Month: October 2016 Page 1 of 2

I left this
comment on an October 26th Gatestone column by Soren Kern, “Germany’s
Migrant Rape Crisis: Where is the Public Outrage?”:

“Where is the
public outrage?” The outrage did not exist because the federal government
and the local police forces withheld information about the identity of the criminals
in an effort to ameliorate public opposition to the invasion of hundreds of
thousands of “refugees,” most of whom were fully grown males. But
now, as s

In the meantime,
in Britain, Her Majesty’s government has seen fit to “screen” children from the
Calais “jungle” – or rather
hide behind physical screens their arrival and the fact that most of these “children”
are advanced teenagers or full-grown males.

In Sweden,
the government and
the press mitigate the criminal impact of Muslim migrants on its society.

Ingrid
Carlqvist and Lars
Hedegaard wrote, in order to underscore the fate of
Swedes, or of Geert  Wilders, or of anyone else brave enough
to report the facts about immigration and made to suffer persecution by their
own countrymen:

Michael Hess, a local politician from
Sweden Democrat Party, encouraged Swedish journalists to get acquainted with
Islam’s view of women, in connection with the many rapes that took place in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the “Arab Spring”. Hess wrote, “When will you journalists realize that it is
deeply rooted in Islam’s culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to
comply with Islamic teachings. There is a strong connection between rapes in
Sweden and the number of immigrants from MENA-countries [Middle East and North
Africa].”

This remark led to Michael Hess being
charged with “denigration of ethnic groups” [hets mot folkgrupp],
a crime in Sweden. In May last year, he was handed a suspended jail sentence
and a fine — the suspension was due to the fact that he had no prior
convictions. The verdict has been appealed to a higher court.

For many years, Michael Hess lived in
Muslim countries, and he is well acquainted with Islam and its view of women.
During his trial, he provided evidence of how sharia law deals with rape, and
statistics to indicate that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among
perpetrators of rape in Sweden. However, the court decided that facts were irrelevant….

Soren Kern
raises these facts:

·        
Despite the mounting human toll, most of the
crimes are still being downplayed by German authorities and the media,
apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

·        
“The police are not interested in
stigmatizing but rather in educating the public. The impression that we are
engaging in censorship is devastating to the public’s confidence in the police.
Sharing information about suspects is also important for developing prevention
strategies. We must be allowed to talk openly about the problems of this
country.” — Arnold Plickert, director of the GdP Police Union in North
Rhine-Westphalia.

·        
“The Press Council believes that editorial
offices in Germany should ultimately treat their readers like children by
depriving them of relevant information. We think this is wrong because when
people realize that something is being concealed from them, they react with
mistrust. And this mistrust is a hazard.” — Tanit Koch, editor-in-chief of
Bild, the most-read newspaper in Germany.

It appears
that the majority of German police entities adhere to Angela Merkel’s “Let’s
not be beastly to the migrants” policy,” and under-report, or do not report at
all, rapes committed by Muslims (and Muslims of all origins have committed
them: Afghans, Somalis, Iraqis, Turks, etc.) at all. Identifying criminals  is verboten
and “discriminatory.”

One ISIS
statement about the Yazidis is that they must be raped to “smash the blonde
bloodline.” Doubtless that is one of the purposes of the widespread rapes in
Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, countries with a high proportion of
blondes and blonde victims. Yet German and other European governments refuse to
ascribe to Muslim rapists the least tinge of “racism.” Yet anyone pointing to a
gang of Somali or Pakistani rapists and expressing the least hint of “Islamophobia”
is automatically deemed a “racist.”

In the
meantime, back in the U.S., damaging, incriminating facts, regardless of how
they acquired, are given short shift  by
criminal politicians and their wonks. 

Interview with Mook:

Clinton Campaign manager Robby
Mook and longtime Clinton confidant John Podesta thought the deal ― in
which Clinton had committed to speak at an event for the king[of Morocco]
on the condition of his $12 million donation ― would look bad. Clinton aide
Huma Abedin tried to explain that it was simply too late to back out.

“Why wasn’t that classic pay-to-play?” Wallace asked.

“There’s nothing new here,” Mook replied, deflecting to
Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers.

“But, Robby, there is some new stuff,” Wallace responded. “Emails
show ― and I’m going to go through some of them ― you were not happy
at all the idea of this meeting and her going there.”

Mook maintained that it was all just a scheduling issue
that had nothing to do with corruption or public perceptions of corruption.

“We didn’t want her going overseas,” Mook said. “I didn’t
want her going overseas before the campaign was kicking off. Again, these are stolen documents.”[Italics mine]

Ergo, the information about
the illicit activities committed by the Clinton campaign is nullified? Not
admissible in a court of law because the emails proving the existence of
criminal activity were stolen?

Suppose Eliot Ness of TheUntouchables (a fine TV crime series until it succumbed to early PC) purloined a series of memos between Al Capone to Frank Nitty about
what to do about the Bugsy
Moran gang. “We got to deal with these buggers. Can we rub them out without
getting a lot of bad press? Without everybody pointing fingers at me?” “Yeah,
Al. Got to call a pow-wow between us and Bugsy’s people. Lure them into a trap.
A garage would be perfect. Got to be stealthy like. Send in a bunch of our
boys, some of them dressed like cops. Then let them have it. Use machine guns
to be thorough. Let me handle the details and the press.”

Would that exchange be
admitted as evidence in court because the memos were “stolen.”? Would Capone be
indicted, tried, and jailed for conspiracy to murder and being an accessory to
murder, instead of being jailed for the paltry charge of income tax evasion, as
actually happened?  Members of the Moran
gang were indeed murdered execution style by Capone’s men.

Possibly Ness’s purloined
(or “hacked”) Capone-Nitty correspondence would be admissible in court, but
then that was another era.

Let’s go one further:
Suppose the mayor of Chicago had criminal connections to Capone and his gang, and
wanted the whole Bugsy Moran or St. Valentine’s Day massacre issue removed from
police and court records. and also removed from “public” consciousness. Would the
massacre have actually occurred? Possibly, but it would have been written off
as “just a bunch of yeggs with mental problems.” Yes. But there is no longer a
record of it. The public is left in the dark. The mayor issues a public statement
to the effect that all the rumors that Capone was responsible were false and slander
the good name of Capone (PPBUP or Benedizioni e la pace sia su
nostro pisano).

So, if the documents were
not stolen, the information would still be festering inside the emails, but no
one would know about it or have any knowledge of the wrong-doing. We would
remain ignorant of the corruption and the scale of that corruption aside from
the King of Morocco issue. Is that what you’re saying? That evidence of
duplicity, if not revealed, would not be judged, or enter into anything because
you might have been successful in suppressing the information, regardless of
the legality of the hacked emails.

Welcome to the universe of thoughtcrime.

Let’s imagine for a moment
that someone was able to hack into the records of the Dusseldorf police, and
the records showed not only how many rapes of German women had been committed
and reported, but the specific “migrant” identities of the criminals, most of
whom were handed light to non-existence sentences. None of that information had
been released, and the public was ignorant of it, even though much of the public
knew something was terribly wrong.  

Suppose the hacker
published that information on his own blog site, a la Wikileaks,  causing an outrage, knowing that no German
newspaper would publish the information lest they be reprimanded by the German
Press Council or its employees even imprisoned and fined. The police track down
the owner of the blog site and he is arrested for “theft” of government property
(the information coming under the rubric of “security), and for instigating “hate,”
“bigotry,” and the “blasphemous libeling” of a racial, ethnic, and religious “minority.”

Soren Kern added:

Germany’s migrant rape crisis — which has continued
unabated day after day for more than a year — has now spread to cities and
towns in all 16 of Germany’s federal states. Despite the mounting human toll,
most of the crimes are still being downplayed by German authorities and the
media, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

The German Press Council (Presserat) enforces a
politically correct “code of media ethics” that restricts the
information journalists can use in their stories. Paragraph 12.1 of the code states:

“When
reporting on criminal offenses, details about the religious, ethnic or other
background information of the suspects or perpetrators is to be mentioned only
if it is absolutely necessary (begründeter
Sachbezug) to understand the reported event. Remember that such
references could foment prejudices against minorities.”

On October 17, the Press Council reprimanded the weekly newspaper, Junge Freiheit,
for revealing the nationality of three Afghan teenagers who raped a woman at a
train station in Vienna, Austria, in April 2016. The press council said the
nationality of the perpetrators is “not relevant” to the case, and by
revealing this information the newspaper “deliberately and pejoratively
represented the suspects as second-class persons.”

On the other hand, it’s
okay for Muslim preachers to advocate war against the West and to take sex
slaves. Ali Hammuda, a Muslim cleric in Cardiff, Wales announced in July to his
teenage audience, as reported in the Daily
Mail:

“One of the interpretations as to what this means is that
towards the end of time there will be many wars like what we are seeing today,
and because of these wars women will be taken as captives, as slaves, yeah,
women will be taken as slaves.

“And then, er, her master has relations with her because
this is permissible in Islam, it’s permissible to have relations with a woman who
is your slave or your wife.”

Sharia will dominate the world, even if perpetrators must show up in court and
be slapped on the wrist, leaving their victims to deal with the rapes and
fearing more.  But Westerners are not
supposed to fear that, or even know about it. That’s thoughtcrime, Islamophobia!  As far as the State is concerned, when it
comes to reporting Muslim crimes, “mum’s the word.” The State doesn’t
want you to know.

Ignorance can be bliss,
until you’re raped. And even dead.

Hillary Clinton’s Unacknowledged idol: Negan

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as
Negan, the “super” villain of Season 7 of The
Walking Dead, has nothing over Hillary Clinton in terms of foul
language. In fact, Clinton has a nonstop sewer of a mouth that puts Negan’s
to shame. All the censors could permit Morgan to say on screen and repeat ad nauseam is the four letter term for
feces.

Clinton has had no censor
to control her mouth rage. In public appearances, she poses as a calm, clean-cut,
well-bred, grandmotherly hostess about to serve you tea and nothing but the
truth. But backstage, and in venues where cameras are not rolling, she is a
harpy dedicated to befouling the minds of everyone she comes into contact with,
which includes her campaign staff, her Foundation clients and donors, the
Secret Service, and doubtless her husband, Bill, and daughter Chelsea. She
makes “biker chicks” look like polished graduates of finishing school. She is
about as “feminine” as a pig in a pantsuit.

A person, regardless of his
gender, who uses that kind of language as an automatic, default means of
expression has a festering ball of noxious grunge for a soul. Clinton has exhibited
that soul many, many times, in public and off-camera.

But Hillary’s and Negan’s
mouths are not the main subject here. I discussed the simpatico political
relationship between The Walking Dead’s
boisterous, glib, repellant villain (the worst ever depicted in the series) in
“Hillary
and Negan: Parallels in Evil.”

What is the difference between
the Negans of fiction and the Negans of the real world? The fictional ones
cannot kill you. The real ones can and will. As happened in Paris and Brussels
and New York City and dozens of other places over decades. There are dozens of Koranic verses for violence that the
fictional Negans could just as well adopt…..

… I do not look forward to the debut of Negan in Season 7.
It appears he’s a thorough-going nihilist and evil to the core. When he shows
up, I’m quits with TWD. It seems that the scripters are pandering to viewers
who want Negan.

 

The title of the debut
episode is “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.” Meaning that when you meet
Negan, you will probably cease to exist. The two most appealing heroes of The
Walking Dead, Carol and Daryl, are no longer heroes. They are just memories
now. They have been changed and demoted to secondary characters. Carol’s future
role is indeterminate; Daryl has been kidnapped into Negan’s Sanctuary maw to
be imprisoned and tortured, future also indeterminate.

What worried me most – but
no longer, because after this review, I will have joined the “Quitters
Club” – has been the new stress on the overwhelming, driving-force of malevolence
in the person of Negan. In the past, the Walking Dead gang fought evil, and
largely defeated it.  They lopped off the
heads of “walkers,” defied and fought gangs of rampaging marauders, and worked
to create a livable “environment” during an apocalypse. They lived as
rationally as they could in a world in which emergency ethics was the rule
demanded of their survival.  Several characters
stood out, Carol and Daryl among them who became favorites of The Walking Dead watchers.
In general, most of the gang would not submit to the state of the world.

Until now. The leader, Rick
Grimes, after six Seasons of leading his gang (and friends) to some semblance
of safety and security, in the latest episode has submitted to Negan’s
threats and killings, and is broken, so broken that he was willing to cut his
son’s arm off at Negan’s command. It was Negan’s purpose to break him, to own
him, to “make him mine.” If there was anyone left alive in the gang, Rick would
now “lead” them in service and in subservience to Negan. Negan almost literally
dances in joy after he’s used his bat on his vicitms.

In “Hillary
and Negan: Parallels in Evil,” I draw a wholly justified parallel between
Negan and Hillary Clinton. As Negan is a psychopathic power-luster who revels
in the power he wields over his mob of awed and comfortably subservient “Survivors”
(her unthinking supporters and the MSM)
Clinton wishes to wield the same kind of power, but elevated to a scope beyond
but hauntingly similar in all its attributes to Negan’s. Hillary would like to
break Americans as Negan broke Rick Grimes. Their purposes, ends, and means
dovetail to exactly the same power-wielding point. They comprise a mutual-nihilist
society.

Make no mistake about it;
Hillary is as much a nihilist as is Negan. Negan smiles in satisfaction when he
sees the sobbing, pleading look in Rick’s eyes. Negan is a first-class jihadist at heart. He enjoys killing for
the sake of killing. He relishes killing spirits and souls as much as he does
lives, in the most horrible, gruesome ways possible. Hillary will gloat in
public and in private, when more Americans are raped, murdered, and beaten by Muslim
immigrants and Mexican illegals when she lets more of them in, just as Barack Obama
has. She and Obama are the cold-hearted “humanitarians” their supporters and
the MSM hope to bring down the country.

Hillary’s Law: the baseball bat

Do you think Hillary isn’t
made of the same stuff? Think again. Her nihilism is the only explanation of
her policies and behavior ever since she entered “public service.”  Remember, she laughed about how a
rapist she represented got off with a light sentence because of time served in
a county jail, and how she victimized the rape victim again, and ruined the
girl’s life.

Do Americans really want
this hellacious, nihilistic harridan laughing at them from the Oval Office?

American citizens are in for a double whammy
of speech restrictions, and even of censorship. 
The Federal Election Commission (FEC),
and the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) want to ratchet up the pressures on freedom of speech.

Two independent
news blogs have bravely reported developments in this realm when they stand a
chance of being “lawfully” obliterated by the government: The
Daily Signal, and Accuracy
in Media.

On the one hand,
the FEC is a government agency that should not even exist. But it was pushed
and encouraged by Theodore
Roosevelt, a Progressive, and so the initial legislation was introduced and
passed by Congress, on the premise that regulating Big Business was the natural
thing to do (re the  Sherman Anti-Trust
Act of 1890 of 1890, and other Federal regulations)

As early as 1905, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the need for campaign finance reform and called for
legislation to ban corporate contributions for political purposes. In response,
the United States Congress enacted the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor
Senator Benjamin Tillman, banning corporate contributions.
Further regulation followed in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act enacted
in 1910, and subsequent amendments in 1910 and 1925, the Hatch
Act, the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, and the Taft-Hartley
Act in 1947. These Acts sought to regulate corporate and union spending in
campaigns for federal office, and mandated public disclosure of campaign
donors.

But the urge to regulate corporate
contributions during political campaigns can be dated to the immediate post-Civil
War period.

Although
attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867,
the modern era of “campaign finance reform” in the United States
begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)
of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA
required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign
expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to
bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by
individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an
independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure
requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their
campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to
promote their political views.

Fred Lucas in The
Daily Signal article of October 20th writes:

But the six appointees are thinking about it. It’s an option “on
the table.”  The FEC is divided evenly
between Democrats and Republicans. It is a “bipartisan” entity. The notion of
“bipartisanship” politics is counterproductive, to say the least.  In a situation when decisions of enforcing or
creating arbitrary power over free men 
must be made, the most consistent party will always “win.” One party
must compromise its principles, if it has any. The Republicans have no
principles. Otherwise they would not have encouraged the creation of FEC. It is
the Democrats, with their consistent, unswerving commitment to statism and the
regulation of the private affairs of other men, who have been setting the terms
and establishing the “moral high ground” of altruism – that is, sacrificing men
and rights for the “greater good,” for the “community” – for over a century.
The Republicans have always seconded that altruism, and said, “Me, too!”  Very few Republicans have maintained an
explicit, articulate fealty to the founding principles of this nation.

It’s a good thing for me that the FEC hasn’t
discovered my books, such as Trichotomy
( a roman à clef), set in 1929, on
how the collectivists and Progressives will take over American education, or A
Crimson Overture, how Reds and Pinks have infested the American
government for decades, or We
Three Kings, about an American entrepreneur who is “thrown under
the bus” by the State Department to be killed at leisure by a Saudi sheik over
a gold coin, or The
Black Stone, in which the hero deals with the Muslim
Brotherhood  killers as early as 1929.  They and other titles are prescient . But
that would not matter. Each and every one of these titles, although they are
fiction, could be deemed too provocative, blasphemous, injurious, or slanderous
to allow their continued availability for sale and reading by “deplorable,”
“every day” Americans. They certainly contain what could be interpreted as
“partisan material.”

There really is no way to know what would be
going through the minds of the FEC. If the proposal to regulate or prohibit the
content of books, editorials, radio stations, and videos is “on the table,” it
is too much to hope it would ever be taken “off the table.” The itch to
control, regulate, or even prohibit is too tempting to resist scratching.

It’s doubtful that these appointees take any
political fiction seriously, but it’s unnerving nevertheless to know that the
option “is on the table” to banish a title or a program or an Internet news
site they could easily put on a Federal Index Librorum
Prohibitorum. A certain presidential candidate has already said that
she wants Breitbart and InfoWars reduced to ashes. What’s to stop
the FEC or the Department of Justice from targeting lesser known blog sites? Nothing.

Lucas continues:

The FEC hasn’t spoken in a unanimous voice about what
Goodman and others say are basic matters of free speech under the First
Amendment. Rather, various commission votes open the door to applying campaign
finance laws to movies, books, and other media rarely ever considered before as
campaign contributions.

The exemption was
designed to ensure that news organizations, which generally are corporations,
cannot be accused of electioneering or making in-kind campaign contributions
based on news reporting or commentary on political candidates. The law states, in part:

B) The term ‘expenditure’ does not include—
(i) any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities
of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication,
unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party,
political committee, or candidate; …

In one case, FEC member Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat,
suggested the “press exemption,” provided in campaign finance law,
 doesn’t protect book publishers.

Weintraub then referred to the Supreme Court’s 5-4
ruling, in the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,
that organizations have free speech rights allowing them to spend money to
support or oppose political candidates.

The work we do
need to do, which some of my colleagues, including Commissioner Goodman, have
blocked for years, is to write rules that respond to Citizens United and the
advent of super PACs. Sadly, even routine regulatory fixes have become nearly
impossible to accomplish at the FEC.

This useful and
almost entirely noncontroversial technological-modernization proposal has been
bogged down for years. I decided to stick with the staff’s draft in the hope of
getting this done without further delaying it with nongermane but substantive
proposals.

And who is to determine
what is and is not “nongermane” or “substantive”? Not you or me.

Six individuals – whether
they are appointed or elected is immaterial – will determine after verbal cat
fights in conference rooms over the future of free speech.

As though that were not
“worrisome” enough, we are witnessing the disgraceful and damning spectacle of
the major American news outlets not so much censoring what they report, but
dispensing with objectivity and facts in their quest to guarantee the election
of their preferred presidential candidate, and so crudely and transparently
biased that few people take them at their word anymore.  Today’s MSM is comfortable with lies and
outright fabrications.

The press, or the mainstream media (MSM), has
usually been exempted from FEC regulations. We have grown inured to that. We
have also grown inured to the blatant liberal bias of the MSM, so much so that
it is largely held in contempt by Americans as a notoriously untrustworthy
source of news.  ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC,
CNN, and NPR have all been “electioneering” for over a year, without disguise
or pretence. The New York Times,  the
Washington Post, and countless smaller newspapers and magazines have gone hog
wild “electioneering” without penalty or so much as a tut-tut from the FEC.

However, “charitable” organizations that fall
under 501(c)3 regulations must remain mute. The FEC virtually acts as a
policeman for the IRS to enforce 501(c)3
constraints.

The “guidelines” include:

Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) are commonly
referred to as charitable organizations. Organizations described in
section 501(c)(3), other than testing for public safety organizations, are
eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions
in accordance with Code section 170.

The organization must not be organized or operated for the
benefit of private
interests, and no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings
may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual. If the
organization engages in an excess
benefit transaction with a person having substantial influence over the
organization, an excise
tax may be imposed on the person and any organization managers agreeing to
the transaction.

Section 501(c)(3) organizations are restricted in how much
political and legislative (lobbying) activities they may conduct. For a
detailed discussion, see Political
and Lobbying Activities. For more information about lobbying activities by
charities, see the article Lobbying Issues; for
more information about political activities of charities, see the FY-2002 CPE
topic Election Year
Issues.

Let us now turn to the Federal
Communications Commission.

Sold to the highest bidder!

Jerry Kenney in his October
21st article on Accuracy In Media  (AIM),
“FCC
Approves Foreign Takeover of  U.S.
Broadcasters,”breaks the bad news:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on September
29th did something worse than give up control
of the Internet. They voted unanimously to put America’s entire broadcast
industry on the fast track to a foreign takeover by Chinese, Russian or Muslim
Brotherhood front corporations.

This new FCC
rule gives foreign interests the long sought-after tools they need to shape
U.S. public opinion and to censor the opposition.

Once a foreign corporation scoops up a media business, such
as a chain of radio stations, it can eliminate national and local programming
and substitute its own government’s propaganda. That means that conservative
talkers could find themselves off the air.

There are eleven
nonfiction titles that should be highlighted with all the fiction. Most of
these titles concern the war on the West waged by Islam. Others are about the
war on America waged by our own government, about the decaying state of the
arts, of language, and of education. Most of them are collections of my essays
on Rule of Reason  and edwardcline.blogspot.
These titles do not sell as well as the fiction; the fiction sells well
(really! At least a dozen full sets of the republished Sparrowhawk and Cyrus Skeen series sell every month). Fiction takes
readers away from the depressing state of the world (at least, mine does); the
nonfiction reminds them of just how depressing the world can be and will
continue to be. Do I blame them? No. But then I am indulging in a kind of catharsis
every time I pen a new column about the killing machine called Islam and the
depredations and betrayals of our government.

The New Sparrowhawk Companion is a republished title I also rescued from the
collapse and bankruptcy of the original publisher, MacAdam/Cage Publishing. It
was my idea, suggested to the publisher after Book Six; War was released. The publisher by this time had accrued
a large stable of writers and an extensive backlist, but its ambition was
greater than its capacity to deal honestly and fairly with its authors. It was
a spendthrift. It competed with larger, mainstream publishers in bidding
contests for titles and authors it thought would enhance its prestige and
appeal. For example, it paid Audrey Niffenegger,
a teacher of “creative writing,” a handsome sum for The Time Traveler’s Wife, which was also made into a flop of a
movie. The novel did not sell as well as MacAdam/Cage Publishing expected. This
was the deal that broke the publisher. Then MacAdam/Cage Publishing began its regular
delinquencies with royalty payments to its other authors, and then
underhandedly “leasing” or selling the e-book rights to books it had no
contractual claim to, in order to raise cash. This was theft and a demonstrable
violation of contract.

Having gone without
royalty payments for a long time, I saw the writing on the wall and began republishing
Sparrowhawk on Kindle, something MacAdam/Cage
Publishing refused to do. I had even offered the publisher a chance to publish
the first Cyrus Skeen novels, believing as he did not that the series was a
perfect fit because the stories were set in San Fransicso,
 MacAdam/Cage
Publishing’s location. Then David Poindexter, the mover and creator of MacAdam/Cage
Publishing, died, and everything fell apart faster than a house of dominoes.

The
New Sparrowhawk Companion is a collection of essays about the six titles in the Sparrowhawk story by other contributors,
and includes a list of characters (over 300) and in which title each appears, a
lexicon of 18th century terms, a bibliography of some of my research sources,
and other features created to help a reader grasp and appreciate the series and
the period in which the story is set.

Rational
Scrutiny: Paradoxes and Contradictions in Detective Fiction, is another animal entirely. It
is a collection of essays, some old, some new, about the art of writing
detective fiction. They focus mainly on the Chess Hanrahan first person
narrated novels, and on what then was only a handful of Cyrus Skeen novels (seven).
It includes “The Wizards of Disambiguation,” a critique of politically correct
speech and writing and of academics who claimed that The Maltese Falcon was, among other things, a fictional diatribe
against capitalism. It was my submission to the Western Illinois Press to be
included in its compendium of essays about the art of detective fiction (it was
rejected). The Cunning Craft was
eventually published, but I have no idea what is in it or whose articles were
included, because its Amazon selling price of over $200 did not entice me to
reward the Western Illinois Press for its Marxist snubbing. Marxists do not
like to be contradicted with facts. “Wizards” could be treated as a companion
essay to “The
Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism,” from 2013, a review of Guidelines
for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn
Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language.

The remaining
nonfiction titles are collectively potpourris of my Rule of Reason columns on
politics, the culture, Islam, and freedom of speech. Islam’s
Reign of Terror, however, was commissioned by Voltaire Press and I was
paid for it. The essay appeared on Voltaire Press’s site. When I proposed to
the owner of Voltaire Press that we convert it into a pamphlet, I received no
response. So, I went ahead with the project and it is now available as a print
book, on Kindle, and on Audible. The piece bears a Voltaire Press copyright
notice, which I included for legal reasons. However, there were miseries
connected with that site. See my article “Thumbs
Down on Voltaire Press” for details. I later learned there was a reason why
Voltaire Press never responded. The founder had been arrested, I think in
Mississippi, as a fugitive from the charge of having absconded with Duke University
funds (in North Carolina). I have been blocked from Voltaire Press’s site,
unable to leave comments. Indeed, an Internet search for Voltaire Press turns up nothing.
It had a Facebook page, from which I was also blocked, and that has vanished,
as well. The new “owner” of Voltaire Press
never replied to my queries about Reign
of Terror, his identity remains unknown, and he, too, has gone the way of
all puff balls. Exciting times for me, but now water under the bridge.  Islam’s Reign of Terror has
a companion pamphlet, A
Handbook on Islam, published later. The new
“owner” of Voltaire Press never replied to my queries about Reign of Terror, his identity remains
unknown, and he, too, has gone the way of all puff balls. Exciting times for me,
but now water under the bridge. 

Please indulge me while I “toot” my horn. Over
the years I have produced a dozen or so novels that touch on current events and
even anticipate them. They are about Islam, cultural and political corruption,
and frauds perpetrated on the citizens and the country by our self-appointed
elite. Here are synopses of their plots. They are all available as printed
books, on Kindle, and also as Audible versions.

I begin with the
earliest series I had finished, self-published on Amazon, because no mainstream
publisher would touch it. It stars Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur and
maverick capitalist who invariably runs afoul of the political and financial
establishments in America and abroad. The first title, Whisper
the Guns, is set in Hong Kong. But the most relevantly violent one is
the second title, We
Three Kings, in which Fury is targeted for death by a Saudi sheik with
the approving nod of our State Department. Sound familiar? The sheik gets his
comeuppance by story’s end, with Fury holding the sheik’s feet and other body
parts to the fire. I boldly adopted the Saudi royal emblem for the cover. No outrage
from the Riyadh medievalists yet.

Another series, published
by Perfect Crime Books in
Baltimore, Maryland features a detective hero, Chess Hanrahan, who specializes
in solving moral paradoxes. In Presence
of Mind Hanrahan encounters and engages in a contest of wits with two
denizens of the State Department, who subscribe to the policy of “cognitive
dissonance,” in order to put across a disastrous “peace” treaty with the Soviet
Union. Wishing hard enough for a preferred result will make it so. Hanrahan
jolts the celebrated denizens back to reality in the worst possible ways. In With
Distinction, he investigates a murder in the philosophy department of a
Midwest university (based on Michigan State University), and uncovers a snake
pit of plots to grant illiteracy and ignorance the highest academic honors, and
to rid the department of a reason-oriented philosophy professor. Sound
familiar?

The Hanrahan and
Fury novels were composed and finished in the mid-1980s. Their plots were
extrapolations of the political and cultural conditions of the time. I had no
sense then that things would grow much worse. Political correctness  in speech and written forms was not yet a
ubiquitous term of derogation of enforced conformity – although Marxists and
feminists were hard at work to impose PC, often successfully – while such
concepts as  “safe places,” “white
privilege,” and “trigger warnings” would have caused even the leftist
professors in academia to guffaw in laughter.

Shortly after the
second Hanrahan title, First
Prize, was published in 1988 and soon reviewed in The New York Times, I
received an invitation from the Western Illinois University Press to submit an
essay to a collection of essays by others on the art of detective fiction. I
sent my piece in (it’s included in Rational
Scrutiny), and waited, half certain that the piece would be rejected
because it went counter to the prevailing tone of criticism. It was indeed
rejected. The essay collection, sans
my essay, was published in October 1990 under the title The
Cunning Craft. Rather  than see
all the research for the essay go to waste, which was on how Dashiell Hammett’s
The
Maltese Falcon (first serialized
in Black Mask crime magazine in 1928-1929, and later published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf
in 1929), was not a “proletarian”
novel as many academics claimed, I decided to write a novel set in the same,
week, month and year as the Sam Spade novel was set, in December 1928. Thus was
born China
Basin, the first Cyrus Skeen novel 

Cover of the first Knopf edition, 1929

China Basin reflects many things, especially the state of the literary
and dramatic  arts. Skeen, who has just
returned from a tour of the Continent, over dinner discusses of the state of
current theater with two friends, who are theater critics. He says about a hit
play that is running in San Francisco and is slated to premier in New York City
:

“I mean that Olympus Deferred
is the slickest paean to transcendentalism I’ve ever seen, Herb. Ninety percent
of the serious drama penned and produced — and a significant volume of sly
boots comedy — says the same things as does Olympus, but not nearly as
well. Olympus answers no questions, takes no sides, and resolves no
issues. It hands approval to both the hero, who isn’t one, and to the
anti-hero, who isn’t anything. It bequeaths happiness to the weakling and pain
to the misanthrope. In a deft sleight-of-hand it sustains — not challenges —
the very conflict you’d expect it to resolve. It preaches tolerance for the
coward and the frightened, and tolerance for the loner. It rations equal
portions of value between the manqué  –
and the firebrand. It’s a vehicle of nihilism, Herb, the best yet to walk a
stage and send people’s minds abuzz. Everybody goes away happy; nobody is asked
to take sides; nothing is affirmed or denied. In that respect, Olympus
is not controversial.”

The two friends
listened:

Castle and Kripps listened to
him with interest and asked him many questions. They even joined in a few
choruses of laughter. But Skeen knew that their eagerness had been doused by
the argument over Olympus Deferred. When he began to report in detail
the things he had seen in Germany — particularly in the theater, and the
influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Neo-Expressionism in the other arts —
Kripps’s attention became more pronounced.

Finally, Kripps interjected,
“Well, Hardenberg’s to blame for that ‘word salad’ nonsense. Lessing, Kant,
Herder, Schopenhauer — that whole crowd is behind the unbelievable insanity you
saw there, Cyrus. We can even see it sprouting here. For example, in the
theater — the serious theater — Olympus Deferred is archetypal. ”

The Skeen series
is long and adventuresome, spanning the 1920s decade and then some. I am
currently working on the 21st Skeen detective novel. I find that I can no
longer set a detective novel in my own time. Political correctness, government regulations,
and the general tone and content of contemporary culture make a hero such as Cyrus
Skeen impossible. I am comfortable working in Skeen’s time – historian Paul
Johnson once wrote that the 1920s was the last decade in which America was what
it as meant to be, Prohibition and some federal intrusions to the contrary notwithstanding
– and Skeen is free to act without the kind of self-conscious restraints that
bedevil fictional heroes today. Skeen and I both have a freedom of action,
speech, character, and manners which in our culture today are alien and unwelcome.
Neither Skeen nor I must jump through federal and cultural hoops to get things
done. And Skeen and I are thinkers and take ideas seriously. Skeen, at least,
is a threat to those who fear his crime-solving prowess and panache.

Skeen ventures
into realms few other fictional detectives are equipped to move effortlessly
in.

In Civic
Affairs he is asked to apologize for his rough treatment of criminals.
He laughs at the preposterous idea and kicks the advocates of the idea out of
his office. In Sleight
of Hand he is asked by a pair of professors from the University of
Wisconsin to stand for the office of Public Defender in the coming local city
elections; he also laughs at the idea. He learns that the former Public
Defender was murdered to make room for another candidate (not Skeen who would
also be murdered) who would introduce Progressive issues into the campaign. In Stolen
Words he proves that a jailed writer did not murder his publisher, but
he also learns that the writer and publisher had made a business of plagiarizing
many American classics. The Circles
of Odin pits Skeen against a cabal of occultists who are on a murder
spree to eliminate “useless” people (echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, although I didn’t
realize the film’s influence on me until after the title was published).

Skeen is not
averse to tackling “big time” issues. In Exegesis
Skeen tracks down the persons responsible for murdering ex-convicts;  throw in the murder of a retired Wisconsin Supreme
Court justice and Skeen’s plate is full.  In The
Daedàlus Conspiracy he journeys to Monte Rio to attend the annual
outing of the country’s elite, businessmen, politicians and cultural leaders to
abort the assassination of a U.S. Senator. Wintery
Discontent finds him hired by an Austrian diplomat who wants to
introduce a scheme to the Western allies that would predate the European Union,
but fears for his own life. 


This caper is linked to a subsequent plot in Seeing
Double, in which the Soviets hatch a scheme to discredit the allies
with a bogus plan to invade and overthrow the Soviet regime. Skeen’s murder is
integral to the plan – he was supposed to be the disgraced courier of the
invasion plan – but the resourceful detective foils it.

Politics is not
the usual focus of Skeen, but often it is unavoidable. In The
Chameleon he solves the murder of a businessman by a member of a
nascent Nazi bund near Stanford University. That episode begins with a bounced
check. A
Crimson Overture introduces him to the web of Soviet espionage when a
British artist he and his wife have befriended is murdered. The lady was a
British spy. And in
perhaps his most ambitious case Skeen tackles The Muslim Brotherhood,
in The
Black Stone, when he investigates the brutal murder of a Jewish girl
and the torture/death of a New York newspaper

reporter who stole the sacred
Black Stone from the Ka’aba in Mecca.

This was Ted Kennedy’s
fondest legislative dream. In 1995, the Center for Immigration
Studies opined on the consequences of the The
Hart-Celler Act of 1965:

The unexpected result has been
one of the greatest waves of immigration in the nation’s history — more than 18
million legal immigrants since the law’s passage, over triple the number
admitted during the previous 30 years, as well as uncountable millions of
illegal immigrants. And the new immigrants are more likely to stay (rather than
return home after a time) than those who came around the turn of the century.
Moreover, this new, enlarged immigration flow came from countries in Asia and
Latin America which heretofore had sent few of their sons and daughters to the
United States. And finally, although the average level of education of
immigrants has increased somewhat over the past 30 years, the negative gap
between their education and that of native-born Americans has increased
significantly, creating a mismatch between newcomers and the needs of a modern,
high-tech economy…..

The liberalization
of immigration policy reflected in the 1965 legislation can be understood as
part of the evolutionary trend in federal policy after World War II to end
legal discrimination based on race and ethnicity — essentially, the immigration
bill was mainly seen as an extension of the civil rights movement, and a
symbolic one at that, expected to bring few changes in its wake. [Bolding the
report’s]

And, there were a number of noteworthy 
foot-in-mouth predictions, this one  by Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), a sponsor of
the bill:

“With the end
of discrimination due to place of birth, there will be shifts in countries
other than those of northern and western Europe. Immigrants from Asia and
Africa will have to compete and qualify in order to get in, quantitatively and
qualitatively, which, itself will hold the numbers down. There will not be,
comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering this country. .. .Since the
people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could
immigrate [sic] from those countries
because they have no family ties in the U.S.” (Congressional Record, Aug.
25, 1965, p. 21812.)

Ted Kennedy wants you to disappear.

Ted Kennedy then assures
everyone that there won’t be deleterious consequences of the new immigration
bill. But, being a Kennedy, he could not help but lie:

Senate immigration subcommittee
chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with
the following:

“First, our cities will not
be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the
present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the
ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in
some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any
one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and
Asia … In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the
proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to
think.”

Sen. Kennedy concluded by saying,

“The bill will not flood
our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It
will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers
to lose their jobs.” (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization
of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)

In 1965, there
was no ISIS, Muslims were all but invisible, and so were Mexican and South
American illegals, and Syria and Iraq may as well have been on the moon. But,
knowing how little Kennedy valued any truth, one cannot but imagine that he was
hoping for the worst: he, too, wanted to destroy America. He got what he wished
for, in the person and policies of Barack Obama.

Now, if we have
admitted thousands of Syrian “refugees”-cum-“immigrants,” and among them is a
high proportion of passive Islamic supremacists, and another proportion of ISIS
infiltrators posing as put-upon sufferers of wartime hardship, what does this
bode for the country?

Well, the French
may not have the knack for keeping out terrorists, but they have grasped a bit
of the problem and have provided us with a foreshadowing of things to come in
this country. Bruce Cornibe in his Counter Jihad article of October 11th, “French
Terrorism Watch List Overflowing with 15,000 Potential Jihadists,” writes:

Terror
watch lists help track potential terrorists, but they are only as good as the
validity of the indicators to get on the list, the intelligence on the
suspects, the manpower to monitor the highest threats, and the aggressiveness
of law enforcement to step in before the radicals act upon their desires.
France’s terror watch
list with its 15,000
individuals gives insight into the extent of how radical Islam is plaguing one
of Europe’s largest countries. The UK’s Express provides some details about the
list and some of its failures stating:

French
authorities began tracking people on a database in March of 2015 following the
Charlie Hebdo attacks and shootings at a kosher market in January of that year
that killed 17 people.

However
that did not prevent the subsequent co-ordinated attacks in Paris in November
of last year which killed 130 or the horrifying slaughter of 86 people at the
Bastille Day celebrations in Nice in July.

There have
been a total of 21 terror attacks across the country since December 2014
sparking widespread anger and a backlash against French president Francois
Hollande.

Now Special
Forces are said to believe that at least 4,000 of these individuals pose a
significant threat to society and are being tracked on a daily basis by the
Directorate of Internal Security.

The majority of the people being
watched are men aged between 18 and 25 and are said to be “psychologically
confused.”

Psychologically confused?? Among other ill-effects of Islam, it can also be responsible
for dementia.

Just as Angela
Merkel wants to see indigenous Germans replaced with what she must imagine will
be a mongrel hybrid of Germans, Middle Easterners, and North Africans (provided
enough German women are raped and impregnated by migrants and denied by the new
fascist German state the right to an abortion). This is the “social justice” of
our warrior “elites.” It is pure undisguised racism.

The Germans have
a “final solution” to the problem of Muslim migrant depredations: Fuse Islamic
ideology with what is left of Western liberalism. Finance Minister Wolfgang
Schaeuble has proposed introducing a “German Islam.” Reuters reported on
October 2nd, in “Germany’s
finance minister presses for a ‘German Islam‘”:

A veteran ally of Angela Merkel
urged Muslims in Germany on Sunday to develop a “German Islam” based
on liberalism and tolerance, saying the influx of people seeking refuge, many
of them Muslims, is a challenge for mainstream society.

Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble,
stepping out of his usual finance remit, urged tolerance, saying the arrival of
hundreds of thousands of migrants required a better understanding among Germans
of what is important to them and how they want to live.

The arrival of large numbers of
refugees has strained communities and led to a rise in far-right violence and
attacks on migrant shelters, particularly in eastern Germany.

Schaeuble, a stalwart of
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), said: “Without a doubt, the growing
number of Muslims in our country today is a challenge for the open-mindedness
of mainstream society.”

In a guest article for
conservative paper Welt am Sonntag, he added: “The origin of the majority
of refugees means that we will be increasingly dealing with people from quite
different cultural circles than previously.”

He acknowledged that sexual
attacks by migrants in Cologne and two attacks by migrants claimed by the
Islamic State militant group over the summer had soured the mood.  “We should not, in this more tense
situation, allow an atmosphere to emerge in which well-integrated people in
Germany feel alien,” he said.

Despite the rising number of
xenophobic attacks in Germany, Schaeuble said he believed the majority of
Germans would say: “Yes, we want you to belong to us.”

Perhaps Schaeuble
is blind or tone deaf, but he seems to be oblivious to a growing number of
Germans who are shouting and demonstrating: “No! We do not want you to belong to us!” Because they know that, in the end,
they will belong to the Muslims. Western values and Islamic values are
irreconcilable.

“Timmy” Kaine (I
call him “Timmy” to indicate his intellectual age), Hillary Clinton’s
vice-presidential candidate, is one of the most voluble and vicious Democratic
racists. He wouldn’t say what he says below unless Hillary and her staff had
first vetted it. “I’m Hillary Clinton, I approved this doofuss’s message.”  Infowars
reported:

“I’ve never been treated badly
in life because of my skin color or my gender,” Kaine told a group of black
Baptists in New Orleans. “I think the burden is on those of us who are in the
majority — Caucasians. We have to put ourselves in a place where we are the
minority.”

The “burden” that Kaine mentions
obviously means taking on “white guilt,” despite the fact that – even at the
height of slavery – only 1.4% of whites in America owned slaves. White people
were also victims of far more brutal and longer lasting oppression under the
Barbary slave trade.

Kaine’s desire to see whites
become a minority in America is set
to be realized in around 30 years because white people are the only group
with a higher death rate than birth rate.

Hispanics are growing in number
at a pace of around 2.1 percent a year, with blacks growing at 1.3 percent, while
whites are only growing at 0.5 percent.

Ann  Moreno on Truthfeed also reported Kaine’s moronic
meanderings in “Tim
Kaine Admits Hillary Plans to “Stick it to White People” Says ‘Whites Need to
Submit’”:

In what can only be
called a colossal Freudian
slip, Hillary’s VP nominee admitted on Thursday that
Democratic policies are harmful to white Americans.

Kaine was speaking to a group of
black Baptists in New Orleans when he suggested that in order to have “equity”
between the races, white people must submit themselves to a state of
repression similar to what black Americans have experienced.

Essentially, what Kaine is saying,
is that he and Hillary want to turn White Americans into the minority race.

…and her policies will do that,
according to him.

Vice President
Joe Biden, the Obama administration’s resident “scary
clown” also had to flap his gums on the subject of erasing “white supremacy.”
Breitbart reported  in June 2015 in “Joe
Biden: ‘A Good Thing’ When Whites ‘Absolute Minority’ in 2017 (Census Bureau
Projects Majority-Minority Nation in 2044):

On Tuesday, Vice
President Joe Biden said it will be a “good thing” when whites are an “absolute
minority” in America in 2017…..

“By 2017, those of
us of European stock will be an absolute minority in the United States of
America,” Biden said at a State Department luncheon for Brazilian President
Dilma Rousseff. According to pool reports, Biden added that that’s “not a bad
thing, that’s a good thing” because it means the country is becoming more
diverse….

Biden
is reportedly considering a run for the White House and his party’s chances of
keeping the White House depend on whether minorities and young voters who made
up Obama’s coalition turn out again with the same level of enthusiasm. Recent
polling has found that non-white voters are less enthusiastic about the
2016 election than white voters who tend to lean more Republican.

Listen to Biden rattle
on with his nonstop “wisdom” about “diversity” and submerging and drowning
whites in a multicultural morass.

A flood of “cultural enrichers” on their way to your town

All of this is
linked to the massive immigration into the U.S. of especially Syrian “refugees,”
a group of Muslims too likely heavily saturated with ISIS operatives and
Muslims sympathetic to ISIS.  Patrick
Goodenough Family Security Matters writes in his October 2016 column, “12,2587
Syrian Refugees Admitted in FY 2016.“

The administration admitted a total of 12,587 Syrian refugees during the
just-ended fiscal year, exceeding the target President Obama declared last fall
by 2,587 (20.5 percent).

Of the 12,587, the vast majority
are Sunni Muslims – 12,363 (98.2 percent) – while another 103 are identified in
State Department Refugee Processing Center data simply as Muslims and a further
20 as Shi’a Muslims.

Sixty-eight of the 12,587 Syrian
refugees (0.5 percent) are Christians. They comprise 16 Catholics, eight
Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, one Greek Orthodox, and
34 refugees self-identified simply as Christians.

The remainder of the Syrian
refugees resettled in the U.S. in FY 2016 are 24 Yazidis, eight refugees with
religion given as “other,” and one with “no religion….”

All segments of the Syrian population are affected by the
devastating civil war, which has witnessed grave atrocities by minorities waged
by the Sunni jihadists as well as sectarian-fueled bloodshed involving Sunnis,
Shi’a (including Iranian and Hezbollah elements) and adherents of President
Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect….

Obama has surpassed his 10,000 Syrian refugee goal. Fred Fleitz of The
Center for Security Policy reports:

The Obama administration
announced this week that President Obama’s November 2015 pledge to bring 10,000
Syrian refugees to this country has been met. Mr. Fleitz writes:

You may remember the Obama administration assured the
American people last year not to worry about the risk from these refugees
because processing them would take 18 to 24 months or longer.

I wrote in a November 20, 2015 Fox News.com op-ed
that processing of the 10,000 Syrian refugees President Obama agreed to admit
late last year probably would be sped up to ensure they arrived while he was
still in office and to prevent his successor from blocking these refugees.

This is what happened.  The Obama administration lied
again.

State Department officials defended the process to vet
Obama’s 10,000 refugees and insisted they are “the most thoroughly-screened
group of travelers to the U.S.”  So how did the Obama administration
resolve the problem expressed by CIA Director John Brennan in June 2016 when he
said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee that ISIS is training
operatives and attempting to enter the U.S. through “refugee flows, smuggling
routes and legitimate methods of travel?”

Obama officials are trying to reassure Americans that there
is little threat from President Obama’s 10,000 Syrian refugees because they
claim 78 percent are women and children.  Given that about 72 percent of
Syrian refugees arriving in Europe are military-age males, this is difficult to
believe.  I believe the administration is playing statistical games in the
way it counts these refugees.  There also could be another group of Syrian
adult male refugees that the Obama administration plans to quietly admit later,
probably after the election.

Admitting poorly-screened female Syrian refugees could
allow male ISIS members to immigrate to the United States through
“chain-migration” when these women refugees apply to admit male refugees who they
claim are husbands or blood relatives.  Without documentation, it will be
extremely difficult to confirm these claims.

Lying is par for the course on Obama’s
political golf course.  I doubt that
Hillary Clinton plays even ping-pong, but she is a congenital liar, as well.
And what about all those Somali “refugees”?  Patrick 
Goodenough on Family Security Matters reports again in “Almost
100,000 Somali Refugees Admitted to U.S. Since 9/11 and 99.6% were Muslim.”

Almost 100,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in the
United States since 9/11, including 8,619 so far during the current fiscal
year. The largest number – some 16 percent of the total over the past 15 years
– have been resettled in Minnesota, home to the nation’s biggest
Somali-American community.

Of the 97,046 Somali refugees admitted to the U.S. since
the fall of 2001, 99.6 percent were Muslim, and 28,836 (29.7 percent)
were males between the ages of 14 and 50.

In FY 2015 Somalis were the third largest contingent of
refugees admitted to the U.S. – 8,858, or 12.6 percent of the total from around
the world. Only Burma, with 26.3 percent, and Iraq, with 18.1 percent,
accounted for larger groups of refugees arriving in the country.

The biggest influx of Somali refugees over the past 15
years occurred during the FY 2004-2006 period, after which the numbers dwindled
before picking up again from FY 2014-2016, State Department Refugee Processing
Center data show.

Given the cited numbers above, is the administration really expecting all these
“immigrants” to behave themselves and abide by the rule of law and American cultural
norm? I don’t think the administration knows or cares. Obama and Hillary just
want to subjugate the country and Americans to savagery, more “lone wolf”
terrorist attacks which the authorities will do their best to cover up, suppress
information, and lie through their teeth about, local and federal authorities, together.
And let’s not forget the small-time enablers, such as the mayor of Rutland,
Vermont, who has secretly arranged to “resettle” Syrians in his small town, and
kept the conspiracy from the town’s residents. 
Judicial Watch has this startling news: “Judicial
Watch: Federal Contractor Tells Local Official to Keep Syria Refugee Plans
Secret.”

Judicial Watch today released 128
pages of documents it obtained from the mayor of Rutland, Vermont, showing
a concerted effort by the mayor and a number of private organizations to
conceal from the public their plans to resettle 100 Syrian refugees into the
small southern Vermont town.

The documents include an April
14, 2016, email from Amila Merdzanovic, executive director of the Vermont
Refugee Resettlement Program, to Mayor Christopher Louras, in which she wrote:

I want to share with you the
concern my HQ has about holding a public forum. If we open it up to anybody and
everybody, all sorts of people will come out of woodwork. Anti-immigrant,
anti-anything. They suggest that the forum be invite only but make it as wide
as possible. Work with faith leaders, United Way, etc… Perhaps, we could go
back to the Congregational Church and continue the conversation there.

The mayor and resettlement
organizations shrouded the plan in such secrecy that not even the town’s
aldermen were informed of what was taking place behind closed doors. The
aldermen eventually wrote to the U.S. Department of State protesting
the plan and opened an investigation
into the mayor’s actions. The State Department has not yet ruled on whether it
will resettle refugees in Rutland despite the aldermen’s protest.

Handwritten notes state that the
issue was, “Not what can ‘we’ do for ‘them,’ but what the diversity, cultural
richness do for the community.” The documents contain detailed
discussions of what Rutland will need to provide for the refugees – including
housing, jobs, medical care, and places for worship.

Judicial Watch received the
documents in
response to a Vermont
Public Records Law request to the office of Mayor Christopher Louras.

Merdzanovic later told the Boston
Globe that the hidden talks were “the right thing to do — to move
slowly, keep it to a small circle of people, and then expand.”

Yes, the “right thing to do” – to conform to
Clinton’s proposed policy of keeping “everyday Americans”

“unaware
and compliant.” But Rutland’s citizens are not complying and they are
definitely “aware.”

One can only wonder who are the true enemies
of the country: Muslims and their hostile ideology, or government officials on
various levels throughout the country and the MSM in collusion with the federal
(feral?) government , right down to small town mayors?

Some of the
bravest and most knowledgeable critics of the stealthy Islamization of the West
happen to be women: Pamela Geller, Clare Lopez, Miriam Shaded, and Machteld
Zee, to name but a few. This post will feature Zee’s discoveries and conclusions
about how Islamization is carried out in Sharia courts, without anyone else hearing
anything about it.

The Gates of Vienna (GoV) is one of the few
sites that reports on what is happening in Europe, and often runs first-hand
essays and observations of the turmoil on the Continent. For example, it
published an interview of Machteld
Zee, a Dutch political scientist who gained an inside panorama of the
workings of Sharia courts. Zee is with the University of Leiden, in The
Netherlands. I republish the whole interview here because it would be
fruitless, and something of an injustice, to slice it up for personal
commentary. My own comments are reserved for the illustrations.

The British
Independent in December 2014 ran a long article on British Sharia courts based
on Machteld Zee’s observations, “Sharia in the UK: The courts in the shadow of
British law offering rough justice for Muslim women.” The article
notes that:

Sharia
law is the Islamic legal system, derived from the Koran and the rulings of
Islamic scholars, known as fatwas. As
well as providing a code for living – including prayers, fasting and donations
to the poor – Sharia also lays down punishments as extreme as cutting off a
hand or death by stoning for adultery. 

Critics
of Sharia law – such as Ms Zee, after conducting her research – say it
downgrades women and is incompatible with European human rights legislation.
Men need only say the word to have a religious divorce (uttering “I divorce
you” three times), but women need the sanction of clerics. Without it, they
risk being called adulterers if they do remarry. 

And also notes about Zee:

Her
book Choosing Sharia? is based on the 15 hours of cases that she saw at
the council in London and another at Birmingham Central Mosque Sharia Council,
alongside her extensive research into Sharia law and other reports on Sharia
councils. She also investigated the Jewish Beth Din religious court, where she
interviewed two judges. 

Ms
Zee’s analysis is blistering: these courts all treat women as less than equal
and are incompatible with human rights law. 

The notion of “human
rights” has always been a fuzzy, woozy one that includes collectivist,
state-originated “rights” which contradict individual rights. It is not based
on any exact definition or perception of men or “human beings.” It virtually
excludes the role of volition.

That qualifier
being registered for the record, here is what GoV published.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­_______________________________________________________________________________

A young Dutch political scientist is causing consternation
among the bien-pensants of the
multicultural Left in the Netherlands with her analyses of Islamization. Her
impeccable liberal background and credentials make it more difficult for the
establishment to discredit her.

Dr. Van Helsing has translated an interview with this
iconoclastic young woman. He includes this introductory note:

Machteld Zee Ph.D. is a Dutch scholar who investigated Sharia
courts in the UK for her Ph.D. thesis. This interview was published in the Algemeen Dagblad,
a nationwide Dutch newspaper, on October 4, 2016.

The interview is relevant for several reasons:

Very few
non-Muslims ever have gained access to the world of Sharia courts in the UK.
She has.

The University of
Leiden is fairly high-brow in the Netherlands, because it is not only one of
the oldest universities, but also because the heir to the Dutch throne
traditionally studies at this university (for example, our former Queens
Juliana and Beatrix did, just like our current head of state King
Willem-Alexander). The reputation of this university gives authority to her
voice.

She has become a
target of attacks by leftist apologists for radical Islam since she published
her thesis. She could do with some positive publicity. Similarly,
Islam-sceptics could benefit from her work.

The translated interview:

“Islamization
is Planned” Investigating Sharia

The
Islamization of Europe follows a strategy, according to Machteld Zee in her
book Holy Identities, which was published today. ‘Once you have
knowledge of it, you understand what is going on.’

‘I discovered a comprehensive
system of law that contradicts our secular laws.’

Investigating Sharia
courts

Machteld Zee
(32), a Dutch political scientist from the University of Leiden, studied Sharia
courts in the UK and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on it in 2015.

She was one of
the few outsiders who gained access to the sessions of these Islamic courts.
95% of the cases before these courts are divorce cases. Her investigations
resulted in a pamphlet, Holy Identities.

‘If you compare
the Netherlands in the 1980s with today,’ says the political scientist and law
school graduate Machteld Zee, ‘you will see an increased influence of Islam
everywhere. Saudi Arabia and other countries flooded the world with thousands
of imams, Islamic text books, mosques and tons of money.’

Machteld Zee
needed barely 150 pages to describe the background of Islamic fundamentalism,
which is gaining ground in Western countries. Her book Holy Identities: On
the Road to a Sharia State is an analysis of the problems of the
multicultural society.

You say
that conservative Muslims want to convince their fellow Muslims to embrace Sharia,
the religious law of Islam. These fundamentalists are being helped by ‘useful
non-believers’, non-Islamic intellectuals, politicians and opinion leaders who
don’t want to offend Muslims.

‘Yes, leading multiculturalists
actually believe that Muslims should be shielded from criticism because it
would inflict psychological damage on them. Although many Muslims consider this
an idiotic point of view, others use it to call those who criticize Islam
‘Islamophobes’ and ‘racists’.

You
described yourself as left-leaning liberal when you started your investigation
on Sharia courts in the UK. Now you warn against a lack of knowledge of and a
lack of resistance against the advancing radical Islam.

‘I discovered a comprehensive
system of law — far more systematic then I had expected — that contradicts our
secular laws. Many Muslim women are locked into a religious marriage because
their community thinks a divorce according secular law is insufficient. In
these communities — Muslim communities — Sharia law trumps secular law when it
comes to marriage. Women have to ask a Sharia judge or an imam to dissolve
their marriage, for example when the husband physically abuses her. Even Dutch
Muslim women travel to the UK to appear before Sharia courts. It is a parallel
society. I object to it because these practices go against women’s rights.’

You have
analyzed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a political and
religious movement that aims for world domination, and is supported by lots of
money from fundamentalist circles. The Sharia courts are part of this project,
you wrote.

‘That is why it is so important
that we know what is going on. Authors that I studied for my investigation were
generally benevolent towards Sharia courts. It turned out, however, that none
of them ever attended a session of such a court. They don’t know what is going
on in these courts. Now they ask me to tell all about it. Women are advised by
these courts to accept polygamy and to not file criminal complaints in case of
domestic violence. Physically abusive fathers are given custody of their
children. I have the impression that the tide of the public debate is turning
now that these facts are becoming public. I hardly hear anyone pleading in favor
of Sharia courts anymore.’

In your
book you call out the politically correct elites, who tries to cover up abuse
within Islam and tries to downplay the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

‘In the first place, I think I
am reporting facts. Where I notice that influential Western intellectuals tend
to discourage critics of Islam and help fundamentalists to isolate and
‘Islamize’ Muslim communities; that is a matter of fact. My book is a compact
discourse that aims to bring its readers up to date on fundamentalist Islam.’

How do you
see the future?

‘We will have to act more
defensively and resist Islamization. We should not yield to demands that images
of scantily dressed women in public have to be covered up, for example. Just
say no. Citizens should not leave everything to the government. They can defend
our beliefs and values themselves, too. Why does a college in The Hague decide
to abandon the Christmas tree preemptively? Why is alcohol banned in places
where Muslims show up? There is no need for that. We are doing it to
ourselves.’

Do you fear
criticism? Undoubtedly, you will be labeled as a right-winger.

‘I don’t experience that when I
speak in public. Even a ‘leftist’ audience responds positively to my story.
Right-wing? Come on, equal rights for women and resistance against
representatives of a religion who make threats of violence — let’s call that
common sense.’

_______________________________________________________________________________

Unfortunately,
the political elites that are enabling the Islamization of the West either lack
“common sense,” or are enemies of it.

Choosing Sharia? Multiculturalism, Islamic Fundamentalism,
and Sharia Councils is an expensive title. There is only one edition of it available for
under $100. All the others are priced over $200. I would order a copy of it,
but that is a tat too dear for my budget. Used copies sold by Amazon vendors are more moderately
priced, but still way out of my range.

Ontario Provincial NDP Leader
Andrea Horwath says Islamic Heritage Month is an opportunity for Canada to
celebrate and learn about the history of Islamic culture.

October will now officially be
recognized as Islamic Heritage Month in Ontario after the legislature
unanimously passed an act Thursday.

It began as an NDP private
members’ bill, and party leader Andrea Horwath says it’s an opportunity to
celebrate and learn about the history of Islamic culture.

Horwath says she also hopes it’s
also a step toward eliminating Islamophobia, noting that in her city of
Hamilton, a fire was set at a mosque recently.

Canadian Islamic
History Month has been officially recognized federally since 2007.

Of course, most
Canadians will be scratching their heads trying to recollect the Islamic
“heritage” they should be proud of and celebrating. Like the Islamic “heritage”
ballyhooed in the United States, it amounts to nil, except for burgeoning
welfare rolls and payments and other “entitlements,” so non-Muslim Canadians
cannot be faulted for not knowing what that “heritage” might be. They will be
hard put to name the Canadian Muslim who invented a new railroad car coupler,
or a new heart surgery technique, or ever won “Canada’s Got Talent!” (It happens
to have been Mohammad Khan, in 2006, who sang “That Wudu Voodoo!” But it
didn’t catch on.)

Let’s take a look
at that “heritage.”  It’s pretty impressive.
No wonder Canadians are dancing in the streets, joined by Muslim males wearing
ski masks, and females in burqas and other Muslim Halloween attire doing that finger
gesture. About that gesture, many non-Muslims say it means “Up yours,” but
Muslim authorities contend it means “Walla is Number One!”

Canadians will
sing that hit Muslim song “Subhaanahu Wa Ta’ala,” adapting the lyrics of
“Who’s
Your Little Who-Zis?” They’ll all be dancing crazily, displaying that
distinctive Muslim gang
finger gesture, in the air, just like the jitter-buggers of old!

But the last
people standing after the celebrations will always be Muslims. All the non-believing
infidels will be dead on the pavement, many of them beheaded or their throats
cut. All will be dead but for many of the infidel women and girls, hustled away
by groping Muslim males. Their dresses will be lifted and tied over their heads,
or they’ll be blindfolded if they’re in pants or shorts. They’ll be pushed into
waiting cars, vans, and trucks, taunted by Muslims for being called “sluts,”
“whores,” and “uncovered meat,” and driven away, destination unknown, but
fate certain.

The pockets and
purses of all infidels, dead or alive, will be emptied, as money, cell phones,
house keys, and other personal property so appropriated will be regarded as
lawful jizya.  

Mounties and
local law enforcement will police the dance-athon but will be forbidden from
interfering with the murders and kidnappings because it would be interpreted by
local Muslim communities as violating their religious freedom. After all,
murdering infidels  (especially if
they’re Jews), raping infidel women and children, cutting off infidels’ heads, and
treating infidels as inferior, are all acts dictated and sanctioned, and
encouraged in the Koran,
the Hadiths,
and the Sira.
The authorities’ presence will be chiefly to protect Muslims from defamation,
insults, and other outrageous Islamophobic behavior.

Giving a Muslim a
“dirty look” in public, or holding one’s nose (when the Muslim is a Somali,
Somali Muslims are notoriously odiferous), or commenting outloud or in
whispers, on the overweight condition of most Muslim women, or likening Muslims
to the Borg of Star Trek, are considered
instances of “hate speech” and are among the many punishable offenses, earning one
either a stiff fine and/or a “night in the box.”
Protest not, complain not, resist not! The best way to survive Islamic Heritage
Day in Canada is to keep one’s mouth shut, one’s face blank, and to act
submissive and humble. Our illustrious and forward-looking lead, Justin Trudeau, will be
very pleased.

Murder record over 14 centuries: millions

Number
enslaved by Muslims: over 14 centuries, millions from Europe
and Africa

Number of terrorist attacks: 29,411

Muslim
rape record: in the thousands, much of it inferred because the Scandinavian
and German governments suppress the true figure

Then there is the 1991 Explanatory Muslim
Brotherhood Memorandum of which NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is ignorant of or
dismisses as Islamophobic “pooh-pooh,” even though to sharp observers it is
obvious what is happening. Stealth jihad. Part of the memorandum is very
specific and reads:

“The process
of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The
Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a
kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from
within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the
believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over
all other religions.”

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath would vehemently deny she has
miserable hands. She would also discredit this from the horse’s
mouth:

“…all
Mushrik (anyone who worships any other God other than Allah, which includes the
Shias, Yazidis, the Kurds) can neither be granted amnesty nor be ransomed off.
Quoting a passage from Surah Al-Anfal (The Spoils of War), it says:
“Punish them severely in order to disperse those who are behind them, so
that they may learn a lesson.”

NDP leader Andrea Horwath has learned her lesson. She’s
playing safe. She wants to play the “heritage” card.

O Canada!
What’s to become of you? Eh? Or, O
Canada! Qu’est-ce tu devenir?

Three cheers for Islamophobia! I will not be eliminated, not even if I travel to Canada!

Let’s start with
Obama saying it a first time: “The
future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” He
said this  in Cairo on June 4, 2009, and then again
at the UN.

And Attorney General
Loretta “Hang ‘em High” Lynch has promised to pursue “hate speech,” aka “blasphemy,”
“slandering the prophet,”  or otherwise
mocking all things Islamic.

It’s so easy to
mock Islam, to defame the “religion,” to kick it in the butt as its faithful
bow to Mecca, moon the West, and do the “gimme gimme gimme” gesture with their
hands, and bang their heads on the ground (doing that ritual Islamic dance, the
Shahada, which is not quite the
“Twist” or the “Macareni”).

The 20th century salat, or the ritual bowing in homage, can
be performed in various stances, such as standing up preferably on one foot,
but has been modified to incorporate bobbing and weaving. Hip Muslims found the
traditional posture boring and not very lively. “As much of the ground
must be felt by the nose
as the forehead.
The elbows are raised and the palms are on level with either the shoulders or the
ears, with fingers together. Toes must not have lint or dirt between them, and
must not wiggle.” Many young Muslims regarded the tradition posture
“degrading.”

Did you know that
if you rearrange the letters in Islam, you can make a SALAMI sandwich! Well,
almost. You’d need an extra “A.”

Did you know that
the town of Walla Walla was actually founded by Muslim settlers in 1818, but
not before the local Nez Perce Indians had been subdued and made to submit,
paying wampum as jizya.  Those who refused to
abjure Wontonka, the local god, and swear to Allah, were summarily beheaded.

So, what is an
Islamic martyr going to do with 72 raisins? One option is to emulate Carol in The Walking Dead and make a cookie
casserole. 

How long would a
fight last between a Norwegian and a Muslim (ethnic identity immaterial)? No
time at all. Muslims fight only in gangs. As they do just about everything
else. The Muslim would be joined by other Muslims. Muslims are not really men.
They can’t stand alone. 

They need their brothers to help them do their dirty
work. Individual bullying is an alien concept to most Muslims, except for “lone
wolves,” who are known to try being Mr. Macho all by themselves. But while
committing what infidels call a “crime,” a Muslim prefers to do it with other
Muslims, to form a bond of “Brotherhood.” That way, if they are ever arrested,
they can share the blame and martyrdom.

Bidets were not invented by the racist
French, but by Muslims who did not like returning to the dinner table from the
bathroom with recently busy and soiled left hands. But Muslims had to wait a
long, long time before one of them invented the bidet. His name was Mohammad,
he was a French-Algerian Muslim, and a former member of the Paris Pompiers.
While helping his colleagues hose down burning Citroens
set on fire by fellow Muslims protesting that the sky was blue, he had a
brainstorm. And then he was declared an apostate. He had a thought.
Thoughts are verboten. But he went ahead and endured the banishment.

Let’s take a look
at one of those 72 virgins
promised to martyrs.

In addition to Quranic translations of 78:33 specifying the
virgins will be voluptuous^[20],
Sahih International translates it as “full-breasted [companions]
of equal age”. Tafsir al-Jalalayn says “and buxom
maidens (kawā‘ib is the plural of kā‘ib) of equal age (atrāb is the plural of
tirb)”. Several Islamic scholars explain that they will have “large,
round breasts which are not inclined to hang”.^[21]

·                 
Wide and beautiful/lovely eyes

·                 
Eyes like pearls (or marbles)

·                 
Be hairless except the eye brows and the head (no
makeup, no hair styling)

In addition to Quranic translations of 78:33 specifying the
virgins will be voluptuous,
Sahih International translates it as “full-breasted [companions]
of equal age”. Tafsir al-Jalalayn says “and buxom
maidens (kawā‘ib is the plural of kā‘ib) of equal age (atrāb is the plural of
tirb)”. Several Islamic scholars explain that they will have “large,
round breasts which are not inclined to hang”.

All of these virgins
will be:

·                 
Beautiful (depends on your definition; beautiful
by Renaissance standards?)

·                 
White skinned ^[(will be as European-looking as possible, 

             Muslim males, regardless of their ethnic origins, seem to prefer White      Chocolate to Brown or Black

·                  
(African,  Asian or Mideastern   woman need not apply)

·                 
60 cubits [27.5 meters] tall (nickname “Big
Bertha”)

·                 
7 cubits [3.2 meters] in width (or Plus Size,
unless she’s on Curves)

·                 
Transparent to the marrow of their bones (not a
pretty sight, raw marrow)

·                 
Eternally young 
(on the Avon program)

·                 
Companions of equal age  (to avoid jealousies and rivalries)

Also, there are other very important attributes to these perfect
mannequins. They will be:

·        
Chaste

·        
Restraining their glances (naturally shy)

·        
Have a modest gaze (downcast eyes, looking at
his or her feet)

·        
Splendid (be a good conversationalist, be able
to discuss Plato’s Forms)

·        
Pure (as the driven snow?)

·        
Non-menstruating / non-urinating/ non-defecating
and child-free (just like Eve)

·        
Never be dissatisfied (she wouldn’t dare!)

·        
Will sing praise (with the voice of Tiny Tim)

I think there was a movie that dramatized some of these virgins. I
think it was the original West World. 

Let’s touch on the subject of that special contribution of Islamic hegemony:
Cultural enrichment. Women in Sweden and Germany are being told to just submit
to rape by Muslims, it’s their duty, it’s their chance to sacrifice themselves
to gang rape, and beatings, and disfigurement. It’s the patriotic thing to do! Never mind the risks of
pregnancy, of contracting incurable diseases the Muslims bring from their “homelands.”
If you wind up looking like a leper, that’s the price you must pay to be a
loyal, true Swede or German. 

And here’s a consolation thought: Boys and men who
rape together, pray together. There’s an element of piety in all of us. Don’t be so judgemental! 

Watch your tongue! Do not call the invasion of your country by
Somalis, Afghans, Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians, and other creatures a form of the
Bubonic plague! You can be fined and even jailed for uttering such a thing!

Now, Mohammad was a big fan of child brides. He married several children
himself by the time he was a crotchety, middle-aged horny toad. An “age of
consent” was an alien concept, a “downer.” He could hardly wait to fondle a
child that that had yet to leave its manger. 
And often he fondled them when they were still in the manger. (Cradles
hadn’t yet been invented.) Uncle Mo was a pedophile.  He loved children. Perhaps even boys. 

But
it does no good to call him a pedophile, just as it does no good to call him a
rapist, a murderer, a thief,  a bandit,
an inventor of genocide, a consumer of widows he made by chopping off the heads
of their husbands. All these labels are to Muslims but virtues, of beatific
lettuce bespangling his military tunic, of brilliant feathers in his turban.
These are things to strive to be  in the
ordinary Muslim. Uncle Mo is the model, ideal man to emulate.

 What
other Muslim can be portrayed as a Christ-like saint, as a brilliant military
strategist, as a dignified “lawgiver,” as a humble “man of
peace”? He is seen as being those things by quaking Western dihimmis, by career blankers-out-of-reality.
Mohammad’s rap sheet belies all those appellations. He is
“untouchable.” He may not be slandered, nor should his
“religion” be slandered.

Attorney General
Lynch can try to do her worst to gag and punish purveyors of “hate speech”
(except for hate-spewing Muslims). The Rodham creature can threaten to shut
down all manner of freedom of speech over the Internet. CAIR can litigate in
our compliant judicial system.

To me, ISIS and
the Muslim Brotherhood can go shoe a goose. Americans who want to scuttle the
First Amendment are traitors. Three cheers for Islamophobia!

I present here Chapter 3 of Trichotomy: A Detective Novel of 1929, the twentieth in the Cyrus Skeen
Mystery series. A private joke of mine is that Skeen has read more than one
book, as opposed to the one book that can be found in Sam Spade’s apartment, “Famous
Criminal Cases,” written by a former chief of police of San Francisco. There is
not much background to Spade to be found
in The Maltese Falcon, but Skeen is a Yale graduate; he worked briefly for
the New York City police, before coming to San Francisco to open his own
private detective agency and to pursue his literary passion of writing short
stories.

Skeen is first introduced China Basin, which is set in December 1928, the same month in which
Sam Spade’s case is set. In the series, Skeen has many adventures between the
two Decembers, and he has ventured now into political and “social” commentary.
His essay, “Trichotomy,” on the predictable but uncorrectable behavior of
recidivists, has been published to some acclaim in The American Mercury, a
prominent cultural magazine published by H.L. Mencken. The acclaim is such that
a professor of criminal behavior at Wexford College in San Francisco has
invited Skeen to address a class on the subject. The professor reads the essay
to the class, introducing to his students many unique insights into the mind of
the career criminal. Skeen takes questions from the class, until…Well, you’ll
see.

Cover and Title Page: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (64/62 BC – 12 BC), Roman statesman, general,
and architect, Louvre, Paris; it resembles Cyrus Skeen, according to Dilys, his
wife, who owns a copy of the bust.

____________________________________________________________________________

Chapter
3:   Questions, Answers, and More         

“Well, there’s the progressives’ ideal polity, a
vision in which all the parts – parts meaning people, mind you – all the parts
move in perfect collective unison, with no friction or conflict or clashes, and
all their thoughts and actions mesh without friction or conflict, too, to
sustain some imagined ‘public good’ or ideal society.

“Now, that vision clashes with reality. Reality is inhabited by individuals with their own choices
and reasons for choosing one thing over another, all acting independently, and
with the freedom to act, and without knowledge of virtually all other
individuals and their choices, and
even without consideration for the choices all those others make. There are no
clashes or conflicts among them, either. There
is the ideal society these other ‘idealists’ wish to obviate with direct force.
Essentially, what the progressives’ wish to neutralize or banish from human
action is human volition.”

Skeen answered the question from one of the older
students, a question posed with some doubt and hostility. He consulted, now and
then, some notes he had typed up for the class the night before, mostly to
refresh his mind on the subject.

The class had attracted an almost overflow attendance.
Aside from the usual thirty students in Caruthers’s class, word had got out
that the guest speaker, Cyrus Skeen, would answer questions from the class
about what Caruthers called a “ground-breaking” thesis that challenged
contemporary thought on criminal behavior and criminal rehabilitation. Some
twenty other students had taken the empty places in the rear of the small
arena-like lecture hall.

In the audience sat Dilys, Clara Reyes, and Mickey
Kane, who was invited especially by Skeen to witness the unprecedented
appearance of his friend.

Close to them sat Professor Eustace Raico, the
Assistant Dean of the department, and Professor Salvatore Selgen, who taught
sociology to freshmen and sophomores. Raico was about fifty years old, Selgen
in his mid sixties with a full head of silver hair.

Caruthers, standing at his lectern, had begun the
class by reading Skeen’s original “Trichotomy” article, and parts of Skeen’s
“The Mental Truancy of the Recidivist.” Skeen had given him a copy of the new
“Trichotomy” article which would not appear in The American Mercury until next
spring, a copy Clara had had made at Boyle’s Advertising the day before.

The hall boasted a small semicircle of raised seats
around the lectern. A blackboard was behind Skeen and Caruthers in the
otherwise gray plaster room.

Caruthers had read the new article and had asked
Skeen if he could incorporate some of Skeen’s new insights into his
introduction, but Skeen had declined. “I think Mr. Mencken has priority in
publicizing the material, Professor Caruthers. I don’t think he would be
pleased.”

Caruthers relented with a sigh of regret, but nodded
understanding.

The hostile student had asked Skeen why he linked
the progressives with his Trichotomy thesis. He sat down and tried to glare at
Skeen, but not successfully. Another student, a middle-aged woman raised her
hand. Skeen nodded to her. She rose and asked, “Do you think it’s possible for
a criminal to reconcile his trichotomy?”

He raised a finger. “Now, there’s the third
level of this trichotomy, which is how these ‘idealists’ and criminals deal
with the reality they face every day, the same reality you and I and everyone
else deal with, such as cooking, and driving an automobile, and so on, and with
their own individual, practical, everyday choices.

“The first tier of a criminal’s trichotomy is
comprised of his metaphysical and epistemological premises, the second tier is
his fundamental operative philosophy based on them, and the third tier is his
everyday operative code, the one that allows him to deal with others without
shooting them or being shot by them….”

Caruthers, sitting in a chair beside the lectern,
looked pleased that the event was going so smoothly.

Skeen, standing at the lectern, answered, “He can’t reconcile the parts of his trichotomy, not
in any long-lasting sense. And if he tried, one part of the trichotomy would
dissolve the others, and he’d either acknowledge the supremacy of reality, or
of existence, or he would go mad, or his mind would stall or grind gears. To
return to my original path of inquiry, that’s why a criminal can’t truly honor
a debt of gratitude or want to fulfill
an obligation. A criminal, no matter how effusive his expression of thanks,
will always resent having to feel gratitude or having a debt placed on his
shoulders. Criminals do not like to owe
anything.

“You know that saying, there’s no honor among
thieves? Well, of course there isn’t. Thieves aren’t capable of honor, except
one that’s based on fear or the disapprobation of their peers. But, then, that’s
not a virtue, that’s no way to live. I always had trouble trying to understand
that saying. Did the people who popularized it know what they were talking
about? I think not.”

The woman student seemed to be satisfied with
Skeen’s answer. Another person rose and asked, “Could you discuss the
relationship between general philosophy and your trichotomy thesis?”

Skeen nodded. “That’s a tall order, sir, but I’ll
try. “What is the ‘Trichotomy’? The first part is an individual’s primary
metaphysics. A criminal’s metaphysics is basically one based on David Hume’s
dictum that reality can change for no apparent reason from one moment to
another. Thus, there is no good reason, he says, that the sun will not rise the next morning. However, it
could sit stationary or go backwards and rise in the West. Or change into a
scoop of ice cream.

“Thus, to a criminal, because reality isn’t steady,
or stable, or predictable, or perhaps n0t even open to sensory perception, no
ethics are necessary to act in it. Criminals need not have heard of Hume or
Spinoza or Leibniz to subscribe to that idea.

“It is an interesting note that Immanuel Kant, the
inventor of what I have called elsewhere the schizophrenic view of reality,
admired Hume and his philosophy. Kant, by the way, cadged much of his own
thought from Plato and his Ideal Forms. Because reality is, to a criminal,
always in flux, the best way to survive in it is to adapt one’s actions to the
reality of the moment. Theirs is the phenomenal
world, while the noumenal world, if
it existed, remains unknowable to them. They certainly do not search for it, or
inquire in any serious depth about it. Things just are, and that’s where the criminal is happy to leave it.

“Lest any reader
assume that I am discussing a novel form of the theological Trinity, I wish to
disabuse him here and now of the notion. As explained in the original
‘Trichotomy’ article, and detailed at length in its briefer successor, ‘The
Moral Truancy of the Recidivist,’ I am referring exclusively to the mental and
moral makeup of criminals notorious and unknown, that is, to how and why they
function in the real world without becoming a casualty of it and of their own
actions. It is, strictly speaking, an issue of epistemology and how a
criminal’s epistemology influences his metaphysics. And vice versa.

“After all, Al
Capone and Frank Nitty and others of their ilk rely on a minimal and tenuous
fealty to reality to survive their denial of and violation of reality, which
they labor to keep at arm’s length, or compartmentalize in a separate quarter
of their minds, before it envelops them and smothers them. For example, neither
would order a plate of meat salted with rat poison or tainted, spoiled meat for
dinner, thinking they could defy the fatal consequences of ingesting it and
smack their lips as they attacked the meal with knife and fork. Capone and
Nitty would both ‘know’ that somehow the chemical composition of rat poison was
in direct conflict with their digestive mechanisms.

“Their metaphysics
is based chance or happenstance that the sun will always rise in the morning,
because there’s no reason why it should not
rise. Likewise, because they knew third-hand that all men who ate rat poison
died of it, there was no reason for any gangster to believe that neither would not die of it. Capone might think he is exempt
from the laws of perilous food consumption, but there was no pressing reason
for him to test the idea! Or so he would think. 
The experiment might prove fatal, unless there was a physician nearby
ready with the quick-acting antidote….”

The audience
chuckled.

Skeen added, “One thing
that criminologists seem to have forgotten, or never conceded, or even
explored, is the possibility that criminals are deathly afraid of reality and
the justice it can met out when something goes awry with their felonious plans
or if the dice role of chance doesn’t fall in their favor. Thus it is with the
actions and world views of conniving politicians, which is why I put the latter
in the same class as common criminals, who, as readers will recall, were not
the original subject of my thesis.

“But one can’t
discuss the pathology of criminals in regards to reality without touching on
the pathology of crooked politicians. The two classes of humanity are brothers
under the skin. That fact is eminently observable even to the person with a
meanest capacity for honest thought. The newspapers are full of stories of the
latest political scandals. Remember the Teapot Dome scandal? As a criminal’s
chief motive is to escape reality, or rather to escape the justice reality is
sure to bring him, or hold it at arm’s length, so is that of a thieving or
dishonest politician or bureaucrat.”

Skeen smiled. “It
cannot be denied that criminals and politicians think. Of course they think.
But when their minds turn to cheating honest men and bypassing reality, their
thoughts are not honest. Then their mental efforts erect a circus tent to put
on fabulous mental contortions and conjurer’s tricks to persuade themselves of
the efficacy of his estimate of reality, and having as an audience only those
with the meanest capacity of awareness coupled with a weakness to be fascinated
by the colorful legerdemain…

“Such minds are but
the clucking, noisy pullets otherwise known as voters who detect in the
political artist an offer of something for nothing, and who are ready for the
chopping block. But, the editor of this fine publication has written far better
and more eloquent indictments of the human poultry species than I have and ever
will…”

Most of the audience
laughed. Dilys was grinning from ear to ear. She raised her hands and applauded.
Others followed suit. Caruthers rose and applauded.

Assistant Dean
Raico, however, raised a hand. “One last question, if you please, Mr. Skeen. I
believe your answer will be brief, so I do not think it would detain you much
longer.”

Skeen sighed and
nodded. “Yes, Professor Raico?”

“Surely this subject
of trichotomies comes under the subject of sociology. I am curious to know if
you are familiar with the works of Ibn Khaldun, who is regarded in sociological
circles as the first sociologist. His major work, Muquadimah, could be said to be the founding work of the subject of
sociology.”

Skeen made a face.
“Who? If I know anything about Muhammadan names, and that’s not much, his is
probably half a mile long.”

Raico nodded, not
happy with Skeen’s answer. “Yes. His full name was Abdurahman bin Muhammad bin Muhammad bin Muhammad bin Al-Hasan bin
Jabir bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim bin Abdurahman bin Ibn Khaldun. He was a prominent
fourteenth century Muhammadan historian and social critic from Andalusia and
North Africa. He also wrote about political science and economics. Are you
familiar with him?”

Skeen shrugged and
shook his head in amusement. “I confess total ignorance of him, sir.”

Raico sat down
wearing a sour expression. His seat companion, Professor Salvatore Selgen,
heard him mutter, “I thought so.”

Skeen overheard the
remark, and grimaced again. “Well, I guess I’m to be faulted for not knowing
how many angels can do the Charleston on the top of a pin, either.”

Caruthers glanced at
his Assistant Dean and did not give his colleague a kindly look. He thought,
and he was determined to express it personally after the event, was, “Professor
Raico, that question was unworthy of you to ask Mr. Skeen. Mr. Skeen has never
professed to be anything more than a diligent and well-read amateur. ”

Caruthers rose from
his chair and shook Skeen’s hand. “Words cannot suffice to tell you how
grateful I am for your appearance, and I think I speak for most of my class, as
well. You speak like no valedictorian I have ever heard, I learned so much just
listening to you today. You had the attention of everyone in this room.”

Several students and
visitors had already filed out. Dilys and Kane stood where they had sat and
waited for the Dean to stop speaking with Skeen. Some of the invited guests
also held back. Neither Caruthers, Raico, nor Selgen had introduced their
guests to Skeen or to anyone else. They were pointed out by Caruthers. Skeen
had introduced Dilys and Kane to Caruthers before the talk.

One woman in a red
overcoat and with a black cloche pulled tightly over her hair went quickly down
the steps to the lectern.  “Oh! Mr.
Caruthers! What a wonderful talk!”

“Thank you, my dear,” said Caruthers,
turning to the woman. “You’re Chastity Biddle, aren’t you? Professor Raico’s
guest? And your husband is here, too, I see – ”

Suddenly the woman screamed, “To avenge
my father!! To avenge my father!!” She took a butcher’s knife from her purse
and plunged it several times into Caruthers’s chest, and then whipped it once across
his throat.

Caruthers gasped, and then gurgled as
blood poured from his chest and neck, soaking the woman’s clothes. The Dean
finally collapsed at the woman’s feet.

Skeen was stunned for a moment.

The woman turned to him. “To avenge my
father!! To avenge my father!!” An otherwise handsome, pale face was twisted
into one of single-minded madness. Her blue eyes were implacable marbles of
hatred. She raised the bloody knife and took several stabs at Skeen.

Skeen had stepped back to evade the thrusting
knife, which he barely avoided, and then bent and moved closer to the woman. He
kicked her once in a shin, which distracted her for a moment, and then struck
her face with a roundhouse punch. The woman dropped the knife, emitting a sound
much like a hiccup, and fell unconscious to the floor on her back into the
spreading pool of Caruthers’s blood at the foot of the lectern.

Skeen stooped down to examine Caruthers.