Liberty Planet

American Muslims are Losing the Trust of the U.S. Armed Services

2011-08-10T01:03:00.011-05:00

The recent deadly Taliban ambush that killed off an entire team of our counter-jihadist fighters in Afghanistan has prompted some unusual responses from the president and the U.S. armed services. The dead are reputedly the team that that took out Osama bin Laden. The president has closed the arrival to the U.S. of their remains to journalists, overturning his earlier policy of publicity for such events. In addition, their names will not be released to the public due to "reluctance" expressed by senior officers. One wonders what CAIR will have to say about this comment as quoted from the story linked here.

"There were concerns expressed by the SOCOM (US Special Operations Command) commander about the safety of the members of the unit and their families and the families of the fallen," a senior military officer told AFP.

"He's raised concerns and senior leaders are looking at it right now," the officer added, requesting anonymity."

If our armed forces can be lethally attacked from within on closely guarded military camps and bases by motivated Muslim jihadists from within their own ranks, as has been the army's experience with Hasan Akbar and Nidal Hasan, it seems wise to attend to their veiled warning to us about our own backyards and what might be in store for us if we are too forthright and public about the neighborhoods where our warriors' families live. It appears that the armed services consider, but cannot explicitly say, that supporters or agents of al Qaeda may be a threat to the families of the fallen here on American soil. In any event, precautions are being taken.

Are there any other reasons that the unit commander might be concerned about the safety of the families of the fallen? I'd like to hear them if there are.

ISLAMIC REPLACEMENT THEORY

2011-04-02T18:47:00.011-05:00

One thing about Islam that cannot be argued is that it was founded by Mohammad on the basis that it would ultimately transcend and replace Judaism and Christianity and begin by overcoming the pagan Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula by force of arms and will. That the Jews and Christians have not yet folded to the Muslim demand changes nothing. The Qu'ran is the revealed word of Allah which exists forever without the intermediation of Man, and as such is not, and cannot be in error. It remains so in Eqypt today.

”We cannot put God’s orders to a referendum,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, 21, one of the Salafi students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M2TAD3eUMg

Egypt, which was the first Christian state targeted and conquered by the Arab Muslim Caliphate almost 1,400 years ago, now intends it appears, to be the seat of a reborn 21st century Caliphate for our new greening planet. But what will the Persians have to say of this? So who will supply the necessary weapons? More to the point, who will repair the cars, collect the garbage, and fix the sewers and the broken power grids? Oh, and why is the Mahdi's coming so suddenly necessary to the Persians? Anyone care to answer?

Obama's Green Revolution

2011-01-30T19:26:00.011-06:00

Well, we haven't drilled for damn bit of new oil. Instead, we're going to "invest" in green jobs for the future--never mind about today and tomorrow. Instead, the all-wise government of Obama has its eye on The Day after Tomorrow. And on the "countless jobs" coming our way.

Thanks to the conceited and concerted policies of inaction of the uber-bourgeoisie of the progressive left, now as the Middle East erupts into chaos, we get to look forward to $4.00-$5.00 gasoline. Drilling for our own oil has been off-limits for quite some time hasn't it?, because we are "addicted to oil". Instead we have been subjected to a program of regulatory hubris--all predicated on the assumption that our well-being as a society depends upon stepping over the past, without a thought for the present or what might follow the present if the comfortable assumptions of the comfortable class failed. --As they are now failing. All predicated upon a rich society growing richer--except that we are not.

I have come to understand the desperation of the Sioux of Minnesota in 1862. While I don't, and never have particularly trusted anything the Federal Government says or does, I know that many people do and many people depend upon the Government. Increasingly. But the actions of my government in the arena of industrial policy, finance and business regulation are beggaring me, just as similar actions beggared the Minnesota Sioux. When, finally after all of the false promises of the government, the Sioux (who had supported themselves from time immemorial) had no food, they came to the store asking for credit so they could feed themselves and their children. "Let them eat grass" was the response.

Knowing how obscenely committed this government is to "going green", and how utterly oblivious they are; when it comes to the point that the middle class cannot afford to gas-up their cars to go to work, (as is rapidly becoming the case for me) because the money is needed for mortgages and food, I'm sure we can all look forward to the government's inspiring message: LET THEM GO GREEN. And they would take that as a measure of their success. Or so I surmise.

Will the Last Generation on Earth Rouse Themselves to Save the Gulf Of Mexico?

2010-06-25T20:37:00.016-05:00

Back when this sign was posted, whether it was in the hallway of a church basement, or the sub-basement of an elementary school, it was understood: Save Yourself. Here's a sign to point the way, but its going to be up to you to know for yourself the news and its urgency. Then the signs, and shelter they offer will take on real meaning. Today the signs are gone. But look at the baby boomers, the children of the time of of the threat of the nuclear armageddon, and hence, the first generation to believe that they might be the last generation on earth. They still act accordingly. In an emergency, they will still reliably go to ground.

"Fallout" was the radioactive dust raised by the atomic explosion, and lofted into the air. It would drift about in the upper atmosphere, until it fell out into our neighborhoods onto the grass and into the trees, so even if we didn't get blown-up we would all die a slow, painful death unless we had taken shelter underground. There, with enough clean water and emergency rations, we could hold out until the radioactivity had (hopefully) abated and it was safe to re-emerge into the new world of civilizational obliteration. It wasn't at all clear that we would, however, or how the world above would ever be safe again. The "Doomsday Clock" told us the planet was in its last few minutes. A nuclear exchange might happen anywhere, anytime. We might all be destroyed.

So the baby boomers acquired an innate fatalism as a coping mechanism, while growing up under these conditions. We can see how it is playing out on the Gulf of Mexico, how the ennui of a generation coming to maturity under the numbing and indefinite threat of total destruction has undone its innate sense of urgency, how the clarion call to action can sound unheard. If the world is to be destroyed, one must remain calm and unruffled. There is nothing to be done but to save one's self..

It's Time for the West to step away

2010-05-15T21:45:00.009-05:00

Iranian cleric wants creation of 'Greater Iran'

As in the past, the Muslims will work assiduously against one another to make a civil war in the best medieval style. Methinks its time to buy popcorn and watch the spectacle and for the West to rebuild. This could go on for a hundred years. There are precedents. Who will be the Caliph? On which side will the Sunni Arab jihadists come down? As in the time of Ali (Mohammad's son-in-law) and later during the time of the Abassids, the Persians will fight the Arabs with the craziness of Islam in the middle. It's happened before and its happening again now, judging from this. It's very good for us, if we can just let ourselves let it happen. Light a fire.

Fiscal sanity comes to L.A.

2010-05-13T01:47:00.009-05:00

For a city on the verge of bankruptcy because of overextended contracts with public employee unions and the maintenance of a tide of illegals in their midst, this looks like a smart, if opportunistic cost-cutting move. Never mind that this kind of embargo across state lines violates the US constitution, as if that matters.

Is the Gulf Oil Spill a Man-Caused Disaster?

2010-05-01T09:19:00.003-05:00

Now that President Obama has dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to the Gulf Coast I guess that we can assume it was. Napolitano is an expert on man-caused disasters, even to the extent of having given us the current working definition of a man-caused disaster. Although it is hard not to fault her for her politically correct obfuscations with respect to Islam and its terrorist underpinnings, what with most Islamic terrorists and oil-rig engineers being men, she is pretty clearly not vulnerable to charges of sexism.

Napolitano Is Thrown to the Wolves at Fox

2009-12-29T20:23:00.027-06:00

Fox News interviewed Janet Napolitano, President Obama's Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend. Pajamas Media has a devastating Dan Riehl story that includes the news of the interview, and more importantly, who aired it. Plainly sent specifically to Fox News by the White House to expiate her earlier sophomoric official response to the Flight 253 Undi-bomber incident, Napolitano was surely cast into this, the vulpine den of cable news as a piece of red meat, knowing its large and talkative audience would be certain to shred her. This will no doubt incline her to understand, going forward, how much easier it will be for her to resign.

Here she is with a shotgun and ear protection, pretending to enjoy shooting at a campaign outing.

Which contrasts with these, those who are not pretending, whom she is, in part, currently charged with protecting us against:

As compared to...Winston Churchill, an iconic bust of whom--a previous gift to the White House from London--President Barack Obama, as one of his first acts upon taking office, repatriated to the British government, while simultaneously hiring Janet Napolitano for the job she will soon be exiting.

Winston Spencer Churchill, superbly pinstriped homeland security expert and son of a New York mother. Led the British Empire to victory against the Nazis.

The Peary Polar Expedition Of 1909: a Forgotten Centennial

2009-12-26T17:49:00.025-06:00

The claims of success of the several polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century were all fraught with the same controversy as to outcome: Did they really make to the Pole? Admiral Robert E. Peary's expedition of 1909 was no different. Peary, after brilliantly studying, and then utilizing Inuit clothing, sleds, and techniques made his 1909 dash for the Pole, on this, not his first expedition, starting on the 1st of March 1909, traversing moving ice and arriving at 90 degrees north latitude on the 7th of April by his reckoning, before turning back to Ellesmere Island on the return trip. That the ice under the feet of his party was moving south as he mushed north was no small factor in their intrepid endeavor.

Peary, a Navy man, was in many ways, a bonafide claimant to the mantel of Christopher Columbus (celebrated at the recent World's Columbian Exposition of 1893) and of John Wesley Powell, the navigator and mapper of the Colorado river through the canyons of the American Southwest. Peary set out with 23 men, 133 dogs and 19 sleds about the cusp of the vernal equinox with a crew of Inuit mushers and former Navy men including Matthew Henson, an intrepid and highly skilled African-American civil engineer.

Despite the subsequent technical arguments made against his claim of success, Peary and Henson will always remain American adventurers of the highest order and iconic exemplars of the American spirit of exploration and courage. Without them it is difficult to imagine either Charles Lindbergh's Atlantic crossing of 1927 or the Apollo mission of the 1960's.

Just Shoot Them

2009-12-19T20:31:00.017-06:00

And be done with it. News today is that a US Predator Drone brigade has taken unprecedented offensive military action in the tip of the Arabian peninsula in Yemen against al-Qaeda operatives on the orders of US president Barack Obama. Meanwhile, also today, we learn that Guantanamo Prison will soon be releasing six Yemeni jihadists to their home country, also on the orders of the President. Unless, on the off-chance they have been implanted with tracking devices for larger purposes, would it not make better military, political and economic sense to just shoot them now, while we have them in custody? Why expend the precious carbon to send them home only to spend millions more later to hit them with drones? Yemenis are perhaps the most recidivist of the previously released Guantanamo jihadist prisoners. Bullets are cheap. A clearer message could not be sent to Osama bin-Laden, if the president were interested in sending one. Osama, as a Yemeni himself, would understand.

Update 12/24/09. Another Yemeni Gitmo recidivist dies in the second strike in Yemen this week. Also taken out was Nidal Hassan's Yemeni contact and "spiritual adviser" Anwar al-Awlaki. A small hive is exterminated. Al-Awlaki had just been interviewed by Al-Jazeera. Fame is fleeting.

The Strategy of Jihad

2009-11-09T20:35:00.015-06:00

When all is said and done, it is the the Koran, and how it is weaponized that will decide the fate of the Ummah. It is the Koran which creates the Ummah, and it is the Koran that enjoins the Ummah of all Muslims to the cause of Islam, and its increase. The Koran provides both a strategy of acquisition and warfare as well as a strategy of negotiation. The imperative to the acquisition of people and land is called jihad. The Ummah is a trans-tribal concept created by Mohammad. A part of the acuity of its invention is that the Ummah explicitly creates a larger political entity than the tribe. The tribe was Mohammad's conundrum. Imposing Allah's primacy, from among the shared deities of the competing tribes in the pantheistic world of the 7th century Arab peninsula, was his key to selling the bargain to the tribes. His unique and personal intercession with Allah was his key to personal political durability and supremacy. For the Arab tribes, the benefits would be huge.

The essence of jihad is extortion, intended to inflict an opt-out or opt-in duality of choice on its subjects. Both choices are accounted for in the Koran to the benefit of the Ummah. The mechanism of jihad is personal violence. Capitulation is to be its own reward, as the wealth and women of all of the kuffar--non-Muslims, are progressively subsumed into the Ummah, at ts pleasure. Those blessed Muslims who die in the furtherance of jihad will have sold their lives in a guaranteed bargain with Allah, for a worry-free eternity in paradise, with all expenses paid and with on-demand access to 72 eternally virgin concubines, thrown in for good measure. Go to sea on jihad, and a shahid's virgins double to 144. For the kuffar who refuse capitulation it means execution for the crime, or dhimmitude: 2nd class legal status, humiliating cash-tax penalties and constant apprehension within your family, if you choose to live.

Individual Muslims, as part of the Ummah, are solemnly enjoined by the Koran to refrain from attacks upon other Muslims, so as not to fracture the interests of the Ummah against the kuffar. This injunction is often breached in practice when recalcitrant Muslims, themselves, need further instruction on the seriousness and severity of jihad, or, if they just get in the way. Islam is a total belief system, encompassing and mandating specific personal moral, physical, dietary, sexual and hygienic behaviors, as well as the public, political and "religious" expressive aspects of life. Those "rightly guided" Muslims who die as incidental collateral damage in the pursuit of jihad by their betters, also get a pass to paradise. Allah sorts them out.

Al-Qaida Snorts at China-& Calls for Jihad

2009-10-18T20:27:00.019-05:00

The Chinese, as they have asserted their right to defend themselves from the Islamists, are now finding themselves in the cross hairs of the सिक्क Al-Qaida Islamic tribalists. China, on a per capita basis, consumes more pig meat than anywhere else on the planet. Abu Yahya al-libi, a Libyan national, has spoken:

A leading Al-Qaeda militant on Wednesday called on Muslims worldwide to defend Uighurs in China's restive northwestern region of Xinjiang. He told Uighurs to prepare for a holy war or Jihad and urged a "vast media campaign" to raise awareness of their fate at the hands of "oppressive" China.

In the video posted to jihadist websites, Abu Yahya al-Libi appeared to launch a frontal assault against China.

"This massacre is not being carried out by criminal Crusaders or evil Jews who have committed crimes against ओउर नेशन," al-Libi stated.

"Today, a new massacre is being carried out by Buddhist nationalists and communists against the Muslim population in eastern Turkestan," said al-Libi.

"Thousands of people have died from the radiation emitted by the many nuclear missiles that have been launched and the experiments carried out in the area," al-Libi concluded.

One can only hope they have enough tin-foil hats--and pork spits.

LIBERAL AVG

2009-09-21T20:54:00.032-05:00

Does nothing ever change? Looking back on the so-called "Golden Age" of the Roman Empire, 50 years after the death of Nero, here is the emperor Hadrianvs Avgvstvs (Hadrian), the second of the adoptive emperors advertising his standard method of mollifying the Roman population to keep them quiet in the face of his foreign and domestic policies. Like Barack Obama, Hadrian toured Europe and visited Egypt, giving speeches and making his presence known. And like Barack Obama, Hadrian used his government to provide cash handouts for his clients and supporters. He issued coins like the one above and similar ones, in their millions, commemorating his every exploit, as if they were tweets, the better to remind the people of his generosity and his patronage.

On the reverse of the coin above, a silver denarius, the emperor is shown sitting on a raised platform behind two officials, one with an abacus, while the other dispenses cash to a citizen who stands, unapologetically before the dais, the folds of his robe open to receive the coins. Under the dais the inscription reads LIBERAL AVG, a commemoration which remains to this day, 1,890 years after the minting of this coin, an easily understood paradigm for political success.

Like Hadrian, Obama is a famous patron of the arts. Like Hadrian, Obama has the the support of the glitterati and the governing elites. Like Hadrian, Obama has forbidden torture.
Like Hadrian, Obama is a fervent (albeit hetero), supporter of gay rights. As Hadrian did, so is Obama in the process of surrendering his predecessor's conquests in Mesopotamia to the Persians. Like Hadrian, Obama has taken the side of the Palestinians against the Jews. In fact, it was under Hadrian that the land formerly known as Judea came to be called Palestine for the very first time. Like Hadrian after his death, Obama has been "deified", despite being still in office. It remains to be seen whether Obama will continue to channel Hadrian, that most benevolent of autocrats, in forming his own version of the frumentarii: loyal followers who, at the the emperor's insistence acted as his personal spies.

Despite being called by some of his critics ignorant of the past, it seems pretty clear that Barack Obama is well on his way to re-enacting almost verbatim, a fairly sophisticated slice of history. Of the ancient and imperial variety.

Sustainability: Graft for the Earnestly Spiritual, Planet-Saving Rent-Seeker. Green is the new Gold

2009-09-14T23:21:00.045-05:00

All too often, in today's greenspeak parlance, "sustainable" means subsidized. It doesn't have to be, but it has been and continues to be the most disingenuous and egregious of eco-jargon patois passed-off as earth-friendly by the progressive non-profits , corporatists, and other rent-seekers of the left. All of the HOV pomposity of the planet-savers and the LEED certified architects at their conventions can't make it otherwise, despite all of their earnest declaiming and seriousness of purpose.

Here's the reality: if a green system, concept, product or energy solution is being offered as "sustainable", and its use therefore imperative, it should be assumed unless it can be demonstrated otherwise, that there is a government subsidy embedded somewhere within it to propagate it. It might be a mandate, it might have its production or labor costs underwritten, its competition may be abolished or selectively taxed, or perhaps some level of government is its primary customer. If any system or concept or energy solution is being referred to as "unsustainable", then, almost invariably, it is privately financed, already, or about to come under government oversight, and probably involves hunting, mining, drilling, manufacturing, cropping or fishing, in one form or another in exchange for money at market prices. The trendier opponents of such "unsustainable" activities will tend toward, or even fully embrace, the beliefs that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and a poison and contraception is "the cheapest way" to combat "global warming". Doomsday is right around the corner.

Rent-seekers are completely predictable (and sought after) by government bureaucracies, and their goals are therefore "sustainable". They are the segment of society the bureaucrat can most readily plan for--and measure. Instead, the entrepreneurs, the wildcatters, the venture capitalists, the innovative production farmers and independent inventors of all stripes, who, by engaging in risk-taking endeavors beyond legislative imagination create and maintain with their hard work and incremental improvements the technical and theoretical bases of all advances in civilization, these are the "unsustainable" ones: yet they are as indispensable as they are incommensurate. These are the people who have no need to fill in the endless and intricate government grant and assistance forms that keep the union bureaucrats at their desks working so diligently day-in and day-out. They ask for nothing more than an opportunity and a marketplace. In a politically-driven economy such behavior is discouraged to the point of being unsustainable.

The Magic Beans of ObamaCare

2009-09-13T00:30:00.025-05:00

The Democrats controlling the U.S. Congress are ready to trade the worn-out cow of economic sanity for the magic beans of ObamaCare. For many of us, like silly Jack, magical thinking transcends good sense and a hopeful and enticing story is enough to persuade. Leading us along down this road, are our representatives, and others with a callous will to power and political advantage.

The story is that the American "healthcare" system is "broken" and can only be fixed by falling one and all, into the welcoming arms of the federal government. As has become customary, the government will use private businesses to the greatest degree possible to implement their plans, just as they currently compel them to be their (uncompensated) revenue collectors and record keepers for sales, income and excise taxes to fund everyday government operations. Yet the proposed government plan can only claim success by virtue of adding more regulation.

Nominally accounting for some 20-30% of the current "healthcare" costs are the salaries of paper shufflers inside the care providers' offices who send (meaningless) invoices to patients, while at the same time processing claims upon their patients' insurance policies, all of which makes the satisfaction of a medical bill a lengthy process. These workers, while dedicated & skillful at what they do, are drawing-off some very big money which adds substantially to the cost of insurance premiums, without ever providing a lick of actual "healthcare" themselves. In addition, there are the government bureaucrats in their thousands, who, at every level, spend their lives as the polar opposites of their private counterparts, sorting, approving, collating and monitoring their reports. They, in turn, report to their current legislative and executive political wings who never stop creating evermore time-swallowing procedural mandates and substantive regulations requiring timely compliance from medical practitioners within the ever-larger loop they create. All government-driven costs.

Add to that the extra 10% or 15% Americans pay for all of the medical research and development financed by American medical device and drug companies that off-shore socialized governments don't perform but benefit from, and another 10% or so for individual state-mandated coverages, plus the aging, litigious, and increasingly risk-averse U.S. population that expects to live forever at any cost, (taking their treatments in the new standard marble-and-oak-paneled clinics and hospitals), and there you have the reasons that the healthcare sector is marauding through the U.S. economy and fast gobbling-up the rest of it. Not to mention the small army of actuaries and attorneys at $200K per year, both in and out of government, that are milking the system on a daily basis.

Lost somewhere in that cacophony of compliance behaviors, lawsuits, marketing costs and paper-pushing are the patients, their doctors and their nurses. Much of the conundrum is a direct result of the legal, financial and social interventions of today's government policies and prescriptions imposed upon the business of doctoring and patient care. So, as is typically the case in Washington, the solution for bad government today is even more government tomorrow.

As Mark Steyn has put it:

Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.

And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.”

When Jack finally climbs his beanstalk, ascending into the clouds, the giant he finds there will be a leviathan federal government, devouring everything it can grasp. And Jack will hear the giant bellowing as it bears down upon him, as children have heard since long ago, "Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread..."

And that's what passes for "heathcare" reform under this Congress and this administration.

Playing the Hand That's Dealt You

2009-08-28T01:51:00.031-05:00

Overlooked in the overwrought and often simple-minded debate over the nature of the now famous photo-shopped image of Obama as the Joker, is the underlying and essential playing cardness of it all. The Joker is after all, the quintessential wild card in the game. Even 5 of a kind is possible when the Joker is in the deck. Obama as the Joker strikes me as a possible metaphor for devious political shape-shifting or changability, and as such, is a completely legitimate means of graphically expressing a complex idea in a complex arena.

Is the image racist? I don't see it, but I can say that it's entirely irrelevant to the artist's message--that is, to the artist who seized the internet image from the original phot0-shopper and put the text SOCIALISM under Obama's photo-shopped face and turned the image into a political poster. As such the two of them became accidental collaborators in a type of gestalt pattern recognition relay of messages. In the aggregate it strikes me as more of a warning to the voters, not to Barack Obama. What he looks like isn't what he is--He can be anything.

Wikipedia states:

The Joker's use is greatly varied....Often, the joker is a wildcard, and thereby allowed to represent other existing cards. The term "Joker's Wild" originates from this practice, as does the game show of the same name....The Joker can be an extremely beneficial, or an extremely harmful, card.

In the Tarot deck there are different properties associated with the card, where it known as the Fool, and from that it's apparent that the figure of the Joker is an ancient one having varied and subtle cultural meanings over time. Batman's Gotham nemesis was fond of leaving a Joker behind as his calling card. Whatever else may be true, it is clear that when you decide to play with the Joker in the deck, the normal rules will no longer apply. In your hand, the Joker can be what you want. But what happens when the Joker can make you become what he wants?

Scots Judge Boots Lockerbie Bomber Out of UK's Free Health Care System

2009-08-21T20:49:00.017-05:00

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the terminally ill convicted Lockerbie bomber, has been released from Greenock prison in Scotland. After spending no more than a fortnight in custody for each of the 270 victims killed in the 1988 Panam flight 103 bombing, the Libyan Arab terrorist has been returned home to Tripoli where he was cheered by 1000's of his fellow countrymen, proving correct the mother of one of his victims: Susan Cohen, who lost her 20-year-old daughter in the attack, is reported to have said in response to recent rumors ahead of the impending release, "If you send him back, he will be a hero and Gaddafi will be able to forget the whole thing."

He was allowed to return home on compassionate grounds Scottish officials said, after doctors said he is suffering from terminal prostate cancer and may have only three months to live.
Al-Megrahi, 57, served only eight years of the life sentence imposed after his 2001 conviction.

Under a deal struck between former PM Tony Blair and the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2008, the release takes the UK's NHS off the hook for footing the bill for al-Megrahi's hospital care for his terminal prostate cancer. The NHS, suffering itself from crippling cost overruns was no doubt cheering politely along with the raucous Libyan mob at the move, over the savings that will be realised. Further, no UK funds will need be expended on a proper Islamic burial for Mr. al-Megrahi, either.

He was released over the objections of Australian and U.S. officials, who obviously have no concern for the problems of socialised medicine in the UK. Most of the victims were U.S. citizens on their way home for Christmas.

Baghdad Reverts to Form

2009-08-19T22:54:00.026-05:00

Truck bombs and mortars exploded across Baghdad yesterday killing scores and wounding hundreds in coordinated attacks. Without the American forces standing watch over their every move, the former seat of the Abbasid caliphate is steadily reverting back to petty, corrupt and bloody form. Is there an Arab society that is not utterly and intractably violent and corrupt?

We waste our American military forces, honorable volunteers all, by using them to fight as surrogates in intra-Ummah battles; a no-win scenario if ever there was one. Just look at the recent victory party Maliki threw to celebrate the withdrawal of the American 'occupiers'. In that sense, Afghanistan will be just another not-so-instant re-play. Where is the overarching strategy for the West? This was President Bush's entirely avoidable error.

GWB had the courage of his convictions, but lacked knowledge and historical imagination or he couldn't have done what he did. He also gets a 'D' for the quality of his political leadership skills in my view (speaking as a 2-time GWB voter). All-in-all, Iraq has been and continues to be, just another in a long line of corrupt Islamic tribal sinkholes for American lives and treasure. Remember, the successes of General Petraeus' tactics were driven by American cash money--greasing the palms of the sheiks. When the money ran out as the Iraqi government took over, so did they.

As far as this having been an illegal war--such a meaningless thing does not exist, and can't--war is entirely about the intention of imposing one's own idea of what 'legal' is by use of force. Either you win or you don't. But fighting and winning a war only to install a Sharia-based Islamic constitution is just plain stupid.

update 8/28/2009

Afghanistan president Karzai takes a page out of Maliki's playbook to put distance between himself and the U.S.A. for domestic political advantage as the Afghan election results get sorted out. Whichever Muslim comes out on top, be it by way of the ballot box or force of arms, Western aims will be inevitably degraded and diminished because Shariah law is consistently allowed to trump the naive "hearts and minds" suasions of the infidel. Playing with Muslims by Muslim rules, so as not to "offend" them by adhering to our own culture, will always produce the same sorry outcome.

One Flew Over the Climate's Nest

2009-08-10T21:47:00.039-05:00

Skeptics of climate change orthodoxy--that is, of the human-caused/human-correctable variety of climate change, as earnestly espoused by our world-government-in-waiting as well as by the once reputable but currently true-believing National Geographic Society, now have something else to worry about.

Serious investigations have recently begun into understanding and correcting the underlying psychological dysfunction of the AGW-skeptical brain, and its for our own good--as a species. Better that the American Psychological Association can provide the government with the insights and psychological tools with which to break down our political resistance and turn us around before we skeptics have to be (justifiably!) sent off to the treason tribunals for climate change deniers. And it's not just for our own good--the very future of the planet is at stake.

Correlating decades of interrelated research, a task force chaired by Janet Swim, PhD, of Penn State University, made its presentation to the 117th annual APA convention in Toronto, Canada, the Association convention's surprisingly frequent home-away-from-home destination, on August 7. Discussing the means and methods of behavioral modification to unblock the sadly ill-informed and closed-minded prejudice of the skeptics was only a part of task force's report and its public policy recommendations.

The task force identified other areas where psychology can help limit the effects of climate change, such as developing environmental regulations, economic incentives, better energy-efficient technology and communication methods.

"Many of the shortcomings of policies based on only a single intervention type, such as technology, economic incentives or regulation, may be overcome if policy implementers make better use of psychological knowledge," the task force wrote in the report.

Because this is presumably a government-financed study, we are I'm sure, intended to understand it as impartial and even-handed, just as are most of the other $79B worth of government-funded global climate warming hope-and-change studies, right? How can I tell? It doesn't say a single thing about electro-shock treatments yet, so far as I know. Let's hope the next APA convention isn't being held in Chicago.

Cloud Ship Earth

2009-08-07T13:51:00.020-05:00

When it comes to cooling the planet, this is a much better idea than spraying particulates into the upper atmosphere, or sending giant mirrors into outer space. Or so they say. It certainly makes for a way-better illustration opportunity (compliments to Telegraph.co.uk). The current fantasy, as it is explained in the article, is to build a global fleet of 1900 immense unmanned, satellite-directed robot ships to inject sea water high into the atmosphere to create fluffy salt-seeded clouds on demand to reflect the sun's heat back into space. On an as-needed basis. Or something. It's amazing to me that there are still folks out there who do not consider the U.N. to be a special interest group. Anyway, my favorite aspect of articles like these (aside from the groovy sci-fi illustrations) is actually the wacky and insightful comments and here are my favorites today:

These clowns have finally have made the L. Ron Hubbard Stage. The Cloud Ship concept is amazing. Your gonna have to create several million tons of thrust to make the upper atmosphere. The Water Ammo will kill all animals in a hemispheric pattern at a rate of 28 miles and raise the water temperature more than 17%

The economic crisis must be the real myth if this is how we are spending our $$$.

The only thing missing here is the little box with a dial that will regulate the amount of cloud to be generated by these ships. This "world thermostat" will, of course, be installed in Al Gore's office at the top of his ivory tower.

painting California WHITE would be a lot cheaper, and would do more to slow global warming...and is at least as practical as the ideas in this article.

What could possibly go wrong?

In the name of fighting climate change, they are going to do some real damage to the planet. If they think that "global warming" is bad, just wait until they cause the next Ice Age.

This too funny, cause I just read an article that said clouds trap atomospheric heat in. And "The Goracle" says the science is settled. Go figure.

Has anyone mentioned yet that when the salted rain falls onto the surface into the top soil that it will kill all life on the planet? That's a surefire way to stop global warming.

its a great idea so long as i can invest in the company

Why bother spending all that money when mother nature has been cooling the earth for free since 1998.

If the global warming zealots don't stop soon they're going to discredit science in general in the eyes of the public. This is and always has been an absurd theory that would have died a natural death long ago if it hadn't been propped up by politically motivated research grants. That grant money has now so thoroughly corrupted atmospheric science, we can't trust anything that so-called climatologists or atmospheric scientists say.

Why not just blast Al Gore into a low orbit and let his fat a$$ block a few tenths of a percent of sunlight. We'll go get him when earth cools back down.

Whenever I start to think about how reckless, irresponsible and/or just stupid the American media has become, I just head on over to the UK. It makes me realize that, by comparison anyway, the US media could be worse.

They want to cut down on CO2 and sunlight....it sounds like a war on plants to me.

HA, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Was this a Saturday Night Live skit? No......It's for real? Who let the inmates run the insane asylem?

It looks like it will work better than than cap & trade and will be much cheaper!

Will National Geographic be endorsing this? Polar bears are waiting.

Already doing this with the chemtrails try looking up for once.

Why not just shift the orbit of the moon to give total solar eclipses every day? ;)

What a ridiculous idea! Don't mess with Mother Nature. Why don't we send some freezer ships to the arctic to make ice for the polar bears...

"Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant" James Madison.

make lots of dry ice and store it at the poles. dont forget to plant a tree.

And I presume these magical unmanned ships will be powered by unicorn farts and rainbows, and protected from pirates who can spot the plumes a hundred miles away by fierce dragons.

It just proves scientists can be insane too.

1,900 ships plying the oceans, and no carbon footprint! fueled by pixie dust, I'm sure.

Unmanned? Perhaps they will have cameras so we can watch pirates steal them.

They tried this on Futurama and it still didnt work. Whats next? a giant space ice cube dumped into the ocean?

Cloud ships? Bwahahahahaha.

Now if only global warming were real, we would have a solution.

Is Obama Really Like the Joker?

2009-08-06T15:36:00.004-05:00

Posters started appearing in Los Angeles depicting Obama as the Joker with the word “socialism” below his face. The image quickly spread throughout the internet, gaining knee-jerk liberal condemnation and making people ask things like “What does Obama have to do with the Joker?” and “What does the Joker have to do with socialism?” and “Is this racist somehow? I’m pretty sure it has to be racist.”

All in good humor, this article by author Frank J. Fleming. Check it out. "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Obama's 911

2009-08-03T22:43:00.012-05:00

Everything that he wanted to accomplish as president is now or shortly will be, drifting away, bobbing out of his grasp. For President Obama, federal tax revenues are the mother's milk of his dreams for the American future. Single-payer "healthcare", the zero-emission utopia of green jobs across the land, government buyouts of private businesses--all are about to crumble before the tremors propagating across the economic landscape. Now that his policies have helped turn down the curve of federal tax revenue receipts, his resources are melting away like an ice floe in the fevered brain of Al Gore and President Obama is like that proverbial polar bear in summer--hungry, angry and lonesome--and drifting, drifting in a forbidding sea.

The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession's impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.

Just as George W. Bush saw his presidency defined by the unforeseen events of the 911 razzia, Barack Obama will see his presidency defined by the unforeseen events and the unintended consequences of the federal economic policies that have given us this recession. He will not have the revenue to implement his policies. Not only are the costs and demographics of today's Medicare and Social Security boondoggles conspiring against it, but the people at large are coming unglued, in open rebellion against the arrogance of the government confiscators. To cut costs overseas, the president is frantically working to mollify the vanguard of Islamic Imperialism and our nearer Marxist enemies while backing away from past principles, commitments and alliances in order to convert the expenses to domestic use. It's not working. Obama's strategic goals will be undone by his own tactics and legislative timing. This is what comes of inexperience and cockiness and a lack of seriousness, and for that we are lucky. Internationally, he is stumbling and the harder and faster he tries to ram his objectives through at home by attempting to create a sense of urgency for them, the less he is trusted--by anyone.

Bills in Congress passed unread,
Disquiet in the land grows and spreads,
As tax reports are held to wait
In hopes that congress votes then skates.

But the haste of July sighs and lapses
As Blue Dogs' confidence collapses
Then August dawns with revenue falling
Obama's month for truths appalling.

Not a Batman Fan

2009-08-02T22:53:00.008-05:00

More creepiness emanating from the persona of the central figure of his own personal drama spilling out into the world beyond his psyche. This bit of sickness from the environs of Los Angeles, CA. Found plastered on walls. HT: American Thinker. More commentary on this can be found at Bedlam Magazine.

Healthcare for Clunkers

2009-07-31T00:38:00.012-05:00

It was in the stimulus package. Buy a new car and get a rebate (up to $4,500.00) for trading in your inefficient old "clunker". The clunker, (if it passed the government clunker-test) would be taken off the road and scrapped, the government-run auto industry stimulated, you'd get a brand-new, new-car-smelling new car and the planet would be saved, all in one fell swoop. Scheduled to kick-in on the 1st of July, many dealers and buyers made their deals over the first two weeks of the month, based on the government's promises and published clunker criteria, only to find the feds holding-up the start of the rebate payments until the middle of the month. When the funds were finally released after the 15th they came with a brand-new, updated and more restrictive set of clunker criteria, non retro-active, thus gumming up a myriad of good-faith trade-ins already made on the basis of the pre-published clunker criteria. Tough break that, for the chumps who will now get no rebate and must pay the full price for the new car. No worries, though, the program was still drawing buyers by the droves to the new car showrooms over the last couple of weeks of the month.

Today, the program was canceled for lack of proper planning. As I recall, Congress didn't have of lot of opportunity to read the stimulus bill before they passed it, and neither did the President, before he signed it, so that's understandable. But they'll read the Healthcare bill, right?

Fixed Gaze Jihadi

2009-07-23T17:29:00.009-05:00

A sad story of jihadi tourism.

The unnamed "foreign fighter" whose corpse was put on display by the alleged government of Somalia has been identified on a jihadi forum as former Minneapolis, Minnesota resident Jamal Bana. He had previously been identified by his mother, who found a picture of his dead body on a Somali news site. HT: Internet Haganah.

Like at least one other of the missing Minnesota Somalis, Jamal Bana "al-Amriki" was presumably executed when he quavered at performing his designated jihadist duties. These are the guys whose bodies Congressman Keith Ellison (MN-5) wants the federal government to buy back to Minneapolis for burial.

Quote of the Day

2009-07-23T11:50:00.016-05:00

In response to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry's quoted opening remarks to his Senate Foreign Relations Committee and this apocalyptic intro from a recent Political Intelligence Column at Boston.com:

Massive crop devastation, melting glaciers, water shortages, millions of displaced people -- all of these will drag the US military into conflict if global climate change goes unchecked, a Senate panel was warned today.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, convened by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, focused on what so far has received only modest attention in the climate change debate: the effect it is bound to have on national defense.

An intrepid observer opines:

"Well Bush might have been misunderestimated but he did manage to keep two of America's biggest morons out of the White House so kudos to him for that"

-Comment #168, posted by Lynn at 10:15 a.m. from the recent Political Intelligence Column at Boston.com on the subject of Sen. John Kerry's fear-mongering "climate change" hearing.

When the government starts buying science, you know it won't stop until it gets what it wants.

The Creepy Warrior

2009-07-18T14:07:00.005-05:00

It used to be asked when shown a picture of President Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon: "Would you buy a used car from this man?". The question more or less had its answer embedded in the combination of the questioner and question. The very fact that the question was asked made it merely rhetorical. We all knew the answer was no, without saying a thing. Nixon's adversary back then was progressive Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was known as the "Happy Warrior" in his day for his upbeat and indefatigable efforts in the cause of civil rights. Barack Obama is the Creepy Warrior. Humphrey and Nixon have changed rhetorical places and the question has changed, too. "Would you dare to try to buy your health insurance from anyone other than this man?" Progressivism's new coercive inspiration.

Undoing the Bush Legacy

2009-07-14T09:16:00.005-05:00

From the war in Iraq, to missile defense for Eastern Europe, from increasing domestic oil and gas production to embryonic stem cell research, the Obama administration has been hellbent on reversing virtually everything set in place by the previous administration. Where we have seen backpedaling on the part of the Obama stampede to undo everything Bush it has been because of inconvenient intervening facts, as in the case of jihadi recidivism and the related Gitmo closure problems. Here's another bit of the Bush legacy recently undone as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

The past six months are Obama's work. Impressive.

Obama's Lifestyle Cops at Work

2009-07-11T20:24:00.010-05:00

In a recent column, Hertitage Foundation contributor Ronald D. Utt cuts to the chase in his acerbic disquisition on some Obama administration policy:

"Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood remarked in May that his livability initiative "is a way to coerce people out of their cars." When asked if this was government intrusion into people's lives, LaHood responded that "about everything we do around here is government intrusion in people's lives," a sentiment that would have certainly surprised the authors of the United States Constitution, a document whose major purpose was to restrain government."

Mr. Utt points out how the new policy appears to be directed at re-creating a nineteenth century transportation lifestyle on the backs of twenty-first century taxpayers. Bear in mind, of course, there were no income or corporate taxes in the nineteenth century. If we're to have free health care (for the healthy), its hard to see how we're going to be able to afford much $5.00 gasoline, right?

One wonders just how a young family of six will be able to exist in our brave new world. Clearly transportation will be an increasingly problematic issue as government pressure mounts to limit the size of new vehicles. There's just so much carbon guilt already that driving down the size of families is just one more way to alleviate it and limiting their transportation options is one way to do it.

Read his article here.

An Ummah of Ants

2009-07-02T09:56:00.005-05:00

From the BBC Earth News comes this:

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.
These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

Remarkable behaviour. See the article "Ant mega-colony takes over world".

The Hive of Islam

2009-06-06T17:54:00.015-05:00

The post title links to a live Saudi web cam trained on the ka'aba in the so-called "Grand" Mosque of Mecca. Watch the swarming ummah at your leisure. For additional background on the ka'aba and the black stone go here or here or here. If you didn't think before that Islam was a creepy cult of ancient tribal superstitions, mated to a barbarous and superficial understanding of Judaism and Christianity, you've got some work to do. And be sure to click-up the links, especially this one.

UPDATE 6/16/2009
It appears they've shut off the web cam, leaving the page there, but without the swarming image. It was a live version of this....

UPDATE 6/18/2009
The web cam is back up.

All four men were US-born.

2009-05-21T00:22:00.017-05:00

From the Daily News comes a timely timely report on a lowdown, homegrown, ex-moderate, 100% genuine Islamic activity:

The FBI busted a homegrown terror cell late Wednesday night as the men sneaked around a Jewish temple in Riverdale planting what they thought was packages of C-4 explosives, sources told the Daily News.
The four African American men, three of whom were said to be jailhouse converts to Islam, also allegedly had what they believed was a working Stinger missile in their car.
Officials said they hoped to shoot down a plane at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh in Orange County.
..................

Arrested was alleged ringleader James Cromitie of Newburgh, the son of an Afghan immigrant and his African American wife.
Cromitie served a long stretch in prison in the past.
Alleged henchment David Williams, Onta Williams and Leguerre Payen were busted with him.
Sources said the three were jailhouse converts to Islam.

Here are my questions about this story. Why are we permitting Saudi Arabia to finance the training for a universal jailhouse da'wa and what is it that criminals find attractive about converting to Islam and engaging in jihadist razzias in their own backyards? Where stand the ikhwan CAIR and their spokesman Ibrahim Hooper in all of this? Do the Saudis find jailhouse conversions to be a cost effective jihadi recruiting strategy? Do they enjoy the clever irony? After all, we absorb the cost of the initial criminal activity plus we absorb the cost of housing the prisoners, and then we pay the Saudi-trained imam-chaplain to do the rest prior to their release.

The technique seems to be in maximal use all across the kuffar prisons of the Western world. Were we to halt the in-migration of Muslims to the USA would that make a difference to the Homeland Security program? Would it be safer to fly an airplane or be a Jew? What's really pathetic is that after all this stupidity we then go on to pay the directors and agents of the FBI to plan and infiltrate and entrap these traitors after we release them while they go about putting into action the Islamist belief system we enabled them to acquire while in prison. Why, the next thing you know, we'll be be cleaning up the wreckage from middle of a city or something. At our expense. Sheesh. Why don't we just convert and pay the jizya? It would be cheaper.

Cleaner Air? There must be some mistake

2009-05-20T23:43:00.010-05:00

This just in:

President George W. Bush drew the ire of environmental groups throughout his eight years in the White House, perhaps the loudest in 2003 when he announced that he would end a Clean Air Act program that required older power plants, refineries and industrial sites to install pollution control devices when they expanded their operations.
But in looking over the data on air quality from the Bush years, Hayward notes that levels of most air pollutants decreased at a faster rate than they did during the Clinton administration.

How odd. How odd that people of good will, intellect and intention would come together without the specter of government compulsion to accomplish a socially useful purpose in course of making their own choices for their own purposes? That to accomplish a socially useful purpose might be one of their purposes? That that purpose might be cleaner air on its own merits? I wonder how that national forest policy of relaxing federal regulation in favor of local administration of local priorities worked out???

More Israeli Genius: 40% Better Gas Mileage

2009-04-27T13:06:00.016-05:00

An Israeli teen has conceived and developed a new device that improves gas mileage by as much as a whopping 40% and cuts emissions as well. The device can be very easily retro-fitted into most gas and diesel powered vehicles apparently and reportedly boosts engine horsepower as an added benefit. Great news on the conservation front that can help to push the cost of gas lower by reducing demand. Maybe someone can figure out a way to keep the device out of Iranian hands while they are busy shouting "Death to Israel". Gas shortages are our friend in their corner of the world.

Update 28 April 2009

I am now wondering if this technology could be adapted to home heating. Many homes in the northeastern U.S., more percentage-wise than any other area of the country, use fuel oil for heat. If so, huge savings could be obtained, and possibly more B.T.U.'s could be extracted per gallon of oil burned in the the home heating market. This could be another frontier of engineering exploration. The entire notion of "peak oil" may have just gotten smacked by a new consumption paradigm.

Update 15 July 2009

The product is now being marketed by the Z5 Global Group . Here is the company website. Here is a recent article with more on the inventor and his invention.

Why is Nancy Nervous?

2009-04-23T19:44:00.052-05:00

John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, has just returned from a fact-finding mission in Pakistan, his timely and worrisome observations challenging President Obama's bellicose but confused Af/Pak policies, while trying to come off as helpful. At home, the country is in a furor over the President's declaration that there could be criminal prosecutions of some Bush era officials based upon the new and improved "torture" policies, contravening his own chief-of-staff and Director of National Intelligence.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, former ranking Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and as Speaker, the 3rd highest Constitutional Officer of the U.S. government, is backpedaling furiously onto the ropes over the same subject, attempting to defend herself from allegations that she had been advised in sub-committee of the secret details of the torture techniques and the policy approach to using them, and had legitimized their use by the CIA (however tacitly). That she chooses to respond to pointed questions by anxiously and nervously defending herself (to her base, no less), is the most telling aspect of her reaction.

That the President might not be displeased by this turn of events should be considered a good bit more than possible. The size and of complexion of the stimulus legislation, for which the President has been roundly criticized even by members of his own party, was composed and packaged by the most left-leaning of the Congressional Democrats, and led by Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker has shown herself to be feisty when it comes to standing up to the Obama White House. Though she leads the left wing of her party, she is not particularly well-liked by her colleagues in the House. Further, were she to fall the chances are slim that her successor as Speaker would be as far to the left as she. Whoever succeeds her leadership among House progressives is not likely to occupy the Speaker's chair. Conceivably she could lose her credibility with the left and yet retain the Speakership. However, if the left's protection of her falls away for this cause, coupled with her role in the Harman wiretapping incident and they begin gnawing at her, she will also be punished by them. As for President Obama, at this point in his career the Community-Organizer-in-Chief no longer requires the brokering services Nancy Pelosi provided him with the bellwether San Francisco Democrats, or with progressives in general.

With Pelosi moved to the sidelines and out of his way, a more Obama-compliant cadre of house leadership will emerge--and she won't be calling in the plays from the left. How this resolves remains to be seen. If questioned about torture-gate on what he knew and when he knew it, Senator Kerry will no doubt turn the conversation to Afghanistan and his very recent trip, accompanied by some helpful statesman-like hemming and hawing. Maybe Nancy's nervous because she senses she's about to be cut into political ribbons by the harpies on the left unleashed by virtue of the President's abrupt flip-flop to their cause. It will be telling to see if she is defended by him now, if given the opportunity, or if instead he chooses remains silent. If it is silence, or less than serious and reasoned defense, listen then for the sound of knives being sharpened in the cellar; Nancy may be on her way out and the president free of one more thorn in his side. Irony or intention?

Update 26 April 2009:
Porter Goss, who was, in the fall of 2002, chairman of the House intelligence committee of which Ms. Pelosi was the ranking minority member, (and later Director of Central Intelligence), has established that the Congresswoman was in on the waterboarding from the very beginning. His piece in the Washington Post makes it very clear that she was, in fact, deeply involved and committed to the technique in the pursuit of information from the al Qaida operatives in CIA hands at the time. Barack Obama, back in Illinois was not, so his hands are clean.

The EPA Takes a Call from Obama's Science Officer

2009-04-17T17:45:00.020-05:00

Presumably its ok for the government to deliberately fill the stratosphere with massive quantities of dust in order to "cool the planet" (forget about the Clean Air Act), but hey, its not okay for you to burn the toast. Down the road, these hyperventilating bureaucrats will be on your case making sure you get the opportunity to pay your fair share out-of-pocket for your own personal carbon "emissions". Just think of it as a sin tax to fund the syntax of post-modern existence. Life will be beautiful in the thrilling, new sustainable world that's out there somewhere beyond tomorrow; I can just feel it coming on, can't you? Of course you can. I do however, sense a troubling disturbance. For the "settled scientists" of man-made global warming worries:

Panic attacks are almost always associated with shortness of breath or difficulty breathing. When people feel short of breath, they often respond by hyperventilating, another common symptom of panic attacks. People hyperventilating exhale more carbon dioxide than they produce, thereby lowering carbon dioxide levels in the body. As carbon dioxide levels drop, several other changes in the body result in the lightheadedness and dizziness that often accompany panic attacks.*

You'd think a little more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be beneficial for some people. And that they'd be self-aware enough to recognize it.

*or maybe its just breathing abnormalities

No Representation Without Taxation?

2009-04-14T22:14:00.014-05:00

What was once merely an outlandish disparity in numbers between those who benefit from U.S. income tax policy and those who actually pay the taxes, is now on its way to its largest and most disturbing level in history. So many voters today pay no income tax that there is little natural incentive within the electorate to keep the cost of government low, to set reasonable spending priorities or to vote for anyone other than a redistributionist Democrat. Rather than trumped-up publicity stunts, I hope that the Tea Party rallies tomorrow will shine a light on this problem above all others. In an article published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary writes:

According to the CBO, those who made less than $44,300 in 2001 — 60% of the country — paid a paltry 3.3% of all income taxes. By 2005, almost all of them were excused from paying any income tax. They paid less than 1% of the income tax burden. Their share shrank even when taking into account the payroll tax. In 2001, the bottom 60% paid 16.3% of all taxes; by 2005 their share was down to 14.3%. All the while, this large group of voters made 25.8% of the nation’s income.

When you make almost 26% of the income and you pay only 0.6% of the income tax, that’s a good deal, courtesy of those who do pay income taxes. For the bottom 40%, the redistribution deal is even better. In 2001, these 43 million Americans, who earn less than $30,500, made 13.5% of the nation’s income but paid no income tax. Instead, they received checks from their taxpaying neighbors worth $16.3 billion. By 2005, those checks totaled $33.3 billion.

Not that this is an entirely new phenomenon; however, the situation in which we find ourselves today, to a far greater extreme devalues work, undermines success, and is at bottom, fundamentally corrupt and debilitating. The pendulum has swung too far in a direction that can only lead to a self-perpetuating and thuggish majority, voting themselves no taxes, but only benefits to be paid for by the minority who are taxpayers.

"in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

2009-04-08T14:38:00.011-05:00

"The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air. John Holdren told the Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort."

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.
Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions."

Living as we are in an era of mass psychosis, I shouldn't be surprised to learn that this kind of nonsense is being seriously discussed in the White House. Giddy with power, and out for a joyride in a hybrid with bad brakes, the Obama administration is accelerating into a foggy left turn.

Israeli Science Breakthrough Extracts Fuel from Water

2009-04-07T23:14:00.012-05:00

What if they came for the carbon tax and no one paid? Enterprising men will always find a way to redefine the political playing field and send the politicians scrambling. The carbon tax juggernaut, now being eyed as the coming cash cow for financing an ever more bloated and intrusive government must surely, if there is any justice in the world, or any luck at all, sputter and die. And hopefully with it will go all of the other avatars of eco-fascist impulse.

An Israeli research team at the Weizmann Institute has found a promising way to convert water into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen parts that may make hydrogen fuel cells economical. The current technique for creating the hydrogen for fuel cells from water has required so much energy input, that hydrogen fuel cells are not now economical to operate as an everyday energy source. The Israeli scientists have devised a three stage process inspired by photosynthesis which actually utilizes light energy in its third stage.

Among the most important challenges facing science today is designing an efficient system for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The ability to do so will introduce hydrogen into the market as a clean, sustainable fuel. But man-made systems for getting to the root of water that exist today are very inefficient and often require additional use of sacrificial chemical agents.

The Who - Shakin' All Over - Woodstock 1969

2009-04-07T21:48:00.002-05:00

Worth listening to, if only for the final image of the slide show. For fans (like me) of the Who; a band I first saw in concert in 1970.

"Our Efforts to Control Climate Change"

2009-04-03T20:44:00.114-05:00

President Obama, on April 2nd discussed his recent meeting with the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. Responding to a young female Indian reporter's question on whether the U.S. was coordinating anti-terror strategies with the Indian state, the president instead took the opportunity to go on-and-on, teasing and wincingly patronizing the young reporter before getting around to the serious business of avoiding her question. Instead of combating real threats, high on the list of priorities he shared with the prime minister in his best Chicago-style spirit of mutuality, was, and I quote: "our efforts to control climate change". As an architect, I am keenly aware of the concept of climate control. Of course, when I think of "climate control" I am referring to mere interior climate control, a highly complex and often times convoluted set of engineering and user-feedback challenges that can take a year or even more to get right in a newly commissioned building. This president, on the other hand, envisions simpler causes and more direct effects on a far broader physical and political climate. A man who has been heard equating his own election to the presidency with coming return of the supposed man-caused swollen seas to their rightful shores, Mr. Obama intends to have his way at controlling the planetary climate, and his first step will be to control us, and all of our energy producing and consuming activities. One might go so far as to say he's got global ambitions.

So, I ask myself. How many kilowatts of energy are delivered to the earth's atmosphere, oceans and surface over the period of a year from the following sources: The sun. The earth's own mantle and core. The activities of humankind. What are the respective percentages? If the climate runs on energy, and it does, then to control the climate we must in some respect control the energy inputs into the climate system and the flux of that energy to such an extent that the effects are not just measurable and meaningful, but also beneficial. Without beneficial effects, the energy expended is wasted because control has not been achieved. If the percentage contributed by human activities is small to begin with, and I would think the order of magnitude is less than one percent, then we might be able to reduce the energy inputs into the climate by some fraction thereof. It might be said, however, that the problem is not the amount of energy that we are putting into the atmosphere but rather that we are changing the proportions of the gases in the atmosphere. By so doing, we are thereby causing more of the natural energy inputs into the climate system to be retained in the atmosphere and oceans over a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case, hideously distorting its otherwise ineffably and sublimely perfect and natural state. An arguable point in a world free from "acts of God".

Imagine for a moment, just for the heck of it, that all of the windmills in all the world, and all of the windmills yet to come, are operating in reverse, blowing like fans, so that instead of drawing energy from the atmosphere, as they now do, they are instead imparting energy into the moving air. What might the net effect be on the global climate? Would it be large and obvious over time? Or would it be miniscule, and difficult to observe the changes, let alone measure them? How much electrical energy would it take to accomplish such an enormous task? How much carbon? What an outlandish example, you say. President Obama, after all intends to control the energy in the climate not just by direct means by burning less fuel, but by indirect means. And the results will be measured indirectly, as well, such as by how many new government-subsidized "green" jobs he can claim his policies have produced. Direct measurements, such as temperatures over historical time and atmospheric and temperature data provided by paleoclimatology, not to mention sunspot energy and orbital cycles cannot be made sufficiently persuasive. Not if your purposes are control and "sustainability".

The provision of food, clothing and shelter for the human population, on an annual per capita basis, means that for each of us a certain amount of energy must be expended, and ejected into the climate system, in the form of heat, cooling, light, transport and utilities. Two of the by-products of this energy production are increased water vapor and carbon dioxide. Some of us on the planet cause more of this energy to be expended than others, of course. First World leisure economies come to mind. Stored carbon (oil, coal, wood) energy buried in the ground is a part of the earth and came from living things that lived and died in the past. Removing and releasing some of it from out of the earth and into the air is one of the costs of maintaining life. Remove and release a little more and you can buy safety and security, a little more yet and you can buy liberty and the luxury of virtue. Perhaps one might even find a direct correlation between increasing energy comsumption and one's ascent up the pyramid of Abraham Maslow's heirachy of needs. How many non-self-actualizeds working in the factories and stores, and on construction sites and farms does it take to produce the surplus that buys for our society the good offices of those with glorious visions?

Globalization is a process that began slowly and spontaneously many thousands of years ago through the course of human migrations, beginning in earnest only with the mastery of the Atlantic crossing by the Renaissance Europeans and the start of smokestack industries, mass production and mass communications in the 19th and twentieth centuries. In other words, modern globalization is carbon-based. Globalization occurs from the top down. The less carbon you release, the less global and more local you are likely to be. As a corollary, you are also more likely to be poorer. Wealth begets globalization. Poverty does not. For those for whom endless cultural striving for improvements in the human condition has produced wealth, security and comfort, globalization is a natural urge.

If carbon is taxed, then like all other taxes, a carbon tax will be levied unevenly, and capriciously. If your intent is the control of economic activity and hence the climate, then taxes are effective at making otherwise uneconomical activities "sustainable", as well as previously economical activities unsustainable. Might they then be a useful tool in order to dial-in and manage the various rates of globalization across the various regions? Maybe its time then for the developed (and taxable) regions of the world to let the Obamas of the world tie one hand behind their backs and knock them a peg or two down on Maslow's heirarchy. Then the game would be fairer.

A Working Man's Philosophy of Climate Change

2009-03-19T17:26:00.120-05:00

Sadly, and hockey stick graphs notwithstanding, past and present human influence on the earth’s climate, despite what you have been told has not been proved to be anything more than marginal, if even that. CO2 is not a pollutant; it is, in fact, and always has been (just as you were taught), essential to life in all its forms. CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere have been considerably higher in the past than they are now, and will continue to vary over time, with or without our help, into the infinite and indefinite future. CO2 is a minor contributor among the naturally occurring greenhouse gases, far-and-away over-shadowed by ordinary water vapor. Sequestering carbon in the hope that in so doing, the earth's climate can be “returned to normal” is a fool's errand and is wasteful of both labor and capital. The au courant notion that worldwide climate stability is amenable to, or governable by human tinkering and tooling is a nefarious and hubristic political fiction, perhaps even an example of the persistence of magical thinking in the modern mind. Just when exactly, was the earth's climate ever "perfect", or in a steady state?

As the Greek philosopher Protagoras posited that "man is the measure of all things", so perhaps it is inevitable that people living today would assume that the condition of the climate in the time in which they live is ideal or perfect in some way. The earth and its climate, however, know nothing of our conceits. A walk under the stars on a dark night, or a trip to the new International Tsunami Museum in Thailand might be a helpful reminder of the actual scale of the natural world and our relative place in it. A proper scientific double-blind test to determine the true influence of human life on the earth's climate can never be performed, and therefore any and all estimates of our impact on the global climate can never be anything more than speculation.

What you are left with then are cherry-picked statistical correlations and earnest but evolving (and at any given time, spurious) computer models to make the case for AGW, "climate change" or whatever you care to call the phenomenon (assuming, of course, that there is such a phenomenon). As correlation does not prove causality, the underlying philosophical assumptions leave us no choice but to conclude that it is no more, nor any less, than our own received, but unexamined ontological opinions on the nature of man and of man's place in the natural world that leads us to nod mindlessly along with the breathlessly delivered reports of the elitist and anti-democratic hacks at NASA, the UN, the EU and the universities on the purported looming climate apocalypse. Ipso facto then, it is our lazy and non-committal approach to the central philosophical questions of life, and not science, that ends up determining or enabling everything regarding current climate change doctrine and economic policies....whether we care to admit it or not.

And comments are most welcome.

Faultlines in the American political landscape

2009-02-04T17:15:00.019-06:00

As exemplified in this photo-shopped image seized upon (and most probably created) by her political enemies, Alaska governor Sarah Palin instantly became an American icon from the moment John McCain introduced to the public last summer. I found her to be a charming and decent human being, as well as a compelling and remarkable campaigner. Most interesting to me, however, was observing the panoply of bizarre reactions to her from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. As Yuval Levin begins in his excellent analysis of the meaning of her meteoric rise:

Two political figures dominated the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign. One was the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. The other had been unknown to all but 670,000 Americans only a few minutes before she was first introduced by the Republican nominee, John McCain, at a rally in Ohio on the Friday before the Republican National Convention, only 66 days before the November election.

This fascinating, if somewhat long, (not a criticism by the way, just a heads-up) exposition of Levin's on the meaning of Sarah Palin's place in American politics is essential reading for any political junkie. From the February 2009 edition of Commentary magazine, you can read Yuval Levin's incisive article here.

Shame on The Netherlands

2009-01-25T18:22:00.006-06:00

Posted in support of Geert Wilders, the Dutch lawmaker who last year produced and released the 15 minute film, FITNA. For daring to take on Islam, he is to be tried in Dutch court for "inciting hatred". His real crime is daring to speak the truth about the Koran and its incitement to violence against non-Muslims.

14th Century Plague Strikes 7th Century Warriors

2009-01-18T19:35:00.008-06:00

The SUN is reporting today that a AQ training camp in North Africa has been snuffed out to the man by the bubonic plague, also known as the "Black Death". Virtually unknown in the civilized world because it is so readily treated by simple antibiotics, in a camp full of mudjahideen, such treatments will be in Islamically short supply. There is even speculation that the brothers may be passing the contagion along to their pals in other places. Given the Muslim Islamic requirement to avoid contact with the najis (unclean) infidels, this can only bode well for our side--poetically speaking, of course. Pox inshallah, one might say.

UPDATE 19 January 2009
There have been suggestions that this occurrence may be a work-related bio-terrorism accident. I don't think so, because the probabilities are high that it is not. The setting for Albert Camus' play "The Plague" was Oran, Algeria because of its history of plague outbreaks (Camus was born in Algeria). Further, Algeria was the site of a relatively recent outbreak in 2003. The requisite rats and fleas both occur in Algeria. And the clincher: how many AQ training camps having a medical lab capable of weaponizing plague bacillus would have no antibiotics?

Victory in Iraq Day

2008-11-22T16:45:00.011-06:00

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but from what I've read, its two to three years from the time we check-out 'til the corruption and chaos endemic to Islamic societies thrusts another strong man back into control; so in other words, it'll be back to the future then. But for now, I guess, let's just toss one back and bar-b-q some ribs. I'm good with some fireworks, too. So, without further ado:

On this November 22, 2008, join us in observing Victory in Iraq Day.

Let us honor the sacrifice, dedication and sheer determination of American, coalition and Iraqi troops who have brought freedom to the nation and people of Iraq.

Although our governments have chosen to not name any official day marking the end of this war, we the people have taken it upon ourselves to commemorate November 22, 2008 as the day of victory over the forces of tyranny, oppression and terror in Iraq.

Join fellow bloggers and other members of the public in this virtual ticker-tape parade for our brave troops, to celebrate their success, to remember the fallen, and to declare, in the words of President John F. Kennedy (RIP):

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Yeah, but do we mean it, though, and for how long?

Middle East 101

2008-11-14T15:25:00.023-06:00

Because it's important to keep in mind the insidious nature of Islam's core beliefs with respect to the non-Islamic world, I am lifting the quote below from the web page of Sheikh Muhammad Saleh al-Munajjid, a Saudi Wahhabi cleric discussing the nature and need for jihad. This is small piece of a recent exposition on the subject, compliments of Jihad Watch. The sheikh's website is quoting from a classic, mainstream Islamic text which is discussing the onset of the Arab armed invasion of Sasanian Persia in the 630's C.E. The "mushrikeen" are the non-Muslims who are considered idolators by the Muslims, e.g., the Zoroastrians (Persian fire-worshippers) in this case. Chosroes was the Persian emperor who received Mohammad's letter "inviting" him to embrace Islam or pay the penalty. Effectively, the last one, although he was succeeded by his ill-fated grandson Yazdgard in 628. Jizyah is the money you pay to the Muslims in return for being allowed to keep your own religious identity (and your life).

This purpose of jihad was present in the minds of the Sahaabah (may Allaah be pleased with them) during their battles with the enemies of Allaah. Al-Bukhaari (2925) narrated that Jubayr ibn Hayyah said: ‘Umar sent people to all the regions to fight the mushrikeen… so ‘Umar recruited us and appointed al-Nu’maan ibn Muqarrin to lead us. When we were in the land of the enemy, the representative of Chosroes (actually Yazdgard III, n.b.) came out to us with forty thousand troops. An interpreter stood up and said: “Let one of you speak to me.” Al-Mugheerah said: “Ask whatever you want.” He asked, “Who are you?” He (al-Mugheerah) said: “We are some people from among the Arabs. We used to lead a harsh and miserable life, sucking on animal skins and date stones because of hunger, wearing clothes made of camel and goat hair, worshipping trees and rocks. While we were in this state, the Lord of the heavens and the earth, exalted be His name and glorified be His greatness, sent to us a Prophet from amongst ourselves, whose father and mother we know. Our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), commanded us to fight you until you worship Allaah alone or pay the jizyah. Our Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) told us the message from our Lord, that whoever among us is killed will go to Paradise to enjoy delights such as no one has ever seen, and whoever among us is left will become your master.”

This is the truth that the Sahaabah and leaders of the Muslims proclaimed in their military campaigns.

For those who need a reminder that there are still devoted and pious Muslims acting on the jihad imperative, and that they are the ones who decide what is and what is not Islamic, I offer you the photo to the left. "Composition with pistol and Quran"

Rosett: Liberty as a Future Republican Platform?

2008-11-06T17:36:00.016-06:00

So says commentator Claudia Rosett in this piece in Forbes.com, in regard to the creed and concept of liberty:

In the American system built around that creed, the monstrous original failing and contradiction was the institution of slavery. America paid for that with a civil war, followed by another century in which, finally--about the time of Obama's childhood--segregation and discrimination began to give way to the equality and opportunities that Obama has now surfed to the presidency. Liberty prevailed.

The irony is that Obama arrives at the threshold of the White House steeped in ideas that subordinate individual freedom to the collective.
In his campaign and his victory speech, Obama declares that America's "timeless creed" is now, "yes, we can." This is not a defense of liberty. It is a declaration so malleable and generic that it could have applied to anything from Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution to the Little Engine that Could.

Obama has called repeatedly upon America's people to sacrifice. What's not yet clear is whether this will entail sacrifice in the common defense of liberty, or whether it is liberty itself that will step by step be sacrificed in the name of the common good. If the latter, the implications are indeed world-changing. For the past century, America has stood as the world's great bulwark of freedom. That can no longer be taken as a given. Americans will be hard pressed to support freedom elsewhere if they do not protect it at home.

If Rossett is right, the U.S. may be seen to be in, or entering an historical phase analogous to the time of Julius Caesar and his nephew, heir, and creator of the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar, in the sense that the fear and apprehension in the people, with leaders willing to exploit it, can lead to the willing abandonment of principles previously considered timeless and unchanging. The extinction of the old Roman Republic was not so much an overthrow of the old order, but rather the deliberate, albeit improvisational, replacement of an existing system from within: the creation of a a new, less-free political amalgamation centered around a cult of personality, all the while using the rubric and structures of the old system to neutralize and dismantle itself. By the time Augustus was done, little of the old system but the formalities, titles, and rubric remained. What had once been a vigorous republican government was left with little more than empty forms and pious ceremonies. Yet, if one were to ask the average Roman of the time, he would have insisted, of course, that Rome was a republic, despite the vast and obvious increases in the powers of the government at the expense individual freedom, and the pointedly public quashing of dissent, if only because Augustus told them so (well, he also provided them with free food and cash donations from the treasury).

It's going to be difficult to gin up much excitement about the concept of liberty if it's defined by the governing class to be in opposition, as well as a risk to the people's meal ticket.

"We're running a business here, not a mosque"

2008-09-20T12:46:00.004-05:00

Which is exactly what they should say when they return the AP's phone calls. From My Way News dated 19 September 2008:

"OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - A Somali-American leader says 150 Muslims have lost their jobs at a Grand Island, Neb., meatpacking plant that has been embroiled in a prayer dispute."

I'll be watching for the follow-up.

Global Citizen

2008-07-26T17:31:00.030-05:00

Secretary General? In what office does Mr. Obama belong? Do the citizens of the U.S.A. really want a president who puts a phantasmagorical one-world agenda ahead-of and into potential opposition to their own interests? Ahhh, but Barack Obama has a dream. And the world has a fever. A fever dream. A vegan, bike-path, soft-power fever dream. And only the state can perfect us. Amen. Merci beaucoup. You will join the global village. No drilling. No resource-consuming children. Back-off America, the planet will be saved. "People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time." For smugness.

the West does not associate war with the divine

2008-05-19T21:58:00.017-05:00

An interview with U.S. Army Lt. Col. Joseph Meyers offers some well-needed clarity of condition to those of us who constantly wonder how the U.S. can be so bumblingly stupid and inept from top to bottom in this war, despite all the good advice available. Meyers, to his credit, and like Gen. George S. Patton before him is a student of military history, but he, unlike the sob-sisters at the Dept. of State is pursuing his studies down the dark and pustulent alleys of the history of jihad warfare as promulgated by Muslims--a field of study all but neglected by his peers and his betters. Col. Meyers was interviewed recently by Matt Korade at Congressional Quarterly, Inc. An excerpt follows, but for Christ's sake read the whole dang thing.

"The enemy we’re facing in the war on terror, al Qaeda, says they are fighting a jihad against the West to establish the faith of Islam. Now, if that’s their doctrine, then arguably that is the doctrine that we template, irrespective of whether their interpretation of jihad or their discussion of Islam within the theological community of Muslims is correct or incorrect; that is irrelevant to our discussion and understanding of how the enemy presents his doctrine to us, and it is his doctrine that we template over the terrain.
In the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we templated their military forces over physical ground. In the context of this irregular war or the long war, we have to template this enemy’s doctrine over the human and cultural terrain. That’s when these human, cultural, historical factors will then shape the doctrine and explain to us how it may or may not manifest itself all around the world. And we do say we’re in a global war on terror, so that means not just Afghanistan, not just Iraq, it means right here in the United States.
As a military officer, I try to think strategically and speak strategically. These are important strategic-first questions that I think we have to answer. If you were to deconstruct, for example, our national security documents on national security strategies, the national military strategic plan for the war on terror . . . and try to define the enemy in the war on terror from those documents, you cannot do it. It is obscure, it is ephemeral. Consequently I think it’s very hard to orient courses of action against an enemy that we have not precisely defined. We have to define the enemy, who and what he is, and generally speaking, in the Cold War we were very clear on that with the Soviet Union, because we knew who they were intellectually, philosophically, we understood Soviet strategic culture, we understood the history of the Soviet Union, and we understood their authoritative published doctrine. And we haven’t published the authoritative doctrine of the enemy in the war on terror. We focus on al Qaeda and violent actors, we focus at the tip of the spear to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland. We are orienting all our resources, intelligence, homeland defense, against preventing attacks. We have very few resources, in my view, oriented on everything that leads up to the point of attack — the radicalization process. And because we don’t have a model for the war on terror, we don’t fully even understand what that radicalization process looks like. What is the infrastructure of it? Who’s involved in it? What is the ideology undergirding that radicalization process? So we still, I would argue, seven years into the war on terror, have big gaps in our strategic thinking about the fight we’re in. I think those gaps explain some of the challenges we are facing in the prosecution of this war, such as, at least from what I’ve read in media sources, strategic communications programs."

Ya think?

This goes out to all the pietistic Inner Goddesses at Code Pink, The World Can't Wait, et. al.

2008-05-18T19:20:00.033-05:00

Sorry, girls. In support of Israel and the West, and in unwavering opposition to the Muslim theocrats of Iran, and all of the Mahdi well-watchers, behind every tree or under whatever rock they may be hiding, may they be damned for all eternity and may all the great apes and monkeys they despise as unclean dance upon their graves at the first sighting of the crescent moon forever.

Celebrating Israel

2008-05-16T10:48:00.002-05:00

Body Armor on a Coin

2008-05-13T12:58:00.004-05:00

How cool is that? A bronze "dupondius" issued by the Roman warrior emperor Trajan (98-117) dating to between 103 and 111 C.E. Trajan led his Roman armies into battle himself. The body armor here depicted is referred to as a cuirass. The Roman dominions were taken to their greatest geographical extent by Trajan and remained relatively stable for about 50 years. The philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius died of old age in 180 C.E. defending Trajan's conquests in Germany after fighting Parthians and Germans for most of his career.

A Vision of Good Government

2008-05-05T22:40:00.026-05:00

Listening to the radio tonight on the way home from work I heard Hillary Clinton (I guess she was somewhere in Indiana) stumping for the highest office in the land. In a brief radio-clip sound-bite I heard her shouting this applause line, "We need a president who will take care of you, a president who will take care of your family" followed by--the applause. A few hours later, just a few minutes ago, in fact, I came across this coin, an ancient bronze medallion, while doing a little numismatic research. Medallions, then as now, were commemorative pieces, issued to celebrate important events. This particular medallion, struck and issued in 350 A.D. was distributed to his close associates by Constantius II, a son and the successor of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who ruled from 307 to 337. Constantius consolidated the power accrued by his father and furthered his new phase of Roman governance, now referred to by historians as the "Dominate", as opposed to the "Principate", which was the form of goverment established by the emperor Augustus, some 380 years earlier. The Dominate threw aside all pretense of republican or democratic forms. Instead the emperor consolidated to his person virtually all power; he was the commander-in-chief of the army, he directed the administration of the government bureaus, he issued laws as the chief legislator, and sat in trials as judge and jury. In short, he was AVTOCRATOR: the govenment personified, and holder of all power. For tax purposes, his subjects across the vast Roman empire, which streched from Britain to Syria, were bound under penalty of death to the land they were born on and bound to the craft or profession of their father, regardless of their hopes and aspirations. The social contract was simple: the land holders, farmers and merchants paid their taxes into the Emperor's purse and the Emperor's indigent urban clientele were paid off for their support and acquiescence. You see it here in this coin. The inscriptions read:

DN CONSTAN-TIVS PF AVG: Draped and cuirassed profile of the emperor, wearing a laurel and rosette diadem. On the coin's reverse it reads: LARGI-TIO: The emperor, diademed, in ceremonial robes, enthroned facing, wearing a large belt decorated with jewels, his feet on a footstool, holding a mappa (an attribute of legislative authority) in his left hand; with his right hand he drops coins into the folds of a robe extended to him by Res Publica, who stands turreted and bowed; to his right, Roma stands facing, helmeted, wearing a tunica, her head turned towards the emperor around whose shoulders she puts her right arm, in her left hand she holds a spear.

This, of course, is like the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler. In this coin we see the image of an all powerful, benevolent government designed to take all, in order order to bestow all; the utopian bringer of constant peace and and eternal satisfaction. A steady-state concept of governance, in fact, not unlike modern liberalism, wherein each citizen is to play his or her fixed role in the wheel of life, where all the errant affairs of men must be restored by law to a preconceived notion of balance and perfection and the even the climate of the earth itself must be measured, fixed and constrained to the purposes of government.

D(ominvs) N(oster) CONSTANTIVS P(ius)F(elix) AVG(vstvs): Our Lord Constantius, Dutiful and Good Augustus

LARGITIO: Generous rewards from the government, freely given (largesse or bounty), Res Publica are the the people. Roma signifies the condign authority of the state.

Is Obama Running a Stealth 3rd Party Campaign?

2008-04-24T23:44:00.017-05:00

Paul Krugman beats around the bush, perhaps unable to commit the heresy, but you have to ask yourself, why can't the Democrats commit? Instead, he wonders about the Democatic Party's message, as he contemplates the recent Obama deflation:

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election? That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover. But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties. (My italics).

It seems to me, the last time a major candidate for the presidency of the U.S. was doing by saying what Mr. Krugman observes in Obama's political statements, that candidate was 3rd party candidate Ross Perot. The Democrats are surely ripping themselves to shreds this season, but are they perhaps finally sundering the great coalition of Roosevelt and Johnson? Are we witnessing the death of the Dems as we have known them as they give birth to a new party from within their ranks? I think there's a good chance that we are. Coalescing around the leftist anti-U.S. imperialism fantasies, the global warmist hysteria and their dreams of America as a parlimentary democracy centered in a stronger U.N., Obama's youthquake of intellectuals may be "totally" about to spin away into its own political orbit. If so, they will certainly be well financed. Yet, should this occur it will still remain to be seen what happens to the old Clinton "New Democrats", as they will certainly not be re-inhabiting the White House.

Obsessed with history vs. obsessed with current events

2008-04-17T21:22:00.023-05:00

As usual, the American media gets it 180 degrees wrong. The bombers and gunslingers of islam continue to run interference for "moderate islam" (like CAIR and the MAS) while running circles around our guys. Our guys in the media are oblivious to it all, of course, harping instead about trivialities and accidentals. The children of islam; in palestine, in Jordan, in Iran, In Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, (and all the other arabias, as well) in Egypt, in Indonesia, etc., etc., are taught their transcendent islamic history while our children are being taught "current events". Journalists love this, thrive on it, in fact, because it is, seemingly, all they know as well. They bring up the Beirut barracks bombing, as history, but to Osama and Nasrallah and Mahmoud, that's just current events. Michael Hirsch, in Newsweek, for instance:

"Once again timorous Democratic advisers behind the scenes are hoping they can run mainly on the ailing economy. While their candidates are urging an end to George W. Bush's war in Iraq, they are terrified of questioning the larger premises of his "war on terror" or John McCain's redefinition of it as the "transcendent challenge of the 21st century." Today's Dems are, in other words, proving unequal to the task of reclaiming the party's mostly honorable heritage on national security. This view is sadly out of touch, today more than ever. To little notice, Obama's tough, clearly stated position on Bush's war—that it was disastrously misdirected toward Iraq when Afghanistan was always the real front—is becoming conventional wisdom, even among the Bush administration's top security officials, like Defense Secretary Bob Gates andAdm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During two days of nearly impenetrable testimony on Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador RyanCrocker last week, one answer rang out as clearly as an alarm bell. Under questioning from Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Crocker admitted that Al Qaeda poses a greater threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan than it does in Iraq. No one knows more about this than the ambassador, an Arabic-speaking diplomat who previously served as envoy to Pakistan and whose career practically tells the story of America and the age of terror going back to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut."

As long as they continue to think about it as "Bush's War" we lose. Just for starters, Iraq is not a war, but merely a battle. Islam's generations are running a relay race into eternity, while our leaders are focused on petulant benchmarks for the Iraqis and cultivating the narcissism of our own electorate. Tragically, the real power is ours, if we only could just seize it and exercise it. We must start by owning our own cultural history and then by standing, unabashedly, on the shoulders of those who have come before us in this fight.

Arab Cat, American Mouse

2008-04-13T21:52:00.020-05:00

Hugh Fitzgerald in his most recent Iconoclast post notes:

"It is not good that the Americans, from Crocker on down and up, appear to be constantly surprised, constantly disappointed, by Arab and Muslim attitudes, inside and outside Iraq, when there is nothing to be surprised or disappointed about. The Sunni regimes have a different interest from that of the Americans: they wish to keep the Americans in Iraq as long as possible, whatever the toll it takes on those Americans, and for several reasons.

First, as long as the Americans are there, the Shi'a cannot completely solidify their hold on Baghdad, historically the first city of Islam. Things remain, or seem to remain, still up in the air, as long as the foreign Infidels are present.

Second, once the Americans leave, the Sunnis of western and northwestern Iraq will be confronted with the Shi'a ascendancy in Baghdad, and realize that the Shi'a have no intention of honoring any promises made about their treatment, their equitable sharing in oil revenues for example, that may have been made, as part of Maliki's miching mallecho, to the ever-trusting Americans.

Third, it will now be the direct responsiblity of the Arab Sunni regimes to help their co-religionists in Iraq, and that costs money, and men, and war materiel. It was so much more pleasant to see the Americans stuck in Iraq, trying to stick up for the Sunnis, trying to modify the behavior of the new Shi'a rulers, in an attempt to "unify" the country. "

The Country. But is there really a "country" there, and I mean in the Western sense--(and Fitzgerald has made this very point in other contexts)--or is Iraq simply the "land of the two rivers"-- part of the formless, ubiquitous, globe-aggrandizing ummah? If it is axiomatic that Departments of State are designed to deal with states, then who in the government deals with nations, in the classical sense, other than the B.I.A.?

Certainly the ummah considers itself a nation, yet not a state. For the ummah to be a state would require a caliph, Allah's vicegerent on earth, and that is not at hand. Perhaps the Department of State would prefer, or would be better equiped to deal with a caliph, so as to better formalize our status with respect to the muslim world. Now there would be a road map and a road they could follow, trudging along in the footsteps of the ancients on their way to an ancient destination. Then we might see the old battles replayed all over again, to the same scripts as of old. Do you suppose the State Department would get it then?

You can read all of Mr. Fitzgerald's piece here.

Red Skelton's Pledge of Allegiance

2008-04-09T12:40:00.001-05:00

This is a touching and warm-hearted piece. I used to watch Red Skelton when I was a kid. He was a gentle man, and funny without being crass or vulgar. What Hollywood was like before the likes of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and their ilk.

Flying penguins! Dear Al, Can the polar bears be far behind?

2008-04-01T23:37:00.011-05:00

Video exclusive: First-ever images of the world's only flying penguins - Mirror.co.uk

This has something to do do with Global Warming--as well as plate tectonics, of course. Am I surprised? Well, yeah. Shocked? Not in the least. Politics vs. nature--and how does nature fight back? Well, not at all. Nature ignores politics, always and forever. That's one of the beauties of nature I find so compelling.

I am continually dismayed by the rigid dogmatism of the narcissistic environmental community. They have a pathologically rigid view of life and and of history. No room for mystery, no room for miracles and no place for the chances that life takes to survive and to persist. Life, life that has flourished and changed for eons without their help. How sad and pathethic they are compared to this colony of penguins!

Update: my wife wonders if this was an April Fools day gag...

A duty to instruct and protect?

2008-03-30T17:07:00.030-05:00

The Iconoclast wonders about the "Great Inhibition", which I take to mean the culture of political correctness, in the context of the recent dissembling injunction of the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith against Dutchman Geert Wilders' groundbreaking production of Fitna-the Movie.

Modern political-correctness was born of the Womyn's Movement; a forced scrubbing-out of the "patriarchal" and "racist" nomenclature of our common cultural inheritance--the inauguration of police officers, firefighters, councilmembers, congresspersons and mail carriers whilst ushering out all of the policemen, firemen, councilmen, congressmen and mailmen. The end of history and the birth of herstory, the end of negroes and the beginning of the endless parade of neologisms designed to replace an inherited vocabulary, however imperfect, that had been developed over historical time to discuss and to cope with common problems and problems in-common. Built essentially upon pretense and wishful thinking, political correctness has, by-and-large enervated our political vocabulary, debilitated our culture's ability to think straight, inhibited reasoned analysis of political problems with historic roots and has cut us off from our intellectual patrimony. Now, against the onslaught of a profoundly not-understood ideology, the "profundity" of which may be lain entirely at the feet of the political correctness movement, The Iconoclast wonders:

"What do the Western scholars of Islam say about the history of Islamic conquest, what prompted it, and what happened to the non-Muslims in the lands that were conquered, over the past 1350 years? Does he know that for a very long period, and especially in that century between roughly 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition, all kinds of Western scholars, German and Dutch and Italian and Russian and English and American and Spanish, studied Islam and the history of Islamic conquest, and their works are not to be ignored nor denied, in the intolerable rush to embrace the assorted espositos and armstrongs, who have nothing like the learning of Schacht, Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Zwemer, Lammens, Dufourcq, and hundreds of others.
This kind of thing cannot be endured..."

I wonder, too. Read it all.

Update: a quote from the British psychiatrist and commentator Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) on the corrosive effects of political correctness upon societies:

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small…the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Da'wa: Are you persuaded?

2008-03-24T09:41:00.005-05:00

I'm not. It just doesn't seem to resonate with me for some reason.
(Rightclick, "save picture as... " & print to 8 1/2 x 11).

Free Speech Solidarity

2008-02-13T08:15:00.005-06:00

With the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard on the occasion of the arrest of his would-be Muslim assassins.

Compliments to Jyllands-Posten.

A token of our Roman Heritage

2008-01-30T23:33:00.000-06:00

And now, a little something different, for a change. When those nasty Romans weren't out conquering the world, they stayed home, engaging in all manner of domestic pursuits, or they travelled to faraway vacation spots for fun. This little gem was struck during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the 2nd emperor of Rome, and the Caesar mentioned in the Christian Bible's New Testament. Tiberius was himself a notorious debauchee, living in self-imposed and libidinous exile on the picturesque island of Capri, in his cliff-top villa, miles away from Rome. This bronze coin, or token, is 24 mm across, or about the size of a U.S. quarter. It is thought by some that this particular token, and others like it, were used in multi-ethnic brothels, to purchase various services. Just go to the room with the XIII on the door. Thus did the Romans transcend the language barrier. Artfully. It sold at auction in April of 2006 for 15,000 Swiss francs ($11,632.00). Enjoy.

Living by the Islamic Golden Rule

2008-01-18T17:55:00.000-06:00

"The honour of Islam lies in insulting kufr and kafirs. One who respects the kafirs dishonours the Muslims... The real purpose of levying jiziya on them is to humiliate them to such an extent that they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur. They should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It is intended to hold them under contempt and to uphold the honour and might of Islam."

Sufi saint Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624), letter #163

Time to Purge the D.O.D. of Muslims?

2008-01-06T12:49:00.000-06:00

The dismissal of analyst Maj. Stephen Coughlin from the U.S. Department of Defense is covered here at Jihad Watch. Maj. Coughlin was one of the most highly placed individuals in the U.S. defense establishment to have a sound, and un-corrupted understanding of the role of jihad warfare in the ideology that is Islam. Now he will be gone, ousted at the behest of muslims who have penetrated the highest reach of our government. How can we even hope to understand the jihadist war being waged against the non-muslim world, let alone emerge victorious when situations like this are allowed to occur or are in fact sanctioned? Just as Sargeant Hasan Akbar tossed genades into the tents of his commanding officers on the ground in Iraq, and when the 911 jihadis drove a 757 into the building, there appear to be muslims attacking the Pentagon, only this time they have been invited in through the through the front door. Is there anyone at the top of our government with a clue? Should we continue to call it the Department of Defense, or could it be better described as the Department of Let's Not Risk Giving Offense?

I guess the pathetic Adam Gadahn, his pal Zawahiri and their ilk have friends in high places.

Update: Jihad Watch has posted an excellent summary of the issues involved in this case. See it here.

The Doctrine of Constant Combat

2007-11-29T16:46:00.000-06:00

This is a piece of a slide show at the International Herald Tribune which illustrates the point noted by Patrick Poole in his FrontPageMag.com article The Parisian Intifada and “The Project” which can be seen here.

And a funny new arabic word has come into my vocabulary: muqawama, the doctrine of constant combat.

Here's another picture from the slide show, this one of a smoldering public library in Paris. Infidel libraries have been a target of the Muslims from the beginning, since the rightly-guided Caliph Omar commanded the final destruction of the library of Alexandria as a part of his conquest of Coptic Egypt in 640 A.D. "The contents of those books," said he, "are in conformity with the Koran, or they are not. If they are, the Koran is sufficient without them; if they are not, they are pernicious. Let them, therefore, be destroyed." Hence, the precious and irreplaceable papyrus and palm leaf manuscripts kept there were burned by the clever Muslims to heat the public baths for themselves over a period of six months. That library, created at the instigation of Alexander the Great, was the vast storehouse and repository of the assembled knowledge of thousands of years of Western and Mediterranean civilization, from the pharaohs to Archimedes to St. Jerome and beyond.

Omar's cultural descendants are here, today, doing the same work. Mr. Poole lays it out in the context of the "Project" of the Muslim Brotherhood:

1) Muqawama, whether in Israel or in the West, is seen as part of the larger global jihad;
2) Little emphasis is placed on territory;
3) Death is seen as an advantage;
4) Battle is almost (always) conducted amongst civilians.

The French intifada is taking place not only in the heart of France, but in the heart of Europe itself. Much like the 9/11 attacks that were directed at the financial and political centers of America, both symbolically and really, the constant campaign of violence by Muslims throughout Europe are intended to extend the global jihad to the deepest centers of the West. But rather than confront the West militarily, the battle against Western civilization that they have already enjoined is going to take place in the banlieues, not the battlefield. Various instruments of violence are being used, ranging from crime, rioting, and as we see in Paris today, urban warfare. Terrorism is currently used only occasionally to initiate peak periods, but we can expect its increased use as the conflict continues.

The difficulty for us on the working end of the “Civilization-Jihadist Process” is that our leaders have steadfastly refused to understand the nature of the threat and the interrelation between what is happening in Paris, France and Khandahar, Afghanistan. While different methodologies are being used, the endgame is still the same: the establishment of the global caliphate through jihad. We must come to terms with strategy and operations of radical Islam in the West, the manner in which they manage conflict, and realize the immanent nature of the threat already in our midst – a lesson the French are learning first-hand.

Until we do, the strategic planning of the forces of the global jihad, as expressed in “The Project” and other Muslim Brotherhood planning documents, will continue to meet with unimpeded success.

Defining the Terms of Debate

2007-11-22T12:41:00.000-06:00

Daniel Larison writing in the recent on-line issue of The American Conservative makes some trenchant and crucial points with respect to the terms "Islamofascism" and "Islamophobia" in his recent article. A sample:

Like the perjorative term from which it derives, Islamofascism means whatever the person deploying it wants it to mean. It is ultimately not an attempt at description or explanation but a demon word designed to generate visceral, irrational reaction. This is precisely the opposite of the careful, deliberate, and informed responses we need to cultivate. And since it obscures the actual nature of jihadism, it is not simply a crime against the English language but a dangerous source of misunderstanding.

“Islamophobia” is a word favored by both jihadist apologists and the conventional enforcers of “tolerance” and opponents of “hate speech.” Attributing acts of violence to Islam, criticizing practices in Islamic countries, or even associating the name of Islam with crimes carried out in its name draw the charge. It, like other thought-policing labels, is a tool for defining the limits of speech and shutting down critical thinking while securing select groups from reasonable inquiry and political opposition. The term implies irrational fear and loathing and classes an entire perspective as nothing more than hatred, denying to critics of jihadism their rationality and so denigrating them as being less than fully human. Control of debate, indeed, control over whether there will even be a debate, is the goal.

"Term Limits", the title of his article, is a rather unfortunate choice of words, as it is intended to be a witty means of describing the way the terms of the debate over Islam serve to limit the scope and direction of that debate. Thinking instead that it was referring to a tired issue pertaining to domestic office-holders, I almost skipped the article entirely. I'm glad I didn't.

Read it all.

Muslimsk slavehandel

2007-11-10T20:27:00.001-06:00

And millions of whites across Europe as well.

Power Line: Osama's Call For Unity Goes Unheeded

2007-10-28T22:12:00.000-05:00

Power Line: Osama's Call For Unity Goes Unheeded

For those of you who don't read Power Line, this may be one reason why you should. While there are philosophical and historical reasons why we shouldn't be in Iraq, there are temporal reasons why its good that we are at this time. John H. at Power Line neatly summarizes a few of them.

The velvet underground - Femme fatale (live)

2007-10-18T22:21:00.003-05:00

I've had a crush on Nico from the from the time I was 15 or 16 years old. Hers is a fascinating story, but ultimately culminating in her accidental death in 1988 at age 50 on the island of Ibiza where she had lived off and on. I prefer not to think about her long and tawdry descent into a heroin addiction. Images of her from those times look as though her soul has spilled out of her eyes and on to the floor into a shrinking puddle of muddy pond water. Here, though, on one of my favorites, she is bright-eyed, vulnerable and sexy as hell. Like I remember her.

Blogger won't let me do a link within a video upload, so for more on Nico, paste this into your browser: http://smironne.free.fr/NICO/bio.html

PATHETIC

2007-10-13T21:53:00.000-05:00

According to an official statement: "This is the first time that the Empire State Building will be illuminated for Eid, and the lighting will become an annual event in the same tradition of the yearly lightings for Christmas and Hannukah."

Another word that comes to mind would be ignominious. In strict muslim societies only muslims are allowed to wear green clothing as an indication of their superiority. For a non-muslim, wearing green was punishable by death. Christians and Jews were relegated to not-green and in addition had their own religion-indicating colors of clothing and mandatory cloth patches to identify them as non-muslims in the islamic heirarchy of being. This was a fashion innovation the Nazis stole and used in the 1st few years of their 1000 year reich.

Green is the symbolic color of Islam. Green was also the color of the banners used on the battlefield when conquering and enslaving our cultural ancestors, the Egyptians, the Judeans and the Greeks, and the color of the first Islamic flag. And Mohammad's turban.

Now it is for non-muslims to become the color of capitulation and cultural self-abnegation. If only we hadn't made them so angry they wouldn't have attacked the twin towers. Or something like that. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

England bends over, the Dutch stand up

2007-10-12T00:07:00.000-05:00

Good news from Holland, bad news from England, in this brief comparison piece from The Gathering Storm:

"Now that Tony Blair and his hard line stance against terrorism has been removed because his stance sparked Muslim anger, now the UK pledges to work more closely with local communities to fight terrorism.

God forbid that we should take a hard line stance on those that want to kill us. But we sure don’t want to insult those that wish to impose Sharia law on us all – do we?

Tony McNulty also described the phrase "war on terror" as "crass". Naughty. Naughty.

I mean, according to liberals, what creates terrorists is not their blind devotion to jihad – but a few simple words. But on the Continent – some Dutch are not buying it.

In a joint opinion piece in newspaper De Volkskrant, Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders and Ehsan Jami, founder of the Committee for ex-Muslims, warned yesterday against what they see as an attempt by Islam to conquer the world. They compare the Prophet Mohammed to Adolf Hitler.

Wilders and Jami suggest that a hushing-up culture reigns in the Netherlands on Islam. They criticise National Anti-terrorism Coordinator Tjibbe Joustra, who recently warned that radical statements about Islam could give the final push to individuals poised on the edge of violence.

"We consider that Joustra should catch terrorists instead of trying to muzzle politicians," according to Wilders and Jami. "His remarks are inappropriate for this reason alone. But we also wonder whether what Joustra claims is actually true. (...) Does Joustra really think that religious maniacs who want to use violence to please Allah need Jami or Wilders as an extra spur to move into action?

Wilders and Jami refer to the 1960s and 1970s, when "Christianity and Jesus Christ were heavily insulted and criticised" in the Netherlands. (...) Did Christians then commit violence en masse? (...) Of course not. Such processes are unique to the Islamic ideology of hatred, violence and intolerance."

Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith

2007-09-12T23:42:00.000-05:00

Ehsan Jami, 22, founder of the Netherlands Committee for Ex-Muslims on Dutch-Islam politics:

"Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

"Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite – everyone should read the Koran.”

....Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United States.

...speaking to the Times from a secret location.

Youth will be served.

Read it all from The Times Online.

Jahiliya was here

2007-08-20T23:56:00.000-05:00

Before Mohammad got Allah on board with Islam and fixed everything for the Arabs, none of the men and certainly none of the women, we generally assume, were Muslims; but that was much to Mohammad's chagrin. Some Egyptians have an understanding of this but can't come right out and say it. Now I'm not a huge fan of Zahi Hawass, the poster boy of Eqyptian Egyptian archeology, but he's certainly not a kook and and he seems to have a genuine sense of history without all of the nagging problems that his sculpture smashing, image loathing, jahiliya-obsessed Arab and muslim co-religionists bring to the table. Jahiliya, the Arabic name for the condition that existed during all those nameless, shapeless, inchoate, blobby Pre-islamic times, when the despised religious cultures (e.g. Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, Christian, or Zoroastrian, etc., etc.) produced all manner of things vile and non-islamic. Their icons and artifacts, ignoble creations all, are to be expressly and affirmatively obliterated by muslims and forgotten. Instead, the cultural lodestone imposed by Islamic sharia law is to be nothing more, or less than the wisdom contained within the Qur'an, the hadiths and the sira of Mohammad. Because, in fact, jahiliyah still exists in the world, the utter eradication of non-Islamic culture is, ipso facto, the ultimate imperative of the Islamic global jihad.

Mohammad placed himself in the Abrahamic tradition, against the indigenous Arab polytheists of his time, as the final prophet of his tradition. Islam was sold on the basis that it was culturally superior to polytheism and its adherents were accordingly morally superior (and naturally, therefore entirely deserving of the polytheists' wives and goods). Curiously, and logically in a way, all of the sympathetic biblical figures Mohammad evoked in the Qur'an, starting with Adam and Eve, the very first man and woman, were incipient muslims, if not actually, and were thus not of the jahiliya which is said to have arisen in those geographical areas not yet touched by Islam. Even Jesus and his mother were retroactively reverted. Well now this week it was announced that fossil human footprints have been found, and in Egypt, no less, which were reputedly stomped down over two million years ago. Were they Muslim footprints? What are we to make of this? Allahu akbar. If an Islamic future doesn't seem bad enough for you, how about throwing in an Islamic history to boot that just keeps penetrating further and further into the past?

"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.

Will Ireland Sign On?

2007-08-19T17:54:00.000-05:00

Hopefully the beginning of a rational debate that concludes with at least some more deportations. Mr. Kevin Myers writes in the Independent.ie:

"Forget lily-livered liberalism, time to take stand and say we don't want Muslim immigrants"

"The question is especially apposite, because we now know the consequences for every single European society which has admitted large numbers of Muslims: social alienation, religious antagonism and outright terrorism.

We know this. We all know it. And yet we continue to allow Muslim immigration. Why? What do we gain from it? "

Nothing but grief and trouble, actually.

Crescent Moon Alert

2007-08-18T17:00:00.000-05:00

Al-Qaida marks the start of a new month: hundreds killed & wounded.

Tuesday's first sighting brought devastation to the Yazidi of northern Iraq, and no doubt Allah is well pleased that Muslim lands are being so efficiently purified.

"Bodies covered by blankets could be seen laid in the street and outside a municipal building. Rescuers are still digging through the rubble of the bomb-flattened clay-built homes in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone.

But Major Rodger Lemons, operations officer for a US brigade in the area, which is near the city of Mosul, said that rescue efforts are winding down.

"My assessment is there’s probably no one left alive in the rubble," he said. "We’ve transitioned through to a clean-up phase."

The US military has said the "al-Qa’eda in Iraq" group is the prime suspect for the attack on the Yazidis, seen by Sunni Muslim militants as infidels.

Major Lemons said it appeared that two refuse trucks packed with explosives had been driven into each of the villages, Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera. " from this article in the Telegraph.

"From their base in a 1000-year-old former monastery at Lalish, near the northern city of Mosul, the Yazidi have kept alive traditions that date back at least to the days of the prophet Zoroaster, about 2500 years ago. "

"Throughout the ages, their beliefs have mingled with the credos of their neighbours, especially Muslims." from this article in News.com.au.

More can be found at Daimnation! .

Malaysian Bloggers Monkeying Around: Islam Threatened

2007-08-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

The prime minister of the Malaysian government is warning bloggers "not to go overboard" in criticizing the government or defaming Islam or they may face legal action.

"Khairy Jamaluddin, deputy youth leader of the ruling Malay party and the prime minister's son-in-law, called for legal action taken against bloggers who spread lies and slander.

"There are no laws in the cyberworld except for the law of the jungle. As such, action must be taken so that the monkeys behave," Khairy was quoted as saying by Bernama."

Good luck on that.

Hat tip to Pedestrian Infidel.

Razzia Redux

2007-07-22T16:30:00.000-05:00

Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, found no need to explain or justify his unprovoked looting raids which suggests that the attitude of, “it’s there for the taking” and the lure of “something-for-nothing” was already well established and accepted as normal behaviour. This barbarous and predatory conduct may have, in time, changed—as it did with the Vikings— had it not been for Islam. Muhammad’s divinely sanctioned marauding of booty-laden merchant’s caravans became the imprimatur that entrenched opportunism and predation as, not only legitimate, but in fact exemplary, thereby immutably casting the die for eternity.
With Islam’s belief that all is preordained, where even the most minute detail in day to day life only happens because Allah has previously willed it, (the inshallah mentality), it doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to conceive that, in the Muslim mind, Allah has permitted Western society to develop, succeed and prosper so as to present the “faithful” with a ready-made “walk-in-walk-out”, “under new management” takeover, complete with a functioning infrastructure and a populace steadily retreating into an ever increasing degree of subservient “dhimmitude”. -Warner MacKenzie at Islam Watch

In most historic instances before nations have been subjugated to the muslim will, the final capitulation can be shown to have been preceded by years of marauding terror raids, "razzias", and the classic contemporary example can be found in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

This week the news in Darfur is the mass re-population by moon-watching, ethnic arabs of the now abandoned homelands of the indigenous black Africans (Dar=land; fur=the fur language). Lets put that bit of predictable news into context. This piece comes from Amnesty International and dates to 2003:

"The attack took place at dawn in September 2003 when many Janjawid arrived on camels, horses and by cars. Some Arab women, on donkeys and on camels, accompanied them. The women took part in the looting. I was sleeping when the attack took place. I was taken away by the attackers in khaki and in civilians clothes, along with dozens of other girls, and had to walk for three hours. During the day, we were beaten up and the Janjawid they told us: 'you, the black women, we will exterminate you; you have no God.' We were taken to a place in the bush were the Janjawid raped us several times at night. For three days, we did not receive food and almost no water. After three days, the Janjawid had to move to another place and set us free. They told us: 'next time we come, we will exterminate you all, we will not even leave a child alive'."

So it has been throughout the history of the non-islamic world beginning with conquest of Mecca by the first muslims. Rape, pillage, burn. Strip the boys and check for pubic hair. Those without become slaves, the others and their fathers and uncles are summarily executed. The women: raped and impregnated to make them dependent on their new masters. The razzia, repeated over and over, has always been the procedural precursor to the major push. This is how Judea went down, and Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, Anatolia, North Africa, and Spain. (Indonesia may be an exception here, but my ignorance of its history doesn't permit me to hazard a guess). Sometimes the razzias were just to extract booty, and sometimes simply to destroy the livelihood of the target peoples to soften them up for later. In Judea, Syria and Anatolia (the last Asian piece of Greco-Roman-Byzantine culture), the raiding parties would burn the crops and cut down the fruit trees, which of course led to immediate (and enduring) famine, untold suffering and eventual depopulation, not to mention de-forestation and ruination of the land. Conversion to islam under those circumstances would mean a chance at physical salvation (but also living life under Sharia law). Thus did islam move into the West at its margins.

Certainly, the razzias of al-Qaeda in the West today are meticulously planned to go after our fruit trees and crops, so to speak, but don't neglect to include as razzias the on-going car-torching campaigns in the French cities, and the marauding gang rapes in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and elsewhere.

I have been meaning to blog something on razzias through history for a while and their connections to current events, but didn't get around to it until MacKenzie's fine article gave me a bit of a kick in the pants. His piece also touches upon a related topic that really interests me: how the rich, and hugely productive Middle-eastern and North African agricultural regions of the Greco-Roman world were largely turned into deserts by the muslims, and are only now, under western influence, slowly beginning to recover.

Read it all.

A shouting headline I heard today

2007-05-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

I have cribbed the following post in its entirety from the Pedestrian Infidel site, as I could not find a quick way to yank it out separately and link to it...This expresses many of my own thoughts regarding islam as my thinking has evolved over the past few years. Most people simply don't get the sense of desperation those of us in the anti-jihad movement feel as we watch the history of islam repeat itself in our own day. But history can be on our side this time if only we can create for ourselves, as a civilization, the tools which are there to be crafted that can defeat this scourge....Thanks to Mark Alexander for putting this down.

Stop the Islamization of Europe! Stop the Islamization of the West!

The West is being Islamized before our very eyes! It is happening in such subtle ways that it is sometimes imperceptible to those who are not looking out for it. But much of the time, what is happening is plain to see. Each and every concession we make to Muslims is a further nail in the coffin of liberal democracy. Each time we consider granting Muslims a public holiday, each time we consider curtailing our own freedom of speech to appease them, we are assisting Muslims to further Islamize our home countries. Be sure of that.

Western governments should not be powerless to deal with this, but even so they seem to be: They lack the will and determination to stop the rot.

Political correctness, of course, has taken its toll on the West. So has the ridiculous concept of multiculturalism. Add to this a deep-seated guilt complex, a pervasive attitude of self-denigration, extreme tolerance, and an army of apologists for Islam, and we have a catastrophe in the making.

One of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam as just another one of the world's great religions. We shouldn't. Islam is politics or it is nothing at all, but, of course, it is politics with a spiritual dimension, politics all wrapped up in a deity.

What is the nature of the politics of Islam? Well, that's an easy one to answer: It is little different from the politics of a totalitarian state, little different from the ideologies of Nazism or communism, different only in detail rather than style. Both Nazism and communism used the purge to try and 'cleanse' society of what it considered undesirable. Islam always does the same. Both of those tolerated only a single political party. Islam generally does the same, and certainly, where it doesn't, insists that all parties be Islamic ones. This, of course, gives the establishment the power to coerce the people. G. H. Sabine, in his book, A History of Political Theory, tells us this about Nazism and communism:

...the party was a self-constituted aristocracy which has the mission partly of leading, partly of instructing, and partly of coercing the bulk of mankind along the road that it must follow. Both were totalitarian in the sense that they obliterated the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control, and both turned the educational system into an agency of universal indoctrination. In their philosophy[,] both were utterly dogmatic, professing, the one in the name of the Aryan race and the other in the name of the proletariat, a higher insight capable of laying down rules for art, literature, science, and religion. Both induced a frame of mind akin to religious fanaticism. In strategy[,] both were reckless in their assertions, boundless in their claims, abusive toward their opponents, prone to regard any concession on their own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival's part as a sign of weakness. The social philosophies of both agreed in regarding society as in essence a system of forces, economic or racial, between which adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance rather than by mutual understanding and concession. Both therefore regarded politics as merely an expression of power.

So much in Islam resembles those two despicable ideologies. The ruling party in Islamic countries coerces the people along the road that it must follow. This is particularly easy to observe in Iran today. Islam, too, tries to obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control. We see this in all Islamic countries. Similar to Nazism and communism, Islam also turns the educational system into an apparatus of the state for the purpose of universal indoctrination. One would be justified in using the term 'brainwashing'.

In addition, Islam also lays down rules for art (no depiction of the human form is allowed, for example), for literature (all is censored), for science (nothing discovered may contradict the Qur'an or Ahadith, or the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), and certainly for religion (no religion is accepted of man except Islam). Where Jews and Christians live in Islamic countries, they are given protection in return for a high tax known as the jiziyah, but are given dhimmi status, which means, in effect, that they are subdued and given second class status.

Islam also induces a frame of mind akin to fanaticism. That this is so is self-explanatory. Islam is also reckless in its assertions, and boundless in its claims. Example: All the world belongs to Allah; therefore it is the duty of all Muslims to Islamize it. In Islam, too, adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance. Note the Jihad.

A remarkable similarity is this: Islam is also inclined to be abusive to its opponents (they are infidels and unclean), and is prone to regard any concession on its own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival's part as a sign of weakness. And Islam, too, regards politics as an expression of power. Oh, and we shouldn't forget that Islam is profoundly anti-Semitic!

Aren't the similarities just remarkable?

What is troubling is this: Islam is closing in on us. We have so many unassimilated Muslims living in Europe, and an ever-growing number living in the States, too. In fact, millions and millions of Muslims live in the West today. But the West has no strategy for dealing with the fall-out. We saw this recently in France when their cities burnt night after night. The mayhem Muslim immigrants caused there was enough to make anyone's hair stand on end. But what has France done about it? It has unveiled a series of measures to appease the Muslim immigrants, and has ignored the fact that this was an uprising caused in no small part by the Islamic community flexing its ever strengthening muscles. Now, however, we have some hope of change: after all, Nicholas Sarkozy has been elected Président de la Republique.

If we in the West wish to ensure the survival of our own civilization, wish to ensure that our children will be able to live as freely as we have been able to do till now, wish to ensure that people are free to choose their religion in the West, but just as free not to choose one, then we have a lot of thinking to do!

I would suggest that we start by asking one simple question: Should we regard Islam as a mere religion, or should we start to see it for what it truly is: a political ideology with megalomaniacal aspirations; a political ideology with a spiritual dimension which will stop at nothing until the West is no more, until the West has been brought into Dar ul Islam, or the 'House of Islam', until the West has been well and truly Islamized. To ignore this fact is tantamount to playing fast and loose with our children's future freedoms and security. In fact, it is negligent of their future well-being!

Mark Alexander*

*All rights reserved

Thoughts for Memorial Day

2007-05-28T15:47:00.000-05:00

Some Memorial Day observations here, courtesy of Jihad Watch

Robert Spencer observes that the western literati have completely lost it. Armies are, of course, obsolete, declasse, and anachronistic. That force of will and steely acts of men-at-arms might be necessary and honorable in their own right is but (temporarily, I hope) a distasteful memory best not memorialized. Of course, all of history has been made for our benefit, for there to be loft condos and granite countertops, and the trophy child and the retirement plan, and preening "pride" festivals and womens' studies, and Richard Brautigan novels, and the little dinner parties and the on-line shopping, and social justice, and arts-on-the-avenue and the lattes, and the nanny and the nanny-state. But no winners and no losers and no army recruiting either, please; its just so--so violent.

And my sentiments... well, there is a quote by General George Patton, paraphrased, that states: We ought not mourn people like those who died, but instead, thank God that they lived.

War? What war? Aren't we ending the war?

2007-05-20T20:24:00.000-05:00

The opportunity of a lifetime! Death! Inshallah...

This interesting recruiting post comes to us courtesy the estimable website Internet Haganah, probably sourced out of an African or European Jihadist website. Internet Haganah performs an invaluable service in monitoring the Arabic jihad websites for sensory indications that somewhere out there there are people who have designs on upsetting our complacency.

A lot of nice people here in the USA think that if you notice things like this, it's racist behavior for sure. If you try to draw conclusions or suggest there might really be something going on, something that our hapless president didn't create or cause, or plan in advance, why, that's insane.

What I find particularly interesting about this item is the expression "He who misses this war". Why is it that the al-Qaida guys tend always to know what war they're fighting in and recruiting for, but we don't? Could it be that what we consider to be wars, they consider to be merely battles? The last I heard, al-Qaida was operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Algeria, and lately in Arab occupied Judea and Lebanon. Probably lots of other places, too, including here in the USA. The U.S. Congress, however, is quite busy with the "War in Iraq", squaring it off and drawing bright lines and such with great emphasis and nodding amongst themselves. Wait 'til they find out it's only been a battle for position.

Just a really diverse group of foot-washing, edgy totalitarians

2007-05-18T10:34:00.001-05:00

They're just pushing the cultural envelope with performance art.

How very fashionable!

Jihad Watch: Berber Leader: "No Worse Colonialism Than That of the Pan-Arabist Clan"

2007-05-02T22:54:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite subjects...the pre-islamic identities of the conquered muslim subject. Here this notion is discussed in some detail. The comments are worth scrolling down .

North Africa was the granary of imperial Rome and one of the most fertile and productive agricultural regions in the world--until the conquering Arab muslims got their hands on it. The Berbers are a native population of Libya and North Africa, who were deeply influenced by the Phoenicians who were the founders of the remarkable city-state of Carthage. The Berbers are still there. The seafaring and Semitic Phoenicians were originally from the East coast of the Mediterranean, today's Lebanon and northern Israel.

It is a hopeful sign when we see the victims of Arab-islamic imperialism defiantly pushing back while firmly grounded in their own history.

Shedding the dead husk of Islam

2007-02-23T00:41:00.000-06:00

Since one of my interests is in trying to understand how muslims might learn to throw off their muslim identity (the "Ummah") and retrieve and restore the native culture that underlies the nearly impermeable islamic outer shell they live in, I found this DhimmiWatch post very interesting.

FYI: Makkah=Mecca.

Click on the post title above to see the article.

HE SAYS DROP THE DROP THE GLOVES

2007-02-04T00:11:00.000-06:00

An important post coming out of England. This is must reading.

Victory Means You Win

2006-10-28T00:02:00.000-05:00

ARMENIA ET
MESOPOTAMIA
IN POTESTATEM
P R REDACTAE

The Romans appear to understand the concept of victory and depict it here on the tails side of an a amazing sestertius of the emperor Trajan. This, a large brass coin that could buy a man a lunch, was the coin of the realm on the Roman homefront in the year 116 A.D. Standing over an abject personification of the land of Armenia is Trajan himself holding an upright spear and and a parazonium (short infantry sword) while the recumbent Tigris and Euphrates rivers look on impassively.

Here, Rome has defeated an enemy, and seeing it fitting to do so , announces, articulates and depicts it. And by making it money, promulgates it into the thickest parts of the daily life of the people.

I wonder how we would depict on TV an American victory over the jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is what we hope to achieve capable of being expressed this compactly? If not, then perhaps we need to re-cast our concepts of victory into something that can be compacted for a clear and effective visual depiction. We must visualize in order to actualize while remembering that the narrative of victory must be capable of being illustrated in order to demonstrate that it has occurred.

Toward a semiotics of victory

A claim to victory must be made without regard to dreams of returning threats.

TRAJAN issued 116 A.D.
Brass Sestertius 33mm, 28.4g.
His laureate and draped bust right
IMPCAESNERTRAINOOPTIMO AVGGERDACPARTHICOPMTRPCOSVIPP
Reverse:
ARMENIAETMESPOTAMIA INPOSTESTATEMPRREDACTAE, SC in fields
Trajan, in military attire, standing right holding upright spear and parazonium in sheath; river gods Tigris and Euphrates reclining on either side; Armenia, in abjection between them, her eyes to the ground.

(this coin is actually for sale on an ebay seller's site) at

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120042235116

...more to come.

Know the Enemy

2006-10-26T02:04:00.000-05:00

Douglas Farah writes the following brief expostion on the central purpose of jihad and da'wa ("combat and preaching" as one Algerian cell's nom de guerre is often translated).

I am quoting the whole thing here, but you can get straight to his blog by clicking on the post title. (scroll down)

"Knowing the Enemy, Understanding the Enemy

One of the greatest weaknesses five years after 9-11 is the striking inability of the political leadership and body politic to define and reach a consensus on who the Islamist enemy is and what the enemy wants. There is a striking lack of intellectual curiosity, or perhaps fear because of concerns about political correctness, that have blocked a serious discussion of what bin Laden and al Qaeda really think, what their real targets and objectives are and how that group fits into the broader Islamist project of converting the world to an Islamic state ruled by sharia law.

Hence we have the absurd ridiculing in Newsweek magazine of President Bush’s use of the word “caliphate” in discussing the Islamist project (and the even more absurd CAIR response that talking about the caliphate is anti-Islamic). We have the inability of senior people whose job it is to study and understand the Islamist project unable to identify the two major branches of Islam, never mind how they differ and what such divisions might mean.

The caliphate, from its historical signficance to the dream of its recreation, is perhaps the best way to understand how the different currents of Islamist thought relate to each other, support each other and form a coherent whole that embraces the Muslim Brotherhood to the historic al Qaeda.

I cannot do better than my friend Walid Phares on the Counterterrorism Blog in describing the history and signficance of the term. But what is most disturbing is that this is an issue at all. The Islamist project to recreate the caliphate is not a secret plot gleaned from suspicious methods of intelligence gathering that are subject to manipulation and political usage.

Rather, it is written and rewritten, as an integral part of the Muslim Brotherhood strategy, al Qaeda, affiliated al Qaeda groups in Europe, by Islamists themselves. They provide the roadmap that they hope to follow, in official publications and in open conferences.

Not all who support the Islamist project support violence to bring it about, but support a more gradual political take over of different countries. Many, perhaps most, of the Islamist community, focus on the conditions in the Arab world and how to get rid of the corrupt, secular regimes there. But the Islamist project does specifically and clearly embrace the concept of re-establishing the caliphate at its time of greatest territorial conquest. From there, the war with the rest of the world will begin.

This is what I find so disturbing about this debate. It is intellectual laziness, not a lack of information, that has led to the paucity of understanding of what the Islamist project is.

The administration, from the beginning, has done an abysmal job of explaining this to the American people. The Democrats have not done any better in presenting an alternative view. Yet it is written out, and we quibble over using the very Islamist terms that the Islamists use to define their Islamist project. And listen when they tell us that those words make us anti-Islamic. Alice in Wonderland would feel right at home on this side of the looking glass."

Indeed.

Live from the Dark Ages!

2006-10-25T23:53:00.000-05:00

A nice bit of perspective on the nature of the battle and the context in which it is being fought.

The historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson writes:

"Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.
Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts."

Read it all.

The Dark Ages -- Live From the Middle East!

By the way, I plan to post in the near future a few ancient Roman coins which give some insight into how ancient enemies have been defeated in the propaganda war at home in the past.

Muslims seething over 2012 Olympic Games

2006-10-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

Little Green footballs has this item:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22964_Muslims_Seething_About_Olympics&only

I don't see a problem here.

The Lunar calendar makes a complete cycle of the solar calendar every thirty-three years. 2012-(4x33)=1880. The last time it happened that Ramadan coincided with the Olympic games was--when? 1880?

The modern Olympic games began in 1896, if I'm not mistaken. Totally unprecedented, then.
Look at it this way: This is an ideal opportunity to call for a re-schedule every 132 years in honor of the Qur'an and Bedouin culture. Give the Islamic athletes the spotlight every 132 years and lets shift the traditional Olympics schedule. Turn their protest on its head so they must focus like a laser beam on the athletics. Schedule the next event in Baghdad (the 2144 Games).

Or if you think that would be a slippery slope, lets have all the athletes fast and don't shift the schedule. I think it would be very interesting to see what they make of it.

It will also be interesting to see how the average Ali Jihadi on the ground enjoys it as the Ramadan fasting regimen recesses over the next few years into the heat of summer.

The War Strategies Succinctly Put

2006-10-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Into which side's strategy does your Democrat party candidate fit?

1. Leave Iraq now.
2. No "wiretapping" on phone calls of "American citizens".
3. Multi-cultural inclusion at any cost.
4. Opposition to Islam is the equivilent of "racism".

Read this piece by Victor Davis Hanson and you decide.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101306.html

Keith Ellison: Spokesman for American Muslims?

2006-10-13T20:48:00.000-05:00

The 5th district Minnesota congressional race is a hot one and has garnered blogospherean ink all across the political spectrum. The race for this long-time Democratic, but now open seat, pits newcomers Alan Fine (Republican endorsed), and Tammy Lee (Independence Party endorsed) against the endorsed favorite, Democrat Keith Ellison to succeed retiring Democrat Matin Sabo. Ellison, 43, raised Roman Catholic in Michigan, is a Muslim "revert" since his college days in Indiana, and a former Nation of Islam adherent. He is currently fasting his way through the campaign which happens to coincide with Ramadan in the Islamic lunar calender.

On Sunday he'll be ushered into the country club set of the Minnesota DFL by Sam and Sylvia Kaplan, impressario and impressaria of the DFL luminati at the Golden Valley Country Club (bring your checkbook).

http://democracyforminnesota.blogspot.com/2006/10/meet-keith-ellison-at-golden-valley.html

The local inclusion crowd of progressive puritans, anti-war lefties and universal health carichondriacs can hardly wait to ram this election home, thus proving to the world they are the most diverse people on earth and will do anything to prove to George Bush just how much they hate him.

However, no one it seems, has yet to cross the mental threshold of the election itself beyond the swearing-in ceremony. It is a thought experiment worth probing in this most unique situation.

If Keith Ellison is indeed elected as 5th Minnesota district representative to the Congress of the United States he will become quite suddenly I expect, the defacto spokeman for U.S. Muslims, by virtue of being an elected representative to the U.S. government. He will join the Black Caucus. On questions of Islam, at least initially, all eyes will be on him, both nationally and internationally. Should he win, look for CNN, the BBC, the NY Times, Al Jazeera and others of the international media to come knocking at his door. One wonders what the electorate of the 5th District, which includes the city of Minneapolis, will think of this. Osama bin Laden, deep in his cave will know the name of Keith Ellison and where he lives. What will be his views on jihad? On Sergeant Hasan Akbar? What about the the honor killings of women that are sweeping the infidel lands being colonized by Muslims? Where does he stand on the imposition of Shari'a law in infidel lands, the U.S., for example? Is Islam really a nation? If so, where is it? What about the veiling controversy in the UK, in Jack Straw's District? And that's just for starters.

How will he reconcile the concepts of American liberty with the inshallah fatalism of the mosque? Will he have the inclination or strength to stand against the bullies and killers in the camp of Islam who seek to stifle free speech. Or will he censor himself and expect us to do likewise? And what if his answers thrust him into the camp of apostates? He almost certainly would not consider himself as such, but its the shahids with the butcher knives and guns who decide these matters. Is he ready for this? Are we ready for this?

I would expect to see even more Muslims flocking to Minneapolis (tens of thousands of Somalis now), and with them the attendant conflicts over Shari'a in our institutions.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-10-10-cabbies-culture_x.htm

If this happens I would also expect to see Islamic issues eventually begin to crowd out the other issues of Minneapolis ward politics. I think Minneapolis will be stunned.

Furthermore, after the election will Muslims of the world consider the 5th District to be Islamic land, and all that entails? It sounds quite absurd, but it would not be an infidel's choice to make.

http://www.keithellison.org/

How do we know what we know?

2006-10-09T22:53:00.000-05:00

Gagdad bob is exploring things epistomological such as the nature of the spell we each cast over over own interior worlds. How does that spell color our perceptions or limit or psychic ken? For instance:

"Rather, science could only be grounded in liberty, not just any liberty, but within a teleological liberty aimed at disclosing transcendent truth. One must be committed to truth while, at the same time, refrain from explicitly defining that truth at the outset. One of the reasons why Polanyi was such a creative scientist was that he came to science as an outsider, and was therefore not committed to certain widely held "truths" that had stymied other scientists. One can say the same thing for his philosophy, as he approached problems in an entirely fresh way, not knowing that he was “wasting his time.” In so doing, he avoided the institutionalized errors of professional philosophers. " Liberating thoughts. See it here:

One Cosmos: Hey Hey, We're the Monkeys! Evolving and Adapting in Cyberspace

Initial Post

2006-10-08T21:55:00.000-05:00

Sir Henry Morgan has sussed out the data and given us graphs. See the jihad like you've never seen it before. Click on the graphics to enlarge them. I like this guy's style:

http://gandalf-reconquista.blogspot.com/

Gird your loins for battle; open your own front.