Westerners Welcome Harems

By Daniel Pipes
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, November 25, 2008


The Ottoman harem in Western imagination.

A Scottish judge recently bent the law to benefit a polygamous household. The case involved a Muslim male who drove 64 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone – usually grounds for an automatic loss of one's driving license. The defendant's lawyer explained his client's need to speed: "He has one wife in Motherwell and another in Glasgow and sleeps with one one night and stays with the other the next on an alternate basis. Without his driving licence he would be unable to do this on a regular basis." Sympathetic to the polygamist's plight, the judge permitted him to retain his license.

Monogamy, this ruling suggests, long a foundation of Western civilization, is silently eroding under the challenge of Islamic law. Should current trends continue, polygamy could soon be commonplace.

Since the 1950s, Muslim populations have grown in Western Europe and North America via immigration and conversion; with their presence has grown the Islamic form of polygyny (one man married to more than one woman). Estimates find 2,000 or more British polygamous men, 14,000 or 15,000-20,000 harems in Italy, 30,000 harems in France, and 50,000-100,000 polygamists in the United States.

Some imams openly acknowledge conducting polygamous marriage ceremonies: Khalil Chami reports that he is asked almost weekly to conduct such ceremonies in Sydney. Aly Hindy reports having "blessed" more than 30 such nuptials in Toronto.

Social acceptance is also growing. Academics justify it, while politicians blithely meet with polygamists or declare that Westerners should "find a way to live with it" and journalists describe polygamy with empathy, sympathy, and compassion. Islamists argue polygamy's virtues and call for its official recognition.

Polygamy has made key legal advances in 2008. (For fuller details, see my blog, "Harems Accepted in the West.") At least six Western jurisdictions now permit harems on the condition that these were contracted in jurisdictions where polygamy is legal, including India and Muslim-majority countries from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to Morocco.


The Iranian harem as depicted by an Iranian.

* United Kingdom: Bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in jail but the law recognizes harems already formed in polygamy-tolerant countries. The Department of Work and Pensions pays couples up to £92.80 (US$140) a week in social benefits, and each multiculturally-named "additional spouse" receives £33.65. The Treasury states that "Where a man and a woman are married under a law which permits polygamy, and either of them has an additional spouse, the Tax Credits (Polygamous Marriages) Regulations 2003 allow them to claim tax credits as a polygamous unit." Additionally, harems may be eligible for additional housing benefits to reflect their need for larger properties.

* The Netherlands: The Dutch justice minister, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, has announced that polygamous Muslim marriages should not be dealt with through the legal system but via dialogue.

* Belgium: The Constitutional Court took steps to ease the reunification of harems formed outside the country.

* Italy: A court in Bologna allowed a Muslim male immigrant to bring the mothers of his two children into the country on the grounds that the polygamous marriages had been legally contracted.

* Australia: The Australian newspaper reports "it is illegal to enter into a polygamous marriage. But the federal government, like Britain, recognises relationships that have been legally recognised overseas, including polygamous marriages. This allows second wives and children to claim welfare and benefits."

* Ontario, Canada: Canadian law calls for polygamy to be punished by a prison term but the Ontario Family Law Act accepts "a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid."

Thus, for the cost of two airplane tickets, Muslims potentially can evade Western laws. (One wonders when Mormons will also wake to this gambit.) Rare countries (such as Ireland) still reject harems; generally, as David Rusin of Islamist Watch notes, "governments tend to look the other way as the conjugal mores of seventh-century Arabia … take root in our backyards."

At a time when Western marriage norms are already under challenge, Muslims are testing legal loopholes and even seeking taxpayer support for multiple brides. This development has vast significance: just as the concept of one man, one woman marriage has shaped the West's economic, cultural, and political development, the advance of Islamic law (Shari‘a) will profoundly change life as we know it.

-Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Convicted in Dallas

By Phyllis Chesler
http://pajamasmedia.com/
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

On the very day, November 24, 2008, that the United Nations spent all day and countless sums of money “mourning” the alleged Palestinian catastrophe, a federal jury in Dallas found all five former officials of the Holy Land Foundation, guilty of having illegally raised money in the United States to assist the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, in its hot war against Israel.


2001 file photo shows FBI agents guarding the entrance to the Holy Land Foundation in Richardson, Texas. The leaders of what was once the largest Muslim charity in the United States were found guilty of acting as a front for Palestinian militants in the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history
(AFP/Getty Images/File/Ronald Martinez)

According to terrorism expert, Steven Emerson, the defendants, “Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.”

All five defendants are “Palestinians” and/or American citizens as well. Elyashi was born in Gaza; Abu-Baker moved to the “Palestinian territories” as a child; both Abdhulqader and Odeh were born in the West Bank; El-Mezain was born in Gaza. One wonders why five Palestinians chose to set up shop in Dallas, Texas?

Has Holy Land Foundation monies been going to widows and orphans? Well, maybe–but I would suggest, mainly to those who sons and daughters have blown Israelis (as well as themselves) up. Maybe The Holy Land Foundation paid for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit who still remains in captivity or for the murder of countless Israel civilians; maybe their monies paid for the Qasam rockets that Hamas has rained down upon civilians in Sderot and Ashkelon. Maybe it paid for most of the weapons shipped to Hamas by boat and by underground tunnel.

But, many people say, the Palestinians are starving refugees and it’s all Israel’s fault.

No. Palestinian suffering is primarily the fault of their own corrupt, terrorist leaders who have refused to allow Arabs who once considered themselves Egyptians, Syrians, or Jordanians to become citizens of those countries and who keep back all the monies and resources sent to the Palestinian people from abroad, including from the Israeli government, in order to show the world how cruel Israel is, and in order to both “grow” homicide-suicide killers, as well as to fund their relentless, endless terrorist war against Israel.

Why are the Palestinians still refugees? Why don’t they have their own state? Why are the people poor?

The answer: The Palestinian and Arab leaders have adamantly and consistently refused their own state from 1947 on to this very day. Their object is to exterminate the Jewish state, not to build their own state and to welcome their refugees.

Approximately 800,000 Jews from Arab countries were exiled and were immediately granted statehood in Israel. The United Nations did not have to fund a swelling number of stateless Jews nor did it fight for the return of the considerable property and wealth that was confiscated from the Jews by Arab Muslim dictators.

Maybe the Holy Land monies funded propaganda. Remember the Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, who supposedly died in his father’s arms? We now know that the Palestinians staged it, just as we know that Palestinian fighters, dressed as civilians, literally launch rockets from hospitals and school houses hoping, praying, that Israel will respond in self-defense and in so doing, kill Palestinian children.

The United Nations, the world media, human rights and campus groups would condemn and demonize Israel in a flash. That is why twenty three young Israeli soldiers entered Jenin on foot–a Jenin that was booby-trapped and in which Palestinian sharpshooters, (perhaps with Holy Land guns and ammunition), picked them off, one by one. Israel could have fought the battle of Jenin safely, from the air, but world public opinion has not allowed Israel the right to defend itself without being demonized as a “Nazi” occupier and aggressor.

According to M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, prosecutors triumphed because they were able to “connect the ideology of political Islam and the overriding mission of Islamist organizations like the Holy Land Foundation to their desire to contribute to the efforts of terror groups, like Hamas. When this connection is made we will see the return of a guilty verdict. In future [terrorism financing] cases DOJ will not only have to connect the financial dots but [will have] to demonstrate an overarching common Islamist mission.”

Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others for conspiring to blow up a series of New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center, had this to say about the decision in Dallas:

“This is one of the most significant victories the Justice Department has won in the war on terror. Financing is the life-blood of jihadist organizations like Hamas. With the assistance of willing co-conspirators, they conceal their activities and use the Muslim obligation of charitable giving to mask support that is actually channeled to their murderous agenda. Today’s verdicts say, loudly and clearly, that Americans aren’t fooled and won’t tolerate it. As a former federal prosecutor, I am especially proud of the assistant U.S. attorneys who persevered through some real travails in securing justice for the American people.”

The conspiracy is grand, great, and deep and involves both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. All called for a “jihad to destroy Western civilization from within.”

My congratulations to the hard-working prosecutors. This is a day of victory for the rule of law over and against the rule of terrorism.

- Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller Women and Madness (1972) and The New Anti-Semitism (2003). She has just published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women's studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women's Health Network (1976). Her website is http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/.

Country Life

We Need Roots
By R.R. Reno
http://www.firstthings.com/
November 24, 2008

G.K. Chesterton was a sucker for romantic gestures. Lines of soldiers with swords crossed, flags rippling in the wind, cathedral bells tolling: These sorts of scenes moved him, as did visions of lovers pledging themselves to each other in the dusky darkness of a summer evening, monks prostrate on cold, stone, chapel floors as they take their vows, and the quiet, invincible resolution of solitary soldiers who face impossible odds. Life is better—richer, deeper, thicker—for our loyalties and loves.

I share this Chestertonian sensibility, which is why the new music from the English folk band, Show of Hands, gives me goose bumps.

Show of Hands: Steve Knightley (L) and Phil Beer

Listen to the band’s bitter lament, “Country Life.” The accompanying video on YouTube features harsh black and white images that match the cutting lyrics.

The background for the song is the post-Thatcher boom in England that has transformed social patterns. Whatever was left of nineteenth-century industrial society has been swept away. Global agricultural markets have changed farming. The explosive growth of wealth, almost entirely focused in London, has created a large class of the well-to-do. The end result for a great deal of southern England: failing village economies now sustained by money infused by London weekenders, many of whom have bought charming cottages as second homes.

Our free-market friends like to remind us that this is all part of the process of creative destruction. And anyway, aren’t those country folks making their own decisions to sell out and pocket the cash? All good and well, but Show of Hands sings of a different, existential truth: “Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.” The kitchens have been redone tastefully, but the village empties during the week.

“Country Life” is not a polemic against free markets or Thatcherism. It thrusts against the left as well. “No one marched to subsidize and save the country way of life,” they sing. We are reminded that so-called progressive politics long ago shifted its focus toward securing lifestyle freedoms for the new-economy winners (gay-pride marches, women’s rights marches), as well as toward movements to satisfy the refined moral palates of the educated elites (animal rights, nuclear disarmament, global warming). The local guy with a high-school education and ordinary expectations from life gets pushed to the side.

Another verse evokes the outsider’s mentality: “We hate the blood; we want the meat.” The London weekenders want the charming atmosphere of an English village—but without all the difficulties of having to live with the villagers. The song ends with a staccato of loss: “No trains. No jobs. No shops. No pubs.”

If “Country Life” gives you a Chestertonian tingle, then strap on your seat belt and click over to “Roots.” This song crashes onto the shore of contemporary multiculturalism like a Cornish storm surge.

The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.

We hear the voice of anger—ready to strike back against the cultural elites who look down on love of place and love of country, assuming that it amounts to a primitive nativism, a reactionary racism, or a weepy nostalgia unwilling to face up to the realities of a global economy. Political correctness be damned: “I’ve lost St. George and the Union Jack / That’s my flag too and I want it back.”

“Roots” ends hauntingly, powerfully. A live audience echoes again and again the band’s refrain: “Haul away boys, let them go / Out of the wind and the rain and snow. / We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know / ‘Round the rocky shores of England.” It’s not great poetry, but as music it galvanizes and calls to action. We will not let our post-national minders seduce us into forgetting that we have forgotten. We will not reduce ourselves to utility-maximizing economic actors or deracinated global citizens. We will love our culture and our country.

No doubt G.K. Chesterton would be roused. But he knew, as we all know, that our loves and loyalties can be cruel, jealous, and wicked. To a very great extent, what flies under the cosmopolitan banner of postmodernism represents a reaction against the bloody consequences of nationalism in the last century. Our multicultural therapists do not counsel moral relativism because they have closely studied questions of epistemology. They want us to be self-critical and non-judgmental so that we can all get along. Let us be lukewarm in our loyalties so that we will be soft in our hatreds. If nothing is worth fighting for, then nobody will fight.

It seems like a good outcome, but at what price? Social capital is a term developed by sociologists to describe the non-economic, non-coercive forces that bind people. Social capital pays out its dividends in all sorts of ways: in community service, in family life, and in often unreflective, habitual acts of courtesy and friendliness. If everything in our lives is run like the futures pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the local courtroom, then we have mean, miserable lives.

Social capital is not a fixed asset. It requires regular reinvestment, which we do by committing resources of memory, love, and loyalty. One of the signal features of our age is the belief that we can have everything for nothing. Our multicultural therapists imagine that we can discharge the batteries of national identity, reap gains in tolerance, and pay no costs. But there are costs. As the Show of Hands sings, “We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know.” We can’t stand forever at a distance with our critical doubts and moral reservations. Love rewards only those who venture her commitments.

When I first heard “Roots,” I was reminded of “Sweet Home Alabama,” the Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem from the 1970s. Sung against the background of the then only recently triumphant civil rights movement, it rang with a white man’s unrepentant Southern pride. The lyrics don’t say so explicitly, but the sentiment was akin to the Show of Hands anthem: “That’s my flag too and I want it back.”

This isn’t the place to rehash debates about the public display of the Confederate battle flag, any more than to make a decision about whether or not British imperialism stained the Union Jack. More to the point, as Edmund Burke, one of the great English champions of tradition, once wrote, “To make us love our country, our country must be loveable.” Our countries, our communities, and our cultures are always marred and unlovely in some respect, and we suffer from the great temptation to turn a realistic love into an ideological fantasy. Love can blind in order to bind.

Nonetheless, most loyalties to culture and place encourage a nobility of the soul. A man from Mississippi who honors the Stars and Bars no more wants to reinstate Jim Crow than a farmer from Dorset who salutes the Union Jack wants to re-establish the British Empire. He wishes to remember something worth cherishing. He wants to give himself in loyalty to what was good and noble, even as it existed (and perhaps still exists) amidst what was (and perhaps remains) evil and base.

This patriotic impulse is based on a deep truth about culture. When human beings invest in a tradition or community or nation over long periods of time, something of our intrinsic dignity as creatures made in the image of God cannot help but find its way into the fabric of the culture. There’s almost always something in every human society worth honoring, which is one reason why patriotism is a natural virtue.

I understand the widespread sentiment in contemporary Christian theology that judges patriotism, especially American patriotism, a temptation toward idolatry. Stanley Hauerwas has rightly pointed out the theological absurdity of the old Protestant habit of placing the American flag alongside the pulpit, as if the Pledge of Allegiance were on the same existential plane as the Nicene Creed.

But we can go too far in our critiques of political idolatry and end up with a deracinating iconoclasm. Worldly loves such as patriotism and regional pride prepare us for the incorruptible love of God. In genuine patriotism, we give ourselves away to our roots—not unequivocally, not uncritically, not without reserve, but really and without hedging our bets. All our flags are corrupted by sin, but when we salute them, we prepare the heart for a deeper, life-abandoning salute to the cross and abandonment to God. All the more reason to wish every success to Show of Hands: May they get back their Union Jack.

R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University.

References:

“Country Life” by Show of Hands (YouTube video)
“Roots” by Show of Hands (YouTube video)

Legislating Immorality

By the Editors of National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 24, 2008 8:00 AM

[The Mormons are a far easier target group with which to grapple than...say...your run-of-the-mill Muslims. The gay-rights lobby better pray to whatever enlightened and accepting god they worship that Sharia law doesn't become the dominant standard in this country. Sharia law dictates that homosexuals stop engaging in such behavior immediately, leave the country immediately or suffer the consequences...those consequences would include getting thrown off a cliff, by the way. Oh, the intolerance of the Christians and Mormons!...you want intolerance? Try chatting up the average Muslim man on the street about homosexuality...he'll show you genuine, get-medieval-on-your-a** intolerance. - jtf]

Last week in a Denver suburb, someone lit a Book of Mormon on fire and dropped it on the doorstep of a Mormon temple, presumably as a statement about the church’s support of Proposition 8 in California, an initiative that amended the state constitution to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. In a move that may make gay-rights supporters’ heads spin, the incident is being investigated as a hate crime.


People gathered on Santa Monica Blvd to protest the passing of Prop 8 in California.

The outbreak of attacks on the Mormon church since the passage of Proposition 8 has been chilling: envelopes full of suspicious white powder were sent to church headquarters in Salt Lake City; protesters showed up en masse to intimidate Mormon small-business owners who supported the measure; a website was created to identify and shame members of the church who backed it; activists are targeting the relatives of prominent Mormons who gave money to pass it, as well as other Mormons who are only tangentially associated with the cause; some have even called for a boycott of the entire state of Utah.

The wisdom of hate-crimes legislation aside, there is no doubt that a lot of hate is being directed at Mormons as a group. But why single out Mormons? And why now?

Dozens of church bodies — including the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Christian bishops of California, and a wide variety of evangelicals — supported the proposition. It’s also worth considering that, while gay-rights advocates cannot discuss same-sex marriage for more than 30 seconds without making faulty analogies to Jim Crow-era anti-miscegenation laws, some 70 percent of blacks voted for Proposition 8. While there have been a few ugly racist statements by gay-rights supporters, such vile sentiment has been restricted. Not so the hatred directed at Mormons, who are convenient targets.

To date, 30 states have voted on initiatives addressing same-sex marriage, and in every state traditional marriage has come out on top. But somehow the fact that Mormons got involved during the latest statewide referendum constitutes a bridge too far? In truth, Mormons are a target of convenience in the opening salvo of what is sure to be a full-scale assault on much of America’s religious infrastructure, which gay activists perceive as a barrier to their aspirations. Among religious groups, Mormons are not the biggest obstacle to same-sex marriage — not by a long shot. But they are an easy target. Anti-Mormon bigotry is unfortunately common, and gay-rights activists are cynically exploiting that fact.

There are no websites dedicated to “outing” Catholics who supported Proposition 8, even though Catholic voters heavily outnumber Mormons. And the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is not remarkably strident in its beliefs on the subject. So far, no gay-rights activist has had the brass to burn a Koran on the doorstep of a militant mosque where — forget marriage! — imams advocate the stoning of homosexuals.

Churches oppose same-sex marriage in part because it represents an implicit threat to freedom of conscience and belief. California already had one of the broadest civil-unions laws in the country. There was little in the way of government-sanctioned privileges that a state-issued marriage license would confer. But the drive for same-sex marriage is in practice about legislating moral conformity — demanding that everybody recognize homosexual relationships in the same way, regardless of their own beliefs. Freedom of conscience, or diversity of belief, is the last thing the homosexual lobby will tolerate: In New Mexico, a state civil-rights commission fined an evangelical wedding photographer $6,637 for politely declining to photograph a gay commitment ceremony. In California, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously against two San Diego fertility doctors who refused to give in-vitro fertilization to a lesbian owing to their religious beliefs, even though they had referred her to another doctor. And just this week, evangelical dating site eHarmony, which hadn’t previously provided same-sex matchmaking services, announced it had been browbeaten into doing so by New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights and the threat of litigation. The first 10,000 same-sex eHarmony registrants will receive a free six-month subscription. “That’s one of the things I asked for,” crowed Eric McKinley, who brought the charges against eHarmony.

Where do they go from here? Gay activists are already using the legal system to try to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Mormon church. If you believe that churches and synagogues, priests and rabbis won’t eventually be sued for their statements on sexuality, you’re kidding yourself. Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown University law professor and gay activist who helps draft federal legislation related to sexual orientation, says that, when religious liberty conflicts with gay rights, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” A National Public Radio report on the conflict noted that if previous cases are any guide, “the outlook is grim for religious groups.”

Given their cavalier disregard for the freedom of conscience, it’s little surprise that the gay lobby is equally disdainful of democracy: They began pursuing legal challenges to Proposition 8 practically before they were done tallying the votes. Lamentably, the state attorney general defending the will of the people will be former Jerry Brown, the liberal former governor who was an open opponent of the measure and tried to sabotage it. The legal challenges will be heard by the same state Supreme Court that overturned California’s previous law forbidding gay marriage back in May. There’s a real possibility the will of the people will be spurned a second time, democracy be damned. They’ve already burned the Book of Mormon. The First Amendment is next.

When Science Points To God

by Dinesh D'Souza
http://www.townhall.com/
November 24, 2008

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science. It is perhaps no surprise that several leading atheists—from biologist Richard Dawkins to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker to physicist Victor Stenger—are also leading scientists. The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.


This handout from Atheistcampaign.Org (AC.Org) shows an artist's impression of a London bus with the slogan 'There's probably no God. Stop worrying and enjoy your life.' London's iconic red buses are to be plastered in January with the slogan in an atheist advertising campaign responding to a set of Christian ads.
(AFP/AC.Org-HO)

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion.”

What is striking about these slogans is the philosophy behind them. There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation. We hear nothing about how evolution has undermined the traditional “argument from design.” There’s not even a whisper about how science is based on reason while Christianity is based on faith.

Instead, we are given the simple assertion that there is probably no God, followed by the counsel to go ahead and enjoy life. In other words, let’s not let God and his commandments spoil all the fun. “Be good for goodness sake” is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The question remains: what is the source of these standards of goodness that seem to be shared by religious and non-religious people alike? Finally John Lennon knew how to compose a tune but he could hardly be considered a reliable authority on fundamental questions. His “imagine there’s no heaven” sounds visionary but is, from an intellectual point of view, a complete nullity.

If you want to know why atheists seem to have given up the scientific card, the current issue of Discover magazine provides part of the answer. The magazine has an interesting story by Tim Folger which is titled “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator.” The article begins by noting “an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.” As physicist Andrei Linde puts it, “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible.”

Too many “coincidences,” however, imply a plot. Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe and no life. Recently scientists have discovered that most of the matter and energy in the universe is made up of so-called “dark” matter and “dark” energy. It turns out that the quantity of dark energy seems precisely calibrated to make possible not only our universe but observers like us who can comprehend that universe.

Even Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics and an outspoken atheist, remarks that “this is fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.” And physicist Freeman Dyson draws the appropriate conclusion from the scientific evidence to date: “The universe in some sense knew we were coming.”

Folger then admits that this line of reasoning makes a number of scientists very uncomfortable. “Physicists don’t like coincidences.” “They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea.”

There are two hurdles here, one historical and the other methodological. The historical hurdle is that science has for three centuries been showing that man does not occupy a privileged position in the cosmos, and now it seems like he does. The methodological hurdle is what physicist Stephen Hawking once called “the problem of Genesis.” Science is the search for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and what could be more embarrassing than the finding that a supernatural intelligence transcending all natural laws is behind it all?

Consequently many physicists are exploring an alternative possibility: multiple universes. This is summed up as follows: “Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse.” Folger says that “short of invoking a benevolent creator” this is the best that modern science can do. For contemporary physicists, he writes, this “may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation” for our fine-tuned universe.

The appeal of multiple universes—perhaps even an infinity of universes—is that when there are billions and billions of possibilities, then even very unlikely outcomes are going to be realized somewhere. Consequently if there was an infinite number of universes, something like our universe is certain to appear at some point. What at first glance seems like incredible coincidence can be explained as the result of a mathematical inevitability.

The only difficulty, as Folger makes clear, is that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own. Moreover, there may never be such evidence. That’s because if there are other universes, they will operate according to different laws of physics than the ones in our universe, and consequently they are permanently and inescapably inaccessible to us. The article in Discover concludes on a somber note. While some physicists are hoping the multiverse will produce empirical predictions that can be tested, “for many physicists, however, the multiverse remains a desperate measure ruled out by the impossibility of confirmation.”

No wonder atheists are sporting billboards asking us to “imagine…no religion.” When science, far from disproving God, seems to be pointing with ever-greater precision toward transcendence, imagination and wishful thinking seem all that is left for the atheists to count on.

Gay Mob Shakes Down eHarmony

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
November 20, 2008

Congratulations, tolerance mau-mauers: Your shakedown of a Christian-targeted dating website worked. Homosexuals will no longer be denied the inalienable "right" to hook up with same-sex partners on eHarmony. What a landmark triumph for social progress, eh?


A 'No on Prop 8' rally in West Hollywood, November 5, 2008.(Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

New Jersey plaintiff Eric McKinley can now crown himself the new Rosa Parks—heroically breaking down inhumane barriers to Internet matchmaking by forcing a law-abiding private company to provide services it was never created to provide. "Men seeking men" has now been enshrined with "I have a dream" as a Civil Rights rallying cry of the 21st century. Bully for you, Mr. McKinley. You bully.

Neil Warren, eHarmony's founder, is a gentle, grandfatherly businessman who launched his popular dating site to support heterosexual marriage. A "Focus on the Family" author with a divinity degree, Warren encourages healthy, lasting unions between men and women of all faiths, mixed faiths or no faith at all.

Don't like what eHarmony sells? Go somewhere else. There are thousands upon thousands of dating sites on the Internet that cater to gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Trekkies, runners, you name it.

No matter. In the name of tolerance, McKinley refused to tolerate eHarmony's right to operate a lawful business that didn't give him what he wanted. He filed a discrimination complaint against eHarmony with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights in 2005.

To be clear: eHarmony never, ever refused to do business with anyone. The company broke no laws. Their great "sin" was not providing a politically correct service that a publicity-seeking gay plaintiff demanded they provide. For three years, the company battled McKinley's legal shakedown artists—and staved off other opportunists as well. The dating site had been previously sued by a lesbian looking to force the company to match her up with another woman, and by a married man who ridiculously sought to force the company to find him prospects for an adulterous relationship.

This case is akin to a meat-eater suing a vegetarian restaurant for not offering him a rib-eye, or a female patient suing a vasectomy doctor for not providing her hysterectomy services. But rather than defend the persecuted business, the New Jersey attorney general intervened on behalf of the gay plaintiff and wrangled an agreement out of eHarmony to change its entire business model.

The company agreed not only to offer same-sex dating services on a new site, but also to offer six-month subscriptions for free to 10,000 gay users, pay McKinley $5,000 and fork over $50,000 to New Jersey's Civil Rights division "to cover investigation-related administrative costs." [Gays, lesbians to get eHarmony too, AFP, November 20, 2008] Oh, and that's not all.
Yield, yield to the grievance-mongers:

Additional terms of the settlement include:

* eHarmony, Inc. will post photos of same-sex couples in the "Diversity" section of its website as successful relationships are created using the company's same-sex matching service. In addition, eHarmony, Inc. will include photos of same-sex couples, as well as individual same-sex users, in advertising materials used to promote its same-sex matching services;

* eHarmony, Inc. will revise anti-discrimination statements placed on company websites, in company handbooks and other company publications to make plain that it does not discriminate on the basis of "sexual orientation";

* the company has committed to advertising and public relations/ marketing dedicated to its same-sex matching service, and will retain a media consultant experienced in promoting the "fair, accurate and inclusive" representation of gay and lesbian people in the media to determine the most effective way of reaching the gay and lesbian communities.

I have enormous sympathy for eHarmony, whose attorney explained that they gave in to the unfair settlement because "litigation outcomes can be unpredictable."[Same-sex dating coming to eHarmony, By Elise Young, New Jersey Herald News, November 20, 2008] The recent mob response to the passage of Proposition 8, the traditional marriage measure in California, must have also weighed on eHarmony management's minds.

But capitulation will only yield a worse, entirely predictable outcome: more shakedowns of private businesses that hold views deemed unacceptable by the Equality-at-All-Costs Brigade.
Perhaps heterosexual men and women should start filing lawsuits against gay dating websites and undermine their businesses. Coerced tolerance and diversity-by-fiat cut both ways.

- Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

Today's Tune: Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

(Click on title to play video)

Paterno plans to stick around for the victories

Sunday, November 23, 2008
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In the Penn State locker room, where the subject was decidedly roses, University President Dr. Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley were never far from camera range.

They matched Joe Paterno beaming smile for beaming smile, which would appear to indicate they're OK with the notion that old coach pretty much rehired himself on the eve of this Big Ten championship game. He told a frothy Friday night pep rally that he fully intended to run out of the tunnel next fall, his 44th as the face of the university, even going so far as to fairly guarantee a win against Michigan State.

Too bad he didn't guarantee one at Iowa two weeks ago, but that's water over the spilt milk dam, and even though that one-point road loss was the only dropped stitch in an otherwise perfect autumn tapestry, Penn State's reservation in the Rose Bowl was essentially presented here yesterday without thorns.

"I've planned on coming back all along," Paterno said in the minutes after his 43rd pride of Lions ripped apart a Michigan State team that woke up yesterday with an outside shot at this same conference title. "I never had any plans otherwise. In the next couple weeks we'll sit down with Tim Curry and President Spanier and we say, 'What about this, what do you think of that.'

"But right now I have no plans to leave."

Of course, when you're going to be 82 in four weeks you don't really plan much of anything, particularly when you'll likely be spending your birthday in full rehab from hip surgery. Those meetings with the president and the AD will likely go a little differently than they did four years ago, when Paterno disavowed them of any suspicion that someone other than the coach would decide when the coach was finished.

Yesterday's 49-18 victory was the 800th in Penn State history, which stretches to 1887. Of those 800, Paterno has won 383 of them. No. 800 was Penn State's 27th in its past 29 home games, 42nd in its past 52 in general.

It's so much closer to what his spoiled constituency expects, so much more traditional than what had horrified it, such as home losses to Iowa by scores like 6-4 in the darkest days of '03 and '04.

"Our fans, they expect so much," Paterno sighed. "And that's good. I mean it's cold, it's windy, and the place is packed. But I don't feel vindicated, and to even think about that suggests some animosity, and I don't have any."

Paterno may have drifted into a reliably cantankerous posture some years ago, just as some of us did 30 years ahead of his schedule, but he's always tremendously adaptable and even a progressive within the culture of football. Of his two national championships, one was accomplished with a first-round draft pick at quarterback, the other with a quarterback who never entertained any professional allusions.

The team that went 11-1 this year ran what it calls the Spread HD offense, a product of both Paterno's lifelong learning and some extremely gifted men 60 years his junior. Even within these innovations, Penn State found space within yesterday's flogging for some old-fashioned Lions offense, like an inside handoff to a fullback -- what's that, you ask? -- a fullback, who bulled 4 yards up the middle for a second-quarter touchdown behind center A.Q. Shipley, who bullied Spartans linebacker Greg Jones halfway to College Avenue. This on an afternoon when Penn State got more yards through the air, 415, than in any game in its history.


Penn state players Stephfon Green, left, and Derrick Williams (2), right, carry the Big Ten Championship trophy out of the locker room. Matthew O'Haren/BWI Photo

"I've been proud of them for four years," Paterno said. "Last year we let a few games get away and we had our problems with some kids who didn't have time to grow up and we made some tough decisions. But these guys stuck together and it's been a great experience being around them. Win or lose, it's been a great experience.

"I'm just delighted for them. I hope 10 years from now, they look back at the whole experience and think, 'By God, I'm glad I went to Penn State.' "

Some of 'em came closer to the state pen, and the coach and the university hierarchy took their deserved lumps for it. Through it all, the old coach urged patience.

"I always thought if we could just get a couple kids with a little better attitude that we'd be all right."

Paterno spent his seventh consecutive game in the press box with an ailing hip. He spent his most animated postgame moments waving his cane at people, thanking Spanier for putting heaters on the sideline.

"If I'd have been on the sideline," he told his players, "there would have been no heaters. But I couldn't be up there in the nice warm press box and leave you guys out in the cold."

The old coach's health now remains the only wild card in the perpetual discussion of his future. What yesterday did was force everyone to look around again at what he has done, at how he has adapted, at how he cares about what he's doing and what it means going forward -- always going forward -- and conclude that there's no good reason to change things.

Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
First published on November 23, 2008 at 12:00 am

Stealth Jihad: How Islam is Infiltrating Your Neighborhood

By Doug Giles
http://www.townhall.com/
November 22, 2008

What if Christians demanded the following:

1. If anyone around Christians at work or school eats pork then they would get fired or severely chastised because we believe that scarfing down pig really offends God (and of course his people). Yep, BLTs—according to our take on Christ’s commands—really ticks him off and therefore bacon should be banned. Not only that, but any food that has even trace amounts of Porky the Pig in it must be verboten and banished from our presence everywhere we go because we’re Christians, and Christians don’t dine on swine. This means Jell-O shots at Tu-Tu-Tango’s and Jell-O served to kids at school ceases to be because Jell-O, hello, contains a wee little bit of a wee little pig, and this pisseth the Lord our God off!

Voice of Islam Foundation Headquarters
Chicago

2. All public schools must have several regularly scheduled 15 minute breaks throughout the school day for Christians to roll out their TBN prayer rugs and pray for revival. If not, we will raise Cain and Abel.

3. Public schools must become sex-segregated so that we, the washed, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost and fire crowd won’t be sorely tempted to swap spit with the hot Daisy Mae looking chick in pottery class. Matter of fact, why don’t public schools just carve out for us Christians a special school within the school, lest we become sullied via association with the unwashed masses and other religious persuasions, which we utterly detest. Howzabout that, mamasita?

4. Any and all the stupid, violent or sexually weird stuff that misguided Christians have done and are doing is to be scrubbed from the historical record, and the only thing that gets reported and taught is that we are the most peaceful, perfect people to ever schlep this planet. Anyone who thinks or speaks to the contrary will get the stink eye and be called a hater. Indeed, all criticism of Christians should be banned, and those who bring up our foibles, draw unfavorable cartoons of us, and don’t parrot our squeaky-clean spin get branded as bigots or Christophobes and should be threatened with prison.

5. Footbaths are to be installed in whichever universities my brethren and I attend (at the public’s expense) because Jesus was into foot washing, so I want a footbath, dammit! And if this means tuition gets hiked up to provide this for all Christians on campus, well . . . tough. I don’t care. My feet must be ritually washed, or Jesus gets angry—and when he gets angry, people die.

6. Any video games that Sony or whoever puts out that might accidentally offend Christians must be 86’ed. However, if other religions get offended via video it’s okay, just as long as my flavor ain’t disssed, can you dig it?

7. We must receive exemptions from the IRS from paying interest on back taxes because that’s against Christianity.

8. When the Christian church accidentally yields up a violent vocal dillweed from our ranks who hates America and is on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, instead of throwing that loopy bastard in prison we demand that the U.S. Army make him a sergeant. Capice?

9. Encourage the Christian high school student who wants to assassinate our President by giving him the “Most Likely to Become a Martyr” award during graduation.

10. Make students in the public school system who don’t believe in Jesus memorize portions of the Gospel of John, adopt Christian names and shout in the classroom, “I love Jesus, yes I do. I love Jesus. How ‘bout you?!”

Would any of points 1- 10 tick you secularists, atheists and agnostics off?

If Christians ever attempted any of the above they would be righteously ridiculed, castigated and condemned by the MSM, school administrators, cartoonists, talk radio, the blogosphere, Rosie, the coven on the View, religious leaders, the ACLU, Alec Baldwin and president elect Barack Obama. All of the aforementioned people would land on our crotch firmly with both feet. Heck, Christians can’t even say “merry Christmas,” cheer on traditional marriage, or champion the life of an unborn baby without being called Hitler, haters of humanity and intolerant bigots of other people’s values.

But Islam can.

Yep, Islam is making outrageous demands upon American life and culture, and we’re bending over and taking it from them, though we would be insanely intolerant of any other religious group—especially Christians—who had such particular and peculiar demands.

In Stealth Jihad, Islam expert and New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer blows the whistle on a long-term plot by Islamic Jihadists to undermine the United States. According to Spencer, this effort aims not to bring America to its knees through attacks with guns or bombs, but to subvert the country from within—by gradually Islamizing America. The ultimate goal, the stealth jihadists themselves declare, is nothing less than the adoption of Islamic law in the United States, that’s all!

BTW . . . this is already happening, and Robert shows the reader in blistering detail how American liberties are having to bow and kiss the ring of Islamic rules and regulations. Indeed, the stealth jihadists are already warm and snuggly within the American political, educational and media landscapes.

My advice, boys and girls, is . . . buy Bob’s book, drink a red bull, wake the heck up and fight for your liberties not to be walked on by anyone anywhere.

One last ditty for the skeptics who don’t think “it” could happen here: I’m sure that’s what the Brits thought 20 years ago. Red Bull, anyone?

Bang, bang, bye-bye

'The Shield,' a one-of-a-kind show, and antihero Vic Mackey go out the same way they came in -- with high-octane violence

BY DIANE WERTS
Special to Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/
November 16, 2008

TV critics know the drill. You watch the preview screener of a new show, and it's usually good or mediocre. Sometimes, it's horrible. (Fun to write about.) Or more occasionally, superb. (Even more fun to write about.)

Only once in two decades has a series pilot climaxed with a twist so game-changing, it actually rocked me to blurt a what-a-shock expletive.

That was "The Shield." And that's why the seven-season drama's inexorable conclusion - two terrific episodes on FX at 10 p.m. Tuesday and Nov. 25 - is such an occasion for celebration.

It's not just for the 88 rousing hours in this saga of rogue cop Vic Mackey's L.A. police "strike team," obliterating the line between being good cops and/or self-interested crooks in blue.

It's not just because "The Shield" sustained the ambition of its 2002 pilot, incarnating flesh-and-bloody characters (including extended guest stints by Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker), while also probing the intersection of law enforcement, politics and citizens who just want both to work by whatever methods necessary.

It isn't even the way the series expanded the boundaries for ad-supported TV with adult story lines, language and authentic urban violence.

Breaking barriers

The show's ultimate achievement may be that "The Shield," in an odd dovetail with the presidential election, has broken barriers in a way that inspires a fresh sense of hope amid uncertain times.

The hope here is for the future of TV drama - in an era when shrinking broadcast networks strain to create new hits, and as onetime premium cable titan HBO flounders after game-changers like "The Sopranos."

Bursting out of nowhere back in 2002, "The Shield" proved basic cable could deliver frank content without scaring off advertisers. That one socko show could elevate an entire channel. That viewers would find quality scripted shows wherever they aired, even in an era of rampant low-rent "reality."

OK, so maybe "The Shield" didn't come out of completely nowhere. "If anyone writes a big thing about 'The Shield,' I don't think you can write it without referencing 'The Sopranos,'" series creator Shawn Ryan told TV critics after a recent Manhattan press screening of the hush-hush finale. "This show would not be on TV if not for 'The Sopranos' and if not for the success it had creatively and economically. It's the show that I believe gave the courage to FX to try this show."

At the time, FX was an obscure cable channel running "M*A*S*H" reruns and the Howard Stern-produced skin spoof "Son of the Beach." Nobody looked to FX for quality - until "The Shield" exploded. If "The Sopranos" and HBO were, as promos proclaimed, "not TV," then "The Shield" proudly was regular TV - just juiced and jumpin'. Coming off writing for Don Johnson's CBS star vehicle "Nash Bridges," the unassuming young Ryan, 35 at the time, would revitalize both himself and one of network TV's franchise genres.

If commercials aren't going anywhere - and they've been funding broadcasting for 80 years now - that's a key achievement. "The Shield" demonstrated that adult drama could thrive beyond the rarefied air of premium cable. Ryan took the cop formula and twisted it - figuratively, with pacing adrenaline, and literally, with gonzo R-rated attitude. He delivered kick-butt melodrama, brimming with crazy cases on the meanest streets, political and workplace wranglings, and personal crises from sexual orientation to having autistic kids - all crammed into every episode.

Everybody loves the approach

Viewers loved Ryan's pedal-to-the-metal approach. So did the industry, which awarded ensemble star Michael Chiklis - who'd played the cuddly "Commish" before shaving his head, buffing up and going bad-dude - the first lead Emmy for basic cable (2002). The show itself grabbed the Golden Globe as TV's best drama (2003).

Maybe the foreign press' outside eye appreciated something else in "The Shield" - the underlying commentary on American law enforcement being a devil's deal of "don't ask, don't tell," as one upright detective groused in the pilot. Vic Mackey really does want to clean up the streets, but he wants to do it through rule-breaking, head-bashing and personal enrichment. Onlookers may be appalled, but, geez, the guy's effective. Who cares about his means to an end?

But what's the cost of that, to him, and to us as that society? "The Shield" addressed that right from the mind-blowing pilot, which climaxed with Mackey's gunshot to the face of a cop close to uncovering his sins. The series thus became: How will Mackey pay? Or: Will he? Ryan and his corps of young writers also charted the broader implications: for business, for politics and for everyday citizens. Deals with the devil get made everywhere.

Now, that's a finale

Payment now comes due in the final two hours, amid a high-octane cocktail of gunplay, betrayals, murders, suicides, desperation deals and multiple lives generally spiraling down the drain. As the episodes unreeled at Ryan's Manhattan screening, gasps were frequently heard from jaded critics who thought they (we) had seen it all. The plots mix horrific violence with tart black comedy and sharp cultural insights.

That makes this finale more overtly satisfying than, say, that of the "The Sopranos." Which just stopped. "The Shield" culminates. "You have all these dominoes start to fall," says FX programming chief John Landgraf, "and you have these characters finally become existentially aware of their condition and what it is that they've wrought upon the world."

Where Shakespeare might reveal through soliloquy, "The Shield" stays true to its take-action characters. "These are not characters that talk about their perceptions and how they feel," Landgraf says. So Ryan pauses the whirlwind for silent zoom-ins on players marooned soul-deep with their thoughts, creating what Landgraf calls "moments when the characters are peeled back to their absolute essence."

"It's a very nonstylistic show," Ryan says. "I never wanted the writing on the show to be noticed. I never wanted the directing to be noticed. And I don't want the acting to be noticed. The moment you can sort of erase the footprints of all three of those, the audience just lives in that world, and the experience is more enjoyable."

And now "The Shield" wraps it all up. With a bang.


What we'll remember about 'THE SHIELD'

Some of the "The Shield's" more memorable moments:

Last shot of the pilot episode (premiered March 1, 2002) - Onetime "Commish" star Michael Chiklis exploded his cuddly image in his debut as pumped-up, shaved-head, good/bad cop Vic Mackey. Gone rogue to clean up the streets while cleaning up for himself, our presumptive hero climaxes the pilot by putting a bullet in the head of a fellow cop onto his dirty dealings. Chiklis won an Emmy for it.

Julien's torment: boys vs. Bible (ongoing) - The upright street cop (Michael Jace) was torn between his repressed gay orientation and his religious certainty of its sinfulness - a dichotomy respectfully portrayed in an evenhanded manner.

Face meets stove (Season 2) - Gang warfare gets disfiguring for fourth-string Strike Team member Ronnie (David Rees Snell). His face meets an electric burner thanks to baddie Armadillo, who'd earlier gotten similar treatment from Mackey.

Aceveda's sexual assault (Season 3) - The precinct's politically ambitious captain (Benito Martinez) is rocked by being orally raped in a graphic hostage situation.

Glenn Close joins the cast (Season 4) - Taking over the precinct, Close's new captain quickly locks horns with Mackey. The actress was Emmy-nominated for her season-long stint (leading to her unrelated FX series " Damages").

Forest Whitaker's obsession (Season 5-6) - The Oscar-winning actor was intimidating as an internal affairs detective so determined to nail Mackey that he sinks to Mackey's level, playing grotesque mind games, before imploding.

Shane kills best friend Lem (Season 5 finale) - Mackey's loose-cannon partner Shane (Walton Goggins) drops a grenade on sweet Strike Team pal Lem (Kenneth Johnson), convinced he'd be forced to confess the team's misdeeds.

'Family Meeting' (Nov. 25 at 10 p.m., FX) - The final episode features a horrific death for one core character. And many other shockers.

-Diane Werts

'The Shield' nears shift's end

FX's gritty police drama has been an arresting experience for its actors as well as its viewers. Its finale is Tuesday.

By Greg Braxton
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
November 23, 2008


Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times

COMRADES: Jay Karnes, left, Benito Martinez and CCH Pounder are mainstays of a show that premiered in 2002, recasting a traditional genre.

Viewers tuning in to the finale of FX's groundbreaking cop drama “The Shield” on Tuesday can count on a few things: There will be no parking difficulties, no plate of onion rings, no Journey song, and no sudden cut to black.

Shawn Ryan, creator of "The Shield," said the end of the drama, which premiered in 2002, will unfold without an ambiguous or mysterious meaning -- the kind that distinguished the series finale of "The Sopranos." The two popular series have often been compared because of their revolutionary approaches to traditional genres.

The final act of "The Shield" is simultaneously explosive and eerily quiet. "I was a fan of 'The Sopranos,' but I had some problems with the way it ended," Ryan said. "I feel 'The Shield' ends on a right and proper note."

"The Shield," which follows a beleaguered Los Angeles police station and its renegade strike team, established FX as a top cable network and proved basic cable could develop quality fare instead of movies and network reruns. Like "The Sopranos," the series is centered on an antihero: Det. Vic Mackey, a dedicated police officer whose unorthodox and brutal methods shadow his crime-fighting.

Though Michael Chiklis, whose portrayal of Mackey scored a first-season Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, has gotten the lion's share of attention, he has been surrounded by seasoned character actors who have all made their mark on the show's gritty realism. Film actors Forest Whitaker and Glenn Close also dropped in for season-long story arcs.

Some core cast members -- CCH Pounder (Capt. Claudette Wyms), Benito Martinez (Councilman David Aceveda) and Jay Karnes (Det. Holland "Dutch" Wagenbach) -- gathered recently at FX to discuss the series and its legacy. Participating by telephone was Walton Goggins (Det. Shane Vendrell) who was on location in Canada shooting a film.

"The Shield" and "The Sopranos" have both been cited as examples of drama series that took established genres and turned them on their heads. What is the place of "The Shield" in the spectrum of television?

Karnes: What I find compelling is that it's a timeless tale -- you could put it almost anywhere. It's "Macbeth." Here is Vic Mackey, a confident man who decides he's going to break the rules, and not the small rules. He's going to kill somebody, he's going to lie to the people he's close to. And ultimately he and those people pay for that.

Martinez: I remember when " NYPD Blue" came out that first season, and everyone went "Oh my God, those guys are beating up people, they're using abusive language, the camera doesn't keep still." "The Sopranos" did the same thing -- knocked us on our butts. What "The Shield" did was not only take a slice of life, but we got to a genuine natural ending that stands on its own.

You can't compare it to those shows anymore.

Karnes: To compare and contrast "The Shield" with "The Sopranos" is an interesting thing to do. But for me, the way "The Shield" ends is like a long play. Although I love "The Sopranos," I feel like that story is not finished, in a sense. We don't know what happens to Tony Soprano. But Vic Mackey's story, in a way, is completed.

Can you all reflect how you felt at the beginning of the series, where you thought it would go, and how that contrasts with where the show wound up?

Pounder: When I read the pilot, I knew it had something. My thought was, how do you keep up this pace? For seven years, it was amazing to go to work, to think, "I've kind of got the hang of this, and I know how everybody's character is supposed to work," and you never did.

Goggins: Michael, Kenny [former cast member Kenneth Johnson] and I were speculating on the demise of the strike team since the second episode of the first season. The ending that we had thought out, and the one the writers came up with, was so outside the realm of our imagination. And yet it seems that it was fated to go down this way from the first words spoken.

Karnes: We were an ensemble in the sense of knowing each others' moves and being able to be comfortable and add on to that, like a jazz combo.

What bonded you all together? You all seem to genuinely like each other.
Karnes: This was a tenuous project to begin with -- a basic-cable cop show for a network that no one had heard of. We all came in with a sense of privilege and entitlement. It was a bunch of scrappy actors putting on a show. We all needed to get along to make this work.

Pounder: We were a league of excellent actors, period. You knew you were parrying and fencing with someone equal or better, which made you better every week.

Martinez: There were things you cannot make up on screen. The biggest thing is chemistry. As soon as Dutch and Claudette started their first speech together, they were a team. The guys on the strike team were laughing between takes, after takes and hanging out afterwards. The bonding worked.

Is it the message of "The Shield" that a strike team needs to go outside the law to accomplish things that bureaucracies can't accomplish? Is this kind of strike team a necessary evil?

Martinez: It asks, "How do you feel if you have to give up some rights to feel safer?" The show never tried to lean a certain way or answer that question for you. There's no heroes, no villains. This is something you take and apply to your own moral values.

Pounder: I completely disagree with that. I think there are plenty of heroes and plenty of villains. This is the way of the world, the fear of democracy of convenience. Mackey is the enemy when you have the time to do the paperwork. But I need this done yesterday, so let's go the other way and let Mackey do it, and I'll turn my back because I've got numbers to prove, I've got higher-ups on my back. And I need Mackey for that. I think people do that all the time -- take the necessary evil because it's easy and convenient. And it's wrong.

Goggins: I agree. If you condone that type of behavior, whether it be law enforcement or a librarian, it's a reflection of your civil society. Everything that Vic and Shane do will come home to roost.

Karnes: That's right. Ultimately it is a cautionary tale.

One of the best aspects of "The Shield" is what Shawn Ryan calls the non-sexual love story between Dutch and Claudette. It goes through the entire run of the show.

Karnes: We just fell into it. CC and I have a very different relationship in real life, but in many ways, it's just as amenable and comfortable.

Pounder: I always see this as one of the great film love stories, where you never see the bedroom. All the intimacies of life are clothed, in a work atmosphere. It is not a salacious or a secret love affair. It is an open marriage that is clear to everyone.

During two of your seasons, you had high-profile stars step into the ensemble. How did the presence of Forest and Glenn alter the dynamic of your established group?

Goggins: When we heard the news about Glenn, we all called each other, saying "Can you believe it?" It wasn't so much the presence but the anticipation of the presence. It was so exciting. Everyone said, "OK, we gotta dig deep."

Martinez: Glenn was brought into our world to play on our court, and she had to come up to our game. As it were, it was part of adding to the team. It didn't diminish or alter the team.

Pounder: Forest has dabbled in film and television, while Glenn had done films for some time. To come up to the speed of working in TV is very intimidating to film people, and then here was Glenn with all this publicity. I really watched a veteran actor say, "OK, this is a lot faster than a moving escalator, and off I go." To watch her throw caution to the wind and get into the spirit of the show, then get into backgammon games with Jay and beat him. . . .

Karnes: Um, she left here owing me $25.

Braxton is a Times staff writer.

greg.braxton@latimes.com

Today's Tune: John Stewart - Midnight Wind (w/ Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham)

(Click on title to play video)

International lawyers should walk the plank

By Melanie Phillips

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/

http://www.melaniephillips.com/

Saturday, 22nd November 2008

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick makes the point about the piracy in the Gulf of Aden that I made here back in April and repeated on Question Time this week– that a major reason this menace has got out of hand is the spineless response of Britain and other western nations which have tied up their own hands through international law and ‘human rights’ doctrine. A Wall Street Journal article a few days ago made exactly the same point, noting that the British Foreign Office instructed the British Navy not to apprehend pirates lest they claim that their human rights were harmed, and request and receive asylum in Britain.

Glick broadens it out to the wider moral bankruptcy which is bringing western civilisation down:

The west’s perverse interpretations of human rights and humanitarian law, which bar it from handling one of the most acute emerging threats to the international economy, is a consequence of the West's abdication of moral and legal sanity in its dealings with international terror. In the 1960s and 1970s, when international terrorism first emerged as a threat to international security, the West adopted international treaties and conventions that tended to treat terrorism as a new form of piracy. Like piracy, terrorism was to be treated as an attack on all nations. Jurisdiction over terrorists was to be universal. Such early views were codified in early documents such as the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft from 1970 that established a principle of universal jurisdiction over aircraft hijackers...

And yet, over the years, states have managed to ignore or invert international laws on terrorism to the point where today terrorists are among the most protected groups of individuals in the world. Due to political sympathy for terrorists, hostility toward their victims, or fear of terrorist reprisals against a state that dares to prosecute terrorists found on its territory, states have managed to avoid not only applying existing laws against terrorists. They have also refrained from updating laws to meet the growing challenges of terrorism. Instead, international institutions and ‘enlightened’ Western states have devoted their time to condemning and threatening to prosecute the few states that have taken action against terrorists....

One of the reasons the international community has failed so abjectly to take reasonable measures to combat terrorism is because international terrorism as presently constituted is the creation of Palestinian Arabs and their Arab brethren. Since the 1960s, and particularly since the mid-1970s, Europe, and to varying degrees the US, have been averse to contending with terrorism because their hostility toward Israel leads them to condone Palestinian Arab terrorism against the Jewish state.

Until and unless the west comes to understand that its insane hatred of Israel – the country that serves as the west’s own forward salient against global terrorism – has been given traction by the international law and ‘human rights’ doctrine to which it so slavishly adheres, it will continue to write its own suicide note.

Who Killed Detroit?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.vdare.com/

November 20, 2008


From the LOC archives of Alfred Palmer's strikingly composed large-format black-and-white transparencies shot in December 1941 at factories in Akron and Cleveland. White Motor Company, Cleveland, Ohio.

Who killed the U.S. auto industry?

To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUVs no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans and Koreans prepared and built for the future.

I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II.

As far back as the 1950s, an intellectual elite that produces mostly methane had its knives out for the auto industry of which Ike's treasury secretary, ex-GM chief Charles Wilson, had boasted, "What's good for America is good for General Motors, and vice versa."

"Engine Charlie" was relentlessly mocked, even in Al Capp's L'il Abner cartoon strip, where a bloviating "General Bullmoose" had as his motto, "What's good for Bullmoose is good for America!!"

How did Big Government do in the U.S. auto industry?

Washington imposed a minimum wage higher than the average wage in war-devastated Germany and Japan. The Feds ordered that U.S. plants be made the healthiest and safest worksites in the world, creating OSHA to see to it. It enacted civil rights laws to ensure the labor force reflected our diversity. Environmental laws came next, to ensure U.S. factories became the most pollution-free on earth.

It then clamped fuel efficiency standards on the entire U.S. car fleet.

Next, Washington imposed a corporate tax rate of 35 percent, raking off another 15 percent of autoworkers' wages in Social Security payroll taxes.

State governments imposed income and sales taxes, and local governments property taxes to subsidize services and schools.

The United Auto Workers struck repeatedly to win the highest wages and most generous benefits on earth—vacations, holidays, work breaks, health care, pensions—for workers and their families, and retirees.

Now there is nothing wrong with making U.S. plants the cleanest and safest on earth or having U.S. autoworkers the highest-paid wage earners.

That is the dream, what we all wanted for America.

And under the 14th Amendment, GM, Ford and Chrysler had to obey the same U.S. laws and pay at the same tax rates. Outside the United States, however, there was and is no equality of standards or taxes.

Thus when America was thrust into the Global Economy, GM and Ford had to compete with cars made overseas in factories in postwar Japan and Germany, then Korea, where health and safety standards were much lower, wages were a fraction of those paid U.S. workers, and taxes were and are often forgiven on exports to the United States.

All three nations built "export-driven" economies.

The Beetle and early Japanese imports were made in factories where wages were far beneath U.S. wages and working conditions would have gotten U.S. auto executives sent to prison.

The competition was manifestly unfair, like forcing Secretariat to carry 100 pounds in his saddlebags in the Derby.

Japan, China and South Korea do not believe in free trade as we understand it. To us, they are our "trading partners." To them, the relationship is not like that of Evans & Novak or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It is not even like the Redskins and Cowboys. For the Cowboys only want to defeat the Redskins. They do not want to put their franchise out of business and end the competition—as the Japanese did to our TV industry by dumping Sonys here until they killed it.

While we think the Global Economy is about what is best for the consumer, they think about what is best for the nation.

Like Alexander Hamilton, they understand that manufacturing is the key to national power. And they manipulate currencies, grant tax rebates to their exporters and thieve our technology to win. Last year, as trade expert Bill Hawkins writes, South Korea exported 700,000 cars to us, while importing 5,000 cars from us.[To rebuild the auto industry, November 19, 2008]

That's Asia's idea of free trade.

How has this Global Economy profited or prospered America?

In the 1950s, we made all our own toys, clothes, shoes, bikes, furniture, motorcycles, cars, cameras, telephones, TVs, etc. You name it. We made it.

Are we better off now that these things are made by foreigners? Are we better off now that we have ceased to be self-sufficient? Are we better off now that the real wages of our workers and median income of our families no longer grow as they once did? Are we better off now that manufacturing, for the first time in U.S. history, employs fewer workers than government?

We no longer build commercial ships. We have but one airplane company, and it outsources. China produces our computers. And if GM goes Chapter 11, America will soon be out of the auto business.

Our politicians and pundits may not understand what is going on. Historians will have no problem explaining the decline and fall of the Americans.

- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.