Apparently, none of Hasan's family had any idea that Hasan could engage in the behavior he did. I mean, how could anyone read the Qur'an and come to the conclusion that it advocates violence against non-believers? Hasan's family is apparently cooperating with the FBI and is saddened by our kuffar deaths. These are the right things to say and do to avoid deportation from a country that is 98% kuffar.

I could only find passing mention of the incident at vaunted "conservative" publications like the National Review, a magazine in perpetual decline since the neoconservative takeover and firing of guys like Steve Sailer. No calls for deporting the Muslims or even ending Islamic immigration.

Pajamas Media was little better, with Victor Davis Hanson repeating the same tired bromides about CAIR and "extremism." Bruce Bawer didn't do much better, despite living in a country being ruined by Islamic immigration.

I guess, what I'm trying to say is that "Operation Camelback" is the only feasible solution I see to Islamic jihad in this country. Of course, I'm just a wild-eyed bigot, so who will listen to me. Those guys at Pajamas Media, NRO, and HotAir have much better ideas, which were....what, exactly? Oh, right, fighting them over in our Asian empire.

Once the toys of rich yuppies, mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world's poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship. All this has a direct impact on economic growth: an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points . . ..

That's all great news. But how many cell phones are designed in Africa by Africans? How many African electrical engineers are there? How many people know what a fast fourier transform is? What an A/D is? How to design a patch antenna at microwave frequencies?

See, the thing is that all of these "revolutions" in the third world are completely dependent on the white people who've developed these technologies for the past 500 years. Fourier, Moore, Maxwell, Shannon, Nyquist, Cooley, and Tukey were all white electrical engineers and scientists who developed the fundamental technology that is now used in cell phones. How much, if any, have Africans contributed to these sciences since they've gotten more "connectivity?"

Nothing, of course. As long as whites and Asians are around to develop new technologies, an idiot can use them, and yes, they will increase productivity. But what happens when such people aren't around anymore?

Now that the white man has been run out of Africa, China is colonizing it. They don't see much potential in the African worker, apparently, as they have brought in a million Chinese laborers.

One item that makes the Chinese substantively different than the West is that they typically build infrastructure; various sources (I can’t seem to find a solid one) say that over 1 million Chinese are working today in Africa, mostly on these types of projects. It is simply amazing that the Chinese are importing labor into Africa; surplus labor is about all that Africa has in abundance.

Yes, amazing. Or not so amazing. How long will that infrastructure last once the Chinese are gone?

What all this "connectivity" and technology is bringing, if anything, is unchecked population growth in Africa, which will only amount to a Malthusian trap once white busybodies lose interest in going there to give money and hand out vaccines. I see some of these shows on National Geographic where a parent-like aging white person is standing amidst a village of sub-saharan Africans and offering them instructions on how to use a mosquito net over their beds like they're little children. Cognitively, they may be. Nevertheless, I find the behavior of whites treating sub-saharan Africans like children to be incredibly patronizing.

Being an electrical engineer by training, I feel qualified to remark on some of Udolpho's comments. Basically, most geeks are loathesome people. They possess little (if any) awareness of the feelings of others and are mostly trapped in their little autistic world of online pwning, gadgetry, and movie line mimicry, just as Udolpho says. The only thing that protects them from others is the fact that society says they should be protected. Were we a society that saw little value in protecting the weak (well, we don't - just look at the millions of babies aborted), geeks would quickly be weeded out of the gene pool or forced into some sort of subservience of the local warlord who needs his weapons fixed.

Geeks were probably not always thus. In the past, you probably had to be more well-rounded. Weaklings were tolerated less. More of an emphasis was placed upon physical courage in our society. Now, however, geeks can go entire days basically without interacting with anyone. In line at Best Buy, they can sit on their stupid little iPhones browsing pages and commenting on some idiotic link they found. At work, getting them to go out to lunch for a beer is considered some major evolution, so it's fraught with high expectations and poor conversation.

Unsurprisingly, none of my close friends work in the tech industry. Most work blue collar jobs. Perhaps the blue collar workers, if there are any left after the Mexicans take all their jobs, will carry on middle class civilization. If you look at the voting patterns of the Republican party, it's mostly comprised of blue collar white males now. Democratic voters, of course, are nothing but a deadweight loss on society, and most geeks voted Obama.

But if you're not comfortable with that lie, as I'm not, then you really DO belong to a legitimate ethnicity, and in this country belonging to the ethnicity "non-Hispanic white" can only hurt you when it comes to things like hiring, promotions, and admissions. If you really DO belong to that ethnicity, it's time to admit that, as a member of that ethnicity, you are subject to discrimination.

By smearing as racist everyone concerned with illegal immigration and the overboard tolerance for radical Islam, the British left is desensitizing everyone to the legitimate charge when it is directed at the BNP. People think, “Well, I’m concerned about illegal immigration, Islamists, the white poor, etc., and I’m not a racist so maybe the BNP isn’t either.” The overuse of the left’s catch-all denunciation deprives it of meaning and force. People may simply stop listening to the left’s warnings because they’ve so many times labeled people with legitimate concerns as racist. By their own narcissism, self-righteousness and contempt, the left is actively driving people to fascist solutions just as their more radical ideological ancestors did back in the 1920s.

Well, the thing about fascism is that it was distinctly nationalist. It put country first. Communism, its opposition, is internationalist. At the end of the day, everything is local/national, not international.

The thing is, who cares if the BNP is genuinely racist? Do all the recent immigrants not have a place of ethnic origin? Of course they do. Do the ethnic British deserve an ethnic homeland just like the Jews have Israel? Of course they do.

The money supply is the driver of inflation. Under ideal circumstances, we'd like to keep the money supply growing at the same rate as productivity in this country so that we have neither inflation nor deflation, but still have the availability of capital. The Fed has various ways of controlling the money supply, including the reserve ratio, the sale or purchase of treasury bonds, and the discount rate. Contra Ron Paul, however, it doesn't have a monopoly on the printing of money. Government fiscal policy, ie. the running of a deficit or surplus, also affects the quantity of money in that it affects what the Fed does regarding it's monetary policy. Get it? Fed monetary policy and government fiscal policy are coupled. So all of these calls for "abolishing the Fed" may be disastrous for us because the Fed can actually help counteract the deficit our government runs. I'm also not sure going back to a gold standard would land us anywhere but in another deflationary depression akin to the one in the late 1800s as the money supply increased much more slowly than productivity, as the money supply was pegged to gold.

What's happening now is that the government is running huge deficits and the Fed has the discount rate pegged to 0. The only thing keeping the money supply from getting out of hand is that the banks aren't lending out that money. Effectively, this is the equivalent of the Fed increasing the reserve ratio, which has almost never happened.

Will that money hit the economy eventually? I have my doubts. People are chronically underemployed in the private sector, banks keep jacking up credit card rates, and we seem to have reached peak consumer debt. As Mish observes

In the US and globally we are in uncharted territory. Odds are we will see many things we have never seen before as stimulus after stimulus fails to produce desired results. Actual results, as in the examples above may very well be unbelievable to all the Keynesian and Monetarist clowns.

The stimulus, once it's been spent, will require another stimulus, which will require another and another ad infinitum

In reality, the entire inflationary mini-boomlet-within-the-depression was simply an illusion. 'GDP growth' that is bought with monetary pumping and feckless fiscal spending only misdirects and ultimately consumes even more scarce capital.

This is an Austrian argument: booms and busts are caused by the mis-allocation of capital. I don't think anyone could disagree with that, except maybe idiots like Krugman. As we cause ourselves more boom/busts with government fiscal policy, we'll keep seeing more of the same.

As good capital dries up, so does innovation. As innovation dries up, so does job creation and productivity. The fewer jobs created, the less need for capital and the less spending and more deflation. The biggest problem, though, will be the lack of productivity growth we would have had with more technological innovation and entrepeneurship. Productivity growth is really what keeps us out of the Malthusian trap. Without it, more wealth is not being created. In addition, the government actively campaigns against keeping business in this country with endless union laws, labor laws, environmental laws, and now tariffs on goods from countries who don't have such things.

If you really want to worry about where the country is headed economically, worry about the effects of government fiscal policy and legislation on businesses in this country.

I know of no businessman that enjoys conference calls to India or 9 hour plane rides to China. They would rather keep everything here. But businessmen have to eat as well.

The problem with Piper is that he's not anchored to any specific Reformed tradition, confession, or denomination, so he's free to make things up as he goes along, even if that means embracing serious errors.

Piper is essentially a non-confessional Baptist, as is the rest of evangelicalism. What does that mean? Well, the Reformed would not say that Baptist congregations are true churches:

“An overwhelming majority of modern evangelicals hold Baptist convictions of one sort or another. If it is the case that rejecting infant baptism is sufficient to unchurch a congregation, i.e. to deprive them of the status of being a “church” then there are very few actual churches in North America, to pick but one global region. To many such a thought is impossible. It was quite difficult for me to reach this conclusion but I didn’t reach it carelessly or quickly. For most of my life in the Reformed world since 1980 I shared the assumption that, though I disagreed with my evangelical brothers and sisters over the question of baptism, their congregations were still churches. It’s only been in the last few years that the other shoe has dropped . . . This principle of radical discontinuity, this denial of the fundamental unity of the covenant of grace as symbolized in the administration of the sign and seal of the covenant of grace to covenant children, is serious enough to warrant saying that any congregation that will not practice infant initiation (baptism) into the administration of the covenant of grace is not a church.”

This becomes more and more obvious as time goes on and you hear what comes out of these sorts of places.

Seriously, the Muslims here have not been working out for us.