Cowboy Confessional

Things are about to get interesting in D.C., as if dodging bullets was not already the town’s primary pastime.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided not to hear an appeal on the Parker case, a 2nd Amendment challenge to the absolute handgun ban in D.C. (well, almost absolute — certain reviled but well connected people appear to be immune from the law).  The denial of an en banc (i.e., the full court) hearing means that the city has only one choice left if they want to preserve the ban — to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

Court speculators are as divided as the Supremes would likely be on the outcome.  Most court watchers believe that the Supremes would sustain the lower court ruling (i.e., kill the gun ban) by a 5-4 margin.  This is significant because if the Supremes thus anointed the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, it would be the foundations for widespread deconstruction of state and local gun control ordinances from coast to coast.

And this is why I doubt the city will appeal to the Supremes.

Elected henchmen in D.C. are widely Democrat, largely liberal, and collectively beyond comprehension.  By nature and affiliation they are politically connected, and specifically connected to dishonorable outfits like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center.  Neither of these organization wants the current court to decide the issue because the downside is too big to risk.

How can we know this?  One indication are their web sites.  Within an hour of the news breaking on the VA Tech massacre, both outfits had updated their home pages with veiled hints that the killings could have been stopped with more gun control.  Yet a full working day after the circuit court denied an en banc hearing, their home pages say nothing about their position on the appeal.  This is dirty laundry they prefer to keep indoors.

Which leads us back to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, the man who will decide to appeal or not.  Like all politicians, Fenty has aspirations for higher office, which requires the support of friends.  If Sarah Brady and her hordes of developmentally disabled supporters apply pressure, and if that pressure is amplified by party loyalist from Diane Feinstein to Chuck Schumer, Fenty faces a big problem:  appeal against party will and lose the case, and he’ll be lucky not to be found floating downstream in the Potomac.  Abandon the appeal and he loses nothing except the local gun control issue, which may annoy some city residents, but is in the list of “forgivable” sins.

I don’t know Fenty personally, but surface reports position him as a man lacking stones large enough to forsake party and profit for principle, and I expect him to fold and cash in his chips on this particular gamble. It is better to annoy a town than a party and a country.

The cheerful upside for Fenty is the likelihood that he can, and will, turn this to his advantage.  In states that have liberalized and loosened their gun control laws, violent crime has gone down.  With the District being one of the most violent cities in America, Fenty has little to lose by allowing the ban to die.  If crime increases, he blames the courts and distant rednecks for the city’s ills, which is not far removed from his current talking points.  If crime goes down, he claims credit, hanging the results on inconsequential action he took.

If gambling were legal, I’d have an open $20 bet that this is as far as D.C. pushes the issue.

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Is anthropogenic global warming a religion? Certainly, and one only slightly less militant than Wahhabism. To wit:

• Deity: Gaia/earth
• High priest: Al Gore
• Scripture: Al’s movie
• Disciples: Most everyone on stage at the Oscars
• Infidels: Anyone who questions scripture
• Jihad: Protecting for or acting on behalf of the deity
• Sacrifice: Driving a Prius
• Rituals: Earth Day
• Mysticism: (way too much material to list here)
• Good/evil duality: Carbon credits, SUVs
• Moral codes: Vilifying “deniers”

Granted, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but all of the elements of a religion appear to be in place, including a belief in something that cannot (as yet) be absolutely proven.

Some have reviewed the IPCC reports and believe it is proof, as some have read scripture and believe they are proof of God. Others play the role of the skeptical atheist, finding enough holes and contradictions in AGW scripture to raise his doubts (having recently downloaded and processed ice core data sets, I have become a bit more skeptical myself).

What I do find ironic is that some of the self-admitted theological atheists are the same people who wage jihad against the global climate change atheists and agnostics. They are comfortable with their healthy skepticism of God, but loathe to give others the same latitude on different subjects. And that is when a belief becomes a religion — when it creates some who are holier than thou.

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Lawyers make ample use of the word trust while instilling in everyone they meet a complete lack thereof.

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Amazing how parallelism works in real life.  I spent the morning doing research on a novel that, in part, covers the Crusades and “modern” Jihad.  While flipping through all forms of information concerning Islam and family law, I ran across recitations on “honor” killings. 

Later in the day came a news story on an “honor” killing of a young girl in Iraq.

“Honor” killings are part of Arabic and Asian family traditions, going back before Mohammad diddled his first goat. Though not part of Islam specifically, and debatable under Sharia law, the practice is not exactly frowned upon by “modern” Muslim clerics and other people of suspicious intellect (like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster Monks).

Which brings us to the sad tale of Du’a Khalil Aswad, who was stoned to death (and I don’t mean the fun variety of “stoned” either) for the crime of not coming home one night, and allegedly having a love affair with a Sunni Muslim boy (if you like, draw your own parallel between a Kurd objecting to his daughter dating a Sunni and a Klansman objecting to his daughter a black — the common denominator is stupidity).

“Honor” killings are a sex-linked sport.  Women are the primary targets, as certain sins of flesh or faith weigh more heavily upon women in various cultures (middle-eastern) and religions (Islam).  Men-folk have license to kill their wives and daughters for allegedly bring dishonor upon the family, an act civilized people would find to be dishonorable itself.  For poor Aswad, her exit from this life took about 30 minutes, a slow death under the best of circumstances, and a might painful when being pelted with slag.  I can only conclude that such a steady supply of rocks came from the skulls of her male family members.

What are the citizens of relatively civilized nations to think when people — in proximity to jihadist theory and practice — commit filicide that was otherwise abandoned more than a thousand years ago?  It has been argued that certain sects of Islam, most notably those wahabist wankers, are reviving medieval social structures, and creating a conflict of cultures between sanity and Saladinism. But as Aswad’s swan song demonstrates, it does not take a Sunni jihadist to enjoy ancient bloodletting rituals.  Wahhabism and tribal law meet at the crossroads of insanity, and in the age of the Internet create a repugnant force.

If you wonder why terrorist do what they do, and why so many in the middle east hate the west, you don’t have to look far beyond family ties.  Cultures in which snuffing your own daughter for romancing a boy of the “wrong” faith is considered honorable have little regard for life in general, and western life in particular.  This divide between western civilization and regressive barbarism is what World War III is all about.

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