While we await to see if The Great Man will give us a hat trick with another Slate column telling us that Major Hasan was a Muslim, let's take a smoke break with the more interesting (even as a corpse) Norman Mailer.
The Hitchens/official line on Ft. Hood: ignore any evidence that doesn't blame what happened solely on Maj. Hasan's extreme Islamic beliefs, his non-connection to al Qaeda, and the government's too lenient, liberal pussy-footed failure to shut him down and get him out.
It should go without saying that there is no absolutely discussion of underlying or root causes of the event, as if the terms themselves somehow don't exist or aren't real.
I would probably be disgusted by this cover-up if it were not so unsurprising.
I'll say it again: it seems clear to me that what drove Nidal Hasan first to Islamic extremism and then to commit the massacre at Ft. Hood is the WOT itself and all of its many damaging consequences both at home and abroad. (Update: a claim that Hitchens has just officially rejected in a new article on Slate, "The war on terrorism didn't cause the Fort Hood shootings." So if WOT had never been waged, the Ft. Hood massacre would've somehow happened anyway? Yeah, right.)
Anyway, Mark Ames has an article today on Alternet that destroys the official line on multiple fronts. Some opening clips:
What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred -- and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?
...The Army's pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important -- and most damaging -- detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service -- then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil. Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were…
Elizabeth over in The Middle of Nowhere has alerted me to the clear and present danger to our kids presented by Kermit the Frog and Co. at the original trash TV program, Sesame Street, and counted 1, 2, 3 reasons why we ought to can it. Now I can't spell it out any clearer than that, can I?
Angrysoba shares his thoughts on one of the most readable of Britain's new generation of old fogies — Theodore Dalrymple — together with a few reading recommendations.
By the way, the photo is not of Dalrymple nor Soba nor Me, but Victor Meldrew, the sort of character I think Dalrymple (real name: Anthony Daniels) has molded his persona upon. — Greywolf
A few weeks ago someone posted an article by Theodore Dalrymple on the subject of vaccines , on the heels of which FGFM posted a list of publications in which Dalrymple's articles appear. One of those was the ever popular City Journal where Christopher Hitchens has plied his trade, and indeed where another article by Dalrymple on the subject of vaccines was published.
I decided to pick up a collection of his essays recently and found that reading it is a little like standing in a wind-tunnel of outrage in which leftist and liberal orthodoxies are fiercely blown away. He savages the idea that poverty is a cause of crime, blaming crime instead on a sense of entitlement fostered by the welfare state and by do-gooders who seem to believe the ultimate virtue is in being non-judgmental. I can't help but meekly protest that crime predated welfare (weren't children strung up for stealing apples or, worse still, shipped off to Australia for the theft of a sheep long before the invention of the dole?) and healthcare (Dalrymple worked for the NHS so it gave him a job) but at the turn of each page he's off on another onslaught against woolly-brained academics and post-modernists, cultural and moral relativism and heroic stalwarts of democracy Tony Blair and Gordon Brown!
Referring to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five as adolescent experimentation was too much for me and his depiction of the novel as poorly describing World War Two seems to miss the point (even as I deliberately miss the point of his essay).
Despite all the disagreements I could have with Dalrymple, I can't deny that he's a good writer and for that reason alone, I can't pass up the opportunity to recommend some essays to Hitch Watchers either because the subject is up their alley or because it is bound to challenge their own ideas. So, for Mark G here's Don't Legalise Drugs and, because Mark is the anti-Dalrymple in almost every political conviction (Dalrymple being to conservatism and even reaction what Mark is to counter-culture), here too is In the Asylum in which he takes serious issue with Michel Foucault and R.D Laing. I think Dalrymple's criticisms of Steven Pinker should appeal to JQ and FGFM (if they don't enjoin me to shove it up my arse). Perhaps Hidari or Sonic can tell me if it is as bad as he says in It's This Bad while yoyo may or may not enjoy Dalrymple's attack on Henrik Ibsen. There's a special one for Rakhmetov on A Clockwork Orange. As for Greywolf, I think he may appreciate these pieces on J.G Ballard and Arthur Koestler.
Finally, Dalrymple also has an essay in the collection titled What the New Atheists Don't See, which originally came out in 2007, in which he excoriates them for having not one original idea among them (save perhaps Dennett) and indeed positively horrible ideas on morality in the case of Sam Harris:
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate...
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live."
On Hitchens, and the new atheists in general, he says:
"A dishonest approach to history" can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.” What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.
I don't know if the recent Fort Hood massacre was the result of an attack by an Islamic enemy within either inspired by or working for Al Qaida (the Hitchens/official scenario); if it was a false flag attack, as in "remember, remember the fifth of November; gunpowder treason and plot" (the Tarpley patsy scenario), an incident that occurred spontaneously and was then spun into something else by Pentagon propagandists who were ordered by Don Rumsfeld back in 2001 to do just this kind of thing; or if it was down to a soldier off his meds, on his meds, over-vaccinated, stressed out, or driven over the edge by a seemingly endless conflict he never wanted any part in and which has dragged on far too long for any good it may have done for anybody outside of the War Party (this last scenario is favored by our own Mark G). It is not my purpose today to examine any of these potential scenarios or to try to pick a winner from among them. But I would like to continue from my previous post by examining Christopher's attitude both to this incident and more generally to violent death in wartime.
In the one post I've seen by Christopher on the incident there is no explicit statement about whether he condemns or commends the killing and wounding of dozens of US servicemen. But I won't fault him for that. Most contemporary readers who are familiar with the context in which the incident is being talked about generally and who know Christopher's own stance will have no trouble concluding that he condemns the slaughter. This is something that, to quote a cliche, "goes without saying". And before anyone forms the impression that I, as an opponent of the WOT and an occasional critic of US militarism and imperialism, have anything but condemnation for whoever was guilty of this atrocity, be assured that my reaction on hearing the news was one of stoic sadness and grief. I have acquaintances in the US armed forces, including one man who currently works at an Air Force base near San Antonio, and my first reaction on hearing of the tragedy was to pray he was not involved. (This was a reflex action that I don't discourage in myself. I'm extremely doubtful of their being a deity who listens to my prayers and acts on them, but I see no harm in giving it a go.)
In the previous post I pointed out that Christopher's reaction to the Virgina Tech massacre was starkly different from his reaction to Fort Hood. I can't think about his summation of Cho's alleged rampage as "a non-story" without remembering those haunting lines from Macbeth:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Again, it goes without saying that Christopher must have lamented and condemned what happened at Virgina Tech, but he doesn't waste valuable column inches adding his voice to the crowd who gush silly conventional verbiage (or worse, prayers) on such occasions. For him, joining in with that would be the equivalent of throwing another bouquet of flowers onto the pile outside Princess Diana's residence at Kensington Palace. But he must surely have really felt grief for the victims of that crime, despite its insignificance to him in the overall scheme of things, mustn't he? Actually, we have a bit more of his thoughts on the matter from Holiday Dmitri of Radar:
Radar: Right, as we saw in the recent case of Seung-Hui Cho. What did you think of the Virginia Tech shooting?
Hitchens: I don't think about it. To me it's a non-event. There will always be a tragedy with some little kid falling down a mineshaft some week. Horrible things will always happen, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. We had a moment of silence at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. But why not for the 116 people who were torn to pieces in Iraq, which does have implications for us, because the people who did that want to do it to everybody? Instead, this little nutcase has state power. I hate it!
When I heard about the Virginia Tech event, I thought, This is horrible, because I knew there would be nothing on the television, in the newspapers, or on the airwaves for weeks. Everyone wants the shooting to be about them, the Russian Federation included. If you look through my window you'll see the Russian Federation has its flag half-mast. What does the Russian Federation have to do with Virginia Tech? Nothing! Nor do I. Nor do you.
From this it is clear that for Christopher, the essential difference between Virgina Tech and Fort Hood is that the first is about nothing more than itself and as such has nothing to do with us outsiders, while the second is part of something bigger that has something vitally important to do with us, which we ignore at out peril. Of course, in order for Fort Hood to be as big as Christopher paints it, Major Hasan has to be linked with our Islamic enemies in some way or another. If not, he would be just another little nutcase with state power. And in exercising his prejudice (judgment in advance of all the relevant facts being established) in this matter, Christopher shows once again that rather obvious bias that has been on view at frequent intervals since he first referred to the WOT as "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." We should not forget that in order to keep fanning the flames of this necessary war, it is incumbent upon him to use any means available to alert his natural allies to the dangers and recruit ever more troops to keep up the fight against his enemies.
The above quotation, given in an interview with Jamie Glazov in 2003, is part of a rather shocking and notorious statement about Hitchens's initial reaction to the events of 9/11. Here's the entire paragraph:
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
A key word here is "exhilaration". I imagine that few people who have a soft spot for either the United States or for humanity in general would have felt that particular emotion in connection with that awful event, and fewer still would have owned up to the feeling. Assorted misanthropes and critics of America will certainly have felt a dash of schadenfreude alongside the shock and horror, but to feel "exhilaration" at 9/11 is an obvious sign of somebody with serious psychological problems. And naturally, a question that has to cross any inquiring mind is "if Christopher Hitchens felt exhilaration on seeing and hearing about 9/11, did he perchance experience the same sort of emotion, albeit on a smaller scale, at the Fort Hood massacre?
I am assumming for the sake of decency and common humanity more than of argument that Christopher, although he seldom indicates it overtly, is every bit as shocked, horrified, petrified, mortified, etc., as the average normal person would be the thought of people being deliberately killed en mass. Emotionally, humans are a mixed bunch, but I assume Christopher's reactions are within two standard deviations of the center of the bell curve. However, if you were to ask me for evidence to back up this assumption, I would have to concede that I have little to offer. I've heard and read him make short references to "terrible" events and "evil", but I've never seen Christopher go to any great length to show us that he actually feels anyone else's pain. When it comes to pouring out sympathy for the victims of violence, he is as cold a fish as I've seen outside of the dock of a courtroom.
On top of this, he often seems prone to levity in situations where propriety, etiquette and decorum would call for gravity in the form of dignified silence, qualified respect, or at the very least repressed dislike or revulsion. There are times when it is quite out of order to gloat, and yet I've never seen anyone have quite as much fun at a wake as Christopher displayed in the wake of the deaths of Mother Teresa and Jerry Falwell. Compared to those outbursts, his treatment of Saddam Hussein amounted to a eulogy. But all this was nothing compared to the pants-wetting performance quoted by Adam Shatz in the Nation in 2002 in which we capture the Hitch waxing genocidal at the prospect of laying waste to his enemies in what sounds like a fantasizing of just the kind of massacre that Major Hasan and young Cho are accused of perpetrating.
If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops... then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.' No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.
Were Hitch as brave and daring as his hero Flashman, I wonder would he really have the lack of scruple to pose as one of the Fuzzy Wuzzies, sneak into their camp, share their bread and wine, and then shoot them down like a bunch of rabid dogs while they were unawares? In the context of a war to the finish, would he consider such a feat heroic or even manly?
What emerges from the above record is a man who will not be caught dead shedding tears for the victims of violence, but will be happy to openly cheer on the slaughter when the victims are "enemy troops" and is unashamed to feel an opportunistic exhilaration at the the thought of allies or neutrals being obliterated as long as this can be made to serve the cause. And if it can't be, as in the case of Virginia Tech, he will not shirk from cataloging it as a non-event and hence a distraction and a terrible waste of human death. For Christopher, the "War on Terror" (incorporating the Wars on Iraq, on Afghanistan and on Islam) is fated to be a long ideological as well as military struggle. He is determined to be on the winning side, but as with his comrades and sputniks throughout the Military Industrial Complex, it is by no means clear whether he is more interested in achieving that final victory or in ensuring that this fight goes the distance.
Christopher Hitchens's new Slate column on the latest Fort Hood massacre is a real Tour de France. We can see that all those Vanity Fair exercise workouts have not been in vain as he bicycles all over the place in an effort, not to get at the truth, because that would be a pointless exercise for Hitchens, but simply and transparently to pin the blame for the tragedy on Islam and then scream to himself "Mission Accomplished!" Never before outside of the realms of fiction have I witnessed a crime solved so effortlessly, so promptly, and with so little equivocation as this masterpiece of deductive logic, made, as far as can be ascertained from this distance, with the aid of nothing more substantial than a selective sampling of information made available at second or third hand and a possible set of talking points from the Pentagon or the American Enterprise Institute. Indeed, the last time I was this favorably impressed by a detective's prowess was when Holmes said to his associate, "Watson, I appear to be suffering from a bout of constipation!", and the good doctor replied, "No shit, Sherlock?"
In a case like this with a media crack whore like Hitchens — the thinking man's Bill O'Reilly — what you see is what the powers that pimp and pay for his journalistic services want to draw your attention too, nothing more or less. Oh it IS interesting — I myself find it ABSOLUTELY fascinating, don't YOU? — that a mere two and a half years ago when a Korean-born student named Cho Seung-Hui allegedly launched a similar mass shooting killing 33 people including himself on the Compass at Virginia Tech, Christopher was equally certain in his diagnosis although at that time he was rudely dismissive of the idea that people should explore the significance of the event:
The grisly events at Virginia Tech involved no struggle, no sacrifice, no great principle. They were random and pointless. Those who died were not soldiers in any cause. They were not murdered by our enemies. They were not martyrs....
Almost everybody in the country seems to have taken this non-event as permission to talk the starkest nonsense. And why not? Since the slaughter raised no real issues, it was a blank slate on which anyone could doodle....
But the quest for greater "meaning" was unstoppable. Will Korean-Americans be "targeted"? (Thanks for putting the idea into the head of some nutcase, but really, what an insulting question!)
Hitch is also reported to have called the Va. Tech. shootings "a non-story" at American Society of Magazine Editors' annual board meeting/luncheon for 2007.
This time around, however, Tweedlehitch is talking contrariwise. Now he's fairly altered his meaning, now he's fairly changed his tune, as the old song goes. Here we have a struggle, soldiers, principles, causes, enemies and martyrs aplenty. What gives?
"Aah," I hear a few skeptical voices humming with index fingers waving in harmony. "Apart from lone gunmen going plumb loco, as I believe they say in Texas, and gunning down dozens of their fellows, these two stories have absolutely nothing in common." Actually though, as Hitchens has brought up the subject of salient facts, there is one very juicy connection that no proper investigation can afford to ignore. And that is that Major Hasan and Cho Seung-Hui both studied at the same college. Hasan is a graduate of Virginia Tech. To have one dingbat crazy mass shooter among the alumni may be dismissed as a freak one-off event. To produce two of them within two and a half years is beginning to look like carelessness. And when you throw in that incident last January when a Chinese graduate student was decapitated by a fellow student with a knife, you get to wondering whether there isn't something in the water or in the curriculum that contributed to this over-the-top snuff-movie violence.
If you'd like to play Holmes and Watson on the Fort Hood case, you can begin by ploughing through this little lot. It's called Fort Hood Shooting 'Oddities' and if it doesn't set you off on a Tour de France of speculation and head scratching all your own, then I guess you're just not detective material. And while you're at it, please don't forget that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is deemed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, regardless of anything Christopher may say to the contrary.
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On Ft. Hood: Hitchens ignores underlying causes, again
Hitch's latest Slate piece can be reduced to this: the Ft. Hood massacre occurred because Major Nidal Malik Hasan was an Islamic extremist bent on killing Americans. Great. So what drove Hasan to such extremes? Hitchens, as usual, doesn't even bother to address root cause questions. He doesn't believe in them, remember.
Was Hasan always an Islamic extremist bent on killing Americans? Of course not. It appears as though a variety of factors drove him to such desperate measures. First, he was to be shipped off to to Iraq. He didn't like this idea. He protested on the grounds that he didn't want to kill other Muslims. But he was ignored. He was also, as we've learned, routinely badgered for his religious beliefs. Certainly, that didn't help matters.
I think it's pretty obvious that the ultimate cause of the Fort Hood shooting is the ongoing WOT pursuit and the twin idiotic wars waged by the US against Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars that, as even Johann Hari now argues, clearly do more to encourage Islamic extremism than diminish it.
Sunday is sermon time here at Hitchens Watch. And so, dearly beloved, I ask you to contemplate the abovementioned question raised by Christopher Hitchens in the course of the Turek debates, that I have yet to hear him answer in any sensible fashion. I have my own answer to this one, but rather than just roll it off, I'd prefer each of you you to think about it for yourselves.
Here in the midst of a tussle with Turek, Hitchens struggles with his inner deamons and his conscience, but despite spending over two solid minutes waffling, he is either unwilling or unable to tell us what he thinks morality is, where it comes from or what use it is. He brings up Socrates's daemon merely as a means of dodging Turek's question and he doesn't attempt to explain what the deamon was or what Socrates thought it was. Nor does he have anything to say about what the conscience is or whether and on what occasions we should heed its voice.
However, in this next one, Christopher in his most bullish of bully pulpits does condescend to take up the heathen's burden and attempt to prove that religion is the source of immorality, and that therefore, by implication, morality must come from somewhere else. But again, the question is from where?
When I watch or listen to Hitchens on morality, I get the distinct impression that his inner daemons—and there is a whole chorus line of them inside that Broadway theater of a conscience of his—are tap dancing across the base of his cerebral cortex singing "In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, anything goes."
Ever wanted to see Hitchens debating a religious fundamentalist? Now's your chance. Here he goes one-on-one with the odious Frank Turek. Another riveting debate.
During the discussion, Hitchens makes a fascinating, and highly persuasive, argument that I've never heard from him before. You know that mean ol' Soviet Union that wasn't a religion? Well, it so was a religion. The Pope has many divisions at his disposal.
A debate like this one, so fresh and engaging as this, just makes me wan.. want to... to...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
One of my favorite blogs is The Oil Drum (TOD), a pleasant and upbeat sort of place where they discuss the impending collapse of civilization as we know it. I don't want to go into all that just now, but on a thread I was reading today a denizen calling himself oldfarmermac made a comment that struck home with me, and which I think is pertinent to how the issue of how Theism-Atheism is too often debated these days. It should provide some food for thought for the less obnoxious among the various Brights, Brilliants and other Luminaries. One thing that occurred to me is that following mac's track leads the deliciously ironic possibility that the efforts of Christopher Hitchens and his fellow horsemen are, by virtue of their very assiduousness, actually reinforcing the very beliefs they are intended to undermine. Note that mac is coming from the non-theistic side of the ballpark, and is intent on saving modern society not from religion but from a catastrophic collapse due to a failure to wean ourselves off of unsustainably high energy consumption. So here goes:
Religions—we're stuck with them. Lord Chesterfield correctly said something to the effect that when men quit believing in God they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING—they just start believing in something else.
Some of those something elses might arguably be described as National Socialisn, communism, capitalism, nihilism,social Darwinianism.....
So as a practical matter perhaps we ought to be careful what we wish for—we might actually get it and it might be worse.
I tend to be rather sympathetic to the pious because (my own twisted version of this old saying) "but for the grace of God ....we are them".
I am not PC but I do understand the importance of treating everybody in a respectful and dignified way and it distresses me when otherwise very polite and responsible people unload on folks who —thru no fault of thier own—happen to believe is something that ain't so.
In this forum it probably really doesn't matter—it is not likely that many seriously pious folks read TOD—BUT IT IS A MAJOR MISTAKE to make fun of people's beliefs in more mainstream forums.
If I had to point out one single PARTICULAR reason why I don't have much faith in most popular liberal initiatives it would be that the average liberal grossly overestimates the general level of knowledge and mental sophistication of the man on the street.
She gets really bent out of shape when somebody calls her a broad or an addled female , and then she turns around and accuses half or more of the population of being ignorant superstitious louts.The TRUTH of the accusation is not the issue-not if the goal is to achieve change.The issue is that even a person who follows as well as he can the teachings of forbearence, turning the other cheek, etc, develops a lasting and deep seated antipathy towards you and what you stand for.
This my friends is NOT the way to convert people to your way of thinking.
For those who may remember some of my own anti religious rants—I am not yet THAT far gone—I just reserve the right unto myself to call my family and my ancestors and millions of others ignorant when I feel like it—in the same way that a black comedian can use the n word if he feels like it.
We all have to make our decisions the best way we can—which means relying on our own judgement when our knowledge is sufficient-and relying on the leadership and advice of others when it isn't.
The average person who takes his or her religion seriously lacks any significant understanding of the sciences, but he has at least a lyyman's grasp of the world of law, business, politics, and so forth.Being UNABLE (what part of unable do WE fail to understand?) to make sense of the arguments made in this or similar forums, he relies on the judgement and advice of whoever he percieves as his friends and allies.
You have lost him or her forever as an ally or convert as soon as you utter the words ignorant, superstitious, deluded....any place he will hear them.
Why are we suprised when he turns into a "rightwingnut?"
We need to seperate the message from the social commentary when we go out into the world and preach OUR message. Let us not be mistaken—there is no hope of EDUCATING the masses within the time frame available—they must be, if possible, gently lead to the correct conclusions by persausion—logic is inadequate.
Please—no one should interpret this rant in terms of feeling the need to apologize for hurting my feelings nor as a personal criticism coming from my direction.
All I'm trying to say is we should be a little more politically savvy.There is no need to go out of our way to furnish the Jerry Falwells of this world with ammo.
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The lesson of 2009: Those who gloat over past tradgedies are condemned to repeat them as farce
In yet another boring Slate article in what seems a lifetime of boring Slate articles on what could have been a fun topic—the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—Christopher complains about other people's boring articles and then starts dabbling in economics.
This 20th anniversary has seen yet another crop of boring articles about how so many people, especially in former East Germany, are supposedly "nostalgic" for the security of the old Stalinist system. Such sentimental piffle—which got a good airing in that irritating movie Good Bye Lenin!—would not long survive a reading of another new book: Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen. Making effective use of archives opened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Sebestyen describes the day in late October 1989 when the head of State Planning in the German Democratic Republic, Gerhard Schürer, presented the party leadership with the unvarnished economic news. "Nearly 60 per cent of East Germany's entire economic base could be written off as scrap, and productivity in mines and factories was nearly 50 per cent behind the West." Even more appalling was the 12-fold increase in the GDR's national debt—a situation so grotesque that it had been classified as a state secret lest loans from Western creditors dry up. "Just to avoid further indebtedness," wrote Schürer, "would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable." So the wall came down just before the hermetic state that it enclosed would have imploded. I doubt that there would have been much "nostalgia" for that.
I can't read that description of the decline and fall of the GDR without recalling that more and more of us "Wessies" these days are witnessing our national economic bases being written off as scrap, our national debts spiralling out of control, our employment and pension prospects bleakening and our living standards plummeting. And unlike those lucky East Germans, there's no wall for us to knock down and nobody to bail us out.
The lamps are going out all over Europe, not to mention America; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
At Least Christopher got it mostly right last week about Afghanistan. The place is a banana republic—or rather, an opium franchise, Karzai is a Chaucerian fraud, the UN from Wan Ki-Loon downwards are shameful (Hitch's favorite adjective) in their complicity, and only Peter Galbraith came out of the Brechtian farce of an election with his honour intact.
While we are bombarded by scare stories about how swine flu might turn out to be a re-run of the Black Death, so far the "pandemic" has, taken globally, been milder than ordinary conventional common or garden seasonal flu. But of course, it might mutate at any time, say the flu-meisters, so merely as a precaution, we should all roll up our sleeves and "just get your damn vaccine", as one bubblehead put it on ABCCBSMBCCNNFOX.
And while the media circus is obviously designed to panic the population into getting their shots (most swine flu vaccines are given in two injections), quite a lot of the population are in no mood to be corralled into compliance on this one. But, like with so much going on at the global level these days, the politics and the facts of swine flu are draped in a fog of lies, deception, half-truths, fearmongering and tabloid hyperbole.
Enter Teresa Forcades I Vila, a Benedictine nun at the monastery of San Benet in Montserrat, Barcelona in addition to being a medical practitioner with a string of qualifications including a degree in Medicine and a PhD in Public Health from the University of Barcelona, a degree in Internal Medicine from New York State University, and a degree in Theology from Harvard. OK, I admit it. Before the inevitable tirades of "Spanish wingnut", "conspiracy theorist" and "bride of the Black Pope" arrive, I'm just trying to tell you how classy she is.
Concerned about what's going on with regard to this nasty swine flu business, Sister Teresa has set out to explain the relevant facts, beginning with the history of the virus since 1918 and what all those letters and numbers in a flu strain name refer to. She then goes on to cover the extremely unfortunate Baxter incident last February where these pharm boys managed to contaminate 72kg of swine flu vaccine ingredients with a mix of bird and swine flu viruses that could—had an unusually diligent Czech lab technician not carried out an unauthorized test feeding the brew to some ferrets—have ended up killing literally millions of people across Europe.
Moving on, Teresa discusses the WHO's decision to declare swine flu a pandemic despite it being less virulent than regular seasonal flu, and mentions the plans a number of governments appear to be harboring to impose mandatory vaccination on their populations. For example, this spring the Massachusetts Senate passed a pandemic flu preparation bill (apparently without bothering to read it) enabling forced vaccinations and quarantine, although the House subsequently watered it down.
Relying on information reported (although for the most part vastly mostly under-reported) in the mainstream media, Teresa talks about the consequences of the WHO's pandemic declaration, discusses the pros, cons and controversies surrounding the current swine flu vaccine, and argues that we should all be campaigning for people's right not to be forced to submit to vaccination against our will and that those who voluntarily accept vaccination and suffer harm or death as a result should be entitled to adequate financial compensation, just as they would if they were poisoned by a pot noodle or fried by a faulty microwave oven.
I'm sticking this up because not because it's fascinating or educational—although it is both of those things, but because I think it's vital for people to have this information—so vital that even if you only came here to find out who Hitchens managed to insult or offend this week and you don't need this crap I still think you deserve the opportunity to be exposed to it. What you do with it is your own concern. But as Teresa herself emphasizes, whatever else you do please remain calm and don't panic.
Collision (2009) Starring Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Wilson Rated: NC-∞ (Not Suitable For Anyone)
0 out of 4 Stars
Webster's Dictionary defines "Collision" as:
KO-LISH-UN - noun 1. A crash; a disaster; a horrible accident causing much suffering; "That collision I saw today sure was agonizing to watch." 2. The act or process of collision.
So I guess we can say one good thing about this documentary "film" and concede that the title is well chosen, for it's a disaster of a B-grade movie that crashes as soon as it takes off. The "film"makers here have cut up a bunch of Hitchens-Wilson debates off of Youtube, bundled them together, added a dash of behind-the-scenes banter, and sold it off as a film. It's a credit-default swap of a movie, and about as derivative and worthless. Amateurish, shiftless, sloppy, dithering, pointless, it's like they re-edited the H-W debates into a bad MTV music video for kids with attention-deficit disorder, right down to the lame soundtrack. Gangsta rap with Pastor Douglas Wilson? I mean come on, Wilson is about as white as a human being can get. It's just so awful and out-of-place.
Many Afghans believe foreign forces providing support for insurgents in the north.
By Ahmad Kawoosh in Mazar-e-Sharif (ARR No. 343, 26-Oct-09) Persistent accounts of western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taleban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.
One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.
“Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taleban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams,” he said. “They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army.”
This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taleban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.
Helicopters are almost exclusively the domain of foreign forces in Afghanistan – the international military controls the air space, and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.
“Our fight against the Taleban is nonsense,” said the soldier from Shahin Corps. “Our foreigner ‘friends’ are friendlier to the opposition.”
For months or even years, rumours have been circulating in Afghanistan that the Taleban are being financed or even directly supported militarily by the foreign forces.
In part it stems from an inability to believe that major foreign armies cannot defeat a ragtag bunch of insurgents; in addition, Afghanistan has been a centre of foreign intrigue for so long that belief in plots comes naturally to many war-weary Afghans.
The international troops hotly deny that they are supporting the insurgents.
“This entire business with the helicopters is just a rumour,” said Brigadier General Juergen Setzer, recently appointed commander for the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, in the north. “It has no basis in reality, according to our investigations.”
The general added that ISAF-North had overall control of the air space in the northern region.
But the persistent rumours that foreign helicopters have been sighted assisting the Taleban in northern Afghanistan were given an unexpected boost in mid-October by Afghan president Hamed Karzai, who told the media that his administration was investigating similar reports that “unknown” helicopters were ferrying the insurgents from Helmand province in the south to Baghlan, Kunduz, and Samangan provinces in the north.
Captain Tim Dark, of Britain’s Task Force Helmand, was vehement in his reaction.
“The thought that British soldiers could be aiding and abetting the enemy is just rubbish,” he said. “We have had 85 casualties so far this year.”
Engineer Mohammad Omar, governor of Kunduz, refused to comment on the issue, but Enayatullah Enayat, governor of Samangan, also denied that the helicopters were moving the opposition around in Samangan.
“I am in contact with both national and foreign forces in Samangan,” he said. “I have not seen any suspicious helicopters bringing in the Taleban.”
The north has recently witnessed a spike in insurgent activity, particularly in Kunduz and Baghlan. Provinces that were relatively calm even six months ago are experiencing armed attacks, suicide bombings, even outright Taleban control over several districts.
In a district of Baghlan province, Baghlan-e-Markazi, residents witnessed a battle last month in which they insisted that two foreign helicopters had delivered the Taleban fighters who then attacked their district centre.
“I saw the helicopters with my own eyes,” said Sayed Rafiq from Baghlan-e-Markazi. “They landed near the foothills and offloaded dozens of Taleban with turbans, and wrapped in patus (a blanket-type shawl).”
According to numerous media reports, the Taleban attacked the district centre, and the district police chief along with the head of counter-narcotics and a number of soldiers were killed.
Commander Amir Gul district governor of Baghlan-e-Markazi insisted that the Taleban fighters had been delivered by helicopter.
“I do not know to which country the helicopters belonged,” he told IWPR. “But these are the same helicopters that are taking the Taleban from Helmand to Kandahar and from there to the north, especially to Baghlan.”
According to Amir Gul, the district department of the National Security Directorate had identified the choppers, but it refused to comment.
Baghlan police chief Mohammad Kabir Andarabi said that his department had reported to the central government that foreign helicopters were transporting the Taleban into Baghlan.
The Baghlan provincial governor, Mohammad Akbar Barikzai, told a news conference on October 21 that his intelligence and security services had discovered that unidentified helicopters were landing at night in some parts of the province.
“We are investigating,” he said.
Rumours have reached the point where US ambassador Karl Eikenberry felt compelled to address them last week at a ceremony honouring the more than 5,500 Afghan police and soldiers who have died during the present war.
The reports were “outrageous and baseless”, said Eikenberry, as reported by McClatchy newspapers. “We would never aid the terrorists that attacked us on September 11, that are killing our soldiers, your soldiers, and innocent Afghan civilians every day.”
Afghan political analysts have woven elaborate theories as to why the foreign forces would be helping the Taleban.
According to Rahim Rahimi, a professor at Balkh University, America and the United Kingdom are trying to keep all of Afghanistan insecure, so that people feel the need for the foreign forces.
“They will try and destabilise the north any way they can,” Rahimi said. “It is a good excuse to expand their presence in the area, to get a grip on the gas and oil in central Asia.”
Fighting Islamic extremists was one way to insert themselves into the area without provoking a fierce reaction from Russia and the Central Asian governments, he added.
Numerous websites have devoted blogs, columns and “investigative reports” to the helicopter rumours; literally everyone has heard the whispers, and many, if not most, believe them. It provides an added reason to suspect and fear the foreign forces, as well as an explanation for the rapid spread of the insurgency throughout the country.
In the end, it may not really matter whether the rumours are ever substantiated. The firm belief that Afghans have in them can determine attitudes and behaviour, further fueling mistrust of the westerners in their midst.
Ahmad Kawoosh is an IWPR journalist based in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Last year, Christopher made an appeal to his readers for books for the newly opened American University of Iraq in Sulaimaniya or AUI-S, a fledgling oasis of learning in the heart of Kurdistan. At about the same time as Hitch was begging for books, Hitchens Watch's very own Mark G, got himself hired as an instructor at the University and spent the best part of a year teaching there. Now his end-of-term report on the AUI-S is out at Counterpunch, and the tale he tells is far from flattering. While the university brochure features an enormous, very modern-looking building that does not exist", the actual classes are conducted "outside in rows of box-shaped huts (which some students call “chicken shacks”)."
On the plus side, the prime mover and shaker behind the project, Iraqi deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region Government of Iraq Dr. Barham Salih is a good friend of Hitch's and seems to have every bit as much personal integrity as Hitch's other best Iraqi buddy, Ahmed Chalabai. Meanwhile, the first chancellor of the University, John Agresto is a former Coalition Provisional Authority man with connections to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and who used to work with Lynne Cheney at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hence Mark can be forgiven some cynicism:
Given these facts, it is not surprising that AUI-S functions more like a political tool, rather than as an educational enterprise. That, of course, does not stop its leaders from promoting AUI-S as a real university bent on spreading democracy. Create the appearance of a thriving western-style university in Iraq and then cite it as evidence of Iraq’s progress toward a liberal democracy. That is pretty much the idea. It looks good on paper for both pro-war cheerleaders and Iraqi politicians in power to brag about. However, almost everything about AUI-S – aside from the inept, villainous crowd who run it – is artificial.
Those who believe religion poisons everything must be anxious about the present state of goings on at Sulaimani, because with the passing on of Agresto from the scene, AUI-S's current chancellor is, if Mark's description is anything to go by, an out-of-the-cloister Bible-thumping Christian who communicates with the teaching staff via scripture, not to mention pseudo-scripture. Is this really the kind of academic institution our fearless Antitheist wants us all to support?
The important work of actually teaching students, as I learned in a most unpleasant way, takes a back seat to everything, especially to the egos of the administrators, including the current chancellor Joshua Mitchell. Mitchell is a straight-laced preppy conservative who both looks and sounds a lot like the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Mitchell makes little attempt to reach out to teachers or students. His driver pulls him up to the front door in a Mercedes every morning; he slithers into his office and is almost never heard from throughout the day. He’s completely out of touch with what’s actually happening on the ground level at AUI-S. When Mitchell does appear, he makes it a point to showcase his Christian beliefs, often quoting from the Bible during speeches, talks, and in email sermons to yours truly. For instance, he recently wrote to me, “You have shown yourself only too quick to point out the splinter in someone else’s eye but not the beam in your own.” (Matt 7:1-5) He ended a separate email lecture with a line that I could not find in the Bible, but which sounds Biblesque: “Be not a perfectionist, for the world you live in is a deeply flawed one, which seldom moves forward by force of arms or by the force of words.”
As this little old blog has been pointingoutfor sometime, the shamelessly endless Hitchens-D'Souza book tours, er, I mean the epic series of public debates where these two modern-day philosopher kings wrestle with the great questions of our time in the grand tradition of Lincoln and Douglas, have proven to be, to all and sundry, a complete and utter failure. No doubt that commercially they've enjoyed some modest success, but since they've lacked any intellectual substance or dynamism whatsoever it means that they have been, in the more critical sense, a total failure. The Marxoid's Dialectical Three-Card Monty of thesis and antithesis has synthesized into dick-all here. It's the same God-damned show every time: a tacky two-ring circus contrived so these two clowns can peddle their latest books and hawk themselves in the most gratuitous way imaginable; it's a cheap dog and pony show where every so often the Hitch-Beast stands up on his two hind legs, growling and baying madly at the crowd, to gasps from a terrified audience, horrified by his wretched beastliness.
The fact that these "debates" are dog-and-pony shows can no longer be denied, as it is now officially official. The Hitch-Monster himself has conceded that he is indeed the "dog to Dinesh's pony" during an appearance on the Laura Ingraham show recently:
You can check out the rest on the Youtube channel of that toiling Hitchophile, "operationmongoose."
I'm glad to hear that Hitch, The Dog-Faced Goy, has come clean and admitted that his ostentatious little book tour masquerading as something serious is just what everyone, sans a few losers and groupies on Youtube, recognized it as from the beginning.
And it appears that Bitchens has cheated on D'Souza and scheduled a series of trysts with Pastor Douglas Wilson. But it's for a worthy cause of course. It's in promotion of a documentary film shot to promote their new book that promotes the debates they've had with each other over some of their books.
Concerning the very fresh, and very unique, debate that takes place between The Hitch and Wilson on Ingraham's show, let me just say that the moniker Mr. Dithers might be more appropriate than Bitchens here. As usual, whenever Douglas Wilson makes some point that Hitchens (apparently) can't deal with, he just dodges it and goes off on God knows what tangent. Right off the bat Hitches pretty much dodges Wilson's challenge about the metaphysical basis of morality in a world without God. You would think that hanging around with Wilson all the time and hearing his arguments constantly (which aren't very novel in the first place) would give Bitchens more than an opportunity to come up with an immediate, decisive riposte to Wilson's claims, but instead, Bitchens has to run away from these points, with his tail between his legs.
But friends, this truly pales in comparison to the crime that Hitchens commits in this appearance, where he demonstrates that he still knows how to really wound his former Comrades on the Left. Laura Ingraham starts off with some God-awful caterwauling from Mr. Bob "You Got To Serve Somebody" Dylan, a cut from the notorious, and best forgotten, gospel period, to which Hitchens bizarrely blurts out: "I have to say it, he never sings more beautifully than in this phase of his life."
What??? Judas!
I think that this pisses me off more than his support for the war in the Iraq. This guy is the fucking poster boy for the Neoatheist movement? What a disgrace.
So I guess it's safe to assume that Chris Judas Hitchens is also big fan of Zimmy's new cheesefest of a Christmas album. Yuucccckkk. Garlic to a vampire for me.
But Hitch doesn't stop there. Later on he rips into John Lennon's classic, antitheist lyrics in "Imagine." One would think that Hitch would sympathize with a song that declares it doesn't want to believe in heaven, but instead, he sweeps it, in one fell swoop, into the dustbin just because Lennon dares to envision world peace on a planet liberated from the Nation-State system.
I think I'll give Hitch the benefit of the doubt about Dylan here and assume that he's just trying to fuck Laura Ingraham, because he cannot mean what he is saying. He must be unaware that he is expressing such contempt for the victims of Dylan's crimes, and cannot intend what his words imply.
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Hitchens quotes Hegel, gets it all embarassingly wrong.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. In a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes our lad opens his first paragraph with a thrilling display of his vast and profound knowledge of 19th century German Idealist philosophy.
'“The owl of Minerva,” wrote Hegel, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” By this he meant to say that an epoch or an era cannot really be judged or estimated until it has entered its closing phase. For those of us fated to lead smaller and less portentous existences, it is still the gathering shade of evening that very often gives rise to our most intense, and sometimes necessarily our most melancholy, moments of reflection and retrospect.'
'Christopher Hitchens in his review of “Nocturnes,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (Oct. 4), misconstrues the passage he cites from Hegel about the owl of Minerva flying only with the falling of the dusk. He takes this to mean that an era cannot be judged “until it has entered its closing phase.” Hegel’s claim, however, bestows no special importance on a closing phase; it refers instead to the end of an era, which is confirmed as such by the appearance of philosophical critique and appraisal that involves making explicit the ideas and beliefs that drove that era but could not be fully articulated until it was over.
Consider Hegel’s passage: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a form of life grown old. Philosophy cannot rejuvenate it, but only understand it. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.” He illustrated his point by the passage from the Enlightenment to the era of Romanticism; the assumptions, virtues and limitations of the Age of Reason could be made clear by its Romantic critics only after it came to an end. There is no endorsement of the magic of the twilight or the evening in Hegel’s image of the owl. In fact, one can take the figure quite literally — the dusk comes only after the sun has set.'
JOHN E. SMITH Hamden, Conn. Professor of philosophy emeritus at Yale University
When will Americans learn that a plummy, English, public school accent is not a substitute for genuine scholarship?
Steven Poole, the London-based hammer of the Decents and analyst of Unspeak, has taken aim at one of Hitch's latest Slate columns on why it's essential to preemptively bomb the Persians out of the Middle Ages and into the Fourth World and come up trumps. In response to the Contrarian Vulgarian's enjoinder to his loyal louseketeers to "Go look this up, and you will discover that those who didn't want to confront Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein would always blah, blah, black sheep, have you any wool, Steven retorts:
Oh, I did just look it up, and it’s bullshit? Those who argued against invading Iraq in 2003 did not, in fact, “always” argue that war was undesirable because Saddam was too fearsome. But Hitchens needs to rewrite history in this way as a set-up for the self-congratulatorily contrarian logic of the rest of the piece. It goes like this:
1 Iran might not be as close to getting a nuclear weapon as we thought; therefore 2 It is all the more imperative that we attack Iran now!
Oh, did I say "attack Iran"? I paraphrase. It is not quite what Hitchens says. Instead, he muses delicately on our duty to "disarm the mullahs", and toys with the idea of "a minor disruption or dislocation of one of the existing key Iranian sites". There is the issue of that tedious conventional military wisdom, which holds, as Hitchens sighs, "The target sites are, anyway, too much dispersed and too deeply buried. You know how it goes." Yet even if that's true, Hitchens cannot bear the idea of sitting in his armchair without warlike acts being performed on his behalf, and his final way of not actually saying "Let's attack Iran now!" has an almost plaintive desperation to it.
No sane multicellular organism could possibly disagree with Steven here, and George Orwell must be banging his head on the lid of his coffin in outrage at the slippery skills his self-appointed acolyte Hitchens employs to avoid stating clearly what he is intending to communicate. While on the subject of Orwell, let's take a paragraph from Notes on Nationalism and ask our selves whether it applies to You Know Who:
It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.
Coming back to Unspeak, there are some interesting comments on the article too.
Dave Weeden: "It’s hardly worth bothering with Hitchens these days. Everything he writes seems to be encoded for fellow true believers, and only makes any sense if you’re nodding along (very like an acolyte before a mullah)...."
Karl: "Well, Hitchens is trying to retrospectively salvage his ‘credibility’ as a commentator on world events. The best way to achieve that is to link the fact that the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999 achieved peace and progress of sorts for the former nations of Yugoslavia with Iraq which has dropped out of the news recently but remains a bloodbath. Hitchens conflates two very different wars out of context: the ethnic cleansing ( yes, it is a legitimate term and not Unspeak ) in Yugoslavia preceded Western military involvement whereas the ethnic-faith based conflict in Iraq followed it."
Sung and strummed in Wylie, Texas by Jack Hardy with backup from Kate MacLeod on fiddle and Robert K. Wolf. on guitar, this paean to George W. Bush dates back to the spring of last year. I watched and listened a couple of times back then and I'm shocked to see that after all this time it's had less than a 900 hits. But maybe Hitchens Watch readers can change that if all six of you view it.
I'm a big fan of Kate, a talented songwriter and vocalist who must have learned her music directly from the Little People. But I'm much less of a fan of Dubya's and I can't think why they were being so nice to him in this song.
There isn't much of Kate on YouTube, but I've found a recent one of her performing her own composition Lark in the Morning on the porch of a friend's house in Utah. (Who know's what's in the root cellar!)
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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