The manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist (see our posts Nemesis comes to Norway, and Nemesis comes to Europe immediately below), can be found here.

It is a long pdf document titled A European Declaration of Independence. The author’s name – an obvious Anglicization of his own name – is given as Andrew Berwick; the place and date of posting online, London 2011.

It is clearly and for the most part correctly written. One would suppose he must have had help from someone whose first language is English, but he says, “It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily.” Chunks of it, with small variations, are copied from the writings of the Unabomber.

In most of the first two sections, reasonable arguments are set out chiefly against the Islamization of Europe, multiculturalism, Marxism, political correctness, leftist indoctrination in the universities, feminism, and what he calls “Enviro-Communism”. In support of his views he quotes or refers to many of the writers and authorities we respect, such as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’Or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple. He deplores as we do the influence that revolutionaries like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and his fellow members of the “Frankfurt School”, have had on the politics of the West over the last half century or so. The values Western leaders have failed, he says, to uphold are individual freedom, freedom of speech, democracy. Histories of Islam’s earlier advances into Europe, quotations from the Koran and accounts of Islamic belief are carefully referenced.

The reasonable arguments are interrupted now and then by flights of romantic fancy inspired by the poetry of Ted Hughes, Nordic legend, and the superman ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche. These foreshadow what becomes, in the third section, full-fledged fantasy. It is here that obsession shows itself. He revives in his imagination the crusading Order of the Knights Templar (destroyed by King Philip the Beautiful and brought to a fiery end in 1314, when the last officers of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake as heretics on an island in the Seine). He declares himself to be a “Knight Justiciar”. He writes as if a considerable number of others, predominantly northern Europeans, share the fantasy with him; a company that will mount a violent crusade against the powers who have betrayed the ideals and achievements of Christian Europe. The crusade will become a civil war – a global civil war: “not  between capitalists and socialists, but between nationalists and internationalists”; and between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

He condemns Nazism, but is prepared to fight alongside neo-Nazi groups. Criminal organizations would also be co-opted. The manifesto becomes a handbook for terrorists. He specifies the buildings that should be bombed, including government buildings and mosques. He lists the chemicals needed for making bombs, advises how to acquire them (eg. by having a farm and buying fertilizer in large quantities as if for the land), and describes in detail how to make them.

He expresses regret that women must be killed as well as men, but insists that in pursuit of such a high task as the Knights have set themselves, soft feelings cannot be indulged.

He sees the role in which he is casting himself as heroic. He encourages others to become hero-martyrs like him:

You will forever be celebrated by your people as a martyr for your country, protecting your culture and fighting for your kin and for Christendom.

You will be remembered as a conservative revolutionary pioneer, one of the brave European Crusader heroes who said; enough is enough, it is time to take back our countries before our multiculturalist traitor elites actually manages to finalize their agenda and sell us all into Muslim slavery.

Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come.

You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.

And when we seize political and military power in Europe within a few decades, it will be pioneers and historical pioneers like you who will be celebrated with reverence.

Revolutionary patriots like the Justiciar Knights will then be celebrated as destroyers of Marxism and the slayer of tyrants; the fearless and selfless protectors of Europe, The Perfect Knights.

For there is no greater glory than dying selflessly while pro-actively protecting your people from persecution and gradual demographical annihilation.

We are destined to win in the end, as our people, all Europeans, are gradually waking up from their slumber and realising the deceitfulness and suicidal nature of multiculturalist doctrine.

We do not only have the people on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have time on our side, we have the will of our ancestors and the will of God on our side.

The Left will almost certainly claim that Breivik’s atrocious acts of terrorism are what opposition to Islamization and multiculturalism et cetera lead to. They will probably use his manifesto as proof of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

The Obama administration likes to pretend that white middle class Americans are the most likely terrorists.

But the fact is that for the last 45 years, acts of terrorism carried out by leftists and Muslims vastly outnumber those carried out in the name of any cause of the “right”. And terrorism as a method has not been often or strongly condemned by the leftist intelligentsia.

It will be now. As of course it should be.

We’ll have more to say about Breivik, his manifesto, and the right and wrong  lessons to be learnt from his actions.

American children must be taught the values America traditionally stands for, and why they are the highest and the best.

They must be taught that the United States of America was founded as a realization of the idea of liberty.

They must be taught that only in freedom are individuals able to achieve the best they are capable of.

They must be taught that the conditions necessary for a good life  – prosperity, physical and mental well-being, the pursuit of individual aims  – exist reliably only in a free society.

They must be taught that only the rule of law, not rule by a person or group of potentates, assures liberty.

Generations of American children have not been taught any of this. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades now the schools and academies have been teaching Americans to be ashamed of themselves. So millions of Americans believe that they are justly hated by other nations, and their country should change to become more like other countries. (See our post Zinn writes histories, December 11, 2009.)

William Damon, professor of education at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the admirable Hoover Institution, writes in a recent essay:

In our leading intellectual and educational circles, the entire notion of national devotion is now in dispute. For example, in a book about the future of citizenship, a law professor recently wrote: “Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete … American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization.” As a replacement for commitment to a nation-state, the author wrote, “loyalties…are moving to transnational communities defined by many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation.” In similar fashion, many influential educators are turning to “cosmopolitanism” and “global citizenship” as the proper aim of civics instruction, de-emphasizing the attachment to any particular country such as the United States. As global citizens, it is argued, our primary identification should be with the humanity of the world, and our primary obligation should be to the universal ideals of human rights and justice. Devotion to one’s own nation state, commonly referred to as patriotism, is suspect because it may turn into a militant chauvinism or a dangerous “my country right or wrong” perspective. …

By “justice” the unnamed law professor probably means “social justice’ – the idea that wealth should be taken away from those who have earned it and given to others who have not. “Social justice” is Orwellian Newspeak for injustice.

William Damon points out:

Discouraging young Americans from identifying with their country — and, indeed, from celebrating the traditional American quest for liberty and equal rights — is a sure way to remove their most powerful source of motivation to learn about U. S. citizenship. Why would a student exert any effort to master the rules of a system that the student has no respect for and no interest in being part of? To acquire civic knowledge as well as civic virtue, students need to care about their country.

It is especially odd to see schools with large immigrant populations neglect teaching students about American identity and the American tradition. Educational critic Diane Ravitch observed this phenomenon when visiting a New York City school whose principal proudly spoke of the school’s efforts to celebrate the cultures of all the immigrant students. Ravitch writes, “I asked him whether the school did anything to encourage students to appreciate American culture, and he admitted with embarrassment that it did not.”

At least he was embarrassed.

These and other American students are being urged to identify with, on the one hand, customs from the native lands they have departed and, on the other hand, with the abstract ideals of an amorphous global culture. Lost in between these romantic affiliations is an identification with the nation where these students actually will practice citizenship. Adding to the dysfunction of this educational choice, as Ravitch writes, is the absurdity of teaching “a student whose family fled to this country from a tyrannical regime or from dire poverty to identify with that nation rather than with the one that gave the family refuge.”

We are not “citizens of the world.” We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator.

Professor Damon wants civics taught in the schools, and taught well.

How can we do better? Of course we need to teach students the Constitution, along with its essential underlying principles such as separation of powers, representative government, and Federalism. Excellent programs for such teaching now exist. But these programs are not widely used amidst today’s single-minded focus on basic skills. Compounding this neglect, the school assessments that drive the priorities of teachers infrequently test for civic knowledge. To preserve the American heritage of liberty and democracy for future generations, citizenship instruction must be placed front and center in U. S. classrooms rather than relegated to the margins. …

And he issues a warning:

There is a looming crisis … the very real possibility that our democracy will be left in the hands of a citizenry unprepared to govern it and unwilling the make the sacrifices needed to preserve it. A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry. Failing this, as Ben Franklin long ago warned, despotism lies just around the corner.

The citizenry should also be informed what life is like in other countries. Most people in the world are ruled over by despots or despotic regimes. Most democracies, like the European nations, are welfare states rapidly becoming poorer as a result of their socialist economic systems. A proper understanding of capitalist economics  – “the natural order of liberty” as Adam Smith called it –  should be taught in America as well as civics and truthful history.

Walter Williams writes at Front Page:

A recent Superman comic book has the hero saying, “I am renouncing my U.S. citizenship” because “truth, justice, and the American way — it’s not enough anymore.” …

The ignorance about our country is staggering. According to one survey, only 28 percent of students could identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Only 26 percent of students knew that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. Fewer than one-quarter of students knew that George Washington was the first president of the United States. …

Ignorance and possibly contempt for American values, civics and history might help explain how someone like Barack Obama could become president of the United States. At no other time in our history could a person with longtime associations with people who hate our country become president. Obama spent 20 years attending the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s hate-filled sermons, which preached that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” called our country the “US of KKK-A” and asked God to “damn America.” Obama’s other America-hating associates include Weather Underground Pentagon bomber William Ayers and Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

The fact that Obama became president and brought openly Marxist people into his administration doesn’t say so much about him as it says about the effects of decades of brainwashing of the American people by the education establishment, media and the intellectual elite.

Actually, though we don’t disagree with the point Walter Williams is making, we think it does say quite as much about  Obama. He epitomizes the sort of America-hating ideologue that the decades of debauched education have bred.

As Americans celebrate their national independence, Mark Steyn praises the spirit of independence that has characterized the individuals of which the nation is composed.

Does it still characterize them? Their present collectivist-minded president is doing his damnedest to make sure it doesn’t.

Mark Steyn writes at Investor’s Business Daily:

In America, “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet.

They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government.

Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he’s history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim.

What’s left of that founding vision on this less-than-Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification!

Fact is, Obama himself introduced a tax break for corporate jets:

In his bizarre press conference last Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” — i.e., the stimulus.

The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

By trying to shame jet owners, Obama is of course stirring up his far-left constituency, whose political viewpoint is chiefly shaped by envy.

Would taking away the jet-owners’ tax break help the economy?

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama’s debt. Five thousand years is the year 7,011. Boy, our kids’ll really be safe by then. …

When Obama himself jets about, tax-payers foot the bill – even when he takes his wife to an intimate dinner in New York (in a small jet, followed by two other small jets). But it’s no new discovery that Obama is a hypocrite.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver [for an ‘economic forum”]? Oh, but that’s different! He’s in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That’s 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats — the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. …

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it’s ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation.

Remember how Nancy Pelosi abused her privilege as speaker of the House to fly in air force jets?

Judicial Watch reported:

Nancy Pelosi continued to use the United States Air Force as her own personal travel agency right up until her final days as House Speaker according to documents we uncovered from the Air Force.

According to these new documents, which we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Pelosi used Air Force aircraft for 43 flights from January 1 to October 1, 2010. By comparison, Nancy Pelosi logged 47 flights in the previous nine-month period, April 1, 2009, to January 1, 2010, according to previous documents we uncovered. …

Here are two quick highlights:

Pelosi used Air Force aircraft for a total of 43 trips, covering 90,155 miles, from January 1 through October 1, 2010. The Air Force documented in-flight expenses for 22 of these flights totaling $1,821.33. The Air Force did not provide expense information for the remaining 21 flights.

Former Speaker Pelosi received chocolate-covered strawberries as a birthday surprise on a March 26, 2010, flight. According to one internal Air Force email sent on March 25, 2010: “The speaker’s office is requesting egg salad sandwiches on wheat toast with fruit (watermelon, etc) for desert (sic). It’s the speaker’s B-Day tomorrow so we’re also asking for something like chocolate covered strawberries (dark chocolate preferred)…” The immediate response to the email from another member of the Air Force staff: “Copy all. We’ll plan something for the birthday and take care of the meal.”

According to previous documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, Pelosi’s military travel cost the United States Air Force $2,100,744.59 over one two-year period — $101,429.14 of which was for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol. …

So that is how the leaders of the Left, perpetually engaged in the class warfare of their imagination, serve the interests of the underdog.

Have you heard of Cafayate?

It’s way down south in Argentina. In a wine valley.

It seems to be the nearest thing to John Galt’s hidden valley that exists in the real world.

You can read a little about it here – though not nearly as much as you might want to know if you’re a free-market libertarian.

Jeff Berwick is the author of the report. He issues a free-market financial newsletter called The Dollar Vigilante.

Berwick explains that the people associated with it are “best described as financial freedom fighters“.

The Dollar Vigilante (TDV) is unwilling to live under a corrupt statist system of finance controlled by a few to impoverish the many. TDV began as a way to help foment a movement, long in progress, by individuals worldwide, to rid themselves of government controlled fiat money in favor of assets of real value void of manipulation. It is the hope of TDV that it can help create a community of dollar crash survivors who can survive the collapse of the global financial system and prosper from the new free-market financial system which will take its place.

The world is changing. The nation-state is passing away. Socialism is failing as it must.

Back to tribalism? Or forward to new communities of members freely associating according to their taste? – In “phyles”, to use the Greek word for clans. But not clans in the old sense, not clans bound by kinship or place of birth, but elective clans. You choose the company you want to keep, the type of economy you want to participate in.

A new vision of an emerging world, different from any other.

Not even quite the same as Ayn Rand’s, though she and her Atlas figures who carried an ungrateful world on their shoulders would surely have liked it.

Not only is it incredibly beautiful here but most of the value lies in the community. … Doug Casey often talks about “phyles” – which is an ancient Greek term for a tribe or clan. He is of the belief that nation states as they exist today are a brief abberation and that the world will trend more towards likeminded people living in areas (call them countries if you wish) with other similar like minded people.

This makes a lot of sense and is, in general, the way things are trending. If people like communism, let them all gather together somewhere and create their own communist phyle. A few years later and most of them will be dead from starvation or murder but, hey, at least they got to do what they wanted with other like minded people as opposed to forcing the rest of us to follow their insane socialist/communist ideas.

In Cafayate, “libertarian/anarchist/austrian-economics adherents” are gathering. We – not anarchists ourselves, but libertarian austrian-economics adherents who argue for minimal government – suspect that many if not all of them are atheists too.

It, quite possibly, is the world’s first libertarian enclave!

Galt’s Gulch does exist and it is in Cafayate, Argentina!

Worth reading about, thinking about – and visiting perhaps.

We often agree with Dennis Prager. We disagree with him when he talks about religion. (As we do with most conservative columnists and commentators, candidates and Congressmen.)

We wonder continually at the strangeness of the fact that millions of highly intelligent, educated, sane adults living in this age of science believe in the supernatural.

How poor their arguments are when they talk about it. How blindly they insist that religion is the sole source and guarantee of moral behavior.

Dennis Prager, writing in Townhall on the fairly trivial subject of an airline allowing a man dressed only  in women’s underwear to fly, mixes sense and nonsense in a manner typical of religious conservatives:

On June 9, a man boarded a US Airways flight from Fort Lauderdale to Phoenix, dressed in women’s panties, a bra and thigh-high stockings.

No US Airways employee at the Fort Lauderdale airport asked him to cover himself. Nor did any flight attendant ask him to do so. And obviously, no one demanded that he get off the plane.

US Airways spokeswoman Valerie Wunder was asked how the airline allowed a nearly naked cross-dresser to board a plane … She said employees had been correct not to ask the man to cover himself. ‘We don’t have a dress code policy. Obviously, if their private parts are exposed, that’s not appropriate. … So if they’re not exposing their private parts, they’re allowed to fly.’

The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one’s breath away.

That a woman speaking on behalf of a major airline can say with a straight face that her airline allows anyone dressed or undressed to fly on its airplanes so long as they do not expose their genitals perfectly encapsulates this decline.

The only question is: How did we get here?

For one thing, the concept of decency is dying. I suspect that if an adult were to say to a group of randomly chosen American college students that this man indecently exposed himself and should not have been allowed to fly, that adult would be a) not understood — what does “indecent” mean? — and/or b) roundly condemned for intolerance and bigotry.

To judge this man as acting indecently, not to mention to bar him from flying, is to engage in violating the only values a generation of Americans has been taught: not to judge, not to discriminate, to welcome diversity and to fully accept those who are different, especially in the sexual arena.

That is why I think it is very difficult to have a dialogue on this matter. For those who believe in public “decency,” the matter is as clear as a bell — this was profoundly indecent — and for those who do not believe in such a concept, the matter is equally clear — “decency” is an anachronism.

So far, good enough. We agree that the man was not decently covered. It’s possible that some people on the flight found the exposure of most of his body shocking. What he did was not polite. Politeness, which respects the dignity of other people, is necessary to human relations: far more necessary than a saccharine pretense of generalized indiscriminate love.

But then Prager goes on to argue that a “reason for the death of the concept of ‘public decency'” is “the age of secularism in which we live”.

In a more religious America, the human being was regarded as created in God’s image, a being that ideally aspires to a level of holiness. As secularism proceeds with the increasing force of an avalanche, however, man is increasingly regarded as just another animal. One way in which higher civilizations have demonstrated the human-animal difference has been the wearing of clothing. Animals are naked in public; humans are clothed. But secularism eats away at such religious ideals. Thus religion-based concepts such as holiness and decency die out.

God’s image with clothes on?

The argument in Judaism is that man was made in God’s “moral image”, but  Christians say God was incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth. In Christian art, both “God the Father” and Jesus are usually depicted with clothes on – often a sort of woman’s nightgown or a toga-like garment – but not always. Michelangelo’s God on the Sistine Chapel roof is nude. Where but half-awakened Adam / Can disturb globe-trotting madam/ Till her bowels are in a heat, wrote W.B.Yeats.

Of course, though many a madam will trot or fly over half the globe to view that naked God and Adam, she might not enjoy having an almost naked man sitting next to her on her journey. We think Dennis Prager is right that she shouldn’t have to.

But no, Mr Prager, secularism does not destroy decency or politeness. Most secularists wear clothes and are polite. What they don’t do in the name of secularism is sniff out heretical views, punish apostasy, blow up infidels, hang homosexuals, stone adulterers, incarcerate critics, or torture and burn the nerve-threaded bodies of the living.

Such acts are done, have been done millions of times, in the name of religion. We think they are rather worse than indecent.

Geert Wilders has scored a victory for freedom. He has been acquitted of “inciting hatred”.

We agree with Mark Steyn’s comments:

The court ruled that some of Wilders’ statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

“On the edge of legal acceptability,” eh? As for the latter part — “the broad context of a political and social debate” — the genius “jurists” are effectively conceding … that the Dutch state was attempting to criminalize the political platform of a popular opposition party. That’s the sort of thing free societies should leave to Mubarak & Co, and even then, you can only get away with it for a while before people draw the obvious conclusion.

Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did …

And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.

That’s the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful. As for the Islamic imperialists, they’re taking their case to the logical venue [the United Nations Human Rights Committee], arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

Meanwhile Muslims everywhere in Europe (and all over the world) continue to do their utmost to incite hatred of non-Muslims, especially Chritsians and Jews, as they have done for some 14 hundred years.

However, there does seem to be a turning of the tide in European public opinion on “multiculturalism”, which is to say Islam in Europe.

Reuters reports:

Opposition to immigration, particularly from Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries, is on the rise. …

Wilders, 47, is one of the most outspoken critics of Islam and immigration in the Netherlands.

His Freedom Party is now the third-largest in parliament, a measure of support for its anti-immigrant stance, and is the minority government’s chief ally. …

Wilders told reporters after the ruling. “This is not so much a win for myself, but a victory for freedom of speech. Fortunately you can criticize Islam and not be gagged in public debate.”

The ruling could embolden Wilders further. He has already won concessions from the government on cutting immigration and introducing a ban on Muslim face veils and burqas. …

Some Dutch citizens have started to question their country’s traditionally generous immigration and aid policies, worried by the deteriorating economic climate, higher unemployment, incidence of ethnic crime and signs that Muslim immigrants have not fully integrated into Dutch society.

Similar concerns have helped far-right parties to gain traction elsewhere in Europe, from France to Scandinavia.

And there is also this report at Hudson New York:

The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society.”

Why has it taken them several decades to wake up?

Immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants to ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

They had actually been bribing Muslims to immigrate into Holland, and only now see what was wrong with the policy:

The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, “it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.” The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and … will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.

If necessary, the government will introduce extra measures to allow the removal of residence permits from immigrants who fail their integration course.

The measures are being imposed by the new center-right government of Conservatives (VVD) and Christian Democrats (CDA), with parliamentary support from the anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) …

That’s the one Geert Wilders leads.

Polls show that a majority of Dutch voters support the government’s skepticism about multiculturalism. According to a Maurice de Hond poll published by the center-right newspaper Trouw on June 19, 74 percent of Dutch voters say immigrants should conform to Dutch values. Moreover, 83 percent of those polled support a ban on burqas in public spaces. …

The Interior Minister’s change of mind is perhaps the visible sign of a deep-sea change in the minds of the Dutch people and maybe of Europeans generally:

Interior Minister Donner… has undergone a late-in-life conversion on the issue of Muslim immigration. In September 2006, while serving as justice minister, Donner provoked an outcry after saying that he welcomed the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the Netherlands if the majority wants it. He also said Holland should give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions. …

Fast forward to 2011 and Donner now says his government “will distance itself from the relativism contained in the model of a multicultural society.” Although society changes, he says, it must not be “interchangeable with any other form of society.”

Meaning, Holland cannot be allowed to become an Islamic country.

The trouble is, try as he might, and try as all the leaders of Europe might, they cannot command the demographic tide to retreat. Unless something unpredictable happens to stop it, a Muslim majority will emerge in Europe before the middle of the century.

Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.

“Will the Democratic Party destroy us all?” ex-Democrat Roger L Simon asks at PajamasMedia.

Our answer is “Yes – if they’re again given the chance.”

But what does Simon say? In part, this:

I used to be a Democrat — for decades. Was it always this bad? Was I that blind?

Well, maybe. But the situation now is drastic. The United States of America has never been in worse shape — foreign or domestic — not since the Civil War anyway. We are en route to being a pathetic, powerless, overblown Greece, but unlike Greece there is no one who can bail us out. We’re too big. We’ll bring everyone else down with us — those left anyway …

Yet to the Democrats — and their bizarrely compliant media — it’s business as usual. According to such solons of big journalism as CNN’s John King, the Dems main aim is and should be retaking the Congress with the same methods they have used for years – blocking spending cuts, accusing Republicans of excessive greed, and catering to unions and reactionary race-based interests groups.  …

This is ridiculous. Why can’t these people wake up? Don’t they have children, grandchildren? Don’t they realize we are going broke? The evidence is everywhere — from Michigan to Madrid. Keynesian economics — the welfare state itself — has become completely inoperative, morphed into a Ponzi scheme by an aging population.

You can pretend that’s not true. You can put your fingers in your ears and wait for it all to go away. You can recite the mantra about taxing the rich until you drop, blame Bush until he’s a figment of our memory more distant than William Henry Harrison, or pledge your allegiance to Gaia while circling the globe in a solar-powered Lear jet. But the reality remains.

(By the way, if you taxed the rich at a hundred percent, it would only push back our bankruptcy from entitlement programs a year, possibly two.)

And what do envious lefties think the rich spend their money on if not employing people and buying stuff and investing in growth? Do they imagine they hoard it under their mattresses?

So what exactly is wrong with the Democratic Party and its constituents? I know change is difficult, that breaking with old ideas … can be painful, and that few of us like to admit we were wrong, but do we have to wait for bread lines?

So what’s the explanation? Why is it that, in these times, there is nothing less liberal than a “liberal,” less progressive than a “progressive”? Why do they and their party adhere to an ideology so shopworn and stultified … ? What explains this political party of lemmings?

I don’t buy the Cloward-Piven argument. Sure, there are some who would like to bring this country down economically so they can rebuild it as some sclerotic socialist utopia replete with Young Pioneer camps and pompous people’s art in the subways (and no food in the stores), but most are not even imaginative enough for that.

I think there are three things at work — habit, fear of change, and pure, unbridled, screw-the-rest-of-us, self-interest. And the ones who focus on the latter — the powerful and self-interested – rely on the habit and the fear of change on the part of the others … to hold the whole tawdry ball of wax together.

And what about stupidity? That’s surely a fourth thing at work.

The Democrats are at a crossroads. Will they face reality?

I sincerely doubt it.

We doubt it too. They won’t face reality any more than the welfare-weakened population of Greece will face it. But real events and conditions go on accruing their consequences whether they like it or not.

Leftism is the stuff that dreams are made on; and the baseless fabric of the Democrats’ vision shall dissolve, leaving an economic wreck behind for the Republicans to deal with.

Either that, or  – if they’re re-elected to power in Congress and the White House – the Democrats will wreck America beyond reclamation.

Europe has capitulated to Islam.

The Jews of Europe, what’s left of them, are being harried out, mostly by the Muslims, but also by the media (such as, and especially, the BBC and the Guardian newspaper), and lickspittle dhimmi politicians and judges who are keeping the seats of power warm for their incoming Muslim overlords.

From the American Thinker:

An ugly, uni-directional pattern of bigoted violence is once again clearly on display in Western Europe. European Muslims have attacked individual Jews, synagogues, and Jewish or Israeli institutions, in Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, Spain, Greece, and Britain. …

Scant attention (or none at all) is being paid to the unequivocal, virulent incitement for these Antisemitic attacks emanating from the Muslim world … Hamas, for example, on its official website (posted December 31, 2008 at the site hosted by Emirnet, United Arab Emirates) urged Muslims to attack Jews across the world … Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar … advocated the murder of Jewish children, globally, claiming Israel had “legitimized the killing of their people all over the world.” …

Murderous calls for indiscriminate anti-Jewish violence … are also expressed locally, by jihadists within Europe….

On a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe accounted for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts.

Hatred of Jews and recommendations that they should be killed are a large part of the religious teaching of Islam:

The ultimate “inspiration” for such rampant Muslim Jew-hatred within Europe’s Muslim communities can be traced to the sacralized bigotry of Islam’s foundational texts, disseminated by Muslim clerics such as Sheikh Feiz. As documented in a British television investigation broadcast January, 2007, the Jew-annihilationist eschatological theme from the canonical hadith quoted in the Hamas Covenant, article 7, The Prophet, ‘Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.’ ”  …

So where are the trials of Muslims charged with incitement to racial hatred and violence?

We’ve tried but failed to find them.

However, Europeans who make known such facts as the American Thinker does, are on trial for doing so.

Also from the American Thinker:

[In Brussels] the Vigilance Musulmane (Muslim Vigilance) advocacy group filed a complaint with the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight Against Racism (CGKR) against professor of sociology Mark Elchardus for statements about Islamic Jew hatred. …

Professor Elchardus’ conclusions are based upon data from a 426 pp. report he co-authored entitled, “Young in Brussels: findings from the JOP monitor Brussels.” Chapter 8 of this study, “Anti-Semitism in Brussels,” devotes some thirty pages to highlighting the problem of rising Jew-hatred in Brussels, particularly amongst young Muslim students. Elchardus provided this overview of the alarming problem to De Morgen:

“Worrying is that half [only half?- JB] of Muslim students can be described as anti-Semitic … Worse, the anti-Jewish feelings have nothing to do with a low educational or social disadvantage, as is the case with racist natives. It is theologically inspired anti-Semitism… Islam’s canonical texts – Koran, hadith, and sira – are redolent with Islamic Jew-hatred …”

The impact of such sacralized, mainstream Islamic Jew hatred on Western Europe’s burgeoning Muslim community is equally apparent. During February of 2008, then European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security [bit of Orwellian Newspeak there! – JB], Franco Frattini, the European Union (EU) official responsible “for combating racism and Antisemitism in Europe,” revealed that Muslims were responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented Antisemitic incidents on the European continent. Demographic data from 2007 indicated that the total number of Europeans is 494.8 million; estimates of the number of Muslims in Europe range from 15-20 million, or some ~3.0-4.0% of the total European population. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe already accounted for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts. …

Rather than being maliciously sued, the Professor should be commended by all decent people for his intellectual honesty and moral courage.

Other Europeans who, like Professor Elchardus, have spoken the truth about Islam and have famously been brought to trial are Elisabeth Sabaditsch–Wolffe (fined for the “denigration of religious teachings of a legally recognized religion in Austria”); Lars Hedegaard (found guilty of hate speech in Denmark), and Geert Wilders.

Today Geert Wilders made his final remarks to the court trying him for “inciting hatred” of Muslims. Here’s part of what he said:

I am obliged to speak. For the Netherlands is under threat of Islam. As I have argued many times, Islam is chiefly an ideology. An ideology of hatred, of destruction, of conquest. It is my strong conviction that Islam is a threat to Western values, to freedom of speech, to the equality of men and women, of heterosexuals and homosexuals, of believers and unbelievers.

All over the world we can see how freedom is fleeing from Islam. Day by day we see our freedoms dwindle.

Islam is opposed to freedom. Renowned scholars of Islam from all parts of the world agree on this. …

The statements for which I am being tried are statements which I made in my function as a politician participating in the public debate in our society. My statements were not aimed at individuals, but at Islam and the process of islamization. …

I am acting within a long tradition which I wish to honour. I am risking my life in defence of freedom in the Netherlands. Of all our achievements freedom is the most precious and the most vulnerable. Many have given their lives for freedom. …

I do not wish to betray the trust of the 1.5 million voters of my party. I do not wish to betray my country. Inspired by Johan van Oldenbarneveldt and Johan de Witt I wish to be a politician who serves the truth end hence defends the freedom of the Dutch provinces and of the Dutch people. I wish to be honest, I wish to act with honesty and that is why I wish to protect my native land against Islam. Silence is treason.

That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak. …

I pay the price every day. Day and night I have to be protected against people who want to kill me. I am not complaining about it; it has been my own decision to speak. However, those who threaten me and other critics of Islam are not being tried here today. I am being tried …

My right to a fair trial has been violated. The order of the Amsterdam Court to prosecute me was not just a decision but a condemning verdict by judges who condemned me even before the actual trial had begun.

Mister President, members of the Court, you must now decide whether freedom still has a home in the Netherlands.

Franz Kafka said: “One sees the sun slowly set, yet one is surprised when it suddenly becomes dark.”

Mister President, members of the Court, do not let the lights go out in the Netherlands. …

Acquit me. Political freedom requires that citizens and their elected representatives are allowed to voice opinions that are held in society.

Acquit me, for if I am convicted, you convict the freedom of opinion and expression of millions of Dutchmen.

Acquit me. I do not incite to hatred. I do not incite to discrimination. But I defend the character, the identity, the culture and the freedom of the Netherlands. That is the truth. That is why I am here. That is why I speak. …

Mister President, members of the Court, though I stand here alone, my voice is the voice of many. This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of expression is the life source of our Western civilisation. …

Mister President, members of the Court, you have a great responsibility. Do not cut freedom in the Netherlands from its roots, our freedom of expression. Acquit me. Choose freedom. …

We ardently hope Wilders will be acquitted. But whether he is or not, Europe has irreversibly condemned itself.

From Big Government, by Bob McCarty:

About six years ago, the Dollarhites wanted to teach their young teenage son responsibility and the value of the dollar. So they rescued a pair of rabbits — one male and one female — and those rabbits did what rabbits do; they reproduced. Before long, things were literally hopping on the three-acre homestead 30 miles south of Springfield, and Dollarvalue Rabbitry was launched as more of a hobby than a business.

“We’d sell ‘em for 10 or 15 dollars a piece,” John said during a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, comparing the venture to a kid running a lemonade stand. In addition, they set up a web site and posted a “Rabbits for Sale” sign in their front yard. Most customers, however, came via word of mouth.

In the early stages, some of the bunnies were raised and sold for their meat. Much further down the road, John said, they determined it more profitable to sell live bunnies at four weeks old than to feed bunnies for 12 weeks and then sell them as meat.

“We started becoming the go-to people” for rabbits in the Springfield area, John said. “If you wanted a rabbit, you’d go to Dollarvalue Rabbitry.” He added that the family even made the local television news just before Easter in 2008 for a report about the care and feeding of “Easter bunnies.”

Initially, the Dollarhites sold the large, white, pink-eyed variety of rabbits. Eventually, however, they switched to selling a couple of different varieties of miniature rabbits, the mating pairs of which were purchased from breeders across the state. Not only did their “show-quality” miniatures reproduce well, but they ate less and seemed to be more popular with theme park visitors and retail buyers.

During the summer of 2009, the Dollarhites bought the rabbitry from their son who had grown tired of managing it. They paid him what he asked for it, $200. Things kept growing, however, and the Dollarhite’s landed a pair of big accounts in 2009.

A well-known Branson theme park, Silver Dollar City, asked the Dollarhites to have them provide four-week-old bunnies per week to their petting zoo May through September. When the bunnies turned six weeks old, they were sold to park visitors. The Springfield location of a national pet store chain, Petland, purchased rabbits from the Dollarhites as well.

In the fall of 2009, the theme park deliveries ended for the year and the Dollarhites scaled back their operation. At about the same time, the folks at Petland asked the Dollarhites to raise guinea pigs that the store would purchase from them. No big deal.

By the year’s end, the Dollarhites had moved approximately 440 rabbits and grossed about $4,600 for a profit of approximately $200 — enough, John said, to provide the family “pocket money” to do things such as eat out at Red Lobster once in a while. That was better than the loss they experienced in 2008.

Then some unexpected matters began demanding their attention.

It’s an understatement to describe the Dollarhites as being “beyond surprised” when, in the fall of 2009, a female inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA] showed up at the front door of the family home, wanting to do a “spot inspection” of their rabbitry. She said she had come across Dollarhite Rabbitry invoices while inspecting the petting zoo at Silver Dollar City.

“She did not tell us that we were in violation of any laws, rules, anything whatsoever,” John said, explaining that the inspector said she just wanted to see what type of operation they had. Having nothing to hide or any reason to fear they were doing anything wrong, the Dollarhites allowed the inspection to proceed.

John said he had to go to work at the family’s computer store, so Judy took the inspector to the back of their property where the rabbits were raised. There, the inspector began running the width of her finger across the cage and told the Dollarhites they would need to replace the cage, because it was a quarter-inch too small and, therefore, did not meet federal regulations.

Such a requirement came as a shock to the Dollarhites, because they had just invested in new cages to ensure the bunnies had a healthy amount of space to develop, John explained. Though raising dwarf breed varieties of rabbits which require less space, they had opted to purchase cages designed for “large breed rabbits” so the dwarfs would have plenty of room. All for naught.

Not only was the cage too small, according to the inspector, but she noted a small rust spot on a feeder and cited it as being out of compliance. When the Dollarhites told the inspector that rabbit urine causes the cages to rust and that they worked hard to keep the rabbits cages in top shape, she told them it didn’t matter. The rust spot would count as an infraction.

The inspector then asked how the cages were sanitized, John said, and Judy explained how she moved the bunnies to travel carriers and powerwashed the cages, using bleach when necessary. Afterward, she allowed the cages to dry in the sun before putting the bunnies back inside them.

The Dollarhites’ practice was much safer than that used by some breeders who used blow torches to burn hair and manure from the cages — a practice that can lead to rusting metal and produce toxic fumes from burning metal.

During the course of the spot inspection, John said, the inspector asked his wife if she and John would like to have their operation certified by USDA. Judy said she wasn’t sure and asked what certification would entail and if it would help them sell more rabbits. The inspector responded, telling her it would involve monthly inspections and was completely voluntary. The inspection ended with the inspector telling Judy that the Dollarhites rabbits looked healthy and well-cared for.

After the inspection, the Dollarhites didn’t hear from the USDA again until January 2010, John said, when he received a phone call from a Kansas City-based investigator from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS].

“He called us and said, ‘I need to have a meeting with you and your wife,’” John recalled.

After explaining that he asked the investigator to come after the workday at the computer store had ended, John said he asked the investigator about the purpose of the meeting,

“He said, ‘Well, it’s because you’re selling rabbits and you’ve exceeded more than $500 dollars in a year,’” John said, “and I went, ‘Okay, what does that have to do with anything?’”

John said the investigator refused to discuss details over the phone and made it clear that rejecting his request for a meeting would be a costly error in judgment.

When Judy asked if they should have an attorney present, the investigator responded, saying, “Well, that might be a good thing.”

“At that point, we kind of set back, (wondering) what in the world is going on,” John said. Then he found an attorney who is also a farmer.

“I didn’t want a ‘city slicker,’” said John, a farmer himself until 1996 when he sold his farm to build a home in Nixa. “I wanted someone that had been around the agriculture and farm business.”

John found a guy and they met for the first time a couple of days later — at the same time both met the APHIS investigator in person at John’s home.

“The first thing (the investigator) said was ‘My name is so and so, I’ve been in the USDA for 30-plus years, and I’ve never lost a case,’” John recalled, continuing. “He said, ‘I’m not here to debate the law, interpret the law or discuss the law, I’m here just to do an investigation.’”

John said the investigator went on to explain that he would ask questions, write a report based on the answers and send that report to his superiors at the USDA regional office in Colorado Springs, Colo. The entire process was suppose to take about a month, and John was told to contact the regional office if he had not heard anything in six weeks.

“At this point in time, we were still not knowing anything about the law he was talking about,” John explained, adding that his rabbitry had never had any issues with any animal welfare agencies.

Eight weeks passed, and John decided to call Colorado Springs. Immediately, he was given the number to a USDA office in the nation’s capitol. He called the new number, and the lady he reached there was blunt, John said.

“She said, ‘Well, Mr. Dollarhite, I’ve got the report on my desk, and I’m just gonna tell you that, once I review it, it’s our intent to prosecute you to the maximum that we can’ and that ‘we will make an example out of you’.”

When John once again tried to determine which law he and his wife had violated, he said the USDA lady replied, “We’ll forward you everything.”

“Ma’am, what law have we broken?” John said.

“Well, you sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in one calendar year,” she replied, according to John.

“Okay, what does that have to do with anything?” John countered.

The lady replied by saying there is a guideline which prohibits anyone from selling more than $500 worth of rabbits per year, John recalled, but she refused to cite any specific law and, instead, promised to send him the report containing details.

At that point, John said he called his attorney and was told not to worry about it, because he couldn’t find evidence of any law or regulation the Dollarhites had violated.

Soon after the meeting with the APHIS investigator and with the stress of the investigation hanging over their heads, John said he and his wife traded everything associated with the rabbit operation for other agricultural equipment. …

Recently, the Dollarhites received a “Certified Mail Return Receipt” letter (dated April 19, 2011) from the USDA informing them that they had broken the law and must pay USDA a fine of $90,643. Their crime? Violating 9 C.F.R. § 2.1 (a) (1): Selling more than $500 worth of rabbits in a calendar year. …

Based on an average price per rabbit sold being $10.45, the fine comes out to more than $206 per rabbit. In addition, the letter contains the following statement:

APHIS laws and regulations provide for administrative and criminal penalties to enforce these regulatory requirements, including civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each of the violations documented in our investigation.

If the threat contained in the letter is to be believed, the family could be fined as much as $10,000 per rabbit beyond the first 50 bunnies that netted the family its first $500. Do the math (390 rabbits x $10,000 each) and, if they don’t pay the initial fine, they could face additional fines totaling $3.9 million.

This is how prosperous nations become poor.

It is government-induced decline.

As President Reagan said:  “Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem”.