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Mark Steyn leads us to a Pakistani newspaper for an honest reporting of the latest honor killing in Canada.

 

 

Here is that article from Daily Times, Pakistan.

… Here’s a fact: Aqsa has been murdered. For us, denial is not an option. According to the United Nations Population Fund more than 5,000 women worldwide fall victim to honour killing. Denial is not an option.

According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur “honour killings had been reported in Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Yemen”. Egypt is 90 percent Muslim, Iran 98 percent, Jordan 92 percent, Lebanon 60 percent, Morocco 99 percent, Pakistan 97 percent, the Syrian Arab Republic 90 percent and Turkey 99 percent. Of the 192 member-states of the United Nations almost all honour killings take place in nine overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Denial is not an option.

More recently, honour killings have taken place in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Intriguingly, all these honour killings have taken place in Muslim communities of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Denial is not an option. …

 

 

Just like the rest of us, Karl Rove thinks this campaign is too long. But, he also points out where it is too short.

… despite the seemingly endless campaign, the nomination contest will be settled quicker than ever. In 2000, there were seven contests in five weeks beginning with Iowa. This time there will be contests in 32 states in roughly the same amount of time. …

 

… Cutting the length of the primary season by more than half by jamming the contests together raises the likelihood of a bandwagon developing for the candidate who wins the first few contests. This would allow a candidate to sweep to victory in the subsequent contests that rapidly follow because all that voters will see is his (or her) face on the evening news and in the papers.

Remember: Few Americans have seen these candidates up close, except voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In an abbreviated primary season, the weight these early state voters carry is even more exaggerated. Both parties could end up with a candidate chosen in haste and repented of at great cost.

If primaries and caucuses were spread out with weeks, not days and hours, between them, then voters in more states could learn more about the candidates. Candidates would have more time to come back from an early loss to a contender who was briefly the flavor of the moment in one state. …

 

 

The Captain tells you how the latest Clinton slime machine works.

Hillary Clinton just launched her new site The Hillary I Know, designed to humanize her to draw down her high negatives, amid much fanfare. On the same servers, ABC News discovered a few other websites that Hillary plans to launch. She has set up domains for websites designed to attack Barack Obama and to claim that they attacked her first: …

 

 

 

Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.

… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …

 

Examiner editors on the spending bill.

If character is what we do when we think nobody is looking, then congressional leaders responsible for the 3,500-plus-page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 have a lot of explaining to do. They should start by telling us why they posted their “omnibus spending bill” on the Internet only hours before voting on it and in a format that made searching the text laborious, at best. …

 

However, Club for Growth says there might be hope. Don’t get too excited yet.

President Bush said something earlier today that has fiscal conservatives giddy with potential joy. During a press conference, he announced his disappointment with the number of earmarks in the recent Omnibus spending bill. He said:

“I am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spelling in the omnibus bill.”

This is president-ese for “through an executive order, I might tell the respective agencies to ignore the earmarks and to spend the money on higher priorities.”

This is a HUGE deal. With his signature, Bush could effectively wipe away almost all of this year’s earmarks. It would easily be the biggest achievement on wasteful spending of all time. …

 

 

Cafe Hayek tells us what is really crass.