It’s Tuesday, June 5th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, a rather thought-provoking bit of commentary from Bret Stephens and Global View:

Lady Gaga Versus Global Jihad

The West needs a countercultural strategy against radical Islam.

We’re definitely not in Mecca anymore, Mohammad!

Two years ago I wrote a column making the case that Lady Gaga did more to galvanize Muslim hatred of the West than all Israeli settlements combined. The column was denounced for naïveté and—what else?—shilling for Israel.

So here’s the latest news from Planet Gaga: Last week, the star announced she was canceling her June 3 Jakarta concert date, disappointing the 52,000 ticket holders who had sold out the show in days. The reason? A group called the Front for the Defense of Islam, or FPI, had threatened to “wreak havoc” at the concert. Their reason? She brings “the faith of Satan to our country and thus will destroy the nation’s morals,” according to an FPI leader.

Then again, who isn’t bringing Satan to the Muslim world these days?

Shortly before Gaga’s canceled appearance, Irshad Manji, director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, visited Indonesia to promote her moving new book, “Allah, Liberty and Love.” Ms. Manji is a faithful Muslim, a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda to Canada, and the author of the 2004 best seller, “The Trouble With Islam.” That book’s subtitle, “A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith,” gives away the gist.

Ms. Manji is also no stranger to Indonesia, having toured the country four years ago to promote her last book. Back then, she found a mostly tolerant country, eager to debate her ideas if not always to embrace them. Not anymore. “Four years ago at Gadjah Mada”—one of Indonesia’s leading universities—”they welcomed me with open arms; I spoke to three hundred students,” she tells me. “This time the rector canceled my event.”

That wasn’t the only trouble Ms. Manji ran into in Indonesia. She and her party were repeatedly turned away from hotels. A community event in south Jakarta was disrupted by a deputy police chief who announced that “the community doesn’t want Irshad here.” At an event at an Islamic Center in Yogyakarta she was set upon by radicals wielding crowbars and yelling “Where’s Manji?” Audience members formed a human shield around Ms. Manji, but an assistant of hers was hit and had part of her vertebrae dislocated.

So here, it seems, is the new state of play: In a country in which transvestism had an honored place in public culture long before it became acceptable in the West, the world’s leading gender-bending pop star is no longer welcome. And in the country long thought of as the home of moderate Islam, a leading voice for Muslim reform is treated as persona non grata.

All this should be taken as evidence that, when it comes to building bridges between the Islamic world and the West, no amount of Western policy concessions—whether that means an end to Israeli settlements or finally closing Gitmo—is going to mollify Islamists. The real Islamist complaint is against Western culture itself, in all its innovating, freewheeling and free-loving glory. Islamists won’t be satisfied until the First Amendment itself is revoked. (And every non-believer either dead or enslaved.)

Yet that’s a lesson that still hasn’t been learned. Since 9/11, the West’s approach to Islamism has been one long pre-emptive cringe. (Led, as of late, by America’s Cringer-in-Chief!) It’s how we have come to handle the Quran with white gloves and shy away from reprinting the Danish cartoons. It’s why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is now being represented in court by a military attorney wearing a hijab. It’s why the phrase “Islamic terrorism” has become taboo. It’s why nobody in the Army had the sense to call out Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan on his rants before he went on his rampage.

The predictable result has been to violate our best principles while encouraging Islamists to make ever-more outrageous demands.

Maybe there’s a better way. The West so far has been trying to fight radical Islamists with a mix of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies. But it’s not going to win the long war unless it has a countercultural strategy, too.

Consider Lady Gaga’s abortive attempt to perform in Jakarta: What’s interesting isn’t merely that she was forced to cancel. It’s that the show would have filled a stadium had it gone ahead. Similarly with Ms. Manji: The salient fact of her visit wasn’t just that she was set upon by thugs. It’s that there were Indonesians on hand to shield her physically against violent men with crowbars. And that was for a woman heckled with calls to “please go back to your lesbianland.”

In other words, both Lady Gaga and Ms. Manji have important constituencies in mass and high culture. The worrying question is whether those constituencies still form a majority capable of defending Western-style rights. “We’re giving away our rights under the constitution piece by piece,” one of Ms. Manji’s supporters told her in Jakarta. Will there be anyone to support her should she visit again in five years?

Thinking about the threat of radical jihadism isn’t fashionable these days, with unemployment at 8.2%. But the threat hasn’t vanished simply because we don’t like to think about it. Countering that threat will require not just drones or boots on the ground, but also moral confidence. For that, there is Ms. Manji—and also (swallow hard, conservatives) Lady Gaga.

We wouldn’t know Lady Gaga from Joe Garagiola….and somehow we doubt we’d enjoy her music anymore than his….assuming he sang at all.  But neither Lady Gaga’s music, nor her morality, which we find highly objectionable, is the point.

The issue is how the West can penetrate the walls of ignorance and intolerance behind which Islam has continued to grow despite advocating positions and philosophies that went out with the Dark Ages.  And if Western culture, in almost any form, can turn the tide of Islamic extremism, well….at least Lady Gaga can only blow up herself and her audience once.

And since we’re on the subject of Mission Impossible, next up, a snippet from columnist Janet Daley writing in the May 19 edition of London’s Daily Telegraph, courtesy of the WSJ:

[I]t is not the dream of European co-operation that was doomed from the start: given the ancient hatreds and unforgivable sins of the past, that was difficult, but it was not impossible. What has made the project unworkable is the insistence that the EU be a vehicle for democratic socialism: the impossible dream was not European unity but universal “social solidarity” stretching across a continent, for which the single market was simply a milch cow to produce the funds.

Unfeasibly enormous social security and entitlement promises were made on the basis that the free market would always provide. Nobody bothered to ask what would happen when the market faltered or fluctuated (as genuinely free markets do) or when the sense of entitlement outgrew the wealth that could be created. The problem is not unique to Europe. They are facing the same question in the US, where benefits programmes—particularly social security (the US federal pensions system) and Medicare—have become as untouchable, and as financially unsustainable, as they are here.

How long will freedom survive in the face of mass rage at the loss of the economic security that has come to be seen as a basic human right? People were told that they could have lifelong protection from want without any restrictions on their liberty or their economic self-determination. So now the cake has been well and truly eaten and had. The EU is going to have to admit sooner or later that this fantasy has run its course.

As will America….and that right soon!

Turning to today’s Money Quote, here’s a piece of Progressive prose from the MSM’s pet “Conservative”, David Frum:

“Some object that the mayor’s proposal to restrict serving sizes will restrict liberty. But the liberty restricted is not the liberty of the soda-drinker. If they wish, soda drinkers can buy a 2-liter bottle of soda at the grocery for about $1.70 and pour as much of it down their throats as they wish.  The liberty that is being restricted is the liberty of the soda seller to manipulate known human weaknesses to the seller’s advantage and the buyer’s detriment.”

Ahhh!  As Inspector Clousseau might say, the old “seller manipulating human weakness” ploy!  Which we’ll assume doesn’t apply to state-sponsored manipulations such as the Stupidity Tax, aka, Powerball, extended unemployment benefits, Aid for Dependent Children or any other form of government-sponsored “entitlement” or welfare program that rewards destructive personal behavior and choices.

It’s like gun control: laws only control those with respect for the law in the first place.  Criminals, by definition, ignore statutory restrictions….just as those intent on eating or drinking themselves to an early grave will ignore or get around restrictions to the contrary.

And in the Environmental Moment, brought to us today by that evil energy czar Jeff Foutch and Lewis Page writing at the UK’s The Register, we learn….

1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today

Recently unearthed photographs taken by Danish explorers in the 1930s show glaciers in Greenland retreating faster than they are today, according to researchers. The photos in question were taken by the seventh Thule Expedition to Greenland led by Dr Knud Rasmussen in 1932. The explorers were equipped with a seaplane, which they used to take aerial snaps of glaciers along the Arctic island’s coasts.

After the expedition returned the photographs were used to make maps and charts of the area, then placed in archives in Denmark where they lay forgotten for decades. Then, in recent years, international researchers trying to find information on the history of the Greenland glaciers stumbled across them.

Taken together the pictures show clearly that glaciers in the region were melting even faster in the 1930s than they are today, according to Professor Jason Box, who works at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State Uni[versity].

There’s much scientific interest in the Greenland ice sheet, as unlike most of the Arctic ice cap it sits on land: thus if it were to melt, serious sea level rises could occur (though the latest research says that this doesn’t appear to be on the cards). It’s difficult to know exactly what’s happening to the Greenland ice in total and very different estimates have been produced in recent times. However Professor Box says that many glaciers along the coasts have started retreating in the past decade.

It now appears that the glaciers were retreating even faster eighty years ago: but nobody worried about it, and the ice subsequently came back again. Box theorises that this is likely to be because of sulphur pollution released into the atmosphere by humans, especially by burning coal and fuel oils. This is known to have a cooling effect.

Unfortunately atmospheric sulphur emissions also cause other things such as acid rain, and as a result rich Western nations cracked down on sulphates in the 1960s. Prof Box believes that this led to warming from the 1970s onward, which has now led to the glaciers retreating since around 2000.

Other scientists have said recently that late-20th-century temperature rises in the Arctic may result largely from clean-air legislation intended to deal with acid rain: some have even gone so far as to suggest that rapid coal- and diesel-fuelled industrialisation in China is serving to prevent further warming right now.

Still other scientists, differing with Prof Box, offer another picture altogether of Arctic temperatures, in which there were peaks both in the 1930s and 1950s and cooling until the 1990s: and in which the warming trend which resulted in the melting seen by Rasmussen’s expedition actually started as early as 1840, before the industrial revolution and human-driven carbon emission had even got rolling. In that scenario, variations in the Sun seem to have much more weight than is generally accepted by today’s climatologists.

At any rate, the new information from the old Danish pictures adds some more data to the subject.

Seriously….would anyone out there who believes in anthropogenic global warming PLEASE explain to us how, absent human intervention, the Earth came out of the last Ice Age?  And while you’re at it, please illuminate us as to how, if we truly evolved from apes, natural selection inexplicably determined mankind’s inability to consume tainted water, a trait found in most every member of the animal kingdom, to be an asset rather than a liability.

On the Lighter Side….

And for those still not convinced tort reform needs to be part of any healthcare reform package, perhaps this next item, courtesy of Bill Meisen, will convince you:

Georgia man’s death during threesome nets his family $3M in trial

Relatives argued he wasn’t properly warned about the dangers of physical activity

The family of a Georgia man who died when his heart couldn’t take a three-way sex romp was awarded a hefty $3 million payout by a jury, according to reports. William Martinez’s estate was originally seeking $5 million in a medical malpractice case that claimed a cardiologist failed to warn the 31-year-old to stay away from physical activity. While Gwinnett County jurors sided with the family Tuesday, they agreed to a lesser amount after finding Martinez was 40% liable for his own death, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Wednesday.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and yet another story you just couldn’t make up even were you so inclined, courtesy of Bill Meisen, the Daily Mail and one rather edgy Dutchman:

Cats away! Artist turns his dead pet into flying helicopter after it is killed by a car

Many animal lovers find it hard to part with their pets when they die. So when cat Orville, named after the famous aviator Orville Wright, was run over by a car, his artist owner decided to turn him into a permanent piece of artwork as the ultimate tribute by transforming him into a flying helicopter.

Dutch artist Bart Jansen first stuffed Orville before teaming up with radio control helicopter flyer Arjen Beltman to build a specially-designed flying mechanism to attach to the cat.

Reports Jansen also utilized cats in his early forays into Street Art….

….remain unconfirmed.

Magoo