Conservative Propaganda

Our Saudi Allies

2010-10-13T04:15:00.009-05:00

Patrick Notestine in "Paramedic to the Prince" on Saudi support for terrorism, pp 294-295:

A metaweh wrote on a popular Islamic web-site, "I'd like to say that the overwhelming majority of my fellow Saudis totally condemn terrorism. Sadly that is just not true. The majority applaud any action that discomforts the royal family whom we perceive to be unreliable in religious terms, and to be too friendly with the US. So we support any action against them, regardless of who dies. And I see this support for terrorists all around me, in overt celebrations, the smiling jokes among friends and the victory fist punched in the air."

Notestine describes his introduction to the true nature of Islam, pp 1-3:

I was working in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, in my office at the King Faisal Hospital, where I managed the ambulance service. It was late afternoon, on a Tuesday, in September 2001. I got a call from a South African guy who works in the military
hospital there. He told me one of the World Trade Center towers caved in, and they blew up the Pentagon.
"Huh, ri-ight."
"No," he said, "I swear to God."

I put down the phone, and ran into the office of the Assistant Director of the hospital, right across the corridor.
"What's going on?
What's the matter?" Short fellow, dyed black hair, a real slimeball. I correctly
suspect that his job is way beyond him.
I told him, "Something bad's happenning."
I ran to his TV.
"You got CNN. Turn on CNN."
We sit close and watch it. I'm from California and he's from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Guys start filtering in behind us through the open door. All the Saudi management, a few in western suits, but mostly in the long white thobe and red checkered ghutra. On the screen there's the New York skyline, sparkling white and blue and sunny, with a vast dark cloud rising from Lower Manhattan. They're leaning against the filing cabinets, and hunched over the backs of chairs, riveted, silent.

I look up at them, the Head of Personnel, several men from the finance department, and the rest of them, and the second plane is coming in. Live. You have never seen such broad smiles. They were joyous. It was wow, man, HIT IT. Nobody said anything.

Well, the aftershock lasted a couple hours, with everyone shaking their heads and bemoaning the carnage, and then nearly all of them left. I have a habit of saying what's on my mind.

"Salman," I said to my friend, his name's Salman Al Dubair, "do you realize, when that second plane hit the tower, how you and Ali Bougesh were standing there grinning? It means you're happy."

"Oh no," he said.
"We're always smiling. It's a terrible thing."

Not long afterwards Prince Naif, the Minister of the Interior and Information, explained publicly that this dreadful event had been a Jewish-American conspiracy. To single out the Saudi passengers on those planes at such short notice, as the FBI had done, was ludicrous; every one of them had been a harmless student or tourist. In the Jewish section of New York on that day, on the other hand, the Jewish community had been dancing in the streets. Not a single Jew had been killed in the World Trade Center, because they all had been warned to stay away. Four hundred Muslims had died in this conspiracy to incite hatred of Islam.
George Bush talking about a crusade really pissed them off. After that most Saudis believed that the CIA, or the FBI, or George Bush personally in collusion with Israel, was responsble for 9/11. It is the conventional wisdom among Saudis to this day, even highly educated ones.

I was talking to a smart, rich Saudi I know, who was complaining that religious education in Saudi Arabia puts a brake on scientific development. You couldn't get the students to think, he said, because they'd been taught to view the world from a religious perspective and never to ask awkward questions. The people in charge didn't want people to think they wanted a continuance of the status quo. Then 9/11 came up, as it always did for a few weeks afterwards, and he went on to tell me how exultant he'd felt. He and his friends had watched the whole thing and cheered.

"Because we hate Americans," he said complacently.
"But not the people, of course," I said. "It's like us in the Gulf, we were against the
regime, we didn't hate the people."
"No, the people, too," he said. "We hate all Americans."
He looked right into my wide blue eyes as he said it.

The Oil Shortage

2010-10-13T03:48:00.003-05:00

George Will on the history of predictions of oil shortages:

"In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world’s petroleum reserves would last 13 years. Oil fueled a global war and the postwar boom, and in 1951 Interior said the world had … 13 years of proven reserves. In 1970, proven reserves were estimated at 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion. In 1977, Jimmy Carter said mankind could “use up” all the world’s proven reserves “by the end of the next decade.” Since then, the world has consumed three times more oil than was in the proven reserves."

Sep 11 Eyewitness at Ground Zero Mosque Site

2010-10-03T13:31:00.004-05:00

Marine veteran Peter Parente, above, was part of the crew that recovered what looks like one of the main landing gear from United Airlines Flight 175 from the then Burlington Coat Factory, now the proposed Ground Zero Mosque. The gear crashed through the roof down through a couple floors to be caught halfway through the third floor. Parente said it was "bone-chilling" to see that gear hanging there. The building had just been renovated and was full of inventory, which was substantially destroyed. The photo above shows him with the strut in a van carting it away to the FBI. You can listen to him describe that day in a radio interview here, (13:16).

The liberals claim that the location for the mosque is not ground zero. The mosque developer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf claims it is not hallowed ground because its neighborhood includes strip clubs and betting parlors.

Parente says, “That is 100% Ground Zero. It was Ground Zero that day and its still Ground Zero today. There was death in the air; I could smell it, I could taste it inside that building.”

No Country For Old Men

2010-10-02T11:59:00.005-05:00

I've been fascinated by the Coen brothers movie, "No Country For Old Men," watching it over and over, five times now. Then I got the book by Cormac McCarthy, which was even better and filled in more details. I've been trying to figure out what it means with partial success. The themes I see are free will versus fatalism, which leads to the larger clash of civilization versus barbarism.

The fatalism is illustrated by the antagonist, Anton Chigurh, in his use of a coin toss to determine whether or not to kill his victims. He has no passion invested in killing them but believes it is a matter of chance whether they live or die, just as it was chance that brought him to them. Nor does Chigurh have any moral qualms about killing. It's just part of his job, neither good nor evil, just something to be done. Carson Wells and Carla Jean Moss both tell Chigurh that he doesn't need to do this, to kill them. Chigurh rejects the idea that he has any say in the matter.

Chigurh first tosses the coin when he encounters the gas station proprietor who notices the Dallas plates on his car. He leaves it to the coin toss to decide whether he should eliminate this witness. When the toss lets the man live, he walks away unperturbed. It was the man's fate to live, not Chigurh's decision, as Chigurh sees it.

Carla Jean Moss refuses to play Chigurh's game, calling the toss, by saying that "the coin ain't got no say." In other words, the coin has no moral agency. It is Chirgurh's decision to kill her or spare her, not the coin's. Carla Jean represents free will. Chigurh, fatalism.

Carson Wells and Carla Jean Moss both tell Chigurh that he doesn't need to do this, to kill them. Chigurh rejects the idea that he has any choice in the matter, that he has any moral agency. Anton Chigurh is the coin.

Barbarism is the absence of moral agency, the Hobbesian state of nature, which is "the state of men without civil society (which state may be called the state of nature) is nothing but a war of all against all; and that in that war, all have a right to all things." In this amoral war, men pursue their aims without limit, recognizing no moral boundaries. Chigurh is an emissary of that Hobbesian state of men, of barbarism. That barbarism was the natural state of humans for a million years until they organized themselves into civilizations in the last few millennia, a barbarism that naturally re-emerges when civilization relents or retreats.

That retreat of civilization is what Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talks about with the El Paso Sheriff, that it all begins to fall apart when kids lose their manners. Sheriff Bell is a tragic figure in this story because ultimately he joins that retreat by quitting law enforcement in the face of rampant barbarism represented by the insanely violent drug trade.

Tom Bell feels like a fraud. He was a soldier, a hero of WWII, where he fought off an attack of Germans single-handedly, winning a Bronze Star. His guilty secret is that when night fell, he abandoned his position and slunk back to his own lines, leaving his dead friends behind. He was sure that, in the same situation, his father, a veteran of WWI, would have stayed and fought to the death.

His family had a tradition of standing up to barbarism. His Uncle Max was gunned down on his own porch, shot in his doorway by a pack of Indians in 1909, as he was going for his shotgun. His Uncle Ellis was shot by a criminal and confined to a wheelchair. They all faced down the barbarians without relent nor retreat. Tom Bell did not live up to their standard and feels himself a lesser man for it. Hence his dreams.

In the first dream Tom Bell says he and his father were in town, his father gave him some money, and he lost it. The town represents the civilization his forefathers built. The money represents his cultural inheritance. He lost it by surrendering to the barbarians.

The second dream is set outside the city in the wilderness. His father passes him in the dark on horseback, carrying fire to make the next campsite out ahead. The camp he will make in the dark wilderness is civilization. The fire he carries is his code of morality, without which there is no civilization. That campsite, that civilization, that moral code is a benchmark Ed Tom never reaches. He wakes from that dream short of that ideal set by his father. He's haunted by his shortcomings, by not measuring up to his father.

When Ed Tom confronts the unrestrained intelligent evil of Anton Chigurh and the chorus of mindlessly violent Mexican drug dealers, he feels overmatched. To defeat them, he feels that he would have to abandon his morality, to become evil to conquer evil, to "put your soul at hazard," something he's unwilling to do, a moral boundary he will not cross.

Divide & Conquer Muslims from Islamists

2010-09-23T18:15:00.004-05:00

Yousef H. Aboul-Enein was born in Mississippi, but grew up in Saudi Arabia. He joined the US Navy Medical Service Corps, rose to Commander (Lt Col), and is now special advisor on Islamic militancy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. In his new book, "Miltant Islamist Ideology", Aboul-Enein divides Muslim world into three groups: Muslims, Islamists, and Militant Islamists:

"Militant Islamist" Aboul-Enein defines as "a group or individual advocating Islamist ideological goals, principally by violent means." Islamists are a group who advocate "Islam as a political as well as religious system.

Chief Islamist objectives include implementing sharia (Islamic) law "as the basis of all statutory issues." Islam is "the religious faith of Muslims, involving ... belief in Allah as the sole deity and in Muhammad as his prophet."

Militant Islamist ideology he condemns as a vicious fraud, for it "is composed of fragmented pieces of Islam ... they are recombined out of context to make up the bulwark of Militant Islamist ideology, which is not the religion of Islam." Militant Islamist ideology "seeks to establish a totalitarian state steeped in the language, symbols and narrowly selective aspects of Islam."

Aboul-Enein says faithful Muslims play a central role in defeating Militant Islamism, arguably the key role.

"Unlike communism," he writes, "against which free enterprise and democracy were used as ideological counterweights, Militant Islamist ideology can be opposed among the Muslim masses only by Islamic counter-argumentation. We cannot contain Militant Islamist ideology but only work to marginalize, de-popularize, and erode its influence and mass appeal by identifying it as different from Islam or even from Islamist political groups."

It's a clever argument and strategy but I'm not convinced that most ordinary Muslims aren't Islamists at heart.

Don't Set Me Free, GI Joe!

2009-01-26T02:04:00.005-05:00

Iraqi prisoners are refusing to leave prison because they want to finish their studies there. About twenty-three thousand adults and juveniles are held in two jails, Camp Cropper at Baghdad International Airport and Camp Bucca at Basr. Not only are prisoners demanding to be kept behind bars until they graduate, their parents are begging the jails to let the siblings of the prisoners be locked up with them so they can go to school, too.

Of the six thousand prisoners released from the camps since last September, only 12 have been recaptured, a recidivism rate of 0.02%, 1 in 500.

Male Bashing

2009-01-15T13:45:00.005-05:00

The late Michael Crichton on the war between the sexes in "Men's Hearts":

Fault-finding through male stereotyping has some unpleasant aspects that should be mentioned. The first is this: if you can adopt the position that you're inherently skilled in some aspect of relationship say, intimacy and the other person is inherently deficient, then you have an unbeatable position of power. The other person is always on the defensive. He will always have his hands full trying to prove he isn't the way you say he is. This is a control dynamic.
The second is this: if both men and women have trouble expressing real intimacy, then both men and women experience tension in this area. A convenient way to get rid of that tension is to blame it on the other person. Everything would be fine if he'd just talk, or listen, or make a commitment. This is a scapegoat dynamic.
The third is this: if you treat another person as a stereotype, he will feel it, and sooner or later he will pay you back. This is a revenge dynamic.
The fourth is this: if you treat another person as a stereotype, you will miss a great deal of delight and richness in your association with him. This is a tragic dynamic.

Sep 11 Terrorist Remains Rejected By Families

2009-01-04T01:53:00.004-05:00

Seven years after the September 11 suicide skyjackings by Muslim terrorists, 1,126 (41%) of the 2,751 victims from the World Trade Center and five individuals from the Pentagon have not been identified. Despite extensive DNA analysis of all the recovered remains, no identifiable part of them has been found.

All four of the terrorists who hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, have been identified by their remains. Two more terrorists from the World Trade Center jets have been identified. Between them all, they amount to only 24 pounds of bone and flesh. The families of the terrorists refused to cooperate in contributing DNA, so it was collected from items in their hotel rooms.

From Newsweek:

So far none of the hijackers' families have come forward to request the remains. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at UCLA and an authority on Islamic law, says he would be surprised if they did: "I've heard many times in the Muslim community that to claim and bury a body of one of the hijackers is to admit or accept that it was indeed those hijackers who committed 9/11."

Reached by NEWSWEEK, one relative of Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker believed to have piloted Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field, expressed just this kind of ambivalence. "Of course we want to get back his remains, but we are not planning to make any contact before things get clarified," said the relative, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. He couldn't bring himself to admit that Jarrah had carried out the atrocities. "Maybe he participated," he says. "Maybe there is something we don't know." But then he paused. Perhaps, he conceded, his relative was indeed involved and he himself was just "engaging in wishful thinking." Admitting it outright, Professor El Fadl says, would run counter to the prevalent belief in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that the attacks were actually an anti-Arab conspiracy perpetrated by the Bush administration. If he were related to one of the hijackers, he says, "I'd be scared for the harm that might befall the rest of my family by the Saudi or Egyptian government if I showed an interest," he says. "There is an environment of fear in countries like Saudi Arabia; it's hard to describe. The culture of terror is suffocating."

I'd like to see the charred remains displayed as artifacts in the September 11 museum which will surely be built one day, each set bearing the name and country of the terrorist.

The Religion of Environmentalism

2009-01-04T00:31:00.003-05:00

Michael Crichton passed away unexpectedly in Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 4, 2008. Crichton was a story teller who gave us many good science-based tales like "Jurassic Park" and "Andromeda Strain" and created the TV show "ER". He also had a lot to say about environmentalism:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. ...

We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s.

Crichton said much more, which you should read by clicking on this link.

Death To Juice!

2008-12-31T12:11:00.005-05:00

The photo above depicts Muslims last Sunday mounting a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Manhattan. The radical Islamic nutcases think it's unfair for Israel to attack targets in Gaza in retaliation for thousands of rockets shot from there by Hamas into Israel.

But this hatred for Zionist juice seems over the top to me. Who's behind THAT? Maybe it's some sort of anti-semitic plot by Starbucks, eh? Or maybe those Red Bull bastards peddling their energy drinks. Maybe even the French vintners, eh? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it was all some sort of Pinot Noir conspiracy.

Anyway, it reminds me of the famous poem by Pastor Martin Teetotaller:

In Palestine, they came first for the juice drinkers,
And I didn’t speak up because I didn’t drink juice;
And then they came for the tea drinkers,
And I didn’t speak up because I didn’t drink tea;
And then they came for the alcoholics,
And I didn’t speak up because I didn’t drink alcohol;
And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left in the bar but us Diet Coke drinkers.

You're not safe, not even if you're drinking lemonade.

Shin Dong-Hyuk

2008-12-12T18:45:00.002-05:00

Shin Dong-Hyuk was born in Camp Number 14, fifty-five miles north of the North Korean capital of Pyong Yang, one of the Kimg Jong Il's archipelago of gulags, where the political prisoners tend pigs, tan leather, gather firewood and work in the in mines until they die or are executed, which ever comes first.

Shin's mother was given by the camp to another prisoner for his good work as a mechanic. Shin lived with her until he was twelve, when he was separated to live with the other boys, per camp policy. He feels no attachment to her. Says Shin, "She never hugged me, never."

Food was scarce. A young girl found with five grains of wheat in her pocket was beaten to death. Shin found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve, and ate them. "That was my lucky day," he writes.

The camp was savage. His cousin was raped by prison guards. His mother offered herself to the guards to survive. Public executions were common. The tip of Shin's middle finger was cut off at the knuckle to punish him for dropping a sewing machine. Shin writes, "I didn't think the world I lived in was wrong. I was born to it."

One day in 1995 when he was 14, Shin was dragged into interrogation for two days about his mother's escape plot. He knew nothing of it, having not seen his mother for two years. His interrogators revealed to him why he was in prison. Two of his uncles had sided with South Korea during the Korean War forty years earlier and fled south. His father was guilty because he was their brother. Shin was guilty because he was his son. Shin accepted that, "I thought it was only natural that I pay for my parents' sins with hard labor."

When Shin didn't tell them what he didn't know, he was hung upside down by ropes from the ceiling over a charcoal fire. To stop him from writhing, the guards stuck a hook in his gut. Shin passed out.

Shin was thrown into a cell with an older prisoner who gave him half his food ration and nursed him back to health. Finally, the guards fetched him from his cell where he was brought together with his father and marched to the public square where executions were carried out. He expected to be executed with his father. Instead, his mother was brought to the square and hung in front of him. His only brother was shot with her.

Shin: "I felt she deserved to die. I was full of anger for the torture that I went through. I still am angry at her."

Nine years later, Shin was paired up with an older prisoner who had seen the outside world beyond North Korea and told him about it. He taught Shin the first song he had ever heard. When the older prisoner plotted an escape, Shin went along out of curiosity. When the older man got caught in the electrical fence on the perimeter, Shin stepped on him and took off running, eventually making it to South Korea in 2005 where he lives now in Seoul. He is the only prisoner to ever escape from a North Korean concentration camp.

Shin is a bit at sea in the free South Korea: "I never heard the word 'love' in the camp. I want to have a girlfriend, but I don't know how to get one. Two months ago, I found myself without any money. It suddenly occurred to me that I had to go out and support myself."

To tell his story, Shin wrote a book, "Escape to the Outside World," which is available in limited edition in Korean only.

Shin, at 26 years of age, has just celebrated his birthday for the first time, which was a very moving event for him, bringing him a discovery, "I realize you really need a family... I have recently discovered that I am lonely."

Northwest Airlines Captain Thomas B. Cook

2008-12-12T10:48:00.001-05:00

The Oberoi Hotel at Nariman Point, Mumbai, India

Hank, an old room-mate from the Air Force Academy who is now an airline captain, sent me this account of the Mumbai attacks from a Northwest Airlines (NWA) pilot who was caught in the Oberoi by the terrorists. These photos were not taken by the captain, but were snatched by me off the Internet to illustrate the story. F/A means Flight Attendant:

To all my friends and relatives, It has been a week since F/A Daryl Jones and I were released from the Trident/Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, India.

First, a sincere and heartfelt "Thank you" to all for keeping us in your thoughts and prayers. Believe me when I say, "we needed them!" Here's my story: Timeline starts Wednesday night 26 NOV (all times local BOM)

2100: Returned alone from dinner(luckily not Leopold's). Headed down to 10th floor aircrew lounge to use the computer. Made a couple of calls to the USA using Skype connection.

2155: Returned to room #1510 and realized I had missed my 2150 wake- up call. Noticed message light NOT flashing. Almost immediately heard what sounded like loud fireworks coming from the street level. My room faced the water. Peaking outside, I saw no unusual activity. The noises continued. I started to think that the cadence was unusual and not really like fireworks.

2205: I then decided to call reception to find out if the flight was operating on time---no answer at the front desk. I then called the hotel operator---no answer! At this point I started to think "terrorist attack" The hotel is extremely customer oriented and they normally pick up the phone on the first ring.

A normal view from a room at the Oberoi Hotel
2210: Looked out the window to see if there was indeed any panic in the street. Everything appeared normal. Nobody running around etc. I start to think that my imagination was getting the best of me. Surely if there were terrorists shooting up the lobby that the people walking around outside the hotel would be running around seeking shelter. At this point I made an unfortunate and almost fatal tactical error. I decided to go down to the lobby to get some first hand info on our pick-up time.

The lobby of the Oberoi

2212: Still wearing jeans and a golf shirt, I jump into the elevator. As I descended toward the lobby I had a thought. "If there are terrorists in the hotel-maybe I should stand closer to the side(by the buttons)of elevator car. Don't want to give the bastards too easy a target!

Elevator doors open and I see a pool of blood directly in front of me. I hear screaming and moaning I immediately realize that my worst fears have come to fruition. I press the button to close the doors and simultaneously look up past the blood and see a guy, who has just noticed me, holding an AK-47. He turned toward me and fired just as the doors were closing. If the doors had not closed as quickly as they did I'm sure I would have been toast.

2215: Ran like lightening back to my room and locked myself in. At this point it took a few minutes to "get it together". Had to really concentrate on exactly what course to take. With all my lights off, I again peaked out between the curtains.

2220: While looking out side, I heard the first of many loud explosions and saw pieces of the hotel falling into the street below. This one sounded like it came from just to my left and above. (in retrospect, I believe some of these bombs were planted days earlier by sleeper cell employees) Glad they hadn't chosen my room!!

2230: "Breaking News" on the attacks was just starting to hit the TV airways when they reported that my hotel was on fire. Not surprising considering all of the explosions. I started to feel very helpless. I faced an unenviable quandary, if I left he room I'd probably be shot, but remaining in burning hotel was almost as unappealing.

2245: Made contact with Northwest Airlines SOC in Minneapolis. Fortunately, they were in contact with my 2 First Officers who were outside the hotel(another story). They were able to conclude that the Trident(my) side of the hotel was not on fire. Amidst all this horror, a little good news goes a long way.

The terrorists occupied various section of the Oberoi/Trident Hotel complex for about the next 37 hours. I won't go into the hostage taking and other atrocities. These were all well reported by the various news outlets throughout the Thanksgiving holiday. Eventually our TV, internet and hot water were cut off. The hotel phone continued to work and I was able to keep in contact with NWA and my family. I was also in contact with Daryl who was on the 23rd floor. As time slowly dragged on, I found myself going through periods of hope and despair. I was hopeful when the sun finally came up and I could see Indian soldiers on the sidewalk below. Though intermittent explosions could be heard, I continued to hope for some good news from NWA but the status quo prevailed. "Hotel not secure--do not move" I started feeling badly for the men and women with whom I spoke. I knew that they wanted desperately to give me some good news. The SOC, Chief Pilot (thanx OC) and NWA security did a super job keeping us informed as best they could. Information was at a premium. About mid-afternoon on Thursday I was told that our evacuation would happen within the hour. This was a real high point. Sadly, no one came. And when the sun started to set I began to think I'd never get out. Soon after, I found out the the last NWA A330 out of town had just departed for AMS--without us. A very sinking feeling.

Halfway through the night I heard a door open in the hallway. Using my peep hole, I could see people across the hall carefully sticking their heads out of the room. They were Lufthansa flight attendants. I was really glad to find that I was not completely alone. I was told that their Purser was on the 17th floor and had informed them that Lufthansa was sending an A319 rescue aircraft. This was very uplifting news. I called Daryl to tell him that we had a "for sure" ride out of town.

The next morning at about 11:00 we were evacuated by the Indian Army. The walk through the lobby was sobering. Looked like a war zone. Details later(preferably at the Belgique). After out-processing, we, along with Lufthansa and Air France crews were bussed to a hotel near the airport. After a hot shower and some lunch, we were boarding the Lufthansa A319. (about 1800 Fri eve)

I can't thank Lufthansa enough. They sent their head flight surgeon, psychologists and all crew members had been trained in Critical Incident Stress Management. We could lean a lot from them.

We were then met in FRA by Lars Reuter and Bob Polak from AMS. They were awesome. Met us in the middle of the night, had our hotel accommodations and follow-on travel arranged. Again, "Thank you Lufthansa" for the first class seat to BOS.

In BOS, I was surprisingly met at the aircraft door(upstream of customs!!) by my family and my dear friend, BOS manager Tommy Neylon. Tommy even had the State Police watching our cars at the curb-right in front Terminal E(Tommy knows everybody!!!)

I'll save all my lessons learned captain stuff for a different audience.

Thank You to all, Cheers-Capt. Thomas B. Cook

Gitmo's Greatest Hits

2008-12-11T20:05:00.001-05:00

1. Enter Sandman – Metallica
2. Bodies – Drowning Pool
3. Shoot to Thrill – AC/DC
4. Hell's Bells – AC/DC
5. I Love You, from the Barney And Friends children's TV show
6. Born In The USA– Bruce Springsteen
7. We Are The Champions – Queen
8. Babylon – David Gray
9. White America – Eminem
10. Sesame Street – theme from the children's TV show

These ten songs are being used to torture terrorists at Gitmo and in CIA clandestine prisons.

Binyam Mohammed, who was planning to bomb high-rise apartment buildings in America with dirty bombs, claims he was a victim of such music torture at the CIA "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan, where his fellow terrorists, unable to endure it, banged their heads on the walls to make it stop: "There was loud music, (Eminem's] Slim Shady and Dr Dre for 20 days. I heard this non-stop over and over ... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night for the months before I left. Plenty lost their minds ... To lose your sight or lose your mind. While having your eyes gouged out would be horrendous, there is little doubt which you would choose."

Sometimes the CIA fiends would play Barney the Purple Dinosaur singing for days his happy song:

"I love you, You love me
We're a happy family
With a great big hug
And a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me, too?

"I love you, You love me
We're best friends like best friends should be
With a great big hug
And a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me, too?"

Over and over and over until the Al Qaeda bastards cracked.

Singer-songwriter David Gray, whose song, Babylon, was used to break terrorists, is outraged: "What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring. That's torture. It doesn't matter what the music is – it could be Tchaikovsky's finest, or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."

Likewise, Tom Morello, a guitarist formerly with Rage Against the Machine, was horrified to find his songs were used as an "enhanced interrogation technique" instead of waterboarding.

The success of the rock music torture is undeniable. It is said that the would be 20th skyjacker Mohammed al Qahtani was forced to confess by pop hits by Christina Aguilera. For some patriotic rock stars, use of their songs to fight terrorists is a point of pride. Bassist Stevie Benton of the group Drowning Pool brags that their song, "Bodies," is used as a weapon by interrogators: "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."

The Global Warming Fraud

2008-12-11T06:52:00.002-05:00

While demagogue Al Gore declares the debate over and wacky-do greenies claim unanimous scientific consensus on global warming, some six hundred fifty scientists have not gotten the word that anthropogenic global warming is their gospel. They are currently challenging the UN's orthodoxy on global warming at a conference going on now in Poland. The opinions of the dissenters is featured in a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report:

Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever:
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.”

Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson:
"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.”

UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, PhD environmental physical chemist:
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”

Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet:
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.”

Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico:
The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.”

U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA:
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”

Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ:
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.”

Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs:
“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet.”

Geologist Dr. David Gee, Uppsala University, Sweden:
“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?"

Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee:
“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.”

Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh:
“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.”

Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal:
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.”

Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research, Chubu University, Japan:
“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.”

Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, University of La Plata:
“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.”

Child 44

2008-12-10T21:08:00.001-05:00

I don't read many novels but "Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith was something else, that rare novel that just grabs you by the lapels and forces you to read on. What the author, Tom Rob Smith, has done is remarkable, taking you back into the crazy, paranoid, conspiratorial, vicious and Kafkaesque world of Stalin's Soviet Union in a way only fiction could. Smith's protagonist, Leo Demidov of the secret police, discovers to his amazement that crime exists in the Soviet Union where communism has purportedly eliminated all the capitalist conditions that lead to crime. From there, it's one wild ride through Stalin's deadly and psychotic police state. The ending is lame but the journey makes it all worthwhile. I read it in a weekend, it was that good.

Moshe Holtzberg

2008-12-05T09:50:00.001-05:00

Moshe Holtzberg, aged two, was with his parents, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg (see below), in the Nariman House in Mumbai, India when two Muslim terrorists attacked their house, part of the larger attack that included the train station and Taj Mahal Hotel. Moshe is pictured above at his parents memorial. Gavriel was 29, Rivka 28.

Gavriel was a rabbi with the Chabad-Lubavitch Movement who had come to the Chabad center in 2003 to run a synagogue and Torah classes to serve the small Jewish community in Mumbai. That small presence was too much for the Muslims who took the Holtzbergs and six other people hostage and then executed them. An Indian doctor who examined the bodies said they were tortured. Rivka was several months pregnant.

Sandra Samuel, the Holtzberg's nanny, locked herself into a room on the first floor when the Muslim gunmen came, escaping their notice. She could hear Rivka screaming from the second floor, "Sandra help!" Then it stopped.

That night Indian commandoes stormed the six story building from the air and fought it out with the two Muslims, who were high on amphetamines and cocaine. The next morning, it was quiet. Sandra could hear the baby crying.

Sandra unbolted the door and crept upstairs to a gory scene (above). She found Moshe alive next to his dead parents and two guests, soaked in their blood. The two terrorists were up on the roof. She snatched Moshe up and ran outside. Sandra has since flown to Israel with Moshe to give him to his grandparents. His parents were buried Tuesday on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.

The terrorists were from Pakistan, from the poor and rural Punjab, to be exact. It's doubtful that any of them had ever met a Jew before they encountered the Holtzbergs. Everything they knew about Jews they heard from the radical mullahs who indoctrinated them to hate them.

Hopefully, Moshe will have no memory of his parents deaths. His only memories are likely to be abstract ones, like this image of him and his Dad.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where the Muslim terrorists were equipped and trained, the local state-run television claimed that the terror plot was neither Muslim nor Pakistani in origin, but the act of Western Zionists, Hindu Zionists, Israelis, and Mossad.

Some Muslims celebrated the slaughter, like Bilal from Britain:

"It was pleasantly refreshing to hear they targeted Chabad Lubavitch. Allah will destroy His enemies wherever they are in the world. You will know when the Muslims have ignited in an insurrection when there is blood on the streets of London and New York like there is blood on the streets of Fallujah (and Mumbai). There is nowhere they can hide from the wrath of Allah and His soldiers."

Martin Durkin

2008-11-25T08:04:00.000-05:00

Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle," is making a documentary series on the social history of Britain. He has a lot to say about welfare and its pernicious effects:

"The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine. ...

"Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened? ...

"The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading."

The Year Zero

2008-11-23T13:54:00.000-05:00

Israel is quietly preparing to go to war with Iran over the threat its atom bomb program presents. The Israelis are convinced, with good cause, that sanctions will fail, that only military action will work. They think that next year will be the Year Zero for making a decision because Iran will have enough nuclear fuel to make a Bomb by then.

Eran Lerman, former senior member of Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence, says, "The Iranian regime's need for a nuclear bomb is a reflection of the profound crisis in which it finds itself after almost 30 years in power. They promised the earth and the country is in disarray. The regime has failed to create or sustain stable social structures. So the last validated remnant of the Iranian revolution is to destroy Israel."

The Israelis had what amounted to a dress rehearsal for an Iran strike last September when they took out a nuclear reactor in Syria. Israel did not comment publicly on the strike, nor did Syria nor did anyone else. That told the Israelis that the Arab countries covertly supported the strike while they could not overtly support the Jewish state.

General Moshe "Boogie" Ya'alon, the Boogie Man, the former head of the Israeli Defence Forces, argues a war is necessary, not a raid, "Military intervention would not be one strike. It needs to be a sustained operation … Any military strike in Iran will be quietly applauded by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states. It is a misconception to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most important in the Middle-East. The Shiite-Sunni schism is much bigger, the Persian-Arab divide is bigger, the struggle between national regimes and jihadism is much bigger. And I can't imagine the US will want to share power in the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran."

While I understand the Israeli enthusiasm for eliminating a nuclear threat by the mad mullahs of Tehran, I see some practical problems for such a military action.

The first problem is targeting. The Iranians aren’t as dumb as the Iraqis, who put all their atom bomb eggs in one reactor at Osirak that could be taken out in one air strike. The Iranians have dispersed their atom bomb program. As I understand it, it is spread across hundreds of sites. Three hundred is the number I've read.

How do you get reliable intelligence about the location of these sites, the nature of their construction, and their relative importance in the program? You would need some recent high-level defectors from the program to provide reliable targeting data. For example, you need to know how they are constructed so as to use the correct type of bomb that will reliably neutralize the target.

The second problem is the massive size of the air campaign to strike these targets, once located. I’m reading three hundred sorties over three days. The Israeli Air Force has about four hundred fighters. If you sent them out in four ship flights, that's about a hundred targets each go. The second and third go's will lack the advantage of surprise. Of course, the IAF can not commit all its fighters to attack. It must keep a substantial number in reserve for defense. They just don't have enough fighters to pull this off.

The third problem is access. The direct route from Israel to Iran flies over Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Of course, to fly over Iraq the Israelis would need US permission and cooperation. We control that air space. For lots of reasons, that’s unlikely to happen.

The Saudis are our allies, at least on paper though not in fact, which means that theoretically we should not turn a blind eye to Israelis flying strike packages over Saudi Arabia. Blatantly disrespecting the Saudis (not that there is anything wrong with that) to help the Israelis wage war against fellow Muslims would stir up the Muslim and Wahhabi pot, maybe even bring it to a boil.

However, it’s within the realm of possibility that the duplicitous Saudis could strike a secret deal to allow their hated Jewish enemies to strike their hated Shia enemies in Iran. The Saudi princes could pose as surprised and outraged at the incursion, however pleased with the outcome. They’re good at lying like that and they hate the Shia more than the Jews.

While it is plausible to deny that a couple flights of Israeli jets masqueraded as an airliner to fly a sneak attack across your air space, it's not plausible to ignore hundreds of jets traversing your sky. You can hide an air raid but you can't hide an air campaign.

The fourth problem is the extreme range. It looks to me to be about 1000 miles, at least, as the crow flies from Israel to the centrifuge facility at Natanz, aka the Esfahan enrichment facility. Of course, the mission will be longer than this when you allow for an indirect route to targets deep inside Iran.

The F-15E Strike Eagle has a range of 2,400 miles (3,840 kilometers) ferry range with conformal fuel tanks and three external fuel tanks. However, that’s FERRY range, not carrying heavy bombs. I’m guessing that adding a couple 2000 pound laser-guided bombs would reduce the range of the F-15Es to less than the distance to their targets. It seems obvious that these fighters would need to be air-refueled, optimally just outside the Iranian border. The range problem is worse with Israel’s 324 F-16s and 50 F-4Es.

Israel only has five tankers, B707 airframes roughly similar to the KC-135. If each tanker supported a flight of four fighters, that’s only twenty fighters Israel could project to Iran. Again, Israel would need US tanker support to fuel its strike force.

The bottom line is that Israel can not successfully take out the Iranian atom bomb program by itself, so the Israeli threat is an idle one. Israel can only succeed with help from the US. However, if we must strike Iran, Israeli help is a political handicap in our foreign relations with the bigoted Middle Eastern and European states. If we must strike Iran, we must leave Israel out of it.

We have better weapons to strike Iran than Israel. Our Stealth aircraft such as the B-2 and F-22 can traverse Iranian airspace with little fear from the 1970s-era technology Iranian fields to defend itself. And who knows what wing of secret srike aircraft we have stashed out in the mountains of Nevada, ready to make its combat debut? Our B-1s, F-15Es, and F-16s would fly over the smoking remains of the Iranian defenses.

We are also better positioned to strike Iran, with air bases in the neighboring countries of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even though I am an advocate of air power, the gains it makes are transient unless followed up by a ground campaign. Without a ground campaign, we’ve only temporarily set back the Iranian atom bomb.

I think we can stop Iranian aggression short of a war. Iran is economically fragile. Already, our financial measures have taken a toll on them. We can bring Iran to its knees without bloodshed by simply stopping it from shipping its oil and/or importing gasoline.

We can also lend support, carefully hidden, to Iran’s resistance. They could use money, training, communications equipment, et al to support their movement. Perhaps we can redirect the Iranian shaped charges we capture in Iraq back into the hands of the Iranian resistance. Let the mullahs fear the IEDs they export to harm the Great Satan.

Rather than a hard strategy of military action that would polarize Iranians against us, we might profit more by pursuing a soft strategy of support for the disaffected Iranians who want to topple the mullahs and restore ties with America. Right now, the low price of oil may do more to slow down the Iranian nuke program than an air campaign.

Obama, the peace candidate, may well have to fight a conventional war to avoid a nuclear war.

The Value of Gitmo

2008-11-23T11:01:00.000-05:00

Presidential Candidate Obama thundered on the campaign trail about how he would close Gitmo as soon as he became president. He may change his mind as President because presidents can not afford to be ignorant and irresponsible as candidates for president can be. Of the 800+ prisoners tossed into Gitmo, most have been cut loose. Some were innocent, some were transferred back to their home countries, and some were small fish not worth holding. There are about 250 remaining, who are the worst of the worse.

Obama is about to discover, doubtless to his surprise, that the Bush approached worked, stopping follow-on attacks on the USA by vigorous interrogation of terrorist chieftains. It's entirely likely that Obama will leave Gitmo substantially alone, if not to defend America then to defend his own reputation against letting terrorists go who will kill Americans. Again.

Thomas Joscelyn lays it out in "Clear and Present Danger" in the Weekly Standard:

"For example, in his autobiography, At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet explained that KSM's interrogation led to the arrest of an entire cell that was plotting destruction. The same day KSM was detained in 2003, another terrorist named Majid Khan was picked up. During his interrogation, KSM admitted that Khan had recently passed along $50,000 to operatives working for al Qaeda's chieftain in Southeast Asia, a man known as Hambali. When interrogators confronted Khan with KSM's revelation, Khan confirmed it and said that he gave the money to an agent of Hambali named Zubair. Khan gave his interrogators Zubair's telephone number. Shortly thereafter, Zubair was taken into custody and gave up information that led to the arrest of yet another operative nicknamed "Lilie." According to Tenet, Lilie then provided information that led to Hambali's arrest in Thailand.

"Khan, Hambali, Zubair, and Lilie are all high value detainees at Guantánamo. They were plotting the "second wave" of attacks on America when they were captured. According to the Guantánamo files, Zubair and Lilie were both chosen to be suicide hijackers in an al Qaeda attack on Los Angeles. They had also plotted against targets in Southeast Asia under the direction of Hambali. Hambali was responsible, in part, for planning the 2002 Bali bombings (killing more than 200 people) and a series of attacks on 30 churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve 2000 (killing 19).

"In addition to serving as an intermediary between KSM and the Hambali crew, Majid Khan was involved in other post-9/11 plots. Khan, who lived in Baltimore for years, was planning to smuggle explosives into the United States. He wanted to target gas stations and landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, and he recommended to KSM that a truck driver living in Ohio named Iyman Faris could help. Faris, who had trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, had begun preparations for these attacks. But within weeks of KSM's and Khan's capture, Faris was identified and arrested. Months later, Faris was convicted of providing material support to al Qaeda and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

"Another of Khan's accomplices, a Pakistani named Uzair Paracha, was also arrested just weeks after Khan and KSM. In late March 2003, authorities raided Uzair's apartment in Brooklyn. There they found a number of incriminating pieces of evidence linking Uzair to Khan. In 2005 Uzair was convicted, and in 2006 he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

"Uzair's father, Saifullah Paracha, is a current resident of Guantánamo. Although he has not been designated a high value detainee, he clearly consorted with terrorists. Saifullah is reportedly a multimillionaire who owns a Pakistani media company and a textile business, which exported goods to the United States. Al Qaeda wanted to use Saifullah's textile business to smuggle explosives into the United States. Saifullah also offered his media company's services to Osama bin Laden for the production of al Qaeda's propaganda.

"KSM and Khan were not the only high value detainees to give up crucial, life-saving details during their interrogations. In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah was captured at his safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet says that Zubaydah unwittingly gave up information that led to the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh on September 11, 2002. At the time, Binalshibh was plotting an attack on Heathrow Airport in London. At least several of the detainees at Guantánamo were captured along with Zubaydah at his safe house in 2002, and they too were involved in al Qaeda's post-9/11 plotting. For example, Zubaydah intended to use one of them in an attack on Israel.
"The greatest success of the Bush administration is that it stopped all of this, and more, from happening."

So, the question is whether Obama will deliver on his foolish campaign promise to close Gitmo and let the terrorists loose via the courts or will he sober up and realize these people are hellbent on killing more Americans? Obama has proven in the past to be averse to making risky decisions and agile at avoiding embarassments. It's just possible that Obama's fecklessness may play in favor of keeping terrorists locked up in Gitmo. Perhaps he will kick a couple loose through the courts to maintain the pretence of keeping his promise.

Seven Days In September

2008-09-13T05:01:00.001-05:00

"Seven Days In September" is a new documentary by SnagFilms about the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center from the street-level perspective of various photographers, professional and amateur, who happenned to be caught up in the event. Some of it you've seen, but some of it is fresh, never seen before. You can watch all 94 minutes of it online now by clicking on this.

Bassam Kossa

2008-08-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

Bassam Kossa makes the case for women's lib, and liberation in general, on Al-Jazeera television of all places. Kossa is Syrian actor who debates the issue with a nutball Islamist professor from Kuwait who rants on about not erasing his cultural values. Frankly, Islam could use a big eraser when it comes to promoting itself through terror and intimidation. It's amazing to watch the secular argument made so well in Qatar, deep in the Muslim world. Watch it here on the invaluable MEMRI.

What Iraq Would Look Like

2008-07-26T17:36:00.002-05:00

... if Obama had defeated the surge.

Senator McCain makes the case against Obama's defeatism in Powerline:

"Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama's failed.
"We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the "surge" was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops -- which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq.

Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn't test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn't matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.
"Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn't just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.
"And as our troops took the fight to the enemy, Senator Obama tried to cut off funding for them. He was one of only 14 senators to vote against the emergency funding in May 2007 that supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
...
"Three weeks after Senator Obama voted to deny funding for our troops in the field, General Ray Odierno launched the first major combat operations of the surge. Senator Obama declared defeat one month later: "My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now." His assessment was popular at the time. But it couldn't have been more wrong.
"By November 2007, the success of the surge was becoming apparent. Attacks on Coalition forces had dropped almost 60 percent from pre-surge levels. American casualties had fallen by more than half. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen by more than two-thirds. But Senator Obama ignored the new and encouraging reality. "Not only have we not seen improvements," he said, "but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there."
"If Senator Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi Army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically. Al Qaeda would have killed the Sunni sheikhs who had begun to cooperate with us, and the "Sunni Awakening" would have been strangled at birth. Al Qaeda fighters would have safe havens, from where they could train Iraqis and foreigners, and turn Iraq into a base for launching attacks on Americans elsewhere. Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been likely.
"Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. ...
"Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.
"Fortunately, Senator Obama failed, not our military. We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right. Violence in Iraq fell to such low levels for such a long time that Senator Obama, detecting the success he never believed possible, falsely claimed that he had always predicted it. ... In Iraq, we are no longer on the doorstep of defeat, but on the road to victory.
"Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice."

It takes a colossal arrogance and determination to see America defeated to go to Iraq and stare your Big Fat Mistake in the face and claim you were still right after all, as Obama did, and absurdly claim that the US military had nothing to do with the current success in Iraq, that the Sunni sheikhs just spontaneously generated the Anbar Awakening on their own. It's like claiming that the Normandy invasion in WWII was a waste of lives and money because the Germans surrendered on their own initiative.

Penn & Teller's Simple Message To Terrorists

2008-07-06T22:14:00.001-05:00

Penn & Teller give their simple message to the suicide skyjackers of September 11 in this video advocating new construction on the site of the World Trade Center, which you can watch here.

There is an emotional appeal to rebuilding the fallen World Trade Center even taller than before as a rebuke to the contemptible Islam which sought to knock them down. On the other hand, the World Trade Center was a bad idea, economically and socially, from the beginning. They cleared away a working neighborhood of businesses to make way for the WTC, which substituted a sterile plaza nobody used. It was the kind of gargantuan urban renewal project which Jane Jacobs rightfully argued was bad for the city. Ric Burns lays out the problems of the WTC in his excellent documentary, "New York."

They could never fill the WTC, either. Even at the end, many of its floors were empty. Worse yet, building so much unwanted and unneeded office space depressed the market in the entire neighborhood. Rather than stimulating the economy of lower Manhattan, the WTC depressed it. It's not clear that committing the same economic error twice would be a sound decision, when the only reward is the emotional satisfaction derived from thwarting the terrorists' goal. We should never be driven by what terrorists think. Instead of spending a couple billion dollars to reconstruct the World Trade Center to impress upon Islamist fanatics the futility of their attacks on America, that money would be better spent simply smashing our Islamist enemies like bugs where ever we find them.

Pork BBQ Signals Victory In Baghdad

2008-07-02T17:21:00.001-05:00

Bassim Dencha, 32, one of the last Christians left in Iraq and the co-owner of Baghdad's finest supermarket, "Al-Warda" on Karada Street, is now selling pork chops and bratwurst. Ham and ribs had been confined to the Green Zone until now by the depredations of the crazy-ass Muslim fundamentalists who attacked shops and their owners who sold pork products, forbidden by their backward religion. Now that the jihadis have been beaten down and driven away, the Baghdadis are lining up for their brats.

It's another miscalculation in a torrent of mistakes made by the dumb as dirt jihadis. When you make war on barbecue, you have no chance of winning. None. Barbecue conquers all.

Gallup Poll

2008-06-21T10:18:00.000-05:00

Gallup released the results of a poll taken in early June that measured confidence in sixteen public institutions. The military enjoyed the highest confidence of the public, with 71% confidence, while Congress enjoyed the least confidence with 12%. The military has had the highest public confidence since 1988, except for 1997 when it was edged out by small business. 1988 came after eight years of the Reagan build up of the military. Coincidence?

Oddly enough, confidence in all public institutions has declined since 2004, the year of the last presidential election.

The Taliban Layeha

2008-06-08T16:53:00.001-05:00

Mullah Omar, the "highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan," has laid down thirty rules for the Taliban. The Layeha, or "Book of Rules," was given to the thirty-three members of the Shura, the highest Taliban council, at the Taliban jamboree during Ramadan in 2006. The Taliban Layeha reveals a lot about the organization that enforces them with beatings or executions:

Layeha (book of rules) for the Mujahideen
From the highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan.
Every Mujahid must abide by the following rules:

1) A Taliban commander is permitted to extend an invitation to all Afghans who support infidels so that they may convert to the true Islam.

The Islamic tradition of jihad requires Muslims to invite infidels to convert to Islam first, before attacking. Once the infidels reject Islam, Muslims then have the right to attack them and kill them. Those infidels who survive must submit to Muslim rule or be killed.

2) We guarantee to any man who turns his back on infidels, personal security and the security of his possessions. But if he becomes involved in a dispute, or someone accuses him of something, he must submit to our judiciary.

No non-Muslim law is valid to the Taliban, since it is man-made law rather than based on the Koran.

3) Mujahideen who protect new Taliban recruits must inform their commander.

4) A convert to the Taliban, who does not behave loyally and becomes a traitor, forfeits our protection. He will be given no second chance.

Because apostates from Islam must die.

5) A Mujahid who kills a new Taliban recruit forfeits our protection and will be punished according to Islamic law.

6) If a Taliban fighter wants to move to another district, he is permitted to do so, but he must first acquire the permission of his group leader.

7) A Mujahid who takes a foreign infidel as prisoner with the consent of a group leader may not exchange him for other prisoners or money.

Sounds like many of the mujahideen are corrupt. They'd rather cash in their prisoners than win the jihad.

8) A provincial, district or regional commander may not sign a contract to work for a non-governmental organization or accept money from an NGO. The Shura (the highest Taliban council) alone may determine all dealings with NGOs.

Another example of the Taliban commanders being eager to cash in with the infidels.

9) Taliban may not use Jihad equipment or property for personal ends.

10) Every Talib is accountable to his superiors in matters of money spending and equipment usage.

11) Mujadideen may not sell equipment, unless the provincial commander permits him to do so.

Is that jihad equipment properly labelled, I wonder? Are the Taliban PCs labelled "FOR JIHAD USE ONLY?" Are the Talib sneaking around cruising porn sites or selling bogus tufts of Osama's beard on eBay?

12) A group of Mujahideen may not take in Mujahideen from another group to increase their own power. This is only allowed when there are good reasons for it, such as a lack of fighters in one particular group. Then written permission must be given and the weapons of the new members must stay with their old group.

Maybe the mujahideen leaders are poaching each other's followers. The main weaknesses of radical groups are infighting and factionalism.

13) Weapons and equipment taken from infidels or their allies must be fairly
distributed among the Mujahideen.

An indicator that the Taliban are poorly supplied and equipped.

14) If someone who works with infidels wants to cooperate with Mujahideen, he
should not be killed. If he is killed, his murderer must stand before an Islamic
court.

Islamic courts do not count the life of an infidel or apostate equal to that of a Muslim. Killing somebody working against the jihad is at best a misdemeanor.

15) A Mujahid or leader who torments an innocent person must be warned by his
superiors. If he does not change his behaviour he must be thrown out of the
Taliban movement.

16) It is strictly forbidden to search houses or confiscate weapons without the permission of a district or provincial commander.

17) Mujahideen have no right to confiscate money or personal possessions of civilians.

In other words, the holy warriors of Islam are using the jihad as an excuse to shake down civilians and loot their homes. That violates Mao's law of guerrilla warfare, where the guerrilla is the fish who swims in a sea of civilian support. Without the civilian support, the guerrillas become vulnerable.

18) Mujahideen should refrain from smoking cigarettes.

OK, we can declare victory now. When the Taliban joins the PC smoking ban, we know they've gone power mad and started establishing a Muslim Nanny State.

19) Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair onto the battlefield or into their private quarters.

The Afghans like their young boys. A lot. While sex with women is strictly forbidden, the Taliban take their pleasure with male children.

20) If members of the opposition or the civil government wish to be loyal to the Taliban, we may take their conditions into consideration. A final decision must be made by the military council.

21) Anyone with a bad reputation or who has killed civilians during the Jihad may not be accepted into the Taliban movement. If the highest leader has personally forgiven him, he will remain at home in the future.

Looks like Osama Bin Laden isn't welcome in the Taliban anymore.

22) If a Mujahid is found guilty of a crime and his commander has barred him
from the group, no other group may take him in. If he wishes to resume contact
with the Taliban, he must ask forgiveness from his former group.

23) If a Mujahid is faced with a problem that is not described in this book, his
commander must find a solution in consultation with the group.

24) It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime, because this strengthens the system of the infidels. True Muslims should apply to study with a religiously trained teacher and study in a Mosque or similar institution.
Textbooks must come from the period of the Jihad or from the Taliban regime.

This is a self-imposed handicap to force Taliban supporters to waste their time in madrassas memorizing the Koran in Arabic, a language they don't speak, while Taliban opponents go to real schools to learn real things that will help them get ahead. Thank goodness the Taliban prize ignorance as a virtue and seek to stamp out the spread of knowledge in their ranks.

25) Anyone who works as a teacher for the current puppet regime must recieve a
warning. If he nevertheless refuses to give up his job, he must be beaten. If
the teacher still continues to instruct contrary to the principles of Islam, the
district commander or a group leader must kill him.

Of course, the problem here is that if the Taliban kill off the teachers, how are they gonna read these thirty rules? Another Talibanic quandary.

26) Those NGOs that come to the country under the rule of the infidels must be treated as the government is treated. They have come under the guise of helping
people but in fact are part of the regime. Thus we tolerate none of their activities, whether it be building of streets, bridges, clinics, schools, madrases (schools for Koran study) or other works. If a school fails to heed a warning to close, it must be burned. But all religious books must be secured beforehand.

Damn those infidel do-gooders building us streets, bridges, clinics, and schools! Nothing illustrates the painful bigotry of the Muslims than their hatred of non-Muslims who do good works for them.

27) As long as a person has not been convicted of espionage and punished for it, no one may take up the issue on their own. Only the district commander is in charge. Witnesses who testify in a procedure must be in good psychological condition, possess an untarnished religious reputation, and not have committed any major crime. The punishment may take place only after the conclusion of the trial.

A common way for Muslim terrorists to justify their infighting is to accuse their internal enemies of being spies for the enemy.

28) No lower-level commander may interfere with contention among the populace. If an argument cannot be resolved, the district or regional commander must step
in to handle the matter. The case should be discussed by religious experts (Ulema) or a council of elders (Jirga). If they find no solution, the case must be referred to well-known religious authorities.

Yes, the local Taliban commanders like the taste of power and wield it gratuitously like they were the emirs.

29) Every Mujahid must post a watch, day and night.

They probably should post this as Rule Number One. Amateur combatants tend to always make the rookie mistake of not posting a guard while they sleep, inviting attack from, let's say, infidels watching them from unseen Predators hovering out of sight in the dark, dark night sky.

30) The above 29 rules are obligatory. Anyone who offends this code must be
judged according to the laws of the Islamic Emirates.

This Book of Rules is intended for the Mujahideen who dedicate their lives to Islam and the almighty Allah. This is a complete guidebook for the progress of Jihad, and every Mujahid must keep these rules; it is the duty of every Jihadist and true
believer.

Signed by the highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan

The Swiss weekly, Die Weltwoche, published the Taliban rules, which were translated into English here by signandsight.com. But sheesh, the Taliban have been fighting for HOW long and they're just now getting around to formulating some policies? No wonder they're losing.

Jihadis Find The Enemy And It Is Them

2008-05-29T23:57:00.001-05:00

The insurgents were trying to make a video of their brilliant attack on the American infidels in Baghdad which may have even worked if they weren't so crazy stupid. Attacking the Yankee infidel soldiers should be easy: Just point your weapon at the infidel and shoot. Alas, one insurgent found that too hard to do when he tried to shoot his RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) down an alley at a US military Humvee. He hit the wall to the right instead, killing some of his pals. Fortunately for our side, he survived to shoot again, hopefully with bigger and more powerful weapons in a new terror cell heretofore unscathed.

This is the kind of incompetence which makes me wonder if letting the Muslims have atom bombs would really be so bad. It looks like we could just let them get busy with the bombs, maybe even feed them some uranium, and let nature take its course.

The survivors of this particular insurgent cell did not fare well. This embarassing video eventually fell into the hands of an Iraqi interpreter for the Marines, which you can watch here. My Arabic is kind of shaky but my translation of the remarks after the detonation are, "HOLY SHIT!" Note that even the insurgents laugh at how stupid their shooter was. The ones who lived, I mean.

These jihadi blooper reels keep rolling in, faster and faster, wilder and woolier. One can't help but notice that the insurgents really aren't very good at their jobs. In fact, they suck. They're far more dangerous to themselves and their fellow jihadis than they are to us.

From that foundation of fact, it follows that the insurgents who can't fight without shooting themselves in the foot can't form a functional government that works, which is harder and more complex work. The best they can do is form crews from their neighborhood to make a half-assed mafia. A mafia works well against an unarmed, undefended, and terrorized civilian populace but it is no match for a well-armed army determined to smash it. In fact, an insurgent mafia is no match for its own jackasses toting RPGs.

Stupid Taliban Tricks

2008-05-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

Breaking news:

"KHAR, Pakistan, May 28 (Reuters) - Six pro-Taliban militants were killed on Wednesday when their vehicle packed with explosives blew up in a northwestern Pakistani region on the Afghan border, a militant and officials said.The explosion was caused by a hand grenade that went off accidently when their comrades were travelling through the Bajaur region, where Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants operate, a militant said."The hand grenade blast blew up the ammunition and explosives in the vehicle killing six militants and wounding two," said a Taliban member who declined to be identified."

Maybe the best way to beat the Taliban is to send them more weapons so they can off themselves like the knuckleheads they are.

Václav Klaus

2008-05-28T08:47:00.002-05:00

Václav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic and proponent of the free market, presented the English translation of his book, “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”, yesterday at the National Press Club, here in Washington D.C. Klaus argues that environmentalism threatens human freedom:

"My today’s thinking is substantially influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under the communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom and wanted to command not only the people but also the nature. To command “wind and rain” is one of the famous slogans I remember since my childhood. This experience taught me that freedom and rational dealing with the environment are indivisible. It formed my relatively very sharp views on the fragility and vulnerability of free society and gave me a special sensitivity to all kinds of factors which may endanger it.

"I do not, however, live in the past and do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old-fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar. There will be the same attractive, to a great extent pathetic and at first sight quasi-noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of something above him, (of something greater than his poor self), supplemented by enormous self-confidence on the side of those who stand behind it. Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality. In the past it was in the name of the masses (or of the Proletariat), this time in the name of the Planet. Structurally, it is very similar.

"I see the current danger in environmentalism and especially in its strongest version, climate alarmism. Feeling very strongly about it and trying to oppose it was the main reason for putting my book together, originally in Czech language, in the spring of 2007. It has also been the driving force behind my active involvement in the current Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York City openly and explicitly challenged the undergoing global warming hysteria. My central concern is – in a condensed form – captured in the subtitle of this book. I ask: “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” My answer is: “it is our freedom.” I may also add “and our prosperity”.

"The book was written by an economist who happens to be in a high political position. I don’t deny my basic paradigm, which is the “economic way of thinking”, because I consider it an advantage, not a disadvantage. By stressing that, I want to say that the Climate Change Debate in a wider and the only relevant sense should be neither about several tenths of a degree of Fahrenheit or Celsius, about the up or down movements of sea level, about the depths of ice at North and Southern Pole, nor about the variations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The real debate should be about costs and benefits of alternative human actions, about how to rationally deal with the unknown future, about what kind and size of solidarity with much wealthier future generations is justified, about the size of externalities and their eventual appropriate “internalization”, about how much to trust the impersonal functioning of the markets in solving any human problem, including global warming and how much to distrust the very visible hand of very human politicians and their bureaucrats. Some of these questions are touched upon in my book.

"My deep frustration has been exponentially growing in recent years by witnessing the fact that almost everything has already been said, that all rational arguments have been used and that global warming alarmism is still marching on. It could be even true that “We are now at the stage where mere facts, reason, and truth are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda” (R. McKittrick, private correspondence). We are regretfully behind it. The whole process is already in the hands of those who are not interested in rational ideas and arguments. It is in the hands of climatologists and other related scientists who are highly motivated to look in one direction only because a large number of academic careers has evolved around the idea of man-made global warming. It is, further, in the hands of politicians who maximize the number of votes they seek to get from the electorate.

"It is also – as a consequence of political decisions – in the hands of bureaucrats of national and more often of international institutions who try to maximize their budgets and years of careers as well regardless the costs, truth and rationality. It is in the hands of rent-seeking businesspeople who are – given the existing policies – interested in the amount of subsidies they are receiving and look for all possible ways to escape the for them often merciless, but for the rest of us very positive, general welfare enhancing functioning of free markets. An entire industry has developed around the funds the firms are getting from the government.

"The basic questions of the current climate change debate are sufficiently known and well-structured: 1) Do we live in an era of a statistically significant, non-accidental and noncyclical climate change?2) If so, is it dominantly man-made?3) If so, should such a moderate temperature increase bother us more than many other pressing problems we face and should it receive our extraordinary attention?4) If we want to change the climate, can it be done? Are current attempts to do so the best allocation of our scarce resources?

"My answer to all these questions is NO, but with a difference in emphasis. I don’t aspire to measure the global temperature, nor to estimate the importance of factors which make it. This is not the area of my comparative advantages. But to argue, as it’s done by many contemporary environmentalists, that these questions have already been answered with a consensual “yes” and that there is an unchallenged scientific consensus about this is unjustified. It is also
morally and intellectually deceptive."

Klaus has offered to debate Al Gore about global warming, but environmental demagogues like Gore want no part of any rational debate. Gore wants a monologue, not a dialogue, and certainly not a debate where his claims can be debunked and he can be shown up as a fool.

Thanks to Power Line

The Value Of An Ivy League Degree

2008-05-26T13:35:00.001-05:00

Diplomad, an underground conservative serving in the super-liberal State Department, writes about hiring college interns for that politicized institution:

A few years ago, more than I care to mention, I headed a large office at the State Department. I got tasked with hiring a couple of Presidential Management Interns (PMIs). These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities. They get hired on a temporary basis and then, usually, get offered prestigious jobs in the government. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whatever else I did, I had to hire women.
So I began to pore over the resumes. My heart sank. I felt inadequate and so, so inferior to these kids. Their resumes, impeccably printed and organized, using dozens of words ending in "-ization," and listing prowess with a dazzling array of complex software programs, described accomplishments beyond my wildest dreams -- especially for when I was the applicants' age!I thought I should resign and give
up my job to one of the "brilliant" child wonders.
Ah, naive me. I obviously had spent too much time overseas. I saw resumes as truthful documents actually written by the applicants, applicants, in this case, full of accomplishments and possessed of massive brains throbbing with energy and ideas. As I, however, kept reading, even slow-witted me began to notice oddities. They all began to look the same: the font, the format, the wording, the list of classes and even -- horrors! -- the "accomplishments."
I noted this in passing to a cynical old friend (now, alas, departed) who worked in "human resources" (what a great phrase that). He laughed, "You dope! They get classes on how to write resumes! They have professors and computer programs that put these things together for them." (Remember, folks, computers were new things back then.) He said, "Just randomly pick a couple of women students, they're all the same, hire'em, and move on."
I could not do that. I stole a friend's idea and devised "The World War II Test." I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of "Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry."
I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few,Can you tell me how US troops got into Europe in the first place? When was WWII? (I would accept a variety of answers as long as the applicant could defend the dates as the true start and end of WWII.) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers? Who was Neville Chamberlain? What he did he do at Munich and with whom? Who was Mussolini? What did he do to Ethiopia? Who was Stalin? Who was Hirohito? What was D-Day? What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why? Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta? What was the Berlin Airlift?
Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right -- the only male in the crowd, by the way. None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one. A very irritated applicant asked me, "Do we really need to know this old stuff?" I noted that we worked with NATO and Europe, hence, it was important to know the background that led to the creation of NATO and the then just-concluded Cold War. She stared at me and said, "What does World War II have to do with NATO, the Cold War and Europe?"
I promptly offered the job to the male -- oh, the cries from "Human Resources" -- who turned it down for a more lucrative one in the private sector. In the best Foreign Service tradition, I stalled hiring anybody else, let my two-year assignment run out, and left my poor successor to get stuck with one of the clueless ones.

It reminds me of a line from the movie, "Barry Lyndon," where young Barry, the rich commoner, wishes to climb the social ladder into the aristocracy, perhaps even purchase a title of royalty. The old noble he hires to help him explains that he will introduce him to the best people. By best, he doesn't mean the cleverest or wittiest or most able or richest, but simply The Best People.

Why They're Losing

2008-05-23T10:19:00.001-05:00

It was another bad day in the jihad for the Unknown Insurgent, who was out skulking in the middle of the night, planting an IED to kill the infidel Americans or anybody else he didn't like or who just happenned to pass by. Kill them all and let Allah sort them out later in paradise, he probably thought.

Unfortunately for him, the Yankee infidels live in the sky and can see in the night and have giant guns with lots of ammo. You can watch his Dead Tango Dance here. Dance, jihadi, dance! You went out to be a killer and came back killed. The good news is that death works for you, you think you go straight to paradise, and collect your 72 virgins. Of course, to enjoy them, you'll need your johnson which I'm pretty sure got shot off. Good luck finding that. Say hello to Allah for us and to all those thousands of other dead tangoes. Make room for more.

McCain Does Streisand

2008-05-18T16:33:00.001-05:00

Enough of the boring debates. What we need is more presidential candidates singing. Here's John McCain covering some of Streisand's most popular tunes. If you thought he was heroic at the Hanoi Hilton, wait until you see him heroically struggling through "Feelings." Watch it here. Then watch McCain's advocacy of senescence here. Finally, McCain cautions the Democrats against haste in picking a presidential candidate here.

You can't survive commie torture without a sense of humor, like McCain. By contrast, you can't get along with commies if you have one, which may explain why Obama is so humorless. When your pastor is damning America and your dinner companions tell you they haven't maimed enough people with bombs, it's hard to respond to that with a good joke. You have to buy in or excuse yourself and leave. And Obama didn't leave. He stayed for coffee and dessert.

Fitna

2008-05-08T04:36:00.000-05:00

Fitna means "strife" in Arabic. It's an Islamic theological term chosen by Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his fifteen minute polemic against Islamic terrorism, a product which has drawn the wrath of the thoroughly intolerant Muslim world. It's an odd reaction in a way because Wilders video is largely recycling the propaganda videos Muslims themselves have made to spread their venomous views. Perhaps the most provocative parts show Muslims wailing that they will conquer the world, citing the Koran to justify terror, and urging their brethren to wage the jihad to make it happen. Wilders links those sentiments directly to terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid.

The truth is too painful for the Muslims who responded with death threats, of course. Death fatwas have been made against Wilders, as he expected, as we can all expect. YouTube was too cowardly to carry the video, which was delivered instead on LiveLeak. Death threats against LiveLeak prompted them to withdraw it. After beefing up security for their staff against Muslim thugs, they put it online again.

This violent reaction proves the point of Wilders video, which is that Islam is inherently a violent religion that can not abide Western civilization and seeks to topple it. Wilders concludes:

"For it is not up to me, but Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran. Muslims want you to make way for Islam but Islam does not make way for you. The government insists you respect Islam but Islam does not respect you. Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our western civilization. In 1945, Nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989, communism was defeated in Europe. Now, the Islamic ideology has to be defeated. Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom."

Well said. You can read the Cliff's Notes version of "Fitna" on Wikipedia here. It's worth fifteen minutes of your time to watch Wilders' movie here.

Ask Dr. Zawahiri

2008-05-07T18:35:00.002-05:00

When Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda announced that he would answer questions submitted to him over the web, Andy Borowitz spoofed it in this New Yorker article, "Ask The Jihadist":

Dear Ayman al-Zawahiri:
I am a journalist for the U.S. publication Tiger Beat. When I heard you would be taking Web questions, I was like OMG, I totes have to write to him!!! Here are three questions we’re asking celebrities this month:
1. If you could be any character on “Gossip Girl,” who would you be?
2. Who would be a better friend, Lauren on “The Hills” or Ashley Tisdale in “High School Musical”?
3. Who is hotter, Zac Efron or Joe Jonas? (LOL)
—Stacy in Manhattan

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:
May you and everyone at your magazine burn in Hell.

Greetings and compliments to you, my good sir:
I am the widow of the late Nigerian head of state, General Sani Abacha. Please wire $15,000 in U.S. funds to the bank information provided below and in two weeks’ time you will receive $150,000 for your kindly services, my goodly gentleman.
—Mrs. Maryam Abacha
Lagos

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:
What kind of simpleton do you take me for? I sent you $15,000 last month and I never heard back.

Dear Ayman al-Zawahiri:
I am a big fan of Osama bin Laden and would like to get his autograph. I have an eight-by-ten glossy of him but don’t know where to send it. Could you please give me his exact mailing address?
—Borge W. Gush
Washington, D.C.

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes:
Please contact him directly. He’s on Facebook.

Nice try, Borge. It was just crazy enough to work.

Feeding The Alligator Instead Of Killing It

2008-05-06T19:40:00.002-05:00

Sam Harris comments on the predictably outraged Muslim response to Geert Wilders, Dutch politician and author of the fifteen minute movie critique of Islam called "Fitna":

"Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

"There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. ...

"A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision," widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing children's books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict Jews as "apes and pigs."

"Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam? ...

"The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam "really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been brought to justice. And these are British Muslims. ...

"It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society."

Finally, Advice College Grads Can Use

2008-05-04T10:33:00.003-05:00

Conservative pundit and humorist P.J. O'Rourke writes the send-off newly made college graduates should receive at their commencement ceremonies this May but won't in his piece, "Fairness, idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere":

"Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.

"Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

"We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

"My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize."
And it just gets better from there.

My first introduction to Peej came way back in high school when he wrote for National Lampoon magazine. He was the editor about every third month in its golden era, 1973 to 1975, and hilarious. I kept reading Lampoon until all the jokes fell out of it in the 1980s. Still, Peej helped write one of the Lampoon's most profound critiques of American culture in the best seller, "National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook, 39th Reunion," which is ranked next to "Moby Dick" in American literature, or should be. His colleagues at the National Lampoon had come from the Harvard Lampoon. One of them wrote a book where they expressed dismay and betrayal to discover that the Peej who had appeared to them to be a fellow lefty was in fact a conservative heretic and blasphemer. Heh.

Peej just got better over the years, writing Holidays in Hell (1989) and many other satirical conservative articles, dispensing memorable quotes like, "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." If it's been a while since you read Peej, it's time to revisit him. If you have never read him, it's time.

Thanks to Hot Air

"Kill The Pigs"

2008-05-04T09:07:00.005-05:00

John Murtagh, an attorney and professor in New York, has watched Obama excuse away his close association with lefty terrorist Bill Ayers with particular interest and weighs in with his own unique perspective in a column called "Fire in the Night: The Weathermen tried to kill my family" in the excellent City Journal:

"During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me. ...

"In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. ... Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS. ...

"Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.

"As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”"

Ayers once described the Weathermen as "an American Red Army" whose mission was, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents." In his book, "Fugitive Days," Ayers boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972." Bombing the Pentagon was particularly dreamy for Ayers, "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them." Osama Bin Laden could not have said it better on September 11.

In fact, Professor Ayers is positively euphoric about bombing people:

"There's something about a good bomb … Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and estructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down."

Ayers is unrepentant about bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, the NYPD, and John Murtagh's family. Obama is unrepentant about his friendship with Bill Ayers and his equally loathesome wife, Bernardine Dohrn. America should be unrepentant about rejecting Obama and his treasonous crew. America should be fighting the terrorists, not doing dinner with them.

Nuff Said

2008-04-17T08:58:00.002-05:00

Seen Tuesday at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.

If you can't make out the words, yellow sign says, "Militarism is terrorrism. Recruiters lie." White sign says, "This guy is a huge pussy. --->"

And a terrible speller.

Walter Reed Three Years After

2008-04-06T08:56:00.003-05:00

Three years ago Code Pink, a far left group, felt it would be a good idea to protest the war in Iraq at the front gate of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, where the grievously wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan were treated. It was the spring of 2005 when CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, Plymouth UCC, Military Families, Newspaper Guild, Gray Panthers, and OPEIU Local 2 began protesting every Friday night from 8 to 10 PM. They called it a vigil, not a protest, but shit by any other name still stinks the same.

The DC Chapter of the Free Republic, outraged at the insensitive and insulting choice of locations and sentiments for this obnoxious protest, decided in March 2005 to counter-protest the Code Pink protest. Tom the Redhunter has written a very good, brief history of the Walter Reed protest here in the Free Republic website, from which I have plucked the essentials. The bottom line is that three years later, protesters and counter-protestors are locked in a grim war of attrition which the Freepers are winning. There has been a dramatic change for the better since I visited first in August and September 2005.

The one thing protestors hate is being protested. The Free Republic, "Freeper," counter-protestors have now been out there 154 Friday nights, steadily gaining the advantage over protestors who suffered from disorganization, poor morale, and a bad cause. Code Pink tried the usual radical lefty tricks to counter the Freepers. They screamed in outrage at the dissenters, villified and demonized them, tried to infiltrate them, tried to get the police to suppress them, tried to get the neighborhood to call in complaints against them, et cetera. As usual, the lefties try to throttle the free speech of political opponents in their typical heavy-handed, un-American fashion. None of it worked.

The Code Pink protest suffered morale problems from the beginning. Being actively confronted by the Freepers made them uncomfortable, defensive, and edgy. They had expected a monopoly on their protest venue. Being protested for protesting didn't seem fair to them. Their moral authority was being challenged and undermined and they didn't know what to do about it, and still don't. Most protestors are in it for the fun of partying. Being counter-protested takes the fun away and strips a protest of most of its numbers.

The next morale problem came with the bus. Every Friday night, patriotic local businessmen treat a busload of wounded warriors to a night on the town. That bus returns about 9:30 PM at which time all the guys on board would flip the finger to Code Pink. That was a bitter blow to the morale of the Pinksters, who absurdly thought the troops would appreciate their protest at the hospital and all those "Maimed for Halliburton" signs. Once the guys had the bus driver stop halfway in the gate and turn on the interior lights so the Pink Ones could see their middle fingers more clearly. That's when Code Pink moved their protest from 8 to 10 PM to 7 to 9 PM, so they'd avoid seeing the soldiers.

The glory days of the Code Pink protest lasted about ten months, when the organizers fumbled the demonstration permits and forgot to renew them. The Freepers had been lurking at the permit office, waiting for exactly such a screw up. Code Pink had permits for both corners on either side of the main gate of Walter Reed, where Elder Street NW ran into the base. The Freepers had the corners across Georgia Avenue NW. When Code Pink let its permit lapse, the Freepers snapped them up.

The night of January 21, 2006 the Pinksters came to their corners at the main gate only to find the Freepers camped out on them, dangling the permit in front of their pink little faces. That was a bitter night for the Pinksters, who dragged their protest signs down in defeat to a little nook half a block away. From there, their protest has gone into a death spiral. Their numbers declined from a regular fifty folks down to half a dozen. Code Pink virtually abandoned the protest, a member or two only showing up sporadically after that, once to call the troops the terrorists. The Walter Reed Vigil Reports stopped at Number 16 in December, 2005. The thrill was gone.

From that time, the Freeper effort has been an exercise in managing and hastening the demise of the Walter Reed protest.

That's Kristinn Taylor, President of the DC Chapter of the Free Republic, the guy who got the counter-protest rolling three years ago. He's holding the three year anniversary sign.

I counted 41 counter-protestors at the gates of Walter Reed, like these fine patriotic ladies.

Another set of counter-protestors staked out the northwest corner of Georgia and Elder at the main gate to Walter Reed. That's the main hospital building in the background. The soldier patients on this side of the hospital said they could hear the protests back in their more boisterous days. It's close enough for wounded guys to walk out on warm nights to ask the protestors why they are protesting them, only to get the cold shoulder.

This is the same corner where a couple years ago I witnessed a protestor troubadour with guitar in hand leading a Code Pink chorus of protestors in protest songs accusing the troops of murdering babies. These are the same people who claim to support the troops.

This red-haired beauty manned the southeast corner with her dog, specially trained to bark in support of the troops and to pee on protest signs.

It goes without saying that our protest babes were way hotter than their protest babes. That means we won. Nuff said.

The Freeper counter-protest has slowly evolved into a flag-waving celebration of the wounded warriors.

The troops, the troops, the troops. It's all about the troops. This is what real support for the troops looks like.

These fine folks occupied the southwest corner, former home of the Code Pink protest, before they were dispossessed and sent packing half a block down the street to the left of the photo.

The Freepers have a little tailgate party to make the counter-protesting go easier. Roasting weenies and counter-protesting Code Pink are closely related skills.

The Freepers are considerably well-organized, pitching a tent and setting up tables full of food in what amounts to a counter-protesting machine.

Behind the newly refurbished Mother Of All Banners (MOAB), Freeper dogs are served.

Meanwhile, down the road at what's left of the sad little anti-war protest are three lonely protestors at 7 PM. What if they held a protest and nobody came? It makes you wonder what kind of excuses protestors give for giving up and staying home: The dog ate my protest sign? I was waiting for the cable guy? I took some bad acid? I ran over my cat on the way here and had to take her to the vet? I thought it was on Saturday night, not Friday? Hey, I'm sorry but I'm busy Friday but I'll be there next time?

It must be pretty discouraging to be running a protest nobody wants to attend, to get nothing but excuses from your old comrades who used to show up, and see others dodge you when they see you first. How are you gonna stop the oppressive Amerikkkan death machine when nobody mans the barricades, preferring to play couch potato at home with a cold beer in front of the TV?

Still, when the three of them spread out like that, I think they look like more of a crowd, don't you? That way it takes their mind off the fact there are a dozen counter-protestors for each protestor. The Freepers have as many folks standing around the grill waiting for their Freeper dog as the protestors have toting protest signs.

The floundering Walter Reed protest is the canary in the coal mine of the faltering national anti-war movement. The Stalinists at ANSWER cancelled their planned and announced giant anti-war demonstration two weeks before the event here in DC last month. That has been a radical springtime ritual since the invasion of Iraq. They just couldn't muster the numbers to march en masse.

There is a declining enthusiasm for protest which I attribute to the success in Iraq under the new Petraeus strategy. Americans only protest wars we appear to be losing and support wars we are winning. That's the way it worked in the Vietnam war, where the media turned real victories like the Tet Offensive into perceived defeats. That's the way it worked during the Civil War, too, where the Peace Democrats lobbied for recognition of the Confederacy with the argument that the war was unwinnable.

Counter-protesting has also contributed to defeating protests. Casual protestors will flee demonstrations that are substantially counter-protested, as the Freepers have done at Walter Reed and the Gathering of Eagles have done against ANSWER rallies in downtown DC. The bulk of protestors are there to party. Counter-protest the fun away and you drive away 90% of the protestors.

That's Bruce Wolf on the left, who is chair of the Social Justice Committee of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 2, a union in the AFL-CIO. Bruce is the original organizer of this wrongheaded and wrongly-placed protest. Notice that he and his comrade are holding their signs over their faces to hide them from my camera. One of the odd quirks of these protests is that virtually all the casual protestors are delighted to have their photos taken, while the radicals who form the spine of these protests fear cameras. You can tell the wolves from the sheep in protest rallies by their positive or negative reaction to your camera. The radicals want to control your camera, order you to stop taking pix in public places, and even demand you delete photos you've taken. They're paranoid.

The first time I met Bruce he threatened to have me arrested if I took photos of the demonstration. He claimed it violated his right to free speech, among other absurd things. It was all BS, of course. The radical Left is all about free speech for themselves and all about shutting down free speech for others. The good thing about Bruce is that if you just talk to him for a while in a reasonable voice he'll eventually pose for you about fifteen minutes after he makes his objections and threats.

Bruce used to be happy to talk to me, arguing against the war, denying the awful songs and signs his group used to carry before they were shamed by the Freepers into sanitizing them into more mainstream-sounding slogans. Out with "Maimed for Halliburton," in with "Support the Troops, Bring Them Home." However, the last time I saw Bruce he was uncommunicative. This time he was downright sullen, refusing to even make eye contact.

It's a sad day when a conservative blogger like me can't even get threatened nor harangued at a peace rally. Where's the love? Where did the revolutionary passion go? When did the anti-war dream die?

Bruce told me, back when he was talking, that he had protested the Vietnam war. Shocker! Maybe he thought he could relive the whole '60s protest scene: Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll! And you can tell from this flyer he was handing out last December that he's into some silly Marxist claptrap with talk about "who truly benefits from the existence of a large military machine and expensive weapons of death" and "does it make sense to use American working people to fight working people in other nations?" It's classic Communist propaganda that posits war as a conspiracy to benefit the capitalists and calls to pit the working class against the capitalist class. Unfortunately, there are no worker and capitalist classes in America and the commies found that most people felt far more loyalty to their nation than any mythical working class.

In this Internet plea for people to join his protest, Bruce calls our troops "gun-toting scabs and thugs." Gosh, I wonder why the wounded warriors don't warm up to his protest which purports to support the troops?

I feel a little sorry for Bruce, who's pushing 61 now. He probably leapt into this protest without a second thought, counting on a quick and uncontested victory, a precipitous retreat and defeat in Iraq, just like Vietnam in the good ole days. His protestors would be home by Christmas.

But then the damned Freeper insurgents came out of the woodwork, bogging down his occupation of the main gate of Walter Reed with their guerrilla counter-protesting. Anything he tried, they countered it, undermined it, defeated it. He lost the initiative from the beginning, spending three years reacting to the Freepers, dancing to their tune. Then the Freepers pushed him out of his prime protest spot and formed a Freeper Quadrangle at the former corners of the intersection at the main gate that he couldn't crack. He can't win and he can't give in. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. He never imagined it would come to this: out-smarted, out-organized, out-numbered, out-protested. It's a quagmire.

It must be depressing to haul his butt all the way from Takoma Park every Friday to run this lame protest which is going nowhere. He had such big dreams at the beginning. He was going to get a clipboard to take down names. He was going to get a big banner, like the Freeper MOAB. But it never happenned. None of it happenned.

If you'd like to cheer Bruce up, you can email him at work at OPEIU2SJC@aol.com.

I'm not a professional protest analyst, I just play one on the Internet, but it seems to me the protest message would be more effective if it was in English. You can't help but wonder what they're thinking when the protestors make their protest unintelligible to most passersby. This woman, who might be Bruce's wife, says the sign says, "Enough to the war!" I recommend they hand out little Spanish dictionaries to the cars passing by so they can understand what they are protesting.

Here are some of the loneliest protest signs in town, just waiting, hoping for somebody, anybody, to hold them. Nothing shows the lack of enthusiasm for this protest more than these signs begging for protestors to tote them. However, to be fair, the demonstration gained some protestors about halfway through, swelling to thirteen people, which meant that the counter-protestors only outnumbered them by three to one now.

A look at some of the signs shows the usual fevered venom directed at Halliburton. However, Halliburton has done far more for the troops than Code Pink or these protestors will ever do, delivering the beans, bullets, and bandages to our guys at the pointy tip of the spear.

This is probably the most annoying sign they sport, diminishing the troops as children when they are more man than any protestor alive. It's the typical liberal arrogance where they see themselves as the wise parents talking down to their childish inferiors. They think the soldiers and marines fighting in Iraq, the Air Force pilots covering them from the air are children. I'm guessing our troops overseas can boast better parents than these protestors.

Freepers and protestors both agree on ending on the war, though not on the conditions. The protestors want to end the war with America defeated while the Freepers want the war ended with victory.

Another point of agreement between Freeper and protestor. The insanity will stop the day the protestors stop showing up. That day may be coming soon. The day Bruce gives up, the protest will collapse. He is near collapse now.

More protestors showed up to put in an hour. There was a Code Pink woman there who looked familiar, perhaps from their rally in downtown DC at the last big demonstration.

Perry was one of the few protestors willing to talk to me. He had a southern gentleman accent and manner about him which I kinda liked though he was fixed in his radical opinion. However, I'm pretty firm in my opinions, too. Perry was insistent that not only were we losing in Iraq, brother, we had already lost. Basra was proof of that. Yet, Basra was an Iraqi victory where Sadr ordered his gunmen to cease fire. We're winning in Iraq by most measures. I think most of the radicals get their info by word of mouth from other radicals.

Perry insisted that I mention that his father was a WWII vet, that he was taught to respect soldiers, and didn't want to see their lives wasted. He also wanted to make it clear that he wasn't flirting with this woman in the picture. He didn't want to get in trouble with his wife, I guess.

I pointed out that it undermined their assertion that they supported the soldiers when their protests had sung about the troops being baby-killers. Perry sharply denied that had ever happenned. He quizzed another protestor, who denied that any such thing had ever happenned. I told her that I was as close to the guitar player as I was to her and had written the lyrics down as they were sung. She scoffed at it. Evidently they expected me to trust their account rather than my own lying eyes and ears.

Even I was a bit surprised to read Bruce Wolf name Perry in his Code Pink Vigil Report No. 5 as the singer at that demonstration. Here's a photo above I took at the September 2005 protest. That's Perry on the guitar. He's the one who was singing the lyrics about the troops murdering babies:

"No more blood for oil;We shall not be moved.
No more killing children;We shall not be moved."

That's three years ago and maybe Perry didn't remember it. But really, can you believe anything these people say?

They don't call him "Big John" for nothing. I conservatively estimate Big John at eight feet tall and 500 pounds, a huge bear of a man. Big John Miska is the Commander of VFW Post 8208 in Ruckersville, VA. He also runs the AdoptASoldier program, which supports "wounded, injured, and ill troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital." This night, he was playing flower child. When the protestors broke camp promptly at 9:00 PM he handed out poppies to them to honor the vets.

It was sort of an ironic reversal of the Vietnam protests where the flower children stuck flowers in the rifle muzzles of the National Guardsman who faced them. Now the vets give the protestors flowers when they leave. It's always good to see them leave.

The bus full of wounded warriors returning from their night on the town rolled in about 9:30, as usual, to the cheers of the Freepers. The guys inside were digging it. If you look close you can see a guy in front waving.

The Freepers are very close to making a precedent of counter-protesting a demonstration to death. The protestors are close to the tipping point of giving up. Feel free to come down and help them give it that last push to end it for once and all.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

2008-03-25T16:38:00.000-05:00

Zombie of Zombietime, the indefatigable photoblogger of the Bay Area on the Left Coast, documented how the lefty loons of San Francisco celebrated the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I filched these photos to tease you to go to Zombie's site, where so much more awaits you.

In a weird way this is so true. The protestors are in fact tacit allies of the jihadis, ignoring their atrocities while always condemning America, making them the political arm of the the Baathists and jihadis in Iraq.

An Obama supporter who favors his pastor's sentiments toward the USA, and the sentiments of the loony left.

Zombie makes the point that anti-war rallies are organized and populated by no-kidding Communists, believe it or not. Zombie's experience in San Francisco is the same as the protest experience I've witnessed in Washington, DC. Maybe you thought commies went extinct and you'd be wrong. There are still knuckleheads who believe this crazy commie crap and want to give it another try. If you think they're crazy, you'd be right. The demonstrations are part of their attempt to batter America as a preliminary for their revolution. It's nuts of course, but there it is.

Truthers infest all anti-war demonstrations because paranoid conspiracy nuts cling together like dirty little dust bunnies.

Fortunately, there were counter-protestors to inject sanity into the situation. In a demonstration of how much they value free speech, the moonbats drove the counter-protestors away. The thing protestors hate most is being protested. They brook no dissent.

Don't miss Zombie's Hall of Shame, the worst of the worst protest images ever. Would you want to stand with these people?

Dead Terrorists Walking

2008-03-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

It was another bad day in the jihad for this terror cell when they found themselves caught on the open street by those pesky infidels in the sky with their giant guns. Maybe they thought the day was going pretty well until then, right up until the lead rain began. You can watch the video of their sudden demise here and read the BlackFive post promising more dead tango dancing here. Apparently, the gentlemen, scholars, and patriots at BlackFive are assembling a compendium of gun film featuring the jihadis, kinduva jihadi blooper reel.

Great Moments In History That Never Happenned

2008-03-20T15:24:00.001-05:00

And never should happen.

Dr Mamoun Fandy

2008-03-19T11:17:00.001-05:00

Dr. Mamoun Fandy, a long-time writer in Middle Eastern media, analyzes the Arab media in his new book, "(Un)Civil War of Words: Media and Politics in the Arab World," reviewed by MEMRI

"[Dr. Fandy] points out that anti-American rhetoric is almost universal in Arab news coverage – not only in countries like Syria, which are openly hostile to the U.S., but also in countries allied with it, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There are several reasons for this, he says: One is that antagonism towards the U.S. is shared by nearly all sectors of Arab society. The nationalists resent the U.S. for undermining Saddam Hussein's Ba'th regime; the Islamists hate it for promoting Western values and for fighting the Taliban and bin Laden; and the ruling elites in the Arab countries resent it for pushing reform and democratization, which threaten their power. Since anti-American is common to all these rival forces, it is not surprising that it percolates into society at large.

"In addition, the Arab regimes use anti-American rhetoric to deflect the blame for their own failures. In other words, they blame "colonialism" or the "imperialist West" for the problems of Arab society, as a way to avoid taking responsibility for them.

"Finally, Fandy points out that the journalists themselves tend to favor reports critical of the U.S., since they are easy to write and are also sure to pass regime censorship – unlike criticism of the regime. In other words, criticizing the U.S. is always a safe and easy option for Arab journalists.

"Fandy concludes that, given all this, anti-Americanism should not be expected to vanish from the Arab media any time soon.

In other words, Arab media is driven by its prejudices. In a 2004 article in the Washington Post, Dr. Fandy gave an example of the form anti-Americanism takes in the Arab media:

"In a search for answers about the Arab media's approach, I went directly to Abdul Rahman Rashed, the head of al-Arabiya, and asked him why most Arab commentators remain silent about these horrific acts of violence and why his channel and al-Jazeera give so much airtime to the terrorists.

"Rashed blames both contemporary Arab culture and the culture of Arab newsrooms. He offered two examples -- one from print and the other from TV -- to make his point. He told me that last year, when he was still chief editor of the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat (for which I am a columnist), he caught one of his editors changing the caption of an AP photo from "an American soldier chatting with an Iraqi girl" to "an American soldier asking an Iraqi girl for sex." "If I had not caught him, it would have gone to print this way," he said."

Kathy Callahan Learns Her Lesson

2008-03-18T00:02:00.001-05:00

Kathy Callahan contributed two grand to the Hillary campaign on her Visa card, but was shocked when Hillary sucked her credit card dry, taking another three grand in unauthorized charges. That's what we judgemental types call stealing. You know, kind of like stealing $100,000 in a cattle futures scam. The Hillary campaign also charged her for an event she never attended and not just once but twice. That pushed the theft to $5800. To add insult to injury, Hillary's theft led to a series of overdrafts which cost Kathy another four hundred bucks in bank fees. Was She Pissed. And she wasn't alone:

"Matt McQuenney who works in the compliance department at HRC headquarters told me verbatim -"What happened to you with credit card errors is happening to others,. You are not alone. Kathy, I'm trying hard to find out where and who it's coming from. What's going on!""

Additional research unearthed a long list of donors who had been charged up to nine grand which had been subsequently refunded. It was obviously not an anomaly, but a policy.

Kathy begged and pleaded for a month with the Hillary campaign to get her money back to no avail. The Hillary people made no apology for the theft. Instead, they tried to bullshit her:

"Kathy Callahan, you are going to be with us all the way to the White House...So let's leave the money where it is and we'll save time on inevitable future donations and transactions!"

In other words, Hillary is not looting your credit card but merely taking the donations in advance that she is sure you'll make later. So, what's so wrong about that? Aside from the theft, the $5,800 the Hillary campaign stole was $1,200 over the legal limit for donations. But then, what are a few broken laws to Hillary? Why should laws apply to Hillary at all?

Kathy Callahan got no justice from the Hillary campaign until she filed a police report and emailed the Hillary campaign about it. She received a phone call and email immediately from Allison Wright, compliance officer at the Hillary headquarters in Virginia: "Kathy, please don't do anything, formally! I will send you whatever you want back, immediately!" And that's how Kathy got back $5300. She was still stuck for the $400 in overdraft charges.

It's a little peek into the future of what the administration of President Hillary would be like, where the government believes it has first claim on your money and thinks you should be glad to give it up to support them.

A Suspected Faith Hate Crime

2008-03-17T22:35:00.001-05:00

Canon Michael Ainsworth, 57, an Anglican priest, went outside his church, St George-in-the-East Church in Tower Hamlets in eastern London, around 7 PM on March 5th to ask some "Asian youths" to quiet down. "Asian youths" is the British euphemism for Southwest Asian Muslims. A large Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant commmunity has settled around the 18th century church.

Seeing his clerical collar, the Muslim gangsters beat the hell out of him, shouting, "FUCKING PRIEST!" Two of them punched and kicked the vicar, inflicting cuts and bruises upon him and two black eyes.

“There was blood everywhere,” said a parishioner. “All the church members are in shock over what happened. Our canon is such a nice man who has done so much for the parish. It’s been very upsetting.”

Canon Ainsworth was treated at the hospital and released but needed to be readmitted a week later because of his nose injuries. He remains in the hospital.

The local Muslim kids have made a habit of smashing the windows of St George-in-the-East Church, shouting, "This should not be a church, this should be a mosque." They've also taken to vandalizing the gravestones in nearby St Dunstan's Church in Stepney. When National Churchwatch surveyed London clergy, almost half said they had been attacked within the last year. National Churchwatch recommends as a security precaution that vicars should not wear their collars in public.

The vicar's wife, Janina Ainsworth, also an Anglican priest, has taken over services for her husband. She brushes aside any suggestion of religious bigotry:

"Quite clearly there are mindless individuals in every community, quite often under the influence of drink or drugs, that engage in random acts of violence. The community organisations here are very shocked. ... We have had very strong messages of support from East London mosque and Tower Hamlets mosque."

Mrs. Ainsworth insists that interfaith relationships with Muslims are good. If you set aside her husband's beating, the regular vandalism to her church by Muslims shouting their bigotry, and their defilement of Christian graves, I suppose you can see her point.

Scotland Yard, unfortunately, is not so enlightened as Mrs. Ainsworth. They're treating the attack as a suspected faith hate crime. I suspect they're right.

Commander Zare'i

2008-03-14T07:27:00.001-05:00

Michael Rubin, resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the Middle East Quarterly, reports on the troubles of Commander Zare'i via PowerLine:

A week after ousting of Commander Zare'i, Greater Tehran chief of Law Enforcement Forces, the news agency of the Amir Kabir Polytechnical University of Tehran (AUT News) reports that Zare'i was arrested at a "House of Corruption," the Islamic Republic's equivalent of a gentleman's club, along with six ladies. The six ladies say upon raiding the place, Commander Zare'i had asked them to perform a group prayer naked, which explains their state undress at the time of arrest. Commander Zare'i was the supreme enforcer of the "societal security scheme" planned under the Khatami presidency and enforced under Ahmadinejad, aimed at eliminating "moral corruption" and "deviation from the path of salvation" in the Iranian society. Commander Zare'i has dealt harshly with what he calls Arazel va Owbash [Hooligan elements] and in an early interview he told the Iranian press: "35,000 people have been warned by the Law Enforcement Forces, 1,000 people have been summoned to police stations, and 124 people have been delivered to the Judiciary." AUT News also claims the arrest of Zare'i took place upon direct orders from Shahroudi, head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Judiciary, who feared the close friendship between the head of police and Tehran judge Sa'id Mortazavi would lead to freeing of Zare'i. According to AUT News, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered the legal proceedings against Zare'i to take place after the parliamentary elections.

Good luck with the naked prayer defense, Commander Zare'i! I'm sure it's in the Koran somewhere. You might study up on Bill Clinton's maneuvers and blame it all on an overzealous prosecutor.

David Mamet Comes In From The Cold

2008-03-12T23:24:00.001-05:00

David Mamet, famous American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director tells of his jump from Left to Right in his Village Voice article, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'." Says Mamet:

"I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

"As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

"These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

"This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

"But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

"And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

"I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it."

It's worth reading the whole article. Mamet's still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome but he's smart enough to work his way out of that, too. Welcome home, David Mamet. What took you so long?

Gathering of Eagles at Times Square

2008-03-09T00:43:00.004-05:00

The Gathering of Eagles (GOE) called for patriotic citizens to show support for the military recruiting center in Times Square, New York, which was bombed Thursday in an act of domestic terrorism, apparently perpetrated by protestors who want the insurgents to win in Iraq. The GOE demonstrated Saturday in Times Square from noon to four PM to support the military recruiters under threat of violence there.

Chris Hill, GOE National Director of Operations, says of the military recruiters in Times Square:

"It is important for them to know we love and respect them, and will stand with them always. New York City has, once again, been the victim of terrorism; this time of the homegrown brand it appears. This despicable act can be laid right at the feet of the vehement anti-American groups we have countered so often. They have made it okay in the minds of some to attack recruiter stations and deface our war memorials. We must not allow this to continue! I have contacted law enforcement agencies in several of the cities where recruiter stations have been previously targeted. They assure me that security has been stepped up. Respectfully, that is not enough. We must show support publicly and proudly for our brothers and sisters in uniform. This is our line in the sand. This nonsense will stop. I look forward to standing with you all again and appreciate your unqualified support. I love New York."

Conservative Propaganda dispatched Celtic Chick, our most able correspondent in the Big Apple, to cover the action, which was especially soggy, and take these photos. Her first reports were that the weather was "TOTALLY LOUSY... It has been raining cats and dogs all day, chilly and windy."

However, neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these patriots from the swift support of their local military recruiting center when it has been bombed by idiots. Celtic Chick says the damage had been completely repaired and was unnoticeable by the time she arrived. Outstanding.

Terrorism will not be tolerated, at least not by the troop supporters. For the feral anti-victory Left, it's another story.

Celtic Chick delivered a plate of chocolate chip cookies to the recruiters on duty. I was gonna talk to her about maintaining journalistic objectivity but then I remembered we don't have any. This is Conservative Propaganda. We're for the US military and for winning in Iraq and beating the insurgents to a bloody pulp. In the time-honored tradition of the US military, the recruiters on duty thanked the Celtic Chick for the cookies and then fell upon them like ravenous wolves, chowing down like they hadn't eaten all week.

Plenty of passing cars honked in appreciation of the GOE flag-wavers taking back Times Square for America. Nobody likes IEDs being laid at the door of the military recruiting center nor the people who place them there. On that, we are all agreed. New York, appropriately enough, is against terror. What did this idiot bomber think he would accomplish by perpetrating a terrorist act in New York? Did he think after Sep 11 that New York would just roll over and give in to his tiny terror? Who does this weenie bomber think New Yorkers are?

Gloria Steinem On Character

2008-03-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

Tired old feminist Gloria Steinem, 73, went on the attack for Hillary, as reported in this article from the New York Observer:

Steinem raised McCain’s Vietnam imprisonment as she sought to highlight an alleged gender-based media bias against Clinton.

“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’” Steinem said, to laughter from the audience.

McCain was, in fact, a prisoner of war for around five and a half years, during which time he was tortured repeatedly. Referring to his time in captivity, Steinem said with bewilderment, “I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so.”

Steinem’s broader argument was that the media and the political world are too admiring of militarism in all its guises.

“I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid. It’s a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting.”

To The Observer, Steinem insisted that “from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”

Maybe John McCain could have won Steinem's respect if only, while the commie fiends were putting him in the rope torture in the Hanoi Hilton and hanging him from the ceiling overnight time after time, he had burned his bra.

Jackson Kirk Grimes For President

2008-03-04T23:58:00.003-05:00

Like a fool I thought there was only two real candidates for president, the ones fielded by the Republican and Democratic parties. I have since been disabused of that naive notion by the current leading authority on American political movements, Noot, who also happens to be my high school pal. There are, in fact, nearly three hundred people in the race for President. They are all listed at the Project Vote Smart website. Most of these people have filed a statement of candidacy or at least told the Federal Election Commission that they have formed a campaign committee. Some have only expressed an interest in being President.

This site tells me a lot of scary information. For example, John McCain's middle name is Sidney. Now, I'm for McCain but this Sidney business gives me pause. McCain and his foxy wife Cindy have a total of seven kids together. It makes me wonder if this whole campaign for President is just an excuse for him to get away from the house.

There are dozens of Republicans and Democrats running. For example, Yaphet Kotto is running as a Republican. I loved him as Mr. Big in "Live and Let Die." Abdul (Kareem) Muhammad is a Muslim out of Long Beach, CA running on Republican ticket. Ain't gonna happen, buddy.

It's odd that Hillary Rodham Clinton lists her maiden name, like it might dilute that Clinton name. The Emperor Caesar is also running as a Democrat, but he's way too easy to confuse with Hillary. That's gonna hurt him. Name confusion is going to hurt Robert Anthony "Ram Rod" Gibson. Ram Rod. Rodham. Let's call the whole thing off. However, Heather Fox is running as a Democrat with a name that just sounds like she's hot but she doesn't post a headshot so she's not getting my vote.

Andy Clown Miannay is running as an Independent. No thanks, Andy, we've already suffered through a clown for president in the '90s. No more, I say. No. More.

Susan Gail Ducey is a registered nurse with a husband and two kids in Sedgwick County, Kansas. She has an associates degree in nursing from Highline Community College, 1989, and volunteers as a nurse in the local hospital but wouldn't mind being president. Republican. She sounds nice enough and being President would probably solve her daycare problems. On the other hand, I resolutely oppose the candidacy of Philipp A. Kok, Republican, because he has a name that lends itself too easily to phone pranks. I don't want to see the headlines that would come of such a presidency.

Jesus Bilal Islam Allah 'Alfred Lawrence Patterson' Muhammed professes the religion of "Almighty God - Almighty God is Everything That Exist" and boasts a grade point average of 2.8 from the year he spent at Wayne County Community College. That's better than Teddy Kennedy's first year at college. He's worked as an assistant janitor and security guard. We've had plenty of lawyer presidents, too many, but never a janitor. It may be time.

By contrast, I have no love for Vermin Love 'Sparky' Supreme who's running as a Republican. He's an "activist," naturally, who works in construction and as street theater performer. He professes the "Old Time" religion, which might be a brand of beer. He's run for mayor of Baltimore, where I think he probably couldn't do much more harm to the city than the present crew.

John Joseph "JJ" Kennedy is a 54-year-old unmarried Democrat, who pulled down a 3.7 GPA during his first and only year of college. From there, he was a male fashion model for Kim Dawson Modeling and JoAnn Fullerton Models. Since then he's been protesting the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) and the government's weather manipulation. He doesn't like nuclear testing, either, and wants the war in Iraq stopped. He sounds dumb enough to be a Kennedy. I'm suspicious of a male model who can't find a wife. That should be his first priority, though we may have to wait for gay civil unions to be legal.

Gene Amondson is running for the Prohibition Party. Dude, your time has come and gone. Jacques Yves Boulerice of the Native American Party sounds way too French to be our President. James Louis Dezort Watchman, Independent Party, has a name that sounds too much like a convicted serial killer. Robert Coleman Jorgenson who lists his party as "Other" is out because I'll never vote for a president too lazy to even make up a name for a fake party. For Pete's sake, couldn't you come up with something, anything, like the "Mom, Flag, & Apple Pie" Party? Who could be against that?

God Johan Josephe Lally also hails from the "Other" party. He's a dairy farmer and Vegetarian Benedictine priest married to Virgin Mary John Lally Burtz and practices the Catholic Teutonic religion. He claims to be self-educated. I can't help but think that giving him the reins of power would be opening a real can of worms here.

Bradley K. Lord-Leutwyler of the "None" party has a law degree. He claims to be a visiting lecturer at the University of Las Vegas and teaches college test prep for Kaplan. He's out. We had a whole revolution to kick out British overlords with names like Lord-Leutwyler and we're not letting them crawl back in now.

There are scads of Green Party and Libertarians including Cynthia Ann McKinney from the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party. However, Noot and my eyes are drawn to Jackson Kirk Grimes from the United Fascist Union who lists his religion as Pagan and boasts of being a Storm Trooper in the Facist Freedom Front from 1967-1975. Hmmm, impressive. Ya kinda think that this candidacy is the result of a bet in some biker bar, but you never know. I'm not too crazy about his membership in the Impeach Bush Movement but then he's a member of the Screen Actor's Guild, so he probably has to do that stuff to get jobs.

Grimes wants to abolish Christianity and substitute classical Roman Paganism combined with Fascism as practiced by Mussolini in Italy. His platform is to abolish paper money, establish a "Universal Price Index" that freezes and then reduces commodity prices, and then create a "Confederacy of States" as a step toward a global government based on Corporate Statism. He's laid it all out on The Jerry Springer Show so he's legit.

However, the most persuasive argument for Grimes is his claim to have played Adolph Hitler in an episode of Star Trek. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to come up in the Internet Movie Database, but if he can prove this, he might just have my vote. It's not so much that I'm for anything that he proposes but rather that he's so freaky deaky out there that I'm crazy curious just to see what would happen if he was president.

Another keen observer of the political scene, Mike, by coincidence another high school pal, is considering running for President on the "Cold Beer Party" ticket: "We're adamantly opposed to stores that sell cold beer at lukewarm temperatures and believe the proprietors should have their heads shaved, they should be stripped naked, their butts paint blue, and then kicked out into traffic."

It's got a certain populist appeal and who wouldn't vote for Cold Beer?

Don't Feel Like Chasing No Squirrels No More

2008-03-02T21:07:00.001-05:00

Romain Pizzi, wildlife medicine specialist with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons says many pets are getting more depressed and require treatment. Parrots suffer the worst:

"Typically if people go out to work all day their parrot will get very bored and frustrated and eventually develop depression. Symptoms often include plucking out their feathers or self-harming, which is obviously very dangerous. When cockatoos in particular are depressed they can start to self-mutilate and peck their own legs to the bone."
When your cockatoo can't do the voodoo he used to do, he must be treated immediately:

“Firstly, we will change the environment of the animal and make sure it has more stimulation and toys. When we have ruled out underlying medical problems, we try to break the cycle by using Prozac… (which) is given to the parrots in liquid form. It doesn't cure all animals, but around two-thirds respond to the treatment. In a small number of cases things will go well until we wean them off Prozac and the problems return."

The plague of depression isn't just for the birds, but extends to canines as well. Eli Lilly has released a chewable anti-depressant for dogs called "Reconcile," beef flavored, in the US for dogs who lost their interest in fetching. And that tennis ball, hey, you go chase it.

There Is No Fun In Islam

2008-03-02T19:23:00.000-05:00

A pep talk for Muslims from the Ayatollah Khomeini:

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

I guess that explains the lack of radical Islamic stand up comedians.

The Last Moments Of Flight 77

2008-03-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

Integrated Consultants, Inc. has animated the final seconds of the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 as a fascinating exercise in forensic engineering. You must watch it here.

Jihadis to Hillary: Please Pick Up The Phone!

2008-03-02T15:46:00.003-05:00

"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone in the White House, and it's ringing. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Who do you want answering the phone?"

Hillary Clinton's ad claims she is the best one to answer that phone when the next crisis comes. Barack Obama's counterpunching ad claims he would be the better one to answer that phone since he opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. Of course, Republicans would claim that McCain would be the best man of all to answer the phone since he's the one who has been most severely tested under fire. However, nobody's asking the terrorists who they'd most like to be answering the phone when they make it ring. Turns out, terrorists hope Democrats answer the phone, especially Hillary.

Aaron Klein grew up as an Orthodox Jew in Philadelphia who found that jihadists in London were receptive to interviews with him, a student in Yeshiva University in New York City, and remarkably talkative. Intrigued by the experience, he became a journalist in Jerusalem, where he found Middle Eastern terrorists just as verbose and often bluntly honest about their goals. Klein wrote it all down in "Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollyood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal their Global Plans - to a Jew!"

Klein was surprised to find that Islamic terrorists in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank live in nicely appointed apartments with state of the art communications gear and they pay close attention to American politics. The terrorists are very much encouraged by the Democrats' talk of pulling out of Iraq. Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, told Klein,

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk. Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Saadi laughed at Klein's question whether a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would end worldwide terrorism:

"There is no chance that the resistance will stop."

Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, loves the American liberals who compare Iraq to Vietnam:

"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq."

The terrorists are fully on board the Democrat defeatist program for Iraq. Abu Jihad, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror organization, was thrilled with the Democrat primary debate:

"We see Hillary [Clinton] and other candidates are competing on who will withdraw from Iraq and who is guilty of supporting the Iraqi invasion. This is a moment of glory for the revolutionary movements in the Arab world in general and for the Iraqi resistance movement specifically. I think Democrats will do good if they will withdraw as soon as they are in power."

That's not to say the terrorists don't dig Obama. They do. Ala Senakreh of the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade:

"I think Obama's success that I heard about in the media is an important success. He won popularity in spite of the Zionists and the conservatives, whom he greatly defeated. I think he can be a great leader but I don't think that the American regime will allow him to progress. They will try to get rid of him."

Jihad Jaara of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, leader of the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, wholeheartedly endorses the Democrats:

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat."

Klein writes that terrorists generally love Democrats and hate Republicans:

"... I have talked countless times off-the-record to terrorists about U.S. politics. And one hundred percent of the time the terror leaders favored the Democrats over the Republicans. I never once came across a single terrorist who supported any Republican. And why would they? The Democrats largely want to withdraw from Iraq. They want dialogue with Syria and Iran. The terrorists share those same goals, because they believe it will lead to the downfall of the American empire and the spread of Islam. ... Overwhelmingly, the terrorists favored Hillary Clinton to win in 2008."

The terrorists had nothing good to say about Republican candidates for president. Ramadan Adassi, an Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades leader, hates Giuliani:

"If I had the occasion to meet him I would hurt him. For the sake of the American people Giuliani shouldn't be elected. He is a disgusting guy and I think Americans must think very hard about their future and their soldiers who will be killed when they come to elect their leaders."

Ali Senkreh doesn't think much of John McCain either, whom he considers a "stupid person":

"To you McCain I say this so-called war on terror you're promoting is causing only the loss of life of innocent people all around the world and the loss of your dog soldiers, and what is the result for you? Zero. Nothing."

And terrorists really hate President Bush, almost as much as the Loony Left here at home. Adassi calls Bush:

"...a psychopath, an arrogant person whose hands are full of blood of American soldiers in Iraq, American civilians killed on September 11, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani and other innocent children and women and innocent civilians. A stupid and insane person who will cause the loss even of America's allies in the Arab world."

The terrorists agree with Hillary and Obama. The next time they attack America, they very much prefer that the Democrats are in the White House to answer the hotline. They figure the Democrats favor them.

Yes We Can!

2008-02-20T17:57:00.001-05:00

Hugh Hewitt featured Michelle Obama's scary stump speech at UCLA on his radio show. The whole thing is worth listening to for a peek into the Obama World View, but here's what comes at 8:41 in the audio on his site:

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

I thought I already was working but then I remember that Michelle is making her pitch to a liberal crowd, so warning that her hubby will make them work may be fair warning to Obama supporters who may not have jobs or maintain a casual relationship with labor.

I'm rather fond of my cynicism, which is a prerequisite for listening to the Obamas speechify. When the Obamas are filling up the auditorium with hot air, I like to dial my Cynicism Filter up to about 6, which is the intellectual equivalent of hip waders.

I'm pretty fond of my comfort zone, too, one which I worked all these years to create. I don't want Barrack or anybody else to move me out of it. Mmmm. Comfort zone. Moving everyone out of their comfort zone sounds like something Fidel says right before he demands everyone volunteer their weekends for mandatory work hoeing the fields to fulfill the goals of the Five Year Plan. The Declaration of Independence explicitly states that Americans have the right to pursue happiness. The Declaration of Obama's Wife says Americans should get out of their Happy Place.

The problem with Obama supporters is precisely that they are uninvolved with and uninformed about the real world, making the Obama rhetoric so appealing if you're a knucklehead. The rest of us know a snake oil salesman when we see one, pitching his potion as the remedy for everything.

In related news, Ben & Jerry made the completely unsurprising announcement that they endorse Obama for president. They're donating two "Obamamobiles" to tour Vermont, giving away free scoops of "Cherries for Change" ice cream. This leads us to the great question of the day: What is Obama's flavor?

It has to be some derivative of Neapolitan: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. I figure the chocolate is swirled on top with the vanilla while the pink strawberry is hidden under it at the bottom. It's about an inch down, where you can't see it until after you've bought it and dug in to discover that you've got nearly a whole pint of strawberry.

Hat tip to National Review Online.

What Obama Means By Change

2008-02-13T16:04:00.002-05:00

Little Green Footballs notes that Obama's campaign office in Houston featured a Cuban flag with Che Guevara's face plastered on it, in this local Fox 26 television interview. In fact, one wasn't enough, there were two. LGF quite reasonably wonders why Obama won't wear a US flag pin on his lapel but his supporters have no reluctance to feature Che's face in Obama's campaign office.

For those who are unfamiliar with Che, he was the architect of Cuba's gulag and secret police, the one who wrote home to his dad after his first execution to tell him he REALLY liked killing people, the guy who went on to kill 1892 people. Che was the one who dispensed with evidence and trials, saying they were obsolete bourgeois artifacts, that people should be executed based on revolutionary necessity, that the people would only learn when taught with the pedagogy of the firing squad. It was Che, the psycho serial killer, who had the doomed tapped for blood donations on the way to their executions, that blood sold for a profit. It was Che who planned to plant incendiary bombs in all the major department stores in New York City on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year, a plot that was mercifully discovered and stopped. And he's a hero to the Obama crowd.

Obama has been awfully sketchy about the particular changes he has planned to make America better. Is Che his model? When the flag in the Houston office was brought to Obama's attention, he casually dismissed it as "inappropriate," but didn't ask that it be taken down. This is the same Obama who castigated his fellow senators who wore flag pins as "hypocrites." Cuban/Che flag good. American flag bad.

The Babalu Blog notes:

"Let's see. Castro endorses a Clinton/Obama ticket. Obama has Greg Craig, castro's attorney during the Elian episode, as a senior policy
advisor. He was for lifting the embargo before he was against it. And now his campaign workers put up a picture of Che Guevara that's 3 times as big as Obama's own poster in his campaign office. And a self-respecting Cuban would vote for this guy, why?"

The crazed moonbat Che/Obama lover who hung the Cuban flag appears to be Maria Isabel, a property rights activist who has been engaged in a fight with city hall over her plans to build a McMansion on her plot in the Sixth Ward of Houston. She's quoted in a TV interview as saying, "It’s wrong to try to implement restrictions in my private property. I own this piece of land. This is America. I should be able to do anything I want with it." Well, that's true enough, but an odd thing for somebody to say who flies the flag of communist Cuba, where you have no property rights, or rights of any kind.

Now, the odds are this nutty woman doesn't know who Che is any more than she knows who Obama is. She's probably got scrambled eggs for brains. But both Obama and Che appeal to her for emotional reasons, which is to say her support is irrational. There is no denying that Obama has a powerful appeal for the stupid. It is a terrible spectacle to see the Stupid energized and in motion, bound for a Stupid destination with Stupid intentions.

Obama, The Lefty Messiah

2008-02-10T22:17:00.000-05:00

"Is Barack Obama The Messiah?", a blog, captures the religious fervor with which lefty airheads are embracing Obama as the Solution To Everything. The trouble is, I'm not sure if it's a parody or another promotion for Obama. With Obamamania, the line between truth and comedy is getting very blurry.

For example, there is Cynthia Keze who tried to squeeze into the Key Arena in Seattle with thousands of others to see, just to see The Future. When she failed in that, she stood out in the rain, hoping to see Obama, to experience Obama, to just feel His Presence.

"The rest of us, we were in this huge crowd outside in the rain and he came out in the rain and talked to us. I was 10 feet away from him, 10 feet away. The only time I felt like that was when I saw Pope John Paul II."

Over and over, Cynthia repeated that she had only been ten feet, JUST TEN FEET, from Obama. Ten feet!

Seattleite Wendy Malabuyo, a 31-year-old engineer, couldn't name anything Obama had ever accomplished but, then, what did that matter?

"He inspires me. I can't even say. … He gives me so much hope. It makes me feel like something will actually change. So I'm speechless. I love him. I love everything he stands for. I love everything that he can bring to this country. And we just need to get him there."

John Cruce, 64, worked thirty years managing records at the State Department in Washington, D.C.. He couldn't think of anything Obama had accomplished either but that's hardly the point:

"Well, I think the biggest thing is he is like a key. He's going to unlock a door that's going to allow us now to pass and finally be able to do some things we would like to do. There are not going to be as many barriers as there have in the past."

Certainly, Obama Love obliterates all the barriers erected by rational thought. Obama need not explain his plans, if he has any, or lay out exactly how he's going to solve the pressing problems of the day. Obama needs only to Be and that's enough. Here's Barack Obama demagoguing away on Super Tuesday:

"We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be. Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can."

Yes We Can do what, exactly? Obama is going to remake the world, The Entire World, into What It Should Be! And what exactly is that? Obama will let you know later, but trust Obama, it will be Good. How exactly will Obama do this remaking? With Obama Magic, that special voodoo only he can do!? Obama is awfully grandiose in his rhetoric, but he never quite gets into those picky little details.

I watch this Obamafying with amazement. It's like watching the best pickup artist in the world work a bar where they've just passed out free hits of Ecstasy.

It's gotten kinda creepy even for some Obama supporters, like Joel Stein of the LA Times. In his piece, "I've Got Obamaphilia," Stein writes that his mom gets Obama. She nails Obama as Peter Sellers in "Being There," an empty suit hailed as a visionary genius.

Message From Mars

2008-02-08T17:49:00.000-05:00

At long last, proof positive of intelligent life on other planets has been delivered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been searching the Red Planet for traces of water since October 2006. This photo of a smiley face on the desolate surface was taken by a special high-definition camera carried by the NASA space probe in a crater nearly two miles wide in the Nereidum Montes, a mountain range.

While we busy ourselves with our earthly concerns, are we being watched by alien intelligences, cool and unsympathetic, studying us through their telescopes like we might scrutinize bugs through a microscope? Is this Martian mockery? If so, I don't care for it, not one little bit. Sure, attack us if you must, but we won't put up with abuse from a bunch of weenie-ass Martian maggots.

Or is this some sort of prank carried out by three-armed Martian teenagers carving out giant smiley faces on their dune buggies? If so, it's hardly proof of superior intelligence but rather of the poor parental discipline of a Martian ghetto where kids just run wild.

Or are they just telling us to have a nice day?

Why The West Is Best

2008-02-08T16:56:00.000-05:00

Ibn Warraq summarizes why Western values are superior to Islam in the excellent City Journal:

"A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate."

Why don't you read it all? And if you like that, you might try his book, "Why I Am Not A Muslim," a rather thorough, devastating, intellectual critique of Islam.

Thank Allah The Americans Have Him

2008-02-04T15:57:00.000-05:00

Michael Yon in "Sons of Iraq" reports how peace has broken out in Mulhallah 838 & 840, neighborhoods in south Baghdad. While back in the States the loony lefties in orange jumpsuits smarmily decry fictional American abuse of prisoners in Gitmo et al, the Iraqis are more closely in touch with reality:

"Numerous times I have seen Iraqis come up to American commanders asking about a family member or friend who was detained. When they learn that Americans have detained the person, they are relieved. But if they find he is in Iraqi government custody, there is dread and despair.

"Colonel Gibbs told the story of an Iraqi man who turned in his own two sons to Gibbs’ Fourth Brigade, First Infantry Division. The man said he knew if the sons were guilty they would be held, but if innocent would be released. Following an investigation they kept one son and released the other. Smart father.

"It’s better to be in an American detention facility than have Special Forces blasting down your door. After all, Gibbs’ brigade has suffered 89 Killed in Action (KIA), and over 700 wounded. This war is for keeps."

Danger, Will Robinson!

2008-02-04T00:08:00.000-05:00

For those ten year old boys from 1965 who never grew up, another dream has come true. You can buy your own robot from "Lost In Space" for only $24,500, including shipping within the US. Space Productions have painstakingly made a replica of the robot based on the third season version.

They have three guys working full time making sets of four robots at a time, about one set per month, about ten sets per year. They plan to make 150 robots, all of which are reserved by customers. However, don't despair. Some customers drop out and robots come up for sale. You still have a chance of nabbing one.

They call their replica B9, but the robot never really was given a name. Some folks call the "Lost In Space" robot Robby, mistaking it for the robot from the 1956 sci fi classic "Forbidden Planet." Both robots were designed by Robert Kinoshita, so they're siblings of a sort.

You can covertly control the robot with a five button key chain remote control which will turn the robot's torso, make the robot answer "Affirmative" or "Negative," and activate its soil sampler. Richard Tufeld, the original voice of the robot, recorded 500 voice tracks which can be played on the onboard stereo. In fact, you can plug your stereo into the robot and play tunes on it like a juke box, which seems an undignified use, in my opinion.

In the original show, stunt man Bob May climbed inside the robot and spoke its lines while jamming on a button which flashed the robot's lights. Later, Dick Tufeld dubbed in the robot voice in post-production.

The original robot is owned by Kevin Burns, a 20th Century Fox executive. A friend had prodded him to go find the original robot. He found it in big airline freight trunks labeled "Friday's Robot" on Stage 2. Japanese customers had last used the robot but got the Robinson family mixed up with Robinson Crusoe and thought the robot was playing Friday.

There were two versions of the robot. One was the full up "hero" version which was filmed. The other was a lighter version used as a stand in to set up lighting. The hero in the trunks had been butchered by the Japanese into "a big white refrigerator with claws."

Burns hired Greg Jein, a master model-builder for film and television, to restore the robot for an estimate of $4000 to $5000. Jein had salvaged the original Jupiter 2 model and other props from the series from the trash where it had been thrown after the series was cancelled after three seasons.

The robot was shipped, still wet, to a December 1990 convention where thousands of fans celebrated the 25th anniversary of the show. There were plans to bring the cast together to do one last TV movie of "Lost In Space," but marketing surveys showed that its audience had moved on. It was not to be.

Musharraf In Davos

2008-02-01T13:26:00.000-05:00

Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online reports from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Pakistan President Musharraf:

"Time and again, this has happened at Davos: A journalist (usually British or American) will ask a question loaded with anti-American bias. And the leader being questioned will say something defensive about America. I will briefly recapitulate a most memorable instance: Americans had just conducted a strike on a target in Pakistan; the Pakistani leadership had not been told in advance about this strike. Someone asked Pervez Musharraf, “How can you tolerate such arrogance and cowboyism from the Americans?” (Again, I am paraphrasing.) “They did not inform you; they violated your precious Pakistani sovereignty. And you are quite rightly a proud people. How can you stand these Americans?”

"Musharraf answered essentially as follows: “Yes, it is true that we would have liked to know about the strike. And it is true that we are a proud people, jealous of our sovereignty. But what about al-Qaeda? They are all foreigners — from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chechnya, and all over. They have no right to be on our territory. They are violating our sovereignty. How come no one ever mentions that? And the Americans are helping us get rid of these foreigners.”

"I think that the room was actually shamed."

Sitting In Obama's Chair

2008-01-14T20:14:00.000-05:00

Armando Iannucci mocks the empty rhetoric of Democrat wannabe president Obama in a Guardian Unlimited article, "Barack Obama - I'm sure we've seen him somewhere before." I was meandering around Iowa at New Year's during the massive ad campaign to convince Iowans to caucus for him. Every fifteen minutes an ad ran for a Obama where he inspirationally called on his supporters to help him change the world. I'm little impressed by this grandiose speechifying. What part of the world exactly did he want to change first? Obama is a little light on details which makes me leery of him changing my world.

Ianucci notes that Obama spouts "... a rhetoric that soars and takes flight, but alights nowhere. It declares that together we can do anything, but doesn't mention any of the things we can do. It's a perpetual tickle in the nose that never turns into a sneeze. Trying to make sense of what he's saying is like trying to wrap mist."

Exactly.

Ianucci descends into cruel, but delightful, mockery when he considers how Obama might orate about a simple chair:

"This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl's behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America's huddled arse."

Damned if I don't want to sit in Obama's chair after hearing that! If only Obama was president so there would be chairs for everyone!

Saddam By The Numbers

2008-01-14T00:21:00.000-05:00

Confederate Yankee takes the new propaganda figures floated by the Left of the number of Iraqis killed in the Iraq war, downsized from the previously preposterous 600,000 to a merely absurd 150,000.

CY accepts the high 150,000 number and calculates that over the first three years of the war that the number covers that comes to about 126 deaths per day.

However, CY calculates that nearly 1.9 million people were killed by Saddam, including the unnecessary deaths in his thwarted wars of conquest in Iran and Kuwait. When that number is distributed over Saddam's 24 year reign, that comes to 235 people killed, on average, per day. And it wouldn't have stopped.

How To Behead

2008-01-13T23:42:00.000-05:00

Budding Islamic poetess, Samina Malik, 23, an admirer of the beheader of Nick Berg, Zarqawi, recently published her new poem, "How To Behead," on Islam Online, an immensely popular website for Muslims:

Hold him
Tie the arms behind his back
And bandage his legs together
Just by the ankles
Blindfold the punk
So that he won't hesitate as much
For on seeing the sharp pointy knife
He'll begin to shake
And continuously scream like an eedyat
And jiggle like a jelly
Trust me–this will sure get you angry
It’s better to have at least two or three brothers by your side
Who can hold the fool
Because as soon as the warm sharp knife
Touches his naked flesh
He'll come to know what'll happen
It's not as messy or as hard as some may think,
It's all about the flow of the wrist.
No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream
But ignore the donkey's ass
And continue to slice back and forth
You'll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe
But don't stop
Continue with all your might.
About now you should feel the knife vibrate,
You can feel the warm heat being given off,
But this is due to the friction being caused.

Samina Malik practices the Religion of Peace in the United Kingdom, where she worked in a Heathrow shop. Unfortunately, her poetry did not elicit the admiration of the British legal system who convicted her of possessing documents likely to be used for terrorism, such as the The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, Encyclopaedia Jihad, How To Win In Hand To Hand Combat, How To Make Bombs, and Sniper Manual.

Her page on the social networking website Hi5 (something like Facebook) was introduced as evidence against her at trial, particularly the section titled "Favorite TV Shows":

“Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs.”

Malik began her literary career writing love poems at Villiers High School in Southall, Middlesex, then graduated to writing rap poems, emulating Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent, under the name "Lyrical Babe." She turned radical Muslim in 2004 and put on the hijab, changing her nom de plume to "Lyrical Terrorist."

When the cops raided her room, they found a scrap of paper on which she wrote:

"The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom, the need to go increases second by second."

They also found her poems, including this ode to killing infidels:

"Kafirs your time will come soon, and no one will save you from your doom."

I wonder how many lyrical terrorists walk among us.

Outsourcing Gone Wild

2008-01-10T21:13:00.000-05:00

We've outsourced computer programming and help desks to India. Even your receptionist may telecommute from Bombay to receive visitors in the lobby via big screen TV. Now they've outsourced motherhood.

For about ten thousand bucks, Western women can hire a woman in the Indian town of Anand to be a surrogate mother for her child. Couples fly in to Dr. Nayna Patel's clinic at Kaival Hospital for one-stop service in commercial surrogacy, which was legalized in India in 2002. The prospective parents are paired with a surrogate mother, one of many who volunteer, some more than once. They sign a contract to pay the surrogate, cover all her medical bills, and the mother agrees to hand over her baby. The father donates sperm which is used to impregnate the surrogate mother in-vitro. Forty babies have been completed so far with fifty more in production.

The womb-for-rent business taps a vast labor pool willing to work cheap. Women are lined up to volunteer at the clinic. The surrogate mom gets about half the ten grand paid, which is fifteen years worth of salary as a $25 per month maid. That's enough to buy a house in Anand. They're counseled to treat their pregnancy as if "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine months."

That ten grand for an Indian surrogate is way cheaper than the $80,000 an American surrogate mother would charge. The Indian mothers are not necessarily doing the work American mothers won't do. In some cases the American women customers have been rendered infertile by such afflictions as uterine cancer.

Dr. Patel defends her commercial surrogacy clinic: "There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her (own) family. ... If this female wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

While that may be a legitimate argument, it raises the spectre of Indian baby farms, like commercial turkey farms, mass-producing cut rate infants cheaper than good, honest American labor. I never thought I'd see the day when American mothers were threatened with layoffs only to be replaced by cheaper foreign contractors making discount babies overseas, stacking them deep and selling them cheap. Will we see American nurseries shuttered like the steel mills with new babies being FedExed in from abroad using just-in-time management techniques? This is worse than the invasion of cheap Japanese cars thirty years ago. It hits home hard. Hard! My friends, it will be a sad day for America when even Americans are no longer made in America.

Blue On Blue

2008-01-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

Blue on blue is a military term for friendly fire, friendly blue forces firing on fellow blue forces instead of the hostile red forces. In the Democratic "blue" states, it seems the bluest candidate is drawing fire from those who once supported The Big Her. Andrew Sullivan prints an email from a good solid liberal reader telling of the surprising reaction to Hillary's victory in the New Hampshire primary:

Watched the NH returns with some friends last night, and something quite unexpected happened when the AP called it for Clinton -- inexplicable ANGER. I was surrounded by people in their early 30's, registered Democrats, receptive to the Clintons in the 90's, and I swear I thought someone was going to throw their wine glass at the tube during her 'victory' speech. We made a pact last that we all followed through on this morning -- logging on to BarackObama.com and donating $100 each to his campaign (this is the first time ANY of us has donated money to a campaign). Oh, and did I mention we're all New Yorkers?

Are lefties going for Obama as a vote against Hillary? Maybe. The liberals, aside from the true believers, have had enough of the Clintons. They don't like them. They really don't like them.

Camille Paglia explores why with a cutting analysis of Hillary's character, which she sees as formed by her "harsh, domineering father":

"Hillary's feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm's length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham's abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage -- the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.

"Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

"It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. ...

"Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary's default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. It's a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias. How will that play in the Muslim world? ...

"She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same."

Yet, Hillary continues her relentless march to the nomination, which she is likely to win. That presents we conservatives with the interesting prospect that the Democrats will nominate somebody to run for president whom they hate more than we do.

Allah Commands You To Kill Yourself

2007-12-19T20:35:00.000-05:00

The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) projects a focused beam of sound that, when it hits a persons head, creates a painfully loud screech, but only in that one skull. People standing next to the target hear nothing. They have no idea why the guy next to them ran away screaming or is rolling on the ground.

The US Navy discovered it could also broadcast speech for about the distance of a football field so they put it to use clearing the way for their ships in the northern part of the Persian Gulf. A destroyer would aim the LRAD at a sailor on a fishing ship to warn him they were coming through. That really freaked the fishermen out when they started hearing voices in their heads beamed from the big American ship. That's when things got interesting.

The Army has quietly deployed the LRAD to Iraq to mess with the heads of jihadis, who tend to be religious and superstitious. When our guys beam messages from Allah into their thick skulls, the jihadis go nuts. When Allah tells you in a revelation that you are a filthy dog who should surrender immediately, what's a jihadi gonna do? When Allah abandons your jihad, you might as well pack your Koran and go home.

Iraq In Perspective

2007-12-19T09:09:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson puts Iraq in perspective with US military history in his article, "In War: Resolution." It's worth reading the whole thing, though his conclusion follows below where he makes the point that the media has made the perfect the enemy of the good for a historically illiterate population that expects wars to be wrapped up quick and neat as sitcoms:

Victory does not require achieving all of your objectives, but achieving more of yours than your enemy does of his. Patient Northerners realized almost too late that victory required not merely warding off or defeating Confederate armies, but also invading and occupying an area as large as Western Europe in order to render an entire people incapable of waging war. Blunders were seen as inevitable once an unarmed U.S. decided to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan all at once in a war to be conducted far away across wide oceans, against enemies that had a long head start in rearmament. We had disastrous intelligence failures in World War II, but we also broke most of the German and Japanese codes in a fashion our enemies could neither fathom nor emulate. Somehow we forget that going into the heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a dictator in three weeks, and then staying on to foster a constitutional republic amid a sea of enemies like Iran and Syria and duplicitous friends like Jordan and Saudi Arabia—and losing less than 4,000 Americans in the five-year enterprise—was beyond the ability of any of our friends or enemies, and perhaps past generations of Americans as well.

But more likely the American public, not the timeless nature of war, has changed. We no longer easily accept human imperfections. We care less about correcting problems than assessing blame—in postmodern America it is defeat that has a thousand fathers, while the notion of victory is an orphan. We fail to assume that the enemy makes as many mistakes but addresses them less skillfully. We do not acknowledge the role of fate and chance in war, which sometimes upsets our best endeavors. Most importantly we are not fixed on victory as the only acceptable outcome.
What are the causes of this radically different attitude toward military culpability? An affluent, leisured society has adopted a therapeutic and managerial rather than tragic view of human experience—as if war should be controllable through proper counseling or a sound business plan. We take for granted our ability to talk on cell phones to someone in Cameroon or select from 500 cable channels; so too we expect Saddam instantly gone, Jeffersonian democracy up and running reliably, and the Iraqi economy growing like Dubai's in a few seasons. If not, then someone must be blamed for ignorance, malfeasance, or inhumanity. It is as though we expect contemporary war to be waged in accordance with warranties, law suits, and product recalls, and adjudicated by judges and lawyers in stale courtrooms rather than won or lost by often emotional youth in the filth, confusion, and barbarity of the battlefield Vietnam's legacy was to insist that if American aims and conduct were less than perfect, then they could not be good at all, as if a Stalinist police state in the North were comparable—or superior—to a flawed democracy in the South with the potential to evolve in the manner of a South Korea. The Vietnam War was not only the first modern American defeat, but also the last, and so its evocation turns hysterical precisely because its outcome was so unusual. Later victories in Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, and the Balkans persuaded Americans that war could be redefined, at the end of history, as something in which the use of force ends quickly, is welcomed by locals, costs little, and easily thwarts tyranny. When all that proved less than true in Iraq, the public was ill-equipped to accept both that recent walk-over victories were military history's exceptions rather than its rule, and that temporary setbacks in Iraq hardly equated to Vietnam-like quagmires.
We also live in an age of instant communications increasingly contingent upon genre and ideology. The New York Times, CBS News, National Public Radio, and Reuters—the so-called mainstream media skeptical of America's morality and its ability to enact change abroad—instill national despair by conveying graphic scenes of destruction in Iraq without, however, providing much context or explaining how such information is gathered and selected for release. In turn, Fox News, the bloggers, and talk radio hear from their own sources that we are not doing nearly so badly, and try to offer real-time correctives to conventional newspapers and studios. The result is that the war is fought and refought in 24-hour news cycles among diverse audiences, in which sensationalism brings in ad revenues or enhances individual careers. Rarely is there any sober, reasoned analysis that examines American conduct over periods of six months or a year—not when the "shocking" stories of Jessica Lynch or Abu Ghraib or Scott Beauchamp make and sell better copy. Sensationalism was always the stuff of war reporting, but today it is with us in real time, 24/7, offered up by often anonymous sources, and filtered in a matter of hours or minutes by nameless editors and producers. Those relentless news alerts—tucked in between apparently more important exposés about Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith—ultimately impart a sense of confusion and bewilderment about what war is. The result is a strange schizophrenia in which the American public is too insecure to believe that we can rectify our mistakes, but too arrogant to admit that our generation might make any in the first place.
What can be done about our impatience, historical amnesia, and utopian demands for perfection? American statesmen need to provide constant explanations to a public not well versed in history—not mere assertions—of what misfortunes to expect when they take the nation to war. The more a president evokes history's tragic lessons, the better, reminding the public that our forefathers usually endured and overcame far worse. Americans should be told at the start of every conflict that the generals who begin the fighting may not finish it; that what is reported in the first 24 hours may not be true after a week's retrospection, and that the alternative to the bad choice is rarely the good one, but usually only the far worse. They should be apprised that our morale is as important as our material advantages—and that our will power is predicated on inevitable mistakes being learned from and rectified far more competently and quickly than the enemy will learn from his.

Only that way can we reestablish our national wartime objective as victory, a goal that brings with it the acceptance of tragic errors as well as appreciation of heroic and brilliant conduct. The Iraq war and the larger struggle against the anti-American jihadists can still be won—and won with a resulting positive assessment of our overall efforts by future historians who will be far less harsh on us than we are now on ourselves. Yet if as a nation we instead believe that we cannot abide error, or that we cannot win due to necessary military, moral, humanitarian, financial, or geopolitical constraints, then we should not ask our young soldiers to continue to try. As in Vietnam where we wallowed in rather than learned from our shortcomings, we should simply accept defeat and with it the ensuing humiliating consequences. But it would be far preferable for Americans undertaking a war to remember these words from Churchill, in his 1930 memoir: "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter."

Camera, Good. Pen, Bad

2007-11-20T13:59:00.000-05:00

Andrew Romano of Newsweek tells how Hillary is stiffing the press in her seven step program. Her embrace of photographers and stiff-arming of writers is part of her approach of form over substance. A more sinister interpretation would be that Hillary simply doesn't do freedom of the press. And why should She have to explain her plans to we mere mortals? Hillary Knows Best. Just Do What She Says. What do you think this is, a democracy?

Iraq Had WMDs

2007-11-20T09:38:00.000-05:00

John Loftus, head of the non-governmental International Intelligence Summit, just released a report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program based on a private study of captured Iraqi documents:

"Roughly one-quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid-to-late-1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam's entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans' noses."
It appears that Syria began an atom bomb program based on the remnants of the Iraq nuclear program at a facility recently bombed by the Israelis.

Civilization Flows From The Barrel Of A Gun

2007-11-19T15:02:00.000-05:00

Marko of Knoxville, Tennessee makes the case for the Second Ammendment in his post "Why The Gun Is Civilization":

"In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

"When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

"There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat--it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly."

The Laffer Curve

2007-11-17T14:44:00.000-05:00

Gene Sperling, Hillary Clinton's chief economic advisor, rhetorically asked on a National Press Club panel discussion not so long ago: "The question is: Should we be giving an extra $120 billion to people in the top 1%?" Such is the arrogance of Hillary's gaggle of socialists that they believe any money you earn that they don't tax is a gift of the government to you. In their view, government has the first claim on your income. You have the last claim on the money you make.

That kind of thinking has led to the current status quo where the top 1% of wage earners pay almost 40% of all federal income tax while the bottom 50% of earners only kick in 3%. That's up from 34% of all federal income tax the top one percent paid in 2003 and way up from 25% in 1990. Hillary thinks they should pay even more.

You enter the top one percent by making $313,469. Now that's a pretty hefty income, an income very few people earn without working their ass off and taking considerable risks to provide goods and services their customers want. Sperling's question reeks of envy, a base motive for taking the fruit of somebody else's hard work, but a core value of Hillary's taxation scheme. Simply put, they think like thieves.

Michael Boskin, Rudy Giuliani's economic advisor, said, "There is no -- let me repeat -- no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes. ... The Western Europeans have seen their standards of living decline by 30% in a little more than a generation because of their high taxes."

Europe's sick economy is caused partly by high taxes to sustain a bloated welfare state. It is the dysfunctional European model which Hillary's team holds up as an example to be emulated by the USA. It's the wrong road to follow for America.

The liberal impulse to overtax the rich is not only morally flawed, but self-defeating in that it diminishes total tax revenue by killing the geese who lay the golden eggs. To understand why, we need to revisit the Laffer Curve from the Reagan era, as shown in the illustration above.

Laffer says, sensibly enough, that you collect no taxes if your tax rate is zero. That anchors the left side of the curve. Likewise, you collect no taxes if your tax rate is 100% because no free person works if they don't get paid. That anchors the right side of the curve. In between those two anchor points is a curve which represents the amount of total amount of tax revenue for each tax rate. You might argue about the specific shape of that curve but it is indisputable that such a curve exists.

As you raise the tax rate from 0% to 1%, the tax revenue collected is directly proportional to the tax rate. The curve is probably a 45 degree slope for the first few percent increases in tax rates because it's too small for the taxed to notice. However, as the tax rate increases, the taxed take notice and begin changing their behavior. If you worked a job where you were paid less and less for each subsequent hour of overtime, it's unlikely you'd want to work much overtime.

In general, government gets less of anything it taxes and more of anything it subsidizes. When you tax work, you get less work. When you subsidize single mothers, you get more single mothers. When you tax the rewards for the extraordinary effort it takes to create a successful business, you get fewer successful businesses. For example, Congress slapped a luxury tax on yachts in 1990 which killed yacht sales and put 25,000 boat builders out of a job. Likewise, Hillary wants to soak successful businesspeople who create the small businesses which are the engines of wealth creation.

The Laffer Curve neatly illustrates that there is an optimum point of tax rates beyond which total tax revenues decline. That's why Bush can cut the tax rates and collect more taxes. It's the same principle Walmart uses to sell cheaper yet make a greater total profit. By contrast, liberals operate on a kind of cartoon economics that holds that greater profits can be had by simply increasing prices.

Liberals always push the tax rate beyond the optimum point to the back side of the Laffer Curve. The irony is that when conservatives like Reagan and Bush pull the tax rate back to the optimum point, tax revenues increase while liberals act like scorched cats. Their class warfare costs the government. They are more committed to punishing the successful than funding their own programs.

The First Republican, Abraham Lincoln, said it best: "You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer."

We can't vote for Lincoln, but we can vote for an economically literate candidate like Giuliani while rejecting the cartoon economics of Hillary and her economic illiterates.

Ramadi

2007-11-17T13:14:00.000-05:00

Douglas Halaspaska of US Cavalry On Point writes of the remarkable progress made in the Sunni Triangle, an area written off as ungovernable not so very long ago, in "So Much Has Changed...Observations from Ramadi":

"As I was sitting atop a sand bag wall interviewing a sergeant, a Marine 1st Lieutenant approached me. He explained that he was going to confront an Iraqi Policeman (who we’ll call Mohammad to protect his true identity) who was suspected of being involved in the insurgency during 2005. The situation was all the more extraordinary since Mohammad and the lieutenant are friends. As the Lt. casually mentioned that I would be able to ask some questions, I jumped off the wall, quickly gathered my gear, and wondered about what I would be witnessing.

"Sitting in a small room lined with cots and gear, the lieutenant talked to Mohammed through an Iraqi interpreter. “We know you were an insurgent during the fighting – you’re in no trouble – I just want you to tell me the truth.” Mohammad was now visibly shaking and appeared nervous before he quietly answered “yes.” “Did you ever fire on any Marines,” was the lieutenant’s first question. Mohammad was clearly concerned and replied with a long answer, but ultimately ended with a simple yes.
“I was in Ramadi during the same time, so you could have possibly been shooting at me,” stated the lieutenant. “It’s okay Mohammad - if you were shooting at me then I was firing back at you,” joked the lieutenant. The rest of the session involved the lieutenant and Mohammad exchanging promises to never fight again, and to work together to protect the city of Ramadi. Furthermore, pledges were exchanged that this new understanding, between friends, would not affect their friendship.

"It was beyond heartwarming to see these two former advisories – one a Marine, and the other an Iraqi Policeman – now working together as friends and comrades for a common cause. I came to Ramadi expecting a war and what I found was a city that has grown from the carnage, and all its inhabitants – both Iraqi and American – healing."

We're winning.

Ten Thousand

2007-11-16T10:07:00.000-05:00

Patrick Poole notes in FrontPage magazine that, since the Sep 11 attacks, Islamic terrorists have made ten thousand terror attacks killing sixty thousand people and wounding ninety thousand. The toll of the carnage wrought by Muslims is documented in detail in the website, "The Religion of Peace (and a big stack of dead bodies."

Islamic Terror Attack No. 10,000 appears to be a bomb planted in a movie theater in Amritsar, India which was packed full of poor migrant workers watching the latest Bollywood comedy. Six dead, 32 wounded. Another glorious victory for Islam! Allah Akbar!

Glen Reinsford, the editor of the "Religion of Peace" website, notes that 225 Iraqis were accidently killed by US forces in collateral damage incidents in 2006, but 16,791 Iraqi civilians were killed on purpose by Islamic terrorists that same year. So the quiz question of the day is: Why does the vituperation of the Muslim world and the radical Left fall only upon America when Muslim terrorists kill 671 times as many Iraqis?

OK, I'll admit it's an easy question. The Left blames America first for everything. Muslims never take responsibility for anything. It's always the fault of the Other. And really, Muslims killing Muslims is not a moral problem worth noting for them.

Why The Saudis Are Evil Barbarians

2007-11-15T16:24:00.000-05:00

Reason No. 1,000,006: A story about a teenager in Saudi Arabia taken from the Saudi Arab News:

"A year-and-a-half ago in the Eastern Province town of Qatif, a seven men gang-raped a 19-year-old girl 14 times. Three judges from the Qatif General Court sentenced the rape victim to 90 lashes for being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape. The sentences for the seven rapists ranged from 10 months to five years in prison.

"The Appeals Court sentenced the victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The seven rapists had their sentences increased to between two and nine years. The verdict came in as a shock to everybody.

"A source at the Qatif General Court said that the judges had informed the rape victim that the reason behind doubling her punishment was 'her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.'"

Leaving Islam

2007-11-15T12:16:00.000-05:00

Poster Q_Q writes in "Left Islam To Never Look Back Again" in the very interesting FaithFreedom.org website:

"Here’s the story of how I came to leave and despise Islam and everything it stands for.
My parents are from India, my mother was born a hindu and my father a muslim. They met in college in Delhi, the usual thing happened and they got married. During the initial years, they continued to live in India where both worked in fairly well paying jobs. Neither of them was particularly religious & therefore neither tried to get the other to convert.
About three years after their wedding, they moved to Canada where my father’s sister already lived. My aunt and her family were particularly observant muslims and almost immediately began to pressure my father into becoming more religious, while at the same time exerting pressure upon my mother to convert. Worse, once my aunt found out that my parents were using birth control so that my mother could continue with her career, the pressure became even more intense.
Eventually, my father caved and in turn began to shove his religion down my mother’s throat. In order to save her marriage, she ended up converting and stopped using birth control. She became pregnant with twins (my sister & me) soon after. Once we were born, my father forbid my mother from returning to work and wanted her to become his personal baby factory so he could fulfil his warped religious obligations and have a ton of little muslim babies. For whatever reason however, my mother did not get pregnant again and in time my father began to talk about a second wife.
At the same time, under the influence of his extremely traditional brother-in-law, he had become physically abusive towards my mother and was always both physically and verbally abusive towards my sister. Towards me however, his darling son, he was completely permissive. I admit that as a child I took advantage of my father misogyny to gain the upper hand over my sister.
However, despite being the apple of my father’s eye, I was far more attached to my mother. By the time I reached the age of 5 or 6 I began to see that she was being made to suffer through no fault of her own. I also began to see my father for the monster that he had become as he became ever more religious with time.
When I was 7, my father beat my mother particularly badly one evening. When I confronted him about it, his response was chilling. Apparently, our beloved prophet had instructed his followers that it was appropriate and even necessary to beat our wives to keep them in line. I got a lengthy religious lecture from my father about this that evening. I suppose that at the age of 7 I was more intellectually mature than my 40 year old father as I saw the religious nonsense for the vile crap that it was and at the end of the conversation, I got went upstairs and called the police.
That day was the last time I spoke to my father for many many years. Criminal charges were filed against him, my mother, my sister and I all testified against him in court. He was sentenced to 15 years without parole. We also testified against his sister and brother-in-law for inciting conjugal violence. Ironically enough, my cousins testified against their parents as well. Both my aunt & uncle were sent to prison for two years each & their children came to live with us for the duration.
Of course once we were free of my father, my mother returned to her original hindu religion. My sister & I converted as well. My cousins, who at the time were in their teens (16 and 17) also left islam and became hindus.
Over the years, I am now 30, married and with a child of my own, I have often wondered about why my father underwent the transition from a perfectly normal, loving man to a complete monster. The only true changes that occurred in his life were that he moved from India to Canada and that he became progressively more religious and orthodox. The move in and of itself couldn’t change family dynamics therefore it had to have been the religious aspect that led to the changes in my father. Therefore, as an adult, I decided to find out more about islam.
I read the Quran & the hadiths as well as several books and commentaries written by both muslim and non-muslim scholars. The more I read, the more I came to understand how this religion can turn a perfectly normal man into a complete monster. And the more I find out about this religion the more I despise it.
Fortunately, once in prison, my father’s conscience began to bother him and he came to realize just how much pain he had caused. He too examined his metamorphosis and understood that islam was at the root of everything that had gone wrong in his life. He eventually abandoned islam as well and once he was released from prison he too converted to Hinduism.
Today my entire family is happy & healthy. And we have all learnt a very important lesson – never again will any of us allow a practicing muslim to enter our lives.

Orders From The Fuhrerbunker

2007-11-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

Michael Crowley writes in "Bunker Hillary" in the New Republic about Hillary's smash-mouth style of press relations:

"Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

"Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative."

How much do you think the press would squeal if such Soviet-style news suppression were perpetrated by a Republican candidate? Isn't it odd how Democrats like Hillary have so little fondness for democracy, especially that messy freedom of speech?

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir

2007-11-13T15:47:00.000-05:00

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir is the spiritual leader of Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) in Indonesia. He was convicted of conspiracy in his group's bombing of nightclubs in Bali in 2002 which killed 202 and wounded 209, mostly Aussie tourists. Consequently, the US Department of State has designated Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya is also probably responsible for the 2003 bombing of the Marriott hotel in Kuningan, Jakarta which killed 12 and wounded 150. That bombing was most notable for tossing the severed head of the suicide bomber to a perch on the fifth floor overlooking the carnage. They went on to bomb the Australian embassy in 2004: 9 dead, 150+ wounded. It was Bali again in 2005 with twenty killed and 129 wounded.

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir gave his thoughts on Al-Arabiya TV on October 26, 2007:

"The path taken by many political parties in their effort to establish an Islamic regime is not the right path, because these parties adopt democracy. Democracy is not an Islamic means. Democracy runs counter to Islam, because it emphasizes the sovereignty of the people, whereas Islam emphasizes the sovereignty of Allah. Thus, if we are to submit to the law of Allah, Muslims have no choice but to say: 'We hear and obey.' In democracy, Allah's commands may be open to discussion, and if we agree with them, we accept them, but if we do not agree with them, we reject them. Herein lies the flaw. Therefore, as long as the Islamic political parties endeavor to adhere to Islam by means of democracy, they will not achieve their goal. ...

"I do not accept their concept of independent judgment, unless the bombing is carried out in the countries of the infidels who declared war against the Muslims, such as America. America has declared war on the Muslims, and therefore, we are permitted to carry out bombings there, because they are the ones who declared war against the Muslims. ...

"It is a duty… We are duty-bound to establish an Islamic state, and the Muslims are duty-bound to live in an Islamic country. Muslims are forbidden to live in an infidel country. Sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to live in the countries of the infidels. That is why we are committed to establishing an Islamic state. The path that the Prophet Muhammad bid us to take is the path of preaching and Jihad. Waging Jihad is the proper conduct. That is why it is essential to establish an Islamic state by means of preaching and Jihad. We have tried to do this in Indonesia, by committing ourselves to Islamic preaching."

"I support Osama Bin Laden, as long as he wages Jihad for the sake of Allah, in order to implement the law of Allah."

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir maintains that the 2002 Bali bombings were hijacked by the CIA, saying that the bombs his supporters planted were not intended to kill anyone, just injure them. He claims the CIA substituted a deadlier "micro-nuclear bomb" for the safer bombs of his organization. Isn't that just like the CIA to pull a stunt like that, ruining a perfectly safe terrorist attack.

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir has a simple answer for what America and the West can do to stop terrorism, "They have to stop fighting Islam. That's impossible because it is sunnatullah [destiny, a law of nature], as Allah has said in the Koran. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam." Everybody's cool with that, right?

Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir's Islamic terror organization has butchered dozens of innocent Australian tourists but old Abu remains puzzled at Australia's animosity toward him, "But it would be impossible to go to Australia because if I went there I would be arrested and slandered by the Australian Government. The Australian Government still treats me like an enemy for reasons that are unclear."

I confess that I'm a judgemental guy but it's pretty clear that you can't reason or bargain or even have a rational conversation with the likes of Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir or Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya. You have to crush them like bugs. So let's get to it.

Bush Was Right

2007-11-07T23:40:00.000-05:00

Here is the Right Brothers singing their hit tune, "Bush Was Right." It sounds even better set to music. It's just our way of saying we will, we will rock you.

Listen to it here.

What Muslims Think

2007-11-05T22:57:00.000-05:00

Muslim Wife is a Muslim woman who lives in Florida and posts her thoughts online in a blog. To represent herself, she posts the illustration above of a woman wearing an abaya robe and niqab face veil, as Saudis do. Here are some of her comments posted under "What's So Good About Fasting," where she describes a conversation with a non-Muslim:

Kaffir: Oooh, you're fasting?
Me: yup
Kaffir: No food?! No Drink?!
Me: nope
Kaffir: Not even water? Oh my gosh...I'm so sorry!
Me: Uh....I'm not.

Kaffir is an derogatory term used by Muslims to describe non-Muslims. It translates as "infidel," but it literally means "ingrate." Muslims see anyone who denies Allah and his purported Messenger Mohammed as ingrates who reject their truth.

A reader challenges Muslim Wife's rudeness:

Anonymous said…
You live in Florida in the United States and you use the word "kaffir" to refer to the people who live next door to you?
I'm not trying to be rude but I'm just curious as to why you would do that...

Another Muslim reader helpfully explains it to him:

abdullah said…
The kaffir (kuffur) are the enemies of
islam. They are less than human unless they revert to the one true way. It is acceptable to be rude to them - regardless of where you live, for they are less than us.

Muslim Wife said…
Anonymous: Did I do something wrong by calling a kaffir a kaffir? Anyways, Abdullah explained it well,masha'Allah, but I'll put it to ya like this...if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

If you were wondering why no Muslims complain about Islamic terrorism, Muslim Wife explains it in a post called "Tag, I'm It":
What Comes to Mind When I Hear
Car: stupid loud muffler
Murder: non-Muslim: Haha.

The reason the Muslim Wife is not objecting to the murder of non-Muslims is that she's too busy laughing about it. This is a Muslim woman, probably foreign, with a very good command of English, living in the US, who is amused when infidels are killed. And why shouldn't she be? That's Islam.

Thanks to JihadWatch

An Offer The Iranians Can't Refuse

2007-11-02T11:52:00.000-05:00

Iran is blaming America for 152 dead dolphins which washed up on their shore at the port of Jask in southern Iran. Photos of dead dolphins are splashed all over the Iranian media to the general public consternation. While more rational heads hold that the dolphins were killed by fishermen, the sane don't rule Iran. There are several theories.

Sha'aban-Ali Nezami, head of Iran's state-run fisheries organisation,

"As these dolphins are not among the species normally found in the surrounding Persian Gulf and Oman Sea, probably the Americans - for tracking purposes - have brought them to carry out laboratory works in the Gulf region. This group of dolphins have not been able to tolerate the tests. The likely reason for these deaths is water pollution, the spreading of electro-magnetic waves by military ships or a kind of virus disease."

However, autopsies on the dolpins ruled out anything but the Americans, just as the crazy Persians suspected.

If they had watched "The Godfather," they might have considered another possibility. These dead dolphins dropped at their door could be a Sicilian message from the US Navy: If you build a nuke, you'll be sleeping with the fishes.

How The Blue States See The Military

2007-10-29T15:48:00.000-05:00

Rochelle Reed, the Features Editor of the Tribune in San Luis Obispo, California, wrote a column about her shock when her son, Evan, enlisted in the army out of the blue:

"Two years ago in September, as my friends were sending their kids off to Berkeley or Stanford or UCLA, I drove my son, Evan, to our local recruitment center where he joined the U.S. Army. ...

"Never in a million years did I imagine my son would join the Army. Nor did Evan. In high school, he’d hang up on recruiters who called the house. He’d blurt, 'Get away from me!' to the ones who trawled the local hangouts. Our home was liberal Democrat and anti-war and now, at 21, he was a Michael Moore fan. The night before he left, he spent his time reading 'Stupid White Men.'"

It must be quite a shock for a Blue State Mom to spend all that time indoctrinating her kid, teaching him the military is stupid and Michael Moore is a genius, only to have it all go horribly, tragically wrong. Here he could have been safely smoking dope at Berkeley and being lectured by tenured hippie radicals on the evils of capitalism and he throws it all away to be a grunt infantryman. Kids!

"When I tell people that Evan has joined the Army, their reactions are almost always the same: their faces freeze, they pause way too long, and then they say, 'I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.'

"I hang my head and look mournful, accepting their sympathy for the worry that lives in me. But as it dawns on them that Evan wasn’t drafted—Vietnam still clings to my generation—their expressions become quizzical, then disbelieving."

The shame of it all! Why didn't he become a drug dealer or something respectable instead of a warmonger razing villages in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan?

"I know what they’re thinking: Why in the world would any kid in his right mind choose to enlist when we’re in the middle of a war?"

Why? Why? Why? Why would anyone risk their life for their country? It's a pretty puzzling riddle for the Me Generation of the Baby Boomers.

"I begin telling them the story, desperate to assure them it wasn’t arrogant patriotism or murderous blood lust that persuaded him to join. What finally hooked him was a recruiter’s comment that if he thought the country’s role in Iraq was so screwed up, he should try to fix it."

She's got a point. My friends in the Air Force all signed up for the arrogant patriotism and murderous blood lust. You know who you are. Me, I signed up for the chow. I LOVED those C-rations, especially the beans & weiners. And the boned chicken, c'est magnifique!

"And on a deeper, personal level, he signed up hoping that somehow the Army would help him find what young men these days often try to fill with alcohol, drugs and video games: a sense of purpose."

Alcohol, drugs, video games, or the army. For lefty moms, the world is full of bad choices for their sons.

Thanks to Best Of The Web

It Sucks Being Bin Laden

2007-10-27T11:56:00.000-05:00

It's been a bad year for Bin Laden. It wasn't so long ago he was sitting on top of the Muslim world, having struck a death blow to the Great Satan which would surely then fold like the paper tiger it was. But America didn't die nor did it suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. To Bin Laden's surprise, America took Afghanistan from him, took down most of his lieutenants, and chased him into a cave in Waziristan, where the worst he could do is make threats by video.

Osama had hope that Iraq might revive Al Qaeda's fortunes but now that's been shot to hell, too, by those damned infidel Crusaders. In his last videotape, "A Message to the People of Iraq," he's given up threatening America and been reduced to bitching about how bad the jihad is going. It sucks being Bin Laden these days.

Mistakes have been made, Bin Laden admits. Insurgents have done bad things, very bad things. Says Osama, "The mujahideen are the children of this nation ... they do right things and wrong things. ... Those who are accused of violations of God's commandments should face trial." Trial? What's Al Qaeda coming to when its terror chieftain starts advocating rule of law? What kind of friggin' terrorist obeys the law?

Bin Laden goes on to caution his followers against extremism: "I advise ... our brothers, particularly those in al Qaeda wherever they may be, to avoid fanatically following a person or a group." It appears that Bin Laden has finally figured out that he isn't winning any recruits with snuff videos or forced marriages or killing people's children to win their support.

Bin Laden even bitch-slapped himself for being too extreme: "I advise myself, Muslims in general and brothers in al-Qaida everywhere to avoid extremism among men and groups." Ya think?

Bin Laden bitched about the insurgents breaking into factions and fighting among themselves: "Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks. ... Beware of division ... Muslims are waiting for you to gather under a single banner to champion righteousness. Be keen to oblige with this duty."

Bin Laden's problem is that the Sunni minority in Iraq who initially supported Al Qaeda has not only abandoned them but is now actively hunting them down and killing them. Bin Laden's thugs didn't know the first rule of guerrilla warfare is to gain the support of the people. As Mao said, a guerrilla must move among the people like a fish swims in the sea. Al Qaeda in Iraq alienated their Sunni supporters by trampling on them like an elephant, thinking they could force their support. Their bad.

In an audiotape, Bin Laden admitted that Al Qaeda had lost the war in Iraq. Fortunately for him, the liberal media hasn't heard about it. They still think he's winning and the war is bringing him loads of fresh recruits. Don't hold your breath hoping to read anything different from the "Iraq Is Vietnam" meme in the New York Times.

When Al-Jazeera broadcast Bin Laden's bout of pessimism and defeatism, Islamists were shamed and outraged that the network would show weakness or admit defeat. "God fight Al-Jazeera," cursed one Muslim yahoo who called Al-Jazeera a "collaborator with the Crusaders." The Islamist nutcases at the Al-Fajr Media Center, which distributes Al Qaeda propanda online, accused Al-Jazeera of "counterfeiting the facts" by editing Osama's speech to make it appear negative about the jihad. Said Al-Fajr, "Al-Jazeera directors have shamefully chosen to back the Crusaders' side, and the defenders of hypocrites and the thugs and traitors of Iraq." One wack job Muslim wrote a poem calling Al-Jazeera a "miserable fly in the garbage," concluding, "Your day will come, vile one. As long as we live, you won't be safe, Jazeera."

I will pause briefly here while I laugh my ass off.

The problem with pandering to an audience of bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics is that eventually they will turn on you when you don't toe their radical line. Violent revolutionaries eventually turn on each other and their violent revolutions eventually consume themselves. Robespierre, while head of the Committee of Public Safety, sent thousands to the guillotine during The Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, only to find himself sent to the same guillotine at the end. It is likely that Al-Jazeera, which happily served the terrorist jihad by broadcasting Al Qaeda propaganda and snuff videos, will one day be featuring the videos of its own managers and reporters being snuffed by Islamists as a lesson.

We're winning.

Space Aliens Attack Sicily

2007-10-26T17:38:00.000-05:00

The good people of Canneto di Caronia in northern Sicily were alarmed when their household goods spontaneously combusted. Cookers, electrical appliances, wedding gifts, and even furniture were catching fire for no apparent reason.

At first, it seemed like it could all be explained by poltergeist. The Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth said, "I’ve seen things like this before. Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods. Let’s not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers." Excellent point. Let's not forget the Clinton White House.

Fortunately, reason prevailed when the government ordered the Civil Protection Department to investigate. They think the most likely cause was space aliens. The Italian government, after a two year investigation costing two million bucks says the fires were "caused by a high power electro magnetic emissions which were not man made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts." The space aliens left behind their telltale footprint: "burnt imprints which have not been explained were found in a field." The Italians think that it could be a UFO landing site.

Francesco Mantegna Venerando, Sicily’s Civil Protection chief and coordinator of the report, said: "We are not saying that little green men from Mars started the fires but that unnatural forces capable of creating a large amount of electromagnetic energy were responsible. ... This is just one possibility we are also looking at another one which involves the testing of top secret weapons by an unknown power which are also capable of producing an enormous amount of energy."

It sounds like the Sicilians are a breath away from blaming Bush and his militarists from making their microwaves catch on fire.

Islamophobia

2007-10-26T14:44:00.000-05:00

Magdi Khalil writes about "Islamophobia and the Islamist Scarecrow" in the American Thinker:

"According to the ["Global Patterns of Terrorism"] report, 14,352 terrorist operations took place across the world in 2006, and as a result 74545 military persons and 20,570 civilians were killed; 1800 children were wounded and killed, 430 students, 215 teachers and 129 reporters lost their lives; 8,200 policemen were wounded and killed, in addition to 1300 public leaders and guards. The number of individuals abducted during 2006 is estimated to be around 15,855; and the number of buildings, schools and governmental institutions targeted amounted to 19,500; 300 terrorist groups took responsibility for these operations, in addition to the individual incidents of terrorism.

"The report indicates that at least 50% of those operations targeted Muslims and were carried out by Muslims as well, and during that same period, 350 mosques were subject to terrorist attacks. When so much death and destruction takes place during a single year, and given that 90% of that horror was unleashed by Muslim terrorists, it is highly absurd to talk about Islamophobia in relation to the current state of affairs. Fear and misgivings are completely warranted in this situation. People are entitled to react in fear when they face a lethal situation, otherwise they would be lacking sensibility and good judgement.

"The term "Islamophobia" is a tool of deception that serves to mislead the world, blackmail the West, terrorize whoever dares to criticize Islam, fuel the anger of Muslim youth, and minimize the danger of Islamic terrorism, in addition to being a threat to the freedoms of thought, creativity and criticism in the West, ultimately the term can serve the interests of the terrorists."

Muslims rarely address criticism rationally or directly. Most usually, they respond to criticism, however valid, with wild counter-accusations. It's a form of fallacious reasoning called "ignoratio elenchi" where the rebuttal has no logical connection to the argument made. If you assert the violent nature of Islam by pointing out the plethora of terrorist attacks in its name, a Muslim is most likely to say Hiroshima proves America is the greatest terrorist.

The charge of "Islamophobia" is another form of ignoratio elenchi. It's pretty foolish to claim that the thousands killed on Sep 11 by Muslim terrorists are not a primary reason for the bad reputation of Islam nor the train bombings nor the snuff videos nor the new terror plots uncovered every month, but rather that the West simply has an irrational aversion to Islam with no basis in fact. You would have to overlook a lot to reduce it down to simple bigotry. Islamophobia is a red herring meant to divert the argument against Islam away from the painful truth that Islam is a bad and backward religion.

Hello Kitty Assault Rifle

2007-10-26T09:09:00.000-05:00

In case you were wondering what to get the rug rats for Christmas.

Thanks to BoingBoing

Why No Nuns Have Been Successful Skyjackers

2007-10-26T08:39:00.000-05:00

Hats off to the TSA for not taking the cheap and easy route of ethnically profiling young Muslim males as potential threats at security checkpoints and taking the politically correct approach of regarding everyone equally as a threat. We can rest easy knowing that Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta is having his troops search elderly nuns for box cutters. And that's why no gang of nuns has ever successfully hijacked a jumbo jet and flown it into Mecca.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin

The Beautiful Country

2007-10-25T16:33:00.000-05:00

James Fallows of The Atlantic Magazine had been away on assignment in China for seven months when he returned to America last March. His first impression of America after a long stay in China:

"It is obvious, but: The wealth. The things. The overall abundance. (And, yeah, well, that you can speak English.) Plus, how clean the air is, and how many trees and birds and flowers there are, and how few unfinished edges -- open ditches, stacks of construction beams -- you come across. Since I'm in Northern California I haven't yet had the cliched reaction of how large the people themselves look. But I notice how sparse they seem to be on the streets, compared with any Chinese town.

"The name for America in Chinese and several other Asian languages is ... meiguo, "beautiful country." ...

"I realize an error of logic I had been making. China is so fast-changing, so ambitious, so covered with construction cranes, so on-the-move and on-the-rise, so dotted with localized pockets of affluence and big new projects like its Olympics sites and its giant factories and its 'Mag-Lev' trains, that I had begun, without thinking, to assume that it was 'rich.' Not even close. I am reminded of where the country actually stands. ...

"Once again, the beauty, wealth, polish, finished-ness, natural abundance, cleanliness, order, consumer choice, etc of America’s polished cities is just stupefying. Yes, this was a clear and perfect autumn afternoon in a prosperous capital. Still: my wife and I walked into a run-of-the-mill drug store and stood for a moment, stunned: there was a wider array of stuff on shelves within our immediate range of vision than we’d seen in months in Shanghai, the cosmopolitan pride of China.

"Americans read so many reports about the dynamism of China’s industries and the skyscrapers of its big cities that they may begin to think there is some overall comparability between the two economies. No. There isn’t. Not to mention: at the friends’ house where we’re staying, we drank water… out of the tap!"

Barack Obama

2007-10-25T00:12:00.000-05:00

It's true. A picture is worth a thousand words. I'm thinking the caption on this should be:

"Please elect me to be president of an America I don't respect."

The Museum of Broken Relationships

2007-10-24T16:45:00.000-05:00

Zvonimir Dobrovic got the idea for his Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin from two Croatian artists who broke up and put all the artifacts of their lost love on display. The idea was to disconnect themselves from the emotional energy of the objects yet preserve them, allow them to convalesce, and act as a collective emotional therapy for the greater world.

A woman from Ljubljana donated her coffee pot which she used to brew coffee for her long ago love, even after they broke up and he came back to visit. Sometimes she would make herself coffee to remember him. "As I would like to break this endless circle I decided to donate it to the museum."

Another mad as hell woman from Sarajevo gave the museum a pen: "I'm just really sorry I didn’t break this pen as soon as I got it, because if I did I wouldn’t have written all that romantic crap he did not deserve."

A Croatian war veteran donated his artificial leg to commemorate his dead romance with the "beautiful, young and ambitious social worker" who helped him get back no his feet: "The prosthetic limb endured longer than our love. It was made of better material!"

Another woman from Berlin (it's mostly women) donated an ax:

"She was the first woman that I let move in with me. All my friends thought I needed to learn to let people in more. After a few months …I was offered the opportunity to travel to the US. She could not come with me. We said goodbye tearfully at the airport with assurances from her that she could not survive three weeks without me. When I returned after three weeks she said: 'I fell in love with someone else. I've known her for four days but I know that she gives me all that you cannot give me.'

"I kicked her out. She went immediately with her new girlfriend on holiday while her furniture stayed with me. Not knowing what to do with my anger, I bought this ax to blow off some steam and to give her at least a small feeling of loss. I started to ax one piece of furniture a day. The more her room filled up with chopped up furniture, the more I started to feel better. Two weeks after she was kicked out she came to take the furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood."

Nonie Darwish

2007-10-24T16:02:00.000-05:00

Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian turned American writer and public speaker who grew up in Cairo. Darwish rebelled against the tyranny and hate-mongering of Islam, detailing it in her book, "Now they Call Me Infidel; Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror."

Darwish spoke at University of California Berkeley last night, Tuesday, October 23, in the face of harrassment from radicals, captured in photos by Zombie. Her lecture was part of a series of events on dozens of campuses across the US for "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," organized by conservative intellectual David Horowitz to highlight Islamic extremism. You can read the whole speech here, but here are some excerpts:

"I moved to the US in 1978. In my first visit to a mosque in America, we were told not to assimilate in America and that Islam is here to become the dominant religion. I was told to cover up in Islamic clothes; but how can I do that when I have never worn Islamic clothes in Egypt? Women in Egypt until the 1980’s did not wear Islamic clothes.

"In August 2001, I visited my birthplace, Cairo, Egypt. I was stunned to see how radical Islam had taken over. The level of anger and hate speech was alarming. I saw extreme poverty, pollution, hazardous material and garbage along the Nile. There was high unemployment, inflation and widespread corruption. But when I read Arab media, all I saw was Israel and America bashing. Citizens were unaware of Muslim against Muslim atrocities in Iraq, Algeria, Sudan etc. ...

"I was happy to return to the US on the evening of Sept. 10th. 2001. The next morning I saw the second airplane hit the twin towers, I knew ‘Jihad has come to America.’ Muhammad Attah was from Cairo, the same city I came from.

"I called several friends in Cairo, they were all in denial and said ‘How dare you say that Arabs did this? Don’t you know this is a Jewish conspiracy?'

"These were not radicals, but ordinary Egyptians who otherwise are very nice people. I hung up the phone and felt alone and disconnected from my culture of origin. Once again, my people are accusing the Jewish people of something we know very well, we Arabs have done ourselves. In any religion this is considered a sin, but in the eyes of radial Islam, Jews do not deserve the truth, justice or mercy. The Jews that we describe in our mosques, Arab textbooks and media don't exist. We, Arabs are fighting an imaginary Jew of our own creation. ...
"On Arab TV, I once saw a Muslim preacher telling little children that lying is not allowed except under three conditions 1- Lying to non-Muslims when it is in the best interest of Islam. 2- Lying to Muslims if it will end conflict between them. And 3rd: Lying to one’s wife to improve the relationship.

"Lying thus has become an obligation in international relationships, Muslim relationships and family relationships. Any wonder why Muslims were silent after 9/11? Those who expose the lying game are considered traitors. By allowing lying, Muslims have created a culture unable to distinguish between lies from truth; truth has become a convoluted game of saving face for the best interest of Islam.

"The Times of London reported that Muslim students in Britain are being taught to despise non-Muslims as ‘filth’. The Arabic word for this is ‘Nagas.’ That is why many Arabs believe that the existence of non-Muslims on Muslim land is a desecration or occupation.

"US soldiers, at the request of Saudi Arabia, sacrificed their lives to protect it from Saddam. Under normal conditions that could have been met with appreciation, but instead, the Arab street reaction was “how dare the infidels desecrate Muslim land.” That is why America’s defense of the Muslims against the Serbs, the Afghani Muslims against the Soviet Union, feeding the Somali Muslims starved by their own leadership, all did not get the US any credit in the Muslim world; just the opposite, the more America tries to help stabilize the region, the more it is despised. Arab-Muslims do not want to be rescued by infidels. This is a proud culture that is easily shamed by feelings of dependency on the non-Muslims. This is the psychology of the Arab Street.

"That is how the West is perceived. In the Judeo Christian culture they say: “we are all sinners” -- but in the Muslim culture “they are all sinners; but we are Muslims”. Non-Muslim are “Cafir”, non-Muslims are not innocent; they are viewed as sinners who need Islam and Islamists have given themselves the role of Allah to force Islam on the world, against their will, through the principle of Jihad."

Sixty-Seven Is Not Enough

2007-10-16T17:19:00.000-05:00

Shahadeh Abu Arrar, 58, is a dirt poor Arab Israeli Bedouin with eight wives. Under Muslim law, you can have up to four at a time, but the Bedouins see that more as a guideline than a law. Men marry women and legally divorce them but everyone, wink, wink, knows they are still married. Says Shahadeh, "My first wife is my age, and today I hardly spend any time with her. Her children are big, and I leave her alone. I have younger wives to spend time with. Every night I decide which wife to be with."

Abu Arrar is the father of 53 children by Arab Israeli wives. He has another 14 children by Palestinian wives over in the West Bank. That's 67 total. How he supports them all is something of a mystery. He raises some camels, goats and cows and gets welfare payments worth about $1,700. That can go a long way if you are living a simple Bedouin life and put your wives to work. By contrast, the average Israeli family, who are paying for Abu Arrar's family, have about 2.3 children.

Abu Arrar brags that he knows all his children's names and is shooting for a longer list: "I'm thinking about a new wife, No. 9. There are many women who wish to marry me and there is no lack of women. I never had a problem with such things."

So there you are, ladies. If Nine is your lucky number, you better move fast. However, if Ten is your lucky number, you can probably take your time.

Thank You, America

2007-10-14T23:53:00.000-05:00

Majhid Hamid Majeed is a 33-year-old shop owner and father of five in the Adhamiyah neighborhood in northern Baghdad who was kidnapped last Tuesday by thugs who beat the hell out of him. They stuffed him in a small room on a cot. They told him that if his family didn't pony up a ten thousand dollar ransom, they'd kill him.

The word spread through the neighborhood. The Iraqis in Baghdad have had it with violence. They're sick of being trapped in their own homes. Many of them have figured out that there isn't any difference between the criminals and insurgents and have been going over to the US to clean up their town. Somebody called the local tip line with the names and hideout of the kidnappers on Wednesday. That happens more and more lately.

A platoon from Troop C, 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Custer's unit) kicked through the door of the hideout, scaring the kidnapper guarding Majeed clean out of his shoes. They caught him before the barefoot bastard could make his escape to the roof. They found a confused Majeed, who thought he was going to be killed, and told him he was being rescued to which he exclaimed, “Thank you America!”

Bring Me My 72 Virgins!

2007-10-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, the Smiling Assassin held on death row in Indonesia for the bombings in Bali which killed 202 people and wounded 209, spoke to reporters about the Australian prime minister's criticism of Indonesia's slowness to carry out the executions of the Muslim bombers:

"I'm very happy, especially after hearing that John Howard is very angry with us. The more he is angry, the more I will get rewards from God, right? The more I make infidels angry, the more I will get my reward, so I'm more relaxed."

Prime Minister John Howard complained about soft treatment of the Muslim terrorists who slaughtered eighty-eight young Australians on vacation in Bali after Indonesia considered cutting the prison terms of ten Muslim terrorists involved in that bombing in Bali and another one. Australians were outraged when Indonesia's anti-terror chief invited "reformed" Muslim terrorists from prison to a party at his home last month.

Amrozi, his older brother Ali Ghufron, and Imam Samudra are all being held in Batu Prison in Java for the mass murder. They refuse to ask for a pardon and are eager to be executed. Samudra says,

"We apologise for the victims, but only the Muslims. The infidels will go to hell anyway. ... Absolutely, we are not afraid. With execution we will go to heaven, and our wish to see God and the angels is far higher than the wish of the infidels for our death. ... Why would we be scared of death? Even now we are not scared to be executed. (US President George W) Bush and his allies, you all will go to hell but me and all my friends in the world will go to heaven."

SLAPPing Down The Soft Jihad

2007-10-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

Muslims are waging both a hard jihad of violent terror against the non-Muslim world and a soft jihad of intimidation, using the legal system to attack their critics and suppress their criticism. A California law called “strategic litigation against public participation” (SLAPP) is helping defeat this intimidation which is fueled by Saudi petrodollars, as told by Judith Miller in the City Journal:

"Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees."

The radical recipients of Saudi largesse in America wage jihad by lawsuit, attempting to overmatch their opponents with the expense of defending against a contrived defamation suit for telling the truth about them:

"Last May, the Islamic Society of Boston dropped its suit against the Boston Herald, a local Fox news channel, journalist Steven Emerson, and 14 others. The Society had accused the defendants of libel and of infringing its civil rights by claiming that it had funded terrorist organizations, received money from Saudi Arabia, and bought land for a mosque below market value from the City of Boston.

"Though Massachusetts’s anti-SLAPP law does not cover media firms, ten of the non-media defendants filed a motion to quash the Society’s suit. When a state judge rejected the motion, a legal discovery process got under way while the defendants appealed. Bank records and other documents revealed that, contrary to its claims, the Society had raised over $7 million from Saudi and other Middle Eastern sources and had funded two groups that the Bush administration has designated terrorist entities: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Benevolence International Foundation.

"Records also showed that Society directors had deleted all e-mails about the Society’s land purchase. Finally, discovery revealed that the deputy director of the Boston city agency in charge of negotiating the land deal not only was a Society member whom it had paid to raise money in the Middle East, but also secretly advised the group about obtaining the land cheaply—a clear conflict of interest.

"On May 29, soon after the state appellate court heard arguments on the anti-SLAPP appeal, the Society abandoned the suit. Though its lawyers did not respond to requests for comment and its website tried to put a good face on the surrender, Jeff Robbins, who represented several defendants in the complex lawsuit, expressed their belief that the Society had caved, fearing the prospect of paying what could have been millions of dollars in court and legal fees. “The anti-SLAPP motion clearly played a role,” said Robbins, who represented two clients for free because First Amendment issues were involved. Another factor, he said, was the Society’s fear that the court would order it to answer questions under oath and release information that it had tried to keep secret, such as the names of its donors."