All individual rights are not created equal.

Europeans and Canadians indeed have a different concept of individual liberty than we do. To them, this concept conveys a sense of each individual’s autonomy in the context of a larger vision of progress and modernity as the latter two terms are interpreted by their respective societies’ two elite, bureaucrats with thorough administrative training and academics with an impressive set of credentials. Such definitions of progress and modernity are, from time to time, reflected in the charters of rights, responsibilities, and good behavior that are promulgated by the legislatures.  In the other developed countries, thus, the idea of individual freedom is a function of the progress towards utopia. Such utopian modernity places little value on organized religion or nuclear families or self defense since, in the eyes of the dreamers of this utopia, none of these artifices of a bygone era of primal existence are necessary anymore. This utopia, in progress slowly but steadily, in the European Union and Canada, consequently, finds it not just legitimate but necessary to forbid some ‘hate’ speech, ban ‘incendiary’ books, criminalize self-defense, prosecute clergy speaking from their pulpits, and outlaw the activities of Christian student organizations on college campuses (yes, all of those things have already happened in various EU countries and in Canada). In a civilized society, the unspoken argument goes, shouldn’t we all got along and not offend each other? And if we won’t act thusly civilized, shouldn’t we be harshly punished for our petulance? After all, what’s freedom got to do with it?

Herein lies the difference between the American and Western European (I am including Canada in that category) concepts of individual rights. The American version of individual rights is descended from the Lockean philosophy of natural rights that the Founding Fathers wrote down in the Declaration of Independence as ‘unalienable’ liberties granted by God. In contrast, the European concept of individual rights is one of utility in that modern societies ‘should’ provide citizens with such rights-as long as they are in conformance with the elite notions of modernity. The difference on the ground, so to speak, is not always very visible to the casual eye. Nonetheless, the difference is there, it is genuine, and it is very fundamental.

Americans stressed out by trying economic times and impressed by messianic political or social leaders are well advised to heed that difference.

Here is a fundamental history lesson, courtesy of my Egyptologist colleague:

For those that don't know about history ... Here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

 1. Liberals
 2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.
 
Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Coors. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, bankers, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

 Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of tryingto get more for nothing.

 Here ends today's lesson in world history.

Unfortunately for us, it takes many, many innocent deaths and devastation to get our laws to be responsive to the need of the times. The most resistant to such changes are those whose livelihoods and careers depend on the legal status quo..i.e. the bar, the bench, and its coterie of bureaucratic court jesters (er..civil servants, I mean). In the grand procession of such tragedies, here is another one over the weekend from the state of Washington though I suspect it will be many more before legislators and lawyers finally say, ‘yes, we gotta change and to heck with the interest groups who are resisting this change’.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090405/ap_on_re_us/children_slain

In the story from Washington, as you read, it becomes evident that a man went over the edge. What pushed him to his murderous rage was not the fact that his wife was cheating; sadly in America of today that is a very common occurrence. Rather what triggered the suicidal-homicidal outburst was the realization of what his wife’s adultery meant for him legally: that he was going to lose his five children who would be left at the mercy of an unethical mother and her (series of) incumbent bedmates. Children who were likely to be abused or even killed by these ‘lovers’ of their mother while the father would have no recourse to protecting them.

That, readers, is what the actual application of divorce and custody laws means in most states of the Union. When wives cheat, our system rewards them for adultery, punishes the victimized husbands, destroys the familial ties between fathers and children so that potential abusers (also known as mother’s boyfriends/new husbands) can victimize defenseless children.

It is impossible to forgive what this man did; doubly so for myself as I am a borderline pacifist. It is not improbable to understand, however, what helplessness and frustration drove a father to do this when he realized that the courts will take his children away from him forever because his wife betrayed the family.

This tragedy is another clarion call to the deaf ears of legislators and journalists to get the laws to change so that no matter who divorces whom, the children are not divorced from either parent (and yes, the twice a month ‘visitation’ is a divorce from the parent indeed). No matter who divorces whom, the law must not mandate that, for all practical purposes, the children be divorced from good, decent parents. And yes, twice a week 'visitation' is just that: a court mandated divorce of children from parents.

Here is a letter to the POTUS from a simple, hard working, middle class Midwesterner:

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for helping my neighbors with their mortgage payments. You know the one's down the street who in the good times refinanced their house several times and bought SUV's, ATV's, RV"s, a pool, a big screen, two Wave Runners and a Harley. But I was wondering, since I am paying my mortgage and theirs, could you arrange for me to borrow the Harley now and then?

Jim 
Wellington, Ohio

P.S. They also need help with their credit cards, when do you want me to start making those payments?

 P.P.S. I almost forgot - they didn't file their income tax return this year. 

Should I go ahead and file for them or will you be appointing them to cabinet posts?

It is a silly question but one that has been raised more than once in the 2000 year history of the powerful and scholarly fraternal orders of priests. After the disgraceful announcement by Notre Dame about its 2009 Commencement speaker, the question can well be raised again, this time about the CSC order. Once upon a time the famed university of Our Lady was considered, rightfully so, the Roman Catholic answer to the Protestant edifices of learning at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. About fifty years ago, the Ivy League's colleges ceased to have anything to do with the Creator, banishing him entirely from the campuses built to honor His gift of learning. In 2009, Notre Dame finally joins that club of 'once Christian colleges'.

Why call it Catholic anyway? Lets at least have some truth in advertising Father Jenkins!

Not too far where I am, and in the city where my alma mater stands proudly, justice was given short shrift yesterday. Not surprisingly, after the make-believe prosecution carried out half-heartedly by second rate lawyers appointed by a radical left wing Attorney General in a trial presided over by a judge who was endorsed by Planned Parenthood, George Tiller was found no guilty. Yes, it is a sham, but even if he was found guilty, the Kansas Supreme Court-which has a six to one liberal Democrat majority-would have set him free. Tiller has given money profusely to the Kansas Supreme Court Selection Committee members. For the time being he has a permanent 'I can do anything I want' card. But take heart. At least, for the first time in Kansas history a man as ferocious, as powerful, and as influential as George Tiller was prosecuted. A small step, but a step nonetheless. 

It tooks us many, many such small steps and over two hundred years from the time of the colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, to finally eradicate forever the idea that one set of people get to define the humanity of another. Just as America did overcome the disgrace that was slavery, so will we overcome the disgrace that is euphemistically called 'abortion' or 'choice'. Not perhaps in the next ten years or even in our lifetimes or that of self declared 'doctors' like George Tiller.  But happen it will. Every few generations of Americans realize where we have fallen short to redeem the pledge of the Republic's founding document that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are Life.."

Some day, I promise you, we will look back with disbelief and disgust at a past era when killing after mutilating the most vulnerable children was called 'choice' and considered a badge of 'courage' and such butchers were termed 'doctors'.

Have faith, have heart, and work doubly hard.

In stark defiance of the indictment and subsequent arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the weekend, Sudanese President Omar Bashir headed to his state visit to Eritrea today. Later in the week, he is scheduled to go to the Arab League meeting in Doha where he has been assured a red carpet welcome rather than the handcuffs that international law mandates for him. The irony of this man, a prime accused of the Darfur genocide, prancing around in the capitals of the Arab world is hardly lost on observers of history. Especially this week.

The night of March 25^th marks the thirty eighth anniversary of what London Times’ columnist Anthony Mascarenhas called the ‘ugliest genocide’ in modern history after the Holocaust: the wholesale massacre of ethnic Bengalis by the Pakistan Army in 1971. It was a massacre that Mascarenhas, a Pakistani journalist himself, saw at close quarters as a war correspondent. By the time Pakistan was defeated and Bengalis free, more than a million had been killed (and some of their hidden graves are being discovered even today as I write), two hundred thousand women raped, entire libraries and museums gutted, and university dormitories turned in torture chambers. Then, as today, the perpetrators of genocide were feted by Arab leaders, and their war machine funded by the petro-dollars earned by squeezing money out of American pockets at gas stations. The bullets which killed Bengali children were fired by Pakistani troops but underwritten by Arab oil money. Like the Sudanese junta today, their Pakistani counterparts too were engaged not just in mere genocide, but in an unholy attempt to eradicate from the face of the planet an entire people and their ancient culture. The Pakistani military succeeded no more than the Sudanese will.

But look at the price. How many times will we have to go through the same thing? When do we mean it when we say ‘never again’? We said it in 1945, we said in 1971, we said in Rwanda in 1994….and yet it goes on. Perhaps President Obama will 'hope' that this time it will be truly never again.

The President, from the time of his campaign, has rightly made a huge deal about the importance of Pakistan to the goals of the United States in the greater Near- and Middle East, especially the war in Afghanistan. Fortunately for us, the President has a fairly decent knowledge about the politics of Pakistan and has even spent time there. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, much of knowledge of Pakistan is filtered through the largely useless lens of professional foreign service and think tank types, to the exclusion of anyone else. Let us make no mistake about it: unlike the previous two generations of foreign service officers, today’s apparatchiks in US embassies and consulates abroad live extremely cloistered, fearful, and detached lives, entirely cut off from the actual pulse of the society where they are supposed to be our eyes and ears. All these pampered bureaucrats hear and see are glimpses of the elite in heavily guarded garden parties and painting exhibits where the only local attendees, in the case of Pakistan, are the second sons of feudal lords, wives of top civil servants, and the army generals who have chests full of medals from wars they never fought and eager for an alcoholic drink they cannot get but at embassy parties. Heck even the wives I mention are often not Pakistani since many of Pakistan’s top civil servants, politicians, intellectuals, and military brass have a peculiar tendency to marry women from elsewhere. Former Prime Minister Z A Bhutto married an Iranian (Benazir’s mother), his foreign secretary J A Rahim wed a German blonde as did his fellow Bengali Air Marshal Tawab, former Finance Minister Noon was married to an Englishwoman as was Pakistan’s foremost poet Faiz and its cricket icon Imran Khan.

The point is that for the last thirty odd years, we have simply not engaged the society of Pakistan, beyond the perfunctory seminars in Karachi, polio shot programs at the Peshawar Club, or scholarships for the elite under PL 480. If Pakistan, as opposed to merely the elite of Pakistan, is to be made a partner in the fight against terror and narcotics, we gotta do better than the noisy and lackluster effort in place now. Public diplomacy (as opposed to the fortress diplomacy in vogue), principled outreach of democratic forces, and robust support of indigenous human rights movements are all elements that must be nourished in order to craft a new approach to Pakistan.

It can be done. We cannot afford not to do so. If Pakistan implodes, and very well may, it will be only a short time that so will Afghanistan, notwithstanding the resources we pour into the latter. For reasons to many to catalogue here, Pakistan is the lynchpin of America’s Transcaucasian strategy.

It is quite amusing to watch another little episode of the almost month long effort by Meghan McCain to be relevant. As I pointed out several times over the course of the last election campaign, I like and admire Ms.McCain, her sense of loyalty to her parents, and her rather considerable skills as a communicator. But let us make no mistake about her political leanings. She proudly claimed to have voted for John Kerry in 2004 and belongs to that class of largely over-pampered and vacuous clueless yuppies that rushes home to watch Sex and the City, affects faux Europeanisms, and generally can’t tell the difference between cricket the game and cricket the insect despite the affectations of being chic and worldy. Meghan McCain is a typical liberal desperately trying to be the daughter of the last GOP standard bearer, upset that she cannot pull it off, and complaining to everyone who will listen that her life is not fair as a result of daddy being a Republican. With her glib talk, good looks, and adolescence exuberance, she will be perfect fit for the Foreign Service where all such creatures go to be pampered around the world by our taxpayers.

Rarely do I have reason to admire Democrats; rarer still is an occasion where I compliment a liberal Democrat. A piece of news today, however, reminded me why Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) is a lib Dem worthy of respect, if not admiration. In the last eight years, Feingold has twice done the things that, in the context of time and his constituency, were very courageous and very honorable. In 2001, he was the only one of 100 men and women who stood up against the Patriot Act in the Senate, objecting to its provisions that threatened civil liberties. Mind you, that was in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks when even so called liberal 'lions' like Kenendy and Leahy were meek domesticated felines when it came to civil liberties. Fast forward to today, Feingold became one of two Democrats to openly oppose the pork laden 2009 budget of a very popular president of his own party, citing the financial irresponsibility of the same. Even some Republicans-namely RINOs like Susan Collins and Arlen Specter-have not had the guts to oppose this Presiden't financial overreach.

Russ Feingold..liberal or not..Shakespeare would have said 'here was a man'. Political courage...what a novel idea.

Usually a bright fellow, Texas Senator John Cornyn has evidently learnt little from the debacle of 2006 and 2008. This should give us pause since he is the guy in charge of leading the Senate Republicans back to the majority in 2010. With libertarians simply abandoning the GOP in the last two cycles, young techies laughing at its utter ignorance of basic modern technology, and small government types shaking their heads, you would thick that the campaign chief of Senate Republicans will get a clue.

Well, think again. Having little to do other than run around aimlessly looking for good candidates, John Cornyn has come up with the brilliant idea to force Internet Service Providers of all kinds-even the smallest start up ones-to keep log in records for all their users for two years (right now it is 90 days). His reasoning for the so called Internet Safety Act? Well, to help law enforcement of course, never mind that no major national law enforcement organization has remotely called for it. Cheap popularity from the MADD kinds, a kind word or two from ultra feminist groups, free publicity, and a dangerous encroachment of civil liberties..that’s all the Cornyn bill does. It will also push up the cost of broadband access specially in rural areas, making the digital divide wider between Blue and Red America, and further turn off the tech savvy young crowd. Barack Obama is raising a toast to John Cornyn right now.

If  Cornyn keeps on pushing the bill, it is he who needs a challenger in the primary and deserves to get beaten and never be elected for any other job outside of the county commission in whichever county he resided in Texas.

Whatever party you belong to, please call your senator and ask him/her to vigorously oppose John Cornyn’s Internet Safety Bill of 2009. The government, even with all its noble intentions, does not need to know where you and I spend our hours surfing the internet. There are strong existing laws to track those down who would mean others harm, and prosecute them. Crafting fancy new laws that gut constitutional safeguards, do little to improve public safety, and serve as campaign props for lazy politicians and lazier prosecutors, is good for Senator Cornyn and bad for the Constitution.