Daniel Greenfield

In the Sixteenth Year of Obama - The Isle of Freedom

(This is a continuation of the Sixteenth Year of Obama Series - A Scientific Romance of the Year 2024. The first part can be found here under The Isle of Endless Education.) The moonlight shone gently down on the solar-powered train resting on a bridge between two government islands. Inside, Marc and Julie, a young couple typical of the over educated upper class of the United States of North America and Europe, drowsed fitfully on the recycled plastic benches, their sleep interrupted by the whirring noises of nearby windmills generating power from the occasional breezes wafting between the islands.

The Fat Nanny State

It's easy to dismiss New York City Mayor Bloomberg's latest nanny state hiccup as the control-freak antics of a powerful man --but that would be missing the point. Bloomberg did not come up with the idea of banning sodas during a spa session on his private island. His implementation of it may be more overtly obnoxious, but the idea that there is a national health crisis that can only be solved by getting people to stop eating sugary foods, is ubiquitous among social policy wonks and national experts on telling people what to do.

The State at the End of the Universe

The current round of class warfare taking place in this country can hardly be called that because it is taking place within a single class. This is no great conflict between the construct of a 1 and 99 percent, this is a civil war taking place within the 1 percent.

No Country for Old Incumbents

A storm is not a good time to be at the wheel of a ship, and a worldwide economic disaster is not a good time to be at the wheel of the ship of state. Hard times are supposed to bring great men to the fore, but instead we have some of the sorriest men in history trying to find the wheel, sleeping off a bender in their cabins or debating whether a wheel even exists. Obama is bad, but he's not exactly up against rival statesmen. After parading around with a one-man cult of personality, launching international projects with no purpose, and displaying all the symptoms of a Napoleon complex, without a world famous conqueror in sight, Sarkozy's only reelection platform was that the alternative to him would be worse. He was right. But you can hardly blame quite a few Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who stayed home, rather than hold their noses and vote for him.

The Dead Baby Media

If the text on that one is too small for you, it's a CNN piece headlined, "Why the Syrian regime is killing babies." There's not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC.

The Patriotism of Palestinianism

Each century brings forth its own patriots. Once upon a time we had Patrick Henry, today we have Senator Patrick Leahy, who declared in the Senate that his opposition to an amendment that would distinguish how much of the UNRWA's funding goes to actual refugees versus fake refugees was a patriotic act. "I always look at what is in the United States’ interest first and foremost, and this would hurt the United States’ interests,” Senator Leahy stated firmly. It is of course difficult to find as compelling a national interest as the UNRWA, a refugee agency created exclusively for the benefit of five million Arabs, approximately 30,000 of whom are actual refugees, but all of whom hate the United States.

Nocturne in Black and White

The respected black commentator and philosopher Thomas Sowell has described the growing toll of black-on-white violence as a race war. I would take issue with that only because "war" implies a level of organization that supersedes that of the flash mobs. Most of the riot organizers have moved on to cozier job titles, like Al Sharpton, who has gone from organizing riots and boycotts to holding down a desk at MSNBC and serving as the unofficial White House liaison to the black community. The old riots were usually a combination of organized protest and opportunistic violence. The organized riot is on the decline, but the opportunistic violence is still very much with us.

In the Sixteenth Year of Obama

-Satire In the sixteenth year of Obama, Marc and Julie obtained a carbon pass and set off on a light rail journey in a comfortable semi-transparent carriage traveling at a top speed of 30 kilometers per hour whose motive power came entirely from sunshine. As it was a cloudy day, the train moved slowly, often stopping for hours at a time, before sluggishly stirring into motion again, but the young couple did not mind.

Spot the Narrative

Wouldn't it be terrible if we lived in some kind of dictatorship where a tiny group of powerful men controlled the broadcast media and used it to justify abuses of power by the government?

The Last Days of the Media

The magazine business isn't what it used to be. In the last ten years, Newsweek lost 2.5 million readers, and its newsstand sales are hardly worth mentioning. A full-page ad in it costs less than the price of a luxury car. Sold for a buck to the husband of an influential Congresswoman, merged with an internet site, it survives only by building issues around provocative essays and covers.

To The Last Byte

The question isn't, "What is Facebook worth?", the real question is what are we worth? The secret of Facebook is that there is no Facebook, just reams of user data, information voluntarily submitted by hundreds of millions of people in exchange for a free ride, which is monetized by a company that makes nothing except increasingly broken code, by selling ads to companies hoping to convince consumers to buy the products manufactured by their Chinese partners.

America: A Rogue Nation

The debate over the Iraq War that was held in the United Nations, and in academic and foreign policy circles, could be broken down as the question whether it was Iraq or the United States that was the rogue nation. On the one hand, Iraq had defied multiple UN resolutions, but so had the United States. Iraq had gone rogue, but, by talking about a unilateral invasion, so had the United States, and, in the moral calculus of the international community, all that mattered was being a team player.

Liberating Our Jerusalem

When Jordan's Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city-- the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible.

All Things to All People

President Clinton was, as we all know, the nation's first black president. Now Newsweek has declared Obama to be America's first gay president which means the first gay president will probably have to settle for being called the first alien president and, after that, the first alien president will be out of luck.

A Day in May

DISUNION SQUARED I passed through Union Square on Wednesday. The park on the square happens to be the fallback point of Occupy Wall Street, but the OWS crowd was a little hard to spot. Oh there were a few vendors in the business of selling "radical" T-Shirts and pins, proceeds to either benefit the occupation or him, but the rest of the occupation was hard to find. The breakdancers working for tips weren't with OWS, but what about the clown with pink hair? The men playing chess for money obviously weren't, that was too capitalist an activity. The NYU students sitting around and drinking soda? The guy playing jazz on a sax? The Halal mafia vendor sending smoke and a burnt smell from his cart? The dogwalkers? The artists drawing cartoons of tourists? The vendors at the farmer's market unloading ostrich meat and gourmet goat cheese?

How to Write About Israel

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week.

The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear A Mortarboard

The commencement address has become part of the campaign trail. How better to showcase your candidate as a man with a vision for tomorrow than to feature him passing along some of his wisdom to the people of tomorrow, those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduates going off with an average twenty grand in debt into a marketplace with few job prospects.

The Post-American Skyscraper

In the days and weeks after September 11 hardly a day would go by without another homemade design for the World Trade Center showing up in my inbox. Some were crude, some were obscene, some were impossible to construct and some were genuinely visionary. Even those most familiar with the crusted workings of New York state and city government, not to mention the bi-state beast of the Port Authority, could hardly have imagined that eleven years later one far smaller tower would still be under construction.

Life is a Bomb

Good news for those of you who enjoy taking your shoes off in airports. Al-Qaeda's chief bombmaker, a cheerful fellow named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who sent his younger brother off on a suicide bombing mission with a bomb up his rectum, has been working on turning everything into a bomb. Cameras, printer cartridges and even pets.

The Fire Burns

The circle of men whirls around the fire, hand in hand, hand catching hand, drawing in newcomers into the ring that races around and around in the growing darkness. A melody thumps through the speakers teetering unevenly with the bass, the sound is both old and new, a mix of the past and the present, like the participants in the dance, the traditional garments mixing with jeans and t-shirts until it is all a blur.