#1
There was an old TV commercial in the 1970s -- can't remember the product, but it consisted of a series of scenes of spectacularly wrong predictions: "If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings." "No, my boy, space travel is merely a dream."
This is like that.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/25/2008 13:33 Comments ||
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#2
If you liked this Newsweak article, you can buy the guy's book on amazon.com for $1.95.
#4
And people still wonder why I think most "experts" are full of crap. And little wonder the MSM is so lagging behind the information superhighway from listening to these elitist dumbshits, that they are little more than the roadkill left over from the day before.
#5
I don't remember the specific website but it had an article on how MANY MAJOR HOLLYWOOD CELEBS ARE NOW PRODUCING, STARRING, ANDOR $$$ SPONORING THEIR OWN NET VIDEOS, which in turn is reportedly causing major film companies to seek copyright and other regulation agz home videos.
THE "MARTHA STEWART/YOUTUBE REVOLUTION" FINALLY STRIKES HOLLYWOOD.
A hard drive recovered from the computer of a killed Colombian guerrilla has offered more insights into the opposition of House Democrats to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
A military strike three weeks ago killed Raúl Reyes, No. 2 in command of the FARC, Colombia's most notorious terrorist group. The Reyes hard drive reveals an ardent effort to do business directly with the FARC by Congressman James McGovern (D., Mass.), a leading opponent of the free-trade deal. Mr. McGovern has been working with an American go-between, who has been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia's elected and popular government. . . . The intervenor with the FARC is James C. Jones, who the Congressman's office says is a "development expert and a former consultant to the United Nations." Accounts of Mr. Jones's exchanges with the FARC appeared in Colombia's Semana magazine on March 15. . . .
"Receive my warm greetings, as always, from Washington," Mr. Jones began in a letter to the rebels last fall. "The big news is that I spoke for several hours with the Democratic Congressman James McGovern. In the meeting we had the opportunity to exchange some ideas that will be, I believe, of interest to the FARC-EP [popular army]."
. . .
Semana reports that Mr. Jones made some proposals to the FARC, including a Caracas meeting with representatives of Venezuela, Colombia, the FARC, other South American countries, U.S. Congressmen and the Catholic Church. "It would be almost impossible for Uribe to reject such a meeting," Mr. Jones wrote, "without burning himself a lot, nationally and internationally. If he persists in being against it, I have understood that there are ways to pressure him from my country [the U.S.]."
In a letter to Semana, Mr. Jones said his words were taken out of context. He says he is not in favor of the "violent methods of the guerrilla" or "the military solutions" of the government. He had only a professional relationship with the FARC and had to address them as he did because he had to build trust. Mr. McGovern's office says it knew what Mr. Jones was doing and engaged with him because "we need to find an interlocutor who could discuss these things including the safe haven" for the guerrillas.
We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a U.S. antiterror ally.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/25/2008 06:42 ||
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#1
Jeeesuuuus H. Keeriist, do you think this will catch the attention of the voters in his district? Nah, maybe not. All the commies view this as a positive, pro-active outlook. What a sorry state this has become. Fat Ted, Traitor Kerry, Deval and all. Damn, the pride of the Pilgrims shot to shit.
March 25, 2008
By Thomas Sowell, Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.
Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.
It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.
Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."
These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.
Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.
In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.
Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.
The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.
The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.
There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?
Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?
One sign of Obama's verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother -- "a typical white person," he says -- with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Jeremiah Wright.
Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.
Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Senator Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright's words have a "resonance" in the black community.
There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan's words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?
While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.
Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.
The more I learn of this man the more respect I have. A rare occasion at any time, especially so in these times. HT Lucianne
#1
The more I learn of this man the more respect I have. A rare occasion at any time, especially so in these times. HT Lucianne
I assume you mean Thomas Sowell. He's brilliant, incisive, clever, and witty (though no Mark Steyn), and always on-target. He's near the top of my must-read list.
#3
Yes xbalanke; I do indeed mean Thomas Sowell. Sorry, English was never my strong suit and I was born here (my Jr. High English teacher was NOT happy with me).
#1
The key to killing the terrorists is knowing where to look, so the Darkhorse helicopter crews prefer to hunt with Special Forces. The SF emphasis is on leveraging limited assets with intelligence, mobility, speed and relative superiority. If Genghis Khan had helicopters, he might have been conducting Nineveh Strikes. You can fly for thirty minutes at a 150 mph out here and hardly see a soul, but there are tire tracks all over the Nineveh deserts, and explosives and many foreign fighters came in on those tire tracks. The Nineveh Strike is a hunting technique often involving a dangerous type of vehicle interdiction where a helicopter swoops down on a moving vehicle and stops it.
Go read it all.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/25/2008 12:42 Comments ||
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#2
Yon's work was featured on the front page of Fox News website earlier today. About time!
A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter's. Allam's renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.
As Magdi Allam recounted , on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his
#1
This is one brave fella. He knows he has a big target on his back. Being confirmed and Baptized by the Pope yet. Meanwhile, the Magic Man has no such fears. He declares he's an apostate also. A confirmed Christian, yet he has no fears. Muzz support him. They write advice columns to Americans counseling what a good choice he would be. No threats to him at all. No death squads on his tail like Rushdie. And, just when was his baptismal ?
#2
Ironically, it is not the attraction of Christianity that is causing conversions, but the revulsion of Islam. It is not enough to just stop practicing Islam. For many, they *have* to convert to Christianity, so they can say they are *not* Muslims.
Christianity, for them, is sanctuary from not just Islam, but Islamic culture, primitivism, and barbarity. They want to belong to the modern world, not some pathetic and dying throwback that cannot advance into the future.
. . . There really is a broad rethink sweeping the Muslim world about the practical utility -- and moral defensibility -- of terrorism, particularly since al Qaeda began targeting fellow Sunni Muslims, as it did with the 2005 suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Al Qaeda knows this. Osama bin Laden is no longer quite the folk hero he was in 2001. Reports of al Qaeda's torture chambers in Iraq have also percolated through Arab consciousness, replacing, to some extent, the images of Abu Ghraib. Even among Saudis, a recent survey by Terror Free Tomorrow finds that "less than one in ten Saudis have a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda, and 88 percent approve the Saudi military and police pursuing Al Qaeda fighters."
No less significant is that the rejection of al Qaeda is not a liberal phenomenon, in the sense that it represents a more tolerant mindset or a better opinion of the U.S. On the contrary, this is a revolt of the elders, whether among the tribal chiefs of Anbar province or Islamist godfathers like Sayyed Imam. They have seen through (or punctured) the al Qaeda mythology of standing for an older, supposedly truer form of Islam. Rather, they have come to know al Qaeda as fundamentally a radical movement -- the antithesis of the traditional social order represented by the local sovereign, the religious establishment, the head of the clan and, not least, the father who expects to know the whereabouts of his children.
It would be a delightful irony if militant Islam were ultimately undone by a conservative, Thermidor-style reaction. That may not be the kind of progress most of us imagined or hoped for. But it is progress of a kind.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/25/2008 06:37 ||
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#1
the old 'force vs. subversion' debate that went on among the Communist party for 80 years or so
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/25/2008 18:46 Comments ||
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#4
The irony here is that iff many peace-minded or "moderate" traditional Muslims are truly worried about Islam becoming obsolete and sufferring a USSR-style implosion, then their "tradional social order" MUST CHANGE TO PREVENT SAID OBSOLESCENCE OR IMPLOSION, WHICH MANY BELIEVE WAS ALREADY OCCURRING WID OR WIDOUT OSAMA + 9-11 EVENT. The dilemma remians, then, is to resist violence and using jihad as a basis for Radical Terror and REPRESSIVE Mil Conquest, while also reforming and improving Islam as an GOD-BASED ANTI-TOTALITARIANIST BUT CONSERVATIVE-PLURALIST overt model for Govt-Society.
As for AL QAEDA, OSAMA's NEW MESSAGE > THE WORLD + WOT IS ENTERING A POTENTIALLY VERY DANGEROUS PHASE. OSAMA + RADICAL ISLAM HAVE CHOSEN TO PROTECT NUCLEARIZING IRAN = "ISLAMIST BOMB" BY DIVERTING INTENSIFIED INSURGENT EFFORTS TO NATIONS OUTSIDE OF IRAQ-AFGHANISTAN, aka " hitting/attacking where US forces are not". They have repeatedly read on the US MSM that POTUS Dubya will perceivably seemingly NOT take any signif mil action agz Iran during the 2008 campaign year - HOWEVER, US ENTRENCHMENT IN THE ME-MUSLIM WORLD STILL NEEDS TO BE STOPPED COLD AS THERE IS NO GUARANTY THAT ANY POST-DUBYA GOP/DEM POTUS WILL END THE US PRESENCE IN THE ME TO THE EXTENT DESIRED BY RADICAL ISLAMISM. POST-JAN 2009 > To continue their Regional-Global Jihad despite a potent albeit par? or reduced? US presence RISKS RADICAL ISLAMISM PUTTING THEIR AGENDA INTO THE DUBIOUS SUBJECTIVE HANDS/CONTROL OF ANTI/NON-ISLAMIST, "INFIDEL" WORLD POWERS.
IOW, OSAMA + RADICAL ISLAM [Islam?] WILL HAD IDEOLOGICALLY + REALISTICALLY FAILED TO DEFEAT OR DESTROY ANTI/NON-ISLAMISM-ISLAM, i.e. HAD FAILED ALLAH/GOD + MUHAMMED.
* CAN AQ + RADICAL ISLAMISM ACCEPT BECOMING A SOLELY POLITICAL FORCE, ONE AMONGST MANY, AND CONTROLLED BY ANTI/NON-MUSLIMS + ISLAMISTS???
The OSAMA BIN LADEN, etc. THAT I REMEMBER WOULD NOT ACCEPT THIS. OSAMA > ISLAM-ONLY TOTAL VICTORY, versus ISLAM-ONLY TOTAL DEFEAT; OSAMA > "THE TIME IS NOW/TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE", NOT A "LONG WAR" KIND OF GUY = WHITNEY HUSTON FAN.
Osama + Islamists need the "ISLAMIST BOMB" NOW, WHICH MEANS PROTECTING NUCLEARIZING IRAN, ETAL. + ASSISTING IN CARVING OUT IRANIAN EMPIRE = IRAN-CENTRIC ISLAMIST BLOC OF NATIONS [read - PERSIAN OTTOMAN EMPIRE, sub-read - RUSSIA + CENASIA].
Any options for AMER HIROSHIMA are likely being dusted off as we speak.
* Iff, by chance, that OSAMA is de facto forced to accept a "long war" scenario agz non-Islamism, IMO IT WILL ONLY BE IFF HE'S DEAD, OR MUSHROOM CLOUDS ARE GOING OFF IN EVERY MAJOR WORLD NATION, i.e. A WORLD AT WAR.
The TEN-YEAR" maxima timeline goes as much agz the USA as it does agz Radical Islamism. REALITY > THE "LONG WAR", FOR BOTH, CAN'T BE SAME.
#5
The irony here is that iff many peace-minded or "moderate" traditional Muslims are truly worried about Islam becoming obsolete and sufferring a USSR-style implosion, then their "tradional social order" MUST CHANGE TO PREVENT SAID OBSOLESCENCE OR IMPLOSION, WHICH MANY BELIEVE WAS ALREADY OCCURRING WID OR WIDOUT OSAMA + 9-11 EVENT. The dilemma remians, then, is to resist violence and using jihad as a basis for Radical Terror and REPRESSIVE Mil Conquest, while also reforming and improving Islam as an GOD-BASED ANTI-TOTALITARIANIST BUT CONSERVATIVE-PLURALIST overt model for Govt-Society.
As for AL QAEDA, OSAMA's NEW MESSAGE > THE WORLD + WOT IS ENTERING A POTENTIALLY VERY DANGEROUS PHASE. OSAMA + RADICAL ISLAM HAVE CHOSEN TO PROTECT NUCLEARIZING IRAN = "ISLAMIST BOMB" BY DIVERTING INTENSIFIED INSURGENT EFFORTS TO NATIONS OUTSIDE OF IRAQ-AFGHANISTAN, aka " hitting/attacking where US forces are not". They have repeatedly read on the US MSM that POTUS Dubya will perceivably seemingly NOT take any signif mil action agz Iran during the 2008 campaign year - HOWEVER, US ENTRENCHMENT IN THE ME-MUSLIM WORLD STILL NEEDS TO BE STOPPED COLD AS THERE IS NO GUARANTY THAT ANY POST-DUBYA GOP/DEM POTUS WILL END THE US PRESENCE IN THE ME TO THE EXTENT DESIRED BY RADICAL ISLAMISM. POST-JAN 2009 > To continue their Regional-Global Jihad despite a potent albeit par? or reduced? US presence RISKS RADICAL ISLAMISM PUTTING THEIR AGENDA INTO THE DUBIOUS SUBJECTIVE HANDS/CONTROL OF ANTI/NON-ISLAMIST, "INFIDEL" WORLD POWERS.
IOW, OSAMA + RADICAL ISLAM [Islam?] WILL HAD IDEOLOGICALLY + REALISTICALLY FAILED TO DEFEAT OR DESTROY ANTI/NON-ISLAMISM-ISLAM, i.e. HAD FAILED ALLAH/GOD + MUHAMMED.
* CAN AQ + RADICAL ISLAMISM ACCEPT BECOMING A SOLELY POLITICAL FORCE, ONE AMONGST MANY, AND CONTROLLED BY ANTI/NON-MUSLIMS + ISLAMISTS???
The OSAMA BIN LADEN, etc. THAT I REMEMBER WOULD NOT ACCEPT THIS. OSAMA > ISLAM-ONLY TOTAL VICTORY, versus ISLAM-ONLY TOTAL DEFEAT; OSAMA > "THE TIME IS NOW/TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE", NOT A "LONG WAR" KIND OF GUY = WHITNEY HUSTON FAN.
Osama + Islamists need the "ISLAMIST BOMB" NOW, WHICH MEANS PROTECTING NUCLEARIZING IRAN, ETAL. + ASSISTING IN CARVING OUT IRANIAN EMPIRE = IRAN-CENTRIC ISLAMIST BLOC OF NATIONS [read - PERSIAN OTTOMAN EMPIRE, sub-read - RUSSIA + CENASIA].
Any options for AMER HIROSHIMA are likely being dusted off as we speak.
* Iff, by chance, that OSAMA is de facto forced to accept a "long war" scenario agz non-Islamism, IMO IT WILL ONLY BE IFF HE'S DEAD, OR MUSHROOM CLOUDS ARE GOING OFF IN EVERY MAJOR WORLD NATION, i.e. A WORLD AT WAR.
The TEN-YEAR" maxima timeline goes as much agz the USA as it does agz Radical Islamism. REALITY > THE "LONG WAR", FOR BOTH, CAN'T BE SAME.
#6
I don't have the source at hand, but I recall an earlier theory that radical Islam, and for that matter Arabian Islam, would succumb ultimately not to "western" efforts, but rather to "southern" forces - the hilarious irony being the rise of Nigerian Anglicanism, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, or some combination of Central African Christian conquest.
Whatever, if it ever happens remotely along these lines, it would be an epochal event of millennial magnitude.
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.
