"The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths Islamic terrorists who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”"

"Call me crazy, but is someone who was impeached and removed for bribery a good choice for leadership on the Intelligence Committee? And is somebody who thinks so a good choice to head the House Democrats?"

"Nay, it is a proxy war between the US and Iran. It is being fought on multiple fronts. Iraq is another. We are going to have to blow Iran up and soon. [ The carrier groups are getting congested in the Persian Gulf as we ponder... -ed. ] "

"So on one side of broad pathway through of history we have the nightmares of the left, while on the other side we have the naughty Moors of the right, i.e., the Islamists who believe that time is a big mistake and that we need to undo it and return to the Golden Age of 1267. But that too is a caliphate worse than death, because you cannot undo time without destroying a lot of genies and the bottles they came in. Tenured clowns to the left of me, armed and dangerous jokers to the right, stuck in the middle are the Jews.

Yes, the Jews, because the Jewish prophets discovered history as we know it, which is to say linear history, which is to say irreversible time, which is to say evolution, which is to say the anti-entropic nature of the whole existentialada as the river of time flows toward its nonlocal deustinocean. And yet, at the same time, no human group has been more diligent about preserving and recollecting the primordial tradition that connects us to our source and makes us human, i.e., revelation. Perhaps a rabbi will correct me, but I believe it would not be treffling with scripture to say that, on a spiritual level, Torah is analogous to DNA, in that it represents not just our human blueprint, but the blueprint of creation itself."

"It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. --Matthew 13:11-13"

POST_HTML:
"It is vain to say: "Well, if they come here, they must conform with British society and its easy ways." Muslims will not do that. Their religion forbids it.

Why do we suppose India had to be partitioned?"

"They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don't know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the "mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm" (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn't that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn't stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded."

"With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions. [ This is what happens when ideology is more important than smarts in academic selection criteria. D'oh. -ed. ] "

What's worse than Tet? Something almost inconsequential compared to Tet is made by the Enemedia to seem worse than Tet -- that's what:

"The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People's Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.

Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. It has become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was. Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from the start, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its own Vietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with the French and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win where they had failed. [ Once more my level of shock could seem to rise no higher... -ed. ]

It was, however, the American rather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The American media had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however, without any end in sight and with the promised military victory constantly postponed, American newspapers and — critically — the evening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story."

"So is the left side of aisle more concerned with image than with substance, that is with the opinion of others rather than the interior compass of the self? It seems to me to be so. I am not saying that, politically speaking, the right side of the aisle evinces no such conerns - pundits love to wax eloquent about how all politicians need to make sure they are attractive to the base of their party. But it does seem to me that the left side overall acts more within honor/shame frameworks than the right side. If so, it also helps explain why the left side is pretty fast to sympathize with the aggrieved feelings of Muslims generally when it comes to US policy: accusations are more important than evidence."

"JERUSALEM (AFP) - Hezbollah fired cluster munitions into northern Israel during this summer’s 34-day war with the Jewish state, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. [ Well those and the unguided rockets filled with pointy scrap metal... -ed. ] "

"Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection. Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature. You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature."

"Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. Thus, there are no feminist groups who have rallied behind George Bush, who has liberated more Muslim women than perhaps any other human being in history. Likewise, I know of no leftists who celebrate the achievements of the great liberator Ronald Reagan, who gave millions of victims of a satanic ideology the opportunity to become human again. For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists. They would be cured."

"Someone one wrote that "pacifism is the process of extending war to its greatest possible duration". That's unfair to pacifists. It's the process of of extending the war to its greatest possible duration in the hope that it will become more humane."

"Abdul Rahman, you may recall, converted from Islam to Christianity and was spirited to Italy when Afghanistan's brave new democratic government determined to obey Muhammad's command to kill those who leave Islam (cf. Bukhari 4.52.260). Now jihadists in Afghanistan are demanding his return in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist.

And meanwhile, Islamic apologists in the U.S. blandly claim that Islam has no death penalty for apostasy, and call me "Islamophobic" for pointing out that it actually does (Salam Al-Maryati of MPAC did this to me on the Medved show not long ago, and it has happened elsewhere also). This illustrates the hollowness of the arguments we hear all the time about how we must support self-proclaimed moderate Muslims by refraining from noting the flimsiness and weakness of their presentations. While we're being polite to alleged "reformers," Muslim hardliners are cheerfully implementing the elements of Islamic law that we're nodding our heads and agreeing don't exist."

"“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”

Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes."

"Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush "accepts" the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not "accepting" that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism puerile fascifist inanity pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists. [ Sometimes, even Tigerhawk needs to be corrected ;) -ed. ] "

"Statesmen. Bi-partisan. National interest. All words and phrases which, if the trend continues, will eventually end up as obsolete terms. And when they do, "American" may not be far behind.

Makes you want to shout, "keep up the good work", doesn't it?"

"Nothing makes me more certain of the victory of our ideas than our success in the universities. --Adolf Hitler [ Fascism ... the same as it ever was... -ed. ] "

"Stein goes on to soften his critique by informing us that Hulon stays “up nights worrying about Al Qaeda.” Personally, I’d prefer he stayed up nights doing a little reading so he wouldn’t be operating under such a cloak of ignorance.

GEORGE W. BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD AND DICK CHENEY are routinely excoriated for not taking every pronouncement from our intelligence community as if it were wisdom handed down directly from Mt. Sinai. I go in the other direction – if the people making the decisions of life and death actually care what these clueless intelligence analysts are saying, shame on them.

One of the many turf-wars Donald Rumsfeld has fought during the last six years has been over his desire to create a new intelligence service that would work under him at the Department of Defense. Is there any wonder why he would feel the old services are broken beyond repair?"

"(Name the true man who said it: “God has created [the United States] and brought us to our present position of power and strength” in order to defend “spiritual values--the moral code--against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.” Answer* at bottom.) ... ... ... ... --Harry Truman"

"People like Reid, Hastert, Pelosi are complete mediocrities who should be at much lower levels in our society. Something is fundamentally wrong on both sides of the aisle if they are the upper leadership of our Congress."

UPDATE: And check out the ending of this comment: "So, more and more people, generations now, grow up in symbol manipulating and think reality is an inconvenience, at best. They live in a dream. They think their lives are fake and TV is real. And they have no clue how everything was made and how we got here, and how it can slip away, fall apart, be gone by inattentive erosion or in a flash. And, for all of my life, the left has ripped at every single, boring institution, and the hum drum work a day values that built it all." Wow. Looks like he just read David Warren not far below...

"What time is it in Russia? Twilight, Yakovlev’s memoir seems to tell us."

"As I’ve written before, Iran and North Korea, which are active partners in the development of nuclear weapons and missiles, take turns in creating crises that put the U.S. and allies in a game resembling “monkey in the middle”. Just as the heat is rising against the one, the other will perform an outrageous, attention-getting stunt. But China quietly and happily benefits from their cooperative effort to keep Western eyes off the Chinese ball.

This picture I am giving of world affairs may seem over-simple, and pessimistic. I wish it were. Postmodern man -- who votes, and swings the opinion polls, in the constitutional democracies -- is remarkably unable to cope with the reality of evil in the world around him. He has an attention span too short to assimilate even a sustained challenge from a single source, let alone multiple challenges. He knows little history, and what he does know tends to be seriously wrong. More deeply, he lacks tradition -- the kind of wisdom that could operate on his instincts, even when his rational mind were neither well-trained nor well-informed. Yet he is also poorly informed about current events, and his native ability to reason is vitiated by cheap and disintegrative “relativist” ideas. He is personally a coward, and a voluptuary: he lives for the day, and for pleasure, even in the absence of satisfaction or joy. His role models in popular culture are all narcissists. He is the pure consumer of morally poisonous entertainment. He lives selfishly; yet in his own loveless, self-regarding world, he avoids thinking of his own death."

"A JoongAng newspaper poll, several days after the reported nuclear test Monday, found 78 percent of respondents thought South Korea should revise its policy, and 65 percent said South Korea should develop nuclear weapons to protect itself.

Protesters have held nightly candlelight vigils, and some have burned North Korean flags."