Cup cakes priced differently for different races (and genders) at Berkeley College, California, to make the point that “affirmative action” is racist and discriminatory.

Photographed by Zombie:

Affirmative action bakesale at Berkeley College, California

Find more pictures and find out how the Left reacted here.

Decisions, decisions!

Even felons have to make them.

This is from Fox News:

Authorities say non-violent offenders in Bay Minette, Alabama, now have a new choice: Go to jail, or go to church every Sunday for a year. …

The city judge will let misdemeanor offenders choose to work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine; or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders select church, they will be allowed to pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department.

If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed. … So far, 56 churches are participating.

If church is not the lesser of the two punishments, at least it takes less time.

(Thanks to George for the link.)

Occasionally we quote a daily report from The Religion of Peace of deadly attacks made in the name of Islam.

The total number since 9/11, recorded by The Religion of Peace and reflected in our margin, is at the time of this writing 17,792.

Here is to-day’s list of atrocities.

It should be remembered that the Koran commands Muslims to kill non-Muslims, but not other Muslims.

A Holy Warrior enters a Sunday church service in Indonesia wearing a vest packed with explosives and shrapnel that includes nuts and bolts. According to his cleric’s teachings, which are rooted in the Quran, this young martyr is rewarded with an eternity of gluttony and sex while he taunts his Christian victims as they are being tortured by Allah himself.

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace “Mohammed is God’s apostle.  Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another”  Quran 48:29 2011.09.27 (Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan) – A man and boy are torn apart by a Shahid suicide bomber. 2011.09.27 (Shindand, Afghanistan) – Eleven children are among a family of sixteen shredded by Mujahideen bombers. 2011.09.27 (Sumisip, Philippines) – Abu Sayyaf members assault a village, killing six, including several residents. 2011.09.26 (Diwaniya, Iraq) – An imam nearly loses his life to Religion of Peace rivals, who do manage to kill his companion. 2011.09.26 (Kabul, Afghanistan) – An American security analyst is gunned down by a Fedayeen working as a trusted employee. 2011.09.25 (Karbala, Iraq) – al-Qaeda devotees target Shiites with four bomb blasts that leave nearly twenty dead.

Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, the Americans held in an Iranian prison for two years for entering the country illegally, were ransomed and released five days ago (September 21). The ransom will ensure that more Americans will be grabbed and held whenever possible, of course.

But that is not the only reason why they should not have been ransomed.

They each made  a speech when they landed in Oman. Fattal said that he and his companions (including Sarah Shourd who was released a year ago for a lower ransom) were innocent of any intention to enter Iran illegally, and Bauer said that they were sympathetic to Iran’s cause [“The irony is Sarah, Josh and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility”], as if this were additional reason why they should not have been arrested and imprisoned. What they did not say was whether their sympathies still lie with Iran rather than their own country. Iran is unjust, it subjugates women, it stones apostates to death, it threatens the annihilation of Israel, it hangs homosexuals, it  is building a nuclear arsenal that endangers the world, but these three citizens of the free and tolerant United States were sympathetic to Iran.

They should have been left to whatever fate Iranian justice would have condemned them to. Then they might have served the useful purpose of providing an object lesson to their like-thinkers back home.

Debra J. Saunders reveals more about them. She writes at Townhall:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad engineered the release last week of two American hikers serving eight-year prison terms on trumped-up espionage charges. He may have thought the release would make him seem more humane, but the $1 million bail-for-freedom deal makes Tehran look like Somali pirates, grabbing innocent tourists, holding them hostage and then releasing them for ransom.

So why did released hiker Shane Bauer say the following upon his release? “Two years in prison is too long, and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America (emphasis added) and Iran.”

The moral-equivalent rhetoric may have worked when Bauer was a peace and conflict studies major at the University of California, Berkeley, but one country ginned up phony espionage charges to use him and his companions as political pawns — that’s Iran — and the other country doesn’t imprison critics because of what they say or use violence to quell dissent.

The nightmare began in July 2009 when Bauer, friend Josh Fattal and Bauer’s girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hiking in Iraq in 2009? And near the Iranian border? How much tourism has there been in Iraq while war has been raging there?  How did they get there, and why?

Many Americans have wondered how they could be so foolhardy that they mistakenly crossed into Iran. Shourd, a self-described “teacher-activist-writer,” says that there were no signs indicating the Iraq-Iran border near a popular waterfall and that the hikers crossed into Iran after an armed soldier summoned them to walk toward him. …

At the time of their arrest, Bauer and Shourd were living in Damascus, in the bosom of Bashar Assad’s Syria. They have shared a professed love of Middle Eastern culture.

That is to say, Arab culture – the morally lowest in the world.

They also shared some blind spots. Shourd, for example, wrote that in Yemen, interaction between the sexes is minimal, absent marriage, and 99 percent of women never leave the house unveiled. But: “The separation of sexes is widely understood as an attempt to protect women, and I have to admit, the streets do feel safe. Men leave you alone as long as you are covered; in a bizarre way it is less of a hassle being a woman here than anywhere I’ve ever been.”

Newsweek lists Yemen as one of nine countries that are “the worst places to be a woman,” because domestic violence is not illegal and there is no legal recognition of spousal rape.

A year before Shourd wrote about how safe she felt in Yemen, 10-year-old Nujood Ali went to a Sanaa courtroom to ask a judge to release her from an arranged marriage to an older man who beat her. Other girl brides came forward with their horror stories. A Sanaa University study found that more than half of Yemeni girls are married before they turn 18.

Shourd never quite comes out and says that she thinks that as Iraq War-opposing liberals, she and her friends should be treated differently than other people in the Middle East. But surely, she noticed that she was an unmarried 31-year-old woman and traveling with her 27-year-old boyfriend throughout the Arabian Peninsula, among people who would not tolerate the same behavior from their own.

Unjust imprisonment? Bauer should talk to a 10-year-old bride. …

Bauer and Shourd “lived in Syria, enjoying privileged lives,” different from the lives of ordinary Damascenes. Yet instead of criticizing Syria’s brutal dictator, Bauer wrote articles hitting America, and Shourd wrote a piece that criticized not Assad, but Israel.

Diana West says it is her “sincere wish that Bauer, Fattal and Shourd return to the United States and realize what a great country America is. Iran arrested them. Iran framed them. Iran jailed them.”

The United States, in contrast, gave them a university education that trained them to blame America first. Or, after serving time in prison … coequally with Iran.

We are not concerned about their possible enlightenment. We think they have been treated too well by America (the real source of their ransom, whatever lies are told or implied about the obsequiously-thanked Sultan of Oman paying it), and – obviously – not badly enough by Iran.

In our post When innocence is a vice (September 24, 2010), on Sarah Shourd and her ransomed release, we quoted this insightful passage from a short story called The Informer by Joseph Conrad, and it bears repeating here:

She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions – the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social classes to which she belonged herself. … She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. … For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures.

Boys of that class too, of course.

We hope to hear of Shourd’s and Bauer’s early return to their residences in Bashar Assad’s chaotic flaming blood-soaked Syria, and of Fattal’s joining them there.

(Thanks to Frank for the link)

In Britain the number you dial for emergency services – “police, fire, ambulance” – is 999. In America there is an economic emergency for which help could come from Herman Cain’s 999 plan: 9% tax on business profits, 9% tax on personal income, 9% national sales tax.

We think Herman Cain is impressively rational (although he is a Baptist) and by far the most likable of the Republican candidates for the presidency. The policies he advocates are firmly conservative. Only on foreign affairs he has been weak, obviously under-informed; but he’s doing what he knows he must about that, starting with a recent visit to Israel.

This is from American Thinker:

Generations of career politicians … have bankrupted our country in a slow side toward socialism and the withering of our liberty.

Patriots are clamoring for an individual who, as president, can calmly and confidently reorient this country to the Constitution and fiscal sanity. We the People must nominate the next Republican nominee, even (especially) if it means making an end run around the party establishment to put forth someone who is not of Washington, nor political moderation. We must eliminate candidates who have had a part — large or small — in contributing to the current crisis. That means no Romney, no Huckabee, no Gingrich, no Palin. The boldest statement that can be made is to elect a private citizen president.

Not for Cain is the dialect of programmed candidates controlled by Republican Party hacks or “up-and-coming political stars.” … Cain does not require handlers and consultants. No political consultant would ever tell a candidate to answer a question, to which he cannot truly give an informed answer, as Cain did on a question of national security, “I don’t know all the facts.” … Cain speaks with total self-confidence born of ability and achievement, not the unearned laurels of sycophants.

Cain speaks blunt truths about how far we have fallen from our charters and the necessity to restore them and revere them again. As he recently [said] when refusing to walk back comments about a ban on Muslims in a Cain administration, he only wants “true patriots” around him, committed and dedicated to the Constitution, the Declaration, and the laws of this country. What else matters?

Cain has proven himself again and again as an executive (which, lest anyone forget, is the office he is seeking), willing to begin at ground level and rising to save a company from bankruptcy. He is a scholar, a mathematician (bachelors from Morehouse), and computer scientist (masters from Purdue) who speaks logically and plainly.

We would like to know what our American readers think of Cain as a prospective president; and whether our foreign readers have taken notice of him, and if so what their impressions are.

American soldiers are suffering horrific life-ruining injuries in Afghanistan because of a stupid directive issued by General Petraeus, who dreams ridiculously that their obedience to it will transform Afghanistan into Martha’s Vineyard (so to speak).

This is from Townhall by Diana West:

Only the U.S. military could build a defensive wall of words — “dismounted complex blast injury” (DCBI) — around the bare fact that single, double, triple, even quadruple amputations are up sharply among U.S. forces on foot patrol in Afghanistan. So are associated pelvic, abdominal and genital injuries according to a newly released report.

Even the antiseptic language of the report is excruciating, as when it calls for “further refinement” of “aggressive pain management at the POI (point of injury),” or highlights the need to train more military urologists in “phallic reconstruction surgery.” …

These grievous injuries have increased because more U.S. forces are on foot patrol in Afghanistan. More Americans are on foot patrol in Afghanistan because counterinsurgency strategy puts them there. … The Associated Press account is typical: “The counterinsurgency tactic that is sending U.S. soldiers out on foot patrols among the Afghan people, rather than riding in armored vehicles, has contributed to a dramatic increase in arm and leg amputations, genital injuries and the loss of multiple limbs following blast injuries.”

But what exactly this counterinsurgency (COIN) tactic is designed to accomplish remains off the radar. The fact is, Uncle Sam is asking young Americans to risk limbs, urinary function and testicles to win something not only intangible but also fantastical. They walk the bomb-packed byways of Afghanistan to win — to “earn” — “the trust of the Afghan people.” This is the mythological, see-no-Islam quest that drives U.S. COIN strategy. …

Once we stop trying to remake Afghanistan in something akin to our own image, once we start preventing Islam from remaking the West into a Shariah-compliant zone  … these shattering body blasts to young Americans on the other side of the world will cease.

Meanwhile, “the trust of the Afghan people” is the holy grail of the Washington establishment, and, even after retiring from the military, Gen. David Petraeus, now director of the CIA, remains chief myth-maker. “Earn the people’s trust,” Petraeus wrote in a signal “Counterinsurgency Guidance” issued Aug. 1, 2010. From his list of how-tos — which range from dispense payola (“COIN-contracting”), to “help them develop checks and balances to prevent abuses” (good luck with that), to “drink lots of tea” — one order stands out, particularly in light of this week’s report on amputations resulting from foot patrols. Petraeus wrote: “Walk. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population.”

One year later, the Army is reckoning with the carnage and after-care requirements that are consequences of this key tactic of COIN strategy. It is high time for the rest of us to reckon with them, too. Is COIN working? Is the burden of suffering that the nation is placing on the military worth the return? Frankly, when it comes to winning “the trust of the Afghan people,” is there any return?

None.

And why should Americans care whether untrustworthy Afghans trust them or not? Leave the Afghans to their poor, nasty, brutish lives. Even if the Afghan nation could be saved from its chosen primitivism, perpetual inter-tribal strife, and traditional misery, its salvation would not be worth the loss of one joint of one finger or toe of a single American soldier.

We will soon be writing again about Christianity. Before we do, we want to get Jesus of Nazareth out of the way as he has very little to do with the Christian religion, no matter what the Christians claim. The thinnest of threads connects the (probable) historical Jesus to the “Christ Jesus” who was born in the imagination of Christianity’s author, known to history as St. Paul.

The Jesus on whom Christianity built its essential fictions probably did exist.

Jesus was a common name at the time, the Greek for Joshua or Jeshua or Jesse or some such Hebrew name. Think of it as a name like Kevin or Juan or Ronald today – nothing special.

What is also probably true of this particular Jesus is that he was a preacher, that he had a following of some tens or hundreds, and now and then perhaps an audience of hundreds and possibly thousands. He was one of the preaching laymen of his time, a rabbi. It was a time when rabbis were becoming an increasingly important feature of religious life in Judea. They were pious men, “Hasidim” – not to be confused with members of the Hasidic movement of our time – who imparted religious knowledge and offered moral guidance. They were ordinary members of their local communities who supported themselves with various trades and occupations. They were not – and never became – priests. The priests were members of an hereditary caste whose duty was to perform the rituals of the Temple, and when the Temple was destroyed an active Jewish priesthood ceased to exist.

It has often been said that if Jesus had been of any real importance in the Judea of his day, there would have been records of what he said and did. Both the Romans and the Jews were record keepers, the Romans meticulously so. However, the absence of records doesn’t mean there weren’t any. Its more likely that they were deliberately destroyed; not by (pre-Christian) Romans who would have had no reason to do it, nor by Jews who would probably have liked to preserve them. The only group who would have had reason to destroy true records of the Rabbi Jesus were the Christians themselves, but when and what cannot be guessed.

The truth is that nothing is known of this Jesus with any certainty. From Josephus we get some evidence of his existence, a passage in one version of his famous History which many believe to have been a forged interpolation, and an anecdote about one James, “a brother of Jesus”, being stoned to death in 62 C.E.

We also know that some who followed Jesus in his lifetime had believed him to be the longed-for Messiah. (The Messiah was desperately hoped for in those years, and now and then a “spiritual” or military leader was declared to be him, the Annointed One, come to save them from Roman rule and taxes. He would be a human being, a descendant of King David.) We know that Jesus’s followers had believed this of him because they survived him and founded a religious sect, consisting entirely of law-abiding Jews, who would not give up the idea of his Messiahship even after his shocking and humiliating execution as an insurrectionist leader. His death by the Roman method of crucifixion, with a notice over his head mocking him as “King of the Jews”, is also a probable fact about him.

The members of the sect, known as the Nazarenes – and/or the Ebionites – believed that Jesus would come back in the flesh to fulfill his Messiahship. Most Jews at the time believed in bodily resurrection after death. (The ones who didn’t were the priests, who were also the aristocrats, including the royal family of the priest-kings who had ruled the nation for some generations before Judea became a Roman province.)

They thought it would happen quite soon, in their lifetimes. This optimistic group are said by Christians to have been the first “Christians”, in that they were followers of the “Christ” – “Christ” being the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah”. But they were not Christians in the sense that is meant by Christians: they did not believe that Jesus was God.

When the last of those who had known Jesus in his lifetime died without witnessing his return, another generation waited for the event. This exercise in patience and disappointment went on for some hundreds of years. None of them ever believed that Jesus was divine (except for an obscure break-away group of Ebionites in the fourth century).

And that is as much as we can say about “the historical Jesus”. How much the biblical Jesus resembles him, we can only guess.

We know nothing of his family, except the one brother James. Ingenious historians have worked out that he had a number of other brothers, one named Judas (or “Jude”) who might have been his twin. Twins enter into the rumors of his life which we know as the gospels. There we find one Thomas Didymus, for instance. As both “Thomas” and “Didymus” mean “twin”, we have a man named “Twin Twin” (which if not improbable is at least odd and certainly redundant).

We can conjecture further, without proofs. He would probably have been married since orthodox Jewish men were required to marry. He probably lived in the Galilee, a fertile region of Judea, in a time when the economy of the Roman Empire was doing particularly well. His family were unlikely to have been poor, and may have been wealthy.

Nothing that is reported of him suggests any extraordinary insight or notable originality of thought. His sayings and moral tales were the common currency of rabbinical teaching. (The miracles attributed to him – changing wine into water, raising the dead, walking on water etc. – were a standard set.) But he must have had what the Greeks call “charisma”, a special gift that attracted followers and made them believe he had a high calling.

And that’s about as much as we can know or reasonably suppose about Jesus of Nazareth. We deduce that he lived, that he preached and taught, that an unknown number of people had high expectations of his fulfilling an historic role in Jewish history but he did not live to do so, being crucified as an insurrectionist leader by the Roman authorities.

This thin conjectured record can be put away now on the shelf. It will not need to be taken down again. For what subsequently happened in the great world, the momentous historical events connected to his name, the invention of a religion that was to prove the scourge of his people, he was not to blame. How appalled such a devout Jew would have been if he could have foreseen the atrocious persecution of his people in his name!

The real man can be forgotten, as he has been forgotten. Very little of his history is necessary to the religion that was founded in his name; almost nothing but his death. He could only be an embarrassment to it after a fictitious figure, bearing his name and endowed with a biography tailored to prove that his life had been predicted by various Jewish prophets, was claimed to be God Incarnate by the adherents of a new religion: Christianity.

Jillian Becker   September 23, 2011

Daniel Greenfield’s 10 Reasons to Abolish the UN is a must-read. Find it here.

These are the 10 reasons summed up in headings:

1. The United Nations Obstructs America’s Defense of the Free World

2. The United Nations is a Force of Global Injustice

3. The UN Obstructs the Prevention of Genocide

4. The UN Distorts Women’s Rights to Promote Violence against Women

5. The UN Cannot Prevent Nuclear Proliferation

6. The UN is an Undemocratic Perversion of Democracy

7. The United Nations is Hopelessly Corrupt

8. The UN is an Economic Drain on America

9. The United Nations Endangers American Civil Liberties

10. The UN Holds Human Rights Hostage to its Double Standards

The booklet is short, but every accusation is fully proved.

In his Conclusion, Greenfield writes:

The UN is a vast global employment agency with no purpose except the perpetuation of its own power and authority. Its lofty buildings and the bustle of its vast armies of employees conceal its underlying corruption and uselessness.

American participation in the United Nations supports the deception that it is an international body capable of fair-minded governance. That deception cruelly betrays the hopes of the weak and the vulnerable and abets genocide, mass rape and terror.

The United Nations has become an organizational assault on its own founding principles. And all the while it undermines the sovereignty and rights of the free member nations who still believe that all men are created equal and that governments derive their authority from the people.

The only way to redeem those principles is to exit its corridors and walk a new path toward an alternative alliance that does more than pay lip service to freedom, democracy and human rights. Only America can be the nucleus of such an alliance. And only when the nation that gave the world freedom leaves the international order that impedes it can a global alliance of free nations truly be born.

*

In an article titled America: The Chief Subsidizer of UN Rapists and Traffickers, chiefly concerned with what happens to whistle-blowers on the UN role in crimes of rape and the trafficking of sex slaves, Phyllis Chesler expresses her disgust with that appalling institution:

The Wilsonian-influenced ideals of the UN are not realistic or realizable.

We agree emphatically. And whenever unrealistic ideals are set, nastiness ensues. (Vide Christianity.)

The UN is predicated on the myth — nay, the lie — that UN diplomats and civil servants are morally upright, fair, decent, rational — and, not the vicious tyrants, bullies, thugs, liars, egomaniacs, cowards, and grifters that they truly are. Nor does the UN have a transparent system in place that would hold their mightily flawed personnel accountable for the crimes they commit. …

Who keeps it going, this Tower of Iniquity, this World Headquarters of Evil? More than any other country, the United States of America!   

If it is clear that the United Nations allows its peacekeeping troops to commit major human rights atrocities, why would we allow such an institution to render decisions that are meant to affect the entire world? Why would we abide by such decisions? More important: Why should the United States fund an international criminal operation? The United States pays the lion’s share of the Secretariat costs at the United Nations. Don’t worry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has assured stressed American taxpayers that the two-year headquarters budget (2010-11) will only amount to a meager $4.92 billion.

According to the UN peacekeeping website, the budget for the fiscal year 1 July 2011-30 June 2012 is approximately seven billion dollars. The United States is responsible for 27 percent of this cost, or about two billion. This is far more than what Japan (1 billion), the UK (591 million), China (285 million), Spain (230 million), or Korea (164 million) pays for peacekeepers. Interestingly, under President Barack Obama’s administration, the United States overpaid its share of the UN peacekeeping budget. In fact, our overpayment of 287 million dollars is more than what most of the world’s supporters — including China — pay for “peacekeeping.”

Why is the United States funding rapists, criminals, pimps, brothels, and sex traffickers? Why are we funding orgies? Why are we funding the most heinous betrayal of the world’s most vulnerable civilians in war zones? Why are we overpaying for UN peacekeeping?

Why is the US paying anything at all to sustain the rotten institution?

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED.

Sam Harris talks critically about religion, Islam in particular. He says the Koran is a “profoundly mediocre” book. We think it is a profoundly bad book, both as imaginative literature and as moral instruction.

(Thanks to our reader Frank for the link)