A Moment of Silence, Attended by Fanfare

Derangement meets cynicism. From Politico, President Obama and the politics of kitsch:

Tuesday morning, a peculiar announcement trickled out of the White House press office: President Barack Obama would be holding a moment of silence for the victims of the Boston bombings. At the White House. By himself.
No press or other intruders allowed. Except the White House photographer. 

Nothing more than the president's sentiment is necessary, because nothing can exceed it. Perfection cannot be perfected. The tragedy is less significant than the great one's recognition of it. We're way beyond kissing babies in this country. This is getting weird.
So I guess it's inconceivable anyone will sit the One down to explain to him the whole point of a moment of silence is, well, silence. I wonder: what would an Oval Office intervention look like, anyway?

Operation Embrace in Effect, Operation Dry Hump Standing By

According to USA Today, the mosque attended by the terrorist Tsarnaev brothers is a tad less liberal than its Boston surroundings:

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque's first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince. 

Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques. The head of the group is among critics who say the two mosques teach a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values. 

"We don't know where these boys were radicalized, but this mosque has a curriculum that radicalizes people. Other people have been radicalized there," said the head of the group, Charles Jacobs.

Recall Fareed Zakaria's advice that we "embrace" our Muslim communities like the Europeans do, establishing contacts so respectable Muslims will inform on their radical cousins. The feds are way ahead of you, Zak:

Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers. 

"If there were really any worry about us being extreme," Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community. 

The Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the Boston mosque. 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, attended the Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of setting two bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264 others at the April 15 Boston Marathon. The FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal activity, but mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in terrorist activity

Note the same organization, the Islamic Society of Boston, runs the Islamic Society of Boston Mosque in Cambridge and the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Boston proper. This may mean nothing, but it could be they have an official mosque for inoffensive services and more radical preaching in another to avoid alarming their more respectable congregants.

Observation

Our zeitgeist: everything is revealed and nothing is known.

People are going to have to think less about themselves and think more about me, Fareed Zakaria...

Fareed Zakaria was born into an elite Indian Muslim family and made his way into the global elite via Harvard and Yale. He's edited Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and Newsweek International; now he's a host on CNN. As you can imagine, this expertise and background have given him unique insight into the inexplicable horror of the Boston Marathon bombing by two young Muslim men whose family was welcomed into United States as refugees when they were children. Mr. Zakaria has had a whole week to apply his keen intellect and experience to the problem. What has he discerned? That we haven't done enough to "embrace" Muslims, and should take Europe, with its much larger, more hostile and separate Muslim communities, for our model:

Over the past two decades...European countries have recognized the dangers created by their indifference and have sought to integrate Muslim migrants. Governments at all levels have engaged with Islamic communities, taking steps to include Muslims in mainstream society but also to nurture a more modern, European version of Islam. In effect, many governments are now dealing with Islam as they have other religions, creating Islamic councils, providing funding for cultural activities, representation in public forums and being mindful of religious practices and holidays.

Note the use of "integrate" in place of "assimilate". This is a long-time trend that has been gaining steam as assimilation has failed due to the sheer number of newcomers, our regnant system of identity politics and the progressive elite's assault on the concept itself. Assimilation of immigrants is now considered either too ambitious or just so, I don't know, last millennium in its backwardness.

Of course I'm forgetting the most important question following the bombings. How does this affect the prospects of Fareed Zakaria and his progeny? Without a separate community (and the threat of violence and general social degradation coming therefrom) Zakaria cannot claim to be our diviner of intention, and his rougher poor relations ("Muslim leaders") cannot appropriate the role of intermediaries. All this talk of "fear" in the elite media--the average American wouldn't know he was in its throes if the Washington Post didn't tell him--is just wishful thinking. Your fear is desired, necessary even, and will be presumed whether you like it or not. The lad(ies) doth protest too much. This is all  leaving aside that Zakaria is nearly as alien to the average Muslim immigrant as Barack Obama is to the urban black.

Fareed goes on to reassure us that if we legitimize separate Muslim communities as such and deal with them through a new generation of Muslim political leaders, occasionally somebody will rat out the terrorists before they strike:

The lesson from Europe appears to be: Embrace Muslim communities. That’s a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely they are to provide useful information about potential jihadis.
An attack — apparently inspired but also perhaps directed by al-Qaeda — was foiled recently in Canada for just this reason. An imam in Toronto noticed one of his congregants behaving strangely and reported the behavior to the police, who followed up and arrested the man before he could execute his plan. Before briefing reporters on their collaboration, Canada’s top counterterrorism authorities invited Toronto’s Islamic leaders to a meeting and thanked them for their help. “But for the Muslim community’s intervention, we may not have had the success,” said the official, according to one lawyer invited to the meeting.

Of course a moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries is inconceivable. What would become of Fareed's CNN gig then?
Wait a minute, I think I've seen this bit before:

Resourceful Satirical Magazine Finds Americans Not Stereotyping, Ridicules Them For Their Ignorance

Via Steve Sailer, here's The Onion engaging in accidental self-parody:

Majority of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens

The peoples' calm tolerance goes into the media's Narrate-o-Matic and voila, out it comes as popular "ignorance." The average American just can't win--must be why the elites think he's such a loser.

 Of course the real irony here is this failed bit acknowledges a certain amount of information is necessary for "stereotyping"; likewise the ongoing media campaign of obscurantism surrounding Boston (of which this piece is a part) reveals tolerance often requires a certain amount of ignorance. But that's getting way too complicated for the typically all-knowing twenty-something a couple of years out of Harvard. Easier (and safer) to just to fire away at the usual targets, because as you know, anyone who runs is a vc...

 

Strife Begins at Conception

In joking about the newest front in the war on the racial achievement gap--earlier and earlier pre-school intervention--Steve Sailer suggested the disparity in children's nurturing between lower and upper income homes, which all decent people know is the only possible explanation for inequality, begins as early as eight months, twenty nine days before birth--but not a day earlier!
Cue the New York Times' Opinionator blog, breathlessly announcing the latest in Promising Studies and Expert Consensus. Specula up, social workers of America! Emphasis added:

By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.

 Your womb belongs to the state, er, village, so say "ahh", Shaniqua, and try not to chatter so much during the procedure...

Tyranny, Hard and Soft

I doubt severe torture could bring me to genuinely care about whatever merit there is behind Femen's protest of Vladimir Putin, and there must be some merit, him being a Russian tyrant and all, prompting the hysterics. But I appreciate the girls giving me the opportunity to use the word in both its original and later meaning: 
from Latin hystericus "of the womb," from Greek hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning "very funny" (by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter. Related: Hysterically.

Indeed, this photo looks like one form of hysterics provoking another.

I couldn't help thinking of our own would-be czar's recent collision with modern feminist wrath. When I read that President Obama had complimented California Attorney General Kamala Harris on her looks I recognized immediately that it wasn't a slip of the tongue--as the outraged and apologists alike would have it, sort of latent misogyny leaching out of its own--but, like almost everything about the Wonder Brother, a calculated political move. Every now and then the president, who imagines--or at least is told by his advisors--that he has a special connection with women undergirded by sexual attraction, finds it advantageous to stoke the smoldering embers of this dysfunctional desire. Remember when he pretended to find Debbie Wasserman Schultz "cute"? Be reassured, bubbas everywhere--your president is a regular guy, not averse to telling an awkward and homely girl she's attractive to get what he wants. And feminist America is at this point one big, awkward girl suddenly all-powerful and settling scores, like Carrie as prom queen, indiscriminately destroying all about in her blind rage.

Masculine charisma was one of the things projected by the racism-consciousness-conditioned masses onto the blank screen that was candidate Obama as a modern Black Hero (along with wisdom, cool, depth of feeling, oratorical majesty--none of which the man, still, evidences any more, and probably less, than the average public figure in modern America; but then, if we really wanted to get down to it, black America only evidences these traits in the romance of film and television). We get a lot less of that now, having been subjected to that skinny, jug-eared face, that narrow-shouldered emaciated frame, that uncertain, transparently false voice and manner, for years now.

The president's maladroit handling of the grant of assumed sexual charisma just reinforces for me something I've suspected for a long time: he isn't much interested in women and he doesn't really get them. He has--let's face it--a rather dull but assertive wife at home who (and can you blame him?) he's only too glad to leave there to hit the links, court or work (and probably in that order) and who resembles nothing so much as a breed-mare, with her stoutness of height and frame and unqualified black American pedigree; he has a troubled relationship to a mother who absented herself from his formative years, and now half of American womanhood expecting him to bring home the political bacon. The cost of power is indeed high.

But the impression I get from both the methods of Femen and the president's awkward courtship of American womanhood is that feminism, despite its rhetoric of revolution, is still doing what women have been doing for ages: regulating masculine sexual energy.