On the Death of bin Laden

I know I sound like a spoil-sport, but I have mixed feelings about celebrating bin Laden's, or anyone's, death. On the one hand it's comforting to know that he is no more. On the other hand the celebrations remind me too much of the sickening spectacle of Palestinians dancing in the streets in the wake of 9/11. There's something about rejoicing at the death of others, even those like Hitler or bin Laden, that strikes me as uncivilized, unAmerican, and unChristian.

Let's take satisfaction in the fact that a necessary task has been accomplished. Let's admire the courage and skill of the men and women who were responsible for finding this awful man and killing him.

But let's not celebrate. Let's view it as a job that needed to be done, like executing a serial killer, but one that gives us no delight. Let's not act like those barbaric Palestinians who rejoiced at the deaths of Americans a decade ago.

Instead, maybe we'd do better to keep in mind two admonitions from the Book of Proverbs. The first applies to Osama bin Laden, the second applies to us:

"A man who is laden with guilt of human blood will be a fugitive until his death." Prov. 28:17

"Do not rejoice when your enemy falls and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles." Prov. 24:17

Re: Criminal Aliens

A couple of weeks ago we did a post titled Criminal Aliens which elicited this comment from Jason:

The inclusion of illegal alliens in our country impacts our society more than anyone realizes, and is a huge drain. For every illegal, there is a legitimate citizen paying extra for car insurance, extra taxes to pay for illegal's unpaid medical bills, extra taxes for additional legal system costs and on and on.

I am friends with a local police officer, who tells me that there policy for illegal alliens caught committing a non-violent misdemeanor is to turn them loose. His department won't even enforce justice on the illegals because it is too much of a burden on their department. I guess illegals are truly free in this country - no taxes, no responsibilities and no justice. No wonder everyone wants to come here.

Indeed, and a lot of politicians in both parties want the influx to continue - the Democrats because they hope that if they can win citizenship for the illegals they'll vote Democratic, and the Republicans because the immigrants form a pool of cheap labor. Both seem to me to be extremely short-sighted, but then political horizons often stretch only so far as the next election.

Hayek and Keynes, Rappers

For those among our readers with an interest in economics I offer a couple of entertaining videos featuring a debate, sort of, between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek. The videos are very well done even if one doesn't have much fondness for the rap genre.

Economics has been called the "dismal science", but I'm not sure if dismal is quite the right word for this. Rap on:

The first video came out a year ago, the second more recently:

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.