Bring the popcorn and settle in to watch another chapter in the ongoing global culture war.  If you cultivate the right frame of mind, fear and despair should quickly give way to malicious amusement.

In Saudi Arabia, the “hard-right” so long the favorite bogeyman of leftist demagogues, has finally turned up.  In predictable response, there will be an increasing demand for thought-control in the West. The lines will be drawn even more firmly.

And all those who predicted the death of religion will have to eat their words as religion rises in every corner of the globe – whether pagan (US), Orthodox Christian (Russia), Hindu (India), Jewish (Israel and all its sycophants).

The Independent reports that Saudi Arabia, where the gloves were never on, has turned up the volume in the culture war:

“To that end, King Abdullah issued Royal Decree 44, which criminalises “participating in hostilities outside the kingdom” with prison sentences of between three and 20 years, Human Rights Watch said.

Yet last month further regulations were issued by the Saudi interior ministry, identifying a broad list of groups which the government considers to be terrorist organisations – including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based”.

Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, said: “Saudi authorities have never tolerated criticism of their policies, but these recent laws and regulations turn almost any critical expression or independent association into crimes of terrorism.”

From GreatGameIndia.wordpress.com, a report about the PR agency behind Narendra Modi:

“Apco’s involvement in various intelligence and security-related projects is done through its strategic partner and sister company Asero Worldwide. While Apco’s expertise is in the field of communications, Asero specializes in homeland security and risk management consultancy.

Ken Silverstein, the editor of Harper’s Magazine (June 30, 2007) described Apco lobbyists as the “crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington”. He exposed APCO’s specialised experience in working on behalf of authoritarian regimes such as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan.

Apco and Asero have many overlapping consultants and management members. For example, Doron Bergerbest-Eilon who sits on Apco’s International Advisory Council was also founder and president of Asero Worldwide.

Mara Hedgecoth, the daughter of Apco CEO and President Margery Kraus also sits in Asero as Vice President. At the same time, Mara Hedgecoth also serves as Vice President and Director in Apco Worldwide.

ASERO’s (MOSSAD) Management Team :

Asero is almost like a retirement home for ex-Mossad and ex-Shabak secret services officials.

David Harel – Managing Director and Vice President, Israel. Former head of international relations for the protection and security division of the Israeli Security Agency

Oded Raz – Vice President, Former Senior ranking security official of the Israeli Security Agency

Gadi Kalai – Director, Former Regional Security Manager (RSO) of the Israeli Security Agency (ISA)’s North Region

One of Apco’s favorite legislators is Senator Joe Lieberman, who is a staunch supporter of military aid to Israel. Lieberman’s wife, Hadassah was Apco’s leading lobbyist for health care and pharmaceuticals clients.

MODI Makeover

Adolf Hitler was a brilliant propagandist. Narendra Modi too believes in the power of image. This is probably why the chief minister hired a US lobbying firm which has serviced clients like former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and President-for-life of Kazakhstan Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev.

This Washington-based firm, Apco Worldwide, was hired by Modi sometime in August 2007, in the run-up to an important Assembly election, to improve his image before the world community. Among its recent clients are Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Communist youth leader-turned-Russian billionaire with mafia links.

The firm has a distinction of taking contracts of boosting images of leaders who fell out of favour of their followers.

On the face of it Apco Worldwide’s brief is to build and sell Brand Gujarat to the international community. APCO, through its 32 offices across the globe, has been promoting Gujarat as a great investment destination. APCO has also been managing Modi’s own behaviour and projection, for which the cost has been over $25,000 per month since 2007.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/specials/Modis-image-builders-have-dictators-on-client-list/articleshow/2600140.cms?

Andrew Sullivan on the persecution of heretics by gay-rights bigots:

“The guy who had the gall to express his First Amendment rights and favor Prop 8 in California by donating $1,000 has just been scalped by some gay activists. After an OKCupid decision to boycott Mozilla, the recently appointed Brendan Eich just resigned under pressure:

In a post at Mozilla’s official blog, executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news with an unequivocal apology on the company’s behalf. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” Baker wrote. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

The action comes days after dating site OKCupid became the most vocal opponent of Eich’s hiring. Mozilla offered repeated statements about LGBT inclusivity within the company over the past two weeks, but those never came with a specific response from Eich about his thousands of dollars of donations in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that sought to ban gay marriage in the state.

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Update: A continuation of my stance here and my response to dissenting readers here.”

[Lila: Of course, the “religious right” of Sullivan’s piece is a bit of a strawman. The real thought-control is always from the left, these days.]

Well, just after Nancy Powell (the US envoy during the inception of the fake-slaver nanny case) bit the dust, we now have news that Devyani Khobragade is being charged again, this time in India by the CBI:

“In fresh trouble for the Indian diplomat, the Central Bureau of Investigation has decided to file a chargesheet against her and her father, Uttam Khobragade, in the Adarsh Housing scam.

Sources said the chargesheet against the two would be filed in the next couple of weeks after the agency found “documentary evidence” to prove that Devyani obtained a flat in Adarsh Housing society on the basis of a false affidavit.”

This is probably a bit of grand-standing ahead of the April elections to show that the government is quite capable of investigating its own. It’s more evidence to to suggest that both Khobragade and Powell were disposable entities in a larger game.

This is Nancy Powell, former US envoy to India.

This is Indian consular head, Devyani Khobragade, who is married and has children.

Khobragade and other Indian diplomats were at frequent logger-heads with the US State Dept. on a number of issues – from the issue of domestic labor to the Indian SC’s ruling criminalizing homosexual activity.

That happened just before the arrest of Khobragade and her subsequent strip-search.

India Today reports:

“It was a series of diplomatic cables sent on behalf of US ambassador Nancy Powell that led to her being forced to resign by the US State Department, which didn’t want to be saddled with the Nancy legacy for doing business with a new government in New Delhi.

Top diplomatic sources said that Powell authorised cables during diplomat Devyani Khobragade arrest row described the Indian position as weak and that it will not escalate the matter as the country was in an election mode, the reverse happened because of elections round the corner there was an unprecedented Indian anger and response which dipped the relationship to an all time low.

Earlier too Powell was blamed for not advising the Washington to do business with Narendra Modi and the US only courted Narendra Modi recently after the intervention of the US State Department.

The envoy was also blamed for being on frequent trekking tours and even the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi had informed the interlocutors in Washington that her conduct was not helpful to the relationship.

Earlier in the day, US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell has resigned from her post, days after speculation that she may be shipped out.

“US Ambassador to India Nancy J. Powell announced in a US MIssion Town Hall meeting March 31 that she has submitted her resignation to President Obama and, as planned for some time, will retire to her home in Delaware before the end of May,” an announcement in the US Embassy website said on Monday night”

Comment:

Search for the posts on Khobragade on this blog and you’ll see we were right on the money in this case – legally, morally, and politically.

As for Ambassador Powell, what went wrong can be summed up in one sentence:

Ideologues don’t do diplomacy. They’re only good at war-making, verbal and physical.

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/nancy-powell-us-state-department-diplomatic-cables-devyani-khobragade-eam/1/352197.html

The New American has a disturbing story on a radical invasion of parental rights:

(h/t to Laurence Vance at LRC blog):

“Citing a radical United Nations treaty known as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), lawmakers in Scotland approved a deeply controversial new law assigning an individual government overseer to each and every child in the country charged with monitoring their development. However, the draconian measure, which has sparked criticism and outrage around the world as a brazen assault on parental rights and privacy, is already in the process of being challenged in court.”

Beverley Eakman explains here why the UN’s definition of “human rights” differs fundamentally from the US definition, being more a guarantee by the government of specific outcomes, and thus, Marxist, by definition.

Dr. Jeffrey Goodman, PhD has written an interesting explanation of the famous prophecy in Ezekiel about the last days, based on his study of Biblical archaeology:  Chapter Nine, Comets of God.

Satoshi Kanazawa in The Scientific Fundamentalist:

“First, modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical.  An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different.  Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women are and should be identical – is doomed to failure.

Further, modern feminism is unnecessary, because its entire raison d’être is the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men.  The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women.  However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.”  Pinker documents the fact that boys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care.  Men succumb to a larger number of diseases in much greater numbers than women do throughout their lives.  The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men’s average life expectancy is shorter than women’s.  This, incidentally, is the reason why slightly more boys than girls are born – 105 boys to 100 girls – so that there will be roughly 100 boys to 100 girls when they reach puberty.

Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women.  Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception.  It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.  What do women control?  Men.  As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

Finally, modern feminism is evil because it ultimately makes women (and men) unhappy.  In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal:  Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men.  Women used to be a lot happier than men despite the fact that they made much less money than men.  The sex gap in happiness (in women’s favor) has declined in the past 35 years as the sex gap in pay (in men’s favor) narrowed. Now women make as much as, sometimes even more than, men do.  As a result, today women are just as unhappy, or even more unhappy than, men are.  As I explain in a previous post, money does not make women happ.

The feminist insistence that women behave like men and make as much money as men do may not be the sole reason for women’s rising levels of dissatisfaction with life; a greater incidence of divorce and single motherhood may also contribute to it.  At any event, the culpability of modern feminism in making women steadily unhappy, because it is based on false assumptions about male and female human nature, is difficult to deny.  Men’s happiness has not declined in the last 35 years, because there has not been masculinism; nobody has insisted on the radical notion that men are women, although, as Christina Hoff Sommers documents, this may be happening in our current war against boys.  For anyone who is looking for an effective antidote to modern feminism, I highly recommend Danielle Crittenden’s 1999 book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us:  Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Women.”

Brandon Ambrosino in The New Republic admits that homosexuality is a choice, not an identity:

“One of the reasons I think our activism is so insistent on sexual rigidity is because, in our push to make gay rights the new black rights, we’ve conflated the two issues. The result is that we’ve decided that skin color is the same thing as sexual behavior. I don’t think this is true. When we conflate race and sexuality, we overlook how fluid we are learning our sexualities truly are. To say it rather crassly: I’ve convinced a few men to try out my sexuality, but I’ve never managed to get them to try on my skin color. In other words, one’s sexuality isn’t as biologically determined as race. Many people do feel as if their sexuality is something they were born with, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. But as I and other queer persons will readily confirm, there are other factors informing our sexualities than simply our genetic codes.”

Well, yes.  The Human Genome project has been completed and there is no gay gene. Of course, there isn’t a clear heterosexual gene, either.

Sexual roles are both biological and sociological. They are genetic, congenital, and socially constructed.

But not so constructed that you can just turn a man into a woman by castrating him and raising him as a girl, as the tragic case of David Reimer illustrates.

But since it makes good political sense to invent a category of identity and appropriate the moral high-ground of civil rights activism, gay activists invented one.

Tim Wise analyzes and explains the flaws in the use of statistics on crimes by racialists who argue that the extent of black-on-white crime indicates a “race war” by blacks against the majority population.

[Lila: Note, while his analysis makes many good points, Wise seems to be a grand-stander on racial issues. A Tuckerian humanitarian, maybe?]

Here are some of Wise’s main points:

1. Blacks make up a smaller part of the population than whites, so the chances of a black person encountering a white person are much higher than the reverse. Thus, whites would be more likely to be victimized by black offenders than the other way around.

2.  There are proportionately more crimes of any sort committed by blacks than by whites, so the likelihood of more inter-racial crime being committed by them is also higher.

3.  A large number of the whites being victimized by blacks are Hispanics who live in proximity with them, so that whites who don’t live near blacks are even less likely to be the targets of black perpetrators than the numbers might suggest.

4. The disproportion in inter-racial crime is most evident in robbery, which suggests that the motivation for the crimes is pecuniary, not racial.

5.  A small proportion of offenders (7%) commit most offenses (70%), meaning that the actual number of inter-racial offenders in either group, black or white, is much smaller than it would seem at first glance. Thus, the evidence of racial targeting becomes even less meaningful.

Wise writes:

“Even if we assumed a random and perfectly mixed white and black population — such that whites and blacks encountered each other at rates relative to their population percentages — the much higher black homicide offending rates alone would predict that there should be 6.7 times more B-W murders than W-B murders. But in fact, as we saw, there were only about twice as many B-W murders as W-B murders. And when we consider the above-mentioned data on relative rates of interracial encounter, the numbers are even more striking. Even if we assume that 5 percent of all persons encountered by whites are black (an increase of 2/3 from prior and clearly documented data), and that only 63 percent of persons encountered by blacks are white (an increase of only 10 percent in the same period), we would expect 12 times more B-W homicides than W-B homicides in a given year. In a community of 3 million people, for instance, in which whites outnumbered blacks 6.7 to 1 (as is the case in the real world) there would be roughly 2,610,000 whites and 390,000 blacks. If 0.02 percent of blacks committed a murder, this would mean that we could expect 78 black homicides that year, and 63 percent of these (or 49 homicides in all) would involve white victims. If 0.003 percent of whites committed a murder that year, this would predict a similar number, roughly 78 murders committed by whites, of which only 4 would involve black victims. In other words, given relative rates of homicide offending along with relative rates of interracial encounter, we could expect 12.25 times more B-W homicides than W-B homicides in any given year. But in fact, in 2010, B-W homicide was only twice as numerically prevalent as the opposite. In other words, B-W homicide is roughly 1/6 as common as random chance would predict.

And given the relative population percentages of whites and blacks, blacks are actually more likely to be interracially murdered by a white person than vice-versa. After all, as for homicides where the race of the offender is known, 447 B-W murders as a share of the white community is 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002) of all whites killed by blacks, which is 1 in every 500,000 white people who will be killed by a black person in a given year; meanwhile, 218 W-B homicides as a share of the black community is 5.5/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.00055). So although interracial homicide is incredibly rare in either direction, any given black person is more than 2.75 times as likely as any given white person to be interracially murdered, with roughly 1 in every 180,000 black persons being killed by a white person in a given year.”

A criticism of part of Tim Wise’s use of the DOJ statistics can be found in this piece at “Feminist Critics”:

“The problem for Wise is that according to the DoJ figures, there are nearly three times as many black on white crimes of violence as there are white on black, from which it follows that, in any encounter between blacks and whites, the black is nearly three times as likely to victimise the white, than the white is to victimise the black. 31% of this excess can be explained by the higher overall crime rate for blacks. For the interracial victimisation rate to be higher than this, at least one (and possibly all three) of the following statements must be true:

1. Whites victimise blacks less often than chance would suggest.
2. Blacks victimise whites more often than chance would suggest
3. Blacks have a much higher per encounter offending rate than whites. To put it another way, it’s much more dangerous to meet a black than it is to meet a white.

No amount of playing around with encounter rates can alter the fact that at least one of these must be true. If, as Wise argues, 1 and 2 are false, then 3 must be true, a proposition which is as likely to be as unpalatable to him as it is agreeable to the racists.

And at Breitbart.com, here is a criticism of Tim Wise, for handing progressives the ammunition that lets them win every argument with conservatives:

“In fact, what Wise has done is taken a vicious subjective prejudice that ascribes the worst motives possible–racism–to his political opponents and declared it to be an accurate diagnosis of everything that motivates them.

This tactic allows progressives to drape themselves in the mantle of a “Hero” who is fighting “Ultimate Evil” in the form of evil racists who want to destroy black people. It legitimizes the role-playing they want to be able to do, so they do not even seriously question what Wise is saying.

This is why discourse with progressives often gets so heated. They are role-playing a fantasy in which they are combating Ultimate Evil. Why would you hold back when fighting Ultimate Evil? Ultimate Evil deserves no quarter!

What results from this is a Republican who thinks he is discussing policy differences with an opponent who has a solution that simply will not work, while the Democrat thinks he is trying to save civilization from the New KKK.”