Assorted

1. Our Muslim Sympathizer President.

There are days it all gets to be a bit too much:

The president continued in this ongoing effort, this week, to shift the national narrative to his pet domestic issues and away from national security concerns in his interview with the sycophantic pro-Obama new media outlet, “Vox”. Obama was asked whether he believes the media “overstates” the threat of terrorism at the expense of other stories, like “climate change and epidemic disease.”

“Absolutely. I don’t blame the media for that. What’s the famous saying about local newscasts? If it bleeds, it leads. You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch. It’s all about ratings,” he answered. What Obama had to say about the targeted attack on Jews by Islamic terrorists at a kosher deli in Paris has people shaking their heads in disbelief. “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive.” This was not “random violence” any more than the Fort Hood shooting was “workplace violence.” But the Community-Organizer-in-Chief would prefer the media talk about the more pressing threat of — climate change – so he’s changing the conversation. “The news media ‘absolutely’ overstates the risks of terrorism because stories about things like climate change aren’t ‘sexy’ and don’t drive ratings.”

“Violent, vicious zealots,” eh? Well, what are those “zealots” zealous about? Obama is absolutely unwilling to say – all the way to his outright denial that the “Islamic State” is Islamic.

As for the business about “randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” it was a Kosher deli chosen specifically because it was owned, operated, and patronized by French Jews. But apparently the mention of that fact comes too close to Islam and its historical antipathy toward Jews: an antipathy that was inaugurated by Muhammad himself and is commemorated in this charming “prayer:”

The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews." (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)

I can think of only two ways to interpret Obama’s behavior:

• It could be a version of the deny-it-and-it-will-go-away syndrome illustrated in the latter portion of Atlas Shrugged, where Jim Taggart appeals to Dagny for help defending the company against the predations of Cuffy Meigs “without admitting the fact of Meigs’ existence.”
• Alternately, it could be simple camouflage for a firm determination not to do anything of substance to counter Islamic terrorism and general militancy — a return by Obama to his Islamic upbringing.

Which of those explanations strikes you as more plausible will be determined by whether you can believe that a man who has said and done what Obama has said and done these past six years genuinely follows Christ…or loves America.

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2. Back To The Family.

With apologies to Jethro Tull, the degradation of the family might be the most important of the sociological maladies that plague the United States and the western world generally today. My colleague Dystopic has some brief yet penetrating comments on it today:

One of the great appeals of Socialism is that it operates on a principle not unlike that of the extended family. The smaller the scale, the more likely it is to be effective. Centrally planning a community of 100 people is a very different matter from that of a 100 million....

With the destruction of the family, most people don’t have anywhere to turn. Government steps in and offers to be the surrogate family, to provide everything people, deep down, feel is missing from their lives. It all seems so convenient.

But it fails a crucial test. Family members care about you in a way the government never will. To the government, you are a Social Security number. A taxpayer and/or a benefit recipient. Only in aggregate do you mean anything at all. Your family has a vested interest in you, or at least it once did.

I suspect future historians will look back on our age and see, above all, the destruction and dismemberment of family life as the single greatest tragedy of our age and the worst enabler of large-scale Socialism. And, above all else, directly responsible for the approaching Fall.

I couldn’t have put it better.

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3. The Final Frontier.

The esteemed Glenn Reynolds suggests that there is something good about the Obama Administration after all:

On the space front generally, the Obama administration's policies have substantially boosted the private space launch industry. Companies ranging from Virgin Galactic to Blue Origin to SpaceX and Xcor and many more are building rockets and experimenting with new ways to get into space cheaply.

But another company, Bigelow Aerospace, has been looking beyond the process of getting to outer space, to the question of what to do once we get there. Bigelow has decided that it wants to go to the moon, and — here's the real news — has gotten the Federal Aviation Administration's space office (Office of the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation) to give it the go-ahead, and to state that the U.S. government will recognize and protect Bigelow's right to create a base and to operate exclusively in that base's vicinity.

I don’t view this as sunnily as Professor Reynolds. The very fact that an agency of the United States Federal Government claims:

• Jurisdiction over whether a group of Americans can go to another planet;
• The power to rule on whether they’re allowed to establish a base there;
• And the privilege of extending state protection to that base;

...is an assertion of extraterritorial powers in the most literal sense of that phrase.

Extraterritoriality is the characteristic sign of an “imperial” or “colonial” power. On Earth, jurisdiction – the power to say what the law is and to punish those who violate it – is tightly bound to national sovereignty and to the nation’s territorial borders. That binding is why nation-states agree to extradition treaties, and why the Constitution specifically empowers Congress “To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations.” (Article I, Section 8) For a nation-state to claim jurisdiction outside its sovereign territory invites clashes with other nation-states, especially should the claim involve territory of disputed allegiance or ownership.

The colonial powers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries practiced extraterritoriality specifically to protect their administrators and other expatriate subjects in the occupied colonies. When the Europeans relinquished their colonial claims, several bloodbaths resulted as the native peoples took vengeance on the expatriates who remained among them. One of those bloodbaths continues today, in the nation once called Rhodesia.

Granted that we haven’t any Lunarian natives to worry about, for the U.S. to claim extraterritorial authority over the Moon still constitutes a step in a dangerous direction...one whose potential will only be revealed when other nations acquire the ability to put men on the Moon.