One of the best special-interest bloggers is Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch.  She knows her territory well and comes up with some amazing stories.  The importation of refugees — a high proportion of them fraudulent (90 percent according to Don Barnett) is an appalling racket that cries out for reform; but of course, any politician who said so aloud would be accused of wanting to slam the nation’s door in the faces of the homeless, tempest-tost, etc.

Ann’s post today is about the sensational growth of Islam in western New York state.  Huge loser from that growth?  The Catholic Church.  Major enabler of that growth?  The Catholic Church.  You can’t make this stuff up.

[I note that the region Ann's writing about belongs to the "burned-over district" of the early 19th century.

The name was inspired by the notion that the area had been so heavily evangelized as to have no "fuel" (unconverted population) left over to "burn" (convert).

Something in the water up there, perhaps.]

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The presidential victory of socialist Francois Hollande in France is being presented everywhere as a vote for “growth” over stagnation:

[Irish Foreign Minister] Eamon Gilmore last night said the election of Francois Hollande will “accelerate” a growth agenda in Europe.

And:

Mr. Hollande has said that he intends to give “a new direction to Europe,” demanding that a European Union treaty limiting debt be expanded to include measures to produce economic growth.

What a brilliant act of branding.  Implication: Those who believe in reining in government debt and spending are “anti-growth.”   Those who believe that the private economy and the free market are the only true sources of economic growth are “anti-growth.” 

The pro-big government stimulus spenders have managed to turn a disagreement over means into a division over ends.  Obviously, there is a lot more work to be done in explaining how an economy works.    The fact that Germany’s is practically the only non-moribund economy in Europe should in theory help make the case for government discipline, but the false promise of the big government Ponzi scheme is apparently too seductive.

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• News that former Trent Lott aide Edwina Rogers named as top atheist lobbyist ruffles commenters at Daily Caller [TheDC]
• Indian skeptic charged with blasphemy for revealing secret behind “miracle” of weeping cross [Doctorow] Denmark Supreme Court, 7-0, strikes down conviction of Lars Hedegaard for criticizing Islam in own home [Mark Steyn]
• N. C. preacher says he was just joking when he advised dads to smack around offspring. Oh? [Ann Althouse]
• Failure to accommodate religious beliefs forbidding hair-cutting result in $27K payout by NC Taco Bell operator [EEOC]
• Law to legalize necrophilia? Egyptian Bonk of the Dead story turns out to be too good to check [Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor]
• Ryan Radia on Twitter, attending American Enterprise Institute banquet: “At #aeigala Leon Kass asks whether freedom and prosperity are meaningful without love for God and country. Answer: yes, absolutely.”
• And speaking of Twitter, you can follow Secular Right on it here.

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A reader brought it to my attention that on Chrome/Firefox the new theme was forcing registration. That was not the setting in WordPress, but the caprice of the theme. An issue I did not notice because I am always registered. I’ve reverted to the old theme, which does not seem to have the problem with slow page load at this time. If it does in the future, I will switch to a new theme, though make sure that the commenting system remains de facto functional.

Sorry about that.

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The similarities between the build-up to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the media demagoguery around the Trayvon Martin case are eerie and disturbing, as I write about here:

Could it happen again? That is the taboo question on the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles’s murderous Rodney King riots, just as another racially charged prosecution—this time in Florida—captures headlines across the nation. Sadly, the answer is yes. As the Oakland riots in 2009 and 2010 following a transit officer’s fatal shooting of a parolee made clear, the threat of riots . . . still hangs over interracial incidents of violence when the victim is black. And just as the press cynically manipulated the facts in the Rodney King beating in order to increase racial tensions, it has done so again in the Trayvon Martin shooting inSanford,Florida.

The best hope for avoiding a repeat of the L.A.mayhem, should blacks not be satisfied with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is that police forces across the country have learned the lesson of the Rodney King riots: that outbreaks of civil anarchy must be immediately and unapologetically suppressed.

Anniversary coverage of the LA riots has sanitized the violence and spun out a narrative that holds individuals blameless for their sadistic and homicidal destruction, placing responsibility instead on the usual suspects: the racism of the police and of society.  Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Jim Newton provides a classic version of the “we are all guilty” topos:

The Los Angeles riots represented the culmination of many failures: the failure to provide hope for young people; the failure to supply education and jobs in the numbers that would stabilize communities; the failure to engage those communities in their own protection instead of relying on harsh and coercive law enforcement.

But even more remarkably, the Los Angeles Police Chief Charles Beck follows suit, using the nauseatingly PC term for the riots, “civil unrest,” and issuing a mea culpa for the police role in them:

The result [of aggressive LAPD tactics] was a city that was increasingly alienated from the police who were supposed to serve them. That alienation culminated in the worst civil unrest in Los Angeles history.

Oh, really?  As I write in City Journal:

If LAPD oppression was both the cause and the target of that violence, why did the mobs assault the following civilians, among many others, in the first two hours of violence alone? There were the son of the Korean owner of Tom’s Liquor Store at Normandy and Florence, beaten by gangbangers while the store was being torched; the white driver of a gray Volvo, who was dragged from his car and kicked in the head by assailants yelling “It’s a black thing,” and who barely escaped in his car (minus his camera and briefcase, naturally); the white driver of a brown Jeep Wrangler who was hit by a rock thrown through the front windshield, then smashed in the face with a bottle when he got out of the jeep . . .

Interestingly, Latinos constituted a majority of the arrests during the riots, as photos of the looting would predict.   The riots began as a “black thing,” but ended up as much a Hispanic thing.  So much for the Ron Unzian view of Latinos as pacific saviors of California.  On the other hand, Hispanics were overwhelmingly the victims, not the instigators, of the most vicious crimes of violence.    While it is hard to imagine a Hispanic-initiated riot, certainly of the fury and personal predation of the LA riots, Hispanics’ eager participation suggests how fragile are the constraints of social order and how essential it is to enforce law and order with unflagging vigilance.

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The New York Times is shocked that Apple seeks to minimize its liability under California’s exorbitant tax rates by moving profits to lower taxing states and countries.  The paper melodramatically suggests in a front page “expose” today that the economic woes of a local community college, attended in the early 1970s by Apple founder Steve Wozniak, are directly related to Apple’s stinginess. 

I wonder if Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and other Times executives employ tax attorneys for their personal finances or for those of the paper.   And if Apple paid more taxes in California, how much would reach the classrooms of Cupertino’s De Anza College, as opposed to bankrolling the thousands of diversity bureaucrats throughout the state’s university and college systems, not to mention funding astronomical public employee union benefits or bloated
government agencies and their ineffective social uplift programs. 

The Times can’t contemplate that the solution to tax avoidance is to lower taxes and reduce the magnitude of government spending.   It’s too bad that the titans of Silicon Valley don’t have the guts to speak out about the economic realities that drive business decisions.

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New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has eloquently opposed two local living wage bills championed by New York’s left-wing City Council:

 “Government cannot bend the laws of the labor market,” he said, arguing that the bills would destroy jobs, and that taxpayers would ultimately pay for the increased wages.

This month, on his weekly radio show, he compared the living-wage bill to Soviet economic policies, saying, “The last time you really had a big managed economy was the U.S.S.R., and that didn’t work out so well.”

And yet, Bloomberg urged the Supreme Court not to hear a case challenging New York’s hoary rent regulations, defending them

as a necessary response to a housing shortage and as a way to prevent “rent profiteering.”
Last month, [he] certified that there was still a state of housing emergency, defined as a vacancy rate of less than 5 percent, which is a requirement for the regulations to be in effect.

The emergency has been in effect for more than 40 years.

There is actually a stronger case to be made for living wage  bills as they apply to government-funded projects than for rent regulations, an insane, demonstrably counterproductive policy far more akin to Soviet-style central planning, one which inevitably produces the very “housing emergency” which Bloomberg cites as justification for it.  Apparently, Bloomberg does understand the workings of supply and demand, except when it comes to New York’s  sacrosanct rent controls, virtually the last in the country.  A very depressing demonstration of the power of politics over principle. 

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In an otherwise fascinating column on Japan’s peculiar demographics, Ross Douthat presents one misleading fact:

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

…
These problems are still with us, and some of them are worse than ever. But they haven’t left us in anything like the plight the Japanese are facing. Our family structures are weakening, but high out-of-wedlock birthrates may be preferable to no births at all. We assimilate immigrants more slowly than we should, but at least we’re capable of assimilation. American religion can be shallow, narcissistic and divisive, but our religious institutions still supply solidarity and uplift as well. Our economy is weak and our deficits are large, but at least we aren’t asking the next generation to bear the kinds of burdens that today’s under-30 Japanese will someday have to shoulder.

From this piece you might infer that Japan has gone through a more radical secularization than the USA. But the World Values Survey has data from 1980 down to the mid-2000s. Below are the results for Japan, the USA, and Sweden (the last as a “control”).

People tend to view other societies through their own experience. So, for example, one presumes a circumstance of modernization where societies become progressive more secular, and less coupled to institutional religion. That’s how it happened in the West. But this is not the case with East Asia. On the contrary, it is a defensible proposition that in East Asia modernization has been coupled with the rise of robust institutional religions! (e.g., South Korea) East Asia has long had weak traditions of organized religion, and the political orders have always managed to maintain the subordinate status of religious institutions.

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Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien is at it again:

Via the Guardian:

One of Britain’s most prominent religious figures, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has accused David Cameron of immoral behaviour and of favouring rich City financiers over those struggling on lower incomes.

O’Brien, Scotland’s most senior Roman Catholic authority, said: “The poor have suffered tremendously from the financial disasters of recent years and nothing, really, has been done by the very rich people to help them.

Nothing? Really?

Amongst his suggestions:

O’Brien called for Cameron to introduce a Robin Hood or financial transaction tax on City dealings. “My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich,” he told the BBC.

Last year Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, led Europe-wide efforts to stop France and Germany introducing just such a tax, arguing that it would be uniquely damaging to UK interests.

In a BBC1 Scotland interview, O’Brien said it was immoral “just to ignore” those suffering as a result of the credit crunch.

“When I say poor, I don’t mean [only] the abject poverty we see sometimes in our streets. I mean people who would have considered themselves reasonably well-off.

“People who have saved for their pensions and now realise their pension funds are no more…”

Of course, amongst those hit by such a tax would be, uh, savers.

As O’Brien probably knows.

Cardinal O'Brien · Religious Left · Roman Catholicism · taxes · UK

Via the Jewish Press:

Tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews will participate in a huge rally to be held on Sunday evening, May 20, at Citi Field in Queens, New York, to combat the evils of the Internet and the damages caused by advanced electronic devices.

The NY Mets will be playing in Toronto on the same day.

The website JDN cites one of the event organizers who said: “This will be a mass rally never before seen in the history of Orthodox Jewry in the U.S. It will be a gathering of unity of all the Jews living in the U.S., a gathering to disseminate information and a prayer rally for the success of Klal-Israel’s war on the Technology which threatens the sanctity of the homes of Israel.”

The “Gdolei Israel” (leading sages) behind the conference have specifically ordered to schedule it for the eve of Rosh Chodesh Sivan, a day which is considered particularly fortuitous when it comes to children’s education, since the goal of their campaign is to save the generation from the ravages of advanced technology…

Okey dokey.

hikikomori · technophobia · Ultra-Orthodoxy