Letter From Libya

Descent into Darkness

Prisoners tortured by Libyan militia

Ian Black, London

January 28, 2012

Prisoners held by Libyan militiamen told Amnesty International they had been beaten for hours and given electric shocks. Photo: AP

THREE months after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, concerns are mounting about the mistreatment and torture of prisoners held by Libyan militiamen.  The militia are operating beyond the control of the country's transitional government and officially recognised security bodies.

Amnesty International warned that prisoners from Libya and other African countries have been subject to abuse.

Letter From America

Social Darwinism at Work

It is only a few short years ago that eugenics was practised in the United States.  It was a direct result of Social Darwinism--of elites trying to "help along" the Darwinist idea of the emergence of an uber-race.  This article, reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald underscores how eugenics is part of our recent history.   It wasn't just the Nazis. 

The killer quotation (literally):  "The board's goal was to purify the state's population by weeding out the mentally ill, diseased, feebleminded and others deemed undesirable."

It's Broken Down

Now Even the Mundane Requires a Miracle

How about this?  NZ government primary schools are having to report back on how their charges performed under National Standards.  One school has fessed up and exposed to all the world how its students and the school have failed. 

A Wairarapa school will come under special attention from the Ministry of Education after most of its students failed the National Standards benchmark last year.  But Dalefield School principal Kevin Jephson, who voluntarily went public about his school's results, said the standards were invalid and inappropriate for his school.

It turns out that the principal, Mr Jephson has been an implacable opponent of National Standards.  By going public, no doubt, he is endeavouring to make a political point.  "Our students failed, and we are proud of it" would be the sub-text.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Honest As White Paint

Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, January 27, 2012

I have said kind things about Ron Paul in the past, and I will continue say them in the future. He continues to be one of the people I could vote for when Ringling Bros. finally brings the gaudy parade to my state. But he whiffed it last night in the debate when asked how his faith would affect his behavior in office. He said that it wouldn't. Not only did he whiff it, but Santorum jacked it out of the park.

Santorum said, quite rightly, that the Constitution is the how of America, and the Declaration is the why. He said that government doesn't give us our rights -- God does that -- and he said that the government's role is to protect God-given rights. This was a dead-on bull's eye.

Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Why Did New York City's Crime Rate Drop by 80%?

A worthy article by Adam Gopnik on crime and punishment has been published in The New Yorker.  We will attempt a precis of the salient points.

Firstly, the size of the problem:  the penal system in the US is vast and racially biased. 

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Secondly, US prisons are brutal places.

Letter From America

The Sinking of the West

It’ll look more like the Costa Concordia than the Titanic.

By Mark Steyn

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship.

Bad Weather Coming

Idiotic Utopians and Mountains of Vainglorious Pride

The Soviet Union believed in Five Year Plans--central, government plans--to develop the economy of the Soviet Union to reach a prosperous nirvana whilst creating a new order in the world.  Government planners would focus the resources of the economy on what was vital and important; resources would be delivered; production targets would be set; and the entire army of Soviet New Socialist Citizens would go to work to transform the USSR from poverty to a socialist paradise.

None can gainsay that every attempt was made, every resource was committed.  Yet for nearly one hundred years the Soviet Union was so poor and backward that it did not have enough food for its own people.  Millions upon millions died through starvation and its attendant diseases.  Ah, but the propaganda machine had a ready series of excuses and explanations.