It's Time for the West to step away

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.