Smoking on the Balcony Banned in Claremont Hall

A friend writes in to say that Claremont Hall's status as a "green dorm" has made it impossible for him/her to smoke on the balconies, without receiving menacing remarks from that dorms R.A.s. Apparently smokers aren't allowed to smoke anywhere near the building.

One wonders what, if anything, prohibiting smoking has to do with global warming, but that would, of course, imply that there is any thinking behind the campus wide movement to mandate green buildings in the first place.

Some Quick Links Out and About the Claremont Blogosphere

• CMC Associate Math Professor Mark Huber has a fantastic blog on science fiction, math, and his general thoughts on life. Highly recommended, especially if you are a closeted sci fi geek like me. (Okay, truthfully, no closet could hold me.)

• Michael D. Steinberger, a Pomona Professor, has a great paper on the economics of homosexuals and the death tax. It was picked up by The Wall Street Journal (gated) and more or less confirms what I have been saying about how the gay activists have been wrong to focus on equality through the state power. You can't make people recognize the supposed equality of your marriage, but you certainly can ask them for a little fairness on the tax code.

• Claremont McKenna econ. professors, Janet Smith and Heather Antecol find that colleges that resort to Early Decision admissions tend to have less diverse students. Why should diversity be a goal for universities anyways? And maybe this is because for institutions, it is more expensive in terms of resources to and so only colleges with large endowments can afford to discriminate on the basis of race. These colleges can Yes, the colleges that are poorer and resort to their ED program would probably have more white people represented in that elite pool, but at the same time, that's not a function of their whiteness, per se. Remember there are more poor white people in this country than there are Hispanics and Asians put together.

Wake Up: Some Follow Up Thoughts on Those Who Ignore Islamic Violence

Some more quick thoughts on Zaid Shakir's apology tour for Nidal Hasan. I'd hazard a guess that this is not a classical Greek apology tour where there might be some explanation provided, but an apology in the more modern sense: an effort to throw up smoke and mirrors, instead of looking to the proper roots of things.

Some of the comments I have been getting from Facebook seem to not know how to parse the difference between fringe elements and a mainstream movement. Nico Brancolini has criticized me and other "right wingers" for our language leading to incitement. All the while, he suggests that a Ugandan law against homosexuality was actually from Rwanda, that there is some giant conspiracy run by religious people, and that Christians and Muslims team up in their extremism to hurt gays, women, etc. (Naturally, he ignores his bigoted comments against Mormons, which actually are hateful.)

I'll get to how Nidal Hasan's acts were very clearly influenced by his faith and how radical Islam is a lot more prevalent than we would like to believe. I do not bring this up because I believe that all terrorists are Muslim. They are obviously not, but I would be remiss if I ignored the very clear warning signs from many, many Muslims throughout the world. To ignore it is to be a fool and so I hope to educate my fellow students in what is going on right now.

Let's check off how we know this is an act of Islamic terrorism.

• He went to the mosque every day.
• He shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he gunned down his fellow soldiers.
• He told people he was a Muslim first and an American second and he gave a presentation suggesting that the war on terrorism was a war against Islam.
• He counseled fellow Muslims not to join the U.S. Army because "Muslims shouldn't kill Muslims" and told another source that "in the Koran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."
• He prosletyzed to his fellow co-workers and was disciplined for it.
• His slide show that he presented at Walter Reed uses the same textual support that bin Laden's letter to the American people does. He quotes the Koran ad naseum.
• He gave out calling cards with the phrase SoA on it, which stands for Soldiers for Allah.
• He attended the services of Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam whose sermons three of the 9/11 hijakers attended. Al-Awlaki praised Hasan's attack on Fort Hood.
• Just like the 9/11 hijackers, he frequented a strip club before he went on his murder spree.

Of course, unlike the supposed radical Christians or libertarians we so often hear about, Major Hasan was not the first American Muslim soldier to kill his fellows. Hasan Akbar murdered two American soldiers and wounded fourteen others in a grenade attack in Kuwait in 2005. Why did he launch the attack? Because he was "concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims."

Given the investment that the media has placed in distorting the threat we face from radical Muslims, I'm not surprised to read of these rather ridiculous examples of the media running interference for the long, long history of radical Muslims killing infidels. Here's just a short summary:

• 1990: “A prescription drug for … depression” (to explain the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane)
• 1991: “A robbery gone wrong” (the murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney)
• 1994: “Road rage” (the killing of a random Jew on the Brooklyn Bridge)
• 1997: “Many, many enemies in his mind” (the shooting murder atop the Empire State Building)
• 2000: A traffic incident (the attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren near Paris)
• 2002: “A work dispute” (the double murder at LAX)
• 2002: A “stormy [family] relationship” (the Beltway snipers)
• 2003: An “attitude problem” (Hasan Karim Akbar’s attack on fellow soldiers, killing two)
• 2003: Mental illness (the mutilation murder of Sebastian Sellam)
• 2004: “Loneliness and depression” (an explosion in Brescia, Italy outside a McDonald’s restaurant)
• 2005: “A disagreement between the suspect and another staff member” (a rampage at aretirement center in Virginia)
• 2006: “An animus toward women” (a murderous rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006)
• 2006: “His recent, arranged marriage may have made him stressed” (killing with an SUV in northern California in 2006)

We need to wake up, my friends, if only so that we might take provisions to prevent against the next attack.