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Deliver Us From Egypt…

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…and Saudi Arabia, and the Congo, and Thailand, and Uzbekistan, and India, and the Philippines, and…. 

As we pause to celebrate Passover, and the liberation of the Jews from Egyptian bondage, it is well to remember that more than 27 million people worldwide today are enslaved.  They are not building pyramids, but they are chained in forced marriages, conscripted as child soldiers, imprisoned as domestic servants, and — particularly grisly — forced as children to become the sexual playthings of their oppressors.

The Bible says that more than 600,000 Israelites were freed during the exodus.  That pales in comparison to the current number.

Take a look at this report from the BBC, filed just a few months ago.

Then do something.

Chag Sameach.

Lakers v. Celtics: The Anticlimax?

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I suppose that Hillary Clinton is doing us all a favor by waiting until Friday to declare her campaign suspended. That way, over the next 48 hours, we can focus on the real business at hand: the NBA Finals.

I grew up in Los Angeles and have been a Lakers fan for as long as I can remember. The 1984 Finals might be my worst sports memory, and the 1985 and 1987 ones my best. Not surprisingly, the press and the league are trying to recreate that time, and I can hardly blame them.

But it doesn’t quite feel the same this time around, and I have at least one reason: race.

The racial subtext of the 1980′s rivalry was palpable. It wasn’t just Magic and Bird, although it helped. Bird was a truly great player, but the press grabbed onto him at least in part because he was a truly great white player when there really weren’t any others. Bird himself didn’t give a damn about any of it, and one could even argue that Magic’s upbringing was more stereotypically white whereas Bird’s was more stereotypically black. (Bird was raised in an impoverished single-parent home; while Magic was hardly wealthy, his father was a long-time unionized auto worker).

But the real reason for the racial subtext was that the 1980′s Celtics tried so hard to find as many white players as they could. McHale of course was a no-brainer, a great player. A fading and injured Bill Walton, okay. Danny Ainge? Greg Kite? Scott Wedman? Jerry Sichting? Michael Smith? Michael Smith picked ahead of Tim Hardaway? Fred Roberts? Brad Lohaus? Conner Henry? Conner Henry?

This used to be a Boston thing. The Red Sox were the last major league team to start an African-American. It was a Boston fan thing. Larry Bird was a legend. Bobby Orr was a legend. Carl Yastrzemski was a legend. Ted Williams was a legend. Bill Russell was not a legend.

Now, it’s all different. The Celtics are all African-American. The Lakers have lots of white guys, but they are virtualy all European (except for Walton’s son Luke). David Ortiz is the most popular member of the Red Sox. Red Auerbach-whose victory cigar put today’s trash talkers to shame-is dead. A multiracial man is the Democratic nominee.

It will be a great series, and I will be miserable if Boston takes it, which I fear they will because of home court advantage. But it won’t quite be the same. And that’s probably just as well.

Mine eyes have seen the glory

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In church on Sunday, after a string of impeccably orthodox and instantly forgettable Ascension-tide hymns, I was woken up by the amazingly incorrect but rousing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Wow! You think. Go Sherman! Go Grant! Die, evil slaver Rebs! But then you realize: this is what it feels like to be a crusader, a warrior in the name of God - a jihadi.

Continue Reading…

Shipwrecks

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I was hoping to get away from Iraq but this oddity came up: the GOP wheeling out Henry Kissinger to defend the Middle East in Flames scenario if America throws in the towel. Whether he wrote the piece or just signed it, it’s a sad testimony to the decay of a once fine if unsympathetic mind. La vieillesse est un naufrage, as de Gaulle said of Maréchal Petain.

Here’s HK’s version of MEIF:

The war cannot be ended by military means alone. But neither is it possible to “end” the war by ceding the battlefield, for the radical jihadist challenge knows no frontiers.

An abrupt withdrawal from Iraq will not end the war; it will only redirect it. Within Iraq, the sectarian conflict could assume genocidal proportions; terrorist base areas could re-emerge.

Under the impact of American abdication, Lebanon may slip into domination by Iran’s ally, Hezbollah; a Syria-Israel war or an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities may become more likely as Israel attempts to break the radical encirclement; Turkey and Iran will probably squeeze Kurdish autonomy; and the Taliban in Afghanistan will gain new impetus.

Continue Reading…

The music connection

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Thanks to Jonathan adding the missing piece, I now see the big picture into which the Ghuman case is a window: it’s all about music!

Musicians of all sorts are nothing but a rogues’ gallery of subversion and disrespect for traditional values: Rouget de Lisle, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Gilberto Gil, Richard Wagner, the Dixie Chicks…it goes on and on. They even send each other secret instructions in Italian, so you can’t understand whether to sing loud or soft. When the first caveman started laying down a beat with a stick on a log, what happened? Everyone came out and danced and dinner didn’t get cooked. The Taliban forbid music…why? So we’ll like it! Right from the start, American greatness has been hobbled by a national anthem with a melody cunningly chosen so no-one can actually sing all the notes (and lyrics that make no sense…what the hell is ‘Donzerly light’?).

That’s a wrap, and the next time you see a guy with his guitar case open on the sidewalk, throw a slug in it like a real patriot.

The real story of the Ghuman case

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Mike’s post about Nalini Ghuman, setting forth the real reasons for her exclusion from the United States, missed what seems to me is the critical point: her husband is a countertenor. This is a definite sign of effeminate, anti-American Islamofascist subversion in favor of such radical Islamist programs as gay marriage. Note how Ghuman’s husband has deceitfully attempted to mislead law enforcement by getting married to a woman.

It’s really quite simple, Mike.

Light 2, Darkness 0

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The forces of light, truth, and goodness triumphed twice today as the glorious armies of virtue, one on each coast, invaded the very hearts of evil and whupped the bad guys 30-24 and 27-3. The Saturday before Thanksgiving has, however, a structural design error that requires me to rearrange neurons between two football games, from “red-good/blue-bad” to “blue-good/red-bad” and in the second game I occasionally cheer the wrong pass completion. I don’t understand why it’s taken so long to tidy this up; it’s inexcusable carelessness. But how nice that we have blogs so I can whine about it to the whole world.

Baseball eschatology

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A reader writes:

“NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE!! Chicago is a wonderful baseball town that hasn’t had a team in the Series since 1959. The Red Sox, of course, won it all just last year. It’s Chicago’s turn.”

Chicago???!!! Let me explain. Baseball is a great ongoing drama in which a cast of minor players provide background for action among a single villainous gang and two heroic and righteous armies. The heroes have azure hats (royal and navy respectively) with the noble device B (argent, and gules with a border argent, respectively) on the front. The villains wear striped suits like convicts, or vicious extortionate oppressive bloodsucking plutocrat bankers, pant pant pant, but I digress. [The White Sox, who are among the minor characters, wear striped suits like a mattress, no taint of evil about them. They are in the ALCS only because they played a lot better than the Red Sox for three straight games, but that has no larger moral significance.]

The heroes with the royal blue hats disappeared completely and without a trace between the 1957 and 1958 seasons, two years after their 1955 apotheosis, and it’s not known where they abide. Perhaps they sailed with the elves, perhaps they are with The Angels. Great was the woe and rending of garments and cries of the faithful at the time, let me tell you, a whole generation disillusioned and blighted, very dark days.

So it’s possible that baseball will finally come to an end in a sort of Götterdämmerung after next season, two years after the red-B heroes’ triumph over the evil spell “w..t t.ll n.xt y..r” with the more powerful magic “…bunch of idiots”. It’s likely we will see the departure from our world of the remaining good guys, leaving only bit players wandering around engaged in trivial games, certainly not baseball. Alternatively, the departed white-B heroes might return from whatever alternate reality they have occupied for almost fifty years, and usher in a new age of greatness.

Either way, prepare for awesome days of great events.

You read it here first.

The Wrong Sox…

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…seem to have won the playoff series.

This is easily misunderstood. Gloom and woe are entirely appropriate, but a defeat for everything noble, good, and righteous, at this awesome scale, can only be an enormous sponge sopping up bad karma in other spheres. This means a lot less for (eg) Tom Delay to spread around; all in all, a noble sacrifice for a better world.

Update here.