Pro Rege Papers

In case any of you Hezbollah supporters were thinking that terrorists were good guys, Scotland Yard has foiled a new terrorist plot to blow up an airplane in mid-flight. The Muslim conspirators (man, that seems to be the religion of choice for terrorists) planned to smuggle in explosive liquids in soda bottles, etc. and assemble the bombs in the bathrooms. They were then going to detonate them with devices disguised as common appliances.

These attacks are going to try to keep on coming. The Muslims just hate the West indelibly. I noticed that the reports said that Scotland Yard was noticing that the conspirators were clicking on flights for the US when they surfed the Internet. I guess keeping track of Internet records helps in the fight against terror.

Having been accused as a bigot, I feel a need to respond to someone who can’t stand intolerant people.  I got involved in a discussion on Saber Point which eventually took me to Romantic Dandy, the blog of someone named Percival. He has called Stogie, Aunty Belle, me, and a few other bloggers “bigots”. Meanwhile, he and his friends over on Romantic Dandy are ranting over how everyone from every religion just needs to get together and love each other, and how they can’t stand dissent from their views. I will attempt to address a few of Percival’s points (see his post too) in this post, though he seems to ignore much of what Aunty Belle and I are saying.

First, Islam is a religion and not an “ideology.”

Islam (as well as all other religions) contains a certain ideology that defines their outlook of the world. I didn’t say religion, because that connotates an attack on their way of life (that’s what the word religion means). I am not attacking the Arab way of life by any means. Many of the points for the way Muslims should live their lives, as prescribed in the five pillars of Islam, are noble. I believe in helping the poor, etc. However, I do not agree with all of them, and by no means think that you can be saved by just being a good guy. I am attacking the ideology, doctrines, and end products of Islam, which are completely false, against Christianity, and non-rational.

Second, you define bigotry as “condemning a whole group of people because they exist.” I’m not aware of any group of people ever having condemned another group for possessing the property of being itself.

What about racists? They are conventionally called bigots. They hate Africans, Asians, etc. for being the way they are. An African American cannot help the color of his skin, yet racists hate him for it. A Muslim can get out of Islam, and become a Christian, although it is harder in Islam than in Buddhism, for example. The recent incident in Afghanistan well illustrates that.

An accurate definition of bigotry is more like ‘condemning a whole group of people because you ascribe certain negative qualities to the people who belong to that group.’ Bigotry is a humungous negative overgeneralization about a large group of people.

Although I disagree with that definition, let’s use it for debate purposes.

The official definition of bigot, according to Webster, is someone who is prejudiced or intolerant. I’ll admit; I am prejudiced heavily toward Christianity, just as you are prejudiced heavily toward universalism, liberalism, and secularism. I try not to be intolerant of people, I try to talk with them first, but I’m not perfect. I might point out that you aren’t the most tolerant, either.

Anyway, you are implying that Aunty Belle, Stogie, and I are condemning specific persons themselves. You are implying that we hate certain Arabs. I definitely do not. It’s hard, the way they behave, and my being a fallen human; but I still do not hate them. I have rebuked Stogie for this several times. On the whole; however, Stogie focuses his attention toward Islam, not individual Muslims. He hates them for their beliefs, (which are capable of changing, as I explained earlier) not parts of their existence (which are incapable of changing, as I explained earlier). The vast majority of Arabs believe in Islam, that’s not an overgeneralization.

…the hate I’m hearing at the moment isn’t coming from a Muslim.

I am not hateful towards Arabs as a people; I am hateful towards their ideology, Islam. Read my comment over again if you’re not sure.

[The minority of] Muslims who are bigoted, violent, and don’t begin to understand the teachings of their own religion,

So you’re saying that you, a Westerner who studied at Chicago, not Riyadh, know more about their religion than they do? That’s very presumptuous. Many people say the same about Christianity who don’t know a thing about basic doctrines.

…serious criticism of terrorism coming from Muslim clerics. Try getting some of your news from the BBC, or out of Canada, or even NPR here in the states!

I do get a lot of my news from the BBC, actually. You missed my entire point that I said in the context to that question about Muslim clerics. I said, “If you ask a head of state or a Muslim in the US, [or Europe, etc.] then they will say that they are not radicals.” They want to make the best possible impression. If you ask a usual, small Arab town, Muslim imam, you will get little, if no condemnation of what terrorists say and do. You’ll get the same result if you ask the majority of leading clerics.

I’m sure that if you want to take particular lines from the Quran out of context and emphasize/distort them; you could find angry/vengeful/hateful verses. Ditto Judaism. Ditto Christianity.

Yes, that’s true. The difference between the verses in the Bible that say that, and the verses in the Quran that say that, is that the Bible is saying that God will punish those people, whereas the Quran clearly encourages Muslims to do the avenging themselves.

Percival goes on to give an excuse for people to become terrorists. He says that because a Palestinian had his relatives killed, and his house destroyed by a “precision” bomb, they have a right to become terrorists. They have a right, then, to strap themselves up with a bomb and blow up an Israeli bus filled with innocent civilians, just for revenge. He then asks what difference there is between Israeli violence and terrorist violence. The major difference between them is that one attacks civilians willingly, whereas the other focuses on civilians primarily for their attacks. There are plenty more differences, as I explain here.

[your] point seems to be that Christianity is “the best.”

Wow, he finally caught on! At least he made one right conclusion. Christianity is the only true religion. All others are fakes.

Then someone named Lady Wordsmith chips in and offers a Universalist proposition:

“We may all bow at different times and say our prayers in different ways, but we all offer the same praise and ask for the same grace.”

Try reading the Bible, compare it to the Quran, etc. and you’ll think differently.

I’ll leave all of you with my telling of what a radio talk show host said to a Muslim, posted in a comment on Saber Point:

I remember that one guy who was filling in for Rush Limbaugh one day about a month ago, who was arguing with a Muslim. The Muslim said that Islam was a religion of peace, and that the majority of Muslims are pacifist Pillsbury doughboys, etc., etc. The host said to him, (I don’t know the exact quote) “If terrorists are such a minority in Islam and the most Muslims are against jihadi violence, then why is there not an uproar and outrage when they do acts of terror? I mean, when the sexual abuse of boys by Roman Catholic priests was uncovered, the Pope and the Vatican cracked down on them. There was a huge trial and scandal and those people were punished. However, when Muslim terrorists blew up 3,000 New Yorkers, you didn’t see that kind of response. You saw people dancing in the streets with their fingers raised in the V-sign.” The Muslim couldn’t answer back, and proceeded to shift the focus of the argument away from what the host had said.
It was interesting to listen to.

Little Green Footballs has another post running on pictures of one building that was destroyed one night that have been made out by AP as seperate air raids. More things are showing up by the day. Yes, Reutergate could spiral into a huge public discrediting of the liberal media.
On the right is another AP photo of a Hezbollah fighter shooting at Israelis, with a civilian family right next to him. Jubilant children are right behind. You’ve just got to love that Hezbollah strategy.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has uncovered the New York Times fudging on another photo of a “rescue worker”.

On this day in 1929, the Federal Reserve raised the rediscount rates to stop the inflation that had been building up all during the ’20s. This was the start of the stock market crash that preceded the Great Depression.

In 1945, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. This was necessary, as the Japanese were thus far convinced that we only had one a-bomb. They would have continued the war even after the Hiroshima bombing, had we not shown them that we could destroy them without invading. This, in the end, saved millions of lives.

In 1974, Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal. Gerald Ford was signed in on the same day.

In 2006, the war between Israel and Hezbollah continued. Blogs continued to increase their influence, and one lone blogger, Althusius, continued writing on various subjects, arousing charges of bigotry from one Percival, and summarizing the events of history on August 9

I just caught the last 20 minutes of a PBS program an hour ago that was teaching the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism. The narrator went on and on about how you have to kill yourself to contact the inner you, how you have to take directions from the Dalai Llama as to what twigs to hold onto as you go down into the abyss before you contact your inner self; also known as a demon. I thought to myself, as images of skulls and weird (that’s the only word to describe it) sculptures flashed across the screen, “Now I know why Christianity was widely accepted among cultures like this. Germanic barbarianism, Greek mythology, African Satanism, Indian Buddhism, and Native American animism all have one thing in common: They’re all really freaky and are based on fear.” Of course that’s not the only reason, but it certainly was a contributing factor.

Then the local PBS manager came on, pleading for money and telling me how evil I was for not paying up for programming like this. Then a question came to mind: “Why in the world do they have the essential doctrines of Buddhism being taught on tax-supported TV, (along with a lot of New Age stuff) but they shun any notion of Christianity, wouldn’t dare to spread the Gospel, and do all they can to bash Jesus and the Christian message in special programs on Easter? They interview all these liberal ’scholars’ from Union, Yale, and Harvard seminaries who tell us what really happened. Yet they won’t examine the massive problems with Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.” I remember the time I was at the Wisconsin state capitol building around Christmas time, and I saw an ACLU sign at one pillar making up the rotunda. The sign said, among other things on the horrible origin of Christmas,

“There is no God, there is no Satan, there is no heaven, no hell, no angels, no demons…”

no life, no books, no cheeseburgers, no Apple computers, etc. etc. etc. Then I walked over to the other side of the big circular chamber and saw a table explaining the god Buddha in detail. I began to have serious thoughts about moving the ACLU sign right next to the Buddha display, just for effect. It shows you the hypocrisy of it all.

So next time you make your pledge to your local PBS station, remember what you’re supporting.

I am disappointed. When this conflict started on July 13, I thought there would be more support for Israel. They are fighting against a terrorist enemy, Hezbollah. Terrorists attacked us on 9/11, and killed 3,000 of our people. I thought we had resolve against people like that. But no, terrorists are praised in protests in cities across America and the Western World. The MSM are doing their best to make Hezbollah look like a poor little innocent child that the big bad bully, Israel, turned on for no reason. They are trying so hard to give this impression, that they pass through photographs that are clearly hampered.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Practically the entire civilized world recognizes that. This war started when Hezbollah and Hamas kidnapped several Israeli troops. Then Hezbollah started launching rockets into northern Israeli cities. Israel decided that they were not going to be pushed around and give back the hundreds of prisoners that Hezbollah was asking for, and start another kidnapping binge. So they launched a bombing, artillery firing, naval and air blockading assault on southern Lebanon.

Israel is not fighting against Lebanon. They are fighting against Hezbollah, which the Lebanese government has allowed to control the southern part of the country. Israel has asked the Lebanese government over and over again to get rid of Hezbollah in their country, but to no avail. So, Lebanon has paid the price: their airports have been destroyed, ports blockaded, and civilians killed.

It would be helpful to point out that Israel had to destroy the Beirut airport, various roads, and port areas to stop Hezbollah from being re-supplied by Iran and other sources. When Israel bombs cities and villages, it’s because Hezbollah troops intentionally mix in with the population. Hezbollah troops are rarely in uniform, and launch rockets, patrol in tanks, etc. in areas where many other people are. In the now-infamous bombing of Qana, it was reported that Hezbollah troops were around everywhere just before the bombing. Hezbollah kept the civilians from leaving in the villages it controlled. They needed them for the body shields.

So while Israel can hardly help killing civilians with enemy tactics such as these, and tries to bomb areas where there are no civilians as much as possible, Hezbollah launches rockets into Israeli cities without warning, without a particular target, and with no particular purpose besides that of murdering civilians. I think the moral balance is clear.

I thought I wouldn’t even have to say all the above. I thought it would be obvious to Americans who is in the right and who is in the wrong in this conflict, but I was wrong. Protests in Boston, New York City, and other areas are praising Hezbollah, waving the yellow and green flags, and chanting terrorist slogans. Apparently people don’t care about brutal terror anymore. Apparently people have forgotten what terrorists did to us on 9/11. Apparently people have forgotten that Hezbollah killed hundreds of our troops in the suicide attack on Marine barracks. I cannot believe the amount of support Bostonians and New Yorkers are giving a terrorist organization. It’s just sick.

Meanwhile the media are hard at work. They show dozens of photos of the same dead people held up by the same Hezbollah workers in different situations, and made to look like separate incidents. They rarely show the damage that is being dealt on Israeli cities by unguided rockets, but eat up shots and stories of Israeli bombings. The way the headlines go, you would think it was Israel who just invaded Lebanon for the fun of it.

Now we have the smoke-plume scandal. Adnan Hajj, a local free-lance photographer, took shots of a burning building. Then he cloned certain parts of the picture in Photoshop to make the smoke plume look larger. He also cloned one flare fired by an Israeli F-16 to look like 4 missiles coming down on a residential area. The same photographer was taking shots at Qana. Who knows if those were largely staged, now too? Reuters passed the photos through; apparently eager to get anything that made the conflict (and specifically the Israelis) look more horrible. Charles Johnson, a former graphic designer and writer of Little Green Footballs, caught the error and fully exposed it. I passed up his post when I first read it on Saturday, shaking my head and thinking it was just another bad old thing the media had done. I didn’t realize that it would turn into a big controversy, and Reuters would eventually withdraw the photo. Whatever.

I just hope it’s abundantly clear which side America should be on, and why protesters should be ashamed of themselves.

As I explained in my post about the Great Depression, one of the major causes of the stock market crash, the bank closings, and the ensuing poverty was credit inflation. Rather, it was the credit contraction that Hoover ordered that started the cycle. But that came as a result of the huge credit expansion. Anyway, credit inflation was one of the major causes. This being the root source of the crash, you would think that government would take steps to restrict fractional reserve banking, the buying of stocks on margin, the inflationary practices of the Federal Reserve, etc. However the measures taken by the government following the crash were nothing like that. They were in entirely the wrong direction. Those measures sought to keep credit from contracting, and even sought to re-inflate the currency, as well as hinder private industry. In hindsight, the governmental response ended up prolonging the Depression.

Credit contraction helps prices and wages to readjust to the new conditions. It’s the first stage in an economic recovery. However, right after the crash at the end of 1929, the Federal Reserve raised rediscount rate on loans. Hoover also pushed through a banking loan corporation, which aided fractional reserve banks to reestablish their reserves. This, in effect tried to reinstate the cause of the stock market crash. These practices drove inflation back up, creating a temporary façade of recovery. But, the inevitable came again, and prices plunged.

More measures were taken by FDR, who took us off the gold standard and onto a government managed currency. Thus, the President could decide how much money was printed, and what price relation the dollar had to gold. FDR also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Farm Credit Administration, and the Commodity Credit Corporation. All these agencies expanded credit further to slow down the contraction from running its course, which it eventually did in 1933.

The regulations imposed on private industry, as well as the free rein given to labor unions throughout Roosevelt’s administration served to keep the country in the state of economic doldrums.

The National Recovery Administration required industries to develop codes that the President would have to approve that would be binding on all companies in that industry. They also sought to reduce of all “unfair” competition by merging different businesses under the same rules. That was part of a collectivist agenda to destroy individuality and competition.

The National Labor Relations Board was set up; restricting the number of ways courts could issue injunctions against, or companies could act against, labor unions. It defined a series of crimes that companies could commit against their employees, such as prohibiting the organization of labor unions, preventing strikes, refusing to negotiate with strikers, etc.

Tax after tax was laid on companies and private citizens. All these things made life much harder for private industry, which prevented them from hiring more people or their stock from rising in value. As a result, the economic recession lasted well into the ‘40s. Yes, extensive government intervention in the economy doesn’t work.