking down which districts have gained or lost population, and by how much.) Keep in mind that at least one or two of those seats will have to be “majority minority” Hispanic seats to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
The only other state to gain more than one House seat was Florida, which gained two. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington state each gained one.
Ohio and New York will each lose two seats, while Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania will each lose one.
The total U.S. population is now 308,745,538, a 9.7% increase from 2000.
The states gaining seats are predominately Republican, while the states losing seats are predominately Democratic, a trend that’s been going on since at least the 1980s. This, along with newly Republican majorities in many of the statehouses that will control redistricting, is the reason some analysts believe that Republicans will control the House at least through 2012, and possibly beyond.
Breakdown on how the DREAM Act Illegal Alien Amnesty Failed
December 19th, 2010This post from Roy Beck of the anti-amnesty NumbersUSA, which is further analyzed by Mickey Kaus here, goes into detail about which Senators flipped from pro- to anti-amnesty. Short version: Republicans were a lot more scared of a Tea Party primary challenge in 2012 than Democrats were of general election challengers. Sayeth Kaus:
Score one for losing Delaware Tea Partier Christine O’Donnell, who knocked off establishment pick Rep. Mike Castle (who voted for DREAM) in the GOP primary. Even score one for Alaskan Joe Miller. He probably alienated Republican Lisa Murkowski by beating her in the primary, and ultimately she won reelection anyway as a write-in. But that’s just one lost Senate vote. By my count, Miller’s primary coup may have helped gain around ten votes by terrifying GOP incumbents who might otherwise have been tempted by the prospect of a feel-good, bipartisan, MSM-approved pro-DREAM stand.
Beck also noted at least two Democrats, Conrad of North Dakota and McCaskill of Missouri, who voted for an amnesty despite coming from deep red states and being up for reelection in 2012. Those two seats should be big, juicy GOP takeover targets two years hence…
DREAM Act illegal Alien Amnesty Fails
December 18th, 2010Democrats Max Baucus of Montana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pyror of Arkansas and Jon Tester of Montana (all Senators from deep red states) all voted against the bill. And boy, the head Kossack is sure pissed about Tester, who had previously been his bestest of buddies.
Kausfiles has the blow by blow.
Still, despite being defeated, the DREAM Act has already fulfilled its primary mission: getting Harry Reid reelected.
(Hat Tips: Instapundt and Mickey Kaus)
Dallas Jury to Rebecca Aguilar: No, You Can’t Have a Successful Lawsuit. Not Yours.
December 17th, 2010Dallas Reporter: Gun owners exercising their 2nd Amendment rights by killing home invaders are evil. Here, let me badger one on camera.
Dallas Station: You’re fired.
Dallas Reporter: I’ll sue.
Dallas Jury: Get stuffed
Bonus: Ms. Aguilar simply can’t stop digging: “I knew it was also an uphill battle with a jury made up of 11 white people.”
Bonus 2: “He also compared Aguilar to former Dallas Cowboys receiver Terrell Owens, whom Shaunessy said “‘was a lousy employee and he was an inconsistent player who couldn’t be trusted.'”
Ouch.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
This Week in Jihad for December 16, 2010
December 16th, 2010Lots of Jihad news of note this week:
- Just in case you were busy Saturday and didn’t hear, a suicide bomber struck central Stockholm on Saturday.
- That bomber, Iraqi-born Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, was yet another product of British schools.
- But don’t worry, there are only about 200 Islamic extremists total in all of Sweden!
- Except that train bomber guy wasn’t among them. Might need to do some more counting there, guys…
- Not News: Middle Eastern religious leader declares that there’s a Zionist conspiracy against Arabs. News: It was the the patriarch of the Church of Antioch and the entire Levant for Melkite Greek Catholics. (Hat tip: The Corner.)
- Kuwait general says Iran’s nuclear program is military, not civilian. On behalf of non-liberals everywhere: Duh.
- Unclear on the concept: Feminists protesting in favor of Islamic extremists. You’re doing it wrong. (Sadly, the impulse seems inexplicably common in feminist circles these days.)
- Al Qaeda is planning suicide attacks against Christmas shoppers in the U.S. and Europe. Honestly, I just assume al Qaeda is planning suicide attacks year-round. It’s pretty much what they do. It’s like saying the New England Patriots work on winning football games year-round.
- Usually you hear about Iranian-sponsored suicide bombers blowing up people in other countries, not Sunni suicide bombers blowing up Shi-ites in Iran itself.
- Danish MP Jesper Langballe fined for telling the truth about Islamic rapes and honor killings. Indeed, he was denied the opportunity to defend himself.
- Did you know that Feisal A. Rauf, the guy trying to build the Ground Zero Mosque, is a slumlord?
- Weimer Istanbul. (Hat tip: Michael Totten.)
- And speaking of Michael Totten, he has an interview with Giulio Meotti, the author of A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. Lots of bracing, disheartening information in that interview. “Europe is an anti-Semitic continent.” “The current European anti-Semitism is a powerful mix of Islamist pressure on Europe by large Muslim communities in its midst and a leftist-progressive ideology.”
- The 2010 Jihad Watch Award Winners. If you haven’t noticed, JihadWatch is one of the sites I
stealreference stories from for this roundup. - Finally, Dwight’s essay on the Iranian Revolution may be of interest to many readers.
Current Death Estimate for the Great Leap Forward: 45 Million
December 16th, 2010According to historian Frank Dikotter, who examined hundreds of documents across China from 2005-2009.
Dikotter is author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which I haven’t read yet. But some of the descriptions of the famine echo those that Robert Conquest relayed in The Harvest of Sorrow, his book on Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
The overall 45 million figure Dikotter comes up with is slightly lower than the previous figures for the death toll by Mao’s communist government I’ve reported here:
- Rudy Rummel’s revised figure of 76,692,000
- The Black Book of Communism‘s estimate of 60 million.
- It’s toward the low end of the 30-80 million scale Jasper Becker estimates in Hungry Ghosts
My working assumption is that Dikotter’s research is solid, and that his estimate of 45 million is probably the floor for the number of people killed under Mao. A total twice that high is also possible.
Somehow, despite an ever-dwindling pool of apologists contending otherwise, communism has been more congenial to genocide as a instrument of policy than any other transnational ideology in the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mengistu’s Ethiopia; different countries, same results. Communism, everywhere and at all times, is a ticket to oppression and death.
(Hat tip: Instapundit, who has several other readers and bloggers chiming in on the issue.)