Much has been said over the past week that the prospects in Egypt and the larger Moslem world are pretty bleak. Anyone who takes the time to consider things realizes that whatever the average man or woman in Cairo might hope for out of the revolt, what they are likely to get will fall far short of desires. At best, we might get regimes which are only moderately Islamist in character; at worst, we get a series of Iranian-style regimes. There has been an interesting debate over at NRO’s The Corner to the effect that the only way to get to a liberal Islam is to go through some sort of Islamist Islam – and there is much to be said for that, though there is also a rather grating error in the line of thinking.

Taking their cue from a bit by Reuel Gerecht, the conception is that we have to go through Martin Luther before we can get to Thomas Jefferson. That, in fact, enlightenment can only come once the people have travailed through religious obscuritanism. After that, once that has failed, the people will suddenly start reading Voltaire, I guess. All of that is a load of nonsense.

First of all, it presupposes that until the Enlightenment – until we get to Jefferson – no one has a clue of a properly governed society of free men. The Enlightenment, though, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. During that time, what happened was a group of shallow, half-educated and self absorbed people starting attacking what they didn’t understand – Christianity and the past. As things weren’t perfect, all that existed up to the moment of judgment was condemned out of hand and a whole, new future was envisioned where people who were properly up to the job would organize everything for everyone. In the long run, this got us the French Revolution with its Terror…and then the successors to the French in Lenin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China. And, indeed, the Islamists who think they are advancing Islam, but actually advancing a socio-cultural bit of nonsense which is only possible for people who don’t know about the past. Islamism has cooked up a story of a glorious Caliphate which can be restored once the right people are in charge and able to organize everything for everyone. This is no more or less stupid than the pathetic imaginings of a Karl Marx.

From the 11th to the 14th century the Christian west was very well governed. This is the time of St. Francis; of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard, Dante, Albertus Magnus, Boccaccio, St. Louis IX, Abelard, Petrarch, the Gothic flowering, universities for higher education, the invention of the compass, eye glasses, the blast furnace, windmills…hardly the Dark Ages of mankind. We didn’t need an Enlightenment to allow justice to be established – and, indeed, in a very real way the establishment of the United States (a federal system where government is strictly limited in nature) is a means of recapturing what was strongly developing until the disasters of Black Death and what amounted to a civil war in Christendom when the Reformation took place.

What does Islam need in order to have a just social order? It needs to desire it. Will the people on the streets of Cairo desire this so strongly that they’ll get it? That remains to be seen. But no one should fear these events – they are working themselves out. They may prove a cure or a poison for Moslem society. Our job is not to wring our hands in worry; our job is not to try and plaster on to current events a false template of what happened in our own past; our job is simply to do what is right – and at this moment that means giving our blessing to anyone who will fight for justice and liberty. Cut our ties with the tyrants, completely and stand ready to assist anyone who is actually fighting for justice, and to smite anyone who would seek to create and export injustice.

Such has really been the actual tasks of men from the beginning of time. To do what is right, as far as our abilities allow. We won’t get it right in all respects. We will make terrible errors. But if our desire is to help the good and defy the bad, then we won’t go altogether wrong, nor instigate complete disaster. Of course, it would be helpful to us if we’d strip away a lot of the nonsense we’ve been fed upon for a couple centuries now about how the world developed. The truth does set you free, and thus the truth is obscured as much as possible – because a select part of our population doesn’t want the rest of us to be free.

But, stand firm for what is right; condemn what is wrong – in the end, that is all anyone can do. And if we do that, then no matter what comes now and in the future, we will be able to meet it with a clear eye and a clean conscience.

Not a good bit of news – from the Vancouver Sun:

Al-Qaida is on the verge of producing radioactive weapons after sourcing nuclear material and recruiting rogue scientists to build “dirty” bombs, according to leaked diplomatic documents.

A leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a “nuclear 9/11″…

We can only hope that our military and law enforcement people are on the job here – with the understanding that we have to get it right all the time, al-Qaeda only has to get it right once. Another reminder of the fact that we live in a dangerous world and that our fight with the Islamists is a war, not a law enforcement issue. Keep that in mind, liberals, the next time you decide to wax eloquent on the horrors of waterboarding.

Is this now, finally, going to be enough to get his anti-human organization de-funded?

A Planned Parenthood manager in New Jersey coaches a man and a woman posing as sex traffickers how to secure secret abortions, STD testing, and contraception for their female underage sex slaves, and make their whole operation “look as legit as possible” in an undercover video released this morning.

Clinic manager Amy Woodruff, LPN, of Planned Parenthood Central New Jersey’s Perth Amboy center, warns the pimp and his prostitute to have their trafficked underage girls lie about their age to avoid mandatory reporting laws, promising, “even if they lie, just say, ‘Oh he’s the same age as me, 15,’…it’s just that mainly 14 and under we have to, doesn’t matter if their partner’s the same age, younger, whatever, 14 and under we have to report.” She says, “For the most part, we want as little information as possible.”…

Here is a link to the whole story and the video. Its pretty terrible – but, once again, if your product is death, then you’re not going to be a person or organization of high moral standards. You can’t be honest, merciful and just if what you do is either prevent pregnancy or butcher unborn children for a living. Its like trying to be a moral whore, or an honest con artist; the trick can’t be done.

At all events, it is time for PP to lose all taxpayer funding. The practice of abortion is legal in the United States, so we can’t get rid of it completely – but, certainly, no decent nation should be directly participation in such crimes.

Even when its 40 to 1 in your favor:

Bishnu Shrestha, a brave Gurkha soldier in Indian Army, defeated 40 train robbers while returning home after a voluntary retirement. The Indian army, is going to awarded Bishnu with Sourya Chakra, Bravery Award and Sarvottam Jeevan Raksha medals during the Indian Republic Day celebration on January 26.

While in the train, Maurya Express from Ranchi to Gorakhpur on September 2, 2010, 35 year-old Bishnu saved a girl about to be raped by train robbers, in front of her helpless parents. After looting the train, when the robbers started stripping the 18 year old girl in front of him, he couldn’t contain his calmness. He took out his khukari and attacked the group of 40 robbers, alone. In the fight, he killed three of dacoits and injured eight others. Remaining looters ran for their lives…

A brave man who does the right thing – the way the world should be. A khukari, by the way, is that wicked looking knife that Gurkha’s have always carried.

From Gallup:

About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement’s positions and objectives into account as they address the nation’s problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this “very important.”…

Here’s the real kicker in the poll – 72% of Independents think that it is “very” or “somewhat” important that the Republicans in Congress pay heed to the TEA Party. This shows a couple things:

1. The GOP leadership ignores the TEA Party at its deadly peril.

2. The TEA Party is not viewed by Independents as a Republican entity – it is the mainstream.

This doesn’t mean the TEA Party gets to call the shots, but it does mean that this movement of the American people must have its voice heard in all debates. Any attempt to shove it out or to cut deals with the left behind closed, Congressional doors will spark outrage and lead to GOP defeat. Once again, the GOP had better have a TEA Party in 2012, or things will get very rough.

The liberal welfare State, write large – from Zero Hedge:

Much has been said about Bernanke’s wealth effect and how it impacts a whopping 1% of the US population… Unfortunately, a little less time has been spent discussing the equal and opposite effect: that of the poverty effect. Luckily, every month we get an update on this just as useful metric. And as of November, the SNAP program had 43.6 million participants, an increase of 400k from October, and a 14% increase, or 5.3 million from a year prior.

Congratulations, Americans! We’ve bailed out the banks, devalued the currency and driven ourselves further in to bankruptcy – and in return, you get food stamps!

Is this hope, or change?

Most have probably never heard of him, but he’s worthy of our note and respect:

Frank Woodruff Buckles, Jefferson County’s most famous living citizen and the last surviving World War I doughboy, turns 110 years old Tuesday…

As the linked story goes on to note, Mr. Buckles is also a bit of a WWII veteran – being captured by the Japanese when he was working in the Philippines in WWII.

God bless this wonderful patriot.

From CNBC:

…America’s home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That’s down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998…

…Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 ’10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round)…

This is why housing will not recover any time soon – and will likely suffer further price erosion through, at least, the end of 2012. There are just too many houses available (some sources indicate that the “shadow inventory” – homes held by banks but kept of the market – may run in to the millions of units), too many people with destroyed credit, too many unemployed and too much demographic pressure against rising prices (boomers are retiring, eg, and thus not looking to buy homes). Even when it starts to recover, don’t look for anything like rapidly rising house prices. Some areas might experience a boom from time to time, but the overall trend – perhaps for a generation – will be from flat to slightly up, with dips mixed in from time to time.

The really bad news is that the banks are at their wits end on what to do – they keep “extend and pretend” on their bad home loans (those they haven’t been able to push off on the taxpayer via TARP, that is) and hoping that that the economy will turn around so massively that housing prices will recover. But they never will – certainly not in the time frame necessary to take care of the problem. Government is clueless, too; mostly because the government actually relies upon the bankers to tell them what to do. What is needed is a complete break with the past.

In July of last year I cooked up a plan to fix things, and I still haven’t come across a better idea. Boiled down, it amounts to incentivizing banks to lease out foreclosed homes – preferably to the people they are foreclosing on – for three to five years. This gets the houses off the market, provides a revenue stream to the banks, allows the housing market to stabilize, gives foreclosed-on people a chance to rebuild their credit and generally relieves the pressure of the housing crisis. Unless and until government and the banks start doing things differently, nothing will improve in this area – and the bad news is that things will have to get a lot worse before public pressure can be developed to force government/bank action.

Just a lousy situation all around, and we’re stuck in it…

John Huntsman. He was governor of Utah. No, really. Anyways, he is currently our ambassador to China. And he’s a Republican. And the word is that Obama picked him for the spot to keep him out of the 2012 field. No, seriously. And now Huntsman, very cleverly, has merely burnished his foreign policy cred in preparation for taking on Obama in 2012.

I know, I know – the really big question now looms:

Who in heck has ever heard of Jon Huntsman?

I have – but only in a very minor, who-gives-a-hoot manner. And I’m pretty tuned in to politics – this guy hasn’t been crossing my radar. If I’m not too familiar with him, then you can rely upon it that 99% of the American electorate hasn’t heard of this guy. But he’s the big threat to Obama in 2012? On what grounds?

Reading his biography, I get the sense of a man who is far too much “in” with the Ruling Class to excite TEA Party support. Sure, he’s got some of the conventional conservative GOP positions on taxes and spending – and that is just great – but as the son of a bazillionaire who has spent his whole life in the very upper class, he’s just not going to resonate with Americans whose mortgages are underwater, pay has been cut and are wondering if they’ll have a job next month.

2012 will be a strange political year, of that I’m certain. So strange, in fact, that a unknown, Mormon guy from Utah might just pull it off…but this guy goes down the list of prospects to the bottom…the man most unlikely to get the GOP nomination. Let’s see if he can pull out of that cellar and make a splash.

From Reuters:

A federal judge in Florida struck down President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul as unconstitutional on Monday in the biggest legal challenge yet to federal authority to enact the law.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called individual mandate went too far in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void,” he wrote, “This has been a difficult decision to reach and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”…

One can figure this is just a first step in the legal process, but I wonder if liberals will really want to fight this? There is a changing dynamic in America these days and while the courts are not reflective of popular movements, they are affected by their times. The paradigm of the past 80 years or so – that government has a right to interfere – is falling and if Obama and his Democrats press this issue in the courts, they might find themselves undoing great swaths of liberalism as judges suddenly re-discover the Constitution. The day of federal mandates is ending and this defeat of ObamaCare might just be the pebble which starts the avalanche.

More than likely, however, the liberals won’t see it like that – for so many years they have relied upon the courts to undo conservatism, they might not recognize that their day in court (as it were) is passing. Hubris tends to take over in dying elites and we can probably rely upon our liberals to keep marching right off the cliff.