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David Warren honors fathers.
… I would argue that men suffer most under Islamist regimes, that women suffer most under feminized ones. Outwardly, the “superior sex” obtains a tyrannical power, but inwardly, their souls are stripped of the moderation, and imaginative empathy, that can come only from respectful interaction between the sexes.
As William Wilberforce noticed, the institution of slave-holding has even worse moral consequences for the master than for the slave; and it was in the masters’ ultimate interest that the Royal Navy went to work, putting an end to the obscene trade. But bonded slavery is a mere aside, in a society, compared to the scale of psychic carnage when one of the sexes is methodically depreciated.
I would further argue that dealing with the fallout from the feminist revolution is the most important domestic “issue” in North American society today — for its effects spread thickly across every other domestic issue. And this necessarily requires an attack on the very premise of feminism: its demonization of “patriarchy.”
If fathers cannot be paternal, we have no men.
Charles Krauthammer says the kid doesn’t want “hope and change” for Iran.
Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.
And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued “dialogue” with their clerical masters.
Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with — which inevitably confers legitimacy upon — leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.
Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”
Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election. …
Andy McCarthy helps us understand Obama and Iran.
… The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden). …
Roger Simon points at Siemens and Nokia for their collaboration with the Iranian regime.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting extensively on the sale of advanced web monitoring equipment to Iran by a joint venture of Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia. …
Volokh Conspiracy tells Twitterers how to help Iranians.
Der Spiegel reports on Neda.
They are shaky, blurred images: A young woman collapses onto the pavement, a dark pool of blood spreads beneath her body. Two men kneel next to the woman and press on her chest, screaming. The camera phone which is filming her zooms in on her face. Her pupils roll to the side, blood streams out of her nose and mouth. “Neda, don’t be afraid! Neda, stay with me. Neda, stay with me!” cries one man. Another man beseeches someone to take her in a car. Then the footage stops.
It cannot be confirmed if the 40-second film, which was posted on the Internet on Saturday, really shows the death of a young Iranian demonstrator. Like almost all the video and photo material coming out of Iran these days, it is impossible to verify its authenticity.
However, even if it may never be certain if these images really show the death of a young woman named Neda, she has still become an icon, a martyr for the opposition in Iran. Neda has given the regime’s brutality a bloody face and a name. Overnight “I am Neda,” has become the slogan of the protest movement. …
More on Neda from the London Times.
Her name was Neda Salehi Agha Soltan and she was a philosophy student. But the manner of her death has turned her into an instant, global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality.
This innocent woman aged 26 was shot in the chest during running battles between opposition protesters and Iranian security forces in Tehran on Saturday. Since then, a grainy, 40-second video showing her final moments, blood streaming from her nose and mouth as a man implores her not to die, has ricocheted around the world on YouTube, blogs and social networking sites.
Miss Soltan, whose first name means “voice”, has become a martyr for freedom, Iran’s equivalent of the student who defied China’s tanks in Tiananmen Square. …
WSJ reports on the Iranian regime’s “bullet fee.”
… At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue.
Upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said.
Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn’t amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour’s body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family. …
The Corner interviews Daniel Pipes.
Q: What do you find most surprising/revealing about this post-election crisis in Iran?
Pipes: I am taken aback by the nearly complete absence of Islam in the discussion. One hears about democracy, freedom, and justice, all of which do play a role, but the key issue is the Iranian population’s repudiation of the Islamist ideology that has dominated its lives for the past 30 years. Should the regime in Tehran be shaken by current challenges, this will likely have profound implications for the global career of radical Islam.
Michael Barone analyzes the new administration’s style.
We pundits like to analyze our presidents and so, as Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama.
First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. On domestic policy, he has been executing his long-range strategy of vastly expanding government, but may be encountering problems as voters show unease at huge increases on spending.
His long-range strategy of propitiating America’s enemies has been undercut by North Korea’s missile launches and demonstrations in Iran against the mullah regime’s apparent election fraud. His assumption that friendly words could melt the hearts of Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have been refuted by events. He limits himself to expressing “deep concern” about the election in the almost surely vain hope of persuading the mullahs to abandon their drive for nuclear weapons, while he misses his chance to encourage the one result — regime change — that could protect us and our allies from Iranian attack.
Second, he does not seem to care much about the details of policy. He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: Indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000. …
Barney Frank gets a compliment from Contentions. Sort of.
… you’d be hard-pressed to find a more intelligent member of Congress. It takes a tremendous intellect to be so colossally, consistently wrong — and cause such harm.
Robert Samuelson sees GM as a metaphor for the country in that it provided benefits beyond it’s means.
… We are borrowing not to finance investment in the future but to pay for today’s welfare — present consumption. Sooner or later, the huge debt will weaken the economy. Nor would paying for all promised benefits with higher taxes be desirable. Big increases in either debt or taxes risk depressing economic growth, making it harder yet to pay promised benefits.
The U.S. welfare state is weakening; insecurity is rising. The sensible thing would be to decide which forms of public welfare are needed to protect the vulnerable and to begin paring others. Our inaction poses another dreary parallel with GM. It was obvious a quarter-century ago that GM the auto company could not support GM the welfare state. But the union wouldn’t surrender benefits, and the company acquiesced. Inertia prevailed, and the reckoning came.
The same cycle, repeated on a national scale with sums many multiples higher, would be correspondingly more fearsome.
Stephen Moore defends baby boomers against their critics.
… I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it’s for rearing a generation of pampered kids who’ve been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known — until now. Today’s high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.
CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year — more than most nations’ GDPs — and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents’ generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation’s notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down. …
Wired Magazine says the boomers’ parents may have effective swine flu immunities.
… “It might be that the H1N1 circulating now (swine-origin influenza virus) has enough antigenic similarity to related H1N1 influenza strains of the past to protect older individuals exposed to them previously,” Mermel wrote in a letter to the journal The Lancet.
That would be good news for public health officials and explain one of the more puzzling aspects of the new swine flu outbreak: why young people seem to be more susceptible to the disease than their parents and grandparents. Regular seasonal flu tends to disproportionately strike the old, not the strapping youthful masses. That can lead to higher morbidity because the elderly population is not as healthy overall. If older people are already immune, public health organizations could allocate what are sure to be small amounts of vaccine to the right populations. …