CUANAS: 04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Wikipedia Says
Robert Spencer
Is "Discredited"
Because Of His
"Jewish Ancestral Roots"

This is from Robert at Jihad Watch:

A few days ago you could have checked my biography at Wikipedia and found this:

Most have discredited Mr. Spencer's views on Islam due to oft-exaggeration. It must also be noted that Mr. Spencer's work is highly biased and influenced by his Jewish Ancestral viewpoints.

... the Wikipedia editor above assumes that I speak about the roots of jihad violence within Islamic theology solely because I'm Jewish. That might make some small bit of sense except for one little catch: I'm not Jewish.

Just for the record, I, the proprietor of CUANAS (Christians United Against the New Anti-Semitism) am not Jewish either.

Since when is such considered a valid criticism of one's political opinion, anyway?

Well, of course, in Britain, where the media seems to think the Jews control the whole world, maybe it is legitimate critical analysis, huh?

Sports Talk
With Pastorius
It's All
About
The Lakers

Blogging has been light because, honestly, I am obsessed with the basketball playoffs.

The Lakers pulled off an amazing win today, coming from behind to tie at the end of regulation, and then, coming from behind, again, to win on a last second jump shot by Kobe Bryant, at the end of the Overtime period.

I became a Laker fan as a little kid, the year Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West took them the the 68-13 record and the World Championship.

Obviously, there have been many thrilling seasons, but rarely has a season been as satisfying as this one.

When the Lakers traded Shaq to the Heat for Lamar Odom, I was so behind it. Shaq was fat and getting fatter, and he wanted his wallet to do the same. The Heat gave him the four year, $140 million contract he was looking for, and they will pay for that.

You see what the Bulls did to the Heat today.

That's all on Shaq. He's old. He was no one to build a championship team around, and he refused to play second fiddle to Kobe Bryant, who, before his career is over, may well go down as the greatest basketball player of all time. Yes, ahead of Jordan, Magic, and Wilt.

So, here we are, 2006, after a disastrous season last year, and Phil Jackson has the Kobe-Lamar Lakers playing as I always thought they could. For years, Lamar Odom has been one of the greatest unknown talents in the NBA. A 6-10 forward who plays like a point guard, and yet, he can muscle in the paint, and rebound along with the best of them.

Lamar is like a more buff version of Kevin Garnett. Going by his track record thus far, he is not as good as Kevin Garnett, but let's wait and see on that one, shall we?

Both the Lakers and the Clippers are up 3-1 in their respective series. If they both win, as well they should at this point, then there will be a Lakers-Clippers series, which will probably bring about the Battle for Los Angeles. I can just picture it, riots in the streets, as the gang members who follow the Clippers get a taste of what a bunch of us upper middle-class dudes can do when were really pissed.

:)

Don't be comin' around here with none of your Clipper shit. This is the Lakers house.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

More Unrest Among
The "Youths"
Of Denmark

I can't read the language, but here's a link to a report on a mini-Intifada which occurred last night in Denmark.

Here's a report we received from an anonymous commenter (he also provided the link):

last night a police team (2 policemans, I think) had to go and check a person (muslim) in a muslim majority neiberhood of Odense. Because they cant check the documents there (and they suspected that can be some fake ID), they ask 2 muslims to come at the police station to can check the documents and the identity of them.

Then everything got in flames.

those 2 muslims was 2 imams coming in Denmark from France. And the rest of muslims (from the neiberhood) start beign agressive and declare war when the policems want to take them at the police station for checking of documents. Then, many other policemans came there to protect the law !!!

More "youths", I'm guessing.

An
American
Divorce

I kind of like this idea, even though I would be put into a pretty crappy position, if it actually happened:

There was a little troll over at http://americasnewcrusaders.blogspot.com who suggested we divide into 2 nations, Red States and Blue States.

Maybe the blue northern states could join their socialist friends in eastern Canada, and the blue states on the west coast could join their buddies in Mexico. Afterall, the Califonia Senate voted to join the "May Day" celebrations with their Mexican, muslim, and communist friends this Monday.

Who knows maybe Western Canada would like to make up the difference and join the US, thus linking us with Alaska.

The thing that I think is so asinine about the whole idea of Reconquista, which MECHA, La Raza, and other Latino rights groups preach, is that, if they were able to take back the American Southwest,

THEY WOULD SIMPLY TURN IT INTO MEXICO,

which is exactly what they are trying to escape from.

The reason they want to come here is not because of the land, but because our political system allows them to make a decent living, whereas they are not able to in Mexico.

Let's all say it together; Mexico Sucks! It has always sucked, and it probably always will suck, unless the United States does the only reasonable thing, which would be to annex it.

Then, instead of millions of illegal immigrants turning parts of the American Southwest into something as miserable as Mexico, we could turn all of Mexico into something as great as the United States.

How do you like that idea?

Keith Richards
Fell Out Of
A Palm Tree

"I conked me head."

Unfortunately, he's hurt and in the hospital, or else this would be even funnier than it already is:

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards suffered a mild concussion while vacationing in Fiji and was flown to a New Zealand hospital for treatment, a band spokeswoman said Saturday.

Media reports said Richards fell out of a palm tree and remained hospitalized in Auckland.

Richards, 62, suffered a mild concussion while on holiday in Fiji earlier this week and was flown to New Zealand, band spokeswoman Fran Curtis said in a statement.

"Following treatment locally and as a precautionary measure, he flew to a hospital accompanied by his wife, Patti, for observation," Curtis said.

By the way, how would a doctor determine whether Keith Richards was suffering the ill effects of a concussion?

Friday, April 28, 2006

United 93

I know it's going to sound strange to say this, but, Roger Ebert is one of my favorite writers. So, when I wanted to read about United 93, I turned to him. Here's an excerpt of his review:

It is not too soon for "United 93," because it is not a film that knows any time has passed since 9/11. The entire story, every detail, is told in the present tense. We know what they know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold. This is a masterful and heartbreaking film, and it does honor to the memory of the victims.

The director, Paul Greengrass, makes a deliberate effort to stay away from recognizable actors, and there is no attempt to portray the passengers or terrorists as people with histories. In most movies about doomed voyages, we meet a few key characters we'll be following: The newlyweds, the granny, the businessman, the man with a secret. Here there's none of that. What we know about the passengers on United 93 is exactly what we would know if we had been on the plane and sitting across from them: nothing, except for a few details of personal appearance.

There has been much discussion of the movie's trailer, and no wonder. It pieces together moments from "United 93" to make it seem more conventional, more like a thriller. Dialogue that seems absolutely realistic in context sounds, in the trailer, like sound bites and punch lines. To watch the trailer is to sense the movie that Greengrass did not make. To watch "United 93" is to be confronted with the grim chaotic reality of that autumn day in 2001. The movie is deeply disturbing, and some people may have to leave the theater. But it would have been much more disturbing if Greengrass had made it in a conventional way.

He does not exploit, he draws no conclusions, he points no fingers, he avoids "human interest" and "personal dramas" and just simply watches. The movie's point of view reminds me of the angels in "Wings of Desire." They see what people do and they are saddened, but they cannot intervene.

Now, that sounds like exactly the movie I would have wanted them to make.

Read the rest.

Ahmadinejad:
"We Don't
Give A Damn"

Everyone will have this today, but some things must be noted for posterity:

Iran's president said on Friday his country would pay no attention to international calls to halt its nuclear work, hours before the United Nations atomic watchdog reports on whether Tehran has met UN Security Council demands.

"Those who want to prevent Iranians from obtaining their right, should know that we do not give a damn to such resolutions," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a rally in northwest Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is widely expected to tell the council and the agency's board on Friday that Iran has not stopped enriching uranium or fully answered IAEA queries as the UN body asked a month ago.

"Enemies think that by ... threatening us, launching psychological warfare or ... imposing embargos can dissuade our nation to obtain nuclear technology," Ahmadinejad said in Zanjan province.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

The Eye

Hmmm ...

A tourist gives a kiss to a cow sculpture called 'Louisanais' by Italian artist Max Squillace displayed on the Opera square in Paris, April 26, 2006. The exhibit of 101 cows called the 'Cow Parade' REUTERS/Charles Platiau

Wasn't there something about this in the Bible somewhere?

As You Do Unto
The Least Of These
You Have Done Unto Me

I hope my friend TVD, over at The Reform Club, won't mind that I post most of his fine article:

It's all about Iraq, of course, the defining issue of the Bush43 presidency. I must wonder if our ally France had got our back, instead of protecting its Oil-for-Food arrangement, or if Russia and China weren't amoral, Hobbesian brutocracies, that freeing 25-odd million Muslims from the boot of a murderous dictator in the heart of the Muslim world and offering them the chance of freedom might have been seen as morally admirable.

But that's neo-con fantasy*, so let's leave that for the moment.

The War, of course, is over, and was within one month. The US and UK are on a humanitarian mission now. No one, not nobody, expected that the one of the world's oldest civilizations would so quickly descend into savagery and indiscriminate fratricide. Neither that al-Qaeda would so remorselessly kill more of their own co-religionists than Americans.

Still, even if Bush is blamed for the carnage, he has killed fewer innocent Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, fewer innocent Iraqis than al-Qaeda, and fewer innocent Iraqis than the Clinton Administration did with their bloodless but no less deadly sanctions. This should be, but isn't, common knowledge. There's the rub.

It's acknowledged by all that the Bush administration is abyssmal at communication with the American people and thereby the world. There are perhaps tens of thousands of murderers yet in Iraq. But there are a quarter million more who risk life and limb to join the police force, and millions more who risked being butchered to vote, each in his or her small way defying the murderers.

It would be cowardly to abandon them to the tyrants.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Demonology
Of
World War IV

The English writer, Melanie Phillips, brings us up to speed on the merging of the Left, the racist "right", and the Islamofascism:

There’s been much discussion of the unholy alliance that’s been formed between the left and radical Islamism. Rather less attention has been paid to the fact that this is in fact a three-way alliance – between the left, radical Islamism and neo-Nazism.

The foaming hysteria that the left expresses towards the racist totalitarians whom they call the ‘far right’ is the rage of Caliban looking in the mirror. If one looks at the outpourings of certain individuals on the left, radical Islamists and neo-Nazis or white supremacists, one is struck by similar preoccupations, demonology and even whole phrases, particularly around the issues of Israel and the Jews towards which all three display a visceral hatred.

Ms. Phillips points us to a recent letter to the London Telegraph, written by Lord Tebbit, suggesting that the party platform of the neo-Nazi BNP looks distinctly leftist these days:

I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies. On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to ‘use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality'’, to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato.

That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.

Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is ‘extreme Right-wing’ about the BNP?

Apparently, Oliver Kamm has also noted this trend with regards to the "Trotskyite/Islamist" Respect Party, founded by George Galloway.

There is a common thread in the politics of the totalitarian Left and the far Right, which is to make people’s wishes secondary to pseudo-scientific abstractions such as race and historical forces. The far Left and far Right increasingly talk the same language: division, nativism and even deference to religious fanaticism. The BNP’s cult of violence was once expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya. It matters that political debate lacks a language for this phenomenon.

Phillips notes that both the BNP and the Respect Party are anti-Jewish, and founded on totalitarian ideologies. The BNP, for instance, for a period of time in recent history was a supporter of Iran and Libya. Now, apparently, they are rampantly anti-Islamist, but how long will that last, considering their dislike of Jews has proven to be stronger historically?

The most interesting things Phillips notes is the recent conversion of noted neo-Nazi, David Myatt, to Islam. Myatt, who now goes by the name of Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt, had been "jailed for leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against Muslims, (but) now supports the setting up of a Muslim superstate and the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam."

Phillips points to an article containing an interview with Myatt, wherein he discusses his recent conversion:

I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.’ But his belief is now that: ‘The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West

. . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy. They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created.

This may well be a long war, of decades or more — and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad — to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.

In my opinion, the reason these three, seemingly, disparate political movements are merging is because they are similar at base. All three are founded on

1) resentment,

2) a worhip of power, and

3) an abhorrence of the idea that all people are created equal, to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To be sure, there is a sense in which all three of these founding principles are manifestations of the same central force. That is, they spring from a very deepseated inferiority complex, which gives rise to extreme oscillations between megalomania, and self-loathing.

This is why the Left believes it is their natural right to dictate the redistribution of wealth, and yet, they are willing to abase themselves at the altar of multiculturalism. This is also why we see the phenomenon of Muslims chanting Allahu Akbar (Allah is Greater) one minute, and then worrying about the humiliation of their god the next. And, likewise, this explains why neo-Nazis think Jews are inferior, and yet firmly believe they are wily enough to control the entire flow of geopolitical events.

Maybe, this coalescence of the three forces of evil is a natural occurence whose time has come. I believe so. I believe we are seeing the sides line up for a final battle.

The other day, Fjordman wrote a prescient essay, posted over at Gates of Vienna, in which he speculated that this new World War which we feel bubbling up from beneath us, is to be something else entirely from the previous global conflagrations we have seen:

I fear this is a world war. Maybe future historians will dub it the Multicultural World War. Just as WW1 was caused by Imperialism, WW2 by Fascism and the Cold War by Communism, this one will be caused by Multiculturalism. The term “the Multicultural World War” has been coined by Fjordman. I find this to be more accurate than “The Islamic World War” because what will cause this world war is Western cultural weakness, through Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, rather than Islamic strength. As poster DP111 says, this world war may very well be in the form of a global civil war, where you get a succession of civil wars instead of countries invading other countries.

I see it as a kind of worldwide feeding frenzy with various factions of mankind jumping over each themselves to destroy each other. Eventually, I do not believe the center of the alliances will hold. Eventually, I believe we will see the phenomenon of our enemy killing himself. But, the question is, will this happen before, or after, our beautiful Western Civilization has been layed to waste?

We Hold
These
Truths
To Be
Self-Evident ...

Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who was voted in by a frightened, and pacifistic, Spanish electorate in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, has made it his latest, and most urgent, cause to insure that apes are granted the same rights as humans.

Little Green Footballs brought us this post, and this comments thread, yesterday afternoon:

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

In this case, the comments thread is as important as the post:

#13 DockScience 4/25/2006 05:35PM PDT
Actually you have this backwards, socialists downgrade humans to status of apes.

#24 kateca 4/25/2006 05:47PM PDT
Can they run for office?

#26 varmint 4/25/2006 05:47PM PDT
they need to be given a seat, with full voting rights, at the U.N. i want to see a gorilla in a poo flinging fight with the french ambassador.

the only good i can see in a muslim take over of europe is that the imams would have this guy locked in a nuthouse wher he belongs.

#44 jpsfudimo 4/25/2006 05:49PM PDT
Bad Monkey

#72 Lizard by the Bay 4/25/2006 05:57PM PDT
More evidence that the left is truly (and has always been) anti-human. They have now reduced being human to just being one more monkey, for all legal purposes.
If I were in Spain, I'd fling my own shit at Zapatero while howling.

#83 Pastorius 4/25/2006 05:59PM PDT
I guess this means that now apes can go on the dole.

#84 St. Pancake 4/25/2006 05:59PM PDT
Here's a joke: Once there was a monkey who figured out his gencodes. It made him proud, until he heard that he shared 98% of the same gencodes as a human being. The simian was so shocked he needed years of therapy before he could design a tool without trembling.

#91 Sol Roth 4/25/2006 06:00PM PDT
I wait with baited breath for the first interspecies marriage. I project a high probability it will consist of an ELF freakazoid who travels to Seville.
Priest: Do you, Bruce, take this orangutan to be your lawfully wedded husband?
Bruce: I do.
Priest: Do you, KoKo, take Bruce to be your lawfully wedded human?
KoKo: Ooooogaboooga!
Priest: I now pronounce you Human and Beast and the whole world has gone batshit.
Priest: You may now fling feces at the, er, your beloved spouse.

#98 Ringo the Gringo 4/25/2006 06:01PM PDT
Does this mean that apes can now vote in Spain?

#190 Jim C. 4/25/2006 07:55PM PDT
I am against unnecessary cruelty to animals. But here's a big fear of mine: the result of treating animals like people, including stuff like this, PETA, and the general animal so-called "rights" movement, will be that people will be increasingly treated like animals. And I fear this is deliberate.

I distinctly remember being in Sunday School when I was five years old, and our teacher told us a story from the Bible about people worshipping rocks. I thought that was so strange that I didn't believe the story. How could people come to a place where they would worship a rock?

Now that we are older, of course, we see that there is, seemingly, no limit to the foolishness of mankind.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Newsflash:
Muslims
Condemn
Terrorism

Hallelujah. Finally, Muslims en masse are coming out against terrorism. I had begun to lose hope and think I would never ... Huh?

Oh wait, they're condemning it because it was mostly Muslims who ended up getting killed and maimed this time:

CAIRO, Egypt - The Arab world reacted in horror and outrage Tuesday at the bombings of an Egyptian resort — and a rift opened between hardline al-Qaida sympathizers and other radical Muslim groups who say the latest attacks have gone too far.

Three bombs ripped through a promenade in Egypt's Dahab resort at dusk Monday, killing at least 24 — most of them Egyptians on a holiday marking the first day of spring.

Ok, well, I guess it's business as usual.

German Weekly
Die Zelt:
American Soldiers
Play Soccer
With The Heads
Of Dead Iraqis

They hate us. They really hate us:

Josh has no fear. What should one be afraid of when one has stormed 75 houses in Ramadi and Falludscha and has seen how his comrades play soccer with severed heads of dead Iraqis? What should one still be afraid of, then, someone should tell him. No one can say that to him – not to him.

Read the rest.

Oh, by the way, I hear Germans play soccer with specially cut-out holes in the back of their shorts, for easy access when they are sitting on the bench.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Iraq Documents Reveal
Hussein Regime
Was Purchasing
Aluminum Tubes For
Nuclear Enrichment

Yeah, I know the MSM would have us all believe this is just a lie of the Bush Administration, but newly translated documents show that Bush was telling the truth. I wonder why the press isn't reporting this huge story?

Ok,
How About
A Force Field

Schwarzeneggar has come out against a wall along the border to keep illegal immigrants out:

LOS ANGELES - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday said that building a 700-mile wall along the Mexican border to deter illegal immigration would amount to "going back to the Stone Ages," and instead urged the use of high-tech gear and more patrols to secure the nation's southern boundary.

"Like going back to the stone ages", huh? God, I wish I wouldn't have voted for this guy.

What a jerk.

The people of California have spoken. We do not want illegal immigrants here. We voted yes on the draconian Proposition 187, and our totalitarian court system threw the entire thing out saying it was unconstitutional.

To this date, no major Californian politician will acknowledge the will of the people.

We are being taxed without being represented.

The Egypt Bombings
As Usual,
It's The Jews

As everyone knows, three bombs went off in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula this morning, killing and maiming scores of people. Now, just hours later, Egyptian "analysts" are blaming the bombings in Egypt on the the Israeli Intelligence organization, the Mossad:

Retired General Salah al-Din Salim, an Egyptian researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute in Cairo, said that it could not be ruled out that the Israeli Mossad was involved in the terror attack in Dahab.

“The Mossad’s ability to penetrate the Bedouins in Sinai is known,” Salim said in an interview with al-Jazeera.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Photo by Joe Citzen,
from his new site Caught Up.

Click photo to enlarge.

"We Have
Only One Enemy.
They Are Jews"

This from the new head of the Palestinian paramilitary force destined to become the official army of the Peaceful State of Palestine:

Jamal Abu Samhadana, the wanted leader of the armed Popular Resistance Committees whose appointment to a senior Palestinian Authority police post sparked a bitter feud between Hamas and Fatah, told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that his only enemy is the Jews, and that the paramilitary force he was nominated to create was to become the "nucleus of the future Palestinian army."...

According to Abu Samhadana, "We have only one enemy. They are Jews. We have no other enemy.

Sometimes
You Just Gotta
Love Your Enemies
Osama Bin Laden
Edition

Bin Laden is calling for volunteers to fight the Infidel.

"Why is that news," you ask?

Because what he's pissed off about this time is that we Infidels are going to go stop a genocide of Muslims in the Sudan:

Osama bin Laden issued ominous new threats in an audiotape broadcast Sunday, purportedly saying the West was at war with Islam and calling on his followers to go to Sudan to fight a proposed U.N. force.

In his first new message in three months, bin Laden said the West's decision to cut off funds to the Palestinians because their Hamas leaders refuse to recognize Israel proved that the United States and Europe were conducting "a Zionist crusader war on Islam."

"The blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist crusader war on Islam," said the speaker on the tape broadcast by the Al-Jazeera network.

"I say that this war is the joint responsibility of the people and the governments. While the war continues, the people renew their allegiance to their rulers and politicians and continue to send their sons to our countries to fight us."

The authenticity of the tape could not immediately be verified.

Bin Laden also addressed the conflict in Sudan, where he was based before being expelled under threats from the United States. He then moved to Afghanistan and is believed to be hiding out in the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of their common border.

A three-year conflict between Darfur's rebels and the Arab-dominated central government has caused about 180,000 deaths _ most from disease and hunger _ and displaced 2 million people.
The United Nations has described the conflict as the world's gravest humanitarian crisis. The United States has described it as genocide.

Negotiators are trying to broker a peace deal between warring factions by an April 30 deadline. Members of the African Union have agreed in principle to hand over peacekeeping duties to the United Nations beginning Sept. 30.

"I call on mujahedeen and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arab peninsula, to prepare for long war again the crusader plunderers in Western Sudan. Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but to defend Islam, its land and its people," bin Laden purportedly said.

By the way, the Western press never spells out what is really going on in the Sudan, probably because it isn't politically correct. So, let me spell it out for you.

For over twenty years there has been a genocide going on in the Sudan, perpetrated by the Arab Islamic government against the black African citizens.

First they killed the black Christians and practitioners of Animism.

Then, when they ran out of Christians and Animists to kill, the Arab Muslims started in on the Sufi Muslims. See, cause Sufis are not Shiite, or Sunni. They are other, so they must be killed, or should I say sacrificed to Moloch.

Because that's just the way it is with Islam in the world today.

So, here you have Osama Bin Laden calling on Muslims to intercede against the Infidel, so that the Arab Islamic government of Sudan can continue killing Muslims.

You gotta love it when you enemy tells the truth, huh?

Thanks Osama.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

How
Sick Is
Europe?

If anti-Semitism is evidence of a cultural illness, then, Europe is very sick indeed. This is from an interview with former German MP Ilke Schroeder:

In the ensuing months, after published reports revealed that the P.A. was directing E.U. financial aid toward the financing of terrorism, she pushed the E.U. Parliament to open an investigation into the matter. She said the only way she could get fellow legislators interested in the matter was to emphasize the P.A.’s corruption, since not many were particularly concerned about the diversion of the money for violent acts.

Eventually, she said the Parliament did convene a “working group” on the matter — on which she was not included — but that no investigation was launched because it could not be proven that the E.U.’s money went directly from their pocket to paying for suicide bombs, which Schroeder found ridiculous.

“They were asking for something impossible” to prove, she said.

Since Hamas took over the Palestinian government, the E.U. has suspended its $600 million in aid to the Palestinians, but Schroeder is not optimistic that the freeze will continue indefinitely. She believes that the eventual E.U. goal is to “challenge the U.S. position [of pre-eminent power] in the Middle East” and across the globe, and funding the Palestinians is one way to do that. ...

Schroeder estimates that as many as one-third of Europeans might believe that Israel was behind a conspiracy to commit the Sept. 11 attacks. And she says that displaying sympathy for Israel has led to accusations from fellow legislators that she is being “paid by the Mossad.”
For many, their anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views fit into their anti-globalization ideology, which states that the “financial sphere” dictates how the world operates and that Jews are influential in that sphere, Schroeder said.

1/3 of Europeans believe Jews were behind the World Trade Center attacks?

I don't know what to say.

Good News
From Iraq:
Talabani Reelected

It looks like Iraq will finally have a fully-formed government:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - After months of political deadlock, Iraq's parliament convened Saturday and filled top leadership posts, starting the process of putting together a new government aimed at pulling the country out of insurgency and sectarian strife.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, was elected to a second term, and the post of parliament speaker went to Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab. Al-Mashhadani's two deputies were to be Khalid al-Attiyah, a Shiite, and Aref Tayfour, a Kurd.

Talabani then named Shiite politician Jawad al-Maliki prime minister-designate after his Shiite coalition nominated him Friday, breaking a deadlock that held up formation of the new government for months.

Here's what Fox News has to say:

On Friday, the Shiite alliance nominated a tough-talking Shiite politician, Jawad al-Maliki, as prime minister in a move that broke the long impasse over forming a new government.

Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians signaled they would accept al-Maliki, clearing the way for parliament to elect top leadership positions, including the president.

Well, it appears to be good news, anyway. I just have to wonder what the "tough-talking" label means.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

And,
I'll Be There
To Help Them

The Minutemen have issued an ultimatum to the President of the United States:

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- If the government doesn't build security fencing along the Mexico border, Minuteman border watch leader Chris Simcox says he and his supporters will.

Read the rest.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

New Italian Prime Minister
Makes It First Priority
To Talk To Hamas

Hmm, Romano Prodi. What a name. What a man:

GAZA, April 19 (Xinhua) — Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haneya Wednesday held phone talks with former leader of the European Union Romano Prodi, who won the Italian parliamentary elections.

A statement issued by Haneya’s office in Gaza said that Haneya expressed to Prodi his gratitude for the Italian position on the newly-installed Palestinian cabinet.

It was Haneya’s first official telephone talks with a European country leader after his Hamas cabinet took office on March 29.

The Hamas-led government is now facing heavy financial and diplomatic pressure from the United States and Western countries since Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, renounce violence and recognize previous peace agreements.

The statement said that Haneya urged his Italian counterpart Mr. Prodi to convince the European countries to respect the democratic choice of the Palestinian people, referring to Hamas’s win in Palestinian parliamentary elections on Jan. 25.

“Prime Minister Haneya expressed to Mr. Prodi that the Palestinian government is keen on calm and settlement in the region and is interested in achieving peace that ends the occupation and brings the Palestinians their rights back,” said the statement.

I wonder if Mr. Prodi has some miraculous peace solution up his sleeve. I wonder if he believes he can surprise the whole world. I wonder if the whole world will buy it.

Peaceful State
Of Palestine
Calls On Muslims
To Murder Jews
Around The World

From Reuters, via LGF:

GAZA, April 17 (Reuters) - Palestinian militants linked to President Mahmoud Abbas’s increasingly fractured Fatah movement threatened on Monday to attack Jews overseas to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners from its jails.

Two other main Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also said they supported violence to free more than 8,000 prisoners held by the Jewish state, but neither explicitly backed attacks on Jews outside Israel.

The call by militants of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades could heighten tension between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has been crippled financially by the loss of Western aid, and of tax and customs revenues frozen by Israel, after Hamas’s crushing electoral win over Fatah in January. “This is an open call to all our fighters in the homeland to focus on kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians inside our occupied land. And if the enemy does not release our prisoners, then Zionists outside Palestine will be an easy target for our fighters,” the group said in a statement.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Yeshua

Beyond all space - beyond all time
Beyond all things - yours and mine
Beyond all land - beyond all sky
Beyond all need for reasons why
I long for You

Yeshua
Passover Lamb
You Are the Great I Am
My bread while we're apart
Is Your Word and Blood and Love on the door of my heart

Beyond all beauty - beyond all truth
Beyond all need for hope or proof
Beyond the stars - beyond the sea
Made of Love you have for me
I long for You

A Question For The ACLU, et al

Sami al-Arian has admitted guilt and will be deported.

David Horowitz has a question:

Terrorist Sami al-Arian has agreed to admit to conspiracy chages that he provided material support to a terrorist organization (he was actually its North American head) and will be deported.

Will the Academic Freedom Committee of the AAUP, Ellen Schrecker, Joan Wallach Scott, the ACLU and Salon.com and the Nation magazine and other leftists including the Black Studies Department at Duke, who defended al-Arian and collaborated his organized campaigns to attack the Patriot Act and other national security measures, now apologize for aiding and abetting his homicidal war against Jews and his Fifth Column efforts in behalf of radical Islam's war against the United States?

No, they'll probably find a way to sue us for asking the question.

Take That,
Ahmadinejad

Germany is opening its Holocaust records to the public. Do you think this might have anything to do with Ohmydumbjihad's insistence that the Holocaust never happened:

WASHINGTON - Germany agreed Tuesday to help clear the way for the opening of Nazi records on some 17 million Jews and enslaved laborers who were persecuted and slain by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.

At a news conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said her country would work with the United States to assure the opening of the archives held in the German town of Bad Arolsen and allow historians and survivors access to some 30 million to 50 million documents.

Until now, Germany resisted providing access to the archives, citing privacy concerns. "We always put it forward that way in meetings," Zypries said.

But in a meeting Tuesday with Sara Bloomfield, director of the museum, Zypries said Germany had changed its position and would immediately seek revision of an 11-nation accord governing the archives.

She said that should take no more than six months.

Finally!!!

For two years I have been saying on this blog that the suicide attacks against Israel are the acts of the government of the Peaceful State of Palestine. When Fatah was in charge, many of the attacks were perpetrated by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is part of Fatah. And, with Hamas now in charge, it should be even more obvious, expecially since Hamas comes right out and says it supports the attacks.

Well, perhaps, someone in the upper reaches of the Israeli government has been reading CUANAS (yeah right), because finally, FINALLY, theIsraelis are holding the Palestinian government responsible:

JERUSALEM - Israel said Tuesday that it holds the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority responsible for the deadliest suicide bombing in nearly two years and debated whether to target it directly as an "enemy entity" — even though the attack was carried out by a different militant group.

Israel's U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, warned that the Hamas government's verbal support for the bombing, as well as recent statements by Iran and Syria, "are clear declarations of war, and I urge each and every one of you to listen carefully and take them at face value." Gillerman said a new "axis of terror" — Iran, Syria and the Hamas government — was sowing the seeds of the first world war of the 21st century.

Israeli Prime Minister-designate Ehud Olmert convened key Cabinet ministers and security chiefs Tuesday to discuss a response. One proposal was to hold the Hamas government directly responsible and declare it an "enemy entity," according to an Israeli official close to the consultations who spoke on condition of anonymity because the ministers had not yet made their decision.

Such a declaration could pave the way for direct strikes against the Palestinian Authority and its officials. Until now, an economic and political boycott had been Israel's main tools against the Hamas government.

There really should not even be a debate about this. When one nation attacks another nation, it is the responsibility of the government attacked to protect its people.

Israel must strike Hamas. In my opinion, Israel should destroy the Palestinian regime, and beat the Palestinians into submission.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Always Faithful

Song by Tyrone Wells
(Look him up on iTunes)

Wherever the wind blows
Wherever the sun may go
You have been faithful to me

Whenever the rain falls
Whenever the night calls
You have been faithful to me

Always faithful you have been
To Me

When I turn my back to run
These arrogant things I've done
Still you are faithful to me
So, Father I'm letting go
Because even a faithless heart knows
That you will be faithful to me

Always Faithful
To Me

When everything is changing around me
You alone are steadfast

Always Faithful
To Me

Egyptian
State-Controlled
Newspaper
Lauds Tel Aviv
Suicide Bombing

Yes, you read it correctly:

An Egyptian state-controlled newspaper praised Monday’s suicide attack in Tel Aviv, which killed nine people and wounded dozens, calling it an act of sacrifice and martyrdom.

Egypt has always taken pains to condemn the violence by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is exceptional for one of the country’s three biggest newspapers, whose editor is effectively appointed by President Hosni Mubarak, to endorse a Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians.

“It is not required of the Palestinian people that they raise their hands in surrender, accept the daily Israeli attacks and watch waves of settlers occupy their land and build settlements,” wrote Al Gomhuria in an editorial of its Tuesday edition.

“It is not required of the Palestinian people that they clap Israel and its allies while they mobilize the whole world to besiege the heroic [Palestinian] people ... because they have chosen Hamas,” the editorial said, referring to the United States and European Union’s cutting off funds to the Palestinian Authority because its Hamas government refuses to renounce violence.

“For all that, the sacrificial and martyrdom attack occurred in the heart of Tel Aviv, and there will be more later,” the daily warned. In the Islamic faith, a martyr goes to heaven.

This hatred of Jews is almost monolithic in the Arab world. The thing is, if the Palestinians have the legitimate right to send suicide bombers into Israeli restaurants to blow up civilians, then the Israeli army has the legitimate right to shoot missiles into public parks and schools.

But, does Israel ever do that?

No. And, if anyone wants to claim they do, I want to see documentation of their anti-Semitic fantasies.

None will be forthcoming, I'm sure.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Your Enemies

The latest suicide bomber - "Suffer the little children to come unto Allah."

A suicide bomber killed 9 people in Tel Aviv today, and Hamas says it's a good thing:

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), said on Monday that the Tel Aviv attack was part of the Palestinians' right of self-defense.

"Resisting Israeli aggression was rightful as long as it continues," Abu Zuhri said."The occupation seized money of the Palestinian people and urged the world not to assist the Palestinians, so this attack took place before those who agree with this aggressive attitude," he said.

Abu Zuhri was echoed by Wasfi Kabha, minister of Prisoners' Affairs in the Hamas-led cabinet.

Kabha told reporters that the attack came "in the framework of legitimate right for resistance against Israeli violations and crimes."

The Islamic Jihad (Holy War) and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to the Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing attack. A spokesman for Saraya al-Quds, the Islamic Jihad armed wing, told reporters on telephone that his group is responsible for the bombing attack in Tel Aviv.

Let's
Play
Ahmadinejad

Mark Steyn has come up with a fun game for us pissed off and cynical Infidels:

You know what’s great fun to do if you’re on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you’re getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, “I’ve got a bomb!” Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, “It’s OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn’t got a bomb.” And then the second marshal would say, “And even if he did have a bomb it’s highly unlikely he’d ever use it.”

And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, “Relax, everyone. That’s just a harmless rhetorical flourish.” And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, “Yes, but it’s entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew.”

That’s how it goes with the Iranians. The more they claim they’ve gone nuclear, the more U.S. intelligence experts — oops, where are my quote marks? — the more U.S. intelligence “experts” insist no, no, it won’t be for another 10 years yet. The more they conclusively demonstrate their non-compliance with the IAEA, the more the international community warns sternly that, if it were proved that Iran were in non-compliance, that could have very grave consequences.

But, fortunately, no matter how thoroughly the Iranians non-comply it’s never quite non-compliant enough to rise to the level of grave consequences. You can’t blame Ahmadinejad for thinking “our enemies cannot do a damned thing.”

It’s not the world’s job to prove that the Iranians are bluffing. The braggadocio itself is reason enough to act, and prolonged negotiations with a regime that openly admits it’s negotiating just for the laughs only damages us further.

The perfect summation of the Iranian approach to negotiations came in this gem of a sentence from the New York Times on July 13 last year: “Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday.”

Got that? If we don’t let Iran go nuclear, they’ll go nuclear. That position might tax even the nuanced detecting skills of John Kerry.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Sex
And The
Body Politic

Let's talk about sex on this lovely Saturday evening.

Dag emailed me a brilliant piece he is working on dealing with Pornography, solipsism, the notion of the Noble Savage, Philobarbarism, and the phenomenon of the Lefts infatuation with the Palestinians.

I present to you, here, an excerpt:

Pornography deals not with people but with images of peoples' bodies. Not even the true bodies themselves, (forget the minds of the clay,) but there is not even a body involved other than image in the mind. The image is of one who is no longer, and no attempt at mind is ever present.

This outrageous dehumanisation and descent into solipsism should enrage us. Far from it in terms of our barbarians, our mental pets, our images of porno were-beings. The philobarbarist, the bobo who idealises the barbarian and to him attributes romantic traits, is a porno-wanker. It's dirty and disgusting; and yet it is a loved position in the theatre of the public mind.

The Noble Savage is an idea of what one wants to see in the image of others for the sake of ones own gratification, however perverse. To be pornography one must not be oneself but must be an image of oneself in the mind; Pornography is not a state but an action. To make a person pornographic is a result of philobarbarism, a nasty practice of the bobo by and for himself alone.

News of the New World prompted Montaigne to pen tales of the Noble Savage. His was not to kill but to quill. Thank God for it. In the 16th century our modern standards did not have high influence in conquerors circles: we, the now-hated Europeans, were as brutal and immediate as any, and our sensitivities were blunt.

Montaigne, in his genuine benevolence, wrote of the cannibals of the New World to suggest that they, though not us, were Human. He went so far, as we will read below, even better than we, the explorers and conquerors. We have no right, he writes, to exterminate them.

Thank God for Montaigne.

And now, in 2006, let's come back to our reasonable senses. ****Michel de Montaigne... began a long tradition of using non-European peoples as a basis for engaging in a critique of his own culture, undoubtedly in the process romanticizing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later call "the noble savage." It is a theme which still appeals to many Westerners.

What reason does Montaigne give for judging cannibalistic Native Americans to be preferable to Europeans?

"These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours. They are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes saddened by the thought that we did not discover them earlier, when there were people who would have known how to judge them better than we. It displeases me that Lycurgus or Plato didn't know them, for it seems to me that these peoples surpass not only the portraits which poetry has made of the Golden Age and all the invented, imaginary notions of the ideal state of humanity, but even the conceptions and the very aims of philosophers themselves. They could not imagine such a pure and simple naiveté as we encounter in them; nor would they have been able to believe that our society might be maintained with so little artifice and social structure.This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers, nor any judges, or political superiority, no habit of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words which mean "lie," "treason," "deception," "greed," "envy," "slander" and "forgiveness" are unknown....Michel de Montaigne, " ****

It is a good thing that Montaigne did his best to protect by romanticising the cannibals. If not for his initial push to make them seem better than we, we might not have preserved them to the great extent we did. The comparison between the Aztecs and the Conquistadors is one of night and day; but with Montaigne's sensitivity we can think that even greater efforts were made over the long term to save not only the savages but their cultures.

Yes, this is against the grain of p.c. ideologic but the facts are there for those who care to find them that the Spanish reconstructed with the aid of natives the artefacts lost where possible. It was the reviled conquerors who preserved and restored lost civilizations in the New World. We do so today. And yet our Left dhimmi fascists condemn us for it, condemn us for the nature of nature and its history. We are, in fact, among the finest; but the fascists refuse to accept it, preferring instead to condemn us and to extol the make-believe virtues of cannibals. That is philobarbarism. That has to end right now.

Turning people into porno images is a delight to our Left dhimmi fascists. Take this turn:

The masses do not exist. The mass... is a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible.... Being essentially unknowable, the mass acquires definition through the imposition of imagined attributes. (Carey: p. 21.)

There are two groups dehumanised by the intellectual elitist philobarbarist: first there is the idealised barbarian, and there is next the devalued suburbanite. Neither is a real being; both are images of people filtered through the minds of the elitist to conform to his values for his solipsistic needs, in effect, made into pornography. The elitist, the intellectual, distances himself from the person and creates a false thing of imagery to give others a form he can accept according to his wants. He idealises the savage and defames the normal and decent. But both are images in the elitist's mind of pornography. The boring and mindless clerk and the noble and superior savage are both masturbatory phantasies for the elitist.

Trying to imagine what she calls 'that anonymous monster the Man in the Street,' Virginia Woolf finds herself visualizing a

'vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff...occasionally wobbling this way or that

as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it.'

For Ezra Pound, humanity, apart from artists, is merely a 'mass of dolts,' a 'rabble,' representing 'the waste and the manure' from which grows 'the tree of the arts.' (Carey: p. 25.)

Can you hear, dear reader, the phrase so often in use today among our journalists, "the Arab street"? For those who have experienced an Arab street the following will resonate:

In Pound's Cantos the 'multitudes' and their leaders transmorgify into a torrent of human excrement-- 'Democaracies electing their sewage.' (ibid)

Democracy, the rule of the people for the people by the people, is an outrage to the gnostic elitist. To the intellectual artist, what can be more unnatural and foetid than life lived by those who are out of place? The solution? Back to the land with them. Or, since there are now too many suburbanites to live a life of harmony in a state of nature, exterminate many if not most or even all of them. Yes, we have seen the rants of Pianka, Darre, Heidegger. Here is H.G. Wells:

Freedom was all very well, but it choked the earth with bodies, Only by system could humanity's rampant growth be checked, so Wells began to work out programmes of world reform.... He feels for them, [urban working class men,] but does not quite treat them as men. They do not even have men's bodies. (Carey: pp. 147;144.)

Wells looks around his Kentish village and sees it overrun by clerks and workmen. He phantasizes:

London is a ghost city, full of skeletons, dogs, and rats. The few survivors of the English people live in rural peasant communities, subsisting by primitive agriculture. They have returned, Wells observes, from 'suburban parasitism' to what had been the life of European peasant since the dawn of history.... The old suburban life was not rooted in history or the earth.... The development of his fiction suggests that destruction lured him even more powerfully than progress. Reducing the world's population became an obsession. In fantasy he took-- again and again, and with mounting savagery-- a terrible vengeance on the suburban sprawl that had blighted Bromley. (Carey: pp. 132-34.)

Those who know Bromley, East London, today will know it as a charming and lovely and affluent place. It is full of clerks. But the point is not what clerks, i.e. the middle classes, do or how they live that is offensive to the elitist: it is their existence itself that offends. It is their existence as equals in a democracy and as autonomous beings that offends. That the mass is not different from the elite, that is more than maddening to the elitist: it is cause for violent rages and genocide. We'll look more closely at this hatred in coming posts. For now we will see more of philobarbarism as a coping stance among the elitists.

Behind all these recipes for supremacy we can observe the pressure of mass culture, driving intellectuals to invent new proof of their distinction in a world which increasingly found them redundant. (Carey: p. 72.)Montaigne was a philobarbarist, and good for him. He didn't know barbarians and cannibals any better than today's elitists do. Montaigne didn't go so far as to urge that the barbarians eat us. Our Left dhimmi fascists do.

[There was a] widespead intellectual cult of the peasant... [a] fanciful pastoralism. ...England had no peasants left at the end of the nineteenth century, so English writers seeking a pastoral version of the mass had to invent them... or pretend to be peasants themselves. Carey: p. 36.)

The cult of the peasant, philobarbarism, support for the suffering! of! the! Palestinian! Peoples! and so on, so long as they are authentic peasants, not Sudanese animists, is with us today at every level, and thickest in the realm of the elite. No, not real Palestinians, because those ones cut off our heads and blow themselves up with anyone unfortunate enough to be too close. The barbarians have to be romantic and know their places. They have to be pornographic depictions of people. Not the real people. They smell bad.

Yes, the more adventurous among us actually go "live with them" is to cement our bona fides; for all but the most supremely stupid, it's a hobby. No one actually likes the Palestinians, and that is partly because there are too many of them to know. To like them is to reduce them all to a jelly-like mass of pornographic proportion and perspective. One can love the idea of the Palestinians, and one can make that love into a cultish ideal. One can get off on the porno-wank.

The demand among intellectuals for a cosmetic version of the mass, which prompted the quest of peasants and primitives in pastoral settings, also sanctioned political rewritings of the mass, whether as stalwart workers or as a the downtrodden and the oppressed....

What? You don't quite buy Dag's line of argument; from Intellectual Solipsism, to Pornography, to Noble Savage, to Palestinian? Well, then let's look to Western Civilizations penultimate expert on sexual depravity, Jean Genet:

It turns out one that one of the élite's favorite literary phenomenons of the post-war period secretly (and not so secretly) admired the Nazis — even if they would have forced him to wear a pink triangle and likely gassed him. His "enrollment in causes led to his defending the Third World, pederasts, Proletarians, prisoners, Palestinians, and (black) Panthers, although it seems the "cursed man at the margins" did so mainly because he thought they were …cute (the Fedayeen were "so young and so beautiful"), a "view" he even holds about about SS officers.

In fact, Genet — whose work is "gangrened by fascism and yet touching" — was "the apostle of evil and its servants, from informers to terrorists, through trators, child killers, kamikazes, and Nazis." Even the man who exposed Jean Genet, Ivan Jablonka, seems in the final analysis (and the final paragraph), to be taken in by him. Come to think about it, Genet's attitude hardly seems that unusual, does it? It begs the question: is this the type of European that Washington should listen to before taking international decisions?

I know, I know, it's hard to see one's whole poltical paradigm reduced to an erotic fantasy. But, if you don't think it's possible, then how to explain this piece of political criticism/hate email sent to Pamela, at Atlas Shrugs:

Hi there skank...miss me?
Just wanted to drop you a line and let ya know that you can shove your hate and intolerance up your gaping asshole sideways.
Ahhhhhhhhhh...that felt better.

Oh...I'm sorry. The ignorance you so proudly display bothered me so much I was in a bit of hurry when I wrote you ...

Just in case your wittle bedwetter brain didn't get it...remove the corn cob from your ass and take a look around ...

Oh, and by the way...f*ck off and die skank.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, Dag, and I rest, our case.

"We Are Not Animals -
We Are Iraqis"

Reporter Franklin Raff tell of an encounter he had with an Iraqi officer:

An Iraqi officer of significant rank approached my translator as I quietlytook notes near the banks of the Euphrates River, at a combat observationpost named COP Dunlop. He knew I was an embedded American. He had a sense,perhaps, that I was a sympathetic soul, and he wanted to pass along anurgent message.

We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. I learned he was an educated andsuccessful man, an accomplished soldier, and quite knowledgeable about theaffairs of the world. He had served under Saddam. He openly spoke about thelikelihood of corruption in the new Iraqi Ministry of Defense. We spokeabout black-market arms trading, ancient smuggling routes, and the problemof porous borders.

We even discussed personal matters, and the question of his taking a secondwife. (I told him the one about a thousand pair of panty-hose hanging fromKing Solomon's shower-curtain.) We had a reasonably long and genuineconversation about matters of importance to all men. And at a certainmoment, he grew a little uneasy and blurted out what he had wanted to sayfrom the beginning:

Why do you people not tell our story? Why do you not say what is going on?

Why do you come to our country and see what is happening, you see the schools and the hospitals and you see the markets and you eat with Sunni and Shia soldiers – everybody eats together, everybody works together –

you see that Saddam is gone forever and we are free to speak and complain.

You see we are working and eating together and fighting together – Sunni andShia – you see what we are building here, you see the votes we make as onepeople. Then you say to the world about a great war and horrible things andhow we are all killing each other?

We are not animals! We are Iraqis.

Look around you! Look!

Friday, April 14, 2006

How Do You Treat
People Who Have
No Power Over You?

'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

Here's an article about how CEO's of major corporations seem to be in consensus on the issue of how people treat waiters:

... it seems to be one of those rare laws of the land that every CEO learns on the way up. It's hard to get a dozen CEOs to agree about anything, but all interviewed agree with the Waiter Rule.

They acknowledge that CEOs live in a Lake Wobegon world where every dinner or lunch partner is above average in their deference. How others treat the CEO says nothing, they say. But how others treat the waiter is like a magical window into the soul.

And beware of anyone who pulls out the power card to say something like, "I could buy this place and fire you," or "I know the owner and I could have you fired." Those who say such things have revealed more about their character than about their wealth and power.

Whoever came up with the waiter observation "is bang spot on," says BMW North America President Tom Purves, a native of Scotland, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, who lives in New York City with his Norwegian wife, Hilde, and works for a German company. That makes him qualified to speak on different cultures, and he says the waiter theory is true everywhere.

The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

I learned this rule a long time ago myself. A man told me that character is not defined by the way a person treats people who are above them on the social ladder, but by how they treat those who would be perceived as below them.

I have, unfortunately, gone the opposite direction in my life. I tend to be very polite to people who have no power over me, and often very rude to those who can actually do me harm.

That's smart, huh?

I wonder what I think I'm accomplishing with that?

Are You An Islamofascist,
Or, A Moderate Muslim?

I remember hearing a Muslim man call into a radio show a few months back, very angry that the host dared to use the term "Islamofascist."

"Islam is not fascist," he repeatedly told the host. Meanwhile, of course, the host attempted to explain to the man that he wasn't saying Islam was fascist, but was, instead, making a distinction between ordinary moderate Muslims, and those who would wage Jihad to kill the infidel.

The man just couldn't get it. It was as if he was constitutionally incapable of understanding the distinction.

Anyway, for those Muslims who are thick, and don't get the distinction, I thought I'd attempt here to lay it out in stark terms.

First, understand that we Infidels are human beings, just like you. We don't like to be murdered. We don't like our women to be taken as booty and raped (as Islamofascists do to non-Muslim women in Sudan). We don't like to have our churches and synagogues burned down.

Got that?

Should be pretty simple.

Now, let's be clear about the definition of an Islamofascist.

You are an Islamofascist if you

1) believe there are two camps to the world, Dar al-Harb (House of War), and Dar al-Islam (House of Islam).

2) believe in waging violent Jihad against the Infidels and the Jews.

3) believe that women are equal to half and man, and that your wife is your possession to do with what you please, including murdering her for "dishonoring" your family.

4) want to see Sharia law instituted all over the world, so that adulterers, apostates, and homosexuals are stoned to death for their "crimes."

5) want women to wear Burqas (for anything other than the occasional kinky bedroom play).

So, there you have it. Do you fall into any of those categories. If you do, I want you to leave my country now. Or, if you were born here and as such, enjoy an American citizenship for which you are not grateful, then please, pray to God that He will forgive you, and straighten our your mind, so that you can learn to let people live and love as they will.

Now, here is the definition of a moderate Muslim. You are a moderate Muslim if you

1) believe that all people should be able to live in peace and be free to speak, worship, and live as they please, as long as they do not physically hurt anyone, or steal the property of others.

2) allow for Freedom of Speech, even up to the criticism and mockery of your own religion in the media, and in the streets.

3) just want to work a job, earn money, and take care of your family, and are happy to see others of all religions and ethnicities, doing the same around you everyday.

There, now if you fit into that, then we have no problems, you and I.

However, if you are a moderate Muslim who is

1) willing to tolerate the preaching of violent Jihad in your mosque, and you still give money and attend services,

2) would not turn in Muslims who are planning to kill and maim Infidels,

3) believe the Jews were behind 9/11,

then you are not a moderate Muslim at all. Instead, you are simply an Islamofascist pussy who lacks the courage of your convictions. If you are this, then I ask you, once again, to please leave our country, or, perhaps, to pray that God would forgive you, and straighten out your mind, so that you can learn to live and love, and let others live and love.

I hope we are clear now.

Ultimately, it is up to Muslims how we in the West eventually will come to define Islam. Will you tell us, by your works, that Islam is Islamofascism, or that Islam is peace.

It's up to you.

Jihadis Kill And
Rampage In
Egyptian Churches
On Good Friday

From MSNBC:

CAIRO, Egypt - Worshippers at three Christian churches came under attack from knife-wielding assailants during Mass Friday.

Police said one worshipper was killed and more than a dozen wounded in the simultaneous attacks in the northern city of Alexandria.

Police were searching for three men, one in each attack.

Hundreds of Christians gathered in angry protest outside the Coptic Christian churches, and witnesses said clashes erupted between Christians and Muslims.

Initial police reports said a total of 17 people were injured: 10 at the Saints Church in downtown Alexandria and three at the nearby Mar Girgis Church. A third attacker wounded four worshippers at a church in Abu Qir, a few miles to the east.

One worshipper was killed and at least two others were in serious condition, a police official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The attack comes on what is Good Friday to many of the world's Christians.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Facing Down Iran

Mark Steyn has a mustread piece over at City Journal. It describes the history of the modern Islamofascist state, beginning with the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, and proceeding, from there, to our present predicament.

Here's the CUANAS Digest version:

Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.”

Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.

When they say “Islamic Republic,” they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades. Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn’t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it.

To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he’s-our-sonofabitch grounds. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he’d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams—a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz.

Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms—the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.

As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?

For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.

If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it.

The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah’s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by “students” acting with Khomeini’s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war.

Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year—ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime.

Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it.

With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.

Iran’s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.

In the latest variation on Marx’s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine.

We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, “It is in our revolution’s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.” Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
1) contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2) long-reach extraterritoriality;
3) effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4) a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5) an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.

Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with.

And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they’re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.

Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran’s ruling class. What the country’s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime’s position.

But, given that they’re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?

By way of illustration, consider the country’s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran’s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura.

Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous “moderates.”

What’s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history,” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.” Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we’re just arguing over the details.

So the question is: Will they do it? And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer.

the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness—the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.
Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it’s all been.

The free world’s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they’d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement—this decade’s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal—that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they’ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West’s reaction to Iran’s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.

One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear.

Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East.

The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.

Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.

Sometimes
You Just Gotta
Love Your Enemies

Zacarias Moussaoui is a very lovable enemy, indeed:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui said Thursday it made his day to hear accounts of Americans' suffering from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and he would like to see similar attacks "every day."

Taking the witness stand for the second time in his death-penalty trial Thursday, Moussaoui mocked a Navy sailor who wept on the stand as she described the death of two of her subordinates.

"I think it was disgusting for a military person" to cry, Moussaoui said of the testimony of Navy Lt. Nancy McKeown. "She is military, she should expect people at war with her to want to kill her."

Asked if he was happy to hear her sobbing, he said, "Make my day."

Moussaoui said he had "no regret, no remorse" about the 9/11 attacks. Asked by prosecutor Rob Spencer if he would like to see it happen again, Moussaoui responded: "Every day until we get you."

Moussaoui also said on cross-examination that he is convinced President Bush will free him before the end of his term and that he will return to London.

Spencer tried several times to get Moussaoui to say he didn't really believe that, but Moussaoui was insistent.

"I haven't doubted it for one single second," said Moussaoui, adding that the vision came to him in a dream just like his dream of flying a plane into the White House.

He also argued that he could not get a fair trial so close to the Pentagon and he criticized U.S. support for Israel.

Yes, yes, death to the Jews and the Infidels, and all that.

God, what a fount of fascism he is, huh? The guy exhibits every symptom of the illness of Islam. Let's see;

Deulusions of Grandeur - check
Sees visions of death and destruction - check
Believes the Jews control the world - check
Death to the Infidel - check
Believes that Islam has some magical hold over the President of the United States, which will cause Bush to grant him pardon - check
Believes his best strategy is to take the witness and spout the God's honest truth about the fact that he wants to kill us all - check

And, of couse, he can't get a fair trial here in the United States.

You gotta love your enemies, when they tell you the truth.

Thanks, Zackie, baby.

Europe Seeks
A New
"Non-Emotive Lexicon"

The smelly old cat (you know, the one who, really, should have died long ago) sprang to her knees this past week, and began heaving and retching. With eyes popping, and ears straight back, the aged girl really gave quite a performance.

In the end, a pathetic, oily little hairball slithered from her mouth:

European governments should shun the phrase "Islamic terrorism" in favour of "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam", say guidelines from EU officials.

Backed by diplomats and civil servants from the 25 EU members, the officials are drafting a "non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation" to be submitted to Tony Blair and other leaders in June.

The Brussels officials hope the new lexicon, which would not be legally binding, would be adopted by governments and other EU institutions, such as the European Commission and European Parliament.

An EU official said: "The basic idea behind it is to avoid the use of improper words that would cause frustration among Muslims and increase the risk of radicalisation."

It might be time to put the poor thing to sleep.

Monday, April 10, 2006

To Be
Or
Not To Be

The media is, of course, currently attempting to make George Bush look like a madman for considering his options in the case of a military strike against Iran. In light of their horror that Bush would even consider an attack, Roger Simon questions where diplomacy could possibly lead in the first place:

What would a "diplomatic solution" to the Iranian nuclear question actually look like? Just give me a few concrete sentences... Not easy, is it? Not for anything tangible anyway. Even if we got the Iranians to sign something, what would it mean?

Hardly any countries acknowledge their nuclear weapons programs while engaged in initiating them. The US didn't in 1944. The Soviets didn't. The UK and the French didn't. The Israelis didn't. The Pakistanis and the Indians didn't.

What they said they were doing and what they were doing were rarely the same thing. And we expect the Iranian Mullahs, of all people, to behave differently?

In order to know, we'd have to have a watcher, or maybe three, on every street corner of their vast country. And even then I'm not sure we'd know.

Remember, back in the days of the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues split the atom in some made-over squash court under the University of Chicago football stadium. Its worth reviewing those times while recalling that was the early 1940s, over sixty years ago!

There are really only two options;

1) Attack Iran

or

2) Live with the Iranian bomb. Uh, or, is that die with the Iranian bomb?

Sunday, April 09, 2006

The West Is The Best:
The Grecaian-Judeo-Christian Tradition

An excellent article from Wafa Sultan appears at the website Annaqed today. Here's an excerpt:

In reacting to the Islamists’ ongoing cartoon Jihad, most commentators have focused on the issue of free speech. This is natural, and necessary, since eradication of free speech is the most immediate risk; and certainly without free speech there can be no defending other values.

Nevertheless it is also vital to take a step back and to view the events as part of a larger pattern, a pattern which poses a grave threat to our core Western values and system of government –- and to their primary consequence and beneficiary: the free individual.

To see why, and to appreciate what we stand to lose, we must begin by understanding what is meant by “Western”. Let us be clear that “Western” refers to a set of ideas -- it is not a racial or ethnic epithet. Anyone can embrace the ideas, just as anyone can reject them, regardless of his race, country of birth, or upbringing. Thus we can speak of Japan and Hong Kong having adopted “Western” principles as accurately as we can speak of Canada having done so.

In the broadest and most essentialized sense, the term “Western” denotes a set of fundamental ideas first discovered and adopted by the ancient Greeks. It was they who, for the first time in history, challenged the age-old notion that only the life of a society’s rulers and/or priests was important -- to instead assert that every man’s life is of crucial value.

It was they who turned their focus from an obsession with death and the after-life -- to instead seek success and joy in this life. It was they who dispensed with all-encompassing superstition and from cowering before the supernatural –- to instead assert that the world was knowable, that no question was off-limits, and that the questioning mind was among the most revered of attributes.

Finally, and as a consequence of all the others, it was they who cast away the resignation of living as unhappy subjects in an unknowable world -- to instead realize that with freedom to live, happiness on earth was possible for every man.

These groundbreaking ideas led to an unheralded flourishing of man and an outpouring of man’s achievements, both spiritual and material. Few, if any, periods in history can rival the developments and accomplishments made by the ancient Greeks in arts, science, mathematics, humanities, medicine, athletics and general living conditions.

And it is for this reason that “Western” ideas and values are rightfully described as life-affirming: for they lead to man’s freedom to pursue success and happiness in this life.

Historically, the transmission and implementation of Western ideas, the so-called Western tradition, was rocky and uneven at best, and its biggest opponent was always authority and dogmatic faith. In fact, during the Dark Ages, Western tradition was nearly extinguished by Christianity, whose irrational doctrines rejected the importance of the individual’s happiness on earth and of the existence of a knowable world; to instead preach abject self-denial in this world and salvation in a mystical after-life.

Not until men reacquainted themselves with ancient Greek ideas did they find themselves back on the “Western” track; and only then did they turn away from blind faith, question and reject the Church and its authority, and eventually produce the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and modern Western society.

Concomitant with the emergence and development of Western ideas came man’s political desire to form societies which would allow him to achieve the promise of these ideas: individual joy and happiness on earth. Defining and building such societies was an arduous task, one much more difficult than it might seem in hindsight, but by fits and starts, Westerners rose to the challenge.

And thus, was born, America. The country that has at the center of its ethos that the Pursuit of Happiness is a God-given right dispensed to all men equally.

Go read the rest of Wafa's article. It's a doozy. As Fjordman said the other day in his excellent article on the decline of the West, our best apologists these days are immigrants (Wafa Sultan, Hirsi Ali, Iba Warraq, Dr. John Sentamu, etc.) who see the great opportunities here and have set out to explain to us why our values and traditions are so important to the world.

Now, Wafa is right in saying that the West learned Democracy from the Greecian tradition. But, the truth is, we have picked and choosed from the Greeks, and we have done so with the mind of the Judeo-Christian tradition. One of the most important things about the new Western Tradition, as developed by Europe, and America, is its separation of church and state. Holding this as a sacred political principle has allowed the public to choose its own beliefs, which means that religious doctrines must thrive in the marketplace of ideas. Overall, this is a good thing, because it serves for the advancement of the cause of Freedom in the lives of individuals, but also because, ultimately, it means that the relationship of individual humans to their God, necessarily will become more direct and personal.

Why is this a good thing? What does this mean to those who, in their Freedom, choose no religion?

Well, what it means is that centralized religious authorities have less power to argue for radical ideas, and less ability to gain political power, in order to implement those radical ideas.

Here is an excerpt from George Weigel writing on the subject of

Anglo-Americans are often taught that the roots of modern democracy can be found in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which secured parliamentary supremacy against toyal absolutism in what would become Great Britain. Continental Europe often imagines Democracy begining in 1789, with the French Revolution. The remarkable civilizational story told by Christopher Dawson and Peter Brown suggests, however, that these readings are myopic, nearsighted.

For the way that the Christian civilization of the Middle settled certain struggles between the Catholic Church and the public authorities of the day taught "Europe" lessons that would later be applied to the defense of what we call "human rights" and the democratic project.

Additionally, I think that the very fact that the Kings and Queens of Europe were not the final end of government but that, instead, even the King had to answer to a higher authority, must have helped give birth to the idea that monarchy, nor any government, is not the ultimate authority.

George Weigel cites the investiture controversy wherein Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) was argued with King Henry IV as to who had the power to nominate Bishops:

It was a theological and legal argument fraught with historic consequences. The Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, knelt in the snow at Canossa, doing penance before Gregory VII; Henry later drove Gregory out of Rome and into exile in Salerno, where he died; the controversy continued. But, when the political and ecclesiastical dust settled, European civilization had learned some things from the struggle between pope and emperor - or, between church and state.

Maybe, we should move on to Thomas Aquinas next. Not today, though. Not enough time.

Iraq Liberation Day

Let's all celebrate.

Sunday, April 9th, is the three year anniversary of the day Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad and his atatue was toppled.

It was a great day for Iraq and a great day for America.

We must not forget that we have achieved our objective in Iraq. We have liberated Iraq and removed a brutal dictator from a state that sponsored terrorism.

One mo' time!

Iraq is but one front in the long, terrible eradication of Islamofascism.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Nuke Iran

Seymour Hersh says plans are already in place, and Bush is determined to nuke Iran.

To my shock, when I told my wife about this story, and voiced my concern that we should not use nukes on Iran, her response was,

"But, isn't it the same thing as the Cuban Missile Crisis? We were ready to use nukes then?"

Since when is my wife more hardcore than me?

Her point is very good. And, i had never thought of it this way. However, the difference between the two situations is that

1) we have time with Iran and could, presumably, attack with conventional weapons, and if that didn't work THEN hit them with nukes

2) Ahmadinejad is more dangerous than the Cuban situation all those years ago, because he believes it is his mission to nuke other nations. The Cuban situation was tactical, although, of course, we could not have known that at the time.

My biggest fear is that we won't attack Iran. If we don't, then I believe this world is doomed to tens of millions dead.

The Cranky Insomniac has some good thoughts on the subject of whether we should go that far:

I confess to being highly skeptical of the idea that the Administration is seriously considering using tactical nukes. Even if it makes military sense (which given the suspected underground nature of Iran's nuclear facilities it well might), from a public relations standpoint it is conceivably the worst possible idea in the world.

As a former senior intelligence official tells Hersh, "we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit."

No war has ever required the winning of hearts and minds throughout the world more than the Global War on Terror, and images of mushroom clouds and children with radiation poisoning would damage America's reputation perhaps irreparably. And, maybe even more importantly, nothing would create more jihadists whose only goal would be "death to America."

On the other hand, having senior officials "leak" the "fact" that the use of nukes is being seriously considered is a great piece of psyops if you want to scare the hell out of Iran and bring them to the bargaining table.

Or, maybe this is true (from the Jerusalem Post):

"On Monday, Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that part of Ukraine's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal may well have found its way to Iran. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians agreed to transfer the Soviet nuclear arsenal that remained in Ukraine after its independence to Russia.

According to Novaya Gazeta, some 250 nuclear warheads never made it to Russia and are thought to have been sent to Iran instead. The report further noted that the warheads will remain operational until 2010."Responding to the report, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia's deputy defense minister and the chief of General Staff, said, 'Russia's General Staff has no information about whether Ukraine has given 250 nuclear warheads to Iran or not.'

"It is impossible to assess the accuracy of the report. The Ukrainian government has dismissed its allegations. Russia may well have invented the story to shift media attention away from the growing awareness that Russian support for Teheran, Damascus and Hamas effectively places it in the enemy camp in the US-led war against global jihad.

"But whether this particular report is true or false, there is no doubt that the danger to Israel and the rest of the Western world emanating from Iran and its allies is growing by the day. In recent testimony before the US Congress, John Negroponte, director of National Intelligence, said that the danger that Teheran 'will acquire a nuclear weapon and the ability to integrate it with ballistic missiles that Iran already possesses' is a cause 'for immediate concern.'

Read the rest. This article is one of the best I have seen in summing up where we are right now in history. These are, indeed, amazing times.

News Story
From
Associated Press

"Leak-Hating President As Leaker-In-Chief?"

Wow:

WASHINGTON - President Bush insists a president "better mean what he says." Those words could return to haunt him.

After long denouncing leaks of all kinds, Bush is confronted with a statement — unchallenged by his aides — that he authorized a leak of classified material to undermine an Iraq war critic.

The allegation in the CIA leak case threatens the credibility of a president already falling in the polls, and it gives Democrats fresh material to accuse him of hypocrisy.

A reader may notice that I ordinarily stay out of the day to day political fighting here on CUANAS. It's just boring and stupid to me, like watching Soap Operas. But, I guess, in this case, I will have to actually think about the "Leak" case a bit.

Ok, here goes.

The President did not deny that he authorized the "leak" because he didn't authorize leaking Plame's name. In fact, as the President has the authority to classify, and declassify, information by his own orders, no revelation of any information can be defined as a leak anyway.

AP admits as much in the very article quoted:

As president, Bush has wide latitude to declassify material. And there was nothing in the legal papers filed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to suggest Bush or Cheney did anything illegal, or had specifically authorized Libby to identify Plame.

But, in the following paragraphs, their "news" story goes here:

The latest flap comes as things seemed as if they could hardly get worse for the president and his Republican allies: Iraq, continued fallout over the botched Katrina response, the Dubai ports debacle, shortcomings in the new Medicare prescription drug program, the resignation of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the collapse of a proposed immigration overhaul.

A new AP-Ipsos poll showed just 36 percent of the public approve of Bush's job performance, a low-water mark for his presidency.

Ok, so let's look at AP-Ipsos:

... if one were to judge by AP-Ipsos polling, one would have to conclude that American attitudes toward their President -- and indeed themselves! -- were beginning to seem positively… well, French.

AP press releases identify Ipsos coyly as an "international polling firm". Ipsos's own releases on its AP work describe the company as "a leading global survey-based market research company" -- as well as "non-partisan" and "objective".

One would hardly expect them to say otherwise. But here is what neither AP nor Ipsos want Americans to know and assiduously avoid saying: Ipsos is a French polling firm. Not that this should matter per se. But AP and Ipsos undoubtedly fear that to many Americans it might or that, in light of the current climate of Franco-American relations, it might at least raise some doubts about Ipsos's impartiality and objectivity.

And what is worse: about this particular French polling firm, these doubts would be highly justified. On its home market, Ipsos is well known precisely for the unreliability of its polls and for being especially tight with the French political establishment.

Here's how a November 2001 profile in the French economics weekly l'Expansion described the cozy relationship of Ipsos co-President Jean-Marc Lech to the occupant of the Elysée Palace:

"During the two seven-year-terms of François Mitterrand, he was one of the advisors to the prince and he held open house at Copenhagen, the famous restaurant on the Champs Elysées not far from the "castle". Since he began working for Jacques Chirac, he has left the Champs and stays put in the XV arrondissement at lunchtime. Now, he merely delivers his confidential polls personally to the antechamber of the President.

According to the latest Ipsos financial report, a holding company controlled by Lech and his partner Didier Truchot controls 35 percent of Ipsos capital and nearly half of the voting rights in the firm.

Ipsos's international expansion in the late 1990s was, incidentally, largely financed by the Artémis investment group of French businessman François Pinault. This is the same Artémis and the same Pinault that were heavily implicated in the Executive Life fraud and that only avoided being indicted in US courts presumably through the intercession of Pinault's close personal friend Jacques Chirac and by coughing up some $185 million. Artémis sold its stake in Ipsos when the firm went public in 1999.

Notice, you had never heard of Ipsos. To start with, many of us do not believe "polls" anyway. But, we at least, do know the names of the polling companies. The most commonly used poll companies are Gallup and Zogby. But, it seems, when AP needs to really hit Bush hard, they trot out Ipsos.

Whatever.

Who killed J.R.? Did Carey marry Big? Has Luke cheated on Laura? Ipsos could probably take a poll and tell you. But, of course, they are probably too busy plotting their coup on the United States government.

Friday, April 07, 2006

The World
Has Finally
Proved It:
Christ's Love
Does Not Exist

Congratulations world:

I have noticed that for the past week or so we’re being treated to stories in the press which seem designed to foment doubts about the tenents, stories and beliefs of Christianity and the efficacy of prayer. Today we get the Judas just did what Jesus asked him to do story from the NY Times and where.

Yesterday it was, Jesus walked on Ice, not water (complete with an article illustration using “The People’s Jesus” from a few years ago. Ugh.)

A few days before that it was oh, yeah, and by the way, prayer? It does nothing.

Can’t help but wonder if some of this is meant to be a prelude to the release of the Da Vinci Code movie - advance work, if you will. Here we have a plethora of stories trying to debunk common Christian understanding, and I am wondering if it is all part of the movement to mush-up soggy Christians - to foment doubt - and to soften up the non-believers to the idea that if everything Christians believe is worthless, well then, their influence is to be discounted or even disdained, lessened and disresepected.

There is a game afoot - already in play, I think. The gameboard is so huge that we can’t see all the pieces. Chesterton used to write about the paradox of a man riding on the back of a beast so big he didn’t know it was a beast and merely thought it was the world.

Oh, And Jesus didn’t die on the cross.

Got that? That’s the latest “theory” which someone came up with and which NBC’s Dateline saw fit to “explore”.

Easter is coming, too. That always brings out a few “let’s debunk Christianity” stories - but this year, it’s really an all-out assault.

Yes, and now we know for sure the media agrees with the Islamofascists, because they, also, say Christ did not die on the cross. Instead, Judas died for him.

Got that?

Think about it, my friends, who is it that twists truth up into such byzantine braids?

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Criticism Of Pastorius

A guy whose opinion I very much respect sent me the following email:

About your recent blogging, I was kinda sad to see how down you've been on Afghanistan recently.. of course I understand and agree with the outrage, but (here's my 2 cents) it seems to me that times like this are when Glenn Reynolds's wise dictum "democracy is a process, not an event" really come into play. We can say Afghanistan is a "failure" because of the apostate case, because the apostate case is/was definitely an injustice. But doesn't that set up an impossible standard for democratizing countries whereby we must erase every injustice or it's a "failure"?

You can say "well we did it in Japan" etc., but

(1) no, of course we didn't erase every injustice in Japan,

and

(2) to the extent that we *were* able to impose a decent society on them, it was because we devastated them with the nukes & then had an imposing occupation force.

Similar with Germany.

But in this case we are simply not able to spare the troops & cost to occupy Afghanistan to that extent. (And devastating them would be counterproductive...)

The fact of the matter is that Afghanistan is now a democratic republic (however flawed), and the good news is that killing (even prosecuting) a person for apostasy is, by any logical reading, unconstitutional under the Afghan constitution. But (absent the willingness/ability to put the entire society under our boot and issue their constitutional rulings ourselves) we're going to have to let *them* come to that conclusion (because it's their institutions that will have to do the enforcing, or not). And that's the "process" part.

Apparently, they have not come to that conclusion yet. That's too bad, in fact it's shameful and wrong. That judge is *wrong*, those prosecutors are *wrong*, to allow prosecution of apostates, and of course it's depressing that no decent voices in Afghanistan's institutions have seen fit to stand up and point that out. But neither did we come to the conclusion that slavery was wrong, for decades. That doesn't mean the US "not a democracy" or a "failure" during that time. It had the *engine* for change/improvement, which is the important thing. And now, Afghanistan does too.

That doesn't mean I'm saying we can kick back and say "whatever happens it's all cool". Democracy is a process!

Notice that part of that process is international pressure on them to improve their institutions. You (I think it was you?) lamented that it required international pressure to help save that guy. Actually, that was a good development. The government of Afghanistan is (at least to some extent) amenable to international pressure!

Wow! Isn't that good?

When they are doing something objectively evil, we can and should shame them. If it were still the Taliban in power, of course, they wouldn't care less. But now....I guess I'm saying, you've become far more pessimistic than me. It's made for good blogging on your part, but makes me kinda sad.

Often, my readers are more reasonable than me.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

I Wish

Song by
Stevie Wonder

Looking back on when i
Was a little nappy headed boy
Then my only worry
Was for christmas what would be my toy
Even though we sometimes
Would not get a thing
We were happy with the
Joy the day would bring

Sneaking out the back door
To hang out with those hoodlum friends of mine
Greeted at the back door
With boy thought I told you not to go outside,

I wish those days could come back once more
Why did those days ev-er have to go
I wish those days could come back once more
Why did those days ev-er have to go
Cause I love them so

Brother says he’s tellin’’bout you playin’ doctor with that girl
Just don’t tell I’ll give you
Anything you want in this whole wide world

Mama gives you money for sunday school
You trade yours for candy after church is through
Smokin’ cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall (you nasty boy)
Teacher sends you to the principal’s office down the wall

You grow up and learn that kinda thing ain’t right
But while you were doin’it-it sure felt outta sight

I wish those days could come back once more
Why did those days ev-er have to go

Hamas Says
They Are Broke

Palestinian women's affairs minister, Dr. Mariam Saleh, attends the first Cabinet meeting of the Islamic group Hamas at the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wednesday April 5 2006. Hamas held its first Cabinet meeting via video conference, with simultaneous sessions taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) Pastorius note: Do you think that might have anything to do with the fact that she is a woman? Notice she is the only one at the videoconferenced meeting.

Yes, they just got started and they have already bankrupted the Peaceful State of Palestine:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The new Hamas-led government is broke and missed the April 1 monthly pay date for tens of thousands of Palestinian public workers, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday.

It was the Islamic militants' first admission they will have difficulty running the West Bank and Gaza without massive foreign aid.

Haniyeh offered no solutions to the cash crunch, pledging only to do his best to make up for tens of millions of dollars in aid being withheld by international donors and appealing to the Arab world to send more donations.

The Palestinian Authority is the largest employer in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, providing salaries for 140,000 people that sustain about one-third of the Palestinians. Haniyeh said it was unclear how the government will meet its payroll.

Finance Minister Omar Abdel Razek said he is waiting for $80 million from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

I've got an idea for them How about starting some businesses, and building and creating things. That way people can make money without the government simply having to hand over cash to one-third of the people.

That's friggin' pathetic.

University of Connecticut
Professor Predicts
Human Time Travel
This Century

Listen to this:

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.

Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.

Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2. “Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space.

Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”

And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”

Step back a minute (sorry, only figuratively). How do we know that time is not merely a human invention, and that manipulating it just doesn’t make sense?

“What is time? That is a very, very difficult question,” said Mallett. “Time is a way of separating events from each other. Even without thinking about time, we can see that things change, seasons change, people change. The fact that the world changes is an intrinsic feature of the physical world, and time is independent of whether or not we have a name for it.

“To physicists, time is what’s measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It’s slower than a clock on earth.”

Although the jet-flying clock regained its normal pace when it landed, it never caught up with earth clocks – which means that we have a time traveler from the past among us already, even though it thinks it’s in the future. Some people show concern over time traveling, although Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.

“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”

In light of this causal “safety,” it’s kind of ironic that what prompted Mallett as a child to investigate time travel was a desire to change the past in hopes of a different future. When he was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 33. After reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Mallett was determined to find a way to go back and warn his father about the dangers of smoking.

This personal element fueled Mallett’s perseverance to study science, master Einstein’s equations, and build a professional career with many high notes. Since the ‘70s, his research has included quantum gravity, relativistic cosmology and gauge theories, and he plans to publish a popular science/memoir book this November 2006.

I think I almost understand what he just said.

What The ...?

Is this satire?

The guy is a member of the Howard Stern "Wackpack," and a complete joke.

Whither Goest
Our
Democracy Project?

We are a nation with a history of making the world a better place. We brought Democracy to the world. In the Civil War, we fought again for the greater establishment of Democracy when we realized that we could no longer tolerate the sin of slavery. We pulled Europe out of its private circle of hell in WWI, we beat back the demonic forces of Nazism and Japanese barbarity in WWII, and we braved the poisonous seas of diplomatic sorcery in bringing the Soviet Union to an end.

We want to and, indeed, we need to believe we are doing good in order to gather the strength to go on.

The recent revelation that Abdul Rahman could be tried, found guilty, and executed for the "apostasy" of converting from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan, has, seemingly, rendered our efforts, in that godforsaken country, useless. The reality is, life is better for Afghanis than it was under the Taliban. Women now go to school and learn to read. Schools are being built, and infrastructure is being put in place, and the Islamofascist circus of public beheadings is no longer prime entertainment in the public squares and stadiums of Afghanistan.

But, that is not enough. How could we be a partner in the creation of a Sharia state, however, relatively, benign? And, if Afghanistan has gone medieval on our watch, what does that bode for Iraq? Have we spent thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, to install the same old bosses in the Arab world?

At Belmont Club, Wretchard points out that Francis Fukuyama, George Will, and William F. Buckley have all become sibilant seamstresses stitchhing together their white flags of surrender. Like tired lounge musicians, they vamp in repetition on pathetic choruses of "the Arabs just don't want to be free."

Such is the postmodern, multicultural bigotry of conservatives without vision.

And whose fault is all this, ultimately?

It is George Bush's fault for not learning the lessons of our own American history. In Japan, we turned an alien culture bent of barbarity, enamored with suicide warriors, inured in a squalid honor/shame mentality, into a modern capitalistic democracy. And, how did we do it?

Well, let me be blunt. We did it through something very akin to fascism. We forced the Japanese to quit their ugly habits at the point of a very sharp sword.

Why did we do this?

Because, we believe that freedom beats in the breast of all human beings. We believe that men are all created equal to pursue their own idea of happiness, and to live without the fear of expressing themselves in worship, creation, or against the hand that feeds. In short, we forced the Japanese to learn freedom and democracy because we believed they would be better off.

To an American, any other course for life is a Satanic lie.

Oh yes, indeed, the Buckleys, Wills, and Fukuyamas of the world have practical reasons for why Iraqis/Arabs/Muslims can not govern themselves morally. You see, they have too many "animosities," history is too viscous for change, traditional hatreds trump progress:

These arguments essentially say that while America can win the military struggle in Iraq it can never win the political struggle. The reasons may vary. Maybe "Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable"; maybe the country "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a Marshall"; or maybe it plain "doesn't want it" -- some form of democracy that is. But whatever the cause, so the argument goes, any success in the military field is negated by the "fact" that the political battle is unwinnable. Therefore the campaign as a whole must fail.

Of course the argument is valid only if the US in fact loses the political struggle. If the US wins the political struggle in some meaningful sense then the whole syllogism falls apart. Because the entire issue pivots on an empirical question it's important to examine just what US policymakers are trying to achieve in current negotiations to form an Iraqi unity government.

Wretchard points to an article by David Ignatius which avoids the totems of fear which lead to hopelessness by outlining the specifics of the Iraqi rifts which are delaying Democracy:

Khalilzad recounted the items that the Iraqi political factions have agreed on in private negotiations over the past month. On Sunday, the leaders signed off on the last of these planks of a government of national unity. The Iraqis have saved the hardest issue for last -- the names of the politicians who will hold the top jobs. That bitter fight will play out over the next several weeks. ... given where Iraq was six months ago -- when Sunni and Shiite leaders were barely talking -- their agreement on the framework for a unity government is important. These negotiations may not succeed, but they are not a fairy-tale fantasy, as some critics argue. "All the elements of the deal are there, up in the air, and they could come down and click into place," Kurdish leader Barham Salih told me by telephone from Iraq. "We have come to the real crunch."

It seems the real disagreements arise over the practical matter of how to share the oil revenue.

The real force driving the formation of a Unity Government is not some desire to satisfy an American obsession with spreading democracy so much as the need to come to agreements over oil and security. All the ethnic groups in Iraq want to share in the oil revenues. The Sunni need a share in oil revenues of which they have none themselves; while the Kurds and Shi'a need to agree how to tranship and manage the oil resources in their areas.

Without a negotiated settlement under a Unity Government, the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds would have to fight for territory and oil resources. It is better to conclude a series of agreements to be administered by a Unity Government than escort every barrel of oil by force of arms to the market.

This should not be a surprise to us. It is a truism as old as Adam Smith that the free market principle of disparate selfishnesses creates the invisible hand which guides our society forward.

However, I believe we must learn from our failures in Afghanistan. Order is not the priority of democracy, freedom is. We can not allow Iraq to become a rigid Islamofascist state administered by purveyors of crude. We must, once again, find the courage of our convictions, the faith of our fathers. We must believe in our own Declaration of Independence and our own Constitution. We must know with a fervor that it is for everyone, and we must become willing to impose it at the point of a gun.

This may seem like an oxymoron, the imposition of freedom by force of arms, but forcing one's worldview on another is the essence of war. So, the question isn't whether my point is accurate. Instead, the question is, do we think our worldview is better.

If we do not, then what is worth going to war for?

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Agnus Dei

Alleluia, Alleluia
For the lord God Almighty reigns
Alleluia, Alleluia
For the lord God Almighty reigns

Alleluia
Holy, Holy are you lord God Almighty

Worthy is the Lamb
Worthy is the Lamb
You are holy,
Holy are you Lord God almighty
Worthy is the Lamb
Worthy is the Lamb

The "Youths"
And
The "Students"
Of France

The "students" were demonstrating, and the "youths," who are thought to be from "tougher suburbs," were violently rioting:

PARIS - Rioting youths swarmed across a downtown Paris plaza, ripping up street signs and park benches and hurling stones and chunks of pavement at police at the end of the largest of massive but mostly peaceful protests Tuesday across France against a new jobs law.

Riot police fired tear gas and rubber pellets and made repeated charges into the crowds of several hundred youths at Place d'Italie on the Left Bank, carrying away those they arrested.

The clashes came as more than 1 million people poured into the streets across the country,

"Students"

including 84,000 in Paris, according to police. Union organizers put the figure in the capital at 700,000 — and 3 million nationwide.

But the violence in Paris was less intense than at previous marches against the law, and the country was less affected by an accompanying national strike. As before, the Paris violence appeared to involve youths from tougher suburbs and extremists from both the far right and far left.

"It is giving them too much credit to ascribe an ideology to them. These are just hoodlums, who come to break and pillage. I'm not sure there is an ideology behind all this," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said.

Groups of these youths attacked bystanders, news photographers and protesters, kicking and punching some. They used metal bars to break up chunks of pavement that they hurled at helmeted riot officers, who advanced behind raised shields to sweep the

"Youths"

square clear.

Youths also smashed store windows, bus shelters and clashed with police in Rennes, in northwest France. Store fronts, cars and telephone boxes also were damaged in Lille in the northeast.

Police said they took 383 people into custody in Paris, where 18 people also suffered slight injuries, and another 243 elsewhere in France. The violence marred another day of demonstrations against the jobs law, which would make it easier to fire young workers.

There were 268 marches nationwide, according to police. It was the second Tuesday running that unions and student groups had mobilized so many protesters, maintaining intense pressure on President Jacques Chirac's government to withdraw the measure.

Strikers again shut down the Eiffel Tower, where tourists stood bewildered before the closed gates. Parisian commuters flattened themselves onto subway trains limited by the strike. Garbage bins in some Paris neighborhoods stood overflowing and uncollected by striking sanitation workers.

Paris police stepped up their efforts to thwart troublemakers, deploying 4,000 officers Tuesday. Armed riot officers pulled over train travelers disembarking from the suburbs before the protest, searching their bags and checking identities.

The Paris march snaked from the Place de la Republique and crossed the Seine River to finish at Place d'Italie on the Left Bank.

Students backed by unions have spearheaded ever-larger marches for two months against the jobs law. Chirac signed it anyway Sunday, saying it will help France keep up with the global economy.

He offered modifications, but students and unions rejected them, saying they want the law withdrawn, not softened.

"We are really close to getting the government to give in," said Marc Dago, a high school geology teacher at the Paris march. "If we give in now, the government is going to carry out much more harmful and far-reaching reforms that will affect all workers, not just the young."

I don't know about you, but I find that article funny. Is it just me?

The Professor
Who Would
Cull Humanity

There's more today on Pianka, the University of Texas professor who seems to have advocated for the spread of ebola virus as a means of population control:

AUSTIN -- A University of Texas biology professor has been targeted by talk radio, bloggers and vitriolic e-mails _ including a death threat _ after a published report that he advocated death for most of the population as a means of saving the Earth.

But Eric Pianka said Monday his remarks about what he believes is an impending pandemic were taken out of context.

"What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it's too late," he said. "It's already too late, but we're not even thinking about it. We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out."

The public furor began when The Gazette-Enterprise of Seguin, Texas, reported Sunday on two speeches Pianka made last month to groups of scientists and students about vanishing animal habitats and the explosion of the human population.

The newspaper's Jamie Mobley attended one of those speeches and also interviewed Forrest Mims, an amateur scientist and author who heard Pianka speak early last month before the Texas Academy of Science.

After the newspaper's report appeared, it was circulated widely and posted on "The Drudge Report." It quickly became talk radio fodder.

The Gazette-Enterprise quoted Pianka as saying disease "will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse."

Pianka said he was only trying to warn his audience that disease epidemics have happened before and will happen again if the human population growth isn't contained.

He said he believes the Earth would be better off if the human population were smaller because fewer natural resources would be consumed and humans wouldn't continue to destroy animal habitats. But he said that doesn't mean he wants most humans to die.

But Mims, chairman of the academy's environmental science section, told The Associated Press there was no mistaking Pianka's disdain for humans and desire for their elimination.

"He wishes for it. He hopes for it. He laughs about it. He jokes about it," Mims said. "It's got to happen because we are the scourge of humanity."

David Marsh, president of the Texas Academy of Science, did not return telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. No recording or transcript of either that speech or another delivered last Friday at St. Edward's University in Austin was available for review by the AP.

The Gazette-Enterprise said it reviewed a transcript of the original speech, which was provided on the condition that it not be distributed.

Allan Hook, a St. Edward's biology professor who heard both speeches, said Pianka "wasn't so perhaps adamant in his own personal views of what he thinks might happen" in his second lecture.

But Hook declined to elaborate on what Pianka said in the earlier speech, which Pianka delivered while being honored as the academy's 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

University of Texas officials don't plan to take any action against Pianka, university spokesman Don Hale said.

"Dr. Pianka has First Amendment rights to express his point of view," Hale said. "We have plenty of faculty with a lot of different points of view and they have the right to express that point of view, but they're expressing their personal point of view."

Here's the good Doctors website.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Let Me Assure You,
The Euros Are So
Much More Sophisticated
Than Us
Ugly Americans

It's true:

It started with a Hitler salute. Two eastern German soccer teams in the fourth division, FC Sachsen Leipzig and Hallesche FC, had just drawn 2-2 on March 25 in Halle, and the fans weren't happy.

Leipzig's Nigerian midfielder Adebowale Ogungbure was walking off the pitch when hooligans ran up to him, spat at him and called him "Dirty Nigger," "Shit Nigger" and "Ape." He ignored it and walked on. Then, when he passed the main stand and heard fans making whooping monkey noises at him, he decided he'd had enough. He put two fingers above his mouth to symbolise a Hitler moustache and stuck out his right arm in a Nazi salute to the crowd.

Given their behavior, one might think they would have appreciated the gesture and even returned it. But a Halle supporter attacked him from behind with a corner flag and another grabbed him in a stranglehold.

What year is it?

Well, anyway, I wish I was up to speed on the Europeein nuancin. I just can't seem to get it down.

Scientist Advocates
Worldwide Genocide -
Peers Give Standing Ovation

Eric Pianka -
Scientist and Intellectual

This may be the most stunning thing I have ever heard:

What would happen if a world-renowned scientist and evolutionary ecologist told hundreds of his colleagues that 90 percent of the human race needed to be wiped out by exposure to Ebola or some other deadly virus?

Apparently, according to a scientist who claims to have witnessed such a remarkable event one month ago, the fiend would get a standing ovation and an award.

That's the story being told by Forrest Mims III, a member of the Texas Academy of Science, chairman of its environmental science section and editor of the Citizen Scientist.

The speech Mims heard was delivered by Eric R. Pianka, a lizard expert from the University of Texas. It is recounted in detail in the latest issue of the Citizen Scientist.

"We're no better than bacteria," Mims quoted Pianka as saying in his condemnation of the human race, which, he claimed, is overpopulating the Earth.

The only way to save the planet for the rest of the species is to reduce the human population to 10 percent of its current number.

"He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," writes Mims. "War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets. AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola (Ebola reston), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs."

Pianka notes in the online syllabus for his Diversity and Ecology class that the deadly form of Ebola – Ebola zaire – that has killed nine out of the 10 people infected currently only spreads by direct contact with infected blood, while Ebola reston, the close relative that currently kills only monkeys, is an airborne virus. Evolution, he says, will in time result in an airborne form fatal to humans.

Mims notes that when Pianka finished his remarks, the audience of fellow scientists and students burst out in sustained applause.

During a question-and-answer sessions, the audience laughed approvingly when Pianka offered the bird flu as another vehicle toward achieving his goal. They also chuckled when he suggested it was time to sterilize everyone on Earth.

"What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?" asked one member of the audience.
"I speak to the converted!" Pianka replied.

Mims said he spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces a one-child policy.
"Smarter people have fewer kids," Mims quoted Pianka as saying.

Following the question-and-answer session, Mims says "almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered. Dozens then mobbed the professor at the lectern to extend greetings and ask questions."

Mims notes five hours later, the Texas Academy of Science presented Pianka with a plaque in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

"When the banquet hall filled with more than 400 people responded with enthusiastic applause, I walked out in protest," he writes.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Surely,
This Is A
Religion Of Peace

Eyes All Around has developed her blog into a must read. Day to day, you never know whether you're going to get science, worship, anti-Jihad, or hardcore conservative humor, but, it's always gonna be something good. Today, she brings us a few servings from the koran:

Qur’an 33.27 And He made you heirs to their land and their dwellings and their property, and (to) a land which you have not yet trodden, and Allah has power over all things.

Qur’an 21:44 Do they see Us advancing, gradually reducing the land (in their control), curtailing its borders on all sides? It is they who will be overcome.

Qur’an 9:123 “murder them and treat them harshly”

Qur’an 3.28 Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves against them, guarding carefully; and Allah makes you cautious of (retribution from) Himself; and to Allah is the eventual coming.

Qur’an 5:51 “Muslims, do not make friends with any but your own people.”

Qur’an 8:12 cp. 8:60 “Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers”; “smite above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them”Qur’an 2:191 “...kill the disbelievers wherever we find them”

Qur’an 9.33 He it is Who sent His Apostle with guidance and the religion of truth, that He might cause it to prevail over all religions.

Qur’an 2:193 “And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should be only for Allah”

Qur’an 22:19-22 “fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem”

Qur’an 8:7 “Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: ‘Wipe the infidels (non-Muslims) out to the last.’”

Qur’an 8:39 “So, fight them till all opposition ends and the only religion is Islam.”

Qur’an 8:59 “The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah’s enemy.”

Qur’an 8:7 “Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: ‘Wipe the infidels (non-Muslims) out to the last.’”

Qur’an 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

Qur’an 47:4 “Strike off the heads of the disbelievers”; and after making a “wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.”

Saturday, April 01, 2006

London Telegraph:
Attack On Iran
Already Being Planned

And, all I can say is, it's about damned time:

The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran.

A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.

It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.

Tomorrow's meeting will be attended by Gen Sir Michael Walker, the chief of the defence staff, Lt Gen Andrew Ridgway, the chief of defence intelligence and Maj Gen Bill Rollo, the assistant chief of the general staff, together with officials from the Foreign Office and Downing Street.

The International Atomic Energy Authority, the nuclear watchdog, believes that much of Iran's programme is now devoted to uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, technologies that could provide material for nuclear bombs to be developed in the next three years.

The United States government is hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little international support.

British military chiefs believe an attack would be limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants - a land assault is not being considered at the moment.

But confirmation that Britain has started contingency planning will undermine the claim last month by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that a military attack against Iran was "inconceivable".

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, insisted, during a visit to Blackburn yesterday, that all negotiating options - including the use of force - remained open in an attempt to resolve the crisis.

Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from US navy ships and submarines in the Gulf would, it is believed, target Iran's air defence systems at the nuclear installations.

That would enable attacks by B2 stealth bombers equipped with eight 4,500lb enhanced BLU-28 satellite-guided bunker-busting bombs, flying from Diego Garcia, the isolated US Navy base in the Indian Ocean, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Whiteman USAF base in Missouri.

It is understood that any direct British involvement in an attack would be limited but may extend to the use of the RAF's highly secret airborne early warning aircraft.

At the centre of the crisis is Washington's fear that an Iranian nuclear weapon could be used against Israel or US forces in the region, such as the American air base at Incirlik in Turkey.

The UN also believes that the production of a bomb could also lead to further destabilisation in the Middle East, which would result in Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia all developing nuclear weapons programmes.

A senior Foreign Office source said: "Monday's meeting will set out to address the consequences for Britain in the event of an attack against Iran. The CDS [chiefs of defence staff] will want to know what the impact will be on British interests in Iraq and Afghanistan which both border Iran. The CDS will then brief the Prime Minister and the Cabinet on their conclusions in the next few days.

"If Iran makes another strategic mistake, such as ignoring demands by the UN or future resolutions, then the thinking among the chiefs is that military action could be taken to bring an end to the crisis. The belief in some areas of Whitehall is that an attack is now all but inevitable.

There will be no invasion of Iran but the nuclear sites will be destroyed. This is not something that will happen imminently, maybe this year, maybe next year. Jack Straw is making exactly the same noises that the Government did in March 2003 when it spoke about the likelihood of a war in Iraq.

"Then the Government said the war was neither inevitable or imminent and then attacked."
The source said that the Israeli attack against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 proved that a limited operation was the best military option.

The Israeli air force launched raids against the plant, which intelligence suggested was being used to develop a nuclear bomb for use against Israel.

Military chiefs also plan tomorrow to discuss fears that an attack within Iran will "unhinge" southern Iraq - where British troops are based - an area mainly populated by Shia Muslims who have strong political and religious links to Iran.

They are concerned that this could delay any withdrawal of troops this year or next. There could also be consequences for British and US troops in Afghanistan, which borders Iran.

The MoD meeting will address the economic issues that could arise if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president - who became the subject of international condemnation last year when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" - cuts off oil supplies to the West in reprisal.

There are thought to be at least eight known sites within Iran involved in the production of nuclear materials, although it is generally accepted that there are many more secret installations.

Iran has successfully tested a Fajr-3 missile that can reach Israel, avoiding radar and hitting several targets using multiple warheads, its military has confirmed.

Can't wait until that 700-ton bomb is ready.

There Will
Be No
Living Church
In The
Land Of Christ

Yesterday, Jamie Glazov, of Front Page Magazine, published an excellent interview with Serge Trifkovic. It is quite an extensive interview, but it is worth the read. I think I will excerpt it here in portions over a matter of a few days:

Glazov: Before we get to your book, let's talk about the Abdul Rahman case for a moment. He has just been released and is now in Italy. What do you think the key significance of this case is?

Trifkovic: This became a cause célèbre only because of the presence of American troops in Afghanistan: having Rahman killed for apostasy under their noses would have made too explicit a debacle of the already farcical neocon phantasy known as "democratizing the greater Middle East."

No, when Christians are routinely mistreated and killed by our other trusted friends and allies of the United States in the region - notably Pakistan, Egypt, and even the "secular" Turkey - you don't hear about it, there are no vigils, no protests, no offers of asylum.

Christians are routinely accused of "blasphemy against Islam," an offense that carries the death penalty as Pakistan has some of the strictest blasphemy laws in the Muslim world. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidence - even one man's word against another - and since it is invariably a Muslim's word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained.

In Egypt, supposedly a friend of the United States and the second largest recipient of the U.S. taxpayers' largesse, not a single murderer was convicted following the January 2000 massacre of 21 Coptic Christians in the village of Al-Kosheh, and smaller-scale massacres continue unabated.

An excellent source is "The New Persecuted: Inquiries into Anti-Christian Intolerance in the New Century of Martyrs" by Antonio Socci. Socci provides evidence that in the past century some 50 million Christians have been killed primarily or exclusively for the reason of their faith; an average of 160,000 Christians have been killed every year since 1990, the vast majority by Muslims in the Third World: East Timor, Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria..

Socci laments the fact that "this global persecution of Christianity is still in progress but in most cases is ignored by the mass media and Christians in the West."There are two parallel processes overlooked in the current Middle Eastern crisis: the apparently terminal decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East after 14 centuries of precarious dhimmitude, and the remarkable indifference of the post-Christian, latently Christophobic Western elite class to its impending demise.

Under the British Mandate, Palestine officially was a Christian country, with Bethlehem having a population that was 90 percent Christian. Today they are literally disappearing. Among over three million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, under 50,000 Christians remain.

By the year 2020 there will be no living church in the land of Christ.

Colorado School
Bans Display Of
American Flag/
"Misguided Patriotism"

From CBS News:

(CBS/AP) Dozens of high school students protested a temporary school policy forbidding students from displaying the U.S. flag, as well as flags from other countries, amid racial tensions following immigration rallies.

Skyline High School Principal Tom Stumpf said American flags were brazenly waved in the faces of Hispanic students and in one case a Mexican flag was thrown into the face of another student.

"When it involves the American flag and its abuse in vilifying other people, we simply will not tolerate it," Stumpf said. "They were using the symbol derisively as misguided patriotism."

As Dennis Prager often says, "You have to go to college to believe something that stupid."

Pre-Futurism:
Matter Itself Is
Beginning To
Wake Up
IBM Creates Tool Which
Could Be Used To Build
Atom-Sized Computer

From Agence French Press:

The development was touted as a step toward making computers based on the spin of electrons and atoms.

"We have a tool in place to develop the product of the future," said German-born researcher Andreas Heinrich of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

"We all know we can't shrink the silicon-based technology used in today's computers down to the atomic level. We have to look at a radically different concept, and that is what we are doing here."

The new method was called "spin-excitation spectroscopy" and used a specially-designed microscope capable of creating magnetic fields as much as 140,000 times stronger than that of the Earth, scientists said.

Researchers were able to manipulate atoms and measure the effect their spins had on each other, according to IBM.

"We can study the magnetic phenomena used in hard drives, but on the scale of single atoms," Heinrich told AFP. "It could enable us, in the very far future, to be able to build computer devices on an atomic scale."

Why is this important? Well, read this post from CUANAS.

Here is an excerpt:

What happens if you string atoms together into an atomic chain functioning as parelell processors?:

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — The only hint that anything extraordinary is happening inside the brown stucco building at Los Alamos National Laboratory is a small metal sign posted in front:

"Warning! Magnetic Field in Use. Remain on Sidewalk." Come much closer and you risk having the magnetic stripes on your credit cards erased.The powerful field is emanating from the supercooled superconducting magnets inside a tanklike machine called a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer.

The device itself is unremarkable. N.M.R. machines are used in chemistry labs across the world to map the architecture of molecules by sensing how their atoms dance to the beat of electromagnetic waves. Hospitals and clinics use the same technology, called magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., to scan the tissues of the human body.

The machine at Los Alamos has been enlisted on a recent morning for a grander purpose: to carry out an experiment in quantum computing. By using radio waves to manipulate atoms like so many quantum abacus beads, the Los Alamos scientists will coax a molecule called crotonic acid into executing a simple computer program.

Last year they set a record, carrying out a calculation involving seven atoms. This year they are shooting for 10. That may not sound like many.

Each atom can be thought of as a little switch, a register that holds a 1 or a 0, and the latest Pentium chip contains 42 million such devices. But the paradoxical laws of quantum mechanics confer a powerful advantage: a single atom can do two calculations at once. Two atoms can do four, three atoms can do eight.

By the time you reach 10, doubling and doubling and doubling along the way, you have an invisibly tiny computer that can carry out 1,024 (210) calculations at the same time.

If scientists can find ways to leverage this achievement to embrace 20 atoms, they will be able to execute a million simultaneous calculations. Double that again to 40 atoms, and 10 trillion calculations can be done in tandem.

The goal, still but a distant glimmer, is to harness thousands of atoms, resulting in a machine so powerful that it would easily break codes now considered impenetrable and solve other problems that are impossible for even the fastest supercomputer.

"We are at the border of a new territory," said Dr. Raymond Laflamme, one of the leaders of the Los Alamos project. "All the experiments today are a very small step, but they show that there is not a wall."

In other words, less than one hundred atoms would be faster than the largest computer on Earth today.

Ok, that is amazing enough, but there is a further implication to this atomic quantum computing. Think about it. We're talking about using atoms as computers.What is the world made up of?Yes, that's right, atoms.

Obviously, huh?

But, if we can use atoms as microprocessors, then can we use the matter around us as microprocessors, turning the world itself into a gigantic computer?Ray Kurzweil believes that is going to happen

This is from an interview with Mr. Kurzweil from What is Enlightenment? magazine:

WIE: You mentioned earlier that as human beings we naturally seek to expand our horizons, and that in the future we will do so largely through the expansion of our intelligence. Do you see the expansion of human intelligence as an evolutionary end in itself?

RK: Well, it's a good question. It's like asking, "What is the purpose of life?" In my mind, we will ultimately saturate all of the matter and energy in our area of the universe with our intelligence, and I suppose you could say that's an end in itself. All of this dumb matter and energy around us will wake up and become sublimely intelligent. Then it will spread out to the whole universe at the fastest speed information can flow. And one could make an argument that it's not going to take an infinitely long time because there may be other ways to get to other parts of the universe through shortcuts like wormholes, which physics has postulated. Eventually the whole universe will, essentially, wake up.

CUANAS