In the summer of Ā78 I was back home in Fargo between college years Ā exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown Āculture,Ā almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away.
Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore Ā which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore Ā and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.
The great brooding man is dead Ā all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldnĀt have liked his Russia Ā autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land Ā but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. ItĀs a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/04/2008 06:17 ||
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#1
Reading the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, among other, is what helped get me interested in studying US-World History and Political Sciences/
Philosophies.
The first in a series of lists leading up the DNC--some will be tongue-in-cheek (hopefully, like this one), while others will be informative, especially to our out-of-state readers.
Given the penchant of the radical left for acronyms (ANSWER--Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and a desire to appear "clever," here are some suggested names that missed the cut, in no particular order:
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#1
The story says much more about humanity's hero-worshipping tendencies & a widespread unwillingness to face the truth that it does about Kafka, proclivities far more destructive than addiction to prOn.
I'm voting Democrat because: I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.
I'm voting Democrat because: I believe three or four pointy headed elitist liberals need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would NEVER get their agendas past the voters.
I'm voting Democrat because: I believe oil companies' profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn't.
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#2
"I'm voting Democrat because it's the only way black slavery reparations will ever become law." The apologists will never prevail in America. Reparations must be mandated by government.
#4
My brother is voting Democrat because he always has and always will. Even though he detests most of what the Dems have done and will do, he can't vote for a Republican. Nope, can't do it.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
08/04/2008 11:24 Comments ||
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#5
Because its the party of John F. Kennedy. (hint: no it isn't - not anymore)
Because those DAMN REPUBLICANS are evil! Just ask ABC / NBC / CBS / CNN / ...
#7
Reminds me of an interview I saw many years ago, they had some nameless black kid on camera and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up?
He answered "I want to be an individual, not like anybody else, I want to be just like Michael Jackson".
(Yes he was wearing one white sequined glove.)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/04/2008 14:09 Comments ||
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#8
I'm voting democrat because I've been smoking too much weed--don't want to have to think.
I'm also voting democrat because I want to preserve the flat earth.
I'm voting for the democrats because technology is evil.
#9
I'm voting democrat because is makes me feel like I'm doing something for, y'know, the environment. And the poor and stuff. Because they like, want good things for everybody, y'know?
Posted by: Baba Tutu ||
08/04/2008 21:14 Comments ||
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#10
Richard, you need to beat some sense into him.
It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
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#1
Real science rests on a solid bedrock of scepticism, a scepticism not only about certain religious or cultural assumptions, for example about race, but also about itself.
Which should tell anyone with two brain cells to rub together that evloution isn't science.
Don't believe me? Try questioning an evolutionist on their beliefs.
The Evolution brand of snake oil is poured from the same bottle the Climate Change brand is.
#2
In the GOREACLE's defense, the series of observed SOLAR PHENOMENAE more popularly known as the "SIRIUS EVENT(S)" was real > WHATS ABSURD IS HOW GUBBERMINT + POL ACTIVISTS ARE HIDING THEIR PERVASIVE UNCERTAINTY OVER THE MEANING OF THE SIRIUS EVENT. Modern Science was NOT around to empirically observe, analyze, and record, etc. ANY OF THE PAST GREAT SOLAR- AND NATURAL EPOCHS IN HISTORY = GEOLOGIC TIME. WE DON'T KNOW WID ABSOLUTE [SCIENTIFIC] CERTAINTY HOW THE SUN BEHAVED = DID NOT BEHAVE DURING THESE KNOWN ANDOR PERCEIVED PERIODS.
Again, 'tis why our best Theories and Hypotheses remains as such, and are NOT "Laws" = Universal Absolutes.
As the saying(s) goes, "IFF MAN CANNOT QUANTIFY/MEASURE/RATIONALIZE IT, IT DOESN'T EXIST", hence so-called "MAN-MADE" GLOBAL WARMING IS SUCH BECUZ MANKIND INCLUD GOVT CANNOT AS YET TECHNOLOGICALLY CONTROL OR ABSOLUTELY COMPREHEND, ETC. THE SUN = SOLAR ACTIVITIES. Mankind can, however, control other Men and Terra Firma, or TRY TO [OWG-NWO]!
IN SUM, WE DON'T KNOW IFF "SIRIUS" AS A MAJOR SOLAR EVENT/PHENOM [hushed up] IS GOOD OR BAD, HALF OR NOTHING, IN RELATIONSHIP TO MAN'S LIFE AND DE FACTO CONTINUING EXISTENCE!?
And now you know, VIRGINA, AGAIN, WHY CAPT.JEAN LUC PICARD MUST BE TRIED FOR GLOBAL AND UNVERSAL TREASON FOR FAILING TO DEV A SUN/STAR-DESTROYING NEXUS MISSLE TO CAUSE THE ARROGANT FASCIST SUN TO SURRENDER, PLUS OF COURSE FAILING TO CONSPIRE WID "PETER" FROM "FAMILY GUY" TO ATTACK AND DESTROY SAID SUN!
D *** YOU, PICARD [shaking Federation fists angrily]!
#3
D *** NG IT, THANX TO PICARD'S HORRIBLE TREASON, THE SUN IS NOT ONLY NOT CONQUERED BUT WORSE MADONNA'S DAUGHTER LOURDES IS NOT TRIMMMING HER HAIRY EYEBROWS!
D *** NG IT, PICARD'S TREASON IS OBVIOUS - HE MUST BE STOPPED - STOPPED - I SAY!
Every war has a story line. World War I was "the war to end all wars." World War II was "the war to defeat fascism."
Iraq was sold as a war to halt weapons of mass destruction; then to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then to build democracy. In the end it was a fabrication built on a falsehood and anchored in a fraud.
But Afghanistan is the "good war," aimed at "those who attacked us," in the words of columnist Frank Rich. It is "the war of necessity," asserts the New York Times, to roll back the "power of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."
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#1
Iraq was sold as a war to halt weapons of mass destruction; then to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then to build democracy.
Strawman argument. Just go read the authorization to use force, it explicitly lists the reasons. If you're too lazy to read the actual document, its your problem in not understanding why we went to Iraq.
But the Taliban government did not attack the United States.
Another strawman argument. Go read that authorization to use force. What part of "That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." does your little mind not comprehend?
Traditional left wing drivel, it's not about facts, its about feelings.
#2
Old-timers on the US left will probably recognize the name Conn Hallinan. His brother Terrence "Kayo" Hallinan was a CP leader on the west coast in the 1960s who eventually became DA for the city of San Francisco. Their father was Vincent Hallinan, an attorney who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 and defended Harry Bridges from deportation. Conn is a provost at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Hallinan boys do have a knack for getting ahead in the world.
#3
The Taliban did not directly attack us. But they aided, abetted, and sheltered the ones who did. The joker who wrote this piece conveniently forgot to mention that. And after 9/11 the Taliban refused to hand over their al-Q friends to us. All that, alone, was enough justification.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/04/2008 12:52 Comments ||
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#4
Forget about the strawmen. Is Afghanistan still a good war? Would a surge help or hinder our efforts there? Discuss.
#5
The Taliwhackers understand power and all its implications. Compassion and a willingness to negotiate are invariably seen as weakness to be exploited. They are incompatible with any society save the one in the mountains of Wazir where they can circumcise their women and shoot people for shaving their beards.
#6
Is there anyone but the Taliban that wants them to be in power in Afghanistan? I don't think so. The Taliban created a haven for OBL and AQ. AQ killed 3000 US innocent US citizens in a despicable and hateful act. The Taliban and other Muslims danced in the streets as I remember. Left-wing crap in support of the Taliban. This piece isn't worth wiping one's arse.
#7
What Afghanistan need from the beginning was a reboot.
That is, an authoritarian effort that would get every unemployed male working in large national infrastructure projects, females busy running things back home with the money their men have earned, and children all attending public boarding schools in safe areas.
Those Afghans who are already employed would be tasked with exploiting the work projects created by the WPA-like mass labor, taking from the unemployed men the extra employees they needed as higher wage employees. The children would be getting strictly secular and intensive education.
The government should have been given a MacArthur constitution, which would be run by the numbers with every government employee having a western boss looking over his shoulder. Endless repetition and troubleshooting.
Western style criminal and civil courts run the same way. Any Muslim anything is for off hours and weekends. During the day, they have prayers and back to work. Good performance means less supervision. Better performance means better pay, perks and promotions.
An illiterate married woman visited a grocer's shop in a federal capital locality for refined salt and matchboxes. Shocked by the latest sharp rise in prices of kitchen items, she refused to buy a normal pack of ten matchboxes. Her argument was handsome: "I've to cut my coat according to my cloth." Retailer Masud, impressed by the village woman's wisdom, obliged the customer at pre-budget rates.
The woman's husband is a wage earner in a fish hatchery and she, like so many others, has to perform domestic chores of two better-off families in a colony two furlongs from her home. She feeds her four small children and looks after her parents-in-law. She bought an old taxicab out of the money saved for the rainy season, which her husband plies at night to meet their monthly budget.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
08/04/2008 17:19 ||
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Then you better start praying to Jesus.
Posted by: ed ||
08/04/2008 20:59 Comments ||
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For a covert spy agency, Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence has been attracting a lot of attention. It's been rebuked by the U.S. government for failing to curb terrorism, accused in The New York Times of involvement in an international bombing, and targeted by the government it's supposed to serve -- first for increased oversight, and now for a purge of its more extremist elements.
After years of denials, Pakistan admitted yesterday for the first time what others have been saying: There are "probably" still agents of Inter-Services Intelligence who are sympathetic to the Taliban and "act on their own in ways that are not in convergence" with Pakistan's interests or policies, Pakistani government minister Sherry Rehman said. "We need to identify these people and weed them out."
Anyone who has tracked the history of the ISI knows this is not a revelation, but a half truth. It's not individuals in the ISI that are rogue and working with the Taliban, but the ISI itself.
Anyone who has tracked the history of the ISI knows this is not a revelation, but a half truth. It's not individuals in the ISI that are rogue and working with the Taliban, but the ISI itself. The ISI, and the Pakistani army it serves, don't want to see the United States, and the government of Hamid Karzai, win in Afghanistan because they believe it would fatally undermine Pakistan's own national security, analysts say. The army does not trust U.S. intentions in the region, and it does not trust the Karzai government, which is close to India, Pakistan's giant and hostile neighbour. "Nobody in Pakistan wants to see America win," said Hameed Gul, a retired general who is the most infamous former director-general of the ISI. "That would spell danger to Pakistan in the long run. They, America, want to make us subservient to India."
Continued on Page 49
This article starring:
Hameed Gul
Posted by: Fred ||
08/04/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
They, America, want to make us subservient to India.
He says that like it would be a bad thing.
(Xinhua) -- Smart leaders of the Islamic Hamas movement grasped a gold opportunity produced by a deadly Gaza bomb attack to wield a dominant influence over the Gaza Strip, analysts said.
The arrests carried out by Hamas security forces and its armed wing obviously are aimed at putting an end to any military presence of Fatah and getting rid of any future armed threats to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, they said. Hamas leaders began to crack down on its rival Fatah movement immediately after the attack on a Hamas militants' car near Gaza city beach on July 25 which killed five Hamas militants and a little girl.
The Saturday assault of Hamas security forces and its armed wing al-Qassam Brigades on the pro-Fatah Helles clan in Sheja'eya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City was apparently part of a wide plan to end any presence of Fatah in the enclave. "Regardless of who is behind Gaza bomb attack on Friday July 25,Hamas picked up the opportunity to accuse Fatah movement before carrying out any investigation to crack down on militants, who are considered as a threat to its rule in Gaza," said Ra'ed Abu Eyada,a Palestinian political analyst.
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Posted by: Fred ||
08/04/2008 00:00 ||
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Until the U.S. opens its offshore waters to oil drilling, it will be seen as the world's worst energy hypocrite.
If you think that the issue of offshore drilling is only a matter of interest to American environmental groups and the U.S. Congress, think again. At last month's World Petroleum Congress in Madrid, the blatant hypocrisy of U.S. energy policy--demanding that OPEC members expand their oil drilling efforts while restricting offshore drilling here at home--was a prominent topic of discussion. Indeed, the U.S. ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf was mentioned by three of the most powerful people in the global energy business: the head of OPEC; the chief executive of Brazil's national oil company, Petrobras; and the Saudi oil minister. All of them said the United States should start drilling in its offshore areas.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
08/04/2008 11:02 ||
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The brilliant, unspoken strategy of the Democrats is to protect and preserve US fossil energy reserves today, so we have the energy monopoly when everyone else runs out tomorrow.
Any other explanation means the Donk are simply pathetic fools.
#1
Can't we have the moral integrity to admit that deinstitutionalization of the "nondangerous" mentally ill has been a disaster?
Ask the federal judiciary, they're the one's who came up with that. Same people who came up with forced busing that was so successful in delivering quality education to the inner cities. They still haven't given up the concept that they can impose solutions without the consent of the governed and get the results they intended. As government derives its power from the consent of the governed, so does its law. Society needs the structure of law to operate effectively but the law needs society's acceptance in order to be effective. Unfortunately, the 'profession' has misused the average American's reverence for law for submission. The profession has become a self selecting [just look at illegal quotas imposed by their certifying bodies for law schools] fraternity that has created and forced a need for their services that has evolved in a veto over the elected representative bodies of the people. They believe they can impose law without consent, for our own good of course. And they wonder why they're referred to as our aristocracy.
#2
San Francisco is like a roach motel. The kind intentions and cash and prizes aimed towards the homeless draw them in but the housing prices and general cost of living ensures they will always be homeless.
Until we are ready to lock up the insane to ensure treatment we are not serious about solving homelessness. The worst thing Reagan did was try to transfer the problem to the states (where it actually belongs) because the states refused the handoff.
#4
Frisco knowingly did it to themselves. They WANT fags and crazies there. Lots of them, too, in all flavors and sizes; they're proud of being the land of fruits and nuts. Now they've got what they want. Peters is pissing into the wind with this article. He may not like it but Friskins do. That's why they keep electing the POS mayors they do.
#5
The kind intentions and cash and prizes aimed towards the homeless draw them in but the housing prices and general cost of living ensures they will always be homeless.
They could solve the problem by just running 'em across the bridge to Oakland, the gangs on that side of the bay would dispose of them pronto.
It is if you can cash in on it...
Liberals know the best way to get black people interested in a political issue: to racialize it and couch it in language like "equity" and "social justice," and push for yet more government programs. That's why reports like A Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S. (PDF) are written.
On Tuesday, liberal Congressman James Clyburn spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to kick off the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, sponsored by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The left-leaning think tank created the Commission to Engage African-Americans on Climate Change to encourage blacks to join the global warming debate. "It is critical our community be an integral and active part of the debate because African Americans are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change economically, socially and through our health and well-being," Clyburn said.
#1
You'd think the racists would have developed a better, simpler, plan to screw with blacks than changin the Earth's temperature. The man works in mysterious ways, eh Mr Feather?
"United We Stand" is the national motto for a reason. The Democrats oppose a strong citizenry ruling themselves (gov't of, by, and for the people), so the strategy of divide and conquer is applied so that the poor darkie, who is obiviously incapable of ruling himself, can be taken care of by his betters.
I love the irony that the party who claims to be against prejudice is in actuality the most prejudiced party around.
#4
Yes - anything that exists is racist if it helps blacks blame everythign on someone else instead of facing up to the fact that their valuing "tribalism" and following poverty pimps has lead them to a dead end, self destructing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
For a covert spy agency, Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence has been attracting a lot of attention. It's been rebuked by the U.S. government for failing to curb terrorism, accused in The New York Times of involvement in an international bombing, and targeted by the government it's supposed to serve -- first for increased oversight, and now for a purge of its more extremist elements.
By Robert Bryce
