Bailout Journal: Newspaper Edition

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Hans Rosling on Economic History

200 years that changed the world

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Fjordman on Muslims and Hitler

From The Brussels Journal:

Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart

In 2005, Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C.  Adolf Hitler remains widely popular in many other Islamic countries, too.  At the same time, Turkish PM Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as a crime against humanity.  It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian genocide in Turkey, a genocide that allegedly inspired the Nazis in their Holocaust against Jews.

Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture.  When confronted with the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven.  Westerners don’t force them to study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Goethe’s Faust; they choose to do so themselves.  Millions of (non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart’s piano pieces.  Muslims, on the other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe.  The fact that they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture.

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Voice Mail Death Watch

Farhad Manjoo on voice mail:

Voice mail is one of the most inefficient, socially awkward, and least user-friendly means of communication out there....

If the voice-mail leavers in your life are anything like those in mine, there's often no great reward for getting through your messages, either.  Guess you're not there. Call me back.  That message might have made sense in the days of home answering machines, when the main function of voice mail was to let someone know who you were and that you'd called—both things our phones now tell automatically.  On the rare chance that you do get an important voice mail, your first move is to transfer the information to some more permanent medium—say, ink and paper.  Unlike just about every other mode of electronic communication today, after all, voice mail can't be searched.

And don't spin me on how voice mail is somehow inherently warmer and more human than e-mail.  Speaking into a dead phone has always seemed unnatural.  That's why we stammer, ramble on, leave awkward pauses.  I submit that whatever finally makes voice mail obsolete will make us all sound far more human—and a little more polished at that.

My personal issue with voice mail is the longer messages.  I always think, what does the caller expect me to do, take notes?  The answer of course is, yes some of them do actually expect that.  Screw that, just send me an email.

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DC School Vouchers

Barack Obama and the DC School Voucher Program

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Who'd Be Female Under Islamic Law?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in The Independent:

I am a Muslim woman and, like my late mother, free, independent, sensuous, educated, liberal, contrary and confrontational when provoked, both feminine and feminist.  I style and colour my hair, wear lovely things and perfumes, appear on public platforms with men who are not related to me, shake their hands, embrace some I know well, take care of my family.

I defend Muslims persecuted by their enemies and their own kith and kin. I pray, fast, give to charity and try to be a decent human being.  I also drink wine and do not lie about that, unlike so many other good Muslims.  I am the kind of Muslim woman who maddens reactionary Muslim men and their asinine female followers.  What a badge of honour.

I am aware that my words will help confirm the pernicious prejudices that fester in the minds of those who despise Islam.  Yet to conceal or excuse the violations would be to condone and encourage them.  There have been enlightened times when some Muslim civilisations honoured and cherished females.  This is not one of them.  Across the West – for a host of reasons – millions of Muslims are embracing backward practices.  In the UK young girls – some so young that they are still in push chairs – are covered up in hijabs.  Disgracefully, there are always vocal Muslim women who seek to justify honour killings, forced marriages, inequality, polygamy and childhood betrothals.  Why are large numbers of Muslim men so terrorised by the female body and spirit?  Why do Muslim women encourage this savage paranoia?

I look out of my study at the common and see a wife fully burkaed on a sunny day.  She sits still.  Her children and husband run around, laughing, playing cricket.  She sits still, dead, buried, a ghost.  She is complicit in her own degradation, as are countless others.  Their acquiescence in a free democracy is a crime against their sisters who have no such choices in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

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