Day: July 20, 2009

And now for something completely different

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m briefly hijacking the blog to mark the 40th anniversary of the moon landing with a few links.  The first is my husband’s entertaining story of how the POWs in Vietnam, of which he was one, heard about what they thought was the moon landing, and declared the moon an American territory to the dismay of their captors.  Our friend Stuart Koehl did a post on the article at the Weekly Standard Blog.

Then there’s an interview with Charles Murray and his wife Catherine Bly Cox at the Space Review. Twenty years ago the Murrays wrote a book, Apollo: The Race to the Moon, that is “widely held to be the best Apollo history ever written.” The interview gives a view of the space program you won’t get anywhere else because the Murrays got to know the people involved in the Apollo program so well — not just the bigwigs, but the young guys who actually made it work.

Here’s the slim connection to our main concern: The ability to put a man on the moon was a product of our civilization, and no other. The Russians were able to get a man in space, as are other countries now (building on our and the Russians’ achievement). But the Russian communist system did not allow for the kind of innovation, or quality control, that ours did. Do we still have that civilization? Maybe. Will we have it in 10 years, in 25 years? Not if we keep going the way we’re going now. All cultures are not equal, and we need to regain our pride in our own culture and civilization and teach it to newcomers. Well, first we have to get rid of an awful lot of junk it’s accumulated.

Janet Levy: When it comes to Islam it is one-way free speech

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 21st:   Steve Emerson tell us what happened at the conference here.

 

Writing today at American Thinker, our friend Janet Levy points out the increasingly frightening attempts to thwart the speech of those warning against the spread of Shariah law while giving free rein to all those who wish to destabilize America.  She begins with the conference we mentioned here on Friday—the Chicago ‘Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam’ conference that went ahead with apparently no problems over the weekend.

On July 19th, a conference entitled “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam” took place as scheduled at the Hilton Hotel in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. There, in the heartland of a post 9/11America, Hizb-ut Tahrir, an international organization outlawed as a terrorist group in several European and Middle East countries, sponsored sessions focusing on strategies to end free enterprise and replace it with Shari’ah law.

Gagging those of us who speak against Shariah law.

It is remarkable enough that a conference of this nature by a group that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government actually took place in an American city. Perhaps even more disturbing is the growing number of cancellations of events and conferences that feature the opposite point of view with material and speakers that seek to educate the public about the threat of radical Islam. Increasingly, our country’s prized right to freedom of speech seems to operate in only one direction, providing plenty of opportunities for our enemies to speak openly against us, yet, placing a gag over any discussion about the radical Islam threat.

Levy then goes on to list many cases, some we are personally familiar with, in which attempts were made (directly by Muslims or their lackies) to silence our point of view.  She mentions the New English Review conference which I attended, the CPAC snub of Geert Wilders (a speech Judy and I attended), Grover Norquist’s role in blocking conservatives discussion of Shariah law, and the Muslim/Somali mess in Nashville (here is just one of many posts on Nashville) which we have covered extensively.  Read the article where she lists many more cases of attempts to silence critics of Islam.

Levy wraps up her list with this:

It is unconscionable in 2009 that an acceptable forum in America today is a conference entitled, “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam,” with a goal of strategizing the demise of the bedrock of our democracy – the free enterprise system – and the replacement of our constitution with a theo-political-legal system that subjugates women, murders homosexuals, confers non-person status on non-Muslims, permits slavery and kills apostates. At the same time, attempts to discuss Islamic doctrine and educate the American public about this very threat are increasingly verboten. In many recent instances, accurate speech is being deemed inflammatory due to fear of retaliation by those who want to silence critics of Islam who engage in legitimate discussion of a serious threat to our nation.

Alaska gets refugees too

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is the first time I’ve seen anything about refugees being resettled in Alaska.  It appears that there is a stepped up effort going on to be sure Alaska gets to share in the joys of diversity too!   From Catholic News Agency:

Anchorage, Alaska, Jul 18, 2009 / 02:21 pm (CNA).- In Anchorage, Catholic Social Services is committed to living out the Gospel mandate, in which Jesus called his followers to welcome the stranger. This is a blessing for people like the Kafley family, who fled the terrors of ethnic cleansing in their homeland of Bhutan in the Eastern Himalayas.

“The government of Bhutan was trying to rid Bhutan of people of Nepalese origin,” explained Patrick Pillai, who mentors the Kafleys through a CSS program. “People were fleeing the country, but Nepal did not want to accept them all because it would sanction the persecution.”

As the official refugee resettlement agency for Alaska, CSS is commissioned to receive people who can no longer live in their own country due to political or religious persecution, war, famine, ethnic cleansing and a host of other woes. If Alaska has been chosen as their destination from among those sent by the United Nations to the U.S., CSS does the work of acclimating them to their new homeland.

And, check this out Alaskans, you are getting Somalis as well.

Last year, CSS welcomed 85 refugees directly from their countries of origin. They came from the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine and Russia. This year refugees have included those from Bhutan and Cuba.

Statistics for Alaska and your state too can be found here, just follow the links to the ORR databases.   I just looked up the previous few years for Alaska and in 2006 Alaska resettled 4 Cubans, 16 from the former Soviet Union, and 4 Vietnamese, for a total of 24 refugees.   In 2007, 30 former Soviet Union (they don’t break it down, maybe Uzbeks) refugees were resettled in Alaska.   So, the numbers are increasing.

To new readers:  I haven’t kept up the “your state” page at the top of our home page, but you can use our search function for your state to see what we have written previously and then use the link to the databases and you can go all the way back to the early 1980’s to see who has come to your state.