Monday, October 10, 2016

Okay, forget about the religion aspect and the jihad...

THE MUSLIM PROBLEM



Written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Centre.


Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.

The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.

Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.

No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.

The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbours both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.

The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.

Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.

The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.

Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.

There are only two solutions; war or migration.

Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.

Let’s assume that the Iraq War had never happened. How would a religiously and ethnically divided Iraq have managed its growth from 13 million in the eighties to 30 million around the Iraq War to 76 million in 2050?

The answer is a bloody civil war followed by genocide, ethnic cleansing and migration.

What’s happening now would have happened anyway. It was already happening under Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad has one of the highest population densities in the world. And it has no future. The same is true across the region. The only real economic plan anyone here has is to get money from the West.

Plan A for getting money out of the West is creating a crisis that will force it to intervene. That can mean anything from starting a war to aiding terrorists that threaten the West. Muslim countries keep shooting themselves in the foot so that Westerners will rush over to kiss the booboo and make it better.

Plan B is to move to Europe.

What's This?
And Plan B is a great plan. It’s the only real economic plan that works. At least until the West runs out of native and naïve Westerners who foot the bill for all the migrants, refugees and outright settlers.

For thousands of dollars, a Middle Eastern Muslim can pay to be smuggled into Europe. It’s a small investment with a big payoff. Even the lowest tier welfare benefits in Sweden are higher than the average salary in a typical Muslim migrant nation. And Muslim migrants are extremely attuned to the payoffs. It’s why they clamour to go to Germany or Sweden, not Greece or Slovakia. And it’s why they insist on big cities with an existing Muslim social welfare infrastructure, not some rural village.

A Muslim migrant is an investment for an entire extended family. Once the young men get their papers, family reunification begins. That doesn’t just mean every extended family member showing up and demanding their benefits. It also means that the family members will be selling access to Europe to anyone who can afford it. Don’t hike or raft your way to Europe. Mohammed or Ahmed will claim that you’re a family member. Or temporarily marry you so you can bring your whole extended family along.

Mohammed gets paid. So does Mo’s extended family which brokers these transactions. Human trafficking doesn’t just involve rafts. It’s about having the right family connections. 

And all that is just the tip of a very big business iceberg.

Where do Muslim migrants come up with a smuggling fee that amounts to several years of salary for an average worker? Some come from wealthy families. Others are sponsored by crime networks and family groups that are out to move everything from drugs to weapons to large numbers of people into Europe.

Large loans will be repaid as the new migrants begin sending their new welfare benefits back home. Many will be officially unemployed even while unofficially making money through everything from slave labor to organized crime. European authorities will blame their failure to participate in the job market on racism rather than acknowledging that they exist within the confines of an alternate economy.

It’s not only individuals or families who can pursue Plan B. Turkey wants to join the European Union. It’s one solution for an Islamist populist economy built on piles of debt. The EU has a choice between dealing with the stream of migrants from Turkey moving to Europe. Or all of Turkey moving into Europe.

The West didn’t create this problem. Its interventions, however misguided, attempted to manage it.

Islamic violence is not a response to Western colonialism. Not only does it predate it, but as many foreign policy experts are so fond of pointing out, its greatest number of casualties are Muslims. The West did not create Muslim dysfunction. And it is not responsible for it. Instead the dysfunction of the Muslim world keeps dragging the West in. Every Western attempt to ameliorate it, from humanitarian aid to peacekeeping operations, only opens up the West to take the blame for Islamic dysfunction.

The permanent refugee crisis is a structural problem caused by the conditions of the Muslim world.

The West can’t solve the crisis at its source. Only Muslims can do that. And there are no easy answers. But the West can and should avoid being dragged down into the black hole of Muslim dysfunction.

Even Germany’s Merkel learned that the number of refugees is not a finite quantity that can be relieved with a charitable gesture. It’s the same escalating number of people that will show up if you start throwing bags of money out of an open window. And it’s a number that no country can absorb.

Muslim civil wars will continue even if the West never intervenes in them because their part of the world is fundamentally unstable. These conflicts will lead to the displacement of millions of people. But even without violence, economic opportunism alone will drive millions to the West. And those millions carry with them the dysfunction of their culture that will make them a burden and a threat.

If Muslims can’t reconcile their conflicts at home, what makes us think that they will reconcile them in Europe? Instead of resolving their problems through migration, they only export them to new shores. The same outbursts of Islamic violence, xenophobia, economic malaise and unsustainable growth follow them across seas and oceans, across continents and countries. Distance is no answer. Travel is no cure.

Solving Syria will solve nothing. The Muslim world is full of fault lines. It’s growing and it’s running out of room to grow. We can’t save Muslims from themselves. We can only save ourselves from their violence.

The permanent Muslim refugee crisis will never stop being our crisis unless we close the door.
ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Centre, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Immortalized in the best political 'toon in the homestretch of the most pivotal political season of our time...thanks Chris!

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/believe/

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

They call him woollllyyyyy...Wooly Booger!

At Chris Muir's Day by Day cartoon, the gang at the Double D ranch are infiltrated by anti-Trump protestors (really just rabble rousers paid by Bernie's money man). They are met pretty angrily by the resident bad-ass Texas Longhorn bull known as Tabasco who was fitted with a warning bell, and I got to remembering old Wooly Booger.


I grew up along the shore of Lake Okeechobee where our rented house was surrounded by a small, about 12-15 acre pasture where the landlord (a big boss at US Sugar Corp.) kept his little hobby herd, maybe 20-25 mixed breed cows lorded over by Ol’ Wooly Booger*.

See, USSC in addition to its cane plantations and mills was at that time a major player in the champion Brahma Bull world, with operations in Australia, Costa Rica, and right there on the Big O. They did some breeding experiments too, and Wooly was a hu-mon-gous Brahma/Angus mix…a Brangus, and he was one mean ol’ sumbitch. Get into *his* pasture, especially anywhere near *his* cows, and your life was truly in danger. No horns, just a huge curly-maned head, with shoulders and chest like a double or triple sized buffalo. And he was fast; he could be on you all the way from the other side of the pasture before you knew it, so you had better stay within a few yards of the board ‘n bobwahr fence, which he could have easily ran right through, but he knew his domain was inside its borders and you were safe if you stayed outside.

So Mr. Stacy put a big old cowbell on Wooly Booger as a warning for us five young 'uns out there, and when you were playing ball or whatever in that pasture and had your back turned and you heard that thing clanging, you better drop everything and head for that fence as fast as you could go. Only Mr. Stacy dared stand up to that bull, he was a huge man and he carried a big lead pipe with him when he was out of the truck; I think that bought him some mutual respect from Wooly, even though he could have easily stomped him down. I saw the bull prove that point one time when Mr. Stacy drove his company car into the pasture and the bull did not like that one bit, so he butted the front of that car head on and it seemed like lifted the front wheels clean up off the ground, then one time rammed it from the side caving in the whole side of that new chevy biscayne (like I said though, Stacy was a big shot and he had a new car I think the very next day).

Anyway. A bell on a big ol’ bull has a very practical purpose, and pays to pay heed, whether rowdy kids playing in the pasture or those dirty hippies doing their dirty deeds.

*Named by my Dad for his massive and mean curly-headed countenance way before the old song song Wooly Bully came out…we lived out there when I was 8 to 13, 1963-68, and the song by Sam and the Shams was I think in '65, but it sure seemed to have been written especially for ol’ Wooly Booger...maybe my Dad should have gotten royalties!

Ol' Bob Wahr

In an episode of my favorite online editorial cartoon, Chris Muir's Day by Day, the guys do some fence work at the ranch, and the wife of the younger is concerned his inexperience will result in him hurting himself at the hands of the treacherous barbed wire, and I couldn't help remembering and commenting about when that happened to me:


What did somebody say upthread, that Bob Wahr bites? Oh yes indeed he do.

The little pasture around our old Lake Okeechobee house, the same one that contained ol’ Wooly Booger the giant Brangus bull that was featured in an earlier post, featured a couple of rickety gates made of 2X8’s, that we ignernt daredevil yard apes liked to tightwalk on, not too easy as it would rock back and forth as you made your way across the 12 or so foot span…lose your balance and fall into Wooly’s space and you’d barely have time to get back over the fence or else just say your prayers.

So one Sunday when it was my turn I get almost to the end and start to lose it, Wooly watching intently from close by, and in an effort not to get stomped to death I tried to leap the last few feet to the little platform we had nailed to the end post. That didn’t work and I instead fell onto the 90 degree adjoining fence section, straddling that rusty ol’ bobwahr. I had on the typical boys tough levis so it didn’t do the damage that might be implied by that landing, instead it ripped my inner forearm flesh open like a ragged can opener, the blood starts spewing and I and my brothers and sisters start screaming.

Like I said it was Sunday, my hardworking Daddy’s one day off. The house was maybe a hundred and fifty feet away, and he was enjoying the Sunday paper while visiting the crapper when he hears the commotion, and as he later told me, he “cut one off in the middle”, pulled up his pants and ran outside, sure he was going to find one of his young’uns under Wooly's hoof. Instead he extricates me from the grips of ol’ Bob, throws me in the back of our ’65 Falcon wagon (two door, like a little Nomad!), and floors that little six banger the six or seven miles into town to Everglades Memorial’s ER. I lived, they sewed me up, but the ragged scar remains to this day, I’m looking at it right now.

 You’d think such an experience would lend a bit of judgment and reserve to a 12-year old wild child…but no, I did a whole lot of stupid shit after that…sometimes even still. Ain’t it a wonder that we survived?

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Of posers, plagiarists, and the truth...

A few days ago when some blog awards were handed out, my favorite editorial cartoonist Chris Muir was a winner for his awesome Day By Day daily cartoon serial. In reviewing the other award winners, one particular blog caught my attention and stuck in my craw. When I commented at DBD, congratulating Chris, I also used the opportunity to criticize that particular site and compare it to the long-running theft and misattribution of another outstanding gunnie essay; it so happened that Ted Nugent had been mentioned in the same thread, and as explained below, he played prominently in the misuse of this writer's essay, making the comparison a good illustration of my opinion on plagiarism.
When another commenter and apparently occasional contributor at the award-winning ripoff site complained about my complaint and said they were the awesomest gunnie site in the whole wide, I was prompted to answer his thusly, and since it would be improper to drag Chris Muir into the mud, I reactivated this long dormant erstwhile blogsite of mine just for the purpose.


@Cliff H, my criticism of TTAG as a user and abuser of others’ work product without attribution is hardly unilateral, and is nothing new; this dirty-laundry list is more than two years old:

http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2012/10/the-truth-about-the-truth-about-guns-and-robert-farago.html

But my recent comment after seeing that poser site given accolades in the company of genuine editorial artists like Mr. Muir here, was brought on by this very recent pathetic and sickening example:

http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2015/12/stop-thief.html

And it so happened that in the same DBD thread was mention of Ted Nugent, one of the few celebrity types on our side, but who unfortunately was responsible for another pretty egregious misattribution in his book “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto”, where two full pages are devoted to the reprint of Marko Kloos’ essay “Why the Gun is Civilization”, listing the non-existent Maj. L. Caudill USMC (ret) as author. The same thing happened at the huge Front Sight Firearms Training Academy website, and was later correctly attributed.

In the case of the Why the Gun essay, most of the reprintings and forwardings are inadvertent, except of course by the original scoundrel who created the marine Major out of wholecloth (a case of reverse stolen valor?). Still, even unintentional intellectual property theft is harmful, and does nothing to feed the true creator’s bulldog.

But at TTAG there’s nothing inadvertent about it; it is instead a long and documented pattern of intentional use of others’ work product without attribution, and when called out as in the case of that creative little gunshow jingle, it is simply deleted, without explanation or apology.

Cliff, I’m sure that you and many other contributors there are unaware of this nauseating behavior, and I guess my own long and close connection to the business and principles of RKBA causes me to react strongly when I think those principles are being crassly and commercially exploited and mocked…but that’s the truth about “The Truth About Guns”.