TerrorWar
"No matter where we walk, the enemy will plant bombs.
Continued...
New York, NY- WTC heavy winds cause a wind swept dust strom around the ring of honor at the bottom of ground zero during the one year anniversary of the tragic event. Photo: David Ryan
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
-- Christina Rossetti
10,000 FEARED DEAD
-- Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within that smoke their ash still falls as snow,
To settle on our flesh like fading stars
Dissolve into sharp sparks at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from inside flowers made of flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
Too far removed to hear their falling cry.
By noon that band of smoke loomed low
Upon the harbor’s skin and made us gasp;
A hand of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its lethal grasp.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
If they lived in light or only for a breath.
They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than despair.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
That marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver'd stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all of what could not be clean again.
We breathed that smoke that bent and crawled.
We learned to hate that smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go but not to go.
Within that city shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where our grief would best anneal.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.
Their last lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded into name scratched stones.
Our years flowed into endless desert seas
Where warplanes prowled in search of bones.
In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.
In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
Reminding us that we have not escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
* For the process of how this came to be written see The Arrival @ AMERICAN DIGEST
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-- Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats
I've been trying to remember September 10 but it's no go.
Continued...
Major Heather Penny
This just in from the intelligent, insightful and marvelous "Iconic Photos," a look at one of the most striking photos of the Iraq war: The Marlboro Marine
The dirt-smeared, battle-weary face with a cigarette languidly dangling from the lips belonged to Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, who would be quickly dubbed "The Marlboro Man" or "Marlboro Marine".The reaction from the feeble Eloi at the time was best summed up by the excrable Naomi Klein in Smoking while Iraq burns:The photo was taken by Luis Sinco of Los Angeles Times on 10 November, 2004; Miller told the intruding photographer, "If you want to write something, tell Marlboro I'm down to four packs, and I'm here in Fallujah till who knows when. Maybe they can send some. And they can bring down the price a bit." The photo was depicted on the cover of more than 150 newspapers and magazines, including the New York Post, whose headline read, "Marlboro Men kick butt in Fallujah." ...
Because of his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, Miller is now separated from his wife and family and currently lives alone. He is unable to discuss certain things that happened in Fallujah. Read Sinco's touching tribute to Miller here.
For a country that just elected a wannabe Marlboro man as its president, Miller is an icon and, as if to prove it, he has ignited his very own controversy. "Lots of children, particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man. The clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after a battle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scolding letter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point to the editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking water would have a more positive impact on your readers."Fretting always about tobacco because their minds are both empty and colonized. Shameful and disgusting people, really.
"On an island of unarmed people, the one armed man is king." -- The Fourth Checkraise
"With the advent of the "Palestinian cause" becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially."
It's baaack! But no, that's not right. Say rather it never really leaves. NeoNeoCon today notes the latest eruption of the disease:
Anti-Semitic drawings and the San Francisco anti-circumcision campaign Zombie illustrates that an anti-Semitic cartoon has been pressed into service in the San Francisco fight to ban circumcision. It was only a matter of time.
Antisemitism is not a sign, a symbol, a bullet or a gas. It is a Virus. It is the oldest known virus to infest the human soul. In those infected, the virus is clever enough to mask it's existence by renaming itself as "anti-Zionism." Through the renaming of this ancient disease as a “political problem,” infected souls can transmit the virus to their friends, families. They can spread their disease at their schools and in their their community, church, or nation. The virus is also transmitted by exchanging infected fantasies with infected ideologues. By changing it's name the disease made it possible for many to deny that they have contracted the virus, and that their souls are chancre-ridden and rotting. This facilitates the current outbreak.
Yes, antisemitism is a clever virus and this shape-shifting is one of its oldest methods of perpetuating itself. Like other viruses currently feasting on humans, this one always has a pleasure principle associated with it. It feels good to get it and we live in the plague years of "If it feels good, do it." Those whose moral immune systems have been previously compromised by other pleasure-born diseases have souls which are particularly susceptible to this virus.
The origin of the virus is unknown, but many suspect the area to be Bablyon and Sumur with an early leap across borders into Egypt. It was later transmitted through not-so-casual contact to much of the world by traders out of Northern Africa and the Roman Empire.
During the period following the fall of Rome, the virus found traction in early Christianity as a common carrier. In this host it thrived, and was able to survive and spread for many centuries. Of late, many parts of Christianity, now that it has become fragmented, have rejected the virus and those who host it, but strains of the virus can still be found at the center of many subsets of the Christian faith today.
Islam, of course, is the not-that-new major religion to not only host the virus, but to celebrate being infected with it, and to actively take measures to make sure that, within the body of Islam, the virus can thrive and expand. What to do about this new and virulent strain of the virus is something that is now consuming a great deal of the attention and treasure of Western Civilization.
In the past, treatment of the virus involved the application of large amounts of steel and fire, but this age is still experimenting with targeted surgery of the infected parts of Islam to see if a less Draconian cure is possible. Recent events confirm that this sort of microsurgery will probably be ineffective since the virus seems to have become the host.
Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.
With the advent of the "Palestinian cause" becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles -- driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies. It is now actually a badge of pride in many Western circles to appear at various events wearing gold-plated buboes inset with multi-faceted Kaposi's sarcoma that contain the virus at their core. Many now believe this intellectual adornment to actually be beautiful.
In a recent mutation, the virus has shown that it can leap the blood/brain barrier and actually infect Jews -- if they feel safe within their "advanced" society. The current term for this mutation is "Juicebox Mafia" in which self-styled "intellectuals" of Jewish lineage actually feel it is "intelligent" to call for a world in which it is easier for Arabs and other Islamic groups to kill Jews wholesale. This sort of strange host to the virus is replacing the previous host termed "the self-hating Jew." The reason for the rise of the Juicebox Mafia is unclear, but it may well have to do with desires for celebrity and paychecks that exceed the desire to live.
The virus, because it is an ancient and clever virus, can lie dormant for years, and like HIV, can mutate around a lot of therapies designed to destroy it.
As noted above, in the recent past, it has been shown that large doses of steel and fire can eradicate the virus in some populations, but only for a time. A cure is promised, but seems to be always delayed. The only measures that work are, at best, prophylactic. Another strategy is strict monitoring to prevent the spread of the virus. This seemed to be holding the virus at bay for decades. Lately, however, this method has broken down. The virus, like terrorism, has recently been able to piggy-back on the world-circling data-stream, and infect individuals and groups previously deemed immune. The current strain has indeed become so virulent that large blocks of Jewish people, in Europe, America and even Israel, have become infested.
As history demonstrates, there is no immunity to be had from the virus. The only strategy that seems to work is abstinence. This is accomplished by a rigorous rejection of all attempts by the virus to establish itself within an individual host. Constant monitoring and the suppression through education or other means of outbreaks in groups or ideologies or nations is also required.
Since the virus has been present in human hosts for well over 4,000 years, hopes for eradication in our lifetime are slim. Hopes for eradication in the future are better in civilized countries if, and only if, members of the generations now living and infected with the virus become dedicated to not passing it on to future generations. The virus is found nowhere else in nature except within the human host. If it is denied transmission to the young, it can be eliminated from the world in three generations. If... but only if.
Outlook? Not favorable.
[First version posted in 2005.]
Well, historically speaking, Europe does have some drastic ways of dealing with minorities when pushing comes to shoving.
"It's civil war. It will not be a civil war like in Spain under Franco. It will be a kind of local civil war," del Valle added. "In fact, I think one day it will be so unbearable that the state will be obliged to send in the army."
It's official. The most dangerous place at the airport is now the line while you are waiting to go through "security screening." Look for this to be overcome by the creation of "pre-security security screening." Which will make for a line which will then become the most dangerous place at the airport.
This nonsense will go on until the Department of Homeland Security expands to a point where they will send individual "Security Screening Vans" that resemble bomb-disposal trucks to your home or hotel for pickup. You'll be strip-searched before being allowed to get in the van, of course.
After all, you can't be too careful, can you?
The real solution is to starting draining the Religion of Blow Everyone to Pieces' gene pool, but to even get started with that project will cost America at least one city. And even then it's unlikely the current president will have the stones for it.
In the meantime, just get in the lines to the slaughter.
Forgotten?
Never.
Forgiven?
Not yet.
Photographer, David Duncan The Soldier and Wanted: Dead of Alive @ the September 11, 2001, Documentary Project | Library of Congress
The 4 COAs of the Apocalypse [COA,military: Course Of Action. Image by Butch**]
[Note: Given current world conditions it seemed a good idea to repost this meditation from nearly five years ago. Some details have changed. For the worse, of course.]
1. The Most Dangerous Game
LURKING BENEATH OUR INTERNAL ARGUMENT concerning the relentless demographic expansion of Islam into the West without assimilation, is the persistent background question, "Oh, my, whatever shall WE do with THEM?"
WE are, you see, like muddlers and fiddlers since Nero, worried about THEM. Our doltish conservative muddlers and fiddlers worry about what "THEY will do to US" if we aren't very, very careful and selective about which of THEM we capture or kill while WE seek to give THEM the "gifts" of freedom and democracy. Our brave new fiddlers on the Left fiddle about worrying if THEY have enough to eat, enough to wear, enough respect, enough, in short, of the love THEY deserve for not killing US today.
Continued...
We have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let one of our cities die.
First published: October 2004 Read Part II below or at The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: The Event
"We haven't had a real-time nuclear demo since Japan, 1945, and that was with one of the prototypes. We've never had a real-time nuclear demo live on TV, but it is on their schedule. What we can't face is that the next time, many more than 3,000 will die and a lot of the dead will be our children. Just what do you think our mood will be the morning after they slaughter not only thousands of adults at their desks like they did on the 11th, but thousands of our children as well?" -- In conversation, July, 2004
THE RUTHLESS DEDICATION OF OUR ENEMIES TO OUR DESTRUCTION was written across our sky with two pillars of flame and smoke in our largest city. We've seen that dedication continue, punctuated by car bombs, mortars, and random attacks against our soldiers. We've seen it continue in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Spain, Russia, Italy and England.
Our unluckiest citizens have had their heads severed from their bodies as pilot episodes of what promises to be a long running reality television series in which American heads are held up, to our horror and for the delight of those many millions that support those that take the heads. The message beyond this madness is that they would be pleased to extend this television series to 300 million beheadings in which each of us would have his "star" turn. Our enemy has not yet taken a woman or a child for a beheading, but both clearly on their programming schedule.
All these things we know. We know the nature and goals of our enemy well. Our army is at the ready and in the field. And yet we hesitate.
We hesitate because we believe our search for a moderate, modern outcome will somehow determine what actions our ancient enemy will pursue. We are a foolish people grown fat and fearful during the long peace.
We stay our hand and hobble our warriors and walk on wrapped in our suburban slumber.
The party in power shambles about speaking in color codes and hushed words of warning. It mumbles of "they" and it seeks love from where there is only hate. It is a party of quislings led by a traitor.
We are soothed on the days when our media feeds us only thick streams of pap concerning grisly murders of obscure women by their husbands, the latest fornication festivals of the lightly talented in music and the cinema, and estimates of how long a woman famous for finger-bowls will spend in jail. We are relieved because the media's relentless focus on the tripe and detritus of our culture tells us that the day of the sacrifice is not to be this day.
And so we dream on. We imagine that the cliff is not really directly in our path, believing on some persistent level that merrily, merrily our life is but a dream, rather than a somnambulant march through the gates of history that is all too real and, for as yet unknown thousands of us, all too lethal.
But this world is not a dream and our awakening will be into nightmare.
Continued..."We have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let one of our cities die."
[First published: October 2004]
San Diego, California. August 6th, 11:36AM
THE TECATE TRUCK was just like all the other Tecate Beer trucks that went back and forth daily at the border crossing, except that it was not owned by Tecate. The driver of that truck spoke fluent Spanish and the truck was always loaded with Tecate. In time the US border guards got used to it. The difference was that this truck had, at its center, a narrow, hollow space shielded with thin sheets of lead so that no ambient radiation would escape.
It had cost The Base over $150,000 to convert the truck at a garage in Ensenada a year before. That was little enough when it came to securing the device which had cost the same group more than $10 million in Russia in 1997. In any event, the truck did its job and passed without incident over the border and into the United States at Tecate, California on August 6th. Dates were important to The Base, and this date was especially significant. After all, what could be more significant than the day on which Hiroshima was destroyed?
After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to it's merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road thought the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway in downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. It's total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.
The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.
The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth.
Continued...
A car bomb is parked in Times Square but fails to go off. Result: Preening and "It's no big deal. Amateur stuff. Not to worry. Move along. Nothing to see here." Others take it seriously. Very seriously. As they should.
There's an old Beyond the Fringe routine concerning the end of the world. The Fringers climb to the top of the mountain to observe the end of the world, but when the appointed moment comes, the world goes on -- nothing happens. The last stinging line of the routine is, "No matter. We'll come back tomorrow. We're sure to get a winner one of these days."
Neoneocon cites Steve Coll whistling through his New Yorker graveyard with Think Tank: Terrorism : The New Yorker
There will be more of this sort of low-level terrorism in the United States in the years ahead, not only from self-styled jihadis but possibly also from the extreme right.Never any shortage of fools at The New Yorker, yes, The New Yorker. I especially love how he conflates "extreme right" with Islamic terrorism. Seems he's forgotten who exactly killed 3,000 of his fellow New Yorkers. Fine. If he sticks around New York long enough, he'll get his lesson again. A fool and his head are sooner or later parted.
Back in 2004, I wrote the following "scenario" of what it would take to kill New York. I've updated it once or twice since, but it still works. I see that currently terrorists are thinking a bit smaller and simpler. And if they miss, they all think:
"No matter. We'll come back tomorrow. We're sure to get a winner one of these days."
THIS JUST IN:
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009: FBI agents with bomb-sniffing dogs Wednesday raided the Colorado apartment of an Afghan national linked to Al Qaeda and a plot to attack the New York City subway system.... In the past three days, the NYPD increased its attention to the subway system and its 5.2 million daily riders. Officers were warned to keep an eye out for vans near transportation hubs such as Grand Central, police sources said. The safety zone around subway and commuter stations also was expanded by two blocks, the sources said.-- FBI unit set for more anti-terror raids in Queens; Colorado home raided
LEADS TO THIS:From the AD Archives, Written March 13, 2004
In the wake of the Spanish outrage, [11 March 2004] an email asks what it would take for the Islamic terrorists to take the next step in the United States.
It turns out that, as in Spain, it wouldn't take much at all. Here's what you'd need and how it could be done. But it is just one way. There are many.
The Elements:
One City: New York
Three Locations: The Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, Penn Station
Terrorists: 4
Equipment:
Plastique explosives (15 pounds)
Backpacks: 2
Ten penny nails and ball bearings: 4 pounds
Anthrax: 2 Liters
Machine Guns: 4 (Small) with 2 extra clips each
Time: Late September to Early November when the weather makes wearing coats common.
Intellectual Equipment: An understanding of the New York subway and bridge system, an understanding of symbolism in America, a willingness to die.
The Method:
Continued...
Charlie Wilson's dead but we're still a long, long way from home: SEALED WITH A KISS: A U.S. Marine read a letter covered in lipstick kisses at his outpost near Marjah, Afghanistan, Thursday. U.S. and Afghan forces were in the area to seal off escape routes ahead of a major offensive against the Taliban.
Deadly: A total of seven World Trade Centre buildings were destroyed that day, killing 2,752 people.
[Click to enlarge]
SO WHY ARE WE SEEING THEM NOW? After 9/11 the U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology collected images from amateur, professional and freelance photographers as part of its investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centre. It completed its research in 2005. In the summer of last year, ABC saw that NIST was asking the photographers' permission to release the images and filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to get access to them. The images seen here are ones taken by NYPD helicopters and come from the 2,779 pictures supplied on nine CDs to the news organisation. -- More chilling images at New World Trade Center 9/11 aerial images from ABC News | Mail OnlineI was standing on the Brooklyn Heights Promanade, less than a mile away, when this happened. At times I think I'll get over it, get beyond it, move on.... but I never do. And I pray I never will.
Anyone - public official or private citizen - who tries to convince you this sort of thing is over, is trying to get you and your loved ones killed. You need to get in their face and back them down.
Melanie Philips has more on The thin blue line of jihad that was first covered here yesterday in England's Muslim Police and Muslim Terrorists Evenly Matched. She illuminates the darker implications in the memorandum of the NAMP pit vipers:
Continued...This morning's Telegraph from London softens the blow with the headline The National Association of Muslim Police is in denial over Islamist terrorism. Denial? Here's an interesting pair of numbers from the article:
The 2,000 strong National Association of Muslim Police is clearly in a state of denial regarding the motivation and inspiration behind the vast majority of terrorists in the UK.... And as the Director General of MI5 pointed out, there are at least 2,000 suspected al-Qaeda operatives based in Britain.If I were a Briton this morning I wouldn't be worried about the "denial" in the National Association of Muslim Police when it came to Muslim terrorists in England. I'd be worried about the overlap. As we saw at Fort Hood, it only takes one to kill and wound many.
Speaking of which, a psychopathic form of denial has evidently infected the Pentagon when it comes to Fort Hood Muslim terrorist:
The Pentagon released its 80-page report on the Fort Hood massacre on Friday - which conveniently fell just before a three-day weekend. Of course, it is devoid of any mention of Islam or jihad. former Army Secretary Togo West even went as far as saying that this had nothing to do with Islam, that it could just as easily have been a radicalized Christian. Really? -- BLACKFIVE: The Pentagon's War on ReasonIt would seem that here, as in England, the Muslims in the police or in the army are a "protected species." We may want to recalibrate that designation.
[An item from my back pages of more than six years ago. Slowly, the world is catching up with me. And I hate it.]
"It does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff." - Susan Hallowell (above), Director of TSA's Security Laboratory.
Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you're not a gamblin' man.
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand.
Your black cards can make you money,
So you hide them when you're able.
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table.
You go back Jack do it again,
(Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round)
You go back Jack do it again....
-- Steely Dan
From where I sit I see many people underestimating President Obama because they cannot get their heads around who and what this man actually is and what he portends. Instead, historical or metaphoric analysis prevails making Obama like “Lincoln” or “Stalin,” like an "angel" or a "devil." Regardless of the comparisons evoked they all fail because Obama is none of these. He is "None of the above." He is not "That what came before." He is all of "What shall come after."
Politically and personally, Obama is a genetic sport, a Chimera; a now not-so-mythical being composed of multiple parts but functioning a a whole. Neither America nor the world has seen his like before. Attempts to analyze him that appeal to history fail because there is no historical precedent. That was, you will recall, part of his mystic allure. As a result many ascribe motives to the president that cannot be accurate; motives that run counter to the blunt evidence of the senses, to the maxim: “Watch what he does, not what he says.”
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Jerry Pournelle looks at the traitor who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood:
I would presume that arming oneself and shooting 43 US soldiers is (1) levying war against the United States, and (2) an overt act, and that Major Hassan should be charged with treason.
Political correctness was the cause of the Fort Hood Massacre, and we ought not forget that. The fact that someone could go through -- at government expense -- an undergraduate education with ROTC, then medical school at a US military institution, and remain a traitor to the United States is a significant warning. A very significant warning that the idea of Political Correctness has consequences we can't afford. Corruption of the Legions is one danger the Republic cannot endure.
The Legions remain faithful; but for how long when their officers are no longer faithful? Hassan had been through ROTC and a US armed forces medical school as a commissioned officer. Why was his failure of loyalty to the armed forces not detected earlier? But of course he was a Muslim, and it would not be politically correct to wash someone out of an armed forces medical school for lack of loyalty to the armed forces of these United States.
We sow the wind. We have reaped one whirlwind.
The politically correct spin is coming like a tidal wave. He is a crazy guy who happens to be a Muslim. All of that misses the point: he was disloyal to the United States, and said so openly and many times; yet he remained a commissioned officer of the United States. That is the point that is being overlooked. Whether the disloyalty is due to a psychotic episode or some other cause is not important.
Michelle Malkin in The Beslan attack: 5 years later is linking current remembrances and updates. This essay was written September 4, 2004 -- In another place and time.
The boy that lies in his father's lap covered with crusts of blood gazing upward at nothing, nothing at all except his own pain.
The soldier with the unlit cigarette carrying the little girl in filthy underwear with a long smear of blood across her nose and down her chin.
The child's small hand with the dry pool of blood in the palm and the small gold crucifix lying in it.
The stretcher being run past the camera carrying what might, under the burns and the blood, be a young girl.... and another, and another, and another, and another, and another....
I began to gather these images yesterday, I think. Or was it the day before? I'm not really sure. The cascade of outrages, the piling of atrocity on top of atrocity, has become so unremitting that it is sometimes difficult to know where one episode of evil ends and another begins.
The waves keep coming and, because they are always to your back, they keep slamming you down into the hardpacked sand. You pick yourself up and spin around to face the next wave, but this sea of evil is cunning and the next wave will always come from behind your back no matter which direction you face. All you can know now is that there will be another one, and it will come at your back in the way the bullets came for the backs of the children in Russia.
Because I am both too old and too distant to either pick up a weapon to defend, or offer help and comfort to the wounded or the dying, I am forced back on silly, futile, small gestures such as gathering images of the atrocities. In this I disgust myself and, like those who did not stand with Henry V, hold my manhood cheap.
I thought that, perhaps, I could gather enough of them and arrange a kind of gallery as a testament, my own small memorial, to the children who were shot in the back or otherwise slaughtered by the diseased "militants" who thought nothing of these lives taken for their vile cause and their vile god. Somehow I would, I imagined, at least bear my own small witness among the millions of others doing the same around the world tonight.
And so I collected the images. I selected ones that showed the fascist smirk that always rises dark above any slaughter of innocents. I selected ones that revealed the courage of those who would try to rescue them. I found and saved some that revealed the chaos and sharp edge of the moment when all that a child may have in front of him is ripped out of him. I saved 10 images, saved 20, saved 40 and then came to the 41st photograph and stopped.
I stopped because in that one image, grainy, indistinct and from the far side of the world in a situation I could not imagine, I saw the one thing I was not expecting to see at all.
No, that's not it. It was not what I saw but what I recognized.
What I recognized was something that I could not see in the picture, but a recognition that came to me through the picture. I knew it immediately and at such a deep level that my first reaction was to look away, to go on to the next picture no matter what it was, to determine to never look at the 41st picture again.
But of course I did. I did because I had no choice. I had no choice because within this one picture I could see two separate episodes of my own life somehow together in one image that depicted an outcome that terrified me to the core of my being.
This is the picture I could not look at. This is the picture I must look at. I will try to explain -- not really to you, but to myself -- why it terrifies me more than all the other pictures.
Continued...
SOMALI BASIN (April 12, 2009) Maersk-Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips, right, stands alongside Cmdr. Frank Castellano, commanding officer of USS Bainbridge (DDG 96) after being rescued by U.S Naval Forces off the coast of Somalia. Philips was held hostage for four days by pirates. -- Navy News Service - Eye on the Fleet
TO: ISLAM
FROM: AUUO! (AMERICANS UNITED UNDER OBAMA)
RE: KILLING US MORE BETTER
DEAR ISLAM,
It's 9/10 again in America! Our President has said the U.S. "is not and never will be at war with Islam." We say, "Come out, come out, wherever you are! Olly olly oxen free!"
You may have asked yourselves if, with the apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, the American supporters of the President of the Millennium are impatient with you. Yes, it's true. You are not fulfilling our desires which we believe we have made clear with our election and deification of Obama. So let's be clear about one thing: as supporters of Obama we thirst for death. Our death. Now that President Obama has signaled we can kill our babies, our brain dead (except if they are serving Democrats), and our too old or too sick, we'd like to move on to ourselves because, as any good Democrat will tell you, there can never be too much death for us!
We would like you, at your earliest opportunity, to slake our deaththirst - especially that of the whitest and therefore most guilty among us - by slaughtering us wholesale.
Continued..."Kuwaiti Professor Abdallah Nafisi Suggests a Biological Attack at the White House and Prays for the Bombing of a Nuclear Plant on Lake Michigan."from Memri.
HT: Brutally Honest
Transcript after the jump.
Continued...
Richard at The Belmont Club is taking a hard look at the Obama Effort in Afghanistan and wondering if the President realizes what he's getting himself into. I think he does.
I think he realizes what his needs are in Afghanistan. What he needs to do is end a war in an American defeat while being seen as "trying for a victory." To do that he has to engineer an American defeat. Iraq is already, in the public mind at least, in the win column. So how do we engineer an American defeat? It is simplicity itself. You begin, not with a "surge" but a ripple.
1) Ripple: Reinforce, but only lightly.
After all, it's not really a "surge."
2) Raise the body count: Tighten the Rules of Engagement on US forces. This loosens the Rules of Engagement for the Taliban which increases the casualties for the US.
3) Look rational: Set “goals” and a “timetable” going in. Make sure these goals cannot be achieved with the resources available in the time allowed.
4) Short Pakistan: Alienate the land power that control the supply routes. Make protecting logistics consume most of the “reinforcements.”
5) Grandstand: When the land supply routes go down, make a valiant “Kennedyesque” resupply “effort” with an airlift for a short period.
5) Look "realistic:" When your goals are not met and airlift fails, announce that you’ve given it the old college try and must regretfully withdraw.
6) Give a history lesson: Make sure you withdraw using plenty of airpower, with lots of large helicopters at the end taking off from Kabul.
The media will be more than happy to compare and contrast the fall of Saigon.
7) Triumphantly involve the UN: Announce at around the same time that your soft diplomacy has born fruit in Iran, and that Hans Blix and the Mullahs have agreed to UN-type weapons inspections of 20 square blocks of the downtown shopping district of Tehran.
8) Be heroic: Announce that the US remains committed to Afghan democracy and get the Congress to agree to fund the Afghan forces and political establishment for "as long as it takes." This can be easily rescinded at a later date as it was for the South Vietnamese.
9) Mission accomplished : Just in time for, say, a 2012 September surprise: "I brought your boys home, and we'll have enough troops for government to fill your sandbags in Fargo this spring!" Make the defeated army "your" helpful-at-home army.
10) Reallocate funding: Once you transform the army into something that fights natural disasters and not enemies, you can slash their budget to the bone. The Navy's next since there won't be any American power to project or protect. But, hey, you've just funded National Health Care so you don't care. Make sure you've got a lot of burn units near major cities. You can name them after Saul Alinsky.
[Republished from last year at this time.]
Five years in. An inch of time. Five years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans scrawled on cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.
Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer of love long sent down to rot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them. That much is certain.
Five years in and we see these old rotting rituals trotted out in the streets like some pagan procession of idols and shibboleths, like some furred and feathered fetish shaken against the sky by hunkering witch-doctors, to hold back the dark, to frighten off the evil spirits and graven images that trouble the sleep of the dreamers.
Five years into the most gentle war ever fought, a war fought on the cheap at every level, a war fought to avoid civilian harm rather than maximize it. Picnic on the grass at Shiloh. Walk the Western Front. Speak to the smoke of Dresden. Kneel down and peek into the ovens of Auschwitz. Sit on the stones near ground zero at Hiroshima and converse with the shadows singed into the wall. Listen to those ghost whisperers of war.
Continued...
Once there under the umbrella of "hunting down Bin Laden," it would be only a matter of time before that "mission" was declared either a success or "impossible." -- American Digest, October 4
Well, that didn't take long, did it? Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of the Taliban
WASHINGTON — President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.
What follows is an article I wrote a month before the election on October 4.
Continued...
Michael Yon has the rest and a full PDF HERE
[First published: October, 2003 ]
Sections of "The First Terrorist War"
1. Calling the War By the Right Name.
2. Not Process But Victory Restores Freedom
3. Playing for Time is Playing to Lose
4. The Goal of Radical Islam is Our Destruction
5. The War of Two Religions
6. The Unspoken Role of the Ballistic Missile Submarines
7. Avoiding the Islamic War by Winning the Terrorist War
"[Arabs] were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail." -- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1. Calling the War By the Right Name.
In a war, "Know your enemy" is one of the first axioms in formulating a strategy for victory. It is an axiom the United States has ignored for over two seven years. Instead we’ve seen a host of euphemisms and slogans thrown up in the belief that, having had many decades of a life where ugly things are given pretty or neutral names, Americans can no longer "bear very much reality."
In the years between September. 2001 and today, the public has had little asked of it and seen nothing happen on our soil that alarms it. All is quiet on the western front.
Foggy thinking, attractive in politics, means defeat in war. War requires "a mind of winter;" a mind that is precise, cold, and unrelenting. War requires that we call things what they are and cease to skirt issues that make us, "uncomfortable." Vague names create fluffy policies, hamstrung strategies, and wishful thinking. This is where we are drifting.
Continued...
"Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended--in ruins. Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the world (but not to heaven) by being shown the riches of earth and the pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head and who depended for his food on charity or birds, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration.
"They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing.
"They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more." - T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
"I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs.Praying towards Mecca - a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs....
My lip curls at their love of theocracies, a willingness to subjugate themselves to the whims of dissolute rulers along side an ancient text they can’t even begin to comprehend, subsuming their divine individuality to a tide of dogmatic mandates. I have no use, or respect, for the people who follow this religion. I’m past tired of their bombing, shooting, acid throwing, coup d’etat loving, rioting asses and it looks like the rest of the world could stand a break from these murdering bastards, too.And she's just warming up.
In the news today, Feds Warn Of Terror Plot Against NYC SubwaysA Pakistani immigrant was arrested and convicted for a scheme to blow up the subway station at Herald Square in 2004. There was also a planned cyanide attack on the subways by al-Qaida operatives that authorities say was called off in 2002; another aborted al-Qaida plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003; and a plot to bomb underwater train tunnels to flood lower Manhattan, which was broken up in 2006 by several arrests overseas.
Not, alas, news to me. What It Would Take (below) is republished from American Digest from March 13, 2004. As you and yøur family give thanks tomorrow, you might want to include George W. Bush.
AN EMAIL ASKS WHAT IT MIGHT TAKE for Islamic terrorists to move to the next level in the United States. It wouldn't, as most of us realize, take all that much. Here's one approach, but only one. There are many.
The Elements:
One City: New York
Three Locations: The Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, Penn Station
Terrorists: 4
The Equipment:
Plastique explosives ( 10-15 pounds) of good quality, preferably military, from one of the stashes hidden years ago around Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Backpacks: 2
Ten penny nails and ball bearings: 4 pounds
Anthrax: 2 Liters from the New Jersey stash
Machine Guns: 4 (Small) with 2 extra clips each
The Time:
Late September to Early March when the weather makes wearing coats common.
Intellectual Equipment:
An understanding of the New York subway and bridge system, an understanding of symbolism in America, a willingness to die.
The Method:
For over a year after the Eleventh, I used to think about the nature of the Brooklyn Bridge, and how easy it would be to damage this 19th century structure every time I walked across it -- which was often.
On the Eleventh I stood at the Brooklyn end of the bridge handing out water bottles to the ash-shrouded ghosts that had fled across it in endless droves.
After the 11th the Brooklyn Bridge was closed except for emergency vehicles for weeks on end. After that the bridge was guarded and vehicles vetted on a random schedule for months. Sometimes the "security" went so far as to park a police car at the Brooklyn entrance.
For all I know this goes on today.
The Bridge and what it represents and, more importantly, what it controls in the way of access to and from NYC, makes for an exquisite lynchpin for a memorable workday morning in New York City. The way to work this little terrorist scenario is as follows:
Continued...
Truth: "uncool."
Nineteen-year-old Army Pfc. Aaron J. Ward, a Fort Lewis military policeman whose hometown was San Jacinto, Calif., was killed May 6 in Iraq's Anbar province when his patrol came under enemy fire. - Ranger, sub officer, MP with links to state died in war last month EDITOR'S NOTE: Each month, the P-I remembers the servicemen and servicewomen with ties to Washington who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The American culture of cool has become a nation apart, an alternate-America..."
It was Easter Sunday in 2004 and we were two and a half years into the war. Good Friday evening was one of those nights when, in Southern California, the weather and the combine to create what are rightly called "balmy conditions." Balm, as in a kind of salve to the soul and the skin. The air is warm but not too warm. The skies are clear and the stars seem closer. My then wife and I had just seen some current comic book confection at one of the 20 screen multiplexes that are so numerous in this area that you can see the same movies 15 times within a ten mile radius.
We sat by a large sandstone and marble fountain in the stone circle between the vast theater and the vaster parking lot. It was date night and the beginning of Spring Break for the schools of Orange County. All around us kids from 11 to 18 were whooping and laughing and forming clusters of friends. They were dressed according to the upscale Goth-Surfer/Balkan Refugee dress-code common to the kid culture here on the coast. Most were too young to have tattoos or piercing, but you could see some were already planning where those lifestyle statements would go. They were slim, energetic and heedless of the future. In short, they were just reasonably rich kids in America in 2003. No different now in 2008, seven and a half years into a war they've been trained to hate or ignore.
The war was not and will probably never become these kids' concern. It isn't even something they consider outside of, perhaps, a few classroom exercises of dubious intent or merit. There is no reason they should consider war, nor do I wish that upon them. It isn't, in any real sense, their war. War isn't being asked of us or the affluent kids of Orange County, nor does it seem likely to be. Besides, war isn't what they're into.
[Note: First published on September 22, 2004 as WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ : Military Bases Are A Requirement, Democracy is Merely an Elective. Only the names have changed. The songs remain the same.]
"Did you ever get the feeling that you wanted to go?
And still get the feeling that you wanted to stay?"
-- Jimmy Durante
Resolved: To safeguard the personal and economic wellbeing of the civilized world in the 21st century, it is essential for the United States to control Iraq for strategic and tactical military purposes alone.
Let's take a step back from our always entertaining electoral circus to cast a cold eye on what needs to be done in Iraq beyond November and far beyond 2005. Don't watch the hand waving the magic wand around, watch the hand held behind the back. It holds what is going to be pulled out of the hat.
Instead of spending untold hours listening to this or that speech from the two sides of the American coin, it's more instructive to take down an atlas, turn to a spread displaying the middle-east and meditate on what needs to be done to control that section of the world.
And while you're at it here's a couple of things you can forget about:
- 1) Democracy in Iraq at all costs. Forget that "We" are in Iraq to bring the blessings of "democracy" to the people. It would be a nice gift to instill "democracy" in an Islamic state of the middle-east. We will spend a lot of money trying to achieve this. We will be sincere in our desire for it to be born. It will make our task easier in the short and long term. But "democracy" is not strictly necessary for the current strategic interests of the United States in the region.
- "Five years ago, Middle Eastern extremists were killing Israelis and Americans. Today they are killing each other. Why is it that some people persist in claiming that Israel's and America's Middle East policy is a failure?" -- Alan Chamberlain
A friend in Israel notes that, during the previous week, whenever the television news would announce a possible ceasefire between the Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah, her husband would shout towards the television, "No! No! Don't do it!"
Continued...The ever-expanding throng of those who want to "get out now even if we have to come back later" seem to be trial-balooning a new Middle East meme. To wit, "That troublesome region? Hah, it isn't really important. Just a bunch of Arabs and Jews bopping about. Who cares?"
The American Interest showcases this devil-may-care attitude with The Irrelevance of the Middle East by Philip Auerswald: "As the 21st century unfolds, the Middle East (leaving Israel aside for the moment) will matter less and less to the United States and to most of the rest of the world." You've got to love that aside about leaving Israel aside.
But this conjoined pair of 'Recommendations' floats right to the top of the Surrender cesspool.
RECOMMENDATION 31: Amnesty. Amnesty proposals must be far-reaching. Any successful effort at national reconciliation must involve those in the government finding ways and means to reconcile with former bitter enemies.It would seem that to the cardboard cut-outs that fashioned this chunk of crap that the criminals who have been building bombs and shooting our soldiers must, for "the sake of the children," "world peace," or the end of Israel, or some such, be let to just walk away. What's more, Baker expects everyone to agree to this going in. No override from the executive or the legislature.RECOMMENDATION 37: Iraqi amnesty proposals must not be undercut in Washington by either the executive or the legislative branch.
Let's just suppose we, at some time in the far distant future, really do get out of Iraq. In the process, some group of criminals takes aim at a departing brigade and slaughters them by fair means or foul?
I guess that would be, from Baker's perspective, just dumb luck filed under "Shit happens."
That's the problem with all these pabulum reports and swatches of smarm oozing out of our "corridors of power" these days. There is simply no will to put some power in the proposals. Cardboard souls in empty skulls just wishing and hoping that somehow the party years will return and the American Happy World will roll along. As well it might.
For today. For, maybe, tomorrow.
But we all know, deep down, we're just waiting for the day of the bomb.
One of my more clear-headed email correspondents has a plan for a little R&R for Iraq Operations at this point in the game. To wit:
Continued...THE NEW BATTLE FLAG now being waved high over the armies of Allah mustering across the world is not the banner of Muhammad, but a flag almost as ancient as the prophet, the Bloody Shirt. Among the weak in arms and courage and righteousness, the Bloody Shirt is their weapon of mass distraction; their attempt to storm the moral high ground and hold it as they wait for their reinforcements of love, peace, compassion and truce to flow in from the far corners of the world screaming "Stop this barbaric war that slaughters, for God's sake, innocent women and children!"
Harvey Logan: Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
[Butch immediately kicks Harvey in the groin]
Butch Cassidy: Well, if there aint' going to be any rules, let's get the fight started. -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
"You hear me talkin', hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on your ass." -- Pulp Fiction
By rote and by ritual most Americans to assert that they "Support our troops." But as we all know, yet seldom admit, America has more of the known reserves of the world's bullshit than the Saudis have oil. The truth of the matter is that far too many Americans are becoming far too interested in our troops behaving correctly than actually supporting and sustaining them. They blather support out of one orifice while spewing disdain from the other. We hear these clapped-out flatulators daily at work, on the street, and over the tube of the boobs. I don't know about you, but for me these hyperventilating hypocrites are beginning to gripe my hindquarters big time.
BUSH STATES WHAT HAS BEEN OBVIOUS FOR OVER FOUR YEARS ( Bush says fight against terror is 'World War III' ) and the ripping sound of twisting knickers and busted bodices echos across the blogosphere.
Continued...If it's a Crusade, let's start crusading....
IS WAR ALWAYS POPULAR in America? Not since the Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress had to gain support on the home front if it was to defeat the British. John Adams estimated that only one-third of the population was in favor of the Revolution at any one time, one-third was opposed, and one-third was neutral. Some of this depended upon whose army was closest.
I was out at a bar and a concert the other night. One of the party showed up, bellied up to the bar, ordered a drink and, getting it, raised his glass and said: "Here's to the 33% popularity rating." Some polite assent was noted, but I somehow forgot to touch my glass.
"I don't think popularity has much to do with it now," I said. "Getting elected may be about 'popularity,' but once you're in and can't run again it's about doing what you want with the power you've got. By my count there can't be any change in the administration or its policies until late January, 2009. I make that about three years. Three years. A lot can happen. For instance, he's got two justices on the court.
Continued...
Pay me now for not kill you then.
FOR AN INSANE THUG WHO HATES THE JEWS, Iran's president has certainly learned and lived the meaning of hutzpah. Not content to play nuclear brinksmanship with a world that could reduce his country to a glowing puff of cosmic flatulence in an afternoon, Ahmadinejad now wants to get paid for all those years Iran didn't build a nuclear weapon.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the West should compensate Iran for its past suspension of nuclear research as a way of building trust.-- Iran demands nuclear compensationAs the article notes, "Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment two years ago - the basis of his call for compensation - had been voluntary." But really, why should that make any difference to the mind set of this man and his whole demented cohort?
This is straight from the Yassar Arafat Playbook. First you threaten to kill a lot of people and drag an entire region of the world into chaos and war.
Continued...Nobody has ever died from a cartoon. If the worst thing the Nazis ever did had been to draw cartoons of death camps instead of putting Jews in them, six million Jews would be alive today. When was the last time any country decided to kill a Muslim anywhere in the world because they felt insulted? But the Muslims have created a new international law called the "insult law." This means they have the right to kill you whenever they please, and you have no right to do anything about it. If a Muslim were walking down a street in Israel with a picture of an insulting cartoon in hand, no Israeli would threaten his life. They would be too busy celebrating the fact that it was a cartoon and not a bomb. -- Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder: The ironies of the cartoon jihadHat tip to JC for the pointer.
MICHAEL TOTTEN, reporting from Iraq, takes you on a chilling tour of one of the holding sites for Abu Ghraib during the Saddam regime. His report, The Head of the Snake, ends with these words:
The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.No sense in saying the obvious. The pictures and words that come before say it all."I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution."
"Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again."
10,725 people were killed in this one building alone. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.
If I listened long enough to you,
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true.
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced, while I cried,
Still I'd look to find a reason to believe.
-- "A Reason To Believe"
IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK that a rich and powerful organ grinder like the New York Times spend a little money and hire a "Stupidity Editor" (SE) ? No, not an internal SE, since just riding herd on the anonymous Editorial scribblers would be a full time job for at least five Pulitzer finalists, but simply an external SE to play "Katie, bar the door!" for all the gunk that consistently seeps onto the OP portion of the OP/ED page.
An old friend who works at the New York Times once confessed to me, not without a certain shame, that the overarching game plan of the Times was to become "the national newspaper of teachers and college professors." And in this they are, beyond a doubt, succeeding. But that does not mean they have to give space every other day to the kind of sludge seeping from the hyperbolic sump pumps that ceaselessly churn in the petrified forests of the Groves of Academe.
Today's seepage is entitled, in a heart warming and positive manner, We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran . It was pumped out of the fervid mind of one Barry R. Posen, a professor of political "science" at MIT. It is a soothing, calming item that, blithely overlooking the unremitting dementia that has ruled Iran for decades, purports to prove that a nuclear Iran would simply be a 'management' problem for the Western Elites to 'handle.' On the one hand, the message of the essay is "Don't worry. Be happy," while on the other it is the parallel message of "What? Me worry?"
While there may in some alternate universe be a cogent argument for simply kicking back and letting events in Iran unfold as they will, there's nothing resembling it in Mr. Posen's article. The unstated premise is that an Islamic nuclear weapon developed by the world's leading Radical Islamic state would forever remain specific to that state. This concept evolves from the idea that nation states are still the only social structures of significance in the 21st century. It's a tidy concept, but it is wrong. The globalization of ideology driven by instant communication and the ability of men and material to be anywhere on earth within 48 hours, makes Posen's premise of nation states as the only significant actors on the world stage quaint to say the least.
What the "What? Me worry?" intellectuals in our universities fail to see, or, seeing, fail to credit, is the fact that Islamic Fascism is a global virus which is replicating with all the speed of other viruses in the modern age. Indeed, it is currently outpacing avian flu. While it may take the resources of a state controlled by religious fanatics and fat with oil funds to create a nuclear weapon, the distribution network for such devices is already in place use them.
For example: If we can only monitor 5% of the containers coming into US ports, how many containers can Mexico monitor? Indeed, to deliver a nuclear weapon to Mexico, you don't need a container or a port of entry at all. A fast boat and a beach in the Yucatan will do quite nicely, thank you. Once that's done, you don't have to control a US port to attack the US with a nuclear weapon, or even drive it into the country. You
Continued...MISSING, SOMEHOW, from your morning newspaper: Investor's Business Daily: Saddam Had WMD
Continued...Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed -- when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.-- David Warren, "Oncoming"This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11. Not one of our prominent politicians dares even to name the enemy.
Hassan Bolkhari: "If you study European history, you will see who was the main power to hoard money and wealth, in the 19th century. In most cases, it is the Jews. Perhaps that was one of the reasons which caused Hitler to begin the anti-Semitic trend...."
FROM LGF comes this Memri video with subtitles .
It's important to watch this short video because it shows Professor Hassan Bolkhari, Iranian "mass media expert" and cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry speaking calmly and in a soothing and persuasive voice to a group of what appear to be students. Among the things he is saying in explaining the deeper cultural subtext of "Tom & Jerry" is this:
Every Jew was forced to wear a yellow star on his clothing. The Jews were degraded and termed "dirty mice." Tom and Jerry was made in order to change the Europeans' perception of mice. One of terms used was "dirty mice."Now we will pass over this "Iranian expert's" stated belief that Tom & Jerry is a product of "the evil Jewish Walt Disney company." After all, the cartoon's producer MGM was also a Jewish company ( Louis B. Mayer / Walt Disney -- what's the difference, really? ). Instead, the video gives you a chilling view of the Fascist mind at work. Taking in the tone of voice, the calm demeanor, the slick look and the deadpan delivery, you might almost think this person believes every word he says. Continued...I'd like to tell you that... It should be noted that mice are very cunning... and dirty.
7. -- Increased delivery of Pizza to Pentagon
ANY QUESTIONS?
More photos from FROM the Muslim No-Cartoons-Ever Demonstration in New York .
Seriously, for serious we shall some day become about this matter, what are we to do about these children of a younger god? For, looked at from any adult perspective, children is what these acolytes of Islam are, and children is what they will remain -- growing ever stronger and more dangerous in the absence of any effective discipline -- until such time as they are instructed, in no uncertain terms, to sit down, shut up, go to their rooms and sleep off the spiritual intoxication which has become a danger to others and, most of all, themselves.
And yet, no such intervention seems readily at hand from the "leaders" of Western Civilization. With numbing regularity, we are reminded daily that Islam is the youngest of the world's monotheisms and hence, I suppose, we all need to cut it a bit of slack. We are reminded of this much as clever lawyers for adolescent school serial killers remind the juries of their clients' tender years in hopes they will ignore the bodies, the collections of weapons, and the hand-crafted web sites promising death daily to all those who will not respect their deadly dementias.
Our elected "leaders" -- interested as always in preserving the status quo ante that elected them and a smooth ride through the always approaching next elections -- are tireless in their tepid promotion of Islam as merely a moderate grouping of one billion misunderstood kids. In this our leaders' dinner party guests, vacation partners, celebrity intellectuals, pundits and entertainers join them in the maudlin plaint "What's wrong with peace, love and understanding?" It is the kind of bromide that those Krazy Kolumbine Kidz would have dismissed as "lame" and go on shooting. But consequences matter little to the private jet elite. Once you've an assured seat on a G5 you cease to inhabit a country and exist only in your own private fantasy island. The consequences of your political philosophies seldom visit this island. You can just emit gaseous slogans and fly, fly away.
Wouldn't it be refreshing for those of us left at the commercial aviation security gates to hear, just once, a bit of straight talk about Islam, the MTV religion that is devoted to getting its latest Gangsta video played in heavy rotation on the news around the world?
Just once wouldn't it be immensely gratifying to get hit with just a jot of a smidgen of the truth about this lethal spiritual confection? Just one time wouldn't you listen with rapt attention to one political pundit stepping up to the microphone and keeping it real about Islam; bringing it out from behind the smoke machine of it's current greatest hit, "A Peaceful, Loving Religion," by Cool Allah and the Gang? "Peaceful" and "Loving" might be the refrain but what we see in the videos is quite a different story. An honest politician might narrate it thus:
"Hey, kick back, relax and chill. These Muslims are just the teenagers of faith. It's a phase. We all went through it. What's a few bombings, stonings, riots, wars, clitorectomies, mass murders, honor killings, kidnappings, subway slaughters, car burnings, skyscraper demolitions, the odd beheading here and there and the fooling about with nerve gas and weapons grade plutonium? They're kids. They'll grow out of it. Love is all they need."
Continued...An excerpt from Dan Simmons' April message:
Continued...
The Time Traveler shook his head. "You've understood nothing I've said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse -- and doomed their democracy -- not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren't ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders -- and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly."I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how it related to the future.
"You came back in time to lecture me about Thucydides?" I said. "Athens? Syracuse? Sun-Tzu? No offense, Mr. Time Traveler, but who gives a damn?"
"It is because of these mid-flight 'Walter Mitty' adventures that I knew the morning of the massacre that the hijackers had used the Hudson River as a visual reference to guide them to Manhattan. I knew it before noon on that very day. I knew it, because I had seen it outside my window on many flights, and I too knew that as long as I followed that clearly defined river, that I could find the fabled island of Manhattan. There was no need to practice using navigation aids like GPS. Just look out the window,
Continued...There were, it is now believed, six bombs: two produced by Iran herself; two purchased from Kim Jong Il, desperate for cash to keep his movies rolling and his regime afloat; and the greatest prize: two high-yield nukes from the Russian Mafia. These broke the bank -- but oil prices were high, their target was priceless -- and money would be worthless after their use.Read what comes before and after. If you can bear it.
TO JUDGE BY NEWS AND BLOGSPHERE REACTION, you'd think an asteroid has hit the Earth and shaken the crust around the planet: Palestinian leadership hit by political earthquake. Everywhere you browse, jaws have dropped -- "I never saw it comin' ", "Whoa, Nelly!", and "Who'da thunk it?" reactions abound.
Me, I don't get all this "shock, horror, surprise." I'm not surprised for a nanosecond. I mean, really, why wouldn't Hamas win going away? They've got the will to kill and the track record. They've got the guns and the goons, and they've had them for years. They've got Jimmy Carter on deck certifying the latest Fascist election and Stephen Speilberg honoring their feelings and boosting their self-esteem. They are the cocks of the walk in the ratty strips of land bracketing Israel and they've got the money too.
Plus they ran on that winning campaign slogan that they've run on for years: "Let's just kill all the Jews now!"
This is a campaign slogan, program, policy and plan that Arabs of all stripes in
Continued...PJM News - Hamas captures majority of parliament seats ".... a devastating upset that is sure to throw Mideast peacemaking into turmoil."
Continued...
SOME GANG HAD PACKED UP most of the tall aluminum light posts in Seattle, laid them out lengthwise, and were carrying them through the streets on dog-drawn wagons. Now why do you suppose they did that?
Oil? No.Gunpowder? Yes.
Cannon barrels. The tall standing posts were smooth and hollow and made excellent cannon barrels.
The police had fled. They lived in the suburbs and they had their own families to take care of.
Things weren't that bad during the first few weeks because lots of families had supplies in the basements. Beans, baby-wipes, bottled water. The free-for-alls at the grocery stores during those first few days were amazing, predictable. What you'd expect. The strong do sometimes survive. Fights over cereal and parking lots filled with bodies, dead.
Dozens reported dead and wounded in Aspen, Colorado blasts**
Pool Coverage by Rodney G. Wentworth, ("Aspen Social Calendar"), Jack White ("Let's Ski Aspen!") and Jennifer Tiffany Beal, New York Times Spa Critic
Three explosions rocked Colorado Rocky Mountain resort town of Aspen on Monday night, leaving at least 30 people dead and 160 wounded.One blast hit the St Regis Aspen hotel, a second Olive's restaurant and the third explosion rocked the Whole Foods Supermarket in the resort town's tourist area about 7:15 p.m. local time (1715 GMT). Colorado authorities said the blasts were likely not caused by suicide
Continued...IN THE MIDST OF A GROUP HUG surrounding Feminist conscientious objector on Flickr comes this startling bit of information about what goes on during party time at Mecca. Here's how they get down!
Any questions?The following are excerpts from a rally of Iranian pilgrims in Mecca, aired on Iran's Channel 1 and Al-'Alam TV, on January 9, 2006. The speaker addresses the crowd in front of a backdrop showing the WorldTradeCenter and an American flag in flames.
TO VIEW THIS CLIP, VISIT: Iranian Pilgrims in Mecca
Crowd: "Israel is the enemy of Allah."
Man: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Crowd: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Man: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Crowd: "May the hands of the infidels be chopped off."
Man: "[Chopped off] from the land of the believers."
Crowd: "From the land of the believers."
Man: "The audience will now split into two groups: One group will settle the score with America, and the other will settle the score with Israel. This group now: Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Man: "Death to Israel!"
Crowd: "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
Man: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Man: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to Israel! Death to America!" Death to Israel!"
Man: "All together now: Death to America! Death to Israel!"
Crowd: "Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to Israel!"
File Under: No Semi-Bold Bush Deed Goes Comprehended
IN A SEMI-BOLD STEP: Bush to Call on Guard to Bolster Border, the President's actions prove to be too much for the stunted intellects of Congress, no matter what the party.
Example the first of what will be hundreds, Chuck-E-Cheese Hagel, who somehow passed the entrace exam for the Republican Party: "We have stretched our military as thin as we have ever seen it in modern times. And what in the world are we talking about here, sending a National Guard that we may not have any capacity to send up to or down to protect borders? That's not their role."
Not? Their? Role?
Perhaps as many as possible should phone or write to Hagel with this simple thought that even he could hope to comprehend.
"Hagel,
When you have and organization called 'The National Guard' one of the first purposes of it is to 'Guard the Nation.'
Press 2 if you wish to continue in English."
DENNIS PRAGER at Townhall this week published a column entitled: The war we are fighting needs a more accurate name which he concludes with:
We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, "There shall be no coercion in matters of faith."But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.
Prager does not quite get around to finding "a more accurate name."
My own suggestion for Mr. Prager is taken from an essay I wrote in 2003 called "The First Terrorist War" in which I too bemoaned the weak and vacillating title "The War on Terror." Instead, I suggest that we should begin to understand this current global conflict as:
The War of Two Religions
Through the violent attacks of a Radical Islam, two religions have been brought into conflict. The first is that of Islam, a faith that at its core requires absolute submission from its adherents, and looks towards the subjugation of the world as its ultimate apotheosis. As the youngest of the monotheistic religions, Islam is at a point in its development that Christianity passed through centuries ago. And it is not with Christianity that Islam is currently at war. Islam is saving that for the mopping up phase of its current campaign. The religion that Islam has engaged is a much younger one, the religion of Freedom.
Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, "Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live." The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.Victor Davis Hanson -- Has Ahmadinejad Miscalculated?
FROM THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION'S IRAQ INDEX: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-Saddam Iraq.
- US Troops killed in hostile action in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25.
- Iraqi military and police killed in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233).
- Car Bombings, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30.
- Civilians killed in Iraq, last 6 months, from October 2005 to March 2006, in order: 527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).
[HT: Dadmanly]
An excerpt:
Continued...HENNINGER on the return of magical thinking:
There is reason to believe that pre-9/11 thinking will in time return and prevail.Defenders of Moussaoui's life sentence say he will "rot in prison." Perhaps in a better world Zacarias Moussaoui would share a cell with Hannibal Lecter. But if our moral betters aren't going to let Saddam's torturers rot in Abu Ghraib, if they aren't going to let the CIA's most important al Qaeda captives rot in "secret" foreign prisons, they certainly aren't going to let Moussaoui rot in Florence, Colo. He will be treated more than well.
Not to mention the Moussaoui trial itself. We arrive at the end of these interminable trial circuses of procedural delay and then claim "the system works" and "justice" has been done. No, it has done damage to the normal idea of justice. He saw the game early on and made a mockery of it. Moussaoui achieved a two-year delay in his trial by demanding to interview al Qaeda detainees. But our moral betters insist that the whole lot of Guantanamo detainees be given access to this same system of justice. They would diminish and crush it.
The odds were strong, as Moussaoui's lawyers knew and the government's should have known, that 9 of 12 jurors would vote that Moussaoui's childhood was "dysfunctional" and "mitigating." This is the therapeutic vocabulary that the West has developed to explain anything in the years from the postwar period to, say, September 11.
For quite awhile after September 11, we were a people united in the war on terror. By now we have let the adrenal pleasures of political fighting over the presidency dissipate the difficult emotions of staying united against a real enemy. The war in Iraq has contributed, but you can't lay it all off on Iraq. The ambiguity of the Moussaoui jury is a portent. See "United 93." It is very difficult. It should be."
-- -- Daniel Henninger: 'United 93' and the 20th Hijacker
LURKING BENEATH OUR INTERNAL ARGUMENT concerning the relentless demographic expansion of Islam into the West without assimilation, is the persistent background question, "Oh, my, whatever shall WE do with THEM?"
WE are, you see, like muddlers and fiddlers since Nero, worried about THEM. Our doltish conservative muddlers and fiddlers worry about what "THEY will do to US" if we aren't very, very careful and selective about which of THEM we capture or kill while WE seek to give THEM the "gifts" of freedom and democracy. Our brave new fiddlers on the Left fiddle about worrying if THEY have enough to eat, enough to wear, enough respect, enough, in short, of the love THEY deserve for not killing US today.
Both bumbling groups may differ in the focus of their fretting, but fret they do. For the problem, as they have defined it, has to do with what is commonly stated as 'a statistically small group of Muslims around the world' who need to be dealt with in some manner so that greater Islam can get on with the historic task of being "a religion of peace and understanding." The majority of both camps of muddlers and fiddlers agree on this one thing: It isn't Islam that's the problem, just a few heretics that have gotten out of hand in their zeal to obey the will of God, and, hey, who hasn't done that from time to time?
One solution, commonly referenced as "the Left/Liberal" position is essentially "leave them alone and they'll come home. They know its for their own good." The other solution, "the Right/Conservative" position, is to force assimilation, modernization, reformation and democratic mechanisms upon Islam "for its own good."
The two positions agree that "something must be done." They differ only in their specifications for "a New!, Improved! Islam" that can play well with other religions and nations in the post-modern world where "business as usual" is worshipped more than any other state of affairs. Both positions, whether they focus on "giving" the benefits
Continued..."Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by."
-- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
JEANNE DEVOTO OF bitter sanity doesn't post daily, but when she does....
A few predictions
I've been thinking that it's only a matter of time before mainstream thought in this country begins the process of lionizing Saddam Hussein. With his trial beginning, the tone of media coverage is starting to bear out my worst fears. (You wouldn't think it would be possible to admire someone who has done what Saddam has uncontestably done, but in a country where people wear Guevera t-shirts without hiding their faces, I suppose just about anything is possible.)I predict:...
Continued...
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know:
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into bright dust at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from out of flowers forged with flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
To land among those dying deep below.
By noon the band of smoke leaned low
Upon the harbor’s skin like some dark shawl;
A pall of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its fatal fall.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
They lived in light or only in reprieve.
They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than clear air.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
And marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all that could not be clean again.
We breathed the smoke that bent and crept and crawled.
We learned to hate the smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go and not to go.
That last, lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded as endless autumn flowed
Through chill and heat into our winter sea
Where warships prowled in search of stones.
Within the city, shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where we stood or where they lay.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.
In time, their smoke and ash became but shapes
Of stories told at dinner, found in books,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.
At first their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But now beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind us all that we’ve not yet escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
FILE UNDER "AGREEABLE PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE WHO AGREE WITH YOU, HOWEVER TARDY": THE FEDERALIST PATRIOT, August 19, 2005
One closely guarded objective in securing a free Iraq is to establish a forward-deployed presence in the Middle East -- a presence that would certainly include personnel but whose primary component would be massive military-equipment depots that could be tapped for future rapid-deployment military operations in the region. This forward-base objective is critical, given that it will ensure our military presence in the heart of Jihadistan, and an ability to project force in the region quickly without having to ramp up via sea and airlift. This alone will pay rich dividends by way of maintaining peace through preparedness.
AMERICAN DIGEST, First published on September 22, 2004
WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ : Military Bases Are A Requirement, Democracy is Merely an Elective.
Resolved: To safeguard the personal and economic wellbeing of the civilized world in the 21st century, it is essential for the United States to control Iraq for strategic and tactical military purposes alone.
Continued...File under: "Suffer the Little Children."
I don't know about you but I'm especially fond of the sub-title that tells us we are spending some quality time with "The family of Ahmed Assil, the first modern-day suicide bomber."
"First modern-day suicide bomber... Sort of gives you a real head's-up notice that the wiring in all human heads is not all exactly the same, doesn't it?
The Killer
There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and a white man dancing
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin'.
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.
No, whether this man had explicit help from other Jihadists or not, today we smelt the first Islamist cordite wafting through downtown Seattle, felt the first piece of Jihadi shrapnel in our flesh. Jews have been first in the line of fire elsewhere; today they were the first fallen on Seattle's battlefield. They will not be the last; the baby killers and torturers of children have promised us that. -- AskMom: Fear and Pandering in Seattle
The AskMom, for now, writes for me.
Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto
I've lived all over this town
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain't got time for that now
Transmit the message, to the receiver
hope for an answer some day
I got three passports, couple of visas
don't even know my real name
High on a hillside, trucks are loading
everything's ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nightime
I might not ever get home
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
This ain't no mudd club, or C. B. G. B.
I ain't got time for that now
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
we blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines
I know that ain't allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle so many times now
don't know what I look like!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender
we make a pretty good team
Don't get exhausted, I'll do some driving
you ought to get you some sleep
Get you instructions, follow directions
then you should change your address
Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day
whatever you think is best
Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won't help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
the burning keeps me alive
And remember kids, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leon Trotsky
What have I been doing for days? Here And here. And here.
What's more, I may have to travel. Give me a plane and I'm gone now.
But, as I say, I will be back, but in the meantime: "The Terrible Ifs Accumulate."
LAST MONTH Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit was taken to task for a time because of his standard catch-phrase, "Don't you know there's a war on?" To his critics it would seem as if this question, from sheer repetition, was a weak reed to use in criticizing others. In a way it is, but what is more interesting is the obvious answer to that question.
That answer , to judge by the rolling defeatism of the last week or so, is "No, most Americans evidently do not know that there's a war on." At least in the sense that the war that's on affects their daily life. As the steady drip of drivel continues unabated from the left, and as no real sacrifice shows up in the lives of vast numbers of Americans, it can clearly be seen that, in fact, there really is no war on at all in the sense that most would understand it.
Continued...A RESPONSE TO DANIEL HENNINGER'S :"Ghost Busters" in the Wall Street Journal:
"Iraq is just like Vietnam except: We occupy Hanoi. We've captured Ho Chi Minh.
The North Vietnamese have just held a free and democratic election. The North Vietnamese are working on a new constitution. Yes, Iraq is just like Vietnam." -- Art Fougner - Flushing, N.Y.
Pointer from The Anchoress.
SEPTEMBER, 2005: MARK STEYN notes in Terror war all but forgotten on home front
"Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. .... Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had."
OCTOBER, 2003: AMERICAN DIGEST notes in The First Terrorist War
"To say we are "involved" in a "war on terror" and to repeat this phrase ad infinitum extends our decades old infatuation with euphemism
Continued...WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH continues to field inane questions from the likes of Helen Thomas, and appear here and there about the land armed with standard soundbites, it falls, as it often does, to Britain's Tony Blair to articulate in a deeper and more meaningful way just what the stakes are in The First Terrorist War. Today 10 Downing released the transcript of Foreign Policy Speech I; the first of three speeches Blair will make on this issue in the near future: "In the second he will outline the importance of a broad global alliance to achieve our common goals and in the third he will say how the international institutions need radical reform to make them capable of implementing such an agenda."
This is an excerpt, but I commend the entire text to you as the definitive answer to "Why we fight:"
There is an interesting debate going on inside government today about how to counter extremism in British communities. Ministers have been advised never to use the term "Islamist extremist". It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those - perfectly decent-minded people - who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a "Protestant" bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it....
This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other. And in the era of globalisation where nations depend on each other and where our security is held in common or not at all, the outcome of this clash between extremism and progress is utterly determinative of our future here in Britain. We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions; this too is a policy.� It is just that; it is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong.
ALAN BROMLEY proposes some bold new Gitmo rules--
Continued...THE HEADLINE SAYS Operation Swarmer Expected to Last Days. And there will be as many nights too.
The announced use of aircraft centers on helicopters:
The U.S. command in Baghdad said it was the largest number of aircraft used to insert troops and the largest number of troops inserted by air, although larger numbers of troops overall have been involved in previous operations.
In recent months U.S. forces have routinely used helicopters to insert troops during operations against insurgent strongholds, especially in the Euphrates River valley between Baghdad and the Syrian border. U.S. warplanes are always in the air, ready to strike targets under direction from troops on the ground.
A Pentagon spokesman underscored that "no bombs, missiles or other ordnance were fired from the helicopters."
Now it goes without saying that air support is always close at hand for this kind of operation, but exactly what sort of air support might it be?
Well, without a lot of fanfare, this sort of air support is back in Iraq:
Spooky's Back: "Good Night and Good Luck"
Lethal 'flying gunships' returning to Iraq
What sort of weapon is "Spooky?" Let's just say you don't want to be on the wrong side below this platform: AC-130H Spectre "Spooky"
Armament: two M61 20mm Vulcan cannons with 3,000 rounds; one L60 40mm Bofors cannon with 256 rounds; one M102 105mm howitzer with 100 rounds; one 25mm GAU-12 Gatling gun (1,800 rounds per minute); one L60 40mm Bofors cannon (100 shots per minute); one M102 105mm cannon (6-10 rounds per minute)
And it loves to work nights.
02/25/05 - Marines with 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, 2nd Tank Battalion, provide security while other Marines use bulldozers to build a barrier berm along the Iraqi-Syrian border south of Husaybuh, Iraq, on Feb. 25, 2005. The Marines are currently engaged in security and stabilization operations in the Al Anbar Province, Iraq. DoD photo by Lance Cpl. Christopher G. Graham, U.S. Marine Corps. (Released)
DefenseLINK Multimedia Gallery - military pictures, clip art, sound clips and video clips
Berms ()the building up and the taking down) were a consideration in March of 2003 along the Kuwait/Iraq border.
For weeks the whispered plan had been that, come the invasion, border berms, ditches and fences of electrified wire would be reduced at dozens of places by huge Army bulldozers simultaneously ripping away in the dark, with the entire army swarming through at dawn. It was said a mock-up had been built in the desert and assaulted again and again with 62-ton Caterpillar D9 Dozers. Their operators wore night vision goggles as they kicked over high berms and filled in deep ditches and blasted through fences in the dark.
--McGraw-Hill Construction | ENR -Border Berms Cleared To Make Way For U.S. Invasion Of Iraq
THE BRAVE AND BRILLIANT MICHAEL YON continues his on the spot reports from the war with:The Battle for Mosul.
Continued...THE BRILLIANT, BRAVE AND AMAZING Michael Yon continues with his upclose and personal reports from Iraq. One is from a town where things seem to have improved in many major ways, not the least of which are in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness:
Once in Dohuk, American soldiers removed helmets and body armor, and carried only their weapons. The commander set them free, with orders to return later that day. I walked with some soldiers to a department store where we passed by the kiddie rides outside. The storefront may well have been in Colorado Springs, or Munich. There were big push-carts for the adults, and little carts for the children.[Be sure to take note of Yon's photographs of the market.]Inside the store was a grocery section, where the people smiled, fresh canteloupes smelled sweet, the apples red and green and yellow. There were oranges, bananas, and more. Nearly half a year had passed since I had seen such things.
Another report is from from Mosul where things are quite different and the "tactics" of the men called "insurgents" continue:
Recently, an insurgent hid behind a child in order to attack Americans. The tactic came as no surprise to the soldiers here. Terrorists routinely play wounded or feign their surrender in order to get close enough to launch an attack on Coalition or Iraqi Forces. In January I wrote about one bomber who grabbed the hand of a small child while she was playing on a sidewalk. Smiling, he walked with the child in hand, approaching some Iraqi police, and exploded. Americans standing close by were unharmed.Tell me again about the "heroism" of Muslim terrorists. Tell me again about the need to "understand" them.
JUAN COLE BELIEVES OUR ".... enemy is four guys in a gymn (sic) in Leeds."
Michael Totten's refresher course in the war has a number of graphic photos proving him, as always, dead wrong.
"Mama, mama," cried Hadeel, 24. "They have just executed my husband in front of my eyes. Please help me. They just shot him in the head. Please help me, mama."You can read the rest if you are in the mood to be sick to your stomach.A male voice then told Alloussi, a prominent Iraqi gynaecologist: "We have killed him and now we shall kill your daughter as well."
She begged for the young woman's life, promising to hand over gold, cash and a valuable building if her captors would set her free. But the line went dead.
Two bags containing the bodies of her daughter and son-in-law, graduates in medicine who had taken internships at al-Qaem hospital close to Iraq's border with Syria, were dumped near their Baghdad home 48 hours later. Alloussi's daughter had been shot in the heart. -- Rebels kill Iraqi women as 'betrayers' of Islam - Sunday Times - Times Online
Dave Weigel's got questions about Gunner Palace
Why do I have to go the movies to see video of soldiers in Iraq? The TVs blaring over our desks in the office had been playing nothing but human interest stories all week - Terri Schiavo, Robert Blake, Scott Peterson, some missing girl in Florida (why is it ALWAYS Florida?) Stories of euthenasia and murder in small-town America and Hollywood. I could expect to hear about this stuff in times of peace. But we have 150,000 soldiers risking their lives for us 24/7 in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're shooting it out with snipers, busting down doors, arresting assassins, quelling riots, handing out candy to schoolkids, cuddling babies at orphanages, Hummering down to the Baghdad airport's McDonalds to get a precious Big Mac. In what twisted universe is this not interesting? What the hell convinces TV producers that this stuff is less interesting than the latest frigging Amber alert for some frigging mullet kin in Bumbleshit, Broward County?Cruel. But fair.
"We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world -- except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relived [likely relieved -EV] of the Jews -- even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew." -- Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris
Well, at least we can't say we weren't warned.
[POST AND LINK pulled by reader request. See comments. He's right.]
DECORATED IRAQ TANK PLATOON LEADER NEIL PRAKASH guides us to ARMOR GEDDON: Fallujah THE Movie
Nerts to Harrison Ford and his movie. Here's the REAL deal on Fallujah. U.S. ARMY's TF2-2IN created it. Combat Engineer - SPC Ronald Camp edited it. S2 blessed off on it. Jonathan Hanson is hosting it. Thanks.Soundtrack: SepulteraSPC Camp of 82nd Engineers. Helluva job with the music, footage and timing. Oh and good job fighting in Fallujah too, Soldier.
Crystal Method: Trip Like I Do, Name of the Game
Fatboy Slim/Steppenwolfe: Magic Carpet Ride
Torrent connections and other downloads can be found @ RedSix's Downloads
I'm also hosting a 50 Megabyte Quicktime download at THIS LOCATION. It's a looong download so place it in the background and posses yourself of patience.
While you wait you could do worse that read Prakash's stunning descriptions for a tanker's fighting life in Iraq at ARMOR GEDDON
It is, quite simply, the best first-hand writing available on what it's like inside a 21st century battle.
IN A HASTILY CONVENED NEWS CONFERENCE this morning, President George W. Bush announced that the Prisoner of War Camp at Guantanamo, Cuba, had been closed last night and all its prisoners transferred by Executive Order via the private Gulfstream fleets of George Soros and Amnesty International to Neverland Ranch in California.
Continued...PORETTO @ ETERNITY ROAD has just about had it up to here with the whiners and the wimps in We The Carping,
Continued...It is ritualistic for most Americans to assert that they "Support our troops," but the truth of the matter is that far too many Americans are becoming far too interested in making sure our troops are behaving correctly than actually supporting and sustaining them. Knowing well that nice guys finish last, it is past time for Americans to ask themselves how 'nice' they want to be in fighting the Terrorist War.
How frustrating to be an American soldier in Iraq and know that strategy, tactics, and the rules of engagement seem to always be subordinate to politics. But because the American people must always support America's wars, this frustration must be accepted. Victory in a democratic society emerges from the people's will to pursue it.
At the moment, our political and moral considerations hamper the battle to expunge Islamic Totalitarianism, and victory is a word not often heard from our leadership. Instead, one gets the impression that the President and his core group would prefer it if Americans and the world began to think of the Iraq stage of the Terrorist War as a kind of Tsunami relief effort with guns. This is not a condition that can be sustained for an indefinite period.
We need to stop pretending. The goal of the Terrorist War must shift from the oft-trumpeted plan of "implanting democracy and bringing freedom" to one of unconditional victory over Islamic Totalitarianism. While "giving the gift of democracy" is a comforting and warm notion on which to run for re-election, it does nothing to achieve victory, since it denies that victory is a goal. Instead, according to the prevailing message being repeated ad nauseum from the administration, "democracy and freedom" are the goals of this war. This is sheer propaganda.
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PermaLinkThe Choice: A Scion or a Bastard
They will elect either a candidate with a famous father or with no father. The surviving serious contenders—Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney—all exemplify one of these two categories. For the seventh consecutive election, the winning candidate will be either a privileged prince with an adored, powerful patriarch, or an up-from-nothing scrapper with no relationship with his biological dad. -- Michael Medved: Presidential Fathers and Sons - WSJ.com
Gay Choice? Yet More "Settled Science" That Is Becoming Unsettled
who were very loosely defined as “exclusively or mostly” homosexual. He claimed to find a pattern in a specific region of the X chromosome that such brothers seemed to disproportionately share. This was widely trumpeted in the media as the landmark discovery of a “gay gene.” But Hamer and others failed to subsequently replicate his results. In fact, a 1999 Canadian study contradicted them. Hamer is a gay man who has reportedly stated he hoped his research would help end intolerance toward homosexuals. He also later claimed he’d discovered the “God gene,” so take whatever he says with a grain of DNA. --Homosexuality: What’s Choice Got to Do With it? - Taki's Magazine
Beardski: Just the Thing for the Coming Global Ice Age
Have you ever wondered where your Flying Car is, now that you live in the Age of the Jetson’s, dear reader?
When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress. When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob’s Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign. -- Futurism and Shoepiles | John C. Wright's Journal
Where Christian virtues fail
"May I suggest that this is not a rejection of the Tea Party,"
Inside The Ridiculously Complicated Process Of Buying A Super Bowl Ad
And now football, like Madonna, is over...
"Then there's the other Republican Party. "
that can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties. --Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield RTWT!
Piltdown Man: Another Case in Which "The Science Is Settled"
those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth. --Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax The Observer
"If you were an Iranian subscriber to the Post who works at Iran's "Interests Section" inside the Pakistani embassy in Washington, what would be your considered judgment? "
I think you'd end up saying: "We can't compete with the Krauthammers. They are better than us at putting together words. Therefore we can't guarantee that the ruling class in Washington won't work itself into another frenzy like it did in 2003 and do something stupid. So, we'd better get ourselves a few nukes as a deterrent." --Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: The Great Game ain't so great anymore
The Summing Up
Citizens of Slab City
soul-searching Gypsy Kids who arrive by train with little more than the ragged clothes on their back, Spaz Kids and their electro-psychedelic outdoor parties, and Scrappers who risk life and limb to collect shrapnel from the gunnery range that flanks the camp, where Navy SEAL teams train year-round (and where rumor has it they prepared for the Osama bin Laden raid). That's to say nothing of the rowdy bikers who pass through, or the meth-addled loners on the outer edges inclined to greet a trespasser with a gunshot. -- Slab City: Living Off the Grid in California's Badlands
Big Wind: For Dummies, Chumps, and Greens
it becomes very difficult to support big wind power on any basis whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are a big developer or investor in government subsidised wind farms. In that case, there are $billions to be made, without the need to provide any useful power to the public, whatsoever. A neat scam, if you can live with yourself. Just ask Warren Buffett. --Al Fin Energy:
"There are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: "
the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the âway you lookâ, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on. My God, man, how did Barack Obama & Co. conjure up so many demons? -- Works and Days » Are You "Them"?
Even a Nun Might Say, "Jesus Christ it's cold in Europe!"
And the Sammy Hager Award Goes to McCain for "You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!"
but evidently they’re issuing drivers licenses to people too stupid to understand that rule, who are probably also too stupid to figure out that passing a semi-truck might require use of the accelerator pedal. (Trust me, idiot: It’s down there on the floorboard of your car, probably somewhere on the right side.) If there were any justice in the world, state troopers wouldn’t be laying radar traps for guys doing 82 mph in a 65 mph zone, but would instead be issuing tickets to slow-moving idiots who take more than a few seconds to pass a semi-truck. -- Hate Hoax Busted by Cop’s Dash-Cam (Also: You Idiots, Get Out of My Way!) : The Other McCain
"Spoiler alert! Living in San Francisco with her gay male BFF blogging the existential ennui of being unmarried was my tip-off."
Change is nothing but the status quo
considering how predictable change has become. (Does anyone dispute at this point that, for example, gay marriage will soon be legalized, most likely by the courts?) Political action must address this change, must figure out where it stands relative to that change and act accordingly; if it limits itself to addressing the present, it may end up misdirecting its energy, addressing issues that will soon resolve themselves by pure inertia and ignoring issues for which the direction that inertia will eventually drive them in has not yet been decided. --Anonymous admits its irrelevance
The One-Check Education Bill in the United States
If Newt wasn't steeped in envy, spite, and self-pity he wouldn't have to empty his drool cup so often
"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn't deserve congratulations. I think that's reprehensible, I think it's dishonest, and I think it's shameful." --Gingrich: Romney didn’t deserve congrats – CNN Political TickerSigh. The person who doesn't deserve congrats for the regularly scheduled destruction of Newt Gingrich is.... Newt Gingrich!
Strange Apparatus
Nerd Valentines
The Dead Cities of Syria
Between the cities of Aleppo and Hama there is a limestone massif and it is here these ancient settlements were built by their once prosperous peoples. The area is about thirty kilometers in width yet is several times longer – extending to almost 140 kilometers in length.... An extensive and fascinating photo essay @ Kuriositas
10-Year-Old Accidentally Creates New Molecule in Science Class
to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she'd made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn't sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical. -- | Popular Science
In which Warren Buffet wraps up his national tour of intellectual drooling and presidential fellatio with bunny ears
The ritual ends with a photo shoot. Each student gets to take two pictures with Mr. Buffett. The first one is a serious shot, the second is a funny pose of their choosing.Would the ritual ended with sepaku for the hilariously named "Sage of Omaha."
If he's talking about prayer we know he's lying. On the other hand....
Obama: 'I have fallen on my knees with great regularity' - Investors.com
Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low
So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. -- | ZeroHedge
Caesar Commands the Jews Eat Pork, Quakers Join Army, Amish Get i-Pods, Christians Burn Incense
Kinder, Gentler Embroidery
O’Sullivan’s First Law: Any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing over time.
It is a fresh reminder that the left fully absorbed and adapted the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they capture an institution, they aren't giving it up. How dare a private foundation stop coughing up the dough. It explains why "diversity" means conformity to liberal views in newsrooms, college faculties, and Hollywood studios. It's why the left reacts with howls of outrage every time you propose reducing taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, even as the left disingenuously argues that NPR and PBS receive only a "tiny" amount of tax subsidy. It should also remind us how the left will fight every battle to shrink government like it was Verdun. Which suggests one obvious conclusion if you're an incoming Romney Administration: go big. Go after everything at once. -- | Power Line
DIANA WEST: An Interesting, In-Depth Interview
Diana West, discusses her weekly online column syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide. She writes about cultural and political issues from a self-described conservative viewpoint. She talks about some themes in her columns, including the spread of Islamic law throughout formerly non-Islamic areas of the western world and her opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
"Every day we see people championing the pathetic in journalistic essays:"
No one champions the simple strivers, those who take care of themselves and in the process alleviate society of one more charity case, and along the way create wealth via 'gains from trade' implicit in market transactions. A simple prosperous mensch who does not hypocritically claim he primarily works for others is off the radar, implicitly insulting to any intellectual making considerably less than him. The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. -- Falkenblog: Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower
Poor Mitt Romney
I would suspect he has actually done more for the poor than anyone else in the presidential sweepstakes, by virtue of the tithes he has paid to his church and the whopping taxes he has actually paid. While we might carp and squeal about his tax rates, the actual amount of cabbage he has forked over in his career to the federal government must cover a sizable acreage indeed, and we assume that even given the spectacular ineptitude of that same government in distributing assistance to the needy without leakages of Mississippi dimensions into various private spillways and sluice gates, a fair amount of Mitt's earnings must have found its way into the pockets of the deserving. -- | The Daily Cannibal
Commenters Can Be Really Mean
2:00 PM: Golf with Plouffe
5:00 PM: Dinner with the wookie
6:00 PM: Sneak a cigarette
6:15 PM: Watch Oprah on Tivo
8:00 PM: Smoke a joint and have sex with a male campaign staffer
8:05 PM: Done with sex
8:10 PM: Watch the wookie scarf down everything in the White House refrigerator
9:00 PM: Hold the wookie's head as she "purges" her snack
9:30 PM: Watch Ray Maddow fantasize about sex with him
10:00 PM: Pass out
This is the ghetto way of life.
The ones I do are 1) really big-ass black guys with hardcore street cred, 320 pounds and a lot off tattoo chatter on their arm, 2) Mexican psycho dudes with tattoos on their face. See the commonality? Once you etch shit in your face you are telling the world that you have ceased belonging. This is a clear signal of danger. Animals use subtle aromatic spear to ward off predators. Man now uses skin ink. Heavy skin ink. -- Men in East L.A. that scare me ｫ An Unmarried Man
"Fiat, fiat, fiat": Catholics need to declare the president as anathema
Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive Barack Hussain Obama himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.That would pretty much work for me. What about the Catholics among us?
GRAPH #20
"The news. I don’t watch it and I don’t read it."
has exactly the opposite effect. At best, it only helps us think we know things. Doubtful knowledge. Or doubtable knowledge. Which is a hell of a lot worse because that makes us want to hurry up and make a whole bunch of other people think they know it, too. --How Dead Do I Have to Be? « The Dipso Chronicles
YUMM!: 64 year-old tub of lard still 'fit for consumption'
"There is of course a slight lack of smell and taste," sniffed Frerk Feldhusen,
from the office of agriculture, food safety and fisheries in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. However, "all in all, given its level of freshness and its material composition, the product is assessed as satisfactory," Feldhusen said, adding it would stand up to today's definition of being fit for the dinner table. --PhotoBlog -
And then he said, with a straight face, "An Economy Built to Last."
He's going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he's just made up, "the economy built to last." It won't last long, but long enough. You'd think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama's crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.... A speech that flopped among Washington's policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why. --Henninger: Obama's Maddening, Winning Speech - WSJ.com
Lest We Forget What Day It Is
Looking Ahead to the Election Coverage of 2048
of most working families that they have been forced to switch to chicken, it is time that our opponents stopped dodging the issues and took a serious look at the economic consequences of their policies,” Bashar Mohammed Hussein Al-Hamdani, said during a campaign stop at a HalalBurger in Peoria, Illinois. -- by Daniel Greenfield
'Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine
sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company's home page. Workers said that when the machine ground to a halt at approximately 11:30 a.m., Evers reached inside to dislodge a particularly thoughtful 700-word Christian Science Monitor essay on the unrest in Syria that had become jammed. Apparently unprepared for the aggregator mechanism's quick restart, Evers was gruesomely dismembered by its rapidly spinning blades, which soaked the room in blood and unprocessed news content. -- America's Finest News Source
Mickey Kaus is sure, really sure, that President Zebra is smart, really smart
accepting the choices presented by his aides, never reaching outside them through unconventional channels or reaching unconventional thinkers, never throwing over the framework with which he is presented. .... He’s asked to check a box saying whether he wants to fund his “child nutrition agenda” out of the money for community colleges. … He’s asked about including medical malpractice reform in his health care bill, and writes (“in his characteristicaly cautious and reasonable style”) that “we should explore it.” … He’s presented a plan for a watered-down tax on multinationals or a very watered down tax. He writes “worth discussing.” --What Does Barack Obama Do All Day ? New Yorker | The Daily Caller
“The Colonels lady and Rosy O’Grady are sisters under the skin.”
Cheek implants and fillers were originally designed to offset the ravages of age, when the cheeks can lose subcutaneous fat and droop. But now even the young have them, especially if in the public eye, and the additions are so noticeable and generally odd-looking that they give their bearers an alien yet almost-familial resemblance to each other.
The great mystery of memory is how it endures.
The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as if our remembered past can outlast the brain itself.
From Furious to Tedious in Under 24 Hours
"Harry Truman, late in life, caught his wife, Bess, burning their letters to each other. "
- "The moon in September was special and the war kept going."
- The Wind in the Heights
- What I Saw: Notes Made on September 11, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights
- The Missing
- September 10, 2001: "Make no mistake, it's not revenge he's after. It's a reckonin'."
- "Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13
- The Marlboro Marine: 2004 and Today
- Time to Update an Old Proverb
- The Religion of Peace at Work Making Converts: These the Savages That The Administration is Pursuing a Truce With In Afghanistan
- Just a Couple of Rollicking Seattle Terrorists Called "Joe" and "Fred"
- On the Most Ancient Virus to Infect the Soul
- Civil War of Europe vs Islam Looming?
- Religion of "Blow Everyone to Pieces" making converts in Moscow
- A Mosque You Say? Images Some May Have Forgotten from September, 2001
- Toying with Genocide: The "Unthinkable" Can and Is Being Thought
- The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: Sleepwalking
- The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: The Event
- Killing New York: What It Would Take, A Simple Scenario
- And Charlie Wilson's War Goes On
- New World Trade Center Images Released Today: Just In Case You Like to Forget