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Mike at Cold Fury excerpts two great articles contrasting the fascination of the socialist left with tyranny,  and what happens when you really do speak truth to power.

Excerpting his excerpts, here’s a whiff of Ralph Peters:

The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate - especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.

The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century’s great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left.

[Note: Japan's regime arose from a true imperialism, not capitalism or libertarianism.]

And a good strong snort of Christopher Hitchens, himself a leftist who seems to be waking up:

The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.

Read the whole things, all three of them.

Trailer for the upcoming Mythbusters episode debunking the myth that the moon missions were a giant hoax:

[link if the embed doesn't work]
[via Bad Astronomy]

Earlier, I referred to Irena Sendler, hero of the Holocaust, getting elbowed out of the Nobel Peace Prize by the Goreacle.

I missed this cartoon attached to the story at Flopping Aces:

Here’s what I’d like to see, in it’s entirety, coming down from the Supreme Beings in a bit more than six hours:

“The right of the people,” you idiots, “to keep and bear arms” that actually work “shall not” even “be infringed”.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to the range.

I’ll be happy, though, if they just uphold the Circuit Court’s decision to void the D.C. gun control laws in question, on the grounds that they are so egregiously infringing that they cannont survive any level of scrutiny.

However, if they hold that the government can take personal property in civil forfeiture or eminent domain,  give illegal combatants killing American soldiers on foreign soil full habeus privileges, and declare that even the most brutal of child rapers do not deserve the death penalty, but that ciitizens in our nation’s capitol cannot be trusted with the means to defend themselves, then they will utterly abdicate their legitimacy.

We’ll see in a few hours.

The Geek With A .45 posts a beautiful musing on the meaning of Heller. No spoilers here; just go read the whole thing.

Ghost of a Flea links to the Quote of the Day from Kathy Shaidle:

The difference between what the Nazis said about the Jews and what people today are saying about radical Muslims is…

What we’re saying about radical Muslims is true.

To pretend otherwise is to perform the intellectual equivalent of hiding Nazis in your attic during World War II.

By the way, not only is what’s being said by pro-War commentators  about radical Muslims true, the radical Muslims themselves are saying it, proudly, and are demonstrating and even rioting to get their points across.

Oh, by all means, you should definitely read the whole damning thing, which includes this QotD runner up:

But then again, Muslims don’t care much for books, do they?

Except for the Koran, which contains more hate speech than every issue of Maclean’s published in the last hundred years put together.

(Now THAT would be an interesting case for the Human Rights Commission. I’m a free speech absolutist, but I’d love to see how a case calling the Koran “hate speech” would play out, what with all its calls to violence against “apes and pigs” , i.e. Christians and Jews.)

Yeah, you should probably read the opinion piece that triggered her outburst, in which Haroon Siddiqui attempts justify the tyrannical “Human Rights” Commissions of Canada.

Q & O has a calmer, more detailed critique.

As always:

There is no God, not even Allah, and Mohammed was no one’s prophet, but a psychotic child-raping, hate-mongering, mass-murderer.

And again, it doesn’t matter whether or not that’s true. What matters is that I have the perfect right to say it, no matter how offensive it is.

[updated to include the runner-up QotD and Q&O.]

Cultural self-perpetuation is on my mind today. I’ve posted before on this Civics Literacy Quiz, which was given to freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. By and large, they failed miserably, with the Ivy League students doing the worst. (I scored 55 out of 60, an A-.)

The QOTD post below, “I’ve heard of that,” links to a brief introduction to the problem.

Now go over to Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and read the long version. I’m not even going to bother to quote from it. It is infinitely worth your time, particularly you home schoolers out there, who are facing state execution, because you are doing the job that state teachers are specifically trying to eradicate: turning your kids into functional, literate citizens. (Hi, Chanda!)

Oh, OK, fine then, fine. Here’s your quote:

I am of the carefully considered opinion that both our media and our educational system have been largely taken over by people who are acolytes of the Holy Grail that Socialism promised, and who put themselves in those positions in the belief that it is up to them to help create the New Men that Socialism cannot succeed without. Our schools, especially, have become centers for the teaching of collectivism, “identity politics,” and for want of a better term, “rage against the machine.”

And to some extent, it has worked.

To a larger extent, it has not.

What has resulted are the unintended consequences of declining standards, high dropout rates, functional illiteracy and innumeracy, almost no general knowledge of geography, history, or civics, and nearly complete ignorance of science - both general and applied.

Schools should be the foundry through which the raw material of our youth is run, coming out the other end with strong and tempered minds well prepared for the world. The ore hasn’t changed, but the ratio of dross to valuable product has grown precipitously.

OK, I gave you the quote. Now do your share and read the whole thing, where Baker backs it up with statistics, with quotes, with news articles, with cold hard logic.

Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves.

Today’s the day we remember how precious freedom is.

The daughter of the head of state of the world’s leading republic was married yesterday. The press expressed some puzzlement that the bride and her father opted for a relatively small, private ceremony, when it could well have been a major affair of state and a huge public gala.

Let me explain to the idiots with mikes and cameras: In a monarchy, marriages are indeed affairs of state, what with the succession and all that. The doings of Princes and Princesses and Queen Mums are essentially legitimate public business.

Some folks, on the other hand, fought a war to rid themselves and their descendants of that crap, and were careful to explicitly forbid it: “No title of nobility shall be granted “.

The refusal to make this wedding a public affair quite properly reflects that attitude. The leader in question is going to rule for less than a year, and his successor will not remotely be a member of his family. His daughter is in no way a player in national politics. The wedding is in fact a private affair, and is none of my business, or yours, or of anybody not invited to the wedding.

To the degree you members of the press do not understand this, you are not fit for your jobs. To the degree you slather after the opportunity to treat as nobility a man and his daughter you have reviled for almost eight years now, you are cowards and hypocrites.

To the degree you would have used invitations as an opportunity to take the most unflattering, even humiliating, photos and videos you could manage, you are poltroons and boors.

The Distributed Republic makes May Day a “Day of Remembrance” for the millions of victims of Communism.

John Wilde’s introduction, “Remembrance”:

Why bring up communism again? Isn’t the idea dead? Haven’t most communist societies collapsed?

The answer is that the tragedy has never been properly memorialized, its victims rarely acknowledged. Too many too easily brush aside the suffering that occurred. Today, we do our small part to remember some of the victims. Keep them in your thoughts–the millions of victims of communism worldwide, the Cossacks extradited to the USSR by nations of the ‘free world’, the victims of the Khmer Rouge, and the North Korean laborers in modern day Russia and Czech Republic.

[links added]

But even in the Gulags, people found a way to love.

Never forgive. Never forget.

Update:
“Victims of Communism Day” over at the Volokh Conspiracy. I’m please to have been early in the pack on this today.

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And Billy Beck at Two–Four points to Reuters video of a 500 year old ritual in the village of Solapur, in western India’s Maharastrawhere district, where infants are dropped from a 15 meter tower (that’s about one and a half stories) into a sheet held by the crowd. This is billed as a Muslim ritual, but frankly, it looks more to me like an Indian ritual. I love it. It’s an annual reminder to parents: “Hey, look folks: the little buggers aren’t all that fragile!”