The Sargent Schultz Routine

The arrest of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell at his grisly Philadelphia abortuary “wasn’t about abortion.” Feminists and other liberals insist there’s no association and if you say there is, you’re a hateful, misogynist bigot who would deny women their constitutional rights.

Gosnell and others are charged with murdering seven babies by cutting their spines with surgical scissors. Clinic workers familiar with Gosnell’s habits testified to the grand jury that he killed hundreds of babies by this method or just by “slitting their necks.” He’d been doing this for decades and would be still if federal agents hadn’t burst into his clinic. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The investigation began last February, after federal and state drug agents and Philadelphia police raided the clinic at 3801 Lancaster Avenue on suspicion that Gosnell was illegally dispensing narcotic painkillers. (The federal drug-trafficking investigation is ongoing.) What they found, according to the report, was ‘filthy, deplorable, and disgusting’: Blood on the floor. The stench of urine. Cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women moaning in the waiting or recovery rooms, covered with blood-stained blankets. Broken equipment. Blocked or locked exits.”

Abuses at the clinic were reported over and over for decades, but regulatory agencies ignored them. For some macabre purpose, Gosnell preserved amputated feet of the babies he killed. There were lines of them on shelves throughout the “clinic.” Investigators found little corpses in freezers. One worker at the clinic said Gosnell tried to joke as a baby squirmed while he cut its throat saying it acted like a chicken with its head cut off. How could abortion clinic inspectors fail to act all those years? The Sargent Shultz routine of politically-correct liberals in government and the mainstream media for whom abortion is sacrosanct: “I see nothing. I know nothing.”

If you can believe abortion Doctor Gosnell isn’t about abortion, you can believe radical Muslim Doctor Malik Hasan shooting forty-three US soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” wasn’t about Islam. Liberals insisted fifteen months ago when the massacre occurred that there was no association. If you still insist there was, you’re an intolerant, hateful, racist, Islamophobic bigot. The denial reached absolutely unbelievable proportions. According to a report by US Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, the federal government knew Hasan exchanged emails regularly with radical imam Anwar Al Awlaki of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula and ignored it. Fellow officers knew of his radical Muslim beliefs because he was anything but secretive about them, but he was not arrested. He was not imprisoned. He was not courtmartialed. No. He was promoted! He was actually promoted by politically-correct, multicultural officers afraid of giving offense to a Muslim. We’re talking about our senior military here in a state of war with radical Islam. If we’re afraid even of offending them, how are we going to defeat them?

As the Lieberman/Collins report puts it: "The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior . . . They collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamic extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”

Are you with me so far? Okay. Let’s take it one step further. If you can believe Dr. Gosnell isn’t about abortion and Dr. Hasan isn’t about Islam, then you’ll also believe that hundreds of homosexual priests raping thousands of altar boys for decades wasn’t about homosexuality. If you still believe it was, you’re a hateful, homophobic bigot. In spite of report after report after report that upwards of forty percent of Catholic priests were homosexual and 85% of their victims were adolescent boys, the mainstream media outlets like The Boston Globe, which broke the story, insist homosexuality had nothing to do with it.

Abortion, multiculturalism, homosexuality. Are there three more sacred cows in politically-correct America? I don’t think so. Whenever they report on these things, we can expect our mainstream media’s Sargent Shultz routine to continue for as long as most Americans remain willing to accept it.

Hot Showers and Indoor Toilets

Indoor toilets and hot showers are great. Both are only short steps from my bed and I start every day with them. Central heat is nice too. I hope to have all three for the rest of my days - about twenty more years for an almost-sixty-year-old, heterosexual white guy according to the actuaries - but I’m not fully confident that I will. For that, I’ll need steady and affordable supplies of electricity and fossil fuel for the next two decades and those require a stable infrastructure, both physical and financial. In spite of what the lefty Cassandras proclaim about us running out of fossil fuels, we’re not, and we won’t for centuries to come. It’s the cracks in our financial infrastructure that worry me. Maybe it’s the widespread strikes in France over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. French unions are shutting down refineries and pipelines. Maybe it’s the riots in Greece over similar benefit and retirement issues. Both portend unrest here in America, which is on the same path many European countries have been traveling. Frenchmen and Greeks and many other Europeans are like petulant children who expect their parent government to take care of them while they put their feet up and relax. They want to retire young, then collect full pensions and benefits for two or three decades. They don’t seem to care or even understand how unrealistic those expectations are. They don’t have enough young people to work and pay the taxes necessary to keep it all going - and it’s their own fault.

When so many French, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Greeks choose not to bear enough children even to replace themselves, who did they think was going to keep working to support them in their declining years? Yeah, I know children are expensive, take a lot of energy and sacrifice and are a pain to raise sometimes, but what’s the alternative? Did they think immigrants were going to fill in for the children they never had? Immigrants, legal and illegal, have swarmed into Europe from Muslim countries to the south, but they’re not assimilating. They don’t want to become Frenchmen, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes, or Italians, and they are proving to be a net drain on government services instead of contributing to the pensions and benefits of aging Europeans. Rather than showing affection for their new homelands, the new immigrants seem disdainful. Immigrant neighborhoods are breeding grounds for terrorists. All this has lead German Chancellor Angela Merkel to declare that multiculturalism - the liberal dream that people from every culture would come to Europe and be smiling, happy people holding hands - “has utterly failed.” She might as well have said that European socialism has utterly failed as well because it has. It’s responsible for a generation of selfish, pampered, spoiled citizens who want what they want no matter what it costs. They don’t care if everything comes crashing down after them, as long as they get theirs while they’re still living.

After 33+ years as a public-school teacher in Maine, there’s a pension coming to me for the rest of my days - theoretically. I have no debts. My expenses are low. My wife and I know how to live frugally, having spent most of our lives together working multiple jobs, paying the bills and raising a family. With a pension, we could cut back our workload a bit and live fairly comfortably but one thing nags at me: Can I depend on that that pension being there in five years? Ten years? Maybe. Maybe not. State pension funds are in trouble all over the country, underfunded by over $3 trillion. As Andrew Biggs writes in the Wall Street Journal: “According to accounting rules adopted by the states, a public sector pension plan may call itself "fully funded" even if there is a better-than-even chance it will be unable to meet its obligations.” Many don’t even reach that threshold. Just as in Europe, government employee unions and left-wing politicians here signed extremely generous agreements over the years that both sides must have known were little better than Ponzi schemes. They worked well for the first waves of retirees, but - as with Social Security - bankruptcy looms for baby boomers like me who are beginning to retire now. The forty million babies aborted in America over the last four decades would have come in handy about now, but oh well. It’s likely they’d have been much more productive than the 12-20 million illegal immigrants from Latin countries to our south who have been allowed in to replace them. Like Muslim immigrants in European countries, they’re a net drain on our system, but at least they’re not plotting to bring down western civilization as Muslim immigrants are in Europe. That’s a consolation. Socialist Democrats running the White House and Congress have added over $3 trillion to our national debt in less than two years. The Federal Reserve is printing $100 billion a month, yet unemployment is still rising. Nonetheless, my toilet worked this morning. Hot water was there in the shower. The heat came on. I still have a job to go to and the election is less than two weeks away.

One day at a time.

When Will We Wake Up?

What is it going to take for Europe and America to realize the threat? Radical Muslim terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaida and others won’t stop until the world is under Sharia law. Don’t know what that means? It means stoning to death adulterers, homosexuals and apostates (anyone who leaves Islam), killing sisters, wives, daughters who “dishonor” the family by wearing bikinis or otherwise dressing like most women in the west do, and beating women if they disobey their husbands. Sounds farfetched, you say? Well, according the BBC, no less a person than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, claims “Sharia law in UK ‘unavoidable’.”

On New Years night a few weeks ago, young Muslims in France rioted. They burned 1147 cars in several French cities. It’s not the first time this has happened and French police were out in force. Still, there were 30% more cars burned this year than last. French media won’t call the rioters Muslims however. Their politically-correct, multicultural denial doesn’t allow them to. Instead, domestic terrorists are simply called “youths.” Car burnings are getting routine for the French. “Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country,” claims the San Francisco Chronicle. “‘Burning cars is rather typically French, said Michel Wieviorka, a French sociologist who has studied the phenomenon.” Uh-huh. Just the usual mischief by those pesky French “youths.” Nothing to do with Radical Islam. Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

In Sweden, rapes by Muslim immigrants and their offspring are skyrocketing, quadrupling in twenty years. Sweden’s liberal immigration policies have allowed huge numbers of unassimilated Muslims to upset their multicultural bliss. It’s getting harder to tolerate intolerant Muslim immigrants when they disdain Swedish women. According to Islam-watch.org, one named Hamid said, “‘It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl. The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably f***** before, anyway. . . . It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean,’ says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words.”

Such attitudes are common in Europe lately. According to the Copenhagen Post: “An Islamic mufti in Copenhagen, Shahid Mehdi, has sparked political outcry from the left-wing Unity List and right-wing Danish People's Party, after stating in a televised interview that women who do not wear headscarves are ‘asking for rape.’”

“Public outcry,” huh? Not enough of an outcry to call Muslim terrorists what they are though. Just those pesky “youths” again. Is it an unwillingness to admit their embrace of multiculturalism - the idea that all cultures are equal - has been wrong all along? Or is it just plain fear of radical Muslim terror? Both, I suspect, but more the latter. They spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back, claiming to “speak truth to power,” but at bottom, western media simply lack courage.

And the nice schools Europeans built for immigrants to attend? Those mischievous “youths” are burning them. “[W]e are close to the point where a majority of pupils have a foreign background, which is to say that either they or their parents come from a country outside Sweden,” says Alan Widman, member of Sweden’s parliament about the situation in the city of Malmo. Where outside Sweden Mr. Widman? He won’t identify foreigners as Arab Muslims, even when they’re torching schools at the rate of one every other day and shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

The canary in the coal mine for western civilization is Israel. It’s under constant assault from Radical Islam. Yet when they retaliate against rocket attacks from Hezbollah or Hamas, the western media condemn them instead of the radical Muslim terrorists who attack them. Indeed, a worldwide intifada has erupted all over Europe, Canada and the USA - http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=230 (a very scary link). Muslim marchers in Fort Lauderdale called for Jews to go back to the ovens.

If you think our “relations” with radical Islam are going to change with the election of Barack Obama, think again. They’re already burning his posters while shouting “Death to Obama” in Iran.

My fear is that it’s going to take something far more drastic than September 11th to wake up Europe and America - like the loss of a whole city to a smuggled nuclear device. A majority of Europeans and far too many Americans cling to their belief that we must continue to tolerate the intolerable, continue to celebrate multiculturalism and diversity - even if it kills us.

Graffiti and Anarchy

Some people consider it an art form, but I’m not one of them. To me it’s a canary-in-the-coal-mine thing, an indication of an unraveling civilization. It was appropriate that one of the symbols was an upper-case A with a circle around it - a symbol of anarchy. Last week, someone spray-painted graffiti representing whatever crude impulses entered his head around the Lovell Dump, or what is probably referred to as the Lovell Solid Waste Recycling Center now. If there ever were a proper venue for graffiti I suppose it would be a dump, but it was offensive even there.

Why do I say “his” head you may ask? Because the perpetrator was likely an adolescent male who knows very little but thinks he knows much. That two giant phalluses were among the symbols is also a clue. It’s possible he’s former student since I’ve taught nearly every fourteen-year-old who came through eighth grade around here for more than a generation. It’s also possible that he’s already been charged by the time this goes to print, but I’m out of town and out of touch, where there’s neither cellphone nor internet service and that’s nice. There’s no graffiti around here either. If he was caught and he’s under eighteen, his name won’t be published. People in town will know who he was though. They always do, and you can find out if you listen to the talk at one of the local lunch counters.

Graffiti “artists” who render crude phalluses probably wear their pants low on their rear ends - because they desperately want to belong to other groups of boys like themselves who don’t pull their pants up. Graffiti is part of their lifestyle. When they get old enough to drive, they’ll have sub-woofers installed in their cars to vibrate everything within a wide radius, blaring their angry “music” which they impose on us along with their graffiti. Sound and symbol go together, and those of us who pull our pants up consider both obnoxious.

Adolescent males who run in packs are anarchist by nature. The only limits they recognize are the impulses of the alpha male and change hour to hour. Anarchy is as old as the human race, but during the past two centuries, anarchists have adopted a loose philosophy. They believe there should be no government and they behave as if there weren’t any. They don’t respect private property, and that squares nicely with communists over on the extreme left of the political spectrum. Anarchists and communists have historically worked together to bring down governments. Once they’re successful in that, however, they part company. To fill the power vacuum, communists create huge government bureaucracies to control everything everybody does, and that’s the opposite of what anarchists profess.

Several anarchist groups like “Unconventional Action” and “Recreate 68” are planning to disrupt the Democrat Convention in Denver next month. According to the Denver Post: “A draft law proposed by the Denver Police Department would ban the possession by protesters of materials such as weighted pipes and chains and items that can make urine and feces bombs.” Hmm. Urine and feces bombs, huh? The excremental equivalent of rap “music” and graffiti, I guess. Would these be aimed at police or at Obama delegates?

Few adolescent boys understand anarchist history, but they’re attracted to symbols like the A with a circle around it because it’s associated with other angry young males who become sub-cultural heroes. Our media magnifies them as they make “music” and destroy things and treat young women like whores. Big media like Time Warner feed this subculture and profit mightily in the process.

The majority culture either accepts this adolescent anarchy, or even celebrates it because it’s associated with protected minorities. It is therefore an element of Multiculturalism - which purports that all cultures are equal. No culture, or subculture for that matter, is any better or any worse than any other. Cultural relativity has become a sacred principle and it’s not politically correct to question it. It’s even a hate crime in Canada where provincial Human Rights Commissions can bring charges against you and impose huge fines if you should publicly criticize a culture to the point where its adherents’ feelings get hurt. They don’t have a First Amendment up there.

Our society seems to have swallowed all this even when it means many of our adolescent boys behave like characters from “Lord of the Flies” and many of our adolescent girls look like prostitutes. Many grumble about it privately, but few speak out publicly lest they be called intolerant or even racist.

Such were my thoughts while I was photographing the graffiti before the dump attendant painted over it last week. That’s what we have to do with graffiti - kill it before it spreads, disinfect before it reproduces. Some claim this prevents “the broken-window effect” - if a broken window isn’t fixed right away, others around it will soon be broken too. Let’s hope we caught it in time.