And Cultural Collapse

clipped from www.frontpagemagazine.com The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls. And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah. Late last year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse.

Angry Words

clipped from www.frontpagemagazine.com For Bin Laden, it is now the final stage in a three-act play.  Having “destroyed the stronger and more deadly superpower,”the Soviet Union, “the effeminate American Empire is not a problem.” Bin Laden attacked U.S. installations in 1998 with impunity.  Americans responded with “angry words” followed by “let’s get out of here.”  This attitude began in 1983 Beirut after the U.S. Marine compound was destroyed and 241 U.S. Marines were killed, repeated in Somalia in 1994.  Bin Laden’s attacks on American interests continued throughout the 1990’s, culminating with September 11, 2001, when Bin Laden opened the third phase - bringing his Jihad to America.

Economics Is For Donkeys?

clipped from www.benadorassociates.com Ahmadinejad's high-risk strategy may soon force the Islamic Republic to fight on two fronts: inside the country against a growingly restive population, and outside against a coalition of determined enemies that will not be content with limited fire-works as imagined by him.

Or will the Dems continue to undermine any chance of winning against the nutjobs?

I'll Pass

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com AltaInd: the US should fight only those countries that threaten it and not go to war on behalf of other counties Sort of defeats the purpose of having allies, doesn't it? And it rules out our war against Nazi Germany, saving South Korea, the rescue of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the liberation of Kuwait. I'll pass.

A Problem With More People Than Tenet...

clipped from www.newyorker.com On the New Republic Web site, the international-relations expert Ronald Steel wrote that Tenet “exemplifies the rule that those in high places will endure virtually any humiliation before surrendering a position of power.”

Blow Up? Or Blown Up?

clipped from www.victorhanson.com The more a Palestinian imam promises us our death, the more the Iranian president promises a world without America, the more these al Qaedists, like the most recent keystone clowns at Fort Dix, do their small part in trying to reify such mad rhetoric, and the more the sophisticated apologists assure us that we, not they, are the real threat, the more likely the sofa-sitting, channel-surfing American will some day very soon blow up, rather than be blown up.

That's God's Word?

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Under cross examination, the Columbia University-trained physician was forced to acknowledge a history of family violence, a fascination with weapons and a belief that good Muslims should engage in armed jihad, or holy war. U.S. Attorney Victor Hou asked Sabir about an audio tape, found at his house, in which a religious lecturer said God would “destroy the disbelievers.” “That’s God’s word. I have to believe in it,” Sabir said.

Polish Darkness?

clipped from instapundit.com DE-COMMUNIZATION IN POLAND: A Polish court says it's unconstitutional, leading Perry de Havilland to observe: "But surely justice cannot be served by allowing the communist era and above all, the role of the people who made it all possible, to vanish down the memory hole. If people did despicable things during the communist era, why should they escape punishment? I cannot imagine a German court being allowed to stop the process of de-nazification in Germany, so why tolerate something similar in Poland in the aftermath of communism? Forgiveness can not come before repentance and a lot of people have yet to repent. I wonder if there are any senior judges who might have an embarrassing file on their communist era activities that they would rather not see the light of day? Just wondering."

Nothing To Do With Terror?

clipped from pierrelegrand.net Well gosh they know where they are and the investigation continues…HOLY SMOKES. We are supposed to be comforted by the fact that the FBI KNOWS where they are? Hell they knew where Moussaoui was as well and that didn’t do us a bit of good. The FBI has turned into the Keystone Kops. In 1993 they knew where the second most important person, Abdul Rahman Yasin, in the plot to drop one WTC into the other with a truck bomb that ultimately blew out 6 floors of reinforced concrete was because they interviewed him. Then they let him go and he went straight to Iraq but hey now they have a cute little WANTED POSTER. Ooops yea I know Saddam had NOTHING to do with terror.  Can someone get the Government to alert us in regards to their attitude towards those who want to murder us? Is this a war or a law enforcement operation? We have heard a lot of criticism of the Clinton Administrations feeble attempts to prosecute folks who were at war with us. Is the Bush Administration any different?

Little Worms (Part 48365)

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The larger truth he serves is the realization that we will get nowhere against the psychopathic, Islamist enemies of our civilization so long as we allow them to thrive parasitically on our own vacuous and craven left-liberalism -- parrying each new threat against us with evasion, conciliation, sophistry, and equivocation.

No Problem Here ... Move Along Now...

clipped from www.canadafreepress.com Islamberg is not as benign as a Buddhist monastery or a Carmelite convent. Nearly every weekend, neighbors hear sounds of gunfire. Some, including a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, have heard the bang of small explosives. None of the neighbors wished to be identified for fear of "retaliation." "We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," one resident said. "They own the mountain and they know it and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy a property near that?"

Last One Out...

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com At the time, we thought that the Strib might be pushing Lileks out because of his connections to the conservative blogosphere. Now, though, it looks much more like a case of complete managerial incompetence, because the new editors have most of the Strib's reporters playing musical chairs:

The Irrepressible Martyr Mickey

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com The monstrous clone of Mickey Mouse used by Hamas to teach children violence, hatred, and Islamic supremacism was back on the air yesterday. Hamas issued a statement with the usual toxic mix of whining victimhood and murderous threats; MEMRI TV captured and translated the latest episode of this nightmarish Islamic children’s show. And the media, meanwhile, continue to make excuses and cover for this depravity, in story after story that claims the evil mouse is doing nothing more than teaching “resistance against Israel.” It’s more disgusting than the show itself.

Why You Should Visit Glenn This Morning

clipped from instapundit.com KAROL SHEININ ON THE FORT DIX TERRORISTS: "When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers. How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother's best friend's mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis." No doubt we'll soon hear that the case for carbon caps is a "slam dunk." Actually, they campaigned against a "culture of corruption" before the voters ended Republican control of Congress. Since then, not so much.

(He had Mission Accomplished too.)

Hillary Says Mission Accomplished

clipped from www.youtube.com

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...

Of Filth And Fantasy

clipped from sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com The Baron highlights the difference between an authoritarian type ideology and a totalitarian ideology. The authoritarian ideologues concern themselves only with your behavior. A good example of that was Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Totalitarian regimes concern themselves not only with your behavior, but they try to enforce as certain way of thinking. A good example of that can be found in the Arab world. They are so frightened of free thinking citizens, that they refuse to upgrade their schools- and in the particularly toxic and dysfunctional Palestinian society, Mickey Mouse is used to indoctrinate children not just to love the Great Leader, but rather to learn to love murder and death. This kind of filth is almost unique in the world. Like the Palestinians, the leftists have known nothing but failure. Like the Palestinians, leftists will blame anyone and everyone but themselves for the ideologies that have led millions to decades of despair, desperation, ruination and hopelessness.

And Michael Moore gets wasted in the ending shot:

"It is interesting that while Michael Moore is taking Americans (and cameras) with him to Cuba, when the wall in Eastern Europe came down, the influx of sick Albanians and Bulgarians to Cuban hospitals came to a standstill. They headed to western hospitals and western trained doctors.

It would appear as if the Albanians and Bulgarians are a whole lot smarter that Michael Moore.

Great minds really do think alike."

Beautiful.

Heads In The Sand

clipped from iraqthemodel.blogspot.com I had said it over and over again that some of us in Iraq and America are sending wrong messages to the terrorists and the dictators behind them; in fact I wasn't surprised when I saw Zawahiri appear on al-Jazeera to announce America's defeat, not long after Reid did. The cost of liberating Europe was enormous in blood and treasure and thereafter it took half a century of American military presence to protect Europe's nations from subsequent threats—now if that made sense during a cold war, and it did, then I don't understand why would anyone demand a pullout from Iraq (and maybe later the middle east) when the enemies are using every evil technique, from booby trapped dead animals to hijacked civilian aircrafts to kill us and destroy the human civilization.

Debating In The Dark

clipped from weeklystandard.com Finally, Iran has seemingly carried out at least one direct attack against Americans in Iraq. The only public incident that has been tied to Iran to date is a January 20 attack in Karbala, where 12 men disguised as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center and mounted an attack that killed five soldiers and wounded three. Military blogger Bill Roggio noted in late January: "Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps." AS THE DEBATE OVER a timeframe for Iraq withdrawal rages, it is obvious that some of the most prominent debaters lack the bare minimum of knowledge necessary for serious participation. Understanding the various factions opposing us in Iraq does not settle this debate--but it is a first step to serious engagement.

What Wahhabi?

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com But the greatest intelligence failure of the past two decades was the CIA's failure to understand and sound an alarm at the rise of jihadist fundamentalism. It is Wahhabi extremism and the call to holy war against infidels that gave us the perpetrators of Sept. 11 and much of the terrorism that has followed. In his attempts to blame others for CIA shortcomings, Tenet cannot say, "I told the president that our Saudi allies were financing thousands of mosques and schools around the world where a hateful doctrine of holy war and violence was being inculcated in young potential terrorists." Fatefully, the CIA failed to make our leaders aware of the rise of Islamist extremism and the immense danger it posed to the United States. We have made only a down payment on the price of that failure.

The Window Of Impunity

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com I have written before in these pages that “global warming” is a great imposture and fraud, that will, a generation from now, look like the Club of Rome forecasts for a generation ago. That aside, it is tremendously consequential: not because the predictions are plausible (they are based on computer modelling, which cannot even tell you reliably what the weather will be next week), but because it offers a “window of impunity” to vastly increase the scope of government. That is why, all over the world, politicians have scrambled aboard the climate-change bandwagon even more enthusiastically than the media.

WWII Interned

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com While people may not want to return to the methods of World War 2, it is dishonest to pretend, as it is now fashionable to do, that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conducted war according to some high moral standard that the Bush administration has somehow betrayed. The current rules of engagement of Bush-Hitler would be unrecognizable compared to that waged by the Greatest Generation, and more to point, compared to warfare conducted by any other country in the world today. World War 2 was the era of unrestricted submarine warfare, unlimited attacks on enemy cities, the development of weapons of mass destruction to counter threats which turned out were nonexistent and the internment of thousands of Japanese-American civilians. One may or may not like the facts, but they are the facts.

Did I forget to mention that there were only 9 allies? Or that Einstein helped "mislead us" that we needed to invent the bomb? Down the MSMemory Hole it goes...

The Missing State

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com This is not to say that an American presence on the ground is required indefinitely, but maybe it is rational to argue that the last four years in Iraq have bought a lot of information and capability that would otherwise not have made it into the military system at all. Based on what I have heard, the State Department is far, far behind the Defense Department in the game of having an "ear to the ground", which is really ironic because while it is the job of career diplomats to be the best informed about conditions in foreign countries they are sometimes the most dis-informed because their natural operating environment is at the level of leadership, which in Iraq might be a nest of intrigue comparable of world-class proportions.

Did I Mention That They Have Nuclear Weapons?

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk President Musharraf could declare a state of emergency in Pakistan amid growing civil unrest against his increasingly embattled regime. Security forces were placed on high alert yesterday, detaining hundreds of activists on the eve of an anti-government rally in Karachi. Rival demonstrations are planned by supporters of General Musharraf, raising fears of violent clashes in the southern port city today.

The Results Of The "Moderate" Mosque

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com As we’ve been saying here for a while, it’s completely irrelevant whether suspected plotters like the Fort Dix jihadis are card-carrying members of Al Qaeda International, Inc. Al Qaeda isn’t a formal organization, it’s an ideology—a philosophy of Islamic supremacism that is not limited to one group or country, but spreads through the medium of Islam. I’d like to see mainstream media take one tenth of the energy and resources they’ve spent investigating US secret programs and put it into investigating where people like the Fort Dix Six learned and hardened the Islamic rationale for their plans. The New York Times has told us that the mosque they attended was a “moderate” mosque, and that’s as far as it’s going to get.

That Old U.N. Magic

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com The UN plans to name Zimbabwe head of the Commission on Sustainable Development. Western countries are "concerned". Samizdata is rolling on the floor laughing. Zimbabwe will get the position because it is rotated through a number of countries. The UN can do little harm as long as it is universally understood that it operates according to the principles of magical realism. Unfortunately it often presented as the very fount of wisdom, capable of offering sound advice on climate change, economic development, human rights and nuclear proliferation when it is not always well qualified to do this.

The Evidence Just Keeps Building

clipped from timblair.net So many pointed heads, so little tinfoil. BTW- did you know Churchill instigated the invasion of Poland in order to get rid of the pacificist Neville Chamberlain? They weren’t Sausage-Eaters who blitzkrieged their way to Warsaw, it was actually a group of Boer mercenaries, recruited by the warmongering Churchill during his stint on the High Veldt; the Huns never had any territorial ambitions, Hitler really wanted to use his democratically elected position to urge Germans to join a united Europe, a sort of early EU. This was all scuppered and millions killed to satisfy the lust for power of the evil Churchill. (Who like his distant royal relatives is really an alien lizard. And that’s another thing- Churchill was in cahoots with the British royal family, who were outraged that their fellow hatchling the Kaiser had been deposed by the democratic nazis, and wanted to destroy Germany for thie insolence. The evidence just keeps building).

Heh.

The Worms Begin The Defunding

clipped from powerlineblog.com Secretary of Defense Gates has written a letter to Congress expressing his concern over proposals to fund the Defense Department in three-months increments and to delay the second increment. Here is the text of the Gates letter: In my view, such a proposal would cause significant disruption to the effective and efficient operation of the Department of Defense and the health and welfare of the U.S. military. In submitting the FY07 supplemental request in early February, the Department planned on these funds becoming available by no later than mid-April. Accordingly, starting in mid-April, the Department began a series of actions to mitigate the impact of the delay in the supplemental on our deployed forces by slowing down spending in less critical accounts. In addition, funds budgeted for fourth quarter Army operations and personnel costs have been or are in the process of being moved forward and expended to partially make up the shortfall.

As Hitler said after Munich, I have met the enemy and they are "little worms". There's almost nothing that I agree with Hitler on but he certainly had that one right. And it seems to never go out of style.

They Say It Wasn't Racial...

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Compared to these three cases of arrested development, Don Imus was a model of propriety. What kind of men think that raping a woman and punching her in the face makes for humor? It doesn't matter whether they were talking about the Secretary of State or the secretary working at XM Radio, it's disgusting and repellent. It shows once again that the two hosts of this show have few redeeming qualities, if any.

... so it must be OK. After all, it was just brutally misogynistic and everyone is allowed to do that so we can avoid facing up to the Islamist thugs. I'm betting they get away scott free. Makes me want to wretch...

New Nekkid No Nos (Obama Version)

clipped from instapundit.com They told me that if George W. Bush was reelected we'd see objectionable paintings taken down. And they were right! (Via Don Surber, who comments: "Shades of John Ashcroft and the nekkid statue." Hey, thanks to Alberto Gonzales, Ashcroft is acquiring a retroactive glow!)

Church Sanctuaries Again

clipped from hosted.ap.org LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Churches in five big U.S. cities plan to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, offering their buildings as sanctuary if need be, as they pressure lawmakers to create a path to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. On Wednesday, a Catholic church in Los Angeles and a Lutheran church in North Hollywood each sheltered one person, and churches in other cities plan to do so in coming months as part of the "New Sanctuary Movement."

But the Iraqis should have been left to the plastic shredders? Remarkable. Maybe because leasing out their sanctuaries doesn't require much blood or sweat?

Fred Rethinks The Boycott

clipped from article.nationalreview.com The refusal by the French people to bow to this political extortion should be recognized and cheered. They have not only sent a message to anti-democratic forces inside and outside their borders, I believe they are telling us something even more important. We are beginning, I think, to see our old friends and allies put aside disagreements and rivalries to do what has to be done. It has been a long road, but the forces of civilization and order are beginning to understand that we are in a global struggle against the forces of death and destruction. Maybe it’s time to rethink the “boycott France” movement that got so much attention a few years ago. Americans once toasted General Lafayette, and his son George Washington Lafayette. I think this would be a good time to toast Monsieur Sarkozy. And if you’re going to use wine for that toast, make it French wine.

King Arthur!

clipped from article.nationalreview.com Today, it’s still the fashion for American pundits and pols to snicker at the revenue-enhancing power of tax cuts. But while they laugh, the world at large is shifting toward what works. First it was Estonia going for a Forbesian flat tax. Then Germany elected the Rhineland’s answer to Margaret Thatcher. That was good for as far as it went, but now France? Yes, the people of Gaul found their inner Charlemagne and put tax-cutting Nicolas Sarkozy into office. The realm King Arthur continues to widen.

Purdue Saves Another 15%

clipped from science.slashdot.org "Purdue researchers say they have made a major advance in the design of the internal combustion engine, one that could seriously boost fuel efficiency and cut emissions. A key portion involves building intake and exhaust valves that are no longer driven by mechanisms connected to the pistons, a departure from the way car engines have worked since they were commercialized more than a century ago. The homogeneous charge compression ignition technique would make it possible to improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by 15 percent to 20 percent, making them as efficient as diesel engines while nearly eliminating smog-generating nitrogen oxides, Shaver said.'"

Return Of The Economy Killers

clipped from article.nationalreview.com This time around, an evaluation of at least one wave of tax-rate increases — whether on oil company profits or hedge-fund capital gains, or by way of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — will give investors the opportunity to view the coming stock market decline like an auto crash in slow motion. Current Democratic proposals to raise taxes are the equivalent of the ones imposed by President Nixon, and if those proposals come to fruition, the second decade of the 21st century may look just like the 1970s — with one caveat. Many foreign politicians have learned from their mistakes; they now know that socialist, redistributionist policies are economy killers. But since too many American politicians have not yet learned this lesson, our economy and financial markets will be stuck fighting bad policy from within, and supercharged competition from without.

The Winning Strategy?

clipped from article.nationalreview.com Meanwhile, the supposedly all-powerful Republican noise machine’s greatest victory is allegedly the George W. Bush presidency — which he barely won the first time. And, recall, Bush had to campaign as a “compassionate” conservative to get as far as he did. If we’re so good at p.r., why did conservatism need the adjective? Netrooters want it both ways. The GOP is evil and intellectually bankrupt because it doesn’t care about anything but winning. But it would be the greatest thing in the world if Democrats could be just like Republicans! That doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.

Fred Knows His History

clipped from article.nationalreview.com Sometimes folks around the world mock Americans for not having more of a sense of history. They might be right, but I think it is often for a good reason. Americans are a people who look to the future instead of the past. We hope and believe that things can and will get better. We are more than willing to forgive our old enemies and move forward together in peace. So we tend to forget the bad things we left behind. Unfortunately, some of our enemies feel differently. They neither forgive nor forget. Listening to the messages of al Qaeda’s leaders, you understand that they see their old defeats in very personal and contemporary terms. They are in a “long war” against us, even if we don’t know it. And they’re committed to winning it.

OTOH...

clipped from billhobbs.com Cutting Taxes Grows the Economy - It Doesn't Shrink Government I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conservatives who think the key to shrinking the size of the federal government is cutting taxes are always going to be disappointed. President Ronald Reagan proved that tax cuts stimulate the economy and lead to record tax revenue - and Congress proved it can spend every last dollar and then some. (The Reagan era deficits were not caused by tax cuts as revenue growth soared, but instead were caused by Congress passing budgets that spent even more.)

This is of course the great persistent liberal myth about Reagan. If the tax cuts didn't actual cause federal revenue growth, we couldn't have "buried" the Soviets since we couldn't have spent the insane amounts we did...

Reagonomics Doesn't Work?

clipped from www.bizzyblog.com Still, you’d think this dramatic fiscal turnaround would cheer up Capitol Hill. Instead, Congressional Democrats seem to live in a parallel universe — one that they claim is starved for revenues, with a runaway deficit, and is dominated by the rich who pay no taxes at all. The reality is that the wealthy are financing Democratic spending ambitions, and the deficit could easily vanish within a year or two if Congress has the good sense to leave current tax policy in place.

What Rules?

clipped from www.instapundit.com Corzine isn't the only one. There's an increasing hubris among many elected officials that their job is so important, their time so much more precious than ours and their position in public life so privileged, that they can zip by us on the road, pushing everyday folk aside so they can get to their far more important destinations. This is about more than just traffic laws, of course. It's about the arrogance of power. These politicians not only assume their lives, meetings and fundraisers are more important than everyone else's to the point that they don't have to follow the rules, they're willing to put other people on the road at risk to prove their point.

Verboten Speech At PBS

clipped from pajamasmedia.com

The beheaders don't like it...

The Vital Lie

clipped from onecosmos.blogspot.com And it all begins with a vital lie of the left, that men and women are identical. Since no normal person believes this, it must be mandated by law. Put another way, it is against the law to be normal. Once a vital lie such as this is accepted, freedom must be constrained in a thousand ways -- not just for men, but obviously for woman as well, since a normal girl doesn't have much spontaneous interest in being a cheerleader at a girls' softball game. For that matter, at least back when I was in high school, no, ahem, "normal" boy wanted to be "yell king."

Safe Houses Needed

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com What we need in France and much of Europe; in Iraq and Afghanistan; and anywhere else women are at risk; is a series of "safe" houses for muslim women who wish to escape from their loving husbands and families; and to protect them legally from the politically correct left; who would abandon them to their fate.

Martin Awakens

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com

Of course a lot of his fellow citizens had to die first...

The Signs Of A Lightweight

clipped from instapundit.com WHY IS OBAMA SO TIRED? "During a campaign speech, Barack Obama overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll by a factor of approximately 1,000, saying 10,000 had died when only 12 did. He later explained that he made a mistake because he was tired."