Women marrying down

Intelligent women forced to 'dumb down' and find a less-educated man to marry | Mail Online

A lot of this going around. And since most women are hypergamous, it's a problem.

See also: "Sex, marriage and exchange of value"

"Why "man up" isn't working"

Not standing with the 99 percent - at least not downwind

Mark Steyn, as usual, just nails it:

I don’t “stand with the 99%,” and certainly not downwind of them. But I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class. It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot. ...

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it.

get that? Only the criminal class is actually honest about what it is up to.

The .001 percent

It makes me think of how many of the OWS frauds are of an age where they could enlist in the military, or for the college graduates crying about their loans, could apply for officer candidacy. Quite a few, I bet.

I scorn them even more when I recall that Friday, my second son drove 180 miles round trip to take his US Air Force entrance physical in exploration of attending medical school under the Air Force's medical-school scholarship program.

Photo found on American Digest.

The real fat cats on Wall Street

The real fat cats on Wall Street are the OWS squatters:

AFTER nearly two weeks of living among the Occupy Wall Street protesters in downtown Manhattan, Ellis Roberts, 25, a Pennsylvania garbage collector laid off last year, looked scruffy and dazed.

He was not, however, hungry.

“I’ve been here for 12 days, and I’ve put on 5 pounds,” he said, sitting on the ground in front of a handmade sign that said “Class War Ahead.” “I’m eating better than I do at home.”

Like the rest of his anti-corporate comrades, Mr. Roberts learned soon after arriving in Zuccotti Park that his meals would be taken care of. All he had to do was amble toward a ramshackle cluster of tables and boxes in the middle of the park and, without paying a cent, grab a slice of pizza or a warm slab of homemade vegan casserole. Last Thursday he had encountered “a bunch of Katz’s Deli sandwiches,” he said. “That was good.” ...

Tom Hintze, 24, was volunteering in Zuccotti Park last week. “Just now there was a big UPS delivery,” he said. “We don’t know where it comes from. It just appears, and we eat it."

And this is, incredibly, how they think all of society should operate all the time. Everything for the good life should just appear.

Occupy Secessionists?

With the fragmented ideology and bureaucratic monstrosity that OWS has become, I have to wonder just how long it will be before the movement splinter and some of the squatters at Zuccotti Square decide to secede. Consider, "How Do You Like the Revolution Now, Comrade?"

Even in Zuccotti Park, greed is good.
Occupy Wall Street’s Finance Committee has nearly $500,000 in the bank, and donations continue to pour in—but its reluctance to share the wealth with other protesters is fraying tempers.

Some drummers—incensed they got no money to replace or safeguard their drums after a midnight vandal destroyed their instruments Wednesday—are threatening to splinter off.

Well, you see, the basic rule of socialist-communal movements was identified by George Orwell about 70 years ago: "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others." It's a tossup whether OWS is more like Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies, or both.

Bryan Smith, head of Zuccotti Park's squatters comfort committee, complained that one day his group raised $2,000, kept $650 for committee operations and turned the rest over to the finance committee. But finance flat declined his later request for funding. "... I was told to fill out paperwork. Paperwork! Are they the government now?” Smith fumed, even as he cajoled the passing crowd for more cash."

So I am imagining this conversation will occur in the near future:

Finance Enforcer: Comrade Smith, I see you have raised a lot of money today.

Smith: Two thousand dollars.

Finance: The Finance Committee thanks you. Place the money in the bank bag and I will give you a receipt.

Smith: No, can't do that. It's our money, not yours.

Finance: All fundraising is done for the common good and all money is held by the Finance Committee!

Smith: For those people [gesturing toward the squatters' camp] but not for us. My group and I are not part of your movement anymore.

Finance: What? You can't do that!

Smith: Already have, tovarich. We are now an independent movement called the Comfort Committee Local 001. When you need soap or toothpaste or hygiene articles, come see us. Oh, cash and carry, no credit. We have found that socialism doesn't work, so now we are free-market capitalists. You have to pay to play.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Occupy Wall Street v. Tea party marchers

For the answer, click here.

HT: Never Yet Melted

"What has Wall Street Ever Done for Us?"

What has Wall Street Ever Done for Us? @ AMERICAN DIGEST:

I mean, aside from financing millions of miles of fiber optic cables that enable the protest marchers to use their iPhones and Androids to organize the marches, and financed the airlines and transportation companies that the marchers used to get to New York or other cities, and financed the agri-conglomerates that raised, brokered and marketed the very food the marchers eat at the restaurants along the route, and the chemical companies that produced products to prevent massive losses of crops and harvests from insects and spoilage and vaccinations of food animals against all kinds of nasty diseases ...

I mean, apart from all that, what has Wall Street done for us?

Nothing! So Down With Evil Corporations!

Why "man up" isn't working

William Bennett gazes upon the sorry state of American manhood:

This decline in founding virtues -- work, marriage, and religion -- has caught the eye of social commentators from all corners. In her seminal article, "The End of Men," Hanna Rosin unearthed the unprecedented role reversal that is taking place today. "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed," writes Rosin. The changes in modern labor -- from backs to brains -- have catapulted women to the top of the work force, leaving men in their dust.

Man's response has been pathetic. Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways. This has led some to ask: do we even need men?

So what's wrong? Increasingly, the messages to boys about what it means to be a man are confusing. ...

Movies are filled with stories of men who refuse to grow up and refuse to take responsibility in relationships. Men, some obsessed with sex, treat women as toys to be discarded when things get complicated. Through all these different and conflicting signals, our boys must decipher what it means to be a man, and for many of them it is harder to figure out. ...

We need to respond to this culture that sends confusing signals to young men, a culture that is agnostic about what it wants men to be, with a clear and achievable notion of manhood.
The Founding Fathers believed, and the evidence still shows, that industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male empowerment and achievement. We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, "Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married." It's time for men to man up.

Bill, I agree with everything you say but have to point out that telling young men, "man up!" is simply silly. You may as well tell a diabetic, "Make insulin!"

If you look at the economics of male-female relationships today (I don't mean the monetary aspects) there is not going to be a way for men to "man up" until women on the whole culture-change themselves into women worth manning up for. In short, women today are giving away what they should be charging a very high price for, and charging a high price for things that men don't much want at all. And then they look around and wonder what's wrong with this picture.

For more, see my essay, "Sex, marriage and exchange of value."

Pavlov's pedestrians

The guy on the escalator just killed me.

HT: 22 Words

Is Barack Obama a black president?

Increasingly, black Americans seem to be saying, "no."

The media have been covering (lightly!) how black Americans are increasingly discontented with President Obama. Although the discontent has been long simmering, Obama's bus tour through middle America did not include stops in black communities, led to voices being heard. For example, left-wing US Rep. Maxine Waters:



Then there is the spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, Niger Innis, and Jehmu Greene.



Former Harvard Professor Cornel West (who, I admit, is a bit of a looney toon) said in May:

"I think he does have a predilection much more toward upper-class white brothers and Jewish brothers and a certain distance from free black men who will tell him the truth about himself as well as what’s going on in black communities, brown communities, red communities, and poor white and working-class communities."

Indeed, they even see the problem from across The Pond:

The first black president seems to go out of his way to avoid being a champion of the race he checked off as his own on his 2010 census form.

So the question sort of begs itself: Regardless of what Barack Obama checked on his census form, is he in fact a black president at all?

In asking this question, I take note of Bill Clinton's characterization as America's first black president:

In her now-famous defense of a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison, went so far as to call him "our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime." "Clinton," Morrison wrote in the 1998 New Yorker essay, "displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

And in so noting, I trust the reader will see that the question posed by this post's title is unrelated to President Obama's ancestry, but, rather, with his American ethnic identification.

That Obama is an African-American is not the question. The question is, Is Barack Obama a black American? And to this question, I think the answer is at best open.

Consider the president's biography. He has no ancestor who was part of the historic black experience in America. His mother was white and his father was Kenyan. What do I mean by the "black experience?" I'll let black Americans answer that. Ralph Remington:

I remember my father telling me, "You're not like them. Our people came over in slave ships." This is the black experience in America.

I remember being told that we have two cultures and speak two languages. This is the black experience in America. ...

I remember "family summer vacations" being day trips or taking car rides "out there" to see how white people lived and going to day camp at urban recreation centers, while white classmates spoke of going to Disneyland and meeting new friends at overnight camp while living in many of those big houses that I peered at from car windows, with my parents, with my bare legs sticking to hot vinyl car seats. This is the black experience in America.

But Barack Obama has no experience with any of this. Instead, it's off to Martha's Vineyard, playground of rich and famous white folks (where he has maanaged to get the wrong optics for everybody):

Choosing an exclusive enclave like the Vineyard after spending three days on the road railing against the rich and the wealthy and the millionaires and the billionaires and the corporate jet owners who vacation exactly in the same place — and then spending ten days in their company — speaks of a kind of dissonance or hypocrisy.

You know, the Vineyard doesn’t have any bridges to it. You either get there on a ferry in your Maserati, or on a jet or a helicopter. It’s not exactly where ordinary folks will take a vacation.

The black American "two-cultures" environment, which was (and still very much is) so central to their lives, was absent from Obama's upbringing. He lived in Hawaii from birth to high school graduation, where the racial friction has always been between Hawaii natives and whites rather than between whites and blacks. Second, he spent ages 6-10 in Indonesia. This is not the childhood the the black experience in America, in which blacks grow up in and spend adulthood in a black culture that "is heavily southern American," even for northern blacks.

The experience of being raised in a distinct black culture, surrounded by whites and significantly controlled by them, is to be immersed in a culture with its own historic baggage of slavery and subsequent racism and Jim Crow, a culture with its own music and coded jargon and Southern Gospel religious heritage. This is a culture that has never been part of Barack Obama's experience. It is literally alien to him.

Even in 2007, this disparity led Time Magazine to ask, "Is Obama Black Enough?"

As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it's also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man. In [Joe Biden] calling Obama the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," the implication was that the black people who are regularly seen by whites — or at least those who aspire to the highest office in the land — are none of these things. But give Biden credit — at least he acknowledged Obama's identity.

The same can't be said for others. "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," Stanley Crouch recently sniffed in a New York Daily News column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me." "Black, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves," wrote Debra Dickerson on the liberal website Salon.

(Time concluded however, that not only was Obama black enough, he was "too black," without explaining what that meant!)

Now , if President Obama became a president over-devoted to the special interests of black Americans he'd be criticized from here to the moon. I think he must know that. And so do, I am sure, his black critics. What is leading them to speak out is that, as Rep, Waters said, it seems the president is doing nothing to address the declining prosperity of blacks and their high unemployment. After all, Obama's just-finished bus tour was through mainly white middle America, where he made no stops in any black community.

(Not that Obama has done anything for the prosperity and employment of whites, either. "Casino and hotel executive Steve Wynn, a Democrat, calls the Obama administration 'the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime.'")

So, having been raised in Asian-Pacific Island culture until he was 18, did Obama have subsequent experiences that joined him to the black American identity? Matt Patterson recounts that Obama was,

... ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present"); and finally an unaccomplished single term in United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. 

Let's see: From Hawaii to Columbia University to Harvard Law to Chicago machine politics to the Illinois legislature, then briefly to the US Senate, then to the White House. Is this remotely like the typical career path of even the most talented, gifted black American?

A lot of whites voted for Barack Obama because he would be the first black American president. But he's not. Will this make a difference in 2012? I think it will, and not only among whites.

Has Britain reached its turning point?

Views from across the Pond: Peter Hitchens says that the degeneracy of British society is now irreversible; it is a "polluted flood ... not a tide." Britain, he says, is "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain," and no longer is it great. The political class has been devotedly destroying what used to be called "civilized society" since the end of World War II while energetically isolating themselves from what they wrought.

Here is an example of how little he [PM David Cameron] knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance. ...

They have all learned what most British politicians somehow cannot grasp – that the more encounters you have with our justice system, the less you fear it. A few ‘exemplary’ sentences – none of which will be served in full, or anything near it – will only help to spread the word that arson, robbery, violence, spite and selfishness are not punished here any more. Indeed these are the things we are now famous for around a world that once respected us.

But maybe not. Charles Moore write in The Telegraph that the dysfunctions that Hitchens describes are neither very old not deeply rooted, and that in fact a consensus is already in place both socially and politically to bring literal discipline back to law enforcement and social order - "How to recover Britain’s streets for civilisation."

As someone who was a young journalist the last time a wave of disorder swept through the country, I am struck by a great change that has taken place. Contrary to what you may have read, this change is not that violence has increased. It was in 1981 that horrible things like attacking fire engines, trying to kill policemen and using riot as a cover for mass looting first showed themselves in mainland Britain. Although the technology is different today, allowing the criminals to bring trouble to more places, the ferocity of violence has been, if anything, slightly less bad than in Brixton or Toxteth 30 years ago.

No, the difference lies in public attitudes to what has happened. This time, the attitudes are much better. Then as now, of course, most ordinary citizens were unequivocal in their disgust at rioting. But in 1981, the prevailing culture among our ruling elites was different. The weight of the BBC, local government, trade unions, officialdom, came down on the police for being too harsh, and, needless to say, on the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, for the same crime. The chairman of the Merseyside Police Authority supported the rioters, saying: “They would be apathetic fools if they didn’t protest.” In Parliament, Michael Foot, the Labour leader, hurled anathemas at the evil Thatcher. In the capital, a young man called Ken Livingstone took over the Greater London Council in a post-election coup, and began attacking the police.

The resuly has been that British police have been thoroughly tamed, subjected to harsh sanctions and even dismissal or actual arrest themselves for enforcing the law too vigorously, which means very much at all. So,

We all saw the police hanging back from making arrests during this week’s troubles. The reason is that, under current rules, arrests are a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. They require at least two officers and inordinate processing time. If there is “insufficient evidence”, the police can be sued for false imprisonment. The scenes all over England this week were uniquely appalling in their scale, but in the character of the police response they were very like what happens in hundreds of towns every Saturday night. Young people tip out of the pubs behaving badly, and the police, worried by what they might be accused of, just watch them.

Yet Moore says that this is n ot in the slightest the atttitude among the political class any more, and that from the prime minister on down, on all sides of the aisles, so that,

In 1981, an MP saying that he supported the police was making a controversial political statement. This week, he was uttering a commonplace.

There is a resolute recognition that the need for civil peace must come first. Mr. Moore does not discuss how all this will find its way into actual law and policy, which is of course the key question.

For us colonials on this side of the Pond the key question is simply: "Is Britain's 2011 August an avoidable portent of America's future?"

In my conversations with people this month and readings I have been struck by how many people here believe that what have seen in Britain is looming in America, not today, not even imminently, but certainly nonetheless. Even Peggy Noonan writes (link may be perisable),

What does this have to do with America? What we're seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn't come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it's growing. And as in Britain, it doesn't have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of "flash mobs." Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It's happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald's, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You've seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them "Les Miserables."

Whether Charles Moore is right that the flood there can be reversed is not predictable yet. There is a vast chasm between politicians knowing what must be done and summoning the will to do it. One thing is for sure: the cancer has not yet metastasized in America so much that it can't be reversed. But the question of political will here is just as pressing. Fortunately, so far the signs are encouraging.

-----------------------------

The film industry is often ahead of the game in understanding (and taking commercial advantage of) the mood of the people. Last year Michael Caine starred in the British film release, "Harry Brown."



Hollywood went down that trail many years ago, of course, with the "Death Wish" series starring Charles Bronson in 1974.



And what, after all, is Batman but the precursor to both of these?

UK riots 2011: Feral children

UK riots 2011: Liberal dogma has spawned a generation of brutalised youths | Mail Online

Max Hastings explains why the riots:

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

Here's the video of that fact.



Hastings continues:

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame. ...

They are essentially wild beasts. ... They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. ...

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality. ...

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

The government has made them literally pets of the State, trying to provide their every physical want and need, including a guaranteed income for not working. As Hastings puts it,

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

But the State does not give these people any reason for living nor anything to aspire to. Indeed, the State is itself so deeply anti-British and indeed, against the very notion of "civilized behavior" itself, that the present ruling classes no longer know how to do otherwise. Case in point: Far-left former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has already said that the riots were caused by decreased government benefits to the rioters.

What the feral kids have learned well, though, is how to play the victim card:

No doubt that punches every liberal-left button there is. Those poor, offended, underpaid, victimized kids! It's bad enough that they are forced by an oppressive society  into venting their frustration by burning cars and buildings, now they have to suffer the indignity of being mocked and insulted because of their choice of clothing!

No brown M&Ms allowed!

In the 1980s, the rock group Van Halen endured media mockery for specifying in their contracts that the venue would provide the band with a large bowl of M&M candies backstage on concert, but with absolutely no brown M&M's allowed.

But there was a reason, and a very good one. Brian J. Noggle explains:

The staff at venues in large cities were used to technically-complex shows like Van Halen’s. The band played in venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden or Atlanta’s The Omni without incident. But the band kept noticing errors (sometimes significant errors) in the stage setup in smaller cities. The band needed a way to know that their contract had been read fully. And this is where the “no brown M&Ms” came in. The band put a clause smack dab in the middle of the technical jargon of other riders: “Article 126: There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”. That way, the band could simply enter the arena and look for a bowl of M&Ms in the backstage area. No brown M&Ms? Someone read the contract fully, so there were probably no major mistakes with the equipment. A bowl of M&Ms with the brown candies? No bowl of M&Ms at all? Stop everyone and check every single thing, because someone didn’t bother to read the contract.

What has this to do with back-to-school shopping? It's a test!

Britain's chickens coming home to roost

London Riots: Kids and Parents Need to Be Held Accountable - The Daily Beast:

There is an excuse for everything. If they behave appallingly, they are “hyper-active,” and if they learn nothing, they are either dyslexic or have attention-deficit disorder. If they are juvenile criminals, they may, in extremis, be subjected to ASBOS, “anti-social behavior orders,” rather as though they had farted, not mugged a 90-year-old for her pensioner’s purse. We have passed edgily by hooded teenage groups on street corners, even while David Cameron, then in opposition, urged us to “hug a hoodie.” Hug a hoodie? Try asking one of these 13-year-olds to pick up the spent can of extra-strength cider he has just chucked under your feet. There are sink schools where teachers count it as a really successful day when they got through roll call without a riot, and actually teaching is an optional extra. Teachers are told to work more closely with parents on children’s behavior, but as my teacher niece explodes, “Find me a parent, for starters! And then find me a parent who isn’t going to threaten to report me, or worse, for dissing her kid.”

This is the result of Britain's statism, enforced by a ruling class that opposes nothing but its own history, with "moral relativism clothed as cultural sensitivity." Britain's political class has simply surrendered everything meaningful about what used to make Britain, Britain. And the British people, trained through centuries of subjecthood rather than citizenship, let them, and looked on approvingly.

A comment at the article: "[W]what the author is missing is the fact that we punish the people who get up and go to work by giving them a life that is far more difficult than the one funded by the state."

Indeed. When indolence is literally more profitable than industry, something is eventually going to burn. In this case, it's London.

More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God

More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God

So says Gallup, down only slightly since 1940. But, as UMC Bishop Ken Carder wrote, belief in God is not the real issue. The real issue is the nature of the God in whom one believes.

I am reminded of the story of a UN mediator who went to northern Ireland during the Troubles, the internecine combat between the Catholics and the Protestants there. During a community meeting, someone asked the mediator who was right about God. The mediator replied that since he was not a Christian at all, being from Asia and raised in ancient Asian religion, he had to admit that he himself didn't believe in God in the first place.

A woman arose from the audience and demanded, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants you don't believe in?"

Just believing beliefs is of no value. What difference they make in our lives is of enormous import.

Remembrance and honor

Fairview Tennessee, Hudgins Cemetery

Israel to be invaded Friday. World to end Saturday.

What an interesting conjunction of events. First: "Facebook Groups Call for Mass Invasion of Israel on Friday."

The Third Palestinian Intifada on Facebook seems to have at least twenty different groups or pages, each with hundreds or thousands of fans. One group has 365,000 fans. According to Yedioth Ahronoth (YNet), these sites are now urging all Arabs to “rush the Israeli borders” after Friday prayers on May 20.

Look: This could be the work of one nerdy Palestinian in a basement in Ramallah. The fans could also be people who exist only in cyberspace.

But, these Third Palestinian Intifada websites could also be the work of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, all of which have problems of their own and for whom a diversion would be mighty fine. In fact, I think they are. Thus, this promised new aggression must be taken seriously and stopped in its tracks.

In any event, these Third Intifada facebook websites are suggesting that armed and unarmed hordes, masses, mobs of incited and hate-filled Arabs invade–“surge”–into sovereign Israel (as they have done for years to India.) The Indian press and police are too afraid to report it or to stop them. Israelis have no choice but to do so.

I do not think that the "surge" will be nearly as great at this piece's author, Phyllis Chesler, fears. But the turnout will still be high. There was, after all, a rehearsal held only a few days ago.

Palestinians rushed Israel's borders at Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Palestinians and many more injuries.

The Israeli Defense Force was caught by surprise but was able to defend the borders. But the crowds got what they came for: heaping more bad publicity on Israel. Most of the international media dutifully complied.

Interesting event number two: Christian Premillennialism, a variety of "end times" lore, insists that Isarel will be invaded by mortal enemies and that to save Israel, Jesus will return in person. And he won't be nice.

Third: Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio Worldwide, with a wide listener base, says that God closes the book on human history this Saturday.

May 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. evangelical broadcaster predicting that Judgment Day will come on Saturday says he expects to stay close to a TV or radio to monitor the unfolding apocalypse.

Harold Camping, 89, previously made a failed prediction that Jesus Chris would return to Earth in 1994.

But the head of the Christian radio network Family Stations Inc says he is sure an earthquake will shake the Earth on May 21, sweeping true believers to heaven and leaving others behind to be engulfed in the world's destruction over a few months.

"We know without any shadow of a doubt it is going to happen," said Camping, whose Family Radio broadcasts in more than 30 languages and on U.S. and international stations.

So: invasion of Israel Friday? Second coming Saturday? I personally think I'll go long on oil.

A fellow named Hal Lindsey wrote a novel in 1970 called The Late Great Planet Earth, though the publisher presented it as "non-fiction." It sold many millions of copies. It was a highly imaginative account of why Lindsey thought the world would end in 1988. Lindsey’s fictional account of the end times had the Warsaw Pact invading Israel from the north and the Chinese army invading from the east, and the United States in the middle, defending Israel. Nuclear war followed, which would have killed every human being except for the direct, personal return of Christ to Jerusalem.

It didn’t happen, of course. The Warsaw pact is gone. For that matter, 1988 is gone, too, and we’re still here. Jesus hasn’t returned yet. The Late Great Planet Earth is in its forty-plus printing; not a word has been changed and it still predicts the end of the world and the second coming in 1988. The track record of everyone who has predicted the end of the world has been one hundred percent in error. One supposes, though, that eventually someone will get it right.

According to the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, we cannot know when comes the end of the age: "You do not know on what day your Lord will come," Jesus admonished his disciples. So we should not even try to predict. Jesus will come in judgment at an unexpected hour. Keep spiritually awake, Jesus cautions, don’t be asleep. Followers of Jesus are to spend their time announcing the Good News and being the body of Christ in this world, not in apocalyptic speculation.

The real pity of Mr. Camping's May 21 prediction is not that it will be wrong, but that it has inexplicably received so much media attention. His is a fringe movement, not even a flicker on the Church-o-meter. So why does his forecast get such media attention? Well, it gives pop culture another reason to dismiss all the Church and all its teachings.

The pity is that so many people will think that Camping-ism is normative of the Christian faiths. But it is not a message of hope nor a position of confidence. Campingism - and "Left Behind-ism" generally - is a theology of fear, and poor theology at that.

Vigilance for the day of the Lord is a spiritual condition. It means that we remain open to what our relationship with God demands. Let God take us in judgment, for that judgment is liberation and freedom. Whenever judgment comes, we should live now in faith, staying spiritually awake. Our Lord will break into our ordinary lives with extraordinary power, even when we don’t expect it.

Update: Here is a convenient flow chart on whether you will be raptured Saturday.

Code-Name Geronimo to be subject of hearings

ABCNews The Note:

The Senate Indian Affairs committee will hold a hearing Thursday on racist Native American stereotypes, a hearing that will now also address the Osama bin Laden mission and the code-name Geronimo.

While the hearing was scheduled before the mission, a committee aide today said the linking of the name Geronimo with the world’s most wanted man is “inappropriate” and can have a “devastating” impact on kids.

“The hearing was scheduled well before the Osama bin Laden operation became news, but the concerns over the linking of the name of Geronimo, one of the greatest Native American heroes, with the most hated enemies of the United States is an example of the kinds of issues we intended to address at Thursday's hearing,” Loretta Tuell, the committee's chief counsel, said in a statement.

American Power: Code-Name Geronimo: "Not the brightest idea for a code name. Good thing they didn't take out Osama with a Tomahawk missile."

What could have been a better code name? Let's see:

Not Osama bin Laden. Not even close.

Pancho Villa? No, for obvious reasons.

Yamamoto? Nope, Japan is our friend now. (And American Indians are, well, Americans.)

John Brown? Not appropriate because John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave. Osama ain't got no grave and chum doesn't really "moulder."

They could have code named Osama something like Eichmann or Himmler, which at least have the virtue of being names of men who hated Jews as much as OBL did. But why give him an actual name at all? They could just as well have coded him as Target Alpha One or Fizziwig. But even I, who am not very inclined toward political correctness, think that Geronimo wasn't too smart (although it will of course be blown far out of proportion to its actual demerits). After all, the real Geronimo was a standup guy compared to OBL. Calling him Geronimo is far too complimentary for him.

Yeah, "Dirtbag One" would have done the trick nicely.

Chivalry is dead and you killed it, ladies

Chivalry is dead and you killed it, ladies
I think that if the writer of this piece was living in the South she'd have a different view.

Giving

Just watch.